Very Bad Men (53 page)

“We think she'll cooperate,” Hannagan said. “She's not a pushover, though. We may have a long wait ahead of us.”

We had the White Stripes to listen to while we waited. Hannagan took Tillman aside to question him about his dealings with Delacorte. The lieutenant went along to take notes, and soon the three of them were huddled in conversation beside the black sedan.

That left Elizabeth and me by our car. I leaned against the fender to watch the glow in Delacorte's window.

“Something's not right,” I said.

She slipped her hand into mine. “It's nothing. A lamp on a timer.”

That wasn't what I meant. “We need a flashlight.”

“What for?”

“There's one in the trunk, isn't there? You may want your gun too.”

“David—”

I gave her hand a squeeze and dug the key out of my pocket to open the trunk. There was a flashlight in the tire well. I closed the trunk without alerting the trio by the black sedan and walked casually through a gap in the hedges toward Delacorte's house.

Elizabeth caught up to me. She had her pistol in its holster clipped to her belt.

“We can't go in,” she said. “We're waiting—”

“I know we're waiting,” I said, clicking on the flash and aiming it at the front door. “What I'm wondering is if everybody else is waiting.”

The light fell on the seam between the door and the frame. The seam was wider than it should have been—the door hadn't been pulled all the way shut.

Behind us a voice called out. “Hey! Get back away from there!” Lieutenant Redlake.

I played the flash low along the front of the house. Behind a trampled flower bed I found a basement window with a few bits of glass remaining in the frame.

Both of them were jogging toward us now, Hannagan and the lieutenant. Tillman followed them uncertainly. When Hannagan got close, Elizabeth gestured at the broken window. “Someone's been here,” she said.

 

 

THEY WENT IN through the front door, Hannagan and the lieutenant. Elizabeth and I stood just outside and listened to them calling to each other, clearing the rooms one by one. Tillman waited farther back on the lawn.

Five minutes later, every light in the house was on. Lieutenant Redlake came out to tell us they'd found no one inside. “But there's something you'll want to see,” he said to Elizabeth, waving her in. “Straight back through the kitchen.”

Redlake stayed with Tillman. I followed Elizabeth and we found Hannagan in a small dining room at the back of the house. The walls were recently painted, what was left of them. Someone had taken a claw hammer to the drywall, tearing out chunks of it. Scraps and dust littered the floor.

He had found what he wanted: It was all laid out on the dining-room table. A black aluminum pen, a few printed pages, a CD, a bundle of hundred-dollar bills. A plastic freezer bag that had held everything inside the wall.

“There's your magic pen,” Hannagan said. “The battery's run down.”

“It would have been hidden away for a few weeks,” Elizabeth said.

“So whoever pulled it out of the wall didn't listen to what's recorded on it.”

“He didn't need to,” I said. I was looking at the CD, which Delacorte would have used to burn a copy of the recording from the pen. It was labeled in black marker:
John Casterbridge.

Hannagan pointed to the sheaf of printed pages. “This is a record of Delacorte's dealings with the senator. It makes it clear that the senator paid to have Terry Dawtrey killed.”

“We have to go, Lizzie,” I said in a soft voice.

“What I don't understand,” Hannagan said, “is why someone would go to the trouble of ripping all this out of the wall and then just leave it here. Especially the money.”

Elizabeth stepped back from the table. “He doesn't care about the money,” she said.

 

 

I USED MY CELL to call Nick Dawtrey from the car, waiting for him to pick up as Elizabeth sped down Delacorte's street and made a sharp turn onto Ashmun. Hannagan followed us in his black Dodge. Redlake and Tillman stayed behind at the house.

Nick's voice came on the line, far off.
Leave a message and maybe I call you.

“Nick,” I said. “Call me back. Don't do anything until you talk to me.”

Elizabeth swung into the northbound lane to pass a slow-moving RV.

“How much of a head start do you think he's got?” I asked her.

“I don't know.”

“I suppose it's too much to hope he's on his bike.”

She slipped back into the southbound lane and said nothing.

I wanted to think he was on his bike, and that we would overtake him on the road. It was fifteen miles from Sault Sainte Marie to Brimley. But it didn't matter what I wanted. Nick had a will of his own. We'd been wrong about him, wrong to assume he would trust us and stay away from Tillman's house. He must have gone there tonight. He must have crept through the woods and listened at the window. He would have been out there all the while in the dark. He would have heard Tillman's confession. He would have heard about Delacorte's pen, and from there he would have gone to the sheriff's house.

The money wouldn't matter to him. He only wanted the name of the man responsible for his brother's death.

Elizabeth touched the brake, made the turn onto Six Mile Road.

“I don't have Madelyn Turner's number,” I said.

She passed me her phone and I found it in her call log.

When Madelyn answered she sounded groggy. It took some effort to explain who I was, but finally she remembered me.

“What's this about, Mr. Loogan?”

I thumbed a button to put her on speaker. “Detective Waishkey's here with me,” I said. “We're trying to reach Nick. Is he home?”

“He's gone to a movie with his friends—Kevin and J.T.”

“In Brimley?”

“In Sault Sainte Marie.”

“How would he get there? It's a long way to ride a bike at night.”

“They took the truck. Kevin has a license.”

“What truck?” I asked her. Then I remembered the rusted pickup at the farmhouse.

“Nick's father's truck,” she said. “I've let them take it to Sault Sainte Marie before. Kevin's responsible. Is something wrong?”

“I hope not. Are you sure the three of them are together? Did you see them leave?”

