Eden in Winter

by Richard North Patterson

  ‘I wasn’t fired,’ she shot back. ‘However hard you tried.’

  ‘How nice for you,’ Adam said, and began walking. ‘But I wasn’t really trying. If I had, you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘But I am. And I think you’re still busy covering up a crime. Actually, several crimes. Do you remember the break-in last June, at this same courthouse?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Because I think it was you who broke into Hanley’s office. You read all the files on your father’s death, then rearranged all the puzzle pieces to protect your family from a charge of murder.’

  Over his shoulder, Adam laughed softly. ‘Print that one, please. I’d like some money to build my own McMansion on the Vineyard. Another monstrosity in Chilmark, only in worse taste. If that’s possible.’

  Ferris shook her head. ‘I’ll wait until I have more – including what happened in the courtroom today. With some reverse engineering of your uncle’s story, I’ll figure out where you fit in. Maybe even including what you really do when you’re not attending to your family’s very special needs.’

  He turned to her on the lawn, his face and eyes hard. Instinctively, she shrank back a little. ‘And then?’ he enquired softly.

  She stood straighter. ‘Assuming you don’t kill me?’

  ‘For the moment.’

  Her lips compressed and then she spat out the words. ‘I’ll go to George Hanley and the police, then to Carla Pacelli. I don’t know which will make the better story.’ She paused a moment, then added in a lower voice, ‘Perhaps Carla will visit you in prison. Far more likely, she’ll despise you as much as I do. Your father may be dead, but you’ll never outrun his shadow. He was far too big a man.’

  The words cut to his core. But he did not show this, or any reaction at all. Impassive, he resumed walking to the car, recalling all too clearly the actions that, more than any others, could yet entrap him.

  *

  It had begun on a warm June evening, weeks before.

  To assure his solitude, Adam had taken the ladder down to the beach below the promontory where Ben’s broken body had been found. Pulling out his cell phone, he called a former colleague for the second time that week.

  ‘I’m out of answers,’ Adam said curtly. ‘How do you get me into the courthouse?’

  ‘Not sure I can,’ Jason Lew replied laconically. ‘Even the standard security system you describe is difficult to beat. Cut the power, you trigger the alarm. And you’re also dealing with cameras inside, right?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got the locations memorized. I also know where the control panel is – a room just off the entrance.’

  ‘That’s what I need.’ Lew paused, signalling his reluctance, then said more slowly, ‘I’d have to pose as a service guy and insert a receiver. That will connect to a switch that shuts the system down from the outside. Pushing the switch is your job.’

  ‘My leave’s running out,’ Adam told him. ‘So I don’t have much more time here. How long do you need on your end?’

  ‘Two days to build the receiver, then a day trip to the Vineyard. Say three nights from now you can go in. Assuming they don’t spot me as an imposter, and arrest me on the spot.’ Lew’s chuckle became the phlegmy rumble of a smoker. ‘Funny work for an old guy. But fifteen thousand in cash would send me to Costa Brava.’

  Adam felt the encroaching night envelop him. ‘I’ll have it for you by tomorrow.’

  ‘Deal.’ Lew’s speech slowed again. ‘This kind of service doesn’t come with warranties. You could hit the switch and find yourself on candid camera, with a shriek alarm for a laugh track. Instead of back in Afghanistan, you’d wind up in jail.’

  How had he gotten here? Adam wondered again. ‘If you’d screwed up on the job,’ he replied, ‘the guys relying on you could have been killed. They tell me no one was.’

  ‘Different times,’ Lew said. ‘The technical obstacles are greater now. We’ll see if I still have it. Otherwise, you’re fucked.’

  *

  In the next three days, Adam had flown to Washington, met with his superiors, transferred money to Lew through two separate bank accounts, then returned to the Vineyard. On the day following, Lew called him to report. ‘I got by with it,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the security guys suspected me. If you’re feeling reckless, you can find out if my technical gifts survive.’

  That evening, at twilight, Adam told his mother he was going fly-fishing and drove to Dogfish Bar.

