The Wrong Man (52 page)

She heard herself groan.

Inside the boot was a gun.

She started to reach for it, then told herself, Don’t touch it.

She did not know why.

A part of her wanted to seize it, steal it, just take it away from Michael O’Connell. Is this the gun he will use to kill Ashley?

Hope felt trapped, as if she were being held underwater. She knew if she took the gun, O’Connell would know that one of them had been here. And he would take action. Maybe it would trigger a violent response. Maybe he had another weapon stashed somewhere. Maybe, maybe. Questions and doubts warred within her. She wished there were some way she could render the gun harmless, like removing a firing pin. She had read about that once in a thriller novel, but she had no idea how to do it. And taking the bullets would be useless. He would know someone had been there and simply replace them.

She stared at the gun. She could see on the side of the barrel the brand and the caliber, .25.

The weapon’s ugliness almost overcame her.

Not sure that she was doing the right thing, she carefully replaced the boot in the corner of the closet and rearranged the clothes so that things looked exactly as before.

She wanted to run. How long had she been inside the apartment? Five minutes? Twenty? She thought she could hear footsteps, voices, and realized that she was hallucinating. Leave now! she told herself.

Hope rose and started to exit, walking past the bathroom, which she didn’t bother to check, and the small kitchen, which made her stop.

Cats, she thought to herself. Mrs. Abramowicz will want to know.

She peered into the tiny area. No table, just a refrigerator, a small four-burner stove, and a couple of shelves filled with canned soups and stews. No cans of cat food. No box of rat poison to mix into a lethal meal.

Hope went to the refrigerator and pulled the door open. Some sandwich fixings and a couple of cold beers were all that O’Connell kept inside. She closed the door, then, almost as an afterthought, opened up the freezer, expecting to see a couple of frozen pizzas.

What she saw was like a blow, and she was barely able to stifle a scream.

Staring back at her were the frozen bodies of at least a half dozen cats. One of them had its teeth exposed, gargoylelike, a terrifying ice grin of death.

Panic filled Hope, and she stepped back, hand over her mouth, her heart racing, nauseous, dizzy, feeling as if her temperature had spiked. She needed to scream, but nothing could choke past her tightened throat. Every fiber of her being told her to run, to flee, to get away and never look back. She tried to tell herself to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. When she reached out, to close the freezer door, her hand shook.

From the hallway, she suddenly heard a hiss. “Hurry, dear! Someone is at the elevator!”

Hope turned away, running for the front door.

“Hurry!” she heard Mrs. Abramowicz whisper. “Someone is coming!”

The old lady was still perched in her own entranceway when Hope burst out into the hallway. She could see the elevator counter starting to rise, and she closed the door to O’Connell’s apartment. She fumbled with the key, nearly dropping it, while she tried to slide it into the lock.

Mrs. Abramowicz shrank back, taking refuge in her own place. The cats by her feet were scurrying back and forth, as if they caught the sense of fear and panic in the old woman’s voice. “Hurry, hurry, we must get away!”

Hope saw that the old woman had nearly disappeared into her own flat, retreating from sight, leaving her door only open a crack. She felt the key drive the dead-bolt lock home and she stepped back, turning toward the elevator. She could see a light from inside the compartment when it reached the floor.

She froze, unable to move.

The elevator seemed to pause, then rose past the floor without stopping.

Her ears were ringing with adrenaline, and every sound seemed distant, like an echo across a wide canyon.

She assessed herself, conducting an inventory of her heart, her lungs, her mind, trying to see what still functioned, what had been shut down by fear.

Behind her, Mrs. Abramowicz cracked her door open a little wider and stuck her head out into the hallway.

“False alarm, dear. Did you find out what happened to my cats?”

Hope inhaled deeply, trying to calm her racing heart. When words came to her, they were cold. “No,” she lied. “No sign of them anywhere.”

She could see some disappointment in the old woman’s eyes.

