Viking Bay

by M. A. Lawson

  “Right as rain,” Jack said.

  “My Jack, he’s a genius, he is,” Jackie said. “He made it look like I broke him in two.”

  Kay wondered where they got their training—Hollywood or the BBC. Probably Hollywood. Masterpiece Theatre was all Downton Abbey and Jane Austen remakes, and the stunts involved horses and buggies more often than vehicular homicide.

  There was a metal trash can on the curb near where Kay was standing. She picked it up, relieved that it didn’t weigh very much, and said to Jackie, “Which side of the car hit him?”

  “The passenger side,” she responded.

  Kay smashed the trash can into the front headlight on the passenger side, breaking the headlight.

  Kay pulled a jackknife with a four-inch blade from a pocket, flipped out the blade, and handed it to Jack. “I need some blood,” she said.

  “Aw, man, do I have to do that?” Jack said.

  “Yes,” Kay said, “you’re the only one here with male blood. Get on with it.”

  Jack winced when he cut his left palm.

  “Cut deeper, you wimp,” Kay said. “I need more blood.”

  “Aw, Christ,” Jack said, like he was about to amputate his own hand, but he drew the knife across his palm again. When his blood was flowing freely, Kay had him dribble a bit over the area of the broken headlight, dribble a bit more onto the expensive leather trench coat Jackie was wearing, then had him deposit a tablespoon of blood in the trunk of the Mercedes.

  “Okay, that’s good,” Kay said. To Jackie she said, “Drive the Mercedes back to Mercer’s place and wait for me in the garage. The garage door’s open. I’ll follow you in my car.”

  To Jack she said, “You can head back to the hotel.” Jack had come in the car he and Jackie had rented. “Good work,” she added.

  “Jaysus, this hurts,” Jack said, pressing a handkerchief against his self-inflicted wound. Kay just shook her head: Getting tossed into the air by a vehicle moving at forty miles an hour and weighing almost a ton didn’t bother him, but he was whining like a little girl about a small cut on his palm.

  —

  KAY FOLLOWED JACKIE back to Mercer’s, stopping her car about half a block from Mercer’s house. Jackie drove directly into the garage—and the floodlight-camera videoed her driving the Mercedes into the garage and recorded the time.

  Kay used one of the red remotes to disrupt power to the floodlight-camera and joined Jackie in the garage.

  “Give me the trench coat,” she said, and Jackie handed her the coat, now smeared with Jack’s blood.

  Kay entered the house and walked back to Mercer’s office to make sure Mercer was still unconscious. She was. Kay picked up Mercer’s laptop; she planned to take it with her when she left. She was concerned that the laptop would have a record of the time when Mercer had transferred the money. Kay knew that Mercer couldn’t tell anybody about the money, but she didn’t want the laptop to provide her any sort of alibi. Next she looked into the closet near the front door, found Mercer’s leather trench coat, and replaced it with the one Jackie had been wearing.

  The end result of everything that had transpired in the last two hours was that there was a video record of Mercer’s car leaving Mercer’s garage at approximately nine p.m. and returning to the garage at approximately eleven p.m. Those times coincided with the time Jackie was swilling martinis paid for using Mercer’s credit-card number. There was also now a trench coat in Mercer’s closet smeared with Jack’s blood and matching the blood in the trunk of Mercer’s car—the same trench coat that would have been captured by the CCTV camera as Jackie was placing Jack in the trunk of Mercer’s Mercedes-Benz.

  Photographs, credit-card numbers, and blood analysis were much, much better, in Kay’s opinion, than human eyewitnesses.

  —

  ON THE WAY BACK to their hotel, Kay left Jackie in the car and used a public phone to call the police. Adopting a Jamaican accent, she said she’d been walking, coming home from work, and saw a woman hit a man with her car but the woman didn’t call the police. Instead, she placed the man’s body in the boot of her car. The police operator asked for the address where the accident had occurred and Kay gave it to her. When she asked for Kay’s name and address, Kay said that because of her immigration status she preferred not to provide that information. When the operator asked how long ago the incident happened, Kay gave the exact time, and when asked why she’d waited so long to call, she said she couldn’t find a public phone. Kay knew the call was being recorded, and she concluded by saying, “I’m sure she killed that poor man. If she’d been taking him to hospital, she wouldn’t have put him in the boot.”

