“Mac”—she stopped eating and looked up at him—“I thought you were starved.”
“You’re right. Of course, sorry, go on.” He took a bite.
“She couldn’t tell for sure, because it was dusk and she wasn’t paying that much attention. But she remembered seeing a girl in the bow, her hand over the side, trailing in the water, and a man at the tiller of the outboard. She was fishing off the end of the dock and saw them land at the beach. As you thought, he jumped out and carried her up towards the cottage, which is hidden behind the point—she can’t see it from the dock.”
She had managed to finish the ravioli between sentences, and now she picked up a piece of bread, broke off a bite-size chunk and swirled it around in the leftover sauce. Just before putting it in her mouth, she added, “Vertesi says she thought the girl was wearing a gown, because it looked so billowy and out of place. She assumed it was a honeymoon, except—and get this—the guy was in cut-off jeans or shorts.” She smiled and popped the bread into her mouth. “She couldn’t remember anything about the second boat other than there were four guys in it.”
MacNeice had stopped eating again. Aziz dropped her hands to the table edge and said, “Are you okay?”
“I was just wondering where this takes us. Why didn’t Vertesi mention this in the briefing with Swetsky? Was there anything else?”
“He wanted to tell you. If I hadn’t teased him he probably would have, but you know Vertesi—he’s a big team player and Swetsky coming on probably threw him. He’s having lunch with her today. She’s a teacher. He took a shot of Ruvola with him to see if she’d recognize him.”
“Romance and police work usually don’t mix well, but maybe Vertesi will prove that theory wrong,” MacNeice said, finally digging into his ravioli.
SEVENTEEN
—
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL THE POLICE what you saw?” Vertesi was sitting in the park opposite Rachel’s school. They had just finished sandwiches and orange sodas and some breezy conversation about life in high school.
“When I heard that my parents had talked with the cops—that was the first time I thought what I had seen could mean something. I was out on the dock fishing when I saw the boat land, and it wasn’t till the next day that I heard the girl had been murdered.” She waved away some flies that had landed on the sandwich wrappers.
“Still, why not call the police once you’d figured it out?” Vertesi wasn’t being aggressive; he was simply determined to find out the answer to something that had been bothering him.
“To be honest, Michael, I didn’t want to get involved. My mother and father and especially my brothers didn’t want me to get involved. Just before you showed up, I’d made up my mind to call when I got back to the city.” She scrunched the wrappers into a tight ball and tossed it into the trash bin five feet away. It didn’t touch the rim.
“Three points.” He met her eyes. “So is that why you agreed to go for a walk with me?”
“No. Well, yes, I realized if I went for a walk with you I could handle it right then and there.…” She smiled to soften it.
“I’ll need you to make a formal statement. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. Will you be there?”
“I can be there if you want me to—or not.” He was roughing up the gravel in front of the bench, playing soccer with the ring from a pop can.
“I do want you there.” She said it so firmly that he rocked her slightly with his shoulder, and she pushed back.
“Where’d the second boat go?”
“I don’t know. It was getting dark and I hadn’t caught anything, so I walked back to see if I could get some leftover dinner. I knew that my brothers and their wives would be finished eating and off doing something else. I didn’t feel like making nice-nice.” She was staring at one of her students, who was walking with his arm around a girl.
“You didn’t hear it, or the other one leaving the beach in front of the cottage?”
“No, I ate something, and since Mom and Dad were upstairs in their room watching television, I turned on the stereo, poured a glass of wine and started marking the last of my end-of-term exams on the couch.”
“How soon can you come in?”
“After school today. Will you meet me?”
“Meet you? I’ll come back and get you!” He stood up and offered her his hand.
The teenager and his girlfriend walked by just in time to catch it. “Whoa, Miss Ingram, get a load of you,” he teased. The girlfriend smacked him but giggled as they passed.
“Now you’ve done it, Detective Vertesi. How am I going to live this one down? By one thirty this will be all over the school.”
