A Welcome Grave (43 page)

______

I gave him five minutes before I called the police. By then, Gaglionci was conscious again. I passed on 911 and called Targent. He answered on the first ring, and he recognized the number.

“Perry, you are about twelve hours late with this call, you son of a bitch, and you’d better be ready to come in.”

“You want to close your investigation?”

“I doubt you say that because you’re offering to confess.”

“Good guess.”

“What do you have for me?”

“I’ve got two bodies in a house by Geneva,” I said. “I’ve got a woman who was abducted today and is now safe and ready to explain some things to you. I’ve got the man who killed Alex Jefferson and Donny Ward in handcuffs.”

“Tell me where you are,” was all he said.

T
hey held me for three days. The warrant for Donny Ward’s murder was still plenty valid when police arrived at the winery, and nobody was so impressed with my explanation that they wanted to tear it up and cut me loose. Tommy Gaglionci wasn’t offering a confession, either. I’d been arrested on a Friday night, which gave the police—or maybe me—a break, because it postponed arraignment until Monday morning, giving them forty-eight hours to plunge into the stories Amy and Joe and I had to offer. On Monday morning my attorney learned there would be no arraignment.

By then, my claims had some evidence behind them. Along with Amy’s story of how Gaglionci had abducted her, breaking into her apartment and covering her mouth with a sweet-smelling rag, the evidence techs had matched prints left in Donny Ward’s yard with the boots on Gaglionci’s feet.

They finally kicked me loose slightly after noon on Monday. Targent came to take me out of the jail himself. Joe was waiting to drive me home, but Targent held the door of a small interview room open and asked me to give him a minute. I went in and sat behind the table, enjoying the absence of handcuffs.

“Listen,” Targent said, “maybe you’re wanting an apology from me.”

“I’m wanting to go home. That’s it.”

“Maybe you deserve one,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “I thought about that a lot last night. We still don’t have all the details of this thing worked out,
but if it holds up the way it looks now . . . My point is, you think I tried to force this onto you. That’s not true. The things that happened to increase my suspicion, I didn’t imagine those, Perry. I wouldn’t have been doing a good job if I didn’t try to explain them, right? And that’s all I was doing. I was just trying to explain—”

“I’ve got it, Targent. I understand. No, you didn’t imagine those things. You didn’t need to believe them so completely, or at least
dis
believe me so completely, but I know what your job was, and I do understand that you were trying to get it done.”

“A case like this,” he said, “somebody actively trying to frame a guy . . . You don’t see that much. It’s tough to believe even when it’s in your face.”

“Your approach, while unimpressive, was no worse than what I brought to the table.”

He tilted his head, looked at me curiously. “Yeah?”

The better part of three days spent in jail, I’d had a long time to consider it. Liked myself less as each day passed.

“You got a taste of some evidence against me and shut out the rest of the possibilities,” I said. “Because you wanted me to be guilty. You didn’t like me. You wanted to take me down. All of that? Same thing I did with Alex Jefferson. I railroaded a suspect, him and the son both. Decided they were guilty because I didn’t like them. I didn’t go out to find the truth, I went out to prove they were guilty. Even while I was ripping you for that approach with me, I was doing the same thing to Alex Jefferson and his son. At least you had the dignity to railroad somebody who was still alive.”

He’d kept his eyes moving around the room when he’d talked, but now they were full on mine. Neither of us said anything for a while. Eventually, he stood up.

“Go home, Perry. Go home.”

Amy and Joe met me outside of the jail. Amy got out of the car when she saw me approaching. She reached for me and I caught her and held her and for the first time I felt like it was done. The worst of it was done. She was here, and she was safe, and I was with her. Tommy Gaglionci and Paul Brooks and the rest of them be damned. They hadn’t done as much damage as they could have.

When Amy stepped back, her eyes were bright with tears that didn’t fall.

“About damn time,” she said.

“Yeah. Long weekend. The accommodations in there aren’t nearly as nice as what I was treated to in Indiana.”

“Write a guidebook,” Joe said.
“Around the Midwest in Fifty Jails.”

He shook my hand and opened the passenger door for me, as if I were a visiting celebrity.

“No red carpet?” I said.

“Thought it might piss the cops off. You know, rubbing it in their faces?” He got in and started the car.

Still standing on the sidewalk, I turned back to Amy. “Are you all right? Did anything—”

“I’m fine. As fine as I could be, at least. I’m okay.”

“When I saw you in that trailer . . . saw you were alive . . .”

I stopped talking then, and she looked away, and I knew we were both thinking about Andy Doran and the shot that dropped Gaglionci as he’d kicked the door open and stepped inside with his shotgun, going for Amy.

“Can I drive us somewhere?” Joe said. “Longer Lincoln stands on the sidewalk in front of the jail, more likely it is someone will think he escaped, throw him back in.”

We got in the car. While Joe drove, he and Amy caught me up on what the police hadn’t.

“I haven’t heard anything about Thor,” I said.

Joe looked at Amy in the rearview mirror. “Hopefully, you won’t. We made a decision not to volunteer anything about him. It looks like you did the same.”

“But Gaglionci and Reed?”

“Gaglionci hasn’t spoken at all. Not yet. We’ll see what happens with him. As for Reed, cops have interviewed him probably ten times, and he hasn’t mentioned Thor once. Says you and I came in and threatened him, alone.”

“Good.”

“Reed’s rolling on Gaglionci now, says the only reason he ever helped him was because Gaglionci had threatened to kill him.”

“No surprise there. Reed’s the type who’ll do plenty of talking when he sees charges ahead.”

