Shadows Reel (Joe Pickett #22)(56)

“This indicates to me that he’d come home before the bad guys arrived. He took off his coat and hat and then he answered a knock at the door. He probably wasn’t expecting company, is my guess.”

Joe nodded. “That’s what Norwood thought, too. There was half-eaten bacon and eggs on the counter,” he said. “Maybe Bert thought it was a prospective client coming to see him.”

“Maybe. Now this coat. Was it a fishing jacket?”

“It said ‘Simms’ on the sleeve,” Joe said. “So, yes, it was a fishing jacket. That doesn’t seem odd for a fishing guide.”

She looked up. “The man I saw yesterday morning in the alcove of the library was wearing a cap like this and a jacket like this. Do you think it’s possible it was Bert Kizer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a recent photo of him? I know the one in your phone isn’t probably something I could use to identify him.”

“True,” Joe said. “And please don’t try.”

“Here,” she said, handing him back his phone. Marybeth dashed inside the house and returned with her laptop. The glow from the screen illuminated her face as she quickly logged on and tapped out passwords on a series of screens.

Joe recognized the layout of the Wyoming Department of Transportation website. He often accessed the site to identify hunters by matching their driver’s license information with their hunting licenses. He’d caught a few out-of-state hunters pretending to be residents that way. The violators had been motivated to commit fraud because nonresident licenses cost much more.

“How do you have access to that?” he asked her.

“Don’t ask.”

A few more taps and she found what she was looking for: Bert Kizer’s motor vehicle license photo. She studied it.

“I think it was him,” she said. “The man who left the photo album at the library was Bert Kizer. I’m ninety percent sure of it. And I think the album belonged to his dad, who’d been in the Band of Brothers during World War Two. He probably kept it in that footlocker you found under his bed.”

“How did you get all of that from my phone?” Joe asked, perplexed.

“All I got from your phone was the name on the footlocker,” she said. “I researched the rest online this morning while everybody was asleep and the gargoyle showed up. Anyway, I looked up R. W. ‘Dick’ Kizer and found his obituary. It said Bert was his son and that Dick was in the Band of Brothers.”

“You’re kidding,” Joe said.

“I’m not. Dick Kizer was one of two Wyoming soldiers in that unit. He landed at Normandy and stayed with the regiment all the way across Europe. They were the first Americans to enter Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, where one of them—a guy from Casper, believe it or not—stole two of Hitler’s personal photo albums and brought them back.”

Joe was stunned by the implication. “So did Dick Kizer take the album that was dropped off at your library?”

“I don’t know for certain, of course, but it’s possible. He was there in Berchtesgaden.”

Joe felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold evening. There had been enough spare room in the locker for the album to have been there. He thought of how pressed the uniform had been, as if something heavy and flat had weighted it down for years before it had been removed.

He asked, “Why would Bert decide yesterday, after all these years, to donate that album to your library if that’s what happened?”

“I don’t know,” Marybeth said. “But maybe he did it because he thought someone was going to come and take it from him. Maybe he did it just a couple of hours before the bad guy showed up at his house and tortured him until he told him where it was?”



* * *



—

“Stay with me on this,” Marybeth said, racing ahead. “Let’s say that Bert somehow found out that somebody was coming for his father’s photo album. How he learned that, I have no idea. But his reaction to the possibility was to get the album out of his house and leave it somewhere secure where no one would make a big deal of it. Believe it or not, that’s one reason people trust our library. They trust us to be discreet.

“So Bert does this early yesterday morning. He thinks he’s found a safe place for it. Maybe his intention was to come back later and retrieve it. Or maybe he hoped we’d send it on to some national archive so no one could get to it. I don’t know his thinking.”

“I’m following you,” Joe said, urging her on.

She said, “Bert goes home after dropping off the album to find a guy—or maybe a couple of guys—waiting for him. I’m going to say it was at least two men because I don’t think one guy could do to Bert Kizer what was done to him, do you?”

“No.”

She said, “They strong-arm him and demand the album. For whatever reason, he won’t tell them anything at first. But when he won’t hand it over, they get nasty with him. Why it means so much to them, we don’t know. And we don’t know how they knew he even had it. It obviously means enough to them that they torture him for it. At some point he breaks and tells them what he did with it. But they can’t just let him go. He’s seen their faces. Maybe they even told him why they want it. So they take him out back and set him on fire and dispose of the body. Then,” she said, leaning in close to Joe, “they drive to my library. By this time, they know we have it.”