Hell Bent (28 page)

“Boo,” I said.

I
folded my phone, stuck it in my shirt pocket, and turned back to look at Herb. As I did, amidst the boxes of suicide-bombing supplies scattered on the garage floor, I noticed the corner of a manila envelope sticking out from under the toppled-over steel cabinet.

I picked up the envelope. It was sealed with cellophane tape. Nothing was written on it. I moved my fingers over it. It felt like the outlines of several thin square plastic boxes. The kind of boxes that held CDs and DVDs.

If I wasn’t mistaken, I’d found Gus’s photos.

I glanced at Herb. His eyes were closed. His breathing came in shallow little pants, and his skin looked pale and clammy.

I unzipped my jacket and stuffed the envelope down inside the front of my shirt.

I was zipping my jacket back up when I heard a quick intake of breath and the scrape of a foot on the concrete floor behind me. I turned. Beth Croyden was standing there hugging herself.

#x201C;What happened?” she said. “Is Herb—”

“He was shot,” I said. I wondered if she’d seen the envelope
or what I’d done with it. “It’s a superficial wound,” I said. “He’s a little shocky, but he’ll be okay. An ambulance is on the way.”

“Shot?”
she said.

I nodded.

“Those
were
gunshots I heard, then,” she said. She waved her hand around the garage, taking in the overturned steel cabinet and the cardboard boxes and her wounded husband. “Who did this?”

“A guy named Phil Trapelo. Do you know him?”

Beth gave her head a small shake that could have meant yes or no. She came over and knelt down beside Herb, laid the back of her hand on his forehead, then bent over and kissed him. “Now what have you done?” she said softly. She looked up at me. “We were up in our bedroom getting ready for bed. Herb thought he saw some lights down here at the carriage house. I told him, I said, ‘Why don’t we call the police?’ But not my old James Bond here. He had to go investigate himself. So what happened?”

I shrugged. “It’s a long story. We better wait for the police.”

Beth cocked her head at me, then nodded. “I understand. This is all connected to Gus Shaw, though, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

She returned her attention to Herb. She stroked his cheek, bent close to his face, and spoke softly to him, and I heard him murmur some kind of reply.

I glanced around the carriage house. The various boxes holding what I guessed were the component parts for suicide bombs that I’d found in the steel cabinet were scattered on the floor. A couple of them had opened and spilled out their contents—TV remotes, packets of multicolored electrical wire, coils of nails, batteries. I wondered what would’ve happened if one of Phil
Trapelo’s bullets had hit the box containing the C-4 plastic explosive.

I heard the distant wail of sirens and went outside to wait. The sirens grew louder, and then I saw the headlights cutting through the trees along the winding driveway. A minute later an emergency wagon came skidding to a stop in front of the carriage house, and two EMTs hopped out.

“He’s in there,” I said, pointing at the door that opened into the carriage house.

They went inside. A few minutes later Beth Croyden came wandering out and stood beside me. “They kicked me out,” she said. “Implied I was just in the way.”

“They’ll probably let you ride in the ambulance with him, if you want,” I said.

A minute later a Concord town police cruiser arrived, and right behind it came Roger Horowitz’s unmarked Ford sedan. The two local cops and Horowitz climbed out of their vehicles at the same time, Horowitz from the passenger side of his. They all came over to me and Beth.

Horowitz flashed his badge at the uniforms. “We got this guy,” he said. “You boys stay with the lady.” He grabbed my elbow and steered me over to where he’d left his car. “Here we go again, Coyne,” he said. “Except I got no coffee and doughnuts this time. Let’s you and me climb in back.”

We got into the backseat of his car. Marcia Benetti, his partner, was sitting behind the wheel. I said hello to her, and she grunted at me.

“Okay,” said Horowitz. “Let’s make this fast and thorough. Can we do that?”

I nodded.

“Just so you know,” he said, “I already put the word out on
Philip Trapelo, so let’s start with him. Tell me everything you know about him.”

Everything I knew turned out not to be much. Trapelo was involved with the support group for post-traumatic stress disorder victims that met Tuesday evenings at the VFW hall in Burlington. People called him the Sarge. He appeared to be in his late fifties, maybe even early sixties. He held strong pro-veteran and anti-war sentiments. He was short and compact. Gray hair, cut military style. Deep voice. He carried an automatic sidearm.

