He opened his eyes. “Funny thing is, it didn’t seem like we were hit all that hard,” Nick went on. “It wasn’t like some horrible collision in the movies where everything goes black. It was a hard bump, like you might feel if you were playing bumper cars. Kind of a hollow crunch. I didn’t get whiplash. Never blacked out. Nothing like that. I turn to Laura and I’m yelling, ‘Can you believe that guy?’ And she doesn’t say anything. And I notice how the windshield is all spiderwebbed on her side. And there’s some pebbles of glass on her forehead. Something glistening in her hair. But there’s no blood, or hardly any. A fleck or two, maybe. She looked fine. Like she’d nodded off.”
“There was nothing you could have done,” Cassie breathed.
Nick only knew that his eyes were wet because his vision was blurred. “Except there were hundreds of things I could have done. Any one of them, and Laura would still be alive. You know, when we were leaving the house that night, Laura was about to make a phone call, and I made her hang up. I told her she was making us late. I told her it was ridiculous that she’d spent fifteen minutes putting on makeup and perfume for a goddamn swim meet. I told her that, for once, we weren’t going to be late. I told her I wanted to get a good seat in the stands so I could see what the hell was going on. Now, thing is, if she had made that phone call, we wouldn’t have been in an accident. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry, we would actually have arrived. And I didn’t have to make those goddamned phone calls in the car that night, for Christ’s sake. Like they couldn’t wait till the morning. I could have driven the car—I mean, look, I was the better driver, we both knew that, she hated driving. I shouldn’t have been arguing with her while she was behind the wheel. Oh, and here’s a sweet one. She wanted to take the Suburban. I said it would just be a pain to park. I insisted that we take the sedan. If we’d taken the Suburban, she might have survived the impact. And I’m just starting a long, long list. All kinds of things I could have done differently. The weeks after she died, I became the world’s leading expert on this subject. Had ’em all cross-tabulated in my mind. Should have been on Jeopardy! Thanks, Alex, I’ll take Vehicular Fatalities for a hundred.”
Cassie looked wan, ran her fingers through her hair. Nick wondered whether she was even listening to him. “Intracerebral hemorrhage,” he went on. “She died in the hospital the next day.”
“You’re a good person.”
“No,” Nick said. “But I wish I were.”
“You give so much.”
“You don’t know, Cassie. All right? You don’t know what I’ve taken, what I’ve done. You don’t know…”
“You’ve given me a family.”
And I’ve taken yours away. He looked at her for a long time. He felt foolish about how he’d suspected her secret intentions and worried that she’d been trying to dig up the truth about what had happened to her father.
Then again, he obviously wasn’t so good at sizing people up, he realized. He’d gotten Osgood wrong in all sorts of ways, and he’d gotten Scott wrong. Todd Muldaur—well, he had Todd’s number from the start, so no surprise there. Eddie? He wasn’t really surprised, when it came right down to it, that Eddie wouldn’t hesitate to kick the skates out from under him.
But Cassie. He hadn’t known just what to make of her, and maybe he still didn’t know her all that well. Maybe his overpowering guilt and her overpowering seductiveness made it hard for him to see her clearly. She was a little emotionally unstable, that was obvious. Bipolar and having your dad murdered—that was a fairly lethal combination.
And he wondered how she’d react when he came clean.
It made no difference to him whether Eddie would strike some kind of deal with the police or not. He’d leave Eddie to his own smarmy fate.
When he and the kids came back from Hawaii, he was going to tell her the truth. And then he’d tell Detective Rhimes the truth.
And there would be an arrest, he knew that. Because whether a DA decided it was self-defense or not, he had killed a man.
Back in Boston, after his meeting with Willard Osgood, he’d taken a cab over to Ropes & Gray, a big law firm where a friend of his worked as a criminal defense attorney. A really smart guy he knew from Michigan State. Nick had told him what had happened, the whole story.
The lawyer had blanched, of course. He told Nick he was in deep shit, there was no way around it. He said the best Nick could hope for was criminally negligent homicide, that if he were very lucky he might get only a couple of years in prison. But it might well be more—five, seven, even ten years, because there was also the matter of having moved the body—tampering with physical evidence. The lawyer said that if Nick wanted to go through with it, he’d get a local counsel and petition to try the case in Michigan pro hoc vice, whatever that meant. He’d arrange for Nick to surrender, and he’d try to negotiate a plea agreement with the DA in Fenwick. And he said he’d ask for a lot of money up front.
Whatever would happen to him, though, was the least of it. What was going to happen to his kids? Would Aunt Abby be willing to take care of them?
This was the worst thing of all, the thing that truly terrified him.
But he knew it was the right thing to do, at long last, however long it had taken him to come to his senses. It was like that dream he’d had recently, the one about the body in the basement wall that gave away its hiding place by oozing the fluids of decay. He couldn’t hold the horrible secret inside anymore.
So in a week or so, after his last vacation with the kids, he was going to tell Cassie the truth. He’d already begun to rehearse, in his head, how he’d tell her.
“What is it?” she said.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve made some decisions.”
“Decisions about the company?”
“Not that, no. My life is about other things.”
