A Ruthless Victim Page 2

  However, the husband and father of those two poor victims had never believed that, not for a single second. According to the case file, the man has attempted to sue everything and everybody related to the case in any capacity. He has even placed a lawsuit against the individual police officers as well as the entire precinct. He sued the insurance company, the car manufacturer, his personal mechanic, their dentist, the city and the review board. This man wanted answers, and he was being denied them at every turn. It was enough of a wave that his persistence had caught the eye of the company. Who, unbeknownst to Mr. Bradley Kramer, has been delving deeply into the case of his wife’s alleged accidental arson….or accidental murder.

  To many, it seems as if it’s little more than Mr. Kramer being mad at the world. It seems that he is a brokenhearted man and that he will turn to any venue or outlet that he can get his hands on. All of the obvious things have been ruled out: the car was never tampered with; there wasn’t a recall, and an engine fire like that has never happened to any of the other cars of that same model that were manufactured in that year. Really, it seems as if Mr. Kramer might be losing his sanity in an effort to make the world make sense to him again.

  However, the police file ruled the accident an arson, but no suspects were ever cornered with any information as to what might have happened or who could have done this. Mr. Kramer used to work in insurance. His reputation within the stock market field is nearly unmatched to this day; he just has a head for numbers, and because of this, he has done very well for himself. Once upon a time, he had quite a bit of money. Though after the death of his family, he quit both of his jobs and went back home to mourn...and then he never left again, something that many would consider to be a great waste of talent. Somebody who ought to be on his way to becoming a very young billionaire was instead nearly destitute and living off of the modest retirement that he had started to accumulate, and then started to draw far too early.

  Standing on the front porch of Bradley Kramer’s house isn’t inviting. The lawn is poorly cared for and browning in some places. The car in the driveway has four flat tires, and there are weeds poking up through the spaces between the wooden slats in his painted front porch. What must have been a very charming family home now seems like the sort of place that should be walled off by vines that children tell horror stories about. Even with the door closed, Nathan can smell liquor coming from inside. He can feel it against his skin as if a warning to every bit of his five senses.

  Behind the chipped front door with peeling paint comes a shuffle, the sort of shamble that’s hard to expect at noon but would been very fitting were this last call at a bar. From the way that the locks start to click open, Nathan knows that Bradley Kramer is drunk well before he ever catches a glimpse of that unshaven face. A patchy growth of facial hair spreads down his neck to the unruly mess of chest hair hardly covered by the robe that the man is wearing pulled over sweatpants at least; that’s a small comfort. It is obvious that this man has given up. Bradley Kramer is a man who is waiting for death; there is no way around it. No doubt he’s a man that feels suicide is a coward’s way out; perhaps he’s drinking so much so that he doesn’t have so many qualms about being cowardly. Nathan wonders for a moment if he’s ever loved anything this much in his life.

  He doesn’t think so.

  “Go away, I’m not buying,” Bradley slurs as he leans heavily against the door frame. He must have forgotten that he has agreed to meet with him today. Well, not Nathan so much. He’s agreed to meet with Chase Shaffer, internal investigations with Audi automotive company. As far as the instructions that Nathan has received goes, he’s supposed to be conducting yet another search into the deaths in an effort to shine some light on the subject and hopefully provide Bradley with some long awaited answers. The company informed him that whenever they arranged this meeting, Bradley had sobbed into the phone for twenty minutes out of gratitude.

  “Good morning, Mr. Kramer, I’m not selling; you agreed to meet with me?”

  “Oh,” a light flickers on above Mr. Kramer’s head, his face a concentrated furrow as he attempts to piece together whatever he might have agreed to. “From the car company?”

  Nathan nods, “Mr. Shaffer, yes, you spoke with my team on the phone.” Nathan doesn’t extend a hand; he doesn’t really want to question as to where Mr. Kramer might have been lately, but he certainly doesn’t seem like he would know what a shower even was.

