Midnight Rain

by Kate Aeon

  “Criminal defense lawyer.”

  “Right. Had a few friends among his clients.”

  “So the FBI thinks he rehabbed at home.”

  “Or in Europe somewhere, or South America, or God only knows where. He was a successful criminal defense lawyer.”

  Alan shuddered. “And the Schaeffers were going for cremation of the stand-in to cover their tracks. Get the ashes, scatter them, and Michael is good and gone forever.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “So Michael Schaeffer is likely in Fort Lauderdale right now. And everything Phoebe has been saying is true.”

  “I don’t know. There’s the detective report she had on you. There’s her arrest record. I don’t know what’s true.”

  “I do. We abandoned her. That’s what’s true.”

  “Yeah. That’s true.”

  Alan turned and slammed his fist into the nurses’ station wall. And pain enveloped his hand, his wrist, and his forearm. Waves of nausea doubled him over, and without warning he lost everything he’d eaten all day into the nearest trash can.

  “Alan?” Brig said. “Thanks for not putting that fist into my nose.”

  Alan grabbed a paper towel and wiped his mouth. “Was my first thought, actually. Should have gone with it.” Alan took the Ace wrap that a nurse silently offered him, and the water and Motrin another held out. “Wouldn’t have done as much damage to the hand.” He started wrapping the palm and back of his hand, and the pain hazed his vision. “I’m a fucking idiot. I knew she wasn’t conning me.”

  “We’re trying to find the truth right now,” Brig said. “Our guys are door-to-door in the neighborhood, asking about her. I have an APB out on her car. We haven’t turned anything up yet. Can you think of anyplace she might be?”

  Alan leaned against the nurses’ station, closing his eyes against another wave of nausea. “No clue. I can’t think of a thing. You think he has her?”

  “I don’t know,” Brig said. “He might.”

  “I’m calling Morrie. He’ll cover for me. I have to get out of here. I’ll help you find her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  After she left Moonstruck, Phoebe didn’t want to go home. She felt safer with the locks changed, but going home meant walking past Alan’s place, and that was going to hurt. She wasn’t ready.

  She thought about going to the range and shooting for an hour, but she wasn’t in the mood. The clouds still ripped by overhead with terrifying speed, but now they were bunching up like cows in a tight corral getting ready to stampede. The wind ripped and tore at the palm trees. Phoebe saw branches down all over. The weather was giving her the creeps; her knee hurt too much to make anything that required standing or walking seem appealing. She decided driving around for a while would be a better idea than getting out of the car.

  That turned out not to be her best idea.

  She made it down to the beach, just because traffic headed in that direction was surprisingly light. And then she saw the line of blackness lying offshore, and her stomach clenched. Red-and-black hurricane flags whipped and snapped, and undertow and riptide warnings and NO SWIMMING signs shimmied against the building gale. Highway A-1-A swarmed with tourists and residents fleeing the coast, getting to higher ground. Caught in the traffic, moving at a snail’s pace, all Phoebe could do was creep forward and wish she’d thought of someplace besides the beach to drive.

  She turned on the radio. Tropical Storm Helene was aimed straight at Fort Lauderdale, stalled not far offshore, building strength and organization. There was some concern that if she stayed stalled, she was going to roll over the city as a full-fledged hurricane instead of at her current tropical storm level.

  Phoebe didn’t want to think about dangerous weather, but she was going to have to. She had almost no emergency supplies in the house. Nobody to get them for her. No friends to ride out the storm with.

  She looked at the line of dark haze offshore, black against the deepening blue of twilight, and at the heavy breakers already threatening to come over the retaining wall and across the road. Storm surge. It could be bad.

  And somewhere along the way she realized that a red Porsche had been beside her in the left lane for a long time. She looked over and saw that the dark-tinted passenger-side window was down. And that she was staring at Michael. Michael, smiling at her.

