Criminal Intent (MIRA) (25 page)

God help him. He’d have been better off if he’d left her there.

He pulled away, adjusted the gun belt one last time. “I’ll let myself out,” he said.

She nodded and wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing at her upper arms as though she was cold, although it was a solid eighty degrees outside. He turned his back on her then, walked briskly and resolutely back to his cruiser without looking back. He started up the engine and raced it for a minute. Feeling as though he’d barely escaped with his life, he left in such a hurry to get away from her that he laid rubber pulling out onto the highway.

Coward. Lily-livered, chickenshit coward.

The joy of electronic eavesdropping was starting to wear thin.

Louis was so tired of the entire Sarnacki family that he wished they’d all hop on a slow boat to China—Rosa the maid included—and float away, never to be seen or heard from again. For days that seemed more like months, he’d been sitting here, parked in various spots around the neighborhood, slowly dying of boredom. He hadn’t seen his buddy, the one in the Buick Century, since Saturday. Either the guy was lying low, or else he’d given up. Louis was hoping for the latter, but banking on the former. Whoever had paid this guy to tail him wasn’t likely to give up after a single day. More likely, Buick Man was stretched out on a motel bed somewhere, probably
directly across the street from the rat hole where Louis was staying, watching
Seinfeld
reruns on cable TV and checking Louis’s door with a pair of Bushnell binoculars during the commercials. All while Louis sat slumped on his tailbone in this rental car, with its AM/FM radio and no CD player, trying to find a Detroit-area radio station that was even remotely listenable. No bed, no cable TV, no bathroom. Just Louis, the Sarnacki family, and Q95 FM.

At least he was getting caught up on his reading. He’d finally finished Nora, and had started in on Susan Elizabeth Phillips. SEP, as she was known to romance fans around the globe, might not be able to write a heavy-duty sex scene the way Nora could, but she had other redeeming qualities, among them a witty, slapstick kind of humor that made her Louis’s second-favorite author. Her series about the Chicago Stars football team was side-splittingly funny, and disproved the commonplace belief that a romance with an athlete hero wouldn’t sell. Hah! He pictured SEP laughing uproariously at that one as she steered wheelbarrows full of money to the bank.

He was so caught up in the story that he almost missed what was coming from his earpiece. Sarnacki’s calls were so boring, so routine, that he’d started to tune them out. When the woman asked for Bobby by his first name, it registered at a subconscious level, but it wasn’t until Sarnacki answered and she called him Uncle Bobby that Louis scrambled upright so suddenly that SEP went flying to the floor. He quickly pressed the button of the recording device he hadn’t used until now, tightened the earpiece, and listened intently.

“What’s wrong?” Uncle Bobby asked. “You sound down.”

Annie sighed and rested her elbows on the kitchen table. Running a hand through her hair, she said, “It’s about a million different things. For starters, the video store was broken into, and
it’s been such a hassle trying to put it all back together that I’m ready to bite somebody. Then there’s—”

“Hold it. Wait a minute. Your place was broken into?”

“Somebody vandalized it to within an inch of its life. I suspect it was teenagers, but of course we’re not sure. The police are investigating it, but you know how that goes. Especially in a small town.”

“Are you sure it’s not related to—” He left the sentence hanging between them.

“Not a hundred percent. But how could Brogan have found me that quickly? Besides, it’s not his style. This looks more like the work of some local yahoos out for fun on a night when the bowling leagues have taken over the local alley and there isn’t anywhere else to go if you’re too young to drink legally.”

“Annie, honey, you’re starting to sound cynical. That’s not like you. Are you sure there isn’t something else?”

With her cell phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, she got up from the table and walked to the sink. Double-checked to make sure that Sophie’s bedroom door was closed. The music—and she used that term loosely—coming from behind it was loud enough to kill a rhinoceros dead in its tracks, like an opera singer shattering glass. “I met a man,” she said carefully.

“And?”

“What do you mean, and?” She took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water. “I can’t do it, that’s what. It’s an absolute impossibility.”

“Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?” When she failed to respond, he added, “Annie, you’re only thirty-six years old. You can’t spend the rest of your life alone. Sophie’s going to grow up one of these days in the not-too-distant future. She’ll be off to college, or getting married, and there you’ll be, sitting in your rocking chair every evening, watching the sun set all by yourself. Is that what you want?”

She
took a sip of water and said, “Do I really have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. You’re already forgetting what I told you.”

“Right, put down roots. How am I supposed to do that? By lying to him? That’s a really great foundation for a relationship. Base it on lies and then keep piling them on. Maybe at our fiftieth anniversary party I can say, ‘Honey, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’”

“It’s not that big a lie—”

“Damn it, Bobby, he thinks my name is Annie Kendall! If you ask me, that’s a pretty big lie.”

“You
are
Annie Kendall. That’s what it says on your driver’s license and your birth certificate. It’s what it says on the deed to that motel you bought. It’s who you are now. Who you were before doesn’t matter. You’re still the same person.”

“It doesn’t say Annie Kendall inside my heart!” And that was the real issue, she realized, the one thing she couldn’t live with. Not if she wanted to maintain any self-respect. She could lie to the world, but not to herself. “When you make love to a man,” she said roughly, “and he calls out your name, you’d like it to be the right one.”

“Oh, shit. You’re right. Of course you’re right. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

“I’m so confused. I don’t know who I am any more. Am I Annie Kendall, or am I Robin Spinney? I thought I’d put all those doubts aside, but meeting him has just set them back in motion.”

“Maybe you should just tell him the truth.”

“I’ve thought about that. But I can’t. I don’t dare. There’s too much at stake. If it was just me, I might consider it. But there’s Sophie to think of. I won’t put her in further jeopardy, not for any man. I’ll keep her safe, or die trying.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“It
did for Mac. I can’t let that happen to Sophie.”

“I wish I had an answer for you. But even if I did, it wouldn’t be the right one. You have to find your own answers.”

“That’s why I love you,” she said. “You understand me. You listen without being judgmental. You don’t try to tell me how to live my life. You can’t know how much that means to me. Just being able to talk to you helps so much. If I didn’t have you, I’d have nobody to talk to. I can’t tell Sophie these things. She’s too young to understand. And God knows, I can’t talk to Dad about it. He just doesn’t get me at all. He never did.”

“Have you talked to him lately?”

“I called him, the day after I got here. We had our usual go-round. The man is stubborn as granite, and about as warm. I just can’t get through to him. I’ve pretty much given up trying.”

“Sometimes these things take time.”

“He’s already had thirty-six years. How much more time does he need?”

Sophie’s door opened, spilling noise into the room. She walked in her stocking feet to the refrigerator, opened it, and stood there staring at its contents. “I have to go,” Annie said into the phone. “Sophie’s looking for her supper.”

“Give her my love. And keep me posted.”

In the jeans and white T-shirt, Sophie looked sweet and innocent, almost happy. Until she opened her mouth and shattered the illusion. “There’s nothing in the house to eat,” she said plaintively.

“I have a better idea,” Annie said. “Let’s go out for supper.”

“You mean there’s someplace in this town to get a decent meal? Besides McDonald’s?”

Annie scouted around for her purse, found it buried in the couch
cushions. “I’ve heard Lenny’s Café serves a pretty good meal, if you like old-fashioned home cooking.”

Sophie didn’t look convinced. “You mean that divehole downtown? It looks to me like they’d specialize in roach-burger sandwiches.”

Annie dug inside the purse and pulled out Jack’s truck keys. Twirling them around her finger, she said, “Aw, come on, Soph. Live life on the edge for once.”

“You’re scaring me, Mom. Who the hel—I mean heck—are you?”

I’m a woman who had screaming sex with a man I barely know on a bathroom toilet seat in the middle of the afternoon,
she thought.
And I loved every minute of it. What does that make me? I haven’t a clue.