  Several men with fly rods were already there, spread like sentries along the surf. Adam stopped to chat, then took his place among the others. For several hours he tried to clear his mind of tensions, focused on his casting. Only as the rest began drifting away did Adam’s thoughts turn from the water.

  Shortly after midnight, he found himself alone.

  Edgier now, he made himself remain for one more hour. Then he returned to the dirt patch where he had parked his truck, changed into jeans and a dark sweater, and made the forty-minute drive to Edgartown.

  He parked on a residential lane two blocks from Main Street. The town was dark and quiet, the last of the drunken college kids cleared from the sidewalks. Sliding out of the truck, he walked near the shade trees lining the road.

  Headlights pierced the darkness, coming toward him. Swiftly, he slipped behind the cover of a privacy hedge, kneeling on the lawn of a darkened house. Peering through its branches, he saw that the lights belonged to a patrol car from the Edgartown police. This much he had expected; what he could not know was whether the cop at the wheel would continue on his rounds.

  Standing, Adam looked in both directions, then continued past more white frame houses in a circuitous route toward Main Street. Then he veered again, quietly but quickly crossing a yard before concealing himself behind a tree next to the courthouse.

  Its parking lot was empty, the rear entrance lit by a single spotlight. Putting on his father’s old ski mask and gloves, he took Lew’s device from his pocket. It was no larger than a car fob, with a simple switch that would disarm the security system – unless the device was defective, in which case arrest was the least of Adam’s worries.

  He paused, envisioning the challenge ahead. A sheriff’s deputy would monitor the surveillance screen in the room near the main entrance, watching images sent by cameras in the hallway and just above the rear door. Assuming that the shriek alarm did not go off when he opened the door, any one of the cameras could reveal his presence inside the courthouse, bringing a troop of cops and deputies. His choice was to back out, or trust in Lew’s skill.

  For a moment, recalling the young man he had been, who once imagined himself a lawyer, Adam was paralysed by disbelief. But in the ten years since then he had learned to ignore boundaries, and to mould events to his purposes. Stepping from behind the tree, he felt the coldness come over him, his heartbeat lowering, his breathing becoming deep and even. His footsteps as he crossed the parking lot were silent.

  Nerveless, he pushed the button.

  The first test would be the door.

  Adam inhaled. The door had unlocked; so far, Lew’s bypass had worked.

  Slowly, Adam edged inside. Dim light illuminated the hallway. A camera aimed down at him from the ceiling, meant to reveal his presence at once. But, if the device functioned properly, the monitor would show the empty space that existed a moment before Adam filled it. No one inside seemed to stir.

  With painful slowness, Adam crept down the hallway toward the stairs to the second floor. As he reached them, he glanced into the security room and saw the broad back of a sheriff’s deputy gazing at a T.V. monitor, watching the door through which Adam had entered. The intruder was safely inside.

  Catlike, he started up the stairs. He willed himself not to look back at the deputy who, simply by turning, would catch him. Reaching the top, he turned a corner, out of sight once more.

  The second floor was quiet and still. If he got in and out without being seen, Lew had promised, no one would ever know he had
been there. But Adam had more complex plans. Reaching the door of George Hanley’s office, also wired to the system, he turned the knob.

  Once again, Lew’s device had disarmed the lock. Slipping inside, Adam softly closed the door.

  Through the window, Main Street appeared dark and silent. Using his penlight, Adam scanned the surface of Hanley’s desk: nothing of interest.

  Kneeling, he slid open the top drawer of a battered metal cabinet, then another, reading the captions of manila folders. Only in the bottom drawer did he find the file labelled, ‘Benjamin Blaine.’

  Taking it out, he sat in Hanley’s chair.

  The sensation was strange. But for the next few minutes, Adam guessed, he was safe. The danger would come when he tried to leave.

  Methodically, he spread the contents of the file in front of him: Hanley’s handwritten notes, suggesting areas of enquiry; the crime-scene report; typed notes of the initial interviews with his mother, brother, and uncle, as well as Carla Pacelli, Jenny Leigh, Nathan Wright – the last man who admitted to seeing Ben before his death – and Adam himself; and, near the bottom of the file, the pathologist’s report.

