by Susan Conant
“The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency is worried about methamphetamine,” Holly said.
“Maine’s favorite drug is marijuana.”
“Maine is considered to be a potentially ideal environment for manufacturing methamphetamine,” she said pedantically. “And there’s a market. It’s mailed from Arizona. Southern California. That’s where Holly Winter was from. Arizona. I talked to her father. He said that Holly was in Maine.”
“I heard that Grant was in the Southwest,” I said. “They must’ve met there. They went to Maine. They were dealing drugs. You got that right, too.”
“Not really.”
“And Calvin was involved. He’s from Maine. His accent? Down East. So, Holly obviously found him more attractive than Grant. Who wouldn’t? And she put Grant in the hospital and took off with everything he had. His dog, his truck, his money, his meth. And she stayed in touch with Calvin. But you know, in a way, you were right about body packers, except that she didn’t use dogs. She used dog toys.”
“Strike can’t have her toys,” Mellie said. “They can make her sick. And don’t talk to anybody! A bad man wants to hurt Strike.”
“The bad man can’t hurt her now,” I said. “He can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
“And she stole my identity because…what could be easier than stealing the identity of someone with your own name?”
“She knew who I was,” I said. “Grant used to show Alaskan malamutes. He bred them. Then he hit hard times. Drugs. His marriage broke up. He abandoned his dogs. She must have heard about me from Grant.”
“His dogs. The least of it,” Holly said.
“From your viewpoint maybe. But I think she really loved the dog. If he was a threat to Streak…Strike, then maybe that’s when she’d had enough. And if they were actually making meth, the environment would’ve been toxic. The dog could’ve been poisoned.”
“You’re very charitable,” she said snidely.
We fell silent, mainly because we’d have had to shout to make ourselves heard above the roar of an approaching motorcycle. It wove its way through the jam of cruisers and turned into Mellie’s driveway. Even from two houses away, I recognized it immediately: the Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide, the Alaskan malamute of motorcycles, the vehicular twin of my own Rowdy. I recognized Adam immediately. Every light in Mellie’s house was on, as were the streetlamps, of course, and porch lights up and down the block. The unnatural brightness and the flashing lights of the cruisers made for a theatrical effect that gave Adam a stronger resemblance than ever to Moses. In this setting, however, he favored Charlton Heston’s portrayal more than he did Michelangelo’s statue. Since he’d originally been looking for what I now guessed was either methamphetamine or drug money that he’d expected to get from the third Holly Winter, as I guess I’ll call her, I couldn’t understand why he’d voluntarily entered this macabre street festival, with all its cruisers, its unmarked law-enforcement vehicles, and its uniformed and plainclothes personnel. As I watched, I half expected Adam to hurl a grenade or stage some other kind of violent attack and half expected the police to slap handcuffs on him and confiscate the gorgeous Harley.
Two halves make a whole. Therefore, I was wholly wrong. After conferring with some authoritative types in plain clothes, Adam came striding down the sidewalk. When he reached Dr. Ho’s porch, he nodded to me, held out his hand, and said, “Al Papadopoulos. Special agent, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Gabrielle sends her regards.”
“Names are so confusing, aren’t they?” I said. “I mean, Adam. Or is it Al? What’s in a name, anyway? It’s hard to remember which is yours, I guess. Unless your name is Holly Winter. In that case, it’s easy, since there are so many of us. Our only trouble is keeping track of who’s who.”
“Just doing my job,” said Al. “Sorry. The malamute. The name Holly Winter. Calvin Jones getting a couple of calls from pay phones in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That little misunderstanding about Gabrielle’s wood lot. I had to check you out.”
“Her name really was Holly Winter.” I was still finding the truth hard to grasp. “She didn’t borrow mine. That actually was her name.”
Holly Winter and the DEA agent spoke simultaneously: “Yes.”
“She knew who I was,” I said. “Malamutes. Rescue. Where I live. Back there”—I pointed toward Mellie’s house—“Grant said that he was sick and that she beat him up and put him in the hospital. She fractured his skull and ruptured his spleen. Or so he said.”
“Basilar skull fracture,” Al said. “That was the least of what she did. He was in the hospital for four days. Got out a week ago yesterday. Then he was back in. The ruptured spleen didn’t show up on the X-rays the first time around, so they missed it.”
