Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  Bobby Mallon’s case had a great many aspects that she found depressing. She had always harbored a wish—not quite allowing it to grow into more than a pleasurable thought—that she and Bobby might someday meet again when they were both free. When she had first seen him in his doorway, it had come back more strongly than she had anticipated, a sudden shock to her chest, almost like air being forced into her lungs.

  It had been looking into his eyes after all this time. Mallon had the kindest eyes she had ever seen in a man. They were watchful eyes, a little sad. She had once allowed herself to think that when they looked at her, he too might be entertaining a wish that he couldn’t speak aloud: he had still been married to Andrea then.

  She had to admit that she had caused the feeling of emptiness she felt now. After he had called her, sometime while she was busy packing and making plane reservations and rushing down here, she had allowed that part of her brain to awaken. But now it was clear that she had been foolish. He had become a rich old bachelor—too rich for anybody to marry without seeming to be after the money—and the case was about a little chick half her age that he had taken to bed with him. She had learned to live comfortably with the idea of Bobby Mallon as a missed opportunity from long ago. This was worse.

  She forced herself to concentrate on her tasks. When she had finished sending her e-mails, she turned her attention to learning about Catherine Broward. Over twenty years ago, when she had started her own detective agency, she had also filed to give legal existence to a corporation called LJM Financial Systems, which she used as a front to request credit checks and other information on people. She set to work now and used the corporation to impersonate an insurance company sending an inquiry about Catherine Broward’s driving record, including any cars registered to her, to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. She ran credit checks with the three major services. Finally, she logged on to the site of a company that collected public records. She began with New York and California and searched for any criminal judgments, civil lawsuits, marriages, divorces. Then she extended her search to Illinois and Texas because of their sizes, and Nevada because it was a stop that had often produced interesting surprises for her in the past.

  When she had finished, she sent the information as an attachment to an e-mail to her computer in her office, then turned off the laptop. The part of this that she could do in Santa Barbara was done. She was going to need to travel. In a way, it was a relief.

  It was nearly nightfall when Mallon returned with the food.

  Lydia waited until they had eaten before she said, “I’ve got a place to begin searching, so I’m leaving.”

  “When?”

  “Now would be pretty convenient.” She glanced at her suitcase, which she had left in the living room. “I haven’t unpacked.”

  “I’d like to go with you.”

  She sat completely still and stared at him. “Why?”

  “I want the answer. I don’t have any reason not to go find it myself. I just don’t know how—even where—to begin anymore. I hired you because you’re the only detective I know I can trust. You know how it’s done these days. You’re also a woman, and I think what we find may be easier for you to understand than for me. Maybe it would be better, simpler, if I didn’t go, but I’ll try to be useful instead of annoying.” He stopped speaking and waited patiently.

  It was the waiting that kept Lydia from delivering the automatic refusal that had formed in her mind. Mallon had said everything he wanted to say, and had then had the sense to stop talking and wait. That was a rare quality, and she had missed it over the years. If she looked at it from a pure business perspective, she was aware that Mallon had put up fifty thousand dollars in advance, which he had a right to expect would buy him extraordinary tolerance from a detective. But none of that would have mattered to her if it had not been Mallon. He wasn’t just a client, he was her old friend, her partner in the parole office when they’d both been young and had shared a belief in the fundamental goodness and perfectibility of human beings. Over the years they had both learned to hide it—she more convincingly—but it was still there. After all, that was what they were both doing in this Catherine Broward case: acting on the faith that things should have gone right, and trying to learn why they hadn’t.

  She supposed she had just discovered the catch in the contract, the unwritten expectation that would make this routine job maddening and difficult. It was possible that at some time in the future, she would remember this as the moment when she should have given Mallon his money back. But she didn’t. She said, “All right.”

  Mallon didn’t thank her, just said, “I’ll be ready to leave in twenty minutes.”

  Lydia sat in the living room and read over her notes in silence while Mallon quickly and efficiently moved from room to room, locking windows, picking up small items like keys and sunglasses, then disappeared for a few minutes. For Lydia it was a pleasant surprise when Mallon was at the front door with a small suitcase after only fifteen minutes. Mallon was a rich man now. There were very few rich people who didn’t speak about other people’s time carelessly, and it was a good sign to her that he still lived up to his word in small matters.

  They got into Mallon’s car and drove up the freeway to Fairview Road and into the entrance to the small, quiet airport. Lydia and Mallon were on a half-empty commuter plane to Los Angeles International in another half hour. When they arrived, they were in time to catch the red-eye to Pittsburgh.

  Lydia sat beside Mallon through the two flights and in the airport waiting areas, preparing herself for questions that never came. At first it seemed to Lydia that Mallon had assumed that questions from him would detract from the efficiency of her inquiry. Later, she wondered if maybe it was simply that Mallon had lived alone for so many years that he had grown comfortable with silence. Halfway through the flight to Pittsburgh, she decided to volunteer.

  “We’re going to Pittsburgh because I think Catherine Broward may have come from there.”

