David shook his head vehemently. “Not like that. I never wanted a fire. Bobby died, for Christ’s sake. He was barely two years old. What kind of monster would have ever wished for that?”
“Maybe the person who set the fire didn’t realize Myra and Bobby were in there,” Reed suggested carefully.
David shrugged and pulled a Coke can toward him, popping the tab. “You’ll have to ask Carnevale. I hear he’ll be getting out any day now.”
“Myra’s story has always been interesting to me,” Ellery said. “The part where she took a young boy out late at night to a dark furniture store, supposedly in search of tax documents, seems odd. Couldn’t it have waited a few more hours? It doesn’t make sense that she’d be so desperate to get her hands on those papers that she’d go out with a two-year-old in the middle of the night. So I’m wondering if maybe she had another reason for being there.”
David pulled his T-shirt away from his throat and rolled his neck. “Such as?”
“Maybe she was meeting someone,” Ellery said.
“Maybe she was meeting you,” Reed supplied a moment later.
David flashed a nervous grin but shook his head. “That’s nuts. I just told you: I was home with Heather. Call her and ask her if you don’t believe me.”
“Right now, we’re asking you,” Reed said pointedly. “You’re the one who was known to conduct romantic liaisons out of the furniture store after hours.”
“Listen, I’m telling you: I wasn’t there that night. I wasn’t carrying on with Myra. The two of them were barely talking to me by that point.”
“Ah, but earlier,” Reed said. “Say around three years before the fire? How were your relations with Myra then?”
“Our relations, as you put it, were just fine. It was only when the business started falling into the crapper that things got tense. Besides, what sort of scenario are you generating here: you think I was trying to bed Myra in the store, and to set the mood, she brought her little kid along? It doesn’t make any damn sense.”
“Maybe she brought him along to see his father,” Reed said.
David’s left eye appeared to spasm. His hand clenched around the soda can. “Patrick was home sick,” he said shortly. “You know that.”
“Patrick doesn’t have a cleft chin,” Reed replied, and pulled out his cell phone to prove it. He called up the picture of Patrick Gallagher and held it up for David to see. David merely glanced at it.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I think the boy was yours.”
Finally, they’d struck a blow. David’s mouth fell open but only a faint wheezing sound came out. The can warped and bent under the force of his grip, and he started shaking his head, back and forth. “No,” he said. “No, that’s not possible. No.”
They let him sit there denying it to himself. He seemed almost in a trance, as if the idea had taken hold of his brain and zapped away all other thoughts. The more David said no, the more possible it seemed that Reed had guessed correctly. If David hadn’t slept with Myra, he would never be so rattled by the very concept.
“Myra told us,” Ellery said. “About the affair.”
She felt Reed stiffen by her elbow and knew she was taking a chance with this lie. Indeed, it seemed to yank David back to the table with them, as he twitched and focused a shrewd gaze on her. “Myra told you? She said we had an affair?”
He seemed to be measuring her, and so Ellery nodded for emphasis. David appeared to consider Myra’s transgression, but then he gave a snap shake of his head. “No, I don’t believe you. Myra would never admit to anything like that. Let me tell you about Myra, okay? She grew up one of eight kids, the youngest, always dirt poor and always ashamed of it. Then one day when she’s around fourteen, this man shows up at the house, claiming he’s her father, asking to see her. The family threw him out, but the damage was already done. Turns out, Myra’s mother was actually her older sister, Maureen. The people she knew as her parents were actually her grandparents, and the family had been lying to her all this time. She was born on the wrong side of the sheets. She doesn’t like to talk about it now, but it’s true. Her whole world with Patrick was built on respectability, on making sure they looked like an upstanding Christian family. It about killed her when Jacob got arrested for setting that fire at school. Never mind getting the kid some help—Myra wondered what the neighbors would think.”
Ellery was not going to let him derail the narrative. “You’re saying you didn’t have an affair with Myra. That there was no chance Bobby was your son.”