“I think I should be leaving now,” she said stiffly. But she had the good sense to slide the key to Michael O’Connell’s apartment into her jacket pocket as she turned and headed rapidly for the emergency stairs. She knew that waiting for the elevator would require a patience she no longer owned.

Hope lurched down the stairs, moving as quickly as she could, the pit of her stomach still clenched with tension. She barreled ahead, shoulders hunched forward, needing desperately to get outside. When she looked up, she suddenly saw a form in the lobby doorway, looming in the darkness ahead of her. She nearly froze with crushing fear, until she saw that it was only two other tenants entering. One of them snorted, “Hey!” as she pushed past them, out into the night cold, welcoming the darkness that surrounded her. She nearly jumped down the last stairs to the sidewalk and, without a look back, cut across the small street toward her car, fumbling with her keys, before thrusting herself into the driver’s seat. Inwardly, she could hear a voice insisting,
Escape! Get away now!
She was about to pull out when she looked up and once again froze.

Michael O’Connell was sauntering down the sidewalk opposite her.

She tracked him with her eyes as he paused outside the building, dug in his pocket for his keys, and then, not even glancing in her direction, stepped up and disappeared inside. She waited and then, a few moments later, saw lights flash on in his apartment.

Hope feared that he would somehow know that she had been there. That she had disrupted something, left something out of place. She put her car in gear and pulled out of the parking spot. Without looking back, she drove to the corner, then turned and continued down a wide street for several blocks, until she saw another spot where she could pull to the side. She slid the car in and thought to herself, What was it? Three minutes? Four? Five? How many seconds existed between her break-in and his return?

Her stomach clenched, and the nausea of fear finally overcame her. Hope opened the door to her car and was quietly and privately sick, vomiting into the gutter all of Mrs. Abramowicz’s Earl Grey tea.

Scott got an early start the following morning, rising in his cheap motel room just before dawn and driving in the dreary gray November half-light to a spot just across from the house where Michael O’Connell had grown up. He shut down the car and sat, waiting, feeling the first hints of winter seep into the compartment. It was a sad street, a step above a trailer park, but not much of one. The houses were all low-slung, and all in need of repair. Paint peeled from eaves, gutters had pulled free from rooflines, broken toys, abandoned cars, and dismantled snowmobiles littered more than one front yard. Screen doors flapped in the wind. More than one window had been patched with a sheet of heavy-duty plastic. It seemed a place abandoned by options. It was a place for six-packs, lottery-ticket and motorcycle dreams, tattoos and Saturday-night drunks. The teenagers probably worried about pregnancy and hockey in equal doses, and the older folks were more likely consumed by whether their small pensions would keep them off food stamps. It was one of the least friendly spots Scott had ever seen.

As at the school the afternoon before, he knew he was completely out of place.

Scott watched the morning ebb and flow of children heading to school buses and men and women carrying lunch pails heading to work. When things quieted down, he stepped out of the car. He had a roll of $20 bills in his pocket and figured perhaps more than a few would be spent that morning.

Turning his back on O’Connell’s home, Scott headed to the nearest house, directly across the street.

He knocked loudly and ignored a dog’s frantic deep-throated barking. After a few seconds, a woman angrily shouted at the dog to quiet down, and the door opened.

“Yes?” A woman in her late thirties with a cigarette hanging from her lip, dressed in a pink coat with a grocery-store logo on it, answered the door. She struggled to hold a cup of coffee in one hand while grasping the dog’s collar with the other. “Sorry, he’s pretty friendly, really, but just scares the hell out of folks, jumping all over them. My husband keeps saying I need to train him better, but…” She shrugged.

“It’s okay,” Scott said, speaking through the screen of the exterior door.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m with the Massachusetts State probation department,” Scott lied. “We’re just doing a presentencing check on a first-time offender. A Michael O’Connell. Used to live across the street here. Did you know him?”

The woman nodded. “A little. Haven’t seen him in a couple of years. What did he do?”

Scott thought for a moment, then said, “It’s a robbery charge.”

“Stole something, huh?”

Yes, Scott thought. “Seems that way.”

