by Harry Dolan
“I’m afraid not. Anthony stole it from a pharmacy.” Elizabeth opened a folder and brought out a photograph of the tin Shan had found in Lark’s apartment. “Have you ever seen this?” she asked Kenneally.
“Not that I remember,” he said.
“Anthony kept pills in it. The label says ‘Imitrex,’ but the pills inside were vitamin D. Do you have any thoughts on that?”
Chatterjee slapped an open palm on the table. “Enough,” he said. “I don’t know what thoughts you expect the doctor to have on Mr. Lark’s vitamins—”
Kenneally ignored him. “Actually, a deficiency of vitamin D has been linked to mood disorders,” he said, “so it’s not surprising that someone suffering from depression would be taking it. Speaking in general, of course.”
ANTHONY LARK’S NOTEBOOK lay on the blotter of Chief Owen McCaleb’s desk. McCaleb himself perched on a corner of the desk and listened as Elizabeth summarized her interview with Matthew Kenneally. Shan sat by the window, tossing in a comment now and then. They had left Kenneally in the interview room to write out his statement, with Rex Chatterjee looking over his shoulder.
When Elizabeth finished, McCaleb asked, “What do we think of Kenneally?”
“He could be just what he seems,” she said. “A doctor forced to defend himself against his patient. But I doubt it. For one thing, I’d expect him to be more broken up about it.”
“On the other hand,” Shan said, “he didn’t try to lie to us. He could have held back the accusations Lark made against him when they were alone—the stuff about the Great Lakes robbery and Lucy Navarro. But he didn’t. So either the accusations are false and Kenneally sees no reason to hide them, or they’re true and he’s smart enough not to get caught hiding them.”
McCaleb bumped his heels against the pinewood front of the desk. “I haven’t talked to the prosecutor yet, but I don’t see him bringing charges. The evidence supports Kenneally’s story. The gun that shot Lark was Paul Rhiner’s, so Lark had to have brought it with him. I’ve had a preliminary report from the medical examiner: she found gunshot residue on Lark’s hands and clothes, which supports Kenneally’s statement that they were fighting over the gun when he pulled the trigger.”
“Classic self-defense,” Shan said, “just like Chatterjee claimed.”
“What about the other stuff?” McCaleb asked. “Do we believe Kenneally is the fifth man from the Great Lakes robbery? Do we think he manipulated Lark—wound him up and sent him after Dawtrey, Kormoran, and Bell?”
“It’s possible,” Elizabeth said. “Lark met Kenneally in March. That’s when Kenneally bought Lark’s boat. At the time, Lark had been in mourning for years over Susanna Marten. He’d been afflicted with headaches. He had a shrine to the girl on the wall of his room.”
“Kenneally could have seen the shrine when he picked up the boat,” added Shan.
Elizabeth touched the glass beads of her necklace. “Lark’s mother told us he had resisted seeing a therapist. He felt responsible for Susanna’s death, because he hadn’t done enough to prevent it. She told us something else too. She thought Lark didn’t want a therapist who would tell him to go easy on himself. He was looking for someone who would agree with him. Someone to tell him he really was responsible.”
“So Kenneally came along and agreed with him?” McCaleb said.
Shan stepped away from the window and paced across the carpet. “If Kenneally was the fifth robber, then he’s been living with the secret for seventeen years. He managed to get away from the Great Lakes Bank, but he did it by ramming a patrol car and killing a Sault Sainte Marie cop—Scott White. So Kenneally knows he’s got a murder charge hanging over him. After all this time he ought to be safe—but then Callie Spencer decides to run for the Senate and suddenly people are talking about the robbery again. Dawtrey, Kormoran, and Bell saw him back then. He can’t be sure what they remember.”
McCaleb nodded. “So he has a motive for wanting them dead.”
“Right,” said Elizabeth. “And then he meets Lark, a man who’s tormented because he didn’t do enough to save a girl with a pretty smile—a smile like Callie Spencer’s.”
“Kenneally gets Lark to come to him for therapy,” Shan said. “Lark talks to him about feeling responsible for Susanna’s death. Kenneally tells Lark what he wants to hear: he is responsible.”
