Nine thirty on a weekday morning. People all over Rockford were out and about, engrossed in their work, doing what they were supposed to do. And Lainie was rattling around her empty house, wondering whether the substitute teacher Hopwell had hired to replace her would know how to get the ADHD kids to burn off their jitters, and how to transform her students’ disputes into debates, and how to coax words past Hayden Blumenthal’s reluctant lips.
Her answering machine had been flashing when she arrived home from school. No calls from Stavik, thank God, but Sheila and Angie had both left messages.
Angie had phoned from work and said, “I don’t care what anyone says—the Colonielles need you.”
Sheila had phoned from her house and said, “This is absolutely horrible, and I told Thomaston she was nuts.”
The third message was from Coach Thomaston, who said, “Lainie, I’m suspending you from the team until your legal situation is cleared up. It wouldn’t be fair to Patty Cavanagh to have you playing on the team.”
Fair to Patty Cavanagh? What about fair to Lainie? She was a Colonielle, and damn it, she’d done nothing wrong. Since when did one freaking date after two and a half years of lonely celibacy mean a woman had to get arrested, lose her job, and sacrifice her place on the Colonielles roster? Innocent until proven guilty? Not in this little corner of America.
To stave off insanity, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt, laced on her running shoes, and headed outdoors for a jog. A long jog. A marathon jog. Maybe, if luck was with her, she’d have a heart attack from running too hard, and she could ride out the next few months in a hospital bed with tubes up her nose.
Unfortunately, she was too healthy. Decades of soccer had honed her heart into a muscle as well tuned as the engine of Margaret’s Mercedes. Lainie’s feet lapped up the miles, the textured soles of her running shoes smacking against the pavement, her lungs pumping like bellows, her skin growing hot and damp. The knots of tension at the base of her neck melted, her fingers flexed into fists, her thigh muscles stretched, and her stomach contracted with a satisfying emptiness.
She jogged to the high school, around the track, and back to the street. She jogged down a twisting country lane to Main Street, passing the tacky supermarket with the reasonable prices and the earthy organic supermarket with the astronomical prices, and then veered off onto another twisting country lane. She spotted two deer poised at the edge of an elaborately landscaped driveway. They peered anxiously toward the other side of the street and then leaped across the asphalt, barely missing a collision with a woman driving a Lincoln Navigator.
Lainie kept running. Five miles, at least. Six. She didn’t know how long she’d been running because she hadn’t strapped on her sport watch. After its having sat in police custody for so many hours, she wanted to disinfect it before she let it touch her wrist again.
Running was supposed to release endorphins, but she was fueled by rage, not bliss. Rage at Howard Knapp. Rage at Frank Bruno. Rage at Coach Thomaston. Rage at the judge who’d set Lainie’s bail at fifty thousand dollars. Rage at Stavik. Rage at Arthur Cavanagh for being such an asshole that someone had felt compelled to kill him. Rage at whoever invented nail guns. Rage at the idiot who had driven her Escalade into a utility pole two weeks ago, causing the power outage that had thrown the sprinkler system timer out of whack. If that woman hadn’t hit the utility pole, Lainie wouldn’t have gone to Olde Towne Olé with Sheila and Angie and spotted Arthur and a blonde with pneumatic breasts canoodling in the restaurant’s lounge.
Rage at Roger for not being here when she needed him.
Her rage propelled her another mile. Up ahead she spotted the entrance to Emerson Village Estates. No picket line of environmentalists armed with buckets of red-tinted corn syrup blocked the construction road carved out of the forest. Having vandalized Patty Cavanagh’s car, they must have felt their work was done and decamped for some other part of the planet in need of preservation.
Or maybe they felt their work was done because arrests in Arthur Cavanagh’s murder had been made. What if they’d killed him, and they’d set up Stavik? What if they’d somehow gotten Arthur’s BlackBerry into Lainie’s purse?
How could they have? They’d never been near her purse. But if they were evil enough . . .
