The Police Investigation — Monday, February 25, 1991, 5:46 PM

Cherry Hills Village / Colorado National Bank / DA’s Office Denver, Colorado

The ceiling was nine feet of poured concrete and Flash could hear Wolf Blitzer through it. Tinny, cadenced, the particular rhythm of a man describing tank formations in the Kuwaiti desert. Windsor had CNN on upstairs. The ground war had started. The whole country was watching the same footage and Flash was in a basement in Cherry Hills trying to remember what day it was.

Sunday. February twenty-fourth. He’d been dead three days.

The other four were still down. Terri curled on the guest bed with her coat pulled over her face. Monica on the couch Emerson had dragged down at three in the morning. Marcus in the corner chair with his jacket folded under his head, one hand on the duffel bag that held everything they’d taken from the townhouse. The cat Flash had carried out of Hadrick’s apartment was asleep on a stack of legal pads, fed and indifferent to the six bodies around it.

Emerson’s basement was finished. Carpet, wood paneling, a wet bar with bottles nobody could open. The house above it cost more than Flash would make in ten lifetimes and the basement was still a basement — low light, still air, the faint mineral smell of concrete curing in Colorado cold. It was the kind of room that rich people put pool tables in. Emerson didn’t have a pool table. Emerson had five strangers sleeping on his furniture because a dead man’s experiment had worked.

The hunger sat behind Flash’s sternum. Not loud. A pull, a request, something polite and patient that would stop being polite in another forty-eight hours. Two nights since Hadrick. The blood was there. The math was always simple.

Upstairs, Blitzer said the ground offensive had begun, and Windsor turned up the volume.

Flash turned on the light. Waited for the blinking and the groaning.

“Two things before anybody goes anywhere.” He stayed standing. The room came to him in pieces — Terri squinting, Monica pushing hair out of her face with both hands, Marcus already alert in the corner with his eyes working before the rest of him moved. “We need a story. Same story, all five of us, for when the cops come asking.” He looked at Monica. “You said you’d check on Mavis tonight. Vince too. I think that’s right. I think that should be you.”

Monica sat up on the couch. Her eyes were already calculating, running something behind them that had nothing to do with waking up.

“What kind of story.”

“The kind where a detective asks four people the same question and gets the same answer.”

She looked at Terri. Terri was sitting on the edge of the guest bed with her coat still half over her shoulders, the cat relocating to her lap with the unhurried authority of a creature that had never once been afraid.

Monica stood. Crossed to the wet bar and picked up a legal pad from the stack Terri had brought in. Uncapped a pen. “The best lie is mostly true. We were all at a party Friday night. We all know each other through Emerson’s bank — that part’s real, that part checks. Party ran late. Separate ways Saturday morning. Nobody saw anybody after that until tonight.”

She wrote while she talked. Neat capital letters, each one pressed into the page hard enough to leave grooves.

“Keep it thin. The more detail you give a detective, the more he can check. You were at a party. You went home. You’ve been home since. You don’t know anything about a fire on Brighton Street.”

Terri pulled the cat off the legal pad it was sitting on. Read the writing upside down.

“The party needs a location. Somewhere real enough that nobody can prove we weren’t there.”

“My office hosted a fundraiser Friday evening,” Monica said. “DA’s office, annual thing. It actually happened. I was supposed to be there. Emerson was on the donor list. I can put the rest of you on the guest list retroactively — I know the woman who runs the sign-in sheet.”

She didn’t pause to let that settle. She was building something and the building was the point. “That puts all five of us in the same room Friday night with a legitimate reason. After the fundraiser, we went to a bar. Pick one none of us actually go to. Stayed late. Went home separately.”

She looked at Flash.

“The problem is your apartment. You live in the same building as the man whose place you —” She stopped. Chose the next word with the precision of someone who’d spent years choosing words in front of juries. “The building on Brighton. If a detective is canvassing that block, your address is already on a list.”

Terri looked up. “Arnold, you can’t go back there.”

Marcus spoke from the corner. First words since waking. Measured, unhurried, already three steps past the conversation.

“None of us should go back. Emerson’s father filed a report Saturday morning. Jenny filed one on me Saturday afternoon. Terri’s school is going to call the police Monday morning when she doesn’t show. Flash’s building super will call in welfare checks on both Hadrick and Flash — same building, same report. We have maybe thirty-six hours before all five of our names are in the same detective’s file and he starts drawing lines.”

Monica wrote on the legal pad. FRIDAY — DA FUNDRAISER — BAR (TBD) — HOME SEPARATELY. Underlined it twice.

“I’ll handle Mavis tonight. And Vince.” She said it the way she’d say she was filing a brief. “But I need to know what I’m authorized to do about Vince. He knows I’m different. He doesn’t know the word for it. If I tell him, he’s in it with us. If I don’t, he’s a cop with half a story and a broken wrist, and broken wrists heal.”

