The Third Victim (20 page)

“We’re going to play a game, Charlie. I’m going to ask questions. You’re going to answer. Quincy, the expert, is going to evaluate your answers for truthfulness. If he doesn’t like what you say—or you make me angry again—I’m going to start slicing up your coat. You give me lip, your jacket loses a sleeve. Got it?”

“It’s just a dumb jacket. I can buy a new one.”

“Okay.” Rainie opened his switchblade and found the collar.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!” Charlie was panting. His gaze was locked down on the collar, and perspiration beaded his upper lip. The jacket was old and sported a biker gang’s symbol on the back. The kid could deny it all he wanted, but Quincy and Rainie had him pegged. The jacket was part of Charlie Kenyon’s costume, and he felt overexposed without it. They might as well have snatched Superman’s cape.

“First question, Charlie. Why were you hanging out with Danny O’Grady?”

“Because he was cool, all right?”

“Danny is a computer geek. How is that cool?”

“No, no, no.” Charlie was shaking his head. “You don’t get it. You had to look in his eyes. He was
old,
man. And . . . and . . . angry. At his father. I know these things.”

“Danny’s a kindred spirit?” Rainie asked dryly.

“Something like that.”

“What about Melissa Avalon?” Quincy interjected. “What was she?”

Charlie’s answer was more forthcoming. “She was hot! Jesus, fed, did you look at her? Whoa, mama.”

“You ever approach her?”

“Sure, I tried.” He shrugged, his hands digging into his pockets. He was definitely self-conscious without his jacket. “She, uh, was intimidated by my good looks. Besides, I heard later I violated her age rules. Avalon had a geezer fetish.”

“Was she a kindred spirit?”

“What d’you mean? Oh, was she angry? I don’t know. Didn’t seem angry to me. You should ask Danny. He was the one spending so much time with her.”

“Did he ever mention his feelings for Miss Avalon to you?”

“Didn’t have to. The boy was lovesick for her. You could see it all over his face.”

“Did Avalon know this?”

“Probably. I don’t think puppy crushes were new to her.”

“How did she treat Danny?”

“I don’t know. I hung around the school grounds, not the freaking computer lab.”

“Did Danny know about her ‘geezer fetish’?”

“Sure, I told him. What, you guys think Danny killed her in a jealous rage? Nah, you don’t get it.” Charlie shook his head, sounding honest for the first time. “Danny’s smarter than you think. He knew he liked her, but hell, she was a teacher. He understood what that meant. Worship from afar, end of story. He wasn’t imagining white picket fences or the mother of his children. The kid’s thirteen, for chrissakes.”

“What about the other two girls?” Rainie asked. “Sally and Alice?”

“Couldn’t pick them out of a lineup if I tried.”

“Are you going to go to the funerals, Charlie?”

He shrugged. “The old man’s making me.”

“Do you think it’s sad that they’re dead?”

“Don’t know them. Don’t care.”

“You’re a real hard-ass, aren’t you, Charlie Kenyon?”

“You’re the one threatening my jacket.”

“Did you ever talk to Danny about killing people?”

“We talked about lots of stuff.”

“Charlie.” She held up the switchblade, then his jacket.

Charlie’s jaw hardened. She thought he was going to freeze up on her. Then she moved the blade closer to the collar and he surrendered again.

“Yeah. Sure. You wanna know? Sometimes I dream of blowing this whole freaking town off the map. I dream of getting my hands on a big motherfucking nuke and saying
sayonara,
babe. You know, plant life grows back bigger and stronger after a nuclear holocaust. Maybe that’s what this town needs.”

“You told all this to a thirteen-year-old boy?”

“Only after he told me he wanted to hack his father into twenty different pieces and run him through a blender.”

Rainie stared at him. A muscle worked in her jaw. She said with more anger than she wanted to give away, “A child tells you he fantasizes about murdering his own father, and you didn’t think to go to the police?”

“Who am I going to go to? Shep, his dad? Or, better yet, you?” Charlie chuckled unkindly. “Isn’t that a pretty picture? Half this town still talks about what you did to your mother. What would you have done with Danny? Mail him a shotgun?”

“I never harmed my mother,” Rainie said hotly. “And if I had done such a thing, I’d be in prison where I’d belong, not standing here talking to you.”

But Charlie had that sly look back on his face. “I know, I know,” he said with a conspirator’s wink. “The fed’s here. You don’t want to blow your cover. That’s all right. But you don’t have to lie to me, babe. I’m telling you, I can see these things. And you’re a member of the cool-kids club too. Hell, around here, you’re probably the charter member.”