Her mind had zoomed into the realm of paranoid dementia. If she couldn’t give herself a heart attack, maybe a nervous breakdown would guarantee her a comfy bed in a quiet hospital somewhere.
She jogged closer to the dirt road leading into the development. The scent of pine seared her nose and the shadows of the tall, straight trees lining the paved main road fell across her skin, cooling her down.
She was reasonably close to her house. She should just keep running. But her feet were far enough away from her brain to ignore its wishes. They transported her onto the dirt road, through the trees to the stark clearing where Arthur Cavanagh had dreamed of erecting a bunch of ugly, expensive mansions.
Breaking into the clearing, she saw the half-constructed house where his body had been found, and the few other foundations that had been poured at the center of flat, treeless lots marked off with white stakes and little red flags. She saw the road, which had been given a few gratuitous curves in a futile attempt to add charm to the denuded landscape. She saw an old pickup truck, marred by patches of rust, parked just beyond the half-constructed house.
She turned, but not fast enough. She heard the squeak of the truck’s door opening, the crunch of it closing and then Stavik’s voice: “Lainie!”
Rage. Rage at the creep who had reminded her of how much she enjoyed sex and then betrayed her by stashing incriminating evidence in her purse. Rage at the son of a bitch responsible for the night she’d spent in the holding cell at the police station, for that disgusting drive into the city with three of Middlesex County’s Most Wanted—or at least Middlesex County’s Most Fetid—for her arraignment, and most of all for her tears. She hated crying, and thanks to Stavik, she’d done way too much crying in the past couple of days.
“Don’t run away,” he shouted.
She’d already stopped running. Stupid, stupid feet. First they’d carried her into Emerson Village, and now they refused to carry her out.
She heard his footsteps approaching from behind, fast but heavier than hers, his work boots clomping along the pebbles and ruts. She kept her back to him, her hands on her hips. She wished she’d donned long sweats instead of shorts that exposed too much leg, and a fleece pullover instead of a thin cotton T-shirt. Who cared that it was sixty degrees out? She’d rather suffer heat stroke than display her body for Stavik.
At least she was wearing her sports bra. The thick elastic cups flattened her already modest bosom and kept her nipples hidden. Recalling Margaret’s description of her sports bra as a jock strap for breasts, Lainie smiled. Then she remembered who was closing in on her and her smile vanished.
“Lainie,” he said, only a couple of yards away, more out of breath from his sprint down the dirt road than Lainie was from her seven-mile jog. “Lainie, are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right,” she snapped, hugging her arms around herself. She shouldn’t have answered—shouldn’t have even acknowledged his presence. If only her feet were functioning, she would have been long gone before he could get so close.
When she refused to turn, he circled her until they stood toe-to-toe, his posture far less confrontational than hers. His arms hung loose at his sides, his head tilted slightly, and his eyes, those blue eyes that she’d once considered beautiful, were glazed with fatigue and something else. Regret, maybe.
“I heard about your arrest,” he said. “I can’t believe—”
“I heard about yours, too. How come you aren’t in jail?”
“I made bail,” he said. “I assume you did, too.”
If Stavik had received the same bail as she ha
d, when he was the one who’d actually killed Cavanagh, she’d have to kick something. His shin would do, although his scrotum would bring her greater satisfaction.
“It took a couple of days to put the bail together,” he continued. “I would have phoned you sooner, but they held me until I could raise the money.”
She shouldn’t ask. She shouldn’t care. But so help her, if his bail had been set at fifty thousand dollars . . . “How high was your bail?”
He winced. “Five hundred thousand.”
Good. Not that she wished him ill—although she did—but she took heart in the notion that the legal system felt her alleged crime was only one tenth as serious as his. “How did you manage to raise that kind of money?”
“I put up my townhouse as collateral. Lainie . . .” He lifted his hand to touch her cheek, but he must have read something in her expression because he let his arm drop to his side again. “I know why they arrested me, but for the life of me, I don’t know why they’re bothering with you. I’ve been sick just thinking about it.”
