Killer Move (20 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
he worst of it was that Barclay had known at the start, from day one—the first time he ever met the guy. He hadn’t known it would amount to
this,
but he’d known Warner was at the wheel of a Bad News Express and sooner or later it was going to pull into a station. You could call it cop savvy—he’d been Deputy Barclay for three years by the time Warner arrived back in town—but he didn’t believe it was that complicated. It was basic chemistry. It was what animals have to keep them safe among predators. It was a red-flashing-light-and-siren combo broadcasting on a silent, invisible wavelength.

It said:
There is something wrong with this man.

And there was, though the others had never seen it. Well, they
saw
it, kind of—Hazel in particular had said things, a couple times, way back—but they didn’t pay attention. They knew he wasn’t the same as them, but they’d never understood just how big the difference was. Barclay hadn’t, either, not until he’d got the call from one of the CSI guys late that morning.

He’d been standing outside the house having a cigarette, wondering what to do—and what to be
seen
to do—about the apparent disappearance of one of the richest men on Longboat Key. The tech team had been getting ready to ship out, having found nothing more than that single splash of blood. The senior tech said the trace was indicative of a larger quantity, inexpertly cleaned, and thus was suggestive of foul play, but no more. In those amounts it
could
just have been the result of a finger nicked while cutting a drink-bound lime. Barclay was sure it was going to amount to more than that—which is why he’d held a presence there for so long and insisted on having every tech he could lay his hands on, and the full CSI wagon outside—but for the time being, there wasn’t what you’d call proof.

Then one of the younger techs had come out of the sliding doors. “Uh, Sheriff?” he said, and Barclay noticed how the boy—previously cocky, “Look at me with the science stuff”—looked awkward. He reached up and pushed his sandy hair back. “We found something. It’s, uh, dunno . . . you probably want to come and see.”

Barclay dropped his cigarette to the deck, thinking:
Here it is, at last.

H
e followed the tech through the living area. He’d been to this house before, though the tech wasn’t to know. It was a perk Barclay had received for doing his job. Not his actual job. His
other
job, the role he’d been playing for twenty-five years. Since Phil Wilkins had died, most of the group’s enthusiasm had waned—not least because everyone was getting older. Life starts to seem complicated enough without screwing with the basic rules. But not Warner. He wasn’t going to give it up, and that was the problem. He was by far the wealthiest of them. Grew up locally, left and founded his computer-games company on the West Coast, sold it at the right time. Moved back to Sarasota, started dabbling in condo development, turned out to be good at that, too. Good at money, good with women. Good-looking. Broken inside.

Every year Barclay had said it was time for them to quit. It had been Warner who’d turned him around—just like he’d turned around the others. Not through reasoned argument, either. Barclay couldn’t even claim that in his defense, though Warner was a very convincing guy when he put his mind to it. No, he’d been compromised by simpler means. Cold cash, sometimes. Also, getting invited to the kinds of events a cop wouldn’t normally get near—not to mention being introduced to the kinds of women who could be encouraged to attend that style of house party, for whom the proximity of wealth (and a big bowl of cocaine) operated like an access-all-areas skeleton key. Warner’s house operated a strict what-happens-in-Vegas policy. It was actually kind of amazing what a couple of nineteen-year-old girls would countenance with a grizzled middle-aged man with a gut, and when you knew the girls had been flown in for the event and would be on a plane back to Hicksville the next morning (never having learned anyone’s names, and not caring), it was easy to indulge yourself. Everybody has a price. It’s never so very high. It’s always paid in the same currencies.

The tech led him along a wood-paneled corridor and through a door that led to a set of stairs. Barclay knew where they went—a large, temperature-controlled wine cellar built into a concrete bunker excavated beneath the house. When they’d tramped down the stairs, Barclay saw the other two techs and Hallam standing to one side.

Barclay noticed that a section of the limestone floor had a sheen to it, as if it had been recently cleaned. Hallam detached himself from the group and went to a bank of the racks on the far side of the room. He took hold of a section loaded with expensive-looking bottles and gave it a tug. It didn’t move.