“Then Kenneally steers him toward Callie Spencer,” said Elizabeth. “He plants the idea that Dawtrey and the others are a threat to her, just like Susanna’s abusive husband was a threat. No rational person would believe that the Great Lakes robbers posed a threat to Callie after all these years, but Lark wasn’t rational. And Kenneally knew it. I think Kenneally played up the similarities between Susanna and Callie. There was the physical resemblance—the smile—but just as importantly there was the similarity between their fathers: both ended up in wheelchairs. Susanna’s husband, Derek Everly, was responsible for putting her father in a wheelchair, and Lark did nothing about it. If only he had done the right thing—if he had killed Derek—then Susanna wouldn’t have been driven to suicide. Lark would have saved her. Likewise for Callie. The Great Lakes robbers put her father in a wheelchair. And in Lark’s mind, there was still time to do something about it. To save her.”
McCaleb looked skeptical. “This sounds like an awful lot of speculation.”
“It’s not all speculation,” Elizabeth said, pointing to Lark’s notebook on the desk. “I’ve only had time to skim through what Lark wrote in there, but I can tell you that he wrote pages and pages about how he failed Susanna, and how he wasn’t going to fail Callie. And the entries in there are dated. The first reference to Callie comes after Lark met Kenneally.”
McCaleb glanced at the notebook. “I don’t suppose there’s anything explicit. Lark doesn’t actually say that Kenneally told him to kill anyone.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t see anything like that. I think Kenneally was much more subtle about it. But Lark got the message. The Great Lakes robbers were his chance to redeem himself.”
Shan had stopped his pacing and gone back to the window. “If we assume Kenneally manipulated Lark,” he said, “then some other things fall into place. Lark’s depression worked in Kenneally’s favor, so he didn’t prescribe drugs to treat it. When Lark complained about headaches, Kenneally gave him some pills and told him they were Imitrex. But they weren’t.”
“It still sounds far-fetched,” McCaleb said. “If Kenneally wanted Dawtrey and the others dead, why didn’t he just hire someone to do it? Why go through all this trouble with Lark? And what made him think he could turn Lark into a killer?”
“He’s a psychiatrist,” said Shan. “It’s not like he knows any professional hitmen.”
McCaleb looked to Elizabeth for her opinion, but she was still considering his question. What made Kenneally think he could turn Lark into a killer?
The answer came to her. “He did a trial run,” she said.
McCaleb’s mouth made a puzzled frown.
“Derek Everly,” she said. “Lark blamed him for Susanna’s suicide. But he didn’t do anything about it for three years. Then Lark met Kenneally, and a month later Everly was murdered.”
“But Lark was never charged in that case,” said McCaleb.
“No. The detective we talked to in Dearborn thought Lark did it, but he couldn’t prove it.”
“Then we’re not likely to prove Kenneally persuaded him to do it,” said McCaleb. “Look, let’s assume Kenneally had some kind of influence over Lark. So he sent Lark after Dawtrey, Kormoran, and Bell. And we think he did that because he, Kenneally, was the getaway driver in the Great Lakes robbery. Can we prove that?”
Shan lifted his shoulders. “We walked Kenneally past Harlan Spencer. Spencer said he didn’t recognize him.”
“We can try Sutton Bell,” said Elizabeth. “But he only met the getaway driver briefly.”
McCaleb got down from his perch on the desk. “That doesn’t sound promising,” h
e said. “So do we have anything at all on Kenneally? Any actual proof of a crime he committed?”
Shan smiled grimly. “We do if we find Lucy Navarro in cold storage in his garage.”
“Right. The freezer. Is there any reason to believe she’s in there?”
“Lark thought so,” said Elizabeth.
“I can’t get a search warrant based on a dead man’s hunch,” said McCaleb. “Can we link Kenneally with Navarro?”
“Lark saw a blue minivan the night Lucy Navarro disappeared,” Shan said. “Kenneally owns a minivan.”
“Please tell me it’s blue.”
