He and Hurley engage in a silent stare-down lasting a good thirty seconds or more. Then Hurley says, “Can you account for your whereabouts on Tuesday, after you went to Harold and Tina’s houses?”
“Maybe,” he says. “There might be some traffic cameras that tracked me. I drove around town here, running some errands, and then I drove to Poynette and spent the rest of the day there in my camper.”
“At a campground?”
“No, in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. I do hit up the RV parks once in a while, but for the most part, I just park wherever I want.”
“Are you living in your camper?” Hurley asks.
“I am.”
“Why do you borrow Peter Carmichael’s car?”
My father flinches a tiny bit and I guess he didn’t know we knew about that. “My camper is a little too conspicuous for some of the errands I need to run. So I drive it into town, park it somewhere, and walk to Mr. Carmichael’s house to borrow his car. I pay him for it.”
“Where do you get your money?” Hurley asks.
“I saved a fair amount of money during the years I was working under the ID the U.S. Marshals gave me, and I do odd jobs on the side to augment it. I don’t have much in the way of expenses.”
“ ‘Odd jobs’?” I scoff. “Is that what you call it when you rip people off?”
Novak’s mouth curls down with displeasure, making him look almost churlish. “I don’t do that anymore, Mattie. Haven’t for more than thirty years.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. “Look, I’m not proud of who I was back when I met your mother. It was a way of life, the only one I knew at the time. It was how I was raised. And the pressure the family puts on you to perform in certain ways, to marry within the family, and to keep things within the family unit . . . it messes with your head. When I met your mother, it was the first time in my life I started thinking about something different, about escaping from the family. As it was, I was living two lives, like one of those men who marries two different women and has two different families, neither one aware of the other. When I married your mother, I had to keep it a secret from the family and divide my time between the two. Then you came along and I became more determined than ever to break away and have a life with you and your mother.”
“Why didn’t you, then?” I ask, hating the whininess I hear in my voice. “Why didn’t you just commit yourself to Mom and me right from the start?”
“I was working on it,” he says, unfolding his arms and resting them on the table. He leans forward and pins me with his gaze. “You have to understand—the family doesn’t let people just leave. Keeping everyone within the ranks is key to the success of their way of life and they can be quite adamant about it, to the point of physical violence. I tried to ease out of it, but it was a slow process. By the time I felt I was ready to make a move, things had changed.”
“What changed?” I ask, my skepticism so solid it’s almost a physical presence. “You were still conning people when you went into the protection program. That’s what led to you needing it. So don’t tell me you were ready to commit to my mother at that point.”
He purses his lips again. “Actually, I was ready to commit to your mother before that happened. But . . . well . . . perhaps you should talk to her about what transpired at that point. Just know this. I loved you and your mother, and leaving you behind was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
I stare at him, confused, angry, disillusioned . . . knowing there is more to this story of my past than either one of my parents is telling me. I have developed a throbbing headache; it feels like there is a tiny man with a pickax trying to escape from inside my skull through my forehead.
“Am I free to go?” my father asks.
“No,” I say.
“Yes,” Hurley says at the same time.
I turn and stare at Hurley. “You’re going to let him just walk out of here?”
“I don’t have anything to hold him on.”
At that, my father pushes back from the table and stands. “I guess I’ll be going then.” He walks around to our side of the room and opens the door. I sit and stare straight ahead, refusing to look at him. “I wish it all could have been different, Mattie,” he says. I want to turn around and ask him not to leave. I have a million more questions I want to ask. But I do nothing.
The quiet closing of the door behind me reverberates loudly in my chest.
CHAPTER 31
Hurley and I ride home in complete silence. I want to talk about what just happened; I want to dissect the meanings behind it. However, I don’t even know where to begin or how to broach the subject without bursting into tears. And there’s a burning lump in the middle of my throat, strangling me, making it impossible for me to talk.
It’s dark as we pull into the driveway and I’m surprised I can’t see any lights on inside the house. It’s only a little after nine and Matthew is most likely in bed asleep by now, but I can’t imagine Emily has gone to bed. Had she invited Johnny over for a little cuddling? If so, she was going to be in trouble because Johnny wasn’t allowed in the house if we weren’t home. Not just Johnny, but anybody. Hurley has guns in the house. They are locked up and kept where Matthew can’t get to them, but teenagers are another story. All we needed was to have someone Emily invited over to the house steal one of the guns and hurt or kill someone with it. Plus, we have confidential files on our computers and we occasionally bring work home.
Emily understood the reasoning behind our request, but I know there have been times when Johnny has pressured her and tried to talk her into letting him come over when we weren’t there because he has no privacy at his house. So far, Emily has stood her ground, but maybe tonight was the night she finally caved?
I pick up my pace and scurry past Hurley so I can be the first one through the front door. He seems so distracted I’m not sure he’d notice Johnny and Emily if they were making out naked on the couch.
But they aren’t. There is no one in the living room or the kitchen. All the lights are out, which is unusual. Emily always leaves a light on downstairs somewhere if she goes up to bed before we get home.
