Sweet After Death

by Valentina Giambanco

  “I beg you,” she whispered. “Hang on, Lee. Just hang on.”

  Madison inched forward in the corridor.

  When she reached the corner and peeked behind it, a man was holding a gun to Brown’s head.

  Fear is uglier than despair, and Brown had been afraid for a long time. For weeks—since a call for backup during a gang shoot-out—he had been waiting for that moment in the Edwards home. Waiting as fear had soured his every day.

  Two years earlier he had been shot by a madman. Since then, he had never aimed his piece at another human being and had never looked at the business end of someone else’s gun. On his way to respond to the gang shoot-out a prickling of fear had given him pause: what if his hand shook when it should be still? What if, in the instant when he should act, his mind was going to be clouded by memories of getting shot? What if he froze?

  The situation had resolved itself before they’d arrived on the scene, but the fear had stayed with Brown and kept him company on every shift since. He was always first through a door, hoping to face whatever it was that was waiting for him on the other side, always going in first because the idea of letting down his partner was more than he could bear.

  When the sniper shot at Madison in the square, Brown had been terrified for her and pissed off in equal measure. And now, he reflected, he finally had his answers. The timing was less than good, for sure, but there he stood, in Lee and Ty Edwards’s living room, and he was still the cop he had always been.

  There was fear—as there should be—but he could still think, he could still function.

  Ben Taylor’s gaze was like a doll’s—empty and flat. Brown focused on it: he needed to warn Madison, and he needed to get to the widow.

  “What the hell did you do all this for?” Brown said.

  Ben Taylor was about to answer. The barrel of his revolver wavered a few inches away from Brown’s head . . .

  And in that instant three gunshots rang out in the enclosed room, so loud that the sound slammed into Brown’s body and spun him around.

  Ben Taylor was on the ground. His eyes were open and all the way gone. There was darker red pooling on his chest, and the force of the shots had sent him halfway onto the sofa.

  Madison stood in the doorway. Her face was blank.

  When their eyes met, she spoke.

  “She’s in the tub. He cut her wrists.”

  Chapter 47

  No one had been told exactly what happened, or what kind of emergency they were dealing with, but a number of ambulances were screeching their way toward Ludlow. The fields on either side of Highway 395 were pure, unbroken white but the lanes had been almost completely cleared—hopefully, they would make it in good time.

  Alice Madison’s hands and arms were stained with blood from the towels, and she gazed at them as if she was not entirely sure what to do. She wanted to wash it all off, but everything was evidence. Her hands were evidence. Reality seemed to come in single bites: Brown was safe; Lee Edwards was on the floor; her gun had already been taken away.

  Dr. Lynch and the nurses were working on Mrs. Edwards; Brown and Madison had been pushed to one side. The woman lying on the bath mat was so pale that she was almost translucent, but she was still alive.

  Brown clasped Madison’s elbow and guided her into the kitchen. He turned on the tap, made sure the water was warm, and put her hands under it.

  “How did you know to come in?” he said as he rubbed her hands with soap.

  “It was taking you too long. If everything was okay, you would have bundled her out of the house in two minutes flat.”

  “And Ben Taylor . . . ?”

  “Sorensen matched the fibers. It was car carpet, and the only one in town who had that kind of car was the man from the radio station. She sent me a picture of his driver’s license.”

  The warm water felt wonderful and Madison turned her wrists into the stream. She could have stayed there for hours.

  “Thank you,” Brown said.

  Madison had been watching them, waiting for the man to move his aim even slightly off Brown so that she could shoot without risk. She had waited and taken her shot at the right moment, and Brown was still alive.

  She nodded, because she didn’t trust her voice.

  Madison dialed the number from the backyard. When it went to voice mail she was almost relieved, because she didn’t want to say I just killed a man.

  Quinn’s voice calmed her somehow.

  “There’s been an incident,” she said into her cell. “We’ve got the man, but people have been injured. I’m okay. We’re all okay. I’ll call in a while.”

  Chief Sangster sat in his cruiser and held his cell. He had been put on hold.

  There were so many crime scenes to process that he had simply locked up Ben Taylor’s home and the Edwardses’ house. Someone would get to them when they had the time. In all probability it wouldn’t be Amy Sorensen, and the chief found that he was sorry about that.

  The Howells’ house—what remained of it after the fire—would be left for the arson investigator to pick his way through. The chief knew what had happened; he had seen Ben Taylor’s body on the floor and the bloody towels in the bathroom. His brain knew, but his heart half refused to believe.

  The woman from the US Marshals Service came back on the line and for the second time asked him the reason for his call. Finally, she transferred him to the right extension.

  “Lee Edwards’s real name is Daisy O’Brian,” Chief Sangster said. “Her husband was Jimmy O’Brian, and he was Boston Mob.”

  The sky through the window was dark, and the chief was holding a glass with a measure of something that shone like liquid amber. Brown, Madison, and the chief were in the Miller guesthouse because it would have felt wrong to have a drink in the police station—and a drink was what they all needed. It was not the kind of party they wanted to hold in the Tavern, and not the kind of conversation Edna Miller would ever have expected of her guests.

