by Harry Dolan
If this were a story in Gray Streets.
James Peltier came sluggishly to life and unbent his back and looked at Elizabeth sadly. He gestured at Loogan with the gun. “You see how he is. A liar on top of everything else. He said he would tell me my son’s final words. And I let him talk, and you see what good it did me.”
“Mr. Peltier—” she began.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot him. Just one. I’d like to hear it.”
She searched for an answer that might restrain him.
“It won’t bring Jimmy Wade back,” she said finally.
“That’s true,” he said, “but it’s not a good reason.”
He raised the gun.
Elizabeth bent her knees, braced her shoulder blades against the wall, tried to get her feet under her. At the same time, Loogan shifted his feet and leaned forward in his chair as if he would try to lunge at Peltier. Peltier’s finger began to squeeze the trigger and there was an explosion of sound and a burst of red mist and Peltier’s scalp peeled away from his skull. Great gaping pits opened in his cheek and the loose skin of his neck was torn away in ragged chunks. On the wall behind him, the glass shattered in the picture frames. b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n
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His body gave way at the knees and dropped and slumped against the sofa. The nine-millimeter bounced a little bounce on the carpet. Elizabeth went tumbling sideways and Loogan, free of the chair, dove to the floor and rolled in front of her to shield her with his body. From the hallway a tall figure stepped into the living room. He held the shotgun aloft like a scepter. His hair was a tangled white crown. He wore a trench coat and black leather gloves. Nathan Hideaway. He stood over the body of James Peltier for a moment, a black snubnosed revolver in his fist. He dropped the shotgun onto the sofa. A final shudder passed through Peltier’s body and then it went still. Hideaway lowered the black revolver. He stooped to dig through Peltier’s pocket for his key ring. He collected Elizabeth’s nine-millimeter from the carpet. Both went into a pocket of his trench coat. Only then did he speak. “Detective Waishkey,” he said, “and the remarkable Mr. Loogan.” His tone was jovial. Elizabeth started to say his name, but he silenced her with a gloved finger raised to his lips.
“Not yet,” he said.
He grabbed Loogan by the collar and dragged him away from her. Stood over him with the revolver at the back of his neck and patted him down. He tugged a canister of pepper spray from Loogan’s coat pocket and tossed it casually aside.
He gave Elizabeth the same treatment, then took the butterfly knife from the sofa and slashed through the tape binding her legs. He seized the handcuff chain and hauled her to her knees.
“On your feet now,” he said. “You too, Mr. Loogan.”
Chapter 38
When the 911 call came in, Carter Shan was already on his way to Sean Wrentmore’s condominium.
He had contacted Elizabeth’s cell phone provider and had run a trace on her phone. It was easy enough to do, once he convinced the operator that it was an emergency. Elizabeth’s phone had a GPS chip; there was no need to triangulate the signal. When the operator gave him the location, he recognized it at once. All he needed were the words “Carpenter Road.”
He tore a jagged path across Ann Arbor, weaving in and out of traffic, and was first to arrive at the scene. He saw Elizabeth’s car in the lot, went through Wrentmore’s front door with his gun drawn.
He found Wrentmore’s neighbor there with Peltier’s body. The nurse, Delia Ross. She had placed the 911 call. She had come off a long shift at the hospital and had been drifting on the edge of sleep when she heard the shot. She convinced herself at first it was a car backfiring in the restaurant parking lot nearby. She turned over and pulled the blanket up and drifted some more until it occurred to her that backfiring cars were something she had mostly read about in books; she had rarely encountered one in real life. By the time she rose and went to the window, there was nothing to see, but she got her coat and went out and stood on the sidewalk under the blueblack sky. She thought of Sean Wrentmore’s empty condo, of some mischief that might have happened there. Kids breaking in; teenagers with firecrackers. She walked to Wrentmore’s door and the knob turned under her hand, and even before she passed in, she knew that what she’d heard had not been fi recrackers.
