Nick pulled into his driveway at nine, only fourteen hours since he’d left this morning. He turned off the engine and sat in the quiet, trying to set aside the scenes in his head, his internal speculations on who might have dressed in black, positioned himself on a roof and killed a man who was already sitting in prison for life and still carrying a death sentence. And that was if Ferris was indeed the intended target. Suppose some incompetent rifleman had meant to hit the jail guard? Suppose Ferris had just stumbled in front of a bullet? Nick took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
“Don’t take it into the house,” he whispered to himself. “Don’t do this to her too.”
When he got out, he fixed a smile onto his face and unlocked the front door. When he stepped in, his daughter was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle laid out before her, half done. The sight stopped him, like always now when he encountered Carly sitting or standing or twisting a strand of her hair in the exact same way that her twin sister had done. Ghosts, Nick thought. Will I always have to live with ghosts?
“Hi, Daddy. I’ve been saving all this side for you,” Carly said in her nine-year-old voice, sweeping her hand over the yet-undone side of the puzzle. She tossed her silky limp hair aside and gave him that face, the mischievous one with the raised eyebrows and the smile made without parting her lips.
“Oh, saved it, huh?”
Nick walked over and reached down with both hands and his daughter took them on cue, and with a firm grip, he lifted and tossed her up with one motion and then caught her against his chest and she wrapped her legs around his waist and squeezed.
“You didn’t just slow down so you could stay up later?” he said into her ear and then kissed her cheek.
“No way,” she said, leaning back with her hands now locked behind her father’s neck. “I could have done your side easy.”
“I know you could have,” Nick said, starting to move in a tight circle, beginning the spin he knew she expected, and her eyes got wider and brighter and the fake smile he’d carried in became unconsciously real as they went around together. They were both laughing when Elsa interrupted.
“Buenas noches, Mr. Mullins,” said the small elderly woman, wiping her hands with a dish towel. “You need something for your dinner, yes?”
Elsa was Bolivian, a grandmother to two young boys, the sons of her immigrant daughter. A decade ago she came to the United States to take care of her grandsons and earned extra money by taking in the children of working parents as a daytime sitter. Kind and matronly and endlessly patient, she had looked after both of the Mullinses’ girls from the time they were babies as their daytime nanny. While Nick and his wife worked, Elsa cared for the girls along with her older grandsons in her daughter’s home. By the time the boys were old enough to be home alone, Elsa had fallen in love with the girls, and they with her. Nick offered her a live-in position and after the accident she stayed, although Nick had never asked her to. She took it almost as a duty to watch over him and Carly, to protect the child from her dreams and to protect Nick from himself.
“Just a sandwich, Elsa. Please,” Nick said and carried his daughter to the small kitchen table.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Carly said, squirming from Nick’s arms. “You have got to see this, Dad.”
When she skipped from the room, Nick sat heavily in the chair near the patio slider and looked out onto the spotlighted pool. The aqua glow rose like a tinted bubble from the water. Nick liked the softness of it on his eyes. After the crash, at the bottom of his breakdown, he’d spent nights staring out into the light, sipping whiskey for hours and trying to let the color wash out the images of white, bloodless skin and torn metal from behind his eyelids. The booze had let him sleep. But the next night he would be back. It had gone on for months until finally he made a decision to stand up and live, for his remaining daughter, and went back to work. Still, on days when he was tired and let down his guard, the lure of slipping into the pale blue light forever would come over him.
“Mr. Nick?” Elsa said and the words snapped him back. When he looked over at her, she was eyeing him and propping up the corners of her mouth with her thumb and ring finger, making a smile. It was her job to warn him when the “grouper” face appeared. The child psychologist had warned him that his own sadness could overtake and eventually empower his daughter’s grief. It was something he needed to stay conscious of. When Carly came back into the room with a sheaf of papers and an unframed canvas, he had regained his smile.
