I nodded. “No car. Only mine . . . in the water. He might be walking.”
“Who?”
“Elliot Orenstein. Hastings. Mila. Emily. All. Has Cassie too.”
Laurie, who had been standing behind Shannon, quickly started screaming to the cops: “Wait a minute! There’s another guy involved.” Then she looked back to me. “You didn’t kill Lipton?”
I shook my head weakly at the absurdity of their assumption that I, even in self-defense, could so viciously slam a knife into someone’s neck. “He could be on foot.”
“Who is it?” Vince Piganno’s face was pudgy as he leaned over me. Gravity was unkind to him. But it was a warm face, soft and concerned, eyebrows furrowed, the kind of face you want on your side.
“Vince,” Shannon said. “Elliot Orenstein. Is he a student at Holton? He has Cassie too.”
“Christ almighty. We weren’t even warm on this one.” He lifted his head and screamed to one of the cops. “She doesn’t look good. White as a Lutheran. Someone get her to the hospital. And I want more uniforms here. We’re looking for another guy.”
“Vince,” I said.
“Shut up. You’re going to the ER.”
“Piganno?” Carlyle’s thin voice came from somewhere behind me. “You and I have to talk,” he said firmly but weakly.
Vince barked his response. “Who the hell called you here? I’ll talk to you downtown, Carlyle, when your face is in stripes for being the biggest drug trafficker since the Boston crime family. You’re a freakin’ kingpin. Go back to your private den and wait for the cuffs.”
“Jeff Kendall gave him the heads-up you were on your way, Vince,” Mike said quietly. “Kendall’s been telling him our every move.”
Vince looked back at Carlyle. “You’re as guilty as the day is long. You knew about those kids—rich little punks—and their drug-importing business. And, McCoy, it was right under your nose too. So if you don’t behave I’ll put you in the cell next to him.”
Carlyle stepped forward. “I did not know the extent of Nazir’s involvement with Sherman. I thought it was Sherman and Lipton and a few parties. You can’t prove I knew anything else. And why would I get involved in such a dirty affair? Your reasoning is flawed, Vince.”
“Tell it to the Feds. You were probably getting drug money from students and calling it donations from their families. Alumni donations, my ass.”
“That’s absurd and you know it. We have to report the source of donations internally even if they remain anonymous to the public.”
A paramedic shoved the sparring duo of Carlyle and Piganno out of the way and pushed an oxygen mask over my face. I swatted him away and pulled the mask away.
While Vince and Carlyle were busy taking verbal shots at each other, Mike returned stealthily to my side and helped me sit up. He held his hand on my forehead and lowered his lips to mine, kissing me lightly.
I put my lips to his ear and whispered, “Lippitt House. Elliot said Cassie’s in his dorm room. Go—before the police. He might hurt her if he hears sirens or sees cops. He might trust you—alone.”
Topless and now dry, I was beginning to shiver.
Mike took off and pushed Shannon to my side. She began removing her jacket.
“Shannon, we’ve got to go get Cassie.”
“And where do you think you’re going half-naked?” Shannon said. “Who do you think you are? Me?”
“It might be too late. We’ve got to get her now. Get me out of here.”
“They’ll stop us,” she whispered. “You need a hospital. Maybe you just let me and Laurie go.”
“Help me up. Pretend you’re taking me to the ER.”
Laurie and Shannon hoisted me up. While Laurie dressed me in Shannon’s leather jacket, Shannon spoke in her tough voice loud enough for Vince and anyone else within a one-mile radius to hear her. “We’re taking her to Rhode Island Hospital. If anyone needs to know.”
Shannon and Laurie at my sides, I hobbled to Shannon’s Suburban, where they put me in the backseat and got in the front.
“Where to, boss?” Shannon asked over her broad shoulder.
“Lippitt House.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Going Home
ON MY DIRECTION, SHANNON drove to Elliot’s dorm. We’d already had our argument in the car, both Shannon and Laurie telling me it was a really dumb idea. Elliot might have gone there, and we would be putting Cassie in worse danger by backing him up against a wall. Let the police go first. I argued my purely emotional position: There was no way he’d go there immediately after a double murder—Rod’s and mine. He’d just take off. And I didn’t care anyway. I was going wherever I thought Cassie was. My unspoken fear being that Elliot wouldn’t go there because Cassie was already dead.