“One last question,” Quincy interjected quickly, because the shotgun comment had pushed Rainie to the brink and they all knew it. “Did Danny ever mention an on-line friend to you? Someone named No Lava?”

“Computer geek? Yeah, maybe. Danny was always into something. I didn’t know how one person could spend so much time staring at a screen.”

“Did you ever see any of the e-mails?”

“What the hell would I want with them?”

“Danny really liked No Lava. Maybe you were jealous.”

“Look, I’ve never even heard of this No Lava, and frankly, the name sounds like an impotent dude to me. Danny liked mail, okay? Six months ago, eight months ago, I don’t remember, he was all excited about someone he’d met on-line. He was always having to go check his frigging e-mail. That’s all I know.”

“You encouraged him,” Rainie said softly. “Danny was troubled and you helped push him over the edge. Now three people are dead, and some of that’s on your head, Charlie. You’re going to have to live with that.”

“Who gives a fuck? Legally, I’m free as a bird. Now, give me my jacket back. As much fun as this has been, I got places to go and people to see.”

“Sure,” Rainie said. She smiled at him. Then she raised the switchblade and sliced the collar clean off his coat.

Charlie shrieked. Quincy took a shocked step forward.

Rainie retrieved the severed piece of leather. A moment later she squeezed the long plastic bag of white powder from the collar onto her palm.

“Heroin. About three ounces of it, which would make a little more than simple possession. Congrat-ulations, Charlie. Legally speaking, your troubles are just beginning.”

“Goddamn cunt! How dare you! You’re no better than me! You’re no better than any of us!”

“Sure I am, Charlie. There are two choices for angry people in this world, and only one of them wears a badge.”

Charlie shrieked again. Rainie enjoyed loading him into the car.

TWENTY
                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Thursday, May 17, 9:05
P
.
M
.

I
T TOOK RAINIE
four hours to process Charlie Kenyon. She had to catalog the heroin into evidence. Then she had to store it in the safe that passed as the department’s evidence locker. She’d just finished fingerprinting Charlie when his father’s lawyer arrived and tried to tell her she’d used entrapment to find the drugs. Rainie volunteered an FBI agent as her corroborating witness. FitzSimons turned downright abusive. She’d had no right to search Charlie Kenyon, no justification for mutilating his jacket, and she’d violated every constitutional law ever envisioned by the forefathers and then some.

Rainie took it in stride. It amazed her how comforting the drug bust felt after the relative chaos of the past three days. She knew Charlie, she knew FitzSimons, she knew Charlie’s dad. All the usual suspects, all the usual paperwork, all the usual crimes. She could’ve done this arrest in her sleep.

She spent two hours carefully wording the arrest report and building the file against Charlie. Then the paperwork was done and she returned to the task-force center, where the shadows had grown long and the attic office was eerily quiet. Well past ten o’clock; another long day in a long, strange case.

Luke Hayes had gone to Portland, where he would hopefully interview Melissa Avalon’s parents. Sanders was out doing God knows what Sanders did. Maybe arranging the soup cans in the grocery store or crashing a Tupperware party for more stay-fresh seals. Quincy was following up on No Lava. Or maybe he’d started in on Shep. Whatever he found, she’d probably be the last to know. She was both frustrated by that and grateful.

Now there was just her and the hum of the old computer and the buzz of all the thoughts still crowding her head.

Charlie had rattled her today. Not just with his accusations against her. Rainie knew what people thought and said. She accepted that salacious rumors would always be more appealing than cold, hard fact. It didn’t get to her.

He had spooked her with his comments about Danny.

“Only after he told me he wanted to hack his father into twenty different pieces and run him through a blender.”

Rainie couldn’t let the statement go. So much violence. So much rage. She knew these things happened. God knows, some nights . . . Huddled in the closet, bruised and shaking and still tasting the blood on her split lip. Wishing it would go away. Wishing she’d have the strength to make it stop.

The fantasies. That she’d rise up and her mother would finally cower before her. That just once she’d strike back, maybe slap her mother hard, and then her mother would repent, weeping, “I never knew how much it hurt. I swear I never realized. Now I know and I’ll never do it again.”

Maybe that was the difference. Through all of her pain, Rainie never forgot that Molly was her mother. And the kernel of her fantasies was still about love and forgiveness. That her mother would realize what she was doing. That she’d give up the bottle. That she’d take her little girl in her arms and swear never to hurt her again. That for once Rainie could relax in her mother’s embrace and feel safe.

