8
The body of Jeremiah Webber had been discovered by his beloved daughter after he failed to make a lunch appointment with her, a meeting dictated at least as much by the desire to hit on her old man for a few bucks and a good meal as the child’s natural affection for her parent. Suzanne Webber loved her father, but he was a curious man, and her mother had hinted that his financial affairs did not bear close scrutiny. His shortcomings as a husband were merely one aspect of his flawed nature; as far as his first ex-wife was concerned, he could not be trusted to behave properly under any circumstances, with the exception of ensuring his daughter’s wellbeing. In that, at least, she could be certain that he would act according to what passed for his better nature. And, as has been said before, she liked Jeremiah Webber. His second ex-wife, who had no residual affection for him whatsoever, regarded him as a reptile.
When his daughter found her father’s body lying on the kitchen floor, her first thought was that there had been a robbery, or an assault. Then she saw the gun by his hand, and, given the implied precariousness of his financial circumstances, wondered if he had taken his own life. Although in shock, she had retained sufficient self-possession to use her cell phone to call the police, and not to touch anything in the room. She then spoke to her mother while she waited for the police to arrive. She sat outside, not inside. The smell in the house distressed her. It was the stink of her father’s mortality, and something else, something that she could not quite place. Later, she would describe it to her mother as the lingering stench of matches that had been lit in an effort to disguise the aftermath of a bad trip to the restroom. She smoked a cigarette, and cried, and listened as her mother, through her own tears, denied the possibility that Webber had shot himself.
‘He was selfish,’ she said, ‘but he wasn’t that selfish.’
It quickly became apparent to the investigating detectives that Jeremiah Webber had not, in fact, taken his own life, not unless he was a perfectionist who, having botched the first shot, had found the will and strength to pop a second one in his head in order to finish the job. Given the angle of entry, that would also have required him to be a contortionist, and possibly superhuman, considering the nature of the catastrophic injuries inflicted by the first bullet. So it looked like Jeremiah Webber had been murdered.
And yet, and yet . . .
There was powder residue on his hand. True, it might have been possible for his killer, or killers, to put the gun against his head and apply pressure to his finger in order to force him to pull the trigger, but that usually only happened in movies, and it was easier said than done. No professional was going to take the risk of putting a gun in the hands of someone who didn’t want to die. At best, there was a chance that, before he was encouraged to plant one in his own head, he might fire a shot into the ceiling, or the floor, or someone else’s head. In addition, there was no evidence of a struggle, and no marks on his body to indicate that Webber might have been restrained at some point.
So what if, suggested one of the detectives, he shot himself, botched it, and then someone else finished the job for him out of a sense of mercy? But who stands back and watches another man kill himself? Was Webber ill, or so overcome by difficulties, financial or otherwise, that he saw no way out of them but to take his own life? Had he then found someone loyal enough to stay by his side as he fired what was intended to be the fatal shot and then, having watched him fail, to deliver the coup de grace? It seemed unlikely. Better, then, to assume that the suicide was forced upon him, that the hands of another placed Webber’s finger on the trigger and applied the pressure required to fire the first bullet into his brain, and that those same hands finished him off instead of leaving him to die in agony on his kitchen floor.
And yet, and yet . . .
Who tries to make a murder look like a suicide, and then undoes all that good work by firing a second shot?
An amateur, that’s who; an amateur, or someone who just doesn’t care about appearances. Then there was the matter of the wineglasses, three in all: one smashed on the floor, and the other two on the kitchen table. Both had been drunk from, and both had fingerprints upon them. No, that wasn’t quite true. Both had Webber’s fingerprints all over them, and the second glass had smears that were almost fingerprints, except that, when examined, they proved to be without whorls, or loops, or arches. They were entirely blank, leading to the suggestion that at least one other person in the room with Webber had been wearing gloves, or some form of patch to mask the prints, perhaps in an effort to put Webber at ease initially, for what kind of killer would choose to leave evidence upon a wineglass of his presence at a crime scene? The glass was sent for testing in the hope that DNA traces might be obtained from it. In time, that analysis would discover saliva which, when analyzed, revealed the presence of unusual chemical compounds: a drug of some kind. A clever lab technician, acting on little more than a hunch, separated the drug and its metabolites from the saliva using a metal-doped sol-gel immobilized in a glass capillary, and found it to be 5-fluoruoracil, or 5-FU, commonly used to treat solid tumors.
The second person in the room with Jeremiah Webber on the night that he died was thus shown to be a male on chemotherapy, which led to a possible resolution of the fingerprint issue: certain drugs used in the treatment of cancer, among them capecitabine, caused inflammation of the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, leading to peeling and blistering of the skin and, over time, the loss of fingerprints. Unfortunately, by the time this was revealed, weeks had passed since the discovery of the body, and subsequent events had played themselves out to the end.