  No one had been interested in lighting the fire—that day they’d had quite enough.

  “Boston Irish?” Brown said.

  “Yup, and those were the hard years, the bloody years.” Sangster had a sheaf of notes in his hand.

  “Lee testified against him?” Madison said.

  “Yes, and Sean O’Malley did too—that’s Andrew’s real name. Jimmy and Andrew had kidnapped a man, tortured, and murdered him for information on a shipment of diamonds. He was a messenger for one of the Winter Hill families, and Andrew always maintained that he had never even touched him. When the FBI got to Andrew, he turned on Jimmy and testified in court. What Jimmy had done to the man was savage. Jimmy O’Brian, of course, said that it had been all Andrew’s doing. Anyway, Jimmy went to prison and Andrew disappeared. He had been having an affair with Jimmy’s wife and, after they testified, she disappeared with him, leaving a son behind who would end up being raised by the paternal grandparents. A boy named Aidan.”

  “Ben Taylor.”

  “That’s right. You can imagine what the grandparents told him about his mother. The picture Ben had put in her hands must have been taken in happier days, when the family was still together.”

  “How well did you know Ben Taylor?” Madison said.

  Sangster took a long sip. “Ben moved to Ludlow about eighteen months ago, when the job at the radio station opened up. He got busy in the local community and he fit right in, like he’d always lived here.”

  “I bet he did,” Brown said.

  “How did he find out?” Madison asked. “WITSEC is pretty tight.”

  “Well, the marshals weren’t overjoyed about telling me, but it seems things were not as tight thirty years ago. Some outsider found out about Andrew and Lee, and they sat on the information until they were ready to sell it. Jimmy O’Brian died in jail four years ago. Died of lung cancer, and he had never even smoked. Talk about rotten luck. Looks like his boy decided to set things right.”

  After the day they’d all had, Edna Miller’
s old-fashioned, lived-in furnishings were reassuring in a homey sort of way. It was a soft place where they could talk about and process horrible events. Sangster closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of the padded chair. He could still see Andrew’s body in the cellar.

  Madison shifted—one leg was over the armrest. “Do we know for sure that it was O’Brian who killed the man and not Andrew?”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Sangster said, and those words had never felt truer. “Except that a deal was struck, and Jimmy got the crappy end of it.”

  Ben Taylor had come after the people who had betrayed his father; he had come after the mother who had abandoned him for her lover. If you squinted from far enough away, he almost had a legitimate grudge.

  “Did he have a record?”

  “No, never been arrested.”

  “The first felony he committed was the burglaries,” Brown said. “Hard to believe he graduated straight to murder and arson.”

  “We don’t know that’s the case.” Madison could still see the man’s hand and the revolver pointing at Brown. “He could have done all kinds of things and gotten away with them, and it wouldn’t show up on NCIC.”

  “The marshals were pretty embarrassed we didn’t know about having two people in WITSEC in town, but it wasn’t their fault,” Sangster said. “The previous chief of police knew, but he died of a heart attack and we never had a proper changeover. For years, all that’s been happening is that Andrew and Lee make one phone call every twelve months—to confirm it’s all fine and dandy—and that’s it.”

  “And now?” Madison said.

  “And now,” the chief replied, “the only people who know about their identities are in this room.”

  “I’m telling Sorensen when she gets back. She deserves to know the truth.”

  “No question about it. I trust her. But, as far as it goes, that’s it.”

  “What about your deputies?”

  Sangster sighed. “They went into a burning building for Andrew—whatever his name is—and I’ll explain the situation. Anyone else, though—including Polly—is not my business to tell.”

  Sangster didn’t want to burden his men with that knowledge, because there was something corrosive about it, and he knew that it would change the town around them forever. Then again, they were grown-ups who had chosen to carry a badge.

  Polly Howell had gone to the hospital with her husband, and she would be coming home with someone altogether different, Madison thought. It wasn’t up to the chief to tell her, but she had the right to know. And so did Betty Dennen.

  “Chief,” Madison said, “Mrs. Dennen has lost her husband, and she shouldn’t have to live with anything less than the whole truth.”

  “I agree. But if she’s told, then Lee and Andrew might have to relocate, create a new identity, and start over somewhere else.”

  “She might be willing to keep their secret.”

  Sangster finished his drink in one long gulp. “Looks like, soon enough, half the town is going to know, anyway.”

  Jay Kupitz tried to shift his body on the bed, and sudden pain reminded him that he was in the hospital. He had been asleep and was not completely awake and alert yet. Morphine had a lot to answer for, but he wasn’t complaining—waiting for the ambulance had been excruciating, and painkillers were going to be his best friend for a few days. He had almost made it out of Polly’s home but had been caught in the building’s collapse. One broken leg and one broken wrist were small potatoes in what could have been the last shift he would ever work.

  “Welcome back, Koop.”

  Kupitz turned to the voice.

  Amy Sorensen was sitting on the chair next to his bed, her long legs stretched out and her red hair loose from its customary ponytail. “Your mom went to get herself a cup of coffee.”

