“Yeah, of course.” She glanced again at the pad in her hand. “Is this guy a friend of yours?”
“He knows me,” Miller said. “It might be best if you call him; he’s not all that fond of the police. Tell him you need this information for me, that I’d consider it a favor. And when you call Spadaro, call from a pay phone.”
Barton nodded. “Okay.”
“I’ll be back in an hour, Kay.”
“And if you’re not?”
“I will be.”
Miller looked once more at the paused image of Abby on the screen. He seemed almost reluctant to look away.
“Be careful,” Barton said.
He looked at her, nodded, and then crossed his living room and hurried out the door. Barton listened to him on the stairs, then listened to his pickup drive away.
Freshly rinsed galoshes on his shoes again, his pickup parked even farther down the dark road than before, Miller entered the cottage and did a quick search for hidden cameras. All four of the smoke detectors present were actual smoke detectors, and all of the wall- and ceiling-mounted light fixtures were light fixtures. Everything else that could have contained a concealed camera—knickknacks, throw pillows, framed photos and prints—was in disarray on the floor. The way in which this place had been searched seemed even more desperate to Miller now that he was there alone. Such thorough destruction, bordering, really, on vandalism. Maybe it was the contrast between this place and the solemn neatness of Abby’s apartment that made Miller feel this way. Or maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t help but connect in his mind the chaos around him with the image of Abby leaving with her beloved antique suitcase after being visited by Michaels. Was the item someone was so clearly intent on finding now in Abby’s possession? Could that be it, what was in play here, behind all this sudden death and trail of selective destruction? Could all this be a mad grab for some thing?
Miller felt suddenly, deeply helpless. He stood still for a long time, letting his mind wander, sifting through free association after free association until a single, crucial thought arose from the clutter. This took close to a minute, but when the thought came to him, Miller was glad he had taken the time necessary for it to be born.
The phone.
The last number dialed from it was a connection to both Abby’s apartment and Miller himself, a connection that needed to be, as best as possible, severed. Miller looked for the phone, remembered that Barton had left it on the upended couch, found it there and placed it on the floor. He looked around for something to smash it with, chose a nearby lamp, held it with his gloved hand like a club and brought it down on the phone, breaking it into several pieces. He then broke those pieces into even more pieces. Cops, via phone records, would be able to trace the call from the cottage to Abby’s apartment, and then connect Abby’s apartment to Miller, but that would take time, and anyway, it wasn’t the cops Miller was worried about. It was hard for him to imagine a cop trashing the place like this. Even a rogue cop, even one of the men blindly loyal to Roffman. And a cop would have known to press redial on the phone and collect the last number dialed, found his way to Abby’s apartment as easily as Miller and Barton had. No one in the last few hours had been caught on the camera outside Abby’s door but Barton and Miller and Abby, and anyone as intent as those responsible for the state of this place would have made a beeline straight for East Hampton if they had discovered the number and in whose name it was listed. That, plus the fact that no one had been tailing Miller and Barton, once the town car had turned off the road back in Wainscott, was reason enough to think that a cop hadn’t been here, hadn’t been involved in this.
So, then, who was? Too much destruction for this to be anyone who knew what he was doing. Someone with experience at this wouldn’t have bothered punching holes in walls covered with paint that was so obviously old, not unless what that someone was looking for had been hidden years ago. And, too, a pro would have pressed redial, gotten Abby’s address and shown up at Abby’s door, been caught by her surveillance. Unless the pro wasn’t thinking, had maybe something major to lose, had been put in a corner and because of this had gone over the edge into recklessness . . .
Stop, Miller thought. Stop chasing the mice in your head. The chaos, he knew, was getting to him. So, too, was the pain in his knee. The painkillers were wearing off. Nothing fucked-up your thinking like a dull, unending ache.
He closed his eyes, to get some relief from the mess around him, the sense it inspired him to make of it, took a breath in, let it out. He didn’t care who was killing who, not really, not anymore. He didn’t care who was looking for what, or why. All he cared about at this moment was Abby, finding her and making certain she was safe, doing that much for her, in the process undoing in some small way what he had done, the choice—the foolish choice—he had made all those years ago. He had no delusions about winning her back, or even earning a night with her in his arms—naked, fully clothed, it wouldn’t matter to him. There wasn’t a day when he didn’t remember her, remember something startlingly specific about her—the smell of her, the feel of her next to him in the night, the way she looked at him, the sudden sweat that would rise from her skin in the seconds before she climaxed, like a fever breaking. He had no delusions, as much as he thought of these things, of ever knowing them again. Still, it would be good to at least see her, to just once say her name aloud while in her actual presence.
He wandered to the other side of the front room then, near to the bedroom doors, and looked down at the envelope of photographs he had left there. He was thinking of picking them up, taking them all with him, when he heard something coming from down the hall.
It was the sound of dripping water.
