Hell Bent (12 page)

“I used to respect him,” I said. “Still do. He’s pretty hard to like, though over the years I admit that he’s kind of grown on me.”

I accessed Roger Horowitz’s secret cell phone number in my phone’s memory and hit Send. He gave me this number several years ago, told me it was the one way I could always reach him, and warned me never to use it unless it was urgent, by which he meant that it related to a homicide.

He answered on the third ring. “Christ, Coyne,” he growled. “It’s Friday night. Are you aware of that? I’ve been home from work less than an hour. I’m having a cup of tea, got my shoes off and my feet up on the coffee table watching TV here with my wife.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here with the body of a man named Gus Shaw. It appears that he shot himself.”

“You couldn’t call 911 like any other citizen?”

“Not when I could call you.”

“Jesus,” he muttered. “So where’s here?”

“Concord. It’s an apartment over a garage off Monument Street. I don’t know the street number. The people who own it live in the house in front. Folks named Croyden.”

“Your body’s inside?”

“Sitting at his desk.”

“So you’ve been in there.”

“I’m here with Alex Shaw, Gus’s sister. We went in. We didn’t touch anything except the doorknobs and the light switch.”

“Alex?” he said. “Your old girlfriend? That Alex Shaw?”

“That’s right.”

“I remember her.”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s hard to forget. She remembers you, too.”

“Jesus, Coyne. I can’t keep up with you. Evie’s in California, so you—”

“None of your damn business, Roger.”

He snorted a laugh. “You are a pisser. Okay. Sit tight. The Concord cops’ll be there in a few minutes, and the rest of the troops’ll be right behind them. What was the name of the people in the house?”

“Croyden. Monument Street.”

“Okay,” he said, and then, typically, he disconnected without a good-bye or a thank-you.

Alex and I sat there on the bottom step of the wooden stairs on the side of the garage. She leaned her head on my shoulder, hooked an arm through mine, and put her hand on my leg.

I gripped her hand, and in spite of the horror up there in Gus’s apartment, I found myself acutely aware of Alex’s breast warm against my arm and the length of her leg pressing against mine and her hair tickling the side of my face.

After a minute, she stood up and fished her cell phone from her pocket. “I’m going to call Claudia now,” she said.

“You sure you want to do this?”

“Of course I don’t,” she said.

She moved over to where I’d left my car, leaned against the side, pecked out some numbers on her phone, then pressed it against her ear. After a moment, I heard her speaking softly. From where I sat, I couldn’t hear what she said.

A few minutes later Alex folded her phone and shoved it back into her pocket. She came back and sat on the step beside me.

“You okay?” I said.

She looked at me. Her face was wet. “I’m hardly okay,” she said. “That was hard.”

“How’d Claudia take it?”

“She seemed … I don’t know. Not surprised. She said some
part of her had been expecting it for a long time. She said that ever since she got that e-mail from him tonight, she’d been assuming the worst.”

A minute later we heard the distant, muffled wail of a siren in the damp night air. It grew louder, and then suddenly the high beams of headlights cut through the darkness and a cruiser pulled up next to my car in front of the garage.

A pair of uniformed officers got out and came over to where Alex and I were sitting. “You’re Coyne?” said one of them.

I nodded. “This is Alexandria Shaw. It’s her brother up there.”

He looked at Alex. “I’m going to ask you to come over to the cruiser with me, ma’am. You, sir, you stay with Officer Guerra here.”

Alex turned to me. “Can’t I stay here with you?”

I patted her leg. “They’re separating us. Eventually they’ll ask both of us a lot of questions, see if our stories match.”

“Don’t you go anywhere without me,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said.

She stood up and looked down at me for a moment with big, liquid eyes. Then the cop touched her arm, and she turned and followed him over to the cruiser. He opened the passenger door and held it for her, and she ducked her head and slid in. When the dome light went on, I saw that a female officer was sitting behind the wheel. I was glad that they weren’t leaving Alex alone.

I remained sitting there on the bottom step. Officer Guerra stood there with his back to me and his arms folded across his chest.

After a while several other vehicles came up the driveway, and pretty soon the place was swarming with people. There were local cops and state cops, some in uniform and some in regular clothes, and there were other officials—technicians from the medical examiner’s office and forensics experts and some others
that might’ve been reporters or maybe just nosy people with police scanners.

