A Cup Full of Midnight (33 page)

“Turn on the recorder. I’ll say I did it. I’ll give a detailed confession. Case closed, everybody’s happy.”

I nodded toward his wife, who clung to his arm as if she might topple. The color had leeched from her face. “Hannah doesn’t look that happy.”

“Prison will kill her,” he said. “I was a POW in ’Nam. I know how to do time. Let me do this, McKean.”

“First tell me about Keating. How’d he get mixed up in this?”

“Hannah called me. I called him. It wasn’t complicated.”

“You hate Alan Keating.”

He shrugged. “She’d already called him. I thought there was a better chance he’d keep it under his jacket if he had something to lose too. Besides, he owed us.”

Keating must have thought so too.

“Tell me the rest,” I said.

When the rage had spent itself, she was horrified by what she’d done and terrified of the consequences. And so she did what she had always done. She called the man who had always been there when she needed him.

Don’t move, he said. I’ll be right there.

He took the time to shop. A hunting knife, garbage bags, baby wipes, handheld vacuum cleaner, shower cap, rubber gloves. A pair of coveralls for Hannah and one for himself. He knew he was forgetting something, but he had no idea what. He was new to this business of murder.

Once he’d bundled Hannah into her new coveralls and sent her home to shower, he allowed himself to feel the panic. He had no idea where to start. The body, he supposed. And he had to do something about the footprints. And the blood. What else?

Alan Keating.

Doug wasn’t a man who would casually ask for help, but the crime scene was beyond him. Keating was a smart guy. He’d know what to do. Besides, if Doug could get Keating involved, he could cover his bases and ensure that the psychologist wouldn’t betray Hannah. He called Keating, and Keating, overwhelmed by guilt and by the knowledge of what his friend had done, agreed to help.

Between them, they staged the scene. Vacuumed the living room. Smeared Hannah’s bloody footprints. While Doug carved his grief on Razor’s body, Keating searched the house for copies of the letter, which would provide the police with a motive for Razor’s death. Instead, he found the journals.

When they’d done all they could think of to do, Doug took the garbage bags with the vacuum cleaner bags, the cleaning rags, and the rest of the evidence and burned it to ash. What wouldn’t burn, including the knife, went into a landfill.

The journals went home with Keating. A little piece of Razor’s soul? A reminder of his fall from grace? Or maybe Keating really couldn’t bear to see his friend exposed as a monster. Maybe, after all Razor’s talk about the deceptive nature of love,Alan Keating had wanted to prove him wrong.

I wondered about Razor. The last few minutes of his life. When he’d seen Hannah holding the knife, had he decided to try one last experiment? See if he could turn an all-American soccer mom into a murderess? She was a better prize than Byron, who was, after all, slightly tarnished.

As the blood leaked out of him, did Razor actually think he’d won?

My cell phone buzzed again, and I said, “I gotta go. Let’s get this over with.” I turned the wire back on and said to Doug, “Tell me what you just said about Sebastian Parker’s murder.”

He leaned toward the wire beneath my shirt and said, “I did it. I killed him. I took that funky little knife off the shelf and almost sliced his fucking little head off.”

The front door banged open, and Frank stomped in, trailed by a couple of detectives I recognized from the surveillance van.

“’Bout damn time,” he said. He turned to Doug. “These fellas here are going to read you your rights. Then you and they are gonna take a little ride.” To me, he said, “Elgin Mayers offed his guard and left the hospital in a stolen BMW. Belonged to some surgeon, I guess. No one noticed he was missing until the relief guard came on.”

My entrails turned to water. “How long?”

“Too long,” he said. “Come on. I’ll drive, and you get Randall on the phone.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

W
e left the Silverado in the driveway. Frank nosed the Vic onto the street while I tried Randall’s cell. Voice mail. I punched in his home phone. Answering machine. Shit.

At Josh’s school, a nasal voice on the answering machine said they were closed for the winter holidays.

Shit, shit, shit.

“No use worrying yet,” Frank said. “He may not go for Josh at all. He wasn’t part of Judith Hewitt’s rape.”

I could have told him about Josh then, but the words stuck in my throat. There was no way to make it sound good.
He was there, but he didn’t hurt anybody.
It was right up there with,
I smoked pot, but I didn’t inhale
. It may have been true, but it didn’t change anything. The fact remained that Josh had watched a woman being terrorized and done nothing. Not then, and not later. I hated myself for being ashamed of that.

