Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)

Monday, 2:30 p. m.

He had been placed in an interrogation room, officially under arrest but not “booked” yet. Jack wanted to hold out the carrot of dismissing the charge before it became official, should Hayes provide a good enough explanation—though he doubted that could be done, particularly now that he got a look at the guy. Eric Hayes stood a couple of inches over six feet and carried at least two hundred and fifty pounds of weight, most of it muscle. If he could produce an acceptable reason to intercept and then strike a young woman easily half his weight, Jack would be very surprised. Hayes sat at a table, wrists recuffed in front to make him more comfortable and therefore more likely to talk. Or so the thinking went.

He wore jeans, a Cavs sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, fairly new athletic shoes, and an olive green parka, which the officer had slung over the back of the chair. His mustache and short beard were trimmed and he regarded them with clear, wry blue eyes.

“Seriously?” he asked, holding up his wrists. “Is this necessary?”

Jack said, “You attacked a very small woman for no apparent reason. So yes, it is necessary.”

“Oh, I have a reason. I have an excellent reason.”

The detectives sat down, formally introduced themselves, and asked to hear it. They did not say they were from homicide. It would only confuse matters, and matters seemed confusing enough already.

They went over Hayes’s Miranda rights and his vital statistics. The man had recently turned twenty-seven, had a wife and a toddler, lived on the west side of Cleveland “almost to Lakewood” and had been employed by Turner Construction for five years. Other than a few speeding tickets and a juvenile charge for possession, he had no record. They knew this last part to be true because they’d already checked.

He spoke forcefully but easily, eager to explain, so Riley stayed friendly in return. “Tell us how we got to be here today.”

“Okay,” Hayes said with increased enthusiasm. “It was about two months ago, the last home game of the World Series. I’m at home, watching it on TV. The wife took our kid out to the library and park ’cause she knows how I get during a game, and we don’t curse around my kid. Third inning, Atlanta was up two, we had two outs. Right?” He gazed at the two detectives, waiting for a sign that they remembered the ball game as clearly as he did. Riley hesitated. Jack had no idea what he was talking about. Hayes gave a disgusted snort and continued. “Lindor hit a single, they cut to a commercial, I got another beer, and my phone rang. I answer it, and it’s a recording telling me that the IRS is auditing me and I need to call this number to avoid prosecution.”

Jack felt his eyebrows raise.

“Yes, yes, don’t look at me like I’m a moron. I know I’m a moron. But I’m watching the game, I’m sitting there by the phone anyway, and I figured it had to be a mistake, right? But who wants to take chances with the IRS? I’ll call them back, have it all straightened out before they’re even done with the eight thousand commercials they show every break, right? I call the number, this chick answers. She’s got no idea who I am, but it’s the IRS. There’s got to be tons of people in the country being audited on any given day, right? I’m not paying enough attention ’cause I’m watching a funny commercial, even though they don’t make as much of a fuss over the World Series commercials like they do the Super Bowl . . . the Super Bowl commercials are such a big freakin’ deal. Football gets all the love in this country.”

“And the money,” Riley said.

Under the table, Jack tapped his foot.

“So she’s asking all these questions and I’m rattling off my info, address, birthdate, Social Security number, because it’s the IRS, right? No harm in telling them; they already have it in a database somewhere. First she tells me me I owe a forty-dollar fee because I underpaid the Medicare tax. I didn’t see how that was possible since work takes it out automatically but hey, the game’s back on, I can afford forty bucks if it gets the IRS off my back. So I get out my credit card, pay it. Done, right? She put me on hold, we got another hit, Lindor’s now on third, the hitter’s on second. Cut for a commercial.”

“Mr. Hayes—” Jack began.

Hayes ignored him, as did Riley. “Then this chick on the phone says that was only one of the fees. There’s a much bigger penalty due for underpaying on the actual income tax. She says I owe seven thousand dollars. Okay! That got my mind off the game. I can afford forty bucks—but thousands? I’m a construction worker! I can’t pull that out of my butt and not miss it. I protest, she ignores me like I’m not even speaking. She says I have to go to the bank right now and get the money or she’ll have no choice but to have the arrest warrant issued. I tell her I simply cannot do that. I don’t have seven thousand dollars that I can hand over.”

Jack said, “I’m guessing the chick is Shanaya Thomas?”

Hayes’s heavy hands, moving in time with his words despite the handcuffs, froze. “Who?”

“The woman you attacked.”