“Tough cookie,” said Holly Winter.
“Which one?” I asked.
“Her,” said Holly. “Holly Winter. You, too. QED.” She paused. “Which was to be demonstrated.”
She had a gift for getting my hackles up. “I didn’t actually require the translation,” I said.
“I’m trying to thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
CHAPTER 34
Mellie clung to her determination to sleep in her own bed. The police told her that she couldn’t. Neighbors cajoled. Francie showed up and spoke gently and persistently. We got nowhere until I promised Mellie that if she stayed with me, she could share a room with Rowdy and, if she liked, a second malamute as well. She jumped at the chance. Still, I understood her desire to be at home. I felt the same way, and it seemed to take forever to get there, in part because Kevin Dennehy finally arrived and insisted on hearing everything “straight from the horse’s mouth,” as he phrased it. I felt insulted. I bear a certain resemblance to the golden retrievers who raised me, but I am not in the least bit horsey. Still, I capitulated, mainly because I felt sorry for Kevin. His efforts to intervene on Jennifer’s behalf had failed; the leaders of the social-skills training course had declared themselves unable to rehabilitate her. Kevin almost choked on the word. Jennifer’s career was in jeopardy. Furthermore, Kevin confessed that his preoccupation with Jennifer’s difficulties had had a deleterious effect on his ability to concentrate on his work. Worst of all, as Kevin did not say outright, whereas he considered law enforcement in the city of Cambridge to be his birthright, the case had been taken over by the DEA, the attorney general’s office, and various other agencies that were apparently cooperating with one another more happily than they were with Kevin. So, out of sympathy, I told Kevin exactly what had happened. He didn’t interrupt. When I’d finished, I said, “And I know you have questions, but they’re going to have to wait. I have a lot of questions, too. There’s quite a bit that I still don’t understand. But I’m exhausted, and I need to get Mellie to my house and settled in, and I need to get the dogs home.”
In spite of everyone’s good intentions, it was one in the morning when I pulled Steve’s van into the driveway. The ride home had been chilly. In liberating himself to come to the rescue, Rowdy had used the back window that I’d left partway open. He had not, as I’d first assumed, simply gone through the glass. Rather, he’d taken out the entire window frame. As I’ve mentioned, everything in the rattletrap rattled: the engine parts, the frame, the heater, the radio, the doors, and that back window that Steve had had installed when he’d bought the van and had it customized. Kevin had helped me sweep up the glass in Mellie’s driveway, and he’d assigned two cruisers the job of escorting us home. The van sounded about the same as usual, and it was actually a good thing that the window frame had been in bad shape. Otherwise, Rowdy could’ve injured himself in barging through it. He seemed fine.
Sammy, I suspect, felt more than fine. What had he been doing after he’d vanished to the back of Mellie’s house? Well, as it turns out—no surprise—he’d discovered the two bags of groceries that Holly Winter had bought for Zachary Ho and had left on Mellie’s counter when she was waiting for Mellie to ge
t Dr. Ho’s house key. Fortunately, Sammy’s booty had been harmless. Indeed, what I’d belatedly realized was Holly’s infatuation with Zach Ho had motivated her to buy the best that Loaves and Fishes had to offer: whole-grain bread, organic milk, eggs from free-range hens, Vermont butter, Virginia ham, an array of French cheeses, and other nutritious foods, including, I might mention, sushi and sashimi. On the topic, let me mention something about Dr. Zachary Ho that strikes me as oddly inconsistent, namely, his devotion to the inhabitants of his aquariums and his fondness for sushi. I mean, what is sushi? It’s dead fish. I’m crazy about dogs, so you won’t catch me…Well, enough said. Anyway, even the raw eggs didn’t bother Sammy, and his expression clearly said that he felt more than healthy: he felt joyfully triumphant.
As promised, Mellie slept in our guestroom with Rowdy and Kimi for comfort and company. Sammy slept on my bed. Before I fell into an exhaustion-induced coma, I removed the Smith & Wesson from my nightstand, unloaded it, put the ammo in a dresser drawer, replaced the revolver in its case, and shoved the case to the back of the high shelf in the closet. As I fell asleep, I thought of Grant and Calvin. I wondered whether or not they’d make it through the night.