“Why is it so dark in here?” I say to Hurley. The living-room drapes are closed, but there is a tiny amount of ambient light coming in through the front-door window from the streetlights outside. I can make out shadows, but not much more. I make my way through the living room into the kitchen and flip the wall light switch. Nothing happens. For a moment, I panic, thinking I must have forgotten to pay the electric bill this month and they turned off our power. I hear a muffled bark I recognize as Hoover’s coming up through the floor. Then I realize a circuit breaker must have blown downstairs in the basement. Emily is probably down there now with Hoover, trying to fix it. I squint in the darkness and take a step toward the basement door, but then I hear a male voice I don’t recognize.
“Stop where you are.”
I freeze, and then I hear Hurley say, “What the hell?”
“Yes, that’s a gun I’m holding to the back of your neck,” the male voice says. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to.”
“Oh, my God,” I say in a panic. I hear Hoover barking again down in the basement. “Matthew? Emily?”
“They’re both fine, for now. They’re upstairs. And that’s where we’re going to go so we can have a room with full curtains on all the windows so we aren’t visible to the outside. But first, Detective, I need you to take your gun out and set it on the table.”
“Look,” Hurley says, but the rest of his words are cut off.
“Do it!” the male voice says.
My eyes are struggling to see in the dark. I see Hurley’s shadow reach forward, and hear the sound of his gun being laid on the table.
“Okay, good,” the male voice says. “Now you go first, lady. Head upstairs and don’t make any sudden or stupid moves because I’ve got a gun aimed at your husband’s head.”
Inanel
y, I start to correct him, to tell him Hurley isn’t my husband. However, I wisely bite it back and walk slowly, carefully, past the two men’s shadows and into the living room. I reach the foot of the stairs and start up. I’m desperate to get to Matthew and Emily, to make sure they’re okay. At the top of the stairs, I see a trapezoid of light emanating from Emily’s room and hurry toward it. When I reach the threshold, I see Emily sitting in her desk chair, her arms wrapped behind her and secured with a zip tie. Both of her ankles are zip-tied to the legs of the chair, and there is a piece of duct tape over her mouth.
Her eyes grow wide when she sees me, and they grow even wider when she sees her father and the other man behind me. I turn so I can move down the hall to Matthew’s room and bump into Hurley right behind me.
I get my first glimpse of the man with the gun. “You’re Jeremy Prince,” I say, dread filling my gut. Hurley’s eyes grow wide and his brow furrows.
Prince looks at me, blinking fast, his face contorting with emotion. “Yeah, I’m Jeremy Prince,” he says. “I don’t know how the hell you people figured that out, but you’ve made a huge mess of things. You’re going to get my family killed.”
“I don’t give a crap about your family,” I say, pushing past him and Hurley. “Where’s my son?” I move down the hall, half expecting to feel a bullet in the back of my head, but I need to see Matthew. I need to know he’s okay. I stop in the doorway to his room and breathe a sigh of relief. He’s asleep in his big-boy bed, thumb firmly planted, cheeks moving in and out like a bellows. Tux and Rubbish are on his bed, the two of them situated at the foot of it like guard cats.
A surge of anger courses through me and I whirl around, confronting the man with the gun. “What the hell do you want? Are you here to kill us? Do you think that’s going to solve your problems?”
“I’m here to turn myself in.”
Our jaws drop and I look at Hurley, curious to see his reaction, wondering if he heard the same thing I did, or if I imagined the whole thing. Judging from the puzzled look on his face, he heard what I did.
“You what?” Hurley says.
“I’m here to turn myself in. I can’t do this anymore. It’s gone too far. I don’t know why you put that bullshit on the news about having someone in custody, but you’ve totally screwed me by doing that. Me and my family.”
“Your family?” Hurley says. He starts to turn around, but Prince jabs the gun in his neck.
“Hold on, Detective,” Prince says. “I don’t want you making any sudden moves. We need to talk and I want you to hear me out. Why don’t you go over there and have a seat on the girl’s bed?”
Hurley does as he’s told and walks across Emily’s room, settling on the edge of her bed. Emily lets out a little whimper and wiggles in the chair, pulling her knees together.
“Undo her,” I say to Prince. “We’ll listen to what you have to say, but let her go. I think she has to pee.”
Emily nods vigorously.
Prince nods toward Emily’s desktop and says, “You can use those scissors to cut her ties. But don’t get any wise ideas with the scissors or I’ll shoot first and ask questions later.”
I nod my understanding, walk into the room, find the scissors, and cut the zip ties around Emily’s wrists. She pulls the tape off her mouth while I cut her ankles free and then she hops out of the chair and brushes past Prince with surprising bravado, heading down the hall to the bathroom.
“Don’t try any funny stuff in there or I’ll shoot your parents,” Prince says.
“You’re an asshole,” Emily shoots back, and she shuts the door.
Prince motions to me with the gun. “Put the scissors down and go sit over there next to your husband.”
“He’s—” Again I was about to say he’s not my husband, but I realize how stupid and irrelevant it would be, and once more bite it back. I put the scissors back in the pencil holder I took them from and go sit on the bed next to Hurley. From down the hall, we hear the toilet flush and water running. A moment later, the bathroom door creaks as it opens—I’ve been after Hurley to fix that stupid squeak—and Emily comes back into the room.