“Ta-daaa!” his daughter announced, holding out the canvas, upon which a brightly colored and finely textured painting had been produced. Nick studied the work while Carly posed and held it with the corners balanced in her palms. He felt her watching his eyes. But this time he did not have to pretend. The colors were pastels of pink and orange, the lines soft and flowing.
“It’s beautiful, C!” he said, using his pet name for her. “Are these wings?”
“Yes. And here in the corner.”
“How did you get that texture in there? That’s really cool.”
“It’s that resin stuff you got me. They showed me how to use it at school, and see, you can peak it just so or really raise it up if you want,” she said, pointing out sections of the painting that rose delicately off the canvas.
They propped the painting up against a napkin holder on the table and while Nick ate, Carly showed him homework, her graded papers, and explained in detail how Meagan Marts had been such a pain correcting her and the other girls on the bus that morning when they were discussing what lip gloss was made of. Nick listened. He had set up this nightly ritual on the advice of a divorced friend whose wife had left him. It was invaluable, the friend said, to keep in touch, to keep a semblance of normality, to stay sane.
Elsa had made him one of her famous Bolivian chicken salad sandwiches. Nick couldn’t tell the difference between the chopped celery or spring onions, but he truly loved the battle of tastes between the seedless grapes and the rainbow chiles. While father and daughter talked, Elsa stayed busy washing and wiping and straightening a kitchen that Nick knew was already spotless.
“OK, Carlita,” Elsa finally said. “It is very late, yes, Mr. Nick?”
Elsa had that wonderful trait of being the boss while using the right phrases to make the man think he was still in charge.
“Elsa’s right, babe. Time to get ready for bed,” Nick said. “You go, and I’ll come in and read.”
With a limited amount of preadolescent huffing, his daughter left the room.
Nick spun his chair back to a view of the pool. A random breeze fluttered across the surface, causing the refracted light to dance on the far wall.
“How was she today?” he asked without looking over at Elsa.
“Yo creo que es mejor, Mr. Nick,” Elsa said. She too was looking outside through the window over the sink. “She is very smart, though. It is too much to see inside her head.”
Nick just nodded, but Elsa went quiet and he turned after a moment to look at her. She was again folding and refolding a dishtowel in her hands, her eyes on the floor now. Nick knew something was bothering her, but let Elsa decide when to tell it.
“She call me Lindsay today,” Elsa finally said. “While she is looking for something in the office room she say, ‘Lindsay, do you know where the, the thing for the paper staples is?’ and I just say, ‘No,’ like I no hear Lindisita’s name.”
Elsa was clearly distressed, but Nick was caught between smiling at her attempt to relate the Freudian slip or crying at Carly’s use of her sister’s name.
“It’s OK, Elsa,” he said. “I will tell the counselor when she goes for her session.”
The housekeeper turned the towel in her hand. Nick looked back out into the light.
“Dad? I’m ready,” his daughter called from her room.
“Can you make me some coffee, please, Elsa?” Nick said as he walked through the kitchen.
“You are going out
again?”
“After she’s asleep,” he said. “I’ll lock up before I go.” Nick did not turn to see Elsa’s reaction. He knew she would disapprove. He’d promised to give up the late-night forays into the streets for the sake of a story, both to his wife before and to Elsa afterward. Now he was again going back on that promise.
In his daughter’s room, he knelt down in front of the bookcase, searching for a title. Carly was already in bed and had slid over against the wall to give him room to stretch out in his usual position. Nick had taken the second twin bed out of the room after two months. He’d replaced it with a desk and an additional case of the girls’ favorite books, some that had been packed away in the garage.
“I’ve got the Harry Potter over here, Dad,” Carly said.
“I’m looking for something else, C. One of my favorites.”
Carly didn’t complain, just pulled a stuffed tiger closer to her and waited for him to find a thin, worn volume from one of the lower shelves. He finally lay down on the outside edge of the bed and turned away from the nightstand, where he knew a family photo of the four of them looked out upon his back.
