No Place to Die (17 page)

“One of the guys that Beckman plays with has a key to Beckman’s condo and went over to check up on him. Beckman wasn’t home. His car wasn’t in the garage, and this morning’s
Republic
was still lying in the driveway. Yesterday’s paper was lying open on the kitchen table next to a box of cereal and a bowl that had a couple flakes of cereal and a little milk dried in the bottom. It looked like Beckman had started reading the paper during his breakfast yesterday and then hadn’t gotten back to it.

“The guy—whose name is Tom Matthews—called the golf club, and Beckman still hadn’t shown up. Matthews was getting increasingly concerned, and he remembered that Beckman had said that he had an appointment with his ophthalmologist yesterday morning. The office is only a couple of blocks away from Beckman’s condo, and so Matthews went over to see if Beckman had kept the appointment. He spotted Beckman’s car in the parking lot, and the receptionist in the ophthalmologist’s office told him that Beckman had been there yesterday and that he’d left a little after eleven. Apparently that was the last time anybody saw
him. Matthews called and reported Beckman missing at noon today.”

“Oh, shit,” I sighed. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Martin agreed. “It’s possible, of course, that Beckman’s gone missing for some reason that has nothing to do with Carl McClain. But more than likely, either McClain’s got him somewhere or has already killed him and dumped the body someplace.”

“What about the rest of the people that were on our list?” Maggie asked.

“I gave the names to Riggins and Doyle, and they touched base with the ones you didn’t get to. Everybody’s scared shitless, and some of them are leaving town in a hurry, but so far they’re all alive and well.”

“What’d you do with the media?” I asked.

“As you suggested, we released a statement indicating our belief that McClain might be targeting anyone who was associated with his arrest and conviction. It was the lead story on all of the early-evening newscasts and, given Roe’s murder, will for sure lead the ten o’clock news.”

“Anything from the hotline?” Maggie asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he sighed, running a hand through what was left of his hair. “Since we released McClain’s picture at noon we’ve had several calls from people who swear that they’ve seen him, and scores more from people who’ve seen mysterious black vans. We’re tracking down the reports as fast as we can, but we’ve got nothing solid yet. I tell you, this whole damn thing is turning into one gigantic cluster fuck.”

Just after five o’clock, McClain walked into the bedroom. Saying nothing, he handed Beverly a shopping bag with Target’s bull’s-eye logo emblazoned on it. She opened the bag to find three T-shirts, two pairs of sweatpants, and a three-pack of black bikini panties. Looking up at McClain, she said, “Thank you.”

He shrugged, obviously embarrassed. “About the…uh…I didn’t know what size. I just got medium.”

“That’s fine,” she nodded. “Thank you.”

He turned to leave, and as he reached the door, Beverly said, “Uh, excuse me…”

McClain turned back to face her. “What?”

She pulled a pair of the sweatpants out of the bag. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that with this cable around my ankle, I won’t be able to get these on.”

He stood there for a moment and then shook his head. “Jesus, what an idiot. I didn’t even think about that.”

Beverly decided to press her luck. In a soft voice, she said, “Is the cable really necessary? I mean, you lock the door every time you leave the room. I can’t get out of here anyway. Isn’t it sort of redundant?”

McClain looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the sweatpants she was holding in her hand and sighed. “Hold on a minute.”

He left the room and returned with two wrenches. “Sit on the bed,” he said.

Beverly did as instructed, and McClain crouched down in front of her. He set the wrenches on the bed
and grabbed her roughly by the shoulders, showing her that he was still the boss. “Now listen carefully, Beverly,” he said in a firm voice. “I’ll trust you to this extent: As long as I’m here in the house, I’ll leave the cable off. But when I leave the house it goes back on.”

Beverly nodded. “Okay. Thank you.”

McClain squeezed her shoulders hard. “Don’t fuck with me now, Beverly—I’m warning you. If you try anything cute, the cable goes back on and stays on. And believe me, I’ll make you regret it.”

“I understand,” she replied meekly. “I promise I won’t try anything.”

“Okay,” he said.

Releasing her, he picked up the wrenches, unscrewed the bolt, and removed the cable. Her ankle was red and chafed, and she began massaging it. McClain reached out, pulled her hands away, and looked at the ankle. “Wait,” he said.

He briefly left the room again, then came back and handed her a small plastic bottle of hand lotion. “Here. Try some of this on it.”

Beverly nodded. “Thank you,” she said again.

And saying nothing more, McClain turned and left the room.

Beverly watched him go and, for the first time in nearly a week, she allowed herself a tiny smile. Somehow, someway, she would beat this bastard yet.

She rubbed some of the lotion into her ankle. Then she took off the shirt he had loaned her and pulled on a pair of the panties, a San Francisco 49ers T-shirt, and a pair of blue sweatpants. Two hours later, she heard McClain’s key in the door again.

