Criminal Intent (MIRA) (23 page)

But tailing Farley was critical if he wanted to locate his target and complete his mission. Teddy Constantine was a hired killer, not a detective. Generally he was given a name and an address, and he went over and did the job, tied it all up neatly in a big puffy bow, collected the balance of his fee, and that was that. This was the first time he could remember being paid to kill somebody who was invisible. Not that he wasn’t up to the challenge. But he was more than willing to concede that Farley was the pro when it came to locating missing persons. Teddy would let him do the dirty work, then he’d swoop in and reap the rewards. As long as he kept Farley in his sights—and he was making sure not to lose the little chameleon—the guy would eventually lead him directly to Robin Spinney.

And that was the bottom line.

She’d been in a sour mood when she woke up this morning, and nothing that had happened so far today had done a thing
to improve it. Sophie had left at the crack of dawn for her babysitting job, dressed in her new white T-shirt and jeans, and so nauseatingly cheerful that Annie wondered if she’d awakened in the Twilight Zone. At nine o’clock, she’d driven Jack Crowley’s gas-guzzler into town to fax her list of destroyed items to the insurance company. It was a good thing she’d made a copy first, because the fax machine ate her original, and she ended up having to fax a copy of the copy instead. Then Estelle had called to ask if Annie really needed her today. Boomer, she said, had been complaining about the condition of their trailer, which bore a marked resemblance to Twilight Video after the vandals had hit. She could really use a day to muck the place out.

It was probably just as well. Annie’s mood was so vile that she probably would’ve scared Estelle off permanently if the young woman had shown up to help her. So she’d given Estelle the day off, leaving herself alone to stew. And Annie Kendall stewing wasn’t a pretty sight.

She’d finished painting last night around eleven-thirty. It wasn’t the best paint job she’d ever seen, but it would have to do. She’d almost managed to cover the word BITCH. So what if it kept bleeding through? Maybe she could work it into some kind of artsy, ultramodern wall decoration. Stranger things had been called art; it was worth considering. In the meantime, today was devoted to sorting the movies they’d salvaged and trying to put them in at least semi-alphabetical order.

It was a killer job, tedious and crazy-making, not made any more pleasant by the news she got from Sonny Gaudette. He needed another day or two to finish the car. He’d located a radiator and was pretty sure it would fit, but he hadn’t yet had time to run over to Rumford Point and pick it up. He’d heard she was using Jack Crowley’s pickup truck, so he knew she wasn’t without transportation. He’d get to it as soon as possible. If
she didn’t hear from him tomorrow, she should give him a ring on Wednesday morning. The Volvo would be ready by then for sure.

Wednesday, for God’s sake. Another two days. Not a damn thing was going her way, and the frustration was so intense that she had a strong urge to sit down and bawl her eyes out. This wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to her. She wasn’t the kind of woman who had tantrums or wept when things went wrong. If she had been, she never would have made it this far; Brogan would have caught her and killed her months ago. In Annie Kendall’s book, crying was a waste of time, time that was far better spent on solving problems instead of wallowing in them. She knew this intellectually, but for some inexplicable reason, she couldn’t seem to get it on an emotional level. Not today, anyway. She couldn’t even blame it on hormones, because it wasn’t that time of the month. She simply felt as though the only possible solution to her problems at this particular point in time was a good, hard cry.

As long as she was making a laundry list of complaints, she might as well add Davy Hunter’s name. God
damn
him.
I’ll call you,
he’d written. Right. That was the line they all used when what they really meant was “Kiss off, sister.” It didn’t matter that barely more than a day ago, she’d vowed to have nothing further to do with him, had promised herself to not even answer the phone if it should ring, had scrubbed and soaped and showered every trace of him from her body. It didn’t matter that it had only been thirty-one hours and change since he’d left her side and slunk away like a thief in the night. She’d expected him to call, had counted on him calling. She might have no intention of getting involved with the man, but damn it, she wanted that decision to be hers. By not calling, he’d taken the decision out of her hands, and she was furious about it.

