Very Bad Men (27 page)

Elizabeth reached for her wineglass. “Does he use any adverbs?”

“I don't see any,” said Sarah. “No, wait. Here's one: the doves taunt him
mercilessly
. That's not our man, then.”

He's not in here,
Elizabeth thought. The man in plaid could pass for normal. If he was in Callie Spencer's files, he was with all the other ordinary citizens who cared about ordinary things: unemployment and taxes, green technology and better schools. But Callie had refused access to those files.

Elizabeth sipped wine and returned her glass to the table. Sarah read aloud from a letter that requested funding from the legislature for research into levitation and telekinesis. When she came to the end of that one, she found another that described a plan for fortifying Michigan's southern border against the coming invasion from Ohio.

“It has pictures,” Sarah said. “Diagrams of battlements. A system of trenches.” She was on her feet now, pacing around, riffling through the pages. “I want to keep this out and show it to David. Do you know when he'll be home?”

Elizabeth picked up a fresh letter. “He didn't say.”

“I think the spirit of it might appeal to him. You know how he is, always checking the locks on the doors and windows.” Sarah paused before one of the windows that looked out onto the porch and the street. The white slats of the blinds alternated with the dark outside.

Elizabeth heard the snick of the blinds being closed. A moment later she heard the front door opening and being pulled shut again. She didn't look up from her letter. She assumed Sarah had gone onto the porch to look at the night.

A minute or two passed before she heard the door again. Sarah came into the living room and touched a button on the stereo. The symphony cut off abruptly. She turned the switch on the floor lamp and the room went gray dark.

“What are you doing?” Elizabeth said.

Sarah knelt beside her. “There's a car parked on the street with its engine running. Two people in it—a man and a woman. There's something strange about them. The man slouched down when I walked by, like he didn't want to be recognized.”

Elizabeth frowned. “You should have said something to me before you went out there.”

“I was curious.”

“I don't suppose you got a plate number.”

“Are you trying to hurt my feelings?” said Sarah, looking wounded.

“Let's have it, then.”

Sarah recited the number. “It's an Audi. Looks new.”

Elizabeth got up, found her cell phone in her bag. Dialed the Investigations Division on her way to the window.

“Shan here.”

“Carter. You're working late.” Parting the blinds, Elizabeth spotted the car down the block, in a dark patch between two streetlamps.

“Paperwork,” Shan said.

“Check a plate for me?”

“Sure.”

She gave him the number. Heard him working a keyboard.

“What's this about?” he asked.

“Call it curiosity. The car's been sitting on my street.”

“Hmmm. Maybe I should come over.”

“Who is it, Carter?”

She heard the squeak of his chair as he sat back.

“The car's registered to Jay Casterbridge,” he said.

Callie Spencer's husband. Elizabeth watched the doors of the car swing open. Two figures got out.

“Say the word,” Shan said, “and I'm on my way.”

Elizabeth saw Jay Casterbridge step into the light of the streetlamp. The woman with him was tall and rail thin. Not Callie Spencer.

“No. Let me see what he wants, Carter. I'll call you if I need you.”

 

 

JAY CASTERBRIDGE MOVED restlessly around the kitchen, skittish as a pony in an unfamiliar stall. His tie was loose and one end of his shirt collar hung over the lapel of his jacket.

“Callie doesn't know I'm here,” he said.

“Is that right?” said Elizabeth.

She had turned on the downstairs lights, and the fluorescents in the kitchen made Casterbridge blink. His companion seemed more at ease. She had long slender limbs and a delicate face. Blond hair with dark roots. She wore deep blue slacks and a matching blazer with a white blouse underneath. The blouse was open at the collar, showing freckled skin stretched over prominent clavicles. Casterbridge had introduced her as his law partner, Julia Trent.

“What Jay means,” she said, “is that we'd like this conversation to remain confidential.”

“That's fine,” said Elizabeth.

Julia Trent braced her arms against the counter behind her. “We saw a young woman come out of the house a few minutes ago. Was that your daughter?”

Elizabeth nodded once. “She's gone upstairs. She's won't overhear us.”

Jay Casterbridge wandered over by the refrigerator and stood with his arms crossed.

“I think you had a good idea the other night,” he said. “About the files.”

Elizabeth watched him pluck at the sleeve of his jacket. She said nothing.

“If you found someone that way,” he said, “no one would need to know, would they? I mean, no one would need to know
how
you found him.”

“All I need is a name,” Elizabeth said. “Once I've got it, I can look into his background, determine if he's a viable suspect.”

“And it wouldn't come back to Callie. That's important.”

“There's no reason it should have to. Are you suggesting she might be willing to let me see her files?”

Casterbridge grimaced. “God no. She's set against it.”

Elizabeth touched the glass beads of her necklace. “Are you offering to let me look at the files without her knowing?”

He glanced at Julia Trent, who stared right back at him.

“Callie's been here for the past three days,” he said carefully. “I've been in Lansing. Her main office is there. All the files.”

“You've found something,” Elizabeth said.

He nodded. “A typical letter from a constituent. He wrote to her about an issue—violence against women. That makes sense, doesn't it? If he thinks he's protecting Callie from harm, if he's targeting the Great Lakes robbers because, in his mind, they pose a danger to her—”

“Yes, it makes sense.”

“Now Callie gets a fair number of letters about violence against women,” Jay Casterbridge said. “I would have passed over this one, except that it fits the pattern you described. It goes on for three pages without using a single adverb. The guy who wrote it, he talks about a friend who was beaten by her husband. He attacked her again and again—‘beat her like a savage would.' That's the phrase that caught my attention. The writer doesn't say ‘savagely'; he won't use the adverb. In the next paragraph he says, ‘Threats are serious and should be heeded'—when anyone else would say, ‘Threats should be taken seriously.' There are at least five more examples like that. Sounds like the man you're looking for, doesn't it?”

