Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

  Praise for Gerry Boyle’s Lifeline

  “[Boyle’s] style is poised and pointed...”

  —New York Times

  “Boyle, a Maine newspaper writer himself, makes McMorrow a credible crusader, equally comfortable in the quiet woods and small town courthouses. The narrative moves briskly as McMorrow eliminates several suspects on his way to a surprise solution.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Stay healthy, McMorrow. You’re fun to have around.”

  —Washington Times

  Praise for Gerry Boyle’s Potshot

  “Fans of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser will love McMorrow, a quintessential male who’s tough, funny, macho, and intelligent.”

  —Booklist

  LIFELINE

  A JACK MCMORROW MYSTERY

  GERRY BOYLE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LIFELINE

  First Islandport edition/March 2015

  Printing History

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition/1996

  Berkley Prime Crime mass market edition/March 1997

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 1996 by Gerry Boyle

  ISBN: 978-1-939017-53-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014911183

  Islandport Press

  PO Box 10

  Yarmouth, Maine 04096

  www.islandportpress.com

  books@islandportpress.com

  Publisher: Dean Lunt

  Cover Design: Tom Morgan, Blue Design

  Interior Book Design: Teresa Lagrange, Islandport Press

  Cover image courtesy of Blue Design

  Printed in the USA

  For

  Jim, John, Mary Catherine,

  Jeanne, and Amy,

  with love

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks go to Tom M., who knows homicide; to my friends and colleagues in the newspaper business, who still fight the good fight; and especially to Mary Marsh Grow, whose generous and meticulous assistance is, and will always be, appreciated.

  INTRODUCTION

  The day was winding down in district court. I’d been parked on a back bench, watching the parade of defendants: drunk drivers, petty thieves, a few inmates from the county jail, slouched in their orange jumpsuits and enjoying a field trip.

  I was a newspaper columnist then, trolling the courtrooms, among other places, looking for a story to tell. Nothing had grabbed me that day, and I was about to move on when she stepped up.

  If memory serves, she was about thirty-five, tallish, dark hair, and a long narrow face, with a stoic yet determined expression. The prosecutor said the woman was seeking a court order to protect her from abuse. The judge said something like, “What sort of abuse?” And the woman told him, then and there, in open court. The inmates sat up and the room went silent as she began.

  It was a terribly sad story. Her boyfriend had assaulted her, threatened her, tried to rape her. He said if she told anyone he’d kill her. She was in court that day because he was, for the moment, in jail for another matter. It was safe.

  The guy did some unspeakable things to the woman, but she was speaking of them anyway. That made the story sadder still. In front of a room full of strangers, most of them men, she told her story in unvarnished detail. She started at the beginning and kept going because nobody tried to stop her. When she was done the judge gave her the protection order, and she turned and walked through the gate in the rail and down the center aisle, all eyes on her, some no doubt luridly imagining what she’d just described.

  The woman went to the court clerk’s window and got her paperwork. When she went out the courthouse doors, I followed her. I caught up with her at her car and introduced myself. She listened to my pitch and the story hung in the air for a moment and then she said she’d do it. She agreed to be in the newspaper because she wasn’t going to be afraid anymore. I hoped her courage wouldn’t come back to haunt her.

  We talked at length, and I wrote about her in the column that appeared in the newspaper the next day. We met a couple more times, as she wanted to keep me abreast of what was happening with her case.

  The boyfriend, still in custody, was charged with additional crimes, though not the ones that she had described. He was sentenced to a few years in prison. The woman moved out of state at that point, but she wrote to me, and stayed with me long after—so much so that my encounter with her was the seed for this novel.

  The fictional character is Donna Marchant, who goes to court to get protection from an abusive, bullying man. The prosecutor is unsympathetic, and the judge tells Donna to be more careful picking her boyfriends. Jack McMorrow, sitting at the rear of the courtroom, steps up. And when McMorrow steps up, he’s all in.

  He writes about Donna and then he tries to protect her. She has a beguiling innocence, despite her hardships. She likes watercolors, and paints along with an artist on TV. She tries to seduce McMorrow, and he tells her she deserves better. In the end, despite his best intentions, his attempt to help Donna Marchant comes up short.

  Donna is a character I’ve thought of many times since Lifeline was first published. I think of her and her daughter, Adrianna, the first child character I had written at that point. And I sometimes think back to the moment when I was writing the climax to the novel.

  I had a plan in my head and no intention of deviating from it, but then, at a crucial moment, an entirely different scenario appeared—one I hadn’t imagined, one that didn’t appear in any synopsis or outline. The words flowed through my fingers to the keyboard like I’d been taken over by a spirit, and the resolution was chilling, even to me. I remember sitting at the desk in my study as I finished the scene. I was stunned. Later I would hear that readers were, too.

