Repo Madness (26 page)

Alan sensed something.
“Who is he?”

Ignoring my threat to put him back down, my would-be assailant used his hands on his knees to straighten himself into a standing position. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered. “What is wrong with you?”

“Look. Mr. Walker. I don't know what you've heard—”

“I've heard you've been telling people you didn't kill my daughter, you lying bastard!”

Then he came at me again, swinging his fist, but I've had a lot of drunks try the same move on me, and it was easy to step out of the way, catching his arm and twisting it a little. “Easy,” I told him, squeezing him tightly. “I don't want to have to hurt you, sir.”

The fury went out of him, and he sagged. “Goddammit,” he muttered.

“Look, you want something? A Vernors, maybe?” I offered.

He gave me a fierce look.

“All right, then,” I said. “I'm having one, though.” I picked out a can of Vernors ginger ale and pressed it to the back of my head. The cold felt good, fleetingly, but an army of pain troopers had assembled at the base of my skull and was attacking the rest of my cortex in a flanking maneuver. I found some aspirin and gulped a couple, warily watching Mr. Walker, who was standing and staring sightlessly at the dusty shelves where my football trophies were all stacked. I'd pulled them out of the closet when I'd started dating Katie.

“I want you to leave us alone. Leave
her
alone,” Mr. Walker said woodenly.

“I understand how you must feel. But a witness has come forward. Someone who saw your daughter that night. Who says Lisa Marie got out of my car at the 7-Eleven and drove off with someone else.”

He turned to face me. “I wanted to kill you. I wanted to take a hunting rifle and remove you from our lives, but my wife wouldn't let me. I've got two other children. But they're grown now. So I'm warning you this one time. Stop it. Stop ruining our lives. Because if you don't, I'm going to shoot you in the goddamn face.”

I stared at him. He looked like he meant it.

“Ask him who told him,”
Alan blurted.

I frowned, not getting it.

“Somebody called him! Find out who. Whoever did it was hoping this would happen, that you'd be warned off. Ask him who called.”

“Mr. Walker. How did you find out I was looking into the case?”

He sneered at me. “My daughter is not a case, McCann. My daughter was a living, loving, wonderful person who you let drown in the back of your car while you swam to safety.”

“The person who called you did it for one reason, which was to get you to come here and get me to stop. He
wants
me to stop, which means I'm getting closer to him than I thought. Who was it? Who called?”

“For God's sake. You're serious,” he said wonderingly.

“Just give me a name.”

“I don't owe you a goddamn thing.”

“Give me a name,” I repeated patiently, “or I will call the police and tell them you came into my house and tried to kill me with a chair leg. You'll go to jail. You want that?”

“Screw you,” he spat. I could tell, though, that my threat had landed on him, could see it in the self-disgust building on his face. I waited. After a moment he looked away. “I don't know. Someone called my firm and left a message. All it said was that it was a friend, and that you were spreading lies about my daughter, saying you didn't kill her, that someone else did it. That you're looking for the real killers.” He said this last part with a sarcastic set of air quotes hanging in the air.

“Mr. Walker. I stood up in court and said that I was responsible for Lisa Marie's death—”

“Don't say her name!” he interrupted harshly.

I nodded. “All right. That I did it, that I should go to prison. But now a witness says I didn't do it, because your daughter was not in the car. I don't know if that's true, but I'm starting to believe it might be. And if it is, it means the person who put your daughter in that lake has never been punished for it. Don't you want me to try to find out who it is?”

“You,” Walker responded after a long moment, “can rot in hell.”

*   *   *

I lay on my couch, a bag of frozen peas pressed to my neck, until Kermit brought Jake home, and then I went to bed with my dog. Katie was at her aunt's bedside and couldn't really talk, so I let her go and tried not to pay attention to the throbbing in my skull. Getting up the next morning was the most difficult task I'd ever undertaken in my entire life, a grunting, wheezing repositioning of myself as an upright human. My neck felt as if a shark were trying to eat its way out of it, my stomach was heaving, and a muscle under my eye was fluttering like a butterfly trapped in its cocoon.

The only thing on my schedule that day was to pee in a cup. I wondered if I was up to it.

“The pain goes from behind the ears all the way down the back,”
Alan complained.

“Do you think I don't know that, Alan?” I responded in irritation. I scrambled some eggs, and Jake came out of the bedroom and gave me a
What, no bacon?
expression.

I vaguely registered that the house looked neat and clean. It seemed unlikely that I'd been picking up after myself, but I couldn't exactly remember
not
doing so, and anyway, the alternative, which was that Alan had defied my orders and continued to be the midnight housekeeper, meant having a fight, and I just didn't have the energy for that at the moment.

I called Barry Strickland, wincing as I tilted my head to cradle the phone with my shoulder. He grabbed it on the first ring, and we exchanged pleasantries. “You get much snow over there?”

I turned and looked out the window. A soft, smooth layer of white stuff coated everything. “Yeah, looks like six or seven inches.”

“Didn't get that much here.”

“So I have a question for you. Just go with me for a minute.”

“All right,” he replied cautiously.

“You know this thing I'm looking into. How Lisa Marie got out of my car that night.”

“Oh. I thought this was going to be about Blanchard. I talked to my contacts; they want to meet with you.”

“Okay, sure. No, this is about Lisa Marie. What do you know about Dennis Kane?”

“The medical examiner? I know he was incompetent. A couple of convictions were reversed because he botched the autopsies. He's not even a forensic pathologist; he's a general practitioner. We've got a good one now. Kane's not been M.E. for, what, more than three years?”

“Do you know him personally?”

“I've spoken to him, sure. What's this about?”

“I was just thinking, if you were going to murder somebody, wouldn't that be the perfect job? They pull a body out of the water, and you're the one that put it there. You find exactly what you want to find, and you miss anything that might incriminate you.”