“Let me walk you to the door, teach.” Remembering the photo of Ruvola, he pulled it out of his inside pocket. “Ever see this guy around the lake or the marina? There’s a kiss in it for you if you have.”
Rachel cocked an eyebrow at him but studied the mug shot, then shook her head. “No, I’ve never seen him.”
“My mother would tell you—will tell you—that I’m actually very shy, and mostly I am,” Vertesi said, to mitigate the line about the kiss. “I’ll be here when, at three thirty?”
“You can be here then, but I won’t be out until four fifteen. I’ll meet you on the steps over there.”
“Oh, and one last question—what do you make of Old Man Gibbs? The guy snapped when I started asking questions.”
“He’s always snapping. Since Florence died he’s apparently been weirder than ever. My brothers think he’s off his meds, but I honestly don’t know. Most of us just avoid his place.”
“Thanks. That’s it—no more questions.”
They shook hands at the door. The gesture was greeted by loud catcalls and whistles and someone yelling, “Don’t be stingy, Miss Ingram. Kiss the man!” followed by more shouts and laughter.
She grinned at him, then turned and climbed the stairs without looking back.
HEADING OFF TO GIBBS MARINA, Vertesi forced himself to switch focus from Rachel to the second boat. He needed to find out whether Thompson or Gibbs had just forgotten to mention it or if there was a reason they hadn’t. Did the two boats go out separately and the second one return on its own? If that was the case, there was nothing to report; they were separate contracts. Though his warrant wouldn’t be issued before Tuesday morning, Vertesi thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask the mechanic about the marina’s rental logs and how thorough they were.
As he rounded the bend to the marina, a Canada goose led her four comical goslings into his path. He slowed, then stopped and waited for them to clear. As the geese were crossing the road, Gibbs came out of the tuck shop, looked towards Vertesi’s car and then headed for his mechanic’s workshop. “So much for being discreet,” Vertesi said to himself.
Parking in front of the workshop’s open doors, he shut down the engine and grabbed his notebook. For no reason that he could later put a finger on, he checked that his service revolver was on his hip with the restraining strap unsnapped.
“Mr. Gibbs, can I have a word with you?” he called as he came around the side of his vehicle. There was a flash of white inside the dark garage and he was blown back against the fender, landing face up on the hood. Struggling to get up, he rolled over onto his side and slid down the front of the car, ending up face down in the dirt. Cigarette butts and gravel stuck to his clothes as he rolled over on his back, to find Gibbs standing over him with a sixteen-gauge shotgun cracked open. The man was reaching into the thigh pocket of his fatigues for another shell.
“Smartass little fucker. Ain’t so smart now, are ya?” Gibbs spat at him but missed.
Vertesi felt a sticky mess on the left side of his abdomen and lifted his hand to find it drenched. He held it up towards Gibbs in an attempt to ward off the next round, and Gibbs laughed. “Fucking wop wop wop. Who’s the smart fucker now?”
Vertesi tried to get enough leverage to sit up, to get away, but his legs slid helplessly beneath him
. His right hand was pinned under his body; he struggled to pull it out, gasping for every breath. He reached for his weapon.
“You take shit all day for fuckin’ years and then—bang—you hit a fuckin’ wall and it’s over!” Gibbs was screaming now, spewing saliva as he rushed to get the words out. “This morning, fucker, I hit the wall!” The shell was sliding into the chamber when he realized what Vertesi was doing. He quickly snapped the barrel shut.
Vertesi fired upwards. The round tore into the old man’s neck and swung him sideways. Wide-eyed with shock, Gibbs lowered his weapon and clutched at the gaping wound, now gurgling with blood. He stumbled backwards, regained his balance and, his finger still on the trigger, tried to raise the barrel of the shotgun. Vertesi fired again, blowing off Gibbs’s Caterpillar cap and most of the top of his head. The man dropped to the ground, still clinging to the shotgun. Vertesi rolled slightly to his left to see Gibbs choking on blood as if he was gargling.
