Hell Bent (25 page)

“Amen to that.” Doug stood up. “Well, we just wanted to fill you in,” he said. “And I needed you to talk me out of committing murder.” He held out his hand. “Thanks for listening.”

I shook hands with both of them, made them promise to keep me updated on their progress, and sent them home to their Jacuzzi by the window overlooking the waterfront in Charlestown.

After they left, I said to Julie, “See if you can reach Molly Burke at Channel Nine in Manchester for me. She should answer her cell.”

Julie cocked her head at me for a moment, then grinned and gave me a two-finger salute. “Aye, aye, sir.”

I went into my office and sat at my desk, and a minute later my console buzzed. “I’ve got Molly Burke on line two,” said Julie.

“Good work,” I said. I hit the blinking button and said, “Molly?”

“Hi, handsome,” she said. “I hope you’re calling for a favor.”

Three years earlier I had handled Molly’s sexual harassment case against her supervisor during her internship at a local-access cable network on the Massachusetts North Shore. We managed to get the pig fired plus a modest settlement and heartfelt public apology from the cable company, and even though I took my usual percentage out of the settlement, Molly insisted that she’d always owe me for giving her back her dignity.

Now she was a popular newshound on New Hampshire’s biggest TV channel. She was pretty and vibrant and personable and smart. People liked to talk with her. She handled hard news and human-interest stories with equal professionalism. She worked hard, did all her due diligence, and had a bright future. I was proud of her.

“Not really a favor,” I said to her, “although if it works out, it will make me very happy. I think I’ve got a story for you.”

Alex showed up at exactly seven that evening lugging big shopping bags. She had brought a sushi assortment from a Japanese restaurant in Arlington, along with some hot-and-sour soup, salad with ginger dressing, and a bottle of sake.

We warmed the sake and drank it from tiny porcelain cups without handles. We dipped the sushi in soy sauce mixed with wasabi, topped them with slices of fresh ginger, and wrestled them into our mouths with chopsticks.

Alex didn’t care for the
unagi,
the eel. I loved it. I, on the other hand, gave her my share of the squid
—ika.
We both gobbled the tuna and salmon
maki
rolls.

Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt. Between the two of us, we ate it all, and Henry, ever watchful from his post under the kitchen table, had to settle for the fortune cookies from which I’d extracted, but didn’t bother reading, the paper fortunes.

Our one concession to our occidental culture was after-dinner coffee, which we were sipping in the living room when my house phone rang. I went to the kitchen, picked it up, checked the caller ID, and saw that it was state police homicide detective Roger Horowitz calling from his cell.

I pressed the Talk button. “Detective,” I said. “I bet this isn’t a social call.”

“Detective Benetti is on her way to pick you up,” he said. “She should be there in about ten minutes. Be ready.”

I started to ask him what was going on, but he’d already hung up.

I put the phone down and went back into the living room. “That was Roger Horowitz,” I said to Alex. “His partner is on her way over here to take me someplace. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got to do it.”

She nodded. “This isn’t the first time he’s done that.”

“You remember.”

“You and Roger Horowitz go way back. He’s always showing up unexpectedly or dragging you off someplace without explanation. Do you think you’ll be gone long?”

“Hard to say,” I said. “You’ll wait here?”

“Sure. Henry and I will find a movie to watch.” She looked at me. “Roger Horowitz is a homicide detective. That means it’s got something to do with …”

I nodded. “With a homicide. Most likely, yes.”

“Gus, you think?”

I shrugged. “As usual, he didn’t give me a hint. If I can, I’ll call you when I know more.” I bent down and kissed her on the mouth. Then I found a jacket in the hall closet and went out onto the front porch to wait for Marcia Benetti.

A few minutes later the headlights of a dark sedan cut through
the misty chill of the November evening and stopped in front of my house.

I slid into the passenger seat beside Marcia Benetti. She’d been Horowitz’s partner for several years, probably because nobody else could get along with him. She was dark-haired and small-boned, with high cheekbones and big black eyes and a generous mouth. She looked about as much like a police officer as I looked like a sumo wrestler.

“How are you?” I said.

“Fine.”

“So what’s up?”

“Dead body,” she said.

“Who?”

“Don’t know.”

“Where?”

“Acton.”

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but all this clever banter is exhausting me.”

