Ready. Set. Psycho.

Chapter Fifteen: Solomon

           

Solomon approached the orange door. He slipped a key into the pad lock, turned it, slipped the lock off, and slid up the storage door. Inside the concrete room with no windows were a second-hand desk and chair. On both sides of the room hung large corkboards, and in the middle of the room was a whiteboard. The corkboard to his left had a picture of the home in Short Hills in the center. Connected to the picture with red string were pictures of all the apparatus of the alarm system that had been recently installed, with post-it notes of codes to disarm or dismantle them. On the right were the four safes the group was targeting, all circled and highlighted in wide-angled photographs of the room where they were situated. There was a fifth picture of an empty closet in the basement that had not been retouched.

Solomon walked to the far wall and picked up a red marker. His name, along with The Man in Black, Sham, Reginald, Vince, and Lisa were written there in his nearly illegible script. Next to each of them was written a phone number and a dollar figure. The Man in Black's dollar figure was largest. Lisa's was $400,000. The three thieves other than Solomon had $1,000,000 each assigned to them. Using the red marker, Solomon crossed off Vince's name and then adjusted Sham and Reginald's shares up to $1,375,000, putting Vince's down to $250,000.

Solomon reviewed his work, checked his math, and then nodded as he drew three more strikes through Vince's name and then a happy face in yellow next to it. Solomon smiled, turned his back to the whiteboard, and left the storage unit. He shut the door, replaced the pad lock, and locked it.

He put the key back into his right pocket and then fished around in his left pocket, removing another, similar key. Solomon walked to the storage unit next door and unlocked it and went in. It was organized identically to the last, except the corkboards and whiteboards contained information exclusively about Justin Graham. Solomon stood in the room, closing the door behind him and turning on a battery-operated lamp. He exhaled, picked up his phone, and then told the person on the other line he needed to talk this through.

***

Lisa arrived with Clive. They knocked on the door to the storage unit. It was raining. Solomon opened, and Clive rushed in. "Fucking cold, Sol," he said. "And wet. And not much better in here." He helped himself to the lone seat and shook off some of the water.

"Nothing on your end?" Solomon asked Lisa.

"I don't really hear much. That's mostly up to Roger and Thomas. I don't have line of sight, but I get the sense that they are as active as they can be, but they are waiting for a break."

"They shouldn't be waiting," Solomon said.

"They're not. You know what I mean. They're working, but there's nothing for them. No clues. Sol, you know what they are up against. There's nothing to work with," Lisa said. "And if Roger and Thomas know something, they aren't saying."

"And you?" Solomon asked, looking at Clive.

"The body with the note was otherwise just a body. And no others have popped up."

"Okay. Well, we have figured out how he got the note into the body," Solomon said.

"Paulie?" Clive asked.

"Yes." Solomon took Paulie's picture and added it to a timeline on the corkboard. On the far left were the eighteen dead homeless men. Next were Francine, then Juanita, then Greg. To the right of them were still frames of Justin's trip through Europe, aligned to the timeline as best as Kevin could figure it. After that was a picture of Vera, and then Paulie. The last picture on the far right was Hyacinth.

"What do we know?" Lisa asked.

"He paid Paul ten thousand to slip the note into Vera's throat."