He paused a moment, then followed the sound, moving down the hallway that led past the bathroom and into the kitchen. He doubted what he heard had come from there; it was the loud, ringing plop of a good-sized drop landing in deepish water, certainly that was water landing in a bathtub, not a sink. But he checked the kitchen first, more to make certain that he was in fact alone than anything else. The kitchen was empty, and the back door was closed and bolted, so he backtracked down the small hallway to the bathroom. He had of course checked it when he had first searched the place, when Barton was with him. The shower curtain had been drawn around the tub then, and he had pulled it back on the off chance someone was hiding behind it. No one had been, and the tub was, of course, bone-dry. He couldn’t remember closing the curtain, probably wouldn’t have done so, but it was closed now, and the dripping sound—slow but steady—was coming from behind it. He didn’t want to move any farther at first but knew he had to. The fact that the tub was now full of water could only mean that someone had been here in the time between his and Barton’s leaving and now. Why, of all things, would someone fill the tub? Deep down inside he didn’t want to know, but somewhere equally as deep he knew he didn’t have a choice, he needed to know, had asked for this, whatever this was.
He stepped to the curtain, reached out for it. Every part of him now was prepared for something bad. He took hold of the curtain, paused, then drew it back a foot or so, just enough to allow him to see behind it. Having himself ready for something bad wasn’t enough; there wasn’t anything he could have done to prepare himself for this, something this bad, this terrifyingly horrible.
In the tub, half-submerged in a mix of diluted blood and water, was a woman. Young, naked, both her wrists slashed. Miller in his panic saw those two details first, his eyes going to everything there was, every single thing, that would tell him that this was someone, anyone, other than Abby. He saw curly black hair, full breasts, a rounded face. Once these things had collected in his greedy mind, been sorted out and added together as best as his panic would allow, he recognized the dead woman as Romano’s girlfriend, the woman Abby had posed with in the photos, the woman she had kissed and whose sweater she had playfully reached under, to the delight of them both.
Miller stared at her, more from shock than any i
nvestigative skill, innate or acquired. He felt the urge to flee but also lacked what it took to move. His feet felt suddenly, ridiculously heavy. He found it impossible to believe what he was seeing, didn’t want it to be possible, how could it be? Not just the death—he’d been near death, had seen people die before, had more than just seen them die—but the mere logistics of it just didn’t add up. In the time since his previous visit, this woman had come back, drawn the water, stripped down and climbed in, then opened up both her wrists? Not likely. His brain repeated that, grasping at it. Not likely, not likely at all. It was the only sense, and small a piece of it at that, that could be made of this.
He finally found what it took to move, broke free of his paralysis and was heading down the narrow hallway for the living room, desperate to get out of there, to get away from there, when he first heard the sirens, far off in the distance but approaching fast. He froze yet again, but for only a second this time. His panic-induced stillness was ended by a surge of adrenaline that hit his legs and, despite his knee, despite everything, he turned and bolted back through the narrow hallway to the kitchen, ran through it, stepping over its debris, to the back door. He fumbled with the dead bolt at first, then spun it open and yanked the door back and burst through it, running across the backyard to the rim of the woods behind the cottage, running almost blindly, running even when his knee started to burn as if from friction. He didn’t look back, just locked on what was ahead of him—tree branches, saplings, uneven terrain—and followed the rim of the woods behind several cottages till he found himself at last behind the cottage in front of which he had parked his pickup. It was a dozen cottages down, at the very end of the residential street. He crossed the brief backyard and stuck close to the side of the dark cottage till he reached its front, then peeked around the corner. His chest heaving, he took a look down the street.
Two cop cars, their lights flashing, were parked at odd angles in front of the cottage. A third car was approaching from the far end of the street. It was now or never, Miller thought. He walked across the small front yard to his pickup at the curb—no running now, though it took all he had not to. He stood by the front bumper of the truck, hidden there from sight of the cop cars, and pulled off his galoshes, then stepped around to get in behind the wheel, first tossing the galoshes into the truck bed. Again, he moved slowly, calmly, despite what every nerve in his body was screaming. Once inside, he cranked the ignition—would they hear it over the sound of the rain and across the distance of the long block?—and turned right onto Shore Road, followed it to Cedar Avenue, turned right onto that, working his way back around to Noyac Road. At Noyac he made a left, not a right, which would have been the direct route back to Southampton. Amnesty or no amnesty, he didn’t want to risk passing any other cop cars that might be racing toward the scene. He watched his rearview mirror as he drove, keeping an eye out for the first sign of a cop car behind him. But none appeared. He had gotten away unseen. Still, his heart was pounding as he continued forward, putting distance between himself and the cottage, the dead body of a beautiful woman in it and the cops now more than likely moving through the chaos of the hastily searched rooms.
