A Hard Death

by Jonathan Hayes

  Between the slow swoop of the windscreen wipers, Jenner’s headlights lit up the open gates of Stella Maris; the security team was gone, the fish-eye CCTV lens still and unseeing. Jenner parked on the carriage circle in front of the house; the driveway was empty.

  He sat, seat belt still fastened, listening to the hushed rustle of rain on his roof, feeling the exhaustion eat his bones like acid.

  Deb would be clean now, in a hospital bed in the small urgent-care center in Bel Arbre. He’d helped her into the reception and rung the bell. She’d hugged him, her arms tightening around his neck when he first started to pull back. She shook her head and murmured, “Please, please, just call the sheriff, Jenner.” But he couldn’t do that.

  He’d turned to look at the Mexicans waiting out on the road in their pickup, and she felt him start to turn, and held onto him; she knew they were taking him back to his car and that she couldn’t stop him.

  She told him to be careful and kissed him on the mouth, a soft, sad kiss, and then he pulled back, away from her. When he turned to look back through the glass doors, the nurses were running to her.

  Jenner moved his seat back, pulled the Beretta out, and lay it across his lap, feeling the seriousness of its weight.

  He looked up at the house, golden and bright in the floodlights. He saw no movement, but they’d be in there now, both of them. They’d have heard his car, seen his headlights.

  He walked down the path, down the steps past the pool to the lower terrace. He stood at the white balustrade, looked out over the dock, where the swamp boat was now moored.

  The house looked huge from the bottom of the garden, coffered by rectangles of light pouring from the windows. Jenner climbed the steps, remembering the first time he’d seen it, how perfect it had seemed, how luxurious, every man’s dream.

  He crossed the broad veranda, stripped of its furniture, now a barren plaza of rain-slick marble; he went in through the open sliding doors that led to the ground-floor breakfast room.

  Lucy Craine’s passport lay on the low glass coffee table; behind the table, the garbage bags had been flung onto a couch. Jenner opened them to check; the money was still there.

  The kitchen tile was clinical white. The room was larger than most restaurant kitchens, with glass-fronted SubZero fridges and wall-mounted ovens and undercabinet wine coolers and an eight-burner Wolf range; a child could dogpaddle in the huge soapstone sinks.

  Jenner stepped out into the back of the huge entrance hall. The floor was a checkerboard of large black and white marble tiles that gleamed under the light of an enormous crystal chandelier.

  He heard the sound of muffled speech from upstairs, movement, too, as someone passed rapidly back and forth between rooms. Jenner lifted the Beretta and climbed the wide stairs, the conversation louder as he neared the landing.

  On the second floor, his footsteps were silent in the deep pile of the carpet. The sound was clearer now, and Jenner recognized the rhythm and crackle of a police radio scanner; Craine was listening in on the sheriff’s frequency, monitoring the situation up at the farm.

  The sound came from the half-open door of the master bedroom, just off the stairwell. Jenner stood in the doorway, the Beretta in his hand.

  There was an open carry-on bag on a large four-poster bed. Craine stood in the middle of the room, back to the doorway, packing his beautiful handmade shirts into the bag. His pistol, a small Walther, lay on his bureau next to the chattering scanner.

  “Craine.”

  The man straightened slowly and glanced toward the dresser.

  “Don’t,” Jenner said. “I’m not the world’s best shot, but at this distance I won’t miss.”

  Craine raised his hands and turned slowly to face Jenner. He was smiling slightly.

  “I like you, Jenner! You’ve got…gumption!”

  “More importantly, I have a Beretta.”

  “Yes,” Craine said. “Yes, you do.”

  He backed over to the bed and sat. “Do I have to keep my arms up?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Craine lowered his arms. “You know, you can still walk away from this a wealthy man.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  Craine laughed. “Good God, doctor! It’s never too late for money!”

  “Your granddaughter is dead because of you.”