  For the next half-hour, he systematically photographed each page, blocking out all thought of detection. He had no time to read. But once he escaped, and studied them, he would know almost as much as George Hanley and Sean Mallory – and, unlike them, would know that he did. Especially advantaged would be Teddy’s lawyer in Boston, who would receive them in the mail from an anonymous benefactor, and who, himself innocent of the theft, would have no ethical duty to return them.

  Finishing, Adam reassembled the file and placed it in a different drawer. This last was for Bobby Towle, his policeman friend who, needing money to pay for his wife’s rehabilitation from drug addiction, had been vulnerable to Amanda Ferris once Adam had betrayed him. Now Hanley would know that someone had rifled his office, but not who it was, creating a universe of suspects who might have sold information to the Enquirer. A gift of conscience from an old friend.

  Opening the door, Adam left it ajar.

  At the top of the stairs, he stopped abruptly. The deputy was padding down the hallway, perhaps sensing that something was wrong. If he glanced up, Adam was caught.

  Utterly still, Adam watched him. The man disappeared, the only sound the quiet echo of his footsteps.

  Adam stayed where he was.

  Moments crawled by while the deputy inspected the first floor. At last, Adam heard more footsteps, and prayed that the deputy would not come upstairs. Back toward Adam, the man plodded to his station and sat before a monitor Adam knew to be disabled.

  With agonizing care, Adam walked down the stairs. With each step, the distance between him and the deputy lessened. As Adam reached the bottom of the steps, it narrowed to ten feet.

  Head propped on his arm, the deputy gazed at the frozen screen.

  Turning down the hallway, Adam passed beneath more cameras, still unseen. A few last steps, swifter now, took him to the entrance.

  Slowly opening the door, Adam re-entered the night.

  As he stepped on to the asphalt, headlights sliced the darkness. In an instant, Adam grasped that the patrol car was arriving. As its lights caught Adam, the driver hit the brakes.

  Whirling, Adam sprinted down Main Street, footsteps pounding cement. In one corner of his mind he gauged the time it would take the patrolman to swing back into the alley toward the street, picking him up again.

  Suddenly, he swerved, cutting back through the lawn of Whaling Church and then a stand of trees bordering a neighbour’s backyard. Behind him he heard brakes squealing, a door opening, the footsteps of the cop scurrying from his car.

  Adam had little more time to run; in minutes, more police would converge, on foot or in patrol cars. Nor could he drive away. His last hope was to hide.

  Bent at the waist, he crossed another yard, heading for his truck.

  It was parked in a line of cars along the crowded lane. As headlights entered the lane, Adam reached his truck, sliding to his stomach at the rear. Clawing asphalt, he pulled himself beneath it, invisible to anyone who did not think to look.

  He heard the patrol car pass, then his pursuer, still on foot, reaching the lane near Adam’s truck. Listening to the man’s laboured breathing, Adam imagined him looking about, mystified by the absence of sound, the sudden disappearance of his quarry.

  Move on, Adam implored him.

  Another car passed without stopping, and then the man’s footsteps sounded again, fading as he moved away.

  Adam removed his mask and gloves. Damp face pressed against the asphalt, he glanced at his watch.

  Three-twenty. Two hours until dawn. Head resting on curled arms, Adam waited.

  First light came as a silver space between the tyres of his truck. Sliding out, Adam looked around him, and saw nothing but the still of early morning.

  He climbed into his truck, started the motor, and drove out of town at a slow but steady pace. Glancing in the mirror, he saw that no one followed. As had been his plan, he headed back toward Dogfish Bar.

  The beach was empty, the only sign of human existence the footprints left by fishermen. Satisfied, he changed back into his fishing gear, and drove to a restaurant overlooking the Gay Head cliffs. He ordered breakfast amidst the tourists and tradesmen, a nocturnal angler as determined as Ben Blaine had been, refuelling after hours of solitary fishing. He made a point of joking with the waitress.

