stop first.”
“I can call the hotel phone, if you don’t want to use your cell,” Lucy says.
“I’m already using it. I’ve been using it.” I don’t elaborate on what I think of Jaime and her self-serving ideas of pay phones and FBI eavesdropping.
“You shouldn’t have any of this on your mind at all,” Lucy says. “It’s not about you. It’s not your problem. And I don’t view it as my problem anymore.”
“You don’t get over something like this as if it never happened,” I reply, looking in the direction of Marino, of what there can be no doubt is his van, which isn’t fixed.
On the wooded square across the street, the Owens-Thomas House hulks against the night, pale English stucco with tall white columns and a serpentine-shaped portico. The shapes of old trees stir and iron lamps glow, and for an instant I catch something moving, but as I stare in that direction, I find nothing. My imagination. I’m tired and stressed. I’m unnerved.
“I still worry about who knows or might find out. You’re right about that,” Lucy says, as I step closer to the street, looking up and down it and into the square, seeing no one. “When I first found out about the protective order issued to the CFC, that’s what I thought it was about. They were after me for hacking. I’ve been careful. They’d probably like nothing better than to get me into trouble because of old shit with the FBI, with ATF.”
“Nobody’s after you, Lucy. It’s time you put that out of your mind.”
“It depends on what Jaime’s said to certain people and what she continues saying and how she twists the facts. What she told you isn’t what happened, not exactly. She’s made it a whole lot worse than it was,” she says. “It’s like she’s obsessed with turning me into a bad person so she feels justified in what she did. So everyone will understand why she ended it.”
“Yes, I’d say it’s exactly like that.” I watch for the van, which I can hear but not yet see, on Abercorn now and getting closer as I try to contain my complete disrespect for someone I suspect my niece still loves.
“Which is the real reason why I left New York. I knew there was talk about the security breach even if I wasn’t outright accused. No way I could continue doing forensic computer work there.”
“The way she treated you is what hurt you most and why you left New York, left absolutely everything you’d built for yourself,” I disagree calmly, quietly. “I don’t believe for a minute you started all over again in Boston because of rumors.”
I look back at Jaime’s building, at her windows lit up. I can see her silhouette moving past the drawn draperies in what I assume is the master bedroom.
“I just wish you’d told me. I don’t know why you didn’t,” I add.
“I thought you wouldn’t want me at the CFC. You wouldn’t want me as your IT person or want me around.”
“That I would banish you the way she did?” I say before I can stop myself. “Jaime asked you to commit a violation when she knew how vulnerable you were to her…. Well, I don’t mean to sound like this.”
Lucy doesn’t say anything, and I watch Jaime Berger’s silhouette moving back and forth past the lighted window. It occurs to me she might have a security camera monitor in her bedroom and she’s checking it. She might be watching me, or maybe she’s distressed because I spoke my mind and walked out as if I might never come back. I think of the old saying that people don’t change. But Jaime has. She’s reverted back to an earlier vintage of herself that’s gone bad like wine not properly stored. Living a lie again, but now she’s impossible to take. I find her completely unpalatable.
“Anyway, I know about it now,” I tell Lucy. “And it doesn’t change anything with me.”
“But it’s important you believe it’s not the way she’s described.”
“I don’t care.” Right now, I really don’t.
“All I did was verify a few numbers by looking at electronic records of the original complaints and the way they were coded, but I shouldn’t have.”
No, she shouldn’t have, but what Jaime did was worse. It was calculating and cold. It couldn’t have been more unkind. She abused the power she had over Lucy and betrayed her, and as I get off the phone I wonder who Jaime will manipulate and manage to compromise next. Lucy and Marino, and I suppose I should include myself on the list. I’m in Savannah, immersed in a case I knew virtually nothing about until a few hours ago, and I look up at her apartment again. I watch her silhouette move past the lighted window in back. She seems to be pacing.
It is almost one a.m., and the van gleams ghostly white in uneven lamplight, loudly heading in my direction like some demon-possessed machine out of a horror film, slowing down and speeding up, lurching and shuttering. Obviously Marino didn’t find a mechanic after he left Jaime’s apartment several hours ago, and by now I’m convinced he deliberately left me alone with her for a reason that has nothing to do with anything I might want or need. Brakes screech when he slows to a stop in front of the apartment building, and the passenger door squeaks as I open it, the interior light out because Marino always disables it in any vehicle he’s in so he’s not an easy target or
“Do a little shopping?” I ask, and I hear the tenseness in my tone. “I picked up some water and other stuff so we’d have it in our rooms. What happened?”
“Nothing I feel good about. Why did you leave me alone with her? Was that your instruction?”
“I thought I said I’d call you when I got here,” he reminds me. “How long you been standing outside?”
I fasten my shoulder harness, and the door squeaks again as I pull it shut. “I needed to get some air. This thing sounds terrible. In the agonal stages of a drawn-out tortured death. Good Lord.”
“I thought I told you it’s not a good thing to be wandering around by yourself. Especially this time of night.”
“As you can see, I didn’t wander far.”
“She wanted time alone with you. I thought you’d want it, too.”
“Please don’t think for me,” I reply. “I’d like to take a detour, take a look at the Jordan house, if this thing can make it without breaking down completely. I don’t believe wet spark plugs are the problem.”
“Pretty sure it’s the alternator,” he says. “Maybe loose plug wires, too. The distributor cap might be dirty. I found a mechanic who’s going to help me out.”
I stare up at Jaime’s apartment, and she has returned to her living room, where the shades are up. I can see her clearly as she stands before a window watching us drive off, and she has changed into something maroon, possibly a bathrobe.
“It’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?” Marino says, as we head south, the dark shapes of trees and shrubs moving in the hot wind. “I asked Jaime if she picked her apartment because it’s close to where it happened. She says she didn’t, but it’s like two minutes from here.”
“She’s obsessed. The case of a lifetime,” I comment. “Only I’m not really sure what case she’s working. The one in Savannah or her own.”
We roar past grand old houses with windows and gardens lit up, their facades a variety of textures and designs. Italianate, colonial, Federal, and stucco, brick, wood, and ballast stone. Then the right side of the street opens up into what looks like a small park surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and as we get closer I can make out gravestones and crypts and white crisscrossing paths dimly illuminated by incandescent lamps. On the cemetery’s southern edge is East Perry Lane, where there are large old homes on spacious lots thick with trees, and I recognize the Federal-style mansion from photographs I found earlier today when I read stories online about Lola Daggette while I was parked in front of the gun store.
The hot night air carries the sweet perfume of oleander as I survey three stories of Savannah gray brick with double-hung windows symmetrically placed and a grand central portico flanked by soaring white columns. The roof is red tile, with three imposing chimneys, and off to one side is an attached stone carport with archways that used to be open and now are glassed in. We park directly in front of a property I can’t imagine owning, I don’t care how handsome it is. I wouldn’t live in any place where people were murdered.
“I don’t want to sit here long, because the neighbors have a hair trigger about suspicious strangers and suspicious cars, as you might expect,” Marino says. “But if you look to the right, almost at the back of the house, just behind the carport is the kitchen door where the killer broke in. Well, you can’t see it from here, but that’s where it is. And that big villa to the right belonged to the neighbor who went out with his dog the morning of January sixth and noticed the glass busted out of the Jordans’ kitchen door and a lot of lights on for so early in the morning. Based on what I’ve been able to reconstruct, the neighbor, a guy named Lenny Casper, woke up around four a.m., when his poodle started yapping. Casper says the dog was upset and wouldn’t settle down, so he figured
