past seventy outside, turning the room into an icebox. I let the door swing shut, stepped into the cold room, and made a quick circuit through it, looking for anything noteworthy and finding nothing. Housekeeping had already made a pass through—the bed was made and the bathroom cleaned, with fresh towels and soap out. If anything had gone wrong in this room, word would have been out long before I conned my way into a keycard.
I saw a charging cord trailing from the bedside table to a wall outlet, and that made me wonder if he could have left his cell phone behind in the room, explaining why he hadn’t answered. I took my phone out and called his number, waiting hopefully as it began to ring, thinking I might hear it in the room. There was nothing, though.
As I stood there amid his things, I began to feel intrusive. I had no right to be there, not just from the hotel’s point of view but also from Ken’s. He’d been gone a few hours, that was all. Hadn’t returned my calls yet. That hardly gave me justification to break into his room and go through his things. Now that I was in here, away from Graham’s suspicions and Harrison’s questions and the collision those things had with my faith in Ken, the sense of urgency faded a bit. He’d turn up soon, and then I’d have to admit that I’d done this and hope he’d be more amused than angry. It would be an embarrassing moment for me. Right then, though, I was looking forward to that embarrassment. By the time I could feel shame over my actions, he’d be back.
I walked out of the bedroom and back toward the door, then stopped in the living room and looked down at the coffee table. His laptop sat there, closed but with a blinking green light indicating it was still on. There was a blank CD in a clear plastic case on top of the computer. I leaned over and picked it up, read the scrawled
I put the CD into my pocket. Even the guilt I was feeling about breaking into his room didn’t give me pause. I don’t know why that was. Maybe it was just that I knew the CD was for me. Maybe it was something darker and more instinctive. Either way, I took it.
I’m glad that I did.
The day faded to evening, and I went back to my apartment and called Amy, asked her to come by. She picked up some Chinese takeout on the way, and while we ate that together I told her about Graham’s call and Ken being MIA. She put her fork down and looked at the clock, and her forehead creased with worry lines.
“He’s not obligated to call, Amy. He’s not our kid, staying out past curfew.”
It was forced nonchalance, though, and she knew it.
“You could call someone else, ask if they’ve heard from him,” Amy said.
“Who? His ex-wife?”
That silenced the conversation, but it shouldn’t have, because the idea wasn’t bad. His ex-wife did hear something before me, when she was called as next of kin and notified that Ken Merriman’s body had been found in one of the Metroparks with two small-caliber bullet wounds, one through his heart and one through his forehead.
The ex-wife heard first, and she gave the police my name. Apparently Ken had spoken of me to his daughter. It was eleven thirty when the phone rang. I was sitting on the couch with my arm around Amy, trying without success to focus on the TV, and for a few seconds before I got to the phone I was sure it would be Ken. They were a pleasant few seconds.
I wish I could have them back.
25
__________
Where his life ended, the police weren’t sure. They knew only where the body had been found, and at four o’clock in the morning, long after I’d widened their eyes with my list of possible suspects, I stood there alone in the dark.
Ken Merriman’s corpse had been discovered on a short but steep hill near the edge of the tree line in Mill Stream Run Reservation, snagged in a thicket of undergrowth that was full and green with late-spring enthusiasm. There was honeysuckle nearby, the sweet cloying scent pushed at me by a breeze that rose and fell like long rollers breaking on an empty beach. The breeze was warmer than the still air, and damp, a messenger sent ahead with promises of rain.
At the top of the hill and beyond the tree line, a small field ran across a parking lot. A walking and bike path snaked away from the lot, a silver thread in the darkness. No cars were in the lot but mine, and no traces of police activity remained. The body had been found at eight that evening, and the Metroparks Rangers who interviewed me said they thought it was found soon after it was dumped. Twenty, thirty minutes earlier and they might’ve had an eyewitness.
Instead, there’d been only the discovery, made by two brothers from Berea who’d ridden their bikes down past the YMCA camp with a glow-in-the-dark football. The police had the football now, because one end of its neon green body carried a crimson smear. The kids had tossed it into the woods, where it took one good bounce into the thicket and landed directly on Ken’s body. Throw got away from him, the older brother, who was fourteen, told the police. Then he started to cry.
Maybe I’d come down here to cry myself. Or maybe to rage and swear. Maybe I thought Ken Merriman would speak to me somehow, that alone in the dark in the place where his blood had drained into the earth and then gone dry under the wind I’d be able to feel his presence, understand something about his end and find direction for the justice this required.
None of that happened. I didn’t scream, I didn’t weep, I didn’t hear any voices of dead men. Instead I smelled the honeysuckle and felt that warm, ebbing breeze and wished that I’d turned Ken away the night he arrived from Pennsylvania.
Where had he gone, what had he done, who had he provoked? Why was his body out here in the brambles instead of mine? We’d worked side by side on this since he’d arrived in Cleveland, right up until those last twenty- four hours when I sat at the office waiting on him to show up and he’d gone out and gotten killed.
What did you do, Ken? What button did you push, what thread did you pull?
There would be no answers here, nothing but wind sounds and sorrow, but I stayed anyhow. When my legs got tired I sat on the top of the hill and stared into the shadows and did not turn when the occasional car passed, disrupting the silence and throwing harsh white light into the trees.
That’s what he’d told me at the start, sitting in my truck with one hand on the door handle, ready to go up to the hotel room where he would spend his last night alive, sleeping alone with a too-loud air conditioner blasting away beside him. I’d responded by telling him . . . what had I said? That we might not get there. Something to that effect, some warning that all the effort might yield no result. He’d shaken his head.
My anger rose with the dawn. As the shadows around me changed from shades of dark to patterns of gray and then golden light, I noticed my jaw had begun to ache from the force of my clenched, grinding teeth. I’d had thoughts of Ken earlier in the night, but now he was gone, and Dominic Sanabria and Parker Harrison filled my mind in his stead.
They had done this. I didn’t know who had put the bullets through Ken’s heart and forehead, didn’t know whose hands had carried him from the trunk of a car and released him at the top of this hill, but I knew who’d put it all in motion. I’d seen them personally, looked into their faces and heard their words, and now the intimacy of that filled me with anger that spread like steam. They had left me alive. They had killed Ken Merriman and yet they had left me alive, and in that action their regard for me was clear—they viewed me as impotent. Of course I would accuse them, of course I would come at them with all the resources I could muster. They knew this, and they did not care.
Harrison had told me to step aside before harm was done. That had not been a wild notion, clearly. He’d warned me, and then he’d reached for the phone and called Dominic Sanabria, and a day later Ken—who had not
