The Wrong Man (62 page)

Ashley didn’t answer. She was unsure.

They got their coats and walked out the front door together. Ashley and Catherine paused, standing on the front stoop, staring up and down the block. It was all family-neighborhood quiet. Ashley kept her fingers gripped around the pistol handle hidden deep in her parka pocket, her index finger rubbing against the trigger guard nervously. She was struck with the way her fear of Michael O’Connell had made her see the world as so many threats. The street where she had spent much of her childhood playing, as she shuttled between her parents’ two houses, should have been as familiar to her as her own room upstairs. But it was no longer. O’Connell had changed it into something utterly different. He had sliced away everything that belonged to her: her school, her apartment in Boston, her job, and now the place where she had grown up. She wondered whether he really knew how much genius existed in his evil.

She touched the gun barrel. Kill him, she told herself. Because he is killing you.

Still scanning the neighborhood with their eyes, Catherine and Ashley proceeded slowly up the street. Ashley wanted to invite him to show himself, if he was there. Halfway down the block, despite the rain, she removed her knit ski cap. She shook her head, letting her hair fall to her shoulders, before stuffing the hat back upon her head. She wanted, for the first and only time in months, to be irresistible.

“Keep walking,” Catherine said. “If he’s here, he will show.”

They sidled down the sidewalk, and from behind they heard a car start down the street. Ashley clutched the pistol and felt her heartbeat accelerate. She barely breathed in as the sound increased.

As the car drew abreast of them, she pivoted abruptly, swinging the weapon free and spreading her feet as she crouched into the shooting stance that she had practiced so diligently in her room. Her thumb slid over the safety switch, then to the hammer. She exhaled sharply, almost a grunt of effort, and then a whistle of tension.

The car, with a middle-aged man behind the wheel, rolled past them. The driver didn’t even turn; his eyes were checking addresses on the opposite side of the street.

Ashley groaned. But Catherine kept her wits about her. “You should put that weapon away,” she said quietly. “Before some nice stay-at-home mother spots it in your hand.”

“Where the hell is he?”

Catherine didn’t answer.

The two of them continued slowly. Ashley felt utterly calm, committed, ready to pull out her weapon and end it all with a rapid-fire answer to all his questions. Is this what it feels like to be ready to kill someone? But the real O’Connell, as opposed to the ghostlike O’Connell who had lurked just behind her every step for so long, was nowhere to be seen.

When they’d patiently made it around the block and sauntered back to Sally and Hope’s home, Catherine muttered, “All right. We know one thing. He’s not here. He has to be somewhere. Are you ready for the next step?”

Ashley doubted anyone could know the answer to that until they tried.

Michael O’Connell was at his makeshift desk in a darkened room, bathed in the glow of the computer screen. He was working on a little surprise for Ashley’s family. Dressed only in his underwear, his hair slicked back after a shower, techno music pouring through the computer’s speakers, he tapped his fingers on the keyboard in rhythm with the electric chords. The songs he listened to were fast, almost out of control.

O’Connell took delight in having used some of the cash that Ashley’s father had given him in the pathetic effort to buy him off to purchase the computer that replaced the one that Matthew Murphy had smashed. And now, he was hard at work on a series of electronic sorties that he believed would make for significant trouble in their lives.

The first was to be an anonymous tip to the Internal Revenue Service suggesting that Sally was asking her clients to pay her fees half by check and half in cash. There is nothing, Michael O’Connell thought, that the tax people hate more than someone trying to hide big chunks of income. They would be skeptical when she denied it, and relentless as they pored over her accounts.

This made him laugh out loud.

The second was designed as an equally anonymous tip to the New England offices of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency alleging that Catherine was growing large quantities of marijuana on her farm in a greenhouse inside her barn. He hoped the tip would be enough to get a search warrant. And even if the search turned up nothing—as he knew it would—he suspected the heavy hand of the DEA would wreck all her precious antiques and memorabilia. He could picture her house strewn with her items.

The third was a little surprise that he’d planned for Scott. Surfing around the Internet, using the log-on
Histprof,
he had discovered a Danish website that offered the most virulent pornography, prominently featuring children and underage teenagers in all sorts of provocative poses. The next step was to buy a phony credit card number and simply have a selection sent to Scott at his home. It would be a relatively simple matter to tip the local police to its arrival. In fact, he thought, he might not even have to do that. The local police would probably get a call from U.S. Customs, whom he knew monitored such imports into the States.

He laughed a little to himself, imagining the explanations that Ashley’s family would try to come up with when they found themselves enmeshed in all sorts of bureaucratic red tape, or sitting across a table in a bright, windowless room from either a DEA agent, an IRS agent, or a police officer who had nothing but contempt for the sort of smug middle-class folks they were.

They might try to blame him, but he doubted it. He just couldn’t be sure, which held him back. He knew that pressing the proper keys on his three entries would undoubtedly leave an electronic footprint that could be traced to his own computer. What he needed to do, he thought, was break into Scott’s house one morning while he was teaching and send the request to Denmark from Scott’s computer. It was also critical to create an untraceable electronic path for the other tips. He sighed. These would require him to travel to southern Vermont and western Massachusetts. Inventing screen personae wasn’t a problem, he thought. And he could send the tips from computers either in Internet cafés or local libraries.

