by Tom Barber
‘Dayton.’
‘Dayton, Ohio?’
Nicky nodded. The deputy twisted in his seat. ‘Brings you this way?’
‘My girl’s from here.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Phoenix.’
‘That’s my hometown. Which street you on?’
Feeling his blood pressure rising at what was turning into twenty questions, Nicky was starting to quietly panic, knowing he was getting closer and closer to having to pull the handgun from his inside pocket and take this conversation somewhere it could never recover from, when the deputy’s radio chirped with a transmission. ‘Howie, you there?’
‘Copy.’
‘Karlsson thinks he might’ve just seen the Loughlin brothers passing in a pick-up over in Oswego. He lost them on the highway but he’s pretty sure it was the two brothers. Marshals want anyone in the area to redirect over there if possible. Figured that’d be you too.’
‘Can I get that breakfast to go, Ed?’ he asked the clerk, rising off his stool as the young man nodded and called in to the back. ‘Hey, Ohio,’ the deputy said, stopping Nicky two feet from the door. ‘Forgot your change.’
Nicky stepped back to take the money from the counter. ‘Thanks. Hope you catch those guys.’
‘We will,’ he said, and by the time the deputy’s food came out, boxed up and bagged, Nicky was gone.
Outside, people were pulling in and out of the gas station to use the pumps and buy supplies, and as one local filled up his truck, dressed in hunting gear with weapons stored in the back, his cousin was sitting in the passenger seat chewing his way slowly through a breakfast sandwich he’d just bought as he idly watched a man cross the forecourt.
Then his gaze sharpened and his chewing slowed.
He’d seen the news lately and had an eye for faces.
As Nicky walked away down the street, the guy in the car didn’t take his eyes off him. ‘You’re paying for the tank, I got the last two yesterday,’ his cousin said, leaning into the car and holding out his hand for the other man’s wallet. ‘What is it?’ he asked, seeing his companion wasn’t paying him any attention.
‘We’re looking for your husband,’ Glick told a woman standing in the doorway of a small home in Cleveland, as thunder rumbled from dark, swollen storm clouds that had gathered overhead. Rain had started falling on the ride over here and now it was coming down hard. He and Richie had found the store where Kat had worked earlier but had been told the manager wasn’t in that day, so armed with his address they’d just pulled up outside his house. Richie had remained in the car, using the time to make some more calls. ‘He runs the floor team at a hardware store out towards East Cleveland, right?’ Glick asked.
‘Wouldn’t be that grand about it,’ she answered sourly, drinking some coffee. ‘He watches other people stack shelves.’
‘Is he here? We want to talk to him about a worker who he let go a few months ago.’
‘He’s out. Wait here for him to get back if you like.’
‘He upset you or something?’
She looked back at him for a moment, glanced past at the pouring rain then turned to lift a key off a hook on the wall beside her. ‘Come with me.’ She led Glick outside, then unlocked and opened her garage door. ‘Take a look for yourself,’ she snapped, as the detective stepped under the open door for cover and saw a gleaming motorbike in the center of the space. ‘We got a leaking attic and garage roof, fall and winter coming, and he blows almost twenty grand on that.’
As he looked in at the bike, Glick saw water dripping through the garage roof into two buckets. The woman brushed past him to collect one, then tossed the old rainwater out onto the drive, followed by the other.
He watched as she re-positioned both under the leaks. ‘Yeah, you could say I’m upset,’ she said.
FORTY FIVE
‘The three survivors who got shot at the fairground last night are all gonna pull through,’ the chief at the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office told Archer and Marquez, who’d left the Best Western at Syracuse airport and driven over to the HQ, meeting the man who’d been communicating with Shepherd. Ostensibly they were here to introduce themselves to the local police authority and explain they were hunting down Lupinetti, but were also hoping to persuade local law enforcement to keep them clued in on the latest developments. Both detectives knew small-town police were more likely to include them than federal agencies now this case was continuing to grow. ‘One of them’s losing his left leg below the knee, but at least he’s gonna live to see his family again.’
