Room 348: Death at the Inn - Ch # 4

A New Match of Eyes

Ken Brennan took Susie’s call on the golf course. She was astounded that he picked up the phone himself.

“Ken Brennan speaking.”

“Oh, my God, you don’t have a secretary?,” Susie asked.

She was bothered. The criminologist had replied on the to begin with ring. She might scarcely get the story out—Greg’s passing, the coroner’s finding, the dead conclusion. He inquired her to send him a few records; he’d take a see. She said she had been feeling beneath the climate, but she would attempt to drag together what she had, immediately, and send it off to him.

“Well,” said Brennan, “you require to fuckin’ take care of yourself.”

Like everything Brennan says, this came in a thick Unused York complement and a voice that sounds like it’s strained through a cubic yard of rock. It was a no-bullshit-you-better-listen-to-me command that was all the more startling since he had said something delicate. It charmed him to Susie immediately.

Brennan is a previous Long Island cop and D.E.A. uncommon operator who presently makes a great living as a private criminologist in Florida. That’s why he was on the golf course in February. He is pushing 60, still strong, and continuously tan and smart, in the South Florida way. Blue-eyed, thick-necked, and roughly good looking, he is fractional to lightweight short-sleeved shirts that appear off his middle and huge arms. He wears flashes of gold at the neck and wrist, and Irish rings on a few fingers. Brennan’s hair is for the most part white presently, and is combed straight back on the sides and straight up in the front in a low-key pompadour, cocky but dignified.

Months prior, not long after Greg was slaughtered, a youthful legal counselor companion, Kea Sherman, had told Susie and Michael around Brennan. Sharing Susie’s disappointment with the examination, she had hit upon the procedure of recording a claim against the lodging as a implies of seeking after the test secretly. She had examined an article by me in this magazine (“The Case of the Vanishing Blonde,” December 2010) specifying Brennan’s exceptional victory in settling a 2005 cold case in Miami. Presently, when the examination appeared miserable, Sherman brought up Brennan again.

“If you need to do something,” she encouraged Susie, “you have got to call this guy—the one I told you approximately. Fair discover him.”

Brennan can be promptly found on the Web and is inquired to take more cases than he can handle. Individuals come to him with unsolved murders and vanishings. He takes these individuals truly and handles them tenderly. When he peruses a record, he is looking for a case that interests him, but moreover one where he considers he might be able to fulfill something. “I ain’t in the trade of giving individuals untrue hopes,” he says. The Fleniken case offered to him since of the puzzle but too since there were so numerous roads to explore—Greg’s family and co-workers, lodging visitors, the support man. To Criminologist Apple, none of these leads appeared new any longer. To Brennan, they were all unused and possibly promising. He knew that a new match of eyes was maybe the most profitable thing he brought to an investigation.

Brennan gone to Lafayette in April. He worked Susie over to begin with, inquiring her a part of difficult questions almost their relationship, almost Greg’s loyalty, around protections courses of action, fulfilling himself that the spouse had no clear thought process to have him murdered. “Let me inquire you one more thing,” said Brennan. “Was there anything approximately the wrongdoing scene that didn’t appear right to you? That appeared off?” Susie told him that she was shocked that the room was so warm when Greg’s co-workers entered it the taking after morning. Her spouse preferred to wrench up the A.C. at night.

Then Brennan went domestic and made courses of action for a moment trip, to Beaumont. Apple came out to a sports bar late to meet him. The two men ate and talked. Brennan told Apple what he continuously tells the cops he meets in his work: “Listen, I’m not a dissident. I don’t go doing things half-cocked. If I choose we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it as a group. There’s nothing I’m going to do that you’re not going to know approximately it, and there ought to be nothing that you’re going to do that I don’t know approximately. The one thing I won’t do is fuck up your case. . . . I’ve been doing this a long time. But I too know that you’re the fellow in charge here, so it’s your case.”

Part of what was going on was Brennan checking out Apple. “I don’t need to work with some person I don’t like,” he told me. He prides himself on being able to examined individuals exceptionally rapidly. He enjoyed the Beaumont detective.

It was common. As Apple would put it afterward, “Ken has great individuals skills.”