Frank said, “Mayers’ll probably try for Barnabus first. Unfinished business, and all that.”

I said, “I put four bullets in him. He’s going to go for Josh.”

“Two bullets,” he said. “The vest stopped two.”

My phone shrilled, Randall’s ring. I snapped it open and said, “Where are you?”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Are you in the house?”

“Jared—”

“Is anybody in the fucking house?”

“Wendy and the girls are Christmas shopping. I dropped Josh off at your place a couple hours ago.”

I groaned. Elgin knew where I lived.

Alarm in his voice, Randall said, “He wanted to watch Christmas movies on the big screen. What’s going on?”

Frank switched lanes so fast I had to grab the dashboard with one hand. “Listen,” I said. “I need you to go get Wendy and the girls. Take them to a hotel. Someplace safe. Do it now. I’m going after Josh.”

“You said you got the guy. So why are we running again?”

“We got him. And then he slipped his leash. Go find the girls. Don’t let them go home. He won’t go after them, but he won’t blink if they get in his way.” I hung up and said to Frank, “Josh is at my place.”

Frank swung the Crown Vic onto Briley and merged into traffic.

“There’s no reason for him to think Josh would be at your place,” Frank said.

“He doesn’t find Josh at home, where do you think he’s gonna look?”

My palms drummed on the dashboard, a rhythmless machine-gun tattoo. Frank reached across with his free hand and blocked mine. “Stop,” he said. “It will be all right.”

A gap opened in the line of cars beside us. Frank punched the accelerator and wrenched the wheel. The Crown Vic hesitated, wheezed, and shot into the gap. A horn blared. Frank swore softly. A few icy droplets splatted onto the windshield. We swooped around the cloverleaf that looped onto I-40 East, merged onto the Interstate, and barreled—as much as the Crown Vic could barrel—toward the Mt. Juliet exit, where we fishtailed onto the ramp, skidded on a thin patch of ice, and shot past the Providence outdoor mall.

I unclamped my teeth and said, “Can’t this thing go any faster?”

“Hold your potatoes,” Frank said. “Let’s get there in one piece.”

As we rounded the last curve, the mailbox at the end of the driveway came into view. A patrol car from the Wilson County Sheriff’s office squatted across the entrance, blue lights flashing. A uniformed officer leaned against the passenger door, talking into his radio.

“Tell me you called them,” I said to Frank. “They’re here because you called?”

Frank didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. His grim expression said everything.

I unstrapped my seat belt, opened the door while the car was still rolling. The officer pushed away from the patrol car and thrust out a hand to stop me. Frank, wrestling the Crown Vic into park, waved his badge out the window and said, “Let him through.”

I darted around the patrol car, bulldozed through a stand of brittle thigh-high weeds, hit the gravel running, and sprinted toward the house. Frank puffed behind.

Through a gap in the trees, I caught a glimpse of flashing lights and ran harder. My boot came down in a water-filled rut crusted with ice, and some distant part of my mind registered the crack of the ice, the splash of freezing water, the sharp pain in my calf that was eclipsed by fear.

Jesus God Jesus God Jesus God.

The place was swarming. Two ambulances, a jumble of patrol cars, a couple of unmarked sedans. Uniforms everywhere. Too much activity. Too many people.
Too late
. I stumbled toward the house, lungs burning, a cold knot in my heart.

A man carrying a memo pad and wearing a Sheriff’s Department uniform stepped into my path.
Blankenship
, said the nameplate. “You can’t go in there, sir.”

I couldn’t breathe. Nodded toward the house. “In there. Are they . . .?”

“I’m sorry, sir. If you could just wait over there.”

I pressed forward, but Frank dug his fingers into my shoulder. “Hold your potatoes, Cowboy,” he said again.

The front door smacked open and a knot of paramedics eased a stretcher through. The wheels left a smeared trail of blood across the porch slats. The paramedics were covered with it. My stomach clenched, and I started forward again, straining against the hands that were suddenly barring my way.

Too many people. I couldn’t see the patient’s face. But so much blood. An IV bag swayed, and someone grabbed it before it fell. Snatches of doc-talk cut through the buzz outside. “Stat . . . BP . . . pressure falling . . . shock . . .”

