Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “Checking in, sir?”

  He looks around to see a uniformed bellman.

  “Yes.”

  “Need a hand with your bag?”

  “No, thanks.” No way is he taking any chances with letting it out of his sight.

  But he hands the bellman a dollar anyway. The kid looks a bit mystified, but pockets it and walks away.

  He likes being called sir, he decides, as he heads for the reception desk. It’s about time he earned some of the respect he deserves.

  He waits his turn to check in, pretending to check e-mail on his BlackBerry like everyone else. Of course it’s just for show.

  If you’re playing a role, you must, of course, have the right wardrobe and the right props. You want to look like a Construction Worker, you need jeans, steel-toed boots, one of those insulated lunch bags. Soccer Dad, you get your hands on a great camera, khakis, and a polo shirt. And so it goes.

  He stole the BlackBerry just a little while ago at O’Hare, lifting it boldly right out of the pocket holster of a businessman waiting to board a plane in the overcrowded terminal. With luck the person—normalwe@aol.com—didn’t realize it was missing until he was on the plane, and it’ll be a few hours before he can do anything about it.

  By then it’ll be lying in the bottom of the Chicago River which, he noticed while crossing the State Street bridge, is conveniently not frozen over.

  “Okay, you’re all set. We have you in room 1421.” Smiling, the clerk hands back his credit card and a room key. “Thank you, Mr. Armano. Enjoy your stay.”

  The cottage Randy’s renting is strictly no-frills: living room; bedroom—marked by a brass plate that reads Captain’s Quarters tacked above the door frame; a kitchen with a similar sign that announces the Galley and literally is one, barely large enough to hold the requisite stove, sink, and fridge. The bathroom, naturally, is marked Poop Deck.

  “Charming, isn’t it?” Randy tugs the front door, trying to get it to close tightly.

  “It’s very…kitschy.” That’s the kindest word she can think of. “At least it’s furnished.”

  Not exactly Ethan Allen, though. More like the kind of stuff you buy in a box with instructions and put together yourself.

  Lucinda looks around at the bookshelves shaped like up-ended rowboats, end tables made from ship’s wheels, lamps with lighthouse bases. The sailboat-sprigged blue couch and chair slipcovers have that dank, beachy mildew smell that reminds Lucinda of canvas lawn chairs left moldering too long in a sealed shed. On the knotty pine walls are framed nautical charts and a seascape painting Lucinda immediately pegs as a paint-by-number.

  “Kind of makes me want to sing ‘Anchors Away,’” she tells Randy, and she is rewarded by a faint smile.

  “You’re too hoarse to sing,” he tells her. “Want some tea with honey instead of coffee?”

  “No, thanks. Need the caffeine.”

  “Tea has caffeine.”

  “Not enough for me. You know I like the strong stuff.”

  “How about a shot of whiskey in the coffee, then? My mother would say that’ll cure all that ails ye,” he adds in an expert brogue.

  “I have to drive. Plain old coffee’s good. Do you mind if I plug in my BlackBerry while I’m here? The battery’s dead, and I need to make a call before I get on the road.”

  “There’s an outlet somewhere here….” He moves aside several cardboard boxes stacked in a corner. “There it is. Hand me the cord.”

  She inserts her phone into the other end and hands it to him. “Are you still moving in?” she asks, eying the boxes.

  “No, that stuff belongs to the people who own the place. They didn’t want to haul it back up to the city over the winter.”

  “What is all that?”

  “Who knows? Probably seashells and lobster traps.”

  She flashes the obligatory smile, but hates that Randy is living like this, in a drafty kitschy cottage that’s barely been winterized, surrounded by other people’s boxed up belongings and press board furniture.

  “Maybe you can move back home to your house now,” she suggests as he fumbles around with the cord, trying to get the plug to stick in an outlet that won’t seem to grip it.

  “I need to plug this in someplace else,” he mutters, and straightens.

  She follows him to the kitchen—more knotty pine, and seagull-printed vinyl wallpaper. The lone wall outlet is occupied by a can opener and coffeemaker. He yanks the can opener cord to vacate a receptacle, plugs in her phone, then takes the carafe from the coffee pot and turns on the tap at the sink.

  “Randy? Maybe you can move back home,” she repeats, thinking he might not have heard the suggestion before. Her voice is wearing away quickly.

  The answer comes immediately this time, and she realizes he heard her the first.

  “I don’t want to move back.”

  He fills the carafe, his back to her.

  “I didn’t mean right this second—I know it’s too soon to make any decisions, but that’s your house, and—”

  “No, it’s actually her house.” He turns off the water and faces her. “I mean, it was hers.”

  “All hers?”

  “When Zelda died, she left Carla some money and her condo. Carla rented it out for a while, but then she sold it and bought the house out here.”

  “You didn’t buy it together?”

  “No.” He dumps the water into the coffeemaker. “Things have been bad for a while, Lucinda. A long while. I guess we both knew it wasn’t going to last.”

  “For how long?”

  “Let’s see—right after we walked down the aisle. Or maybe even before.”

  Then why did you marry her? she wants to ask, but talk about a loaded question.

