by Lisa Gardner
“Break it down. I’ll be right there.”
Then D.D. pulled a hard left and was racing for Aidan Brewster’s apartment. An explosion. A missing teenager. Shots fired. What the hell was going on tonight?
“Ever since September,” Sandra was saying, “I’ve been worried that you were some kind of predator, doing terrible things online. So I started learning more about computers, and in the course of doing that, I met Wayne Reynolds.”
“You fell in love with the state computer guy,” Jason stated. He withdrew his hands, fisted them on his lap. Maybe that wasn’t fair of him, but he could only give as much as he could give.
“I became infatuated.”
“You slept with him.”
She immediately shook her head, then hesitated. “But sometimes, on the spa nights …”
“I know about the spa nights,” Jason said curtly.
“Then why did you let me go?”
He inhaled, exhaled. “I didn’t think it was fair to punish you for my failings.”
“You can’t have sex.”
“We did have sex.”
“Did you like it?” she asked curiously.
He managed a crooked grin. “I’d be willing to try it again.”
That made her smile, eased some of the tension. But then her expression grew somber again, and he leaned closer, so he could study her eyes in the dark.
“After our family vacation,” she said, “when I realized that the photo I saw wasn’t something you’d done, but something that had been done to you, I tried to break it off with Wayne. Except he didn’t take it so well. He thought you were coercing me, that I didn’t know what I was doing. He threatened to turn you in to the police if I didn’t keep seeing him.”
“He wanted you for himself.”
“I found out I was pregnant,” Sandra whispered. “I took the test last Friday. And I realized then that I really did need to end things with Wayne. I’d been stupid, reckless. But … I wanted you, Jason. I swear, I just wanted to be with you and Ree and whatever little life we’ve made together. So I e-mailed Wayne again, told him that I’d made a mistake, and that I was sorry, but I’d decided to save my marriage.
“He called me immediately. Agitated, angry. He kept trying to tell me that I wasn’t thinking straight. He seemed to think that you had some kind of hold over me, maybe you were beating me into submission, I don’t know. But the more I tried to tell him everything was okay, the more he became convinced he had to save me.
“I broke off all contact. Stopped answering his calls, his text messages, his e-mails. I purged accounts. I did everything I could think of. I just wanted him to go away. And then, Wednesday night …”
She looked away. Jason caught her chin in his hand and brought her gaze back to him. “Just tell me, Sandy. Let’s just get it all out, then we can determine where to go from here.”
“Wayne appeared. Right here. In our bedroom. Apparently, he’d made an impression of my house key the last time I’d met with him. His face was red, angry. He was holding a baseball bat.”
She broke off. Her gaze was out of focus, seeing something only she could see. Jason didn’t interrupt. Just waited.
“I tried to stop him,” she whispered. “Tried to calm him down, tell him everything would be okay. I’d resume talking to him, go to the basketball games, whatever. Just, he needed to leave. He needed to go home.
“He hit me. With his hand. He struck me, here. Here.” Her fingers idly brushed the bruises on her face. “I fell on the bed and he came after me. I stopped fighting. There didn’t seem to be any point, and I thought, maybe if I just submitted, he wouldn’t be so angry. He’d finish and go away, before something worse happened. I was terrified about the baby, and Ree, of course. And you, too. What if you came home and found us, and he grabbed the bat.…
“So many terrible things were going around in my head. Then … Ree appeared. She’d heard the noise and come to our bedroom. She was standing in the doorway, half-asleep. She said, ‘Mommy.’
“The second he heard her voice, he stilled. I thought that was it. He’d kill her, kill me. It was over. So I pushed him off. Told him not to move. Then I pulled my nightgown down, walked over to our daughter, and escorted her back to her room. I told her that Mommy and Daddy had been wrestling. Everything was okay. I’d see her in the morning.