Reed helpfully called up the photo of Bobby, and this time David did look. He stared long and hard, and finally reached to take the phone in both hands, cradling it gently. “I haven’t seen his picture in years,” he said, his voice full of emotion. “Man, he was a sweet little guy. Didn’t say much but always had the biggest grin on his face…”
“You loved him,” Reed said softly.
David blinked wet eyes. “Sure. We all did.” He shoved the phone back in Reed’s direction. “No one in the family ever would have hurt a hair on that boy’s head. Not Myra, not me, and not—not his father.” He gulped in air in a pained gasp. “You—you should go now. I don’t think I can help you anymore.”
“There are still unanswered questions from that night,” Ellery said.
“Maybe there always will be,” David said, bracing his hand on the table. “Maybe that’s what we have to live with. It’s been twenty-six years. The state says it’s over with now—they’re letting Carnevale out, they’re moving on. Maybe we should all do the same.”
* * *
They said little on the trip home. Ellery eased forward in her seat to fiddle with the radio until she found the news, and it didn’t take long before Luis Carnevale’s story came up in the rotation. Bertie Jenkins gave a breathless, excited interview. “We are thrilled that the board has recognized Luis’s exemplary record while incarcerated and decided to set him free. Of course, we remain angry that he was ever locked up to begin with—the state fixated on Luis as the arsonist and never even investigated other people with motive to set fire to the Gallagher Furniture store. The twenty-five years he’s served are twenty-five too many.”
“Are you going to sue the state?” the radio interviewer asked.
“Now is not the time to discuss that,” Bertie replied. “Now is the time to rejoice in Luis’s freedom.”
The piece closed with a comment that Luis would be released within the next few days to a group home of some kind, where he would continue to be monitored on parole. The Gallagher family declined to comment on his release. Reed switched off the radio but kept his eyes on the road. “Maybe Luis was the answer all along,” he said. “Like Powell said, they locked him up and the fires stopped.”
“Maybe.” Ellery had turned her gaze to the window, watching the dark, bare-boned trees lined up along the stretch of highway. “Do you think Bertie will sue on Carnevale’s behalf?”
“She wouldn’t get very far if she did. You’d have to prove both that Luis Carnevale definitively did not set the Gallagher store fire and that the state knew this fact at the time it arrested him and convicted him of the crime. I don’t see that happening.”
Ellery turned back to look at him. “If we told her about The Blaze…”
Reed tightened his hands on the wheel. Ellery understood that selling out The Blaze meant possibly taking down McGreevy with him. “I’ve thought about that,” Reed said after a beat. “But what would he say—that he saw nothing that night? He’s not the crucial witness Luis Carnevale made him out to be. He saw Myra and her son and no one else, no one except Luis after the fact.”
“So that’s it, then. Everyone just walks away.”
“At this point, I’m not sure there’s another choice.”
Ellery looked away again, back out at the gray sky and passing scenery. She put her hand flat against the cold window and regarded its shape, how it mimicked the branches of the trees. Fro
m this angle she couldn’t see the scars, but she felt them always, or rather, she felt the absence of feeling, as her dead, wizened skin refused to transmit the sensory input from the cool, smooth glass. She and Bobby Gallagher would be about the same age, if he had lived. Maybe he would have inherited the family store and shared Patrick’s love of wood carving. Maybe he would have followed David into the restaurant business. Wherever he might have gone, there was a path out there somewhere in the world that was missing him. Ellery stroked the glass and felt his absence, the place he might have been.
* * *
Back at her apartment, Ellery escaped to her bedroom while Reed booted up his laptop to look for a flight home. She lay down gingerly, her bruises smarting even at the gentle contact of the pillows. Speed Bump jumped onto the bed and she winced at his enthusiastic snuggling. “Easy,” she told him. “I’m walking wounded.”