“We Were Tired of Living in a House, by Leisel Moak Skorpen,” he announced and then peeked over from the side of the opened book to see his daughter’s reaction. She rolled her eyes but still smiled.
“Alright, go ahead,” she said, giving him permission.
Nick read the book aloud, pausing to give both of them a long look at the accompanying artwork on each double page. It was actually a long, lovely and mischievous poem about two brothers and two sisters who get scolded for misdoings at home and their adventures finding another place to live—a tree, a pond, a cave and the seashore—before finally returning home to their parents to live in a house.
When he finished, Nick closed the book and turned off the bedside lamp and waited in the silence. He could tell by her breathing that she was still awake. Before, he’d always read to the girls from a rocking chair set in between the beds and when he was done he’d continue to rock, the low creak of the runners sounding in a rhythm that would eventually put them to sleep. He found he could no longer stand the sound and had thrown the chair out.
“Was someone killed today?” his daughter’s voice finally, quietly broke the silence.
Nick just closed his eyes. Unfortunately, it was not an unusual question from Carly. She was a bright girl.
“Yes, honey,” he said.
“Did you write about it?”
“Yes.”
“Will I read about it in the newspaper?”
“I’m not sure you should be reading the paper, honey, with all your schoolwork and stuff. You should really concentrate on that reading.”
He had never encouraged his daughters to read his work, but Carly had taken more to it since the accident, and the counselors had suggested he let it go instead of trying to ban her from the practice.
“Did it make you sad, the killing?”
“No, Carly. Not really. I was just trying to find out how it happened. That’s my job, to report what happened. You know?”
The girl stayed quiet for several moments.
“Why do you ask?” Nick finally said.
“’Cause you always read that book when you’re sad, Daddy.”
Jesus, Nick thought. He tried to look into his daughter’s eyes but couldn’t make them out in the dark room. The kids are too smart for you. You can’t overestimate their perception. And you can’t hide.
“I know, baby,” he whispered. “It just makes me feel better.”
He touched her hair and she whispered back, “Me too.”
When her breathing went soft and rhythmic and she was finally asleep, Nick carefully rolled off the bed and left, closing the door gently behind him.
Chapter 8
Nick didn’t call the medical examiner’s office until he was in the parking lot.
“Would it help you to decide if I told you I was right outside?”
He had called Nasir Petish’s cell phone. The doc’s midnight autopsy was only just beginning and though the physician had known Nick for several years—they shared an appreciation for Jameson’s whiskey and Cannonball Adderley’s saxophone—the physician still fell back on administration rules against press access. At least for the first twenty seconds of each conversation.
“You are in my parking area?” Petish said, his East Indian accent flicking high at the end of every sentence.
“Yeah. I figured you’d be up late with this one,” Nick said, leaving the assistant M.E.’s heads-up out of it.
“And what you listening to out there, Mr. Mullins?”
“The Adderleys and, uh, George Shearing at Newport,” Nick said, quickly rummaging through his collection to see if he actually had the CD in his car.
“Is that the one during which Mr. Adderley comments on the influence of a young pianist named Ray Charles?” Petish said.
“Yeah,” Nick said, coming up with the CD, “that’s the one.”
“Bring it in, if you will, Mr. Mullins.”
Nick went around to the loading dock area where the M.E.’s vans and black Ford Explorers were parked. A light mounted above the double-door entrance bathed the raised deck in an orange-tinted glow. One of the doors opened and a small man with tea-colored skin and wire-rimmed glasses ushered him in.
“Thanks, Dr. Petish. I appreciate this,” Nick said, shaking the man’s offered hand.
“Ahhh. No thanks are necessary, Mr. Mullins, for nothing that has been given, yes?”
