A Blood Thing

by James Hankins

  Henry chuckled. “I’ll just sit with them for a few minutes then.”

  Henry was apparently feeling the need to spend a little extra time with Tyler. Andrew understood that. Though they didn’t speak of it often, they all knew there was a chance that their time with their youngest brother might be limited one day soon. Andrew was struggling with that notion as much as any of them. He watched Henry head back into the house, leaving him alone with Molly. He took a sip of wine and looked out into the night.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. I know that having to . . . do what you did was hard for you.”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure Henry really understands why this wasn’t easy for me. I’m not very proud of myself.”

  “You should be. You’ve done so many good things as governor, accomplished so much. And this situation with Tyler . . . well, you’re taking care of the family, like Dad used to do.”

  Andrew shook his head and said, almost under his breath, “Dad.”

  He kept his eyes on the street but could feel Molly looking at him. “Whenever anyone mentions Dad, you get quiet. I didn’t notice that until a few years ago.”

  He finished his glass of wine and placed it on the wooden porch floor beside his chair. “He was mostly okay, I guess. We never saw him mistreat Mom. He worked hard, left a lot of money behind when he died. He was certainly a towering figure in the Vermont legal community, and they seemed to like him well enough in Washington. Wasn’t the warmest guy I’ve ever met, but I didn’t need him to cuddle with me. The rest of you were closer with him, but that didn’t really bother me.”

  Molly never spoke badly about their father. Whatever her reason for that, Andrew had chosen long ago to respect it, which was why he didn’t bring up any of the things about Patrick Kane that he didn’t care for, things Molly might not have known, things Andrew had learned later in life by doing a little research and asking around. Like the man’s cutthroat legal tactics—respected by some, despised by others. And like his voting record in the Senate that suggested—to some, at least—that he might have been too good a friend to big businesses . . . businesses with a lot of money to throw around to make sure things went their way on Capitol Hill. And like the rumors of the special relationships he had with at least two of the secretaries in his old law firm. But those things were supposition, gossip, without hard evidence to support them. No, Andrew never talked about any of those things with Molly or his brothers . . . just as he never, ever—

  “There’s more, though, isn’t there?” Molly asked. “I can see it on your face . . . you know there’s more.”

  He wasn’t sure how she could see it. He was facing the street, giving her his profile, not wanting to meet her eyes. Finally, he sensed her turn away and look out toward the street as well.

  “He never touched me, Andy,” she said softly.

  They had never spoken of this before. Not in all these years. He’d figured they never would, and that would have been fine with him.

  She said, “It’s true that he came to my room now and then after Mom was asleep, but he never touched me.”

  Andrew said nothing.

  “You knew that, didn’t you? That he came to my room at night sometimes.”

  He nodded but just barely.

  “All he did was talk, Andy.”

  “It went on for months,” he said. “I’d hear him walk past my room. You weren’t even ten years old.”

  “He just sat at the end of my bed and talked. That’s all. About things he said he couldn’t talk to Mom about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how hard he was working for the family. How difficult it had been to step down as senator at Mom’s request and return to his legal practice. The pressure he felt carrying on the Kane name. How Mom didn’t really understand him.”

  “I’m getting teary.”

  “I never wanted him to visit me. I was always . . . a bit nervous, I guess. And I was definitely relieved when he stopped coming. But he never touched me, Andy. I swear.”

  “I know.”

  “What?”

  “I know he didn’t touch you.”

  She paused. “How could you know that?”

  “Because I stayed up as late as I could, listening for him.”

  “When?”

  “The first night I heard him, I followed him and sat outside in the hall, listening at the door. I couldn’t hear what you two were saying, but I could hear your tones of voice, both of you, and you sounded okay. After that, at night, I’d stay up late, listening for him going down to your room. If he did, I followed. And listened. And you were always talking. If I’d ever heard you stop talking, I’d have . . . wondered what was going on. But all you did was talk—mostly Dad, but you, too.”

  “You stayed up late?” He sensed her turn toward him, but he kept his eyes forward, on the darkness. “Every night?”

  “Until he stopped going to your room.”

  She looked at him a long moment. He looked at the night. Finally, she said, “I never really worried that he was going to . . . do anything he shouldn’t.”

  “He shouldn’t have been going to your room after Mom fell asleep.”

  “You know what I mean. I think he was just . . . lonely. He and Mom weren’t as close as they should have been. I’m not sure if you knew that, but he told me.”

  “I knew.” He didn’t think it had always been like that, at least not if the photographs of his parents’ early life together were any indication. But somewhere through the years, maybe sometime after the kids came along, things apparently changed.

  “So he came to my room and talked,” Molly said. “I never knew why he eventually stopped.”

  “I do.” He finally turned to her. “I let him see me. Usually, when I heard him start to leave, I’d run back to my room. One night, though, I decided it had to stop. So I just sat there. He opened the door, and there I was. Neither of us said anything. He just stood there for a second, looking down at me, and I looked up at him.” Andrew could still see his face—first surprise, then shame. “Then he went back to his room. For the next couple of weeks, I didn’t hear him in the hall, and I realized he’d stopped for good.” And for the next couple of weeks Andrew couldn’t even look at his father.

