Cold Case (37 page)

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

He clamped his lips, so I delved into his pants pocket, and extracted a battered wallet. Driver's license for one Ralph Farrell. MasterCard for same. I compared the driver's license photo with the drawn features of the man on the ground. Ralph Farrell, all right. A total stranger.

“Talk,” I said, waving MacAvoy's piece.

“Get me to a hospital, Carlotta.”

“As soon as I know how you know my name, and not a second before.”

He said nothing. I walked away.

“Carlotta!”

“You could bleed to death,” I said through gritted teeth. “Hell, I might shoot you myself.”

“Keith Donovan,” he said faintly.

“What?”

“I'm an investigator. Mainly bodyguard stuff. Keith Donovan hired me. He said you were in danger. A threatened mob hit, but he knew you weren't taking it seriously. I told him a blind tail wouldn't work, especially with a pro, but—”

“But he paid you,” I said, blood roaring in my ears. Donovan.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked sharply.

“Lady, will you fuckin' take me to a hospital? And put the damn gun down.”

“When did he hire you?”

“First of the month.”

Before I'd even known that Thea Janis and Dorothy Cameron were one and the same. Before Paolina's father had disappeared.

“Who told Donovan about the hit?” I asked.

“I don't know. How the hell should I know? I'm bleeding here, lady. I saved your fuckin' life.”

My hand shook. I could have killed Ralph Farrell, Donovan's goddamned unsolicited answer to my imagined cry for help.

For a brief moment, I wished I had. Considered it. Easier to explain to the cops. With two corpses, I could spin a fine tale: MacAvoy kills Farrell, kills himself. I'd never used my gun.

Fini.

We were at the end of the earth, on the ocean, in a quiet cove. Nobody'd heard the shots. I could have left MacAvoy, his gun beside him, walked away clean.

Farrell was groaning, making like MacAvoy'd hit a major artery, and he was watching his life's blood flow onto the sand. I knelt to get a better look. It was a clean, in and out wound through the fleshy part of the calf. I managed to rip the lining out of his sweat-stained windbreaker, fashion a pressure bandage.

“Can you drive?” I asked. “Where's your car?”

Nothing but a shiny upturned face. Not even a grunt.

I had to bundle Farrell into my car, get him to a hospital. He was loath to enter without me. Seemed to think he'd done something terrific. Ought to get a reward.

I said, “That old man wouldn't have killed me. I was never in any danger.”

“Sure,” Ralph Farrell muttered. “He just pulled his gun to show off.”

I dumped him on the doorstep of the nearest medical center, told him to tell the cops any fantasy that appealed to him.

“Oh, I will,” he said.

“Remember,” I said. “This gun is registered to a dead man. If they let you go, trot back to your employer. Tell him I will be in touch. Tell him he did the wrong thing. Tell him I could have fucking killed you.”

“You're angry.”

“Tell him that, too.”

I drove back to the beach. I was finding too many corpses. I wasn't linked to the one in Marblehead. Yet. Could I afford to get tied to this one?

Could I leave him here, the crooked old cop who'd taken his pension in real estate instead of respect?

Did I have a friend on the Marshfield squad?

Nope.

Did I have a friend on the Boston squad?

If my numbers really matched the tag on an old missing persons file, I might.

I dragged MacAvoy's body further up the beach, staggering under the weight of him, avoiding his ruined head with my eyes and my hands. I keep a coil of rope in the trunk of my car. I tied one end tightly around his legs, tied the other to a piling behind the old stone wall, relic of an ancient pier. Probably the same piling he'd used to tie off his six-packs.

I opened my shirt and ripped the tape off my bra, stared at the soaked mini-recorder. The spindles had stopped turning. I hoped it was the end of the side, not irreparable water damage.

I left the recorder on the seawall, crawled down the beach, curling into the salt water, inching deeper until it covered me, washing away the blood and stink. When I thought of all the answers MacAvoy could have given me, all the secrets lost in bright blood and tissue, floating out to sea, I could have cried. I'm not sure I didn't. I splashed my face. It was all salty water. An infinite wash of tears.

For whom?