  Now is not the time to ask it.

  “Don’t get me wrong—I loved her. But I knew it wasn’t in the right way, and I knew it wasn’t ever going to be enough. Eventually, we were basically going through the motions—both of us, not just me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I fell out of love with her,” he says simply. “And she fell in love with someone else.” As he methodically measures coffee grounds into the filter basket, he adds, “When I look back, it’s hard to tell which of those things happened first.”

  “She had someone else?”

  He nods. “Jack Ramsden.”

  Jack Ramsden.

  She heard that name earlier. Santiago asked Lambert if they had tracked him down yet, and Lambert said they were still trying. No one elaborated for the benefit of Lucinda and Neal, and she didn’t want to ask many questions.

  “He’s a fisherman on the island,” Randy tells her now. “Been dating my wife for…oh, I’d guess almost a year, give or take. The first few months of it behind my back, obviously.”

  “But you knew they were seeing each other?” She follows him back to the living room as the coffeemaker begins to hiss.

  “Not right away. Unlike me, Carla was a damned terrific liar.” Randy sits on the sofa. The springs creak noisily. He looks at her. “I can’t believe I’m saying any of this. I mean, right now. Speaking ill of the dead is…”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Randy.” Lucinda sits, too, keeping a full cushion between them. It’s tempting to rest her aching neck and back against the cushions as a wave of weariness washes over her.

  “I was shocked when I found out what happened to her, and I was sick about it.”

  “I know you were. Of course you were.”

  “She was my wife. She was a good person.”

  There’s a but coming. She can tell by his tone.

  Well, of course there is. Randy isn’t your typical grieving widower—not with a marriage that has long since crashed and burned.

  “I cared about Carla. But the truth is, Lucinda, it was long over between us. We haven’t lived together since September, and it feels like a lot longer. That was just when I finally got myself out.”

  “That had to be so hard
for you to do. Leave, I mean.”

  “I wish I could say it was. But we both knew it was over way before then. And I wasn’t going to tell you this, but…what the hell…”

  Her heart pounds. She has to force herself not to break eye contact, much as she longs to avoid what she sees in his eyes.

  “…It was seeing you again last July, out of the blue, that made me realize…a lot of things.”

  “Please don’t say you left your wife for me, Randy, because—”

  “No, I didn’t leave her for you. I left her because of you. There’s a difference.”

  “I know.” She gets it—really, she does.

  She knows what he’s trying to say.

  But he shouldn’t be saying it.

  Now is not the right time.

  Not when she’s so tired she can’t think straight and she’s going to lose her voice any minute.

  Not with Carla lying dead in the morgue and Lucinda, in the most bizarre twist imaginable, somehow involved.

  “I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again,” Randy tells her. “After last summer, I mean. But knowing that when we reconnected—that I could still feel that way about you, after all those years—about someone who wasn’t my wife—well, it pretty much told me all I needed to know. It made me take the initiative to get out, because I knew she never would.”

  “Not even for—what was his name? Jack?”

  “I doubt it. Carla has never been one to make decisions and changes. She lets herself be propelled. I mean—she did,” he amends, and Lucinda glimpses a flash of sorrow in his eyes.

  “So where is Jack now?”

  “Away. He’s divorced, and his kids live somewhere in the Midwest—I’m not sure where. But Lambert said that when they checked with his neighbors, they all said they hadn’t seen him in a few days and he’s been visiting his kids on their winter break. They’re trying to track him down.”

  “You don’t think there’s any chance that he…”

  “Jack? No.”

  “Based on what? Do you know him well?”

  “Not really. He hasn’t lived on the island very long. But based on sheer gut instinct as a cop—and the evidence we have so far—this is something bigger than Carla being killed in some lovers’ quarrel. It feels to me like…”

  When he trails off, she completes his sentence. She knows where he’s going. She thinks of Ava Neary, of all the pretty dead girls who supposedly took their own lives.

  “It feels like a serial killer.”

  “And if it is,” Randy tells her, “he’s going to do it again.”

  Lucinda nods, sickened by the realization that he’s already been in her apartment. He may still be watching her, following her….

  Stalking his next victim.

  Before leaving for the airport, Vic was interviewed by a couple of agents who wanted to know whether he’d had any other recent contact from the anonymous person who’d sent the note, whether he’d seen anyone suspicious lately, whether he’d had phone call hang ups—all the usual questions he himself would have once asked someone in his situation.

  He had nothing to tell them, other than that the note had arrived out of the blue.

  They assume, as Vic does, that the recent publicity about his book smoked the deadly phantom out of his hiding place. And that it might trigger him to start killing again.

  “We can only hope that’s not the case,” one of the agents told him before he left.

  The local field office will be involved now, they told him. They’ll send agents out to Vic’s house to investigate, and probably keep tabs on him to determine whether anyone is lurking.

  The long-ago profile he’d helped to create in the early years of the BSU will be resurrected, re-examined.

  They’ll be looking for a nocturnal loner, intelligent, organized.

  A careless set of footprints found on the muddy grass leading to the sidewalk at an early crime scene—before he perfected his M.O.—indicated that back then, he’d weighed about two hundred pounds and worn a size eleven loafer.

