by Linda Barnes
I pretended to accept his lie.
“And that’s why you hate the Camerons,” I said.
“They used me. They’ll use you, too, girl. Sorry, sorry. Girl’s what I grew up with. It’s hard to change.”
I’d have felt better if he hadn’t thrown in that last apology. He was damned good, but he was a barefaced liar. Had he concocted the suicide tale himself or had Tessa briefed him? Franklin, before he died? Garnet?
Between them, the Camerons had constructed several lines of defense: First, simplest, innocent Thea was murdered by Albion; second, only if required, Thea killed herself and MacAvoy helped set Albion up to play patsy.
Problem: Neither take seemed worth the kind of money the Camerons had shelled out to MacAvoy.
“There was a funeral,” I said conversationally. “Who’s really buried in Thea’s grave?”
He shifted, rubbed his knee.
“All I know is she’s buried in sanctified ground. There’s a tomb, and the case is closed and cold as my bones in January.”
She, not Thea, not Dorothy.
“So why would someone pretend to be Thea now?”
“Rattle some skeletons in the Cameron closet,” he suggested with satisfaction. “It would have to be someone close to the family.”
“Or someone close to the investigation,” I said.
“Nix that.”
“The other daughter, Beryl, the one ‘headed to the looney bin,’ you ever interview her?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I saw enough crazies on the street, thank you. I didn’t have to check out the ones in padded cells.”
“You remember her doctor’s name?”
“You don’t ask much,” he said ruefully. “Why in hell should I?”
“Was it Andrew Manley? Guy who died in Marblehead last night?”
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s enough. That’s all. I’m a tired old man. Leave me in peace.”
“I could,” I said quietly, “if you’d tell me the truth.”
“I’ve told the truth.”
“You told me a good story, Mac. Not the truth. There’s a difference.”
“Get away from here.”
“I especially like the part about the grieving father removing the silver ring. You make that up yourself?”
“What would you know about any of it?” he asked.
“The Camerons aren’t fools. Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars is way too much to pay a cop to turn a suicide into a murder.”
“Six hundred and fifty—what are you saying, girl?”
They must have paid even more, to account for the boat and the Cape properties.
I said, “Of course, it’s not too much to pay for a murder. Did Franklin Cameron pay you to kill Thea?”
“Murder? You’ve lost your senses.”
“You’re going to have a hard time explaining away that real estate, Sergeant. On your retirement? You shouldn’t be slapping down any twenties on bar tables. The cottage is a good cover, and so’s the ‘I hate all Camerons’ routine, but it’s not enough. The money, and the file erasures, and the simple fact that you got total control of the case all scream cover-up.”
He had a grip on my arm. “Are you saying I killed someone? I never drew my weapon on duty except once, and then I never fired it.”
“Too bad you got greedy.”
“And you’re not working for money, I suppose.” He rose to his feet slowly, an old bull elephant, a rogue. He grabbed me by the arm, tried to get a stranglehold on me. I let him walk me a few steps into the tide. I wasn’t going to hit him unless I had to. He was an old drunk. His strength had deserted him. His fury I could handle.
“I want the truth,” I said.
“What’s truth, anyway? An old whore, there’s truth for you.”
“What did the Camerons pay for?”
“Concealing a suicide.”
“The truth, dammit.” I recited the nine-digit number. “What does that mean? Why did you erase it off Thea’s file? Why?”
I wasn’t sure if it was the number or the tide. MacAvoy took a wavering step and collapsed. Goddamn, I thought, he’s having a heart attack! For a moment we both splashed around. I righted myself, turned to find him.
He had a gun pointed at my left eye.
43
Time settled over us like a blanket of dust. I had all eternity to notice that MacAvoy didn’t hold a matte black pistol in his two-handed grip. Black, I might not have seen the details. Moonlight glinted off the stainless steel finish of the big SIG-Sauer automatic. Maybe that’s how he spent the money, I thought, buying expensive guns.
I smiled at him, my best effort. It must have looked ghastly.
