“What a godawful boring fucking life.” Bubba fidgeted, then absently punched a tree trunk.
I heard a muffled thump from the shed, and a line of lower shingles shook. Miles Lovell, stuck in a pump shed, kicking the walls, as bored as Bubba.
A crow, maybe the same one we’d heard earlier, cawed as it glided low over the bog, swept gracefully around the front of the hut, skimmed its beak over the water, then swooped up and away into the dark trees.
Bubba yawned. “I’m gonna leave.”
“Okay,” Angie said.
His hand swept the trees around him. “I mean, this is great and all, but there’s pro wrestling on tonight.”
“Of course,” Angie said.
“Ugly Bob Brutal versus Sweet Sammy Studbar.”
“Where I’d be,” Angie said, “but, alas, I have a job.”
“I’ll tape it for you,” Bubba promised.
Angie smiled. “Would ya? Gosh, that’d be just super.”
The sarcasm completely eluded Bubba. His spirits picked up and he rubbed his hands together. “Sure. Look, I got a whole bunch of old ones on tape. Sometime we could—”
“Sssh,” Angie said suddenly, and put a finger to her lips.
I turned my head back toward the hut, heard a door close quietly from the far side. I raised the binoculars and stared through them as a man exited the far side of the shed and walked along the plankwood toward the stand of thick trees.
I could only see the back of him. He had blond hair and stood maybe six-two. He was slim and moved with a casual fluid ease, one hand in the pocket of his trousers, the other swaying languidly at his side. He wore light gray trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows. His head was tilted back slightly, and the sound of his soft whistling carried back over the mist and bogs to us.
“Sounds like ‘Camp Town Ladies,’” Bubba said.
“Nah,” Angie said. “That’s not it.”
“Then what is it, you know so much?”
“I don’t know. I just know what it isn’t.”
“Oh, sure,” Bubba said.
The man had almost reached the middle of the planks and I waited for him to turn and look back so I could see his face. The whole point of coming here had been to see who Miles was meeting, and if the blond guy had a car in those trees, he’d be long gone even if we gave chase right now.
I picked a rock up off the ground and arced it out through the trees and over the bog. It dropped into the watery mass of bobbing fruit about six feet to the blond guy’s left and made a distinct plunking sound that we could hear thirty yards away.
The man didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t break stride. He kept whistling.
“I’m telling you,” Bubba said, picking up his own rock, “it’s ‘Camp Town Ladies.’”
Bubba threw his rock, a hefty two-pounder that only reached halfway across the bog but made twice as much noise. Instead of a plunk, we got a heavy splash, and still the blond man showed no visible reaction.
He’d reached the end of the planks, and I made a decision. If he knew someone was following him, he might vanish, but he was going to vanish anyway, and I needed to see his face.
I screamed, “Hey!” and my voice ripped the mist and sullen bog air, sent birds shredding upward through the trees.
The man stopped at the tree line. His back tensed. His shoulder turned ever so slightly to the left. Then he raised his arm so that his hand was held up at a ninety-degree angle from his body, as if he were a traffic cop halting the flow, or a party guest waving goodbye as he left the party.
He’d known we were there. And he wanted us to know it.
He lowered his hand and disappeared into the dark tree line.
I bolted from our stand of thin trees and out onto the soggy shore, with Angie and Bubba right behind me. I’d been loud enough that Miles Lovell would have heard my call across the bog, so our cover was blown in either case. Now our only hope was to get to Lovell while he was alone on a bog, before he could bolt, and scare the truth out of him.
As our heels hammered the plank wood and the sharp scent of the bog turned bitter in my nostrils, Bubba said, “Come on. Back me up, man. It was ‘Camp Town,’ right?”
“It was ‘We’re the Boys of Chorus,’” I said.
“What?”
I picked up my pace and the hut canted from side to side as we bounded toward it; the planks felt like they’d give way underfoot.
“From the Looney Tunes cartoon,” I said.
