Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

“Oh, hell.”

  “He shouldn’t have been able to do that, should he? If he was really a fugitive?”

  The Nossos Tribune had a Web site, but no archives online. Carter Shan called the city desk and got a number for the paper’s crime reporter. She had covered the Malone case when she was just starting out, and after some cajoling—he had interrupted her Saturday-night dinner date—she told him what he needed to know about Darrell Malone.

  Malone had been indicted nine years earlier in the stabbing death of Jimmy Wade Peltier. That much was true. But he had never fled. He had been put on trial for murder in the second degree, and the jury had been unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The reporter claimed to know that they had been split nine to three in favor of acquittal. The prosecutor had declined to retry the case. Darrell Malone was a free man.

  Owen McCaleb received the news stoically. He stood at his office window, looking out into the dark.

  “Is there a Detective Roy Denham in the Nossos Police Department?” he asked Shan.

  “There was. He died year before last. Stroke.”

  “So the Denham we talked to—”

  “James Peltier,” Shan said. “Jimmy Wade’s father. The reporter gave me a description. She interviewed him a few times, before and after Malone’s trial. He wasn’t happy with the outcome.”

  The weight of the situation descended on McCaleb. It showed in his posture—the energy seemed to drain out of him.

  “He showed me an ID card,” McCaleb said faintly.

  “According to the reporter, he owned a printing shop for thirty years,” said Shan. “He could manage a fake ID.”

  “I imagine he has a wife. A tough old broad. Does a good impersonation of a chief of police.”

  “They planned this well. She calls to let you know he’s coming. He appears right on cue. The faxed case file seals it. What is there to doubt? The file was probably more or less authentic. The reporter told me the real Denham befriended James Peltier. It wouldn’t be the first time a detective felt sorry for a grieving father. Peltier could have asked for a copy of the file and held on to it. It would only require a few alterations, to make it look like Malone had skipped out before his trial. Probably the wife handled that, after Peltier told her what he needed.”

  “What led them to Loogan in the first place?” asked McCaleb. “How did they know he was here?”

  “I haven’t checked on that yet, but it probably happened just about the way Denham—Peltier—described. Loogan goes shopping for a shovel. The cashier recognizes him, because she went to school with him. She mentions him to her sister—who, instead of passing it along to the police, passes it along to the Peltiers.”

  McCaleb gathered himself and turned away from the window. “All right,” he said. “I’ll send a patrol car around to James Peltier’s hotel. See if we can pick him up. You should call Elizabeth in. She’ll want to hear about this.”

  Shan took out his cell phone and dialed Elizabeth’s number. His call cycled through to her voice mail, and he began to feel uneasy as he remembered that Alice too had tried to reach her earlier and had gotten no answer. He left a message and then tried Elizabeth’s home number. His conversation with Sarah did nothing to reassure him.

  He turned to McCaleb. “Lizzie’s not answering her phone. She called her daughter around seven-fifteen, said she had errands to run. No word from her since.”

  McCaleb frowned. They both knew that Elizabeth kept her phone close. It wasn’t like her to be out of touch.

  “Maybe nothing’s wrong,” McCaleb said, “but I’m not willing to make that assumption. Not tonight. We need to find her. I want you to work with Harvey Mitchum on that. I’ll call him and tell him to pull everyone off the Gray Streets stakeout.”

  “Right.”

  McCaleb sank into the chair behind his desk. “Maybe her phone isn’t working,” he said wistfully. “Maybe she really is running errands. Do you think she’s running errands?”

  Shan was already on his way out. Without breaking stride he said, “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Chapter 37

  ELIZABETH WAISHKEY FELT TREMORS PASS THROUGH HER. THE MUSCLES of her back twitched as she leaned against the wall of Sean Wrentmore’s living room. Her wrists tingled within the circles of handcuffs. Her legs, extended straight along the carpeted floor and bound at the ankles with electrical tape, jerked and trembled with minor aftershocks.

  A single lamp lit the room, a table lamp with a shade like parchment. It gave off a golden light and the light seemed to flicker, but after a time Elizabeth realized it was steady. The flickering was in her mind.

