“That’s possible. I definitely don’t believe Weston continued to work for the wife. She’s having her husband’s attorneys write the guy checks? No way.”
I got off the couch and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. I put a good Guatemalan blend in to brew and then returned to the living room with a glass of water for Joe.
“When was the last time you dusted in this dump?” he asked, tracing the edge of the coffee table with his fingertip. He lifted it up and showed the gray grime it had gathered.
“Take off your apron and leave it at the door when you come in my apartment,” I said.
“You find out anything on the Russians?”
The coffee was percolating now, clicking and clacking coming from the kitchen, the rich scent drifting into the living room.
“Dainius Belov,” I said. “That name mean anything to you?”
“Of course it does.”
I frowned. “Am I the only person who hasn’t heard of this guy?”
“You don’t know Dainius? You’ve got to be kidding me, LP. How the hell did you do two years as my partner and stay this stupid?”
“Who is he?”
“Dainius is the closest thing to a don this city has. Of course, he’s not a don, that’s the Italian Mafia, but he’s the Russians’ answer to one. He’s been here for fifteen years now, maybe more. Don’t you even remember the Chester Avenue auto bust?”
“Nope.”
He groaned and rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if searching the heavens for help in dealing with his moronic partner. “LP, I’m ashamed of you. The Chester Avenue bust was the biggest car-theft success the department had in the last decade.”
“I didn’t work on car thefts, I worked narcotics,” I said.
“So did I, but I’m not completely clueless. They found an old warehouse out on the east side, off Chester Avenue, with about twenty stolen cars inside. Arrested two of Dainius’s soldiers, but they couldn’t touch him, because no one would testify against him. Still, it was a big find, headline news, made our detectives look good.”
I vaguely remembered the recovery of quite a few stolen vehicles, but I certainly hadn’t connected it to Belov. That had happened in my early years on the force, when I was working nights and didn’t know many of the detectives.
“Is he still involved with car theft?”
“As far as I know he is, but he certainly isn’t limited to it. He’s got organized muscle and big money, I can tell you that.” He drank some more of the water and stared at the bottom of the glass as if he didn’t like what he saw there. “Are you telling me Dainius is connected to those jackasses who smashed up Ambrose’s car?”
“That’s what I was told.” I explained my conversation with Sellers to him, then went back to the kitchen to pour my coffee. When I came back to the couch he looked grim.
“I don’t like the way this thing smells,” he said. “Jeremiah Hubbard and Dainius Belov? There’s nothing good coming out of that combination.”
“Figure they’re linked?”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. As far as I’m concerned, they’re linked already.”
“By?”
He looked at me. “By Wayne Weston’s corpse.”
I nodded. “Think the Russians could have the wife and daughter?”
“Possibly, although I can’t think of any reason they’d have to keep them alive. Of course, right now, I can’t think of any reason for any of it, because we don’t know shit.” He shook his head. “If I remember right-and I always do-several of Belov’s boys used to be with Spetznatz. You know, the Soviet answer to our special forces and covert operations units.”
“Sounds like a pretty dangerous bunch.”
“Yeah.” Joe grinned. “But at least we know what we’re up against. They don’t.”
CHAPTER 6
WAYNE WESTON’S home in Brecksville had an air of modest elegance. The large brick ranch was impressive, and clearly expensive, but not overly extravagant. A blacktop driveway led past a row of spruce trees. Traces of snow remained in the shadows under the trees, where the sun hadn’t been able to reach. There was a detached two-car garage set slightly behind the house. Everything about the home and yard gave an impression of serenity and safety. The police had searched every inch of the property, but Joe and I agreed that we wanted to see it, to try to absorb a little more of who Wayne Weston was, and how he and his family had lived. As the sun came up that morning and people with normal jobs made their commute to the office, Joe and I arrived at a dead man’s house to soak in the ambience. It was a hell of a way to start the day.
John Weston’s Buick was parked in front of the garage, and I pulled in beside it. Behind the house was a deck with a propane grill and a picnic table. We found John Weston sitting on the picnic table, staring at the remains of a snowman in the backyard.
“My granddaughter made it,” Weston said, his voice thick, as we joined him on the deck. “The day before she… before she went missing.”
The snowman had melted slowly, and was hardly two feet high. The carrot nose had slipped as the snow melted and loosened, and now it sat in the grass. There was a pink ski cap perched on the snowman’s head, and the two rock eyes were still in place, staring back at John Weston, seemingly taunting him. I’m still here, the snowman seemed to say, but she’s not.
Weston took his eyes away from it with an effort and handed us a key. “That’s for the front door. You go in, take all the time you need. Look at whatever you want, I don’t care. But I can’t go in that place.”
That place. Like a small child afraid to go down the cellar steps. A child would be afraid of what he might find in the cellar, though. John Weston was afraid of what he knew he would not find in the house.
Joe took the key, and we left the deck and walked back to the front of the house and let ourselves in. The front door opened into an entryway with hardwood floors. A hallway led away to the left, and a small sitting room with a couch, a wooden rocking chair, and an antique sewing machine was on the right. There were a few pictures on the walls, and a small table with back issues of Time, but the room appeared to have been more for show than use. We went right.
Behind the sitting room was the kitchen. We rifled through the cupboards and drawers. The refrigerator was full of food; the freezer had two New York strip steaks and an unopened box of Popsicles. Everything was neat and well organized and gave the impression that the residents had every intention of returning home to their normal lives and routines.
Next to the kitchen was a dining room with an oak table that would probably seat twenty. Past the dining room was a sunken living room with comfortable, well-worn furniture and a high-end entertainment system. This was the room where Weston’s body had been found, but you’d never be able to guess it now. We went over it carefully, turning the cushions upside down and opening the videotape boxes, but it was a formality. The police wouldn’t have missed anything. It was the only way Joe and I knew to search a room, though, and it beat standing around and feeling the emptiness. We finished the living room, returned to our starting point, and went left, down the hall. We had not spoken since entering the house. The silence was a heavy thing. The house seemed to hold a sense of a family; it made you feel as if at any second the door might swing open and a mother’s voice and a child’s laughter would fill the home.
Four doors opened off the hall. The first was to a bathroom, the second to an office with a flat desk, a file cabinet, and two bookshelves. There was a large empty space on the desk, and several electrical cords lay coiled on the floor. Weston’s computer had likely sat there until the police removed it. The bookshelves held some family pictures, a framed program from the ’53 World Series, and some John Grisham and Dean Koontz novels. We started on the desk drawers and the file cabinet.