But of course she couldn’t say it to Sophie. “I’m the woman who’s paying for your supper,” she said dryly. “Now, dress your feet, and let’s go sample the exotic cuisine of western Maine.”

Among his peers, Louis Farley was known as a hacker extraordinaire. He understood computers, understood the way they operated, the way they thought, the way their little hearts beat to the tune of numeric code. What most people couldn’t figure out how to do, he found so easy it was laughable. Sitting in his motel room with the television on for company, a Big Mac and a Coke on the desk beside his laptop, Louis went to work. Ten minutes later, he was in the phone company’s database system. From there, it was an easy hop and skip to the information he needed, the origin of the call that had come into the Robert Sarnacki residence at 4:13 this afternoon. Louis jotted down the number from which the call had been placed, backed out of the system, and pulled up Google. The reverse phone directory identified the number as a Detroit-based cell phone, carried by Am-cell. Did that mean that Robin Spinney, aka Annie Kendall, was still in the area?

It
was a good question. Picking up his cell phone, Louis dialed the number just to see what happened. It rang four times and switched over to voice mail.
I’m not available to take your call,
the female voice said.
Please leave a message.
She didn’t identify herself as Annie Kendall, but he recognized the voice as belonging to the same woman who’d called Bobby Sarnacki.

Louis glanced at the clock. Five-fifteen. Two-fifteen in Los Angeles. Garcia should be in. He probably could have gotten what he needed by himself, but it was quicker and cleaner this way. He’d given Eduardo Garcia a freebie a couple of years back, when the LAPD detective’s wife was running around on him. Louis had brought him photographic proof, Garcia had gotten the divorce he so badly wanted, and the bimbo had known better than to ask for alimony payments. Garcia’s gratitude was all-encompassing. Since that time, they’d called on each other whenever the occasion arose to make use of each other’s services. It was a great backup plan, like having money in the bank for a rainy day.

His rainy-day backup plan answered the phone, and Louis quickly explained what he needed. “It’ll take a few minutes,” Garcia said. “You gotta know how to work these people, bring ’em around to your way of thinking. Of course, I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

No, indeedy, he didn’t. Louis was an old pro at working people. But some things were easier done with a police badge in hand, and this was one of them.

While he waited, he watched the local news. The city’s coffers were running low, and the powers-that-be were thinking about raising property taxes. There’d been a bad accident on I-96, and a stabbing in the downtown area that had left one man dead and a second with serious injuries. The trial of a local pedophile was entering its third day, and the judge had ruled that the defendant’s previous convictions weren’t admissible
in court. Louis shook his head. It was a terrible world out there, and Detroit didn’t look like it would pick up any awards for City of the Year. Thank God his time here was nearly at an end. This job had been nothing but a pain from the beginning, and he’d be glad to be home in his tidy little house in a quiet neighborhood outside Tupelo.

A half-hour later, Garcia called back. “Told you I’d get it,” he said. “I just turned on a little of that natural charm, and Louise, who sounded old enough to be my grandmother, practically fell at my feet. You were right. It’s a Detroit-based cell phone, registered to a Robert Sarnacki.”

“Really,” Louis said.

“Yeah, but what’s really interesting is that the call didn’t come from Detroit. Louise told me they can’t always pinpoint it with a hundred percent accuracy, but they can come pretty close by tracking which towers it bounced off of. As far as she can tell, the call originated from a little town in Maine called Serenity. Does that help at all?”

“It sure does. Thanks, buddy.”

“Hey, next time you’re in L.A., look me up. We’ll play a couple rounds of golf. Or sit around the club and get shit-faced.”

“You’ve got it,” Louis said.

He hung up the phone, looked at the piece of paper in his hand.
Annie Kendall. Serenity, Maine.
“Gotcha,” he whispered.

H
e
must be going for some kind of record. Fourteen months without a single visit to the cemetery, then two trips in one week.At least there were no groundskeepers around. The place was deserted, which was just as well, considering the reason he was here. Half the town already thought he was nuts. If he was caught in a cemetery arguing with a dead woman, it would cinch the deal. He picked the dinner hour because he knew most people would be home, watching the Channel 13 news and getting ready to eat. Rush hour, such as it was in Serenity, was over, and it was too early for the evening dog walkers to be out. It was the ideal time to have it out with her once and for all.

