Very Bad Men (36 page)

He would give the leg another day to heal, but after that he would need to move. He had waited long enough. Tomorrow he would head back to Ann Arbor and deal with Sutton Bell.

 

 

PAUL RHINER WOKE to the sound of snoring.

They had him in a semi-private room, and the patient in the other bed was recovering from an operation. They must have scooped out most of the man's internal organs, Rhiner thought, because his snoring sounded deep and hollow, like wind blowing through a mine shaft far underground.

Every few hours a nurse would come in with a syringe. She'd tap the side to get rid of the air bubbles and she'd inject it into the snoring man's I.V.

Rhiner had an I.V. of his own. They were giving him drugs for the pain, strong ones that made him sleep. He didn't want to sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw things. He saw Terry Dawtrey lying in the grass on the hillside of Whiteleaf Cemetery. Dawtrey struggling to breathe and blood staining his white shirt. Blood bubbling out of the wound in his throat.

He saw Walter Delacorte at Lark's apartment. The moment when the tire iron sank into Delacorte's flesh. His mouth opening to scream.

Whenever the nurses came in, they asked Rhiner to rate his pain on a scale from one to ten. He lied and gave them low numbers. He didn't want them to increase his dose. He wanted to stay awake.

A doctor stopped by to talk to him about his hand. The fingers wouldn't move the way they should. With surgery and physical therapy, he might be able to recover full function. He might also want to think about plastic surgery to straighten his broken nose.

Rhiner nodded his agreement and the doctor went away. As he left, Rhiner caught a glimpse of the uniformed cop in the hallway. There'd been one posted outside his door for as long as he could remember.

The detective had come to see him twice. The Asian one, Shan. Wanting to know what happened at Lark's apartment. Rhiner had come close to admitting it—that he had stabbed Walt. It was an accident. They might not even charge him, and if they did, a good lawyer could get him off. He could have the doctors fix his hand and his nose, and he could go on like nothing had happened. Except he couldn't close his eyes.

A nurse came in with a syringe for the man in the other bed. She flicked her finger against the side of it, because air bubbles are dangerous. If they get in your veins, they can kill you.

Rhiner watched her, but even now, awake, he was seeing Walter Delacorte's face. The dull fear in his eyes as he bled out on the floor.

After the nurse left, Rhiner looked at the I.V. running into his arm and wondered what would happen if he bit through the plastic tube. If he blew air into his vein.

No,
he thought.
Too fancy.
Better to stick to something he knew would work.

He rolled onto his side—the one without the fractured ribs. He sat up by slow degrees, letting the pain sear through him, beads of sweat breaking out on his scalp. He opened a drawer by his bedside, ignoring the tears that ran down his face. They had left him his clothes—some of them at least. Not his shirt or his windbreaker, but his shoes, his pants.

His belt.

 

 

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON Elizabeth stood by the row of windows near her desk in the Investigations Division. The temperature outside stood at ninety degrees. The building's air-conditioning overcompensated as usual. Inside, it felt like fifty.

She looked down at heavy traffic on Fifth Avenue—people getting an early start on the weekend. A few students were out walking in short sleeves and cutoffs. One young man stood across the street in front of the old firehouse. Dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck. Long dark hair slicked back from a tall pale forehead.

Elizabeth listened to the rhythm of Carter Shan's fingers on his keyboard. He was typing a report on their interview the day before with Anthony Lark's mother.

Without turning she said, “What if I told you there's a kid down on the sidewalk, maybe twenty-two, dressed all in black?”

No pause in the rhythm. “I'd say we're living in a college town.”

“It's awfully hot for it, though. He has to be burning up.”

“Maybe the emptiness in his soul is keeping him cool.”

She touched the sunlit glass. “What if I told you he's carrying a bowling bag?”

“I'd say he's probably got a severed head in it.” The sound of Shan's typing broke off. “Is he really carrying a bowling bag?”

“No, but he's got a backpack. You could carry a head in a backpack.”

They had spent the morning at Helen Lark's house, searching through the possessions her son had left behind and photographing his shrine to Susanna Marten and Callie Spencer. They had Mrs. Lark's permission to conduct the search, and a warrant as well, in case anyone decided to object later.

The Dearborn police had agreed to keep an eye on the house, but Elizabeth didn't think Lark would show up there. He seemed to be lying low. His description and a description of his car had gone out to law enforcement agencies throughout Michigan and the surrounding region.

At one o'clock Elizabeth and Shan had met with Chief McCaleb in his office, along with several other detectives from the division. McCaleb broke the news about Paul Rhiner's suicide. A nurse had found Rhiner's hospital bed empty, and when she checked the bathroom she found him with his belt around his neck, hanging from a hook on the back of the door.

“I just talked to the Chippewa County administrator,” McCaleb said. “He's feeling a little anxious. He's now lost a sheriff and a deputy in the space of three days. He'd like to believe that Walter Delacorte was a hero who died trying to bring in a killer. That's a story that works better if Lark was the one who stabbed him. Is there any chance that's true?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “The lab found two sets of fingerprints on the tire iron, Delacorte's and Rhiner's. None from Lark. The evidence points to a quarrel between Delacorte and Rhiner.”

“You think they quarreled over what to do with Lark?” McCaleb asked.

“That's really the only way it makes sense.”

“We know Rhiner felt guilty about having to shoot Terry Dawtrey at Whiteleaf Cemetery,” said McCaleb. “He blamed Lark for what happened. Could he have intended to kill him?”

