by Harry Dolan
“He gave me that same smile. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Bell. I shouldn’t have asked you. Don’t give it another thought.’”
Bell moved his left hand back and forth over the maplewood table. “Floyd didn’t mention it again,” he said, “and not long after that, he was gone, on to a different college. But he left me a phone number so we wouldn’t lose touch. Don’t give it another thought, he’d said, but of course I did. One night I called him and we ended up talking about it—just hypothetically. About the morality of it. We figured that since the money people deposit in banks is insured, no one would really lose anything. And no one would get hurt—we agreed on that. We would bring guns to scare the tellers, but at the most we might fire a shot in the air. We wouldn’t actually harm anyone. And it could mean the difference between life and death for the Rosebear brothers—that’s what Floyd kept saying. I’m sure now that he never meant a word of it; he always intended to keep the money for himself. But I wanted to believe. And somewhere along the line it changed from something Floyd and I were just talking about to something we were going to do.”
Bell shrugged his shoulders and closed his eyes to let me know that he’d given me all the explanation he could. “I was twenty,” he said again, “and I wanted something more than an ordinary life. Which is just another way of saying I was an idiot.”
His eyes opened and settled on mine. “This isn’t what you came here for.”
No, it wasn’t. I realized I’d been stalling because I didn’t know where to begin. I regarded him across the corner of the table and said, “We need to talk about Lucy Navarro.”
“I’m not sure what I can tell you,” he said. “I don’t really know her.”
“She saved your life last week,” I reminded him, “outside the Eightball Saloon.”
He focused on his left hand in its brace, as if he were remembering. “That’s true, but I didn’t talk to her that night. I’ve never really talked to her.”
“I know she tried to interview you—about what happened at the Great Lakes Bank.”
“She tried. But I don’t do interviews.”
“She spoke to Terry Dawtrey and Henry Kormoran,” I said. “She was working on a story about the Great Lakes robbery. And three nights ago she disappeared. Somebody didn’t want her to write that story. I think it might have been the fifth robber. The getaway driver.”
Bell shook his head. “I can’t help you there.”
“Dawtrey claimed to know who the fifth robber was. But you don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“I want you to look at a picture for me.”
He started to protest. “It’s been seventeen years—”
I took a sheet of paper from my pocket, a page torn from a copy of Newsweek . I unfolded it on the table.
“That’s Callie Spencer,” Bell said, “and her husband—the senator’s son.”
“Jay Casterbridge,” I said, nodding. “Could he have been the fifth robber?”
A pained expression passed over Bell’s face. “I can’t help you.”
“Imagine him younger.”
He pushed the page away. “I just don’t know. Do you think I’m lying?”
I studied his eyes. No answer there. I refolded the page and returned it to my pocket.
Looking at his hand resting on the table, I realized I wanted to bring the heel of my palm down hard on his broken fingers. I wanted to shout at him. Instead I made my voice quiet.
“I think Lucy may be dead soon, if she isn’t dead already,” I said. “She saved your life. You owe her. I think you know something about the Great Lakes robbery—maybe not the identity of the getaway driver, but something that could help me.”
“I don’t—”
I went on in the same voice, empty of hope. “It’s something you don’t want to tell me, because you’ve put it all behind you. You think it’s in the past, but it’s not. Not for Lucy.”
“I’m sorry. You’re asking the wrong person.”
“No, I don’t think so. Dawtrey got thirty years for what happened at the Great Lakes Bank, and Kormoran served six years. But you served two and a half.”
“Dawtrey’s the one who shot Harlan Spencer—”
“Kormoran didn’t shoot anybody, but you made out better than he did.” I leaned closer to him. “You’re a lucky man. But I don’t think it was luck. I think you knew something, and you used it to get a better deal.”
Bell’s head bowed and his eyes went into shadow. “I wish you’d let it lie.”
“I can’t.”
“What I know won’t help you.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But you’re going to tell me.”
CHAPTER 45
Elizabeth learned about Lark’s aborted attack on Sutton Bell a little before five o’clock. She heard the details from Shan, who heard them over the phone from Owen McCaleb. Her first instinct was to head back to Ann Arbor, and Shan agreed, but McCaleb told them to keep plugging away at Helen Lark’s list of names.
“I’ve already got everyone looking for Lark here,” McCaleb said. “I want you to stay there and find us a lead.”
Their next stop was a duplex with a pair of dead ash trees in the front yard. This was where Lark had lived after he left his mother’s house and before he rented his apartment in Ann Arbor. Elizabeth and Shan had driven by earlier in the day but had found no one home. Now they found a beat-up Firebird in the driveway.
The owner of the Firebird was a guy Lark had gone to school with. Glen Gough answered the door wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and smoking a cigarette. He got a guilty look on his face when Elizabeth showed him her badge—as if cigarettes weren’t the only thing he ever smoked. He seemed relieved when he found out they were there to talk about Lark.
“Is it true what I’m hearing on the news?” Gough asked, leading them inside. “He’s some kind of serial killer?”
Elizabeth pretended she hadn’t heard the question. “What sort of person was he in school?”
Gough plopped himself down on a ragged sofa. “Honestly? He was always a little weird. Kept to himself.”
“So you weren’t friends?”
“I don’t know if he wanted friends. He was never one of the guys. For a long time, I thought he was a fag.”
“Is that right?”
Gough nodded, brushing at the cigarette ash that had fallen on the cushion beside him. “I guess he wasn’t though, because of the way he fawned over Susanna Marten. You know about her, right?”
“Yes,” Shan said.
“He used to follow her around in high school. Even signed up to work on the yearbook because she was one of the photographers.”
“What about after high school?” asked Elizabeth. “Did you see him much?”
“We worked some temp jobs together. Then back in May he was on the outs with his mom—she was mad at him for selling his dad’s boat. I told him he could stay here. I needed help with the rent.”
“What was he like to live with?”
Gough dropped his spent cigarette into a mug on the coffee table. “Honestly? He was kind of a slacker.”
Elizabeth looked around at the shabby furniture and the giant flat-screen television. At Gough’s uncombed hair and slouching form. “Is that right?”
“Yeah, he never really went anywhere. Except to work.”
“Did he ever talk about Susanna Marten?”
Gough shook his head. “I tried once, because I knew they’d been close right up until she died. But he turned cold on me, like I didn’t have any right to say anything about her.”
“What about Callie Spencer?” Elizabeth asked. “Did he ever talk about her?”
“The chick who’s running for Senate? No. But if he saw her on the news he’d always watch. And if he got one of his headaches he’d go looking for her, flipping through the channels as if seeing her would help.”
Shan broke in. “Did he get a lot of headaches?”
“He got ’em all the time
.”
“Did he take anything for them?”
“Sometimes he’d fill a towel full of ice and put it on his forehead.”
“But you didn’t see him take pills?”
“Sure, he took pills, but I couldn’t tell you what they were. You should ask his doctor.”
That got Elizabeth’s attention. “He was seeing a doctor?”
“A shrink. Sometimes Anthony would pass along his psychobabble—about how we all want to be known for who we really are. Stuff like that.”
“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.