Criminal Intent (MIRA) (28 page)

His mood as flat as an old helium balloon, Louis stuffed his newspaper into the trash can that was barely big enough for it. Why was it that hotel wastebaskets were always toy-sized? Once you threw a paper cup or two into them, there was never room for anything else.

Skirting the foot of the bed, Louis headed for the telephone to call a porter to come and pick up his luggage. He walked three steps past the bed and stopped, hesitated for half an instant, then whirled around to look at the two bags sitting on the standard-issue ugly hotel carpeting.

When he’d gone down to breakfast, there’d been three bags standing there.

Son of a bitch. Son of a goddamn bitch! His laptop was gone.

And Louis didn’t have a single doubt about who’d taken it.

She’d stayed up too late last night, and after the interlude in the car with Davy Hunter, Annie hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d spent hours thrashing around, flopping from one position to another, dozing and waking, finally going into a deep sleep just as the sun was creeping over the treetops. She’d awakened abruptly ninety minutes later when Sophie closed the door a little too hard before she hotfooted it down the outside staircase on her way to Jolene Crowley’s.

And that had been that. Her night was over. She had too much work to do to justify spending half the morning lying in bed—or, more accurately, on the lumpy couch. It had taken a hot shower and three cups of coffee before she was able to elevate
herself to a semicomatose state. She felt like a card-carrying member of the walking dead, but it was an improvement over comatose. At least she could see more than two feet in front of her, and her arms and legs appeared to be functioning properly.

She spent five minutes wolfing down a bowl of Sophie’s sickeningly sweet sugared cereal before she went downstairs to the shop. Yesterday afternoon, after Davy had gone back to work and she’d pulled herself together, she’d finished the shelf she’d been remodeling. Last night, she’d thrown a touch-up coat of paint on it. This morning, the paint was dry and the shelf was ready for use. She might not be the most competent woodworker in the history of the craft, but at least tearing the thing apart and hammering it back together had been therapeutic.

Annie vacuumed up the sawdust that was pretty much everywhere, gathered up Jack Crowley’s circular saw and his goggles, and scooted across the street to return them. When she got back, she began the endless task of shelving the thousands of movies she’d spent yesterday sorting. It was mindless work that gave her plenty of time to think. Too much time, if she wanted to be truthful about it, time to fret and stew over one particular topic she would have preferred to avoid. But it wouldn’t leave her alone.
He
wouldn’t leave her alone. Davy Hunter was such a strong presence that even when he wasn’t around, she could still feel him. Could still smell him, still taste him.

Damn it.
She swiped furiously at a tear and continued shelving videos. She should never have gone downstairs last night, should never have gotten in the car with him. Should never have allowed Davy Hunter to reveal to her his vulnerabilities. She should have run away screaming, instead of allowing him to let down his guard long enough to show her that little glimpse inside his head and his life.

But
she had, and it was a little late now to undo what she’d done. She’d known full well that she couldn’t involve herself with him on an emotional level, but she’d gone ahead and let it happen anyway. Now what? Now that she’d let the man weasel his way into her heart, how was she supposed to deal with the situation? Her initial response last night to the feelings he’d invoked in her had been anger. But was she really angry with Davy, or with herself? He’d only spoken the truth. Loving Davy Hunter wouldn’t be easy, not for any woman. There was nothing easy about the guy. He carried on his back a heavy enough load of baggage to flatten a lesser man. His previous experience with women had made him understandably skittish, and hadn’t exactly provided solid grounding in how to maintain a healthy relationship. He didn’t know how to do relationships. Jumping into a romance with him, even if she were to allow herself to do something that crazy, would be a long shot. He was, to put it bluntly, a lousy risk.

Her logic was solid. There was just one problem with it. It came too late to do her any good. It was too late to debate the risks, too late to look at reason, too late to argue herself out of falling for Davy Hunter. She’d already taken that giant leap into uncharted territory. Regardless of how things stood between them after she’d walked away from him last night, regardless of what the future would bring, he’d already wrested control of her heart.

It wasn’t possible. She’d known him for, what? A week? She’d dated Mac Spinney for a
year
before things even got serious between them. With Hunter there’d been no courtship, not a single normal, ordinary date where he picked her up in his car and took her to dinner or a movie. Just this—
thing,
for lack of a better word—between them, something that had started as pure animal attraction and had evolved into something else, something that involved tenderness and intimacy and notions about forever. She’d felt
it in his touch yesterday, heard it in his voice last night. He was as bowled over by it as she was, and just as uncertain about where they were supposed to go from here. Like a pair of thoroughbreds racing frantically toward the finish line, they’d taken things far too quickly. But it hadn’t been their fault. The little drama they were acting out had progressed at its own pace and in its own time, with little to no input from the principal players. They’d simply been carried along on a sea of emotions that were beyond their control.

