by Harry Dolan
Bell brushing past the cop.
Lark sat sideways on the bench, resting his arm on the back of it, aiming the rifle. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the young mother pull her boy off the swing and hustle him away.
Looking through the scope, Lark saw one of the cops toss the camouflage jacket onto the ground. He saw the gray T-shirt HomeLess Vet had on underneath, the crimson stain at the shoulder.
Sutton Bell with his white towels. He pressed one of them against the wound.
Lark moved the crosshairs to Bell’s neck, to his face in profile. He fixed them on a spot just behind Bell’s ear.
The crosshairs swayed. The buzz of the lawn mower was loud, but it didn’t bother Lark. He took a breath. Laid his finger on the trigger. The crosshairs held still.
His vision was clear. His brow felt cool. Nothing twisted behind his eyes.
The headaches are a symptom.
He didn’t have a headache. He’d felt one coming on, and he’d taken a pill, and it had gone away. The pill worked.
The sound of the lawn mower faded from his mind. The crosshairs drifted along Sutton Bell’s cheek.
The headaches are a symptom. You’ll have them until you deal with the underlying problem.
Lark didn’t have a headache. Not now. And not in the past few days.
Because the pills were working.
The crosshairs drifted into empty space.
Now or never, Lark thought.
He moved them back to the spot behind Bell’s ear.
Do it now, or lose your chance.
His finger tensed on the trigger.
The pills—
“DID YOU HEAR what I said about the pills?”
On Saturday afternoon Elizabeth and Shan cruised along a pitted street in a neighborhood of bland brick houses. They had driven back to Dearborn to work their way through Helen Lark’s list of her son’s friends.
They’d already spoken to half a dozen men in their late twenties or early thirties, unambitious and underemployed, living in ratty apartments. None seemed to have been very close to Anthony Lark. They didn’t strike Elizabeth as the kind of men who would take you in if you were on the run. She didn’t expect to find Lark hiding out with one of them.
But there were more names on the list. She still hoped that one of them might tell her something useful. From behind the wheel of the Crown Victoria she looked out at houses of dull red brick. Shan was in the passenger seat beside her. He’d been texting back and forth with his son, who was pitching in a Little League game today.
Elizabeth had been listening to a classical station on the radio, her mind wandering along with the melody of a Bach sonata. She noticed when Shan’s cell phone rang, but she didn’t pay attention to his conversation.
“Lizzie,” he said in a raised voice. “Did you hear me—about the pills?”
She touched the power button on the radio. “What pills?”
“The pills I found in Lark’s apartment,” he said. “They were in a metal tin with a handwritten label that said ‘Imitrex.’ But the lab says they’re not Imitrex. They’re vitamin D.”
She could still hear Bach’s music in her head.
“What do you think that means? Lark got his pills mixed up?”
“I don’t know,” said Shan. “But if he’s taking vitamin D for headaches, he’s probably not getting much relief.”
AT TWENTY AFTER FOUR I heard a siren, distant but coming closer. I saw a chaos of lights in my side mirror and pulled over to the side of the road. The ambulance filled up the mirror until it sped past me heading south.
That morning I had returned to the house on Fernwood, the one Callie Spencer and I had visited the night before. I didn’t really believe I’d find Lucy Navarro there, but I couldn’t shake the image of her lying in a basement somewhere. My dreams had been filled with stairs running down into darkness.
At the house on Fernwood I walked up the driveway scanning the ground for stones. I found one and was about to break a window when I remembered the FOR RENT sign on the lawn. I used my cell to dial the number for Casterbridge Realty.
A rental agent showed up half an hour later, a cheery woman in a red blazer with a lot of platinum blond hair. She took me through the place room by room, showed me the attic, the basement, and the garage. I saw nothing to suggest that Lucy had been there.
I spent the early afternoon at my desk at Gray Streets, pretending to work on the story about the detective and the heiress. But I couldn’t get my mind off Lucy. I had nothing but hunches about what might have happened to her and no ideas about where to look for her. About all I could say was that her disappearance had something to do with the Great Lakes Bank robbery. I knew of two people who had been at the bank and were still around to tell the tale: Sutton Bell and Harlan Spencer.
The coin I tossed came up heads, so at twenty after four when the ambulance roared past me, I was driving south on Ann Arbor–Saline Road, bound for Sutton Bell’s house.
When I reached Bell’s neighborhood I saw people gathered on the sidewalks in small groups. I saw the ambulance at the end of the street, and as I drove closer I watched the EMTs lift a gurney into the back. They slammed the doors and drove off, leaving two patrol cars behind, and four uniformed cops on the lawn of Bell’s house.
I parked a block away and walked over. One of the cops was a kid named Fielder—Elizabeth and I had seen him Monday night, when the senator had his car accident. Fielder stood talking to a woman in a summer dress who kept pointing at a playground in the distance.
She held fast to the hand of a young boy who acted like he wanted to drag her away. “Push me,” I heard him say. “I want you to push me on the swing.” She managed to quiet him down, and after a time the two of them walked off, but not toward the swings.
Fielder gave me a neutral stare when I approached, but then he remembered me.
“What happened here?” I asked him. “Was it Lark?”
