“What?”
“The front of the car parked there. Yeah, that’s a Crown Vic parked there. Preferred car of the Secret Service. Might make approaching him tricky.”
“But not impossible.”
“Not for us.” He looked at his watch and said, “I’m going to go down to the lobby, use a pay phone to call my friend.”
“Give it everything you’ve got.”
“You know me,” he said. “Mr. Persuasive.”
After he left, I kept looking at different angles of the McConnell house, zooming in on details like the coal chute and the wrought-iron fixture servants would have used to scrape manure off their shoes before entering the side door.
When the phone rang, I assumed it was Ryan calling from the lobby but it wasn’t.
“Hi,” she said. “It’s Sandy Lerner.”
“Hi.”
“We just got your message. I wish I’d listened to it sooner but we never do until Shabbos ends.”
“I figured as much.”
“Dad and I are both so sorry about your partner.”
“Sorry enough to tell me the truth?”
CHAPTER 25
The knock on my door came half an hour later. Ryan had already come back up from the lobby, saying the man who owed him a favour was going to see what he could do on our behalf. I told him Sandy was coming over to talk about David, and that I was sure she knew where he was. He retired to Jenn’s room to give me the space I needed to get it out of her.
When I opened the door, Sandy was standing in the halo of light from the hall lamp, holding a bottle of wine and a corkscrew.
“I think I might need a glass of this,” she said.
I slipped the paper wraps off two water glasses I found in the bathroom, and poured us each a measure. I tasted mine and said, “Just right for the occasion. Now tell me what the occasion is.”
“It’s helping you find your friend, of course. As long as we protect David too.”
She was sitting on the club chair, slim in jeans and a black sweater, feet up under her. I said, “The man who kidnapped my friend is a gangster named Sean Daggett, and he’s going to kill Jenn tomorrow unless I find David first.”
“I won’t let you turn David over to him, even to save her. If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I just need to speak to him, face to face. Between us we’ll find a way out.”
“From a gangster? I don’t think David’s much of a fighter.”
“I am.”
“I know. My father told me a few things about you after you left Friday night.”
“What things?”
“That you were a martial artist and you’d been in the IDF. And …”
“You can say it.”
“That you’ve killed three people.”
“Did he tell you how?”
“They were all in defence of yourself or others.”
“That was nice of him.”
She sipped her wine. “I heard you discussing Abner, so I take it there was some grey area?”
“In one of them.”
“But you live with it.”
“For the most part.”
“You’ve been injured a lot.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way you carry yourself.”
“It hasn’t been a great year in that way,” I admitted. “As my grandmother would have said, there was too much excitement.”
“Did you get injured helping people?”
“Mostly.”
She took a longer drink than before, a longer pause, before saying, “You’ll protect David? You won’t use him as bait?”
“Just a diversion. And I’m not alone. I brought someone down from Toronto who’s a fighter too. A frighteningly good one.”
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what happened.”
On the Friday morning after David’s flight from Summit Path, Sandy had woken at dawn and driven him to a place called Plum Island, accessible only via a causeway near Newburyport, an hour north of the city. Much of it was a nature reserve, she told me, with home ownership restricted to certain areas. A wealthy developer named Stephen Cooper, who attended Adath Israel and adored her father, had a retreat that he allowed Rabbi Ed to use from time to time, knowing his finances would never allow him a decent weekend out of the city. Sandy had always been invited too. “Normally,” she said, “a weekend with my dad after spending all week with him at home? No thanks. But Plum Island is magical. You see plants there you don’t see anywhere else around. Birds too. It’s a huge nature preserve, with all kinds of tidal flats and salt marshes. You see different water, and bluer skies. So I went a couple of times. Took a lot of long walks, tons of photos.”
“This is where David’s been the last two weeks?”
“As far as I know. Our agreement with David was we wouldn’t contact him. He threw away his cellphone. If he needed anything he would call from a pay phone in town. The house has no phone service in the off-season, no Internet, so we’ve had no way of reaching him, and he hasn’t called here. There’s also no electricity, water or heat. But I set him up with candles, blankets, a lot of canned food, bottled water. A camp stove he could use to warm up soups and meals, make coffee. I thought he would call after a few days, a week, for more supplies or cash.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“No.”
“You’ll take me there in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need to leave early,” I said. “First light.”
She got up off the club chair and sat down next to me on the bed. Her hair smelled like green apple and the smell went straight to a sweet spot inside me, a welter of emotion and feelings that had been aboil far too long. I hadn’t held a woman with feeling in many, many months. I hadn’t had sex in the year since Camilla Lauder and I had split. And I hadn’t had anything remotely resembling good sex with the lovely Camilla for a year before that. I might have hooked up with Katherine Hollinger, a Homicide sergeant in Toronto, but my friendship with Ryan had cost me that one.