She was looking at Flash. Not because he was in charge. Because he was the one who’d broken it.

“Tell him,” Flash said.

Monica didn’t blink. She wrote something on the legal pad that Flash couldn’t read from where he stood, tore the sheet off, folded it into her coat pocket.

“If he goes to his department with it, we’re done. You understand that.”

“He’s your husband.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yeah it is.”

Something moved across her face that wasn’t gratitude. She picked up her keys from the wet bar.

“Mavis first. Then Daniel’s house. I’ll be back before dawn.”

She was halfway to the stairs when Terri said, “What about the bar?”

Monica turned.

“What?”

“For the cover story. We need an actual bar. Somewhere none of us go.”

Monica looked at Marcus. Marcus pulled a name without hesitating — information filed and ready, a card that had been in his hand before anyone asked for it.

“The Wynkoop. LoDo district. Opened two years ago. Brewpub, big weekend crowd, no reservations, cash bar. Nobody would remember five faces on a Friday.”

Monica wrote WYNKOOP on her palm with the pen. Turned. Went up the stairs. The basement door closed. Windsor’s voice, muffled — “Good evening, Ms. Belhurst” — and the front door opened and shut.

The room was four. Terri on the bed with the cat. Marcus in the corner. Emerson near the wet bar with his hands in his pockets, carrying himself with the particular discomfort of a host who wanted to offer drinks and couldn’t.

Discussion turned to the bank. Colorado National opened Monday morning. Marcus had the key — the small brass thing they’d found in Prestor’s effects, bank-stamped, specific. Somebody needed to get inside the safe deposit vault during business hours, and business hours ended at five-thirty, and none of them could walk in the sun.

Emerson cleared his throat. The banker in the room, speaking the language.

“Colorado National closes at five-thirty. Sunset tomorrow is —” He paused. Did the calculation he’d never had to do before last week. “Quarter to six. Fifteen-minute gap. If I call ahead Monday morning, tell them I’m coming at close of business on behalf of a client’s estate — I have credentials, I know the branch manager — I can be at the door at five-twenty-five. The sun will be behind the mountains by then. Not full dark, but not direct.”

He looked at Marcus. “I’ll need the key.”

Marcus didn’t hand it over. Looked at Flash.

“Two people,” Marcus said. “Emerson gets us through the door. Someone else carries whatever’s inside out. In case we get separated.”

Terri, from the bed: “I’ll go. I need to eat anyway. I’ll hunt on the way.”

She said it flat, without irony, without the hesitation that word still carried for the rest of them. Hunt. Like she’d said drive or park. Flash noticed and didn’t say anything.

Emerson nodded. Then stopped. Pulled his wallet from his jacket, found a business card, turned it over. Read the back. Turned it again.

“Gerald Pilkerswith runs the safe deposit division. I’ve dealt with him — he’s thorough, documentation-first, but reasonable. He’ll want authorization, signature cards.” Emerson turned the card over once more. “But his wife just had a baby. A week early. He mentioned it at the Rotary lunch before —” He gestured vaguely at himself. Before the basement. Before the fire. Before the word for what they were. “He may be on paternity leave.”

Marcus: “So who covers his desk?”

“Whoever’s junior. Someone who doesn’t know me. Someone who goes by the book because they’re afraid not to.”

Terri scratched the cat behind its ears. “So we need the key, which Marcus has. We need paperwork saying one of us is authorized to open Prestor’s box. And we need to get there at five-twenty-five on a Monday and hope the person behind the counter doesn’t ask the one question we can’t answer.”

“I can draft an executor letter,” Emerson said. “Prestor’s estate, emergency access. My letterhead. It won’t survive a phone call to verify, but it doesn’t have to. It just has to get us past the counter.”

Marcus handed him the key. Emerson took it with two fingers, held it up to the light. Small thing. Brass. The number stamped on its face was somebody else’s secret, and they were about to try to open it with a forged letter and a dead man’s name.

“I’ll have the letter ready by morning. Terri, you and I leave at four-thirty tomorrow. You hunt on the way downtown. I’ll drive.”

Terri nodded. She didn’t make the joke she would have made three days ago. The hunger was making her quiet and the quiet was making her careful and Flash recognized the chain because it was the same one tightening in his own chest.

Monday came the way things came now — a black interval, then the body switching on.

Flash opened his eyes at 5:46 p.m. to an empty basement. Marcus sat in the corner chair with his hands folded in his lap.

“They left an hour ago.”

The phone rang at 6:40.

Emerson’s voice on the other end was controlled in a way that meant control was all that was left. The box was flagged. Police preservation request in the system. No access without a court order or detective authorization. The junior employee — not Pilkerswith, not anyone who knew Emerson’s face — had seen the flag, refused the letter, and reported the inquiry to the branch manager. Emerson had left his real business card. A mistake he couldn’t take back.

Flash hung up the phone. Marcus was watching him.

