But this time it didn’t happen that way. He didn’t pause to run my plates. He climbed out of his cruiser and came to the window beside me. He tapped it with his big flashlight, and I rolled it down.
He bent to the window, and I saw that it was the tall female officer I’d met at the police station the day after Brian’s accident. V. Whyte, her nameplate had said.
“Mr. Coyne,” she said, “would you mind following me?”
“Did I—?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, sir. Follow me, please.”
I nodded. “Sure. Okay.”
She went back to her cruiser, turned off all the flashing lights, and pulled out in front of me. I followed her for about a mile down the road and then into the parking lot of a small strip mall, now closed down for the night.
She stopped in front of a bank, and I pulled in beside her. She got out of her cruiser, opened the passenger door of my car, slid in beside me, and closed the door, dousing the dome light.
“What’s up, Officer?” I said.
“It’s Tory,” she said. “Tory Whyte. I wanted to talk with you.”
“About what?”
She was staring out the front window of my car. The dim night lights from the bank exaggerated the shadows on her face. “About what’s been going on around here,” she said.
“Why me?”
“Yeah, good question.” After a minute, she turned and looked at me. “Believe it or not,” she said, “I don’t know who else I can trust, and I gotta talk to somebody. You’re a lawyer, right?”
“Right.”
“So I can trust you.”
“Oh, we lawyers are eminently trustworthy.”
She laughed quickly.
“This about what happened to your chief?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“How did you know I was—?”
“We’ve been told to keep an eye on the Golds’ house.”
“In case Jake comes home?”
“Yes. I saw your car, ran your plates and remembered you, that you were a lawyer. So can I talk to you?”
“Sure.”
“Confidentially, I mean.”
“Yes. Consider me your lawyer.”
“Good.” She cleared her throat. “I can’t make any sense out of this. Maybe I just need to get it off my chest. That accident?”
“The two kids,” I said.
“Right. I came up with a witness.”
“I didn’t think—”
“Right. Exactly. The official word was, there was no witness. But I found one. He didn’t actually see it happen, but he was heading south on River Road, and just before he got to the place where those kids went into the river, he saw this car coming at him, going like a bat out of hell. You understand?”
“This car your witness saw, it was headed in the same direction that Brian and Jenny Rolando were headed?”
“North. Right.”
“So it could’ve been behind them, seen it happen, and it kept going.”
“Maybe. The timing was right. Certainly worth tracking down. But there’s something else.” She hesitated, glanced out the window, then looked back at me. “I saw the car those kids were in. I was there when they dragged it out of the water. There was a big scrape along the driver’s side.”
“That car had crashed on the rocks, hadn’t it?”
“Yes. But this was a different kind of scrape. And there was red paint in it. The kids’ car was blue.”
“You’re saying they got sideswiped by a red car?”
“Yes. I believe that’s what happened.”
“And you think the car your witness saw did it?”
“I don’t know that. But it’s certainly worth a follow-up, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would say that, yes,” I said. “And I surmise there was no follow-up.”
“No, there wasn’t. Sprague read my report, thanked me, said he’d take care of it, and that was it.”
“Did you mention it to him again?”
“Sure. Several times. First he told me that he was on top of it, whatever that meant. Then he told me it was a dead-end, and I know damn well he didn’t pursue it at all.”
“What about the car? The one the kids were in? What happened to it?”
“Good old Ed, helping the dead girl’s parents, he got the insurance company to settle the next day. It was a total, of course. So they took it away.”
“If I might say so,” I said, “you don’t sound exactly enamored of your late chief.”
“I’m not happy that he got murdered, if that’s what you mean.”
“But?”
She hesitated. “But nothing. Everybody’s in shock.”
“So who’s running the show?”
“The DA is for now. He’s going to appoint someone temporarily until they can find a replacement for Ed.”
“Are you in line for the job?”
“Me?” She laughed. “Hardly. Reddington isn’t ready for a female chief. No, I think Luke’s got his eye on it.”
“Luke—?”
“McCaffrey. He’s been here the longest, put up with more of Ed’s shit than anybody. Luke deserves it.”
“How would you feel, working for McCaffrey?”
She shrugged. “It’d be an improvement.”
“I do get the sense that you weren’t a great admirer of Chief Sprague.”
“Yeah, well, I try to keep personal things separate,” she said softly.
I cracked my window, lit a cigarette, and said nothing.
After a minute, Tory said, “Yeah, okay, we had a thing, Ed and I. Shortly after I started here in Reddington. I knew it was stupid. Christ, screwing my boss?” She snorted a quick laugh through her nose. “Anyway, he got sick of me, and that was that. Back to business, on to the next conquest. He didn’t let it get in the way of the job, I’ll give him that. He treated me pretty much like he treated all the other officers.”
“And how did he treat you and all the other officers?”
“Like we were stupid and incompetent. He told us what to do, and we did it. Anybody showed a spark of initiative, started to become popular with the kids or something, they were out of there.”