“Wouldn’t have found it at all if one of these guys hadn’t been going beyond their remit,” he said. He looked at one of the techs, a weedy, sheepish-looking guy. “Got a little too interested in what vintages were in the racks, lifted a bottle. And dropped it.”

Hallam lowered himself to his knees, pointed at the lowest section of the rack. “Mopping up the mess, he noticed a handle in here.”

He reached into a space that looked like nothing more than a gap for another bottle of wine, and Barclay heard a businesslike clunk, presumably a lever being turned. His heart sank.

Hallam stood back up, tugged at the rack again. This time it swung away from the wall, a four-foot section pivoting soundlessly.

There was a wide metal door on the wall behind, with a recessed handle. Hallam looked at his boss, evidently feeling that Barclay would want to take it from here.

Barclay wasn’t sure he did. He believed, on balance, that he’d rather walk back up the stairs and get into his car and drive somewhere else. Maybe Key West. Or Brazil. He stepped forward, however. That’s what being a cop is about. You’re the guy who has to take that step, who has to open the doors that all the other people don’t even want to know exist.

Behind the door, however, was another door. This was nearly a foot back from the first, suggesting a very thick wall. Barclay turned the handle, and was relieved when it didn’t open.

“Locked,” he said, but he knew that wasn’t going to be enough. He knew they were now into a period where they tried to locate keys for the door, and couldn’t; tried to establish whether the lock was tied into the security system and under its control; and eventually wound up bringing in someone with the equipment to cut through this barrier with brute force.

We’ve all got that door inside. Behind it we keep the things that are personal, and what’s personal to us may not be good. Either way, Warner wasn’t here to stand in the way of this door now.

“Get it open,” Barclay said.

Then he tramped back upstairs toward fresh air and sunlight and somewhere private to make a telephone call to a man he’d met once at one of Warner’s parties, a man who’d taken him to one side and given him a card and told him to call if—and only if—there was a problem that threatened to get out of hand and become public. All the sheriff knew about this man was that his name was Paul, and that he’d have been happy never to speak to him again.

But Barclay figured that if there was ever a day to make that call, this was it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I
ran/walked/lurched back into Sarasota, under skies that were beginning to cloud up fast. I took a chance and went to an ATM when I got to downtown, reasoning that if it refused me or set off a siren, I could be long gone before anyone could drive to the area to detain me. In fact, the machine simply gave me two hundred bucks, without backchat or prevarication—the process feeling magical, unforeseen.

I took the money to a nearby Gap and quickly bought new chinos and a shirt, then made another stop at the Walgreens three doors down. I changed in a Starbucks restroom, giving myself a wash-toothbrush-antiperspirant makeover and dropping my old clothes into the trash. I walked straight back out past the baristas without allowing myself to check whether they’d noticed the transformation. People seldom do, too wrapped up in their own concerns and neuroses to even notice yours. That’s the kind of thing the positivity blogs yammer on about all the time, and evidently they’re right. Nobody knows about your hell. They don’t care. They’re too busy cooking in their own.

I hailed a cab and went to St. Armands Circle. I chatted with the driver about property prices on the way like I always did with anyone. After he’d dropped me off I walked over to where I’d left my own car the night before.

I turned the AC on full and waited until it was working. When it finally got cold I started to feel slightly better, despite the fact that from where I was sitting I could see the table outside Bo’s where I’d encountered Cassandra the night before. At some point in the last hour a thin film of protective scar tissue had started to build around what had happened since. Along with this had appeared something else, however: anger. She’d been a nice girl. A good kid. I didn’t yet have any real understanding of what was unfolding or breaking down all around me, but I knew that it had brought about her death. And for that, someone was going to pay.

That was in the future, however. The next step in my plan—and it was a plan that had no aspirations beyond taking one step at a time and hoping I didn’t fall on my face straightaway—was driving to The Breakers and dropping back into my role. Chatting with Karren, getting e-mails done. If I was “just that guy,” then any bad things becoming associated with my life would be judged according to character. The character I wished to project. The real me, whoever that was.

Then I could get on with trying to find out where the hell Steph was, making sure she was okay, and not ungovernably pissed at me.

