Keeper of the Bride

“He’s just a policeman doing his job.”

“Just a policeman?” Spectre turned to her, but his expression remained hidden in the shadows of the warehouse. “Navarro is more than that. He’s a challenge. My nemesis. To think, after all these years of success in cities like Boston and Miami, I should find my match in a small town like this. Not even Portland, Oregon, but Portland, Maine.” He gave a laugh of self-disgust. “It ends here, in this warehouse. Between Navarro and me.”

Spectre crossed toward her, carrying the final bundle of dynamite. He knelt beside the rocking chair where Nina sat with hands and ankles bound. “I saved the last blast for you, Miss Cormier,” he said. And he taped the bundle under Nina’s chair. “You won’t feel a thing,” he assured her. “It will happen so fast, why, the next thing you know, you’ll be sprouting angel’s wings. So will Navarro. If he gets his wings at all.”

“He’s not stupid. He’ll know you’ve set a trap.”

Spectre began stringing out more color-coded wire now, yards and yards of it. “Yes, it should be quite obvious this isn’t any run-of-the-mill bomb. All this wire, tangled up to confuse him. Circuitry that makes no sense…” He snipped a white wire, then a red one. With his soldering iron, he connected the ends. “And the time ticking away. Minutes, then seconds. Which is the detonator wire? Which wire should he cut? The wrong one, and it all goes up in smoke. The warehouse. You. And him — if he has nerve enough to see it to the end. It’s a hopeless dilemma, you see. He stays to disarm it and you could both die. He chickens out and runs, and you die, leaving him with guilt he’ll never forget. Either way, Sam Navarro suffers. And I win.”

“You can’t win.”

“Spare me the moralistic warnings. I have work to do. And not much time to do it.” He strung the wires out to the other dynamite bundles, crisscrossing colors, splicing ends to blasting caps.

Not much time to do it, he had said. How much time was he talking about?

She glanced down at the other items laid out on the floor. A digital timer. A radio transmitter. It was to be a timed device, she realized, the countdown triggered by that transmitter. Spectre would be safely out of the building when he armed the bomb. Out of harm’s way when it exploded.

Stay away, Sam, she thought. Please stay away. And live.

Spectre rose to his feet and glanced at his watch. “Another hour and I should be ready to make the call.” He looked at her and smiled. “Three in the morning, Miss Cormier. That seems as good an hour as any to die, don’t you think?”

THE WOMAN WAS NUDE from the waist down, her body crumpled on the wood floor. She had been shot once, in the head.

“The report came in at 10:45,” said Yeats from Homicide. “Tenant below us noticed bloodstains seeping across the ceiling and called the landlady. She opened the door, saw the body and called us. We found the victim’s ID in her purse. That’s why we called you.”

“Any witnesses? Anyone see anything, hear anything?” asked Gillis.

“No. He must’ve used a silencer. Then slipped out without being seen.”

Sam gazed around at the sparsely furnished room. The walls were bare, the closets half empty, and there were boxes of clothes on the floor — all signs that Marilyn Dukoff had not yet settled into this apartment.

Yeats confirmed it. “She moved in a day ago, under the name Marilyn Brown. Paid the deposit and first month’s rent in cash. That’s all the landlady could tell me.”

“She have any visitors?” asked Gillis.

“Next-door tenant heard a man’s voice in here yesterday. But never saw him.”

“Spectre,” said Sam. He focused once again on the body. The criminalists were already combing the room, dusting for prints, searching for evidence. They would find none, Sam already knew; Spectre would’ve seen to it.

There was no point hanging around here; they’d be better off trying to chase sirens. He turned to the door, then paused as he heard one of the detectives say, “Not much in the purse. Wallet, keys, a few bills—”

“What bills?” asked Sam.

“Electric, phone. Water. Look like they’re to the old apartment. The name Dukoff’s on them. Delivered to a PO box.”

“Let me see the phone bill.”

At his first glance at the bill, Sam almost uttered a groan of frustration. It was two sheets long and covered with long distance calls, most of them to Bangor numbers, a few to Massachusetts and Florida. It would take hours to track all those numbers down, and the chances were it would simply lead them to Marilyn Dukoff’s bewildered friends or family.

Then he focused on one number, at the bottom of the bill. It was a collect call charge, from a South Portland prefix, dated a week and a half ago at 10:17 p.m. Someone had called collect and Marilyn Dukoff had accepted the charges.

“This could be something,” Sam noted. “I need the location of this number.”

“We can call the operator from my car,” said Gillis. “but I don’t know what it’s going to get you.”

“A hunch. That’s what I’m going on,” Sam admitted.

Back in Gillis’s car, Sam called the Directory Assistance supervisor.

After checking her computer, she confirmed it was a pay phone. “It’s near the corner of Calderwood and Hardwick, in South Portland.”

“Isn’t there a gas station on that corner?” asked Sam.

“I seem to remember one there.”

“There may be, Detective. I can’t tell you for certain.”

Sam hung up and reached for the South Portland map. Under the dome light, he pinpointed the location of the pay phone. “Here it is,” he said to Gillis.

“There’s just some industrial buildings out there.”

“Yeah, which makes a collect call at 10:17 p.m. all the more interesting.”

“Could’ve been anyone calling her. Friends, family. For all we know—”

“It was Spectre,” Sam said. His head jerked up in sudden excitement. “South Portland. Let’s go.”

“What?”

Sam thrust the map toward Gillis. “Here’s Bickford Street. A squad car was dispatched there at 12:10. And here’s Calderwood and Hardwick. The squad car would’ve gone right through this area.”

“You think Spectre’s holed up around there?”

Sam scrawled a circle on the map, a three-block radius around Calderwood and Hardwick. “He’s here. He’s got to be around here.”

Gillis started the car. “I think our haystack just got a hell of a lot smaller.”

Twenty minutes later, they were at the corner of Hardwick and Calderwood. There was, indeed, a gas station there, but it had been closed down and a For Sale — Commercial Property sign was posted in the scraggly strip of a garden near the road. Sam and Gillis sat in their idling car for a moment, scanning the street. There was no other traffic in sight.

Gillis began to drive up Hardwick. The neighborhood was mostly industrial. Vacant lots, a boating supply outlet. A lumber wholesaler. A furniture maker. Everything was closed for the night, the parking lots empty, the buildings dark. They turned onto Calderwood.

A few hundred yards later, Sam spotted the light. It was faint, no more than a yellowish glow from a small window — the only window in the building. As they pulled closer, Gillis cut his headlights. They stopped half a block away.

“It’s the old Stimson warehouse,” said Sam.

“No cars in the lot,” Gillis noted. “But it looks like someone’s home.”

“Didn’t the Stimson cannery close down last year?”

Sam didn’t answer; he was already stepping out of the car.

“Hey!” whispered Gillis. “Shouldn’t we call for backup?”