Cold Around the Heart

by Michael Prescott

  “I’m flattered and all, but I’m a little old to be adopted.”

  “Shut up and listen to me.”

  “There are lots of Chinese orphans who need parents. You could look into that.”

  “Shut the hell up!”

  The meeting had gotten off to a bad start. He sat down opposite her, placing the bag ostentatiously on the table, and tried to regroup.

  He studied her. She appeared disappointingly unruffled, but it had to be an act. “That poncho’s looking a lot worse for wear,” he said.

  She shrugged. “You try getting by on a PI’s salary.”

  “You’ve been out all night, haven’t you?”

  Let her deny it. Hendrys and Jepson would testify she hadn’t come home till sunup.

  “No law against that,” she said, disappointing him.

  “What were you up to?”

  “Sex orgy.”

  “Good. Then you’ll have witnesses.”

  “Okay, you got me. There was no orgy. I drove up to Sandy Hook and watched the storm.”

  “All night?”

  “I conked out in my car for a while. Guess the rain put me to sleep.”

  “You were alone the entire time?”

  “Natch. You think I sleep in my car with strangers?”

  “I don’t know who you sleep with. Your account doesn’t exactly ring true.”

  “It’s what happened. Just another boring night in my boring, ordinary life. Why are you so interested in my whereabouts, anyway?”

  “I’m not convinced you’ve been up to anything so innocent, either before or after I stopped you on the highway.”

  “You’re getting to be a real hard-ass, Dan. This police chief gig has gone straight to your head.”

  He sat back in his chair. Her story was preposterous, yet in its devilish simplicity it was impossible to disprove. He was momentarily alarmed. His quarry might slip away after all. Then his gaze traveled to the paper bag.

  Time to play his trump card.

  He reached into the bag, hesitated for maximum dramatic impact, then took out the powder-blue bucket cloche and slapped it down on the table. “Recognize this?”

  “Hey, that’s my hat.”

  This was not what he’d wanted to hear. He’d wanted her to say she’d never seen the hat before, wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the thing. Then he could pull out a copy of the sales slip and nail her with it.

  “So you do recognize it,” he said belligerently, trying to recapture the offensive.

  “Sure. Where’d you find it?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “I’m guessing at the Roach House, ’cause that’s where I lost it.”

  He could hardly believe his good luck. She’d just put herself in the motel. “So you’re saying you lost this item at the Roach—I mean, the Coach House last night?”

  “Not last night. Last month. And I guess lost isn’t the right word. It was pinched.”

  “Pinched?”

  “Lifted. Snatched. Swiped.”

  “Someone stole this hat?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  All right, he saw her strategy now. But it wouldn’t work.

  “Why don’t I believe you?” he said slowly.

  “Because you have a suspicious nature?"

  “I think you lost your hat there last night. I think you were present in room thirty-two of the Coach House when some crazy shit went down. I want to know what happened.”

  “And then you’ll prosecute me for, what, participating in some crazy shit? I don’t think that’s a felony. In Jersey, it may not even be a misdemeanor.”

  “We’ll consider the legal ramifications once we know all the details. You can help yourself a lot by cooperating.”

  “Sure I can. You’re all about helping me, aren’t you, Dan?”

  “Were you in the motel or not?”

  “Last night? Nope. But it looks like my hat was.”

  “And how did it get there?”

  “Probably on top of some hooker’s head. Like I told you, it was stolen last month. I was working a case at the Roach House. Taking pictures of a husband who was there in the company of someone other than his wife. I prefer not to give any names. A certain borough councilman would prefer it that way too.”

  “Stick to the point.”

  “The point is, the hat was filched from my Jeep while it was parked there.”

  “And you’re claiming a hooker stole it?”

  “That’s how I always figured it. That place is pretty much crawling with skankaroos, and we gals like our hats.”

  “Was anything else taken?”

  “Pack of cigarettes and some spare change. It was strictly a smash and grab—except there wasn’t any smashing, ’cause I’d left the Jeep unlocked.”