This time he handed her two beers, some silverware, and the roll of paper towels. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

Beverly set the table, folding a couple of the paper towels into napkins. McClain returned with a pizza on
a cooking sheet and two plates. He set the pizza in the middle of the table and handed her one of the plates. “Sorry we’re temporarily back to junk food,” he said. “I was going to get to the grocery store, but then some problems came up late this afternoon and I couldn’t get out of the house again. So we’ll have to make do with a frozen pizza tonight.”

Beverly took a sip of her beer, then said tentatively, “Can I ask what sort of problems?”

McClain sat back in his chair, took a pull on his own beer, and said, “You still don’t know who I am, do you, Beverly?”

She slowly shook her head. “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t. I know you think that I should recognize you, but I’m sure I’ve never seen you before.”

“Well, that’s probably a good thing,” he sighed. “So far nobody else has recognized me either, which means that you and I will probably be safe and sound here for the next four days.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

McClain set down his beer and waited until she looked up to meet his eyes. He waited another couple of beats and then said, “You let them send me to prison, Beverly. For something I didn’t do. And for the rest of my fucking life.”

She was thunderstruck. “Carl McClain?” she said, incredulously. “You’re telling me that you’re Carl McClain?”

“In the flesh,” he nodded.

She paused for several moments, taking in the enormity of it, trying to comprehend something that was clearly incomprehensible. “But how…Are you telling me that they paroled you?”

He flashed her a lazy smile. “Even better than that,” he said. “They pardoned me.”

“Pardoned you? But when? How?”

“Three months ago. The real killer finally confessed, and the DNA proved that it was him and not me.”

Three months ago.

Beverly shook her head again. Three months ago, she and David had been in Tuscany on an extended vacation. It had been the best three weeks of her life, and in the middle of it all, some idiot had decided to turn Carl McClain loose on the world?

“But I didn’t hear anything about it,” she said.

McClain gave her the smile again, broader this time, as if he was very pleased with himself. “Yeah, I know. Most of these stupid bastards, they get cleared after being inside for ten or twenty years, and the first thing they want to do is hold a fuckin’ news conference and get their faces splashed all over the front page of the newspapers.

“Well, not me. I had very definite plans for if I ever got out, and I didn’t want anybody to see me coming. Fortunately, after you failed me so miserably, a couple of years ago I was able to hire a real attorney to try to get my case reopened. When the other guy confessed, I told the attorney no publicity and definitely no pictures.”

McClain laughed. “The poor bastard couldn’t understand that at all. ‘You’re an innocent man,’ he kept saying. ‘Why don’t you want everybody to know it? They sure as hell plastered your picture all over the place when they convicted you.’ But I told him just to let it go—that I wanted to slip back into the world on my own terms. In the end, there was just a brief story in the
Republic
, and so here we are.”

Beverly started to cry. “But Carl, I don’t understand. Why me? I defended you. I did the best I could for you…”

He leaned forward across the table and pulled her hands away from her face. “Well, your best wasn’t very
damn good, now, was it Beverly? There I was, an innocent man, but you let them convict me anyhow.”

“I did everything I could,” she said again. “I worked day and night for you. And after all, it wasn’t my fault that the evidence was stacked against you so heavily. Don’t you think that you bear at least some of the responsibility for what happened to you?”

McClain released her hands. “How do you figure that?” he asked.

She picked up her “napkin” and swiped at her tears.

“Well, for openers,” she said, “you chose to have sex with a prostitute. Obviously, if you hadn’t done that, you would never have been arrested in the first place. Then when you were initially questioned about the killing, you lied to the police. If you’d been truthful with them right from the start, perhaps they would have been more willing to believe you. Certainly the jury would have been more inclined to do so.”

He sighed and shifted in his chair. Looking at the pizza rather than at Beverly, he said, “Yeah, well, the last I heard, getting a blow job from a hooker isn’t a capital offense in this state—at least not yet. And neither is lying to the cops. I told them the truth fast enough once they found her earring in my car. A decent lawyer wouldn’t of let them send me down for that.”

“So why didn’t you hire a ‘decent’ lawyer in the first place?” she asked bitterly.

Rising to the bait, McClain answered, “Because, as you know damn good and well, I couldn’t afford one. So I got stuck with you.”

Beverly threw up her hands. “And you expected what—that you’d get Perry Mason out of the Public Defender’s Office? You’re smarter than that, Carl. What sort of lawyer do you think is going to work for the salaries they can afford to pay? Hell, if you’re looking to lay the blame somewhere, why don’t you just start with the damned county commissioners?”

