Hollis made no reply. He watched the bearded driver begin to work the winch on his truck.
“Nobody saw anything. I asked in the neighboring places after I phoned you. Whoever it is is careful, sly. And lucky.”
“Yeah. Whoever it is.”
“Not Ryan, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Just what I’m thinking.”
“No,” she said. “When I took Kenny to day care this morning I asked him about that Saturday in May, his lunch with Mommy and Daddy. We thought it was just the three of them, but it wasn’t. Rhona was there, too.”
“So what?”
“Ryan went home with her afterward.”
“Kenny told you that? He’s six years old, Cass. You can’t trust a six-year-old’s memory.”
“Let me finish. I called Rhona after I dropped Kenny off. She confirmed it. Ryan spent the rest of that day with her and her family. Had dinner with them, didn’t leave their house until after eight o’clock.”
“And you believed her. How do you know she wasn’t lying?”
“Would her husband lie, her kids? They were there, too. Why would Ryan ask them to lie for him? There isn’t anything to connect him to Rakubian’s death, no reason for him to prepare an alibi for himself.”
He couldn’t argue with the logic of that, and he didn’t try. But he remained unconvinced until after they got home and he talked to Fred Gugliotta on the phone. Pierce had spent the entire day on the ranch, working with Fred and two others baling hay. From 8 A.M. until 4:30 he hadn’t been out of Fred’s sight for more than a few minutes.
20
Tuesday Morning
EVEN with the living room closed off, the house had an oppressive feel after Cassie left with one of her co-workers for Animal Care. Yesterday, home alone, he hadn’t been so aware of the aura of violation because he’d had ways to keep his mind occupied; there weren’t enough distractions today to fill the time until his one o’clock appointment with Stan Otaki. Neither Camden Home Security nor Tom Finchley could get started until later in the week, and sitting around doing nothing, waiting for the mail, waiting for something else to happen, would have him climbing the walls. Work was what he needed. Human contact and the illusion of normalcy.
He let Fritz in from the back porch, giving the Doberman free run of the house. The dog was housebroken and well trained; there wouldn’t be any problem unless somebody tried to break in again. Hollis found himself wishing that would happen. That he’d come home later, find Fritz growling over a bloody, chewed-up, half-dead intruder in the front hallway. The image made him smile with his lips flat against his teeth. He’d buy the Doberman a steak a day for the rest of his life if that happened.
He drove to the office at nine-thirty. The morning went well enough except for a call from Pete Dulac about a minor problem with the Chestertons’ master bedroom. Every time he had contact with Dulac or Shelby Chesterton these days, he felt twinges of guilt and shame, and it was worse now that he knew how wrong he’d been about Eric; he stayed on the phone just long enough to provide a solution to the problem and to find out that PAD Construction was still on schedule for completion at the end of September.
Mannix arrived shortly after eleven. Late as usual and in one of his uncommunicative moods. With Gabe there, the illusion of normalcy faded and left Hollis tense, unable to concentrate.
Gabe wore a black sweater and black slacks; hunched over his board he seemed almost predatory, like a giant bird of prey. Ridiculous image, but once lodged in Hollis’s mind it would not go away. He kept glancing over there, watching Mannix consult spec sheets and code books, the quick jerky movements of his hands as he manipulated T-square and pencil. Big hands, strong hands. It’s not Gabe, it’s not Gabe … like song lyrics beating percussively until they lost all sense or meaning. And still, in spite of himself, his eyes kept shifting, watching, as though they were independent organisms no longer under his control.
After a while Mannix sensed it and swiveled his head, scowling. “What?” he said.
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“My fly open, piece of snot hanging out of my nose?”
Gloria was listening. She said, “Now, that’s disgusting,” and laughed appreciatively.
Hollis said, “I’m twitchy today, that’s all.”
“So am I. You’re not making it any better.”
“Another hangover?”
“King-size. I collect ’em like bottle caps, didn’t you know?”
“Sorry,” he said again.
“Don’t apologize. Just let me suffer in peace.”
Suffer. SUFFER!
Hollis stood and went into his cubicle. Developing a headache now. He opened the blinds, stared out. Downriver, the drawbridge was parted into two upslanted halves; a tall-masted sailboat with its sails furled was gliding in toward the turning basin, its hull and superstructure cream-colored against another overcast sky. Restless, that sky, the clouds being driven inland by high winds. The colors up there were varying shades of gray, with traceries of black like poisonous veins.
Poison, he thought.
An evil time bred that, too, a slow, insidious psychological contamination that changed your outlook, ate away perspective, turned you sick and withered inside. You saw people differently, as if through a dark filter. Everyone seemed to be a potential enemy, or at best a hindrance or an irritant—close friends, even members of your own family. It was happening to him, here and now. He couldn’t be in the same room with his partner and best friend without wondering if maybe, just possibly, despite all the arguments against it, the stalker was Gabe. The same thing had happened with Ryan Pierce. Hating him, condemning him without any real justification. Who would he start suspecting next? Gloria, who didn’t have a mean bone in her body? Pete Dulac? Shelby Chesterton? Eric again? Cassie, for God’s sake?