  Craine’s smile slackened a little, and a tremor of emotion passed through the man’s face; it could have been real. “You can have no possible idea of what a nightmare this has been for me.”

  He paused a second, then said, “But of course, you have to understand I had no way of knowing what would happen there tonight.”

  Maggie Craine said, “What would happen where?”

  They both turned. She stood shivering in the doorway, hair wet, skin flushed; in her hand, she held Lucy’s passport. There was something ominous, fevered in her expression.

  Jenner turned to Craine and said, “Tell her.”

  Craine stood; he looked at his daughter but stayed silent.

  “Tell her or I will.”

  “Where is she? Where’s Lucy? For the love of God, what did you do?”

  Craine said, “Maggie, listen…You need to pull yourself together. This is hard on all of us.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” She was shaking violently now, the words chattering out of her mouth.

  Craine looked at Jenner. “Doctor, my daughter needs help. I think we should get her to a hospital.”

  The scanner crackled, and an urgent voice said, “Sheriff, this is Weeks. We’re in the basement now…” The voice grew hesitant. “You maybe oughta see this. We have the body of a young female, a girl. She’s pretty charred up, but…I’m sorry, sir, but she’s a skinny little thing, and with the backpack, I’m pretty sure we got Lucy Craine here.”

  Maggie howled, “NO! You fucking bastard! How could you! How could you?”

  Craine shook his head helplessly. “Maggie, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just wanted to…”

  “You wanted to what? You wanted to WHAT??? What were you doing with her in the basement?”

  He smiled thinly. “I just took her to the farm for a nice evening with her papaw.”

  Maggie pulled the pistol out of her purse so quickly Jenner had no time to react. She fired once. There was a spray of red from Craine’s neck; the string went out of his spine and he collapsed vertically, folded into himself and on down to the floor. He lay there, gasping, eyes open but not moving, blood pulsing rhythmically out of the hole in his neck.

  Jenner dropped to his knees, threw his gun aside, and said, “Jesus Christ! Jesus!”

  He hovered helplessly over Craine, saw the blood pumping out. He covered the hole with his hands—he had to do something. He pressed firmly, feeling the shredded muscle beneath the skin ripple under his fingers.

  Over his shoulder, he said, “I think it hit his spinal cord. Please, call 911, Maggie. Please, they can help him.”

  “Move, Jenner.”

  Hands pressing firmly on the wound, Jenner looked up at her. She was pointing the gun at him.

  “Move now. Don’t make me.”

  “If I let go now, he’ll die, Maggie. You’ll be a murderer.”

  “Let go, Jenner. It’ll be on me.”

  “This is a death penalty state, Maggie. He’s not worth it.”

  She lifted the gun slightly and fired. A shower of pulverized veneer and mahogany erupted from the dresser by Jenner’s shoulder.

  “Let go.” She pointed the gun at Jenner.

  Jenner looked down at Craine, at the blood welling over his fingers, the muttering lips. He couldn’t make himself lift his fingers up, couldn’t just let him die like that. He said, “I…I don’t think I can.”

  Maggie stepped closer, leaned over Jenner, pointed the weapon down, and fired two more shots into her father’s face.

  “You can now.”

  CHAPTER 139

  Maggie? It’s over.” Jenner stood. “Put the g
un down, now.”

  She looked down at the pistol.

  “I had to, Jenner. He wouldn’t have left her alone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s all I’ve got, Jenner.”

  He wanted to reach out to her, to touch her. To somehow make it easier for her.

  Maggie stood in front of him, staring down at her dead father.

  She turned to him. “I found her journal this evening. He was calling her, talking to her—he’d given her a cell phone, I didn’t know, I swear, or I’d have stopped it.” A big tear welled up in her left eye and spilled down her face.

  “He was calling her most nights, Jenner. Daddy was making her…do things. To herself.”