“She didn’t want to let go of my hand at first. I got anxious. I thought if I didn’t get out of the room fast enough, maybe he’d come in. Bring the Louisville Slugger. So I swore to her that I had to go away for a moment, but that I’d be back. Everything was okay. I wouldn’t be gone long.”
“She let you go.”
Sandra nodded. “And when I returned to the room, Wayne was gone. I think Ree scared him. Maybe she shamed him back to his senses; I’m not sure. I went downstairs, redid the locks, not that they would do much good against a man with a key. Then I started to clean up. The bloody comforter, the broken lamp. Except …”
He rubbed the back of her hand. “Except …”
She looked at him, “Except I started to realize that nothing I did would be enough. Wayne works for the state police. He has a key to our house. Maybe he didn’t kill me that night, but what about the next, or the next? It’s not like a guy shows up with a baseball bat when all he wants to do is talk. He might press charges against you for the computer image, putting my husband in jail. Or heaven help us, he might go after Ree. She thinks he’s a friend. She’d get in a car with him. I started to realize … I started to realize that I’d made a huge mess of things.”
“So you ran away.”
She smiled thinly, catching the edge in his voice even as he tried to flatten it out. “I thought the only way to be safe from a man like Wayne was to have public knowledge of our relationship. If it was known that he was involved with me, then he couldn’t hurt me or my family, right? He’d be an automatic person of interest.”
Jason couldn’t follow her train of thought. “I guess.”
“So, I decided to disappear. Because if I disappeared, then the police would investigate, right? They’d learn about Wayne, then when I reappeared, I’d be safe. He wouldn’t dare do anything; it would cost him his career. So I retrieved your lockbox from that attic—”
“I never told you about the lockbox.”
“Ree did. She saw you after Christmas, when you were putting away the ornaments. She spent most of January chattering away that you had a treasure chest in the attic and now constantly demands to go ‘treasure hunting.’ I thought she meant that you had a box of mementos or something, but then, in the past few months, given everything that’s been going on, I’ve been reconsidering you. How easily you changed your name from Johnson to Jones. Our considerable cash reserves, which you never talk about, but I know are there from reading the bank statements. I decided to do a little digging around in the attic. It took me a couple of tries, but I finally discovered the metal box. The cash was very useful, the fake IDs … troubling.”
“Escape plans are important to me,” he said.
“There’s only ID for you. Not for a family.”
“I can change that.”
She smiled, more warmly now, and he found himself taking her hand again, tucking her fingers inside his.
“I threw on your old clothes, all in black,” she said. “I stuck the cash and IDs in my pocket—cash for me to use, IDs for me to hold so you didn’t disappear while I was gone. I used one of our spare keys to lock the door behind me, then I hid behind the bushes until you returned.”
“You hid in the bushes?”
“I couldn’t leave Ree alone,” she said earnestly. “In case Wayne returned. I couldn’t just leave her. It was hard—” Her voice broke. “It was very hard to walk away. You have no idea. Leaving the two of you … I kept telling myself it would only be for a few days. I’d lay low, stay at some cheap hotel, paying cash. Then, when the police started questioning Wayne, I’d reappear, say I’d gotten overwhelmed, some sort of
Mom excuse, and after a few embarrassing days, the dust would settle and we’d continue on with our lives.
“I never expected my father would show up. Or they’d put Ethan through the wringer. Or … I don’t know. Everything grew bigger than I expected. The media attention, the police scrutiny. It’s all gotten out of hand.”
“You have no idea.”
“I had to cut through four back yards just to sneak into my own home tonight. It’s crazy out there.”
“So how are you going to do this?”
She shrugged. “Throw open the front door and declare, ‘I’m back.…’ Let the photographers click away.”
“The reporters will eat you alive.”
“I have to pay for my mistakes sooner or later.”