A single lamp bathed the living room in golden light. James Peltier’s b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n
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body was a still figure of bronze and crimson and shadow. She made the call and waited with him. She knew at once he was beyond her help. Shan talked to her in Wrentmore’s kitchen, then asked her to wait outside. He tried to make sense of the scene. He was sure Elizabeth had been there. He had more to go on than the car outside; he had a broken strand of necklace on the living-room floor, a scattering of glass beads. He took note of the overturned chair. The sliced remnants of electrical tape. He found the Taser in Peltier’s pocket, the shotgun on the sofa, the sliding glass door left ajar in the bedroom. He traced the path that Peltier’s killer must have taken. Soon Harvey Mitchum and Ron Wintergreen arrived, and once they’d had a chance to look around, there were other clues: James Peltier’s car beneath the crab-apple tree, with Elizabeth’s cell phone on the fl oor on the passenger side. Loogan’s car abandoned in the restaurant parking lot. When Owen McCaleb drove up a few minutes later, Shan and Mitchum had worked out a theory of what had happened, one that came very close to the truth. They huddled with the chief on Wrentmore’s front lawn and sketched it out. It seemed clear enough that Elizabeth had come here looking for Loogan. She found Peltier instead and got into his car. Peltier caught her by surprise, used the Taser to subdue her, and hustled her into the condo. There was no sign of forced entry, because Loogan was already inside.
“Suppose Loogan cooperated, he let Peltier in, because Peltier was threatening Lizzie,” Shan said. “Once Peltier had them both under control, he could relax a little. He planned to kill Loogan, because Loogan killed his son. But he couldn’t resist taunting him first. He wanted Loogan to know exactly what was coming.”
“But he delayed too long,” Mitchum added. “Long enough for someone else to show up. Someone with a shotgun.”
Owen McCaleb stood with his arms crossed, his head bowed. “And this someone would be Tom Kristoll’s killer,” he said. “And he showed up here because Loogan went to a lot of trouble this afternoon to make himself a target.”
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“Right.”
McCaleb looked up. “So why isn’t Loogan lying dead in there with Peltier? What am I missing?”
“Maybe the killer wants something else from Loogan,” Shan offered.
“Maybe there’s unfinished business between them.”
Shan watched McCaleb shift his weight from one foot to the other, thinking it over.
“All right,” McCaleb said at last. “Loogan talked to four people this afternoon. Laura Kristoll, Bridget Shellcross, Casimir Hifflyn, Nathan Hideaway. I want to know where each of them is right now, and where they’ve been. That’ll do for a start.”
Just then Ron Wintergreen came loping up. He had been canvassing some of Sean Wrentmore’s neighbors. “I don’t know if this is important,”
he began.
“What is it?” the chief asked him.
“I talked to a woman four doors down. Lady in her sixties. Retired. She says she didn’t hear anything or see anything. She’s been watching TV all night.”
McCaleb frowned. Harvey Mitchum made a gesture to hurry his partner along.
Wintergreen went on at his own pace. “She only came outside after we showed up. She mostly wanted to make sure no one trampled her lawn. She’s protective of her landscaping, and her garden.”
Mitchum started to interrupt, but Wintergreen raised a hand to show he had come to his point.
“She had a shovel out by her front steps. She says someone stole it.”
A twig is a poor
implement for picking a handcuff lock. She had hoped it might be otherwise, but twenty minutes of patient experimentation had convinced her.
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Elizabeth relaxed her hands, slowly flexing her fingers. She kept her movements small, and Nathan Hideaway seemed not to notice. He stood a little way off, at the edge of the clearing, in a thick woolen sweater and corduroy slacks. He had shed his trench coat and his gloves. Too warm, perhaps. He had kept his black revolver.
He had pressed the muzzle of the revolver to the back of her neck as he took her out of Sean Wrentmore’s condominium. He made sure Loogan saw the muzzle at her neck, and the sight of it was enough. The threat didn’t have to be put into words.