Miller followed Noyac Road to Majors Path, took that south, his heart doing flips in his chest. Just before Majors crossed Sunrise Highway, on the outskirts of the village, he pulled over and got out, grabbing the two pairs of galoshes from the truck bed and tossing them down a storm drain. He was miles from the cottage now, on a desolate road just past the town dump, so there was no one around to see him ditching the incriminating items. He thought he’d feel better once they were no longer in his possession—it had been all he could think about as he drove, struggling not to speed—but he didn’t feel any different at all. His heart wouldn’t stop pounding, and his mind wouldn’t stop thinking, running, chasing a new set of mice. It was, he knew, unlikely that it had been chance that the cops arrived at the cottage while he was there for a second time, and so long after the actual destruction, when a neighbor might actually have been alerted to the possibility of some kind of trouble going on there by the sound of furniture being overturned and Sheetrock being smashed. Of course, since he doubted Abby’s friend had committed suicide, maybe the neighbor had heard something, seen someone leave. Maybe that someone had left just minutes before Miller had arrived. There was no way of knowing that now, and when there was no way of knowing something, the safest thing was to assume the worst. Someone must have watched Miller enter the house—a neighbor, or someone else, whose presence on that street was certainly less than innocent. These were the options, the ones that he could think of now, neither good but one maybe a little better than the other, if only a little. At some point in the near future, though, Miller would need to determine which of these had been the actual cause of the cops’ arrival, how much the person who had alerted them had seen or knew.
He called his landline as he drove, but Barton didn’t pick up. She would have seen his cell number on the caller ID, so that meant she had left, was probably talking to Spadaro right now. He thought of calling Barton on her cell phone—maybe she could find out from Spadaro how the cops had come to be at the cottage—but he didn’t dare. So far there was no direct link between him and Barton, and a call to her cell phone from his at this time of night, moments after he had fled the cottage one step ahead of the cops, would require her, should this all go to hell, to do some explaining to the very men who had driven her off the force. He wanted to spare her such grief.
From Majors Path, Miller was only a few moments from the train station. He made his way into the village and parked his pickup at the far end of Powell Avenue, just a few blocks east of his apartment. Powell was as much of an industrial side of town as there was in Southampton—running parallel to the train tracks, it was home to a lumberyard and several small auto shops on one side of the street and a row of working-class houses on the other. Miller ran the length of Powell in less than a minute, paused at the corner of Elm to study his street, what was parked along it now, saw nothing out of the ordinary. He then looked for Barton’s Volvo, didn’t see it anywhere. He stepped out into the open and walked the dozen steps to his street door, then climbed the steep stairs and entered his cold apartment.
He heard only silence but hadn’t been expecting anything else. He moved through his kitchen to the large living room, then checked his bedroom and bathroom, making certain he was alone. He went back into the living room, looked at his TV, saw immediately that the DVR was gone. He took a quick look around; maybe Barton had moved it, or placed it somewhere for safekeeping. But he couldn’t find it anywhere. It, like she, was gone.
He stood there in his empty apartment, still laboring to catch his breath, his heart still throbbing. The blue flame in his chest, so long gone now, had been replaced by a burning in his lungs. There was, too, heat in his knee now, but there was nothing comforting about that. Out of habit he thought of his painkillers, the bottle on the table by his bed, but quickly dismissed that idea. He needed a different kind of escape now, an actual route through the trouble ahead and not just a hole in which he could sleep and hide.
He listened to the stillness around him, as still as Abby’s place had been, as still as a graveyard. There was only one thought on his mind now. Why had Barton taken the DVR? Had she found something she didn’t want Miller to see? Had she witnessed Roffman coming to visit his new lover? Had she, when push came to shove, felt more loyalty—a twisted, neurotic loyalty—toward Roffman than she did toward Miller? Or, with Roffman’s fate in her hands for a change, had she found the idea of revenge too tempting to pass up?
For whatever reasons, had Barton betrayed him?
Another thought came to his mind then, the worst yet. Had Barton been the one to send the cops to the cottage?
There was nothing left for Miller to do but to wait and see. But he had no desire to do so there, sit around like a rat in a trap, so easily found by anyone who might want to do him harm. There was, then, only one place for
him to go.
He left his apartment, checking all directions before stepping out onto the sidewalk, out into the open, then made his way around to the back of the restaurant and let himself in through the kitchen door. He sat at a table toward the back of the room, Elm Street and the train station visible through the large front windows but himself invisible to anyone who might pass by. With the lights off and a tumbler of grappa in front of him—for his knee but also for his nerves—he waited there for whatever was to come next.
He’d been there only fifteen minutes when his cell phone rang. The number on the caller ID was one he recognized, one of the pay phones in town. He answered quickly, knew who it had to be.
“Where’d you go?” he said.
“I was getting the information you wanted,” Barton said. The sound of her voice was no small relief to Miller.
“Where’s the DVR?”
“I have it with me,” she said. “I didn’t want to let it out of my sight. I swung by my place to get my VCR so we could make copies. And a change of clothes and things. I found something on the surveillance you’ll want to see, Tommy.”
Miller already knew what it was. He could tell by the sound of her voice. “Hang up and I’ll call you right back from a landline.”
“Okay.”
They hung up. From the phone behind the bar he called Barton back. She answered on the first ring.
“I watched everything there was in the memory,” she said. “Abby installed the camera herself about two weeks ago. You can see her doing it. The only people who came and went during that time were Abby and Michaels—with one exception.”
“Roffman,” Miller said.
“Exactly. But I’m not sure what to make of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He showed up two nights ago, came to the door, knocked, glanced up at the photos, then left. Hardly definitive evidence.”
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