He didn’t like it. And pieces of the story nagged at him. Sandy’s lover hadn’t taken no for an answer, so she’d thought to expose the relationship by disappearing? Why not just go public with the affair? Tell him, notify the state police. Her vanishing act seemed extreme to him. Then again, she’d just been assaulted, had been terrified for Ree. Her level of physical duress, mental exhaustion …
He wished again he had been home Wednesday night. He wished he had kept his family safe.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll do this together. Walk out together, hand in hand. I’m already the menacing husband. You can be the ditzy wife. Tomorrow they’ll crucify us; by end of week, we’ll have our own reality TV show and be sharing a couch with Oprah.”
“Can we do it in the morning?” Sandy asked. “I want to wake up with Ree. I want her to know I’m all right. Everything’s good again.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
They stood together. They had just taken the first step, when they heard a sudden dull roar from outside. Curious, Jason crossed to the bedroom window, cracking the blind and peering out.
One by one, all the news vans with their enormous klieg lights, camera crews, and news reporters were suddenly packing up and pulling away. He watched the first one do a U-turn, then another, then another.
“What the hell?” he murmured. Sandra had come up behind him.
“Something bigger must’ve happened.”
“Bigger than your return from the dead?”
“They don’t know about that yet.”
“True,” he said. But the sudden darkness outside discomfited him after two nights of blazing lights. Then, suddenly, he was aware of something else. A high-pitched scrape, like tree branches against a bare window, except their property didn’t have any trees that close to the house. From the back yard, he realized, and it was already moving away from the window, toward the hall.
“Stay here,” he ordered.
But he was too late. They both heard it at the same time: the tinkling of shattering glass, someone breaking through a back window.
| CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX |
“Shot twice,” D.D. was reporting to Miller, who’d just arrived at the Brewster scene after being called out of bed. D.D. had been at the house for nearly twenty minutes already, so she was bringing him up to speed. “First time in the stomach, second time in the back, between the shoulder blades, apparently as he tried to crawl away.”
“Messy,” Miller observed.
“Certainly not professional. This was personal business, through and through.”
Miller straightened, wiping at the Vicks he’d smeared on his mustache. Gut shots weren’t just messy, they were smelly. Feces and blood and bile, all churned up and soaked into the carpet.
“But Wayne Reynolds was taken out with a car bomb,” Miller countered. “That’s a professional-grade hit.”
D.D. shrugged. “Guy can’t be in two places at once. So he rigs a bomb for bachelor number one, and pays a visit to bachelor number two. Either way, in one night, his competition is eliminated.”
“You think Jason Jones did it.”
“Who else had links to both men?”
“So Jones kills his wife first, in a fit of jealousy, then sets out to get revenge against the men he believes were her lovers.”
“Hey, crazier things have happened.”
Miller arched his brows, just to show his doubt. “Ethan Hastings?”
“Bolted. Maybe he heard what happened to his uncle and is scared it might be him next. Hell, maybe it could be him next.”
Miller sighed. “Crap, I hate this case. Okay, so where’s Jason Jones?”
“Sitting in his house, contained by two of Boston’s finest and most of the major news outlets.”
“Not the news outlets,” Miller corrected. “This made the airwaves. By the time I pulled up, they were already lining the street. Might want to fix your hair before you exit, because we’re tomorrow’s news lead.”
“Ah shit. Can’t anything stay quiet anymore?” D.D. selfconsciously touched her hair. It’d been nearly twenty hours since she’d last showered or tended to personal hygiene. Not the look any woman wanted to present to the world. She shook her head. “One last thing,” she informed Miller. “Out here.”
He obediently followed her to the glass sliders leading outside. The back yard was dark compared to the lights blazing around front. But Southie had small yards, mostly fenced in, which kept the media at bay.
D.D. led Miller over to the tree she had checked out during their first visit. The one with limbs perfect for climbing up to see into the Jones residence. It occurred to Miller now that those same tree branches made a nice ladder over the neighbor’s fence. And sure enough, he saw exactly what D.D. had meant.
