by Harry Dolan
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
Acknowledgements
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY HARRY DOLAN
ALSO BY HARRY DOLAN
Bad Things Happen
AMY EINHORN BOOKS
Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dolan, Harry.
Very bad men / Harry Dolan.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-51700-0
1. Periodical editors—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Ann Arbor (Mich.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.O424V
813’.6—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To my mother and father
There’s a necklace in my office, a string of glass beads. It hangs over the arm of my desk lamp, and any little movement can set it swaying. The beads are a middle shade of blue, the color of an evening sky, and when the light plays over them they look cool and bright and alive.
I’ll tell you where they came from. Elizabeth was wearing them the first time we kissed. It happened here in the office on a winter night, six stories up over Main Street in Ann Arbor. Elizabeth is a detective, and that night she’d been called out to the scene of a car accident: crushed metal and broken glass, and other crushed and broken things. Three fatalities, one of them a child. The kind of accident you don’t want to see, the kind you hope you can forget.
She saw it, and afterward she wanted to get as far away from it as she could. She came to me. I was working late and I heard the hallway door open, heard her footsteps cross the emptiness of the outer office, and then she was standing in my doorway. She’s tall, and the long overcoat she wore only emphasized her height. The coat had snowflakes melting on the shoulders. It was open, and the blouse she had on underneath was unbuttoned at the neck. The fingers of her right hand worried over the blue beads at her throat. That was her only movement; the rest of her stood still.
I knew her well enough to know something was wrong. Her face was pale, and her hair—black and shiny as a raven’s wing—fell loose around it. I got up from my desk and went to her, and her stillness as I approached made me leery of touching her. I started to lay a palm on her shoulder, then drew it back.
Snow fell lazily outside my office window. We stood together for a long while, and I didn’t ask her anything. I waited for her to tell me, and she did. She told me all of it, everything she had seen. The words poured out of her in a relentless stream. Her fingers on the glass beads counted off each terrible detail.
When she was done, she turned her face away from me. Shyly. Almost awkwardly. And awkwardly I stepped back and, not knowing what else to do, offered to pour her a drink from the bottle of Scotch I keep in the deep drawer of the desk.
She didn’t want a drink.
I watched her shed her overcoat and fold it over the back of a chair. Watched her close the distance between us, her eyes steady on mine. She kept them open when she kissed me; they were the same blue as the glass beads. The first kiss was slow and lingering and deliberate. We both knew what it was: an act of defiance. It’s human nature. We look on death and we rebel; we want to prove to ourselves that we’re alive.
These thoughts passed through my mind, but I didn’t have time to dwell on them. The second kiss was harder and more eager. I felt her hands move over my shoulders to the back of my neck, felt her fingers twist into my hair. She pressed herself against me and we held on to each other, and I could feel the heat of her, the vitality, the coiled energy of her body.
THERE’S A LIMIT to how much of this memory I intend to share, and I think we’ve reached it. The rest is hers and mine and no one else’s. But that’s where the necklac
e came from, the one I keep in my office. Elizabeth left it behind that night.
I’m telling you this for a reason. It has to do with motives.
If you took that necklace to a jeweler, he’d say it wasn’t worth anything. The beads are only glass, and they’re held together by a string. And on some level I know that’s true.
But I also know that if a thief tried to take those beads away from me, I’d do everything in my power to stop him. I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, if that’s what it took.
THIS STORY I have to tell—it’s not about a necklace. But it is about the motives people have for killing one another. That’s a subject I know something about, not least because I’m an editor and people send me stories about killers all the time. My name is David Loogan. Most of the manuscripts that come to me are awful, but some of them have promise. I find the best ones and polish them up and publish them in a mystery magazine called Gray Streets.
Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that my part in this story begins with a manuscript.
The facts are simple enough. I found it on a Wednesday evening in mid-July, in the hallway outside my office. That’s not unusual. Local authors leave manuscripts out there more often than you’d think.
This one was different, though. It came in a plain, unmarked envelope and amounted to fewer than ten pages. It was the story of three murders, two already committed, one yet to come. And it wasn’t fiction.