“The box is locked,” Flash said. “Police got there first.”

Marcus absorbed it the way Marcus absorbed everything — face still, eyes moving, the information slotting into a grid Flash couldn’t see but could feel being built. Then he stood, crossed to the stack of newspapers Windsor left on the wet bar each morning, and pulled the Monday Denver Post from under the Tuesday circulars.

Below the fold, local section. The headline fit in two lines: BRIGHTON ST. FIRE LINKED TO MISSING PERSONS CASES — DPD CONFIRMS INVESTIGATION. Five adults reported missing. Detective William Brandt, Arson/Homicide, confirmed the cases may be connected. No names released.

Marcus read it aloud. Then laid out the exposure, ticking through it like a man reading an invoice.

Emerson’s father had filed Saturday morning. Jenny Bingham had filed on Marcus Saturday afternoon. Terri’s school had reported her absent Monday morning. Flash’s building super had called in welfare checks on both Hadrick and Flash — same building, same report. Five names. One fire. One detective with a timeline and a phone.

Flash looked at the newspaper. The photograph was the Brighton Street block from the east, shot during the day, the burned building’s roof caved in and two DPD cruisers parked at angles in the street. His building — the one he’d lived in for three years, the one where he’d paid rent and played guitar and argued with Hadrick about the radiator knocking — was in the background, intact, anonymous, three windows from the left.

It looked like someone else’s life. It was.

Monica came through the basement door at 8:45 p.m. She had her coat on and her legal pad out and she sat on the edge of the couch and delivered the report the way she delivered reports — organized, compressed, stripped of anything that wasn’t operational.

Mavis was handled. Grateful. Quiet. But Suzy was sick — fever, vomiting since Saturday, the girl’s small body burning through something it hadn’t asked to carry. Monica thought it was the residue of whatever Prestor had given them, working its way out of a child’s system the hard way.

Mavis needed a doctor. That was a problem without a clean answer.

Then Vince. Monica had gone to Daniel’s house and told him. Told him everything — the serum, the fire, the word she hadn’t wanted to say out loud in someone else’s living room but had said anyway because the alternative was lying to a man who’d been a cop for eleven years and would know.

“He listened,” Monica said. “Didn’t shout. Didn’t reach for his badge. Sat on Daniel’s couch and said he needed to think.”

She set the legal pad on the arm of the couch.

“He won’t go to the department. Not yet.”

The yet was the weight of it. Flash heard it and put it where things went now — the place behind his ribs where the hunger lived, the place that was filling up with facts that had no solution.

Monica had more. She’d gone to the DA’s office after Daniel’s house, used her access, checked the system.

No warrant application filed on the safe deposit box. Brandt had a preservation request — informal, bank-cooperation only. No judge had signed anything. The five missing persons cases were cross-referenced but not consolidated. Still treated as separate incidents in the system. Still five files on five desks, not one file on one desk.

Estimated window before Brandt filed for a warrant: two to three days. The Gulf War ground offensive was pulling DPD resources sideways — overtime, reassignments, the bureaucratic drag of a country at war eating into local police work. It was buying them time they hadn’t earned.

Flash stood at the wet bar and looked at the bottles he couldn’t drink and the legal pad with Monica’s capital letters and the newspaper with the photograph of the building where Joseph Hadrick’s cat was still waiting for someone to fill the bowl.

Three days dead and the mortal world kept its hours. Detectives filed requests. Banks flagged accounts. Schools called homes. Fathers reported sons missing. The machine didn’t care that the people it was looking for had stopped being people. The machine ran on paperwork, and paperwork didn’t need a pulse.

“Don’t file anything,” Flash said. “Don’t put your name on anything. Don’t put anyone’s name on anything. Come back with intelligence.”

Monica looked at him for a long second. Then she picked up the legal pad and wrote something he couldn’t read and folded it shut.

The basement was quiet after that. Marcus in his corner. Terri back from the bank run, fed, the color in her face closer to right than it had been in days. Emerson at the wet bar, turning the brass key over in his fingers, the executor letter folded in his breast pocket like a mistake he was still holding. The cat asleep on the legal pads.

Outside, Denver went on being Denver. The mountains to the west black against a sky that was purple turning black. Thirty-eight degrees and dropping. The Gulf War on every television in Cherry Hills Village. A detective named Brandt in an office downtown with five files he hadn’t connected yet and a preservation request on a box he didn’t know mattered.

Flash sat on the edge of the guest bed and listened to the nothing that passed for silence in a dead man’s body. No heartbeat. No breath unless he chose to draw one. The radiator hissing and Windsor’s television and the distant sound of a car on the road outside and underneath all of it the pull behind his sternum, patient, patient, patient.

Tuesday night. Tony was coming. The cohort would be six. And somewhere in Denver, a small brass key fit a lock that the police were standing in front of, and inside that lock was whatever Jacob Prestor had thought was worth dying to protect.