Criminal Intent (MIRA) (3 page)

His patriotic little speech might have been stirring, except that he still hadn’t answered the question. Davy stifled the urge to sigh. Beside him, Officer Pete Morin stood, a hulking, silent presence. Probably enjoying the hell out of the show. Pete hadn’t bothered to hide the fact that he wasn’t thrilled about having to spend the next two months answering to Davy Hunter.

“Mr. Lathrop?” Davy said.

“Yes?”

“You say Mr. Letourneau does this every day?”

“Well, yeah. We’ve been watching him for months—”

“We?”

“The girls on the front end. Every weekday morning, they watch Letourneau come into the store. He goes to the coffee machine and pours himself a cup of coffee. Black, with two sugars. He pays for it at the checkout, then he picks up a copy of the
Gazette
on his way out the door.”

“You
have witnesses who’ll swear to this in court?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, they’ve seen it happen, day after day. They told me about it. But I don’t know if they’d be willing to go to court. I mean—it’s only a newspaper.”

Davy slowly turned cool, searching eyes on Letourneau. “Do you have anything to say to that, Gilles?”

“In the words of my persecutor,” Letourneau snapped, “it’s only a newspaper. What the hell is the problem? With all the money I spend in this store every year, I should be entitled to a free newspaper once in a while.”

“So you’re admitting that Mr. Lathrop’s telling the truth.”

“Holy mother of Mary, what difference does it make? The paper’s right there beside the door. If they don’t want me taking it, they should put it somewhere else.”

Davy closed his eyes for an instant. When he reopened them, he said, “Tell me, Gilles. If you came out of the store this morning after picking up your coffee and newspaper, and saw Buzz here driving off in your pickup truck, what would you do?”

“What? What kind of question is that? How the hell am I supposed to answer that?”

“Would you figure it’s okay, because the truck was parked right by the front door for anybody who wanted to drive it?”

“Of course not!” Letourneau snapped. “It’s not his truck.”

“Very good. That means you understand the concept of ownership. What does it say on the masthead of the
Gazette?
Does it say that the paper’s free?”

Letourneau glared at him before spitting out a hard, monosyllabic response. “No.”

“Thank you. Mr. Lathrop, I believe that in exchange for your store not pressing charges, Mr. Letourneau would be willing to reimburse you for the cost of the newspapers he inadvertently borrowed over, say, the last six months. And, of course, he’d also agree that from now on, he’ll pay for his morning
Gazette.
Am I correct, Gilles?”

“Do
I have a choice? If I say no, you gonna haul me off in handcuffs and throw me in that little jail of yours?
Merde.
” Davy didn’t speak French, but he had a pretty good idea that the word wasn’t complimentary. “I still say if they want me to pay for the damn thing, they shouldn’t leave it by the front door.”

“Buzz? That arrangement okay with you?”

Lathrop cleared his throat again and squared his slumped shoulders. “That would be acceptable to us, yes.”

“Good. Six months times five days a week times fifty cents should come to—” He quickly did the math in his head. “Sixty dollars. Mr. Letourneau, I’m sure you’d be happy to write Mr. Lathrop a check right now for sixty dollars.”

Muttering under his breath, Letourneau pulled out his checkbook, scribbled a check, and tore it off. “Here,” he snarled, holding it out to Buzz Lathrop. To Davy he said, “Now can I go?”

“You can go,” Davy said. “Have a nice day.”

“Hah.” Letourneau stalked to the door. Hand on the doorknob, he said, “Goddamn paper isn’t worth fifty cents,” and slammed the door behind him.

Annie Kendall pulled her ancient Volvo station wagon into the weed-choked parking lot of the Twilight Motel and Video Store and rolled to a stop next to a permanently darkened vacancy sign, its shattered neon tubing bearing mute testimony to the Twilight’s quiet desperation. The motel’s heyday had clearly passed, evidenced by the 1950s-era gas pumps sitting out front, and Annie couldn’t help but wonder if the entire town wore the same bleak facade. All the better for her if it did. She wasn’t expecting much anyway.

It was a good thing she wasn’t. The drooping ridgepole gave the roofline the appearance of a swaybacked old nag. The building itself hadn’t been painted in at least forty years. What
had once been white was now a dingy gray, and Annie realized it was entirely possible that even her meager expectations had been too high.