  “And it just so happens that whichever party girl took your hat was in room thirty-two last night?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. Was the hat in plain sight or tucked away somewhere?”

  “It was found under the bed,” he said reluctantly.

  “Then I guess it could’ve been there for days. Weeks, even. It’s not like there’s any maid service in that dump. When do you think was the last time anyone looked under the bed?”

  This still wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. He decided to try a psychological approach. “You can lie to me all you want, Parker.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I know what’s really going on with you. Let me tell you exactly what happened last night.”

  “This oughtta be good.”

  “I think you finally pissed off the wrong people. Somebody with a grudge lured you to that motel, where the occupant of room thirty-two—a mystery man with a Latin American accent—put you in the tub and subjected you to electroshock torture. Maybe for interrogation. Maybe just for kicks. You got away somehow. He fired off a shot as you fled.”

  “I hope he missed. Did he?”

  He ignored her. “Later you cruised past the motel to see if the police were there. That’s when I stopped you. You made up an obvious lie about meditating on the beach. I think you spent the rest of the night hunting for this man.”

  “Did I find him?”

  “You tell me.”

  “That’s a really great story, Dan. You could write it up and sell it to Reader’s Digest or something. But I already told you how my hat got into the room.”

  “Right. It was stolen. So I assume you filed a police report?” He knew she hadn’t.

  “Nah. You guys have more important things to do than chase after my stolen merchandise.”

  “Do we?”

  “Sure. Those bribes and kickbacks ain’t gonna take themselves.”

  He felt a sharp pain in his hand and realized he had squeezed it into a fist. “You didn’t report the theft to the police. There’s no paper trail. Is there any reason I should think your story isn’t complete bullshit?”

  “You can ask Lizbeth.”

  “Who?”

  “Lizbeth, the waitress at the Main Street Diner. I eat there all the time. You know her?”

  “Yeah, I know her.” He’d grown up next door to her. She’d been an annoying little squirt, and time had done nothing to improve her. “What about Lizbeth?”

  “I’m pretty sure I mentioned losing the hat to her. That would have been right after it happened.”

  “And she’ll vouch for that?”

  “You might have to jog her memory. I remember we got to talking after I had sort of a sneezing fit and she brought me a Kleenex. There was too much pepper in my soup. I said the chef needed to tone it down, because it nearly knocked the hat off my head. That’s how we got talking about hats.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Just tell her we were talking about pepper. That ought to do it.”

  “Talking about pepper.”

  “You got it.”

  Something about this story struck Dan as wrong—not just as a lie, which it undoubtedly was, but some kind o
f inside joke at his expense.

  “I’ll ask her,” he said. “If she doesn’t back up your story ...”

  “Why wouldn’t she back it up?” Bonnie Parker asked with a blank-faced innocence that infuriated him.

  There was a knock on the door. He was almost relieved at the interruption. “Yes?”

  “Chief, something’s come up.” The voice was Jepson’s.

  He rose from the table and stuck his head into the hallway. “What?”

  “Could be another link to the motel case,” Jepson said in a low voice.

  Dan stepped into the hall, closing the door, and motioned for Jepson to continue.

  “Highway patrol just called in. Something weird went down at Millstone Airport. Someone in a rented SUV blew through the gate, knocked it pretty much off its hinges. Vehicle was abandoned. It looks like someone took off in a private plane.”

  “And you figure it could be the guy from the Coach House? Why?”

  “They found medical stuff in the car. Bloody swabs, stuff like that. You know, like someone cleaned out a wound.Could tie in with the gunshot in the parking lot.”

  Dan didn’t want it to play out that way. He wanted the foreigner to be the shooter, and Parker to be the intended victim. That was how he’d reconstructed it. But he could have been wrong. It was possible—just possible—that Parker hadn’t had anything to do with the Coach House at all.

  “Okay,” he said wearily. “Canvass the neighborhood around the airfield and see if anyone noticed a plane coming in or leaving. Maybe we can establish some kind of timeframe. Are the state troopers going over the vehicle?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “See if we can get the same bag-and-tag brigade that worked the motel. They might pick up something that can link the car to the motel room. Carpet fibers or some goddamn thing.”