‘We saw cruisers and other vehicles going fast heading west on our way here,’ Marquez asked. ‘Something come through?’
‘Sighting of the Loughlins over in Oswego.’
‘Could it be another hoax?’ Archer said. ‘Or mistaken identity?’
‘Possibly. Still needs checking.’ The chief was visibly stressed. ‘Brooks and Billy have been gone four years since they were last sent down, but they’ve still got plenty of people around here who’d help them out.’
‘Their family network’s got a long history, we heard.’
‘Been a blight in these parts long as I’ve been alive. Involved in all sorts of bad shit. Thought we were done with those two once they kidnapped that college girl and had her tied up in Billy’s basement. Shamed the entire area, what they did to that poor kid. Knowing they’re probably up here somewhere after what went down at the fairground last night isn’t gonna let a lot of people sleep easy.’
‘Marshals?’ Marquez asked.
‘They’re taking over the whole region. SWAT and fugitive squads in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo are on standby. FBI want to send people up here too after last night, but the Marshals Office said the brothers are gonna be their collar. Brooks and Billy keep dropping bodies, that might change.’
‘And Frank Lupinetti,’ Marquez said. ‘He’s who we want. He seemed to separate himself from the others but they keep getting drawn back together. We’re hoping you find the brothers, we can find our guy.’
‘My units get a sighting or hear one over the radio, I’ll pass it on and he’s all yours. One less to worry about.’ He then cast a look at Archer. ‘Heard you were the man who put down Craig Loughlin the other night. I knew that boy since he was knee high. He was a dipshit but wasn’t a killer like his brothers.’
‘Turned out he was,’ Archer said. ‘He just hadn’t got around to it until the day I shot him.’
The chief looked at him for a moment longer, then nodded. ‘Been in law-enforcement twenty seven years and I’ve never seen a criminal successfully ride off into the sunset with a bag of money. Not once. Never mind five from the same job. This thing’s gonna end pretty soon. Highway Patrol have roadblocks in place blocking off the region. Same as out on the water. These guys are boxed in and can’t escape.’
‘That’s what Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania police thought,’ Marquez said.
‘Hardware store manager’s got a bike in his garage that looks close to my six month salary,’ Glick told Richie, getting back into their car beside his lieutenant, having jogged over in the heavy rain. ‘Bought it April this year, according to the wife. Victory 8 Ball, cost him eighteen and a half grand including helmet, leathers and insurance. Their roof’s been needing fixing all year which is why she’s so pissed about it.’
‘Kat was let go April 2nd.’
‘I don’t know what to make of this, Rich,’ Glick replied. ‘People drop money on stupid shit sometimes when there are bills to pay.’ He paused, looking down the street at the house. ‘But that timing, man. We’ve never believed in coincidences.’
‘When you were knocking on the door, I called the diner Kat worked after the hardware store tossed her. Waitress said the manager was unavailable until tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘He gets back from a vacation today from Key West. Been down there for two weeks. Said he’s been bragging about it to the staff all month.’
‘Ev
eryone needs a vacation, LT. He might be good with money.’
‘He’s not, and she said none of them could work out how he was affording it. Told me the guy’s paying child support on four kids and is double mortgaged on his home. That money would get pulled automatically from his paycheck. Wouldn’t leave him with much.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘He and our friend who bought that bike both got rid of this girl, just as she’d be settling in. We go to the managers of all the other places that have sent her out the door over the last five years since she got out of ORW, I’m starting to expect to see them walking around with diamond earrings and gold teeth.’
‘You think someone’s paying them off to fire her? Why would they do that?’