No, I didn’t know where Trapelo lived or worked or what kind of car he drove. Not counting tonight’s encounter, I’d only met him once. All I knew was his cell phone number, which I looked up on my own phone and recited for them.

“So, Coyne,” said Horowitz, “what the hell were you doing here on a Saturday night in the first place?”

“As you know,” I said, “all along Alex has refused to believe that her brother committed suicide. More and more I’ve come around to her way of thinking. What happened to Pedro Accardo—and finding my business card in his hand—pretty much clinched it for me.” I shrugged. “I came here just to see if I could find something that would give me a clue about Gus.” I jerked my thumb in the direction of the garage. “I guess I did.”

Horowitz nodded. “I guess the hell you did. Looks like all the ingredients for half a dozen men to dress up in fishing-vest bombs and blow themselves—plus anybody who happened to be nearby—into smithereens. You figure that was Shaw?”

“I think it was Trapelo,” I said. “I think Gus just let Trapelo store his stuff here. I doubt if Gus even knew what was in those boxes.”

“Trapelo,” he said. “So he killed Shaw?”

I nodded. “And Pedro Accardo.”

“Why?”

“I think Gus and Pedro figured out what Trapelo was up to,” I said. “He thought they were going to turn him in, so he killed them. He might’ve thought Pedro told me about it. So he followed me here and tried to kill me and Herb Croyden, too.”

“But you shot back at him.”

I nodded.

“And missed.”

“Looks like I did,” I said.

“Too bad.”

“Guess it scared him away, anyway,” I said. “Luckily, he missed me and only nicked Herb.”

“Yes, lucky.” Horowitz shrugged. “What else can you tell us?”

I told the two homicide detectives that Pedro emphasized the number eleven, eleven, eleven, and I thought that Trapelo might’ve had something planned for Veterans Day, which was just a few days away.

“Symbolic, huh?” said Horowitz.

“Profoundly disturbed, if you ask me,” I said.

He asked me a lot more questions, and Marcia Benetti chimed in with some of her own from the front seat. I answered them all as well as I could, and then they asked me to go over some things a second time, and to elaborate on some details, and they probed me with some questions that I couldn’t answer, and by the time they decided they were done with me, I felt like I’d been sucked dry.

They did not ask about Gus Shaw’s photographs. I hugged the envelope holding the CDs inside my shirt and didn’t mention it to them.

Maybe I was withholding evidence, but I doubted it. That
box of C-4 was evidence enough to keep the police occupied for a while.

Horowitz told me to keep my cell phone with me at all times, as he was positive he’d want to talk with me again in the next couple of days, and he wanted to be sure that I’d be available.

It was after two in the morning when they dropped me off at my car where I’d left it in Concord center near the Inn. I got in and headed for home.

I wondered if Alex was still upset with me. Knowing her, I guessed she probably was. But I figured that when I told her all about my evening’s adventures with suicide bombs and gunshots and police and ambulances, and when I showed her the envelope that held Gus’s Iraq photographs, she’d feel different.

I parked on Mt. Vernon Street and went in my front door. Henry was waiting there with his tail wagging, and when I scootched down, he came over and lapped my face, then turned and trotted toward the back door.

I let him out, then went to the living room.

The television was not turned on, and Alex was not curled up on the sofa.

I went upstairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t there, either. Nor did I find her on the daybed in my den.

I looked out the front window to the Residents Only space on the street where she’d left her car the previous evening. It was gone.

She was gone.

I stood there for a minute feeling sad and alone. And then I smiled. Of course she was gone. She was Alexandria Shaw. She didn’t put up with a lot of shit—from me, or from anybody. That was one of the things I loved about her.

I realized that in a small but important way, if I’d found Alex sleeping on the sofa or waiting upstairs in my bed when I’d come back home at close to three in the morning, or even if she’d been awake and pacing the floor angry and worried about me, my pleasure would have been mingled with a vague feeling of disappointment.

