The Price of Malice (15 page)

She sighed and returned to the convenience store’s counter, her own dubious dinner of a shrink-wrapped sandwich, a bottle of Yoo-hoo, and a bag of chips cradled in her left forearm.

The counterman didn’t bother making eye contact. He stared at her choices, her breasts, and back again.

“Twelve ninety-eight.”

She laid fifteen dollars on the surface. He did his automated routine
with the register, the receipt, the paper bag, and handed her change, telling her breasts to have a good night.

She’d left her motel on foot around the corner, on Odlin Road, in hopes of raising her spirits slightly, exchanging the offerings of the hallway vending machine for the wider variety at the gas station. She should have known better. The walk in this part of town offered no iota of rest for the eye, down to the burned grass by the curb, nor had it taken her mind off her earlier conversation with Dick Brandhorst.

He hadn’t called her, of course. And she wasn’t expecting much when she showed up at his office the next morning. What was truly dispiriting, in truth, wasn’t the lack of progress, but the continued insinuation—from Joe to Harry Martin to Brandhorst—that her father and older brother had been neck-deep in illegal activities.

Lyn had a high tolerance for the realities of life, and the compromises they could spawn. But her father had issued the challenge of the high moral ground to all his children, and then embodied it to give it form. After his death, she’d held his example before her as she’d struggled being a wife and mother, a daughter and sister, and an overall human being, awed by how the Old Man had done it with such ease.

And only sometimes—in short, cynical spurts during challenging times—wondering
if
he’d been able to do it.

Because
that
had become the hardest aspect of Joe’s discovery: that deep in her heart, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Why else had her mother corrupted her younger brother, Steve, by involving him with alcohol to keep her company in her grief; and why else had Steve then followed that by becoming a drug dealer and getting arrested? How to now explain the depth of their mother’s near paralyzing depression? Or even her own ready acceptance that both experienced men had perished during a storm deemed mundane at the time?

In Lyn’s emotion-racked turmoil of the last few weeks, the common denominator had appeared to be personal weakness. Their father may have preached the high and mighty, but he’d practiced a nuanced pragmatism—apparently, his true genetic gift to the rest of them.

She headed back out into the hot and humid night, the store’s air-conditioning evaporating from her clothes like a fog. The overhead summer clouds were stained with the city’s luminous thumbprint and the lingering yellow afterwash of the sun’s recent departure. The effect made passing headlights look ineffective and weak, echoing much of her mood.

She ate as she walked, without appetite or interest, her goal to have something in her stomach by the time she threw the rest of it into a roadside barrel she could see in the distance.

She thought also of Joe, albeit without much hope, low enough on herself to imagine that their relationship—once similarly held to high expectations—would inevitably founder as part of the disintegrating whole.

By the time she reached her motel room, down a dark hallway anchored by a stained patterned rug, she was deep in the dumps. Not even her own air-conditioning, tainted with the syrupy sweetness of room freshener, came as a relief.

She hit the lights, threw her plastic key card onto the dresser, and surveyed her small domain. A single queen bed, guarded by tiny night tables, a round table with a chipped edge, a single chair with a dirty cushion, and her bag, lying open near where she’d just thrown the key card.

The room was on the ground floor, which she generally didn’t like, since it forced her to leave the curtains drawn.

Except, they were open.

She stood very still for a moment, studying her own reflection in the distant window. She had taken this room earlier, after meeting with Brandhorst, in full daylight. She always drew the curtains, and she definitely would have before heading for the convenience store. But had she? Her mood was so dour, she remembered being surprised by how the sun flooding the room had appealed to her.

Maybe she hadn’t drawn them after all. The sunset had been spectacular, after all. But was that a memory from her walk outside, or because she’d admired it at the window?

Shaking her head, she closed them now, ruffling them to make sure they met tightly in the middle.

She then flopped down on the bed, piled up a stack of pillows, and reached for the TV remote, hoping to clear her head.

It wasn’t where she’d left it.

