Mansions Of The Dead (43 page)

“The soap!” Marino said. “The gloves must have had soap on them! The killer uses them, dips them into the tank so it’ll look like they were used for cleaning up after the fish or whatever, and then folds them up neatly with all the other stuff. When we first got the aquarium, my older kid thought it would be funny to put bubble bath in there. It was like the Valentine’s Day massacre.” Marino grinned at him. “We got it,” he said. “We got it!”

They bagged the gloves and the rest of the aquarium supplies. “Hey,” Quinn said as they were about to get into Marino’s car. “There’s this guy I’ve been trying to interview, one of the neighbors. He’s been away, but since we’re here, maybe we could just see if he’s in.”

“Sure. Sounds good.” Marino locked the gloves and other stuff in his trunk and they went around to the back of the building and knocked on the door. They heard a loud, “Yeah, hang on,” then footsteps coming toward the door.

“Hi, yeah?” The guy who had opened the door was about Quinn’s
age, with spiky dark hair and a lopsided grin. “What can I do for ya?” His accent was South Side—upper crust—Dublin, what Quinn’s North Sider mother would have called a “Ballsbridge accent” after the tony suburb.

“Hi,” Quinn said. “I’m Detective Tim Quinn of the Cambridge Police Department. Are you Lorcan Lyons?”

“Yeah, that’s me. I’ve been expecting you ever since I heard. Come on in.”

His apartment was sparsely furnished, a single, hand-medown–looking couch in the middle of the living room and a bunch of posters on the wall. The posters all featured what looked like fancy writing from a Bible, huge curling letters with little pictures on them. “Illuminated Manuscripts from Europe,” one of them said under the picture. A suitcase, still full of clothes, was sitting in the middle of the living room floor.

“So what can you tell us about Brad Putnam?” Quinn asked, once the guy had told them to sit down on the couch and brought a plastic chair in from the kitchen for himself.

“I’m sorry . . . ?”He looked confused.

“Your neighbor, Brad Putnam. Did you know him?”

“Yeah, of course. But I thought you were here about Alison.”

“Alison?” Quinn and Marino looked at each other.

“Alison Cope, the girl who was run down. I couldn’t believe it when they told me. I was pretty well devastated when I heard. I didn’t know her that well, really. Not yet. But she was quite a girl. She . . . ”

Marino was sitting up on the couch, staring at Lorcan Lyons. “Wait a second. You knew Alison Cope?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“No. We’re here about your neighbor, Brad Putnam. But tell me about Alison Cope.”

“Well, we’d been out a few times. She stayed over here the night that Putnam kid was killed. I thought that’s why you wanted to see me.”

“She was here the night Brad Putnam was killed?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah. She was house-sitting for me. Staying here a couple of nights. We hadn’t been dating that long so it was kind of an odd thing to ask her to do, I suppose, but I don’t know a lot of people and it gave her a chance to get out of the dorm, you know. Stay in a real house.”

“None of her friends knew she was staying here. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. She was keeping things kind of quiet. Maybe because I’m older or something. I don’t know. Anyway, I gave her the keys and said she could stay.”

“But how do you know she was here that night?”

“Because I called to check in and she answered the phone.”

“Did it bother you? That she answered the phone?”

“Not really. I don’t have any other girlfriends at the moment. It wasn’t any problem really.”

“She must have seen something that night. What could she have seen that night?” Quinn asked Marino. They both looked at Lorcan.

“I don’t know. Brad’s apartment’s up there.” He pointed through the window to a window up on the second floor. “The shades are down now, but he and Jaybee used to leave them up most of the time. She might have seen something through the window.”

“Did she say anything on the phone?”

“Not about that.”

“You’re sure? There wasn’t anything that struck you as strange?” Marino asked.

Lorcan shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, she didn’t say anything like, ‘Hey, someone’s killing Brad Putnam through the window.’ “

“Ain’t that a bitch,” Marino said, grinning.

Quinn thought out loud. “Suppose Alison
had
seen something. What would she have done about it? Why wouldn’t she have called us?”