A flutter of static on the line. Then: “No. Nick called to tell me they were leaving. They were gone when I got home. You're starting to scare me, Mr. Loogan. What's going on?”

I turned to Elizabeth, unsure how to answer.

She said, “We think Nick may have gotten the idea that the senator is to blame for Terry getting shot. We're worried about what he might do.”

Madelyn took a few seconds to absorb the news. I wondered how she would react to the mention of the senator—if she would pretend to be puzzled.

In the end she simply said, “Where would Nick get that idea?”

“It's not important,” Elizabeth said. “Is the senator still at the cabin?”

A few more seconds passed. Then: “Yes.”

“Nick knows he's there,” Elizabeth said. “The best thing would be to call the senator and tell him to get out. We're on our way there now.”

The line went silent and I realized Madelyn had hung up. Three minutes later she called back. “I couldn't get through to John. If he's sleeping he may have his cell turned off.”

“There's no landline at the cabin?” I said.

“Not since Charlie died. Nick's not answering his phone either. And there's something else—Kevin and J.T. aren't with him. I just talked to their mother.”

I thought of Sarah—how eager she was to learn to drive. Nick would feel the same way. And up here, in the country, they would start early.

“Could he be driving the truck himself?” I asked Madelyn.

“He knows he's not supposed to,” she said. “But he could be. Charlie was teaching him.”

I glanced at Elizabeth, at her profile in the dashboard light, her easy grip on the wheel. We sped west, the straight gray line of Six Mile Road rushing to meet us.

The fields on either side of us ran out into the empty dark. Beside me I heard Elizabeth say calmly, “Mrs. Turner, I need to know if you keep a gun in the house, or if there's one in the cabin.”

Madelyn answered in a hollow voice. “No. Do you really think—? No, no guns. I have to go now. I'm heading to the cabin.”

“That's fine,” said Elizabeth. “We'll be there in a few minutes.”

As I snapped the phone shut I thought about guns and felt a ripple of dread run through me. Nick had seen me fiddling with a bullet earlier in the day. Where there's a bullet, there's a gun. We had left the car unlocked in Tillman's driveway, with my borrowed revolver in the glove compartment. If Nick had been there—

I popped the latch of the glove compartment and it fell open. I unzipped the cloth pouch and saw the barrel of the revolver.

“It's still here,” I said, half to myself. “I was afraid he might have taken it.”

Elizabeth lifted a hand from the wheel and brushed her fingers through her hair.

“You're forgetting about Tillman's pistol,” she said.

T
he truck had one headlight to pierce the dark under the trees. The light jittered over the unpaved lane and the tires sent pebbles bouncing into the undercarriage. Nick Dawtrey drove with the seat racked forward. Sam Tillman's gun belt lay on the passenger seat beside him, the nine-millimeter in its holster.

He had doubled back and discovered Tillman's house empty. Had broken a window to get in, just like at Delacorte's.

In places the trees grew so close to the lane that the branches scraped along the side of the truck. Nick liked to hear the swish of the leaves. It reminded him of driving with his father.

He doused the headlight well before he reached the cabin, lifting his foot off the gas at the same time. The truck crept to a stop. He killed the engine and let his eyes adjust to the dark before he climbed out. He left the belt and the holster on the seat. Took the pistol.

His father had always kept a spare key under a bucket on the porch. Nick found it and let himself in, slow and easy so the hinges of the door wouldn't squeak. Inside, a lamp was burning with a shade like parchment. It gave off enough light to show him John Casterbridge lying on the sofa, mouth open, snoring softly. The senator had fallen asleep in his clothes.

On the floor by the sofa were playing cards laid out in columns—a game of solitaire. What Casterbridge had been doing before he fell asleep. Nick knelt and set the pistol on the carpet and gathered the cards. He didn't like to see them there, because they belonged to his father. And because he used to play cards with Terry.

He had met his brother for the first time when he was five years old, in the visitation room at Kinross Prison. He had been afraid that day; at least that's what his father told him later. He might have been afraid of all the people and the noise, but not of Terry, who had a wide smile and a gentle laugh, who wanted to hear about his friends and about school.

He remembered other visits. Terry telling jokes. Silly ones.
Why do cows wear bells? Because their horns don't work.
Sometimes they played checkers. Sometimes Terry would have a deck of cards. The three of them would sit at a table with a white plastic top—Nick and his father on one side, Terry on the other—and they would play fish.

It took a while for Nick to realize that Terry was a prisoner—and what it meant. At the end of those early visits, his father would take his hand and tell him to say good-bye. “Can Terry come with us?” he would say. “Not this time, kiddo,” Terry would tell him. Once, on the drive home, he asked his father about it—why Terry never came home with them. “He can't,” his father said. “They won't let him out.” “Why not?” Nick asked. “He did something wrong,” his father told him, “and now he has to stay there.” “Couldn't he say he's sorry?” “Sometimes sorry's not enough.”

His father sounded very sad, and Nick didn't ask him any more about it. But from then on he was more aware of the gray walls of the visitation room, of the guards who wouldn't let his brother leave. The next time he said good-bye to Terry, he leaned close to him and whispered,
“Someday I get you outta here.”

Terry smiled, but he didn't laugh, and Nick was glad of that. When the next visit rolled around, he said it again, and Terry only nodded. “I bet you will, kiddo.”

The visits continued. Nick got older and the card games he played with Terry evolved, from fish to hearts to crazy eights to poker. By the time he turned fifteen he had long ago stopped saying,
“Someday I get you outta here.”
He had stopped because he didn't want the guards to overhear. Because it was a promise he intended to keep.