Very Bad Men (49 page)

And he had kept his word. The evidence was spread across the table. Stacks of printed pages—some of them outlines, some of them rough drafts of chapters. The one I'd been looking at had a title that read “Intelligence Failures—The Iraq War.”

John Casterbridge had served five terms as a congressman and another five as a senator. He was giving her an insider's view of forty years' worth of scandals, everything from Watergate to weapons of mass destruction.

“He offered me an exclusive,” Lucy said. “As much access as I needed, starting that night. The plan was for me to check out of my room. We would go off somewhere and get to work. But when we drove back to the hotel we saw police cars. We kept on driving.”

“Was that your decision or his?” I asked.

“It was mutual. You have to understand, I didn't know you'd been shot. I didn't realize what a big deal it would turn into. And the senator didn't want to be seen by the police. He didn't want to explain himself to anyone. His family, Alan Beckett—none of them knew he planned to talk to me. And if they knew, they wouldn't have approved. As for me—”

“You didn't want to break the spell. Here's John Casterbridge willing to talk to you—a man who never talks to reporters. You were afraid something might change his mind.”

“That's true.” She was standing still now, looking out at the lake. A distant patch of white was the sail of a catamaran.

“You know about his condition, don't you?” I said. “Some people might say he shouldn't be making important decisions—like whether to talk to reporters about intelligence failures.”

“I didn't know about that at the time. Honestly, he seems fine to me. Sometimes he'll get tired in the evenings and go off on tangents, but other than that . . .” She let the thought trail off.

I prompted her again. “For those three days—Wednesday night to Saturday night—where did you go?”

“We started to drive here, but the senator decided against it. He thought they might look for him here—his son, or Beckett. He didn't want anyone interfering. So we found a hotel. He paid cash and used a fake name.”

“No one recognized him?”

“He wore khakis and a polo shirt. Slicked back his hair. He looked like somebody's grandfather. I think he enjoyed that part of it. Putting one over on everyone.”

I could believe it. He would have liked thumbing his nose at Alan Beckett. But Beckett had handled himself well. All the while, when I was searching for Lucy, he must have been searching for John Casterbridge. He must have suspected that Casterbridge and Lucy had gone off together, but when I talked to him he never let on. How could he? He couldn't admit he had misplaced a U.S. senator.

And that day at the Bridgewell Building, he had made a show of wanting to keep me away from the senator. I never suspected that the senator wasn't there.

“What did you do for those three days?” I asked Lucy.

“I set up a tape recorder and listened to him talk. We stayed in the room, except when one of us went out to get food. When he got tired, we'd take a break and he'd sleep. I'd nap for a couple of hours and then go over my notes, figuring out what questions I needed to ask him.”

She came back to the table and sat across from me. “We watched a little news,” she said. “Enough to know I was being thought of as a missing person. But he was still talking. So I wasn't about to stop. On Saturday things heated up: the news was full of reports about Lark getting shot, and a lot of them mentioned my disappearance. We decided we'd stretched our luck as far as it would go. It was time to head back.”

“What about your cover story—the architect from Chicago?”

“He's a friend who happens to own a blue minivan. I called him and he came through for me.”

She reached for the bullet and rolled it along the table with her fingertips.

“That night at
Gray Streets,
” I said, “you could have told me the truth.”

Her brows knitted together. “I wanted to, Loogan. But you might have decided you had to tell the police. You with your ethics. I couldn't let it get out that the senator had spent those three days with me while everyone thought I was missing. How would that look? And he didn't want our arrangement made public. Not yet.”

“What is your arrangement, exactly?” I asked. “He feeds you material for a book, and in return you leave the Great Lakes robbery alone—is that it?”

“That's it.”

“And that doesn't bother you? As a journalist?”

A bit of mischief returned to her expression. “You don't know what he's been giving me. In a few years no one will remember the Great Lakes robbery. But this,” she said, pointing to the stacks of pages, “this is history.”

I tipped back in my chair. A breeze came through the screen behind me.

“Have you thought about the senator's motives, about why he agreed to give you all this?”

She shrugged. “There must be some truth in something Terry Dawtrey or Henry Kormoran told me. Something that would reflect badly on Callie Spencer.”

“So he just wants to make sure his daughter-in-law gets elected?”

“What else could it be?” she said. “Do you know something?”

I let the chair fall forward. “I don't know anything.”

“What about Lark's doctor—Kenneally? Is there a story there?”

I drummed my fingers carelessly along the edge of the table. “If there is, I'm sure it's nothing big. It's not
history
. What do the senator's people think of your arrangement?”

“Alan Beckett isn't happy. He thinks I can't be trusted to hold up my end.” She waved the matter away. “There's not much he can do.”

“You don't think he'll try to stop you?” I said. “Beckett likes to be in control.”

“Let him try.”

“I'd say he's already trying. The senator's resignation last week—don't you think Beckett was behind that? It's his way of reasserting his authority.”

“That's not the way I saw it. I think it was more the senator's idea. He's been playing a role for a long time. He's tired of it.”

I nodded toward the interior of the house. “Where is he now? Is he here?”

She shook her head. “He was here most of last week. Working with me. This week he's been coming and going. I haven't seen him for two days.”

“Where did he go?”

“Down your way, I imagine.”

I didn't feel the need to correct her.

“He's letting me stay here to work on the book,” she said. “I don't expect him to tell me where he goes.” She was quiet for a moment, reaching across the table to put her hand over mine. “It's good to see you, Loogan. How did you know where to find me?”

“I didn't.”

The wind picked up. The leaves of the white oak whispered. Lucy drew her hand back. “You didn't come here to find me. You were looking for the senator. He's not in Ann Arbor?”