“Your whole career, you never shot anybody,” I said, keeping my voice rock steady. “You’re not going to start with me, are you?”
Deliberately, I turned the last sentence into a question. Keep him talking.
“Why’d you have to mess with it? After all these years?” he asked.
“The nine-digit number, the one you erased, what’s it mean?”
“Can you swim?”
“No,” I lied, letting my tone and my breathing register panic. “Not well.”
“I’m a crack shot,” he said. “Maybe you oughtta just swim out to sea, keep going till I can’t draw a bead on you anymore. Give you, like, a sporting chance.”
“I’d never make it,” I said, hoping he’d give me the opportunity. The water felt cool and murky. I lifted one foot, then the other. My sandals floated free. I took inventory. My clothing was light, nothing that would weigh me down. I’d hate to soak the miniature tape recorder. My S&W 40, at forty-one ounces, was centered in the small of my back.
MacAvoy said, “Too bad this didn’t happen twenty-four years ago. Your body could have been mistaken for Thea’s. The family wasn’t fussy about a likeness.”
As he spoke he waved the gun, motioning me away from shore. The water was up to my rib cage. I wondered how good a swimmer he was. The tide was sucking us both deeper.
He started to laugh, possibly the beer catching up. The gun barrel didn’t waver.
“What’s funny?” I asked mildly.
“What some people pay for,” he said. “That’s funny. The way some people think that more money than a guy ever dreamed of—more than he could even imagine—is peanuts. That’s fuckin’ funny. People and money.”
He wasn’t drunk, but he was happy. He’d flashed the gun, but now that the shock value had worn off, I didn’t believe he’d use it. The man acted like he wanted to talk; maybe he needed the weapon in order to feel he was in control of the situation.
I encouraged speech with another question.
“You thought the Camerons offered too much?” I asked.
He was facing the shore. I was staring out to sea, considering the tide, feeling the ocean rhythm, praying for a sudden crashing wave. Undertow. Riptide.
“The damn number you’re so interested in,” MacAvoy said teasingly. “It’s a cross-reference, to a missing persons file. What do you think about that?”
He sounded so full of himself, so boastful. I thought of all those nights at the bar, when he hadn’t been able to one-up his cronies. A rich man, a clever man, a man who had to walk down to the beach to get drunk alone, so he wouldn’t spill his secrets.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I didn’t kill anyone. Don’t you see? Yeah, I got Albion to confess to another one. Big deal. What did he care? What did it matter, where he was going? For the Camerons, Dorothy’s disappearance wasn’t such hot stuff either, you know? The big deal for them was this: Two people disappeared the same day! Dorothy Cameron and the family gardener, some no-account bum named Alonso Nueves. I was paid for Albion’s confession, sure, but mostly I was paid to make damn certain that nobody ever connected those two disappearances. That’s the God’s truth.”
He started laughing again.
“Better their daughter sh
ould be dead, you know? Better a Cameron girl should get murdered than to run off with a fuckin’ gardener.”
“Put the gun away,” I said. “Mac, face it, you’re a cop, not a killer.” I wasn’t afraid of him. There’s a tension in someone’s face, in their arm, in their whole being, before they pull the trigger. MacAvoy wasn’t even breathing hard.
The bright light on shore shocked both of us. A deep voice boomed, shouting against the roaring ocean waves. I couldn’t understand a single word.
For a moment the ex-sergeant stood frozen. Then he drew the wrong conclusion.
“Goddamn you, you set me up!” he muttered, and all the murderous energy he’d been lacking poured through his body, an almost visible impulse from brain through spine to shoulder, racing down his arm toward his trigger finger.
I filled my lungs and dove to the side, kicking for the sandy bottom. I expected a shot, sudden pain, but none came. I kept moving my arms, kicking my legs until I had to breathe or burst.
When I surfaced, I tried not to gasp for air, to inhale quietly.