McClain gave her a hard laugh. “Yeah, well, now that you mention it, maybe I should add those fuckers to my list.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to say here,” she said in a defeated voice. “Yes, I was young. And yes, I was relatively inexperienced. But I
did
do everything I could for you. Where do you think I went wrong? What else do you think I could have done?”

She stared at him, waiting for an answer, but he simply turned away. Nearly a minute passed before finally he looked back to her. In a resigned voice, he said, “Christ, Beverly, I don’t know. You’re the lawyer, not me. I just keep thinking about all that bullshit we learned in civics class about how our justice system is set up to protect the innocent—about how everybody’s presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Jesus, what a crock…”

“I can understand how angry you must be,” she said, “and I don’t blame you for that. And I know that you can never get back the time you lost, but you’re still a young man. Why throw away the rest of your life? What does that accomplish?”

“
You
understand how angry I am?” he said, mocking her. “Jesus Christ, Beverly, you couldn’t
begin
to understand. You haven’t been there. When you let them send me away, I lost everything that mattered to me—my wife, my child, my freedom, even my poor mother. And the
only
thing I had to hold on to for all those endless days and nights was the dream that some day I might have a chance to even the score. That’s all I have left now.”

“And so you killed my husband,” she said quietly. “You’ve kidnapped me and raped me repeatedly. What else are you going to do to ‘even the score’?”

McClain looked away. “I am sorry about your husband,” he said. “I had no ax to grind with him and I had no intention of shooting him. I only wanted you. If
you hadn’t laid on the fuckin’ horn and attracted his attention, he’d still be alive tonight.

“As to what else I’m going to do…well, so far I’ve settled up with the judge, your old friend Harold Roe, and two of the jurors.”

Beverly stared at him. “They’re dead?”

“God damn right. And in the end, they were all extremely sorry for what they’d done to me.”

She swallowed hard, trying to comprehend the depth of his madness. “And you expect to get away with this?”

“To be honest,” he sighed, “I don’t know. I
hope
to get away with it, but it’s more important that I finish what I came out to do. And I still have a few more people to see before I’m ready to ride off into the sunset.”

“You’re going to kill me too, aren’t you.” She said it as a matter of fact, not as a question.

For a long moment, McClain stared at the cold pizza sitting on the table between them. Then finally he looked up to meet her eyes. “The jury’s still out on that, Beverly,” he said.

At ten o’clock, McClain sat down to watch the evening news. The lead story was the same as it had been at six. A tall blonde model posing as a “reporter” stood in front of Harold Roe’s house and breathlessly updated the situation. What it amounted to was this: Harold was still dead, and McClain was still the prime suspect.

On the television screen was a picture of the old, fat McClain with his glasses and a full head of hair. As long as the cops had everybody looking for that poor
stupid mope, the sleek new McClain figured that he should be able to wander the streets in relative safety.

The prison authorities could tell them that he’d lost the weight. So could his old buddy Richard Petrovich, for that matter. But none of them knew about the contact lenses, and none of them realized that he’d shaved every single hair off of his body. Only Beverly could tell them that. But then, of course, in spite of what he’d suggested over dinner, she wouldn’t be getting the chance.

Thinking about their conversation over dinner, he wondered if he’d made a mistake in going after her. The rest of them, no question. But Beverly?

Lying in his prison bunk, he’d been convinced that she deserved it more than anybody else on his list. Christ, he would have done better defending himself.

Or maybe not.

The new hotshot attorney that he’d finally been able to hire had gone through the motions of appealing the conviction on the grounds that McClain had not been adequately represented by counsel. But every court that heard the argument had thrown it out. On the record, at least, it appeared that Beverly had done the best she could with what she had to work with.

But what the printed record didn’t show was that she’d seemed tentative in her presentations to the court and in her examinations of the witnesses—unsure of herself and of her client as well. Just his luck to be the first person she’d ever defended on a murder rap.

She
had
worked hard during his trial; McClain would have to give her that. She’d come into court every day looking haggard and drawn. He remembered her saying that she wasn’t sleeping much, both as a result of the hours she was putting in and on account of the anxiety of it all. But in consequence she’d stood before the court looking and acting exactly like the rookie she was. Her inexperience was apparent to everyone—to the judge, to the jurors, and to McClain himself.

On the other side of all that was the sex appeal. Tired as she might have been, Beverly still had a fantastic face and an even better figure. Even the bags under her eyes and her tasteful, conservative suits couldn’t hide that. Every man in the courtroom had been glued to her every move, and McClain had hoped that if nothing else, the five males on the jury would be seduced by Beverly’s body, if not by her arguments on his behalf.

Unfortunately it hadn’t worked out that way, and fairly or not, McClain blamed her for that too. Lying awake, listening to the night sounds of the cell block and plotting his revenge, he’d always put Beverly’s name at the top of the list, convinced that she deserved the number-one slot for being so inept, and fantasizing about the ways in which he’d like to repay her for that ineptitude.

