Hell (18 page)

Appetite shot to pieces.

Fucking fool.

They were sitting in front of Sam's desktop PC, working their way through the YouTube video.

Both looking for Cooper.

Both tense as tightropes.

They saw Ricardo Torres.

Young and alive, eyes twinkling.

Talking to someone else.

Another man.

‘What the . . .?'

Sam saw him about one-eighth of a second before Martinez.

Not Cooper.

Someone else altogether.

The man whose photograph they and their colleagues had begun showing around college campuses across Miami-Dade.

Charles Duggan.

Two ghosts in one hit.

Jerry Wagner had come to Key Biscayne for a meeting with Grace.

‘I don't know if it's going to be a good time,' she'd said when he'd called ahead. ‘Sam's working, but the others may be around.'

‘I imagine we could find a quiet space somewhere,' he'd said.

‘Couldn't we wait till tomorrow?'

‘I'd rather we didn't,' Wagner had told her.

So she'd agreed, and the family had melted away so that attorney and client could sit out on the terrace and not be disturbed.

‘I thought I remembered that you liked ice tea,' Grace said.

‘You remembered correctly,' Wagner said, and nodded at the plate of cookies on the table between them. ‘And those look tempting.'

‘Cathy baked them last night,' Grace said. ‘She couldn't sleep.'

‘A lot of that going around, I'd imagine,' Wagner said.

She poured his tea, gave him a couple of cookies, waited till he was properly comfortable, and then went first.

‘I have to plead guilty,' she said.

‘No, you don't,' he said.

‘Yes, I do,' Grace said, quiet but insistent. ‘I do because I am guilty, and there's no getting away from that. But I'm not saying that I don't want you to help me reduce my punishment – my sentence – because I have a family to consider, and it would be selfish of me to say something like that.'

Wagner took a drink of tea.

‘You need to listen to me,' he said.

‘Of course,' she said.

‘This isn't going to play out like some TV movie, Grace. We tell your tale of nightmares and a judge or jury want nothing more than to get the nice lady back home where she belongs, so the judge finds some way to suspend your sentence.' He paused. ‘If you plead guilty to a charge of vehicular homicide, you will almost certainly serve ten to fifteen years in the state prison.'

Grace closed her eyes.

Pictured Joshua as a teenager, his future face indistinct to her because she would not be there to see him.

Better for him if she died than this.

‘Grace.'

She opened her eyes.

‘Are you OK?'

She nodded.

‘Then can we please get to work to try to salvage some kind of workable life for you and your family.' His smile was kindly. ‘Plenty of time later for you to work on your guilt. I daresay you can't counsel yourself, but you're bound to know a few half-decent therapists.'

Grace almost managed a smile. ‘I do.'

‘You look like hell,' he told her.

‘I know.'

‘So are you going to let me help you?'

She took a long moment before she answered.

Knowing there was no real choice.

‘I am,' she said.

It was hard to take in.

These two unconnected cases overlapping this way.

‘Not so unconnected, I guess,' Martinez said.

‘Grace,' Sam said.

The connection. Plainly.

Though it made no sense.

‘We need to talk to Rowan again,' Martinez said.

Jurisdictional niceties to be settled.

Sam's mind was reeling.

‘Am I crazy,' Martinez said, ‘or do we have ourselves a new suspect?'

‘For the killings?' Sam said.

‘Charles Duggan, deceased,' Martinez said.

Killed by Grace.

‘I don't think I buy that,' Sam said.

Cal-Cooper still right at the top of his suspect list. The handwritten extract of the
Epistle
left in Sadie's Boatyard having added weight to that, the preliminary comparison with the original
Epistles
pointing to the writing being genuine.

Though maybe nothing in this case was exactly as it appeared.

Except Jerome Cooper's undying malevolence towards Sam.

‘One thing's for sure now,' Sam said. ‘You were right about Duggan.'

‘If that's even who he was,' Martinez said.

They both sat for a moment, staring at the frozen screen on Sam's PC.