“It’s gray,” said Elizabeth. “His wife drove it to the hospital this afternoon.”
“Could it have been painted in the last three days?”
“Didn’t look like it, but we can check.”
“Maybe Lark made a mistake that night,” Shan offered. “He confused gray for blue.”
“Maybe Lark was mistaken about a lot of things,” McCaleb said. “I think the only way we’re going to get a look inside Kenneally’s freezer or his minivan is if he gives us permission. How likely is that?”
ELIZABETH AND I circled around and ended our walk where it began, in front of City Hall.
“We asked Kenneally to consent to a search,” she said to me, “but his lawyer jumped in and dismissed the whole idea. I don’t know if he did it on principle, or if he thinks Kenneally’s guilty.”
“So that’s the end of it?” I said.
She turned to face me. “No, David. The reason I’m telling you about this is to let you know it’s not the end. We’re going to look into Kenneally’s background, try to connect him with Floyd Lambeau and the Great Lakes robbery. I’m not giving up on this. But I don’t want you to do anything. I know your first instinct when you leave here will be to head to Kenneally’s house. But you won’t help Lucy that way. If she’s there, she’s beyond your help. And if you go there, you’ll make things harder for me.”
We parted there, at the steps of City Hall. She had to stay behind to wrap things up with Kenneally. I walked west as far as Main Street, which was the right idea, if I wanted to go home. Then I turned south toward the Gray Streets building.
The air in the office felt stale. I switched on my desk lamp and touched the necklace that hung there—Elizabeth’s glass beads. They glowed blue in the light. I put up the window and heard the same saxophone I’d heard the night before, the winding notes of a Charlie Parker tune coming up from the street. I thought about Lucy Navarro. On Monday night, less than a week ago, she had called to thank me for setting up a meeting with Callie Spencer. We’d joked about what might happen if she asked the wrong questions. If I disappear, maybe you can find me, she’d said. If you can’t find me, I wouldn’t mind being avenged.
I had her book on the corner of my desk, her vampire novel, right next to the bottle of Macallan that Alan Beckett had given me. I wanted a drink, because I didn’t like the thoughts going through my head.
I didn’t know where Matthew Kenneally lived, but I could find out. I didn’t have my car; I’d left it at the Spencer house. But I could get it.
Maybe you can find me.
I stood listening to the music from the street and tried to think of a way around it.
If you go there, you’ll make things harder for me, Elizabeth had said.
That was true. If I went there, that made me the kind of man who couldn’t keep his nose out of trouble, the kind who broke into people’s garages and looked in their freezers. It would be bad for me if I got caught, and worse for Elizabeth.
She hadn’t made me promise her. I took some comfort in that.
I picked up the bottle from the desk and carried it with me through the outer office to the washroom. I poured it in the sink, watched it spiral down the drain. A token gesture, really. Because I had a fifth of Glenfiddich in the deep drawer of the desk.
When I dialed Alan Beckett’s number, I had my feet up on the windowsill and a glass balanced on my knee.
“I’m planning to commit a crime,” I said to him when he answered.
A grumble of annoyance came over the line. “I’d like to hear about it, I’m sure. But you’ve reached me at a bad time.”
“I thought you might like to come along,” I said. “You could bring your glass cutter. You might be useful.”
“Have you been drinking, Mr. Loogan?”
“Not so you’d notice. The crime I’m planning—it’s a break-in. At Matthew Kenneally’s house.”
The sound of his breathing. Then: “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“I’d like to have you there,” I said. “To see the look on your face when I find what I think I’m going to find.”
“I’m hanging up now. It would be lovely if you didn’t call me again.”
“She asked me to avenge her, Al. You don’t think I can walk away from that, do you?”
“Good night, Mr. Loogan.”
The line went dead and I dropped the receiver into the cradle. I raised the glass and studied the Scotch in the light of the desk lamp. A minute later I got up and went to pour it in the sink. When I got back the phone was ringing. I answered it.
“Did you change your mind, Al?”
After a moment of pure silence on the line, I heard a voice that didn’t belong to Alan Beckett.
“Loogan, it’s me.”
