Killer (24 page)

“No. For getting me out of it,” she says. “How are you feeling?”

“Alright. Little foggy.”

Nicki straightens up and looks at Melvin and says, “Okay, let’s talk while he’s alert and see if we can’t catch this crazy fucker.”

I talk for the next hour, telling everything I know to Melvin and Nicki and an officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who is even taller than Melvin. A stenographer records every word I say. After an hour my hand is throbbing and I am pressing the button on the PCA pump at my bedside for the pain injections almost constantly. My eyelids are drooping and the fog is creeping back.

“Alright, that’s enough for now,” Melvin says. We’ll pick this up after you get some rest.”

I nod, trying to think if there’s anything I left out.

“The women—the other victims,” I say. “Were any of them waitresses?”

“Two of them had been,” Melvin says.

“Truck stops?” I ask.

“Caitlin Stubbs and Sharon Belton worked at truck stops.”

“He’s a truck driver—or was. Said he used to haul machine parts out of Chicago.”

Melvin nods. “That’s good. Helps a lot,” he says. He turns to make sure the stenographer makes note of it. I can’t keep my eyes open any longer and I begin to drift off. Melvin gives me a tap on the shoulder and a nod.

“Good work, Jack,” he says. Then he and the RCMP officer and stenographer leave, and Nicki comes to the side of the bed and I open my eyes and see her watching me.

“Why did you go to the cabin?” I ask.

“To oversee the search. I wanted to get there before the FBI. See if there was anything I could find that might lead me to you. And I wanted to make sure their search warrant was as limited as possible. I was really scared. And I was furious with you.”

“Still mad?” I am fighting to stay awake.

“No,” she says. “You’ve suffered enough. Laurie asked me to tell you something.”

“What?”

“She wanted me to tell you ‘Thank you.’ ”

She smiles at me, then goes to the window and closes the blinds and I am asleep before she turns back.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Three days later, I have just arrived at LAX with Nicki and Melvin Beauchamp when Melvin’s cell rings and he stops and says “Hold up,” to Nicki and me. Melvin listens to his phone, then points to a television near the gate, and the three of us walk over to it and I see the face of David Doyle Harris, as he was identified from the forged license in his wallet—
Dave
, as I knew him—staring back at me from his commercial truck driver’s license photo on CNN.

David Doyle Harris pulled a stolen Cadillac into the parking lot at Belvedere Hospital in Franklin, Oklahoma last night, propped Claire Boyle’s shotgun under his chin, and blew his head through the roof of the car.

I feel Nicki stiffen beside me when she sees his face. We watch the coverage as Melvin talks to his boss in Washington. CNN doesn’t know much, but we see Dave’s body on a stretcher, the blood-soaked wallet chain dangling from under a bloody sheet, and a quick shot of the blood-spattered car interior. Dave’s body is loaded into the Franklin County Coroner’s van and Melvin gets off his call.

“Looks like he knew he was about to bleed out from that shot you gave him in the leg. They think he drove to the hospital, then decided he’d rather die right there than turn himself in.” We watch CNN as the news breaks, and I see more about me, and about Nicki and Laurie Vonn.

Did he go out like that…like Sara…as some kind of message to me?

Like a lot of things, the answer died with David Doyle Harris.

Nicki looks at Melvin. “What now?” she says. The three of us have come to L.A. to talk to Detective Marsh, to see if there’s anything more I can help them with. Nicki worked out a deal with LAPD, West Virginia, and Maryland to drop all of the pending charges against me—grand theft auto and felony evasion, and a string of other things—in return for my compliance in helping to find Dave.

But now Dave is found. David Doyle Harris is dead, and Melvin calls LAPD and it is decided that we should go ahead to Parker Center so I can tell them what I know and make a statement for the record.

“Might as well get to see Marsh squirm a little,” Melvin says. I know Melvin takes satisfaction from this. Marsh got a lot of TV time in pursuit of me, and Melvin hates showboating as much as he loves shooting bad guys.