  Phoebe almost wrecked. She was trapped in traffic, trapped in her car with no way to get away from him. Cars jammed together like sardines. She wasn’t going anywhere. At the next light, Michael could get out of his car, walk over to her, shoot her in front of everyone, then run away on foot and make better time than the traffic.

  Her hands locked around the steering wheel, she started praying — and when she glanced over again, this time in an intersection, the tinted window was rolled up, and the Porsche was making a left turn away from her.

  She couldn’t believe it. He had her trapped and he was driving away?

  She had to run before he changed his mind. Before he came after her.

  But—

  The inside of that Porsche had been dark. She’d only had the one glance at the man in it. He’d smiled at her, and the smile had looked like Michael’s smile. But could she have been seeing things?

  She kept her eyes open for a red Porsche, but she didn’t see one. It couldn’t have been Michael, because Michael wouldn’t have let her get away. Still, she wasn’t taking any chances. She got off A-1-A at the first opportunity. Just to lose anyone who might be following her, she meandered, making risky turns at the last minute, causing horns behind her to blare. Fifteen minutes of execrable driving and she was sure any tail she had was three bad turns behind, swearing.

  She tried to figure out where she should go next.

  Home?

  The storm wasn’t going to give a shit whether she was scared or not.

  She had to get some groceries. Had to float another check and pray that the last few days hadn’t killed her priority level so badly that she wouldn’t be able to make rent and cover the bills that were going to smash her.

  A couple of gallons of bottled water, she thought. Some batteries. Some bread — or maybe soda crackers. Some canned vegetables. Nothing big, nothing expensive.

  Phoebe turned into the Winn-Dixie parking lot, still watching for the red Porsche, just in case. It wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t there.

  In the store, she grabbed the next-to-last empty cart and leaned heavily on the handle, babying her knee, watching out for people who didn’t see her who might run into her or trip her.

  Shoppers jammed the aisles, grim-faced. The shelves already looked like they’d been hit by a plague of locusts, and Phoebe realized that she wasn’t going to get anywhere near bottled water or batteries. She’d be lucky to grab a couple of cans of beans.

  She needed to get home. Fill the bathtub upstairs with water — which meant climbing the damned stairs—

  And suddenly she got the feeling that someone was watching her. She looked down toward the other end of the frozen foods aisle, and Michael was standing there.

  Smiling.

  She had good light this time. It was Michael. She let go of the cart, turned away, and walked as quickly as she could back towards the doors.

  She looked behind her, but he was gone.

  Coming down another aisle to cut her off?

  Her throat constricted, and her hand patted the flap of her backpack. All those people — if she missed Michael, they were going to backstop the stray bullets. And if she hit him, the bullets might go through him and into them anyway.

  She had to get out of the store. She couldn’t pull the trigger knowing that she might kill innocents.

  Which was what he’d planned, wasn’t it?

  But he wasn’t at the end of the aisle. Or by the front door. Or out in the parking lot.

  Where was he? What was he doing?

  In the parking lot, hurrying towards her car, she tried to spot the Porsche. It wasn’t there.
>
  She had to get home, she thought. Behind closed doors. Where she was as safe as she could hope to be.

  She had the gun. It was loaded. She had new door locks, her windows were secure. She would get through this. Wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?

  She had to. She couldn’t let Michael win.

  She pulled into one of the two entryways to the neighborhood, and there was a roadblock, and cops. And her first thought was, Oh, God, Michael’s killed Alan.

  But the cop came to her window and said, “License and registration.” She handed them to him. He looked at them and walked away from her car, but she could still hear what he said into his walkie-talkie. “I’ve got her. East entrance. She’s alone.” And a furious voice demanding, “Keep her there.”

  “Pull off to the side right here and don’t move.”

