Second Shot (30 page)

“Well, I’m guessing
that
wasn’t a good move,” she murmured.

“No, I’m fine,” I said, forcing myself up slowly. “Just pass me my crutch, would you?”

“Do you want me to give you a hand to the bathroom?”

“I’m fine,” I said again, through gritted teeth.

“O-K,” she said, drawing it out, dubious. She got to her feet, an easy swift movement I envied instantly. “I’ll leave you to it, then. We got Detective Young coming over in about a half hour. Sean wants Matt to tell her his story and see if we can’t get her fighting in our corner.”

“I’ll be ready,” I said, and hoped it was true.

In the end, I made it out with about five minutes to spare. I’d managed to dress myself only because Sean had been out and bought me a couple of pairs of sweatpants with elastic in the waistband that I could pull on with one hand, unlike my jeans.

The entry and exit wounds in the skin of my thigh had closed up without any apparent problems, leaving deep indentations where part of the muscle had been destroyed by the path of the bullet. With time, the physio had told me, I could build the bulk up again, but I was always going to have an interesting set of scars. At the moment, where it wasn’t wasted it was swollen. It looked and felt like a deformity.

When I hobbled out into the living room, the conversation paused while they watched my halting progress from the bedroom door to the sofa.

“Feel free to break into spontaneous applause at any time,” I said, narked.

“Hell, Charlie, you probably deserve that just for standing up,” Nea-gley said, her voice neutral. “You want coffee?”

“Oh yes,” I said, grateful, easing myself down onto the sofa. Matt had clearly been the one who’d slept there last night, and now he piled his blankets and pillows to one side for me to sit, shifting over himself into one of the other chairs.

I saw Sean watching Matt carefully moving out of my way and realized that he was not entirely comfortable around me. And who could blame him? The first time we’d met Fd humiliated him, in public. But, worse than that, I’d humiliated him in front of Simone and Ella. And then I’d been responsible, one way or another, for their safety. Strikeout on both counts.

Neagley handed me my coffee and turned to Sean, obviously picking up the conversation exactly where it had broken off at my arrival.

“The answer’s no, Sean,” she said. “If you were caught with it—never mind firing it—I’d lose my license. Besides, since Barry died, I’ve had it on me at all times.”

“Really?” Matt said. “You’re actually carrying a gun right now?”

For an answer, Neagley picked up her shoulder bag and pulled out a .357 Smith & Wesson Model 340 PD Centennial revolver.

“Only five shots,” Sean murmured.

“Yeah, but with Magnum loads —if it doesn’t go down with five, it ain’t going down at all,” she said, tucking it away again. “Damn thing kicks like the proverbial mule, but it’s light and easy to conceal.”

“You must have a backup piece,” Sean persisted. He had that dogged, head-down, nothing’s-getting-in-my-way air about him.

“Yeah, I have a Glock nine,” Neagley said, starting to bristle, “but there is no way in hell you’re getting your hands on it, so back off.”

They’d just dug in for a full-scale glaring match when there was a knock on the front door. Sean put his coffee cup down and went to answer it. When he came back, the stringy, dark-haired detective who’d interviewed me in the hospital was with him, and she didn’t exactly look happy to be here.

Today she was wearing black trousers and a polo-necked jumper, with a rust-colored tweed jacket over the top. Her gaze went round the mismatched group, resting briefly on Neagley as if recognizing the cop in her.

Sean introduced her and let Matt repeat the story he’d told us about Lucas. Young sat and listened without any emotion showing on her thin face. She didn’t fidget in her chair and she didn’t make notes. When Matt was done she was silent for a moment before she looked at the assembled faces.

“So,” she said, “let me get this straight. You’re talking about the possible disappearance of an adult, more than twenty years ago, in another country, that Mr. Lucas
might just
have had something to do with, but no charges were ever filed? Heck, you don’t even know for sure there was a crime committed. Am I understanding this right?”

“That about sums it up, Detective,” Sean said evenly

“And just what is it that you want me to do about it now, Mr. Meyer?”

Matt glanced at Sean, as if for courage, before butting in. “I’m worried about my daughter,” he said. “I just want her to be safe and how can I be sure of that when she’s with a man who could be a murderer?”

