Banks Street, gave him his favorite bourbon doctored with Theresa’s phenobarb. As soon as he started feeling ill, before he lost consciousness and couldn’t walk, she would have hustled him to his car-“I’d better get you to the hospital,” I could imagine her saying, the organizational genius at work.
When Renee reached Coverdale Lane, Marc would have been barely conscious. She could safely leave him in the car, go under the culvert, get a golf cart, push his body from car to cart and drive him to the pond.
Bobby listened to me all the way through, but he was skeptical when I finished. “Picturesque, but no proof.”
I almost stamped my foot in frustration. “If I’m right, that cart in the equipment shed will have evidence for your forensic techs to find. It would be great if they got to it before the golf course repaints it or trashes it.”
He paused. “All right. I’ll move that up the priority list, but what does your fairy tale have to do with the mess you’re in now?”
“Renee hightailed it up here to silence Benji, so he couldn’t identify her. But Geraldine Graham and I both heard him say he’d seen her put Marcus Whitby into the pond when he was up in the Larchmont attic.”
“Yeah, hearsay testimony of a dead terrorist. I’m not even going to try to take that into court.”
“Well, try some real evidence, then, with some real police work.” My temper was fraying. “Before Renee returns to Chicago as a triumphant heroine who killed a terrorist, it would be great to nail down Calvin Bayard’s nurse and the housekeeper, and find out how much of the nurse’s phenobarb is missing. Whether Renee’s prints are on the bottle. Whether they saw Renee last Monday night when she claimed to be in Chicago. Also, someone might have seen Renee go into Taverner’s place the night Taverner died. Also, someone might have seen Whitby go to Renee’s apartment last Sunday.”
“That’s a lot of mghs,” Bobby objected, adding with heavy humor, “and a hundred `mites’ don’t add up even to a flea.”
“The golf cart is pretty damned concrete.” I tried not to shout.
“Don’t swear, Vicki, it’s ugly in a woman. I told you we’ll look at the cart. We’ll do it today, but for the rest of it, you know I don’t like playing with your theories, especially not when they cross jurisdictions like this. And even more especially not with a wanted man like Sadawi involved.”
“And especially not with a family like the Bayards. But the Grahams will back me up on this. And I’m going to sic Murray Ryerson on it; if the police don’t find evidence, he will. It’s even possible one of the DuPage deputies will have the guts to go to the Bayard house if I tell her what I just told you.”
“I don’t stand for your threats any more than I do your insinuations, Vicki.” Bobby’s temper was also wearing thin. “You know damn well that my work is always by the books, regardless of who or what a suspect is. And you know, too, I’m going to have to talk to Jack Zeelander in the federal
attorney’s office about what happened to Sadawi, and I’m not going to feed him your line about the helpless orphan boy. You hear?”
“Oh, Bobby, if you were here now, if you could see Catherine Bayard, lying like Juliet in the tomb, you wouldn’t-“
“Okay, Vicki, calm down. You’ve had a long day, you’ve seen too much blood, you need to go to bed. I’ll tell Zeelander Sadawi’s dead and we’ll leave the rest until we’ve got some ballistics. Okay?”
“Thank you, Bobby.” His sudden switch to kindness made me want to cry again, which I couldn’t afford right now. “Will you talk to the officer in charge here, see if you can move him along? Ms. Graham’s lying down with this wound in her foot, and she’s ninety-one. She needs a doctor. I need a bed.”
Bobby talked to Officer Blodel. To my face he might poohpooh my detecting, but he would support me-support Tony and Gabriella’s daughter-to an outsider.
After talking first to Bobby, and then to the lawyer Freeman had recommended, the tenor of Blodel’s questions began to change. He stopped addressing me as cop to perpetrator, and began speaking as one law professional to another.
Finally, around six in the morning, someone collected Benji’s body to deliver to the county morgue. It took two officers to move Catherine away from him. When they finally lifted her from the table, she started to follow them to the hearse. One of the deputies picked her up and carried her back into the kitchen. She stumbled over to me, clutching me as an infant would. 1 put my arms around her and murmured those senseless coos one gives to aching children.
An ambulance came to take Geraldine to the local hospital. The EMS techs wanted to take Catherine with them as well, to treat her for shock and check on her wound, but she burrowed deeper into my arms, her cast digging into my breast.
Renee bustled forward, the Cannonball in full throttle. “Come along, darling. Let’s get you checked over by a doctor and then we’ll charter a plane for home.”
Catherine clung to me. “Go away! Don’t come near me. You shot Benji,
you shot him like he was a horse with a broken leg. I don’t want to see you again. Go away, go away, go away!”
I didn’t know if the law would ever catch up with Renee Bayard, but Catherine’s outburst shocked her as nothing else had all evening. For a brief moment, her face collapsed; she looked like a stricken old woman, not the brigadier in charge. This wasn’t retribution that I could offer to Harriet Whitby or Benji’s mother, but it was a small offering on the scales of justice.
Renee tried to argue with Catherine, but her granddaughter began to scream. Two officers hustled Renee away. They weren’t charging her with anything, they said, but they wanted to question her more about her gun.
Blodel saw that he couldn’t possibly take me to the station for a formal statement, unless he was prepared to deal with more hysteria from Catherine. In the end, he talked to me in the living room at the cottage while a deputy took notes. I finally had a chance to recount everything-well, almost everything-that had happened since Geraldine and I left Chicago. I left out the tape we’d found in the Saturn, because I wanted to take that home to Chicago with me.
While Blodel and I finished talking, a woman officer fetched clean clothes for Catherine from her own teenage daughter’s closet. She also roused a local motel owner to get us a bedroom.
In the motel, the woman officer helped me bathe and undress Catherine and get her into a nightshirt. I spent a long time under the shower myself, trying to stop my skin from feeling as though it were turning inside out. When I got into bed, I collapsed into sleep so fast I couldn’t even remember lying down. I woke once around noon, because Catherine’s cast was digging into my back, but was asleep again as soon as I turned over.
When I finally came to at three that afternoon, she was still sleeping, her narrow face gray and puffy. I stumbled to my feet and into my well-worn clothes, wishing the woman officer had brought something clean in my size last night.
I roused Catherine to tell her I was leaving to find food, but would be back within an hour. She blinked at me dopily and went back to sleep. When I returned with a bag of groceries and a hot pizza, I was stunned to find Darraugh Graham waiting for me. He had hired a small plane to
collect his mother, he said, and he planned to fly Catherine and me down to Chicago with him. I explained that I already had two cars at the cottage, but he told me he’d send up a team later in the week to drive them back.
“Mother told me what you did the last twenty-four hours. For her, for the boy, for Catherine. It’s enough for one week. I’m going to collect Mother at the hospital now; I’ll swing back for you and Catherine. My pilot is instrument rated, but it’s a small plane, it’s better to fly while we still have light.”
I said I needed to check with the local lawyer to make sure everything was settled with the local police, but Darraugh had taken care of that, too. I think I was twelve the last time anyone took care of things for me. I thanked him shakily and went down the hall to rouse Catherine.
On the flight south, we sat in a stupor for most of the journey. At the little airport on the lakefront where we landed, Darraugh had a car waiting. He sent his driver out to New Solway with his mother and escorted Catherine and me into the city in a cab. When he directed the cab to the Banks Street apartment, Catherine started sobbing again: she couldn’t see her grandmother, she wouldn’t see her father, not now, not after seeing Benji die and listening to everyone call him a terrorist. Finally, not knowing what else to do, I said she could come home with me.
