The Wrong Man (60 page)

“I have a plan. I’m not sure it will work. But Scott’s coming over and we can go over it together.”

“Where are my mother and Ashley?”

“Upstairs. Not at all pleased with being banned from the conversation.”

“My mother doesn’t appreciate being excluded from things, which is a curious position for someone who has spent much of her adult life living in the woods in Vermont, but there you have it. That’s the way she is.” Hope hesitated, and Sally looked up as if she heard a catch in Hope’s voice.

“What is it?”

Hope shook her head. “I don’t know exactly, but try to follow me on this. She’s doing what we ask her to, right? Well, that’s just not her style. Not in the slightest. She’s always been a lone-wolf type, the
I don’t give a damn what other people think
sort of person. And her seeming compliance…well, I’m not sure that we should rely on her ever doing exactly what we ask her to. She’s just a bit of a loose cannon. It’s what my dad always loved about her, and me, too, except, upon occasion, growing up, it made things, well,
difficult,
if you catch my drift.”

Sally smiled. “Are you all that different?”

Hope shrugged, but laughed in response. “I guess not.”

“And don’t you think that I might have been attracted to those qualities, as well?”

“I never thought of
stubborn
and
unpredictable
as my best sides.”

“Well, just goes to show what you know.” Sally managed a small grin as she dipped her head to the paperwork spread out on her lap.

The two women were both silent. Oddly, Hope thought, it was the first affectionate thing Sally had said in weeks.

There was a knock on the door. “That will be Scott,” Sally said. She gathered her papers together as Hope went to let him in. In the second or two of solitude, she put her head back and took in a deep breath. Once you start this thing moving, there will be no going back.

Catherine fumed inwardly. She looked across at the younger woman, until finally Ashley dashed her book to the floor after reading the same page for the third time and said, “I don’t know if I can stand this much longer. I’m being treated like a six-year-old. Being sent to my room. Told to keep myself occupied while my parents map out my future. God damn it, Catherine, I’m not a baby! I can fight for myself.”

“I agree, dear,” Catherine said.

“You know, I should take that damn pistol and just solve this problem once and for all.”

“I believe, Ashley, dear, that’s in some ways what your parents are trying to avoid. And I didn’t get you that gun so that you could go off and use it willy-nilly, just because you’re pissed off. I got it so that you could protect yourself, if O’Connell came after you.”

Ashley leaned her head back. “He has, you know.”

“Has what, dear?”

“He’s come after me. He’s probably outside right now. Just waiting.”

“Waiting, dear?”

“For the right moment. He’s crazy. Crazy in love. Crazy obsessed. Crazy I don’t know what. But he’s there. He has only one thing of any importance in his life, and it is me.”

Catherine nodded. She suddenly leaned forward. “Can you do it?”

Ashley opened her eyes and stared across the room, first fixing on Catherine, then on the shoulder bag that contained the pistol.

“Can you do it?” Catherine repeated.

“Yes,” Ashley answered stiffly. “I can. I can. I know it.”

“I couldn’t. I should have. With the shotgun when he was right across from me. I should have. But I didn’t. Can you be stronger than I was, dear? Can you be more determined? Are you braver?”

“I don’t know. But, yes. I think so.”

“I need to know.”

“How can anyone know, until they actually do it? I mean, I’m angry enough. Maybe scared enough. But can I pull the trigger? I think so.”

“I imagine you could,” Catherine said. “At least maybe you could. The chances are, you could. It’s dark out. Are you convinced he’s out there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you could end it all by putting the pistol in your jacket pocket and taking a walk with me around midnight. And when he tried to stop us, you act. He might say he just wants to talk with you, that’s what they always say. But instead of talking you just shoot him. Right there. Right then. The police will come and probably arrest you. And then we can have your mother hire the best attorney. Take your chances in a court of law. It’s not exactly as if this community, where your mother and Hope live, is particularly predisposed to giving men—and especially men who have been stalking a young woman—much leeway. Or, for that matter, the benefit of any doubt whatsoever.”

“You think…”

“I think you can do it if you’re willing to pay the price.”

“Prison?”

“Maybe. Notoriety. Being the poster child for every person with some other agenda, which will surely happen, just as your folks have predicted it would. But it might be worth it.”

Ashley rocked her head back. “I can’t stand this for much longer. One minute I’m terrified. The next I’m furious. I feel safe one second. Then threatened the next.”

“Why can’t we be violent before they are violent towards us?” Catherine said fiercely. “Why is that so goddamn unfair? Why do we have to wait to be a victim?”

“I’m not going to.”

“Good. I didn’t think so. So, let’s consider what
we
can do.”

Ashley nodded her head in agreement.

Scott looked at several small piles of items collected in the living room. “You’ve been shopping.”

“Indeed,” Sally said.

“You want to go over it for us?” Scott picked up and fiddled with a box of ammonia-based Handi Wipes. “Like these?”

Sally was quiet, even-toned. “If one thought they had left a DNA sample in a compromising location, they could swipe it down with these, eradicating any trace evidence.”

Scott blew out his cheeks. He was almost dizzy. Handi Wipes, he thought. Part of a murder weapon.

Sally watched her ex-husband and could feel him wavering. She continued solidly, “As best as I can deduce, what we have agreed to do is bring O’Connell and his father together. We can do that. Scott more or less inadvertently has given us a way. And I think we can presume they will have words. We’ve been over that. Then we must find a way to steal O’Connell’s own weapon, use it, as he presumably would, on his father, and return it to O’Connell’s hideaway before he realizes it is missing.”

“Why not just leave it at the, ah, crime scene?” Scott asked.

