Very Bad Men (42 page)

“Anthony's mother told us she tried to get him to see a therapist,” Elizabeth said, “but he only went a few times.”

Gough shrugged. “Would you go see some shrink your mother picked out?”

“What was his doctor's name?”

“I'm not sure. It might've started with a K.”

“We need more than that. It's important.”

“I don't remember,” Gough said. “But what about the boat?”

Elizabeth tilted her head curiously. “What about it?”

“Anthony sold it. There must be a record. His shrink's the one who bought it.”

 

 

THE BOAT SAT on a trailer in the driveway. Sunlight threw the shadows of birch leaves onto the hull and the wind set the shadows in motion. Anthony Lark trailed his fingers along the hull as he went by; he had parked his Chevy on a side street out of sight.

A stone path led around the garage to the back of Dr. Matthew Kenneally's house. Moss grew in the cracks between the stones. The path widened out into a patio. Four metal chairs surrounded a table topped with glass. A wheelbarrow held gardening tools. A soccer ball and a set of Rollerblades lay abandoned in the grass.

At the far end of the patio, wooden steps led up onto a deck. Lark mounted the steps and saw himself reflected in the mirror of sliding glass doors. The wind opened his suit jacket and he could see Paul Rhiner's pistol tucked into his waistband on the left side.

He stepped close to the glass and brought both hands up to block the sunlight so he could see inside. A big, high-ceilinged room. Red pillows on a sofa of black leather. A bowl of fruit on the tiled surface of a coffee table. No movement. There might be no one home, Lark thought.

He climbed down from the deck and walked back across the stone patio until he came to an unassuming door painted white. It was locked, but it rattled loose in the frame. All he needed was a lever to pry it open. A pair of hedge trimmers from the wheelbarrow did the job.

There was hardly any sound, just the splintering of wood.

The book-lined room on the other side was Dr. Kenneally's study. Lark had been here before. His first session with the doctor had been held in his office near the north campus of the university. But their later sessions had been here. Lark would come in through the white door and they would sit in low-slung chairs in the middle of the room, Lark with his feet on an ottoman, the doctor with his fingers interlaced beneath his chin. They would talk about Susanna Marten.

Once, Kenneally had left Lark waiting while he made a phone call in another part of the house. Lark drifted around the study, scanning the books on the shelves. He came back to his chair and noticed a magazine lying on the ottoman—a copy of
Time
open to a profile of Callie Spencer. The story detailed the injuries her father had suffered during the Great Lakes robbery and the role she played in his recovery. A sidebar showed pictures of Terry Dawtrey, Henry Kormoran, and Sutton Bell.

Lark became so engrossed in the story that he didn't notice when Kenneally returned to the study. He got to the end and looked up to find the doctor sitting across from him, gray eyes kind and patient.

“What are you reading?” Kenneally asked him.

Lark held up the magazine in answer. He tapped a picture of Callie Spencer talking with a group of her supporters, wearing a brilliant smile. “She reminds me of Susanna,” he said.

“Does she?” Kenneally said. “Why do you think that is?”

 

 

FROM KENNEALLY'S STUDY Lark walked down a short hall to the living room he had glimpsed through the glass doors. He picked out an apple from the bowl on the coffee table and ate it as he wandered through the house. In the hallway on the second floor, he found a collection of framed black-and-white photographs. In one of them Kenneally had his arms around his wife, a woman with dark wavy hair and a plump face. Other photos featured their children—two boys, one girl—all of them wavy-haired like their mother.

In the most recent pictures the older boy seemed to be around twelve, the younger ten, the girl seven or eight. Lark moved down the hall, glancing through open doors. A room for each of the children: clothes on the floor, beds unmade. And a master suite where Kenneally and his wife would sleep. The light from the south-facing windows would wake them early in the morning. Lark ate the last bites of his apple standing by the windows, looking down at the yard. He tossed the core into the wastebasket in the master bath.

Down the hall again to the stairs, and he made it halfway to the bottom before turning back. There was something familiar in one of the photographs; he had seen it without really seeing it. He found it right away: an image of the older boy posing in a uniform with a soccer ball under his arm. Posing in the driveway with a minivan in the background. Lark couldn't tell the color from the black-and-white photograph, but if he had to guess he would have guessed blue. Like the minivan that had taken Lucy Navarro.

 

 

THERE WAS NO MINIVAN in the Kenneallys' garage.

There was certainly room for one. It was a cavernous space, lit by fluorescent lights hung from the rafters. It had two doors, a double and a single, and room for three vehicles. When Lark switched on the lights he saw two: a Dodge pickup truck and a BMW. He had seen the pickup before. Kenneally had driven it when he came to buy Lark's father's boat.

One spot left over for the minivan. The Kenneallys must be using it now. That's what you would take, if you were going for a drive with the family.

Lark wondered if Lucy Navarro had ever been here. If Kenneally took her that night from the parking lot of the Winston Hotel, it seemed unlikely he would have brought her here. It would make more sense to kill her somewhere faraway and dump the body.

But the police hadn't found the body.

Lark stood in the still air of the garage and heard the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead, a pleasing, steady sound. Mingled with it was a second hum, deeper and rougher. He looked around to find the source. A tool bench ran along the back wall, with lines of screwdrivers and socket wrenches hanging above it from hooks on a pegboard.

Beside the bench was a white metal box, long as a coffin and twice as deep. A freezer. Lark rested a hand on the lid and felt the hum. He knew before he tried that it wouldn't open. It needed a key. He was scanning the hooks of the pegboard when he heard the squeal of a garage door beginning to rise behind him.