“He fired them?”
“He got rid of them, one way or the other. Usually just made their lives so miserable they quit. A lot of cops have come and gone here in Reddington. I’ve been looking for something different practically since I got here.”
“What about Luke McCaffrey?”
“Oh, Luke just hunches his back and does what he’s told and doesn’t complain. He just bought a house in town, got a pregnant wife, big mortgage. He’s kinda stuck.” She cranked her window halfway down and waved at my cigarette smoke. “Anyway, all that’s irrelevant. The townspeople loved Ed. I guess they should. He was like everybody’s big brother. Coaching his soccer teams, putting on his parties for the teenagers. Halloween parties, Christmas parties, last-day-of-school parties, Friday-night parties in the summer. It was like open house at the chief’s. Sprague’s Teen Center, people called it. They thought it was great. A place for kids to go, keep out of trouble. He’s got about twenty acres, nice swimming pool, woods, pond, big barn.”
“He sounds like the perfect small-town police chief,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, “if you didn’t have to work for him. Anyway, all that, my—my personal feelings about him, that’s not the point.”
“The point is,” I said, “you think there was another vehicle involved in that accident.”
“Yes.”
“Are you thinking that it wasn’t an accident?”
She let out a long breath. “I don’t know. But regardless of whether it was an accident or—or on purpose—you’ve obviously got to find the person who was driving that other vehicle. Hit-and-run, leaving the scene of a fatal accident? Jesus.”
“And Sprague ignored it.”
“Covered it up, if you ask me,” she said.
“And now he’s been murdered.”
“Yes.”
“And Jake Gold, the father of the boy who was in that car, is the most likely suspect.”
“I guess he is. Him or some other soccer dad.”
“Your chief fooled around with the soccer moms? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I told you,” she said. “Everybody loved him.”
“And you’re thinking—?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The accident, and then Ed getting murdered? I can’t quite make sense out of it. But it sure doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me.”
“Me, neither,” I said. “I’ve got a suggestion.”
“What’s that?”
“You should tell this to the DA. Gus Nash. He should know this.”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t like him.”
“Who, Gus?”
She nodded.
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Just, he and Ed were friends, and a couple times when Mr. Nash was here in Reddington, I caught him kinda looking at me funny. Like he knew something, like there was some joke, you know? I always thought Ed talked about me to him. Locker-room stuff.”
“I can talk to Gus Nash if you want.”
“You mean about that witness?”
“Sure.”
“You’d have to tell him you heard it from me, right?”
“I’d have to tell him something.”
“Don’t. Please.”
“But—”
She reached over and touched my wrist. “Just don’t. Look, I’m sorry. This was stupid. I should just forget the whole thing. Those poor kids are dead, so what difference does it make?”
“Sprague was murdered,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “But they’ll catch Mr. Gold, and then it will all be clear, and that will be that.” She opened the car door, and when the dome light flashed on, I saw that Tory Whyte had been crying. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Coyne. Please. Just forget the whole thing. Okay?”
“I promised you I wouldn’t tell anybody,” I said. “And I meant it. But I doubt if I’ll forget it.” I took out a business card and handed it to her. “Call me anytime, okay?”
She nodded and put the card into her pocket. Then she handed me a card. “My pager number’s there if you need me. I’ll return your call.”
When I got back to my apartment, I climbed out of my office clothes and into my sweats, poured an inch of Rebel Yell over some ice cubes, and took it out onto my balcony. The moonlight reflected off the harbor and lit up the night, and a springlike breeze was huffing in off the water. It reminded me that Punxsutawney Phil had slipped out of his hole exactly three weeks ago, and he’d seen no shadow to scare him back in. March was less than a week away.
The air smelled salty and warm and promising, but I couldn’t shake the spooky, jangled feeling I’d picked up that afternoon when I walked into Brian Gold’s room and found the torn-up bills hidden in the bottom of his trunk.
Coincidences, I know, occur all the time. Things happen that make no sense, that have no cause or explanation or connection. They just … happen. But we human beings are uncomfortable with coincidences. It’s our nature to crave explanations. That’s why we call ourselves homo sapiens. We need to know. A child’s first sign of intelligence is the word why. For every effect, we need a cause. When the cause isn’t obvious, people who are too lazy or too stupid to look beyond the obvious shrug and call it “fate.” The concept of fate is sort of a poor man’s explanation. It presumes some kind of orderly plan, however beyond our understanding that plan might be. Fate takes various forms—gods, or demons, or the alignment of the stars and planets. For those who believe in it, fate is infinitely preferable to coincidence.
Coincidence is utterly random. It unmasks a world of chaos, a world without sense or logic, an insecure, frightful world in which anything can happen to anybody at any time. By definition, there is no explanation for a coincidence.
The human drive to understand has produced religion and art and science. It has dragged us out of caves and into the computer age. When rational analysis doesn’t give us answers to that primal “Why?” question, it drives us crazy.
