The Woman (7 page)

“You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

“Good, if you’re going to survive that’s how you need to be, scared, but keep your wits about you. Don’t trust anyone. And say nothing to Police Chief McIlhenny. I’ll be in touch with you when I get back there, probably tomorrow. When you call me, always say hello first. Your first word, your very . . . first . . . word. I’ll always say hello back. My very . . . first . . . word. If you are in danger say hello a second time, after I’ve said hello back to you. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you keep a diary, Ms. Darby?”

“What?”

“Simple question, do you keep a diary, a ledger, a journal, anything like that?”

“No. But what does that have to do with anything?”

“Not important. Do you have any questions about our use of the word hello to first begin and first reply in our phone conversations?”

“I understand that, but nothing else.”

“That’s all for now. I’ll call you tomorrow night to let you know I’m back or when I will be. Until then you are on your own. Stay alert and ready. Do you have any questions about what I have told you?”

“Plenty, but apparently you won’t answer them.”

“I will later.”

“From what you’ve said I may not have a later.”

“Then the answers won’t matter.”

* * *

After hearing the dial tone, Linda held the phone in front of face, looking at it as if it were a severed umbilicus cord.

After thanking her neighbors, she went home, hooked the chain lock on the front door and got into bed fully clothed, even her running shoes. After a few minutes, she got back up, went out the front door and walked around to the back of her condo. The ground sloped down enough so she could stand under her deck. From a distance, even in the ambient light, she could see the canvas bag on the clothesline looked extra plump. Inside she found everything Ahab said would be there. She took out the money and the cell phone, putting them in her pockets. Then she took out the gun. The first time she had held a gun since she was twelve. She held its coldness, stared at its hardness. No. She would not take the gun into her home. Instead, she took her black sweatshirt off the clothesline and wrapped the gun in its hoodie. Then she buried it in the sand beside the sea grass on the far side of a berm, a short distance behind and to the right of her condo. Away from the trail the locals used to go down to the beach.

Back inside, after relocking her front door and checking the window locks, she sat on her bed. Too nervous to sleep, even to lie down, she went to the kitchen sink and filled her tea pot. While at the sink, she looked out the window. The night seemed unusually dark. Most nights the moon, glancing off the surface of the ocean, provided ambient light that gave the sand a sheen as it snaked around the scattered berms crowned with sea grass. But tonight the choppy surface of the ocean denied the reflection, reducing the moon to a ragged spot on the distant water, the sand to a lifeless matte gray.

Chapter 11

“Ms. Darby. Linda. It’s Chief McIlhenny. I hope this isn’t too late to stop by?”

“It’s only a little after nine.” Linda stood back and held her door open. “Come on in.”

Ben was a solidly built man around six-foot-three, with good facial features, except for his habit of cropping off his sideburns level with the tops of his ears. When he had on his service cap it looked as if he had no sideburns.

“How you doing, Linda? Have you had any dinner?”

“Haven’t felt much like eating. I’m making some tea, though, chamomile. It’s steeping. Wanna join me? I got a full pot on.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Can we sit outside, Chief? It’s a little cool, but I like the night.”

“Outside is good. Call me Ben, Linda. We’ve known each other too long.”

Linda had met Ben McIlhenny two years ago when he first took the job of police chief. He had asked her out, more than once. Twice she had come close to accepting his dinner invitation, but so far she had held fast to her self-imposed rule: no relationships beyond one-night stands and never with men who knew her for real.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I didn’t mean to be overly formal . . . I just don’t know how one should talk about . . . a murder.”

She walked toward the back of the house. He pushed the sliding screen door over, the glass slider was already open. They stood looking at the ocean for a minute or two. Then Linda swiped at a tear. Ben came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She collapsed against him. Her head pressed into his chest, and she let her tears flow.

Ben said nothing, just held her in a comforting way. After a few minutes, she stepped back and went inside. When she came out, she handed Ben a cup of tea.

“While you were inside,” he said, “I noticed the way the moon dies in the rough sea. Still, at night, the ocean . . . well, it’s just beautiful, the stars. We don’t need to talk right away, drink your tea.”

Linda sipped. The warmth relaxed her some. She had great difficulty accepting that a man this sensitive, this gentle, could not be trusted. Neither of them said another word until their cups were empty. Then the chief broke the mood.

“I’ve been police chief for a few years and outside of an occasional bar fight over a ballgame or a woman, Sea Crest doesn’t have much that takes any big-time law enforcement. No drugs. Well, hardly none, sometimes a little marijuana from the growers over the ridge. A home burglary now and again, and there’s a guy who books a few bets, penny-ante stuff. The guy even has a full time job to support his family. Now . . . this.” He waved his hand before letting it fall to his side. “I guess I better get on with it. So, you and Cynthia Leclair were really close?”

“Close enough that I told her about my terrible teens: wearing red tennis shoes, chewing gum with my mouth open, wearing tops just because they showed my bra straps, having my lip and nose pierced for rings. Like the girls I see downtown now, anything to show a little rebellion, get some attention. It all seems so childish now.” She looked toward the ocean. “Yeah. We were that close.”

“Well, you’ve grown into a woman who doesn’t need those kinds of things to get noticed. But I’m not so sure you want to be noticed.”

“Thank you and you’re right. I prefer staying to myself, living quietly. Was this more than a social call?”

“I guess I should get down to business. Have you thought of anything more about Cynthia’s house? SMITH & CO.? Anything Cynthia said or did lately that seemed outside her normal behavior.”

“No, but then I’m not yet thinking all that clearly, maybe in a day or two.”