  I also think of Lifeline at other times—when I hear of yet another domestic violence murder, another woman terrorized. It’s been ten years since that woman stood up in the courtroom, and sadly, this terrible problem is just as real and relevant as ever.

  In my fictional world, Jack McMorrow is ready to strike back, with Clair Varney to back him up. Roxanne is there to counsel McMorrow when needed, waiting when he returns, bruised and bloodied from having fought the good fight.

  I like to think there are real McMorrows out there. I know his fictional world is a much better place because of him.

  —Gerry Boyle, March 2015

  1

  It was the low end of what had once been a pasture but now, like a field full of Hydras, was growing back into forest. Where teams of horses and then tractors had worked, there was an almost impassable tangle of poplar and spruce and blackberries and burdocks.

  I had worked my way into the thick
et just before dawn, when the woods were still blurred with mist. For a half hour, maybe longer, I had sat still on a rock that had been part of a wall that some Sisyphus, now long dead, had built where his field met the forest. I had heard chickadees. A redstart in the distance. Gulls calling as they wafted overhead on the way to the dump. And then a musical gurgle, high-pitched like a piccolo, coming from somewhere in the brush behind me.

  Motionless, I waited, resisting the urge to turn around. The trilling call came closer and then there was a flutter to my left. I looked without turning my head and saw a small bird perched near the bottom of a poplar sapling, a couple of feet from the ground. It was a thrush, smaller than a wood thrush and more olive-colored, more drab. Its eyes were dark and wet. I held my breath as it flitted closer, from the poplar to the ground and then back up again.

  As I exhaled silently, it began to call again, a series of soft, piping notes.

  And then there was a flash.

  A missile-like shadow.

  A barely audible poof.

  “So, right in front of me, the hawk just picks this thrush off, just like that,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it was a Swainson’s thrush. But it might have been a Cooper’s hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk. They look sort of the same.”

  I took a sip of ale.

  “But it was this unbelievable moment. Sort of transcendent or something, you know? This thrush is there one second and then swish, the angel of death comes out of nowhere and the thrush isn’t singing. It’s having its heart picked out of its chest. I don’t know. It was like, there was life right there. And wham, it’s gone. Like a meteor dropping out of the sky and hitting you right in the head. Life’s going along fine and a spear comes out of the darkness and skewers you. And you never even saw it coming.”

  I finished the ale in a long swallow.

  “You want tea?” Roxanne said.

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ll have another beer.”

  I got up from the table and brought my plate over to the counter. Roxanne’s back was turned to me, and I squeezed her hip as I slid by to open the refrigerator door. It was the last can. I opened it as I went back to my chair. Roxanne snapped the lid on the coffeemaker and it started to hiss. I opened my field guide to where I had the page marked.

  “Yeah, it says even experienced birders have trouble telling a Cooper’s from a sharp-shinned. The sharp-shinned is smaller, but a male Cooper’s is quite a bit smaller than the female. Cooper’s, fourteen to twenty inches. Sharp-shinned, only ten to fourteen. So maybe it was a Cooper’s. It seemed more than a foot long. God, you should have seen it, though. Not from you to me away. Whoosh.”

  Roxanne poured her coffee and stood against the counter. The smell of hazelnut filled the big open room.

  “It sounds like an interesting thing to see,” Roxanne said. “Why don’t you write an essay about it.”

  I shrugged. Sipped the ale.

  “No, really,” she said. “It sounds like something the Globe magazine might buy. Maybe the Times. I don’t know. Sell it to Maine Times, but at least you’d be doing something with it.”

  “Why should I do something with it?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re a writer. A reporter. Jack, don’t you want to get back into it? Somehow? Really. You can’t just tromp around the woods and then come home and drink beer all night.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Thoreau did it.”

  “He drank beer?”

  “They all drank beer back then.”

  “But he also wrote Walden,” Roxanne said.

  “So he was an overachiever.”

  “But, Jack, this is your life,” she said, a hard edge creeping into her voice.

  “Don’t tell me that you’ve found my third-grade teacher. Mrs. McGillicuddy! You haven’t changed a bit!”

  “Jack.”

  I sipped the ale. Roxanne held her mug to her chest but did not sip her coffee.

  “But I’m happy,” I said. “This thing this morning was great. An epiphany or something.”

  “Great. Wonderful. But you should be creating something, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Goddamn it,” Roxanne said. “Because you’re good at it. You’re thirty-eight years old. You can’t just retire. My God, are you going to go from the New York Times to nothing? Just stop? Retire to Prosperity, Maine. For the rest of your life?”

