Chapter 2: The Best Thing in the World - Lucidity

FOUR MONTHS BEFORE NYPD DETECTIVE THOMAS CHU ABRUPTLY ended Fremmer’s meeting with aspiring author Brian Tynan at the Starbucks on Columbus, another aspiring author on the other side of the country, one Detective Hank Madden, Menlo Park PD, Retired, was debating the future of his book project.

His problem was more acute than Tynan’s, for he’d lately come to the conclusion that he really couldn’t write. He never thought it would be easy. But he didn’t think it would be that hard. After all, he was telling his own story, he wasn’t using his imagination, and everybody said he had a compelling story to tell. Not only had he led two sensational murder investigations in a span of just a few years, he also had his own well-documented narrative of overcoming childhood sexual abuse. So many people insisted the book would write itself.

It didn’t. Madden spent days sitting at his desk, staring at the screen, trying to decide where to begin. He began many beginnings but never finished any. The more he examined his life, the more he didn’t like what he saw, although he had much to be proud of. The evidence was right at his fingertips. All he had to do was type his name into a Google search bar. Or “handicapped detective.” That worked, too.

The links went on for pages. TV reports and newspaper articles repeating themselves as smaller newspapers and blogs reposted them with clever headlines or some unique insight. Some of these reports were word-for-word copies of the original news stories while others adopted a more narrative or opinionated tone, with a couple of highfalutin think-pieces thrown in for good measure. When he’d still been on the job, Madden mostly ignored the posts. But now he couldn’t resist clicking.

He clicked on the People magazine profile entitled “Handicapped Detective Makes His Big Exit.” He clicked on articles in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter about a film that was in early development based on the People profile. He smiled rereading about the actor Kevin Spacey’s interest in playing him, the handicapped detective, in “The Big Exit,” the working title for the elusive movie.

As a child Madden had one of the last cases of polio in the U.S. The disease left him with a drop foot and a limp. According to the articles in the trade magazines, Spacey, adept at playing physically challenged characters—he did a bang-up Richard III and won an Oscar for his portrayal of the palsied con man Roger “Verbal” Kint in The Usual Suspects—was perfect for the role. Madden clicked on all the photos comparing the actor’s receding hairline to his own.

They were hardly dead ringers, Madden thought. His face was longer and narrower than Spacey’s; his hair, the little that ringed his head, was grayer, and he wore a neatly trimmed moustache. But he had nothing against Spacey playing him.

In the two years since he’d retired, he’d become even slimmer. Now sixty-six, he looked truly slight, and he’d recently traded a pair of half-rimmed glasses for thicker tortoise-shell Ray-Ban frames that had come to define his face and make him look hip in a throwback, old-school way. Or so several people had told him.

After the People article first appeared a couple of years earlier, his agent in Los Angeles kept him apprised of the developments. Until there were no more. She mentioned something about ageism in Hollywood and that was the last he heard from her until one day she called him about a potential book deal. Could he write a synopsis? An outline with a sample chapter?

He said he could, then never did. No one asked him for them again, so he assumed no one wanted them. But the book idea stuck. He believed he could do it, wanted to do it, if only because he wasn’t really doing anything else. Also, he’d told a few people that he was working on a book outline for his agent and they kept asking him about it.

“How’s the book coming?” his friend, Nick Page, the owner of the Ace Hardware on Santa Cruz Avenue in downtown Menlo Park, asked him every Tuesday and Thursday when Madden turned up there to work.

“Slowly,” Madden sometimes replied. Or: “It’s coming.”

At his wife and kids’ urging he’d completed all the coursework and passed all the exams to get his private investigator’s license. But six months later he still hadn’t taken the next step to set up his business and acquire the liability insurance for a firearm. He needed an open schedule to write the book, he told himself, but the resulting lack of structure and schedule started to weigh on him. When Nick offered him a part-time job at the hardware store, he decided to take it.

He didn’t need the money. Under the state and city’s “3 at 50” pension formula for public safety employees, cops who were hired before 2010 could retire as early as age fifty and receive three percent of their highest annual salary for each year they’d worked for the city, up to thirty years. Madden had put in thirty-two years, and was now receiving 90 percent of his highest salary for the rest of his life, a sweetheart deal if there ever was one. But sometimes he felt bad that he didn’t feel better about his situation. His friends thought he was the luckiest guy in the world. But he didn’t. Far from it.

The hardware store job mainly entailed helping people find what they were looking for in the relatively small retail space. Even though it was an Ace franchise, it was pretty mom-and-pop, so it didn’t seem unusual for a senior citizen to work there, especially one who looked pretty fit for sixty-six, despite his pronounced limp.