  Mallon looked politely interested. “Why do you think that?”

  She said, “What you and I are working on now is an outline I got from a credit check. About two months ago, she was there. She flew to Pittsburgh from her last place in Los Angeles. She bought a plane ticket in Pittsburgh to fly back to Los Angeles after a couple of weeks. But while she was there, she didn’t use a credit card to pay for a place to stay. She didn’t arrive with a round-trip ticket. It all has a certain feel to it, doesn’t it?”

  “A man?”

  She shrugged. “If she was visiting a boyfriend, she would have made a round-trip reservation, knowing when the visit would be over. If she had been coming to Pittsburgh to live with him, she would have given up her apartment in L.A. and put her stuff in storage or shipped it. Those are things that create charges, and there aren’t any.”

  “So you’re guessing she was visiting her family.”

  “Everything is a guess right now, except that somebody let her stay for free. This isn’t science,” said Lydia. “It’s just like looking for parole violators. The method is still just using your instinct for recognizing something that’s odd.”

  Mallon studied her for a moment. “Why did you start in Pittsburgh, and not L.A.? You think they’ll know, don’t you?”

  She hesitated. “Maybe, if they are relatives. If she went home to see them for an open-ended visit, maybe what she was doing was something young people sometimes do. The world out there gets to be too much for them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. She gets a job, and the job is low-paying and leads nowhere. She has a relationship, but the boyfriend isn’t somebody she wants to marry. So maybe she waits until she can get some time off or, more likely, makes time by quitting, and goes back to where she came from. She knows she can’t go back there to stay, because that would be the dead end of all dead ends. Her family is glad to see her, but even they know it isn’t going to last. Still, she toys with the idea of staying in
Pittsburgh. What she’s doing, really, is playing that she can stay, pretending that she’s younger and hasn’t gone off on her own yet. It goes away.” She sighed. “Or it takes a worse turn.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that Catherine went to see them because she knew she was about to commit suicide? I mean, if that’s who she saw.”

  She nodded. “It’s entirely possible.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then either she will have told somebody her troubles, or she will have lied through her teeth, smiled a lot, and pretended everything was just great. They do that, too.”

  They arrived in Pittsburgh in daylight, with the sun still very low and shining almost horizontally into the windows of the airport. Lydia rented a Lincoln Town Car and checked them into a large, expensive hotel downtown. While they were walking to the elevators, Mallon said quietly, “Everything doesn’t have to be luxurious just because I came along. I’m still a pretty ordinary guy. Do whatever you normally do.”

  “I’m not wasting your money,” she said. “When I hunt bail jumpers, I check into the cheapest, most anonymous fleabag in town, lie low, and start hunting for my guy in the neighborhood. In this kind of investigation I try to play against type a little. People who live in a town know the hotels better than we do. They form impressions of outsiders based on a lot of superficial things, including what kinds of cars they drive and where they’re staying. Detective work is a trashy profession. Expecting that people will talk about personal matters to a private detective staying in a cheap motel by the tracks is asking too much.”

  “This hotel’s fine with me,” said Mallon. “I don’t have any more nostalgia for cheap hotels than you do. I just don’t want you to waste your energy trying to keep me pampered. I haven’t changed that much. Where do we go first?”

  “You can get yourself settled in now. I’ve got to go back to the car-rental agency, but I’ll be back in an hour or two. If you can’t sleep, maybe you can take a walk and get a swim. That’s pretty much your regular routine, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Mallon. “That’s why I don’t need to do it here. What are we going to do at the car rental?”

  “I’m going to get somebody to show me the forms Catherine Broward filled out to rent her car when she was here.”

  “How?” asked Mallon. “We’re not cops carrying an arrest warrant anymore.”

  “What I usually try first is bribery.”

  “If the person turns you down, what do you try second?”

  “Bribing somebody else.”

  CHAPTER 7

  They arrived outside the car rental just before nine. The sun was bright, but the air had a humid heaviness that made them glad to get into the small air-conditioned building. Mallon was silent while Lydia tried talking the pale, thin young woman behind the desk into showing them the papers, offering her one hundred, then three hundred, then five hundred dollars. As the young woman politely and cheerfully shook her head, the thin, faded blond hair flew into her face and she had to brush it away from her eyes in a practiced gesture that Mallon sensed made her feel unapproachable and yet alluring. It seemed to give Lydia an idea. She turned to look at Mallon.

  Mallon stepped closer. “Miss,” he said. “I’m Robert Mallon, the client who hired Miss Marks. Catherine Broward tried to drown herself on a beach in California where I live. I pulled her out of the ocean, but a few hours later she shot herself. She’s dead. The police in Santa Barbara have not yet been able to find and notify her family. All we want to know is whether there’s a local address on the form where she said she could be reached. It might lead us to her parents. They could be frantic with worry, trying to reach her right now, and there’s no reason to make them go through that. They have a right to be told what happened.”

  The young woman was no longer smiling opaquely, but she did not offer to give them anything.