For MacAvoy, making his final move so suddenly I couldn't stop him. A crooked cop.

For Thea lost long ago? For near-speechless sedated Beryl? For a mother with no daughters? For an unmourned, forgotten missing man, possibly the sole innocent, and the way they'd all come together twenty-four years ago and spoiled their lives forever.

After I'd retrieved the recorder and rubbed MacAvoy's SIG-Sauer with sand and hurled it into the ocean, I called Mooney from a gas station.

45

Home is where they have to take you in, no matter how battered, bruised, or broke. I don't have that kind of home. I have friends. I have Gloria. I have Mooney.

He met me at a rest stop on Route 3, dropped off by an unmarked unit. Found me barefoot and shivering at a picnic bench, elbows on the table, heels of my hands pressed into my brow. He coaxed me into my car, fiddled with the heater. He waved the officer in the unit off to Boston, then listened to everything I had to say—no interruptions. He waited a few minutes, as though he were chewing and digesting each word.

“It wasn't your fault,” he said.

That's what I should have said to MacAvoy:
It wasn't your fault
. Universal absolution.

“What do you mean, it wasn't my fault?”

“You want to take credit, go ahead. But MacAvoy messed with the records, MacAvoy took Cameron money. What with you out there asking questions, he was probably thinking about the end of the road, keeping his piece in his pocket when he went beer drinking by the ocean. You sped up the action, that's all.”

That's all
. I swallowed a lump as big as a goose egg and tried not to see the ocean water change color around MacAvoy's misshapen head.

“You got something on tape,” Mooney continued.

“I'm not sure,” I said, reluctant to display my drowned recorder. “At first, MacAvoy was giving me nothing but crap, a fairy tale about how he got this enormous reward for making Thea's suicide look like murder.”

“And that's not what this is about.”

“Did you find the cross-reference, the file that wasn't supposed to figure in Thea's disappearance?”

“MacAvoy never threw out a sheet of paper in his life.”

“You found it.” I almost stopped shivering.

“The Cold Case squad had it. Sooner or later, maybe in a hundred years, someone might have linked it to Thea.”

“Why didn't MacAvoy destroy it?” I asked. “Or take it home, put it in a safety deposit box, so he'd have a stronger hold over the Camerons?”

“He couldn't destroy it, Carlotta, because it's cross-referenced twice, the second time to the FBI. I've got a call in to Gary Reedy.”

I rubbed my head. It felt heavy, logy, like I was waking up the morning after a high-octane bash.

“We ought to be heading back,” Mooney said. “Want me to drive?”

“No. I can handle it,” I said automatically. I flicked on the headlights, put the Toyota in gear. Route 3 was practically empty. A few dark trucks hustled along in the middle lane.

“Have they heard from Marissa?” I asked. “Is she still missing?”

“Daily newspaper readings. On tape. She's okay so far. They're renegotiating, a new price, a different rendezvous.”

“Reedy seems to be handing you more information.”

“When he feels like it. Back to tonight. You said this guy, Nueves, the gardener, disappeared the same day as Thea Janis.”

“That's what MacAvoy said. The exact day. MacAvoy was paid off to make sure the two disappearances were never linked.”

“You figure they ran off together? This Alonso Nueves and Thea Janis? That it would have been some kind of political bomb?”

I said, “I don't figure it at all, Mooney. Six hundred thou is too much to pay just to name suicide murder. It's way too big a payoff to keep newspapers from speculating that your underage daughter ran off with a guy who's not listed in the Social Register.”

“Doesn't make sense,” Mooney agreed.

“Dammit, Mooney, I blew this. I should have given MacAvoy to Internal Affairs. If he'd had the chance to come clean, he might not have killed himself …”

“Carlotta, if you can't drive straight, pull the damn car over. You win some, you lose some. If it went down like you said, you're not doing jail on this. You even have a witness.”

“Some witness.”

“Get over it,” Mooney said through clenched teeth.

A shiver ran down my spine. “I've got blood on me, I've still got his goddamned blood on me. I—”

I coasted into the breakdown lane, and we sat. He looked at me once. His hand moved, like he wanted to hold me, comfort me, but I was stiff and miserable, chilled with salt water and failure.