In the distance, he heard a dog barking. Probably Andy Lester’s black lab. Geronimo barked every night at this time, which didn’t endear him to Ethel Crowe, who lived next door to the Lesters and had tried everything short of rat poison to make Geronimo shut up. She’d probably try that if she thought she could get away with it. He wouldn’t put it past the old bat. But Serenity was a small town, and Ethel had never bothered to hide how she felt about Andy’s dog. If anything ever happened to Geronimo, there’d be a dozen fingers pointing in her direction before nightfall.

The
lowering sun threaded fingers of light through the trees. Chelsea’s grave sat in a pool of brilliant sunshine. He squatted before it, studied the gravestone with a critical eye. “I imagine you were expecting me,” he said. “No big surprise there. You knew every damn thought that went through my head when you were alive, so you probably have a pretty good idea of what I’m thinking now.”

Chelsea didn’t answer. She just lay there under six feet of dirt, slowly turning back to dirt herself. The thought didn’t bother him as much as it used to, back in the early days, when he slept with a light on because the nightmares were so horrific and so vivid. That was what had eventually driven him to the bottle. He’d discovered that if he got shitfaced every night before he went to bed, he could keep the bogeyman in the closet. After a while, it just seemed easier to get through life if he deadened his senses a little. No wonder Chelsea had been hooked on the stuff for so long. When you were chemically impaired, you didn’t have to feel, didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to give a shit about anything. Not even the fact that the woman you loved was slowly rotting in the cold ground.

“It didn’t have to turn out this way,” he told her now. “If you hadn’t been so pig-ass stubborn, you wouldn’t be dead now. Do you have any idea how pissed off I was when they pulled you out of the river? If you’d just listened to me for once in your damn life, if you’d just trusted me until I could tell you the truth about what was going on, I wouldn’t be sitting here now. We’d be sitting together in one of the booths at Walt’s instead, laughing and knocking back a couple of cold ones. I’m still pissed off at you, Chels. You see, you got out of it easy. You died, but I’m the one who spent the last fourteen months in hell.”

He watched a blue Toyota pass slowly down the street, waited until it had gone out of sight before he continued. “And
what about Jessie? Were you even thinking of her when you went sailing off into the storm that night in search of journalistic glory? That’s the thing with you, Chels. You never thought about other people. You always thought about yourself first. And Jessie’s the one who suffered. Christ…I wish you could see her now. She’s come so far, no thanks to you. It was Ty and Faith who made the difference for her. If you did one thing right in your entire life, it was picking Faith to be her guardian. I have to give you credit for that. The rest of it…”

He took a deep breath. A few feet away, a robin hopped across the grass, searching industriously for its dinner. “The rest of it’s pretty much a total loss. Why the hell—” He had to stop because his voice broke, and tears—tears, for Christ’s sake—stung his eyelids. Davy cleared his throat. “Why the hell it took me twenty years to figure that out, I don’t know. But I finally did. I finally realized that I’m worth more than that. I deserve something better than a woman who sucked me dry and then ate the marrow out of my bones.”

He stood up, took a last look at her final resting place. “I won’t be back,” he said. “This is it, Chels. The big goodbye. I gave you twenty years of my life. I’m not giving you any more. Maybe, if I’m damn lucky and do a few things right, I can make the second half of my life count for something.”

He stalked back across the grass, yanked open his car door and slid into the driver’s seat. It wasn’t until he started up the car that he realized his hands were trembling so hard he couldn’t drive. Some police chief he was turning out to be. He couldn’t even break up with a dead woman without going to pieces. What would happen if he was ever faced with a real emergency?