  Her mind ran scenarios. Michael had framed her for Alan’s murder. Or his attempted murder. Maybe Alan was at least still alive. Or Michael had framed her for a whole lot of murders. She laid her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. Maybe jail would be a safe enough place to spend the night. Or the next ten years. She would have to specify no visitors. Couldn’t chance Michael getting through to her. Being alone was better than being dead. She’d been getting good at being alone before Alan came along.

  And she tried not to see Alan lying on the floor of his townhouse, shot or stabbed. She tried not to think of him dead, because the world without him in it would be hollow.

  He’d hated her at the end, but it wasn’t his fault. Someone had told him something about her that wasn’t true, and it had sounded true enough that he’d believed it.

  “Phoebe! Oh, God, Phoebe, you’re okay!”

  Her eyes flew open and Alan, alive and unscathed, was pulling open the door of her car, and he didn’t seem to hate her at all. In fact, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her and buried his face in her hair and sobbed, “I thought you were dead. Oh, Phoebe, I thought he’d gotten to you.”

  She gave Alan a hard hug, not understanding what had changed. “When I saw the roadblocks, I thought he’d killed you,” she said.

  She pulled away after a moment and saw Brig standing there looking like warmed-over hell, and behind him a man in a dark suit and white shirt and gray-striped tie who had to be FBI.

  “You found out he’s alive, didn’t you?”

  Brig said, “We don’t have any solid proof yet that he’s alive, but the man who was in the coma and died wasn’t him.”

  “I’ve seen Michael twice today; once in traffic driving a red Porsche, and once in the grocery store when I was going to pick up some storm supplies.”

  All any of them seemed to hear was “red Porsche.”

  “Did you get his plate number?” Brig asked. “Or even a partial? Anything that would help us sort it out from the ten thousand other red Porsches in Broward County?”

  She could have gotten that. Michael had been in the turn lane. Ahead of her. He’d been stuck there for long enough that if she’d been thinking, if she had just been thinking instead of panicking like a bird watching a snake coming for it — IDIOT! She closed her eyes, seeing the two of them in traffic again, seeing him in the left turn lane and her about a car length behind him, feeling her heart racing, feeling her blood pounding through her veins, and she could see the place where the tag was, and there was one there, and it was...

  “Not a thing,” she said. “I cannot remember a thing. I can’t even tell you if it was a Florida tag or out of state. I know it was there, but what it was — nothing.” She hung her head. “I’m sorry. I should have been able to get that.”

  And then the hair went up on her arms and on the back of her neck, as she realized that there had been a red Porsche parked in the reserved space to the left of hers in the parking lot of the development for the last month or so. She closed her eyes and imagined the parking lot layout. Alan’s car sat to her right. Her car. The red Porsche to her left. Then the white Sunbird that belonged to the widow who owned the unit on the other end.

  “Is there a red Porsche parked in space four fifty-four right now?” she asked.

  Brig spoke into his walkie-talkie and got the reply that the space was empty. “But there’s been one there before?”

  Phoebe nodded. “It would belong to the townhouse to the left of mine. I’ve never seen anyone going in or out of there, but that’s not unusual. I’ve spent almost all my time in my own place with the curtains drawn for the last two years. My neighbors are all quiet all the time. Either that, or the walls between these places are very well insulated.”

  “They’re pretty well insulated,” Alan said. “Not perfect. The family who lives behind me has teenagers, and I know they play their stereos all the time, and loudly, because I get the bass through my closet wall. I keep the door closed, though, and mostly don’t hear it.”

  Phoebe nodded. “The builders made sure that there were closets and bathrooms and public spaces along the shared walls, as much as possible, anyway. That was one of the features the real estate agent pointed out to me when I looked at the place. She said they did that to keep the bedrooms quiet. It seems to work.”

  Brig nodded. “Okay — so your ex might have been living in the townhouse right beside yours without you knowing it. That would be the perfect place for a watch post. And if we can figure out how he got into your place the first time, it would explain how he was able to drug your tea water and move things around.”

  Phoebe froze. “Drug my tea water?”