“I don't know where he is.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you up to, Loogan?”

“I'm not up to anything. Lizzie and I are on vacation.”

She looked uncertain. “You're not mad at me, are you? You're not holding out on me?”

“I'm not mad.”

“I really am sorry about what happened. You understand why I did it, don't you?”

I patted her hand gently. Picked up the bullet.

“Sure,” I said.

E
lizabeth drove us back to I-75 and out of Saint Ignace. I sat beside her and recounted everything Lucy had told me. I was restless, turning the bullet end over end with my fingers. Elizabeth saw it, but she didn't say anything about it. She'd glimpsed the revolver in the glove compartment earlier, but she hadn't said anything about that either.

“What do you think of this deal Lucy made with the senator?” she asked when I finished my story. “Does she really believe he would agree to give away national secrets just to save Callie Spencer some embarrassment?”

I worried my thumb over the surface of the bullet. “I think in her eyes he's an old man whose judgment is failing him. And she's willing to take advantage.”

“Does she intend to honor her part of the deal? To forget about the Great Lakes robbery?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm not sure she knows. But if she found out Matthew Kenneally was the senator's son and the fifth robber—I think she might decide that belongs in her book.”

 

 

WE REACHED BRIMLEY around quarter to six and checked into a hotel with a view of Lake Superior. Forty minutes later, after a shower and a change of clothes, we drove to Madelyn Turner's converted farmhouse. The sunlight spread the shadow of the house over the side yard. The tire swing hung perfectly still from the bough of the elm.

There was a rusted pickup truck in the driveway, but no other car and no sign of Nick's bike. No one answered our knock.

We rode back through the center of Brimley and found the Cozy Inn. A waitress seated us at a table in a corner of the dining room, away from the noise of the bar. She brought us sweet tea and we let her talk us into ordering the shrimp cocktail. We followed that with beer-battered perch, seasoned fries, coleslaw. We were thinking about apple pie when Madelyn Turner came in.

I had my back to the wall, so I saw her entrance. “Don't look now,” I said to Elizabeth.

She kept her eyes on me. “Madelyn?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Is she alone?”

“She's alone,” I said. “She's heading for the bar. How should we handle this?”

“We don't want to talk to her here. Let her be.”

I watched the bartender put a drink in front of her. “Could be a long night,” I said.

“I don't think so. What's she wearing? A skirt?”

“Slacks.”

“Tight blouse, or something loose?”

“Loose,” I said. Her clothes were casual. She had her hair pinned up. She wasn't trying to impress anyone or to hide her age.

“She'll have one drink,” Elizabeth said. “And dinner to go.”

We passed on the pie and asked the waitress for the bill. Ten minutes later, Madelyn Turner left carrying two Styrofoam take-out boxes. We followed her.

Out in the parking lot the day had begun to fade. Madelyn's car stirred up dust when she drove out. We tailed her east to an intersection and waited behind her at the light. From here she would need to turn south to go home.

“She's not going home,” Elizabeth said.

She went straight for half a mile and then turned north. She got off the main road and onto a lane that wound through the shade of tall birches and pines. We lost sight of her, and when we came around a bend we saw her pulling onto a patch of grass in front of a cabin. She parked beside a long car covered with a canvas tarp.

I pressed the brake reflexively, but Elizabeth told me to go on past.

“Eyes ahead. Act natural.”

I acted natural and rolled on another hundred feet. Beyond that, the lane curved and the cabin would have been out of sight. I shifted into park and watched the scene unfold in the rearview mirror. Madelyn got out of her car with the take-out and walked toward the porch. The door of the cabin opened and a man came out to meet her. If I hadn't been expecting to see him I might not have recognized him. He wore khakis and a linen shirt, and his silver hair had been cropped short like a Roman emperor's. John Casterbridge.

He collected the take-out boxes from Madelyn and they went inside. I turned to Elizabeth, who had been watching over her shoulder.

“What are they doing out here?” I asked her.

She touched the glass beads at her throat absently. “That's Charlie Dawtrey's cabin. It's been empty since he died.”

I gave her an appraising look. “Did you know Madelyn would come here?”

“I thought she might. It's not ideal for a rendezvous, but at least it's out of the way. She can't parade him around town. And she can't bring him home, or she'd have to explain him to Nick.”

I looked in the mirror again at the cabin and thought of the two of them sharing dinner. A simple act, but the senator had come a long way for it. I thought about what Lucy had said—that she thought the resignation was the senator's idea. Was this why he'd done it? Was being with Madelyn Turner what he wanted?

A subtle change in the idle of the engine broke my reverie. I switched it off, popped the door, and climbed out. Elizabeth did the same.

“We're going in?” she said.

“Sure. I thought that was the point.”

She looked across the roof of the car at me. “We came here to confirm that the senator had a relationship with Madelyn Turner, that he's the father of Matthew Kenneally.” She tipped her head in the direction of the cabin. “I think this more or less confirms it. But it's another thing to get them to admit it.”

I laid a hand on the warm metal of the roof. “But if they know we've caught them here together—that'll make it harder for them to deny it. Won't it?”

“Maybe. But even if they admit that Kenneally is the senator's son, we can't prove any wrongdoing. Not yet. We can't prove that Kenneally was involved in the Great Lakes robbery or that the senator covered it up.”

“Are you saying we should walk away?”

She stared off toward the cabin. “I'm saying we should think about what we hope to accomplish. I'm saying—”

She didn't finish, and I could tell something had caught her eye. I turned and saw a figure crouched by the side of Madelyn's car. Even from a distance I knew it was Nick Dawtrey.