And so, on the day after the body was discovered, the police began investigating Webber’s ex-wives, his daughter, and his business associates. In time, they would find more than one dead end, but the strangest of all was the correspondence in Webber’s files relating to an institution described as the ‘Gutelieb Foundation,’ or, more often, merely ‘the foundation,’ because the foundation did not appear to exist. The lawyers who purported to represent it were shysters with holes in their shoes, and they claimed never to have encountered in person anyone from the foundation. All bills were paid by money order, and all communication was carried out via Yahoo. The woman who took messages on the foundation’s behalf worked out of the back of a strip mall in Natick, sitting in a booth surrounded by five other women, all of them purporting to be secretaries and PAs for companies or businessmen whose offices were their cars, or their bed rooms, or a table in a coffee shop. The secretarial services company, SecServe (which the detectives investigating Webber’s death felt was a name open to misinterpretation, particularly if spoken aloud), informed the police that all bills relating to the foundation were paid, once again, by money order. SecServe had never raised any objection to this form of payment: after all, it was perfectly legitimate. Some of the company’s other clients had been known to pay in bags of quarters, and in the current climate SecServe’s boss, whose name was Obrad, was just relieved when people paid at all.
‘What kind of name is Obrad anyway?’ asked one of the detectives.
‘It is Serbian,’ said Obrad. ‘It means “to make happy.”’
He had even had it written on his business cards: OBRAD MAKE HAPPY. The cops were tempted to correct his grammar, and point out that statements like this, combined with the possibilities for misunderstanding inherent in his company name, were likely to get him into trouble at some point, but they did not. Obrad was helpful, and an enthusiast. They didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
‘And you never spoke to anyone connected with this foundation?’
Obrad shook his head. ‘Everything done on Internet now. They fill out form, forward payment, and I make happy.’ Obrad did manage to produce a copy of the original contract form filled out over the net. They traced it back to a cyber café in Providence, Rhode Island, and there the trail ended. The money orders came from a number of post offices all over New England. The same one was never used twice, and the transactions were untraceable since the US Post Office did not accept credit cards as payment for money orders. They set about seeking court orders to examine security footage from the post offices in question.
The existence of the foundation troubled the investigating officers, but post offices and internet cafés were as close as they would ever get to it. As it happened, the foundation was Herod, and it was only one of the names that he used to disguise his affairs. After Webber’s death, the foundation effectively ceased to exist. In time, Herod decided, he would reactivate it in another form. Webber had been punished, and the small community through which both men had briefly moved would be aware of the reason why. Herod was not worried about someone approaching the police. They all had something to hide, each and every one of them.
Two nights after Webber’s death, yellow tape still indicated the scene of the crime, but there was no longer a police presence at the house. The alarm system had been activated, and the local patrols made regular passes to discourage rubberneckers.
The alarm on the house went off at 12:50 a.m. The local police were at the door just as the clock tipped 1:10 a.m. The front door was closed, and all of the windows appeared to be secure. At the back of the house, they found a crow with a broken neck. It appeared to have flown into the kitchen window, activating the alarm, although neither of the cops could remember ever seeing a crow in the dead of night.
The alarm went off again at 1:30 a.m, and a third time at 1:50 a.m. The alarm company’s monitoring system indicated that, each time, the source was the kitchen window beneath which the dead crow had been found. They suspected a malfunction of some kind, which they would check in the morning. At the request of the police, the alarm was deactivated.
At 2:10 a.m., the kitchen window was opened from outside using a thin piece of metal, warped at the center so that its top half was perpendicular to its lower half, enabling it to be twisted in order to move the latch, unlocking the window. A man climbed through and alighted gently on the kitchen floor. He sniffed the air uncertainly, then lit a cigarette. Had the light been better, and had anyone been there to see him, he would have been revealed as a disheveled figure wearing an old black jacket and black trousers that nearly, but not quite, matched. His shirt might once have been white, but was now faded to a bone gray, its collar frayed. The man’s hair was long, and slicked back, revealing a pronounced widow’s peak. His teeth were yellow, as were his fingernails, all stained from decades of smoking. His movements were graceful, although it was the predatory grace of a mantid or a spider.
He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a Maglite. He pulled the drapes on the kitchen windows, twisted the top of the flashlight, and allowed its beam to play upon the table, the chairs, and the dried blood on the floor. He did not move, but simply followed the light, taking in all that it showed but touching nothing. When he had concluded his inspection of the kitchen, he progressed through the other rooms of the house, as before only looking, never touching. Finally, he returned to the kitchen, lit another cigarette from the first, and disposed of the remains of the latter in the sink. Then he retreated to the door connecting the kitchen to the hallway and leaned against the frame, trying to pinpoint the source of his unease.
The death of Webber had not come entirely as a surprise. The man in the kitchen kept a close eye on the activities of Webber and his kind. Their occasional lack of scruples did not surprise him. All collectors were the same: their desire would sometimes overcome their better natures. But Webber was not really a collector. True, he had kept some items for himself over the years, but he made his money as a middleman, a facilitator, a front for others. A certain degree of good faith was expected from such individuals. They might sometimes play one buyer off against another, but they rarely actively cheated. It was unwise to do so, for the short-term gain from a single deal handled dishonestly might well damage one’s reputation. In Webber’s case, the damage, revealed in a smear of blood and gray matter, had been fatal. The visitor took a long pull on his cigarette, his nostrils twitching. The smell that had so disturbed Webber’s daughter and which, to her shame, she associated with the relaxation of her father’s muscles after death, had faded, but the intruder’s senses were intensely acute, and largely unaffected by his love of cigarettes. The smell bothered him. It did not belong. It was alien.
Behind him was the darkness of the hallway, but it was not empty. Forms moved in the gloom, gray figures with skin like withered fruit, shapes without substance.
Hollow men.