  “Do I need to have my lawyer present? I’ll go call him…” Bradley attempts to lean off of the doorjamb and stumbles backward a foot before catching himself.

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Kramer; we have the same goals in mind. I’m here independent of the fact that you’re attempting to sue the parent company. I’ve been working closely with the local police force in an effort to get your case closed. Certainly, if I do a good job, and we are successful, then the lawyers will take it from there. My personal background is in private investigation; it’s really a wonder that a job like mine even exists really,” Nathan is talking a lot. This is perhaps his least favorite of all of his false personas. The persona of Chase Shaffer has a bit of a stick up his ass and tends to be a bit of a know it all. However, Nathan is the consummate actor while he’s assigned to a particular role like this one. Work is the most important here.

  “Right. Well. Let me change.” Bradley seems to struggle with the effort of removing his robe. Though once he drops it off of his torso, and it pools around his feet, Nathan can see the puckered skin covering his hands and forearms. That must have hurt quite a bit.

  “Was trying to pull them out…”

  Nathan must have been staring at the scarred, burned flesh that covered his arms now.

  “They were late coming home, and her car has tracking so I went to meet them...figured she must have let her phone die yet again...but the car was,” Bradley chokes up, clearly the image is still fresh in his mind. “There was no noise...I went to pull Emma free first...that’s my daughter.” Bradley picks up a picture frame off of the kitchen counter and brings it closer to Nathan, holding it out for his inspection. “I tried, but it was too hot...they don’t hurt so much now, but the skin does hurt like a bitch when it gets too hot out…”

  Nathan doesn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry,” he replies honestly while reaching for the picture frame, shocked whenever he recognizes the figures in the picture. It’s Bradley Kramer and his wife pushing their little girl on a swing. Only, they didn’t die in a fire; they were kidnapped. Nathan knows this because he lived it.

  That isn’t something that was in the file from the company. He needs to report this change, and clearly, Kramer doesn’t know the specifics about what happened. Were they kidnapped and then put back into the car afterward? Were the bodies in the car even them? “Do you have water?” Really, Nathan wants coffee, but he doesn't want to sound too pushy.

  “Water...tea...coffee...whatever you like, the kitchen is through there,” he gestures, clearly making an effort to keep himself upright and to quickly sober himself so that he can have this conversation with Nathan.

  Without waiting for further invitation, Nathan goes into the kitchen and starts making himself comfortable, finding the coffee grounds and starting to make what’s going to be a very strong pot of coffee in the cheap coffee pot. There isn’t a single dish in the sink. When Nathan goes to pull the milk from the fridge, he finds it empty. However the trash can is nearly full of takeout containers. Clearly, he doesn’t spend his time cooking. No doubt, Mr. Kramer was once a very well formed, handsome individual who just stopped caring about the world or wanting to have anything to do with it. Nathan doesn’t suppose he can blame him. There’s a feeling in his gut that won’t leave; something else is off about this case, and he needs to get to the bottom of it.

  “They were identified with dental records, weren’t they?”

  “Shouldn’t you know that?”

  Nathan forces a good natured chuckle. “I only know what’s on the re
ports. I’m fairly new to your case. I prefer to hear what they told you and work backward that way. The more details that you can provide me with, the better.

  “Their identities were only presumed; there wasn’t enough to identify them any other way.”

  “The car fire burned hot enough to have melted their teeth?” Nathan says incredulously. Of course, he already knows this.

  “Apparently. The police said that somebody started the fire, or that they must have driven over something...they never could even pinpoint the location where the fire started; isn’t that some shit? That’s their fucking job, and they couldn’t even do that...I had four teams looking over the case files, and not one of them was a help to me. Not a single fucking one. So they declared them dead, and it was my car, two things that were once living, breathing, beautiful creatures...nothing more than ash piles.”

  Nathan lets the silence fill the kitchen as Bradley moves to sit at the surprisingly clean kitchen table, and Nathan pours the both of them cups of black coffee for the heck of it and sits to join Bradley at the table.

