A Bat in the Belfry

by Sarah Graves

  Ordinarily, it could take days to get someone to dig up the relevant records. That Dylan had the answer now meant he’d gotten it himself, by calling, say, an assistant DA with whom he already had a relationship.

  He was good at relationships, she thought to herself dryly. Or at starting them, at least. “I thought you were only observing this investigation?” The fish really was very good; she finished the last bite.

  He tipped his head before attacking the french fries again. “Hey, it doesn’t hurt me to be useful once in a while,” he said, dipping one in ketchup. “Work my way back into the higher-ups’ good graces.”

  So that’s what this was all about. Just as she’d thought, he’d been kicked upstairs as a time-out for bad behavior. But he wanted active duty again and she was supposed to help him get it.

  Showing her how easily he could get information out of back channels might kill two birds with one stone: demonstrating his skill and moxie to the bosses, while also further persuading her that he could be useful in helping to find her niece.

  If she’s alive. Glancing at him again, she found him studying her. “I see you’re catching my drift,” he said.

  His gaze lingered unnervingly on her lips. She broke the moment by saying, “How do I know you’ll come through with what I need, though? I don’t even know there is anything to—”

  He laughed without humor. “Yeah, and it’s not like I haven’t burned you before, huh?” He ate a pickle slice.

  That wasn’t like the Dylan she remembered. In the past he’d have tried wriggling out of any blame, no matter how slight. She thought again of how fast he must’ve had to grow up when his wife was dying, as across the pleasant room a pair of good old boys in bib overalls tucked into plates of meat loaf.

  “That’s why I figured that you might need a sample of what I’m promising,” said Dylan.

  He pulled a photograph from the inside front pocket of the sport jacket he was wearing over a black turtleneck. “Does this look familiar?”

  Lizzie took it. The photo was a picture of Sissy as a child: white-blonde hair, pale eyes, gap-toothed grin. Only—

  Only it wasn’t Sissy. “Where did you get this?” The child in the photograph was holding a small American flag in one hand and a red, white, and blue banner in the other.

  In sparkly script, the banner said HAPPY 4TH! Lizzie stared. She’d been sent a photograph of this same child, just in different clothes.

  Also, this photograph was date-stamped. “This was taken—”

  Dylan nodded. “Uh-huh. Last summer.”

  Last summer, Sissy had already been dead eight years. And Nicki was nine.

  About the same age as the child in the picture. “This came to me in the mail,” said Dylan, “about a month ago. Plain brown envelope, no return address, no note, no explanation.”

  He shook his head frowningly. “I’ve been carrying it around with me ever since, wondering why. Never made the connection with your thing back then, but when I saw you and realized what you must be doing here, then I got it.”

  He laid the photograph on the table between them as Lizzie tried to find her voice and couldn’t. Leaning back in the booth, he waited while the waitress cleared plates and offered coffee, which Dylan accepted for both of them. Then:

  “I didn’t know,” he repeated, “but even if I had, if I had tried calling you about it would you have given me the time of day? No, you wouldn’t,” he answered himself, “and I don’t blame you.”

  Her hand moved unbidden to touch the picture, her finger moving lightly over this new bit of evidence that after all, she might not be alone in the world.

  That she still had family. Her eyes prickled with tears. “No,” she replied finally. “You’re right, Dylan, I wouldn’t have. You were dead to me.”

  And now he wasn’t. He was here with her right now, no longer the perennial bad boy but instead a grown man, owning frankly up to his past mistakes. Here just the way she’d dreamed, with his dark, knowing eyes and his expressive mouth and his dark forelock perpetually begging to be tugged very gently—

  Stop that, she ordered herself.

  “And why would anyone send this to you, anyway?” she added, because it made no sense. Who from around here would have known enough about them both to do so, first of all, and—

  “I have no idea.” He plucked up the photograph, glanced at their lunch check and got his wallet out.

  “Tell you what, though,” he said, laying a twenty and a five atop the check; he always had been a generous tipper.