The woman snorted. “And got his damn fool self busted, huh? I always figured him for something a little more clever.”

“Smart guy, right?”

“Acted smart. I’m not sure the two are the same.”

Scott smiled. “Anyway,” he said slowly, “what we’re really interested in is background. I’ve still got to interview his father, but, you know, sometimes the neighbors…” He didn’t need to finish because the woman nodded vigorously.

“Don’t know too much. We’ve only been here a couple of years. But the old man—well, he’s been here since the Ice Age. And he ain’t particularly popular around here.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s on disability. Used to work at one of the shipbuilders over in Portsmouth. Had some kind of accident. Said he hurt his back. Collects a check every month from the company, from the state, and from the Feds, too. But for a guy that says he’s hurt, he seems to get around okay. Moonlights as a roofer, which is kinda odd work for a guy who claims to be crippled. My husband says he gets paid in cash under the table. I always figured it would be some tax guy snooping around here, asking questions.”

“That doesn’t say why people don’t—”

“He’s just a mean-ass drunk. And when he gets drunk, he gets abusive. Makes a racket. You can hear him screaming all sorts of language in the middle of the night, except, odd thing is, there ain’t no one there for him to scream at. Sometimes he comes out and shoots off some old gun he keeps in that mess he calls home. There’s kids around, but he don’t care. Took a shot at one of the neighborhood dogs once, too. Not mine, luckily. Anyway, opened fire for no real reason at all, just because he could. Just a bad dude, all around.”

“And the son?”

“Like I said, I hardly knew him. But the apple, as they say, don’t fall far from the damn tree. At least, don’t sound like it.”

“What about the mother?”

“She died. I never knew her. It was an accident. Or so the story went. Some people think she took her own life. Others want to blame her old man. Police looked pretty hard at the whole thing. It was pretty suspicious. But then, it got dropped. Maybe something in the papers back then, I don’t know. It happened before I got here.”

The dog barked once more, and Scott stepped back.

“Thanks very much,” he said. “One thing. Please keep this confidential. It sort of screws up any questions we might ask if people start talking.”

“Ah, sure.” The woman pushed at the dog with her foot and took a drag from the cigarette. “Hey, can you folks down in Massachusetts put the old man in jail alongside the kid? It sure would make things quieter around here.”

Scott spent the rest of the morning working his way around the neighborhood, pretending to be a variety of investigators. Only once did he get asked for some identification, and he backed his way out of that conversation quickly. He didn’t learn much. The O’Connell family had predated most of the other folks in the neighborhood, and the impressions they had made limited their contact with their neighbors. Their lack of popularity helped Scott in one regard: folks were willing to talk. But what people said merely reinforced what Scott had already heard or presumed.

There had been no sign of the elder O’Connell emerging from the house, although Scott told himself that the man might have slipped away when he was talking with one person or another. Still, a small, black Dodge pickup truck hadn’t moved all day. Scott assumed this was the older O’Connell’s vehicle.

He knew he would have to knock on that door, but he was as yet unsure exactly who to pose as. He decided he would make one more effort, at the local library, to find out about the circumstances surrounding O’Connell’s mother’s death.

The town’s library, in contrast to the bedraggled buildings on side streets and former farmland, was a two-story, glass-and-brick building, adjacent to a new police department and town offices complex.

Scott approached the main desk, and a slight, thin woman, maybe a half dozen years older than Ashley, looked up as she was sliding library cards into the backs of books and asked him not unpleasantly, “May I help you?”

“Yes. Do you keep high school yearbooks on file? And could you direct me to where you would keep local newspapers on microfilm?”

“Sure. The microfilm room is over there.” She gestured with her hand toward a side room. “And the collection is pretty clearly marked. Do you need help with the machine?”

Scott shook his head. “Think I can manage. The yearbooks?”

“In the reference section. What year were you hunting down?”

“Lincoln High, class of 1995.”

The young woman made a small face of surprise, then grinned. “My class. Maybe I can help you?”

“Did you know a young man named Michael O’Connell?”

She froze. For a second she didn’t reply.