 

 

ELIZABETH AND SHAN left Glen Gough slouching on his sofa in the late afternoon. They got onto I-94 heading west, Elizabeth behind the wheel, Shan making phone calls. Anthony Lark had sold his father's boat at the end of March. Helen Lark told Shan she had met the man who bought it, but couldn't remember his name. Shan called in to the department and asked a dispatcher to run a vehicle registration search, which turned up a record of a twenty-four-foot runabout that had once been registered to Thomas Lark of Dearborn. The same boat was currently registered to Matthew Kenneally of Ann Arbor.

Shan took down Kenneally's address and asked the dispatcher to run another computer search, which revealed that Matthew Kenneally was a licensed psychiatrist.

Elizabeth heard the snap of Shan's phone closing. Heard him say, “Do you think Kenneally went down into Lark's room in the basement? Do you think he saw the shrine to Susanna Marten on the wall?”

She had been wondering the same thing. “I think he did.”

As the Crown Vic shot along the interstate, she visualized Lark's wall: images of Susanna Marten on the left, images of Callie Spencer on the right.

“Do you remember what Lark's mother told us?” Shan said.

Elizabeth remembered.
When did your son get interested in the Great Lakes robbery?
she had asked Helen Lark.
In the spring,
the woman answered.
I was angry with him at the time, because he sold his father's boat. Right around then he started putting pictures of Callie Spencer on the wall.

 

 

THE KENNEALLYS WERE a lively bunch. The sons kept up a stream of banter about the soccer game they'd just played in. The daughter fired up the television and found a channel showing cartoons. Mrs. Kenneally teased her husband about leaving the lights on in the garage and asked him what he wanted for dinner and what were the chances he would help cook it.

Lark listened to them from behind the closed door of Dr. Kenneally's study. He had run into the house at the first sound of the garage door. Now he heard footsteps tromping upstairs—probably the two boys. If he waited a few minutes, he could slip back into the garage. The key might be out there, and if not, he could find some other way to open the freezer.

Or he could forget about the freezer. Because really he was here for Dr. Kenneally, wasn't he? No accident that he had Paul Rhiner's pistol tucked in his waistband. The doctor would be in the kitchen now with his wife. Lark could get to him. Nothing stood in his way.

Lark realized he had backed away from the door. He had Rhiner's pistol in his hand, though he didn't remember drawing it.
Mixed messages,
he thought.
You want to do it and you want to back away from it at the same time.

He sat in one of the low-slung chairs and returned the gun to his waistband. Covered it with his jacket. He could afford to wait, to think things through.

He had his notebook and his father's pen out when the door opened.

Matthew Kenneally was in his middle thirties. Medium height, medium build. His dark hair had begun to recede at the temples. He wore glasses with silver frames.

There was the barest break in his stride when he saw Lark, but he recovered and came into the room, tossing some letters onto a table just inside the door.

It was typical, Lark thought. Maybe it was something they taught therapists in school: never to react. Kenneally's face had always seemed to Lark like a mask. The man's eyebrows were straight lines with no arch at all, as if he were incapable of expressing surprise.

“How long have you been here?” Kenneally said.

“Not long,” said Lark.

“I knew I didn't leave those lights on in the garage. How did you get in?”

Lark glanced at the white door that opened onto the patio. “I had to break in,” he said.

Kenneally frowned, the first real reaction he had shown. “That's bad form.”

“It's not the worst thing I've done.”

“Trespassing is a violation of trust. We've talked about the importance of trust, Anthony.” Kenneally took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Let's leave that aside,” he said. “It's a good thing, your coming here. I've been worried about you. You need help.”

“You're the second person to tell me that today.”

“Who was the first?”

“Someone who actually wanted to help me.”

Kenneally frowned again and slipped his glasses on. From the hall a voice said, “Where'd you go, Matt? Are you talking to someone in there?” A woman's voice. Kenneally's wife.

The doctor stepped out into the hall. “I'm with a patient, darling.”

“Now? I didn't know you had an appointment.”

“I'm sorry. It slipped my mind. It shouldn't take long.”

She told him she would go ahead with dinner, and Kenneally came back in and closed the door. He sat opposite Lark and crossed one leg over the other. He brushed lint from his slacks. He didn't say anything. That was one of his tricks: not saying anything.

Lark spoke into the silence. “I've got the headaches under control.”

“Have you?” Kenneally said. “That's good.”

“Do you really think so?”

Kenneally laced his fingers. “Do you see what you're doing, Anthony? You've already suggested that I don't really want to help you, and now you're implying that I secretly want you to have headaches. Why would I want that?”

“That's what I've been wondering,” Lark said, sliding his pen into his jacket pocket. “Can I show you something?”

Without waiting for an answer he held his notebook out, open to the page where he had first written down the names of Terry Dawtrey, Sutton Bell, and Henry Kormoran. Now he had added another.

Kenneally reached for the notebook. “What's this?”

“Those are the men who robbed the Great Lakes Bank.”

The doctor studied the page. “You've got my name on this list.”

“It belongs there, doesn't it?” Lark said, sitting back in his chair. “Do you see how the names move, how they breathe on the page?”

“We've been over this, Anthony.”

“Can you see how red they are?”

Kenneally shook his head sadly. “You suffer from synesthesia, Anthony. The words aren't really red. They're not really moving.”

“Can you see how your name is different? The others are red, but yours is pitch-black. It's broken into a million pieces, and the pieces are crawling over one another.”

Kenneally sighed. “And what do you think that means?”

“It means you're worse than the other three,” Lark said. “Can't you see it?”

“It's not there to see, Anthony. There's nothing here but names you wrote on a page. The rest is in your mind.”

“Is it? Where's the key to the freezer in your garage?”

The question seemed to give Kenneally pause. He closed the notebook and tapped it against his chin.

“Why?” he asked.

“I'd like to see what's in there.”

“What do you think is in there?”

“A body,” Lark said. “Lucy Navarro's.”