She searched more carefully, frowning, swinging her legs back down onto the floor to check the dark crevice between the table and the box spring. Nothing.

“What the hell?” she muttered, checking the flowered bedspread, expecting to see the remote’s small black rectangle lurking like a hiding lizard.

Failing, she glanced up at the TV, and saw it resting on top of the set. She froze.

First, the curtains. Now, the remote. Maybe she was starting to lose it.

She got back up and fingered the remote lightly without picking it up, as if it might have a pulse.

She studied the sparse room in detail, now questioning everything in it. Was her bag as she’d placed it, or slightly askew? Had it been open all the way, then, or just partly, as now? Hadn’t she hung
her clothes apart evenly? They were clumped together now. And that one, slightly cracked drawer . . . That wasn’t like her.

She opened the drawer to reveal her underwear, neatly stacked, along with a folded blouse. Staring at the lingerie, she shivered, ever more uncomfortable.

Slowly, quietly, as if stalking prey through the woods, she moved up the tiny hallway, toward the bathroom. There, she stood for a moment, trying to see into its enveloping darkness, before finally reaching out for the light switch.

She screamed slightly as soon as the light flooded the room—not from any disarray; nor from some man standing before her. But one had been there, sure enough, and had left compelling proof of it.

Before her stood the toilet, its seat up, as only a man would leave it after taking a pee.

Lyn staggered back, physically shoved there by the realization. Fighting near panic, she grabbed a spare hanger from the open closet, and brandished it toward the drawn shower curtain.

“I’ve got a weapon. Come out
NOW
,” she ordered, immediately feeling like an idiot. To cover her embarrassment, she slashed at the flimsy plastic with the hanger, whipping it aside and revealing the empty tub.

“Shit,” she muttered, and tossed the hanger onto the floor.

Without hesitation, she threw her bag onto the bed, loaded it fast and without care, and stepped out into the hallway, all in under two minutes.

The hallway was silent and empty. She headed away from the lobby, toward the exit leading to the rear parking lot, and there emerged into the night air, like an underwater swimmer coming to the surface.

Her bag in one hand, she pressed her back against the rough wall of the motel, studying every aspect of the parking lot. It wasn’t very full—most cars, including hers, being out front—and she could see pretty clearly into the interiors of most of them. They all appeared to be empty.

She tried telling herself that she’d pulled a fast one and gained the advantage—like a fox doubling back on the hounds.

Keeping to the shadows, she circled the building, until she’d placed herself in the shade of an evergreen bush, from where she could see most of the front lot, along with her own car.

Here the vehicles were too many and too tightly parked to allow her an unimpeded view.

She considered her options. That Brandhorst had ordered she be followed and checked out—or had done so himself—she had no doubt. Of his purpose she was less sure. In gross terms, it may have been simply to find out more about her, or at least get a look at any documents she might have; more subtly, it may have been a warning—I can get to you anywhere, at any time. The real question now was whether he was done, or just starting a process that included babysitting her to see where she went next.

That last part was the most ominous, making her think that tonight’s scare was just the beginning of being under constant scrutiny.

She looked beyond the parking lot at the traffic, suddenly thinking of another option. She’d remembered something—a familiar logo—either while she was driving to this motel or while she’d been gazing about its lobby, waiting to register. It would mean a bit of a walk, but it could also sever the rope between herself and the people stalking her.

She discreetly backed away from her observation post, abandoned the parking lot and her car, and struck out for Odlin Road by cutting
through a low barricade of shrubs. Once on the sidewalk, she transformed her bag’s handle into a shoulder strap, fitted it comfortably onto her back, despite the instant heat it created against her spine, and set off at a fast pace. She was heading east, toward the airport terminal.

She’d readied herself for an hour or more of walking, but in far less time, damp with sweat, she found what she was after. She crossed another parking lot, pushed open the establishment’s front door, and tilted her head back in relief as the air-conditioning engulfed her.

“Whoa,” said the woman behind the Enterprise counter, laughing. “You’ve been putting in some exercise. Don’t tell me: You want to rent a car.”

