Retribution (#3)

by M. M. Mayle

  Anthony nods warily.

  “It’s okay to want to know, sweetie. You’re not out of line to ask and the answer is yes. It’s time you had your own room, new baby or not, so we will go forward with the plan. And we’ll furnish it the way you want—within reason, of course—and you’ll get to pick out which room, as long as it’s not in the north wing. That’s too far away from Dad and me.”

  “Aw, no fair.”

  “Very fair, Anthony. When you’re old enough to move to the north wing you’ll be old enough to leave home.”

  “But I’m old enough nowwwww,” Anthony whines, putting some real howl into it. “I’m old enough to be way far away from you and Dad, I’m even old enough to live in-in-in the attic,” he sputters. “That’s it! I could live in the attic, actually, and Simon could never follow me because I know secret ways of—”

  “Not going to happen, Anthony, so you may as well get used to being stuck with us here in the main part of the house.” Laurel smiles and gathers up the flowers scattered between them on the sofa. “You know what? I’m rather glad to hear your grousing. It’s the first sure sign we’re getting back to normal.”

  Anthony must agree because the grousing leads to a spate of wide-ranging questions, standard operating procedure for as long as she’s known the boy.

  She’s called on to assure him that work will indeed resume on the oasthouse conversion any day now, and that his grandmother will eventually move there, and yes, Gran probably will invite him to sleep there on special occasions.

  “You know what else, Anthony? That gives me an idea. Maybe we could borrow a workman or two from the oast project to customize your new room. What would you think of that?”

  He shrugs as expected. What eight-year-old has the faintest interest in practicality and economy? Besides, he’s already moved on to another set of questions, these concerning overheard talk of buying property in London, New York, and perhaps at a resort area somewhere in Europe. He deflates, but only slightly, when she dismisses those possibilities as what they are—just talk.

  Next he seeks and receives a guarantee that she intends to follow through with the job of organizing and editing the Jeremiah Barely-There stories into a book with him as chief consultant. He further disarms her with a series of innocent-seeming questions about school, his schoolmates, and the massive amount of homework they’re made to suffer, so she’s ill-prepared for the segue to the not-so-innocent questions when they come.

  She somehow manages to answer without gagging: “Yes, Anthony, I was there when Mr. Sebastian was murdered, and yes, I did see him die—with my very own eyes, as you put it. I was not there, however, when his body was removed from the garage, but you can be very sure—dead sure, as you would say—that his head did not fall off and roll around on the ground.”

  She somehow manages to answer his next question without gasping or laughing. “No, sweetheart, my father is not going to turn into a zombie because he hasn’t been buried in the ground yet. There’s no such thing as zombies—you know that—and even if they did exist, my father would be the least likely candidate.”

  Watching his zest for zombies wither away to nothing, she cannot fail to comprehend the extent to which the child has had to rely on partial information augmented by an overactive imagination and the always sensationalized input of his school friends. She faults herself above all others; if she had to put an approximate date on it she’d say she hasn’t availed herself to one of his questioning sessions since before the August wedding—a full month ago—and certainly not since the double tragedy in the States.

  Laurel leans over and kisses him on the cheek, draws him to her. “I missed you, darling. I missed you while I was away,” she says for all the times she was away while he was within arm’s reach.

  He tolerates her embrace longer than expected, leading her to believe the worst is over. But once he regains his independence by widening the space between them, he zeroes in on the latest misfortune, questions if it hurt and if she was scared when it happened—when the unfinished baby escaped out of her, is the startlingly original way he puts it.

  “It hurt . . . a little,” she admits, but she’s not about to tell him it hurt more in her heart than anywhere else. The child doesn’t need that kind of information—no one does—and he doesn’t need to know how truly scared she was when the bleeding just wouldn’t stop.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking if you were scared?” She deflects the question. “Weren’t you scared when Gran sent you to get Dad from the studio in the middle of the night?”