  There were things she remembered. A glimpse of black and yellow in Roy Denham’s hand. The cry that escaped her when she felt the current. Her fists clenching uselessly and Denham tugging her pistol from her holster.

  Denham’s voice. “My dear lady, forgive me.”

  Then her feet on the ground. Knees wobbly. Tightness in her arms. The cuffs were on by then. Her own cuffs, from the leather case at her belt. A drunken march across the parking lot with Denham at her back, his fingers like talons in the flesh of her arm.

  The porch light shining suddenly over the door of Wrentmore’s condo. David Loogan in the doorway, a shotgun leveled, wavering.

  Denham holding the muzzle of her pistol to her temple. Cool steel. Loogan bending slowly to lay the shotgun on the step, retreating into the house with his palms open, fingers spread wide.

  “Take it easy, Mr. Peltier,” he said.

  She would have slapped her forehead then, if her mind had been less addled, if her hands had been free. Instead, the realization sank in slowly, as Peltier’s fingers dug into her biceps. As he guided her up the steps.

  You’re awfully hard on yourself, she remembered him saying. You can’t think of everything.

  Passing through the doorway, she heard his voice again, a whisper at her ear: “Keep quiet and do what I say. You’re going to survive this.”

  Now, in the flickering golden light, she saw David Loogan in the center of the room, in a straight-back chair from Wrentmore’s kitchen. He had shaved his head. She hadn’t noticed it before.

  His hands were behind his back—Peltier had produced a second set of cuffs.

  Loogan regarded her calmly. She looked at his mouth. She had always thought he had an interesting mouth. His lips were moving. “Elizabeth,” he said.

  James Peltier—the man who called himself Roy Denham—extended his arm casually. The Taser, black and yellow, touched Loogan’s chest and made a spark. Loogan grimaced and his body stiffened, but only for a moment.

  “Shut up,” Peltier snapped, and returned the Taser to the pocket of his jacket.

  He got his cigarettes out and fired one up. Blew smoke at Sean Wrentmore’s ceiling. Another drag and he switched the cigarette to his other hand, reached into a trouser pocket, and came out with Elizabeth’s nine-millimeter.

  “Mr. Peltier,” she said, “you don’t want to do this.” Her voice sounded odd, as if it were flickering like the light.

  Peltier didn’t look at her. “I asked you to keep quiet.”

  “If you really wanted to,” she said, “you would have done it by now. And you would have brought a gun of your own.”

  Peltier still didn’t take his eyes off Loogan, but he took the cigarette from his lips and ground it into the carpet with his shoe. He tucked the nine-millimeter into his waistband and rooted in an inside pocket of his jacket. When he drew his hand out he held a metal object six inches long. A snap of his wrist and the thing unfolded as if by magic—a butterfly knife with a polished blade like a mirror.

  He held it up for Elizabeth to see, but his eyes remained on Loogan. “He killed my son with a knife like this, and he ought to die the same way. That would be justice. But I guess I don’t have the stomach for it.” He tossed the knife onto the sofa behind him.

  “It’ll have to be a gun,” he said.

  His hand went to the grip of the n
ine-millimeter, but he didn’t draw it out. Elizabeth took that as a positive sign. She might be able to talk him down. She had precious few other options. She could yell at the top of her lungs and hope someone heard. But if Peltier panicked, that might get her shot—no matter what assurance he had given her about surviving.

  She scanned the room and didn’t see Loogan’s shotgun. Peltier might have left it outside on the steps. Someone might see it and get suspicious and call the police. Or they might not. If the porch light was off—and Elizabeth thought it was—the shotgun might go unnoticed. And the blinds were all closed now. No one would be able to see in.

  She would try to reason with him, stall him. It was the best she could do.

  “Mr. Peltier.”

  He took a step back from Loogan and turned to look at her.

  “Think about what you’re doing,” she said.

  David Loogan chuckled then. An unexpected sound.

  “Oh, he’s thought about it,” Loogan said. “He’s been thinking about it for years. He’s been working up the nerve.”