“Just go,” I ordered. “I don’t have the strength to explain.”
In deference to my weakened physical and emotional state (under normal circumstances Shannon would have told me to go pound sand and then done whatever she wanted), Shannon followed my command and pulled her Suburban to the front doors of Lippitt House. She and Laurie hopped out and held on to me as we walked slowly through the main doors and located Elliot’s name next to the bell for Apartment 4F. We made a keyless entry by ringing every doorbell until someone buzzed us up.
Laurie was planning our break-in as we walked to the end of the hall to Elliot’s room.
“He’s not going to invite us in for tea and scones. Do you have any ideas on how to break a door down?”
“I’ll get one of the guards to open it,” I said, remembering Elliot’s suggestion.
Laurie suggested straightforward guile. “Is he Jewish? I’ll pretend I’m from the Jewish Defense League and we need signatures for something.”
Shannon stopped walking and looked at Laurie as if she had just vomited all over herself. “And I always thought you were the smart one.”
“Shut up then,” Laurie quickly retorted. “What do you suggest?”
“Um . . . gee . . . let me think. How about breaking the fucking door down with our feet?”
“In your brand-new Giuseppe Zanottis? I don’t think so. Unless you’re planning to jimmy the lock with your metal heel tips.”
I snapped at them with the little energy I had left. “Please stop fooling around. Cassie might be in there.” Then I put my ear against the door.
While the girls stood back and waited, I listened to silence for half a minute. Shannon gave me her cell to dial the guard station and Laurie simply turned the knob. The door was unlocked.
Elliot’s bed, apparently rarely slept in, was blanketed in books. Clothes and sneakers were strewn on the floor. The room had a familiar metallic odor.
Shannon lit a cigarette the way cops always did at the morgue to cover the smell of blood and corpses. “It friggin’ smells like guts in here,” she whispered.
Next to Elliot’s computer on a white towel sat an opened bottle of Heinz white vinegar. Next to that were several beakers and eyedroppers—a veritable chem kit.
One glance around the room told us that Cassie wasn’t there. What were Elliot’s interests? Where else did he hang out? I cursed myself for having been in his company so often and knowing so little about him.
Cassie had dismissed him too—a nerdy scientist who smells, she’d called him. So why had she left camp with him? Had he lured her away with some story about an emergency involving me? A chill went through me as I thought that maybe he’d given her a glimpse into the future—that I was the Holton murderer’s next intended victim.
And why hadn’t Cassie called me to verify? But I already knew the answer. That little Band-Aid of advice—the words of wisdom I’d offered that day at Nick and Tony’s. What had I said? “Don’t trust Sherman and Lipton . . . They’re drugging girls and raping them. . . . How’s your tutoring going with Elliot? . . . Elliot’s the kind of guy you can trust.” Isn’t that the message I’d inadvertently given her? I might as well have delivered Cassie to the murderer’s f
ront step.
An ear-splitting pop cracked the air.
Shannon, Laurie, and I screamed in unison. No stranger to the sound of guns, we knew the shot was close by.
“The bathroom,” Laurie whispered, pointing to a door camouflaged in the wall behind us.
We ran in and found Mike staring at us with a puzzled look on his face. His confused expression was unfamiliar; his bravado under pressure was second only to Vince’s, and Mike was never at a loss for action, even if it was the wrong one. So I knew by his stillness, the sad look on his face, that something was wrong. Very wrong.
Laurie grabbed my elbow. I pushed away from her, reached Mike, and stopped. As if he were the curator of an art gallery and were proudly presenting his newest gala, he backed away from me slowly, hesitantly, waiting for my reaction to this abstract painting in broad splatters of scarlet red—the color still wet—that surrounded me on the walls and ceiling, and, as I watched, dripped down the front of Mike’s white shirt.
I heard a cell phone click open, an odd softness in Laurie’s voice, then a rare whisper and the word “ambulance.”