  When they reached the hotel, Kay couldn’t help herself. “How long have you and Jack been married?” she asked Jackie.

  Jackie laughed and said, “We’re not married. We’re livin’ in sin.”

  But that’s all she said, the bitch, and Kay still had no idea if they were brother and sister or just a twisted couple who looked like twins.

  47 | Anna Mercer—known to the police as Abigail Merchant based on her driver’s license, passport, and credit cards—was arrested six hours after Kay called the police. Hoping to get her to confess and plead guilty, and thus save the Crown the expense of a trial, the cops laid out their case: CCTV camera footage of her hitting a man with her car and dumping the body into the trunk; a clear image of the license plate on a car registered to Merchant; credit-card statements supported by statements from a waitress that Merchant had had three large, dry vodka martinis in a two-hour period; blood on the damaged right front fender and in the trunk of Merchant’s car; a video recording obtained from Merchant’s own security system showing her leaving and returning to her home consistent with the time she’d spent in the bar and when the man had been run over.

  The fact that Merchant refused to reveal what she had done with the body added another dimension to the case. For one thing, the poor man couldn’t be identified and his next of kin notified, and her refusal to say where the body was showed just how cold and calculating Merchant was. That wouldn’t go over at all well at her trial.

  Merchant’s only response to these charges was to say she was being framed. She couldn’t say by whom, but she claimed it was obvious that that’s what had occurred. She screamed that she couldn’t tell them where the damn body was because there was no body.

  At her first appearance in court, a bewigged judge clucked his tongue at her brazen lies—but he did grant her bail. When the police received a phone call a day later, her bail was revoked.

  —

  KAY CALLED CALLAHAN and asked: “Did you take care of the fingerprints?”

  “Yeah, that turned out to be pretty easy, because the only time she was fingerprinted was when she first signed on at the State Department. She never got a DUI or worked for anybody else who required fingerprints, so her prints weren’t on file in a bunch of other places, like criminal databases.”

  “Good,” Kay said.

  “When are you coming back?” Callahan said.

  “Soon. I just have a couple more things to do.”

  —

  FOLLOWING THE ANONYMOUS CALL from the woman with the Jamaican accent, the police dug a bit deeper into Abigail Merchant’s background—and discovered she had no background. Merchant had appeared out of nowhere approximately three months before, and although she claimed to be a British citizen she had no employment, tax, or scholastic history in the U.K. They took her fingerprints, but she had no fingerprints on file, not in the U.K, or with Interpol, or in the United States. This brought British intelligence into the case, wondering if Merchant was some sort of undercover-sleeper agent working for a foreign government. The Cold War was supposedly over, but this was the sort of thing the damn Russians would do.

  When the police confronted Merchant with the fact that she was not whom she appeared to be, she didn’t sa
y anything. She couldn’t point the finger at Callahan, because Callahan would have her killed for sure. She obviously couldn’t say she’d obtained false documents to flee the U.S. after killing Ara Khan and stealing fifty million dollars.

  Mercer was informed that her bail was being revoked until she cooperated and told them who she really was, or until such time as they could figure out who she was. They took her passport, clamped a GPS bracelet onto her right ankle so they could keep track of her, and gave her a week to put her affairs in order.

  Mercer hired a lawyer in London who had a good reputation, but when the man asked for a twenty-five-thousand-pound retainer, she said that was going to be a problem. She explained that she had only ten thousand dollars in cash and she needed some of that to live on. (Hamilton had forced her to transfer all the money she had in British banks but hadn’t known about a box in her attic that contained her rainy-day cash.) However, Mercer told the lawyer, she was putting her home on the market immediately, expected to clear at least a million and a half dollars, and as soon as the sale was complete she’d be able to pay his fees. The lawyer wasn’t a bad guy: He took five thousand for his initial retainer and agreed to trust her for the remainder of his fee provided he could confirm she was making a genuine effort to sell the house and, when it was sold, the money would be put into an escrow account.