  “You stayed up late listening for him every single night, sitting outside my door when he was in there with me? For all those months?”

  She looked directly into his eyes, a gaze strong and steady but still soft, and though he wanted to look away, he found he couldn’t. Instead, he gave a small shrug.

  “Andy, what would you have done if . . . if you heard . . .”

  “Whatever I had to,” he said. He didn’t tell her that after that first night, whenever he listened at his sister’s door, he brought his Little League baseball bat with him. She didn’t need to know about that. But their father knew. He’d seen his son holding it that final night—the night Andrew finally found the courage to let their father see him—and the old man had never gone back. Andrew didn’t imagine that his father had been afraid of a fourteen-year-old kid, even if the kid was armed with a Louisville Slugger, but something about his son sitting outside his sister’s door had been enough to put an end to the nighttime visits.

  “You’re a good man, Andy,” she said. “You always have been. You may be having your doubts about that right now, but no one else in this family is.”

  She reached over, gave his hand an affectionate squeeze, and headed inside. He considered what she’d just said. Was she right about him? Or was it too early to tell? Was the jury still out? He closed his eyes and let the soft night breeze roll gently across him. He was tired. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. He was certain that none of them had. He thought he might have been able to fall asleep then and there, though . . .

  Then the peaceful moment was shattered by the vibration of the black cell phone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Wyatt Pic
kman’s eyes were closed. With one ear, he was listening to the ringing of the burner phone while his other ear was attuned to the contrapuntally complex The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach, playing at background-level volume through the top-of-the-line Klipsch sound system in his war room. He loved The Art of Fugue because it was considered by many music scholars to be a nearly perfect musical composition. It had even been opined that the mathematical architecture of the piece suggested that Bach had been inspired by the Fibonacci sequence—a pattern of numbers that appeared in such an astonishing variety of arenas as mathematics, science, art, and nature. Pickman knew next to nothing about music, but he’d read about Bach’s compositions in general, and The Art of Fugue in particular. How could he, of all people, not love a piece founded on math and science? He listened to it every day. In fact, long ago he had disposed of all other music in his home. To listen to anything else would have been to subject himself to something . . . less. Interestingly, Bach never finished the piece. Yet it was somehow perfect nonetheless. Incredible.

  The phone at his ear rang a fourth time before he finally heard the governor’s voice on the line. “I’m here,” he said. “Where the hell’s the evidence you owe us?”

  Speaking into his voice changer, Pickman said, “Your brother broke the rules. He breached our contract. The deal’s off.”

  “Are you serious?” Governor Andy sounded really upset. “How the hell—”

  “Whoa there, pardner,” he said, and the quaint phrase sounded particularly odd coming through the voice changer, even to his own ears. “Don’t worry. I have a new deal for you.”

  “You son of a bitch. No new deal. I did what you asked. Now it’s your turn to—”

  Pickman snapped the phone closed, ending the call. He closed his eyes again and listened to the music as a harpsichord, an organ, and other instruments he couldn’t identify plinked and trilled and thrummed in patterns he could barely follow, sounding harmonious and melodious at times and dissonant and clashing at others, as if they weren’t certain whether their relationships with one another were based on love or hate. The burner phone rang—the governor trying reach him—and he ignored it. A few minutes later, it rang again, and, mostly because the instrumental was nearing its end, he ignored it a second time. When the last strains of the music faded away, he called the governor back.

  “You do not want me to hang up again,” Pickman said when Governor Andy answered. “I might not call back. I might call the police instead. And trust me, you do not want that. Now, are you ready to listen?”

  “I’m not cutting a new deal with you.”

  “If you give me a minute, I think you will. So I’ll ask again: Are you ready to listen?”

  “Say what you have to say.”

  “First, let me play you a recording.” He held the phone near one of his computer’s external speakers and pressed the “Play” button on the keyboard, starting the audio file he had downloaded from where he had paused it. The speakers were good quality, and the sounds through them were perfectly clear.

  “I’ll tell Andrew you’re legit.” There was no doubt that was Molly Kane’s voice.

  “Did he authorize you to make a deal?” Pickman found that hearing his own voice on the recording, distorted into a harsh metallic monotone, was interesting.

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “He’ll do it.”

  “In exchange for the video you saw and the rest of the evidence I have against your brother Tyler, he’ll grant clemency to Gabriel Torrance, get him out of prison?”

  “He will.”

  “No halfway house, either. Totally free.”

  “He knows that.”

  “When will it happen?”

  “When you give us the video and the evidence.”

  Pickman smiled. He wished he could have seen Governor Andy’s face at that moment, the moment he realized that Pickman not only held all the cards, he had created the game and was setting all the rules.

  This is devastating, Andrew thought.

  “Did you hear that clearly?” the caller asked through the speaker on the black cell phone. After the blackmailer hung up on him initially, Andrew had called the others, except for Tyler, into the drawing room so they could listen together when the bastard called back. And there they were, standing in a tight circle, listening to the phone in Andrew’s hand. He’d left it to Henry to record the conversation on his phone.

