The Wrong Man (70 page)

“Two things, really. I mean, you have a fire and a dead body that was partially burnt, and truly dumb guys that we are, we initially just figured that the older O’Connell got drunk and somehow managed to set the place on fire along with himself. You know, passes out with a cigarette and a bottle of Scotch in his hand. Of course, that more than likely would have been in the living room in a chair, or in the bedroom, on the bed, instead of the kitchen floor. But when the medical examiner gets the body back on a table, peels away some charred flesh, sees the gunshot wound, and finds a twenty-five-caliber round in his brain, and another in his shoulder, well, that made things a whole lot different. So we were back at that soaking mess, looking for something to get us going, you know. But the doc also finds scrapings under the guy’s fingernails, as well, so we’ve got some pretty interesting DNA, and then all of a sudden, the mess in the house looks like a fight that went poorly for the old bastard. And then when we canvas the place, one of the neighbors recalls seeing a car with Massachusetts plates squealing out of there not too long before the smoke started. That and the DNA results got us a search warrant. And then what do you suppose we find?”

He was smiling, and he snorted a small laugh. A policeman’s satisfaction in once again learning that the world occasionally works the way it is supposed to.

I was less sure I would have reached that same conclusion.

45

A One-sided Phone Call

H
ope drove north, through the tollbooths at the border to Maine, heading toward a spot near the shoreline she remembered from a summer vacation, many years earlier, shortly after she and Sally had first fallen in love. They had taken the young Ashley there on their first trip together. It was a wild spot, where an overgrown park of dark trees and tangled underbrush went straight to the water’s edge, and the rocky shoreline caught the breakers that rolled in from the Atlantic, sending sprays of salt water into the air. In the summer it was magical, seals playing against the rocks, a dozen different species of seabirds crying against the onshore breezes. Now, she thought, it would be a lonely and abandoned spot, and it was the only place that she could think of that would be quiet enough for her to figure out what exactly she was to do.

She tucked her elbow down, keeping pressure on the wound in her side. This helped stymie the flow of blood, and the injury itself had slid into a constant throbbing pain. On more than one moment, she thought she was going to pass out, but then, as the miles slid beneath the wheels of the car, she had gathered some strength and, keeping her teeth clenched against the hurt, believed she could tough out the entire trip.

She tried to imagine what had taken place within her. She pictured different organs—stomach, spleen, liver, intestines—and like playing a child’s game guessed which ones had been sliced and creased by the knife blade.

The countryside seemed darker even than the night that enveloped her. Great stands of black pines, like witnesses by the side of the road, seemed to be watching her progress. When she exited the turnpike, she gasped with a sudden pain as she gently turned the wheel, steering the car down the ramp, then twisting through back roads that reminded her of her childhood home. She tried to measure her breathing, telling herself to take cautious pulls of the night air.

She let herself imagine that she was really on the road to the house where she had grown up. She could picture her mother years earlier, hair up, in the garden, wrangling with the flowers, while her father was in the back on the field he’d built for her, trying to juggle a soccer ball in the air. She could hear his voice calling for her to put on her cleats and come out and play. He sounded strong, not at all as he was later, in the hospital being stalked by disease.

I’ll be right there, she thought.

Small brown signs every few miles pointed her in the direction of the park, and now she could smell a little salt in the air. She remembered a hidden parking lot, which she knew would be empty on a cold November night. A single, yardwide pathway thickly padded with pine needles led through the stands of trees and brush, past a picnic area, then another three-quarters of a mile to the ocean. She lifted her eyes and saw the full moon. She knew that she might need its meager light. Hunter’s moon, she thought. It was rimmed with yellow, and she imagined that the first snows and ice weren’t far off. She doubted anyone else would come along; she did not know what she would say if someone did. She did not have the energy left to lie even to the most mildly inquisitive policeman or park ranger.

Hope saw another sign, a blue background with a large white
H
in the middle.

This was an unfair temptation, she thought. She had not remembered that the park was only a couple of miles from a hospital.

For a moment, she envisioned turning in that direction. There would be a large swath of bright light, and a sign in neon red spelling out
EMERGENCY ENTRANCE
. Probably an ambulance or two parked nearby, on a circular entry. Right inside there would be a nurse, behind a desk, doing triage.

She imagined the nurse: a sturdy, middle-aged woman, unfazed by blood or danger. She would take one glance at the wound in Hope’s side, and the next thing Hope would be aware of would be the fluorescent lights of the exam room, and the murmured voices of a physician and nurses as they bent over her trying to save her life.

Who did this to you?
someone would ask. They would have a notepad handy to record her words.

I did it to myself.

No, really, who did it? The police are on their way, and they will want to know. Tell us now.

I can’t say.

We have questions. We need answers. Why are you here? Why are you so far from your home? What have you been doing this night?

I won’t say.

That’s not the same as you can’t say. We are suspicious. We have doubts. If you live through this night, we will have many more questions.

I won’t answer.

Yes, you will. Sooner or later, you will. And tell us, why is there someone else’s blood on your coveralls? How did that get there?

Hope gritted her teeth and kept driving.

Sally pulled her car into almost the same spot opposite Michael O’Connell’s apartment that she had occupied earlier that evening. The street was empty, save for the cars parked up and down the block. It was urban dark, where the night blackness tried to creep into corners, join shadows together, fight against all the ambient light that crept out from more vibrant parts of the city.