  Mercer contacted a real estate agent and, crying the whole time she was talking to the man, told him to put her house on the market and to sell all the furniture for the best price he could get. She said things were going to be a bit complicated as she would be in jail, awaiting trial. The agent wasn’t a bad guy: He raised his commission by only one percentage point to compensate for the hassle.

  —

  ONE DAY WHILE MERCER was meeting with her lawyer—and two days before she would be remanded to jail to await trial—Kay punctured two of the tires on Mercer’s Mercedes to give herself some extra time, then she picked up three hooligans that the old thief Geoffrey had recommended. The hooligans had shaved heads, multiple piercings, and numerous tattoos. In other words, they looked like the guys who started riots at British soccer games, and at ten in the morning they all smelled of beer.

  Kay drove to Mercer’s house and, using her magic remotes, killed power to the floodlight-camera over Mercer’s garage, opened Mercer’s garage door, and drove her car into the garage. The hooligans then unloaded Kay’s rental car, taking from the trunk sledgehammers, crowbars, gallon-size cans of purple paint, and two chain saws. Kay and her three companions entered Mercer’s house via the door in the garage that permitted entry to the house and, using the code previously obtained by Geoffrey, disarmed the security system.

  Then the hooligans destroyed Anna Mercer’s fabulous home.

  They smashed toilets and marble countertops with the sledgehammers. They plugged all the sinks and turned on the water to flood the floors. They splashed purple paint about until the paint cans were empty. They punched holes in walls, ripped out electrical wiring, and used the chain saws to cut enormous, jagged holes in the hardwood floors. Almost every piece of furniture in the house was demolished, including the beautiful love seat that Kay had sat on when she’d visited Mercer. After they finished with everything in the living sections of the house, Kay directed two of the hooligans into the attic, where they cheerfully chain-sawed through a number of joists necessary for structural support, and cut a four-by-four-foot hole in the roof.

  Mercer’s homeowner’s insurance would—eventually—pay for the damage and, being an insurance company, they wouldn’t give her anywhere near enough to cover all the repairs or to replace what had been destroyed. It would take months to repair the damage—the structural damage to the roof was going to be a bitch to fix—and there’d be no one available to really supervise the repairs. If Mercer sold the house in the condition it was in, she’d be lucky to get one-tenth the price she’d paid for it.

  Mercer would have been much better off if Kay had simply burned down the house—which was why she didn’t burn it down.

  —

  MERCER WAS SUPPOSED to turn herself in a week after the judge had revoked her bail—but she didn’t. When the police arrived at her house, they found her sitting on the back deck, facing Viking Bay. She was soaked to the skin from a gentle rain, and there was one empty vodka bottle on the deck and one half-full bottle on a table next to the Adirondack chair in which she was sitting. On the same table was the pistol she’d pointed at Kay Hamilton.

  The police assumed that she’d been sitting there contemplating suicide—and they were correct. She seemed almost catatonic as they led her away.

  —

  AS NEAR AS Kay could figure, based on a Google search, the maximum penalty in the U.K. for a hit-and-run death was fourteen years—and she was confident Mercer would spend at least that much time behind bars in view of the disappearance of the victim’s body, Mercer’s refusal to cooperate, and her questionable identity. She’d spend fourteen years in jail thinking about everything she’d lost and knowing that when she got out, she’d be sixty years old, totally broke, a felon with a record, and unemployable.

  Kay thought all that was better than shooting a bullet into Mercer’s head and putting her out of her misery.

  She had only one thing left to do with regard to Mercer.

  —

  KAY CALLED JESSICA and said, “Hey, do you think it would be okay if you missed a couple days of school?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “I was thinking that you should fly over to Merry Old England and meet me. We’ll go see the place where Henry the Eighth chopped the heads off all his wives.”

