“An alarm will probably go off,” said Robie calmly. “You might want to call the cops and tell them not to bother.” Before she could say anything, he opened the door and stepped inside.
No alarm went off.
Robie did not take that as a positive sign. He kept his gun out, felt for the light switch, hit it, and the pawnshop was quickly draped in weak light. Robie had been in pawnshops before and this looked pretty typical. Watches, lamps, rings, and an assortment of other items were stacked neatly in bins or inside glass cabinets. All had tags with numbers written on them. The man’s military background, thought Robie. You never lost that precision. Or at least most didn’t.
But the floorboards smelled of urine and the ceiling was blackened with decades of grime. Robie didn’t know what the place had been before it was a pawnshop, but it had not worn well.
There was a cash register cage. Robie noted the bulletproof glass. There were scratches on the glass and what looked to be two dents from gunshots. Upset customers or people looking to rip the guy off. Ex-military Rick Wind probably dealt with that with his own hardware. Robie figured there were at least two guns in that cage somewhere.
He looked toward the ceiling corners and saw the camera mounted in one. It had a direct shot of the cage. That might come in handy.
Robie moved forward, doing visual sweeps. He heard nothing except the sounds of life outside. A breeze pushed through the open door, rustling lampshades and lifting tags on the merchandise. When he heard footsteps behind him he turned to see Vance there, gun out, her expression seriously pissed off.
“You’re an idiot,” she hissed.
“I told you to stay outside,” he whispered back.
“You don’t tell me to do anything. Not unless you want your ass—”
Robie put a finger to his lips. He’d heard it before her.
A squeak. And then another.
He pointed to the back of the shop. She nodded, her angry expression gone.
Robie led the way, turning down one aisle, and rode it back to a pair of swinging doors with a gap between. The doors were moving slightly, but that was not the source of the squeak.
He looked at Vance, pointed to himself and then the door, and then motioned to the right. She nodded in understanding and took up position on his right flank.
Robie lifted one foot, kicked one of the swing doors open and bulled inside, his gun making arcs and ready to fire as he stepped to the left. Vance followed on the right and cleared that part of the room.
Nothing.
She looked down and grimaced as the gray critter skittered into a darkened corner.
“Rats.”
Robie looked down and saw the animal’s tail before it whisked out of sight.
“I don’t think rats squeak like that,” said Robie.
“Then what?” she asked.
“That.”
He pointed to one darkened corner of the room on the left side.
Vance looked that way and caught a breath.
The man was hanging upside down from the exposed rafter.
They approached. His body was swinging slightly. And the rope was squeaking against the wooden beam. Robie looked at the slit between the pair of swing doors.
“Acted like a funnel with the front door open,” he said. “With the wind outside. Got the body to move a bit.”
Vance looked at the dead man. He was black.
And green. And purple.
“Is that Rick Wind?” asked Robie.
“Who the hell can tell?” replied Vance. “He’s been dead a while.”
“Didn’t kill himself. Hands are bound. Not strangulation.” He touched the man’s arm. “And he didn’t kill his wife and kid. Condition of the body means he was dead before they were. Rigor’s long since passed.”
Robie bent over and looked at the man’s open mouth. “And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“It seems they cut out his tongue.”
CHAPTER
29
ROBIE HAD LEFT Agent Vance to deal with the new body in the pawnshop. They had confirmed that it was Rick Wind. The cause of death was not obvious and would probably require a medical examiner to figure out. They had checked the shop’s surveillance camera. Someone had taken the DVD. Robie was now sitting in his apartment typing on his computer. He was not working the murders of Jane Wind and her ex-husband. He had his mind on something else, at least for now.
He typed in the name Gerald Dixon. He got too many hits, because it was too common a name. He switched tactics, going from Google to a more exclusive database