The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m ready.”

“Is that all?” Sara said. “Is that all you wanted to know? Is that why you came here?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I,” said the chief.

“Patience,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “Patience.”

Dawn Neske was wearing a thin, filmy red short-sleeve robe that ended just above her knees, and nothing else that I could see, when we opened the door to her apartment.

“Did you forget something?” she said. She saw the chief and me standing behind her husband in the doorway and quickly pulled her robe tighter. “Perry, geez.”

“They stopped me in the corridor,” Perry said. “They wouldn’t let me go to work.”

We pushed our way deeper into the apartment and closed the door. The rooms were sparsely furnished, and I noticed that there were several boxes stacked against the walls. Either the Neskes were just moving in or getting ready to move out.

“I should get dressed,” Dawn said.

“Don’t bother on my account,” I said.

Dawn pulled the collar of her robe up and glared at me. “What do you want?”

I fished the cell phone out of my pocket and dialed up the photograph that Greg Schroeder had sent me. I showed the video display to Dawn.

“Is this Nicholas Hendel? Is this the man who called himself Rushmore McKenzie?”

Dawn nodded. I pivoted toward Perry and held up the video screen for him to see. He looked at the face on the screen, glanced at Dawn, and edged closer to the front door. The chief deliberately made a loud thud as he leaned against the door, his arms folded across his chest.

“Is this Nicholas Hendel?” I said again.

“Yes,” Dawn said.

“Are you sure? It’s a high school yearbook photo. A few years old, not very good—”

“It’s him.”

I glanced at Perry. He shrugged as if he didn’t know whom I was talking about.

“Where is he?” Dawn said.

“I’m not exactly sure, but I have a good idea.”

“Where?”

“You took an awful chance coming to me, Dawn. Did you really think that if I found Nick, I wouldn’t also find his sister?”

“His sister?” the Chief said.

I dialed up another photo and held it up for everyone in the room to see. It was Dawn, the photo taken six years earlier when she was in high school. I spoke to her.

“You told me that you and Perry worked in a call center in Franklin, a town just down the road from where you lived. A database search for Nicholas Hendel revealed that at least one person by that name had lived in Ashton, Illinois. While he was here, Nicholas made a slip. He told someone that in high school he had been a Raider.” I made air quotes around the name. “He also left a clue that suggested he was from Illinois. So we checked all the high schools in Illinois and discovered that the nickname for Ashton-Franklin was the Raiders, Ashton-Franklin being a consolidated high school drawing from towns just a few miles apart. Yesterday, I had an investigator take a look at the Ashton-Franklin yearbooks. When you think about it, it was all really quite simple.”

I gave a triumphant glance at Chief Gustafson.

“Was that what you had in mind when you dragged me here?” I said.

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“Of course not.”

“I knew it,” Perry said. He was speaking to his wife. Dawn slowly sat in one of the few chairs in the apartment and lowered her head. “I knew this would happen. I told you so.”

“I thought you didn’t know who Nicholas Hendel was,” the chief said.

Perry looked at the door the chief was leaning against, wishing he were out the door and down the street.

“You were Nick’s shills, both of you,” I said. “You helped set up the town for him, picked Mike Randisi as a target—because of your job, Dawn, you knew about his agoraphobia. You slept with Ed Bizek to keep close to the money. It was his wallet that you told me about, the one you searched; that’s where you found the account numbers and password.”

“We have the right to—”

I interrupted Perry before he could say any more.

“Shut the hell up,” I told him. “You pimped your wife for money. That means you don’t get any rights. Not from me. So you just stand there and shut up.”

Dawn looked like she was about to say something, but I cut her off, too.

“Please don’t,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “Honest to God, we haven’t got the time.”

“Time for what?” Perry said.

“I said shut up.”

I moved close enough to Dawn to see the goose bumps on the flesh of her bare arms and thighs.

“It’s all true,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

She lifted her head to look at me.

“We didn’t steal the money,” she said. “We don’t have it.”

“I know you don’t.”

That caused Chief Gustafson to push himself off of the door.