  “Well, actually, he only executed two of them. Anne Boleyn and—”

  “Whatever,” Kay said, rolling her eyes. “You wanna come?”

  “Yeah! That would be great!”

  “So get a ticket to fly over here on Thursday and we’ll fly back home together next Tuesday. And Jessica, pack a few things so we can go out to dinner someplace nice.”

  She meant: bring something besides jeans and sweatshirts.

  “One other thing. Fly first class. Mommy’s getting a bonus.”

  She hadn’t spoken to Callahan about a bonus, but she would. She figured she deserved one.

  —

  THE MORNING OF THE DAY she was supposed to pick up Jessica at Heathrow Airport, Kay stopped at the jail where Anna Mercer was being held pending her trial.

  When Mercer was led into the visitors’ room, she didn’t really look all that bad except for the fact that her hair was plastered to her head as if she hadn’t showered in days and her dark roots were beginning to show. She moved like she was shell-shocked, and a guard had to lead her over to the table where Kay was waiting.

  “I want to show you something, Anna,” Kay said.

  Mercer didn’t respond—and Kay wasn’t sure that Mercer had understood what she’d said. The lights were on, but nobody was home.

  Kay took out an eight-by-ten color photo and placed it facedown on the table. Mercer didn’t react.

  “I have it on good authority,” Kay said, “that you’re going to be incarcerated in Bronzefield Prison in Surrey. Bronzefield is a Category A prison for females, meaning it’s a maximum-security pen for really bad apples. You’re a designated bad apple not only because you killed a guy and hid the body, but because nobody knows who you are.”

  Kay flipped the picture over so Mercer could see it—but Mercer didn’t look at it.

  “Look at the picture, Anna,” Kay said. When Mercer still didn’t look, Kay barked, “Anna!”

  Mercer finally looked down at the picture, but she didn’t react.

  The picture showed a woman with a face that would terrify children—or grown men, for that matter. She was of mixed race, dark complexioned, her head was large, her eyes were small, and her nose appeared to have been squashed flat. Her ha
ir sprang out from her head in all directions.

  “That’s Margaret Chase—Big Maggie to her friends,” Kay said. “She’s currently serving twenty-five years without the possibility of parole in Bronzefield. She’s six feet three inches tall and weighs two hundred and forty pounds. She’s in Bronzefield for killing her husband, his girlfriend, and her husband’s Yorkie terrier, and you know how the British feel about dogs. She beat them all to death with a cast-iron frying pan.

  “Anyway, the Callahan Group has placed Ms. Chase on retainer. She came quite cheap: six cartons of cigarettes, two dozen chocolate bars, and twenty-five pounds will be mailed to her every other month by a lady named Blanche, one of our associates in the U.K.

  “The reason I’m telling you about Margaret Chase, Anna, is if we hear you’re talking to anyone about the Callahan Group, Maggie is going to pay you a visit. Do you understand, Anna?”

  Mercer didn’t respond; she just continued to stare down at the picture. But Kay couldn’t tell if she was really seeing it.

  Kay stood up. “Well, I sure as hell hope you understand, because everything I just told you was true.” Kay picked up the picture of Margaret Chase and walked away, leaving Mercer sitting at the table staring down at the place where the picture had been.

  —

  JESSICA WAS BEAMING when Kay met her at baggage claim at Heathrow. She was so excited she couldn’t stand still, and she reminded Kay of a little kid who’d just heard the ice-cream truck coming down the street.

  Jessica held up a book that was over four hundred pages long: Fodor’s travel guide to London. “I read this on the flight and made up a list of the places we have to go see. Did you know that right where this airport is, that in 1564 . . .”

  Kay knew she was going to be bored stiff looking at museums and art galleries and ancient castles for the next four days—but if it made her daughter happy, that was all that mattered. She was going to make more of an effort in the future to enjoy Jessica’s company before she grew up and became a hotshot doctor too busy to spend time with her mom.