Prayers for Rain (31 page)

“He keeps files on everyone,” Siobhan said. “He has a file on me, one on you, Mr. Kenzie, and one on you as well, Miss Gennaro.”

“What are in the files?” Angie asked.

“Your daily routines. Your weaknesses. Oh,” she waved her hand at the smoke from her cigarette, “there’s plenty else. Whatever biographical information he can find.” She pointed the cigarette at Angie. “He was so happy when he found out about the death of your husband. He thought he had you.”

“Had me?”

“The means to break you, Miss Gennaro. The means to break you. Everyone has something they can’t face, don’t they. Then he discovered you have some powerful relatives, yeah?”

Angie nodded.

“That was not a day you’d have wanted to be around Scott Pearse, you can be certain.”

“My heart bleeds for him,” I said. “Let me ask you—why’d you speak to me that first time I came to the Dawes’ house?”

“To throw you off the scent, Mr. Kenzie.”

“You sent me after Cody Falk.”

She nodded

“What, did Pearse think I’d kill him and be done with the case?”

“It seemed a reasonable possibility, don’t you think?” She looked down at her coffee cup.

“Is Diane Bourne his only source for psych files?” I asked.

Siobhan shook her head. “He’s got a man in the records department at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Can you guess how many patients McLean services in a year, Mr. Kenzie?”

McLean was one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the state. It handled both voluntary and involuntary committals, had locked and unlocked wards, treated everything from narcotics and alcohol dependency to chronic fatigue syndrome to paranoid disassociative schizophrenia with violent tendencies. McLean had over three hundred beds and an average of three thousand admissions a year.

Siobhan leaned back in the booth and ran a weary hand through her close-cropped hair. We’d left the commuter station in Weston and driven straight into rush hour, pulled out of it in Waltham and stopped at an IHOP on Main Street. At five-thirty in the evening, the IHOP sported only a few patrons, and after we ordered a pot of regular coffee and a pot of decaf, the surly waitress was happy to ignore us and leave us to our privacy.

“How does Pearse enlist people?” Angie asked.

Siobhan gave us an acrid smile. “He’s very magnetic, isn’t he?”

Angie shrugged. “Never met the man up close.”

“Take it on faith, then,” Siobhan said. “The man looks straight through to your soul.”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

“He befriends you,” Siobhan said. “Then he beds you. He learns your weaknesses—whatever those things are you can’t face. Then he owns you. And you do what he asks, or he destroys you.”

“Why Karen?” I said. “I mean, I know he was trying to teach the Dawes a lesson, but even for Pearse that strikes me as severe.”

Siobhan lifted her coffee cup, but didn’t drink from it. “You don’t see it yet?”

We shook our heads.

“I’m beginning to lose respect for the both of you, I am.”

“Gee,” I said. “That hurts.”

“Access, Mr. Kenzie. It’s all about access.”

“We know, Siobhan. How do you think we came around to you?”

She shook her head. “I’m limited—a snatch of conversation here, a glimpse of a bank statement there. Scott despises limits.”

“So,” Angie said and lit a cigarette, “Scott’s after half the Dawes’ fortune…” She saw something in Siobhan’s face that halted her in midsentence. “No. That wouldn’t be good enough, would it, Siobhan? He wants it all.”

Siobhan’s nod was barely perceptible.

“So he destroys Karen because she’s the heir.”

Another tiny nod.

Angie took a drag off her cigarette, considered it. “But, wait, impersonating Wesley Dawe would only get him so far. Even if the Dawes die and the circumstances don’t seem suspicious, they’re not leaving their fortune to a son they haven’t seen in ten years. And even if—even
if
—they did, Pearse’s impersonation of Wesley is limited. It’s not going to pass muster with estate lawyers.”

Siobhan watched her carefully.

“But,” Angie said, going really slowly now, “if he destroys Christopher Dawe, he’ll still gain nothing.”

Siobhan used Angie’s matches to light her own cigarette.

“Unless,” Angie said, “he’s gained access to…Carrie Dawe.”

The name fell from her mouth and seemed to drop on the table between us as heavily as a plate.

“That’s it,” Angie said. “Isn’t it? He and Carrie are in on it together.”

Siobhan flicked her ash into the ashtray. “No. You were so close there for a moment, Miss Gennaro.”

“Then…?”

“She knows him as Timothy McGoldrick,” Siobhan said. “They’ve been lovers for eighteen months. She has no idea he’s the same man who destroyed Karen and wants to destroy her husband.”

