“Sherry?”
“I’ve seen him before,” Sherry whispered huskily. “He was in the store where Susan Paxton was killed. It was the second time she’d seen him that day.”
“The same man in the sketch you gave to Payne?”
Sherry shook her head. “No, this was an older man; he was picking up a stack of sweaters and handing them to Susan. I thought he was a customer. I picked the younger one because I saw a gun in his hand. I saw him last.”
O’Shaughnessy closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “Describe this man.”
“Fifty, sixty, short gray hair, long white scar on his neck—you wouldn’t miss the scar.”
“I know who it is,” O’Shaughnessy said quietly. She took Sherry’s arm. “We’ve got to get back.”
O’Shaughnessy’s mind was racing. It was the man who’d stuck his head in her car in the sanitation yard parking lot the night she searched the meat wagon. She had been right about the truck all along, but wrong about Lyons. It hadn’t been Sandy Lyons driving the truck. It had been the man with the scar, one of the other drivers. And she’d missed it!
28
SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 10:45 P.M.
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
“Randall, this is Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy. Anyone talked to McGuire? I can’t get him on the phone,” she said into her cell.
She had to reach McGuire and let him know he was showing the sketch of the wrong man.
Streets had begun to flood; fallen tree limbs and branches appeared and disappeared in her headlights.
“Haven’t heard from him, Lieu, but a Trooper McCallis keeps calling for you from Cape May barracks. Something about a missing person.” Randall rummaged around his desktop for a sticky note. “Marcia Schmidt ring a bell?”
O’Shaughnessy sighed. She didn’t have time for this now. “Yeah, she was a friend of the lady who was trying to make a report yesterday to Celia Davis. This friend was supposed to visit from the other side of the state and never showed. We checked the tags and got nothing. She thought the friend might have been delayed by an abusive husband.”
“Well, the trooper’s got her car impounded, and he spoke with the owner in Glassboro, New Jersey. The driver’s a critical missing person as of two hours ago.”
Her heart stopped. “They have her car?”
“They found it on the parkway yesterday. He acted like you might know what he was talking about.”
“Randall, find McGuire. I’ll call you right back.” She hung up the phone and called Youth Division.
“Is Davis there?”
She was told the officer was on leave and got her home number. A minute later she had the officer on the phone. “Celia, sorry to wake you. Do you remember the woman who reported her friend missing yesterday? Connie something?”
“Connie Riker. Yeah, sure, Lieu. What’s up?” She yawned.
“What happened when you ran her car through NCIC?”
“Nothing. It came back clean. I gave her the social service numbers like you asked and went on leave. What’s up?”
O’Shaughnessy sighed. “I’ll call you later.” She hung up the phone.
Was everything she touched going to turn to shit? She dialed the operator. “Give me the Cape May State Police Barracks.” When she got through, after identifying herself she said, “Trooper McCallis, please.”
“Just a minute,” the clerk told her.
He was on the phone a minute later.
“Trooper, this is Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy, Wildwood. Detective Randall said you called about Marcia Schmidt.”
It turned out that Riker’s Ford Escort had first been seen on the Garden State Parkway early Friday morning by a New Jersey state trooper. When it was still not moved by noon, they towed it off to their impound lot. That’s when it was first entered into their records, which was why NCIC wouldn’t have had the tags when Connie Riker called to check on it the night before, the night that Marcia Schmidt was supposed to have arrived in Wildwood. Celia Davis couldn’t have found anything on it the following morning, either. It simply hadn’t gone in the system until noon.
McCallis said he had asked a trooper to go by the Rikers’ home in Glassboro—on the other end of the state—yesterday to leave a message for the owner that her car had been impounded at the Cape May State Police Barracks, the closest barracks to the city of Wildwood. When Connie and her mother returned that afternoon from Wildwood, they found the message to call Trooper McCallis’s number, but no car. Marcia Schmidt wasn’t at her home, either.
“She said she talked to you.”
There really was a missing woman.
O’Shaughnessy felt a chill come over her. Thursday night she had searched the truck in the highway shed. It had to be Marcia Schmidt’s hair and blood she’d found in the meat wagon!
She turned the wheel sharply and took an eastbound street toward Atlantic. “Trooper McCallis, can you get the barracks in Glassboro to send someone out to the Schmidt residence right away? I need hair exemplars and fast.”
O’Shaughnessy wheeled into the Driftwood garage off Atlantic.
“Sherry,” she said as she jumped out and came around to the passenger door, “I’ve got to get you back in the condo and find Mac.”
Within the hour, two state police officers were sent to collect combs and hairbrushes from the Schmidt house in Glassboro. When they arrived, Nicky and his older brother were driving a John Deere front-end loader onto the back of a spotlit flatbed with Delaware tags. The tractor looked like one on a flyer the troopers had on their clipboards; its serial numbers matched those of a machine stolen from a dairy farm in nearby Tylertown. The troopers placed the Schmidt brothers and the driver of the flatbed under arrest and got into the house long enough to remove hairbrushes from both bathrooms.
29
SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 10:00 P.M.