  “What do you think happened?” Nathan asks.

  “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I’ve gone over it again and again. I’ve looked at every picture and thought of every single scenario that I can concoct, including lightning strikes and random, spontaneous combustion and nothing matches. All documented cases of both of those things would have left their bodies looking differently; the car wouldn’t have started to melt from the inside out...it simply doesn’t make any sense at all. My wife, she grew up here. It’s the only reason we even bought a house here. She wanted our daughter to have a childhood like her own; she wanted her to grow up in a similar way, and whatever my wife wanted, I was and am more than happy to provide for her. She is….was, my whole world. I didn’t have parents growing up, really so it certainly didn’t matter to me.” Nathan pauses, drinking the scalding hot coffee like he can’t even feel it on his tongue. “She was always going on and on about how safe this town is. How comforted she constantly felt here and that everybody knew who she was, knew our daughter...and while it was an all-new experience for me, I can’t say that it wasn’t charming for a time...so it’s not like somebody would have targeted her in particular. Besides...Emma was only three...she was only three….who would burn a child? Not even monsters stoop that low.”

  Nathan wants to disagree because he has seen just how horrible humans can get, but he says nothing. He blows on the top of his coffee before taking a sip. It’s bitter and terrible, and he can’t name the blend for anything. Whatever it is, he never would have bought it for himself.

  “What about you, Mr. Kramer,” Nathan starts carefully, as if he is treading on eggshells. He doesn’t believe that Bradley will become violent if he’s offended, but Nathan also isn’t willing to risk having that hot coffee thrown in his face either.

  “What do you mean what about me?”

  “Is there anybody in your life that would have wanted to hurt them...to hurt you?” This isn’t the line of questioning that the company wanted for him to start down, but he has to know. Nathan knows that vision that he saw of them being kidnapped is real, and he needs to find a way to make the pieces fit together.

  “Hurt...me?”

  Nathan nods. The look on Mr. Kramer's face is one that Nathan cannot understand; he can’t put an emotion to it. It’s not confusion, and it’s not pain, but more as if he’s straining in the haze of his once spectacular brain to attempt to make all of the pieces fit together. As if this is a brand new angle that he couldn’t have ever imagined having to consider before.

  “Maybe.” The word is a whisper as it leaves Kramer’s booze-soaked lips and falls heavy to the table as Nathan waits for him to provide more information, no matter how slow. “Whenever I worked downtown, I wasn’t the most popular fellow. In my line of work that’s not uncommon. You bid for stock buyer accounts and have to strong arm your way to the top. You don’t make friends easily...there was a man who was particularly offended by me. I never cheated my way to anything, mind you, and I got this man fired for cheating, for embezzlement. He was a few years older than me and came from old money. He has shown up over the course of the last few years off and on, just happening to be where I was. It was something that always struck me as odd, but given that he lives downtown and has family out this way, I never really thought too much of it. He had more money than god; it wasn’t like he needed to work in the first place. I never understood why he blamed me personally...well, that’s not true, I was the one who found the little wormhole that the money would fall through into his accounts. I did the right thing...which naturally, he reacted to like an infant.” At this, Bradley almost smiles for half a moment. In that moment, he almost looks like an entirely different person. Not just a skeleton wearing skin but a real person. An echo of the man that Bradley once would have been. “He threw things and screamed; he punched the security guard and stomped on all of the muffins in the break room. It was comical...but then every night for a month, he would be waiting for me by my car after work. Eventually, I had a restraining order placed and then he disappeared mostly. Never even looked at me whenever I saw him those other times...just random...he’s just about the only enemy that I’ve ever had.”

  “What was his name?” Nathan asks, pulling out a scrap of paper and making some notes on it, waiting for the name of his alleged enemy before nodding to himself.

  “Alex Paulson, I think...maybe Alexander is what it’s short for; I’ll have to fish out my legal papers to be certain.”

  Nathan makes a note and nods. “I can pull it up through the court systems for sure.”