He hesitated, making up his mind about whether he should answer.
“It must have been,” he said at last. “He shot a vagrant, a guy he had picked up on the road. And while we were dealing with that, he drove around to the playground there and got his rifle out. Not a bad plan, and Bell walked right into it.”
Fielder glanced at the house. “Bell comes out to help. Florence goddamn Nightingale. Brings towels. I tell him to get back inside, but naturally he won’t. Stupid son of a bitch.”
His tone made me fear the worst. “Is Bell dead?”
“He’s fine,” said Fielder gruffly. “Turns out he’s a lucky son of a bitch too.”
“What happened? Lark missed?”
“He never took the shot.”
CHAPTER 44
They had changed the lock on the door of his old apartment.
Lark expected to find something more, some kind of official seal from the police department or bands of yellow crime-scene tape. There was nothing like that, but his key wouldn’t turn in the lock.
He got his tire iron from the Chevy and went around to the bedroom window. This was the way Walter Delacorte had broken in. When Lark tried the window it slid open easily; the latch hadn’t been repaired.
He climbed down into the room and stood by his mattress for a moment. His clothes were gone from the closet, his books and magazines no longer littered the floor.
He looked down at the tire iron in his hand and remembered Charlie Dawtrey’s cabin in the woods. He had used the iron to beat the old man to death. Lifting it up, he stared at the bend in the metal. He could see streaks of dried blood.
He dropped the iron, feeling queasy. Bowed his head and breathed through his nose until the feeling passed.
He looked around. His old pills should have been on the floor by the mattress, but he didn’t see the tin there. The police must have taken it.
He checked the bathroom and the kitchen, just to be sure. No pills. An odd smell in the air, slightly metallic. It might have been from the blood that stained the
carpet: Delacorte’s blood in the living room, Rhiner’s in the hall.
The stains didn’t bother Lark, not like the streaks on the tire iron.
He ran the water cold in the kitchen sink and drank some from the palm of his hand.
You don’t need to find the pills, he thought. You know what happened with the pills.
As he shook his hand dry, his glance fell on a yellow sheet of paper. His neighbor’s flyer: LOST CAT. The letters a cool blue-green, the color Lark associated with calm, with peace.
He left by the door, found the hallway outside deserted. No reason to think she’d be home on a Saturday afternoon, less reason to think she’d let him in. He fiddled with the cuffs of his shirt until half an inch of white showed at the ends of the charcoal gray sleeves of his jacket. He smoothed his tie.
Should have brought flowers, he thought.
Ten seconds from his knock until the metal door drew inward. She was listening to her iPod, just like the last time. She wore a tank top and shorts, as if she’d been exercising. She was slow to recognize him in the suit, but then her eyes went wide.
Surprise, he thought. Not fear. She started to shut the door, but her heart wasn’t in it. He could have stopped it. He let it close. Waited for the sound of the dead bolt.
When he didn’t hear it, he called her name.
The click of a chain lock sliding into place, and the door opened again, just a few inches.
“Mira,” he said.
“Anthony.” She held the earbuds of the iPod in her fingers.
“What were you listening to?” he asked.
She frowned at the question. “Anthony, the police are looking for you.”
“I know.”
“They’re saying—”
“I know what they’re saying. Do you have a car?”
She had a worry line between her eyebrows. He watched it deepen.
“I can’t help you get away,” she said, “if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “A plane is better anyway.”
“A plane?”
“Have you seen the redwood trees?”
“Anthony, you sound—”
“Crazy, I know.” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Story of my life. If you fly into Eureka, California, and rent a car there, you can drive north to Prairie Creek State Park. They have redwoods. You’ve got to see them. I went there once with a girl I used to know. It’s as far away from home as I’ve ever been.”
He watched her try to make sense of him. Her eyes a deeper brown than the color of her skin. He thought he could see flecks of gold in them, like the gold of the chain that stretched across the opening between the door and the frame.
“Anthony, I can help you,” she said. “We can find you a lawyer.”
He moved closer to her. “I don’t know if it’s possible to make a new start,” he said, almost in a whisper. “For a long time I didn’t think so. But if it’s possible, then that’s the place to do it. Prairie Creek State Park. Remember that. I won’t be able to fly, so it’ll take me a few days. I’ll look for you there.”
“Anthony—”
“You should see them, the redwoods. We tried to take pictures, but they’re so big they won’t fit inside the frame.” He let out a breath. “Look, I know how I sound, and I know what you must think of me. I’ve killed three people. I wish I could tell you it’s not true. I killed a man named Derek Everly, because he took away someone I loved. I don’t regret that one. The others—I’m not sure anymore.”
He watched her close the door, heard the chain slip free, saw the door open again.
“Anthony,” she said gently, “you need help.”
He shut his eyes. “I’m done with all that. I want a new start. Prairie Creek. I’ll understand if you’re not there.”
“I can’t—”
“Don’t say yes or no right now.” He opened his eyes and stepped back. “You should close the door. You don’t want the cat to get out.”
She glanced back into the apartment. “He’s hiding under a chair.”
“You can’t be too careful,” Lark said. “And I can’t stay. So there’s nothing to do but close the door.”