I was much farther out to sea than MacAvoy. He’d chosen to target the beacon on the beach, firing round after round. If I could swim nearer … My hand closed on the S&W 40 in my waist clip.
I couldn’t swim with the gun in my hand. Its weight unbalanced my stroke. I tucked it back in my clip, slid underwater.
There was no light, no sound. No way to gauge my progress.
This time I surfaced badly, close to MacAvoy, but not close enough to grab him.
“Bitch!” MacAvoy yelled when he saw me.
He gazed at the light on the beach, at the moonlit sky. He didn’t point his gun at me. Suddenly he turned, opened his mouth, stuck it in, deep, so that most of the barrel disappeared.
“No,” I screamed. The noise was soft, a gentle pop.
I got the full back-lit effect. The sudden jerk of MacAvoy’s head, the recoil that dropped his arm and gun into the sea. The back of his skull opening, leaking blood and coral. I could close my eyes, I thought, and still see it, over and over.
I made a retching noise, grabbed my gun, and aimed at the light. Anger flooded me. Whoever the hell was on shore—the Windbreaker Man, DEA, the police, a mob hit man—had scared MacAvoy into the long silence, and he’d never tell me more about the man who disappeared with Thea Janis.
“Stop,” screamed a voice. “Don’t shoot. I’m hit. I’m on your side.”
On my side. Right. So why was I the one who pulled the ex-sergeant’s bloody corpse out of the sea? Why was I the one holding a dead man and wishing I could remember the words, the all-important words of my father’s religion? All I could mumble was “Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done.” I said it twice, three times, four. It wasn’t absolution. I couldn’t have granted absolution, but how I wished I could recall the Latin words.
44
Thank God for full moons. I finished dragging MacAvoy’s remains onto the sand, fully appreciating the term “dead weight” as I rolled him out of the water. Slowly, I approached the beacon, a huge battery-powered flash, the type used to warn drivers away from major accidents. He was on the ground, moaning: Mr. Windbreaker, Mr. Denim Jacket, leaking blood from a leg wound.
I found that I had MacAvoy’s SIG-Sauer in my hand. I didn’t remember retrieving it. It felt slightly heavier than my 40. The stainless steel glittered.
What kind of harebrained idiot stands next to a light and yells at an armed man holding a prisoner in the ocean? A sniper lurks in the background, wears black, uses an infrared scope and a target piece. Silence and stealth are his weapons.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
He clamped his lips, so I delved into his pants pocket, and extracted a battered wallet. Driver’s license for one Ralph Farrell. MasterCard for same. I compared the driver’s license photo with the drawn features of the man on the ground. Ralph Farrell, all right. A total stranger.
“Talk,” I said, waving MacAvoy’s piece.
“Get me to a hospital, Carlotta.”
“As soon as I know how you know my name, and not a second before.”
He said nothing. I walked away.
“Carlotta!”
“You could bleed to death,” I said through gritted teeth. “Hell, I might shoot you myself.”
“Keith Donovan,” he said faintly.
“What?”
“I’m an investigator. Mainly bodyguard stuff. Keith Donovan hired me. He said you were in danger. A threatened mob hit, but he knew you weren’t taking it seriously. I told him a blind tail wouldn’t work, especially with a pro, but—”
“But he paid you,” I said, blood roaring in my ears. Donovan.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked sharply.
“Lady, will you fuckin’ take me to a hospital? And put the damn gun down.”
“When did he hire you?”
“First of the month.”
Before I’d even known that Thea Janis and Dorothy Cameron were one and the same. Before Paolina’s father had disappeared.
“Who told Donovan about the hit?” I asked.
“I don’t know. How the hell should I know? I’m bleeding here, lady. I saved your fuckin’ life.”
My hand shook. I could have killed Ralph Farrell, Donovan’s goddamned unsolicited answer to my imagined cry for help.
For a brief moment, I wished I had. Considered it. Easier to explain to the cops. With two corpses, I could spin a fine tale: MacAvoy kills Farrell, kills himself. I’d never used my gun.
Fini.