  “Of course you have your doubts about me. I didn’t exactly earn your respect as a guy you could depend on, did I?”

  Oh, I could depend on you. To lie, and cheat, and …

  And break my heart. “But I think we could find out the why of all of this. I think we could help each other,” he finished.

  He let his hand rest on her shoulder again briefly as she went ahead of him out the door. Then they were in the pelting rain once more, dashing through it together toward the shelter of his car. In the few moments before they reached it, he took her hand.

  “Come on, you’re getting drenched!” he laughed, and pulled open the car door with a sweeping, mock-gallant gesture.

  Heaven help me, she thought as she ducked in, laughing, too, now, in spite of herself, feeling only the giddy exhilaration she recalled so well, that pure happiness.

  Except it wasn’t so pure. By the time he’d hurried around and climbed into the driver’s seat, she’d gotten control of her emotions again, or enough so that she could talk and think.

  “So listen, how come you and Liam never got together?” he asked casually, as if back in the restaurant he hadn’t just made her search for Nicki even more troubling and confusing than it was before.

  Because … why would someone send that picture of the child to Dylan? Or send the other ones to Lizzie, for that matter?

  Now the one Dylan had received lay on the Saab’s center console. She glanced around uneasily, filled suddenly with the sense of some unknown person out there somewhere, knowing more than she did. But then it hit her, what Dylan had just said.

  “Liam? You mean … God, Dylan, he was my partner.”

  As she spoke, the memories rushed back of her job as a cop with the Boston PD, first on patrol with her partner, Liam, later as a homicide detective; a murder cop, those whose work it was called it. Getting promoted had been the proudest moment of her life, leaving the job the most difficult.

  But now that she’d quit, it wasn’t the detective work she’d done that rose vividly in her mind. It was the memory of all the shifts on patrol with Liam that assailed her, the bond they’d shared along with the fast-food sandwiches and take-out coffee.

  Liam had been the most honest man she’d ever known, before he died trying to stop a convenience store robbery. She wondered what he’d think of the way she was lying to everyone in Eastport, now, hiding her cop past.

  Lying her head off, at least by omission. Keeping her true self, her real feelings, secret.

  And not only about having been a cop. “Why do you want to know, anyway?” she asked Dylan.

  Dylan shrugged. “Just wondered. Is there … anyone now?”

  None of your business. But she answered. “No.” She didn’t elaborate; let him make what he wanted of it. Her personal life—not that I have one—wasn’t his concern anymore.

  He nodded judiciously, not prodding slyly as he once might have, instead waving at the photo to change the subject again. “Anyway, think it over. You never know what somebody in the house where the Hahn kid was staying might’ve seen or heard, that could nail the lid down on him.”

  Backing out of his parking spot, he turned on the Saab’s heat; the rush of warm air carrying the smell of freshly cleaned car upholstery sent another rush of nostalgia through her.

  He’d always kept the old car up beautifully. Memory flooded her: late-night Boston traffic, the lights and cars, flaring of neon through a rain-streaming
windshield …

  And afterwards. Oh, afterwards … She wrenched her thoughts back to the present. “But what if it doesn’t? Nail the lid down, I mean. Are you so sure this kid is your guy?”

  Surprised, he glanced over at her as he made the left turn back toward Eastport, the road ahead a shiny, dark gray ribbon pelted with rain, the drops hitting so hard that they bounced up again, and the roadside puddles seemed to be boiling.

  “I mean, so he’s got a peeping arrest,” she went on. “That doesn’t mean he carved up some girl with a hunting knife.”

  Another glance, this one bemused. He drove fast and well, as she remembered, unfazed by the wet and murk outside the car.

  “No, Lizzie, it doesn’t. But something about his story just doesn’t jell. That’s why I want everything you can get, no matter how unimportant it seems,” he replied.

  A sudden downpour flooded the windshield; he turned the wipers to high. “Especially if he comes up with an alibi of some kind; as it is, from what I understand, he’s sticking with his original story, that he was out for a walk, nothing more. But we’re not buying it.”

