How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “Howard, before you let yourself even think about doing something, I need you to make me a promise.”

  “No! I’m not giving you any more promises, no patience, and I don’t want to hear any more of the ‘Give it time, it’s a process’ bullshit. Don’t ask me for that again!”

  “I’m not. I’m asking you to let me help you if you decide to settle this in a different way.”

  “You don’t get what I’m sayin’.”

  “Oh yes, I do. And if it comes to killing him,” Barrett said, “then we’ll do it together.”

  Howard Pelletier stared at him, mouth agape.

  “We will bury him,” Barrett said, “and walk away clean. People may wonder. They may talk. But we will walk away clean.”

  “You don’t sound quite like yourself.” Howard’s eyes were locked on his, and they were hungry. “You ain’t kidding. You mean to do it.”

  “Yes. Will you promise me that you won’t do this alone? If he’s got to be killed, then we kill him together.”

  He hadn’t intended to say this. Hadn’t believed himself capable of saying it. And yet it felt good. Felt more natural than any words he’d ever said.

  “Okay,” Howard Pelletier whispered. “We’ll kill him together.”

  “I need your help, though. You’ve got a cell phone and a landline, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll need to borrow the cell if that’s possible.”

  “No problem.”

  “And I’ll need a gun.”

  Howard didn’t question him. He left the garage and went into the house and Barrett stood beside the stack of battered lobster traps, breathing in their scent, until Howard returned and gave him a cell phone and a Taurus nine-millimeter with an extra magazine.

  “That work for you?” Howard asked.

  “That works.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “To take a last swing at doing this the way I always wanted to. I’ll call tonight. Stay close to the phone.”

  41

  His first call was to Liz, and she answered her phone by saying, “Hello, Howard.”

  “It’s me. I took his phone.”

  “Rob? What in the…” He heard her take a breath, and the background noise told him she was in the newsroom and didn’t want to be overheard. “Oh, Rick. Sorry, your connection’s terrible. I was confused.”

  It was an awkward cover, but he knew that she sat four feet from a colleague. He kept his voice soft when he said, “You know the gist of today, I take it?”

  “The gist, yes. Details, no.”

  “I found her at her father’s house. She’d been dead for a while. Needle at her side. A song playing on her phone that I can’t get out of my mind.” He cleared his throat. “She was an addict, Liz, but not a suicide case. On the same day someone tried to kill me, she randomly overdoses? I’m not buying it.”

  She was quiet, and he said, “I’m hoping you had some luck with the ME reports. I really want to see the toxicology on those, Liz. I need to.”

  “Hang on a minute, would you, Rick? I want to get outside. Maybe it’s my phone and not yours.”

  He waited in silence while she left the newsroom and found a quiet spot, and then she spoke again, her voice hushed. “I’ve got a call in to the medical examiner, but I also received a call this afternoon. For you.”

  “What? Who was looking for me?”

  She took a deep breath. “I feel like I shouldn’t even tell you this, because it’s bound to get you in deeper trouble, but it was Bobby Girard.”

  “Why did he call you?”

  “Because he heard I might know you. He wants you to call him. Says it’s important. Wouldn’t say why.”

  “You get his number?”

  “Yes.”

  She read it to him, and he scribbled it down on the back of a receipt that was jammed in the cup holder of the Mustang.

  “You’ve gone from an emergency room to a police station in under twenty-four hours, Rob.”

  For a long moment there was nothing but white noise on the line, and then she said, “Right. That won’t discourage you. So when you go missing today, I’ll tell the police you were headed to Bobby Girard’s before you disappeared. Got it.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Sure.”

  She hung up, and he wanted to call back and say something better, but he didn’t know what that was. Instead, he called Bobby Girard.

  “It’s Rob Barrett. Heard you wanted to get in touch with me.”

  “And I heard you nearly got clipped.”

  “What’s up, Bobby? I don’t have time to waste.”

  “Ain’t no wasted time here, man. I got something to show you.”

  “You’re two hours south of me. Just tell me what you have to say.”