“Shit,” I said. “We had the picture of him and she wasn’t home.”

Angie kicked the floorboard of the booth with her heel. “We should have gone to the damn country club with it.”

Siobhan’s tiny eyes had grown large. “You have a picture of him?”

I nodded. “Several.”

“Oh, he won’t like that. He won’t like that at all.”

I shivered and wagged my fingers at her. “Oooh.”

She frowned. “You have no idea what his rage is like, Mr. Kenzie.”

I leaned into the table. “Let me tell you something, Siobhan. I don’t give a shit about his rage. I don’t give a shit how magnetic he is. I don’t give a shit if he can look into your soul and my soul and has God’s phone number on speed dial. He’s a psycho? Yes. He’s a Special Forces bad-ass who can do spin kicks that can rip your head off your neck? Good for him. He destroyed a woman who never wanted more out of life than to be happy and drive a fucking Camry. He turned a guy into a vegetable just for fun. He cut off another guy’s hands and tongue. And he poisoned a dog who I happened to have liked. A lot. You want to see rage?”

Siobhan had pressed her shoulders and head as far back as possible into the red imitation leather behind her. She glanced nervously at Angie.

Angie smiled. “It takes a lot, but once he gets revved up, honey?” She shook her head. “Pack up the kids and get out of town, because Main Street’s going to explode.”

Siobhan glanced back in my direction. “He’s smarter than you,” she whispered.

I shook my head. “He’s had the advantage of access. Now I do, too. I’m in
his
life now,” I said. “I’m in it up until the very end.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea what you’re…” She dropped her eyes, continued to shake her head.

“No idea of what?” Angie asked.

She raised her eyes and her head stopped moving. “What you’re truly up against, what you
really
walked into.”

“So tell us.”

“Ah, thank you, no.” She placed her cigarettes in her purse. “I’ve given you all I care to. I trust you won’t call me to the attention of your INS friend. And I wish you both the best, though I don’t think it’ll help.”

She stood, slid the bag strap over her shoulder.

“Why did Pearse have to be so merciless with Karen?” I asked.

She looked down at me. “I just told you. She was the only heir.”

“I understand that. But why not just have her meet with an accident? Why destroy her piece by piece?”

“That’s his method.”

“That’s not method,” I said. “That’s abhorrence. Why did he hate her so bad?”

She held out her arms, seemingly exasperated. “He didn’t. He barely knew her until Miles introduced them three months before she died.”

“So why do all that to her?”

Her hands clapped her outer thigh. “I told you—it’s his way.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’s all I have for you.”

“You’re lying,” I said. “Big chunks of this don’t add up, Siobhan.”

She rolled her eyes, exhaled a weary sigh. “Well, that’s the thing about us criminal types, yeah, Mr. Kenzie? We tend to be a bit untrustworthy.”

She turned toward the door.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’ve a friend in Canton. I’ll stay with her for a bit.”

“How do we know you’re not going straight to Pearse?”

She gave us a wry grin. “The moment I didn’t arrive on the train into Boston, they knew you’d gotten to me. I’m a weak link now, aren’t I? And Pearse doesn’t like weak links.” She bent for her overnight bag, lifted it off the floor. “Not to worry. No one knows about my friend in Canton, except for you two. I’ll have at least a week before anyone has the time to go looking for me, and by then, I expect you’ll have all killed each other.” Her flat eyes twinkled. “Have a nice day now, won’t you?”

She walked to the door, and Angie said, “Siobhan.”

“Yeah?” She grasped the door handle.

“Where’s the real Wesley?” Angie asked.

“I don’t know.” She wouldn’t look at us.

“Guess.”

“Dead,” she said. She still didn’t meet our eyes.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “He outlived his usefulness, yeah? We all do where Scott is concerned, sooner or later.”

She opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot. She walked toward the bus stop on Main without a look back, just a steady shake of her small head, as if simultaneously bitter and bemused by the choices that had led her here.

“She said ‘they,’” Angie said. “You notice that? ‘They knew you’d gotten to me.’”

“I noticed,” I said.

Carrie Dawe’s face cracked in on itself as if it had been hit in the center with an ax.

She didn’t weep. She didn’t cry out or scream or move much at all as she looked down at the photo of Pearse we’d placed on the coffee table in front of her. Her face merely folded inward and her breath turned shallow.

Christopher Dawe was still at the hospital, and the great empty house felt cold and haunted around us.