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
Sykes recalled an FBI agent commenting during the sniper shootings in D.C. that law enforcement solved only 47 percent of all murders in the United States each year. That meant one had a better than even chance to kill someone, even a cop, and get away with it.
Sykes knew, too, that if one could permanently dispose of the bodies, he could split the odds even further. No bodies, no evidence. And that was a hard case to prosecute. They’d be tripping over themselves for months trying to figure out what happened. And even if they suspected him, those months meant all the time in the world. At least all the time in his world. He was going to make the lieutenant go away—permanently.
The storm had unexpectedly turned inland. Garbage flew through the streets; winds turned unfettered furniture into dangerous missiles. City workers and emergency personnel had been held over into the midnight shift; Sykes, who’d reported back to work, was supposed to use the meat wagon to collect debris from the flooding roads along Cottage Town. He piled the back of the truck high with picket fencing, bicycles, and Big Wheels, but not nearly enough to fill it. Only enough sticking out of the back to appear as if he had.
Thank God O’Shaughnessy knew the man Sherry had seen in the vision in the morgue; she even knew where he worked.
Sherry took a drink from the bottle of wine she’d opened when she returned to the condo, set the bottle on the vanity top, and hung her wet clothes on the bathroom door. She was already tipsy from the night’s drinking, but the boardwalk and the morgue had unnerved her. She’d been wrong about the man in Philadelphia. She’d given Payne the wrong suspect to go after.
By tomorrow, though, O’Shaughnessy would have the man arrested and Payne would have his suspect in the Susan Paxton murder. So, yes, she had made a mistake, but it had turned out all right in the end. She wasn’t infallible. She was human just like everyone else and would make more mistakes before it was all over.
She raised the bottle and drank some more. Somehow, the feeling was liberating. She had always taken life so seriously, always lived in fear she might do or say something wrong. Now, tonight, she
thought, putting the bottle down unsteadily, she would do something selfish for once in her life.
She would be honest with John.
She stepped into the hot shower, thinking of what she might say when he came through the door.
She lifted her hair, thinking of young lives cut short, dreams unfulfilled. She felt changed by it.
She shut off the water and wrapped herself in a towel, brushed her teeth, and combed her hair, which she let hang damp on her shoulders.
Maybe it was his touch last evening, the way he took her arm and put a hand on the small of her back; John had never touched her like that before.
She let the towel drop to the floor and put on one of John’s dress shirts appropriated from his luggage; she fastened two buttons midway to her navel.
He’d talked differently, too, as if there was something on his mind and he couldn’t yet bring himself to say it. Let it hang there like a question mark between them.
The energy in the little apartment was palpable. She could feel it even after they said their good nights. Lying under the covers, hearing him toss and turn in the living room, her own guilty desire that every noise was him coming through her open door. But he hadn’t, and by morning her fear was that the spell had been broken. That both would be returned to the reality that he was married, even if, as Sherry suspected, the marriage was not a happy one.
But it hadn’t been broken. Morning found them in the tiny kitchen together, brushing against each other unnecessarily, tangling fingers when she handed him a coffee cup. They were like strangers caught together, the tension unbearable, then McGuire phoned to say he was downstairs. And suddenly John was gone.
She stepped into lace panties and a pair of shorts, put gloss on her lips.
There was a knock at the door. She took a deep breath.
She must not waste any more time. Come what may, she wanted him to know just how she had felt all these years.
“I’m coming,” she called.
“God, don’t let me be wrong,” she whispered, walking to the living room, stopping to take a breath, undoing one of the two buttons that held her shirt together.
And opened the door.
Sykes kicked Sherry in the chest, knocking her over the packed suitcase sitting by the coffee table; she heard the telephone stand splinter and the telephone receiver fly off the hook as her head struck the floor. Then he stepped inside, dropped a tarp, and closed the door. She heard him throw the dead bolt. He flicked on lights and ran to the bedroom to make sure they were alone. Another suitcase was packed and waiting in the hallway.
Sherry had already pushed herself off the floor and was dragging the phone by the cord toward her when he kicked her in the side and leaned across to tear the phone from the wall. Then he knelt and put a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were open; they looked normal, but they didn’t move. They never moved. “My, my,” he said, glancing around the room again. “You’re not Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy.” He looked down at her open shirt and bare legs. “Pretty little thing and blind as a bat, too.”
Her forearm shot forward with a barely perceptible flick of the wrist, driving three fingers underhanded into the soft part of his neck. The Japanese called it nukite, the spear hand, and it sent him sprawling backward into the kitchenette, where he struck his head on the cabinet doors. He grabbed his throat trying to get a breath of air. She cocked one leg for a side thrust and used her fist to pound the floor. “Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”
He had his stun gun on his hip but was afraid to get close enough to use it. Whatever she’d done to his neck was some serious shit, some kind of judo or something. He couldn’t let her daze him long enough to call for help or gain an advantage over him.
