First Family (16 page)

After absorbing all she could take of this, she retreated to the backyard where she sat on an old bench next to an apple tree weighed down nearly to the ground with fruit, closed her eyes, and pretended her mother was still alive. She thought back to her childhood with them both. This was tough to do because there were blocks of her youth that Michelle Maxwell had simply eliminated from her memory for reasons that were obviously more apparent to her shrink than to her.

She called Sean to let him know she’d arrived okay. He had said all the appropriate things, was supportive and gentle. And yet when she hung up, Michelle felt about as alone as she ever had. One by one her brothers joined her in the backyard. They talked, cried, chatted some more, and cried some more. She noted that Bill, the biggest and the oldest, a tough beat cop in a Miami suburb that could reasonably be classified as a war zone, sobbed the hardest.

Michelle found herself mothering her older brothers, and she was not, by nature or inclination, a nurturing type. And the close, grief-stricken company of her male siblings started to suffocate her. She finally left them in the backyard and returned to the house. Her father was upstairs. She could hear him talking on the phone to
someone. She eyed the door to the garage accessible from the kitchen. She hadn’t gone in there yet. Michelle didn’t really want to see where her mother had died.

Yet she was also one to confront her fears head-on. She turned the knob, opened the door, and stared down the three unpainted plywood steps leading to the two-bay garage. A car was parked in the nearest bay. It was her parents’ pale blue Camry. The garage looked like any other. Except for one thing.

The splotch of blood on the cement floor. She drew closer to it.

Blood on the cement floor?

Had she fallen down the steps? Hit her head? She eyed the door of the Camry. There was no trace there. She gauged the space between the rough steps and the car. Her mother was a tall woman. If she had stumbled forward, she
had
to have hit the car. She really couldn’t have fallen sideways because the stairs had half-walls on both sides. She would have simply ended up slumped there. But if she had stumbled because she’d had a stroke? She could have bounced off the car and then hit her head on the floor. That would account for the blood.

That
had
to account for the blood.

She turned and almost screamed.

Her father was standing there.

Frank Maxwell was officially six foot three, though age and gravity had stolen more than an inch from him. He had the compact, dense muscle of a man who had been physical his entire life. His gaze flitted across his daughter’s anxious face, perhaps trying to read all the content there. Then it went to the spot of blood on the floor. He gazed at it as though the crimson splotch constituted an encrypted message he was trying to decipher.

“She’d been having headaches,” her father said. “I told her to go get them checked out.”

Michelle slowly nodded, thinking that this was an odd thing to open the conversation with. “She could have had a stroke.”

“Or an aneurysm. The neighbor down the street, her husband just had one. Nearly killed him.”

“Well, at least she wasn’t in any pain,” Michelle said, a bit lamely.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“So you were in the bath, Bill said?”

He nodded. “Showering. To think that she was lying there while I…”

She put a hand on his shoulder and clenched it tightly. It scared her to see her father like this. Right on the edge of losing it. If there was one thing her father had always been, it was in control.

“There was nothing you could have done, Dad. It happens. It’s not fair. It’s not right, but it happens.”

“And yesterday it happened to me,” he said with finality.

Michelle removed her hand and looked around the garage. The kids’ things had long since been purged from her parents’ lives. No bikes or wading pools or T-ball bats to clutter up their retirement. It was clean, but stark, as though their entire family history had been washed away. Her gaze went back to the blood as though it was the bait and she was the hungry fish. “So she was going to see some friends for dinner?”

He blinked rapidly. For a moment she thought he was going to dissolve into tears. She suddenly recalled that she had never seen her father cry. As soon as this thought fully formed in her head, she received a jolt somewhere in her brain.

I have seen my father cry, but I just don’t know when.

“Something like that.”

His vague answer made her mouth dry up and her skin feel like someone had just burned it.

She slipped past her father without a word and grabbed her rental car keys off the kitchen counter. Before she drove off she snatched a glance at the house. Her father was watching her through the picture window in the living room. His face carried a look that not only couldn’t she decipher, she didn’t want to.

A cup of coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts in hand, she drove the streets of the Nashville suburb where her parents had built their retirement dream home with financial help from their five kids. Michelle was the only unmarried and childless one, so she had contributed disproportionately to the cause, but never regretted it. Raising a large family on a cop’s salary was no easy thing, and her parents
had sacrificed much for them. She had no problem paying that debt back.

She pulled out her phone and called her eldest brother. She didn’t even let him get the hello all the way out before she pounced.

“Bill, why the hell didn’t you tell me about the blood in the garage?”

“What?”

“The blood on the damn garage floor!”

“She hit her head when she fell down.”

“Hit her head on what?”

“Probably the car.”

“You’re sure about that? Because there wasn’t a mark on the car that I could see.”

“Mik, what the hell are you suggesting?”

“Are they doing an autopsy?”

“What?”

“An autopsy!”

“I… I don’t know that for sure. I mean, I suppose they might have to,” he added uncomfortably.

“And you didn’t mention this to me when you called because why?”

“What would have been the point? They’ll do the autopsy and we’ll find out she had a stroke or a heart attack or something like that. She fell, hit her head.”

“Yeah, the head again. Did the police come?”

“Of course. And the ambulance. They were here when I got here.”

“Which of you four were there first?”

Michelle thought she knew the answer. Her brother Bobby was a police sergeant in the town where their parents lived. She listened to a mumbled conversation as Bill apparently consulted with his brothers.