“You know him as Timothy McGoldrick,” Angie said. “Correct?”

Carrie Dawe nodded.

“What does he do for a living?”

“He’s a…” She swallowed, snapped her eyes away from the photo and curled into herself on the couch. “He said he was an airline pilot for TWA. Hell, we met in an airport. I saw his IDs, a route schedule update or two. He was based out of Chicago. It fit. He has the trace of a midwestern accent.”

“You want to kill him,” I said.

She looked at me, eyes wide, then dropped her chin.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Is there a gun in the house?”

She kept her chin pressed to her chest.

“Is there a gun in the house?” I repeated.

“No,” she said quietly.

“But you have access to one,” I said.

She nodded. “We have a house in New Hampshire. For ski season. There are two there.”

“What kind?”

“Excuse me?”

“What kind, Mrs. Dawe?”

“A handgun and a rifle. Christopher sometimes hunts in the late autumn.”

Angie reached out, put a hand over Carrie Dawe’s. “If you kill him, he still wins.”

Carrie Dawe laughed. “How’s that?”

“You’re destroyed. Your husband is destroyed. Most of the fortune, I’ll bet, will go to your criminal defense.”

She laughed again, but this time tears had sprung out along the tops of her cheekbones. “So what?”

“So,” Angie said softly, tightening her hand on Carrie’s, “he set out years ago to destroy this family. Don’t let him succeed. Mrs. Dawe, look at me. Please.”

Carrie turned her head, swallowed a pair of tears that reached opposite corners of her mouth at the same time.

“I’ve lost a husband,” Angie said. “Just as you lost your first. Violently. You got a second chance, and yeah, you’ve fucked it up.”

Carrie Dawe’s laugh was one of shock.

“But you still have it,” Angie said. “You can still make it right. Make a third chance out of your second. Don’t let him take that.”

For a good two minutes, no one spoke. I watched the two women hold hands and stare hard into each other’s faces, heard the clock tick on the mantel above the dark fireplace.

“You’re going to hurt him?” Carrie Dawe said.

“Yes,” Angie said.

“Really hurt him,” she said.

“Bury him,” Angie said.

She nodded. She shifted on the couch and leaned forward, placed her free hand over Angie’s.

“How can I help?” she asked.

As we drove over toward Sleeper Street to relieve Nelson Ferrare on the roof, I said, “We’ve tailed his ass for a week. Where’s he vulnerable?”

“Women,” Angie said. “His hatred sounds so pathological—”

“No,” I said. “That’s deeper than I’m looking for. What makes him vulnerable right now? Where are the chinks in his armor?”

“The fact that Carrie Dawe knows he and Timothy McGoldrick are one and the same.”

I nodded. “Flaw number one.”

“What else?” she asked.

“He has no curtains on most of his windows.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been following him during the day. Anything there?”

She thought about it. “Not really. Wait. Yeah.”

“What?”

“He leaves the engine running.”

“On the truck when he does his stops?”

She nodded, smiled. “And the keys in the ignition.”

I looked out the windshield as we approached the end of the Mass Pike, and shifted lanes from the northbound to southbound exit.

“What are you doing?” Angie asked.

“Going to drop by Bubba’s first.”

She leaned forward, peered through the wash of a yellow light strip in the tunnel above us. “You’ve got a plan, don’t you?”

“I have a plan.”

“A good one?”

“A bit crude,” I said. “Needs some polish. But effective, I think.”

“Crude’s okay,” she said. “Is it mean?”

I grinned. “Some might call it that.”

“Mean’s even better,” she said.

Bubba met us at the door wearing a towel and a face completely devoid of hospitality.

Bubba’s torso, from the waist to the hollow of his throat, is a massive slab of dark and light pink scar tissue in the shapes of lobster tails and smaller red ridges the length and width of children’s fingers that litter the pink like slugs. The lobster tails are burns; the slugs are shrapnel scars. Bubba got his chest in Beirut, when he was stationed with the marines the day a suicide bomber drove through the front gates and MPs on duty couldn’t shoot him because they’d been given blanks in their rifles. Bubba had spent eight months in a Lebanese hospital before receiving a medal and a discharge. He’d sold the medal and disappeared for another eighteen months, returning to Boston in late 1985 with contacts in the illegal arms trade a lot of other men before him had died trying to establish. He came back with the chest that looked
like a mapmaker’s representation of the Urals, a refusal to ever discuss the night of the bombing, and a profound lack of fear that made people even more nervous around him than they’d been before he left.