“I thought of that,” Sally replied. “But it will be the crucial piece of evidence. The police and the prosecution just love finding the murder weapon. It’s what they will build their theory around. It will be the item that is incontrovertible in a court of law. To be sure, it, more than anything else, needs to be discovered in his control.”

“What are these other things?” Hope asked.

Sally looked over at the gathered items. There were several cell phones, a tube of Super Glue, a portable computer, a size-small men’s coverall, two boxes of surgical gloves, several pairs of surgical bootees that could be pulled over a pair of shoes, two black, tight-fitting balaclava face and head cover-ups, and a Swiss Army knife. “They are what we need, as best as I can tell. There are some other things that would be really useful, as well, like some hair from a comb in O’Connell’s apartment, maybe. I’m still fitting pieces together.”

“What’s the computer for?” Scott asked.

Sally sighed. She turned to Hope. “That’s the same make and model that you saw in O’Connell’s apartment, right?”

Hope examined the machine. “Yes. As best as I can tell. At least, that’s what I remember.”

“Well,” Sally said, “you said that his computer contains encrypted material about Ashley. And about us. This one doesn’t.”

Hope nodded. “I think I see.”

“The police will seize his computer. I’d rather have it be one that we’d prepared for that circumstance.”

“Switch them?”

“Correct. It will just erase a link between us and him. He’s probably got backup somewhere, with all the stuff about Ashley and us, but still…Timing will be critical.”

She handed each of them a sheet of yellow legal-pad paper. At the top she had drawn a timeline.

Hope stared down at the paper. Sally had delineated tasks, events, actions, but had marked each with an
A, B,
or
C.
When she looked up, she saw that Sally was watching her.

“You haven’t assigned roles,” Hope said. “You’ve got three people doing interrelated things, but you haven’t yet said who does what.”

Sally leaned back in her chair, trying to remain composed. “I have tried to think of this from the position of a modern police officer,” she said. “You have to consider what they will find, and how they will interpret it. Crimes are always about a certain logic. One thing should lead them to the next. They have modern techniques, like DNA analysis and forensic weapons studies and all sorts of capabilities that we only know about peripherally. I’ve tried to think of as many of these as I could and remember what screws up investigations. Fire, for example, makes a mess of things—but it doesn’t necessarily destroy firearms forensics. Water compromises all sorts of wounds and DNA, ruins fingerprints. Our problem is that we want to commit a crime, a violent crime, but we want to leave a trail. Not a perfect trail, but enough of one that leads in the direction we want. The police will, if we’re careful, do the rest, even without a confession from O’Connell.”

“What if he points the police in our direction?”

“We must be prepared for that. We can, to some degree, create alibis for each other. But mainly, we must make it seem unreasonable. That’s the trick. Far better that the police simply not believe anything he says—which is what they will be inclined to do—and try to ride out any attention that comes our way. Don’t underestimate how unlikely it is that we are doing what we are about to do. And police, well, they really like simple answers to simple questions. Even simple questions about death.”

Sally paused, staring first at Scott, then Hope.

“But I don’t think he will,” Sally said.

“Will what?”

“Point the police at us. If we do this right, he won’t know.”

Scott nodded. “But, you know, I was there, asking questions. Someone is likely to remember me.”

“That’s why at some key point you will have to be miles away doing something in someone else’s presence. Like using a credit card and making a complaint someplace where there is a video camera. But on the other hand, it’s probably critical that you’re close by, as well.”

Scott sat back hard. “I see that, but…”

“The same is true for Ashley and Catherine. Although they will have a role to play.”

Again the others remained silent.

Sally took a deep breath. “Which brings us to the crucial question. The actual crime. I’ve thought about this, and I think it will have to be me.”

She waited for someone to say something, but no one did.

“I’ll have to get the gun,” Hope said. “I’m the one who knows where it is. I’ve got the key.”

“Yes. But you were there once before. You have the same problem that Scott has. No, someone else has to get the gun. You can tell me where.”

Hope nodded, but Scott shook his head.

“That’s, of course, assuming it remains where you saw it. Which is a big assumption.”

Sally coughed, then said, “Yes, but if we
cannot
recover the gun, we’re only partially committed. We can still pull back, then come up with a secondary plan on a new day.”

Scott was still shaking his head. “Okay, if we steal the gun. And then get it to you…what makes you think you can handle a weapon? Especially under these circumstances?”

“I’ll just have to. It’s my job, I think.”

Hope shook her head. “I don’t know about that. It seems to me that there is a certain danger—I’m trying to be like you, Sally, and think like a policeman—in Ashley’s mother committing the crime. That might make sense to a cop, you know. Protecting your child. But I doubt that any cop would think that the mother’s
partner
would perform this act. In other words, my distance from Ashley, her not being my own child, my own blood, protects me from inquiries, don’t you think? And I’m younger, quicker, and stronger, in case there is some actual running involved in all this.”

Both Scott and Sally stared at her. Both could see what she was about to say, but neither could muster the words to prevent her from saying it.

Hope tried to smile through a cloud of her own doubt. “No,” she said slowly, “it should be me with that gun in my hand.”

This time, I was sure I could hear a catch in her voice.

“Do you ever wonder how much of life can change in a second? So many things seem small, yet they become large.”

It was close to midnight, and she had surprised me by calling.

“Do you think,” she asked abruptly, “that we make better choices in the dark, alone, at night, when we lie in bed and try to sort through a sea of troubles? Or is it wiser to wait until morning, when there is daylight and clarity? I wonder what sort of decisions they were making,” she said slowly. “Night decisions? Day decisions? You tell me.”