  Peltier stood impassively. The golden light cast half his face into shadow.

  “He used to throw rocks through my windows,” Loogan said. “Used to call me in the middle of the night. Always from a public phone, always un-traceable. And he never said a word. The police could do nothing about it. After a while, I moved away. I changed my name. I’m almost grateful to him for that. I never much liked being Darrell Malone.”

  Elizabeth studied the easy set of Loogan’s shoulders. He looked relaxed for a man with his hands cuffed behind his back. She allowed herself to hope that he might have a plan. He was a juggler. Dexterous. Perhaps he had other skills. Perhaps, somehow, he was picking the locks of the handcuffs even now.

  He was still talking: “Mr. Peltier and I have been out of touch for six years. I thought maybe he had mellowed. He’d come to grips with what happened. But I guess not. Here he is, primed to shoot me. That’s a far cry from prank phone calls. But I think I understand. You got old, Jim. Time’s running out. If you don’t do it now, you might never do it.”

  “If I were you, I’d keep still,” Peltier said in his gruff smoker’s voice. “I’d think about the state of my soul. I’d try to get myself right with God.”

  “I feel like talking, Jim. When are we going to have a chance to talk again?”

  “I’ve heard enough of you talking. I sat through two days of it at the trial.” Peltier drew the gun from his waistband and glanced at Elizabeth. “He testified at his trial. He told them exactly what he did to my son. He didn’t even try to deny it. And they let him go anyway.”

  “I’d like to hear about it, Mr. Peltier,” she said calmly. “Why don’t you sit, and we’ll talk about it?”

  His expression showed his disappointment. “That’s not going to work. You’re not going to talk me out of it. And I don’t care to listen to him.”

  “You and I can talk,” she said. “I’d like to hear what you have to say.”

  “Talking won’t do any good.”

  Loogan broke in. “You heard him, Elizabeth. He doesn’t want to talk. And he doesn’t want to listen. I killed his son. Jimmy Wade. I was there in his last moments. I heard his last words. But Jim here’s not interested.”

  Peltier pointed the gun at him accusingly. “That’s a lie. Jimmy didn’t say any last words.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “You’re trying to buy yourself time. You never said anything about last words at the trial.”

  “It’s something I kept quiet about at the trial. Because what he said wouldn’t have helped my case.”

  Peltier aimed the gun at Loogan’s heart. “What did he say?”

  “That’s not how it’s going to work,” said Loogan. “I’ll tell the story my own way, from the beginning.”

  “Tell me now, or I’ll shoot you.”

  Loogan sat very still and said in a low voice, “You’ll shoot me anyway. I know I’m going to die. But so are you, Jim. Both of us are dying men. Do you want to die without hearing your son’s last words?”

  The nine-millimeter held steady. Peltier’s face was impossible to read.

  “What harm can it do to hear him out?” Elizabeth said. “You’re in control here. You can show some mercy.”

  “He doesn’t deserve mercy.”

  “Justice then,” she said. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You’re not a killer. You’re an executioner. He deserves to die.”

  “That’s right. He does.”

  “But even a condemned man has the right to make a statement. That’s the law.”

  Without looking at her Peltier said, “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to save him. He’s not worth saving.” The gun stayed steady, then fell a fraction of an inch, then dropped gradually to Peltier’s side. “You can listen to him if you like. It won’t change anything. When he’s done, I’m going to shoot him. You can arrest me after. I don’t really care what happens to me, so long as he’s dead.”

  In the next moments, as Loogan began to tell his story, Elizabeth knew for certain that there was no grand plan. He didn’t have the skill to pick a handcuff lock, and he had nothing to pick it with anyway. He could only play for time, try to draw out the last minutes of his life.

  “It happened in the summer,” he said. “Nine years ago. June twenty-first. I went out that night with Charlotte Rittenour. Charlotte had a beautiful face. People have done studies about what makes faces beautiful. It’s mostly symmetry and proportion. High cheekbones and wide-set eyes and just the right distance between the mouth and the bottom of the chin. Charlotte’s face was perfect. That’s not opinion. I think it could be proven mathematically.”

