by John Philpin
A woman with black hair, wearing jeans, and a flannel shirt opened to display a Joan Osborne T-shirt, lay sprawled on the platform. Eyes wide, she seemed to stare at the ceiling, her face a mask of shock or disbelief.
Dark blood pooled beneath her right ear. A Glock nine-millimeter handgun rested on her open right palm.
I kneeled beside her.
Jaworski, gun in hand, entered the room from the north. “Didn’t expect you to stay put,” he said. “The house is empty. Who is it?”
“Squires,” I said as I examined the head wound.
“Jesus Christ,” Jaworski muttered, as he crouched beside me. “She wanted Heath’s gun to blow her brains out?”
“That’s what someone wants us to believe,” I said. “The entry wound is behind her right ear. No stippling. There’s an exit wound lower and forward on the left side of her head. That’s no selfinflicted wound.”
“Heath?”
I considered the chauffeur, his devotion to Lily Dorman, his exquisite sense of her suffering. “I don’t think so.”
I imagined Amanda Squires mechanically playing Brahms in a music room at Harbor College, her slight hands gliding over the keys.
she is not real…
her insubstantial hands…
she steals the air
In the key of blue, she said.
“We’re missing a player.”
“Baker?”
I stared at Squires’s face. “Lily Dorman said that I would find her. She planned to kill me.”
“She got the first part right,” he said, snapping open his cell phone. “You walk back to the pier and collect Heath. I’ll call Ragged Harbor.”
I nodded, thinking that blasts of ocean air laden with purifying rain might clear my head. My mind was like a drawer brimming with unmatched socks.
The silversmith, Loudermilk, embellished the scrimshaw to order.
Our missing player was the timber rattler, the viper that injects its venom.
I stepped over the shattered French door and into the storm. No cleansing rain greeted me. Gusts from the Atlantic launched me toward Lobster Point. I thought of the return walk into the gale’s force and growled my discontent.
According to most studies, Amanda Squires said in the seminar, women prefer to kill with poison.
All serial killers, male and female, choose victims who are vulnerable. That includes anyone whose back is turned.
I glanced over my shoulder at the darkness that followed me. Scrub growth shuddered in the cutting wind, but no one pursued me wielding a giant syringe filled with succinylcholine.
I shook my head, shoved my hands deep into my pockets, hunched my shoulders against the chill, and quickened my pace to the harbor.
I FOUND LODGE AND HEATH SITTING NEAR THE WOODSTOVE in the bait shop. I nodded as I stepped into the small, overheated room.
Heath’s eyes locked on mine. “You killed her, didn’t you,” he said, then lunged at me headfirst, his hands still cuffed.
Lodge was quicker and stronger than the driver. He locked Heath in a judo hold and lowered him gently to the floor.
Outside the shop, the launch ramp’s chains banged against pilings.
“There’s a Glock nine in her right hand,” I said. “Someone wants us to believe that she killed herself.”
Heath shook his head. “She never said she wanted to die. None of them did. I wouldn’t have given her the gun if I thought that.”
“Who’s left? You took her there. You gave her the weapon.”
His face was miserably blank.
Lodge released his hold and stood erect. “Edgar ain’t killed no one,” he announced, and spat tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup.
I nodded my agreement. “You took her to see her mother,” I said to Heath, fishing for some scrap of information that would help me to understand and perhaps give me direction.
“She hadn’t been home in years. Lily didn’t tell me that. Katrina did.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Katrina has her own problems, but she knew that something wasn’t right with her daughter. She asked me to take care of Lily.”
Heath covered his face with his hands. “We drove to Eastern Promenade and fed the birds.”
Heath was distraught, but I had no desire to hear about cracked corn and pigeons. A wave of exhaustion rolled through me. “Let’s go to the house,” I told Lodge.
He helped Edgar Heath to his feet, and the three of us walked into the wind, a chilled, solemn procession to Horns Hill Road.