Now she had decisions to make. Life-altering decisions about whether to maintain the status quo and hope for the best, or lay it all on him and pray she could trust him. A third, less feasible option hovered in the periphery of her mind: pack up everything she owned and keep on running. Away from here, away from him, away from herself.

But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Dad was right. Maybe he’d been right all along, and wasn’t that a hoot? She’d have to call him when he got back from his cruise and tell him what she’d learned, which was that sooner or later, it always caught up to you. The lies, the deception, whatever you were running from. You could run as far and as long as you liked, but running eventually turned into a dead-end road, and when you reached that, there was nowhere left to go.

But Davy was a cop. Maybe there was a chance he could help her. Maybe he’d know what to do, where to turn, how to take down Brogan and reclaim her pilfered life.

Tonight.
Tonight she’d sit him down and tell him everything. Maybe, once her conscience was cleared, they could start over again, try to build something that was based on truth instead of lies. She had to hold on to that hope. Had to make him understand that she was the victim in all of this. As a cop, he might not look too kindly on her actions. Some of what she’d done was simply unethical. Some of it was downright illegal. She
might have done it in order to survive, but all of it weighed on her like a mountain of stone.

It was time to dislodge the mountain. Time to free herself and Sophie. Time to take back her life. With renewed determination and a sense of hope she hadn’t felt since before Boyd Northrup died, Annie Kendall went back to shelving videos.

F
or
the Serenity Police Department, it was yet another day from hell. The lunar cycle was wreaking havoc with the town’s inhabitants, and the phone was ringing off the hook. Davy wondered how he could ever have thought he’d die of boredom in this job. His first couple of days might’ve been slow, but things had certainly picked up since then. First thing this morning, before he even got to work, he’d had to deal with a car/deer collision on Bald Mountain Road, just a couple of miles from his trailer. Nobody was injured, but the deer was killed, which meant he had to call in somebody from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to dispose of it. By the time he got to work, his coffee had gone cold, and Dixie was practically tearing her hair out. “Thank God you’re finally here,” she said. “I was ready to commit hari-kiri with my letter opener.”

“That bad?” he said, going to the pot to warm up his tepid coffee.

“Worse. René called in sick. He’s caught some flu bug his kid brought home from day care. He spent the night yakking up everything he ever ate.”

“Thanks for sharing. Love the visual.”

“He
said if we really needed him, he’d clean up and get dressed and come in.”

“Christ,” he said, alarmed. “I hope you told him not to.”

“I told him if he dared to even come near this place before he was completely over it, I’d cast a voodoo spell on him that would make his testicles shrivel up and fall off.”

Davy didn’t bother to hide his grin. “Bet that did the trick.”

“It did. He suddenly remembered that he needed to get back to bed real quick.”

“Good call.”

“Yeah, but that leaves us a man short when the place is—” The telephone rang, cutting her off. She spread out her arms as if to include all the woes of this world. “See what I mean?”

“Where’s Pete?”

“Over at the Big Apple. Some customer drove off without paying for his gas.”

“Well, calm down. Take a deep breath. Hold it in, then let it out slowly.” She did as he said, held it in for so long he was starting to worry about her. The breath came bursting out of her in a sudden and violent rush, and the color returned to her face. “Jesus, Dix,” he said. “I didn’t mean you should suffocate yourself.”

The phone continued to ring. “You should’ve given me better instructions, then.”

Calmly, he said. “Repeat after me:
‘One thing at a time.’
We can only do as much as we can do.”

Giving him the evil eye, she said, “That was helpful.” She picked up the phone and said smoothly, all trace of panic gone from her voice, “Good morning, Serenity Police Department. How may I direct your call?” She listened a moment, then raised an eyebrow. “Goats, you say? On the loose? Again?”

Davy nearly choked on his coffee. He shook his head and crossed his arms in a “no way” gesture, and Dixie smiled sweetly. “I’ll
send Officer Morin right on over, Mrs. Daggett. It’ll just be a few minutes. Last time I checked, he was right around the corner from you. I’ll call him on the radio right now.”

By ten-thirty, he’d already had a full morning. He’d managed to separate a battling couple who’d both had a few too many beers after they got off the night shift at the paper mill in neighboring Rumford. Eddie Tiner was an easygoing sort until he started drinking, at which point he liked to slap the little lady around some. This morning’s argument hadn’t yet escalated beyond the shouting point, so Davy did his best to calm them both down. Once he’d convinced Eddie to shuffle off to bed, he loaded Eloise into his cruiser, with Eddie’s car keys in her pocket just in case Eddie decided he needed to go somewhere before he’d sobered up, and dropped her off at her sister’s house.

