From this information, DeMarco was able to surmise two things: that the withdrawals of eighty dollars each week were used to cover his admission to whatever strip club he had visited that night, his drinks, plus his champagne room visits. The combined six-hundred-dollar withdrawals were not.
The third fact DeMarco was able to glean from his information was this: Bonnie had lied.
DeMarco stared at the notes on his legal pad. He said, “Where would she and Huston spend six hundred dollars on a Thursday? Or maybe on Friday. Or both.” He already knew, thanks to an earlier call to the English Department secretary, that Huston had taken a personal day on the Thursday in question but had shown up for his afternoon office hours on Friday afternoon, then had rushed home in time to catch Tommy’s sixth-grade basketball game.
By all appearances, the writer’s life had veered from its routine only from approximately 6:30 a.m. Thursday until noon or so on Friday. A thirty-hour anomaly.
DeMarco asked himself who besides Bonnie could account for this change. Not Danni. Not Nathan. Possibly Bonnie’s brother, Moby, but DeMarco knew that if he contacted Moby, Bonnie would soon be alerted to it. What about Tex? Tex who? No last name, no last known residence, nothing but his association with Bonnie.
DeMarco needed another coffee after all. But he had filled his mug only halfway when a thought occurred to him. With coffeepot in hand, he walked briskly to Bowen’s office. He said, “I’m going to need Carmichael and Morgan for a little overtime tonight.”
“Of what nature?” Bowen asked.
“Tits and asses.”
“You want to see theirs?”
“Keep your fantasies to yourself,” DeMarco said. Then, “Plainclothes. I need them to watch Whispers from the inside while I watch it from the outside.”
“You have reason to believe Huston is going to show up there?”
“No. But the woman who owns the place. There’s something not right about her relationship with Huston. I think it went deeper than she claims. Plus there’s another character there who might be of some interest.”
“You sure this isn’t just an excuse to look at naked girls again?”
“That’s what I subscribe to Showtime for. Just authorize the fucking overtime and expense money, okay?”
“Expense money for what? Let me guess. The three of you are going to have to buy a few lap dances, right?”
“It costs fifteen dollars to get inside. If they don’t sit around the stage, they won’t have to tip the dancers. Besides, I want them sitting at a table, where they can keep an eye on the entire place. But they’ll have to look legitimate, for Chrissakes. A couple beers each, maybe a drink or two for the girls. It’s a hundred dollars max. Quit your bitching and take it out of petty cash.”
“That’s three troopers with what, four hours OT each?”
“Or pull our guys back and let the sheriff’s department and game commission handle it.”
Bowen blew out a noisy breath. “Any thoughts on what might be going through his head right now?”
“Huston’s? Pain. Grief. Anger. Murderous rage.”
“You have a theory, don’t you?”
“I always have a theory.”
“You going to share it with me?”
“E equals mc squared.”
Bowen sat motionless, staring hard at DeMarco’s face.
“What? It’s revolutionary. People are finally going to realize what a genius I am.”
Nodding his chin toward the coffeepot in DeMarco’s hand, Bowen said, “You drinking straight from the pot now?”
“I brought it for you, asshole. You want a refill or not?”
Bowen pushed his empty cup across the desk. “I’m getting a little annoyed with your insubordination, Ry. From now on, it’s Sergeant Asshole.”
DeMarco filled the cup. “In the spirit of love, peace, and harmony, sir, I will do my best.”
• • •
DeMarco returned to his office and set his coffee mug on the edge of the desk. Instead of refilling it, he had emptied it out and rinsed it clean in the lavatory. No more caffeine. His stomach was sour enough already, his mouth foul. He wished he had some chewing gum or breath mints, a candy bar, something to create the illusion of sweetness and cleanliness. But he had nothing. There was a vending machine in the lounge, but that was half a building away. Too far to walk for an illusion that would dissipate after a few minutes.
He turned to his right and looked at the whiteboard on which he had copied the names and notes from his legal pad. What usually happened when he was deep into an investigation was that one or two of his scrawls would appear to stand out from the rest, appear darker or slightly raised off the surface of the board, and he would know then that those names or clues were pivotal and held the keys to a resolution. But not this time. The longer he stared, the less distinct the writing became, the less legible, until all of it swam before his eyes in a blur.
“Go home and take a nap,” he told himself. He turned to the window behind his desk. It was still a beautiful day outside, blue skied and sunny. Warm enough that he could sit on his back patio with a jacket and gloves and a ski cap on, stretch out on the chaise lounge, lose consciousness for a while. Maybe he would try Huston’s prescription of meditation and progressive relaxation. Except that he didn’t know how to meditate. Did it involve prayer of some kind? Prayer had never worked for him. Television sometimes worked, but only at two or three in the morning with the volume low and the flickering images muted behind a glass of Jack and melting ice. Not a good prescription for an afternoon nap.