“Oh, yeah!” Bubba said, and then he sang it: “Oh, we’re the boys of chorus. We hope you like our show. We know you’re rooting for us. But now we have to go-oh-oh!”
The words, as they boomed from Bubba’s mouth over the still, silent bog, rode up my spine like insects.
As I reached the hut, I grasped the doorknob.
Angie said, “Patrick!”
I looked back at her and froze in her glare. I couldn’t believe what I’d almost done—run up to a closed door with a potentially armed stranger waiting on the other side and been about to throw open the door like I was going home.
Angie’s mouth remained open, her head cocked and her eyes blazing, stunned, I think, by my almost criminal mental lapse.
I shook my head at my own stupidity and stepped back from the door as Angie pulled her .38 and stood to the left, pointed it at the center of the door. Bubba had already pulled his gun—a sawed-off shotgun with a pistol grip—and he stood to the right, pointing it at the door with all the trepidation of a geography teacher pointing out Burma on a dated classroom map.
He said, “Uh, we’re ready now, genius.”
I pulled my Colt Commander, stepped to the left of the doorjamb, and rapped the wood with my knuckles. “Miles, open up!”
Nothing.
I rapped again. “Hey, Miles, it’s Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private detective. I just want to talk.
I heard the sound of something hitting cheap wood inside, followed by the rattle of tools or some metal in a corner.
I knocked a last time. “Miles, we’re going to come in. Okay?”
Something banged up and down against the floorboards inside.
I flattened my back against the wall and reached around to the knob, looked at Angie and Bubba. They both nodded. A bullfrog croaked from somewhere out on the bog. The breeze died and the trees were still and dark.
I turned the knob and threw open the door and Angie said, “Jesus Christ!”
Bubba said, “Wow,” with a touch of admiration, if not awe, in his voice, and lowered his shotgun.
Angie lowered her .38, and I stepped in front of the doorway and looked in the shed. It took me a second or two to realize what I was looking at because there was so much to digest and yet nothing you really wanted to.
Miles Lovell sat tied to the motor of a septic pump in the center of the shed. He’d been fastened to the motor by a thick electrical cord wrapped tight around his waist and tied off behind his back.
The gag in his mouth had darkened with blood that seeped past the corners of his mouth and down his chin.
His arms and legs had been left untied, and his heels kicked the floorboards as he writhed against the metal block.
His arms, however, hung immobile by his sides, and the man who’d done this to him hadn’t been worried Miles would use them to untie himself because Miles no longer had possession of his own hands.
They were on the floor to the left of the silent motor, chopped off above the wrists and neatly laid, palms down, on the floorboards. The blond man had applied tourniquets over both stumps and left the ax embedded in the wood between the hands.
We approached Lovell as his eyes rolled back to whites and the hammering of his heels began to seem less like pain and more like shock. Even with the tourniquets, I doubted he could live much longer, and I willed myself to put the horror of his maiming in the back of my mind and try to get him to answer a question or two before either the shock or death set in permanently.
I pulled the gag from between his lips and jumped back as a mouthful of dark blood spilled out onto his chest.
Angie said, “Oh, no. No fucking way. You have got to be kidding.”
My stomach slid east, then west, then back east again, and a soft, warm buzzing found my brain.
Bubba said, “Wow,” again, and this time I was sure I detected awe in his voice.
Miles, shock or no shock, death or no death, wouldn’t be answering my questions.
He wouldn’t be answering anyone’s questions for a long, long time.
And even if he lived, I wasn’t sure he’d be happy about it.
While we’d waited in the trees and the mist had ridden gently over the cranberry bog and his BMW had sat waiting on the shore, Miles Lovell’s tongue had gone the way of his hands.
19
Three days after Miles Lovell was admitted to ICU, Dr. Diane Bourne walked into her Admiral Hill town house and found Angie, Bubba, and me cooking a very early Thanksgiving dinner in her kitchen.