  “But if he had an alibi”—one that was verifiable, Lizzie meant, not the goofball out-for-a-late-night-walk nonsense Hahn had tried to make fly—“why wouldn’t he have told you about it already?”

  Dylan shook his head. “No idea.” He changed the subject. “How’d you know what kind of weapon it was?”

  She explained about being there in the Tiptree house when the husband came in asking about the knife. “And from the look on his face, I didn’t think he’d just misplaced it.”

  “Aha. You must be a detective.” Zipping along through the rain, he attempted a comically mysterious expression, succeeded only in looking lovably goofy, and then several things happened:

  A van in the oncoming lane slowed suddenly, its turn signal flashing, fat waves of puddled rain sluicing away from its front tires. From behind it, a pickup truck swung out wildly, crossing the center line straight at the Saab.

  “Damn,” Dylan said tightly, swerving right. There would be, Lizzie realized as the pickup truck kept coming, room on their left. By straddling the center line, the truck headed straight at them could get by them.

  But the pickup didn’t stay on the center line. It crossed all the way over, and now she noticed the van that had originally slowed for its turn, somehow lying in the ditch on its side.

  The pickup must’ve rear-ended it, she realized, sending it out of control. That wasn’t the important thing, though. The important thing was the pickup truck itself, now filling up the whole windshield even though Dylan kept on trying to evade it by swerving onto the shoulder.

  Lizzie tried to relax, remembering how loose-limbed drunks always seemed to survive their driving mishaps. As a patrol cop, she’d shoved her own share of slurring fools uninjured into the back seats of squad cars …

  Then came a massive thud that stopped everything: the truck, the Saab, the world as she knew it. She felt the seatbelt yank itself viciously tight across her chest, her left arm flinging out as if reaching for the Saab’s front bumper, her neck stretching impossibly as her head flew forward and then was slammed back again, against the headrest.

  And then silence. Breathe in. Breathe out. Part of her knew she was alive and that any minute, she would have to do something about this. A whole laundry list of tasks had to be completed in the event of a serious motor vehicle accident.

  The trouble was, she couldn’t recall what any of them were. She blinked deliberately, hoping her mental switches would clear, but they’d been hit very hard by that pickup; just sitting there drawing slow breaths one after the next seemed to be all that she could accomplish at the moment.

  In fact, some small part of her felt good just being able to do that much. The part that says you’re lucky to be alive …

  Steam rose from the Saab’s radiator, boiling up in white billows into the dark afternoon of pouring rain. The smell of hot antifreeze confused her until she realized that the windshield was gone, shattered into a thousand greenish-white granules that lay all over her lap and the front passenger area.

  What was left of it. The whole dashboard seemed to have been moved back several inches toward the passenger seats, and most of the center console was crumpled, accordion-like, halfway into the rear compartment.

  No movement from the pickup truck. None from the van that had gone into the ditch over there, either. Really, it was very annoying that she couldn’t seem to think, couldn’t …

  Outside, other cars were stopping, people’s voices seeming to come from a distance. A cherry beacon flared rhythmically out there somewhere, getting nearer very fast.

  Now she could hear its siren. Good, she thought dully. It was good that the cops were coming now. But the Saab was a mess, and oh, Dylan was going to be so upset.

  He’d loved this car. He hadn’t said anything about it yet, but … Dylan.

  She turned very slowly. Her neck didn’t hurt yet, but it was going to. Careful, a little more …

  Shifting gingerly, she angled her body around toward the driver’s seat, while outside, the sirens screamed nearer and the rain hammered down.

  That was when she saw the blood.

  Twenty minutes later she sat in the front seat of Eastport police chief Bob Arnold’s squad car, its roof rack strobing the rainy gloom with red and its radio sputtering intermittently. The heater was on, but she shivered uncontrollably despite the warm jacket someone had thrown over her.