She shouldn’t be surprised that he’d wimped out. Davy Hunter
wasn’t the kind of man to make a commitment. He’d been up-front with her right from the start. He hadn’t painted her any rosy pictures of love ever after. It should have been clear to her that what had happened between them hadn’t been about romance. It had been about hunger, about need. About two people who saw something in each other and reached out and grabbed it.

So why was she expecting more from him?

Maybe it had something to do with the age-old biological imperative that preprogrammed men to be warriors and women to be nest-builders. If so, it wasn’t a side of herself that she found particularly admirable. This was the twenty-first century, and she didn’t believe in that “Me Tarzan, You Jane” baloney. She’d seen too many women sucked into it, like lint into a dryer filter, trapped by their own hand because they believed it was better to live with a lousy man than with no man at all. Many of them, even if they figured out the truth, couldn’t figure out how to extricate themselves once the trap closed behind them.

She’d always taught Sophie to be independent, to make her own way in the world. To depend on herself and nobody else, because when it came right down to it, who else could you depend on? Too much of life was the result of random circumstance. Unexpected events occurred even in the best of marriages. Look at her and Mac. How could she have predicted that she’d be a widow at the age of thirty-four? She’d had to be smart and resourceful to keep herself and Sophie afloat, even more so after she found out the truth about Mac’s death. She’d tried to provide Sophie with a worthy role model, had tried to be the kind of mother, the kind of woman, that she would have admired as a young girl.

She thought she’d done a pretty good job of it. So why in God’s name had she gone all girly and clingy the instant Davy Hunter gave her more than the time of day? She’d never been
that way with Mac. They’d had a warm, rock-solid relationship based on mutual trust, mutual respect. With him, she’d never been tempted to act like a spoiled princess. At the age of thirty-six, she was a little old for that kind of adolescent behavior. She abhorred weakness in other women, yet here she was, obsessing over a man’s failure to phone her a whopping thirty-one hours after he climbed out of her bed. It was totally adolescent, totally irrational, and it made her mad as hell.

She set an armload of videos on the floor and glared at the small shelving unit on the end wall. For some reason, it was irritating the hell out of her, probably because it seemed such a poor use of space. Whoever the bonehead was who’d nailed it up there, she could have done a far better job of designing it than he’d done. She walked over to it and examined the way it was put together. A little cut here, a couple of nails there, and she could convert the ugly thing into something that was both usable and aesthetically pleasing.

She shoved a clump of hair behind her ear and marched across the street. Sophie answered the door. In the background, Annie could hear shouts and laughter and loud music, some kind of nauseating, indecipherable noise, heavy on the drums and the power chords. Jolene would be ecstatic to know that Sophie was introducing her sons to Goth rock. “Mom,” Sophie said, sounding surprised. “Are you here to check up on me?”

“While I think that’s never a bad idea, I’ve actually come to talk to one of the boys. Can you grab one of them for me? Either one will do.”

Sophie looked at her askance, undoubtedly wondering what her aged mother could possibly have to say to a nine-year-old boy. Shrugging, Soph disappeared into the depths of the house. After a minute or two, the ruckus quieted down. She returned with one of the twins, who ran into the living room, skidding
the last twelve feet across the hardwood floor in socks that had probably been white a couple of hours ago. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi. Are you Sam or Jake?”

“I’m Sam.”

“Tell me, Sam, does your dad own a power saw?”

“You mean one of those electric things with the big round blade? Sure. You wanna borrow it?”

“Do you think he’d mind?”

“Nah. He thinks you’re awesome. I heard him tell my mother that after you fixed the motel roof. He said he hadn’t seen too many girls willing to tackle something like that.”

She followed him to the garage, waited while he raised the door. “What did your mom say about that?”

Crossing the cement floor, still in his stocking feet, he said with the oblivious candor of a nine-year-old, “She told him to roll his tongue back into his head and stop drooling over that unattached blonde across the street.”

Annie blanched. “Yikes.”

Sam opened a cabinet beneath Jack Crowley’s work bench, rummaged around, and pulled out his father’s circular saw. “Here you go. You know how to run it? If you need any help figuring it out, Dad’ll be home in a couple of hours.”