She glanced at me. “Sorry. I’ve been on the go since six this morning. I was looking forward to a quiet evening in my pj’s eating popcorn and watching TV with my family.”

“Murderers are inconsiderate that way.”

Benetti didn’t smile. “They sure are,” she said.

“Where in Acton?”

“I’ll show you,” she said. “Okay, Mr. Coyne?”

“Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

She headed west on Route 2. As we passed the exit to Route 128, she hit a number on her cell phone, put it to her ear, and said, “Fifteen or twenty minutes … yeah, he’s here … right. Okay.” A few minutes later she drove past the Best Western hotel where Alex was staying and the Papa Razzi restaurant next
door where we’d eaten, then halfway around the rotary and into Acton on 2A/119. A few miles later she turned right at some lights, and a mile or so after that she pulled off the road into a parking area in some woods.

There were at least half a dozen vehicles parked there—a couple of Acton cruisers, the rest unmarked. Some had their headlights on and their doors hanging open and their radios crackling from inside. Down a slope in the woods I saw some lights moving and flashing through the trees.

A uniformed police officer stepped out of the shadows and shined a flashlight into the car window on Marcia Benetti’s side.

She held her badge up to the window, and the cop moved away.

Marcia opened her door. “Come on,” she said. “Follow me.”

Her big cop flashlight lit a narrow dirt pathway that wound through the woods toward what I recognized as the gurgle of moving water. As we moved, the sounds of voices became louder and the flicker and flash of lights became brighter.

Then we stepped into a clearing on the edge of a small stream. Eight or ten people, a couple of them in uniform, were standing in a cluster.

Horowitz separated himself from the crowd and came over to us. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

“You didn’t give me much choice,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t. Come on. This way.”

We approached the group of law enforcement officials. “Back off,” said Horowitz to them, and they all backed away.

When they did, I saw the body lying there on the rocks and gravel and sand at the edge of the stream. He was sprawled on his belly. His legs and arms were bent as if he’d been running when he suddenly collapsed.

I stood there looking down at the body. He was wearing faded blue jeans and muddy white running shoes, with a dark blue
windbreaker. He had dark hair, cut short, and a small, compact body. I couldn’t tell how old he was.

Horowitz knelt beside him. “C’mere, Coyne,” he said. “See if you recognize him.”

I squatted beside Horowitz.

He tugged on the dead man’s shoulder, rolling him onto his side. His head lolled strangely on the uneven bed of rocks.

Horowitz shined his flashlight on the dead man. “Can you ID this man for us?” he said.

The first thing I saw was the big pink gash on the man’s throat and the redness that had soaked the front of his shirt and jacket. His throat had been sliced open nearly to his spine and had emptied his body of blood.

The second thing I saw was that the dead man was Pedro Accardo. His face was pale and shrunken, but there was no mistaking him.

“I know who this is,” I said to Horowitz. “I half expected it. His name is Pedro Accardo.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” I said.

He stood up. “Okay. Come on. We’ve got to talk.”

I stood up, too. “I got a question,” I said.

“I’m the question man, Coyne,” he said. “You’re the answer man. How it works.”

“Whatever gave you the idea that I might know him?”

“We’ll talk in the car,” he said.

When we got back to the parking area, Horowitz pointed his flashlight at Marcia Benetti’s unmarked sedan and said, “Get in.”

I got in the passenger side.

Howowitz went over and spoke to one of the uniformed cops who was patrolling the parking area, then came over and slid in beside me.

One of the Acton cruisers pulled out of the lot and drove away.

Horowitz patted his chest, then pulled a notebook from an inside pocket of his jacket. He flipped it open. “Spell that dead man’s name for me.”

I spelled Pedro Accardo. “He had no ID on him?”

“If he did,” he said, “I wouldn’t’ve needed you, right? So you know him how?”

“He was a friend of Gus Shaw’s.” I told Horowitz about meeting Pedro—Pete—at the Sleepy Hollow Café with Gus. I told him that Pedro and Gus were both members of a support group for people who came home from Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder, and that the group was led by an older guy named Philip Trapelo, whom people called the Sarge. I told him that I’d talked with Trapelo about Gus because I was trying to figure out if Gus really had taken his own life. I also mentioned talking with Jemma Jones, who owned the camera shop where Gus had worked, and Herb and Beth Croyden, Gus’s landlords in Concord. The Croydens, I told him, had lost a son in Iraq. Ms. Jones’s husband had been killed over there.