  That particular crime had been committed on a busy suburban avenue, at a time of night when others would have been on the streets. Yet he had walked—not run—away from the scene. Clearly, he was ordinary-looking enough to have managed to blend into the setting without anyone’s giving him a second glance.

  That image has haunted Vic all these years: an average Joe sauntering away into the night after hacking a woman to death in her own kitchen.

  The crime would be no less heinous were he a frenzied madman racing from the scene, but he sure as hell would have been easier to catch.

  Now, sitting in a crowded gate area at Dulles airport, Vic thumbs through yet another newspaper, searching every headline.

  There are plenty of homicides in the news today, but none so far that match, at a glance, the Night Watchman’s M.O.

  That doesn’t mean he hasn’t struck again, or isn’t about to.

  Vic figures that chances are slim of his randomly stumbling across a murder that fits—particularly without the resources he’d have were he still a part of the Bureau—but what else has he got to do?

  What he really needs is the Internet, so that he can check in a more methodical manner, beginning his search on recent dates when the moon was full, and working backward.

  But he doesn’t have his laptop, and the business center here at the airport is closed.

  So he keeps looking, going through one paper after another from the stack he bought at Hudson News on the concourse after he learned that his flight has been delayed yet again.

  Weather is wreaking havoc up and down the East Coast.

  He has a feeling he’s going to be stuck here all night. It shouldn’t matter. Kitty isn’t even home. He asked her to stay with a friend while he’s away. Just in case.

  “Just in case he’s watching us?” she asked matter-of-factly.

  “He’s probably not watching us,” he told her.

  But chances are, he’s watching someone.

  Ordinarily, on a night like this, with a storm blowing in, Frank Santiago would be focused on what lies ahead, counting on the department’s being flooded with calls regarding car accidents, downed trees, that sort of thing.

  But tonight, the storm is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

  Tonight, they’ve got a murder on their hands, and every bit of manpower, every resource they have, is aimed at figuring out what the hell happened to Carla Barakat.

  That Neal Bullard has become involved has really thrown Frank for a loop.

  But then, it’s no coincidence.

  It was Neal who asked him to hire Randy in the first place.

  “Why?” Frank asked suspiciously. “Is he in some kind of trouble there?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “It has to be something, or you wouldn’t be calling me.”

  “He just needs a fresh start.”

  “He’s burnt out?”

  “No. He’s planning to get married. Wants to get away from the city, buy a house, raise a family someplace safe—you know the drill.”

  Yeah. Frank knew the drill.

  Detective work takes its toll on a guy. On his health. On his marriage.

  Frank knew.

  It just so happened that Frank had an opening on the township force at the time. Otherwise he really could have given a shit about repaying a decades-old favor.

  He had other things to worry about. Chemo, radiation, endless tests, and then waiting for the numbers.

  Numbers—it was always about numbers.

  Still is.

  The numbers measure his blood levels, and his tumors. The numbers essentially tell Frank Santiago—who never smoked a cigarette in his life, yet somehow found his lungs clogged with cancer cells—whether he will live or die in another couple of months.

  They continue to do so.

  The news isn’t always good.

  Frank detests numbers. Fears them.

  And s
o the irony hadn’t escaped him today when Neal Bullard blew back into his life like a nor’easter, with numeric evidence to turn everything upside down.

  From the start, though, Frank had assumed they were dealing with a domestic case. Everyone knew Carla Barakat had a lover—and at first, no one knew where Jack Ramsden was, other than that he was unaccounted for.

  Lovers’ quarrel gone bad. That was what Frank figured.

  But Jack Ramsden turned up in St. Louis with an airtight alibi right around the time Bullard showed up with the evidence.

  Evidence that, along with the bloody ring, soundly links the Other Woman to the crime, as far as Frank’s concerned.

  Lucinda Sloan.

  Lucinda Sloan who, he had realized earlier, in the meeting, really might be a psychic after all.

  He’s always had his doubts about that.

  But when he caught her looking at him in the meeting, some flash of empathy—or maybe sympathy—in her eyes told him that she knows his dark secret. Somehow, she picked up on the one thing he hasn’t told anyone—and doesn’t intend to, until it’s absolutely necessary.

  Damn her, he’d thought when he realized she knew. Why does she have to be involved in this case?

  Why, indeed?

  He has his suspicions. Had them before she barged into his private hell.

  Why would she just hand over the ring, though, if she were involved in Carla’s murder? Why wouldn’t she have hidden it?

  It doesn’t make sense.

  But if Frank looks hard enough, it will. Of that, he’s certain.

  Lucinda, after all, is the reason Randy Barakat was so hot to get out of Philadelphia.

  Any skilled detective—hell, any human being with eyes and ears—could figure that out after spending five minutes in the same room with the two of them. Frank had certainly done his share of that last summer when she was in town working on the Pearson and Hastings cases.

  It was no accident that the Barakats’ marriage crashed and burned weeks later.

  And it was obvious—if anyone cared, which Frank really didn’t at the time—that Randy Barakat and Lucinda Sloan must have picked up right where they left off.