Melvin calls for our ride to pull up, and while we wait we watch the CNN coverage, as more information about David Doyle Harris comes in. He had owned and operated his own truck, hauling machine parts on different routes all around the country. He had no police record, and no known address. “We know the license was forged. He had half a dozen documents with different names. Who knows what his real name was. He was as off the grid as you can get. Probably lived in his rig,” Melvin says.

I wonder how long Dave had followed me. I think of my kitchen door standing open, and the noise that woke me that night—the floorboard that cracked—

How many times had he been in my home? How many times had he watched me sleep?

I think of things—a spare set of keys that I thought I had lost…

“Jesus,” I say under my breath, and a slight shudder moves through me. Nicki looks at me and touches my shoulder.

“Come on,” she says, and she and Melvin and I leave the terminal. The last thing I watch of the TV coverage is a shaky handheld shot of Dave’s rectangular wire-framed glasses, lying on the pavement outside the car, shattered and covered with blood.

We go out to the curb and get in the black Chevrolet that pulls up for us, a young FBI field agent at the wheel. Melvin gets in the passenger seat and Nicki and I get in back. The young agent hands Melvin a large manila envelope.

“What’s this?” Melvin says.

“Security video from the parking structure at the mall in Trenton.” The young agent’s eyes flick up at me in the rearview mirror. “You might find it interesting,” he says to me. Melvin and the young agent talk about coordinating agents and flights to and from Oklahoma, their conversation punctuated by Melvin’s constant phone calls.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The meeting at Parker Center was uneventful. Marsh was formal, as his supervisors and the District Attorney looked on, and he expressed “regret about the course of the investigation” without looking at me. My old pal Detective Larson was there, sporting a black necktie a mortician would be proud of. I don’t think he looked at me once during the hour that I spoke, on the record.

After I finished, Melvin played the time-stamped security video from the mall parking structure in Trenton. The video showed Dave, about to break into Laurie Vonn’s Honda, then moving into the shadows when I walked past.
The footsteps I heard.
Then, once I was gone, Dave broke into the Honda with a Slim Jim and climbed into the back. A few minutes later, Laurie Vonn got in her car and drove off. Dave then forced her—with the point of the knife in her neck—to drive to my cabin.

But the most striking part of the video was at the beginning. Just before Dave broke into the Honda, he punched out the lens of the left rear tail light with the handle of his knife. He wanted to make sure the Honda could be seen in the dark, through the storm. He knew I was following her. He was probably following me since I went to her place. He was waiting there for me to show up. And I had done exactly as he planned. I had been so preoccupied with keeping a step ahead of the police I didn’t realize he was ten steps ahead of me. Just like Killer—smart, meticulous, leaving nothing to chance.

“Marsh has some serious egg on his face,” Melvin says happily to Nicki and me in the car as we pull away from Parker Center. “Not only did he NOT catch the guy, he wasted a lot of time and money chasing the wrong guy. He was adamant about you, Jackie boy—one hundred percent convinced you killed those girls.”

“How about you?” I ask him.

Melvin shakes his head. “Always let the facts lead my judgment, not the other way around.”

“And where did the facts lead you?”

“To a damned truck full of oranges,” Melvin says, and turns and shoots me a glare in the backseat. I can’t keep the grin off my face. Melvin turns back and looks out the window.

“We would have caught you, you know,” Melvin says after a moment. “Eventually you would have fucked up.”

“I know,” I say.

The car is quiet for a moment.

“Hey, Melvin?” I say.

“Yeah?” He turns and looks back at me again.

“If you had caught up with me but I ran from you…?”

A slight smile from Melvin.

“I wouldn’t have killed you,” he says. “Unless you shot at us.”

“I wouldn’t have done that.”

“Then I’d have put you down but I wouldn’t have killed you,” he says casually. He points a long finger at my knee like a gun. “Woulda gone for that left knee you favor, unless I had to go higher.” He grins at me and I smile back, but I know he means it and I know he knows.

“Tell you one thing,” he adds. “If I’d have caught up with you right after I found that phone in that damned truck full of oranges I’da blown your head straight off.” He looks at me and I smile and look over at Nicki next to me, who is resting her temple on the tip of her index finger and looking at us.