  On the way home, he tossed the garbage bag filled with his clothes in a pile of refuse at the Chilmark dump, and dropped Lew’s device in its incinerator. Parking at his mother’s, he saw Clarice drinking coffee on the porch. ‘You look terrible,’ she observed.

  Adam fingered his dark stubble. ‘The price of watching the sun come up. All that’s left when you catch no fish.’

  ‘Get some sleep,’ his mother suggested with a smile. ‘You’re not twenty anymore.’

  Climbing the stairs, Adam closed himself in a room that still held the artifacts of his youth. For a moment he had contemplated Jenny Leigh’s photograph, a painful remnant of the time before his break with Ben. Then he downloaded the images he had taken into his computer, reviewing the documents he would provide to Teddy’s lawyer.

  The process took two hours, more disturbing by the minute as the mosaic of evidence began forming in his mind. The witness statements conformed to what he knew: the Blaines, Jenny and Carla Pacelli all denied knowing about the will, and his mother and Teddy’s central assertion – which, in his brother’s case, Adam had no longer believed – was that neither had seen his father once he left the house. Far more lethal were the crime-scene and pathology reports. He was not surprised that someone besides Benjamin Blaine – no doubt Teddy – had left distinctive boot prints at the promontory. But there had been drag marks in the mud as well, mud on the heels of the dead man’s boots, suggesting that someone had dragged him, perhaps struggling, through the wet earth near the point from which he fell. Worse yet, there were circumferential bruises on Ben’s wrists, heightened by his regime of chemotherapy, appearing to confirm that a murderer had grasped him by both arms. It was plain that the police and prosecutor believed that someone had thrown Benjamin Blaine off the promontory.

  Adam felt a coldness on his skin. His next task was to print these pages, mail them to Teddy’s lawyer, then erase the images from his camera and computer before getting rid of both. But he paused to absorb what he and the authorities now further believed in common – that Teddy had killed their father. The job Benjamin Blaine had left him was not just to undo a will, but to save his own brother.

  *

  And so he had, Adam believed now. But that Benjamin Blaine was not his father was far from the only surprise awaiting him after the break-in. Another was that Teddy was innocent of murder; Jack – his real father – guilty. But this did not change the risk to Adam himself. Now he, too, was guilty of a crime – obstruction of justice in order to save one member of his family, then an
other. All that was left him was the hope that, despite the suspicions of George Hanley and Sean Mallory – and now Amanda Ferris – no one could ever prove that. Another secret Adam carried alone.

  Ignoring the reporters’ shouted questions, he opened the door of the S.U.V. and slid into the passenger seat, beside his father.

  PART TWO

  The Devil’s Pact

  August–September, 2011

  ONE

  At the end of a long, silent ride, the Blaines arrived at a rambling white frame house once owned by Clarice’s parents, placed on a spacious meadow in Chilmark with a view of the Vineyard Sound through a cut in the trees overlooking the water. In his youth, this bluff had been Adam’s favourite place to watch the sun set with Benjamin Blaine. But now the site was marred by all that had come since, the most haunting of which was what had happened there the night Ben died.

  Touching Teddy’s shoulder to signal that he wanted a word, Adam walked with him across the rain-dampened grass to the guesthouse where his brother lived and painted. At the door, Teddy turned to face him, worry showing through his quizzical smile. ‘I know that look by now, Adam – the indecipherable expression that conceals a cool brain at work. So the problem is … ?’

  ‘A tabloid reporter, named Amanda Ferris: the National Enquirer’s gift to journalism, and now to us. She’s after me, which means she’s after you.’

  At once, his brother’s tepid smile vanished. ‘I don’t even know her. But it seems that you do. Would you mind telling me how?’

  Once again, Adam found himself regretting all he could not say, even to the brother he was determined to protect. ‘I’d prefer reminding you what to avoid – talking to anyone at all about our father or this inquest. If you hear anything about her, tell me. We need this locked down tight until the judge issues his report, and George Hanley decides what to do.’