Bloodline (23 page)

“So what do you think happened, or can't you tell me?”

“We don't know,” Parker said.

“But you're the only one we know had any contact with her in the day or so leading up to her being killed,” Poole put in. “So we want to make sure we have all possible information from you. Anything you can tell us. From when you first met her 'til, what was it, a phone call?”

As he spoke, his expression earnest, I could feel Parker watching me closely. I felt like a sick person surrounded by doctors. One prodding, one watching. Every few minutes, they change places. And I didn't want to be their patient.

“Yeah,” I said, caution creeping into my voice. “The last time was the phone call. She called me. Here.”

“And she wanted to talk to you, about what?” Parker said. “Getting her baby back?”

“That's right.”

“Tell us about that again. Even better, let's go back to when you first met Missy. Where was that?”

“In her apartment. In Portland. And I'm glad to talk about it. Really. But—and I'm not sure how to say this—am I a suspect or something?”

“Oh, no. We're not anywhere near suspects. Just not there yet at all,” Poole said. “We've got a homicide and we're just trying to gather all the information we can so we can figure out where to go from here.”

“But I'm not off the list.”

“We're not gonna bullshit you,” Parker said. “You're not on the list, but that's because there isn't one.”

“But I'm not off it, either.”

“You got it.”

But in the next couple of hours, I began to feel more ruled in than ruled out, and it was a strange feeling, indeed.

Poole diligently took notes. He was left-handed and he held his arm crooked around like left-handed people sometimes do when they write. Parker did most of the talking, first standing and then with all three of us sitting at the table, like chums getting together to do homework on a rainy day. He wasn't hostile, just very thorough. The guy would have made a good reporter, if reporters carried guns.

His was on his left side, in a shoulder holster under his armpit. When Parker moved, I could see the brown leather of the belt. Every once in a while he reached in and jiggled it, as if it were uncomfortable and he really would have liked to take it off and toss it on the table.

So he jiggled. Poole scrawled. I talked, feeling like something out of a movie. I started with the phone call from Slocum at the magazine. I hit Janice Genest and the girls and crazy Kenny and Missy's drunken mother. Roxanne and Tracy Crown and the kid from the mobile home park, or whatever it was. I even told them about the
lady at the junkyard. Tried to get back to Kenny, a psycho if there ever was one. But in the end, the script had the cops interested in three things: how I got on to Missy Hewett, what we talked about when we met, and what the hell I did for a living.

“So you went all the way to Portland to find this girl you'd never met, so you could interview her for this article?” Parker asked.

“Right.”

“For a magazine in Massachusetts?”

“Yup.”

“And you stood in the hallway until you could convince her to take the chain off the door and let you in.”

“Yup.”

“You must be a very persuasive fellow.”

“Not really. Not any more than anybody else who does this job.”

“Which is.”

“Out-of-work reporter. Doing freelance stuff to pay the bills.”

“For a reporter, you lead sort of an exciting life, don't you think?” Parker said, adjusting his gun.

“I don't know about that. Kind of dull, really. Back in the city, they think I'm nuts living out here in the boonies in a houseful of bats.”

Parker frowned in distaste.

“Place has bats?” he said. Both he and Poole paused and looked up at the ceiling.

“Just a few. They keep the bugs down.”

“Give me the creeps,” Parker said.

“I don't know,” Poole put in. “I think they're kind of interesting. You ever fish a stream at around sundown and the bats are swooping over the water, picking up bugs? It's sorta neat.”

He caught himself and looked sheepish for showing a human side to a state police detective.

“I don't know,” Parker said, getting back on track. “Maybe those buddies of yours from the city are right. You got bats in your belfry, right?”

He grinned and I grinned back. Always laugh when the guy telling the joke can lock you up.

“So Missy Hewett told you she wanted her baby back?”

“Right.”

“How'd she put it?”

“About like that. ‘I'm thinking of telling them I want my baby back.'”

“Them?”

“Yeah. Not him or her. Them. Like there was more than one.”

“She didn't say who?” Parker said.

“Nope.”

“Or where or anything?”

“That was about it. She said she was calling from a pay phone and somebody else was waiting to use it.”

“And you never heard from her again.”

“Nope.”

“Did you like her?”

The question took me by surprise. Poole and Parker caught my reaction.

“Did I like her? Yeah. She was a tough kid, and she was working hard to make herself a life. Nobody was helping her, either. She was just doing it on her own. Whatever it took to make it.”

“Even giving her kid away?”

“Don't judge her for that,” I said, getting a little irritated with this big jock cop. “It wasn't easy for her. She thought she was doing the best thing for the baby. Giving it a better life.”

“That's what she said?”

“Yup. She said the baby was with a nice couple, that she'd have a good life. Something like that. There wasn't anything selfish about it.”

“Didn't say where? Give you any indication?”

“Nope. None.”

“Didn't say anything about the dad?”

“Didn't think much of him. I didn't get the impression they were very close.”

“Close enough, right?” Parker said.

“Whatever.”

“Did you have any interest in getting close to her like that?”

Poole looked up.

“Go to hell,” I said.

“I gotta ask.”

“And I have to tell you you're out of line.”

Parker shrugged.

“Hey, somebody offed this kid you thought was so great. I can ruffle a few feathers and maybe find out who did it, or I can go through the motions and collect my check. Which would you want?”

I looked at the big son of a bitch and realized he was right.

“Consider mine ruffled,” I said. “And go to it.”

Parker gave me a long look, then a smile.