He leaned back in his chair and once again laughed out loud.

Not for the first time, Michael O’Connell wondered why they thought they could compete against him.

As he was grinning, working over each of these unpleasant surprises for Ashley’s parents and family in his head, the cell phone on his desk corner rang.

It surprised him. He had no friends who would call. He’d quit his mechanic’s job, and no one at the school where he was occasionally taking classes had his number.

For a second, he stared at the small window on the outside of the phone that gave the incoming identification. He saw only a single heart-stopping name:
Ashley.

Before giving me the detective’s name, she had made me promise to guard my words.

“You won’t say anything,” she had said. “You won’t tell him anything that will set him on edge. You must promise me that, or else, forget it, I won’t give you his name.”

“I will be cautious. I promise.”

Now, in the waiting room of the police station, seated on a threadbare couch, I was less sure of my capabilities. To my right, a door opened and a man about my own age, with salt-and-pepper hair, a garishly pink tie around his neck, a substantial stomach, and an easygoing, slightly twisted smile on his lips, emerged. He stuck out his hand, and we introduced ourselves. He showed me back to his desk.

“So, how can I help you?”

I repeated the name I had given him in an earlier phone call. He nodded.

“We don’t get too many homicides around here. And when we do, they’re usually boyfriend-girlfriend, husband-wife. This was a little different. But I don’t get your interest in the case.”

“Some people I know suggested taking a look at it. Thought it might make a good story.”

The detective shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that. I will say this, it was a hell of a crime scene. A real mess. Sorting through it was quite a task. We’re not exactly Hollywood Homicide in here.” He gestured around the room. It was a modest place, where every bit of equipment, including the men and women who worked there, showed the fraying of age. “But even if people think we’re all dumb as logs, eventually we were able to figure it all out.”

“I don’t think that,” I said. “The dumb as logs part.”

“Well, you’re the exception, rather than the rule. Usually folks don’t get the big picture until they’re sitting across from one of us in handcuffs, we’ve got ’em nailed six ways to Sunday, and they’re looking at doing some serious prison time.”

He paused, eyeing me carefully. “You’re not working for a defense attorney, huh? Someone who jumps into a case and tries to find some mistake that they can crow about in an appellate court?”

“No. Just looking for a story, like I said.”

He nodded, but I wasn’t sure he completely believed me.

“Well,” the detective said slowly, “I don’t know about that at all. It might be a story. But it’s an old one. Okay. Here you go.”

He reached down beneath his desk, brought up a large accordion-style file, and opened it on the desk in front of us. There were a stack of eight-by-ten color glossy photographs, which he spread out on top of all the paperwork. I leaned forward. I could see debris and ruin were strewn throughout the pictures. And a body.

“A mess,” he said. “Like I told you.”

42

The Gun in the Shoe

A
t about the same time that Catherine and Ashley were walking around the block wondering where Michael O’Connell was, Scott was parked in the far corner of a thickly wooded rest area off Route 2. The virtue of the rest area was that it was almost entirely blocked by trees and brush from the highway. That, in part, was why they had chosen Route 2 as the way to travel to Boston. It wasn’t as quick as the turnpike, but it was less patrolled and less traveled. He was alone in his beaten old truck, having left the Porsche in his driveway.

Scott could hear the shallowness of his breathing, and he told himself that he was being crazy. Whatever tension there was at this moment, it would undoubtedly get far worse by the end of the day. His patience was rewarded a few minutes later when he saw a late-model white Ford Taurus pull into the rest area. It came to a stop about twenty feet away. He recognized Hope behind the wheel.

He reached down to the leg well beside him and pulled up a small, cheap red canvas gym bag. It rattled with a metallic sound when he picked it up. He got out of the truck and swiftly walked across the parking area.

Hope rolled down the window.

“Keep watch,” Scott said briskly. “You see anyone pulling in, let me know pronto.”

She nodded. “Where did you—”

“Last night. After midnight. I went down to long-term parking at the Hartford airport.”

“Good thinking. But don’t they have security cameras in the parking garage?”

“I went to the satellite lots. No pictures. This will only take a second. This a rental?”

“Yes,” she said. “It made the most sense.”

Scott opened the gym bag and went to the back of the car. It only took him a few minutes to exchange the Massachusetts license plates for the set from Rhode Island he’d taken off a car the night before. A small socket wrench and pliers were also in the bag. He placed the car’s actual plates in the duffel and handed it to Hope. “Don’t forget,” he said. “Got to change back before you return that vehicle.”

Hope nodded. She already looked pale.

“Look, call me if you have any hassle. I’ll be close enough, and—”

“You think if there’s a problem, I’ll have time to make a phone call?”

“No. Of course not. All right, I’ll just guide myself…” His voice trailed off. Too much to say. No words to say it with.

Scott stepped back. “Sally should be on her way down the turnpike by now.”

“Then I’ll go,” Hope said. She placed the gym bag on the seat beside her.