had killed her husband.
She stuffed Ben’s things in her pockets. Slammed the boot lid shut, placed her hands on the bumper and started to push. The damp ground was muddy but sloped forward and after a moment the car started to pick up speed.
Bullshit. An undercover cop or Fed wouldn’t have forced his way inside a house and shot two children in cold blood. A cop wouldn’t have allowed two men to shove someone’s hand inside a running waste-disposal unit and wrap a noose around their neck. A cop wouldn’t have broken into a house and slit a woman’s throat. Ben had made it up, a last-ditch attempt to spare his life.
The front tyres dripped over the edge. Jamie gave a final push and let go. She stood hunched forward with her hands on her knees, sweating and sucking in the muggy night air as the car disappeared from her view.
For a moment the only sounds she heard were the crickets chirping from the woods. Then a loud splash that sounded far away, as though it was happening in another place, at another time. Standing at the cliff’s edge, she watched the car being swallowed inside a cyclone of silver moonlit bubbles. Growing up in Belham, she remembered the time some drunk had fallen over in the water. For days divers searched for the man’s body. It was never found.
Her muscles tensed and her skin grew cold. What if the car didn’t sink? What if the water was too shallow? In the evening’s chaos she hadn’t thought through that possibility.
All her worrying, it turned out, was for nothing. The car sank below the black water shivering with moonlight. The surface grew calm again.
She headed towards the path, hot and uncomfortable underneath the bloody windbreaker. She wished she could take it off but it covered the shoulder holster and Ben’s Glock, which was wedged in the back of her jeans. The extended magazine kept digging into her lower back.
She had a long walk ahead of her. She had parked on Kale, a busy neighbourhood off Blakely full of other suburban homes with minivans much like her own. She knew she couldn’t watch him from the neighbourhood – too risky, too exposed; plus Ben or his partner had started drawing the front shades of the house. Fortunately, she knew Belham and knew where to park.
Jamie hoped the teenager was okay.
She hadn’t known he was inside, not at first. Standing in the hot, dark woods behind the house, she had debated about moving to the back fence for a closer view, then ruled it out. The homes were too close together. Someone might be watching from a window, see her and call the police. Safer to watch from inside the woods.
In addition to the Magnum, she’d brought the small pair of binoculars she kept in the back of the minivan. (Michael liked to use them; Dan had bought them for sporting events and those rare times he went hunting. She kept them in the glovebox.) From her vantage point she could see only part of the kitchen. She had an excellent view of the sliding glass door leading into the living room and for a long time watched Ben search every inch of the room, even going so far as to cut the chair and sofa cushions. Not once did she see the teenager tied down to the chair.
That changed later, when she heard a car pull into the driveway, and the mechanical chug as the motor hauled up the garage door.
Jamie remembered trying to find a new vantage point. The tree limbs kept obstructing her view. Walking through woods in the dark, in a hurry and without the aid of a flashlight, wasn’t desirable. She kept tripping and bumping into things. It was slow, tedious work.
By the time she’d found a new spot, the blonde-haired woman in the blue T-shirt was taped down to a chair seated across from her son, their eyes covered with duct tape. The boy’s mouth was taped shut but not the woman’s; Jamie could see her screaming as the man with the suit started breaking her fingers. Ben stood behind him holding a barber’s straight-edged razor.
Jamie reached for her phone, then remembered she’d left it in the minivan. It didn’t matter. Even if she had brought it, by the time she stammered through the 911 call the woman and boy would be dead. Ben had just cut off one of the woman’s fingers.
Jamie’s first thought – and it shamed her to admit this – was evidence. As a former cop, her fingerprints were stored on a database. She couldn’t leave her prints or any other evidence for the police to find; she had to protect her children. She fumbled at her zippered pocket for the latex gloves.
What happened next came back to her in a series of flashes: running down the incline, slipping and falling. Getting up and tripping again. Finally finding the gate. Unzipping her jacket, grabbing the Magnum and sprinting across the lawn. Moving quietly up the back steps, not wanting to alert Ben and his partner, then discovering that the sliding glass door was locked. The woman screaming. Two shots and the glass shattering. Climbing inside. From the living room, firing two shots at the suited man, hitting him in the stomach. Swinging the Magnum to Ben and seeing the woman’s cut throat. A shot to the thigh and Ben falling backwards, on top of the boy, tipping over the chair. Kicking Ben in the stomach and then grabbing the handcuffs from the suited man lying on the floor, bleeding out of his chest. Wrestling Ben on the floor and cuffing him. Then picking up the spent brass.
A quick search of the woman’s pockets revealed the set of keys for the Honda. With Ben cuffed and taped inside the boot, Jamie came back, picked up the straight-edged razor and cut through the boy’s bindings. She left the strips of tape covering his eyes, placed the cordless phone she’d found on the floor in his hand and ran fast to the waiting car.
Jamie wished she could talk to the boy. Hold his hand and share her story, a fellow traveller who could help him navigate his way through this new landscape of grief.
Jamie drove well under the speed limit in case any cops were out on patrol. She turned on the radio and moved the dial to Boston’s all-news radio station, WBZ.
She had to wait fifteen minutes to find out what had happened in Belham.
Police hadn’t released the names of the woman or the boy. A reporter on the scene described ‘an intense shootout in the woods behind the home that included stun and smoke grenades’. The reporter didn’t have any details, as ‘police have refused to comment’.
Jamie wondered if the fat man in the Hawaiian shirt was involved. He had parked the BMW at the end of the street. Had the police somehow found him? Maybe tried to corner his BMW? Had Mr Hawaii tried to escape through the woods?
The reporter had a breaking development. One of the victims, a male teenager who had been rushed to hospital, had apparently committed suicide. Nothing more was given, but the reporter urged listeners to stay tuned for further details.
Suicide. The boy had seemed around the same age as Michael, her thirteen-year-old. Jamie drove the rest of the way home numb all over.
Forty minutes later she pulled into her driveway. She didn’t open the garage, not wanting to wake the kids. She ran to the back of the house and unlocked the cellar door. She heard the beep for the burglar alarm, entered the code, and then placed Ben’s Glock and the things from her pocket on Dan’s old desk – a slab of plywood the size of a door set across two metal filing cabinets. When he was alive, Dan would come down here to catch up on paperwork or to read through one of his woodworking magazines.
She picked up Ben’s wallet. No credit cards, just a licence with the name Benjamin Masters. Local address too: Boston.
She picked up the Glock, turning it over in her hands.
Three safeties, three modes of fire: safe, automatic and semi-automatic. Laser-targeting sight mounted against the frame. She examined the barrel and found the model number. A Glock eighteen. She’d never heard of it. She ejected the extended magazine and read the words stamped into the metal tubing: RESTRICTED IN THE USA.
The rounds had a pitted nose. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
She knew about hollow-point rounds, how they expanded when they hit the victim’s skin, the pressure from the rush of blood expanding the snub-nose tip and turning it into a spinning mushroom of razor-sharp lead claws that shred tissue and organs as it spiralled its way through the body. Hollow-point rounds were one-stop shots. Even with immediate medical attention, victims usually died from massive blood loss.