Thinking about it now, he wondered if he’d been entirely fair to the woman. For seventeen long, hard years he’d been consumed by the idea of having his way with her. But in truth, was it really because she had failed him, or simply because he wanted her? Had he simply been looking for an excuse to take her?

And what of her argument that he might have attempted to make something of himself?

In theory, of course, that was his other option. He could have walked out of prison and hired a top gun as his new attorney. Instead of eliminating the people who had conspired to steal seventeen years of his life, he could have sued the hell out of them. Doubtless, the county attorney’s office and the other agencies involved would have been tripping all over themselves offering a settlement of some sort. And that, combined with the money he’d inherited from his mother, would have been more than sufficient to give him a start at a new life. But by the time society’s mistake had been discovered and “corrected,” McClain was burning with a
rage that had been smoldering for all those years, and there was simply no way that he could lead anything approaching a normal life until that rage had been extinguished.

And anyway, what sort of a life could it have been?

With his mother dead, the only two people he cared about were irretrievably lost to him. In spite of the fact that the state had now declared him to be an “innocent” man, he could not begin to fathom a scenario in which Amanda and Tiffani would welcome him back into their lives, even in the most marginal way. Nor could he imagine that employers would be lining up to offer top-level jobs to a guy who’d spent nearly half of his life in the system, no matter the fact that his conviction and imprisonment had turned out to be a lamentable and tragic mistake.

Even had he not opted for his present course of action, McClain well understood that, like that poor jerk Richard Petrovich, he would have spent the rest of his life on the margins of society, working at jobs that commanded little if any respect, that offered very little money, and that allowed a man virtually no sense of pride or satisfaction. Having chosen his current path, McClain would at least have that—the satisfaction of knowing that the bastards who had combined to steal his life were getting their just reward.

And that included Beverly.

She “understood,” she said, how angry he must have been. Shit, in a thousand years, she would never—
could
never—understand that, no matter how diligently he tried to reason with her or how harshly he might punish her. No one could.

McClain’s first few months in the joint had been an indescribable nightmare. And even seventeen years after the fact, he sometimes snapped awake in the middle of the night, startled out of his sleep by a
memory so sharp and so immediate as to convince him that he was living it all again.

He had been so young and so green, tossed into a sea of hardened, bitter, and sadistic men who lived by their own rules in a prison system that was overcrowded, underfunded, and totally unconcerned with such quaint ideas as rehabilitation and humane treatment. He had quickly discovered that the inmates truly
did
run the asylum, and his initiation into the system had been hellishly brutal.

After four months of physical and psychological abuse that no one on the outside could ever begin to imagine, he had finally surrendered and made an “arrangement” with an older, stronger longtime con who offered Carl protection and taught him how to survive in the system. But Carl had paid dearly for that knowledge and protection, and that too had fired his determination to one day avenge himself against the system and the individuals who had consigned him to that hellish nightmare.

Perhaps Beverly
had
done her best. And maybe, in retrospect, he should have thought harder about including her on the list of his targets. But that was water under the bridge. The die was cast. And no matter what he might think about Beverly now, that was the cold, hard fact of the situation.

McClain returned his attention back to the television set as the blonde interrupted her spiel and raced over to join a group of reporters pressing up against the police barricade. The camera swung away from the woman to show a man with a detective’s shield hanging over the pocket of his suit coat approaching the reporters. As the detective came within range, the reporters shouted questions at him, and McClain heard his own name mentioned in several of the questions.

The detective appeared to be in his middle thirties, tall and a bit on the thin side, like a runner maybe. The
suit looked expensive and was well tailored; McClain wondered if it was Italian. The camera zoomed in close to show dark, wavy hair cut to a medium length, with the first touch of gray showing at the sides. Strong features filled out a face highlighted by eyes that might have been blue or gray; from the television, you couldn’t really tell. McClain thought he saw a profound sadness in the eyes, but maybe the guy was just tired.

The detective told the reporters that McClain was wanted for questioning but that there was no evidence yet to link him to the tragic death of Harold Roe. He advised anyone seeing McClain to be cautious, warning them that McClain was considered to be armed and dangerous. Then he turned away and left the reporters clamoring behind him.

The camera swung back to the blonde, who identified the detective as Sean Richardson of the Phoenix Homicide Unit, who was “leading the hunt for suspected killer Carl McClain.” For a moment, a picture of the “old Carl” flashed on the screen again, and then the camera cut back to show Richardson getting into his car with his partner, a black woman who looked to have a pretty good body herself.

McClain made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger and pointed it at the detective. “Boom!” he said. Then, more quietly, “Happy hunting, pal.”