CHAPTER 35
Kevin called in the morning to tell me that Graham Grant had died. I hated to think that Rowdy had contributed to anyone’s demise, even Grant’s, but Kevin informed me that when Holly Winter—you know which one—beat Grant up with a two-by-four, she inflicted such massive injuries that he’d have survived only if he’d obeyed the instructions of his doctors and taken good care of himself, as he had not. In particular, he should have stayed off his motorcycle instead of riding it all the way from Down East Maine to Cambridge as soon as he was released from the hospital after having his spleen removed. The motorcycle, by the way, was a Harley. The police recovered it from Appleton Street, where Grant had parked it in a permit-only spot. He obviously wasn’t a Cambridge resident, and he didn’t have a visitor’s permit. You’d think he’d have learned about Cambridge parking, wouldn’t you? Not that it mattered. The police confiscated the Harley before it was ticketed, and dead men aren’t in a position to complain about the draconian nature of Cambridge ticketing and towing. They’re the only ones who aren’t.
I still didn’t understand the chronology until the next day, Thursday, when I went to Zach Ho’s house for a debriefing with Al Papadopoulos—which is to say, Moses or Adam or, if Gabrielle had anything to do with it, my honorary cousin-to-be. When Zach Ho called to invite me, he didn’t use the word debriefing; rather, he talked about the need to impose rationality on emotionally charged life experiences. He also mentioned trauma and healing. I didn’t mind. I’m used to Rita, who is a clinical psychologist as well as my tenant and friend, and who is always using words like catharsis when all she really means is a good cry. Zach Ho wasn’t a shrink, but he was a doctor and a special doctor at that, one who practiced medicine in the third world as well as in Cambridge and one who worked to prevent war as well as to repair the injuries it caused. I knew about him because I’d used Google and some other Web resources. As I’ve mentioned, a fondness for the Web and for databases was something that Holly the statistician and I had in common. In a way, we’d taken a common approach to researching the identity of the murder victim. The difference was that she’d used databases about human beings, whereas I had delved into a database of Alaskan malamutes. She’d discovered that the victim was actually named Holly Winter. I’d been on the trail of Graham Grant. She’d succeeded where I’d failed, but she’d made the mistake of extrapolating beyond the limits of her data. She, a statistician!
So, as I was saying, Zach Ho invited me to his house. The invitation did not extend to my dogs, even to Rowdy, who was, after all, a hero. Zach apologized and explained. His worst asthma attacks had all been triggered by dogs. As Mellie had failed to mention, whenever he entered her house, he had to take medication beforehand and had to wear a mask while he was there.
“So that’s why your, uh, house sitter left her dog with Mellie,” I said.
All he said was yes. The topic of his, uh, house sitter was obviously an awkward one for him.
When I arrived in the vicinity of Dr. Ho’s house, I took even more care than usual to make sure that I wasn’t parking where the city would tow Steve’s van. Neither side of the street was due for cleaning, and there obviously wasn’t a snow emergency, but around here, you never know what new excuse there’ll be to kidnap your vehicle and hold it for ransom: routinely scheduled aerial photography, a march and rally to protest the presence of Thomas the Tank Engine in a local preschool, anything. I was especially eager to avoid drawing attention to the van because I’d done a temporary and probably illegal repair job on Rowdy’s window, as I thought of it, with plastic and duct tape, and I didn’t want Steve to arrive home to find that his precious rattletrap had been officially declared unfit for the road. It was, in fact, my hope that Rowdy had delivered the coup de grace to the rattletrap and that when Steve discovered that the cost of repairing the window exceeded the value of the van, he’d finally ditch it. But the choice had to be his.
