Chapter73
“STRIPPED CLEAN,”Bogart said over the phone to Decker. “Gardiner’s office didn’t have a thing left in it. He must have had an exit plan in place. As soon as you spooked him, he probably had the place wiped. Same thing for Peyton’s apartment. Nothing left, if there was anything ever there.”
Decker said, “We need to find out all we can about them, Ross. And his house and office have to be full of the guy’s prints. Same for Peyton’s apartment.”
“I already have a team looking for that. Now, these ‘trainees’ you told me about at the American Grill?”
“Yeah?”
“I doubt any of them will show up for work. Peyton would have given them a heads-up. But I’ll have people there just in case they do. And we’ll track down where they were staying and search all those places too.”
“Let me know if you turn up anything,” said Decker.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take a little trip down memory lane.”
***
Decker sat across from Lancaster at her house. In the background he could hear Earl and Sandy getting ready to go out.
Sandy burst into the room. She was a fireball of energy, always in a good mood, until she dropped into the blackness of despair, something that could occur within seconds. Her coat was half on and a ski cap covered her eyes.
She pulled it up and announced herself. “I know you,” she said to Decker. “You’re my mommy’s partner. You’re Amos Decker.”
“And you’re Sandra Lancaster.” This was a little ritual that the pair had always engaged in.
Earl hustled in and grabbedSandy’s hand.
“We’ll be back later,” he said, glancing first at Decker and then at his wife.
“Right, hon, thanks,” said Lancaster.
After the pair left, Decker refocused on his old partner. “Things going okay?” he asked.
“We’re taking it day by day, hour by hour. I have to tell you that Earl teared up when I told him what you said to me on those bleachers that night. He’s very grateful for your talking some sense into me.”
“It was just my opinion, Mary. I can’t judge you, because I haven’t walked in your shoes.”
“Well, I think you stopped me from making a big mistake. When things go bad, you need your family. You don’t push them away.”
“No disagreement from me.”
“Okay, the case?”
“It’s starting to make sense, but there are some gaps.”
“Somegaps?”
“We know that Meryl Hawkins was set up. His daughter helped to frame him for the four murders. We don’t know the exact motivation for the killings, but the fact that Katz had some sort of spy ring going on underneath his restaurant gets us close to it. He either had a falling-out or demanded more money, or whoever killed him was feeling threatened by him.”
“Okay.”
“Fast forward to today. Hawkins learns the truth from Karl Stevens. He gets out of prison and comes back here to enlist our aid to prove his innocence. Someone kills him that same night.”
“And we still have no idea who that is.”
“Since we’ve learned that the spy ring or whatever it is was still operating in Burlington, it seems to me that the spy ring’s the likeliest culprits. Now we have Rachel Katz. She was the point person for a consortium of shell companies that Bogart has discovered have a Russian connection. Now, Rachel was waffling some. Look at her discussion with Melvin. They might have been afraid that she was going to turn on them. So they tried to kill her. They tried to kill me too. And theydidkill Sally Brimmer.”