“I’LL TELL YOU what I’m looking forward to,” Sutton Bell said. “The day I can open the curtains again.”
We were sitting at a maplewood table in his dining room. The police were still outside, keeping watch in case Lark should come back. Bell had agreed to see me when I told him I wanted to talk about Lucy Navarro.
At the other end of the table lay a pad of newsprint open to a crayon drawing of horses in a field. The only light in the room came from a hanging lamp. Heavy curtains were drawn tight over the windows.
“You must think I’m foolish for staying here,” Bell said. He had turned his chair to face me. His left arm rested on the table, the hand in a brace.
Before I could answer, he went on. “I probably am. I convinced my wife to take time off from her job. She’s staying with a friend out of state. She’s got our daughter with her.”
“You could have gone with them,” I said.
“I almost did, but then I thought it over. If someone wanted to kill you, would you want to be with your wife and daughter, or as far away from them as possible?”
“I see your point.”
He used his good hand to brush his long hair out of his eyes. “Apart from that, I have obligations here. The clinic where I work is short-staffed as it is. They can’t afford to give me an indefinite leave. And they don’t mind having the police watch the place. The patients there can be a little rough around the edges, especially late at night.” After a pause, he added, “The way I look at it, the clinic took a chance, hiring me. I don’t want to let them down.”
I nodded and watched him turn to stare at the wall opposite the windows, at a cluster of photographs hanging there. The largest was of his daughter, a tow-headed girl with blue eyes.
“The police suggested I stay at a hotel,” he said. “But this house has an alarm system, and there’s a car out front whenever I’m here. The truth is, I feel like I need to be here. Otherwise it’s like I’m abandoning the place. Does that make sense?”
“It does to me.”
Bell studied the photographs and seemed to search for something more to say. I thought he looked at ease in his surroundings—a decent man living out a plain, middle-class life, a man who cared for his family and didn’t want to abandon his house. Then I remembered what he had been once, and a question occurred to me. I found myself asking it out loud.
“How did you get mixed up in the Great Lakes robbery?”
He turned back to me, shifting uneasily in his chair. “I was twenty. I was an idiot.”
“Most twenty-year-olds don’t try to rob a bank,” I said. “There must have been more to it. I know Floyd Lambeau recruited you. How did he convince you?”
His head moved side to side. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
I watched him thinking about it. After a time he said, “The thing about Floyd . . . he never tried to convince me to do anything. He had a way of sitting back and listening. And he had kind eyes.” Bell hesitated. “I’m not expressing this well.”
“Go on.”
He thought about it some more. Then: “Everyone knows now that Floyd Lambeau was nothing but a con artist. Of course I didn’t know that when I met him. I was in college. He was a guest lecturer in one of my classes—a course on Native American culture. He was only there for three or four weeks, talking about living conditions on Indian reservations. A lot of them are plagued by high unemployment. Alcoholism. The kind of poverty you usually find in Third World countries. The class met in the evening, and a few people would get together afterward, and Floyd would take us out to a coffeehouse or a restaurant. The first time I went, I did it to impress a girl I liked. But later she dropped out, and I kept going. I liked to listen to Floyd talk. I had no experience of the things he tal
ked about, but he was obviously very intelligent. And he was soft-spoken. He seemed humble.”
Bell scratched the side of his face with his good hand. “One night the others in the group had left and it was just me and Floyd. I remember sitting across from him with a lot of empty glasses spread over the table between us. I remember him looking at me as if he were seeing me for the first time, as if he regretted not paying more attention to me sooner. I remember him asking me a question: ‘What do you want out of life, Mr. Bell?’
“I had to think about it. What did I want? I was a kid from the Midwest with an accountant for a father. My mother had raised four kids and never worked outside the home. They had struggled to save money to send me to college—the same college my father had gone to. I was a member of his old fraternity. No one had ever asked me what I wanted out of life, and the best answer I could give was that I wanted to be like my father. I wanted to get a degree and work in a profession. Maybe I’d be an accountant. Maybe a doctor. I wanted to meet a girl in college like my father did, and I wanted to marry her and have a family.
“That’s what I told Floyd, and he listened, and at the end he said, ‘That sounds like a very respectable life, Mr. Bell.’ And as far as I could tell, he meant it. He wasn’t mocking me. He wasn’t questioning the worth of what I wanted. But I was.
“ ‘It sounds like a very ordinary life,’ I said.
“His smile was slow and gentle. ‘There’s nothing wrong with an ordinary life.’
“And then he had me, though I didn’t know it yet. I said, ‘I want something more.’
“He laughed, but the laugh was gentle too. ‘You must be careful, Mr. Bell,’ he said. ‘It’s not something to be done lightly—wishing for an extraordinary life.’
“He didn’t say anything more that night. It was only later that he told me about the Rosebears—two brothers falsely accused of murdering a woman in Ohio. It was only later that I found out what he meant by ‘an extraordinary life’—that he wanted me to help him rob a bank so we could use the money to make sure those brothers got a good legal defense—so they weren’t at the mercy of some overworked, court-appointed lawyer. When Floyd told me that, I thought he was nuts, and I let him know it.