Realizing he was going to pass out, Vertesi held up his weapon once more and fired the remaining rounds in the air, hoping Dennis or someone would come. Then he lay back, tried to breathe slowly, and looked at the soft white clouds above. “Beautiful,” he managed to say before he sank into darkness.
IT WAS JUST PAST FOUR P.M. when Swetsky met them outside the surgical unit. Several uniformed officers were standing nearby in a cluster, and off to the side was a woman in her thirties with her arm around an older woman; MacNeice took them to be Vertesi’s mother and sister. The father, a tall, elegant man with a thick moustache, was at the water cooler filling a tiny paper cup.
Swetsky took MacNeice aside as Aziz went over to the family. “He’s lost a lot of blood—that isn’t good—but the round tore through the flesh on the left side of his stomach. There’s no kidney or spleen damage and the ribs weren’t shattered, so the lungs are fine. But they need to stabilize him before they operate.”
“What the hell happened, Swets?” MacNeice looked over his shoulder at Aziz; she had her arms around Vertesi’s sister, whose shoulders were heaving. The mother stood sobbing quietly next to her husband, who was looking down at the two paper cups of water he was holding.
“Dennis Thompson—he’s the mechanic—had gone to get something in the back of the shop when he heard the blast and the place lit up. He had been cleaning the shotguns, said Gibbs complained that they hadn’t been cleaned properly at the end of hunting season the year before. Thompson had finished the single-barrel that was Gibbs’s wife’s. If he’d done one of the others first—the ten- or the twelve-gauge double-barrel—Vertesi would’ve been finished. When he went down, Gibbs had one in the chamber and two more in his pocket. The guy had flipped; he would have used them all if Vertesi hadn’t taken him out.”
“Was it the mechanic who called it in?”
“Yeah, and the kid is lucky for another reason. Out on one of the docks was a …” Swetsky pulled out his notebook to check. “… a Dr. Van der Hilst—he’s an oncologist over at St. Joe’s. He was just about to set out for an afternoon’s sailing when it happened. The call went in to Search and Rescue out on Kendal Island, and within eleven minutes the medivac helicopter had landed on the road. Twenty-seven minutes later he was here.”
“Christ almighty, and bleeding all the time.”
“Yeah, but Van der Hilst had plugged pretty much all the wadding from the marina’s first aid kit into the wound, and then he got some more from his boat. He’d packed and wrapped it so well the medivac guys just put in a plasma drip and got him the hell out of there.”
“What about Gibbs?”
“Vertesi fired two rounds—one took out his neck and the other the top of his head. Then he pumped the rest into the sky to get some attention. Hell, they must have thought a war had broken out on that road.” Swetsky seemed impressed.
“But what went wrong?” MacNeice saw the doors swing open. A young woman rushed through, her face contorted by fear as she looked around frantically.
“Van der Hilst said Gibbs was a time bomb, and nobody wanted to be around when he went off. He’d lost half his boat storage and moorage business—and all of his profit—because he would flip out and tear into his customers. The doc once suggested to Gibbs that he see a neurologist about his headaches and mood swings. Gibbs told him to go fuck himself and walked away. His wife had been sick with cancer for three years. When she died last winter, he just got weirder. I asked him if Gibbs was medicated and he said maybe, and then he added, ‘Maybe not legally.’ He figures Vertesi was just the last straw.”
“Can you send someone out there to get the rental diary or logbook? I don’t want that going south on us while we deal with all this.” MacNeice put his hand on the big man’s shoulder.
“Yep, but don’t worry. The place is shut down tighter than a loan shark’s heart.” Swetsky pulled out his cellphone and moved over to the windows.
MacNeice studied the agitated young woman waiting at the reception desk, went over to her and held out his hand. “Rachel? Rachel Ingram?”
She turned to him, wide-eyed, and took his hand. “Yes. I’m here for—about—Michael Vertesi. He’s a police detective. He’s been hurt.”
“The surgical team is trying to stabilize him before they operate.” MacNeice let go of her hand.
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I’ve been told he’s lost a lot of blood but that this is a very good team, so his chances are better than even.”