“Oh yeah. Yes, I mean. To answer your question.”

“How did you find her?”

“I’m getting to it. She’s on the phone, right? She does not care that I don’t have seven thousand dollars to spare. So I’m protesting, the bank’s about to close, I won’t get there in time, and even if I do, what am I supposed to do with this wad of cash? Walk around town with that much money in my pocket? Do I take it to the federal building here? No, she says. I am not supposed to take it anywhere, I can change it into a number and give it to her over the phone. Meanwhile Lindor tries to steal home, so I get distracted by that; I missed exactly what she said next but when I listen, she’s saying something about iTunes cards.”

Jack felt himself frown. “What?”

Hayes waved his hands toward them. “Yes! Doubleyou tee eff, exactly! I said, What? This chick says that once I got the cash, I should immediately go to a CVS or Walgreens and put it all on an iTunes card and give her the number. That would take care of the issue and the IRS would no longer have a reason to arrest me or seize my assets. I stood there in my living room, with the phone pressed to my ear, staring at the game on the screen. And before I can say, ‘Either you are out of your mind or I’m being punked,’ Rodriguez hits a home run. Lindor comes in, the guy on second comes in, Rodriguez dances around the bases. I’m torn between doing a flamenco over the floorboards and figuring out where the hell I’m going to get seven thousand dollars. But I’ve got the sound up a little, right?”

Jack ached to hurry him up but swallowed his frustration. Physically.

“The crowd screeches like raccoons caught in a trap, this deafening wave of sound, must have blown out the eardrums of everyone at the stadium. Then it falls until the next guy reaches home, goes crazy, then waits to see if Rodriguez is going to make it or if Atlanta is going to get the ball back into the infield and beat him to home. As I’m sure you both know—”

No, I don’t, Jack thought, grinding a few molars.

“—he makes it. Noise is like, that first colossal sonic boom raised to the tenth. And it went on and on.” Hayes paused to sip his coffee which he had, miraculously, not spilled in the midst of his gestures, and finally got to the point. “Here’s the thing. On the phone, I hear the crowd. The exact rise and fall of the roaring, in unison, with what I’m hearing and seeing on the TV.”

“So they were watching the game,” Riley guessed, but his voice seemed uncertain.

“That’s where my brain went at first, even though way back in my mind I’m thinking, the Nationals aren’t even in the series—I mean, as if, right? And they’ve got a TV on? IRS agents are staring at the tube while they’re threatening citizens with arrest? Talk about our tax dollars at work. But that wasn’t it. Suddenly I knew everything she’d said was total BS.” Hayes gesticulated with his hands, straining against the cuffs. He would probably have bruises on his wrists in another ten minutes. “I said, ‘Where are you?’ She said D.C., but there was a hesitation, you know? She could tell from my voice that the tide had turned. I started shouting. I called her a liar, she wasn’t the IRS, told her to give me my forty bucks back. She tried to give me the same lines, shouting back about warrants and arrests, but she didn’t last long. I was out of my mind, you know? I called her everything but, well, human.”

“And?” Riley leaned over the table.

“Click,” Hayes said.

“Click?”

“Click. Bitch hung up. Figured she wasn’t going to see a penny of that seven thousand dollars so she gave up. I’m standing in my living room listening to a dial tone. The crowd on the screen is still going wild, and all I can think about is I gave that chick my credit card number!”

“Okay,” Jack said. “What happened then?”

“Garcia came up to bat—”

“I meant with the woman on the phone. I assume you think she was Shanaya Thomas.”

“I’m getting to that. So Garcia comes up to bat and hits a pop fly, so okay, I watched that for a couple more minutes but that was all, and then I got the eight-hundred number off the back of the card and called them to say I was scammed out of forty bucks. Of course I had to go through the whole menu system because you can’t get a friggin’ person on the line anymore and you have to listen to all the options and I got the wrong department and they had to transfer me and then they friggin’ cut me off and I had to call back. But finally I get Fraud and I tell that chick the story and she keeps telling me to calm down and I’m saying stop the card, just stop the card, don’t let anyone charge anything to it. But she’s gotta check this and that and then recent transactions and—it’s too late. Forty bucks, it was supposed to be? Four thousand. This chick charged four thousand. So I ask what she bought and the chick on the phone—the new chick on the phone—says ‘financial services.’ I’m like, what the crap are financial services? Did this chick—the first chick—pay for her accountant with my card or something like that? I mean sure, she could probably use an accountant, but—”

“She bought a money order,” Jack guessed.