Now here was someone I found very attractive, close to me now-too close. As much as I wanted to take her clothes off and swarm her, my heart was with Jenn, wherever she was. My head was troubled by the danger she was in. I needed to stay focused on what was ahead of us. Like a fighter before a championship fight, the last thing I needed was wobbly legs.
“Go home, Shana,” I said. “I’ll pick you up around six.”
She leaned in closer. “Are you sure?”
“No,” I said. “Which is why you should go.”
Later, I went next door and told Ryan where David was.
“I should go with you,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t worry it’s a trap?”
“The rabbi’s daughter?”
“She could be the pope’s mistress, I don’t give a fuck. It could still be a set-up.”
“It’s not.”
“Said Caesar to his wife. And what am I supposed to do while you’re out getting your throat slit?”
“We have two places to watch now. The mortuary and Williams Wharf.”
“I’ll take the Wharf, where us lean Italian guys blend in, hang there until I hear from you.”
“Maybe your guy will have news.”
“Maybe. Just watch your back on this island.”
“I will.”
“And if David won’t help?”
“He will. He has to. I’m not going to ask him to walk into Daggett’s arms, but there has to be a way we can use him.”
“My advice is drag him back here by the hair if it saves Jenn’s life. But I know you won’t do that.”
“No.”
“Take your gun.”
“I will.”
“And an extra clip.”
“Yessir.”
“All right. Thirty-four shots ought to get you through the morning.”
That’s the kind of send-off you get when you hang a
round Dante Ryan.
CHAPTER 26
I woke up at five-thirty, my head reasonably clear and free of pain. I had a light breakfast as soon as the hotel coffee shop opened and by six-thirty was on my way back to Brookline with my Beretta snug in its holster on my right hip. I was feeling a sense of excitement that bordered on hope. If David was still at the house on Plum Island, and if he agreed to help, I’d be one step closer to finding Jenn before Daggett could carry out his sick plan.
Shana was standing outside her house in a dark wool coat. She got in and directed me to the I-95; I realized I much preferred her voice to that of the GPS. I felt a twinge of regret that we hadn’t spent the night together. I certainly could have used the release. But it was the right decision and I shook my mind clear of it. “How far is this island?”
“About forty-five minutes to the causeway,” she said. “And another twenty or so from there.”
She fell into silence, looking out the window, twisting a strand of her hair around her fingers. I asked if she was okay.
“I’m just worried about what we’ll find,” she said. “Without heat, power and everything, it will have been hard on him these last two weeks. He’s not the hardiest of men.”
“You said he had plenty of supplies.”
“Still, it’s been cold at night. Colder up there, I imagine. But I suppose he’s also an ascetic kind of character. If anyone can get by on the bare minimum, it’s him.”
“From what I’ve heard of him, he’ll have written a new research paper on toilet paper by candlelight.”
We went past the exits to Lowell, Lawrence and Ipswich and got off on Scotland Road, which bent toward the sea and Newbury. The road went south and east around the wide mouth of the Merrimack River, then took us north on the Plum Island Turnpike, the river basin on our left, the ocean on our right. As the road became narrower. I cracked open my window and smelled salt and brine, only slightly tainted by diesel fumes.
“You should see it here in the spring,” she said. “Between the wildlife refuge and the tidal flats, more than three hundred bird species have been recorded. The spring migration here is one of the biggest in the world. Zillions of hawks, shorebirds, warblers. If you’re into that sort of thing.”
I wasn’t, not now. Not unless one of those birds could tell me where Jenn was, and that she was okay.
I guess Shana picked up on what I was thinking about, because she asked, “How long have you and Jenn been partners?”
“Just a few months. But we’ve known each other much longer-she’s my best friend too, like a sister.”
“You have any?”
“Sisters? No. Just an older brother.”
“That didn’t sound warm and fuzzy.”
“Our relationship has a lot of grit in it. Bit of a sandstorm sometimes.”
“What’s the age difference?”
“He’s three years older chronologically. And twenty more mature.”
“One of those,” she said.
We drove in silence until she said, “You see the house there on the right?”
It was an A-frame made of dark stained wood, with a lot of pine trees around it. “That’s not such a bad campsite. I don’t think I’d call it ascetic.”
“That’s not the Coopers’ house. That’s where their summer help lives.”
The road to the main house was gravel but had been graded so the ruts weren’t deep. The Coopers probably had an Escalade or Navigator anyway, in case a twig fell off a tree and blocked their path. At one point the road narrowed so the branches of laurels leaned in close as if they wanted to pull on our sleeves, whisper something useful, but they just scraped against the side of the car as we eased past at low speed.
“Okay, about a hundred yards ahead-do they use yards in Canada?”
“I watch football. I know what a hundred yards looks like.”
“It’s just past that big spruce. You’ll have to stop at the gate.”
Past the spruce, a towering blue one, I turned into a flagstone drive blocked by an iron gate set into stone posts on either side. Shana got out and used a key to unlock the gate and swung it open. After I passed through, she closed it behind us, locked it and got back in.
“I’m so nervous,” she said.