  “You can’t think that could possibly have anything to do with this, do you?”

  “Well, Mr. Kramer, nothing else has been right, so might as well give it a shot.”

  What looks like hope shines briefly in Kramer’s eyes. Nathan wonders how long it’s been since Bradley Kramer has had reason to hope about anything at all.

  Chapter Four

  T he office of Alexander Patrick Paulson is a very small one. It’s a standalone building that seems to have been set on a small quarter acre lot with the dreams of looking like something else. It wasn’t like he was terribly hard to track down, and his firewalls were terrible. Through some searching, Nathan discovered that this man, Alex, spent a handful of years in jail after Bradley exposed him for his crimes. He stayed until he could work off just enough of his sentence to pay bail, and it seems like another good portion of his finances have been made in steady payments to something that Nathan is fairly certain is one of the judges in his county. It appears that he’s paying bribes or hush money for the fact that he was allowed to go free sooner than he was supposed to. No doubt, he should have spent a good deal longer behind bars for the amount of money that he embezzled. It seems to always be this way, that the rich men get richer, and the poor stay poorer. If it had been anything else that had been stolen from the company that somebody else worked for, they would have been persecuted to the extent of the law.

  However, that’s how corporate America tends to work.

  Now, Alexander Paulson seems to be working a combination of a tax preparation office and bail bondsman. No doubt, he still gets a fair amount of money that crosses his hands but nowhere near the money that he used to get certainly. At first, Nathan isn’t one hundred percent certain that he wishes to go inside, but he needs to know for certain just what they might be dealing with here.

  The interior of the office is broiling hot; there seems to be one window unit pumping through the entire building, and central air conditioning is a joke apparently. The woman behind the front barrier sits with her feet up on the desk, fanning herself with a file folder. She doesn’t so much as look up; she doesn’t even open her eyes to meet his gaze; she's so concerned with regulating her body temperature.

  Despite the semi-professional setting, she’s wearing a low cut blouse and a tight pencil skirt covering her slender but slightly toned
legs down to the knees, where she’s got her legs crossed at the ankles. Black high heels with an ankle strap circling each one are still on her feet. Nathan would have assumed that those would have been the first thing to go. Perhaps it is simply just his preference, but he never did much care for high heels. He prefers any other type of shoe. However, the company doesn’t exactly give time for having a personal life, nor does it allow for dating. Nathan wouldn’t have known how or where to go on a date in the first place.

  The wallpaper is peeling in the corners, and the smell of cigarettes and cigars lingers in the air. Nathan doesn’t even see Alex anywhere in the office, and clearly, she’s not too concerned with the prospect of people coming in or out. It’s curious to Nathan, given that he knows how much money is in this man’s bank accounts, that he would be working in an office like this. Nathan would have expected the man to have gone right back into the corporate world; he would have been welcome enough there, as most of them are crooked anyway. It’s surprising to Nathan that a man who grew up used to a certain standard of life and having certain things would be able to tolerate living this way for very long. The carpet is threadbare and patchy; this looks like the sort of place that Nathan would have expected to find on the ‘bad side’ of town right next to the jail. That certainly would have made a lot more sense.

  Furthermore, from the research that Nathan has been provided by the company, he’s owned this building for some time and lives not too far away. From the pictures of his townhome, it also appears that is of a substandard quality compared to somebody of his income level. Routinely, the company pours through the contacts lists, bank statements, text messages and email files for anybody that they send Nathan or any of the other Doe operatives out on missions for. They will pour over all records, high school and college transcripts, utility bills, account for every cent until they know the person just as well or better than they even know themselves. The company is straightforward and leaves very little room for error. They noted almost nothing out of the ordinary other than the hush money payments and the fact that his electric bill was through the roof. It took the company less than an hour to learn all of this after Nathan had sent off a couple text messages about his vision and the possible kidnapping, as well as giving the name that Bradley gave him. They only answered him with an office location and left the rest to him.