His eye was drawn then to the rose of Sharon bush outside his window. That bush had put him to sleep once. He still remembered how restful the nap had been, one dusky afternoon last spring. He had spotted a movement of some kind in the center of the bush, had pulled his chair close to the window for a better look. At first, he had had difficulty making sense of the object in the shadows; it fit no preconception. Gradually, the object separated into two objects, and he saw that the lower one was a bird lying on its back. The other object, a second bird, was standing over it and lightly pecking at the first bird’s neck. His first thought was cannibalism, one bird eating another. But as he watched he realized that he was witnessing a courtship, two cardinals engaged in foreplay. The female, on her back, would turn her head this way or that, allowing the male to nuzzle his bright beak against her.
DeMarco remembered the sense of lightness he had felt while watching the birds, a quiet kind of happiness. He had leaned back in his chair and watched them just over the windowsill, and at some point, he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep. When he’d awakened a half hour was gone, but he’d felt as if he had slept for ten hours. Afterward the day had been clean and new again. On his way home that afternoon, he had stopped at a local travel agency and picked up brochures about Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Bahamas. He had made up his mind to take a vacation in the summer, leave everything behind in drab Pennsylvania, all the crimes and bloodstains and adumbrations. He had held onto that plan well into July. Now it was November and he could not remember where he had put the brochures.
Forty-One
The night was cool and smelled of woodsmoke, the kind of late autumnal night that, in other circumstances, might have found Thomas and Claire Huston lying on their backs on a blanket in the backyard, holding hands and watching the stars with Alyssa snuggled against her father, Tommy with his head on his mother’s shoulder. The adults would take turns pointing out constellations, maybe telling the story of Orion and Artemis, recounting how the Seven Sisters had committed suicide and were then turned into stars by Zeus. Tommy would probably turn the talk to aliens, while Alyssa remained contemplative and silent, alert for a shooting star. A foot or so behind Thomas’s head, a speaker from the baby monitor would be humming softly, a barely audible murmur of comforting white noise.
But tonig
ht, there were no comforting sounds for Thomas Huston. Music from inside Whispers came to him disjointed and jarring, bass thumps and screeching guitars. The temperature was in the midfifties, but he could not stop shivering. Before leaving the equipment shed in Bradley that afternoon, he had anticipated the night’s chill and had searched the shed for something extra to wear, something less filthy than the torn quilted jacked. He had found a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt that had been rolled into a ball and stuffed onto the top shelf behind some batting helmets. The sweatshirt was a good fit, had probably belonged to one of the coaches, who had pulled it off on a warm day, threw it aside, and forgot about it. It was stiff with dust but loosened up after a vigorous shaking. He wore it now with the hood pulled low over his ball cap, the drawstring snug beneath his chin, his hands drawn up into the sleeves. It had kept him warm enough while hiking, but now, every minute or so, as he huddled in the trees behind the gravel lot, a spasm of shivers would seize him, spreading out from his solar plexus and down his spine.
At other moments he felt feverish. His eyes burned and his stomach fluttered with nausea from time to time. He had been too nervous all day to eat anything, had drunk only a can of Diet Pepsi purchased from a vending machine outside of a gas station just thirty minutes earlier.
Now he lowered himself onto his knees in the darkness of the tree line. The low trees and bushes grew to the very edge of the gravel lot, which left him a mere twenty yards from the building, from Annabel. The only illumination at the rear of the building came from the bare yellow bulb above a door with neon-yellow lettering that said Employees Only. All Others Use Front Entrance.
On a couple of occasions in the past, he had waited in his Accord for Annabel to come out that door and join him in his car so they could talk. If he had his cell phone, he could call and she would come immediately—he knew she would—and surely she would have the answers he needed. She would help him now just as he had helped her. But all he could do was kneel and wait. Eventually she would step outside for a break from the noise and strobing light, the smells of beer and desperation. Only three weeks ago, though it seemed months past to Huston, she had done just that. “I’m going to take a breather in a few minutes,” she had said. “How about if we continue this conversation out in your car?”
Tonight, there had been only seven cars in the lot when he’d arrived, but four more had pulled up in the last thirty minutes, one with two males, one a single male, and two cars each occupied by a dancer. He wished he could have called out to one of the girls, asked her to tell Annabel he needed to talk to her, but he could not take that chance. After his first visit, the word had quickly spread that he was a mere spectator, that except for his single private dance each night, he was there only to observe, and that if he wanted anything else, he would smile and nod his head and a girl would come to his table. So now it would not be safe for him to speak to anyone but Annabel. He would have to wait.
He thought that maybe Annabel would let him go home with her when Whispers closed, let him have a shower and shave, feel like a human again, at least on the surface. She would have information for him, answers, an explanation. Maybe a weapon of some kind. She seemed like the type of woman who would keep a gun at home.
He shivered and waited. From time to time he looked up at the stars.
It happened sooner than he expected. He thought he might have to wait until midnight for her breather, but suddenly the door opened and she was there, standing in the yellow light, peering out into the darkness. At first he could not believe it had happened so soon, and he stared for a moment as if she were an apparition. Then he pressed a hand to the tree trunk and pulled himself to his feet. He had not thought about how to best approach her at this moment, how to make her aware of his presence without frightening her. He blew air through his teeth, just wanted to catch her attention. “Sssss!”