“Well, let me bring you up to date. An investigator from the state police and the boys from the Bradford police department spent most of the afternoon with me. Cynthia’s clothes were wet. Her tub was half full and a lot of water had been sloshed onto the floor. Two of her fingers had been broken.” Linda put her hand to mouth. “Do you wanna hear these details?” Linda nodded with her hand still over her mouth. “Okay,” he went on. “Her dresser mirror was a real mess. You knew that. Some of the glass was embedded in her forehead. There were also cigarette burns on her breasts. Bottom line: She had been worked over pretty good. Hell, I’d a told ‘em whatever they wanted, so I’m figuring that’s what she did.”

McIlhenny took off his service cap and held it on the tips of his fingers. “You okay?”

“Yes. Well, hell no. I’m not okay, but, yes.” Linda took the last sip of tea into her mouth, held it there for a moment and swallowed. “What’s next, Chief? Uh, Ben?”

“Too late tonight, employees would all be gone, but I plan to start my morning over at SMITH & CO.
Find out more about Cynthia and it’s about time we learn just what in damnation them folks consult about. And for who? Or is it for whom?”

Linda smiled, “Whom. For whom.”

The chief slipped his cap back on. “I’ll find my own way out. But you might want to lock the door behind me, and the slider, too, while you’re inside. Thanks for the tea. It was a nice break in the nuttiest day of the year. Goodnight.”

Linda kissed him on the cheek.

A moment later, he knocked on Linda’s door and came back in.

“You heard about the two men found shot in the alley two nights back?”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

“Here’s their pictures, sorry for the gore. You ever see either of them with Cynthia or anywhere else?”

“No.”

“You know, Sea Crest’s not exactly the murder capital of the country. Hell, we never had one before. Now we have Cynthia and these two. The only difference being the men took two in the noggin, while Cynthia got one in the head and one in the heart. I figure all of it is linked up somehow. You got any thoughts?”

“None, but what you say makes sense.”

“If you had to guess at a connection, among the three of ‘em, I mean knowing Cynthia so well, what you figure that connection would be?”

“I wish I could help you, Ben.”

“Well, had to ask. Never know which question will bring forth something helpful. I’ll stay in touch. You try to get some sleep. I’ll stop back by sometime tomorrow to check on you and bring you up to speed.”

I should have told Ben about those two men. At some point I’ll have to tell him, also about Captain Ahab, all of it. But when Ahab comes back, I don’t want Ben waiting to arrest him. The man saved my life.

Chapter 12

A lovely woman with a daring measure of cleavage took Alistair Webster’s coat while welcoming him to the Italian Embassy. The pop of champagne corks punctuated the quiet notes emanating from the piano and harp in the far corner of the grand foyer. Then a young man approached with the grace of a ballroom dancer. He bowed slightly and extended a tray crowded with flutes filled with champagne.

“A lovely evening, sir,” he smiled, “would you like champagne?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Webster circled his fingers around one of the crystal stems and turned from the server.

Actually, for Webster it had not been a lovely evening. The Sea Crest mission had called for SMITH & CO., to be completed and the full team extracted before any of the bodies were found. From what Webster had learned not even the work at SMITH & CO. had gone according to plan. Cynthia Leclair had not been at her office, although Testler’s men had effectively improvised to find Leclair at her home. Then, another glitch, Linda Darby, a woman who had initially been seen as nothing more than a loose end, had become a thorn. Testler had sent his two men to question Darby, and then terminate her in a staged rape and murder. But some unidentified force had stepped in and saved her, killing Testler’s two men.

The loss of the two men itself was not a problem. Testler had always been able to put together specialized teams. The remaining problems were Linda Darby and the identification of the forces that had saved her. Webster needed to know who had interfered. But for now, he had appearances to maintain, and one contact, in particular, he wanted to make at this pompous gathering.

Webster had been to the Italian embassy on Whitehaven Street in Washington, D.C., on several occasions. Tonight’s gathering was a smallish affair commemorating the latest update of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Israel regarding the prevention of weapons and war materials to terrorists. He did not understand why Italy was hosting the event.

Webster drifted outside onto the marble balcony and leaned up against the balustrade. He had long been convinced that the industrial and political world was effectively shrinking. The business activities of all countries needed to be based on free enterprise principles. All of it ultimately controlled by a few international kingpins capable of not only grasping the big picture, but of making the hard decisions needed to keep it all in balance.

Traditional democratic governments, wallowing in their need to posture to sound like they were serving the people, had outlived their effectiveness. The selection of leaders could no longer be left in the hands of the fickle rank-and-file citizenry. The overwhelming majority of American voters simply voted for whichever candidate promised the most wrapped in the no-cost lie: a boldfaced falsity told repeatedly by both parties while they spent the taxpayers’ money for anything they believed would garner them votes or campaign contributions. The predictable results were broken promises, bigger deficits, and more and more convoluted laws. In his lifetime, the voters had shown themselves incapable of dismantling the platforms of lies upon which the current political process had been built.

The developed world needed to be run by the multinational corporations. Once in charge, the multinationals, not the people, would elect a council responsible for setting policies designed to see that consumers were treated fairly in the marketplace. Laws would be simplified. Justice would return to the swift status that existed in early America when the hammer building the gallows would ring as if an echo to the rap of the judge’s convicting gavel. Life sentences would be abolished as such terms of incarceration only burdened society. If the crime was sufficiently evil to warrant life in prison, then the verdict should be death by public hanging. Let the public see the results of violating the law. It worked in early America, before the nambie pambies took over.

While competing brands of the same products would be tolerated, efficiency would dictate fewer competing brands, and that would mean higher profits for the companies and lower prices for the citizens. People would live in comfort and not have to endure the unsettling and contentious political cycle of lies and disappointments. In the end the people only wanted to be cared for, to be protected. That was why the people believed the preposterous lies upon which politicians commonly rode to victory.