JAWORSKI HAD COVERED THE BODY WITH A SHOWER curtain. I stared at the low stage and thought of the woman of many faces and more souls.
“The storm’s center veered south of Cape Cod,” Jaworski said. “We’ve had the worst of it. Jasper and the feds will be here in a couple of hours.”
“Do they know anything that we don’t?”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“I want to see her,” Heath said.
I looked at Jaworski, who studied Heath’s face. “Stay with him,” the chief said. “Touch nothing but the curtain.”
With Lodge behind him, Heath kneeled beside the body as I lifted the heavy plastic. I expected the driver to again go for my throat. Instead, he looked up, his face creased with confusion.
“I don’t know this woman,” he said. “I’ve never seen her before.”
I SLEPT FITFULLY FOR THREE HOURS, UNTIL THE ABSENCE of the wind’s roar awakened me.
I stared at the pebbled white ceiling. If I wanted to move, I could not. The plush sofa that I had crashed on was a spinal trap designed for polite sitting, and excruciating low-back pain if you dared recline. I added “chiropractic visit” to my mental to-do list.
Amanda Squires was not Lily Dorman.
The thought illuminated my fogbound head like a distant beacon across rough seas.
Lily Dorman is the missing player.
“Where the hell is she?” I muttered.
In a wing chair across the room, Jaworski pulled himself from sleep. Al Lodge sat crosslegged on the floor, opposite Edgar Heath.
“You didn’t sleep so good,” Lodge said.
“Understatement,” I muttered.
I rolled onto my side, placed my right hand on the floor, slid to my knees, and leaned on the sofa to push myself to a standing position. My neck and one knee cracked.
“You could be the percussionist in a band,” Jaworski said. “You sound like a wood block. Remember Spike
Jones?”
“Are you always this witty when you first open your eyes? Remind me never to sleep with you again.”
Jaworski snorted and opened a piece of gum.
“If a wood block’s one of those things you beat with drumsticks,” I said, “I feel like one.”
As I stretched to loosen kinks and unravel knots, the Coast Guard delivered Karen Jasper and a small army of seasick federal agents. The state investigator huddled with Jaworski. Men and women in blue jackets imprinted with the initials BATF, FBI, or DEA fanned through the house with cameras, radios, measuring tapes, powders, sprays, and yellow plastic crime-scene ribbon.
Jasper turned from Jaworski, glared briefly at me, then walked to the stage and glanced at the corpse. She nodded to the chief, then fixed me with her burning eyes and strode in my direction. “I don’t like you,” she began.
“You had her and you let her go,” I said.
“There was nothing to hold her on. We still require evidence. There is no evidence that this woman engaged in any illegal activity. You know that. You avoided us. If you came in and talked with me—”
“You made it clear that you had no interest in anything I had to say.”
She looked at the ceiling, then snapped her gaze back to me. “I want to know everything that you know about this woman, about Martin International, and about the murders. We’re going to hold you until you’ve answered every factual question that we have.”
If Jasper’s gut ever told her a
nything, she would mistake it for indigestion.
I grabbed my wallet, found my attorney’s business card, and handed it to Jasper. “I have nothing to say.”
She did not look at the card. “You’re obstructing,” she snapped.
“I’d call it exercising rights guaranteed to me by the United States Constitution. Bunch of old men thought they had some pretty good ideas, so they wrote them down. Some other old men amended it a few times, but it’s held up pretty well.”
She spun on her heels and stalked off to join her army.
“You didn’t have to needle her,” Jaworski said.
“Yes I did. I’m insufferable. Remember?”
I wandered onto the patio, where a small troop of agents had gathered. I stood in the stiff, chill breeze, listened to bits of conversation, and allowed my mind to drift.
“Looks like a suicide,” one agent said.
“Probably is. We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner.”
An autopsy and report would take days. I did not have days.
“There is a confusion about what Lustmord is, Amanda Squires said.