  She sat on the bed, looking up at him. “He was making her sick, you know? He told her she was fat, even when she weighed eighty-seven pounds, Jenner. When my little girl was just a crumpled paper bag of tiny bones, he told her she was fat. He gave her a kind of anorexia prayer list, sick little prayers, horrible things to make her hurt herself.”

  Maggie held the gun loosely in her lap. “He was calling her most nights, calling while I was painting shitty paintings, or out at the Polo Grounds with shitty men.”

  Jenner said, “It’s finished, now. Give me the gun, okay? Let me take it…”

  She shook her head. “There’s one thing left, one more step to get rid of everything that man polluted.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Jenner, don’t even! I know you know. You figured it out pretty quickly; I could tell you knew when you came to my house this afternoon.”

  He was silent.

  “Say it. I know you know. Say it!”

  He knew. “He said he just wanted to go away with his daughter, but he took her, not you.”

  She sneered. “Oh, I’m his daughter all right! One hundred percent Craine DNA…Can’t you tell?”

  “And Lucy?”

  She smiled, her face suddenly calm. “You’re getting warm…”

  “Lucy was his daughter too?”

  She crumbled, put her face into her hands, the pistol nuzzling her thick hair, her shoulders curving and sagging as the sobs rocked her body.

  “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and the only good thing I ever did with my life.” Behind her hands, her face was red and wet.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She sat up, wiping her eyes. “Well, it wasn’t a stork!”

  Jenner sat next to her.

  “What happened, Maggie?”

  She was crying hard again, her knuckles white around the gun, her fingers wet with tears.

  Jenner waited.

  “It’s so fucking dull…it happens every day to some girl somewhere in the country.” She calmed a little, wiped her face. She said, “I was twenty-three, home from grad school for spring break. And we went to the Polo Grounds, and we got drunk, both of us, real drunk.”

  She sat straighter and wiped the damp hair from her eyes.

  “We were in the kitchen alone, and ‘Stand by Me’ came on the radio, and he hugged me, and we were dancing in the kitchen. And then I felt him pressing against my leg, and I pulled away, but he wouldn’t let me go. He dragged me into the breakfast room, and he was kissing me, trying to get his tongue in my mouth, but he couldn’t, so he was licking my neck—I remember that so clearly, his spit on my neck, the smell of alcohol in his mouth. And he was too big for me to get him off of me. And it was like, you know…It all went quiet inside me. I just let him do it, I stopped fighting and just let him do it.”

  Maggie breathed out. “When he finished, he rolled off me, and went to the kitchen and got a bottle of wine, and asked me if I wanted any. And that was that.

  “I mean, I washed myself as best I could, but there wasn’t a morning-after pill back then. And when I told him I was pregnant, he wasn’t mad or even upset—he was…interested. He took me out of school, brought me back to Stella. He took me to a clinic in Gainesville to have early amnio, and when it came back all right, he promised me all sorts of things. And I kind of just went along with it.”

  She noticed the photo of Lucy on the bedside table and picked it up, running her thumb softly over the little face.

  “I was worried, but she came out pretty much perfect. She had some hearing problems; the doctor didn’t know, he said I probably had a viral infection while I was carrying her. But she was beautiful, and sweet, and a good girl.”

  There was crackling on the police scanner. She stood abruptly, flicked the scanner off.

  “But she’s dead, and my father’s dead—my turn now! Sorry.”

  Maggie smiled helplessly at Jenner, lifted the gun to her temple, and he shouted, “No!”—and she pulled the trigger.

  She fell back against the bed and slipped to the floor as he tried to gather her in his arms. Blood soaked her hair. She wasn’t moving.

  Jenner laid her flat. He touched his fingers to her neck, felt for a pulse. He pressed harder, felt nothing but the beat of his own heart in his fingertips.

  He pressed the heel of his palm into her breastbone and began to pump, felt the give of her chest wall, the recoil of her lungs. He pumped for a minute, then felt for a pulse again.

  And there was none, and Jenner knew she was dead.

  He stood, looked around the room. Craine lay dead on the floor, his daughter by the bed, four feet away from him.