Shannon was inching up behind me.
Mike reached out his hand to me and took me by the wrist, pulling me to him. I watched helplessly as his eyes flickered and his head fell forward to his chest as he crumpled slowly against the wall and slid to the floor. I looked up at the sound of the approaching sirens. And that’s when I saw Elliot partially hidden behind shower curtains, standing in front of the bathtub with my Walther .380 in his hand. It was pointed at my head.
Shannon, standing next to me like a crossing guard, lifted her left arm slowly and held the flat of her hand toward Elliot. “Stop,” she said softly. “Think about this. You don’t really want to do that.”
As she spoke softly to him, wooing him with a gentleness I’d never heard in her voice before, her right arm swung weightlessly up by her side, and the pop of her gun echoed through the air only after the red spot between Elliot’s eyes began to drip. He stared blankly at me, one, two seconds, then folded to the floor.
Shannon holstered her gun and went directly to the tub, sweeping the curtains aside in one swift motion. Cassie was in the bathtub, drenched in blood.
“No! Cassie!” I couldn’t run to her. My legs were stone. My body finally failing me under this latest shock.
My little sister lay motionless, her eyes closed, her head tilted to the side facing us, her lips parted. She didn’t look dead, but I knew she was. She couldn’t have been in a bathtub in a dorm room for three days and still be alive. She was spunkier than that. Cassie would have gotten away—if she could have.
“Shannon . . . Laurie . . .” I had finally been taken down. I rolled into a cocoon on the floor, and wailed like a baby. “I can’t . . . Help me.”
Laurie left me and went to Shannon, who was bending down to Cassie.
On her knees, Laurie gently placed her hand on Cassie’s forehead.
“It’s okay, baby,” Laurie said, wiping Cassie’s wet hair from her face. “It’s okay. It’s over.”
“No, Laurie!” I screamed. “Noooo . . . ! Cassie!”
Laurie turned to Shannon, who was already on her phone dialing 911 again.
My body was burning. Sweating. And then freezing cold.
And then darkness.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Do Not Disturb
WHEN I AWOKE, LAURIE was rifling through the metal drawers of my bedside table. My forehead had been bandaged and an intravenous drip stand was by my bed. The saline bag was empty and the needle had been removed from my hand while I slept.
“Look at this,” Laurie said, lifting a black book from the drawer. “They put Bibles in the drawers here. What do they think this is? A Holiday Inn?”
“More like a YMCA flophouse if you ask me,” Shannon quipped from a distance. “No wonder everyone gets sick in hospitals. This septic tank needs a Roto-Rooter house call.”
I watched their comedy routine and listened patiently. I was afraid to interrupt them, to say my sister’s name. I was afraid to ask the obvious. They would tell me in their own time and I would wait. They were making jokes and I was terrified, because I knew the longer they avoided the issue, the more jokes they told, the worse it would be when they finally told me.
Laurie, as if hearing my internal reasoning, or reading the fear in my eyes, quickly moved onto the bed with me. “She’s in the next room. Orenstein drugged her senseless but nothing else. She’ll be fine. Your parents are shuffling back and forth between your rooms. They’re with her now.” Laurie flipped the Bible open. “Now let us all join hands for the reading of a passage from Psalms.”
I heard Shannon’s guffaw from across the room. She walked over to me with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lip while Laurie slammed the book closed and threw it back into the drawer.
“Haven’t you smoked that damn thing yet?” I asked.
“Oh yeah? Well, you look like something the cat dragged in.”
I looked up at Shannon seriously now. “Elliot Orenstein?”
“On a slab. And let me tell you, he looks a hell of a lot better than you do right now.”
Shannon and Laurie laughed, and somewhere in the distance I heard Beth’s small voice.
“I don’t know how you two can make jokes at a time like this.”
Shannon pulled a chair to my bedside and joined Laurie. Beth walked over and I saw her sweet, liquid-blue eyes over me. God, how I missed them.
“How could I have trusted that sick bastard Elliot with Cassie? How could I have been so wrong about him? Crazy Lisa,” I said. “And Melinda and poor innocent Emily. All of them killed by a psychotic nerd who was tired of being rejected. He just wanted a girl to take him seriously.”