I’m a rationalist. I don’t believe in fate or astrology—or God, for that matter. I believe in explanations. When I can’t find them, I assume it’s because I don’t know enough, and I try to learn more.
When it stumps me, I feel jangled and spooked.
So I sat there on my balcony, sipping my Rebel Yell and smoking cigarettes and trying to understand what was going on in the quiet little town of Reddington, where until three weeks ago a big news story was the score of the high-school basketball game.
Then two young teenagers smashed through the guardrail into the river and died, the chief of police was murdered in a Framingham motel room, and an English professor at the local college, who had paid a week’s rent on that room, disappeared.
The dead boy had torn up several hundred dollars and hidden the pieces in a secret compartment in the bottom of his steamer trunk.
One of the local cops was so spooked—or frightened—that she spilled her guts to a lawyer she’d barely met.
Coincidences?
I refused to believe it.
Explanation? Cause and effect?
I thought hard about it. But I had neither science nor art nor religion for it, and I came up with nothing.
It was nearly midnight when I downed what was left of the melted ice cubes in my glass. I snapped my cigarette butt off the balcony and watched it spark its way down to the water below. Then I went inside. I put the glass in the sink, turned out the lights, and went into my bedroom.
I glanced at my answering machine. No messages.
I flopped down on my bed, bunched the pillow up under my head, and picked up the telephone.
It rang five times before Evie’s machine picked up. “Hi,” came that throaty voice of hers that never failed to make my stomach clench. “It’s Evie. I can’t come to the phone right now, but your call is important to me, so please leave a message and I’ll get back to you, I promise.” Then came a series of beeps. Then her tape began to roll.
I held the phone against my ear for several seconds, listening to the almost subsonic static. Then I clicked the OFF button. Still in the bathtub, probably. Evie had the habit of falling asleep in the tub. Or maybe she was already in bed. She always turned off the ringer on her phone before going to sleep.
I’d call her in the morning.
TWELVE
The telephone woke me up. It took me a moment to identify the noise, another moment to shove myself up into a semi-sitting position in bed, and yet another to fumble for the damn phone. The clock on my bedside table read 7:10.
No one but Evie would call me at seven on a Saturday morning.
“Hi, honey,” I mumbled.
“Rise and shine, sweetheart.” It was a sarcastic, masculine growl.
“Christ,” I said. “Horowitz. What do you want?”
“I’m on my way over. I got coffee.”
“Wait a minute—”
But he’d disconnected.
I pulled on my jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of socks, went into the bathroom to splash water on my face, and by the time I got out to the living room, my intercom was buzzing.
I hit the button, and Horowitz thumped on my door a couple of minutes later. I opened it for him, and he brushed past me and headed for the kitchen, where he deposited two Dunkin’ Donuts bags on the table.
He took two extra-large Styrofoam cups from one bag, pried off the tops, and pushed one toward me. “Black, right?”
“Right.”
He ripped open the other bag. “Muffins,” he said. “I got honey-bran, orange-cranberry-nut, and corn. Two of each. They’re still warm.”
“What a delightful surprise,” I said. “This is awfully sweet.”
“Fuck you,”
said Horowitz.
“Where’s your partner?”
“I sent her home an hour ago, told her to get some sleep. You disappointed?”
“Choice between you and Marcia? Of course I’m disappointed.” I put a tub of margarine, two mugs, two plates, and a stack of paper napkins on the table, then sat across from him. “So what do you want?”
A big hunk of muffin bulged in his cheek. He needed a shave and his eyes looked red and piggy. He held up a hand while he chewed and swallowed. Then he took a sip from the big Dunkin’ cup. “I want Professor Gold,” he said.
I poured my coffee into a mug and took a sip. “I don’t know where he is.”
“I been on this since Thursday night,” he said. “Guy kills a cop, I get no sleep. How it always works. I need my fuckin’ sleep. So what do you know?” He took another bite out of his muffin.
I told him about my talk with Sharon and about finding the ripped-up money in Brian’s footlocker. I also told him that there might’ve been a witness to the accident.
“A witness, huh? Who told you that?”
“I can’t tell you.”
He blew out a quick, cynical laugh. “Fuckin’ lawyers. Anyways, what’s that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. I also heard that Sprague might’ve fooled around with the soccer moms in town.”
“Hmm,” he mumbled. “Suppose you can’t tell me where you heard that one, either.”
I shook my head.
“So whaddya think, Coyne? Sprague was humping the professor’s wife? That why he killed him?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think anybody was humping Sharon Gold except her husband.”
“I see it all the time,” said Horowitz. “It’s our number-one murder motive, hands down. Sex and jealousy. She’s a good-lookin’ woman. I been checking up on the victim. Sprague was the kind of guy women like, the way I hear it. One of those sensitive type of guys, you know? Bachelor, nice place out there in the woods …”
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