  Jenner went to the scanner and tried to find a microphone to call for help, but there was none. He switched it on, and the overheated chatter from the farm filled the room. In the moment, confronted with the carnage and the loss, the deputies had given in to chaos, abandoning ten-code and just blurting out whatever was going on out into the air-waves. The sheriff was on the scene now, shouting out orders to establish a perimeter, to keep the press at a distance.

  Jenner walked down the stairs. In the kitchen fridge, he found a carton of apple juice. He poured a tall glass, sat at the counter, and drank it, tried to figure out his next step. He had Maggie’s blood on him, both her blood and her father’s; God only knew what else he’d touched in the house.

  He finished the glass and poured another. He drank, then rinsed the glass, and put it back in the cabinet.

  He took the bags of cash from the breakfast room and walked them out to his car. He jammed them into his trunk, pressed them as flat as he could get them, then covered them with his clothes.

  In Craine’s bedroom, the air smelled of blood and metal and gun smoke. Jenner stood in the doorway, looking at the bodies. Maggie Craine lay stretched next to the bed, her right leg draped over her left; she looked like a mannequin now, as if she’d never drawn breath.

  Jenner listened to the noise of the scanner for a minute, then went out to his car and drove to the farm. Just north of Bel Arbre, he stopped, threw the spare tire into the irrigation ditch by the side of the road, hid the money in the tire well, then laid the carpet back down on top of it.

  CHAPTER 140

  At the farm, it was pandemonium. Jenner parked on the bridge over the mangroves and stared out over the fields at the burned wreckage of the distant farmhouse. The approach road was clotted with rescue vehicles, fire trucks, ambulances and patrol cars from as far away as Fort Myers, and white news vans, their microwave antennas red and blue in the turret lights. They were already live, the on-air talent standing in isolated pockets of white light in the dark, sharing with the nation rumors of the carnage gleaned from returning paramedics and firemen.

  Jenner drove on, parked at the mouth of the approach road, and walked the rest of the way, passing unrecognized through the throngs of emergency personnel and news people. Parked up near the white gate was a furniture van: the DEA response team, he figured. A young uniformed deputy stopped him at the gate; he identified himself, and she pulled up the sheriff on the radio, then let Jenner through.

  The sheriff stood in the middle of the slope, surrounded by a knot of SWAT cops in black uniforms and body armor. The bodies of his men h
ad been cleared from the field; those who hadn’t been removed by ambulances lay in a row of body bags at the foot of the rise, two uniformed officers standing watch.

  The stand lights turned the slope into a floodlit nightmare, strewn with the battered and burned bodies of men and pigs. Anders had sent an officer around to put the wounded animals out of their misery; periodically, a gunshot rang out as he came across another.

  The sheriff was pale and sweaty, juggling priorities as fast as he could. When he asked what Jenner was doing there, desperation had driven the animosity out of his voice. Jenner suggested they speak privately; the sheriff followed him across the field, relieved to be out of the spotlight, if only for a moment.

  “The Miami pathologists are on their way, Dr. Jenner. I think it’s best we just let them get on with it, keep it local.”

  “I was here.”

  “What?”

  “I was here when this happened. With Deb Putnam, from the Park Rangers.”

  “Why were you here?”

  “I was looking for Lucy Craine; her mother called me after Chip Craine took her without permission.”

  “Just what the hell happened here?”

  “What do you have so far?”

  “Nothing. Zero. Fire got called in by a motorist who saw it from I-55. It’s an underserved rural area, so both Douglas and Lee County FD respond. They find multiple fatalities, evidence of multiple explosions, and dozens of dead or wounded pigs. Just after we get here, a DEA response team shows up; they’re not saying anything about who put them into this, or why they responded.”

  Anders squinted at Jenner, noticing for the first time the state of his clothes, soiled and bloody.

  He said, “Drugs, right? It’s drugs if the DEA’s here.”