They walked out in a line, with Loogan in the lead. When they got to Hideaway’s car—a sleek black Lincoln—Hideaway used James Peltier’s key to unlock one of Loogan’s cuffs. The left hand. Loogan would do the driving; Elizabeth and Hideaway would travel in the backseat. The shovel was a last-minute acquisition. It appeared in the spotlight glow of the Lincoln’s headlights, standing upright beside the front door of one of Wrentmore’s neighbors. Hideaway sent Loogan to fetch it. Stowed it in the trunk.
They crept through the parking lot to Carpenter Road, Loogan with his wrist cuffed to the steering wheel. She could see his eyes—dark, colorless—
in the rearview mirror.
When they reached the road he said, “Where to?”
Hideaway said, “Take me to Sean Wrentmore’s body.”
The dark eyes narrowed to slits. “What for?”
Elizabeth felt the muzzle hard against her neck. Hideaway said nothing. Loogan turned north onto Carpenter and rolled along with the traffic.
“I’ll take you,” he said. “But I don’t know why you’d want to go.”
Beside Elizabeth, Hideaway smiled. “Detective Waishkey knows.”
She thought for a moment and realized he was right. She did know.
“Tattoos,” she said.
They stopped at a light, a car full of college kids beside them. Hideaway brought the revolver down from her neck and pressed it against her side. 2 9
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“You talked to Cass Hifflyn today,” she said to him.
“We had quite a visit, yes.”
For Loogan’s benefit she added, “Sean Wrentmore wrote novels for both of them. He tattooed the titles on his skin.”
She watched Loogan nodding in the mirror.
“Valerie Calnero found out about it after Wrentmore died,” Elizabeth said. “She blackmailed them. Blackmailed Tom Kristoll too. Tom decided not to go along. That’s what got him killed.”
The light changed and they started moving again. Hideaway silenced her with a nudge from the revolver. “That’ll do, Detective.”
He leaned toward Loogan and asked, “How far is it?”
It wasn’t far. North for a few miles on Route 23. East on Plymouth Road. A left turn, a gravel drive. A row of parking spaces marked with old railroad ties. A sign at the base of a path leading up into the woods. marshall park. Loogan led them up the hill, then off the path and through the trees. They ended in the clearing. Through a break in the clouds, the light of the full moon cast thin shadows at the edges of the fallen leaves. Loogan was at work now, at the clearing’s center, the blade of the shovel biting into the earth. One circlet of steel around the wrist of his right hand, the other dangling. Hideaway had brought a flashlight from the car; it hung from a branch, secured with a knotted handkerchief. The branch moved with the wind, and an oval of light played itself over the ground at Loogan’s feet. Elizabeth sat on a bed of moss, her back against the trunk of a birch, and considered her situation. Her nine-millimeter was in the pocket of Hideaway’s trench coat, in the backseat of his car at the bottom of the hill. Her legs were free, but her hands remained cuffed behind her. She had failed to open the lock of the cuffs, but she still had the twig between her fingers and she would try again.
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one would have called it in. That would do her little good out here, but the thought of it encouraged her.
The presence of her car would place her at the scene, along with the beads of her necklace in Wrentmore’s living room. Carter Shan would recognize the beads. Elizabeth had broken the necklace intentionally—tucked her chin inside it and then pushed outward until the string snapped. She had picked up two of the beads with her teeth, and deposited them later in Hideaway’s car. She was fairly sure Hideaway hadn’t seen. Those beads, if they were ever found, would tie him to her disappearance. Not much encouragement there. She was already thinking of this as her disappearance. But what else could it be? Her chances of walking away from the clearing seemed slim. No reason to suppose Nathan Hideaway would let her leave, once his errand was done.
She listened to the sound of the shovel slicing the earth. David Loogan had sunk into the excavation to his knees, and little mounds were growing all around him. Nathan Hideaway prowled at the edge of the clearing, the black revolver ever-present in his oversized hand. A meager rain had begun to fall, specks of it passing between the branches of the trees. Loogan turned his face up to it.