Nick grinned into the smiling face of the physician and nodded his understanding of the terms. He was never here. No comment. No attribution. He raised the CD and handed the plastic square to the M.E., who scanned the back intently. Petish carried a perpetually charmed look on his face despite his blunt speech and grim profession.
“Ahhh, yes,” he said. “The one when Nathaniel still, as you say, had his lip. I like this recording very much.”
The doctor read through the playlist as they passed through an area of wheeled gurneys and shelves of supplies and then down a wide corridor to his favorite examining room. Inside, the walls were concrete block and painted white with the kind of paint that was shiny and smooth and left an almost plastic texture, the better to wipe clean. The floor was done in gray with similar paint and Nick noted the drain located in the middle. There were two stainless steel tables in the room. Only one was occupied.
Ferris had been heavily built, with powerful arms and thin hips in the way of a farmer or factory worker. Nick remembered the yokelike shoulders and the way they’d slumped during his trial. His freshly shaved skull was now gone from the ears up. Petish had already started with the bone saw.
The M.E. slipped the CD into a portable player on a high shelf and set the music at a low volume and then snapped on a new pair of latex gloves. He almost always began his autopsies by sawing through the skull bone in a circular fashion and then lifting the top portion to reveal the brain inside. The sight did not bother Nick. He had attended autopsies before. The clinical atmosphere was actually a lot less disturbing than the open wounds and aftermaths he’d seen on the streets.
“As you can see, Mr. Mullins, the deceased has considerable damage to the brain from a single wound.”
Nick moved with the doctor as he positioned himself at the head of the table and turned the dead man’s face to the right. A small black hole appeared to be neatly bored into the exact line where his high-cut sideburn had once been.
“It was a very high-velocity round and would most likely have snapped the head in this direction,” Petish said, mimicking the movement by grasping the dead man’s stiffened neck and jerking it toward one pale shoulder. When he turned Ferris’s head back the other way, an exit wound four times the size of the hole on the other side yawned ragged and blackened with dried blood in the area of the jaw.
“Any way to guess the caliber?” Nick said, letting the doctor make an assumption instead of making it himself
.
“Yes. A .308, if I am not mistaken,” Petish said while sneaking a peek at Nick and smiling at his raised eyebrows. “Oh, they recovered the round, Mr. Mullins. I am good, but certainly not that good.”
Nick instinctively reached for a notebook from his back pocket, but then simply scratched a spot on his thigh, recalling Petish’s rules.
“If the marksman was only just lucky, he could not have been more accurate,” Petish said. “To enter the skull from this point and the expansion of bore diameter damage as it enters the brain would have the effect of instant cessation of all motor and neurologic response.”
“Dead before he hit the ground,” Nick said.
“Precisely,” the doctor said as he pointed out other discolored spots on the body.
“My external examination of the deceased shows a number of bruises both anterior and posterior. Some very old, some more recent, but none that would have been administered in the last few days,” Perish began as if he were reading into a report recorder.
“Jailhouse jostle,” Nick said, thinking of the status Ferris would have had at MDCC as a child molester.
“Possibly,” the M.E. said as he positioned a scalpel over the body’s chest and began making his incisions.
Nick concentrated on the tattoos that Ferris had obviously gotten while he was inside. Serpents in dark ink that now stood out on the pale insides of both forearms. Somewhat crude but detailed enough to see the fierceness of eyes and sharpness of claw. Nick wondered if Ferris had paid a prison artist to do them so he could project his toughness or whether it was an expression of what was inside his head.
Petish worked quickly and meticulously, cutting away inside the chest cavity, with deft strokes slicing the connective tissue of major organs and carefully weighing each before unceremoniously dropping them into a five-gallon bucket on the floor nearby. In the air, the Adderley brothers played a buoyant riff of 1930s blues in stark juxtaposition to what was going on at the table. Nick asked an occasional anatomy question and watched as the doctor took tiny samples of the organs and slipped them into test tubes for later microscopic examinations.
Eye of Vengeance Page 6