I told him how Pedro had called me the previous night implying that he knew, or believed, that Gus had been murdered. I told Horowitz that Pedro mentioned the name John Kinkaid and the number eleven, eleven, eleven, and that judging by the background noises, he was calling from a public phone and was unable to say very much.

“He said he’d call me back at midnight,” I said. “He seemed to have more he wanted to tell me.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No. He never did call me back.”

“We figure he’s been dead between sixteen and twenty-four
hours,” said Horowitz. “He might’ve already been dead at midnight last night.”

“Soon after he called me, then,” I said. I shuddered at the obvious possibility that talking to me had gotten Pedro murdered.

“He died right there by that stream,” said Horowitz. “Bled out on the rocks and sand. Killer was standing behind him. Right-handed. Big sharp knife.”

“And didn’t bother trying to hide his body,” I said.

“No. This is a popular area. There’s a hiking trail and a picnic area. They expected him to be found.” He looked at me. “You were asking how I knew to call you.”

I nodded. “Yes. Why me?”

“He had your business card crumpled up in his hand.”

“I left a stack of cards for Phil Trapelo to give out to his group,” I said. “Or he might’ve gotten it from Gus.” I frowned. “The killer left the card in his hand but stripped him of his wallet and other ID? Isn’t that a little strange?”

Horowitz shrugged. “Not if he’s trying to send you a message, it isn’t.”

“Me?” I stopped. “Oh. A warning, you mean.”

“Maybe.” He turned and looked out his side window. “Aha,” he said, as a pair of headlights turned into the parking area and stopped.

A minute later, a flashlight came bobbing through the darkness toward us.

“Ah, yes,” said Horowitz with more enthusiasm that I’d heard from him since I got there. “Coffee. Doughnuts. Finally. All is well with the world.” He opened his door and stepped out.

One of the uniformed cops was balancing a box in one hand and two large Styrofoam cups in the other. His flashlight was tucked in his armpit.

“Here you go, sir,” he said to Horowitz. “One black, one with milk, no sugar. Two jelly, two glazed, two plain. Here’s your change.”

“Take a doughnut and keep the change,” said Horowitz. “You can have anything but a glazed.”

The cop took a doughnut. Then Horowitz climbed into the car, handed me one of the cups, and put the doughnut box on the bench seat between us.

We both sipped coffee and munched doughnuts for a minute. Then, with his mouth full of glazed doughnut, Horowitz said, “So you think this Accardo got murdered because he knew something about what happened to Gus Shaw?”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“And he was going to tell you what he knew.”

“Maybe. He called me, couldn’t talk, said he’d call again. He had my card with my phone numbers in his hand, right?”

“Why you?”

“I guess I’m the only one still asking questions about Gus,” I said.

Horowitz peered at me for a moment, then grunted. He washed his doughnut down with a gulp of coffee. “For all we know,” he said, “the killer put that business card in our dead man’s hand. A message for you. So do you get the message?”

I nodded. “I get it. If it is a message.”

“It’s about you asking questions.”

“I said I get it.”

“Do I need to reinforce it?”

“No,” I said. “The message is clear enough.”

“So you’ll leave the homicide detecting to the homicide detectives.”

“The homicide detectives concluded that Gus Shaw committed suicide,” I said.

“Actually,” he said, “that was the ME’s office. You got a problem with their verdict, I gather.”

I shrugged.

“If you had just let it rest there,” Horowitz said, “maybe Pedro Accardo would be alive today.”

“I hate to think that might be true,” I said.

He shrugged. “In light of this new development,” he said, “perhaps we’ll have to give the Gus Shaw case a second look. Do you have any other reason to think he didn’t kill himself?”

“Me?” I thought for a minute. “Honestly, no, not really. It’s just about whether he was the kind of man who’d do it, that’s all. I know what the evidence looks like. I’ve tried to think about it objectively. Alex doesn’t believe it, of course, but she’s still remembering him from when they were kids. I think Claudia, Gus’s wife, does believe it. People I’ve talked to, none of them has seemed overly surprised. Until Pedro Accardo called me last night, I’d pretty much accepted it. Gus had PTSD. He lost his hand in Iraq. His career and his marriage, his life as he knew it, all down the tubes.”