I was in charge of the thirteen-pound turkey because I was the only one of us who liked to cook. Angie lived in restaurants and Bubba was strictly takeout, but I’d been cooking since I was twelve. Nothing spectacular, mind you—after all, there’s a reason you rarely hear “Irish” and “cuisine” mentioned in the same sentence—but I can handle most fowl, beef, and pasta dishes, and I can blacken hell out of any fish known to man.
So I cleaned and roasted and basted and spiced the turkey, then prepared the mashed potatoes with diced onions, while Angie assigned herself to the preparation of the Stove Top stuffing and this green-beans-and-garlic recipe she’d found on the inside of a soup can label. Bubba had no official duties, but he’d brought plenty of beer and several bags of chips for us and a bottle of vodka for himself, and when he came upon Diane Bourne’s blue Persian cat, he was nice enough not to kill it.
Roasting a turkey takes a while, with very little to do during the downtime, so Angie and I availed ourselves of the upstairs quarters and ransacked Diane Bourne’s house until we found one thing of particular interest.
Miles Lovell had gone into shock not long after we called the ambulance. He’d been rushed to Jordan Hospital in Plymouth, where he was stabilized and airlifted to Mass General. After they’d worked on him there for nine hours, he’d been placed in ICU. They’d been unable to reattach his hands, but they would have had a shot at reattaching his tongue if the blond man hadn’t either taken it with him or tossed it into the bog.
My gut feeling was that the blond man had taken it with him. I didn’t know much about him—not his name or even what he looked like—but I was getting a sense for him. He was, I was sure, the man Warren Martens had seen at the motel and described as the man in charge. He had destroyed Karen Nichols, and now he’d destroyed Miles Lovell. Merely killing his victims seemed to bore him—instead, he preferred to leave them wishing they were dead.
Angie and I returned downstairs with the treat we’d found in Dr. Bourne’s bedroom, and the plastic thermometer popped up from the turkey just as Diane Bourne let herself into the town house.
“Talk about your timing,” I said.
“Sure,” Angie said, “we do all the work, she reaps the rewards.”
Diane Bourne turned into the dining room, separated from the kitchen by nothing but an open portico, and Bubba gave her a big three-finger wave with the same hand that held his bottle of Absolut.
Bubba said, “What’s shaking, sister?”
Diane Bourne dropped her leather bag and opened her mouth as if about to scream.
Angie said, “Now, now. There, there.” She crouched on the kitchen floor and slid the videocassette we’d found in the master bedroom into the dining room, where it came to rest at Diane Bourne’s feet.
She looked down at the videocassette and closed her mouth.
Angie hoisted herself up onto the counter and lit a cigarette. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but isn’t it unethical to have sex with a client?”
I would have raised my eyebrows at Dr. Bourne, but I was busy pulling the roasting pan from the oven.
“Damn,” Bubba said. “Smells good.”
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“Anyone remember cranberry sauce?”
Angie snapped her fingers and shook her head.
“Not that I particularly care for the stuff. Ange?”
“Never liked the cranberry sauce,” she said, her eyes on Diane Bourne.
“Bubba?”
He belched. “Gets in the way of the booze.”
I turned my head. Diane Bourne was frozen in the dining room over her dropped bag and the videocassette.
“Dr. Bourne?” I said and her eyes snapped my way. “You a fan of the cranberry?”
She took a long, deep breath and closed her eyes as she let it back out. “What are you people doing here?”
I held up the roasting pan. “Cooking.”
“Stirring,” Angie said.
“Drinking,” Bubba said, and pointed the bottle in Dr. Bourne’s direction. “Taste?”
Diane Bourne gave us all a tight shake of the head and closed her eyes again as if we’d disappear by the time she reopened them.
“You,” she said, “are breaking and entering. That’s a felony.”
“Actually,” I said, “the breaking on its own is just misdemeanor vandalism.”
“But, yeah,” Angie said, “the entering part is definitely wrong.”
“Bad,” Bubba agreed, and swiped one index finger off the other several times. “Bad, bad, bad.”
I placed the bird on top of the stove. “We brought food, though.”
“And chips,” Bubba said.