  The EMS guys had tried cajoling her into an ambulance, but she’d refused; as far as she could tell, sore muscles in her neck and shoulder would be her only injuries out of this mess.

  Dylan, though, was another story. From across the road, she watched them remove him from the bent and broken Saab, secure him to a stretcher, hustle him through yet another downpour, and hoist him up through the brightly lit back door of the emergency vehicle.

  He wasn’t bleeding anymore that she could see. But he wasn’t moving, either. A plastic oxygen mask covered his face; one of the EMTs held up an IV bag. She bit her lip hard as Bob Arnold appeared, leaning in through the open squad car window.

  “Here.” He thrust in a steaming-hot paper cup of coffee.

  She took it gratefully. “Thanks. Is he—?”

  Bob shook his head. “Breathing. Got a pulse. That’s all I know. Pickup driver bumped his head but that’s all, and those people in the van ended up okay, too, don’t ask me how.”

  She nodded, sipped some more of the hot liquid as Bob strode off again. Now that the adrenaline from the crash was fading, she felt flattened, as if most of her own blood had been drained from her. In the wind and rain, flashlight-carrying figures moved in the road, routing cars over onto the shoulder to get by, waving them along.

  The boxy red ambulance’s rear doors were closed, so she couldn’t see Dylan anymore. But he had a heartbeat, and he was breathing … Please, she thought. Just let him be okay.

  Even her anxiety over Dylan’s condition, though, didn’t wipe out her doubts over what he’d been saying just before the crash. He’d told her he wanted to hear anything she found out about Chip Hahn’s activities the night of the murder, incriminating or not. But the trouble was, she realized with deep regret as she sat in Bob Arnold’s squad car getting her wind back …

  The trouble was, she didn’t believe it. He was after the bad stuff, if there was any, or anything about Chip Hahn that Dylan might be able to make look bad. Not that she had any particular loyalties to the suspect, or to his hostess Jake Tiptree, either.

  Still, she’d rather liked Jake and her redheaded friend, Ellie White. They’d both seemed to be pretty straight-up people; she’d felt bad about, in effect, lying to them about who she was. So to stay straight with herself, Lizzie realized as she sat gathering her wits, there was one more thing she was going to have to do about this whole situation.

  And there’d be no need for Dylan to know what that one thing was, either, she tho
ught … because of course he was going to be okay, of course he was.

  The ambulance backed up, turned sharply, and sped toward her, activating its lights and siren as it went on by. Then a cop who’d been helping the EMTs sprinted over, one hand tucked into the front of his jacket as if protecting something he held.

  It was the young Eastport cop she’d gotten herself into the beef with last night, at the church. At the murder scene …

  When he reached her, his face changed, official courtesy giving way to recognition and personal dislike. “He said to give these to you.”

  “Who—?” Squinting through the gloom, she made out only the shapes of cops and fire department personnel, and of a tow-truck guy ready to haul the Saab up onto a flatbed. Confused, she took the sheet of paper the young cop held out.

  But then she saw what it was, and realized: Dylan must have been alert at some point after the crash, awake enough to—

  Hope energized her suddenly; she sat up straight. “Thank you,” she called after the departing officer, then looked down again at what Dylan, even injured and in pain as he must’ve been, had wanted her to have.

  It was the picture of Nicki—if it is her, Lizzie reminded herself—the photograph he’d received at about the same time as Lizzie herself had been getting two of them. But that wasn’t all. Folded behind the picture was a sheet of paper, a printout of something that someone had emailed to Dylan.

  Today, to judge by the date at the top. It was an annotated list of odd, alphabet-soup-like website addresses.

  Private websites, Lizzie realized, with addresses consisting of meaningless letter sequences; they could be accessed only by people who already knew about them, not casual Web surfers.

  The practical result, she knew from an Internet security in-service she’d taken in Boston, was that the sites were “members only,” but why?

  And then, from the websites’ real names noted alongside the scrambled ones—names with the words “death,” “women,” and much worse things figuring prominently in them—she understood why.