My previous experience with the interior of Zach Ho’s house had, of course, consisted of peering through a glass door and seeing Holly Winter’s body on the floor of the ransacked kitchen. This time, when I entered through the front door, I felt ridiculously surprised to find myself in the kind of bright, pleasant room that the warm yellow of the exterior and the prosperous neatness of the house and yard should have led me to expect. The fabric blinds visible from the outside let in the late-afternoon light and softened the cold illumination provided by the compact fluorescent bulbs of the lamps. As in Mellie’s house, the living room occupied the front, but Zach Ho’s living room had bare, shiny hardwood floors and two large aquariums with colorful fish. His furniture was simple and modern, with an emphasis on wood. The couch and chairs were upholstered in terra-cotta canvas, with one wall painted in the same shade and the others in basic academic-community white. Because he traveled to exotic places, I expected to see the kind of travel-trophy artwork that I’d learned never to admire aloud lest I have to listen yet again to “Oh, we found it at a little stall in the marketplace in Nairobi” or “We picked it up on our last trip to Belize” or “It was a special gift from a tribal chief in Senegal.” Here, there wasn’t so much as a single African mask. It occurred to me that the stripped-down decor might have more to do with Zach Ho’s asthma than with his aesthetic preferences.
The beautiful Harley had been squeezed into the parking area next to the bright blue hybrid. Seated on the couch was the man I was still struggling to think of as Al. He wore a light blue button-down shirt and chinos, civilian gear rather than motorcycle-undercover leather, and his dark hair was now as short as Holly Winter’s—an L.L.Bean Moses with a fresh haircut. Holly sat next to him. Little and bony, she looked half his size. She’d softened her boxy beige-linen look by adding a patterned scarf, and she was wearing lipstick that hinted at red. Now that I’d finally seen Zach Ho, I understood his effect on her. Indeed, I understood why the mention of his name made Mellie preen and why he’d succeeded in picking up women at a natural-foods supermarket, of all places. He was gorgeous. No, he was more than gorgeous: he was a Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide in human form. All on their own, my hands flew up and fluffed my hair, and I wished that instead of just substituting cords and a good sweater for my jeans and sweatshirt, I’d worn…a dress! Stockings. High heels. That I can’t walk in high heels and don’t even own a pair bothered me not at all. I could practically feel myself gliding smoothly across Zach Ho’s polished hardwood floor in those sexy heels without groaning about the pain in my toes and, miraculously, without tripping. Six feet tall, he had dark hair, dark eyes, and skin of Polynesian gold. Even when he wasn’t speaking, you could practically hear that smooth, powerful Harley engine purring in his chest.
“Thank you for inviting me,” I said breathlessly. “I’m, uh, happy
to meet you. Hi, Al. Holly. I hope I’m not late.”
“I just got here,” Al said.
“I can’t apologize enough,” said Zach Ho. “Everything you’ve all been through. It’s because of my crappy judgment.”
“What were you supposed to do?” Holly demanded more sharply than she probably intended. “Cancel your trip to Africa? Renege?”
“No. But…”
Al said, “Look, let’s fill in some missing pieces here. I’m the one who’s in a position to get that started.”
“Good,” I said. “First of all, who was she? And how did she get mixed up with Grant? And Calvin?”
“Holly Winter. She and Grant met in—”
Holly interrupted him. “Arizona. I reached her father. Holly was living with him, and she met Graham Grant. He was staying in the same trailer park.”
“Her name must’ve rung bells with Grant,” I said. “He must’ve recognized my name. We’d met at a dog show, and I write about dogs.”
“What is there to write?” Holly demanded.
“I don’t think that you really want me to answer that question.” I felt sure that she’d Googled me and knew precisely what I wrote. “The background on Grant is that he was in Illinois, and he got in trouble there. Money, drugs. His marriage broke up, and he took off. He abandoned his dogs. The people who rescued them thought that he’d left all of them, but he actually took one with him. The blue malamute. Streak. And he went to the Southwest. Arizona. Where he met Holly Winter. But how did they end up in Maine?”
“Calvin and Grant were Army buddies,” Al said. “But the real reason Grant wanted to go to Maine was business. He’d been shipping methamphetamine there, and he knew there was a market. Or a potential market. In Arizona, he was smalltime. The big meth labs were nearby. California, the Southwest, Mexico. Calvin owned a hunting camp he let Grant use. A shack, basically. This is in Washington County, northwest of Machias. He and Holly showed up there last spring. She hated it. That’s according to Calvin. He can talk a little. Not for too long at any one time, but he’s doing okay. He says she started going to his house to take showers.”