A second stretcher followed the first, pushed by a pair of EMTs in blood-splashed uniforms. My stomach sank at their lack of urgency even before I saw the crisp white sheet draped over the body. Red stains were beginning to seep through.

A sound tore from my throat, and all the fight drained out of me. The hands fell away, all but one. Frank’s hand, heavy on my shoulder.

Too late. Too late for one of them.

I couldn’t bring myself to ask which one. Knew which I would choose and felt a wave of guilt and shame, because to hope for one was to betray the other.

There were noises around me—shouting voices, running footsteps, the metallic bang of ambulance doors, the scream of a siren. They all seemed very far away.

“Sir, you can’t go in there,” Blankenship said again, but not to me.

I shrugged off Frank’s hand and willed my feet to move toward the sheet-draped gurney. My boots were almost too heavy to lift.

One wheel of the stretcher caught on the porch step. As the EMTs jostled it free, a bloodied hand slipped out from beneath the sheet.

Around the thin wrist was a frayed gauze bandage.

Behind me, someone moaned. I turned around as my brother, still breathless from the sprint up the long driveway, sank to his knees.

“My son,” he said, voice breaking. “My son.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

S
ometimes, in His infinite cruelty, God allows us to believe we can protect the things we love. I held my brother as grief shuddered through him and knew that was a lie.

We can protect nothing.

The EMTs were kind. Tried to keep Randall from the broken boy that had been Josh, and when that didn’t work, held him at arm’s length while they rolled back the sheet. Preserving evidence. Not that there would be any.

Josh’s eyes were closed. More likely, someone had closed them. His skin looked almost translucent in the dimming light. There was a smear of blood on his chin, and I wanted to wipe it away. It made him seem even younger than he was.

Randall made a keening sound, stretched out a hand to touch Josh’s cheek.

“I’m sorry, sir,” one of the EMTs said, easing Randall away from the body. With clinical efficiency, the second pulled the sheet back up and laid it over Josh’s face. “I’m very sorry.”

I knew they’d taken hundreds of gurneys from hundreds of houses, that to them there was nothing special about this day or this boy. All the same, they were gentle as they eased the stretcher across the graveled parking area and loaded it into the second ambulance. They didn’t bother with the siren this time. There was no need.

Blankenship’s voice cut through the fog in my brain. He was talking, not so much to fill us in as to bring us back. I knew, because I’d done the same thing often enough, when I was in his shoes. “The call came from a guy named Jay Renfield. Said there was a prowler, they were going upstairs, get his roommate’s gun.”

“My gun,” I said, dully. Saw the speculation in his eyes. Didn’t answer the unspoken question. None of his fucking business.

“There was a dog barking on the tape. Some little yappy thing.”

“Only dog in the house is Luca,” I said. It was just something to say, to keep from thinking about the things I didn’t want to think about. “He doesn’t bark.”

He gave me a brief smile. “Tell it to the dispatcher. She could hardly hear Mr. Renfield for the yapping.”

“That’s how he knew to call,” I said, putting it together. “Jay wouldn’t have heard Elgin, but the dog tipped him off.”

“Yeah, that’s what he told the dispatcher. Then there was a crash and a couple of shots.”

Randall looked up. “That’s how it happened? He shot my boy?”

Blankenship looked like he wished he were somewhere else. “We don’t think so, sir,” he said. “We think the shots came from your son or Mr. Renfield. We think the suspect used a knife.”

A small sound came from the back of Randall’s throat. Then he said, “Was it quick? Did he—did my son suffer?”

“It was quick,” Blankenship said. It was the right thing to say, but that didn’t make it true. Josh had bled out, and that takes time. I hoped he’d gone into shock quickly. After that, he wouldn’t have felt much. I wondered if he’d been afraid.

“There was a struggle,” Blankenship said. “Then the cell phone signal got cut off.”

I said, “Cut off how?”

“Phone got crushed. We figure one of them stepped on it, probably the suspect.”

“Son of a bitch,” Randall said. “Son of a fucking—” He stopped. “You’ll catch him, right? You’ll catch him?”

“We’ll catch him,” Blankenship said. A raindrop landed on his forehead, and he wiped it away with one hand. “We did a sweep of the area, and we’ve set up roadblocks on all the surrounding streets.”