Nevertheless, the Twilight was all hers, from the saggy roof to the defunct vacancy sign to the crumbling parking lot. Every spiderweb, every mouse dropping, every water stain belonged to her, purchased sight unseen from an owner eager to dump the place and relocate to the sunbelt. Real estate values in this neck of the woods had tanked right along with the town’s economy, and she’d bought the Twilight for a song. Now she just had to figure out what to do with it.

Rebirth. Or, as the French would say,
renaissance.
She liked the sound of the word, liked the feel of it, appreciated the symbolic link between her own life and that of the old motel that had been closed for more than a decade.

Hide in plain sight.
That was the advice Uncle Bobby had given her.
Decide who you want to be and then become that person. Plant roots in the soil. That’s how you build credibility.

She’d done her research carefully before she left Robin Spinney dead and buried in a Dumpster on the outskirts of Detroit. It didn’t get much more credible than this. Annie Kendall was planting roots in the soil, and this particular piece of property in this particular fading mill town seemed as good a place as any to start digging.

Annie turned off her ignition and was instantly enveloped in the familiar sounds of a rural summer day: the sweet fluid warble of a robin, the distant whine of an eighteen-wheeler, the rhythmic screek of a rusty Amoco sign swaying in the breeze above her head. The Twilight’s dilapidated neglect reminded her of places she’d seen in the rural south as a kid, places that were little more than wide spots in the road where time had stood still. If she closed her eyes, she could still picture dented gas pumps, an old yellow dog sleeping in the dirt, an
ancient soda cooler just outside the front door, filled with ice-cold bottles of Coca-Cola and grape Nehi.

But she didn’t have time for daydreaming. She had too much to do, and her backside ached from sitting too long. Except for a single stop somewhere on the Maine Turnpike for a bathroom break and a snack, they’d been driving since dawn. Beside her, Sophie slept in the passenger seat, dog-tired after being dragged at an ungodly hour from her comfy bed in a Motel 6 outside Providence and driven to this place at the far end of the universe.

Annie still hadn’t adjusted to the changes in her daughter. Sophie’d always been such a great kid, and the transformation had occurred pretty much overnight. A week before Soph’s fifteenth birthday, Annie had come home one afternoon to discover that while she was gone, that sneaky bitch Adolescence, with all her angst, had swept in with hurricaneforce winds, stealing away her sweet-natured daughter and leaving an irritable, bizarrely-dressed alien in her place. Sophie had hacked off the silky blond hair that had never been cut, and she’d dyed it jet-black. Now she wore it in a scruffy, shoulder-length style that hung like a dark cloud around her lovely face and turned her pale complexion ashen. She’d taken to dressing mostly in black, with a decided preference for Marilyn Manson T-shirts and black lipstick.

Although looking at her daughter made Annie’s teeth ache, she’d bitten down hard on her tongue. Her mother had told her years ago that with kids, you had to choose your battles wisely. Annie had always found that to be sound advice, so she was saving her wrath for something bigger. And even though with her new look Sophie didn’t exactly blend into the mainstream, still it was one hell of a disguise. Nobody who came looking for them would ever connect this belligerent Morticia Addams type with the outgoing, sweet blond teenager who’d played soccer and volunteered at the local animal shelter
every Saturday. As hideous as Sophie’s appearance was, it could conceivably save her life one day.

Hating to wake her sleeping daughter, Annie nevertheless touched her arm. “Soph,” she said softly, “wake up. We’re here.”

Sophie stirred, stretched and blinked a couple of times before focusing on the ramshackle establishment they were parked in front of. “This is it?” she said in disbelief. “We drove all the way from Las Vegas for
this?
”

Trying to ignore the consternation in her daughter’s voice, Annie said, “It’ll be fun. An adventure.”

“Right.” Sophie wore contempt the way Annie’s mother had worn Chanel No. 5. It rolled off her in waves. “Whatever you say.”

The rest of her sentence was unspoken, but Annie heard the words anyway.
I’ve had enough adventure. I want to go home.
Over the past six months, her daughter had been forced, through no fault of her own, to give up everything. Her friends, her school, her home, her history. Even her family name. No wonder she’d rebelled.