I was convinced that everything Squires said contained an explicit message.
“… the pure joy of killing, a sexual excitement unlike any other…”
She was not describing her own love of the rush, the excitation associated with the kill. She was Lily Dorman’s surrogate.
“Some of us love to fuck. Some of us love to kill.”
Squires, whoever she was, was searching for conscience.
“The Mexican connection blew up on them,” an agent said.
“They had six countries wrapped up.”
“Jasper estimates two hundred million dollars.”
“Lustmord is not the exclusive province of men.”
“She doesn’t care about the money,” I muttered. “She’s having a good time.”
Jaworski approached behind me. “Jasper says you and Al can return to the mainland. She wants you at the P.D. until this crew catches up with you. There’s a couch in my office. Grab some sleep.”
“Jasper trusts me?”
The chief looked down and shuffled his feet in what had become a familiar dance. “I gave her my word that you’d stay put.”
I nodded. “I don’t have anywhere to go, Herb.”
“You figure that’s Janine Baker in there?”
“Makes sense,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know.”
Jaworski gazed into the conservatory. “Everything connects to MI. They gained respect as a legitimate outfit, then playacted their way to the top of the corruption heap. What went wrong?”
“One of their clients hit the tequila too hard and washed up on your beach,” I said. “The feds handled the investigation, and Steve Weld showed up. Baker and Dorman would have operated on different agendas after that. Baker was in it for the money. Dorman is entertaining herself.”
Jaworski shifted his gaze back to me. “So, where is Lily Dorman?”
THE BLACK SKY FADED TO SLATE GRAY AS AL LODGE and I trudged the road to the harbor.
“Don’t know much about murder,” Lodge said, talking around a walnut-sized chaw wedged in his cheek. “Except what I seen on TV. I heard you and Herb talking. This woman kills for the hell of it.”
“I believe that.”
“She’s got more money than she can spend, but that don’t matter to her.”
I nodded. Lodge weighed his thoughts.
“She ain’t practical. What she feels like doin’ decides what she’s gonna do. Ain’t nothin’ else matters to her.”
Lodge’s words echoed Sydny Clanton’s as she confronted Charlie Manson. Whether the little guru’s gofer got sliced hinged on Clanton’s feelings.
I looked at the lanky lobsterman’s back as he piloted his boat, and recalled his incisive observation about Edgar Heath.
“She ain’t come full circle,” Lodge said, and arced a stream of tobacco juice across the wind. “Best you don’t stand right behind me.”
I glanced at the years of brown stains splattered across the boat’s stern.
Full circle.
Feelings dictate Lily Dorman’s behavior. Anyone who hurt her in the past, or tries to stop her now, dies.
Intellect would tell her to take the money and run. The Bahamas or Costa Rica.
She can’t run until she has killed me and confronted the birthplace of her nightmares.
I was not the source of her suffering, but I had failed to protect her. I was a child’s dream of salvation, and I had become another nightmare.
Full circle.
You want me to find you.
She was not ready to be found on Monhegan.
Good and evil inhabit the same circle. The circle itself is complete, but Lily Dorman has not concluded her circuit.
You must finish the task of making yourself whole.
She said that I would eventually find her. “I’ll wait,” she said. “I’ve waited for years.”
She had more confidence in my intuitive gymnastics than I.
The apartment on Danforth Street was furnished with props.
What about the trailer park?
Would she bring her performance to her mother’s doorstep?
THE TRIP TO PEMAQUID WAS UNEVENTFUL. THE SEA remained choppy, but the wind had calmed considerably.
Lodge stood at the helm. I sat in the stern, away from Lodge’s occasional blasts of black liquid, and thumbed Lily’s journal, searching for something that would tell me where her circle began, and where it would end.
I flipped back through the pages. Lily’s notes to Dr. Westlake would not help me. What drove Lily Dorman was primal, something in a horribly aching past.