“I don’t know,” Lorcan said. “Maybe she didn’t actually see the person killing Brad, so she didn’t realize what she’d seen until later. Or didn’t realize there was anything wrong with it until later.”

“Yeah.” But Quinn was still thinking.

Marino got up to go. “Thanks for your help. If you think of anything,
please call me.” He got a card out of his pocket and handed it to Lyons. By the way, where did you meet her? At the university?”

“No. We worked together for a while.”

“Where?”

“At the Davis Gallery. We both worked there on weekends.”

Quinn said, “The Davis Gallery? The one on Newbury Street? What did you do there?”

“I was kind of a glorified receptionist. I sat at the front desk. Answered phones. Ali worked there for a couple of months doing the same stuff. We’d chat when she came on and I had to give her the messages and whatever. But then she got an internship downtown and she quit. That was when I got the nerve to ask her out.”

Lorcan looked curiously at Quinn, who was standing stock still in the doorway.

“The Davis Gallery,” Quinn said. “Wait. That’s where Jack Putnam shows his work. I think that . . . ” He looked at Marino. “I think we’ve got to get down to Newport.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain on the way.”

IT WAS AS SHE
came around the side of the house that Sweeney heard the sirens. Shrill and clear, they rose through the night air, and she sprinted around the side of the house to find Kitty Putnam standing in the driveway in a long flannel nightgown.

“What’s going on? Where’s Melissa?” Sweeney called out to her.

Kitty looked up, tears streaking her face. “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh my God! She’s . . . ” and Sweeney looked in through the open front door. Melissa was lying at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn’t moving, and as Sweeney rushed to her body, an ambulance came screaming up the drive.

“She’s in there,” Kitty told the EMTs. They swarmed into the house and then there were more sirens and she looked up to find Quinn standing in the doorway. Marino was in the driveway, talking to some other cops.

He didn’t seem surprised to see Sweeney. “Where’s Jack?” he demanded. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t with him.” Sweeney was confused. What was he doing here? How did he know? But there wasn’t time to ask.

“We’ve got the driveway blocked. Is there any other way off the property?”

“There’s the Cliff Walk,” Sweeney said. “Down there.” She pointed toward the bottom of the lawn.

“Show me.” Quinn took a flashlight from his belt and switched it on as they ran down the lawn to the hedge, and stood there, looking over the Cliff Walk. Quinn’s flashlight cast a wide arc of light on the greenery below.

It was then that she saw the figure on the path, leaning out over the rocks.

“Freeze!” Quinn called out. “Police.” In a fluid motion that couldn’t have taken more than three seconds, he had his gun out and he was holding it on the figure below. The flashlight clattered to the ground. “Freeze!” he called out again. In the moonlight, the figure hesitated, then started running.

Sweeney’s heart was pounding. She put a hand on Quinn’s arm. “Don’t shoot,” she said. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

It was as though she wasn’t there. He stood stock still, the gun trained on the path ahead of him. “I’m warning you that I will shoot,” he called out again. “Freeze.”

Sweeney looked down at the stretch of dark and empty path. “I’m going down,” she told Quinn. “Look, I think he’s going to jump. I know what happened. I can talk to him.”

“No!” He didn’t even look at her. “Do not go down there!”

“I have to. He’s going to jump.” And before she knew what she was doing, Sweeney was over the hedge and running along the Cliff Walk. Ahead of her she heard the low slip-slap of footsteps against the gravel path. In a quarter mile or so, the path would get very rocky. Without a flashlight, it would be almost impossible to make her way.

The moon still hung hugely in the purple black sky and the air was scented with salt and something else, honeysuckle maybe. She felt suddenly alert and alive, like an animal. All of her senses were in overdrive.

Up ahead was the entrance to the second tunnel. The moonlight was gone once she was inside. Terrified now, she felt her way along the wall, feeling first the stone and then the corrugated metal that lined the
moist, rounded walls. After maybe thirty seconds of shuffling, she saw moonlight again and made for the end of the passage.

