him. She would want to go to Hope’s side immediately and not do what was next in line on the plan.
It could all fall apart.
He drove through the night knowing that he was going to lie. Perhaps not much, but enough. It made him angry and it made him sad, but mostly it made him feel incompetent and deeply dishonest.
When he pulled into the parking lot from the highway ramp, he spotted Sally. It did not take him long to accelerate into the space next to her. Scott grabbed the backpack with the gun and the dish towel covered with gas and blood and stepped from the car.
Sally remained behind the seat, but she turned on the engine.
“You’re late,” she said. “I don’t know if I have enough time left. Did it go as planned?”
“Not exactly,” Scott said. “It wasn’t as simple as we thought.”
“What do you mean?” Sally asked in her brisk lawyer’s tones.
“There was a bit of a struggle. Hope succeeded, she did what she volunteered to do.” He hesitated. “But she might have gotten hurt a little bit in the confrontation. She’s in the car now, heading home. And I was worried there might be something left behind that indicated she had been there, so I set a small fire.”
“Jesus!” Sally exclaimed. “That wasn’t in the plan!”
“I just was worried about the scene, you know. I thought that would be the best way to compromise what some cop might think had taken place. Isn’t that exactly the sort of thing you told us about?”
Sally nodded. “Yes, yes. Okay. I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“There’s a towel in with the item in the backpack. It will transfer some of the gas to the gun barrel. Get rid of it afterwards.”
Sally nodded again. “That was smart. But Hope, what were you saying about Hope?”
Scott wondered whether he wore the lie on his face. “She’s on schedule now. Do what you have to do and speak with her later.”
“What exactly happened to Hope?” Sally demanded sharply.
“You have to leave. You have to get back to Boston. Time is critical. There’s no way to tell what O’Connell will do.”
“What happened to Hope?” Sally repeated, bitter anger in her voice.
“I told you, she was in a fight. She got cut with a knife. When I left her, she said to tell you she was okay. Got it? That’s exactly what she said. Tell Sally I’m okay. You need to finish the job tonight. We all do. Hope did her part. I did mine. Now do yours. It’s the last thing, and…” He didn’t finish.
Sally hesitated. “Cut with a knife? What do you mean cut with a knife? Tell me the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth,” Scott answered her stiffly. “She was cut. That’s it. Now go.”
Sally imagined a hundred different responses to her ex-husband right at that second, but stopped. As angry as she was, she knew that once, years earlier, she had lied to him, and that right then he was lying to her, and that there was absolutely nothing she could do about any of it. She nodded, not trusting her voice anymore, took the backpack, and drove off into the night. Once again, Scott was left behind, staring at car lights disappearing in the darkness.
“And so,” the detective said as he pointed to the crime-scene photographs, “the fire really messed everything up. And, even more than the fire, it’s the damn water that gets poured over everything by the fire department. Of course, you can’t really ask them not to do that,” he said with a wry laugh. “We were just really lucky the whole house didn’t go up in flames. The blaze was pretty much contained to the kitchen area. See the back wall there, all scorched? The arson guy said whoever it was that set the damn thing didn’t know what they were doing, so that instead of spreading across the room, the fire went up the wall and into the ceiling, which was how it got spotted by the neighbor across the way. So all in all, we were fortunate to be able to piece things together.”
“Have you worked many homicides before?” I asked.
“Here? We’re not like Boston or New York. We’re a pretty modest-size department. But the state bureau of forensics is pretty good, and the medical examiner’s office isn’t filled with slouches, so when a killing does come along, we generally get a pretty good handle on it. Most of the homicides we see are like domestic disputes that got out of hand, or else drug deals that turned sour. Most of the time the bad guy is standing there, or at least his buddy is, so someone tells us who we’re looking for.”
“That wasn’t the case this time, was it?”
“Nah. There were some questions made us scratch our heads at first. And there was a whole lot of folks who weren’t going to shed a tear over O’Connell buying the farm. He was a nasty husband, a nasty father, a nasty neighbor, and as dishonest a son of a bitch as the day is long. Hell, if he’d owned a dog, he probably would have starved the beast and kicked it twice a day just on principle, you follow? Anyway, there was just enough left in the house and in the crime scene for us to go on.”
I nodded my head. “But what put you in the right direction?”
“Two things, really. I mean, you have a fire and a dead body that was partially burnt, and truly dumb guys that we are, we initially just figured that the older O’Connell got drunk and somehow managed to set the place on fire along with himself. You know, passes out with a cigarette and a bottle of Scotch in his hand. Of course, that more than likely would have been in the living room in a chair, or in the bedroom, on the bed, instead of the kitchen floor. But when the medical examiner gets the body back on a table, peels away some charred flesh, sees the gunshot wound, and finds a twenty-five-caliber round in his brain, and another in his shoulder, well, that made things a whole lot different. So we were back at that soaking mess, looking for something to get us going, you know. But the doc also finds scrapings under the guy’s fingernails, as well, so we’ve got some pretty interesting DNA, and then all of a sudden, the mess in the house looks like a fight that went poorly for the old bastard. And then when we canvas the place, one of the neighbors recalls seeing a car with Massachusetts plates squealing out of there not too long before the smoke started. That and the DNA results got us a search warrant. And then what do you suppose we find?”
He was smiling, and he snorted a small laugh. A policeman’s satisfaction in once again learning that the world occasionally works the way it is supposed to.
I was less sure I would have reached that same conclusion.
45
Hope drove north, through the tollbooths at the border to Maine, heading toward a spot near the shoreline she remembered from a summer vacation, many years earlier, shortly after she and Sally had first fallen in love. They had taken the young Ashley there on their first trip together. It was a wild spot, where an overgrown park of dark trees and tangled underbrush went straight to the water’s edge, and the rocky shoreline caught the breakers that rolled in from the Atlantic, sending sprays of salt water into the air. In the summer it was magical, seals playing against the rocks, a dozen different species of seabirds crying against the onshore breezes. Now, she thought, it would be a lonely and abandoned spot, and it was the only place that she could think of that would be quiet enough for her to figure out what exactly she was to do.
She tucked her elbow down, keeping pressure on the wound in her side. This helped stymie the flow of blood, and the injury itself had slid into a constant throbbing pain. On more than one moment, she thought she was going to pass out, but then, as the miles slid beneath the wheels of the car, she had gathered some strength and, keeping her teeth clenched against the hurt, believed she could tough out the entire trip.
She tried to imagine what had taken place within her. She pictured different organs-stomach, spleen, liver, intestines-and like playing a child’s game guessed which ones had been sliced and creased by the knife blade.
The countryside seemed darker even than the night that enveloped her. Great stands of black pines, like witnesses by the side of the road, seemed to be watching her progress. When she exited the turnpike,