  “The samples we got were laced with scopolamine,” Brig said.

  “You knew that he’d... that he’d drugged my tea water? And you didn’t believe me?”

  Brig said, “We need to go sit down and talk.”

  “I just need to go sit down,” Phoebe said, feeling sick.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Phoebe and Alan and Brig and Special Agent Toeller went to Alan’s townhouse for the time being, because the FBI wanted to search Phoebe’s place for any further evidence of Michael, as did the police.

  Alan kept his front curtains open, so Phoebe could tell that outside was like a fire-ant hill someone had stirred with a stick. She saw men and women in uniforms, in suits, in lab coats swarming everywhere.

  She felt bad for them. Tropical Storm Helene finally made landfall, and the weather, which had been weirdly bright and windy all day, turned to shit.

  Inside, dry and secure, the four of them sat in comfortable chairs around Alan’s elegant coffee table, and Brig said, “First, let me tell you how sorry I am, Phoebe. I talked to Michael’s family about how you and Michael ended up getting married, and one of our guys found a detective’s report about Alan in a blue shoe box in your closet. It covered his credit, his income, his behavior and habits, his past including some details about his wife and daughter, and an estimate of his financial net worth.”

  “I never had him investigated. I couldn’t afford to hire a detective.”

  “We’re checking into the origin of the report right now.” Brig looked down and shook his head. “I know that good people sometimes make mistakes; I’m not used to dealing with good people, though. And the detective’s report combined with your current form of employment and your arrest record made me think I knew more than I did.”

  Phoebe sat there staring at him. “Brig — I don’t have an arrest record.”

  “Yeah, you do,” he said. “Up in Ohio when you were nineteen years old. You were charged with fraud, contributing to the delinquency of a minor—”

  She interrupted him. “Those charges were dropped and the case was dismissed.”

  “You were still arrested. And the charges were dropped only after you got yourself an expensive criminal defense attorney — whom you later married.”

  Phoebe rested her face in her hands. “Good Lord.” She looked up. “If you’re here, I guess you’re at least open to hearing my side of this.”

  “Yes.”

  She folded her hands together and lean
ed forward in her chair. “I was in college at the time — had just finished my first year. I’d earned a full four-year scholarship to Muskingum College and was pursuing my bachelor’s degree in science. But while the scholarship covered room and board and tuition and books, it wasn’t enough to cover things like clothes. Or transportation. I had a Vega station wagon that I could barely keep running, and even though I kept my needs simple, I had to have gas, car insurance, and the occasional new pair of shoes or jeans.

  “While I was home over the summer, my sister, who was seventeen at the time, reminded me of how we’d made our own spending money with lemonade stands and by selling homemade pot holders door-to-door in the various trailer parks where we’d lived. I told her I didn’t think I’d be able to cover the Vega’s expenses with homemade pot holders, and she told me she had a better idea. We could set up a little fortune-telling stand under this awful striped awning that my parents had tacked onto our trailer, and we could stick a classified ad in the local paper and charge a few bucks per reading. I read tarot, and she had a real knack with psychometry — holding things that belonged to other people and telling them about the owners of the objects.” Phoebe shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  She saw Brig and Alan exchanging glances. Agent Toeller sat quietly, looking at his hands, not saying anything.

  So Phoebe continued. “We started slowly, but our prices were low — I think we were charging five dollars for a reading, and we were both pretty good. We got busy, and then we got very busy, and then one of the neighbors called the police and complained because our summer business customers were blocking her driveway. And the police came and discovered that we were running a business without a license, which neither of us had the faintest idea that we needed, and that we were engaged in a business that the State of Ohio at that time looked upon as criminal, or at least questionable. Nicki was underage, so she basically just got yelled at. I was nineteen, almost twenty. So I got booked and charged — and would have had a public defender, except that Michael Schaeffer happened to walk through and see me during the booking phase. He told me and my defender that he’d take my case pro bono.”