“Sit,” Prince says, gesturing toward the chair she was tied to.
Emily does as she’s told and we all sit there, hostage to this suspected killer who says he wants to turn himself in. I wonder if I’m asleep and dreaming, because this makes about as much sense as most of my dreams do, and they’re typically Alice in Wonderland kind of stuff.
Prince sucks in a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and lets the breath out in a big sigh. “Here’s the deal,” he says, looking at Hurley. “I’m willing to confess to those killings . . . all of them, though I don’t know how you connected Carolyn.”
“The nicotine,” Hurley says. “We found it in her skin cream, and in her work gloves. And we also found it on the lid of the cooler on Hal Dawson’s boat.”
Prince screws his face up in thought for a moment; then he bursts out laughing. “I had a soda,” he says. “Done in by a frigging soda. I was wearing gloves, but they were the same gloves I’d used to mix the nicotine in Carolyn’s cream.”
“Why did you kill them?” I ask.
“Because that’s what they paid me to do,” Prince says.
“They who?”
Prince shakes his head. “No, that part’s going to have to wait. I’m not giving up any names until I have a deal on the table. In writing. I want witness protection for me and my family.”
“You killed three people,” Hurley says. “They’re not going to let you go free after that.”
Prince looks confused for a moment, but then says, “We’ll see. I didn’t want to kill anyone. They sucked me in. They started paying me for little jobs—delivering packages and some bodyguard work—and they paid well. We needed the money. My wife, she’s sick. She has multiple sclerosis and we have two daughters. I had to leave the military so I could be around to help take care of her and the kids. When they offered me work, I took it. I did some special ops stuff in the military and they said they needed someone with my skill set. And with the money they were paying me, I could afford to hire round-the-clock help for my wife.”
He pauses and sighs, his expression pained. “They made me do some things that . . . things I’m not proud of. Then they asked me to get rid of someone. I told them I wasn’t going to kill anyone, that’s where I drew the line. But then they said if I didn’t do it, they’d kill my wife and daughters.” He pauses, running his free hand through his hair, and making a grim face. “They had it all planned out that first time and told me what to do. When I realized they wanted me to kill not one, but two people, I tried to back out again. But they kept threatening to hurt and kill my family, so I did what they wanted. Things didn’t work out quite the way they planned, but in the end, they were satisfied with the outcome and I only had one death on my conscience. I thought that would be the end of it, but they didn’t stop there.”
I wonder if he’s referring to Marla Weber and Tomas and start to ask him, thinking that’s why he looked momentarily confused when Hurley said he had killed three people, but Hurley gets his question in first.
“Why did they want Hal, Tina, and Carolyn dead?”
“I don’t know the ‘why’ part for Hal Dawson. I just did what they told me to do.” He pauses, wincing. “I didn’t like doing it the way I did, but I couldn’t risk the sound of a gunshot out on the water. And I feel bad about the lady. I didn’t realize she was going to be on the boat. She fainted after what I . . . after the guy went over the side, and for a moment, I thought about letting her be. But she’d seen me and would have been able to ID me later.” He shrugs, indicating the conclusion from all this was obvious.
His dismissive attitude angers me and I struggle to stay focused and not rip his face off. “There were witnesses,” I say. “They said the man on the boat had a beard.”
Prince pulls at his clean-shaven chin. “A disguise,” he says with another shrug.
�
�What about Carolyn Abernathy?” Hurley asks.
“That was different. Initially all they said they wanted me to do was to get close to her and search through her house and her computer to see if she was looking into anything related to drug research. I staked her out for a while, but she didn’t go out much. So I created the false ID for Keith Lundberg, got a job at the mechanic shop, and followed her to the grocery store one Saturday. I flirted with her, told her I came there every Saturday at the same time and hoped to see her again the following week. Sure enough, she showed up. It was easy from there.”
This last, cavalier phrase makes my blood boil.
“You dated her and then you killed her?” Emily says, looking aghast.
Prince shoots her a wounded look. “I didn’t know they were going to ask me to kill her when I started seeing her.”
Emily shakes her head at him and looks away in disgust. I do the same.
“And I thought the nicotine was a smart way to do it,” Prince adds, seemingly oblivious to our reactions. “How did you happen onto it?”
“You got careless,” Hurley says. “The invoice for the tobacco juice you ordered was in the Dumpster at the motel where you were staying.”
“But I shredded everything,” Prince says, looking confused.
“You should have burned it,” Hurley says.
Prince shakes his head and again runs a hand through his hair. “Clearly, I’m not cut out for this kind of work.” He gives Hurley an appealing look. “You have to help me get out of this. I figured I might as well turn myself in because they’re going to believe that crap you put on the news tonight, and they’re going to come after my family. I’ve got them hidden for the moment, but they’ll find them eventually. They’ve got eyes and connections everywhere. That’s why we need witness protection—if not for me, then for them. You get my family somewhere safe and I’ll give you names.”
Dead in the Water Page 30