Even at the worst of it, she had not wished her mother dead.

It had taken a great deal more than that to push her over the edge.

Rainie paced the tiny attic. Her body ached and her mind ached and she couldn’t stand being alone with her own thoughts anymore. She needed sleep, a decent meal, a good hard run. It was too late to jog, she had no appetite, and she was honestly afraid to close her eyes.

“What would you have done with Danny? Mail him a shotgun?”

No, she would’ve told him that she understood. She would’ve taken him to her back deck, where the mountain pines towered above them and owls hooted deep in the shadows and it was difficult to take yourself seriously when you were so small in the general scheme of things. She would’ve let him talk. Get it all out, angry child to angry child if that’s what it took. Then maybe she would’ve talked. Perhaps she would’ve told him things she’d never told anyone else. Sitting on her deck with the trees around them and the clean mountain air fresh on their faces.

Maybe she would’ve saved Danny O’Grady.

But she hadn’t done any such thing. She’d seen him just two weeks before the shooting. She’d thought he was pale and jumpy and curt with his father. And in the next instant she’d shrugged it away because, just like everyone else, she thought it was a phase. Trouble happened only in bad families. Not to a nice, ordinary kid like Danny.

She, a kindred spirit, had failed him. And she didn’t know yet how she was going to live with that.

QUINCY WAS HUNCHED
over his laptop in his cramped hotel room when knocking sounded at the door. He’d been working for two hours, scouring various on-line carriers for any record of a member named No Lava. His eyes were blurry. His shoulders carried knots the size of small boulders. Every time he shifted to get more comfortable, the rickety desk threatened to collapse and take his laptop with it. Thirty minutes ago he’d started cramming crime-scene photos under the uneven legs for better support. He did not want to know what this said about his life.

The knocking came again.

Quincy pushed away from the table, rubbed the back of his neck, and self-consciously checked the mirror. His white shirt, pressed crisp just this morning, was now a wrinkled mess. His tie was somewhere on the floor. His cheeks sported a five o’clock shadow, and his dark hair was rumpled from running his fingers through it over and over again. If memory served, this look had worked for him in his thirties, when it made him sexy in a dark, brooding sort of way. He was in his mid-forties now. He thought he simply looked tired.

Some decades were definitely better than others, he thought. What the hell.

He checked the door’s peephole and was not surprised to see Rainie standing there.

He opened the door, and for a moment they simply studied each other.

She’d changed out of her officer’s uniform. Now she wore faded straight-leg jeans and a loose hunter-green sweater with a turtleneck collar that framed her face. Her chestnut hair was down and freshly brushed, gleaming gold and red beneath the hotel’s outdoor lights. She didn’t appear to be wearing a drop of makeup, and Quincy liked her that way. Her pale skin fresh and untouched. No barriers between his hand and the feel of her cheek, or his lips and the corner of her mouth.

He had spent the latter part of the afternoon learning things about Lorraine Conner he had not anticipated. Certainly he was starting to understand that her past held a great deal more than met the eye. Maybe nothing, but maybe something. He doubted she would tell him the whole truth yet, and he wondered about the dangers of learning it all at the last minute, when it might be too late for both of them.

He should be careful. He was a smart, logical man who knew better than most the dark potential of human nature. The warning did him no good. She was here, at his hotel room, and he suspected his face now held a giddy smile.

“Hey,” she said after a moment.

“Good evening, Rainie.”

“Working?”

“Just finishing up.”

“Really?” She stuck her hands in her back pockets and studied the pavement. She was clearly self-conscious, and that touched him.

“I was just about to order take-out Chinese,” he said politely. “Would you like to join me?”

“I’m not that hungry.”

“Neither am I, but we can pretend together.”

She entered his hotel room. He made an effort to clear his paperwork off the bed, since the room was small and there was no place else for her to sit. She studied his laptop while he shoved manila files back into his black leather briefcase/computer carrier.

“Looking for No Lava?” she asked.

“Yes. Most Internet providers have member directories where you can enter your on-line name and vital statistics. Lots of people fill out the forms, so I thought I’d see if we could get that lucky. Unfortunately, we’re not that lucky. Next step is to get a subpoena and contact the carriers directly.”

“Did you run a background check on Shep today?” she asked.

Quincy stopped, still holding four files, and blinked. She wasn’t wasting any time. He put the files in the bag, zipped it shut.

“Do you like lo mein?” he asked lightly.

“Order whatever you want.”