‘I guess,' Martinez said, slowly, ‘this might just help Grace.'

Sam shook his head. ‘All we have right now is a guy at a party.'

‘Talking to a murder victim, man.'

‘Two dead men,' Sam said.

‘But it's something,' Martinez said.

One of Jerry Wagner's gifts, he liked to think, was for persuading his clients to think productively for themselves.

And the fact was that, as they sat sipping ice tea, a little more clarity had begun to return to Grace, most of it painful. But something else had accompanied the torment: a greater degree of comprehension of what had led to the catastrophic events of Thursday evening.

The culmination of other events, forebodings and small panics . . .

And, she was only just becoming properly aware, the key element that had been present in two of those alarms
before
the disaster.

The red convertible VW Beetle.

The single most important thing that she'd forgotten to tell Sam about while they'd been waiting for the police to arrest her.

‘I can't be sure if I forgot it exactly,' she told Wagner now. ‘It was so uppermost in my mind when I saw that car coming toward us – I think I was still holding Pete's hand at that moment. He was ready to go back to Sara, but then everything seemed to happen so fast, and all that's seemed to count since then is that it wasn't –
he
wasn't Jerome Cooper – which meant I'd killed an innocent man.'

Wagner had been jotting down notes as she spoke.

Now he laid down his gold and black Mont Blanc pen.

‘You may have killed him,' he said, ‘but I'd say there seems a little more reasonable doubt over whether he was innocent.'

‘You still can't kill a man for driving a red VW,' Grace said.

‘Maybe not,' Wagner said, ‘and we may not be any farther down the road just yet to learning more about Mr Duggan, but I'd say it's high time I see if we can get a good close look at his car.'

Sunday evening felt hardly any better than the morning had.

Grace had told Sam about her meeting with Wagner, about her memory jolt regarding the red VW, and for a while he had felt positive about that – one more ingredient to stir around the pot as he tried to figure out who Duggan might have been . . .

Yet Grace appeared to feel no positivity. She was going through the motions, but she was listless.

‘She's very depressed,' Claudia said to him in the kitchen.

‘Of course she is,' Sam said.

Feeling much the same.

He had not yet told Grace about the YouTube video, because all it would do was add another layer to the confusion she was already feeling, and Martinez had questioned that decision, but Sam had told him he thought it was too soon.

Not that he was sure about anything.

They watched TV together for a while in the big family nook, and the others came and went but said they all had stuff to do.

‘They're giving us space,' Sam said.

‘They're relieved not to have to babysit me,' Grace said.

He looked at her.

‘Don't look at me that way,' she said.

‘What way?' he asked.

‘Sharply,' she said. ‘Analytically.'

He half laughed. ‘I wasn't.'

‘You were. You do it all the time.'

‘Since when?' he said, and wanted to kick himself for his stupidity.

He was saved by Woody, who appeared, wanting to be picked up, and Grace set him on her lap for a while and stroked his head and fondled his ears, but Sam could tell that her heart wasn't in that either.

‘I think I'll go to bed,' she said, shortly after ten.

‘Me too,' Sam said.

‘You don't have to,' she said.

‘Gracie, I'm tired,' he said. ‘I want to come to bed with you.'

They looked in on Joshua, who was sound asleep, and they put the TV on in their room, and she got undressed and took off what little make-up she'd put on that morning, and brushed her hair and put on a nightdress.

‘I never get tired of that,' Sam said.

‘Of what?'

‘Watching you do those things.'

She smiled at him, but it seemed an intensely sad smile, and soon after that she got into bed and turned out the light on her side.

‘Goodnight,' she said.

‘I love you, Gracie,' he told her, and kissed her.

‘I love you too,' she said.

She was asleep within minutes, and Sam was glad for her temporary escape, wished he could switch himself off the same way, but Charles Duggan was on his mind, and first thing tomorrow he was going to talk to Mike Alvarez, try getting the lieutenant on side.

He left the bed quietly just after eleven and went back downstairs, watched some more TV, felt something niggling at him but couldn't nail it, and after a while, he fell asleep on the couch.