Then I remembered Mike, but his name caught in my throat and I went silent again, because I knew that when the girls thought it was time—when they thought I was ready—we’d talk about him too. Talk about how he’d charmed me, then frightened me into suspecting him; how he’d saved me from the river; how he’d found Cassie. And how he died.
“Don’t be so naive,” Laurie said quickly. “Elliot Orenstein didn’t serial-mutilate and kill because of a broken heart. He had some serious head issues going on that we can’t even hope to understand. And he was like the ‘cunning spider to the fly.’ Everyone trusted him. Including you, Mari. I’ve got to say, I’m a little surprised.”
“Stop it,” Beth said. “Leave her alone. No one even knew he existed, that’s how close we were to not finding him. Mari got that serial nutcase all by herself.”
“I’m not sure who got who. He was this brilliant kid pretending to help me solve a murder, and all the time, he wanted the information just to see how much I had on him. And he always looked so pathetic. I felt sorry for him without ever feeling his rage underneath.”
Then Laurie again. “Forget about it. What did the Bard say? All’s well that ends well. Orenstein is history. Now Vince is lusting after Sherman. He wants Carlyle too, but I think he’s stumped again by the elusive dean. Vince claims Carlyle was taking a finder’s fee on the dope and loading up Holton coffers with ‘discreet private donations.’ Imagine that? Dean Kenneth Oberlin Carlyle, the blue-blooded blackmailer.”
“I think all Carlyle wanted was the presidency when Hatchett retired.”
“If Vince has his way, Carlyle’s retirement will be in some cushy federal prison.” Laurie pushed hair out of my sweaty face.
“Why is there never smoking in hospitals?” Shannon said. “I mean, not just now, with all these godforsaken no-smoking laws. They’ve never let you smoke in these joints.”
“Oxygen, for one thing,” Beth said. “And then there’s always the fact that people are usually sick in here and don’t want to add lung cancer to their medical records.”
“Thanks, Bethster.”
“And why do you always have to make up nicknames for people? It’s just Beth.”
“I bore easy,” Shannon stated unapolo
getically. She threw her still-unlit soggy Camel in the trash.
Laurie relinquished her seat on my bed to Beth, but she kept talking as she walked to the window and pulled open the curtains. Laurie was still working the case. “We had Sherman in our sights for a drug operation from California. But through phone records and a tail, we found something even bigger.”
“Mila Nazir,” I said. Laurie nodded. “That’s when the Feds joined the party.”
“But you knew all this, Mari. We kept you filled in on everything,” Beth said. Then she glanced at her two other AG friends. “Didn’t we?”
But Vince Piganno prevented Laurie and Shannon from answering. His voice boomed through the open doorway. “You got good instincts, Meloni, that’s why I let you take that job at Holton. It’s instincts that were telling you these murders were connected to the drugs. I always wanted to dig deeper and get inside Holton to Carlyle. When he offered you that job, I got to thinking. If I didn’t let you back from your suspension you’d accept his offer and be inside enemy territory without passing Go. It seemed like a stroke of genius at the time.”
“You did what?” Shannon barked.
“Holton’s a fortress,” he said. “We could only pussyfoot around it. I needed an insider there and I knew Mari would rip the guts out of it. And she didn’t disappoint me.” He looked at me now like a coach at his prized fighter. “Even if Carlyle manages to slip through my fingers again, Holton will never be the same.”
“You let her work there to go after Carlyle?” Laurie said. “After all the begging and plotting we were doing to get her back . . . why didn’t you just friggin’ say so?”
“Wait a minute. I didn’t put her there. I suspended her to scare the crap out of her. Then Carlyle offers the job and I thought, Hey, great. We’ll get dirt on that school that we could never get on the outside.”
Vince could have saved us a lot of sleepless nights if he’d told us his plan from the start. Somewhere inside him, he had a big heart, but he was the kind of guy who forgot that other people had them too. Typical Vince Piganno. Play with people’s lives like they’re chess pieces because he believed his reasons were altruistic. He was a big egotistical kid with an underdeveloped conscience.
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