  “It’s not something I can tell you. I gotta show you.” When Barrett didn’t answer immediately, Bobby added, “Trust me, it’ll be worth the drive.”

  “Isn’t much that’ll make Biddeford worth the drive for me.”

  “I think I know how he did it. Still not worth the drive?”

  42

  It was near dusk when Barrett arrived, and the gates at the salvage yard were locked, but Bobby Girard appeared immediately from the house across the street, keys in hand.

  “You don’t look so bad for nearly getting murdered,” Bobby said as he unlocked the gates.

  “I’m doing fine,” Barrett said, though in truth his skull throbbed and the light in his peripheral vision was a floating gray ring that had made the drive down exhausting. “Would’ve been nice to have an idea of what this is about, though.”

  “You’ll see.”

  Bobby was buzzing, moving fast and with confidence, like a ballplayer sure he’s going to have a good night at the plate. They walked through the wrecked cars to the garage at the back of the property. Bobby unlocked the pedestrian door, and the smells of grease and paint and trapped sweat enveloped them as they stepped into the darkness. When Bobby swung the heavy steel door shut and it closed with a clang behind them, Barrett had the uneasy sense he was walking into a trap. He had to talk himself down from drawing Howard’s gun—guns hadn’t worked out for him on this property before.

  “Mind turning on a light?”

  “I’ll turn on the light. Go on out into the shop.”

  Barrett fumbled through the workbenches and toolboxes and out toward the open area of the shop. The overhead fluorescents came on with their trademark hitch between initial glow and full brightness, and then his unease was swept aside by astonishment.

  He was looking at the truck hood that Kimberly Crepeaux had described.

  The hood was resting on a pair of aluminum sawhorses in the center of the garage. It was a vivid, glistening white, almost unpleasantly bright beneath the fluorescent lamps, and in the middle was the outline of a black cat, jagged lines sprayed along its arched back to indicate raised fur. The cat’s eyes were a strange, glowing red with a textured finish that gave them an unsettling depth, as if they were actually watching him.

  “What do you think?” Bobby Girard said.

  “Where in the hell did you find this?”

  “Right here.” Bobby grinned with pride. “I did it myself. That hood’s off an old Silverado, not a Dakota, but I figured it didn’t really matter for this test run.”

  Barrett felt a wash of disappointment. A test run. At first, he’d thought he’d stumbled on the actual hood.

  “Okay,” he said, circling the paint stand, taking in the striking glow of the white, and, for some reason, trying to avoid looking directly at those deep red eyes. “You did a real nice job with the paint, but that’s not much help, Bobby. I need to explain what happened to it, not show how it looked.”

  “Hang on.”

  Bobby crossed the garage, grabbed a pressure washer from the back of the room, and wheeled it over. He flicked the battery on and pulled the starter cord until the little two-stroke engine caught and filled the room wit
h echoing, clattering noise.

  “Time me,” Bobby said over the sound.

  Barrett gave him a curious look, but Bobby didn’t offer anything other than a tight smile. Barrett took Howard’s cell phone out and opened the stopwatch application.

  Bobby stepped away from the pressure washer, withdrew a knife, and flicked the blade open. He put the tip of the blade against the hood and then popped his wrist upward. A small, pocked hole appeared in the paint. He pocketed the knife, grabbed the nozzle of the pressure washer, turned on the water, and adjusted the setting to a narrow jet before he turned it on the hood.

  When the water contacted the pockmark he’d opened in the paint, the tiny hole widened and the adjacent paint seemed to rise, as if the water were sliding beneath it instead of over the top.

  The hood blistered, swelled, and burst.

  Bobby shut off the pressure washer, and silence returned to the garage. The white paint was gashed, and the blistered areas now showed red underneath, as if blood had been drawn.

  Barrett started to speak, but Bobby Girard lifted a hand.

  “Just watch. And keep timing.”