Hayes blinked, surprised and encouraged by the detective’s ability to track. “Yes! No—not a money order, but a gift card. In the couple of seconds after she hung up on me, she used the number online to add funds to a reloadable gift card.”

“Wait,” Riley said. “She used your credit card to buy a gift card?”

“Yep. That’s what the credit card company told me after the chick filled out a report, sent me some ‘we’re working on it’ follow-up letters, and finally said it had gone to a gift card.”

“Whose gift card?”

“No idea. I don’t know if they really can’t track it, don’t have the legal ability to do that, or if they figure four thousand dollars isn’t worth their time. They’re a credit card company, so it probably isn’t. They take the loss and raise my interest a couple percent.” He seemed to run out of breath, exhausted by this recitation. “Eventually, they cancelled the charge.”

Riley said, “But how does this get around to—?”

Instant reenergizing. “I started to think, this chick wasn’t in India or Pakistan and she sure as hell wasn’t in D.C. She was here, someplace close enough to the ballpark to hear the crowd, maybe even through closed windows. I mean really hear them. A pretty narrow area, when it comes down to it. And winter comes, work slows up, I got a lot of time on my hands, right?”

“You came downtown and looked for her,” Jack said.

“Damn skippy. I started at the ball field and circled outward. I went up and down every floor of every building, popped into every waiting room, put my ear to the door if the places weren’t open. When she was talking to me I could hear a ton of people in the room with her, all yakkin’ away doing the same shit she was. It was loud.”

“So you walked around town trying to find a noisy office. No one called the cops on you?”

He seemed surprised. “No. Why would they? They’re offices, open to the public. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I’d walk in, say sorry, wrong place, and leave. No one cared.”

“But you came to the building at East Ninth and Bolivar.”

“Yep. No nameplates, no signs. I rang that little bell in the air lock there and said I was trying to find a place called Beaver Industries—”

“Beaver?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, uh, my little joke. Some guy said I had the wrong address. I tried saying I was looking for work, what did they do there—nothing. Just repeated that I had the wrong place, and then stopped saying anything at all, let me stand there in the air lock pushing the button and talking to myself. So I put my ear to the door—you can’t see through the door, they have them painted on the inside—”

“We know.”

“And I heard it. That buzz like when you have a beehive in your wall, right? I knew I had it. That was the place that had called me. I’d found it.” His face glowed with triumph. “That was about three weeks ago. I started doing surveillance.”

“Surveillance?” Jack pictured Hayes dressed in black, with camo makeup on his face, lurking behind the benches outside the stadium entrance.

“From the Thirsty Parrot, if you look over the cars in that parking lot, you can see the front door. I downed a lot of chicken wings and brewskis hanging out there, until they got tired of me bolting out the door whenever I saw a group going in or coming out. I’d always go back and pay for my stuff, but finally they told me I wasn’t welcome. I borrowed my cousin’s camera with a big telephoto lens and I guess that made them nervous . . . anyway, I had to do something. Intercom guy wouldn’t tell me anything, I Googled the address, and the rental agency wouldn’t tell me anything. That left the employees. I still can’t figure out what kind of hours they work. They seem to switch off in groups of seven or ten but at random times during the day. Other than that, let me tell you, no one goes in and no one comes out.”

“And you saw Shanaya Thomas?”

“Probably, but I didn’t know what she looked like, of course. I only knew she was a chick, and most of the people there are guys. I counted maybe ten different women. I couldn’t make it over there from the Thirsty Parrot before they scattered, so a few times I had to hang out by the ballpark and wait. Got friggin’ cold, too. I’d go up to the people leaving, say I’m looking for work, what do they do, are there any openings? They’d look at me like they’re Amish and I’m a biker with chains hanging off me and a bourbon in one hand and a porn tape in the other. Like they were afraid of me. It was weird, man. So finally I would follow the women until I could hear them talk. Easy, if I could get behind them and especially if there were two of them, because then they’d chitchat and I could hear their voices.”

“Ah,” Jack said. Eric Hayes had taken a logical, methodical approach to his task: collect possibles, then eliminate until you identify your target. “So today you found Shanaya Thomas.”