Young made a gesture of impatience with her left hand. “Sir, you can’t possibly know that Mr. Lucas is guilty of any crime. If anything, he was an intended victim in all this. Now, he and Mrs. Lucas have a perfect legal right to care for his granddaughter and unless you can provide a good reason—and I mean
a.good
reason—we’re happy to leave her in their care until the courts have come to their decision about her future.”

Matt started to object but she cut him off with nothing more than a stare. “Mrs. Lucas has already made us aware that you have tried to gain entry to their property and that you made certain threats against them. She is in the process of filing an official complaint, and I should warn you,
sir,
that any further attempts to see your daughter would be inadvisable at this time.”

Matt’s face went from angry disbelief to anguish in one turn. Young rose, straightening her jacket so that I caught a flash of the gun on her hip, and regarded him with a flicker of something that might even have been sympathy

“If I can offer some advice, sir, if you want to see your daughter again soon, you need to get yourself a fancy lawyer,” she said, looking down at him. “We’re still investigating the events leading up to the death of Si-mone Kerse, but at the present time all the evidence shows that she entered the property and attacked Mr. Lucas, during which time Mr. Jakes fell and died from his injuries. Mr. Lucas, fearing for his life, went to his gun store in the basement to arm himself. But during the argument that followed, it was Miss Kerse who got hold of a gun—we’re still not entirely clear how—and attempted to use it to shoot Miss Fox when she arrived.”

“But why?” Matt burst out. “Why would she do any of that? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“When people get killed it rarely has a whole lot to do with sense,” Young said shortly. “I’ll be in touch.” She nodded sharply to us in dismissal. “In the meantime, stay away from the Lucases. If there’s anything going on here, we’ll take care of it. We do not need some goddamn vigilantes stepping in, you hear me?”

Sean rose, effortlessly, his face carefully expressionless. “Loud and clear, Detective.”

He showed her out and the rest of us sat and listened as the front door slammed behind her.

“Simone must have remembered something,” Matt said, almost to himself. He lifted his head, focused intently on me. “You told us she said that he’d killed him—but killed who? Her mum’s boyfriend?”

I shut my eyes briefly and brought back Simone’s bitter flood of words like they were permanently written to the hard drive in my head. “She said, ‘He killed him. I saw him do it. I loved you. I trusted you. You bastard. You
utter fucking
bastard.’“ I repeated the words devoid of emotion and opened my eyes again. “That was it. At the time I thought that when she said, ‘He killed him,’ she was talking about Jakes.”

“But how come she said that she loved and trusted Lucas when we know he was such a bastard to her when she was a child?” Matt said. He had his hands in his lap, fingers locked together until his skin had turned white.

“If we now assume that she was furious because she remembered her father killing her mother’s boyfriend, why did she shoot you and not Lucas?” Neagley asked.

“Look, as far as we know, Simone had never picked up a gun before that night,” Sean said, moving over to the open-plan kitchen area and pouring himself another cup of coffee from the pot. “Maybe she knew she wasn’t good enough to hit him and not Ella at that distance and she couldn’t risk getting it wrong.”

“But that doesn’t explain why she shot Charlie instead,” Neagley persisted.

Sean looked at me over the rim of his cup. “Charlie had the chance for a shot at Lucas and didn’t take it,” he said. “We’ve already established that Simone was beside herself with rage. Perhaps she saw him getting away—literally with murder—and she just… snapped.”

W
e lunched on takeaway pizza. I managed half a segment before the rich greasiness of the food dawned on my stomach and I had to leave the rest. While we ate we kicked around some theories on what might be going on, although without seeming to advance very far in the process.

Felix Vaughan’s role bothered me. I’d already told Sean about the enforced meeting I’d had with him at the restaurant the night Simone was killed. I kept going over his parting shot about Simone finding out the truth about Lucas. What did that mean?

‘After the way Lucas was acting—like a bloody coward—and the fact that the photo message you sent me just didn’t seem to compare all that well, I would have bet almost anything that the DNA test was going to come back a total mismatch,” I said, watching the three of them fighting over the last piece of pizza.