“Oh, please.” He was a damned good liar, but she’d dealt with better than he. Fourth-graders were the slickest liars in the world.
Stavik’s eyes narrowed. “Please what? Why are you angry at me? We’re both up to our ears in shit here.”
“And you’re the one who dragged me into the shit pile,” she said, refusing to recoil from his steely stare. “You’re the one who planted that thing on me.”
“What thing?”
Oh, yes, he was very good. His bewildered-innocent expression was Oscar-worthy. “Arthur Cavanagh’s BlackBerry,” she reminded him.
“His BlackBerry? What the hell are you talking about?”
“It was missing the day he was murdered. Whoever murdered him apparently stole it. And suddenly . . .” Her voice cracked as the reality of her predicament and the misery of the past few days eddied around her. “Suddenly the missing BlackBerry turned up in my purse. Right after my purse sat on your dresser in your bedroom.” Her voice cracked again, this time from the memory of what had occurred in his bedroom before he’d stashed the BlackBerry inside her purse.
His frown creased the bridge of his nose. “You’re kidding.”
“Right now, I can’t imagine kidding about anything ever again.”
Stavik shook his head. His mouth flexed, his lips groping for the right words. “Number one, I never touched your purse. Number two, I never touched Cav’s BlackBerry. Number three, this whole thing is fucked.”
“His BlackBerry was in my purse,” she said, trying not to shout. “You put it there.”
“I did not!”
“Then who did?”
“You’re asking me? How the fuck should I know?” He fell back a step. “If you had the BlackBerry, how do I know you aren’t the one who killed Cav?”
“Why would I have killed him? I didn’t hate him. You did.”
“But I’m not a fucking killer!” He ran his hand over his mouth, as if to wipe away the residue left by his crude language. “How did they find the BlackBerry? Did they have a search warrant?”
“I found it myself. My lawyer made me turn it in.”
“Jesus.” He paced in a small oval. “I can’t believe you had it in your purse.”
“I can’t, either, since I didn’t put it there.” She wanted to pace, too. Belatedly, her feet had regained their ability to move. But if Stavik was pacing, she wasn’t going to pace. She didn’t want to do anything that might imply she had something in common with him. Instead, she scuffed her toes against the packed dirt of the road.
“Why would the cops think Cav’s murderer took his BlackBerry?”
“Because he always had it on him. According to Patty, he would have slept with it if she’d let him. But it turned up missing when his body was found.”
“Yeah, but—why would the murderer take it? If whoever killed him wanted to rob him, why not steal his watch and his wallet, too? And if they stole his BlackBerry, why wouldn’t they have fenced it by now? Like the thing would have been worth murdering a guy over. What does a BlackBerry even cost?”
“I’m supposed to know?” Belatedly, she realized his question had been rhetorical. He was thinking out loud, seeking a logical explanation for what she’d told him. She would have been greatly impressed by his mental efforts, except for the fact that he’d been the one to hide the gadget in her purse. “Did you ever see him use it?” she asked.
“His BlackBerry? Sure. He used it all the time. Phoning, emailing, texting, whatever.”
“So what was in it that a murderer wouldn’t want anyone to know?”
“You should have checked while you had it in your possession,” Stavik said.
“I didn’t even know how to turn the thing on.”
“Great.” He stalked in another lopsided oval. “This is the twenty-first century, Lainie. A person doesn’t need an advanced degree to locate the power switch on a PDA.”
“Well, that’s good, because I have an advanced degree and I couldn’t locate the power switch.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked in a quieter voice, no longer pacing.
Lainie glanced down at her apparel. What she was doing should have seemed obvious to him, but she answered, anyway. “I’m jogging.”
“Was school cancelled or something?”
Damn it, her eyes were filling again. Like an eternal spring, her tear ducts began producing a fresh flow. Shouldn’t a person run out of tears after a while? Especially since she’d just jogged a whole bunch of miles and sweated most of the fluid out of her body. Where were these tears coming from?