He and Nick put sale items in front of the store in an effort to capture some of the limited foot traffic on Santa Cruz. Technically, Santa Cruz Avenue was the main drag in downtown Menlo Park, but it wasn’t a shopping destination like Stanford Shopping Center and University Avenue in Palo Alto were. No one came to spend the afternoon on Santa Cruz; people went to a shop or two, maybe a restaurant, then got back in their cars and drove away.

One day—or more precisely, one hundred thirty days before a car mowed down Candace Epstein in New York City—a man came into the store. Late thirties, medium height and build, a little preppy, with a full head of dark curly hair. He walked past Madden to the back of the store. Madden looked down an aisle and saw that the guy had stopped in the tool section and was examining a shovel. After giving him a minute or two, Madden set off down the aisle, his awkward gait making him look like he was in the process of rehabbing a knee after surgery.

“Can I help you find anything?” he asked.

The customer looked at him and smiled. He seemed familiar for some reason, but Madden couldn’t place him.

“I hope so,” the customer said. “I want to dig a hole. A pretty big hole. Say at least six feet deep, but maybe deeper. Pretty wide, too. Which one of these shovels would you recommend?”

When a guy said he wanted to dig a hole six feet deep, a salesman didn’t have to be a former detective to get a little suspicious. But former detectives didn’t come right out and show their suspicion. Instead, Madden said:

“That would take a long time to do by hand. You looking to do this by yourself?”

He didn’t look like the type of guy who’d dig a hole by himself. He was dressed in a tight, long-sleeve navy polo shirt, chino pants, and a pair of fancy sneakers that were meant to pass for casual dress shoes. Madden noticed a large, well-worn gold class ring on his right hand. From which university Madden couldn’t tell, but it seemed oddly out of place and made his hand seem small.

“Yeah,” the guy said. “The ground’s really hard, too. Drought’s a bitch. How long you think it would take to dig?”

“Alone? It could take you a couple of days. And your back might go out. What are you looking to put into this hole?”

“Let’s say for argument’s sake, a body.”

Madden smiled. “What kind of body?”

“You know, a dead one. A corpse.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I killed my wife.”

Madden tried his best to look amused but he wasn’t. “For argument’s sake?”

“Well, if I’m dumping her in a hole, I think we can assume she lost the argument.” He erupted into hearty laughter. “Am I right?”

Madden gave him a hard look. He didn’t like this guy. Not one bit. But he was also pretty sure someone was trying to put one over on him.

“That one you were holding is a good choice,” he said, continuing to play along. “You might call it the Mercedes of grave-digging shovels.”

The would-be wife-killer looked at the shovel, which was made of high-grade steel and had a polished, gleaming look. “Mercedes, huh?” he said with a straight face, picking it up again. “I’m more of a Tesla guy. You got one of those? Anything I can plug in?”

He started laughing again, but then stopped abruptly.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “I’m just kidding around. Hal Shelby. It’s an honor to meet you, Detective. A real honor.”

Hal Shelby extended a hand. Madden let it hang there a few seconds, then shook it reluctantly.

“Do I know you, Mr. Shelby?”

“A mutual acquaintance told me you were working here. Tom Bender. He suggested I speak with you. Says you’re writing a book but that it isn’t going too well and that you’re in a bit of a funk.”

“That so?” Madden replied, a little perturbed yet not surprised Bender was broadcasting his personal life. Bender had made a career out of saying whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted whenever he wanted. He was a narcissistic tech blogger whom Madden, for better or worse, had gotten to know through his last case, the murder of a Silicon Valley executive.

“I have a proposition for you, Detective.”

“I don’t need help writing this book, Mr. Shelby.”

“Hal,” Shelby said. “No one calls me Mr. Shelby.”

“OK. Hal. I don’t need any help. I’m doing just fine, thanks. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to see if that customer who just came in needs any assistance.”

A woman in workout gear had walked into the store and was chatting with Nick, who was behind the counter. Madden took a step away, but Shelby wasn’t ready to let him go.

“I’m going to tell you something that I don’t tell a lot of people,” he said.

Madden looked at him. He couldn’t help it. But he also doubted Shelby was about to tell him anything proprietary.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a cop,” Shelby said. “I was in a Police Explorer Unit when I was a teenager. Right around here. When they had the old station house.”

Madden was a bit taken aback. “That so?”

“You know that unit?”

“Sure.”