“That bitch, yeah. I had seen her before, knew she usually approached from east on Bolivar. I had gone to the Subway on East Eighteenth to get something to eat and I saw her cross the street. I caught up, asked her if she knew where a gas station was. Yeah, don’t ask me why a gas station, it was the first thing that popped into my head. She said no, but I couldn’t tell from that, I needed her to talk more. So I asked if she worked in the building. No answer. So I figured the hell with it. I got in front of her and told her I knew what they were doing, it was illegal, and she was going to be arrested instead of me. That got her to say more than two words! What was I talking about, leave her alone or she’d call the cops, she didn’t know what I was going on about. Then I knew. It was her voice. Especially the way she said that I would be arrested and not her. She’s got a funny way of saying it, like ah-rest instead of uh-rest.”

Jack skipped ahead. “And then you punched her.”

“No! I mean, well, yes, but that—I wanted her to admit it. I wanted her to admit she’s a thief, I wanted her to tell me who she worked for and what they were doing with all this money, and what she did with my four thousand dollars. But she kept up the innocent act and tried to dodge around me until I grabbed her arm. She wasn’t going to listen unless I made her, obviously.”

“And you pulled her into the alley because—”

“She kept saying she’s gonna be late, I’m gonna get her fired. I know her office or whatever you’d call it is right there on the corner so I thought if we hid so she couldn’t be seen from a window or something, she’d be more likely to talk. But then those two other girls saw us.”

“And,” Jack added, “you punched her because—”

“She kept trying to run away! I had spent two months looking for her! I wasn’t about to let her weasel out of it. I was going to keep her there until she either told me the truth or you guys got there. I was doing your job for you, actually.”

He sat back, arms crossed—as well as he could with the wrists still cuffed—and fixed them with a look both accusatory and slightly disappointed. And, Jack had to admit (only to himself), not completely unjustified.

But Hayes’s cool demeanor had a short shelf life. “Then those other two chicks showed up and waylaid me with the stick—that one’s got an arm, let me tell you. I’ll bet she plays hockey. But I’ll take a broken shin before letting that bitch get away. Only then, she’s trapped in the alley, right? You should have seen her trying to tell her little friends not to call the cops. She said it’s no big deal, then she says it’s a misunderstanding, finally she’s flat-out shrieking at them to hang up the phone. And they look at her like she’s nuts, like why wouldn’t you call the cops, this guy’s attacking women, yada, yada. And the one with the stick, man, she’s hot, she’s ready to take me out herself if you guys are a little busy or something. So my girl was screwed. Screwed, screwed, screwed.”

A grin split his face. He had won. He had a bruised shin and cuffs on his hands, but his target now rested in the custody of the police.

“Okay,” Riley said. “So you admit approaching and working to restrain Ms. Thomas?”

“Hell yeah, I admit it. As long as I can add why.”

“You can. Did she answer any of your questions? Anything about the money or her job?”

The grin faded somewhat. “Not a word. What was I talking about, she had to get to work, leave her alone. Nothing else.”

Jack said, “One thing, Mr. Hayes. You got your money back.”

“Yep. Took a while.”

“So you’re not really out anything, except the time you spent—”

“Doing surveillance.”

“To find the woman you think called you.”

Hayes nodded happily.

“Why?”

Hayes blinked. “Why? You’re asking me why?”

“It seems like an awful lot of time and effort, when you’re not even out the money.”

The scruffy man’s mouth fell open briefly. “Why? Because it needed to be done, that’s why! This chick and whoever she works for are parasites, feeding off the rest of us. Earlier this year, back before Easter I think, someone took my mother for two hundred bucks! Told her her computer was sending out error messages, that stupid crap, but my mom’s not a technical wizard. She still thinks e-mail is amazing futuristic shit. So this turd calls on the phone and she buys it! She—well, she does the same thing I did; she hands over her credit card number. I guess we’re lucky they only took two hundred instead of two thousand. And she’s only got a little pension from my dad! So why did I punch this bitch? Because she freakin’ deserved to be punched! She’s lucky I didn’t kill her.” He sat back, glanced up at the bubble camera, thought better of his last remark, and waved his fingers dismissively. “In a theoretical sense, I mean.”

“Got it,” Jack said. “Theoretical.”

Riley said, “You don’t think she works for the same people who scammed your mom.”

“Nah. But that’s not the point! They’re all people who would take a naïve old lady’s rent money! What kind of complete scumbags would do that?” Hayes crossed the arms, jerking the cuffs, and gave his parting shot. “And you guys aren’t doing much, that’s for sure.”

Jack said, “I’m not going to argue with you there.”