It took him a few minutes to pull himself together. When he finally accomplished the task, he drove home and went straight to his bedroom, bypassing the dog, who was snoozing
on the couch. He opened his closet and took down a box from the shelf. It was loaded with pictures of Chelsea, years of them, two decades of glossy memories he’d intended to put into an album someday. He lifted off the cover and looked dispassionately at what was there. For a brief instant, he considered disposing of them with kerosene and a flaming rag, but thought better of it. He might not want them, but Jessie would.

Davy picked up the framed five-by-seven he kept on his nightstand.Yes, she’d been beautiful, but that beauty had been only skin deep. Inside, she’d been cruel and selfish and thoughtless. And yes, he’d loved her. But he wasn’t blind any longer. The scales had been lifted from his eyes. He understood the truth now, and didn’t they say the truth would set you free? She might still be Jessie’s mother, thanks to an accident of birth. But she was nothing to him, not any longer. Simply his ex-wife. Ex-lover. Ex-everything. Emphasis on the ex.

He added the five-by-seven to the box, carefully placed the lid back on top, and left the box in the center of Jessie’s bed. There was no need for explanation. Jess was a smart kid. She’d understand. If she didn’t now, she would someday. In spite of Chelsea’s neglect, they’d had a pretty good relationship, Jessie and her mom. She’d appreciate the pictures.

He felt a thousand pounds lighter when he pulled out of the driveway and headed to the hospital for his daily visit with Gram.

Louis couldn’t get out of Detroit quickly enough. He logged onto the Internet and Googled Serenity, Maine, to see what he could find out. It was a little town out in the williwacks, population about five thousand, and nowhere near anything, as far as he could tell. The state of Maine only had two major airports. The nearest one big enough to fly into was in Portland, and it was still a bit of a haul from there to Serenity. He’d
have to drive the rest of the way. That meant one more cheap, generic rental car with a smelly ashtray, a steering wheel that had been touched by a thousand germy hands, and a plethora of scratches and dents because nobody was the least bit careful about parking a rental car. The dents and dings were somebody else’s problem, so people took advantage.

He called the airport and booked himself on the next flight to Portland. It departed from Detroit around eight-thirty, and landed in Portland around midnight. That was a crummy time to be arriving in a strange city, but it beat spending another night in Detroit. The place was starting to give him the willies, with Buick Man following him around everywhere.

Except that Buick Man had disappeared off the face of the earth. He’d seen no sign of the Buick, no sign of any kind of tail, for twenty-four hours. That bothered him more than being followed, because there was no logical explanation for it. The tail he could understand. Either Brogan didn’t completely trust him, or somebody else was piggybacking on the work he’d done, trying to locate Robin Spinney by following him. Either way, it made perfect sense. But he couldn’t find any rationale to sufficiently explain why the tail would suddenly be pulled.

It worried him all the way to the airport. Louis kept a watchful eye on the traffic around him, but there was no ugly brown Buick, nobody following too close or for too long. Cars, vans, and pickup trucks came and went at random, none of them alerting his radar, none of them overstaying their welcome. Unless Buick Man had superhuman powers, he wasn’t being tailed any longer.

Either that, or Louis was losing his touch.

No, that was just paranoia speaking. If somebody had been following him, he would have known it. His radar was faultless. And Buick Man, whoever he was, was so incompetent that
Louis could have been asleep at the wheel and he still would have picked up on the guy.

The thought gave him pause. That kind of incompetence seemed an awful lot like overkill. What if B-Man wasn’t incompetent at all? What if Louis had been meant to see him all along? What if the guy had followed him openly and blatantly, then ducked back into the woodwork in order to lull him into a false sense of security?

It sounded crazy, like some movie script where the bad guy lured the detective down the primrose path in order to keep the audience in suspense. But this was real life. In his experience, most of the time things were pretty straightforward. If it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck and had downy white feathers, you could be pretty sure it was a duck.

But the niggling doubt remained: What if he were intended to think it was a duck, when really it was something else entirely?