But there was nothing Annie could do about it. She couldn’t rewrite history. This was home now, and the past no longer existed. Pulling her keys from the ignition, she said with forced cheerfulness, “Come on. We might as well check it out and see what we’ve gotten ourselves into. Just think, Soph. All the videos you can watch, and no late fees.”

Sophie rolled her eyes, but she got out of the car. At the center of the long building, a second-story overhang held aloft by rusty iron posts jutted out fifteen feet into the parking lot, ending above a concrete island where the aforementioned gas pumps sat. Beneath the overhang, above the door to the former motel office, a white wooden sign with black stenciled lettering read VIDEO RENTALS. Annie stepped into the shade beneath the overhang and approached the door. She
pulled out the shiny silver key she’d been handed by her attorney, but before she could slide it into the lock, the door swung open, and a noticeably pregnant young woman said, “Sorry. We don’t open until noon.”

For a moment, Annie was taken aback by the sight of the girl, whose dark hair was chopped off in an ultra-short cut spiked in forty different directions and lacquered with some kind of styling gel. She wore a pair of fuchsia slacks and an oversized white T-shirt emblazoned with the word
BABY
and a pink arrow pointing directly at the oversized mound of her belly.

Recovering, Annie said, “Hello. I’m Annie Kendall. And you would be…?”

“Oh, my God.” The young woman’s hands went to her mouth in a gesture of horror. “I’m so sorry! I thought you were a customer! I’m Estelle. Estelle Cloutier. And you’re my new boss.”

“It certainly looks that way. This is my daughter, Sophie. May we come in?”

Estelle winked at Sophie, who was staring at her openmouthed, and stepped aside. “Welcome.
Mi casa es su casa.
Well, actually, it’s
su casa
anyway, isn’t it?” She let out a nervous giggle and covered her mouth with her hand to prevent any more giggles from escaping. The other hand came to rest on her expansive belly. “Take a look around.”

The walls were paneled with the tongue-and-groove knotty pine that had been fashionable somewhere around 1959, but the shelves were newer, built by somebody who knew what he—or she—was doing. The room wasn’t very big, but the walls were lined with movies, and a trio of long, freestanding shelving units created aisles where customers could browse through a fairly decent selection of videos. Block-buster clearly wasn’t in any danger from the competition, but for a small business in a small town, this place wasn’t half bad.

“We’re
open from noon to eight, six days a week,” Estelle said. “Sundays, we close at six. That’s the way Mike always did it. Of course, it’s your place now, so if you want to make any changes…” She drifted off, and Annie turned to look at her. The girl was leaning against the checkout counter, all wide, dark eyes, spiky hair, and bulging belly.

“You work here full-time?” Annie said.

“I’m the manager. I have a couple of high school kids who come in part time, but I’m the only full-time employee. Mike used to help out some of the time, but mostly he just let me run things. He said he trusted me, and besides, all he really wanted to do was retire and get the heck out of Dodge.”

Annie considered her words. “And how much am I paying you?”

“Fifty cents over minimum wage.”

Good Lord. Those were slave wages. Even in this neck of the woods, how did anyone survive on that kind of salary? Especially with a baby coming. Estelle wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe she had a significant other somewhere who raked in the big bucks. Or maybe Annie needed to consider giving the girl a raise.

She glanced around again, wondering if the place did enough business to even support giving Estelle that fifty cents over minimum, and decided to play it by ear. “Once I get settled in, we’ll have to sit down and go over everything. You can teach me the ropes.”

“Cool.”

“Meantime, where are the owner’s quarters?”

“Oh, of course! You want to get settled. I didn’t mean to babble on. It’s a bad habit. Your apartment’s upstairs. Right through the door over there. You have an outside entrance, too, around the corner by the pay phone.”

“Thanks. Coming, Soph?”

Her
daughter, who was browsing through the horror section, shrugged and set down the movie case she held in her hand. “They have all the
Friday The 13th
movies,” she said.

“Well,” Annie said. “There’s something to really look forward to.”

“I think that went well.”

Officer Pete Morin, riding shotgun in the passenger seat, mumbled a monosyllabic response. Davy glanced over at him, but the red-haired giant, focused on the road ahead, remained silent as granite. He hadn’t said two words since they left Grondin’s. Hell, he hadn’t said two words the entire time they were there. Davy wasn’t exactly the Great Communicator himself, but Morin evidenced all the warmth of an iceberg.