“Lo mein it is.” He picked up the batch of take-out menus Ginnie had left next to the phone and sorted through them until he found one for the Great Wall of China. He placed an order for lo mein and green tea. Rainie was still studying him.

“I don’t think we should have this conversation,” he said presently.

“That means you found something.”

“No. It means I have professional standards and this is a clear case of conflict of interest. Shep is your friend. You and he go way back.” He regarded her steadily.

“I never slept with Shep,” Rainie said matter-of-factly.

“You know most people think that you’re the reason his and Sandy’s marriage is falling apart.”

“We’re not involved. Never have been, never will be.”

“He spends a lot of time at your place.”

“I know.”

“Rainie—”

“People talk. Don’t you get that yet? It’s a small town, it rains eighty percent of the year, and the cows outnumber the people two to one. Most of the time there’s nothing else to do around here but talk. That’s just the way it is.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about the shotgun, Rainie? The shotgun that killed your mother had your prints on it until it disappeared from the police evidence locker. Then one day it was magically back in custody, but completely wiped clean. Why didn’t you tell me it disappeared from evidence?”

Her face went cool, her chin coming up, her gray eyes turning the color of slate. He recognized that expression. Her fighter’s stance.

“Do you think I killed my mother?”

“No.”

“Do you think I shot her in cold blood? Came home from school one day and blew off her goddamn head? I’m just a female version of Charlie Kenyon. No better than Danny O’Grady?”

He said gently, “No, Rainie, I don’t.”

“Then what does it matter, Quincy? It was fourteen years ago and I didn’t do it, so just let it go. It’s one thing to deal with all the stares and rumors from my neighbors, but I don’t expect that from you!”

“Give me some credit,” he countered sharply. “I’m not a small-town deputy you can snow under with a few loud words. I know something happened, Rainie. Something happened, Shep helped you with it, and that’s what binds you, isn’t it? I still don’t know what. Maybe I don’t need to know, but there
is
something between you and Shep. And it’s beyond professional ties and it makes the fact that you were alone in the school with Shep and Danny very shaky. Sanders was right. You should’ve surrendered jurisdiction over this case. And I suspect you know that as well.”

She fell silent, her lips thinning. He’d caught her off guard. He had wondered in the beginning what a woman as smart as Rainie was doing working such a limited job, and today he’d gotten his answer. Because it kept her in control. She worked with nice people, but none of them was the type to pry. He suspected she dated men of more brawn than brains and kept the relationships short. No one could question her too much. No one could get too close. She had turned protecting herself into a way of life.

“I couldn’t give up jurisdiction,” she said abruptly.

“Because you promised Shep you’d be the primary in the case?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “I owe him that much.”

“Just how much do you owe him, Rainie?”

“Shep had faith in me. He’s been a good friend and I feel loyalty toward him. But I have professional standards, too, Quincy, and I don’t compromise them. We all go through life making our choices and we’re all responsible for what we’ve done. If Danny shot those girls, then by God, he needs to be held accountable for that.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure! Covering up doesn’t do him any favors. Why don’t people realize that? We have a basic human need to make restitution in order to absolve our guilt. Letting kids walk away scot-free or shielding them from the consequences of their actions doesn’t help them. A moment’s mistake, a moment of bad judgment could fester into a lifetime of hatred and self-loathing and destructiveness. Until it’s become a dark spot you can’t forget and can’t let go and it builds and builds—”

She broke off. She was breathing hard. Her gaze had become locked on the blue floral bedspread and her hands were fisted at her sides.

“The nightmares are worse, aren’t they?” Quincy asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“You’re not eating.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re too smart to be doing this to yourself.”

“I can’t seem to stop.”

“Why did you come here tonight, Rainie?”

She looked at him with frustrated, troubled eyes. “I think I need to talk.”

“Then talk. But say something new, Rainie, because I no longer have the patience for lies.”

The Chinese food arrived. Quincy split the lo mein, though he suspected she wouldn’t eat. She didn’t. She set the white container aside but accepted a cup of tea. He took a bite of his own dinner. He wasn’t that hungry either, but he’d learned a long time ago that letting himself get run-down during a case, especially a very difficult case, didn’t do anyone any favors.

“Sally and Alice’s funeral will be held tomorrow afternoon,” Rainie said shortly. “The mayor just called and told me. The bodies were retrieved from the ME’s office this evening, and the families don’t want to wait. Everyone thinks it would be best to get this behind us.”

“That will be a rough afternoon.”

“Yeah. We’ve called for backup from Cabot County. Extra patrols both during the funeral and afterward. Patrol cars stationed outside of the bars, you know.”