An anxious look came over her. “Is this bad?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Is it bad for us?”
“No. It’s not about us, exactly.”
“‘Not about us, exactly’—what’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’ll talk when the time is right. Just not yet.”
She placed her hand on his. He took it in his hand, holding it gently. Hers was small and trembling; his was big and steady.
The hand that killed her father.
“Cass, we’re off tomorrow,” he said. “We’re going to Hawaii for a few days. I already got the tickets.”
“Hawaii?”
“Maui. Laura loved that place most of all. There’s this great resort Laura and I discovered before we had kids. We had our own villa, right on the beach, with its own pool—not that you needed it—and all you could see from it was the Pacific Ocean.”
“Sounds amazing.”
“Until Laura died, we used to take the family there every year. Our big splurge. Same villa every time, Laura made sure of it. I think of it as a time when we were completely happy, all of us. I remember last time we were there, Laura and I were in bed and she turned to me and she said she wanted to spray a fixative on the whole day and keep it forever.”
“God, it sounds beautiful, Nick.” A light seemed to flicker in her eyes. She looked almost serene.
“I called the travel agency we’d used, and—it felt like a miracle—they said that exact same villa’s available.”
“Are you sure you want to return to a place they associate so closely with Laura? It might be better to go somewhere new—you know, create new memories.”
“You may be right. I know it won’t be the same. It’ll be sad in some ways. But it’ll be a new start. A good thing—just going there as a family, being together again. And there isn’t going to be any pressure to talk, or work through ‘issues,’ or anything else. We’re just going to play on the beach and do stuff and eat pineapple and just be. It won’t be the same, but it’ll be something. And it’ll be something we can all remember when things change, because they’re going to cha
nge.”
“The kids can miss school, right? No big deal.”
“I already called the school, told them I’d be taking Julia and Lucas out of classes for a few days. Hell, I even picked up the tickets at the airport when I got in.” He pulled an envelope from his breast pocket, took out the tickets and held them up, fanning them like a winning hand of cards.
Cassie’s smile vanished. “Three tickets.” She pulled her hand away.
“Just family. Me and the kids. I don’t think we’ve ever done this. Just us three, heading off for a few days somewhere.”
“Just family,” Cassie repeated in a harsh whisper.
“I think it’s important for me to try to reconnect with the kids. I mean, you get along with them better than I do, which is great. But I’ve let my part in it slip—I’ve sort of delegated that to you, like I’m CEO of the family or something, and that’s not right. I’m their dad, whether I’m any good at it or not, and it’s my job to work on making us a family again.”
Cassie’s face was transfigured, weirdly tight as if every muscle in her face were clenched.
“Oh God, Cassie, I’m sorry,” Nick said, flushing, embarrassed by his own obliviousness. “You know how much you mean to us.”
Cassie’s eyelids fluttered oddly, and he could see the veins in her neck pulsing. It was as if she were struggling to contain herself—or maybe to contain something larger than herself.
He smiled ruefully. “Luke and Julia—they’re my direct reports, you know. And I don’t know when I’ll have the chance again.”
“Just family.” The sound of one heavy stone scraping against another.
“I think it’ll be really good for us, don’t you?”
“You want to get away.”
“Exactly.”
“You want to escape.” Her voice was an incantation.
“Pretty much.”
“From me.”
“What? Jesus, no! You’re taking this the wrong way. It isn’t about—”
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “No. No hiding place. There’s no hiding place down there.”
Adrenaline surged through Nick’s veins. “What did you say?”
An odd smile appeared on her face. “Isn’t that what the stalker spray-painted in the house? That’s what Julia told me.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Those very words.”
“I can read the writing on the wall, Nick.”
“Come on, Cassie, don’t be silly.”
“It’s like the book of Daniel, isn’t it? The king of Babylon throws a big drunken party and all of a sudden he sees a mysterious hand appear and start writing something strange and cryptic on the plaster wall, right? And the king’s scared out of his mind and he calls in the prophet Daniel who tells him the message means the king’s days are over, Babylon’s history, he’s going to be killed.” Her expression was glassy.
“Okay, you’re starting to creep me out.”
Suddenly her eyes focused, and she met his gaze. “Maybe I should be grateful. I was wrong, wrong about so many things. It’s humbling. Humbling to be put right. Just like with the Stroups. But so necessary. Listen, you do what you think is best. You do what’s best for family. There’s nothing more important than that.”
Nick held out his arms. “Cassie, come here.”
“I think I’d better go,” she said. “I think I’ve done enough, don’t you think?”
“Cassie, please,” Nick protested. “I don’t get it.”
“Because I can do a lot more.” Noiselessly, she walked out of the kitchen, her steps so fluid she could have been gliding. “I can do a lot more.”
“We’ll talk, Cassie,” said Nick. “When we get back.”
A final glance over her shoulders. “A lot more.”
99
Early Sunday morning, before church. Audrey sat in the kitchen with her coffee and her buttered toast while Leon slept. She was poring over the bills, wondering how they’d be able to keep up, now that Leon’s unemployment benefits were running out. Usually she paid off the entire credit-card balance each month, but she was going to have to start paying only the minimum balance due. She wondered too, whether they should drop to basic cable. She thought they should, though Leon would not be happy about losing the sports channels.