“Can we talk about something else?” She says.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The city of Los Angeles had graciously offered to pick up the tab for our first-class airfare and two hotel rooms, and Nicki had graciously accepted. “Wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful,” she smirked at Melvin as the FBI car pulled up to the Bonaventure downtown.

Nicki and I get out. Melvin has to return to LAX to catch a flight to Oklahoma City, where he will oversee the autopsy and the forensic work on David Doyle Harris and his stolen Cadillac.

Melvin gets out and gives Nicki a quick hug and shakes my hand and says, “Next time write a nice love story or something, okay, Jack?”

“Yeah,” Nicki agrees, turning to me. “Something where nobody dies.”

“People die in love stories,” I say.

“Why do people have to die in love stories?” Melvin asks, with more outrage than I’ve ever seen from him.

“Because people die in all of the best stories,” I say.

“Why?” Melvin says.

“Because that’s what people do,” I say.

Melvin and Nicki exchange a glance.

“You’re a grim motherfucker, you know that?” Melvin says.

I smile pleasantly.

“I wouldn’t want to live in your head,” Melvin says.

“There are times I’m not crazy about it myself,” I say. “But what’s the alternative?”

“You need to get out more,” Melvin says, and then he gets in his car and it drives away.

* * *

Nicki and I have a nice meal at the hotel, sitting side by side in a corner booth. We chat about the weather in Los Angeles, earthquakes, Malibu mudslides, our favorite movies—about anything and everything except David Doyle Harris and the last few days. And over dessert, a crème brulee we were supposed to share—of which Nicki ate a total of two microscopic bites—I ask her a question that I’ve been wondering about. It is late and we are the last diners in the dim, elegant room.

“That night,” I say. “At the Mirabelle. When you got mad at me for tracking down Sallie Fun...”

She looks at me and says nothing.

“I told you I thought there was something else—something more that was bothering you than just having a reckless client,” I say. “What was it?”

She is quiet for a moment. She takes a sip of her wine. I wait.

Then she speaks, softly.

“My childhood sweetheart was a boy named Michael Furie,” she says, finally. Her words come slowly, carefully. “We started dating in the ninth grade, and we went to Brown together. We were…he was everything to me,” she says, and takes another drink, then a long, deep breath.

“He asked me to marry him the day we graduated. The wedding was a month away when he was mugged one night, just a few blocks from where we were living. The guy took his money, then shot him. He died three days later.”

She is quiet again for yet another long moment. I keep my mouth shut, and wait some more.

“I sat in court and watched the state’s case fall apart. Watched them make mistake after mistake. When they asked the guy why he shot Michael after he’d already given him his money, the guy just shrugged. ‘No reason,’ was all he said. He got six years for it,” she says, her voice edged with bitterness. “That’s when I decided to become a prosecutor.”

I say nothing. We sit there and let the long silence play out again.

“It’s just that I couldn’t—I can’t stand the thought of losing someone again

that I care about,” she says so softly I can hardly hear her.

“You said you weren’t sure if you trusted me.”

“Yes.”

“Still not sure?” I ask.

“No, I’m sure,” she says. “You’ve earned it.”

The light from the candle in the center of our table catches the fine, narrow band of downy blonde at her hairline and makes it shimmer bright gold.

“What did you think about what Melvin said?” she asks me.

“What, about shooting me in the knee?”

“No,” she smiles. “About how you need to get out more. Get out of that head of yours.”

“I think he’s right,” I say. “I think I’ve always known the time would come, but I didn’t feel like I was ready. Until recently.”

She takes another tiny sip of wine.

“You never talk about her,” she says.

I know what she’s talking about, but I pretend like I don’t and give her a blank look.

“About Sara,” she says.

“What do you want to know?”

“Who she was. Why you loved her. Why…” she begins, then chooses to let me complete the question.

“Why she killed herself?”

“Yes,” she says. “I don’t expect you to talk about it, but it’s part of your past and part of who you are now…so I thought I’d ask.”

“I don’t know why,” I say.

She looks at me. There is a deep, pure empathy in her eyes that raises my heart into my throat. I push the painful feeling away, out of long habit.

“I don’t know why,” I say again.

I don’t want to talk about this. Not now, not yet.