“Yeah.” I nodded at him. “The chips alone should balance out the B and E thing.”
Diane Bourne looked at the videocassette between her feet and held up a silencing hand. “What do we do now?”
I looked at Bubba. He shot a confused look at Angie. Angie passed it on to Diane Bourne. Diane Bourne looked at me.
“We eat,” I said.
Diane Bourne actually helped carve the turkey with me and showed us the locations of all the ceramic bowls and serving dishes we’d have probably busted the place up looking for.
By the time we all sat down at her hammered-copper dining room table, the color had returned to her face and she’d helped herself to a glass of white wine and brought the bottle to the table with her.
Bubba had called dibs on both legs and a wing, so the rest of us ate white meat, politely passed around the bowls of green beans and spuds, and buttered our rolls with pinkies extended.
“So,” I said over the volume of Bubba’s teeth tearing a Hyundai’s worth of meat off the bone, “I hear you’re short a part-time secretary, Doctor.”
She took a sip of wine. “Unfortunate, yes.” She took a miserly bite of turkey and then another sip of wine.
“Police talk to you?” Angie asked.
She nodded. “I understand they got my name from you.”
“Did you tell them anything?”
“I told them Miles was a valued employee, but I knew little of his private life.”
“Uh-huh,” Angie said, and drank some of the beer she’d poured into one of Diane Bourne’s wine goblets. “Did you mention the phone call Lovell placed to you about an hour before he was attacked?”
Diane Bourne didn’t miss a beat. She smiled around her wineglass, took a delicate sip. “No, I’m afraid that slipped my mind.”
Bubba poured a gallon of gravy over his plate, added half a shaker of salt, and said, “You’re a drunk.”
Diane Bourne’s pale face turned the color of a cue ball. “What did you just say?”
Bubba used his fork to point at her wine bottle. “You’re a drunk. Sister, you’re taking tiny sips, but you’re taking a lot of them.”
“I’m nervous.”
Bubba gave her the grin of one shark to another. “Right, sister. Right. You�
�re a drunk. I can see it in you.” He took a pull from his Absolut bottle, looked at me. “Lock her in a room, buddy. Thirty-six hours tops, she’ll be screaming for it. She’d blow an orangutan, he’d give her a drink.”
I watched Diane Bourne while Bubba spoke. The videocassette hadn’t rattled her. Our knowledge of the phone call hadn’t rattled her. Even our being here, in her home, hadn’t shocked her too much. But Bubba’s words sent tremors up her fine throat, tiny spasms through her fingers.
“Don’t worry,” Bubba said, his eyes on his food, fork and knife hovering above the mess like hawks about to descend, “I respect a woman likes to drink. Kinda respect that nympho-lesbian action you got going on the tape, too.”
Bubba dove back into his food, and for a few moments the only sounds in that room came from his shoveling and snarfing.
“About the videotape,” I said.
Diane Bourne tore her eyes away from Bubba and gulped the rest of her wine. She poured another half goblet, looked at me as a brazen pride swept over the unsettlement Bubba had placed there.
“Are you angry with me, Patrick?”
“No.”
She took another meager bite of turkey. “But I thought Karen Nichols’s death was a personal crusade for you, Patrick.”
I smiled. “Classic interrogation technique, Diane. Kudos.”
“Which?” All wide-eyed innocence.
“Using the subject’s first name as much as possible. Unnerves him, supposedly, forces intimacy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Ah, well, maybe not, but—”
“Doctor,” Angie said, “you’re fucking both Karen Nichols and Miles Lovell on that tape. Care to explain?”
She turned her head, locked Angie in her calm gaze. “Did it turn you on, Angie?”
“Not particularly, Diane.”
“Did it repulse you?”
“Not particularly, Diane.”
Bubba looked up from his second turkey leg. “I got major wood, though, sister. Keep it in mind.”
She ignored him, though another of those tremors found her throat for a moment. “Come, Angie, no latent desires to experiment sexually with another woman?”
Prayers for Rain Page 17