Sean shrugged. “Well, it didn’t,” he said. “And from what Young and Bartholemew told us at the hospital, they’ve had it verified by their own lab, so there’s no doubt.”

“But all the stuff about his behavior in the army,” I said, still frowning, “and what Simone’s mother told you, Matt, doesn’t seem to fit the

guy.”

“People change I suppose,” Matt said dubiously. “But he was an SAS thug, wasn’t he? No changing a warped personality like that.” He missed the slight eyebrow quirk that Sean fired in my direction. “But he’s been out a long time, and maybe Rosalind had a settling influence on him, though she seemed a bit of a dragon to me.”

“She can’t have been that good an influence on him—not if he was behind my partner’s car crash,” Neagley said, wiping her hands on one of the paper napkins and taking a swig of Tab. She’d laid in a private supply in the fridge.

I shrugged, carefully. “It just doesn’t fit somehow. I wish I knew what Vaughan was hinting at that night. And why he was so anxious to get us out of the way.”

“Well, I’ve put out some queries about him with my contacts,” Neagley said. “We know he’s ex-military which gave me a good place to start looking. Soon as they get back to me, we might have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

I sat back against the sofa.
What were the Lucases mixed up in with him that made them so scared of him?
Why had he been so against Simone staying in North Conway in the first place, and so keen on me taking her away? It couldn’t have been a coincidence that he’d had me picked up on the very night Simone had gone rushing to confront her father. So did that mean Vaughan was involved in some way in the shooting? I couldn’t see how.

Jakes had been a good man, but I wished I’d been the one who’d gone with her. If I had … y
eah, right,
said the sarcastic voice in my head,
because you managed things so well after you did finally get there.

I mentally shook myself out of that downward spiral. The police were convinced it was an open-and-shut case as far as the “who” was concerned. What was driving me mad was trying to work out the “why.”

“Have you got any further with tracking down this guy Oliver Reynolds?” I asked.

Neagley shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe you scared him off when you grabbed him. Or maybe he injured himself getting away. He did have to jump through a window, after all.” She glanced at her watch, then at Sean. “We ought to get going,” she said.

Sean nodded and rose, gathering the empty pizza box and folding it in half. “Neagley and I are going to go and do some digging around,” he said.

Matt jumped to his feet. “What do you want me to do?” he said, eager.

Sean’s eyes drifted over me. “You two just stay put here,” he said, like I’d been contemplating going out jogging. When Matt opened his mouth to object, Sean added, “Why don’t you make some calls —see if you can find yourself a decent legal man. Won’t Harrington help out?”

Matt looked crestfallen. “I asked. He said he couldn’t be seen to be taking sides and if it came out—,” he began.

Sean took a business card out of his pocket and handed it over. “Call Parker Armstrong,” he said. “He was Jakes’s boss. He and I know each other—we’ve worked together in the past. He’s a good guy and he’s offered to help us get to the bottom of this.”

Matt stood there for a moment, fingering the card in his hands. “I don’t know what to say,” he ventured at last. “I don’t know how to thank you for—”

“There’s no need,” Sean cut in, lifting his jacket from the back of a chair and shrugging his way into it while Neagley grabbed her own coat and picked the car keys out of her pocket. They’d almost reached the door before he stopped and glanced back. “Besides, we’re not doing it for you.”

After Sean and Neagley had gone out, Matt got straight on the phone to Armstrong in New York, who in turn put him onto a firm of lawyers specializing in child custody cases who worked out of Manchester, New Hampshire.

There wasn’t much I could do to help other than sit and listen to one side of the conversation. Besides, I soon realized that without the others to act as a buffer Matt was still uneasy around me. Eventually, I clambered to my feet, picked up my crutch, and mouthed, I’
ll be in my room,
to him. He clamped his hand over the phone mouthpiece and nodded distractedly at me.

I hobbled back into the bedroom and shut the door behind me. I’d only been out of bed for a couple of hours but it was looking decidedly welcoming. I switched the TV on low, picked a news channel, and lay down on top of the covers to watch. I think I’d nodded off before the end of the first item.

I
woke up with a start that sent my breath out in a hiss. The news anchor still seemed to be rattling on about the same story, but the clock in the corner of the screen showed I’d been out of it for about three-quarters of an hour.