He came back on. “Dad called Bobby and he was here like within ten minutes even though he lives on the other side of town.”

“Great. Put Bobby on!”

“Jesus, what the hell are you getting so pissed off—”

“Put him on, Bill!”

Bobby’s voice came on a few moments later. “Mik, what is up with you?” he began sternly.

“Dad called you. You came over. Were you on duty?”

“No. I had yesterday off. I was at home helping Joanie with dinner.”

“What did Dad tell you?”

Bobby’s voice rose. “What did he tell me? He told me that
our
mother was dead. That’s what the hell he told me.”

“Were the police there when you got there?”

“Yeah. Dad called ’em. They got there maybe five minutes before I did.”

“And Dad told them what exactly?”

“Well, he was in the shower, so he didn’t know
exactly
what had happened. He found Mom and he called 911 and then he called me.”

“And what did the cops say after they looked over things?”

“They said it looked like she’d fallen and hit her head.”

“But they didn’t know
why
she’d fallen.”

“They wouldn’t know that. If she just stumbled and hit her head, okay. But if something popped in her body to make her fall, the ME would have to determine that.” He added fiercely, “And it’s making me sick to think of them having to cut Mom up.”

“Did you see blood on the Camry door when you went into the garage?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because, Bobby, she had to hit her head on
something.
”

“Like I just said, she could’ve stumbled down the stairs, bounced off the car, knocked her head on the floor. Or maybe on the stair wall. It has a sharp edge. You hit a spot just right, it’s all over. You know that.”

Michelle tried to imagine her mother catching her heel on the unfinished riser—maybe on a nail head that had popped upward over time—stumbling forward, hitting the car without making a
dent in it, falling sideways, and smacking her head with such force on the floor that it had drawn blood. Yet if the autopsy revealed a reason for her death?

“Mik? You still there?”

She snapped back. “Yeah.”

“Okay, look, we don’t know where you’re heading with this but—”

“Neither do I, Bobby. Neither do I.” She clicked off, stopped the vehicle next to a small park, hopped out, and started to sprint.

She was having thoughts that were terrifying her. And all she could do right now was try and outrun them, even as the image of her father watching her from the window, his face seized into a solid mask of what she didn’t quite know, chased her all the way.

W
HILE HIS PARTNER
was in Tennessee trying to confront family demons, Sean was finishing up some Italian take-out in his office and still studying the reams of paper he’d printed off the computer. He was hoping that buried in here somewhere was a clue that would tell him if Tuck Dutton had had his wife killed and his daughter kidnapped for reasons yet unknown.

The ringing phone interrupted his thoughts. It was Jane Cox.

She said, “I want you to meet me at the hospital. Tuck wants to talk to you.”

“About what?” he asked warily.

“I think you know.”

Sean pulled on his jacket and walked down to his rental. His car was in the shop with about eight thousand bucks’ worth of damage and his insurance company was telling him that a bullet barrage was not covered under his policy.

“Why not?” he’d argued.

“Because we consider it a terrorist act and you don’t have a terrorism rider,” replied the insurance grunt, somehow managing to convey this denial in a cheery tone.

“It wasn’t terrorism. It was a criminal act and I was the victim.”

“There were thirty-seven bullet holes in your car, Mr. King. Under our policy guidelines that is not a criminal act, it’s terrorism.”

“You go by the number of bullet holes! How the hell does that make sense, lady?”

“You can always appeal the decision.”

“Really? What do your
guidelines
say the odds are of me winning that appeal? Less than zero?”

Miss Cheery had hung up on him after thanking him for his business.

He started up the car and was preparing to back out when someone tapped on his window. He looked around. It was a woman, early thirties, blonde hair, shapely, too much red lipstick, and with the dried-out skin of someone forced to undergo pancake face paint on a daily basis to fight the high-def cameras. She was holding a microphone with a built-in digital recorder like it was a grenade she was about to heave.

He glanced behind her and saw the news truck ease into view and block his exit.

Crap.

Sean rolled down the window.

“Can I help you?”

“Sean King?”

“That’s right. Look, I gave the media pool guy a statement. You can piggyback off him.”

“Developments dictate a fresh angle.”

“What developments?”

“Did you steal confidential records from the office computer of Tuck Dutton?”

Sean’s stomach gave a heave and part of his veal picatta got bumped up into his throat.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who told you that?”

“Do you deny going to his office?”

“I’m not admitting or denying anything.”

“Tuck Dutton’s firm is a government contractor working on highly classified matters for DHS.”

“So are you a reporter or a company spokesperson? I can’t tell.”

“Do you realize it’s a crime to steal someone else’s property? And if you’re found to have stolen classified information for purposes of espionage you could be charged with treason?”

“Okay, now you sound like a lawyer wannabe. I happen to be the genuine article. So if you don’t get your buddy back there to
move his van, I’m going to see how far I can push it down the street with my wheels. And then I’ll pull him out of the van and start to ‘assault and battery’ him. But I’ll just call it self-defense. It’s less of a prosecutable offense that way.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“I’m one second away from calling the cops and charging your ass with unlawful detention, harassment, and slander. Go look those up in your
Black’s Law Dictionary
while you’re cramming for the LSATs.”

Sean gunned the motor and slammed the car into reverse.

The woman jumped back and the news van driver nailed the gas just in time to avoid getting T-boned by Sean’s ride.