She scratched him behind his long ears, enjoying the quiet, until it was broken by Reed’s voice on the telephone a few moments later. She couldn’t make out what he was saying but didn’t have the energy to eavesdrop anymore. He would be leaving soon, going back where he belonged, and they might never see each other again. He could get promoted all the way up to Lord President of the FBI and go on normal dates with normal women. She told herself she didn’t care.
She picked up her own laptop, and the screen that flickered to life showed what she had been working on when she’d last logged off: all the possible names of the serial rapist. The next one on her list was Richard Hopkins, a thirty-year-old with a rap sheet nearly thirty pages long. He’d been in and out of the system starting with possession with intent to sell at age fourteen, and by the time he’d hit adulthood, he’d graduated to more serious felonies like assault (with a knife), attempted murder (again with a knife), and two counts of forcible rape. Despite all this, his longest stint inside totaled just three years. His victims, though, they all got life. Ellery could only imagine what Wendy’s reaction might be if they finally arrested the guy and he did just a couple of years for his crimes.
Reed came to hover in her doorway. She saw him in her peripheral vision but waited until he cleared his throat to actually look in his direction. “Booked a flight?” she asked, her voice high and tight.
“Er, not yet. I was on the phone with Heather Soto, David Gallagher’s ex-wife. For what it’s worth she says his ‘no hard feelings’ story is complete bullshit, but she does still back up his alibi for the night of the fire. She says he was home in bed with her. He may actually be telling the truth.”
“Right,” she said, returning her gaze to the screen. “I guess that settles it then.”
“Right. Settled.” He didn’t move from her doorway, but neither did he say anything else. She scanned a few dozen more faces and did not look at him. After a while, she heard him take a breath. “Okay, then. I guess I’ll go book that flight … unless there’s anything else you need from me.”
She regarded him with a neutral gaze. “What else could I possibly need?”
Her curt words had the desired effect. His face fell and then he nodded to himself. “I’ll make that reservation and get out of your hair.”
He disappeared and Bump rolled his head backward to look up at her with huge brown eyes. “Stop it,” she told him automatically. “He doesn’t actually live here, you know.”
She returned to her search, trying to get a line on Richard Hopkins. His latest parole had come just a year ago, but she found no current address for him. Information was easier to access when she had the power of a badge behind her. She couldn’t simply phone up the parole board and ask for Hopkins’s supervising officer. Outside in her living room, she heard Reed shuffling some papers and she regarded the empty space where he’d recently been standing. Maybe there was one last thing he could do for her.
Reed’s footsteps started heading for the door, and Ellery scrambled off the bed as fast as her sore body could carry her. “Wait,” she called out as she rounded the corner from the hallway. Reed stood with his hand on the doorknob, but he looked toward her, expectant. She swallowed. “Um, do you feel like getting a cup of coffee?”
He narrowed his eyes at her, appropriately suspicious. “You don’t like coffee.”
“Yes, but you do. What do you say? I’m buying.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, clearly not buying it. But at least he’d moved away from the door. “And what else will be happening while we drink this coffee? You’re not planning on surveilling another rapist, are you?”
“Of course not,” she replied, and Reed visibly relaxed.
“Good.”
“I have to find him first.”
Reed looked to the heavens in beseeching fashion. “Ellery…”
“If you could call the parole board and get the address, I’ll do the rest.”
He glared at her. “Rest, yes. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing. You’re still walking around with a goose egg on your head from your last encounter—an incident that ended with a dead man and the confiscation of your gun, if I’m remembering correctly. Hell, Detective Rhodes is probably sitting out there in her car, waiting for your next illegal maneuver so she can finally take you downtown!”
“Good! I hope she is watching. She can see what it looks like to work an actual case.” Ellery went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, but she felt Reed following her. He continued to press his case as she stood at the sink.
“This isn’t your case,” he argued. “It isn’t mine, either.”
“Fine,” Ellery said without turning around. “Go home then. I’ll find another way.”