We were at the end of the earth, on the ocean, in a quiet cove. Nobody’d heard the shots. I could have left MacAvoy, his gun beside him, walked away clean.
Farrell was groaning, making like MacAvoy’d hit a major artery, and he was watching his life’s blood flow onto the sand. I knelt to get a better look. It was a clean, in and out wound through the fleshy part of the calf. I managed to rip the lining out of his sweat-stained windbreaker, fashion a pressure bandage.
“Can you drive?” I asked. “Where’s your car?”
Nothing but a shiny upturned face. Not even a grunt.
I had to bundle Farrell into my car, get him to a hospital. He was loath to enter without me. Seemed to think he’d done something terrific. Ought to get a reward.
I said, “That old man wouldn’t have killed me. I was never in any danger.”
“Sure,” Ralph Farrell muttered. “He just pulled his gun to show off.”
I dumped him on the doorstep of the nearest medical center, told him to tell the cops any fantasy that appealed to him.
“Oh, I will,” he said.
“Remember,” I said. “This gun is registered to a dead man. If they let you go, trot back to your employer. Tell him I will be in touch. Tell him he did the wrong thing. Tell him I could have fucking killed you.”
“You’re angry.”
“Tell him that, too.”
I drove back to the beach. I was finding too many corpses. I wasn’t linked to the one in Marblehead. Yet. Could I afford to get tied to this one?
Could I leave him here, the crooked old cop who’d taken his pension in real estate instead of respect?
Did I have a friend on the Marshfield squad?
Nope.
Did I have a friend on the Boston squad?
If my numbers really matched the tag on an old missing persons file, I might.
I dragged MacAvoy’s body further up the beach, staggering under the weight of him, avoiding his ruined head with my eyes and my hands. I keep a coil of rope in the trunk of my car. I tied one end tightly around his legs, tied the other to a piling behind the old stone wall, relic of an ancient pier. Probably the same piling he’d used to tie off his six-packs.
I opened my shirt and ripped the tape off my bra, stared at the soaked mini-recorder. The spindles had stopped turning. I hoped it was the end of the side, not irreparable water damage.
I lef
t the recorder on the seawall, crawled down the beach, curling into the salt water, inching deeper until it covered me, washing away the blood and stink. When I thought of all the answers MacAvoy could have given me, all the secrets lost in bright blood and tissue, floating out to sea, I could have cried. I’m not sure I didn’t. I splashed my face. It was all salty water. An infinite wash of tears.
For whom?
For MacAvoy, making his final move so suddenly I couldn’t stop him. A crooked cop.
For Thea lost long ago? For near-speechless sedated Beryl? For a mother with no daughters? For an unmourned, forgotten missing man, possibly the sole innocent, and the way they’d all come together twenty-four years ago and spoiled their lives forever.
After I’d retrieved the recorder and rubbed MacAvoy’s SIG-Sauer with sand and hurled it into the ocean, I called Mooney from a gas station.
45
Home is where they have to take you in, no matter how battered, bruised, or broke. I don’t have that kind of home. I have friends. I have Gloria. I have Mooney.
He met me at a rest stop on Route 3, dropped off by an unmarked unit. Found me barefoot and shivering at a picnic bench, elbows on the table, heels of my hands pressed into my brow. He coaxed me into my car, fiddled with the heater. He waved the officer in the unit off to Boston, then listened to everything I had to say—no interruptions. He waited a few minutes, as though he were chewing and digesting each word.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
That’s what I should have said to MacAvoy: It wasn’t your fault. Universal absolution.
“What do you mean, it wasn’t my fault?”
“You want to take credit, go ahead. But MacAvoy messed with the records, MacAvoy took Cameron money. What with you out there asking questions, he was probably thinking about the end of the road, keeping his piece in his pocket when he went beer drinking by the ocean. You sped up the action, that’s all.”
That’s all. I swallowed a lump as big as a goose egg and tried not to see the ocean water change color around MacAvoy’s misshapen head.