I let him drive me home. That's how bad I felt.

“Mooney,” I said as I opened the door. “You know how MacAvoy seized control of the case, years ago.”

“Yeah.”

“Can you do that? Since it's so spread out, over time and space. Dover, and Marblehead, and Marshfield. Weston.”

“State police will have something to say about it.”

“But they know you. And with the FBI connection, they may want nothing to do with it.”

“I may want nothing to do with it.”

“Mooney.”

He shrugged. “They might give me some time with it, hoping I'll fall on my butt.”

“You won't.”

“Why's that?”

I was starting to feel less like a killer. More like a cop.

I said, “You know Marblehead's searching for a young guy in the Manley death, the one they're calling a tramp—”

“Seen hanging around the Marblehead shack. Yeah. What about him?”

“How are you at lying to the media?”

“I love it.”

“Tell them there's been a break in the case. Tell them you've got the guy in custody.”

“Just for the sake of lying?” he asked.

“Why not?” I said.

He yanked out a cellular phone, dialed a number, spoke briefly.

“That ought to make the morning editions,” he said.

We sat on the front porch waiting for a unit to come and fetch him. As we spoke I noticed a light in Donovan's house.

I took a brief inventory. Had I left a nightgown, underwear, anything I cared about at his house? Would I go there again?

How had he learned about the supposed mob hit? Had Mooney betrayed me? Set Donovan up? Mooney would know I could never go back to a man who didn't respect my ability to protect myself, to live my own life, make my own choices.

I swallowed and stared at Mooney. I couldn't ask him. I needed him too much.

“Mooney,” I said. “Do you think you can wangle an exhumation order?”

“I doubt it,” he said. “Why?”

“Something MacAvoy said, about the Camerons not being too choosy with the body. And a girl named Heather Foley, who drowned right before the Camerons' Mount Auburn Cemetery funeral extravaganza. At first, Heather's family maintained the body was hers. The ME went against them. Heather's body has never been recovered.”

“Some never are.”

I could tell he was interested. Mooney doesn't believe in coincidence any more than I do.

“Who's buried in Thea's grave, Moon?” I asked.

46

I woke well past three the next afternoon, feeling sandy, waterlogged, and uneasy. My sheets were twisted and tossed on the floor, like I'd fought with them during the night. I had trouble deciding on a pair of shorts, a simple shirt. My hands moved awkwardly, as though they'd swollen from the heat. I fumbled, matching holes and buttons incorrectly, cursing repeatedly. Finally I tossed the clothes in a heap, yanked on an extra-long T-shirt, and headed downstairs.

Sunday. Sunday afternoon. A mere week ago “Adam Mayhew” had called, begging for an appointment. Now he was dead. MacAvoy was dead. I swallowed phlegm, ran for the bathroom, brushed my teeth twice, then scoured my hands so thoroughly I might have been mistaken for an obsessive-compulsive and hauled off to Weston Psych.

Newspapers were stacked on my desk. My message machine blinked red. I navigated the straits, made it to the kitchen, swigged orange juice from the carton.

Roz must have done groceries. I ate half an English muffin smothered in peanut butter. It felt fine going down, but landed in my stomach lumpy and indigestible.

I studied myself in the hall mirror, climbed the stairs, and tried dressing again, consciously choosing an image. Not the navy power suit. Easy slacks, shapeless top. Vest. Yes. If I tucked in the shirt, the vest added a touch of professionalism. I shook out my hair, looped it through a stretchy band. Nothing fancy, just sufficient to keep its weight off my neck, its curls under control. I hadn't selected my role yet, but I had determined my destination.

Swampscott.

My target was one Edith Foley, called “Edie” by the public relations cop Roz had snookered into divulging her address. Edie Foley, Heather's mom. I studied Roz's notes: Divorced. Ardent churchgoer. Catholic mother of eight, once upon a time. If I asked her how many kids she had, what number would she recite? Do you stop being a mother if your child dies?

I shuffled business cards. Reporter, real estate agent, Avon lady, product survey specialist. I wound up tucking eight possible identities into my wallet. Improvisation is often the key.