After a while, a bulky guy in a dark suit, no necktie, came over to me. “You’re Coyne?” he said.

I nodded.

“I’m Detective Boyle,” he said. He had a bald head and a fat face and small eyes. He had flipped open a notebook and was holding a pen in his other hand, as if he expected me to say something interesting. “State cops.”

“I expected Horowitz,” I said.

Boyle shrugged. “You got me. You’re the one who found the body, called it in?”

I nodded.

“You were in the apartment up there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you remove anything?”

“No.”

“Touch anything? Move anything?”

“Touched the doorknobs, inside and out. And the light switch. I didn’t move anything.”

“And the victim? His name is Shaw?”

“That’s right. Gus Shaw. Augustine. He’s—he
was
—my client. I’m a lawyer. I was handling his divorce. I came here with his sister.”

He looked at his notebook. “That would be Alexandria Shaw?”

“Alex, yes.” I pointed at the Concord police vehicle. “She’s in that cruiser.”

“What about her? She okay?”

“She’s pretty tough,” I said, “but this is bad.”

“He was getting divorced, huh?”

I nodded.

“For some men,” Boyle said, “that would be a reason to celebrate.”

I shrugged. “Not for Gus, I guess.”

He nodded. “Okay. We’ll get your story later.” He flipped his notebook shut. “For now, I want you to stay out of the way.” He inclined his head at Officer Guerra. “I’ll catch up with you.”

Guerra motioned for me to stand up, and I followed him away from the garage to the edge of the clearing.

A minute or two later Boyle climbed the stairs up to Gus’s apartment. He was followed by three other official people, two men wearing blue jeans and windbreakers and a woman with two cameras strung around her neck.

I looked over at the cruiser where Alex and the female officer were waiting, but it was dark inside and I couldn’t see them.

Guerra was not inclined to talk to me, nor did I have anything to say to him. We stood there in the driveway watching the people go up and down the steps to Gus’s apartment and mill around outside. After a while I found a big boulder to sit on. Officer Guerra didn’t seem to notice that I’d moved a few yards away from him.

A little while later, a man with a flashlight in one hand and a dog on a leash in the other came down the driveway. He stopped beside me. “What’s going on?” he said. “All these vehicles …?”

I pointed up at the apartment. “A man up there is dead,” I said.

The dog was a golden retriever. It sniffed my pants legs with great interest.

The man was wearing a dark fleece jacket and khaki pants. He shook his head. “Dead,” he said. “Oh, dear. Gus, is it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s Gus.”

“I’m Herb Croyden,” the man said. “I own this property. This is Gracie.” He patted the dog. “Gracie, cut it out. Behave yourself. Sit.”

Gracie sat.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “She smells my dog. I have a Brittany.”

Herb Croyden looked to be somewhere in his fifties. He was a stocky, fit-looking guy with silvery hair and rimless glasses. “So what happened?” he said.

“Gus apparently shot himself.”

“Apparently?”

I shrugged.

“That poor, tortured soul,” said Croyden.

“How well did you know him?” I said.

“Me?” He shrugged. “Not very well, evidently. I know he had his problems, and he always seemed to be in pain, but you never think a man’s going to …”

I nodded.

“He liked Gracie, here,” he said. “He’d sometimes take her down to the river and throw sticks for her. She’s a retriever, you know.” He reached down and gave Gracie’s ears a scratch. “She’ll fetch sticks all day, and she loves to swim. The river runs right behind our property, you know. Gracie seemed to give Gus a lot of pleasure. He was very good with her.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this. Beth—that’s my wife—she’ll be devastated.” He touched my arm. “I’ve got to go back to the house and tell her what’s going on. She was quite frightened, hearing those sirens, seeing all these vehicles come up our driveway. She wanted to come with me, but I told her to wait there and Gracie and I would see what the story was.” He cocked his head and looked at me. “I didn’t get your name.”

I held out my hand to him. “Brady Coyne. I’m Gus’s lawyer.”

“You found him? His body?”

I nodded. “Alex and I. Alex is his sister.”