“Oh, I'm gonna do that, Mr. McMorrow,” he said. “You don't have to worry about that.”

21

I
t was a funny feeling, being a suspect in a murder. It was like all my life I'd tried to do the right thing, or at least something close to it, and it was all for nothing. Like the character I thought I had, the person I thought I was, didn't exist in the eyes of these cops. It was like nobody knew me in this place, or if they did, they didn't know that I wasn't capable of strangling an eighteen-year-old girl and dumping her beside the road.

God almighty. Was this what I had come to?

It didn't hit me until Poole and Parker left. Tough guy Parker had told me to keep my eye out for those bats. Poole, a quiet, thoughtful guy whom I really liked, had just nodded and walked out the door. Did he think I could do this, too?

I sat there at the table for a long time. The rain kept up and it was quiet and eventually the light began to fade as the afternoon slowly slid away. The phone didn't ring. Not a single car went by. I had never felt so alone.

Other people had something in which to root themselves. A wife or husband to shore them up. A mother or father to give them an encouraging word. Kids to call them Mom or Dad and reaffirm their
relationship to the rest of the world. Somebody to say, “Yeah, you are who you think you are. You're not what they're making you out to be. So don't let the bastards get you down.”

What did I have?

I had a good career gone astray. A liver that probably was half shot, if I dared to check. I lived alone in a tiny town where I was, for the most part, a foreigner. I had no family, and had cut myself off from the people I'd considered my friends. In Prosperity, I had Clair. In Colorado, I had Roxanne, who had loved me but I'd driven her away. I was doing a story that had turned into a tragedy, and in the back of my mind, I wondered if a young woman hadn't died because of me. That was the thought I wanted to keep buried, but as I sat there, letting the dark wash around me like an incoming tide, the image of Missy Hewett, determined little Missy Hewett, kept coming to the surface like a body covered by shifting sands. What had I done?

The sound woke me, still in the chair. It was a clink, like metal hitting a rock. I sat up and wiped the bit of drool from the corner of my mouth. Listened for the sound again. It was absolutely dark in the room, absolutely still. I was facing the back window but could see nothing outside. I stared. Then turned. Noticed a glow from the front of the house.

Fire.

I lurched out of the chair and over to the door. Jerked the latch hard and bolted out into the dark and into the dooryard. On the far side of the truck, on the side of the cab, flames were stabbing up past the driver's window. I ran around the front of the truck and pulled up short. The flames were coming from the side of the cab, where
something long and black was burning. And they were licking upward from the open hole where the gas cap had been. They were licking up from the filler pipe to the gas tank.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

I ran back toward the house, not sure what I was looking for. A shovel to throw dirt on it? A bucket to fill with water? The hose? But that was out back. Or should I be taking cover, getting out of the way in case—

As I paused, paralyzed, by the door, a low whooshing sound came from behind me. I turned and held my hand in front of my face as a mushroom of flame engulfed the cab. The
whoosh
turned to a sort of roar, like the sound a jet makes before it takes off, and the fire jumped twenty feet in the air. I watched it, felt the heat, and then there was a muffled boom and the flames jumped, then receded, leaving the form of the cab silhouetted like bones in a funeral pyre.

“Damn,” I said. “And I just filled it up.”

The college girls down the road called the fire department, then stood with me in their parkas and flannel nightgowns as my truck burned to a crisp.

“Bet you didn't think you'd be invited to a weenie roast,” I said to the pretty girl standing next to me. She gave me a wide-eyed look that was full of, not sympathy, but suspicion.

“Who would want to blow up your truck?” she said.

“I don't think they blew it up. I think they lit it on fire.”

“Why would they do that?” she asked, her eyes reflecting the flames.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I've been running with the wrong crowd.”

It was a joke, or at least as close to a joke as you can make when you're watching your truck burn up, but the girl didn't get it. She gave me a quick sidelong glance and then moved away toward her two roommates. They stood together, in their jackets and bare legs and L.L. Bean boots, and then she whispered something to one of them and that one whispered back. I stood watching the fire, and in a minute or two, they turned and walked into the darkness and left me alone.

“Hey,” I said. “Just 'cause I didn't have marshmallows.”

Maybe I was becoming paranoid—I had every right to be—but the implication seemed clear. I was some sort of suspicious character. I knew people who blew up people's cars. I had offended someone to the point that he had blown up mine. I was not someone with whom respectable law-abiding college students would associate.

Unless, of course, you couldn't make bail.

It was a different feeling, being an undesirable, and it didn't end when the college girls went back to their beds. I was alone no more than a minute or two when the first four-wheel-drive pickup came banging down the road, the red fire department dash light flashing. The guy pulled up fifty feet from the house, got out, and left the motor running, the way fire department guys like to do. He was big, maybe late twenties, wearing a Red Sox hat and big rubber boots.

“Hi,” I said.

“Tank blow yet?” he said.

“To hell and back.”

“Was it running?”

“What? The truck?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Nope. Just sitting there.”

“And it just caught fire?”

“No,” I said. “Somebody torched it.”

He gave me that sideways look, as the college girl had. Sizing me up. I got that look a lot in the next hour or so, as more pickups arrived and then a pumper from the volunteer fire department rumbled up, its red lights flashing all the way down the road. Five or six guys got the hoses uncoiled, fired up the pump motor, and gave my truck a blast of water that snuffed the flames with barely a hiss. It was like kicking dirt on a smoldering campfire by that point, but it was the thought that counted.