Lyn laughed and approached the counter. “You bet I do.”

L
ester compared the man in the distance to the mug shot in his hand. Usually, when people posed for these things, they weren’t at their best, making the end result look more like a morgue photo.

But not this guy. He was his own worst photograph’s spitting image, pale and dark-eyed with translucent, bloodless skin—a man death might actually improve.

He looked up and down the street, standing under a light on the stoop of his run-down apartment building, and lit a cigarette before crossing the sidewalk and getting in behind the wheel of a rusty, dilapidated Volkswagen Beetle of ancient vintage.

“Mr. Needham, I presume?” Les asked of his companions.

Ron Klesczewski was in the passenger seat; Sheila Murphy in back.

“The one and only,” Sheila confirmed from the darkness. The alleyway facing Canal Street had no lights and no windows overlooking it—the perfect black hole in which to sit and wait.

They’d been doing just that for three hours, pinning their hopes on information Murphy had gleaned about a rash of salvage metal thefts,
now the sudden rage in a poor economy. Copper tubing had gone missing from a building supply store, half a dozen catalytic converters from parked cars, and one homeowner had returned from vacation to find strips of copper roofing missing from his home. All in the last month.

Indications pointed to Ray Needham, and a check on him in Spillman’s data bank revealed Wayne Castine as a frequent companion—until lately, according to Sheila’s source.

That possible falling out explained Lester’s presence here.

“There he goes,” Ron muttered as the Volkswagen lurched away from the curb before winding down the street, heading west.

It was almost two in the morning.

Lester eased out of the alleyway and slid in far behind Needham, his lights off.

“You get a sense from your snitch that Ray was pissed enough at Wayne to kill him?” Spinney asked Sheila.

“He’s pissed,” she confirmed. “But murder didn’t come up; just that Wayne had screwed him royally and Ray was looking for him. I can tell you Ray’s a bad boy when it comes to temper.”

“But you don’t know the details?”

“Those are the details.”

Lester smiled to himself. Sheila was old school—a Bratt detective for several years, comfortable within the community, with a teacher husband and two kids in local schools. She saw Lester as state police first, VBI second, and never a municipal cop. That made him suspect. And so it went, across the profession and throughout the state.

Ahead of them, the lopsided Beetle turned the corner without signaling and drove up Washington Street, its taillights looking like they were helping to push.

“What’s he going after tonight?” Les asked.

“Not the ghost of a notion.”

“We could pull him over for not signaling,” Ron suggested lightly.

“Keep that in mind,” Les agreed. “Might come in handy.”

The car, however, left Washington at the top of the rise, entered a quiet side street free of overhead lighting, and slowly rolled to a stop in the middle of the road, as if out of gas.

“What the hell?” Sheila murmured from the back.

Ron laughed softly. “I think I get it.”

“What?” Lester asked.

Ron pointed. He, too, had stopped, a hundred feet back, using a parked car as a shield, and they had a clear view ahead as Ray emerged from his vehicle holding a long, polelike object.

He stepped behind the Volkswagen and began poking at something in the middle of the road.

Lester put it together. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Using a VW bug as a getaway car? Is he nuts?”

Sheila eased her door open and began getting out. “He was never the sharpest blade in the shed.”

The two men followed her, spreading out to both sidewalks, and surreptitiously worked their way toward where Ray Needham was lost in his efforts. By now, he’d managed to pry up the manhole cover he was hoping to steal, and was trying to keep it balanced on edge and place the crowbar quietly on the road. Stealth, as the name implies, usually demands a certain amount of quiet, and this was clearly becoming a challenge. All around them, lining both sides of the street, were dark, quiet, sleeping houses, presumably filled with good citizens who would later resent losing an axle—or a small child—to an open manhole.

Noise wasn’t Ray’s only problem, though. As the three cops, now so close they could hear him muttering, paused and watched from the
shadows, he struggled to roll his prize to the side of the car—before discovering his second major hurdle. How to lift the thing inside?