  Kupitz frowned. Thinking was arduous with the morphine in his system: for a moment there, he thought he might be hallucinating Sorensen.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Hockley said that you were practically out of the building, but you went back because you said the chain might carry the killer’s fingerprints.”

  “You said we needed his prints to nail him.” It was as much as his confused brain allowed him to verbalize.

  “And you went back for the chain . . .”

  He nodded.

  “You daring, foolish man,” Sorensen said.

  Then she got up, leaned forward, and kissed the top of his head—like she’d done when her kids were small.

  The next time Kupitz opened his eyes, his mom was in the chair.

  He didn’t tell anyone about Sorensen; he didn’t want to be told that it had been a dream.

  In bed, with her cell phone on the pillow and her eyes closed, Madison could almost believe that Quinn was next to her. They had spoken and they had been quiet and he hadn’t asked her much about the shooting. What she wanted to say, she would say. His company in the attic room was all she needed.

  She fell asleep after a while and from all the way across the state Nathan Quinn listened to her breathing slow down and deepen.

  Chapter 48

  Today is the day, Alice thought, and she was too far out of herself to be either surprised or scared. Today is the day he’s going to tell me that I have to kill one of them.

  The notion didn’t startle Alice, because she had been petrified for three solid days and her system couldn’t take any more. She was there and she was elsewhere, watching herself being afraid. There was a line, though, and the little girl could still see it, feel it in herself like a hard ridge in her personality: she had gutted a squirrel for him, she had stolen a silly red canteen for him, but she would not shoot a person for that crazy mothertrucker—the word was a memory from her days in Friday Harbor and it made her smile so unexpectedly that it broke through the numbness. Mothertrucker. That was it. That was all. Mothertrucker. She was done. She was past caring, way past.

  There was dew on the grass, so pretty it made her heart ache. Her hands stroked the tips of the blades and she rubbed her damp fingers together. What would happen if she started walking right now? If she just walked away and never looked back? Alice placed the palm of her hand flat against the ground. How curious that, days ago, she had been afraid of being lost and now nothing would have been better than being completely alone on the mountain, meandering along the stream and lying on the warm grass with her hands behind her back, tiny under the wide blue sky.

  The mountain wouldn’t kill you, she said to herself. The thought had come from nowhere and there it was. The mountain wouldn’t kill you, but he will.

  What was she prepared to do? How far was she prepared to go?

  The hikers were still asleep and Alice gazed at their tents, so familiar now. She believed in her bones that—if it came to it, if she tried to escape—the man would run after her and not pursue the campers. He couldn’t split himself in two, and she was the one he’d go after. She knew that like she’d known a bad bluffer with a good hand at Joey Cavizzi’s table in Vegas.

  The mountain wouldn’t kill you, the little girl repeated to herself. The man would not be happy about it, he’d made that clear enough the other night. Well, sister, what are the alternatives?

  “The way you kill your target is just as important as making the kill in the first place,” the man said. “It’s got to be clean, quick, and you have to know how to dispose of it when you’re done.”

  Alice listened to The Hunter, and as she had done every morning, she rolled up her sleeping bag and made sure her pack was zipped closed and ready for travel. It was essential, he had told her the first day, to keep a neat camp.

  The hikers had left their site after a late breakfast—it looked as if they had brought with them all the food they’d ever need and were not bothered by the necessity of hunting for their meals. Must be nice. Alice could smell the eggs and bacon from where she was hiding.

  The three couples walked off into a thicket
that opened onto a trail.

  “There’s a waterfall about a mile that way,” the man whispered. “Bet you anything that’s where they’re heading. We’re going to cut them off where the trail forks. On your feet, boy.”

  This is it, Alice thought, and she shouldered her pack with her baseball bat tied to the side. She was calm all of a sudden—creepy calm, as her friend Jessica used to call it.

  The weather had decided that cool rain would do better than sunshine and the wind had brought black, churning clouds. It was only drizzle so far, but you could tell that the sky was working itself up to a showstopper.

  The walk, following in the man’s steps, was not easy. They were striding through a sweep of roots and shrubs and low branches that whipped back against the little girl’s face. Alice pushed her baseball cap down and kept on. The drizzle tapped on her visor, and raindrops found their way into the back of her neck and down her shoulder blades, but Alice kept on. When the man turned and saw how determinedly she was doing so, he grinned at her as if they were on the best of outings. Alice did not smile back.

  “Look . . .” He pointed at a green shoot with oddly shaped white flowers. “Some call it vanilla leaf, some call it deer’s foot—see the shape of the leaves?” An ugly glint in his eyes now. “Some people, though, call it sweet after death, because if you crush the leaves you can smell the sweetness.”

  Sweet after death. If you crush the leaves . . .

  Alice looked away.

  After what seemed like hours, just ahead of them, Alice saw a trail and a little farther on a fork that led south one way and east the other. The man paused and unshouldered his pack.

  “This is what I want you to do—,” he said, but his next words were swallowed by crashing thunder.

  The rain fell in sheets over them, around them, and every which way. So heavy that it appeared to be a solid shape molding itself around everything.

  A shriek nearby, and the man turned.