A lot of police departments around the country had Explorer programs. The one in the Menlo Park Police Department had been organized through the Explorer program of the Pacific Skyline Council of Boy Scouts of America.

“I enjoyed it,” Shelby went on. “They used to call us in whenever they had any sort of tedious project. You know, we’d have to walk along the side of the freeway and try to find evidence people had chucked out the windows of their cars. I loved doing it, even though we almost never found anything. They made you feel part of the team. And they’d teach you stuff as you were doing it.”

“It’s a good program,” Madden said, still unsure why Shelby was bringing it up.

“You remember Stacey Walker?”

At first, Madden thought he was asking about an old colleague of his. But then he realized the name was familiar for another reason. The Walkers. Stacey and Ross. She didn’t come home one night. Four months later, as the DA was preparing to file charges, Ross split the country and never came back. They’d never found her body. Or him.

“Of course I do,” Madden said. “I was a patrol officer at the time. I went to the house a few times.”

“That article, the one that was in The Merc a couple of weeks ago, the one about the twentieth anniversary? That got me thinking. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years, but I didn’t have time to really think about it, you know, to really do something about it.”

Do something about it? What was he going to do?

“They had us down there on the husband’s land in Saratoga,” Shelby went on. “When I was in the Explorers. We had those metal rods and we went around for hours, poking the ground, looking for soft patches.” He raised his right fist up and down, performing an imaginary thrust into the earth. “I was on the property on and off for a week, maybe longer. I was sixteen.”

“I remember you guys doing that,” Madden said. “And all the other volunteers.”

“For years afterwards I had dreams about her. Weird ones. Sometimes I’d be looking for her in my own backyard.”

The case had haunted a few people, Madden thought. Not only did he know the detectives who’d worked it, he was also friendly with Carolyn Dupuy, who’d been an ADA in the San Mateo County District Attorney’s office at the time and was now in private practice.

Shelby took the shovel off the rack again. He examined the shiny head for a moment, then extended it to Madden and said:

“Hold onto that. You’re going to need it.”

He then reached into his back pocket and pulled out a blank white envelope that was folded in half. He handed it to Madden.

“There’s a simple contract in there along with a check for $10,000 to get you started,” he started. “If you cash the check and sign the document, I’ll send you over a check for another $10,000. I’ll pay expenses, too. Whatever you want. An assistant. A slush fund to bribe people. Whatever.”

Madden looked at him, dumbfounded.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to do some digging. Literally.”

“So this isn’t about the book?”

“Screw the book. You’re not a writer, are you?”

No, Madden admitted, he wasn’t.

“I’m not either,” Shelby said, “which is why I didn’t write my book. And I’m not a detective either. Which is why I want you to find that woman’s body. And while you’re at it, I want you to find her husband. You’ll be well compensated if you succeed at one or both. The terms are in your hand.”

Madden looked at the envelope, which he didn’t quite remember accepting, then back up at Shelby.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but a lot of people—smart people—have already spent a lot of time trying to do both of those things. Most of them think Ross Walker isn’t alive anymore. I’m sure you’re quite aware that the DNA tests on those remains came back a match.”

“Remains?” Shelby scoffed. “You call one arm remains? Where was the rest of him?”

Madden smiled. “So you’re in that camp.”

“You’re damn right I’m in that camp.”

That camp was the Ross-Walker-had-sacrificed-an-arm-to-fake-his-own-death camp. Madden found its hypothesis rather far-fetched, but plenty of people were sure Walker was still very much alive. They pointed to the fact that it was only the lower portion of his left arm, everything below the elbow. That wasn’t so bad, their reasoning went, especially given the quality of available prosthetics. And besides, it was possible that he’d developed some sort of infection and had to have it amputated anyway.

Madden didn’t buy it. “It seems like there are better ways to fake your death than chop off your arm,” he told Shelby.

“Well, you need to open your mind, Detective. And I think those figures in that envelope might help you do that.”

Madden glanced one more time at that envelope, which suddenly felt a little heavier in his hand. Then he said to Shelby:

“Even if I open my mind, what makes you think I’m the one who can find him? Why me?”

Shelby smiled. “I’m going to let you in on another little secret, Detective.” This time, he leaned a little closer and lowered his voice: “You know the reason I wanted to make all the money I’ve made?”

Madden slowly shook his head. He had no idea.

“So I could afford to make mistakes,” Shelby whispered.

“That must be nice.”

“It is,” he continued in a low voice. “It’s the best thing in the world. And I don’t mean that in an arrogant way.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Oh, I think I did, Detective. I think I did.”