But first she put her hands out to find the tunnel’s walls. Instead she found human flesh, warm human flesh that moved and put its arms out and grabbed her, whispering hoarsely, “Be quiet.”

She started to scream, but a hand covered her mouth and she could taste salty skin against her lips. She felt herself being dragged along the gravel floor of the tunnel and fought for breath as the close, damp air gave way to the sky and they were on the path again, heading for the rocks.

“No,” she tried to cry out, kicking and twisting. But she was being dragged toward the edge of the path, and below were the jagged shapes of the boulders. Below that was the water.

Then they stopped. The voice was unrecognizable in her ear. She smelled sweat. “Is she dead? Melissa? Is she dead?”

“No,” Sweeney gasped. “They took her to the hospital.”

“Oh God.”

He let her go and as she struggled to sit up and get her bearings, Drew Putman made his way to the rocks and sat down, head in hands.

“She may be okay, Drew,” Sweeney told him. “It may be just fine. Let’s just go up to the house and talk about this. We can explain everything to them. It’s not too late. You still have a chance to go back and make this right.”

“How do you know?” It came out in a sob. “You don’t understand.”

“I think I do.” She told him about how she had figured it out, about everything she had learned over the last few weeks, and finally he stopped crying.

“Let’s go back up to the house,” she said. “Let’s just go back.”

But then they saw the flashlights up ahead on the path, and heard Quinn’s voice calling out. “Sweeney? Where are you?”

“I’m here,” she called back. “Don’t shoot. It’s okay. He’s going to come up to the house and explain everything.”

But Drew was already up and running toward the edge of the path.
“No,” she screamed, and closed her eyes as she listened to the sound of a body falling against earth. She opened her eyes.

Quinn had Drew on the ground and he was handcuffing his hands behind his back.

“He needs to explain,” Sweeney said. “Just let him explain.”

Quinn looked at her and she thought she saw anger in his eyes. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he told her. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “But what are you doing here? How did you know to come?”

“We found out that Alison Cope was in Brad’s building the night he died. I think she looked up and saw someone in the window that night. And we found out that she worked at the Davis Gallery. I thought that . . . ”

It was the last piece she needed.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?” Quinn asked her. “Do you know who killed Brad?”

“Yes,” Sweeney said. “I do.”

“I want to know what’s going on.” Andrew Putnam told Quinn. “I deserve to know what’s happening.”

They were all sitting in chairs in the living room at Cliff House, Sweeney at one end of the room with Quinn and Marino and Drew. Quinn had taken off Drew’s handcuffs but he was sitting next to him, a hand on the arm of Drew’s chair. The rest of the family was sitting on the other side of the room and she was conscious of their bewildered eyes on her, especially Jack’s.

“I’m going to let Sweeney explain,” Quinn said. “I think she’s got all the pieces.”

She turned to Andrew and Kitty. “This all started with Petey’s death. Five years ago, Camille, Jack, Drew, Brad, and Petey were all in a car and the car crashed and Petey was killed. By the time the police got there, no one was saying who had been driving. But one of the
people in that car had been driving that night and was responsible for Petey’s death.

“As you all know, Brad was one of my students. A couple of months before he died, we had kind of a strange conversation. He was asking me if I thought he should tell someone something. It was kind of a roundabout way of asking and at the time I didn’t know what he was talking about. I do now. Brad was wondering if he should reveal the name of the person who was responsible for Petey’s death.

“Then he was killed, and although it took me a while, it finally occurred to me that maybe he had been killed because he was going to reveal that name. He was very angry that night. He got extremely drunk, which was uncharacteristic for him, and his friends say that he was going on and on about how he didn’t have courage. I think it’s pretty fair to say that he was getting up the courage to reveal the name of the person who was responsible for Petey’s death. I think what he was asking me was whether I thought it would make his parents feel better, whether it would give them any peace.” She looked around at Camille, Jack, and Drew, then back at Kitty and Andrew.