I regretted the waste of the Scotch then. My mouth was very dry. It couldn’t seem to form words.
“I’m right outside,” she said. “Shall I come up?”
I moved to the window and looked down. Scanned the street and found a patch of blue: the roof of a minivan.
There’s one possibility I left off the list of things to do in Ann Arbor on a Saturday night. Sometimes you can see magic.
Down on the street the front passenger door of the minivan opened and Lucy Navarro stepped out.
CHAPTER 49
In the days that followed I slept late. I spent long afternoons watching television, flipping around through old movies. Once, I found In the Heat of the Night and stayed with it all the way through. Rod Steiger playing the police chief, Bill Gillespie. The way he inhabited his uniform, the way he walked when he carried Sidney Poitier’s suitcase at the train station—he made me think of Walter Delacorte.
Around the time I watched the movie, they were burying Delacorte in Sault Sainte Marie. The turnout was small: one ex-wife out of three, a daughter from somewhere out west, a few deputies and their families. I heard about it from Nick Dawtrey, who attended with his mother.
When I tired of television I went for walks. One ambitious evening I got out the lawn mower to cut the grass. Halfway through, Sarah came out and insisted on taking over. I let her. I was supposed to be mending.
During the daytime, I had the house mostly to myself. There was always something in the refrigerator for me to eat. There was nowhere I needed to go, no one tied up in a basement waiting for me to find her. Lucy Navarro had left town. I didn’t know where she’d gone and it was none of my concern.
The Ann Arbor police weren’t pleased with her. She went to see them that Saturday night, after turning up at Gray Streets. She told them that on Wednesday around midnight a former boyfriend had appeared unexpectedly in the parking lot of her hotel. On an impulse she had driven off with him, and they had spent three days together in his apartment in Chicago, reigniting their old romance, cut off from the rest of the world. No television, no Internet. Only on Saturday had she bothered to charge her cell phone and check her messages; only then had she learned that people were looking for her.
She told the police she was sorry. She hoped she hadn’t caused too much trouble.
Some of the elements of the story—the ones that could be readily checked—were true. The putative boyfriend, an architect named Railton, lived alone in an apartment in Chicago; he owned a blue Honda Odyssey minivan. The rest of the story was barely plausible, and Elizabeth didn’t believe a word of it. Owen McC
aleb listened to it silently, waited for Lucy to leave his office, and kicked a wastebasket across the room—the closest he’s ever come, I’m told, to throwing a tantrum.
I knew Lucy was lying.
I’d like to say she told me the truth about what had happened, but when she came up to my office Saturday night she gave me the same version the police would soon hear. I watched her across the desk: her hair in a limp ponytail; dark circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept in three days. Her face seemed thin and drawn, and I thought she had lost weight. She wore blue jeans and a turtleneck with long sleeves.
She tried to inject some life into her story, but it seemed like an act. Her usual energy was gone. When she got to the end, I did nothing to fill the silence. I’d brought the bottle out of the drawer again and filled two glasses; they rested on the desk between us. I sat with one foot propped on the open drawer and watched her reach for her glass.
“I’m sorry, Loogan,” she said. “You must have been worried.”
“Me?” I said, looking up at the shadows on the ceiling. “Why?”
“You must have wondered what happened to me. I feel terrible.”
I shook my head at the shadows. “I figured there must be an explanation, and if I just sat tight, everything would work itself out.” I looked down and saw her holding the glass. “And what do you know—I was right.”
She didn’t seem convinced, but I wasn’t trying to be convincing.
“Well,” she said, “I hope it wasn’t too bad.”
“I hardly noticed. I’ve had my own troubles. I got stabbed, you know.”
She took a sip and returned the glass to the desktop. “I’m still catching up on the news,” she said. “But I heard you got shot.”
“No. Stabbed. With a bayonet.”
“The report I read said you were shot by Anthony Lark.”
“Goes to show you can’t trust what you read. It wasn’t Lark. It was an unidentified assailant. In a clown suit.” I stared at her soberly across the desk. “But you had no way of knowing that. You were in a love nest with an architect.”