On his way back to the station, he pulled over a kid in a beat-up purple Javelin for having an expired inspection sticker. When he ran Ricky Cormier’s license, he discovered the kid had an outstanding warrant from the Rumford PD. He cuffed the kid, read him his rights, called Sonny Gaudette to pick up the Javelin with his tow truck, and transported Cormier to the station until somebody from Rumford could pick him up.

A short time later, Angus McDonough called him out to the family farm to check on a possibly rabid raccoon who’d taken up residence inside one of the farm’s crumbling out-buildings. It was a little beyond his area of expertise—but then again, so was most of this stuff—and he wasn’t inclined to spend the next two months taking daily rabies shots, so he called in Doc Morgan, the local vet, who doubled as animal control officer. He was just leaving the McDonough farm when Dixie called him about a group of juveniles who’d been tossing Trojans filled with poster paint off the railroad trestle downtown. She’d had several calls from irate motorists who were innocently driving along, minding their own business, when
the missiles struck. If the surprise plop as the condom landed wasn’t enough to startle the living daylights out of motorists, the blood-red paint spreading across their wind-shields sent several of them into near-hysterics. The boys, all about ten or eleven, thought it was hilarious until he came driving up with his blue lights flashing. Then they’d just looked scared. He’d read them the riot act, confiscated their weapons of destruction, and sent them packing.

Relieved to have gotten out of it with just a warning, they didn’t have to be told twice. The boys made themselves invisible with amazing speed, which was a good thing, because he wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain his gruff policeman face. When he thought of the things he and Ty had done at that age, what these kids were doing was tame. Potentially dangerous, yeah. If they didn’t give some old lady a heart attack behind the wheel, they were apt to send her crashing into the puckerbrush beside the trestle. But it was small potatoes compared to some of the stuff he and Ty had done, stuff for which they should have received one hell of an ass-kicking. They never had, in spite of Ty’s own father being the chief of police. He’d reamed them out pretty good a couple of times, but he’d never laid a hand on either of them. He hadn’t tattled, either. Buck might have been a sour-tempered old coot, and they might have been the bane of his existence, but for whatever reason, he’d never told either Lorena Hunter or Glenda Savage what their precious baby boys were up to.

It was a good thing, Davy thought now, because Gram would have been more than happy to administer the ass-whipping that Buck had neglected to execute. He suspected Glenda Savage would have been equally obliging. Maybe that was why Buck kept his mouth shut, because he knew that if either of those fine and upright ladies ever found out, neither of the boys would have been sitting down for a week.

By the time he got back to the station, Pete had returned from
goat duty, looking relatively unscathed, and was at his desk in a back corner, typing up a report, fingers flying over the keys at lightning speed. Up front, sitting on the corner of Dixie’s desk, was none other than Davy’s own kid brother. “Bri,” he said in surprise. “How’d you get here?”

“Taxi,” his brother told him. “Next time I’ll know better.”

“Ah, geez. And you’re still in one piece?”

“I told him it was a miracle he made it here alive,” Dixie said.

“You should’ve called me if you wanted to come into town,” Davy said. “I would’ve picked you up.”

“I figured you were busy. I didn’t want to bother you. Just thought I’d stop by and check the place out, see what you do all day. I had no idea Dixie worked here. We’ve been catching up on old times, in between the phone calls.”

“I’d give you the grand tour, but you’ve pretty much already seen it all.”

“That’s what Dixie told me.”

There was a commotion outside, and all four of them—including Pete, who’d stopped typing to hear better—glanced in the direction of the door Davy’d just come through. It blew open, and Estelle Cloutier stormed through it, leading with her pregnant belly. Judging by the look on her face, she was mad as hell and loaded for bear. Behind her, looking a little green around the gills and nowhere near as happy to be here, was Boomer Gunderson. Estelle marched up to Davy and said, “We have to talk to you.”

Davy sized up the situation and gave Estelle a quick nod. “Right through that door,” he told her. Estelle marched off, Boomer in tow. Davy met Pete’s eyes across the room. Pete shrugged and went back to typing. “Hold my calls,” he said to Dix, and followed them into his office.

The information Teddy Constantine had gleaned from Louis Farley’s hard drive had been primo. He had to give Farley
credit; the man was a bulldog when it came to digging for information. It hadn’t taken him any time at all to track Spinney and her daughter to a little town called Serenity, Maine. It was a shame that Teddy was going to have to kill Farley. If Louis had been willing to come over to the dark side, they would have made a crackerjack team.