I found an intriguing passage about her snakes in the swamp behind Bayberry Court, how they shed their skins and became new creatures of God. Then her handwriting changed from a child’s neat script to a heavy scrawl.
We went to an amusement park today. Inside the beast’s belly, a mirrored room showed me what I am. Mom was afraid. She waited outside. Harper took me inside, touched me inside, and laughed like the metal monster. Then I was no longer there.
Was this the beginning, the first time that Lily Dorman broke away from herself?
You must enter the beast again, look with confidence into the mirrors, see that you are whole, a new child of God.
She would go there before she vanished again, I thought, but I had no idea where “there” was.
JAWORSKI’S DISPATCHER ESCORTED ME TO THE CHIEF’S office.
“He says that you’re to make yourself at home,” she said, and closed the door as she left.
The mute TV reflected the scene outside the police station. An underfed, black-haired woman in a fire-engine-red suit and matching lip gloss maintained a somber expression as she spoke into her microphone. The on-screen banner changed from LIVE IN RAGGED HARBOR, MAINE to TAPED EARLIER as the station cut to views of the college entrance, Crescent Street, footage from Jaworski’s press conference, and yearbook photos of Susan Hamilton, Kelly Paquette, and Jaycie Waylon.
I turned away. The chief’s vinyl sofa hulked against the wall. I would sleep later, either in my bed or in the jail cell that Karen Jasper had waiting for me. I did not intend to subject my back to a second round of pain. I paced, paged through an instruction manual on the proper use of Mace, paced more, then settled into a chair.
Jaworski’s corporal, Dickie Stevens, pushed open the door. “Will it bother you if I watch some videotape?” he asked. “The chief’s got the only VCR.”
I told him to go ahead, then watched as he screened the memorial service videos. Solemn faces streamed past the camera in silence. In the background, in black, white, and gray, Jaworski and I engaged in soundless dialogue as we surveyed the mourners.
“He’s here,” I told the chief.
The killer was conflicted, I thought at the time, but I had not realized then that “he” was a “she.” Now I understood the frenzy evident in Harper
Dorman’s apartment, the savage attack on Jaycie, then the patient efficiency with the Crescent Street scene. Lily Dorman would attend the memorial service not because of any psychic turbulence. As I had suspected, the killer was there to enjoy her sense of invulnerability.
Dawn Kramer drifted across the screen to the chapel. Then Amanda Squires clung to Wendell Beckerman’s arm in a brief procession of the now dead. Squires snapped her head in the camera’s direction; her eyes scanned to her right, then stopped.
“Someone called her,” I muttered.
“What’s that, Doc?”
Squires’s eyes widened. She shook her head, turned away, and moved beyond the camera’s reach.
“Can you back that up?” I asked Stevens.
“Sure.”
Squires zipped backward across the screen.
“Right there,” I said.
Again, Squires walked.
“Can you slow that?”
She seemed to freeze; her body, wrapped in a dark jacket and ankle-length skirt, moved in hesitating increments to the beat of the VCR’s soft click. Squires’s eyes shifted to the camera; her neck muscles tightened.
“Hold it.”
The thin line of her mouth hardened as she glared into space beyond the camera. Stevens froze the image.
“Someone called her,” I said again.
“Batson taped the same people from a different angle. Want me to try that?”
“Please.”
This time, the view was from Beckerman’s side.
Stevens slowed the tape as Squires reacted. The corporal pointed to the screen. “Just over my shoulder, on that little hill,” he said.
I pushed myself from the chair, ignoring a twinge in my back. “She has a gun.”
The blurred figure stood alone on the knoll behind Stevens. Her left hand gripped what appeared to be a handgun.
“Go slowly forward.”
Squires jerkily shifted her attention to the chapel. The woman on the hill folded her arms across her chest; the object in profile in her hand was clearly a weapon.
“Yeah, she was conflicted,” I said. “She couldn’t decide whether to mourn or to kill.”