“Who are you?” She met his eyes for the first time.
“I’m Detective Superintendent MacNeice, Michael’s commanding officer.”
“He’s told me about you. He worships you, I think.” She was doing her best to hold back tears. “What on earth was he doing out there?”
“He was gathering information for an investigation. It was expected to be a routine call. How did you hear about it?”
“My mother called me at school. The news was all over the lake. I guess Dennis Thompson was talking and then …” Her voice trailed off. “Michael was supposed to come and get me after school. I wanted to make a formal statement about what I saw the other night—when the girl died.” She looked around the waiting room, past the clutch of police officers that had now grown to seven, in and out of uniform, to where Aziz was standing next to the Vertesis. “Are those his parents?”
“Yes. And his sister. Next to them is Detective Inspector Fiza Aziz, another colleague of Michael’s. Would you like to meet them?”
“Oh God, I don’t know. I hardly know Michael. I mean, it feels like I’ve known him all my life, though we only just met, but …”
“But what?”
“Do you think it’s appropriate? I mean, I don’t want to offend them.”
“I don’t think that’s likely, Rachel. Come on, we’ll meet them together.” She nodded, and as he took her by the arm, a trail of tissues dropped from her jacket pocket onto the floor. MacNeice picked them up and put them in his pocket.
Aziz came towards them as they approached. “They’re very upset, obviously, but they’re dealing with it.”
“Fiza Aziz, this is Rachel Ingram. I thought Rachel should meet Michael’s parents and sister.”
The two shook hands and Aziz said, “Michael told me about you. I’m glad you came.” She put her arm around Rachel just as MacNeice’s cellphone buzzed in his pocket. He wheeled away towards the windows.
“MacNeice.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What in the world is going on? I mean, we’ve got serious heat coming down and one of your people gets taken out by some cracker in the woods?” With each phrase the deputy chief’s volume rose.
“At a marina, sir.”
“I want to know what’s going on with your crew. Are you in control over there?”
“Vertesi was at that marina for more information about the—”
“Are you saying you sent him there alone?”
“It was routine, sir. He just found himself in the wrong place when the old man snap
ped.”
“Right out of the blue? The guy just snaps when he sees your man? Don’t bullshit me! What went on?”
“There was a slight altercation on his last visit, but nothing to indicate—”
“Indicate what? That the next time he was going to haul out a shotgun and blast away at Vertesi without warning? I’m sorry about your soldier, MacNeice, but this is a sideshow you’ve got us into. You’ve seen the headlines, heard the news. I want the killer of that girl, and you’re back down to three people. Get it done!”
“Understood, sir.”
The phone went dead. MacNeice slid it back into his pocket as Swetsky came to stand beside him. They both looked out the window, MacNeice following the flight line of several crows that were pedalling against the wind over the trees beyond the parking lot.
“You know, I’ve always thought crows were the biker gangs of bird land,” he said.
“Is Wallace thinking this was your fuck-up? Did he even ask how Vertesi was doing?” Swetsky didn’t seem the least bit interested in crows.
“Well, it is my fuck-up. No doubt about it—I own it. And in a moment I’m going to have to own it with his family.”
“How so?”
“I knew the old man and Vertesi had had a go-round the last time he was out there. Gibbs called him a wop and Vertesi dumped his weapon and badge and was going to beat the prejudiced shit out of him until he apologized. He apologized.”
“So what? Let’s say, for instance, I’d gone with him today. He gets out of the car, the old man pops him and maybe me, and we’re here and they’re working on both of us. The old man snapped. It would’na mattered a sweet goddamn if we had the Fifth fuckin’ Cavalry there. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—people get weird when they spend too much time at the lake.”
“Nice try, Swets, but you know the rules as well as I do. I didn’t even know he was headed out there today. He’s keen—too keen.”
Swetsky was looking out at several birds that had settled along the eaves of a building next to the parking lot. “What about those guys?” He nodded in their direction.
Erasing Memory Page 15