“I’m fine.” She’d already done enough damage in that area. “Tell him thanks, and I’ll bring it back later tonight. Okay?”

“Okay. Oh, wait, you need safety glasses, too. Dad says you always have to wear safety glasses when you run a power saw. So you won’t get sawdust in your eyes.”

She took the saw from him, waited while he dug around some more. “Your dad’s a smart man,” she said.

“He’s okay.” Sam pulled out a pair of safety glasses and handed them to her. “So, are you gonna, like, take down a wall or something?”

“Something,” she
said. “But nothing quite that ambitious. Thanks, Sam.”

He heard the screech of a circular saw the minute he pulled into the parking lot. Annie was inside the video shop, giving what-for to some poor, unfortunate slab of wood. Davy climbed out of the cruiser, closed the door behind him, and just listened, hoping to Christ she knew how to run the damn thing. Otherwise, she was apt to lose an arm or a leg. He crossed the broken asphalt, climbed the steps and, shading his eyes with his hands, peered through the window. God only knew what she was up to, but the place looked almost as bad as it had after the break-in. Hundreds of movies stacked in random piles all around the room, sawdust and wood chips flying, pine shelving cut into odd lengths lying around on the floor.

At least she’d had a new door installed, a sturdy steel door that would keep out the mildly motivated criminals, the ones who wouldn’t try very hard. He rattled the doorknob, but the door was locked, so he rapped on the glass instead. Annie looked up and saw him standing there, and the circular saw in her hands whined its way to silence. She set it down and peeled off the safety goggles, tossing them onto the makeshift work bench she’d created using two kitchen chairs and an old door. Her blue eyes caught and held him. There was something faintly accusatory in them, although he couldn’t quite pin it down. Crossing the room briskly, she undid the lock and flung the door open. “Hunter,” she said, her intonation turning the single word into something halfway between a greeting and a question. “What are you doing here?”

It wasn’t a particularly auspicious beginning. “Bad day,” he said, and stepped inside. Examining the devastation she’d wrought at closer range, he added, “I guess I could ask you the same thing. What are you doing? Here?”

She
shut the door and locked it. Looking around, she said, “I seemed to have a compelling urge to slice something to ribbons.”

“I can see that. Was there anything Freudian about this compulsion?”

Scowling with a ferocity that would have been comical if she hadn’t been so deadly earnest about it, she rubbed absently at her lower back. “Don’t worry, Hunter. The urge didn’t include castration fantasies.”

“I’m so relieved.”

“You should be.”

She was mad at him. That much he understood. It was the why that eluded him. Had he committed some sexual faux pas? Besides the obvious one of sneaking out while she was still asleep? She’d enjoyed their little rendezvous the other night as much as he did. So what was wrong? Had they changed the rules while he wasn’t looking? He’d left her a note, promised to call, only he’d done better than call. He’d shown up in person. It should have earned him a few brownie points. Instead, for some unknown reason, she was furious with him, and doing a damn poor job of hiding it.

She sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. “What is that terrible smell?”

“Wet goat.”

“Oh,” she said, as though it were a perfectly rational explanation. “Well. Excuse me.” Turning her back on him, she picked up a hammer and a length of pine, scooped up a couple of nails, and with hard, furious whacks of the hammer, she began nailing the board to the wall.

It was a good thing he was out of the line of fire. The way she was whaling at that nail, her hammer strokes could be lethal. She finished pounding a two-inch spike into the wall and started in on another.
Wham.
She hit the nail so hard the building shook.
Whack.
It shook again. “How’s your grandmother?” she asked between wallops.

“About
like you’d expect. Hurting, frustrated and homesick.”

She picked up a third nail and began driving it into the pine board. “What’s the prognosis?”

“Her doctor thinks she’ll heal pretty quickly.” He crossed his arms and watched her work. “Assuming they can keep her still long enough to heal. It won’t be easy. That woman has more energy than a tornado.”

“How soon—”
whack, whack
“—will she be able to go home?”

He drew in a long, hard breath. “That’s just the thing,” he said, leaning his hips against the checkout counter. “She may not be able to. Doc Colfer thinks she’s reached the point where she needs round-the-clock supervision.”