  Mallon persisted, as though what needed to be prodded was her memory. “She was about your age, not blond like you but with long, dark hair. She was kind of pretty—I don’t mean like a movie star, just a nice-looking person. Do you at least remember her coming in?”

  The young woman looked worried, and perhaps even a bit irritated by his attempt to manipulate her. “So many people come in for cars, and I have to watch the paperwork so closely that I don’t always even look close at faces.”

  “Honey, you look at their faces when they show you their driver’s licenses,” Lydia reminded her gently. “You have to be sure it’s the same person.”

  The girl’s smile came back. Mallon could see it was her armor. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Lydia would not be dismissed. “We’re not from your company. We don’t work for your company. Here’s my identification. As you can see, I really am a private investigator.”

  The girl stared at the detective’s license, but seemed unconvinced. She looked at Mallon expectantly. He pulled out his wallet and held it open while she examined the California driver’s license behind the plastic to verify that his name really was what he had said. She sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can find.”

  Lydia reached into her purse. “Here’s your five hundred.”

  “I don’t want it,” she said. “I just don’t want to lose my job.” She began typing on the keyboard of her computer terminal, staring at the screen. Then she took the pen that was lying on the counter tied to a string, scribbled something on the back of a company brochure, and handed it to Mallon. She did not touch the money Lydia had placed on the counter. “That’s the address and phone number she gave.”

  “Please,” said Mallon. “I would like you to take the money. If this is her family, the whole search is over, and you’ve saved me whatever I would have spent hunting for them.”

  She ventured a glance at the money, but she didn’t move. She studied Mallon. “Why are you doing this—any of it?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose it’s because this is the only thing left that I can do for her. I had a chance to talk her out of it, but I didn’t think of the right thing to say. I feel sad about it. I wish you would take that money.”

  “Why do you care whether I take the money?”

  “So that somebody who showed compassion would get some small benefit out of it.” He took the bills from the counter and added some from his pocket. “I’m rich now, but there have been a couple of times when a few hundred bucks might have changed my life.” He folded the money, took her hand, and folded her fingers over it. He held the hand for a couple of extra seconds, until he felt her finger muscles tighten, then gently released it like a small bird. “Thanks for your help.” He turned and walked out the door.

  Lydia said quietly, “We really aren’t from your company. And I really am a detective.” She pointed up at the tinted glass half-globe on the ceiling above the door. “Don’t forget to put a fresh tape in the security camera’s tape deck before you leave. You can lose the old one on the way home.”

  The address belonged to a woman named Sarah Carlson. The house was a very small, narrow, two-story cottage painted a daffodil yellow with spotless white enamel trim. There was a small covered porch with a white railing that gleamed in the sunlight.

  Lydia and Mallon stood on the porch listening to the soft footsteps moving toward the door. The woman who opened it was about thirty, with light skin and dark brown hair that she wore short, and Mallon knew that Sarah Carlson was not just a friend.

  Lydia appeared not to have seen the resemblance. “Good afternoon. Are you Sarah Carlson?”

  The woman looked at Lydia, then at Mallon through the closed screen door, and answered, “Yes.” The voice was like Catherine’s. It made Mallon feel the sadness again.

  “My name is Lydia Marks, and this is Robert Mallon. Do you know Catherine Broward?”

  She looked at them warily. “What is this about?”

  Lydia said, “A few days ago, in Santa Barbara, California, Catherine Broward took her own life. We’re trying to find her family,
and—”

  Sarah Carlson was crying. It had begun at “took her,” the tears appearing in the eyes without the expression having time to change yet, so that it looked as though a cold wind had simply blown into her eyes and made them water. But then the eyes squinted, the shoulders came up in a cringe, the mouth quivering and the chin puckering before the hands could rise to her face to hide it. She began to wail, “Oh, no. Oh, no. No …”

  Mallon watched, wondering. The girl he had saved had seemed to be healthy, smart, sure of herself. Now he could see that she’d had someone who had cared very deeply about her. He had heard or read somewhere, in the period after his sister’s death, that sometimes people killed themselves in order to punish someone—their families, usually. As he watched this young woman behind the screen sobbing, he reflected that if this was a punishment, it was incredibly effective. It was hard to imagine anything a stranger could have said to this woman that would have made her dissolve into sorrow this way. It occurred to him that what he was seeing was probably like watching himself thirty-three years ago—not the tears or the exact expressions, but the utter devastation.

  He turned to Lydia, at first only to keep from staring cruelly at the woman. Lydia’s body was straight and rigid, her face solemn, but her eyes were in quick motion. She was looking past the woman, over and around her into the house, then to the left at the house beside hers, then to the right, and back at the woman. Now that she had temporarily forgotten the visitors, Lydia studied her pitilessly. After Lydia seemed to have exhausted the sights available to her, she asked, “Would you like us to come back later? We only need to ask a few questions. Her parents …”

  Sarah Carlson forced herself to focus her attention on the two people still standing at her door. She raised her eyes toward them and seemed to see them as troublesome. She began to nod, but then appeared to remember something, or to discover it. “No, please,” she said. “Come in.”