Richie didn’t answer. Instead, a few moments later he pulled a packet of cigarettes from the glove box and got out of the car. Glick watched him for a moment, seeing him light up, then stepped out to join him, the two men standing under an awning for a corner store nearby. He’d only ever seen his lieutenant smoke on a few rare occasions; the pair of detectives stood there watching the rain.
‘Case I worked just after I made detective, we had a dead kid,’ Richie said, leaning back against the wall behind him. ‘Young girl. Her mom and dad reported her missing and she was found three days later beside some abandoned buildings over in Glenville. She’d fallen off the top of one. Or been pushed or thrown.
‘Me and my partner couldn’t work it out. The girl lived with her family across town and they seemed tightknit; took a lot of care of her. She’d been sick most of her life. Hospital records had her spending over four hundred days in the ER. She was left behind by the other kids in her grade because of all the school she’d missed; didn’t have any friends, so wouldn’t have been playing at the site with anyone.’ Richie took a drag from the cigarette, reliving the case. ‘Who’d want to abduct a kid like that and kill her, right?
‘Then we found a blog on a website. Back before social media and all that crap got big. It was run by the girl’s mom, documented the kid’s struggles and how the family were handling it, that kind of thing. Photos of the girl in the hospital, stories, the good and the bad. Fox 8 even did a main primetime slot story on the mom running a 10k raising money for the kid’s treatment.’ He tapped some ash from his smoke to the concrete by his feet. ‘No-one else in the family had a history of consistent illness.
‘Day the girl went missing, the mom said she went to the store, but when she came back found her daughter was gone. Me and my partner drove the journey ourselves, timed it, and asked locals how often the woman normally spent in the store. She was a local celebrity by now, so everyone remembered her. For some reason, the trip the day her daughter died took almost forty minutes longer than it should have done. We found tape of other times she or her husband visited the store, but this time there was an unexplained gap.’
He dragged on the cigarette, the end burning bright in the damp air.
‘Some kids had been filming each other flipping skateboards not far from the site where the girl was eventually found, and one of them came in with a recording. One guess who we saw in the background of one of the videos driving past on the way to the site.’
‘Momma bear.’
‘She went on the offensive, played victim. Screamed and cried, couldn’t believe we could accuse her of hurting her own kid. Her husband almost jumped across the interview table and swung on my partner when he suggested it as a possibility. Said they were gonna have our badges, sue the Department, go to the press. But then we showed him the skateboarder’s tape.
‘Never seen a man’s face lose color like that. That’s when the mother’s armor began to crack. My partner worked her down and we got her to break. She’d been poisoning that little girl her entire life with low doses of thallium in her food. Doctors missed it because it never occurred to them to look for it. Left the other kids in the family alone for some reason, just targeted her. She used the girl’s illnesses and the blog for attention. Liked being in the spotlight. Became like a drug, and she kept wanting more.
‘But on their most recent trip to the hospital, one of the nurses who’d been there several years made it clear to the mother that she was getting suspicious and the woman panicked. Mom took the girl out to that abandoned lot in Glenville, told her she had a surprise for her up there, then pushed her off. Drove to the store, bought a few things to establish an alibi, got home then reported the girl missing.’
‘How old was the kid?’
‘Eight years old.’
After a moment, Glick stepped forward and took a cigarette from the pack too. Richie lit it for him.
‘Kat O’Mara’s not a quitter,’ Richie said. ‘She was underweight and sick a lot as a young teenager, but the maid said once she moved in and started prepping the family’s food, the girl got better. But she dropped off again once her father died and the maid got fired. Ever since she’s been out of prison, she’s had her ass kicked out of every job, her inheritance has been kept from her and she’s been stuck living in the worst parts of the city with every opportunity to climb her way back out ripped away. I took a look at the timings of all this shit and when her life started to change. Laid it out against the family history. Fits like a glove.’
‘Right when her stepmom began living in the house,’ Glick said, as Richie nodded. ‘You think Blair was poisoning her? Making her sick?’
‘I don’t know. But I’m gonna find out.’