Her cell phone rang. A 616 number: Grand Rapids.
It was a Lieutenant Lawrence Pettigrew of the Grand Rapids police. The man who’d first talked to her about Edward Rinaldi. She’d placed several calls to him over the last few days and had all but given up on him. Noyce had made it clear that he didn’t want her asking around in GR about Rinaldi, but she had no choice in the matter.
“How can I help you, Detective?” Pettigrew said. “The kids are waiting for me to take them out for pancakes, so can we make this quick?”
The guy was no fan of Edward Rinaldi, so she knew that asking about Rinaldi again would be like pushing a button and watching the vitriol spew out. But she had no reason to expect that he’d know the specifics of a long-forgotten and, in fact, quite minor, drug case.
He didn’t. “Far as I’m concerned, Rinaldi’s gone and good riddance,” he said. “He wasn’t exactly a credit to the uniform.”
“Was he fired?”
“Squeezed out might be more accurate. But I were you, I wouldn’t be bad-mouthing Eddie Rinaldi over there in Fenwick.”
“He’s the security director of Stratton, is that what you mean?”
“Yeah, yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Didn’t you say you’re in Major Cases?”
“That’s right.”
“Hell, you want to know chapter and verse on Eddie Rinaldi, you could ask Jack Noyce. But then again, maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I don’t think Sergeant Noyce knows all that much about Rinaldi.”
Pettigrew’s laugh was abrupt and percussive. “Noyce knows him like a book, sweetheart. Guarantee it. Jack was Eddie’s partner.”
Audrey’s scalp tightened.
“Sergeant Noyce?” she said, disbelieving.
“Partner in crime, I like to say. Don’t take this the wrong way, Detective—what’s your name again?”
“Rhimes.” Audrey shuddered.
“Like LeAnn Rimes, the singer?” He warbled, off-key, ‘How do I live…without you?’”
“Spelled differently, I believe.”
“Quite the babe, though, no matter how you spell it.”
“So I hear, yes. Noyce…Noyce was known to be dirty, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Hell, there’s a reason Jack got sent to Siberia, right?”
“Siberia?”
“No offense, sweetheart. But from where I sit, Fenwick is Siberia.”
“Noyce was…squeezed out too?”
“Peas in a pod, those guys. I got no idea who did more pilfering, but I’d say they both did pretty good. Works better in a team, so they’re each willing to look away. Eddie was more into the guns, and Jack was more into the home electronics and the stereo components and what have you, but they both loved the cash.”
“They both…” she started to say, but she lost the heart to go on.
“Oh, and Detective LeAnn?”
“Audrey.” She wanted to vomit, wanted to end the call and throw up and then wrap herself in a blanket and go back to sleep.
“Sweetheart, I were you, I wouldn’t use my name with Noyce. Guy’s a survivor, and he’ll wanna let bygones be bygones, know what I’m saying?”
She thanked him, pushed End, and then did exactly what she knew she would. She rushed to the bathroom and heaved the contents of her stomach, the acid from the coffee scalding her throat. Then she washed her face. All she wanted to do right now was to enrobe herself in the old blue blanket on the living room couch, but it was time for church.
100
The First Abyssinian Church of the New Covenant was a once-grand stone building that had slowly, over the years, gone to seed. The velvet pew cushions, badly in need of replacing,
had been repaired in far too many places with duct tape. The place was always cold, summer or winter: something about the stone walls and floor, that plus the fact that the building fund was suffering, and it cost a fortune to heat the cavernous interior adequately.
Attendance was sparse this morning, as it was on most Sundays except Easter and Christmas. There were even a few white faces: a couple of regulars who seemed to find the sustenance here they didn’t get in the white congregations. LaTonya’s family wasn’t here, which was no surprise, since they came only a few times a year. Early in their marriage, Leon used to accompany Audrey here, until he announced it wasn’t for him. She didn’t even know whether he was sleeping late this morning or doing something else, whatever else he’d been doing.
Leon was only one of the reasons why her heart was heavy today. There was also Noyce. That news had punctured her. She felt betrayed by this man who’d been her friend and supporter and who hid from her his true nature. It sickened her.
But this discovery, as much as it shook her to the core, liberated her at the same time. She no longer had to agonize about betraying him, going behind his back, end-running him. She knew there was no choice, really. Whether Jack Noyce was in the Stratton Corporation’s pocket, had been leaking to his old partner details of the investigation—or was simply compromised, trapped, by what Rinaldi knew about him—he had been working to defeat her investigation. She thought back to the many talks she’d had with him about this case, the advice he’d dispensed so freely. The way he’d cautioned her to proceed carefully, telling her she didn’t have enough to arrest Conover and Rinaldi. And who would ever know what else he’d done to slow things up, block her progress? What resources had he quietly blocked? Whatever the truth was, she couldn’t tell Noyce that she and Bugbee were about to get an arrest warrant for the CEO and the security director of Stratton. Noyce had to be kept in the dark, or he’d surely notify Rinaldi and do everything in his power to halt the arrest.
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