She looked down first at her wristwatch, then at the stopwatch, which was keeping a running time for the entire day. She breathed in slowly. Time was moving far too slowly.

Sally stared up at the façade of Michael O’Connell’s building. His apartment windows remained dark.

Gazing up and down the street, Sally could feel heat building within her. How close was he? Two minutes? Twenty minutes? Was he even heading this direction at all?

She shook her head. Proper planning, she told herself, would have designated someone to follow him out of his father’s home, so that every step he took that day was monitored. She bit down on her lip. But doing that would have endangered them all, for it would have put one of them in closer proximity to O’Connell than she wanted. That was why she had created the gap—between his exit and his return. But Scott had been dangerously slow at returning the weapon, and now she had no real grasp on where O’Connell might be. Did the air seep from his tire as Scott had promised it would? Had he been sufficiently delayed? Maybes screamed at her like a dissonant symphony of out-of-tune instruments.

Glancing sideways, toward the backpack that contained the gun, she fought off the urge to simply stick it into a trash container behind the building. There would be a more than good chance the cops would still find it. But it lacked the certainty of what she needed, and in a night filled with doubt, this part had to be conclusive.

For a moment, she grasped at the cell phone. Her mind spun wildly to Hope.

Where are you? she asked herself.

Are you okay?

Her hands were shaking. She did not know whether it was out of fear that O’Connell would catch her and destroy everything by doing so, or whether she was afraid for Hope. She pictured her partner, tried to imagine just exactly what had happened to her, tried to read between the lines of what Scott had told her, but every step she took along this path of imagination only frightened her more.

O’Connell was closing in on her, getting nearer with every passing minute; she could sense it. She knew she had to act without delay. And yet, crippled by uncertainty, she hesitated.

Hope was out there, in pain; she could sense that as well. And she could do nothing about it.

She let out a low, slow moan.

And then, with an overwhelming force of will, Sally seized the backpack and launched herself out of the car. She prayed that the night would conceal her as she ducked her head down and rapidly crossed the street. She knew that if anyone saw her and connected her and the backpack to O’Connell and his apartment, everything might unravel. She knew enough not to run, but to measure her pace. Eye contact with anyone would be fatal. Conversation with anyone would be fatal. Anything that made the next few moments noticeable in any manner or form would be fatal. To all of them.

She knew that this was the moment she had to rise to. It was the second where everything that had happened that night hung in some balance. A failure on her part would doom all of them, and possibly Ashley as well. She had the murder weapon in her possession. It was a minute of complete vulnerability.

Sally whispered to herself, Keep going.

As she moved through the vestibule of the apartment, she could hear voices on the elevator, so she ducked into the stairwell and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

She paused by the solid fire door, trying to listen through, then, realizing that that was impossible, she stepped through and walked steadily down the corridor to O’Connell’s apartment. She held Mrs. Abramowicz’s key in her hand, just as she had earlier that day. For a terrible second, she imagined him inside, lying on the bed, the lights out. She should make a plan. What if he was inside? What if he showed up before she finished her task? What if he spotted her in the hallway? What if he saw her on the elevator? Or exiting the building, on the street? What was she going to say? Would she fight him? Would she try to hide? Would he even recognize her?

Her hand shook with questions as she opened the door.

She stepped inside rapidly, closing it behind her.

She listened for breathing, for footsteps, for a toilet flushing, for the tap of computer keys—anything that might tell her she wasn’t alone—but she could hear nothing beyond the tortured noise of her breathing, which seemed to grow in sound and intensity with each passing second.
Do it now! Do it now! There’s no time!

She ducked across the entryway, afraid to turn on any light, cursing herself as she bumped against a wall. A little streetlight slipped through the bedroom windows, giving her just enough illumination to see. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. It almost made her scream.

She dashed toward the closet and frantically unzipped the backpack, removing the gun. She could smell the pungent odor of gasoline, just as Scott had warned her. She slipped the gun back into the shoe and rammed the stray sock down over the top to stifle the smell. After pushing it back into position, hoping everything was placed exactly as she had memorized earlier, she rose.

Sally told herself to move calmly, efficiently, to think every step of the way, but she could not. She took the now empty backpack, glanced around rapidly, thought it all looked as it had earlier that day, and turned to head out.

Once again riveted by darkness, she stumbled.

She tried to control her racing fears, told herself not to run. She did not want to crash into anything, maybe knock something over. There had to be no sign at all that someone had been inside the apartment twice that day. Nothing, she told herself, as she waited for her heart to slow, could be more important.

Delaying her exit was almost painful.

When Sally finally reached the door, she almost panicked.
He’s there,
she thought. She imagined that she could hear his own key in the lock. She thought she heard voices, footsteps.

Sally told herself to ignore the tricks fear was playing on her, and she pushed her way out of the apartment. She swept her eyes right, then left, and saw that she was alone. Still, her hand twitched, and she thought she could hear telltale sounds approaching from every direction. She steeled herself, told herself to hold it all together.

Just as she had done earlier, she locked the door and made her way down the hallway. Again, she chose the stairs. Again, she made her way through the vestibule and out into the night. Suddenly she was flooded with a glow of success. She crossed the street, embracing anonymity.