Poison, as virulent as any of the chemical variety. And only one sure antidote: the identity of Rakubian’s murderer.
Cassie, last night: “I wish we still had the dossier on Rakubian. There might have been something in it, a name from his past, some clue. The person doesn’t have to be anyone we know, does he?” But Hollis didn’t need the actual dossier; he knew it by heart, and it had contained nothing to point to anyone past or present. Besides, what possible motive could a stranger, one of Rakubian’s long list of enemies, have for stalking them?
“What if it’s two people?” she’d said. “The one who killed him a stranger, the one tormenting us someone we know.”
He couldn’t credit that at all. Too much coincidence, too little motivation. Cassie didn’t really believe it any more than he did. The same person was responsible, for whatever reason; and it had to be someone known to them, perhaps not intimately as he’d first believed, but well enough to have formed and nurtured an irrational hatred.
Not Gabe. Definitely not Gabe.
But the poisonous seed of doubt was still there.
Goddamn it, he thought, I can get rid of it. I don’t need the antidote for that. Just suck it up and spit it out.
He went back out front. Mannix was on the phone; he waited until the conversation ended and then said, “Let’s take a walk.”
“Walk? What for?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“So talk. It’s cold outside and I’ve got a lunch in fifteen minutes—”
“This won’t take long. And it’s important.”
He pulled his overcoat off the rack, slipped it on as he pushed through the door. Mannix followed him, scowling, a few seconds later. They walked across the grass strip that separated their building from the River House, down past the restaurant’s outdoor patio and along the seawall toward the turning basin. The wind was sharp enough so that they had to hunch their bodies against it.
“Freeze our asses off out here,” Mannix grumbled. “What’s so important?”
“David Rakubian.
“What about him?”
“What do you think happened to him?”
<
br /> “We know what happened. He disappeared.”
“How? Why?”
“What the hell is this, Bernard?”
“Is he dead? What’s your take on that?”
“Sure he’s dead. If he wasn’t, he’d’ve shown up by now and started making everybody’s life miserable again.”
“How do you suppose he died?”
“Somebody killed him. A hero, in my book.”
“Who?”
“Listen,” Gabe began, and stopped, and then said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let’s quit all this pussyfooting around. What’re you trying to get me to say, that I think you bumped the son of a bitch off?”
“Is that what you think?”
“Come on, man. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who killed him, just so long as he’s dead.”
“It makes a difference to me.”
“All right, then. Yes, I think you did the deed. I also think you deserve a medal for it. Satisfied?”
“I didn’t kill him,” Hollis said. “I planned to, I even convinced myself I had the guts to go through with it—not once but twice. Somebody beat me to it.”
“No shit?”
“You, Gabe?”
“… What?”
“Was it you?”
Mannix stopped walking, turned to gape at him. Then he threw his head back, let loose a bray of laughter that swiveled heads on the sailboat that had just tied up at one of the floats. He kept right on chuckling, his eyes wind-reddened slits in the rough plane of his face.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. Me. A couple of big clowns.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Sure I did—you weren’t listening. That’s what’s so funny, Bernard. I thought you offed Rakubian, you’ve been thinking I did it, and we both kept our suspicions to ourselves and we’re both dead wrong.”
“Are we?”
“Dead wrong.” Mannix laughed again. “You want me to swear my innocence on a Bible?”
Hollis blew out his breath; it made a gusty sound, like the wind. He didn’t say anything.
“There was a time,” Gabe said, “a week or so before he disappeared, that I considered it. I mean really considered it. I didn’t think you were capable of it, not then, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that bastard hurting Angela. I guess you know how I feel about her.”
“Well enough.”
“Pathetically obvious, right? My best friend’s daughter, and half my age to boot. But I’ve never done anything about it and I never will. You believe that?”
“I believe it.”
“Good. It’s the truth. Okay, so I had a little scenario all worked out. But when push came to shove I couldn’t go through with it. Bullshitted you that I could, bullshitted myself, but I don’t have the balls for a thing like that. I could probably blow somebody like Rakubian away in self-defense, if I had enough Dutch courage in me, but in cold blood, eye-to-eye? No way.”
“No way,” Hollis echoed.
“Like that for you, too?”
“Pretty much. I got closer than you, right up to a time and place, waiting for him with a loaded gun, but even if he’d shown up I doubt now that I’d’ve been able to go through with it. Enough nerve to reach that point but no more. Not even to save my daughter’s life.”
“Clowns and gutless wonders, a pair.”
“No. A couple of average guys incapable of crossing the line.”
“Maybe so,” Mannix admitted. “So who did have the guts to cross it? Any idea?”
“Not anymore.”
“Well, we were wrong about each other. Could be we’re wrong about him being dead.”
“He’s dead, all right.”
“That sounds definite.”
“It is. I found his body, at his house two days before Angela went away. Head smashed in. At the time I believed Eric did it, so I erased the evidence and took the body away and buried it.”
“Jesus,” Gabe said softly.
“I won’t tell you where. That’s between me and my conscience.”
“I don’t want to know. It wasn’t Eric? You’re sure of that now?”