  Jepson nodded. Dan released a long and heartfelt sigh, then reentered the conference room. He found Bonnie Parker leaning against the wall, inches from the door. She was blowing smoke rings again.

  “What did I tell you about smoking?” he snapped.

  “That it’s bad for my health?”

  “Put out the goddamn cigarette. And not on the table.”

  “You’re the boss.” She stubbed it out on the door, leaving another burn mark, then dropped the spent butt on the carpet.

  He realized she’d been close enough to the door to listen through the plywood. “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “Yup.” She grinned. “Sounds like your boy’s flown the coop. Literally.”

  “I still say you were involved.”

  “How about an alternate theory? Let’s say this dude comes to town to do some wet work. He’s a pro, hired to do a job. He tortures some poor schmoe in the motel room. The victim gets away. Maybe the pro is wounded in that episode, or maybe it happens later. Either way, he tracks down his quarry and finishes the job, then takes off on a private plane.”

  “How do you know he finished the job?”

  “ ’Cause a pro wouldn’t leave unless he’d gotten it done. A hit isn’t something you just walk away from.”

  “I guess you would know.”

  “Bottom line, Dan, my version makes way more sense than yours. You got nothing to hold me on. Which means I’m free to go.”

  She didn’t wait for confirmation. She brushed past him in her wet, dirty poncho, soiling his shirt.

  He got in a parting shot. “This isn’t over. I’m still going to talk with Lizbeth.”

  “Remind her about the pepper.”

  Something stirred in Dan’s memory. He gave Parker a hard stare. “You know, I had a dog named Pepper.”

  “Did you? Hope you treated her right. I like dogs. Big fan.”

  “How about dogshit? Fan of that too?”

  She sniffed the air. “Is that what that is? I thought you were trying a new cologne.”

  “I know you were in that motel room, Parker. Your story’s crap. Even if Lizbeth confirms it, I still know you’re lying to me.”

  “And she’s lying too? Everybody’s lying?” She shook her head, assuming a sorrowful expression. “Paranoia’s not a good look for you, Dan. You should lay off the detective work. Stick to those jaywalking geese.”

  He fumed, having nothing to say.

  At the door she paused, looking over her shoulder. “Hey, can I get that hat back? I like it.”

  “It’s evidence.”

  “Maybe I can fill out a claim form or—”

  “Get out, Parker. Just get the fuck out.”

  She left. Dan sat in a chair and slumped forward, his head in his hands, feeling like all the air had been squeezed out of him. The interview had not worked out as planned. Nothing with Parker ever did.

  And now that itch was back, more insistent than ever, and he didn’t know if it would ever get scratched.

  CHAPTER 39

   

  It was a short drive from the police station to her office. Bonnie took care to ensure she wasn’t followed. She wouldn’t put it past ol’ Danny Boy to stick a tail on her.

  She parked in her usual spot. The alley, paved with crunchy sand pebbles, ran perpendicular to Main Street and was bracketed by her building on one side and a retail establishment on the other.

  She retrieved her fanny pack and strapped it on under the poncho, then left the Jeep, moving quickly. If her assumptions were correct, this was the moment of maximum risk. But she was counting on Kurt Land not to be watching the alley. By now he must be familiar with her schedule, and ordinarily she never showed up this early.

  She made it inside without incident and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Her key let her into her office. As usual, the place smelled of old carpet and musty third-hand furniture. She’d done nothing by way of improvement except tack a couple of posters to the wall. One of them was a reproduction of the famous shot of the original Bonnie Parker posing on the grille of a roadster, a gun in her hand and a stogie in her mouth. It was the stogie that had most scandalized public opinion of the day. The other was a shot of Clyde and Bonnie’s last car, the one that Frank Hamer’s posse had shot to pieces on a rural road. She had bought it as a reminder of where her own road was likely to lead.