Serenity wasn’t exactly a happening place. If he’d expected a fancy welcome sign at the edge of town, he’d have been sorely disappointed. There was just the plain black-and-white town line marker that was as common as pine trees in rural Maine. The town had long since lost its luster. If, indeed, it had ever had any. He crossed an old iron bridge, his tires singing on the grillwork. On the river bank, in the shadow of the bridge, sat an abandoned mill, its windows boarded up, its brickwork defaced by graffiti, its parking lot gradually giving way to dandelion and milkweed and soil erosion. No doubt the town’s economy had once been based on that mill. Now, he suspected, it was based on nothing at all.

Downtown didn’t look any better, with its empty store-fronts, their windows dusty with neglect. This place looked just like a thousand other small towns across this great and prosperous nation. As a matter of fact, it looked just like the one he’d escaped from when he was sixteen and his stepfather had taken the belt to him one too many times. He’d left the son of a bitch lying in a pool of blood. Dead, for all Teddy knew, since he’d never bothered to go back and find out.

In the middle of a work day, people came and went: a mother in a ten-year-old minivan full of screaming, snot-nosed kids; a mail carrier in shorts and a blue shirt, his mail-bag slung over his shoulder; the town barber, dressed in a white smock, standing outside his shop smoking a cigarette. Sheep, every last one of them, going about their daily lives because they weren’t smart enough to leave a place that had died a long time ago. None of them was even remotely aware that
a stone killer was driving through their midst. It was his secret alone. Teddy liked secrets. He liked being the only one who knew the real score. It was almost as much fun as killing.

In a town this small, he shouldn’t have much trouble locating the Spinney woman. If she’d been here any time at all, people would know who she was. A discreet question or two should get him the information he needed. After she was dead, if anybody remembered the stranger who’d been asking about her, there was no way they’d ever track him down. Even if they copied down the license number of his rental car, they wouldn’t find him. He’d paid for it with a stolen credit card that he’d used once and then thrown away. He had a wallet full of them, along with half a dozen fake driver’s licenses. If there was one thing Teddy Constantine cared about, it was protecting his own ass. By the time they found the bodies, he’d be home, sitting in his hot tub, smoking a smuggled Cuban cigar and watching the fights on his fifty-inch plasma TV.

He didn’t intend to dawdle here in Dogpatch, but there was no need to rush, either. He’d play it by ear, get the lay of the land. Maybe find some place where he could get a nice, juicy steak. While he ate, he’d watch the people interacting around him. He always found human behavior fascinating. The way people did the same things, made the same mistakes, lived the same lives day after day, again and again and again, like Bill Murray in
Groundhog Day,
until eventually they keeled over dead of old age. The worst thing was that most of the dumb schmucks weren’t even aware of how meaningless their little lives were.

But not Teddy Constantine. He was too smart, too strong, to let that happen to him. Devoted to his work, yes, but not obsessed with it. If the day came when he started to get bored, he’d quit. Who knew where he might end up? Maybe he’d spend
his old age digging in the dirt, raising orchids on some remote tropical island. But whatever he did, he’d do it because he wanted to. Not because he didn’t have a choice.

These were heavy thoughts for such a beautiful, sunny day. He needed to lighten up. Enjoy himself a little. The job would take care of itself. He’d already planned his strategy. It would need a little fine-tuning, but the skeleton was already in place. First, the envelope. That was the single most crucial facet of his mission, getting his hands on the written proof that the Brogan brothers had been involved in the kid’s death. Once he had the envelope tucked away for safekeeping, he’d take care of Farley. The man was little more than a minor inconvenience, but Teddy couldn’t leave any loose ends. Farley was unpredictable; he might even run to the cops. And that wouldn’t be pretty.

He would save the best for last. That was the way he always did it. The build-up of anticipation always felt so good. It was already beginning. Now that he was so close, he could almost smell the Spinney woman, the way a predator scents the nearness of its prey. Tonight, he would catch Robin Spinney and her daughter. He’d kill the kid first. Make the mother watch. When he got around to the woman, maybe he’d take a little extra time with her. She was a good-looking piece, and he wanted to make absolutely certain that Marcus Brogan got his money’s worth.

But first, he needed a Dr Pepper and a bathroom. There had to be a public restroom somewhere in this pathetic excuse for a town. Spying a convenience store ahead, he signaled for a left turn and pulled into the parking lot. Maybe while he was here, he’d pick up a couple of steamed hot dogs. He’d skipped breakfast, having better spent the time breaking into Farley’s hotel room, and his stomach was reminding him of that fact. Convenience stores always carried steamed hot dogs. If they were the red ones, the kind that snapped when you bit into them, all
the better. The steak could wait until tonight. He’d eat it rare and bloody. By dinnertime, he’d need the red meat anyway, to bolster his strength for the job ahead of him.