Before I set off, I tried Deputy Hallam’s number yet again. Still no reply. I didn’t leave a message. Dismissing the idea gave me another, however, and I called our home number. No reply, but I entered the key combination that allowed me to remote-access messages on the machine. I listened again to my previous messages. In the cold light of day I realized they would serve no purpose, and the last few sounded very drunk. The undertone of increasing moral indignation would also not sit well with my own lack of return to base overnight. I deleted them one by one.

But then, right at the end, I found another message. It had been left early that morning, and this time it was for me—but it was not from Steph or Hallam or anyone else I knew.

It was from the hospital.

S
arasota Memorial is a big white modern building with a sweeping approach and nice trees. Without the flag and the signs it could easily be a major condominium development. I ran into the main entrance and established that the ICU was on the third floor. I found an elevator. Stood in it, blinking, twitching.

I burst out into a big waiting area, sparsely occupied and decorated in the colors and shapes of expedience and calm. I went to the desk, said who I was and who I was there to see. The instant recognition this gained me just made me even more scared. The nurse said that someone would be right out, and got on the internal phone.

I pushed back from the counter, breathing deeply, trying to keep it even. I noticed a nervous-looking midtwenties guy on one of the benches, hands clasped. I was suddenly sure that he was waiting to hear about his wife, a pregnancy, an oncoming child. Maybe he had some superbad reason for being here, but I thought not. Probably everything in his life was going okay.

I wanted to be him instead of me.

A man in a white coat appeared at the entrance to a side corridor, and the station nurse pointed me out. I hurried over before he’d started in my direction.

He led me down the corridor and into a further side area, without saying anything. Toward the bottom was a portion where sections of the walls were made of glass, to allow people to see what was happening inside. He led me to one of these. I looked through.

Lying in a bed, eyes closed, and with plastic tubing going into her, was Stephanie.

H
er skin was pale and seemed to hang off the bones of her cheeks and wrists. Her eyelids were lilac. She did not look like my wife. She looked like Steph might look like to herself in cracked mirrors glimpsed in bad dreams.

“To be honest,” the doctor said, “we’re not one hundred percent sure what we’re dealing with. She arrived with vomiting, which was not a cinch to diagnose as she’d clearly drunk a lot. But then we discovered there’d been diarrhea, with blood, which switched us to looking at a bacterial infection. It seemed like this was heading into hemolytic uremic syndrome and kidney failure, which kind of made sense, though it’d be unusual given your wife’s age and state of health—and there’s no previous indicators of renal problems, correct? But then we started to see drops in organ function overall, to the point where we’re running a slew of new tests on everything from E. coli to a couple of rare seafood biotoxins.”

He finally left a gap, as if for me to speak. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and with my hand clamped over my mouth as it was, he wouldn’t have heard the words anyway.

“It could be E. coli,” he said, as if that was in some way reassuring. “We’re pumping antibiotics and fluids into her and we’re putting out the other fires as best we can. At the moment that’s all we can do.”

She looked so pale, so broken, and very far away.

“Is she conscious?”

“Intermittently. She was awake up until about forty minutes ago, now seems to be drifting in and out.”

“I have to go in there.”

“Not right now.”

“Well, when?”

“I don’t know. Maybe soon. It depends.”

“How long has she been here?”

“Since three
A.M.
”

“But . . . how come the first I hear of this is a message at eight thirty this morning? Why did nobody call me right away?”

The doctor glanced at his clipboard. “The notes say your wife requested you be contacted as soon as she was admitted. Her brother said he’d get hold of you.”

I turned to look at him. “Her brother?”

“Right,” he said, still reading. “He brought her in. I don’t want to be critical, you’ve got enough to process as it is, but she’d evidently been deteriorating for several hours before the guy thought, okay, there’s a situation here, let’s get to the hospital. You might . . . want to talk to him about that.”

“Oh, I will,” I said. “Though I’ll need to discuss a couple other things with him first.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like the fact that my wife doesn’t have a brother.”

The doctor looked up from his notes. I could see him making a decision that this wasn’t his problem.

“I’ll be ten minutes,” I told him. “And then I’m going to want to talk to my wife.”

When I got back out to the waiting area the guy was already trying to escape. The corner where he’d been sitting was empty. I saw the back of someone heading fast down the corridor toward the bank of elevators.

“Hey,” I shouted.