Herb Croyden shook my hand. “What an awful thing. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Beth.”

He turned and started to walk away.

Officer Guerra said, “Hey! You, sir. Hold on, there.”

Herb stopped. “You talking to me?”

Guerra shined a flashlight on him. “Who are you, sir?”

“I live in that house at the end of the driveway,” Herb said. “I’m Mr. Shaw’s landlord.”

“You better stay here,” said Guerra. “They’ll want to talk to you.”

“Well,” Herb said, “they can find me at my house. My wife is there waiting for me. She’s frightened and all alone, and I’m going to go back to her now.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” said Guerra, “but you’ll have to wait here.”

“Shoot me, then,” said Herb, and he flicked on his flashlight, said, “Come. Heel,” to Gracie, turned, and headed up the driveway toward his house with Gracie heeling nicely.

Officer Guerra stood there watching the beam of Herb Croyden’s flashlight move away. Then he turned to me and smiled. “Oh, well,” he said.

“I’m glad you didn’t shoot him,” I said. “He seems like a nice guy.”

I
sat there on the cold boulder beside the driveway wishing I’d worn something warmer. A shot of brandy would’ve helped, too. Officer Guerra stood stolidly nearby, doing his job, babysitting me and ignoring me at the same time.

Now and then camera flashes lit up the window of Gus’s apartment, and various uniformed and plainclothed people went in and out. Others stood around in clusters in the driveway mumbling to each other.

After a while two men lugged a collapsible gurney up the steep steps to the apartment. A few minutes later they carried it back down, this time with a plastic body bag strapped onto it. They loaded it into the back of an emergency wagon, slammed the doors, and got in. Somebody went to the driver’s side and talked through the window for a minute. Then the wagon rolled down the Croydens’ driveway, no red lights twirling, no sirens sounding, headed, I assumed, for the medical examiner’s office in Boston.

A minute or two later Detective Boyle came over. He said something to Officer Guerra, who moved away from us, then sat
on the boulder beside the one I was perched on. “I sent him for coffee,” said Boyle, jerking his head in the direction of Officer Guerra.

I nodded. “Great. Thanks.”

“For me,” he said.

I shrugged.

“Just kidding,” he said. “So I need to know everything, Mr. Coyne.”

“About Gus?”

He nodded. “All of it.”

“You’re not going to take me to the station and challenge me to a game of good-cop bad-cop?”

“Not tonight. It’s late, I’m tired. Unless you’d rather.”

“What about Alex?”

“My partner’s getting her story. If yours and hers don’t match up, you probably know how it works.”

“I do,” I said.

“You found the body,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

“Alex got a call from Gus’s wife,” I said. “Claudia got an e-mail from Gus that worried her, so she—”

“Worried her why?”

“It said something like ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”

“A suicide note, huh?”

I shrugged. “It could be interpreted that way, I guess.”

“You don’t think it should be?”

“Interpreted as a suicide note, you mean?”

Boyle nodded.

“I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t’ve thought Gus Shaw would kill himself.”

Boyle nodded. “So his wife got that e-mail. Then what?”

“Claudia was worried, of course,” I said. “She tried to call
Gus, got no answer, so she called Alex, who was at my house. Alex tried to call him, got no answer, so we came here.”

“You live where?”

“Boston, Mt. Vernon Street.”

Boyle scribbled in his notebook. Without looking up, he said, “What’s your relationship with Ms. Shaw?”

“How is that relevant?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. Just answer the question.”

“Alex and I are old friends,” I said. “She’s the one who asked me to handle Gus’s divorce.”

“So tell me about Gus Shaw,” said Boyle. He flipped to a clean page in his notebook, which was balanced on his knee.

“I didn’t know Gus that well,” I said. “I only met him a week or so ago. Met with him just twice. He lost his hand in Iraq. He was a photojournalist, a freelancer, and next thing he knew, he couldn’t handle a camera. He was depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His wife was divorcing him. She’d taken out a restraining order on him.”

Boyle nodded but said nothing. He made some notes in his notebook, then looked up at me with his eyebrows arched.

“What?” I said.

“The man sounds like an ideal candidate for a bullet in the brain,” he said, “but I’m hearing a ‘but’ in your voice.”