And why did being temporarily removed from her job hurt more than being arrested? Did teaching mean more to her than freedom?
Now wasn’t a good time to get philosophical. She blinked her eyes furiously and hoped Stavik would assume the fresh moisture on her cheeks was perspiration. “I was forced to take a leave of absence,” she told Stavik, hating the plaintive catch in her voice.
“Shit.”
“Could you try cursing a little less?”
“Sorry.” Stavik raked a hand through his hair and sighed deeply. “What made you come here?”
She couldn’t possibly explain that her feet had dragged her to Emerson Village Estates against her will. A chill ruffled her as the sweat evaporated from her skin. She rubbed her palms along her arms to warm them. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I was hoping to discover I’d imagined this whole thing. You know, maybe that house”—she pointed to the half-built mansion where Arthur had been found—“wouldn’t be there, and these naked lots”—she swept her hand across the stark vista—“would still be a forest, and none of this would have happened. Why are you here?”
“Same thing, I guess.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair again. “I just don’t know how things got fucked—fouled up the way they did. One day I’m living my life, going to work, building a house, and the next day . . .” A broken breath escaped him. “I’m not allowed to see my daughter until this is done.”
“The court said that?”
He shook his head. “My ex-wife. I can’t blame her, either. How could I explain to my daughter that her old man spent three nights behind bars because he’d made the mistake of stumbling onto a crime scene?”
That was hardly the only mistake Stavik had made. For instance, hadn’t he made the mistake of killing Arthur Cavanagh?
He was playing for her sympathy, and she had to admit his plight—being separated from the daughter he loved—was a sad one. But either he’d killed a man or he’d surrounded himself with enough evidence to convince the cops that he had. And he’d implicated Lainie, all his protestations notwithstanding. And he cursed too much. Hanging around with him had gotten her to start cursing, too, damn it.
Her chills c
ontinued as her skin dried off. Or maybe it was Emerson Village Estates that gave her the chills. Or maybe it was Stavik, or her knowledge that this man, with his large hands and his powerful shoulders and his long legs, this man who had seen her naked and kissed her in places she hadn’t been kissed in a long, long time and made sweet, satisfying love to her, could have killed someone—and then set her up.
“I’ve got to go,” she said abruptly. Fortunately, her feet got the message this time, and she broke into a lope along the dirt road and back to civilization. “Don’t call me,” she yelled over her shoulder, then picked up her speed.
Chapter Sixteen
JACKSON BRAY’S office was not what she’d expected. She’d thought it would look film noir-ish and gloomy, with scuffed flooring and scratched wood furniture, a waist-high railing separating the receptionist’s desk from the waiting area, and a long-bladed ceiling fan churning the smoke-stale air. The receptionist would have a pompadour and heavy red lipstick, and she’d be wearing a snug-fitting dress with padded shoulders, and she’d have the kind of curves that used to be considered appealing before anorexia became the ultimate in fashion.
Jackson Bray Investigative Services didn’t look like a place where Sam Spade might hang his trench coat on an old coat tree and kick up his feet on his desk, the bottom drawer of which held a bottle of cheap whisky. It looked more like a plastic surgeon’s office: clean nearly to the point of sterility, with bright lighting, comfortable seating, pastel still-life watercolors on the walls, and a bamboo palm in a ceramic pot occupying one corner. The air smelled not like old cigars or overcooked coffee but like lemon furniture polish.
The women seated on the leather couches in the waiting area all kept their gazes trained on the copies of People and Vogue, which they’d pulled from neatly fanned arrays of magazines on the occasional tables. The receptionist, seated behind a sleek semicircular desk that would have fit in quite nicely on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, was model slender and dressed in the kind of crisp, tidy business apparel Margaret would approve of. She even had a silk scarf looped around her neck. Given the receptionist’s youth, Lainie doubted she’d worn the scarf to hide crepey skin.
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