  Des had tried to reassure her by saying she was not like her namesake. Well, maybe not. History’s Bonnie was a blond hellion with bright blue eyes, her head filled with unrealistic dreams and bad poetry. She’d been a waitress slinging hash in Cement City, Texas, until Clyde Barrow, all five feet five and 140 pounds of him, offered her a more exciting life. The result was a multi-state crime spree, several deaths, and a great deal of wanton violence. It all ended badly, as it had to.

  In the words of a Texas lawman, Bonnie Parker was “a two-gun girl, as tough as the back end of a shooting gallery.” She was in some ambushes and survived most of them, though the last proved fatal. Up to the end, she was a survivor—desperate, half starved, crippled from a car wreck, but going on, until the guns mowed her down and she couldn’t go on anymore.

  Still, she’d been memorable. A newsreel poster at the time shouted: Bonnie Parker—modern tigress, fast shooting, cigar smoking, blond Jezebel!

  There were worse epitaphs.

  She turned away from the posters and carefully approached the window that looked out on the alley. The building across the way hosted a shoe store on its ground level. Its second floor was taken up by rented rooms.

  Bonnie had never thought much about the people who lived in those rooms. She was thinking about them now.

  Only two windows above the shoe store looked out on the alley. One of them was open a few inches. Faded curtains flapped in the damp breeze. The other window appeared to belong to an unoccupied room. The curtains were pulled back, exposing bare walls and no furniture.

  If her theory was right, the first room was where she would find Kurt Land.

  Kurt knew things about the shooting in the alley that only an eyewitness would know. She was guessing he’d staked out her office, repeatin
g his old habit of obsessive surveillance. He’d watched her come and go, just as he’d watched Jacob Hart.

  She left her office and exited the building via a rear door, then made her way to the other building. That one had a rear door also. Locked, but she bumped it and got in with no difficulty. Near the staircase, a row of mailboxes hung on the wall. She scanned the names affixed to the boxes with plastic labels.

  The name on unit 2A was BOWMAN.

  Cute.

  Before going upstairs, she pulled on the gloves she’d taken from her house. Black leather gloves. She flexed her hands, watching the leather stretch.

  She took out the Beretta.

  Pascal’s gun. Gloves like his.

  I’m a killer too, she’d told Cynthia Kirby, alias Mariana Ortiz.

  She climbed the stairs in the half-light trickling through high, curtained windows. The upstairs hall was lined with rooms on both sides. She went to room 2A and turned the knob. Locked. Bumping it would make too much noise, but the door had no deadbolt, and the beveled edge of the lock faced the hall. Easy enough to pop it open with a credit card.

  She entered the room, and there he was, Kurt Land, snarled in a tangle of bedsheets. Beer cans littered the floor by his bed. He had drunk himself asleep.

  His shirt was on, and his trousers were off, exposing a pair of Jockey briefs, not clean, and an ugly brace on his left leg. Bonnie saw that brace and thought of the man with a limp in the pavilion’s tower.

  And she knew. She couldn’t make sense of it, but she knew.

  Kurt Land had been Pascal’s partner tonight. His decoy.

  She shut the door and explored the room. It was a sad little hole. Hotplate, can opener, cans of Beefaroni and pork and beans. No toilet; she’d passed a communal bathroom down the hall.

  She found no diary, no handwritten notes of any kind, and no computer. There was a cell phone, the one he’d used to call her. She put it in her pocket. The call log would include her number. Nothing else in the room would tie him to her.

  She removed the .38 from its Ziploc bag and placed it carefully in a bureau drawer. Dan Maguire didn’t know it yet, but the mystery of who shot Jacob Hart was about to be solved.

  On the cold radiator by the window sill lay a pair of binoculars and Kurt Land’s most recent acquisition, a PSE Mach-12 compound hunting bow. No surprise. Kurt was a bow hunter, after all, and Dan had told her that Starkey’s had been robbed of this exact item two nights ago. She’d never had any doubt about who’d stolen it, or who its intended target was.

  The bow could easily be aimed at the window of her office, where she would be seated at her desk. In his last phone call he’d bragged that she would never know what hit her.