There was no signature or byline. The man who wrote the story didn’t want to give himself away. He had typed it on a computer and printed it out in a copy shop. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time. Elizabeth discovered it later.
When I turned the manuscript over to her, I had an outside hope that it might yield some useful piece of physical evidence. Crime labs can do wonders now with hairs and fibers, with DNA. I thought there might be fingerprints on the pages, other than my own. But when she sent the manuscript to the lab, it was a dead end. It rendered up no secrets—nothing to tell her who wrote it or what his motives were.
If you want to know the answers to those questions, we’ll have to go back. Back before that day in mid-July. We’ll have to put aside the usual rules, because this is a story that doesn’t want to follow them. It has its own ideas. Although it’s mine, and Elizabeth’s too, it doesn’t really begin with us. It begins in northern Michigan, in the city of Sault Sainte Marie. It begins in a hotel room.
It begins with a notebook.
CHAPTER 1
The notebook is a simple thing, but elegant. Lined pages bound with thread between soft black covers. Small enough to fit in a pocket. Vincent van Gogh made sketches in a notebook like this. Ernest Hemingway jotted lines of terse dialogue in Parisian cafés.
Anthony Lark uses his to make a list.
Three names, in rich black ink. Henry Kormoran. Sutton Bell. Terry Dawtrey. The letters flow gracefully. The pen is a Waterman, an heirloom from Lark’s father.
Kormoran and Bell should be relatively easy. Both of them live in Ann Arbor—Kormoran in an apartment, Bell in a modest house with a wife and daughter. The wife and daughter complicate things, but on the whole Lark is unconcerned. He can manage Kormoran and Bell.
Dawtrey is another story. He’s serving a thirty-year sentence at Kinross Prison, twenty miles south of Sault Sainte Marie.
LARK LEFT his notebook on the hotel bed and padded barefoot to the ice machine down the hall. He caught ice chips in a plastic bag, just a handful, enough to soothe his brow. The headaches had been coming more frequently.
He had been fine this afternoon when he drove past the gates of Kinross Prison. He didn’t know what he expected to see, maybe something like a fortress. Tall buildings of stone. Ramparts and buttresses. Lofty walls with turrets for the guards.
The reality was less impressive. There were a few broad buildings of homely tan brick. The sun cast the shadows of the guardtowers across the yard. Two high chain-link fences, topped with razor wire, surrounded everything.
Lark had been raised in a working-class neighborhood in Dearborn, on the outskirts of Detroit. Take away the towers and the fences, and he might have been looking at his old high school.
Still, the fences and towers would be enough to keep him from Terry Dawtrey. In theory, he could make a go of it, if a dozen things went his way. He could acquire a high-powered rifle. He could find some cover in the flat, featureless land that surrounded the prison. Dawtrey could walk out to the front gate with a target painted on his chest.
Lark pondered the problem in his hotel room, lying against the pillows with the ice pressed to his forehead. There was another alternative. He could find some pretext for a visit to Dawtrey. He could walk through the gate, submit to a search. They would lead him to a room with bland cinder-block walls. A common room with lots of tables, full of convicts’ wives and their restless children. He would sit at a table across from Dawtrey. There would be no glass between them, not like in the movies. He would have no weapon, but he would only need something sharp—a stem broken off from a pair of eyeglasses. It could be done.
But there would be no going out again past the guards. It would be a oneway trip.
A hard problem. He needed to consider it some more. He pressed the power button on the television remote and flipped through the channels. Cop shows, infomercials, cable news. He wasn’t really looking for the woman, but he found her on CNN. Sometimes it happened that way. She was at a podium with a crowd around her. Young people holding up signs. She had as much of a tan as you could get, living in the state of Michigan. She had hair like black silk and wore it in a short, stylish cut.
He had the sound muted, so he didn’t hear what she was saying, but it hardly mattered. She smiled, and the people applauded and waved their signs. The smile was wondrous. Without it, she could seem stern, aloof. With it, she was joyous and mischievous at the same time. He remembered something he’d heard once: That smile alone should be worth ten points at the polls.