Edgy for the first time since he’d begun this case, Louis turned in the rental car, stood in line to check his baggage, and went through the metal detector while they X-rayed his carry-on. While he jumped through each of these hoops, he studied the people around him, searching for anybody who might look nervous or secretive or out of place. Anybody who might be looking back at him in a manner that was slightly more than casual. But all he saw were weary travelers, headed to God only knew where at an hour when most of them would probably have preferred to be headed home to bed. Businessmen in wrinkled suits yakking on their cell phones. College kids in jeans and T-shirts, curled up on the floor, heads resting on their L.L. Bean backpacks. A couple of Indian women in saris, eyes downcast as they waited quietly for the boarding call. None of them paid him the least attention, and he decided he really was being paranoid.

It was other thoughts that occupied him during the three-hour
flight. In flying to Maine without first calling Brogan, he was going directly against his client’s wishes. He’d never done that before. The client’s needs always came first with him, and Luke Brogan had clearly instructed him that he was to be notified as soon as Louis located Robin Spinney. There was just one problem with that. Until he knew the truth about what was going on—all of it—he didn’t trust Luke Brogan. The man might be his client, but Brogan had lost a great deal of credibility the moment Louis first spied Buick Man tailing him. His instincts were telling him that there was more to this little endeavor than Brogan had let on. Now that he had the information Brogan so badly wanted, Louis was suddenly developing cold feet. Especially after hearing Spinney’s conversation with Sarnacki.

“Maybe you should just tell him the truth.”

“I’ve thought about that. But I can’t. I don’t dare. There’s too much at stake. If it was just me, I might consider it. But there’s Sophie to think of. I won’t put her in further jeopardy, not for any man. I’ll keep her safe, or die trying.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“It did for Mac. I can’t let that happen to Sophie.”

Her words confused him. What kind of jeopardy was she putting Sophie in? And what did she mean about Mac Spinney? His death had been an accident, hadn’t it? Or was there something else going on here, something dark and sinister, something Louis wanted no part of?

He pictured Luke Brogan in his mind. A slow-moving, slow-thinking good ole boy. Mean and stupid, not a good combination. A man who, no matter what the circumstances, would make an unpleasant adversary. But did he have it in him to be a killer? That seemed to be what Mrs. Spinney was implying, that Brogan had been involved somehow in her husband’s death. It was hard to imagine, but Louis knew that killers came in all shapes and sizes. Why hadn’t Brogan disclosed
to him the reason he wanted to find Spinney? What was so important to him that he would go to such lengths, not to mention such expense, to locate the woman? A very ordinary woman, by all accounts, one who seemed unlikely to become involved in some kind of dangerous intrigue. Not unless she was dragged into it, kicking and screaming all the way.

No, he didn’t trust the good sheriff of Atchawalla as far as he could throw the man’s tubby, middle-aged body, and he wasn’t spilling a word until he found out what was really going on here. Even if Brogan had a valid reason for hunting down Robin Spinney like an animal, her fifteen-year-old daughter was an innocent bystander. Louis didn’t have any daughters, but he had two teenage nieces, and if any man ever dared to harm so much as a hair on either of their heads, God help him, because Louis’s wrath would be boundless.

He would play it by ear. Keep his eyes open. Dig around a little, see what he could uncover. Try to figure out what Brogan was up to. If there was something funky going on, Sophie Spinney wasn’t going to be caught in the middle of it. Not as long as Louis Farley had any say in the matter.

When Brian stepped off the plane, Davy barely recognized him. Even though it had been fifteen years, he was somehow still expecting the too-scrawny kid with straggly shoulder-length hair, a bad case of adolescent acne, and a boatload of insecurity. What he got instead was a man in his midthirties, a little pudgy around the middle, with a receding hairline he tried to disguise by trimming his remaining hair as close to the scalp as possible without actually shaving his head. Gone were the downcast eyes, the shuffling walk, the Texas-sized chip on his shoulder. This Brian walked with confidence, his head held high. Except for the twin hoops in his right ear—and nowadays a lot of straight guys had multiple piercings—he didn’t give off any overt gay vibes. He was
just an average-looking guy in his thirties who was doing his best to stave off as long as possible the approach of middle age.