  James Peltier stood back by the sofa, well out of reach of either Loogan or Elizabeth. He held the gun down by his side, but his finger rested on the trigger.

  There were frames behind him on the wall—rectangles of glass. Sean Wrentmore’s black-and-white photographs. Grim, sober, defiant faces.

  “Charlotte met me for dinner at an Italian restaurant,” Loogan said. “It was our first date. The waitress put a basket of rolls on the table and when Charlotte and I threatened to run out of conversation I picked out three and started juggling them. My one trick. It went over well, and later on the waitress brought three little bottles of Perrier and I did it again. I made kind of a stir. Darrell Malone, entertainer. Charlotte seemed amused.

  “We went to a movie after, but I couldn’t tell you the plot. What I remember is sitting close to her in the dark and waiting for something bright to come on the screen so I could turn and look at her face.

  “It was late when the movie let out. I walked her to her car—we were parked in the same garage. But when we got there she wanted to go to the top and look at the stars. We got up there and she pointed out a radio tower in the distance. It wasn’t far from the house where she lived as a kid. She talked about her family then, and growing up, and I talked a little about my work. I was a structural engineer. I had consulted on the construction of the parking garage we were standing on. She was interested in that, miraculously, and I spent a few minutes explaining to her what kept the garage from collapsing beneath our feet.

  “I’m not sure how that led to kissing. It was a fine night, and clear, and we were alone in a high place under the stars. We got carried away, I guess. Lost track of our surroundings. And that’s the way Jimmy Wade Peltier found us.”

  Loogan turned suddenly toward Elizabeth. “I don’t know what Jim told you about his son—”

  “I told her what she needed to know.”

  “He wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout—”

  “You’re on thin ice,” Peltier said, tapping the barrel of the gun against his side. “You better get along to the end. You don’t have much time left.”

  Loogan took a long breath before resuming. “He’d been raising hell, before he ever got to us. Jimmy Wade. The police went back and retraced his movements afterward. He clocked in
and out of five bars that night. Got into a scuffle with a college student, chipped the kid’s tooth. Tried to pick up at least two waitresses, and struck out with both. By midnight, when he broke in on us at the top of the parking garage, he was drunk, and high on crystal meth.”

  “I told her that,” Peltier snapped. “I never pretended Jimmy was perfect.”

  “No, I think you’d have to say he was slightly imperfect. Also, he was stranded. He had hitched a ride into town with a friend of a friend, who had promptly abandoned him. So when he found Charlotte and me, he was looking for a car.

  “There happened to be a single car on the top level of the parking garage. It didn’t belong to either one of us, but we were standing near it so Jimmy made an assumption. The first words out of his mouth were a demand: He wanted our keys. He startled us out of the clinch we were in, and as soon as I got a look at him I didn’t like him. I took a step forward to get between him and Charlotte.

  “He was thin and pallid and his shirt had a tear from the fight he’d been in. His hand came out of his pocket and there was a flash and a twist of metal and suddenly he was holding a knife.

  “ ‘Car keys,’ he said again. ‘Right now.’

  “I made the mistake of trying to reason with him. ‘That’s not our car,’ I said.

  “ ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ he said. ‘Gimme the keys.’

  “Charlotte was more sensible. She got her key ring out of her handbag and stepped around me. ‘The man wants keys,’ she said. ‘Give him keys.’

  “He didn’t take the keys. He grabbed her wrist and yanked her toward him.

  “ ‘Smart girl,’ he said to her. ‘Too smart for this bozo you’re with. You should take a ride with me.’ ”

  Loogan had been talking with his eyes held shut, as if to remember better. Now he opened them. “Several things happened then. She tried to pull away, but he kept his grip. Without thinking, I reached for his right hand, the one that held the knife. I felt a sting and drew my arm back. Charlotte stomped a heel hard on his foot and broke away from him and took off running across the parking deck. He let out a yell and chased after her. I froze for a second. There was a six-inch slash along my forearm. It wasn’t deep and didn’t even hurt that much, but as I looked at it blood started to well up along the length of it.