  “No, I’m not scared of the dark—that’s why I’m old enough to have a room in the north wing—and besides, I had Toby with me.”

  “I see,” she says. Nice try, she thinks.

  “Did you cry when the little baby died?” he says, not to be put off again.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Did Dad cry?”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t want me to see how bad he felt.”

  “Are you gonna to get divorced now because he was out in the bloody studio instead of where he was supposed to be and wouldn’t answer the phone?”

  “Anthony!” She twists to face him. “You know better than that. You shouldn’t have to be told again that your father and I can have a disagreement—a row, even—and it doesn’t mean we’ve stopped loving each other. I thought that was made clear when you raised similar worries after the tour—when you thought Dad and I might not go through with the wedding because of the row we had in Paris . . . Well, we went through with the wedding, didn’t we? And I am still here after what happened the other night, aren’t I? . . . Aren’t I?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Don’t hang your head. Look at me. I want you looking at me when I tell you what a wonderful man your father is . . . how incredibly loving and forgiving and understanding he is. No one, Anthony—not even my mother and father—has ever been as unselfishly supportive of me as he has. No one has ever appreciated me—and shown it—as much as he does. Do you seriously think I’d walk away from that? Do you?”

  “No.” He swallows hard.

  “Thank you. Now go call downstairs for a proper tea with plenty of little cakes. And tell them to bring cookies.”

  “Biscuits.”

  “Whatever.”

  A surfeit of sweets does nothing to relieve the depletion felt after the harrowing give-and-take with Anthony, but the biscuit overdose does make her sleepy. She won’t have any trouble dozing, or even slipping into a deep slumber.

  She’s stretched out and covered with a light shawl when she awakens. Curtains are drawn over all but the oriel window, casting the room in semidarkness, so she doesn’t see Colin right away.

  “There you are,” he says when she begins to stir. “I relieved the lad a bit ago.”

  She makes space for him on the sofa and fairly erupts with an account of the time spent with Anthony. She talks almost as fast as Amanda, hardly pausing for breath, consciously holding off the moment when he’ll have to tell her what brought Emmet to Terra Firma.

  “Anthony was in rare form,” she says, “approaching brutal, but I had it coming. I haven’t been much of a mother to him these past few weeks. I haven’t taken the time to explain, to separate gossip from fact and discount the rumors he hears from those sensation-seeking schoolmates of his—the ghoulish little shits.” She prattles on, berating both herself and the outside influences she should have curtailed. Colin indulges her obvious stalling tactic, smoothes her hair back from her face, caresses her shoulder, shows only a suggestion of impatience with a mild frown now and then.

  “At the start, his whole thrust was about how brave he is and how he’s old enough for a room far removed from ours,” she continues unabated. “Funny thing, though, with all his talk about not being scared of anything he never once mentioned the . . . the unmentionable
and he has to have heard of Jakeway, if not from you, then from his morbid friends. And speaking of morbid, wait until you hear this.” Her voice drops to a conspiratorial tone, “He wanted to know if my father will turn into a zombie because he hasn’t been buried yet and I could see he was really hoping that might be true. But I think his greatest disappointment came when I had to tell him David’s head did not fall off and roll around on the ground when the body was removed from the crime scene.”

  “Then he’s gonna be clear over the moon when he finds out what Emmet came to tell me—that Aurora’s head—amongst other things—has turned up inside a rented storage unit in New Jersey,” Colin says.

  — TWENTY-FOUR —

  Early evening, September 15, 1987

  Nate lets himself into their Dorchester hotel suite much later than expected. He’s unsure how he’ll be greeted or even if he will be greeted. But when he penetrates the early evening gloom and turns on a few lights, Amanda is revealed, curled on the settee in the window alcove much the way she was discovered two days ago, following his unnerving breakfast with Brownell Yates and her disturbing news from Terra Firma.