  “I don’t know. When I get real old, maybe I’ll move to one of those places in Arizona. You know, the ones where they don’t allow anybody under fifty?”

  “Come on, Jack. I’m serious.”

  “So am I. When we’re old, the last thing we’ll need is a lot of youthful forty-nine-year-olds doing laps in the pool. We’ll hate people who have their own teeth. All shiny and white and—”

  “Goddamn it, Jack. You know what I think?”

  “No, but I think I’m going to find out.”

  Roxanne glared at me. I closed the bird book.

  “How many beers have you had?” she asked.

  I looked at the table. There were three empty sixteen-ounce cans of Ballantine ale. A fourth that was a third gone.

  “Two,” I said. “Officer.”

  I grinned. Roxanne didn’t.

  “I think you’re numbing yourself for some reason. To keep from having to go out again and give it your best shot.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Masterson, but I gave it my best shot. Sorry if I’m not being a high-enough roller for you.”

  “Jack, you know that’s not true,” Roxanne said, softening for a moment. “But you know I’m right. You may not like it, but I’m right.”

  I looked at her. Shorts. Sandals. A sleeveless denim blouse, undone to the third button.

  “You know you’re sexy when you’re right?” I said.

  “I know I’m sexy when I’m happy. And it doesn’t make me happy to see you in this, I don’t know, this state of hibernation.”

  “So either I do a five-part series on the plight of the middle class, or I sleep on the couch?”

  Roxanne sagged.

  “Oh, Jack. I don’t want to fight. I know you were happy and I know how you love the woods. But are you happy like this? With only this?”

  I eyed the green can of ale, ran a finger across the condensation on the silver top.

  “That hawk really was beautiful,” I said quietly. “And that thrush. I don’t know. I feel like my eyes are just opening up.”

  “It’s not enough, Jack,” Roxanne said.

  “For me or for you?”

  “For us.”

  “Why do I feel like that’s an exit line?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Roxanne said, blinking back tears. “I just know I have work to do.”

  She took her coffee and a bundle of folders and went up the stairs to the loft. I heard the bedsprings squeak, a sound that for months had been associated with our joy and pleasure, but now sounded like a gate that had just swung shut.

  2

  The Kennebec Observer offices were in an old brick building on the city’s main drag. They offered a view, indeed, of the Kennebec River, which loitered in the distance, but mostly of downtown Kennebec, a cluttered, half-vacant jumble of shops and offices. The place looked as though it was in the grips of a long-standing economic malaise, one of the benefits of which was ample parking. I pulled the truck into a space directly in front of the newspaper, where an old man was allowing an old golden retriever to defecate on the sidewalk.

  “Nice morning,” I said, slamming the truck door shut.

  Neither the man nor the dog appeared to have heard.

  It was a nice morning. Cool and fresh and filled with the promise that marks early June. I’d spent it in the woods, listening to spring warblers, straining to catch glimpses of them as they fluttered and fell through the trees. Then, as the sun moved higher, I’d made my way back home, where Roxanne was still asleep and the house was quiet. I’d showered, put on khakis and my least-worn oxford cloth shirt, and grabbed a bl
azer and a half dozen newspapers from the stack in the back of the bedroom closet.

  Now, on the sidewalk, I put the blazer on, dropping the papers in the process. I gathered them up, a few of the fruits of ten years’ labor, yellowed reports of what had once, and only once, been news. The dog and the man still ignored me.

  The sign in the foyer said the Observer newsroom was on the second floor, circulation and advertising on the first. There was allegedly an elevator, but I took the stairs, which were old and wooden and creaky. After two flights, I came to a door with a frosted-glass window. A sticker on the window said someone at one time had given to the United Way. Someone else had tried to scrape the sticker off, but the United Way had prevailed.

  I opened the door and stepped out into the newsroom, startling a circle of men and women who were standing around a table, feeding on doughnuts. They looked at me as if I’d just stepped into the ladies’ restroom.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I’m looking for Mr. Albert.”

  A pale, wizened man with glasses turned toward me. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt that was two sizes too small, and his mouth held a chaw of honey dip. But he did the polite thing and pointed me to the end of the room.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Still chewing, he nodded.

  The place was like most newsrooms I’d been in over the years, except smaller. I walked past small cardboard signs that had been stuck on the walls to designate the different departments. Sports had four desks. The Living department had three. News had five. On each desk was a beat-up computer that no doubt had taken the place of a beat-up typewriter. The desks were covered with newspapers and notebooks and page dummies: The plants were mostly dead.

  I walked in the direction Mister Doughnut had pointed. When I got to the end of the room, I stopped. There was a clatter, then the muffled sound of a restroom hand dryer. I waited for a moment and a guy walked around the corner and almost bumped me in the chest.