“Positive. But that’s not all. It isn’t over yet—I didn’t get away with what I did. Things are almost as bad as they were when Rakubian was alive.”
And he told his partner, his friend the rest of it. Sucking up and spitting out the last of the poisonous seed. One long look into Mannix’s eyes when he was done, and even the bitter aftertaste disappeared.
Tuesday Afternoon
Stan Otaki said, “It’s too early to tell yet if the antiandrogens are shrinking the tumor. There’s still plenty of room for optimism.”
“But,” Hollis said.
“There’s always a ‘but’ in prostate cases. As we’ve discussed before, no two are exactly alike—it’s a predictable disease in some respects, unpredictable in others. In case the hormone treatments don’t do the job, I think you need to start considering the remaining options.”
“Surgery and what else? Or is there anything else?”
“A clinical trial of new techniques in radiation therapy. Other clinical trials.”
“Such as?”
“Hormonal ablation, for one. Chemical castration.”
Terrific. Chemical castration translated to mean radical hormone-block treatments that deprive the tumor of the testosterone it needed to grow. Reversible if the patient stops the treatment, but stopping it meant that the cancer was likely to recur … if the growth process were arrested in the first place. Catch-22. The best-case scenario was a permanently limp dick. Along with the usual splendid array of potential side effects, such as weakened bones, loss of muscle, and personality changes.
“Normally,” Otaki was saying, “that’s a radical procedure implemented after the prostate has been surgically removed and there are indications that the cancer is still metastasizing. In such cases the patient is five times more likely to survive.”
“And without surgery?”
“The jury’s still out.”
“Uh-huh. Would you recommend that option?”
“Not before a prostatectomy, no.”
“What are my chances with surgery? Survival, and the ability to function sexually?”
“At this stage, assuming the absence of complications, the survival rate is very good. The impotence factor is problematical no matter what we do.”
“How soon before we know about the hormone treatments?”
“A few weeks at the outside.”
“And if they’re not working, I’d need to go under the knife right away?”
Otaki raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you may be changing your mind?.”
Did it? Maybe so. Funny, but the prospect of submitting his body to a surgeon’s scalpel did not seem quite so terrifying now as it had for so long. If there was a chance, even a small one, that surgery would keep him alive, make him whole again, didn’t he owe it to Cassie as well as to himself? Pigheaded, selfish, angry, closed off … he’d been all of that and more. Chained to Pop all these years. And chained to Mom, too, by the way she’d died. It didn’t have to be that way. Cassie had opened up his mind for the better. Why not let a frigging scalpel open up his body toward the same result?
“Let’s say I’ll be in a more receptive frame of mind,” he said, “if and when the time comes.”
Tuesday Evening
Cassie said, “I think we may have been looking at the stalker from the wrong perspective.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s been nagging at me all day. We keep assuming it must be a man. Eric, Ryan, Gabe … all men. But the more I think about it, the more it feels to me like a woman.”
“A woman smashed in Rakubian’s skull?”
“Why not? Women can be just as violent in the right, or wrong, circumstances. You know that. And the weapon … a statuette, heavy but not too heavy … it’s the sort of object a woman would grab in self-defense or the heat of a
nger.”
He was silent, weighing the possibility.
“Then there’s what’s been done to us so far,” Cassie said. “Written threats, poison pen notes … woman’s methods more than a man’s. The phrasing in the notes, too. ‘What did you do with his body?’ ‘You’ll suffer for what you did.’ Wouldn’t a man be more likely to say, ‘Where’d you hide the body?’ ‘You’ll pay for what you did’ or ‘I’ll fix you for what you did’?”
“Maybe,” he said slowly. “Maybe.”
“And the vandalism. Everything breakable in the living room smashed, couches and chairs slashed to ribbons, all that spray paint … it had a tantrumy look, didn’t it? Not that a man is above throwing a tantrum, God knows, but the way the room looked … it just didn’t feel like a man’s work. Neither does sugar in the van’s gas tank. It’s the first trick I’d think of if I wanted to sabotage someone’s car. One tire punctured, three tires flat—that’s another thing.”
He knew what she meant by that. “Takes strength to jab a sharp object deep enough into hard rubber to bleed the air out. Try it once, find that out, and then you start unscrewing the valve caps.”
“Exactly. None of this is conclusive, but when you take it all together … I think I’m right, Jack.”
“Who, then? I can’t think of any woman we know who’d have it in for us.”
“Someone Rakubian was seeing after Angela left him, or even before she left him.”
He shook his head. “Not as obsessed with her as he was.”
“A woman from his past, then. Didn’t he tell Angela he had one serious relationship before he met her?”
“That’s right, he did. He wouldn’t say when, or who the woman was. He kept his private life too damn private.”
“The police might’ve found out.”
“I can check with Macatee. But it still doesn’t add up, Cass. Why would a woman, anybody from Rakubian’s past, be stalking us? Angela, yes, that’s conceivable—some sort of crazy jealousy thing—but why would you and I be targets?”
“I can’t imagine. If we just knew who she is …”
“I’ll call Macatee first thing in the morning. But if he can’t point us in the right direction—”
In an Evil Time Page 18