Up on the second branch, a smudge of black, which upon closer inspection with their flashlights turned out to be a dark brown leather glove.
“Think that glove fits Jason Jones?” D.D. asked.
“I think there’s only one way to find out.”
“Hide,” Jason whispered urgently. “In the closet. Now. You’re missing, remember? No one will think to look for you.”
Sandy remained rooted in place, so he pushed her toward the open closet, getting her inside and partially closing the door.
The footsteps were on the stairs now. Slow, stealthy. Jason grabbed two pillows and shoved them under the sheets, a poor attempt at fashioning a sleeping body. Next, he pressed his back against the wall next to the door and waited. He was very aware of his four-year-old daughter, sleeping just twenty feet away. He was very aware of his pregnant wife, standing in a closet only ten feet away. It made him feel icy, preternaturally calm. Deep inside a zone, where if he had a gun, he’d be emptying a clip into the intruder by now.
The footsteps paused in the hallway, probably outside Ree’s closed door. Jason found himself holding his breath, because if the intruder opened that door, woke up Ree, tried to grab her …
A soft shuffling sound as the intruder eased forward one step, then another.
Another pause. Jason could see a shadow in the doorway, hear the sound of low, even breathing.
“Might as well come out now, son,” Maxwell Black drawled. “I heard you moving when I was coming up the stairs, so I know you’re awake. Keep this simple, and your daughter won’t get hurt.”
Jason didn’t move. He held the heavy metal flashlight by his hip, debating his options. Maxwell hadn’t stepped far enough into the room for Jason to ambush him. The crafty old man stayed a foot back from the open doorway, enough in the hallway so he could see into the room while keeping his sides protected.
The hall floor creaked slightly, a man moving backward, one step, then two, then three.
“I’m at her door now, son. All I gotta do is turn the knob, flick on her light. She’ll wake up. Ask for Daddy. What do you want me to tell her? How much do you want your little girl to know about you?”
Jason finally eased away from the wall. He moved out just slightly, enough that Maxwell could see his profile, without exposing all of his body to the hallway. He kept the flashlight behind his back.
“Little late for a social call,” Jason said evenly.
The old man chu
ckled. He stood in the middle of the lit hallway, outside of Ree’s room. He hadn’t been bluffing; the man had one gloved hand on Ree’s doorknob. In the other black-gloved hand, he held a gun.
“You’ve had a busy night,” Maxwell said, gun coming up, aiming somewhere around Jason’s left shoulder. “Shame you had to kill young Brewster like that. Then again, most people think death is too good for those perverts.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s not what the police are thinking. Bet they’re tossing his place right now. Finding some old love letters Sandy wrote years and years ago stuffed under his mattress. Then there’s the discarded glove here, broken branch there. I give them twenty, thirty minutes, and they’ll be here to arrest you. Means we’d better keep this quick.”
“Keep what quick?”
“Your suicide, boy. Christ almighty, you killed your wife, shot her lover. You’re wracked with guilt, consumed with remorse. No way a man like you can be a fitting father. So, of course, you came home and shot yourself. The fine detectives will find your body, read your note. They can dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Then I’ll take Ree away from all this sadness to a whole new life in Georgia. Don’t worry I’ll do right by her.”
Jason heard a sharp hiss of indrawn breath from the closet. He took a step closer to the doorway, trying to keep Max’s focus on him.
“I see. Well, it sounds like quite a plan, Max. But I see one flaw in it already.”
“What’s that?”
“You can’t shoot me from the hallway. Surely, you’ve learned from enough criminal cases by now. First thing that gives away a fake suicide is the lack of gunshot residue. No GSR on the contact wound means the gunshot was not self-inflicted. I’m afraid if you want this to be suicide, you’re gonna have to be up close and personal.”
Maxwell contemplated him from the hallway. “The thought had occurred to me,” the old man said. “All right, step into the light.”
“Or what, you’ll shoot me? I don’t think so.”