Watching her helped. The ice helped too. It cooled the ache behind his brow. He was tempted to check out in the morning and drive south to Ann Arbor. That was what most people would do. Take the easier way. Deal with Kormoran and Bell. Save Dawtrey for last. Put off confronting the problem. But that’s not the way he was raised.
Always do the hardest thing first, his father used to say.
THE NEXT NIGHT, Anthony Lark found himself in a town called Brimley on the shore of Whitefish Bay, sixteen miles southwest of Sault Sainte Marie. He ate dinner at the Cozy Inn, a restaurant that catered to tourists. He sat at a table in a corner and kept his eyes on an old man who had settled in on a stool at the bar.
Lark knew there were Chippewa Indians in Brimley. They ran the Bay Mills Casino, the area’s main attraction. The old man at the bar looked like he had Chippewa blood. He had a weathered face marked with deep vertical lines, the kind of face you might find carved into the side of a cliff. He had a compact frame and limbs that might once have been sturdy and thick—before time diminished them.
Lark knew the man’s name. He had found it in the Brimley telephone directory. He had written it in his notebook with his Waterman pen.
The man lived in a cabin not far from the shore of Lake Superior. A wooden shanty, really, one of a score of cabins scattered in the woods, with a warren of unpaved lanes running between them. It would be a pleasant place to live now, in the summer, in the dense shade of old birch trees. In the winter, Lark thought, it would be hell.
He had spent an hour in the cabin around midday; he had found a key under a wooden bucket on the porch. The old man had been away at work. A drawer full of pay stubs told the tale: he had a job at the casino, probably on the cleaning crew. His wages were pitiful.
The cabin had a cramped living room, a small kitchen, a smaller bath. No bedroom, just a fold-out sofa bed. A bare minimum of possessions. The medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink held a straight razor, a toothbrush, toothpaste. The furnishings of the living room included a TV set with rabb
it ears and a wall calendar illustrated with watercolor sparrows. Lark leafed through the pages. Someone had written the letter “T” on every other Saturday.
A framed photograph hung next to the calendar: a school picture of a boy fourteen or fifteen years old.
A ringing telephone startled Lark as he studied the photo. He followed the sound to the kitchen, where a battered beige phone sat on the counter beside a primitive-looking answering machine. The tape in the machine began to turn, the old man’s outgoing message. Then a beep and a woman’s voice, rough with cigarette smoke.
“Charlie, are you there?” she said. A pause. “Maybe I’ll see you at the Cozy later.”
When the old man got home from work, Lark was sitting in his Chevy a little distance down the lane. He watched the man step down from the cab of a pickup and trudge to the cabin door. He might have done it then, might have simply followed the man inside, but it seemed too abrupt somehow. And it was still daylight. Better to do it after dark.
Lark drove to the Cozy Inn and had a leisurely dinner—fish caught from the bay, french fries, coleslaw. He had brought a newspaper with him from Sault Sainte Marie, and after the waitress cleared his plate away he started reading the front page. She brought him the bill and he gave her a sizable tip and after that she left him alone.
The old man came in at eight and took up his position at the bar. He drank shots of Irish whiskey and mugs of beer. By ten o’clock most of the tourists had left and the locals began to fill the place with raucous voices and laughter. At eleven a woman came in wearing a leather skirt and a knitted blouse. Hair dyed black. Fifty-five years old, Lark thought, hoping to pass for forty.
“There you are, Charlie,” she said to the old man.
“Madelyn, you vixen,” he said, patting the stool beside him.
As Lark watched them from the corner—Madelyn producing a cigarette from a beaded purse, Charlie lighting it with a Zippo—he wished that he were done. He should have taken care of things at the cabin. He felt a headache coming on and took a pill (Imitrex) from a small tin that once held breath mints. He didn’t expect the pill to work. He could feel the pain creeping into the space behind his eyes, curling and twisting like the smoke of Madelyn’s cigarette.