  He stepped forward and grabbed an edge of the white paint, which was tattered near the pressure-washed gash but still tight across the rest of the hood. Bobby took the edges with both hands and lifted, and the paint came up in long strips, like sunburned skin. When they tore loose, he discarded them on the floor and grabbed another handful, moving fast, peeling, tearing, tossing. The red hood showed itself like an original painting hidden beneath a false canvas.

  When the floor was littered with white strips, there was nothing left of the previous paint job but a thin layer near the windshield. Bobby fired up the pressure washer again, turned the nozzle against the hood at a forty-five-degree angle, and blasted the remaining white off in one smooth stroke. Then he killed the pressure-washer engine. The hood was now all red, dripping water into the tangle of white strips below.

  “Time?” Bobby Girard asked.

  Barrett looked at his phone and hit the stop button.

  “Four and a half minutes.”

  Bobby nodded, pleased, and then he lowered the pressure-washer nozzle and turned to face Barrett.

  “Plasti Dip,” he said.

  “What is Plasti Dip?”

  Bobby went to the workbench, grabbed a can, and tossed it to Barrett. It was the same size and shape as a standard can of spray paint.

  “I was thinking about your sticker idea. You’ve got to have good equipment and know what you’re doing to make a whole hood look good with a vinyl wrap like that. And even then, it’s hard for me to believe that somebody would confuse a sticker with actual paint. But this shit?” He nodded at the can. “What’d it look like to you?”

  “Paint. Bright, clean paint.”

  “Exactly. It sprays on like paint, but it’s actually just putting this rubber layer over the top, almost like a new skin. Guys started using it to coat their nice chrome wheels in the winter to keep them from getting torn up from salt or sand, and then in spring they’d pressure-wash it off. Over time, people started doing more with it. You ever see cars done up to look like something out of The Fast and the Furious, all neon, that dumb crap?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, that would cost you five grand to have painted, and maybe twice that if you cared about detail. But you could Plasti Dip it for maybe eight hundred bucks and then just blow it back off when you got tired of it and wanted a new color. It gives gearheads ways to play around like that. And it comes off fast.”

  Barrett studied the can. “It actually holds up to weather?”

  “It can take rain, snow, hail, go through the car wash, whatever. But I’d heard that if you got a pressure washer working under it the way I did, it would peel off fast. And you saw it—four and a half minutes.” He waved his hand at the original red hood. “Now your new truck hood looks just like the old one again.”

  Barrett knelt and picked up one of the loose strips. It felt like a piece of a burst balloon. He rubbed it between his fingers and then dropped it. He was interested in the possibilities but also not sharing Bobby Girard’s buzzing enthusiasm. Not yet.

  “How long did it take you to put it on?”

  “Less than three hours. I did four coats, gave each one thirty minutes to cure, and then tried painting the cat. That took longer than it should have, just because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Barrett fished among the white strips until he found one with the odd red sheen.

  “What gave the eyes that glow?”

  “It’s a different texture. Called a metalizer. The color was black cherry.” Bobby shrugged. “I figured I’d give it a try. Stuff is only eight bucks a can.”

  “It’s interesting,” Barrett said.

  “It’s more than interesting! If she wasn’t lying to you, man, then this is how he did it. Guarantee you. That hood wasn’t repainted. I’m sure of that, and so was your police lab.”

  This was true. The evidence techs had dismissed the possibility of any repainting.

  “So Mathias could have painted it with this and he could have cleaned it off in—”

  “Five minutes.”

  Barrett nodded. “Five minutes, sure. So by the time Jeff picks it up from him, he’s seeing the same truck. No alarm bells go off.”

  “Exactly.” Bobby looked at him with a proud smile, like he’d cracked the case.

  “I’m just wondering why,” Barrett said. “Even if this stuff is fast and cheap, why would he have spent any time and money at all on a truck that wasn’t his.”

  Bobby’s smile wavered.

  “Man, I can’t answer all of the questions! I’m only saying that this would have worked.” Bobby pointed at the dripping red hood that had once been white.

  “I’m just trying to wrap my head around the idea that he’d have gone to all the trouble to paint your brother’s truck so memorably just before he happened to get in a hit-and-run.”