I liked feisty, confrontational, independent, competent, autonomous, self-contained women. I liked women who knew what they wanted and went after it. I liked women who thought they were at least as important and capable and valuable as men.

Like Groucho, who said he’d refuse to join any organization that would accept him as a member, I tended to lose interest in women who were overly tolerant of me.

I looked on the kitchen table and counters for a note. I didn’t think Alex would leave one, and she didn’t disappoint me. She knew I could figure it out without having it explained. It was simple. I’d treated her badly, and she wouldn’t put up with it.

I let Henry in. I realized that as late as it was, the evening’s adrenaline was still zipping through my veins. I was wideawake.

So Henry and I went into my den. I fished the manila envelope out from inside my shirt and tore it open. Six flat plastic boxes slid out. Each held a plain CD on which someone—Claudia, I guessed—had used a black indelible marker to write “GS” and what I figured was a date, day and month—7/16, 9/12, 9/18, 9/19, 10/22, 12/8. I guessed those were the dates that Claudia had received each batch of e-mailed images from Gus and had transcribed them onto these CDs.

I popped one of the CDs into my computer, and when it loaded I saw that there were 174 images. I clicked on one of them at random. It showed several men wearing military camouflage squatting on some sandy ground talking with a dark-skinned
boy. The child was propped up by an improvised crutch. He had only one leg.

Another image showed a skinny, dark-haired girl—she looked maybe thirteen or fourteen—leaning back against the exploded remains of a building. She wore a skimpy tank top and a denim skirt so short that it barely covered her hips. She had the bony legs and flat chest of a preadolescent, but the look on her face was old and corrupt, made more so by bright red lipstick and big round sunglasses decorated with rhinestones and a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth.

If an ordinary picture is worth a thousand words, this photo of Gus Shaw’s was a whole novel.

Each of the six CDs held between 142 and 179 images. Those I chose randomly to enlarge on my computer screen portrayed something Gus had seen in Iraq. Every one of them was painful to look at. Each managed to capture a psychological as well as a physical element of the human destruction that Gus found over there. Each had its story to tell.

I put the CDs back into their boxes and slid the boxes into a big padded mailing envelope and stuck the envelope into the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. I shut the drawer and re-locked the cabinet. Then I leaned back in my desk chair and looked up at the ceiling.

Phil Trapelo said he doubted the impact of Gus’s photographs. Trapelo was convinced that public attention could only be grabbed and held by something as stunningly dramatic and shocking as American veterans turned suicide bombers.

I wished I felt more confident that he was wrong.

Henry, who’d been snoozing on his dog bed in the corner, whimpered, stirred, got to his feet, and walked stiff-legged over to where I was sitting. He plopped his chin on my thigh and
looked up at me with his big loyal eyes, as if he sensed that I was having Deep Thoughts and wanted to reassure me that all was well because he loved me.

I gave his muzzle a scratch. “I wish it was that simple,” I told him.

The shrill of the phone on the bedside table awakened me. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was ten after nine. I was surprised that Henry had let me sleep that late.

I groped for the phone, pressed it against my ear, and mumbled, “Yes? Hello?”

“I’m on my way over.” It was Horowitz. “I got the doughnuts. Be sure there’s coffee.” Then he hung up.

I rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, splashed water on my face, and let Henry out. I’d made the coffee before bed, so the pot was full.

I was halfway through my first mug when the doorbell rang. I went to the front door and opened it. Horowitz stood there wearing an old ski parka and holding the kind of cardboard box that would contain a dozen doughnuts.

Beside him was a balding man of around sixty with a neatly tied necktie showing under his camel-hair topcoat. He was carrying a slender oxblood attaché case.

I held the door open, and the two of them came inside. Henry shuffled over, sniffed their cuffs, found nothing interesting, and wandered away. Both men ignored him.

Horowitz handed me the doughnut box. “This is Agent Greeley,” he said. He took off his parka and hung it in the hall closet.

The bald guy held out his hand. “Martin Greeley,” he said. “FBI.”

I shook his hand. “Brady Coyne. Family lawyer. Let me take your coat.”

Greeley turned his back to me and let me slip his topcoat off his shoulders. He was wearing a neatly pressed charcoal suit under it, and he kept his grip on his attaché case.