“Where is this coming from?”
Alan demanded.

When Strickland replied, I heard something in his voice, a caution, as if he were trying to figure out a way to let me down gently. “Ruddy. I know you like to read mysteries, but I have to tell you, life isn't like that. There's almost never any mystery to it. Usually a robbery goes bad, a husband loses his temper, two guys get in an argument. Murder is always simple and usually stupid. Smart people don't kill people.”

“All right, but yesterday afternoon, when I got home, Lisa Marie's father was waiting for me in my living room. With a club.”

“A club?”

“A chair leg, like what you can get at the hardware store. He hit me with it.”

“Is he okay?”

I laughed mirthlessly. “He hit me in the head and you're worried about
him
?”

“No, I'm worried about you. If you put him in the hospital, the judge is going to revoke your probation, even if it was justifiable.”

“He's probably got a sore stomach this morning, but he walked out of here under his own power.”

“All right.”

“But you have to wonder why he was here. He said someone left a message at his company, saying I was running around denying I had done anything to his daughter. But I'm not. Very few people know anything about it. There's you. There's the medical examiner. And that's it. Whoever called Walker did so just to stir things up, maybe to get him to come here and put my head in telescopic sights.”

“It's not just Dr. Kane who knows. You told David Leinberger,”
Alan reminded me.

“I told this guy Leinberger that I was looking into a missing persons case,” I added, “but I didn't explain who Lisa Marie Walker is to me.”

“If he is the murderer, he would know that,”
Alan argued.
“And what about Audrey Strang?”

I put my hand on my phone. “Audrey Strang couldn't leave
semen,
” I hissed.

“What was that? I didn't catch it,” Strickland said.

“Oh, I was just … talking to my dog.”

Jake, sprawled on the couch, opened one eye but otherwise didn't move.

“I can find out if Kane has ever been suspected of anything,” Strickland advised me, “but I know he's never been convicted of a crime.”

“Can you get a copy of Lisa Marie's autopsy?”

“Oh, and you told the bar owner, Wade Rogan,”
Alan interjected.

“I don't know, Ruddy,” Strickland waffled.

“Can you try? Please?”

Strickland thought it over. “All right, I'll try,” he told me.

We hung up. “Alan,” I said, “you know how hard it is to carry on a conversation with you yammering away?”

“So you've got Leinberger, Rogan, and then the mayor of Shantytown, and Rogan said he told him why you wanted to talk to him. Amy Jo Stefonick knows—maybe she told somebody else. Audrey Strang could have told somebody, too.”

“Amy Jo said the guy that night had a bald spot. Leinberger doesn't have a bald spot. And Rogan's isn't a spot; it's his whole head.”

“You don't know Leinberger doesn't have a bald spot; you didn't look. And it was night; maybe Amy Jo is mistaken. And people do go more bald; maybe Rogan's spot got to the point where it got easier just to shave his skull.”

“If I didn't already have a headache, you'd be giving me one.”

“And what do you expect Lisa Marie's autopsy to prove?”

“You know what? I've pretty much had it with you. Anytime you get an idea—like how practically every woman who has ever vanished around here was killed by the same person who murdered Lisa Marie, even though there's not a shred of evidence, and three of the women didn't even drown; they're just gone—I'm supposed to take you seriously and fly to Beaver Island and traipse out to Shantytown to track down Phil somebody. But when I get a really good idea, like maybe the reason why the good doctor Kane didn't save the semen was that it was
his,
you piss and moan like I'm wasting your time.”

“Oh my God. Good doctor,”
Alan breathed.
“That's it!”

“What?” I replied suspiciously. It didn't sound like Alan's reply had anything to do with my rant.

“He wasn't a good doctor. You heard Strickland.”

“Are you going to answer what I just said? I made some damn important points there.”

“He's been out of office for three years.”

“And?”

“Two of the three women who vanished did so in the past three years. But the ones who drowned were while Kane was medical examiner.”

I could hear the excitement in Alan's voice, and it irritated me. “Please get to your point so we can go back to mine,” I said icily.

“What if Lisa Marie was the first? The man who took her from the 7-Eleven couldn't have known you were going to drive into the lake; he was just being opportunistic. Then when he reads about your accident and how they're looking for Lisa Marie, it gives him an idea on how he might dispose of her body.”

“And it works,” I added, catching on.

“Yes! But only because the M.E. is incompetent and doesn't mention the semen. Let's say our killer thinks that maybe he figures he can get lucky twice. So, sure enough, he sees some guy buying Nina Otis drinks, and kidnaps her, and when he's done, he tosses her in the lake. Next he boats out to a party on a sailboat, slips aboard, and takes a drunk woman captive. He sees a woman getting intoxicated on the public docks and snatches her. Each time, he gets away with it because Kane is
not
a good doctor.”

“But now,” I finished for him, “we have a new M.E. One who can't be counted on to miss things. So he has to come up with a new MO.”

“He's doing something else with the bodies.”

I thought it over. “You said two out of three.”

“Yes. Kane was still M.E. when Rachel Rodriguez vanished.”

“Not every body tossed into the water is going to wind up in Boyne City,” I speculated.

I could practically feel Alan deciding not to remind me that Nina Otis didn't float to Boyne City. I was grateful to be spared the nitpicking.
“So Rachel Rodriguez could have sunk,”
he agreed.
“She could still be at the bottom of the lake.”

“Makes sense. Of course, maybe the reason the women who vanished in the last three years haven't been found is that
Kane
knows he can't pull the same trick anymore. He's no longer M.E.”

“I suppose,”
Alan said condescendingly.

“God, you're a joy to be with. Come on, Jake. I'll drop you at Uncle Kermit's; Daddy's got to go urinate for the doctor.”