He started to hurry. I ran faster.

I got to him as he was jumping into the elevator. I shoved him in ahead, turned, and stabbed the button for the basement. He started to say something. I grabbed him by the neck and smacked his face into the wall of the elevator. I’d never done anything like that before, but it came easy and it felt good. His head bounced off the paneling and snapped back hard.

I put my face up close. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Nobody,” he stammered.

I threw him back into the corner. “Are you with them? Are you with that woman? Jane Doe?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He looked scared now—but more than that. Wary, on alert, as if I was the guy in the wrong.

“Look . . . ,” he said, but he had
guilty
written all over his face, and he didn’t know where to take it from there. I smacked his head into the wall again. There was a loud
ping
and the elevator doors opened behind me.

I hauled the guy out into a subterranean corridor that was hot and semidark and smelled of chemicals, and shoved him backward, pinning him against the wall.

“Tell me,” I said. “And make it the truth, or I’m going to hurt you as badly as I can.”

“I brought her in. That’s all.”

“Bullshit.”

I pulled my fist back. I hadn’t punched anyone in a long, long time—there’s not a lot of call for it in professional realty—but I figured I could remember the basics if I had to.

He jerked up his hands, started to stammer.

“I don’t
know
what happened to her. We were at my apartment. We were . . . just talking. Hanging out.”

Suddenly something clicked. “You’re . . . Nick,” I said. “New guy at the magazine, art department. Golson, right? I met you at a party about a month ago.”

“Right. I’m Nick. Exactly.”

He nodded enthusiastically, as if saying his name to the best of his ability was going to get him out of this situation. I smacked him back against the wall again to let him know how wrong he was.

“What the fuck was my wife doing at your apartment?”

“It was, look, seriously, it was nothing. They had this meeting in the morning. Her and Sukey, they went out afterward, celebrating. I ran into them downtown, after work. They were pretty . . . you know, they’d been in the bar quite a while by then. Sukey got a cab. Steph, uh, Stephanie, your wife, she . . . shit, I don’t know. We had another drink. We wound up back at my place. I’ve got a studio in town. It was close.”

“And?”

“We were just talking. Magazine, work stuff. Had a couple more beers. Actually, she was drinking wine, but I only had beers. She brought the wine with her.”

“From the bar?”

“No. It was in her bag.”

“She was carrying a bottle of wine
around with her
? Are you
making this shit up
?”

“No! I don’t know why she had it. But she, she got the bottle out as soon as we got to my apartment, seemed psyched about having it. Like it was ‘score to her’ or something. Wanted me to have some, too, but I don’t like wine. And so she just kept knocking it back, and then after a while she started getting sick. I assumed it was because she was so bombed, but then she’s, like, ‘I need a paramedic.’ I figured she’d plane out of it, but after a couple hours . . .
fuck,
dude, I didn’t know what to do.”

The back of my neck felt cold. “What wine was it?”

He looked at me like I was insane. “I don’t know—I know shit about wine. Like I said, I don’t drink it. It had a fucked-up label. It looked old, I guess.”

“Where is it now?”

“My apartment. But it’s empty. She finished it.”

“This ever happened before?”

He looked confused. “Has what?”

“Have you two had a drink together before? You guys ever ‘hung out’ before? How often? Just how far does the ‘just talking’ go?”

He was absolutely still, and silent, and did not say “dude” or fluster or try to deny anything. It could be a lot of prior hanging out and just talking had happened, it could be not. Either way he evidently realized that the next thing he said had to be right, and phrased carefully, and that was enough for me. I got my face up really close to his. I suspected this guy was too stupid and scared to tell me anything that was worth me knowing, but I didn’t have time to prove that to myself. Maybe he was my wife’s lover, maybe not. I could determine that from her. Right now I had a bigger problem.

“I’ll be back for you,” I said. Then I hit him in the stomach, as hard as I could, and left him sagging down toward the floor as I got back in the elevator. “Go home, get the bottle out of the trash, bring it here, and give it to the doctors,” I told him, as he crashed down onto the floor. “Do it right now, or I’ll come find you. Do you believe me?”

I saw him nod as the elevator doors closed. I stood, hands shaking, as the elevator shot back up.