  What are the odds her afternoon was as challenging as his? Zip, he decides as he loosens his tie and tugs open his shirt collar. What could she have experienced during her previewing of residential real estate that would in any way rival what he’s just been through? Nothing, he concludes. Absofucking-lutely nothing. Not unless she also heard from Detective Grillo.

  “So,” she says, giving him time to pour a stiff vodka from the drinks trolley. “Are you just going to keep me hanging?” She looks up at him, curiosity overriding the annoyance she’s entitled to feel at his tardiness and his leaving her in the virtual dark until now.

  “How did it go with Emmet?” she says. “I’ve been a nervous wreck about that ever since Laurel gave the go-ahead from her hospital bed yesterday and judging by the lateness of the hour and the way you look right now, I’ll guess he took a pretty dim view of withheld information.”

  “I never made it to Emmet’s office.” He moves an armchair closer to the low table between them and drops into it.

  “Oh?” She uncurls to a sitting position.

  “On my way, I stopped by the King’s Road office and a call from Grillo caught me there.”

  “And?”

  “Grillo’s call took precedence over all else.”

  “What happened?” Her eyes predictably widen. “Did they catch Jakeway?”

  “No, not yet, but it looks like they’ve got a bead on him.”

  “Tell me for heaven’s sake!”

  “It all started yesterday morning, their time, when Grillo decided to follow a shaky lead the Bureau had given low priority. I think he said it came in on the tip line they set up a couple weeks ago.”

  Nate fishes a sheaf of notes from an inside pocket, shuffles through them. “Yeah, it was an anonymous tip from a motel worker in Union, New Jersey. Turns out that Jakeway works at this motel or did work there because nobody’s seen him for a while. Grillo said the motel management was persuaded to cooperate and volunteered that Jakeway lived at the motel under an arrangement that provided housing and substandard wages with no questions asked.”

  “Meaning no social security paid, no employment records of any kind, no paper trail.”

  “Right. But, interestingly enough, because he once was a registered guest at this motel, they had his particulars—a home address of Bimmerman, Michigan and a license plate number jibing with the information Mrs. Floss provided. And both the desk clerk and the maintenance supervisor matched the Jakeway name to the photo Grillo showed them.”

  “Wow!”

  “And that’s not all. In the room Jakeway occupied, they found a beat-up bike that’s being viewed as the probable means of getaway following the attack on David and Laurel. Grillo said he also recovered a cheap coffeemaker and an assortment of personal items—toiletries, mostly—and all of it’s headed with the bike for forensic testing. No clothing was found, though, and that’s what led Grillo to believe Jakeway had moved on.”

  He hesitates for a moment, giving Amanda time to absorb the initial revelations. “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” he continues, “ahead of Grillo’s account, most of which I recorded with his permission once the import sank in. Okay, then . . . At this juncture Grillo was still working alone, independent of the Bureau and his Glen Abbey colleagues when he mass-interviewed all the motel employees working the day shift—mass-interviewed is his term—and elicited spontaneous testimonies—again, Grillo’s terminology. These testimonies, however he got them, commented on Jakeway’s behavior patterns and the consensus was that Jakeway either had a home away from his home there at the motel or maintained a repository somewhere because he always seemed to be moving small loads to and from the motel.”

  “On a bike?”

  “Yeah, on a bike.” Nate shuffles the notes again. “Anyway . . . Hold on a sec.” He gets up to pour another vodka, thinks to offer her something this time. She declines and motions for him to continue. “I’m quoting Grillo almost verbatim now,” Nate advises when he’s resettled in his chair. “He said he radioed for help at this point and instigated an immediate search of every rental storage facility within a fifteen-mile radius of the motel—a reasonable bike ride from the motel was the criteria used—and hit pay dirt within an hour of mounting the search.

  “And to hear Grillo tell it, the rest was easy. Jakeway had used his real name when renting a storage unit only a mile or two from the motel, and his idea of jacked-up security—the bulletproof padlock he’d added to the electronic locking system of the garage-size unit—was only an obstruction until the Feds arrived with a hydraulic bolt cutter.”