Hideaway came to sit on a fallen tree trunk a few feet away from Elizabeth. He kept his eyes on Loogan, held the revolver between his knees. The rain seemed to glitter in his hair.
“A few years ago,” he said, to either one of them, or both, “a tourist went hiking on a glacier in the Austrian Alps. He found a body that had been almost perfectly preserved. Perhaps you heard about it. The body was dressed in leather clothes. It had an axe in its belt and a quiver of arrows. It was a Stone Age hunter who had fallen into a crevasse. He’d been there for more than five thousand years. His skin was intact, and so were the elaborate tattoos that covered his back.”
Hideaway used his sleeve to wipe the rain from the revolver.
“Poor Sean would never last that long,” he said. “Still, his skin might 3 0 0 h a r r y
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take years to decompose. Burying a body delays things—it keeps the animals and the insects away. If Tom had dumped him in a field, the tattoos might be gone by now, picked away by scavengers. But here we are. I wish it hadn’t come to this.”
At the center of the clearing Loogan laughed, shaking his head. A smile passed over Hideaway’s face. “Mr. Loogan finds me amusing,”
he said to Elizabeth. “I can hardly blame him. He imagines I’ve killed three people already—Tom and Adrian Tully and Michael Beccanti—so why should I balk at digging Sean up and slicing away chunks of his hide? That would be the least of my sins.”
Hideaway’s expression turned serious. “But as it happens, I haven’t killed three people. Mr. Loogan would realize that if he gave it some thought. Consider Michael Beccanti. I’m supposed to have killed him because he was looking into Tom’s death. But he and Mr. Loogan were working together, and they were both there in Mr. Loogan’s house that night. Why would I kill one of them and let the other live?”
The simple logic of the question caught Elizabeth off guard. She looked at Hideaway curiously, wondering if he might be telling the truth. He continued: “Mr. Loogan told a tall tale about Michael Beccanti’s murder this afternoon. But he may have been closer to the truth than he realized. He said Sandy Vogel killed Beccanti because they were having an affair and he left her for another woman. Beccanti was stabbed, of course, and some might wonder whether a secretary in her forties would make a good suspect in a crime like that. But Mr. Loogan had an answer for that too. What do we really know about Sandy Vogel? Maybe she used to be a stuntwoman, or a Navy SEAL.”
No reaction from Loogan. Only the steady rhythm of the shovel. Hideaway said, “I happen to know that Sandy has never been anything but a secretary, and I have no reason to believe she ever had an affair with Michael Beccanti. But I know Br
idget Shellcross did.”
That caught Loogan’s attention. He paused for a moment to glare at Hideaway.
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“I saw them together once, at a coffeehouse downtown,” Hideaway said.
“Later I asked her about it, and she told me. Bridget trusts my discretion. Some people mistake age for virtue.”
Elizabeth tipped her head back against the trunk of the birch. “So you’re saying Bridget stabbed Michael Beccanti? Do I have to point out the obvious? Bridget Shellcross was never a stuntwoman or a Navy SEAL either.”
Hideaway smiled, acknowledging the point. “No, Bridget wouldn’t know what to do with a knife. But you’re forgetting the Amazon she lives with. Rachel Kent used to be a martial arts instructor.”
He turned to watch Loogan. “I think she found out about Bridget’s affair with Beccanti by accident. Tom’s death was what triggered it. Bridget took it hard. She and Tom had been involved in their college days. Rachel knew about that, and I think she wondered if there was something more to it—if they had been involved more recently.”
Elizabeth thought suddenly of her last conversation with Bridget Shellcross. She remembered the cool reception the woman had given her. Shellcross had learned about a detective who’d been showing her picture at restaurants, asking questions. She had been offended. Elizabeth had assumed that the detective was one of her colleagues from the Investigations Division. But there was another possibility.
“Rachel Kent hired a private detective,” she said aloud. Hideaway nodded. “I think so. And I think the detective found out that Bridget hadn’t been running around with Tom, but she had been running around with Michael Beccanti.”