When he woke, someone had put a rug over him, and he wondered if it was Grace, wished she'd woken him instead, so he could have gone back to bed with her, but it was after five now, and he needed an early start.

He went upstairs, wanting to go look at Joshua, but he couldn't do that because he was sleeping in Robbie's room, and suddenly he missed their home, their real
life
, with such violence that he had to stop himself from punching the wall.

‘Easy,' he told himself softly.

He opened the door of their room.

She was sleeping, hair spread on the pillow.

He wanted to get back into bed with her, hold her, kiss her awake.

But he knew that would be selfish.

He sighed, went into the bathroom and shut the door quietly behind him.

TWENTY-SIX

May 10

W
ith no patients before eleven fifteen on Monday morning, Magda drove her Lexus Hybrid to the offices of Shrinkwrap Publications, the company on Biscayne Boulevard that published, among other medical and self-help titles,
Psychology 101 Magazine
.

Her editor was out, but a copy of Sunday's
Herald
was on the reception desk, Grace's and Charles Duggan's photographs face-up. The young woman on duty looked vaguely familiar, but had no ID pin.

Magda took a chance.

‘I see you were looking at that, too,' she said in her most affable tone.

‘Sure.' The other woman's eyes seemed almost to sparkle with excitement. ‘I was going to call the number in the article, but one of the editors said she would do it.'

‘I thought I recognized him,' Magda said, ‘but I couldn't quite place him.'

‘It's Richard Bianchi,' the receptionist said. ‘He's – he was – a freelance copy editor. He was in and out of here all the time just a little while back.'

Back in the Lexus, about to phone Grace, Magda changed her mind.

She didn't have Sam's cellphone number, but she certainly knew where he worked.

She got the number and put through a call.

‘Surely,' Sam said to Lieutenant Alvarez, ‘if Charles Duggan, aka Richard Bianchi, is now a person of interest in the murder of Ricardo Torres, that also makes him a person of interest in the killing of Andrew Victor and, therefore, part of a Miami Beach case?'

He'd been in Alvarez's office for almost ten minutes, would have been there much earlier had the lieutenant not been in a meeting with Captain Kennedy. But since then Magda Shrike had called, and Sam had talked with Dave Rowan, who'd received two calls from Shrinkwrap Publications and had been willing to share with Sam a few basic starting points about the dead man.

Born in Fort Myers, Florida, twenty-eight years ago. A mostly unsuccessful writer, a few features and two short stories published, supplementing his income as a copy editor.

Pretty much all that the publishers had on file about Richard Bianchi.

No rap sheet.

But a
name.

And now, thanks to the Broward detective's cooperation, Sam also had his address on NW North River Drive.

Not a million miles from Sadie's Boatyard.

‘We need a search warrant,' Sam said. ‘Or consent.'

‘That's not going to happen,' Alvarez told him.

‘The guy used a false identity.'

‘No fake ID was found on him.'

‘No ID found on him, period,' Sam said. ‘He told Sara Mankowitz and her son that his name was Charles Duggan. He told her on that last day that he'd been working at the university marine lab on Virginia Key.'

‘Hearsay,' the lieutenant said.

‘I'd guess it's in her statement,' Sam persisted. ‘And given that she's a possible witness for the prosecution against Grace, mightn't that help with a warrant?'

‘It's still hearsay,' Alvarez said. ‘Bianchi's parents have been informed. They're on their way over from Fort Myers to make the ID.'

‘Bianchi as Charles Duggan told Sara Mankowitz his father was dead and his mother lived in North Miami,' Sam said.

‘Hearsay again,' the lieutenant said. ‘Though if Mr Bianchi's parents weren't coming to ID him, we might have applied for a warrant to help us obtain further information to confirm his identity, but . . .' He shook his head.

‘What about the YouTube video?' Sam said. ‘We could subpoena YouTube to determine who posted it, then subpoena that individual, make their testimony probable cause for the warrant.'