  “I did,” he said, seething.

  “In case you’re wondering, my guy checked her for a wire, but she never checked him.”

  “You won’t release that recording.”

  “I won’t? Why not?”

  “Because it exonerates Tyler. It shows he didn’t do it. And that someone out there has the evidence to prove it.”

  “You weren’t listening closely, Andy,” the caller said. “Nothing in what I just played you exonerates your brother. Nothing identifies the party Molly is speaking to. It could be a cop on the take. It could be anyone with access to evidence against Tyler. The only thing that is clear from the recording is that Molly was saying that you would let Torrance out of prison in exchange for evidence against Tyler.”

  Andrew realized he was right.

  Molly looked stricken. “I’m so stupid,” she whispered.

  “Who was that?” the caller asked abruptly. “Was that Molly? Am I on speakerphone?”

  Andrew sighed. “Yes.”

  “Is Detective Henry there, too?”

  “I’m here, you twisted—”

  “Hold on there, Henry. Before you say anything you might regret, I have something for you, too. I can’t send it to you, but I can describe what I’m watching. Are you ready?”

  “What the hell?”

  “Give me a sec,” the caller said. “Okay, here we go. So there you are entering a parking lot . . . You’re looking around . . . up at the buildings. I think you’re looking for cameras.”

  Andrew turned toward Henry, who looked equal parts surprised, furious, and embarrassed.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t look in the big stack of empty milk crates to your right. Now there you are . . . kneeling down . . . feeling behind the wooden pallets . . . ooh, it looks like you found something. How exciting.” The juxtaposition of the caller’s upbeat content and robotic monotone made for bizarre listening.

  “That’s enough,” Henry said.

  “What’s that you found, Henry?” the caller said, ignoring him. “A white plastic bag? You’re looking inside the bag now. What do you see? What’s in the bag?”

  “Knock it off.”

  “Well, whatever it is, you decided to keep it when you left the parking lot . . . Now I’m seeing nothing but empty lot. Here, let me fast-forward two minutes and thirteen seconds.”

  Henry said, “You don’t need to—”

  “Hang on . . . almost there . . . ah, here we go. Two minutes and thirteen seconds after you left the parking lot, two of Rutland’s finest boys in blue showed up. I told you they would, Henry. I told you I’d give you an hour’s head start, and I did. You got there ahead of them. But look at them now . . . one of them searching behind the pallets for the bag I reported in my anonymous tip, a bag containing a T-shirt and bloody jewelry. But it’s not there, is it, Henry?”

  Henry mumbled a bunch of curse words very far under his breath, name-calling of the most offensive kind, and Andrew wasn’t certain whether Henry was directing the slurs at the blackmailer or himself.

  “All right,” Andrew said, his voice carrying more weight and authority than it had moments ago. “We get it.”

  “I don’t think you do yet. Not completely, anyway. Because the other cop is looking where I told him to, behind the dying plants in the big pots, looking for the second bag of evidence I planted. Did I forget to mention that one, Henry? My bad.”

  The look on Henry’s face made it plain that he hadn’t searched behind the pots, or anyplace else where evidence might have been hidden. He’d looked
only behind the wooden pallets, as the blackmailer had wanted.

  “What’s in the second bag?” Henry asked.

  “A pair of blue jeans belonging to Tyler, most likely with his DNA on them. They also have Sally Graham’s blood on them—and a lot of it—because I was wearing them when I killed her. Now do you get it?”

  “Yes,” Andrew said, “we do.”

  He sure as hell did, at least. Henry had been caught on video obstructing justice in a high-profile murder case in which the accused was his brother, as well as the brother of the sitting governor. Molly had been secretly recorded negotiating on the governor’s behalf, brokering a deal involving the pardoning of a prisoner in exchange for evidence against Tyler. Andrew wasn’t thinking as clearly as he would have liked, so he didn’t know in that moment whether Molly had broken any laws, but this certainly wouldn’t look good on a state police job application. And Andrew? If the media got wind of any of this, he’d be flayed alive. He could only imagine the fire he would take from Angela Baskin alone. And in a blink, the public would turn on him and tear him to pieces. He was looking at an ignominious end to his time in office, and possibly even prison. His wife, Rebecca, innocent in all this, would face public scorn, as well. And Tyler? This sure as hell wouldn’t help his legal defense any. These recordings were a catastrophe for the entire family. A sudden pain shot down into Andrew’s lower jaw, back by his molars, telling him that he’d been clenching his teeth far too hard.

  “There’s a problem with your plan, though,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel.

  “I doubt that.”

  “Tyler rarely leaves Manchester. He wouldn’t go all the way to Rutland to—”

  The caller cut him off. “Now you’re just fibbing, Andy. Of course he leaves Manchester sometimes. I’ve followed him around many times as he rode his adorable electric bicycle from town to town. He likes to explore.”

  Damn it. “Look, no one’s going to believe he rode all over Vermont on his e-bike hiding incriminating evidence. It just doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t he just throw it out?”