“Should help you, though. He’ll seal some things up with Gaglionci. Who was, I might add, arraigned this morning on one charge of kidnapping, two of murder. There’s a team doing background on Paul Brooks, too. Found out he was arrested for sexual assault out east, during college. The girl backed out on her accusation, and charges were never filed. About the same time that happened, the girl started driving a new Lexus, and Brooks came home to Cleveland.”

“Fenton’s heavy hand.”

“You got it. He’d already been diagnosed with his cancer by the time Monica Heath was killed. Knew he was dying.”

“Seems he was willing to go pretty far to protect the legacy.”

“I wonder how many times Jefferson’s son thought about what might have happened if he’d just called the cops instead of his dad,” Amy said. “Told them the truth.”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said, “he thought of it the night I met him. I left that damn note on the kid’s door, and he expected Gaglionci and Doran were in town to finish the job. Yeah, I’d say he thought about it then.”

I woke up in Amy’s apartment the next morning, with her hair soft on my shoulder. I watched her for a long time, following the slow rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, relieved to see that she’d found sleep. We’d remained awake well into the night, and she’d told me the things she had not told the police, the things she’d felt and feared when she woke up in the van, the things she’d thought when Doran crawled back into the trailer with the sound of gunfire echoing outside. She told me that Gaglionci had hummed to himself while he cleaned his gun, waiting for Doran to get back, that he’d smelled of cologne and smiled at her in a way that made her go cold with fear, that even when I’d entered the trailer she’d felt hopeless because Doran was there, and when Thor holstered his gun she knew it was over.

She told me all of those things, and I told her some others, and at some point we slept. It was nearly nine now. I forced myself out of bed and onto my feet. Amy didn’t wake when I moved. I went into the bathroom and took a shower and came out and brewed a pot of coffee.

Thirty minutes passed, and Amy didn’t wake. I hoped that she would, that she’d come out and talk and we could waste the morning and delay the visit I had ahead. That wasn’t going to happen, though. Amy needed sleep, and I needed to deal with a conversation I’d hungered for once and wanted nothing to do with now.

The day was clean and crisp after the rain, a cold sun still putting up a hell of a fight to work its way past the clouds and through the bare branches that surrounded Alex Jefferson’s house. Karen came out into the driveway when I pulled
up. When I got out of the truck, she came over and put her hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t need to be, Karen.”

“I’ve talked to the police. I’ve heard about most of it, although I’m sure there are a thousand details I don’t know or don’t understand. What I
do
know is that it’s over, and that you made that happen. And I’m so sorry, Lincoln. I never wanted to believe any of the things that were being said about you, but every day it seemed like there was something new, and I just—”

“You just responded like they hoped you would,” I said. “They wanted to play with your emotions. Targent and Gaglionci both. They wanted to turn you against me, and they did a damn good job of it. You don’t need to apologize for that. In the moment when it mattered most, when that cop showed up, you trusted me. Enough to let me leave, at least. Without that . . .”

“They told me about your friend,” she said. “Amy Ambrose. I’m so glad she’s safe.”

“She’s doing fine. You helped let that happen.”

“Okay.” She took her hands off my shoulders and stepped back. The wind picked up and blew her hair over her face, temporarily obscuring the fear and the fatigue and the pain that were in it. I ached for her in that moment, thinking of the memory I’d held of her on the day we’d rented that boat in the Bass Islands, the smile she’d been capable of back then. A smile like that wouldn’t come to her again after all of this, or at least it wouldn’t come easily.

“When all of this got started,” she said, “when Alex was killed and the police couldn’t tell me why, I called you.”

“Yes.”

“I called you because this family had too many secrets. Or at least it felt like that to me. The breach between Alex and his son . . . it was something I always wanted to understand. When Alex was murdered, that changed. I
had
to understand it.”

I didn’t want to meet her eyes anymore. There was such a sense of bracing in them, of preparing for fresh anguish.

“Now I know you can do that,” she said. “You can help me understand. And all of a sudden, I don’t think I want to anymore. I don’t think I want to at all.”

She forced out a laugh that was on the edge of tears and shook her head.

“But I need to know. I’ve heard some of it from the police, and I need to know the rest.”

______

We stayed outside while we talked. Sat on the steps in front of the house, side by side.

“If what the police think is true,” she said, “then Alex always knew that Andy Doran was innocent.”

I held her eyes for a moment before I looked down.

“Here is what I can tell you, Karen. Paul Brooks killed Monica Heath. He confessed to it in front of me. Andy Doran thought your husband’s son killed her. So did I, for a while. We were both wrong.”

“But they knew,” she said. “Alex and Matthew, they knew what had happened.”

“Yes,” I said, and a swell of sorrow passed through me when I saw the look on her face.

“Alex helped,” she said. It was not a question. “He helped put Doran in prison when he knew who had really killed that girl.”

“It cost him a lot. He lost his son, Karen. Saved his client’s son from the proper punishment and lost his own.”

“Lost his son,” she echoed. “Yes, he did. And when his son committed suicide . . . when his son
shot himself in the head
because he thought someone else was going to do worse, he blamed Alex for that. Didn’t he? He thought Alex was the reason it was happening.”

“I think he blamed himself, too. He wasn’t a child, Karen. He was encouraged to identify Doran, yes, but the decision was his own.”

She was quiet for a few minutes, then said, “You think Alex was evil, don’t you? How could you not? He helped send this innocent man to jail, made a profit from it. You think he was evil.”

I shook my head. “No, Karen. I don’t. I think he deferred to money and power on that night, and once he’d deferred, he felt trapped. I don’t think he envisioned what would happen as it continued, and once it got rolling he didn’t know how to get out of it. And he paid dearly for what he did. More than he should have. More than anyone should have.”

She sat with head bowed, silent.