‘Why would she want to keep Kat’s inheritance? She’s already a multimillionaire and she doesn’t have a key to that deposit box. She can’t touch it even if she wants to.’
Richie finished off his smoke and dropped the butt before grinding it out, looking at the rain. ‘But what if the girl dies?’
In a sunnier, drier Oneida County, checking that he hadn’t been followed by anyone, Nicky had just made it back to the church he and Kat had hidden in last night. The building was near some woodland which stretched down towards the lake where he’d dumped and hidden the kayak, and had felt sufficiently secluded and safe.
He slipped back into the church with the grocery bag in his hands and knelt beside Kat. He unscrewed the cap off one of the bottles and supported her head so she could drink. The holdall with the titanium lockbox was beside her, and there was also a twelve gauge shotgun from the trooper’s car that Nicky had lifted from the park last night. All the possessions the two of them now had in the world.
‘I’m worse…aren’t I?’ Kat said quietly, seeing the expression on his face and the way he was looking at her.
He didn’t reply and tipped the bottle of water again but she didn’t manage to drink much. ‘The doc back in Erie said you needed rest. We just need to find somewhere where we don’t have to keep moving for a while.’
‘This…gets…’ She took a slow breath and tried again. ‘This gets worse, you don’t…take me…to a doctor, Nick. No…hospitals. Understand?’
‘You might die if I don’t.’
‘You’ll get…captured…if you do.’ Despite her weakened state, her eyes sheened with tears. ‘I should have listened…I’m…sorry.’
‘We can’t change it. We just gotta figure it out.’
‘So what do we…do?’
‘We find somewhere to wait a few weeks until you’re good enough to travel. Then try to get over into Canada.’
She closed her eyes. ‘We can’t…stay…here?’
‘Not for long. But it’s Monday so there’ll be no church service today, so we should be good until nightfall. We’ll get back in the kayak on the water and go east. I saw a map at the gas station. The lake connects to rivers that can get us out of the State. We can hide somewhere east closer to New England. They’ll never find us there.’
She didn’t answer and he realized she’d dozed off. He quickly changed out of the jeans and ballcap back into Barry’s suit, wanting to switch appearance from what he’d been wearing at the gas station in case the deputy he’d spoken
to or the clerk realized in hindsight who he was. He’d have preferred not to wear the suit jacket as well, back in the clothing Barry had last seen him in and which he would’ve told police Nicky was wearing when he left the barn, but he felt chilled to the bone after such little sleep last night.
He pulled it on, picked up the loaded shotgun and rose, going back to the door, the bright light making him squint. He was exhausted, his cheekbones framing the black stubble that wasn’t quite hiding the weight he’d lost over the past three days.
A couple of gunshots came from the distance somewhere; hunters, he thought. In a perfect world, the cops would have taken down Brooks and Billy by now, but he’d never had that kind of luck; it was disappointing to hear the pair hadn’t been captured at the fairground, which had been part of Nicky’s plan when he’d cut and resewn the bottom of the bag, and lit those firecrackers to draw as much attention as possible to the two big men. They couldn’t be far away, wherever they were, and they’d be as pissed at him as they would be at whoever had shot their youngest brother on the bridge on Friday night. He’d cost them a lot of money at the fair fifteen hours ago. Nicky remembered turning and seeing those loose dollar bills spilling out of the split bag and a quick smile appeared under those hollow cheekbones. He’d always intended to make it as difficult as possible for them to escape with it all.
But then, hearing a car approaching down the track and stop outside the church, the smile vanished. Nicky swore as he stepped back, looking through the gap in the door, and saw a man in a reverend’s clothing behind the wheel, wearing a white collar and black shirt.
In panic, he looked back at Kat who was lying near the altar, but as the clergyman got out, Nicky knew he’d see the splintered damage to the lock on the church’s door.
Against his greatest wishes, it looked as if he was going to be forced to take another hostage.