  He walked back to the hood, knelt again, and probed through the strips of peeled rubber until he found one with a splash of that metallic red.

  Kimberly Crepeaux hadn’t liked the cat’s eyes. They’d bothered her more than the rest of it. She’d thought the eyes looked mean. She’d also thought that was the point.

  “He wanted it to be noticed,” Barrett said. “The only way it works is if he wanted it to be memorable.”

  “So he planned it.”

  “It’s one thing to believe Mathias planned a murder,” Barrett said. “I can buy that. But would he be dumb enough to take two witnesses along?”

  Bobby frowned and picked up a ratchet and spun it, as if the question were something he could solve with torque.

  “Maybe he didn’t take them along. Maybe you got lied to and don’t want to admit that. Listen, I was trying to help you, that’s all. My original theory was that the Crepeaux slut lied and then—”

  “Kimberly Crepeaux is dead, Bobby, and if you call her a slut one more time, I’ll take that wrench out of your hands and lay it upside your skull.”

  Bobby Girard stared at him, then set the ratchet down.

  “What is your problem, man? I didn’t know she was dead. And my cousin is dead too. Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t. Sorry. You just…”

  Don’t say it, damn it. Do not say that he just got your blood up.

  Barrett pulled in a few breaths, feeling the tingle along his scalp wound. The threat he’d just made to Bobby Girard was bad-beat-cop behavior, precisely the sort of thing he’d have highlighted in the past while prepping lectures about police mistakes for students who had no intention of participating in fieldwork. Today, though, he’d meant the words, and he’d said them to a witness who was only trying to help him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “This could be big, Bobby. Thanks for tracking me down to show me this.” He sat back on his heels, turning the thin plastic skin with the dark, metallic red over in his fingers. “I appre
ciate it.”

  Bobby Girard was nonplussed now. “It’s the only way he could have done it,” he said petulantly. “I’m sure of that.” He stared forlornly at the damp red hood above its sheath of peeled white skin. He was convinced he’d found a puzzle piece, but he had no idea what the other pieces were, let alone how they might fit together. All he could do was turn this one over and wonder.

  “Waste of time,” he muttered. “You got me thinking about it, and I was curious. But it was a waste of time, wasn’t it?”

  “There’s only one guy who can answer that question for us.”

  “Mathias Burke is not going to talk to you.”

  “Maybe not,” Barrett said, “but it’s time to try again. If you’re right, and this is what he did to the truck, then he won’t like to be asked about it.”

  He pushed away the creeping memory of the last time he’d wanted to test Mathias’s reaction, when he’d told him that divers were at work in the pond.

  “I think I’ll be able to tell if you’re right,” he said, but he said it more for himself than Bobby Girard.

  43

  He called Mathias Burke from a cell phone he borrowed off an elderly man at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Wiscasset. He told Burke he’d just moved to Rockport but was leaving town for a month and was having trouble with his caretaker. He had plenty of projects, he said, but he wanted to be sure he found someone reliable. He then asked if Mathias could guarantee a job done by the end of the week as a test run and offered to write him a check for it right away.

  “What’s the job?” Mathias asked.

  “Pressure-wash and seal,” Barrett said.

  Mathias agreed but said he was on a job site in St. George, checking on a wall his crew was building, and he couldn’t pick up the check until the next day. Barrett said he was headed to St. George anyhow, for a stop at Luke’s Lobster, and he could deliver the check in person and before five.

  Mathias appreciated that.

  When Barrett reached the job site at St. George, a van with the PORT HOPE CARETAKING SERVICES logo was pulling away, leaving a truck behind. Two men were in the van, but Barrett saw that Mathias was still on the property, standing alone, his back to the road, surveying a half-completed fieldstone wall that spanned most of the distance between the main house and the guesthouse. Penobscot Bay was visible beyond him, and on a clear day you’d see islands and the Owls Head Light and maybe even Marshall Point. It was high-dollar real estate. The new wall alone would cost more than many homes in Maine.