But it wasn’t loud enough. She remained in the doorway, kept scanning the parking lot. He took a step forward, felt a thorny branch against his neck, put out a hand to push it away.
Then a car door opened, the dome light dark. “Over here,” the man inside said, and blinked a flashlight on and off. He was sitting in a light-brown Bonneville, one of the seven cars that had already been in the lot when Huston arrived.
Annabel strode toward the man’s open door. Huston thought she appeared angry, walking with an adamant stride, leaning forward. But before she reached the car, the man pulled his door shut, then the passenger door popped open. Annabel altered her path, crossed in front of the car, bent down beside the open door. Huston heard her say, “All right, so what’s this about?”
The man’s response was muted and indecipherable. Annabel straightened, looked back toward Whispers, stood motionless for a few seconds. “This is bullshit,” she said. Then she faced the car again, climbed inside, and shut the door.
Huston retreated a bit deeper into the trees. He watched the car but could see only the silhouettes of their heads and shoulders. She did not move close to the driver, nor he to her. Over the next fifteen minutes, bits of their conversation were loud enough to reach Huston but only as dull intonations, mere sounds. He had no idea what was transpiring inside that car. More importantly, no idea about what to do when Annabel emerged from the car. If he revealed himself so as to catch her attention, the man in the car would see him too, would see a hooded figure calling out from the edge of the woods. But if he did not, Annabel would return to Whispers, in which case he would probably have to wait until the club closed for her to come back outside.
In the end, he decided that the best course of action was to wait. At two a.m. the customers would all leave, then the employees. So he should wait. He would sit and tremble and wait.
Annabel remained in the man’s car for approximately twenty minutes. Then suddenly the rear door of Whispers sprang open. The rectangle of yellow light was filled by the figure of a large man, his shoulders nearly as wide as the doorframe, arms thick with muscle. In his right hand, he held a baseball bat against his leg.
Now the driver’s door on the car in the lot popped open. His dome light did not come on. Huston looked back and forth from the two men, one standing and enveloped in light, the other seated in darkness. The man in the car said, “You need to go back inside, pardner.”
The man in the doorway started forward. The baseball bat swung back and forth beside his leg.
The man in the car slid out and stood up, turned on a powerful flashlight, and aimed it directly into the other man’s eyes. “This is state police business,” the man said. “And I am telling you to go back inside. Now.”
The man with the baseball bat stood motionless. Five seconds passed. Finally he took a step and a half backward, then turned, retreated inside, pulled shut the door. The other man slid inside the car again and softly closed his door.
Thomas Huston could not breathe. He could hear the sound of breathing coming from his mouth, one quick gasp after another, but he could get no air into his lungs. There was only blackness now, no oxygen, everything extinguished by the face of the man with the baseball bat, the voice of the man in the car. He had recognized both of them. And now, everything else except that knowledge was suffocated, stabbed out. Huston stumbled backward, back through the trees, falling against one and then another until he finally wheeled around, gasping for air, sucking in the blackness, plunging blindly through the branches. He could not breathe, could not think, could do nothing but plunge deeper and deeper into the woods while his chest ached as if stabbed again and again and again by the knife of recognition.
Forty-Two
With his car radio turned low, DeMarco could occasionally hear a particularly loud blast of rock music from inside Whispers, and it never failed to set his teeth on edge. More often, he felt the noise as a thrum of vibration on his skin, a recurring itch. He had the radio tuned to Erie’s NPR station in hopes that the soft-voiced host and the strains of Coltrane and Monk woul
d lessen the unquiet he felt, the jitteriness that resulted from having to sit too long with empty hands and a sober mind. He had been watching the parking lot for nearly eighty minutes now, only a few minutes longer than Morgan and Carmichael had been inside, dressed like golfers fresh from nineteen holes. During that time, each trooper had made a visit to the men’s room to make a cell phone call to DeMarco. Bonnie remained at her station behind the bar, they reported, and displayed no signs of nervousness, no particular interest in anybody there. None of the customers bore any resemblance to Thomas Huston.
DeMarco could not have explained, had he been asked to do so, why he expected Huston to show up there tonight. Yet he felt certain of it. Somehow, this place or Huston’s relationship with Bonnie was integral to the slaughter at the Huston home. DeMarco knew it, Huston knew it, Bonnie knew it. And Huston was a creature of routine, a man who, like many, employed routine as a palliative, a damp blanket laid over the fires within. He had spent several Thursday nights in a row in the same place Bonnie had, even the one Thursday night neither had shown up at Whispers—this, DeMarco knew in his gut. Then Claire, Tommy, Alyssa, and Ryan had been murdered, and Huston had been spotted wandering through the dawn in a daze. Now it was Thursday night again. Where else would Huston go, distraught as he surely was, consumed by either guilt or rage?
DeMarco checked his wristwatch again: 10:07. “Where the fuck are you?” he said.
Finally he had to admit to himself that he had been wrong. Huston was not coming. DeMarco sent a text message to both troopers: Send her out. With luck, one of them would feel the vibration through the booming rattle of Def Leppard.
Two Days Gone Page 19
