She is in capable hands, and well protected, and while I will think about her a lot, I won’t obsess about it.
My only distraction now is Marcus, and the fact that more than sixteen hours have passed since Willie and I left him with Childs, and I have not heard a word. It’s ludicrous to consider myself responsible for Marcus’s protection and physical well-being, but if last night somehow ended badly, I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive myself for leaving him there.
I decide to call Laurie and see how she’s doing, only to realize that I neglected to bring my cell phone with me. It was a stupid thing to do: With all that is going on I need to be reachable at all times.
I borrow Kevin’s cell and call home, and Willie Miller answers. “Where the hell you been?” he asks.
I’m worried, so I decide I prefer asking questions to answering them. “Is Laurie all right?”
“Yeah, she’s fine, but we’ve been trying to find you.” “Why?”
“Marcus is here.”
LAURIE IS DOING PHYSICAL THERAPY when Kevin and I get home.
Willie is in the den with Tara and Waggy, feet up on the coffee table, drinking a beer and watching ESPN. Tara is working methodically on a rawhide chewie, while Waggy’s front legs are going a mile a minute as he furiously tries to burrow a hole in the carpet.
Willie tells me that Marcus is in the kitchen getting something to eat. I have seen Marcus eat once before, and it is seared into my memory. While I have stocked the refrigerator because of all the people in the house, Marcus will clean it out by himself. Then, if memory serves, he will belch once and start hunting for more food.
“What happened after we left last night?” I ask Willie.
“Laurie said to wait for her to finish her therapy. She wants to be there when we tell you. She’s almost done.”
“I don’t want to wait,” I say.
Willie shrugs. “You can always ask Marcus.”
“I’ll wait.”
Laurie is finished in ten minutes. During that time I hear noises coming from the kitchen, but I am not about to go in there to see what is going on.
She calls us to the bedroom; she is back in bed and obviously exhausted from her efforts. I have seen her run five miles without breathing heavily, and now a few minutes of exercise wipes her out.
“We talked to Marcus and learned what happened after you left. It’s not good news.”
“What do you mean?”
She nods. “Marcus asked Childs the questions you and he had discussed. He is confident that Childs had an incentive to tell the truth.”
“Who hired him?”
“Childs didn’t know; nor did he know why. It was all done in secrecy, and he had no personal contact with the man. He was paid two hundred fifty thousand dollars, with the promise of another two fifty when the jobs were completed.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars?” I repeat. It’s an amazing figure. Then I realize that Laurie said “jobs.” “There was more than one job?”
“Yes. Andy, Childs killed Diana Timmerman. He planted the explosives in the house.”
“What?” I look at Kevin, and he is as bewildered as I am. None of this makes any sense; it’s connecting two different things that I thought had no connection at all.
“Why the hell would someone want to kill you and Diana Timmerman?”
“Andy, Childs wasn’t after me. He was told to shoot the dog. He was told to kill Waggy.”
“Waggy?” I point to him. “This Waggy?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Somebody paid a hit man five hundred grand to shoot a dog?”
“Marcus was positive about it,” Willie says.
I have no idea what to make of this. It simply does not compute. “Where is Childs now?”
“That’s the bad news,” Laurie says, and she turns to Willie.
“He went for a swim,” Willie says. “But I don’t think he got very far, because he has a broken neck.”
“Marcus killed him?”
Laurie nods. “He was going to turn him in to the police, but Childs took another run at him, and Marcus got a little carried away. He said he dropped him in the river.”
“Damn.” Hearing that Childs is dead doesn’t exactly bring me to tears, and I’m not likely to reflect that his untimely demise “really puts things into perspective.” The problem is that now I have a million more questions to ask him, with no ability to do so.
The truth is that I am defending someone against a charge of double homicide, and I had the real murderer in my hands and let him get away. And thanks to Marcus, he’s not coming back.
Had I realized that the shooting of Laurie and the Timmerman murders were connected, I would have gotten all the information out of him that I could, and then turned him in as the real murderer. And I should have realized that the shootings might be connected; as Willie had pointed out, both Diana Timmerman and Laurie were connected to Waggy when they were victimized.
I’m so frustrated by this turn of events that I go into the kitchen to question Marcus personally, to see if he knows more than has been drawn out of him. I have to wait what seems like twenty minutes while he finishes chewing the four or five pounds of food in his mouth.
I ultimately get nowhere; Marcus doesn’t even know for sure if Childs is responsible for killing Walter Timmerman. It’s not Marcus’s fault; he asked the questions I wanted him to ask. It’s my fault for not understanding that the events could all be connected, though I still don’t know how they possibly could be.
And now it’s too late.
Of course, there is always the chance that Childs was playing a game with Marcus, and that he was not telling the truth when he said Waggy was the target. I mean, Waggy can be annoying, but not quite that annoying. The problem with this theory is that Marcus is not the type one would have a tendency to joke with, especially when the potential joker is about to have his neck broken.
But if there is some wealthy lunatic out there who has decided Waggy is to be killed, then I have to be the wealthy lunatic who is going to protect him, especially since he is going to be hanging out with Laurie and Tara.
It makes the custody fight with Robinson all the more important. Hatchet has set a date for the hearing, which will actually be during Steven’s trial. It is on the calendar for two hours, and Hatchet made it clear that he is not happy about interrupting the trial. I have not handled Hatchet well in all of this, although Hatchet-handling is a rather delicate task in any event.
The off-duty cops I’ve hired will stay on, but now that Marcus is free I’m going to bring him on as well. He can be Waggy’s bodyguard and double as my investigator. It will make me feel better to have him on the team; Marcus can be a really comforting teammate.
I CAN TELL that Martha Wyndham considers my request to be a little strange.
I’ve called to ask her to arrange a meeting for me with someone who knows all there is to know about dog shows. She hesitates for a moment, no doubt wondering how this can possibly help Steven.
“Well… sure… I guess I can do that,” she says. “Is this about Waggy?”
“It impacts on the case in general. It’s quite important.”
“What is it you want to know specifically? That way I can figure out the best person for you to talk to.”
“A person with as much general knowledge about the process as possible. Also with a knowledge of the business end of things.”
“The business end?” she asks.