  Amanda is beyond speechless; she’s transfixed, caught someplace between horror and astonishment when he finishes reading from the list of items Grillo and the FBI recovered from Hoople Jakeway’s depository. He gives her another moment before resuming the story.

  “Nearly every damn thing I postulated has been realized,” he says. “The links from Cliff Grant to Gibby Lester to Sid Kaplan to Rayce Vaughn to old Mr. Chandler and to David . . . they’re all firmly established now. The porno connection . . . the cocaine connection . . . the wads of money . . . the fucking headache powder connection . . . the evidence was all there. And the vehicle . . .” He consults his notes. “The truck they found in the unit is a 1985 El Camino Conquista that’s a perfect match for Mrs. Floss’s description. The magnetic sign they found inside it read ‘Superior Maintenance,’ just as she said. In the journal they came across, Jakeway’s entries support any number of the claims and suppositions we’ve made. And there is no doubt whatsoever that the severed human head they discovered in a five-gallon can of embalming fluid is Aurora’s, but they’re checking dental records to be sure.”

  Amanda reaches for what’s left of his drink and finishes it in one gulp. Her eyes are now watering from vodka burn as well as undiluted shock. She clears her throat, blinks several times, and responds in a much steadier voice than he would have thought possible.

  “Does Colin know?” she says.

  “Yes. I filled Emmet in as soon as I could and sent him to Kent with a faxed transcription of Grillo’s recorded statement. Laurel will be told at Colin’s discretion.”

  “What does this mean? You said Grillo believes Jakeway’s moved on. Does he mean Jakeway’s moved over here?”

  “I need to clarify that,” he says. “At first Grillo thought Jakeway had pulled up stakes altogether—maybe even returned to Michigan—because the things left behind in the motel room supported that belief. The bike was beyond repair, the cheap coffeemaker was pretty much shot, the toiletries more than half used-up. Those items were obviously abandoned. But Grillo said that when he viewed the contents of the storage unit, he backed down on that belief. He argued—as did the FBI profiler on the scene—that Aurora’s severed head served as a powerful motivator to keeping Jakeway’s obsession alive, that Jakeway wo
uld be reluctant to distance himself from it.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Do you really have to ask? Do you really think all that shit yesterday with the fabricated story about the London clinic and the decoy ambulance and the standins for Laurel and Colin was staged with the sole purpose of throwing the media off?”

  “No, I never really thought that was the sole purpose, but I never really thought I’d have to worry about the Jakeway creep slipping past customs and immigration. Those agencies have his picture and description, don’t they?”

  “According to Grillo, they were given that information the same day Laurel ID’d Jakeway and that’s a month ago. But that’s no guarantee. And there’s no guarantee Jakeway won’t leave his goddammed motivator long enough to do some damage over here. None at all, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t give a shit what the profilers say. Or Grillo, for that matter.”

  “Is that something Emmet was authorized to pass on to Colin?”

  “No, I’ll do that myself when I make a trip out to Kent to review the security protocols in person.”

  “Do you feel like you’re right back where you started?”

  “A little, with the difference that I now have absolute vindication. Jesus, Amanda, do you realize that in a very short span of time I’ve gone from wondering if I hallucinated an intact corpse to learning that the head in question has been soaking in a bucket of embalming fluid all along? And it wasn’t that long ago that I would have been considered a crackpot by the same authorities who were competing for my opinion today. I don’t think five minutes went by when I wasn’t fielding a call from one police agency or another. That went on for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “You couldn’t be a crackpot if you wanted to. And it’s about time your opinion was sought. You have, after all, known about Jakeway longer than anyone else—well, maybe not Jakeway precisely, but you knew of the threat.”

  “Yours is not an unbiased opinion.” He produces a weak smile, leans across the table and grasps her nearest hand, interlaces his fingers with hers in the manner initiated in a Paris taxicab and since become something of a standing joke between them that more often than not leads to full-body action.