He didn’t leave. He stood there watching her until she set down her empty glass and slowly turned to face him. His dark eyes looked her over probingly, and she had to force herself not to squirm under the intensity of his gaze. “Ellery,” he said finally, “you won’t ever stop them all.”
She stuck out her chin. “One name. That’s all I’m asking for.”
Reed let out a thin sigh and shook his head, but then he checked his watch. “How many names are left on your list?”
She exhaled in a rush. She’d been holding her breath, holding in hope. “Four.”
He waved his fingers at her. “Hand them over, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Reed worked the phones and fifteen minutes later, he was on the line with Darrin McKinney, parole officer for Richard Hopkins. Reed put him on speaker as he introduced himself and explained that he was interested in speaking to Hopkins.
“He’s got up to something and I don’t know about it?” McKinney asked. Ellery heard the sound of swift keyboard typing on McKinney’s end.
“I don’t know that he’s done anything at all,” Reed replied. “I’d just like to talk to him.”
“Talk about what? Hopkins has been keeping his nose clean eight months now, as far as we know. Did a check-in with him myself just two weeks ago.”
Ellery looked at Reed, who hesitated for a long moment. “It’s about a rape.”
Silence stretched on the other end. Then they heard leather creaking, as if McKinney had leaned back in his chair. “Hopkins is at 1244 West Selden Street,” he said grimly. “I’ll meet you there.”
Darrin McKinney beat them to the redbrick apartment building, where he stood outside smoking next to a dirty snow pile. To Ellery, he looked more like a fisherman from the docks, with his weather-worn face, thick flannel shirt, and rubber-soled boots. He dropped his cigarette butt into the slush as they approached. “I didn’t call to say we’re coming,” he told them as he nodded at the squat, rectangular building. “But he’s bound to be home. He always is, these days.”
The front door wasn’t locked, and so the three of them easily entered the nondescript lobby with its wall of metal mailboxes and gray linoleum floor. They added their own muddy footprints to the scrum as McKinney punched the elevator button with his thumb. “Hopkins is in 412,” he said.
“You’re authorized to search the premises, isn’t that
right?” Reed asked as they entered the elevator car. It gave a heavy groan and then lurched into motion.
“Sure, yeah. Anything in particular I’m looking for?”
“Women’s underwear. Jewelry. Driver’s licenses.”
McKinney gave a curt nod and hit the fourth-floor button again, harder this time, but the elevator continued its glacial ascent. Finally, the doors slid open to reveal a long, bare hallway with white walls and industrial-grade red carpet. “This way.” McKinney led them to the left, muttering as he walked. “He was supposed to be low risk.”
Ellery couldn’t hide her surprise. “He raped a woman in his car at knifepoint and abandoned her alone in the woods in the middle of winter, barefoot and half naked. He’s lucky he didn’t end up with a murder charge.”
“Yeah, but that was before.” McKinney rapped on the door marked 412. “Hopkins? McKinney here, open up.”
Ellery heard someone moving around on the other side, and she tried to prepare herself for Richard Hopkins’s appearance. She’d seen a bunch of these guys now, men who might pass as ordinary on the street but they appeared permanently defiled in her eyes. You couldn’t read about a man raping a fourteen-year-old girl until she’d bled from her rectum and ever hope to see him as normal after that. All of these monsters could be the guy they were looking for, but only one of them actually was. The problem was, she couldn’t trust her gut to know him when she saw him. Her gut reviled them all.
Finally, she heard a chain come loose from the inside of the door, and it pulled back slowly. At first, there seemed to be no one there, and Ellery blinked to clear her vision. A man in a wheelchair rolled into sight. He had scraggly brown hair and two missing teeth. “Officer McKinney, you’re back so soon. And you brought friends with you.”
“They’re from the FBI, Ritchie, and they have some questions for you. You don’t mind if we come in for a minute, do you?” McKinney had already pushed his way inside, but Reed and Ellery hung back in the hallway.
She looked at Reed and shook her head slightly. Hopkins wasn’t climbing in anybody’s window.
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 26