Wind and rain battered the sliding glass doors, drowning her screams. He searched for a broom or a pan or anything he could use to defend himself. Then he noticed the open cabinet under the sink; the door had popped after his head struck against it. He grabbed a can of ant and roach spray from in front of the cleaning supplies and started spraying a stream in her face. She put her arms down and he moved closer and closer until the poison was foaming over her nose and mouth, and when she started to gag, he slammed his fist into her face.
Sherry snap-kicked, but this time he was ready, catching the leg and rolling on top of her. She lunged for his eyes, raking skin from his cheeks and slamming her knees into his sides simultaneously. The move used so little motion that the power behind it shocked him.
He knew he didn’t have a chance in a prolonged struggle with this woman; he stretched to reach the leg of the broken telephone stand and brought it down across the bridge of her nose hard enough to crack bone. He managed to reach the stun gun in his belt before she recovered and jabbed it into her side. She went limp.
He took a roll of duct tape from his jacket and tore off a strip, which he put across her foaming mouth. If she died of the insecticide poisoning, it was what she deserved. Fuck her after all that shit.
“Think you’re so tough,” he heaved; his heart was racing and sweat doused his shirt. He wrapped tape around her ankles, then laid her wrists together over her pelvis and bound them tight.
He got to his knees and dragged her toward the door, pushed the coffee table on its side, and opened the tarp next to her, then rolled her body in it. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew by the suitcases that she was only visiting. And he knew now how he was going to get the lieutenant here.
He unlocked the door and looked down the hall before he dragged her body along the rough concrete hall. The sky was dark, and many of the windows had been taped or boarded with plywood before the tenants fled the coast.
The elevator was waiting. A moment later he was dragging her across the parking lot and onto the hydraulic lift behind his truck. Once she was in the bed, he shoved her behind fencing he’d stacked against the tailgate. Then he got behind the wheel and activated the yellow roof beacon, pulled out of the lot, and turned the corner onto a side street.
All city employees had been authorized overtime tonight. He wouldn’t have to return the truck as long as he was involved in the storm cleanup; they would simply reassign Sandy Lyons until he got back.
When he’d first parked the meat wagon in the condominium garage, he’d believed that O’Shaughnessy was inside. Her Third Avenue address was dark and the driveway was empty. A police car assigned to watch her house was still stationed in the park across the street, had been ever since the night he’d put her uniform on the bed.
Then he’d seen lights on at the Atlantic Avenue condo and decided she had moved in there, thinking it safe.
He checked the back of the truck; the body wasn’t visible and neither could the truck be seen from Atlantic Avenue, which was the way O’Shaughnessy would come in. He returned to the garage, unscrewed the four bare lightbulbs on the ceiling, and dragged his tarp back to the elevator.
Payne’s and McGuire’s luck never improved. The wind was gusting to forty knots, the boardwalk and most of the beachfront hotels and condos were virtually empty. By 10:30 they had called it a night, McGuire heading to the office, Payne to the condo to collect Sherry, thinking there was little else to be done in Wildwood.
Maybe Sherry had gotten the face wrong, or maybe Susan Paxton never knew who her shooter was. Maybe she really had been killed by a stranger who had come in to rob the store and panicked before he got the money.
Maybe, he thought, Payne would tell Sherry how he felt about her tonight.
10:35 P.M.
Sykes stuffed a paper towel in his mouth and lifted the receiver.
“Police Department,” a woman answered.
“Detectives.” He snapped the latex gloves over his hands.
A few clicks later he was transferred.
“Detectives,” Randall answered.
“Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy, please.”
“Just a minute.”
Randall watched her come dripping through the door, raised three fingers, and mouthed �
�Phone.”
O’Shaughnessy nodded and picked up the nearest receiver. “Hello,” she answered, staring down at the puddle at her feet.
“Yeah.” The voice sounded froggy. “This is maintenance down at the Driftwood. I got a soaking wet blind woman, says she locked herself out of her apartment. I’m just here to unblock the drains; they don’t give me no keys, lady.”
O’Shaughnessy stifled a groan. “Tell her I’ll be right there. And stay with her if you can.” She hung up and looked for McGuire. “Anything at all from Mac?”
He shook his head. “I left a message on his voice mail.”
She turned for the door. Damn, she thought. “Tell him to wait for me if he beats me back.”
30
SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 10:50 P.M.
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
Seagulls beat their wings, buffeting in the night winds, relentless in their pursuit of food. Street signs wobbled on their stanchions; rain pounded the sides of windows and cars, sheets of it white as ice.
O’Shaughnessy was just pulling into the Driftwood lot when a vertical streak of lightning sizzled over the ocean. The street lamps flickered off and back on; a thunderous boom shook the ground.
She turned on the defroster and bent forward, trying to look out the windshield; she shut off the wipers and searched the garage. Everything was dark. All of the lights had gone out; the power must have failed.
Maintenance kept a small office in the garage, but their lights were off as well.
The police radio had earlier announced a power line down on Thirteenth Avenue, just half a mile away. Another flash of lightning preceded a thunderclap; she could feel its vibration traveling through her knees to the floorboard beneath the steering column.
She left the car by the elevator and ran up the stairs to the second floor, turning down the hall toward number four.
18 Seconds Page 26