Elizabeth had been standing across the room from the other two. Now she moved closer. “It does,” she said. “I need to see that letter.”

Julia Trent stepped over to Casterbridge's side. “We're willing to let you see it,” she said in a crisp lawyer's voice, “but we have conditions. You get one look. You don't keep the letter, or even a copy. You don't reveal that we showed it to you.”

“That won't work. The letter's evidence—”

“It's not evidence,” said Julia Trent. “It's not a crime to write to your state representative. You get a look, that's all. The letter's signed. You said all you needed was a name.” She shrugged as if the matter were settled. A woman used to getting her way.

Elizabeth sighed. “Fine. Let me see it.”

She would have bet that Julia Trent had possession of the letter, but Jay Casterbridge was the one to reach inside his jacket, draw it out, pass it over.

Elizabeth accepted it, three sheets clipped together. She saw the date: May of this year. The salutation: “Dear Ms. Spencer.” Neat blocks of text. She turned to the last page and the signature had a half-familiar look. The sharp angles of the capital A and L reminded her of the man in plaid's note: LET ME HAVE BELL AND I'M DONE. Some of the letters of the signature were hard to make out, but the name was right there in type underneath. She felt a rush of heat in her fingertips, goose bumps rising on her arms. She knew it was him.

L
ark's hand felt better every day. The swelling had gone down and a scab had formed over the cut. He could poke it without wincing. He left the bandage off now, and if he curled his fingers no one would notice the wound. He kept taking the Keflex, morning and evening. A ten-day course, Sutton Bell had told him.

He had been testing his strength, venturing out of the apartment. Working on the problem of how to get to Bell.
Slow and steady,
his father used to say. Lark had driven through Bell's neighborhood and past the clinic where he worked. He had gone at different times of day. He had seen patrol cars parked in front of the house and the clinic, but never at the same time. The police were conserving manpower. They watched the house when Bell was home, but not when he was at work.

That probably meant that Bell's wife and daughter weren't staying at the house, which was fine with Lark. When the time came, he didn't want the wife and daughter to be there.

Lark drove into his apartment complex Wednesday night with a deli sandwich and a six-pack of beer on the car seat beside him. A dim suggestion of a headache had begun to stir behind his eyes, but he thought if he went in and took a pill and laid some ice on his brow he might be able to fend it off.

He passed along a curve in the drive that led to his building and his headlights washed over the Dumpsters. He spotted a flash of movement, orange and gray, quick as lightning. An animal darting through a break in the wooden fence that framed the Dumpsters on three sides. Through the break and into the tangle of brush on the other side.

A cat,
he thought.

He stopped the Chevy and left it idling. Got out before he had a chance to think about the wisdom of it. He crouched to look through the break in the fence and thought he could see eyes peering back at him.

He retreated to the car, unwrapped his sandwich, and peeled off a slice of turkey. Took it with him and left a scrap of it by the break in the fence.

More scraps at small intervals, a trail to lure the cat out. Lark knelt on the bare concrete before the Dumpsters, a last scrap of turkey dangling between his fingers. The eyes watched him.

He waited. The cat made a foray through the break, putting its nose out to sniff the air, and then a paw. It came out to the first scrap of turkey and nibbled at it. Lifted its head to stare at Lark. Nibbled some more.

It came forward, its tail raised cautiously in the air. The pattern of its fur resolved itself for Lark's eyes: faded calico. White patches on large paws.

When it came to Lark, it had lost interest in the turkey. It turned its head to the side and rubbed its neck against his wrist. He put the last scrap on the ground and the cat nosed down to smell it politely, then stretched, swaybacked. It turned sideways to rub itself on Lark's knee, and he ran his fingertips along its back.

He thought its claws would come out as soon as he tried to lift it—he remembered the scratches on his neighbor's hands—but he got a palm beneath its belly and it seemed all right: no struggle, just sober green eyes regarding him.

He hugged the cat to his chest with both arms. Left the Chevy running and walked steadily toward the apartment building's entrance. Halfway there he felt the cat begin to squirm, but he knew better than to stop and try to soothe it. He got through the glass doors and into the ground-floor hallway. The thing was whining now, the legs flailing. Lark came to his neighbor's door and kicked the gray metal—not hard, but insistently.

She took forever answering and he dropped the cat as the door swung open. It darted inside.

“Roscoe!” she cried, spinning after it. Lark watched it dash through the kitchen and duck under a recliner in the living room.

He thought it best to close the door. Wasn't sure which side of it he should be on. She made the decision for him. “Come in,” she said.

He went as far as the threshold between the kitchen and the living room and watched her crouching by the recliner with her ear against the carpet.

She talked to the cat first—“Roscoe, baby, are you all right? I was so worried. Where have you been?”—but after a while she got up and talked to Lark.

“Thank you,” she said. “You don't know—” She didn't finish the sentence; astoundingly, she threw her arms around him.

He patted her shoulder and tried not to focus too much on the smell of her: lavender and something else—peach shampoo, he thought.

After a moment she stepped back. “Where did you find him?”

“By the Dumpsters,” Lark said.

“I've looked there every day.”

“There's a hole in the fence. He was behind that, in the bushes.”

He told her how it had gone. She admired his trick with the turkey. The cat's whiskers edged out from underneath the recliner, but the rest of him stayed hidden.

The conversation trailed off. “I should go,” Lark said.

She followed him out through the kitchen, thanking him all the way. When he reached the door something changed. He felt her fingers on the bare skin of his arm. Something intimate in the touch. He thought she would ask him to stay.