“About what we’ll find?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll know in a minute.”
The road rose steeply enough that I had to ease the little Dodge into second gear. Then it plateaued in front of a magnificent house with a stone foundation and wood-and-glass front. The wood was richly stained cedar. The windows promised expansive views of the ocean at the rear.
We parked in front of the house. Complete quiet except for the rush of the water. The surrounding homes weren’t close and all seemed unoccupied. I’d seen no cars in the driveways we’d passed. No wood smoke from chimneys, no mail or newspapers outside the houses.
No sounds at all from the Cooper house.
Shana let us in with another key. The foyer was so brightly flooded with natural light, I forgot for a moment that there was no electricity and found myself listening for music, a television or other sign of occupation. We walked over a flagstone floor into a great room that included a kitchen with an island that had four stools lined up, a dining area that looked out at the sea and a living room that faced a large stone fireplace. In front of it was a small mattress and a pillow and three grey wool blankets, neatly folded at one end. There were several candles in glass dishes. A daily prayer book and a coffee-table book on the castles of the Loire. I guess it was the one thing he’d found to challenge his mind in some way. Take him away from the frightening bleakness of the last two weeks.
We padded quietly over hardwood floors as if neither of us wanted to be the first to disturb his monastic silence.
On the kitchen island was a loaf of bread, with a few crumbs scattered near it. In the sink was a plate and one knife smeared with peanut butter, and another with jelly. I also saw some over-the-counter cold medication beside the sink and some crumpled tissues in the trash bin beneath it.
“David?” Shana called. “It’s me, Sandy. Are you here?”
Silence.
“David?”
Nothing.
I looked out the glass doors that opened onto a stone path that led out toward a wood-and-wire fence and beyond that the dunes and the water. Near some grassy scrub a white tissue shivered in the breeze.
“Out there,” I said.
Out there was a grey sea under a cloudy sky. The wind whipped the water into brisk whitecaps where gulls dove and smacked against the crests, cawing and slashing the water with their beaks. The roar of the surf was as loud as racketing trains, as the waves pounded in. In both directions the sand dunes sprawled, empty except for fences to keep people away from fragile growths of piney scrub.
I almost didn’t see him because the blanket around his shoulders was the same colour as the sky. He was facing the water, where the sea and sky met in similar shades of iron. I thought the first voice he heard should be Shana’s, to keep him from bolting, so I waited for her to catch up and gave her a hand signal to take over.
“David,” she called. “It’s Sandy.”
He didn’t stir. He kept staring out at the horizon.
“He can’t hear you,” I said, pointing at the waves.
She took five or six more steps and called his name again, and he turned and his face broke into a huge smile when he saw her. Since the case started, I’d pictured him as sober, serious, studious, when I wasn’t thinking of him as dead, dying, hurt or pleading for his life. I realized I’d never pictured him happy, grinning and filling with light from the inside.
Then he saw me. The smile went away. His brows lowered and met in the middle. He stood up, letting the blanket fall to the sand. He held a tissue in his hand and the area around and under his nostrils looked raw and red. He was wearing jeans that were too long and rolled up at the cuffs and a red sweatshirt also meant for a bigger man.
Shana ran across the sand and hugged him. He wasn’t sure what to do at first, just kept looking at me, but finally he balled up the tissue and held her tightly, and it didn’t take more than a few seconds before his shoulders started to shake and he wept. Shana patted his back and murmured things and they rocked together for half a minute longer.
When he pulled away, he came toward me, his hand extended. “Sandy says you’ve been looking for me.”
“Yes. Jonah Geller.” We shook.
“Hired by my parents.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“We got here Thursday.”
“You’re very good then. I commend you.”
He was on the small side, about five-eight and 145 pounds, and his eyes looked red and rheumy. But when he smiled, like he was doing now, he really did seem lit from within. Not an athlete’s glow, and not a saint’s either. Here was a man who had known what he wanted to do from a very young age and had pursued it ardently with every ounce of his considerable gifts. There was a contentment about him I knew I could never achieve, no matter what I did in the future, because of what I’d done in the past. That he had commended my work mattered because I so admired his.
“Have you been sick the whole time?” Shana asked.
“No, just the last few days,” he said. “It gets damp in the house at night. I can’t seem to find enough blankets. I didn’t want any wood smoke so I never lit the fire. I just used the camp stove, like you said.”
“You poor thing,” she said.
He looked at me and said, “So. My parents hired a private investigator.”
“They needed to know what happened.”
“I feel terrible that I haven’t called them. I just couldn’t. I was afraid it would put them in danger. If they didn’t know where I was, Daggett would have no reason to hurt them. I take it you know about Daggett?”
“Yes.”
“After the first few days here, I kind of lost track of time a little. It became easier not to do anything at all, other than subsist and think. There were a few interesting books I could read during daylight hours. Thoughts I jotted down about HOOD and other matters. I mostly tried to sleep and stay warm and ration my supplies.”
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