“It would be simpler that way,” Elizabeth said, “and I imagine it would make the Chippewa County administrator happy—he could still paint Delacorte as a hero.”

“But you don't believe it.”

“No. When I spoke to Walter Delacorte a week ago, he claimed he didn't believe Lark was ever at the cemetery. But he went to the trouble of tracking him down—without telling anyone what he was doing. I don't think he meant to arrest him.”

“What was Delacorte's motive? Why go after Lark?”

“That would be one of those things we don't know yet,” Elizabeth said.

Owen McCaleb planted his elbows on his desk, rubbed his hands over his face. “All right,” he said. “Let's move on. I want to hear about the reporter.”

Detectives Ron Wintergreen and Harvey Mitchum were leading the search for Lucy Navarro. They were a mismatched pair: Wintergreen was thirty-one, tall and slender, serious and reserved; Mitchum was twenty years older, heavyset, affable and outgoing. Wintergreen had contacted Lucy's cell phone provider, hoping to use her phone's signal to locate her, but the phone must have been switched off or damaged, or the battery dead. There was no signal.

Mitchum had tracked down Lucy's parents, a job that proved more difficult than anyone expected. Standing at ease near the chief's desk, hands clasped behind his back, he reported that they were on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, touring the Greek isles. They had been on the ship for a week, and traveling for two weeks before that. They hadn't spoken to their daughter in all that time.

“They're worried, naturally,” Mitchum said. “They plan to fly home as soon as they can make arrangements.”

Lucy's editor at the
National Current
could offer no help. He told Mitchum he hadn't heard from her in a week. “Her cell phone records bear that out,” Mitchum added.

The same records showed calls to Kinross Prison in the spring, presumably in regard to Terry Dawtrey, as well as calls to Henry Kormoran and Sutton Bell. David Loogan's number popped up several times in recent days—both his cell phone and his phone at
Gray Streets
. Lucy's last call on Wednesday had been to Loogan's office.

“Other than that, there were some calls to California,” Mitchum said. “She kept in touch with friends from back home. But none of them have heard from her since Wednesday night.”

A search of Lucy's room at the Winston Hotel had turned up nothing of use. Mitchum and Wintergreen had questioned the hotel's staff and guests, but no one there had witnessed what happened to Lucy on Wednesday night. Wintergreen had contacted a manager at Coleman Trucking, and after some wrangling was put in touch with the driver of the eighteen-wheeler Loogan had seen in the parking lot of the hotel.

“His name is Sullivan,” Wintergreen said. “He was on his cell talking with his wife and he pulled off the interstate. Wound up in the hotel lot. His wife was on his case about being away from home. She was complaining about the kids and the bills. When I pressed him he said he remembered a yellow car, and a guy who waved at him to move his truck. The guy fit Lark's description. But that's all he remembered. He was preoccupied with the call. ‘If you ever got chewed out by my wife you'd understand,' he told me.”

Wintergreen shrugged. “I checked into him. He's got no criminal record. As far as I can tell, he has nothing to do with Lucy Navarro. He's a dead end.”

THE MEETING IN McCaleb's office had broken up around two. Now, as Shan finished typing his report, Elizabeth crossed from the windows to her desk. She found the list of names Lark's mother had given her the day before. Lark's friends and acquaintances. She and Shan had already spoken to a few of them, and the plan was to head back to Dearborn and continue working through the list.

When they walked down the stairs and through the lobby and out into the heat, Elizabeth saw that the kid dressed in black was still loitering by the old firehouse. His backpack lay at his feet on the sidewalk.

She told Shan she'd meet him at the car and started across the street. The kid locked his gaze on her and ran a hand over his slicked-back hair. He stepped over his backpack as she approached. As if he wanted to block her view of it.

“Are you waiting for someone?” she asked him.

His lips parted to show her his teeth. “No.”

“Is there something I can help you with?”

He looked past her at City Hall. “Are you a cop?”

She nodded.

“I've been thinking things over,” he said, “trying to make up my mind.”

She waited. Shan stood a few steps away. He had followed her instead of going for the car.

“Now that I'm here, I'm not sure,” the kid said.

He pushed the backpack with his foot, nudging it toward the firehouse wall.

“Is there something you need to talk about?” Elizabeth asked him.

“That depends. Are you working on the E. L. Navarro case?”

Elizabeth studied the fine sheen of perspiration on the pale skin of his forehead.

“You mean Lucy Navarro?”

A strange light flashed in the kid's eyes. “You shouldn't call her Lucy,” he said. “It's not respectful.”

“Do you know something about her?” asked Elizabeth.

The tip of the kid's tongue ran along his front teeth.

“I know everything about her,” he said. “I killed her.”

H
is name is Jeremy Dechant,” Elizabeth told me that night. “He's from Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo.”

She'd just come home, around eight-thirty. Sarah and I had already eaten dinner: barbecued chicken and a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers. I was loading the dishwasher.

“He read Lucy's novel,” Elizabeth said. “He claimed it made him realize he was always meant to be a vampire. He thought if he kidnapped her and drank her blood, that would do the trick. Said he never meant to kill her.”

It turned out that almost nothing he said was true.

“He doesn't drive a blue minivan,” Elizabeth told me. “I doubt he's ever been in the parking lot of the Winston Hotel. He couldn't give us a description of the place. We asked if he could lead us to Lucy's body, and he said it turned into a mist when she died. Apparently that's what happens when you kill a vampire.”