Dreams in the Key of Blue (33 page)

I studied the crumpled photograph of the young woman that I had found in Melanie Martin’s safe. She stood beneath a tree on what appeared to be a college campus. A stack of books rested on the ground at her feet. There was something familiar about her, but I could not put my finger on it.

As Jaworski slipped into the cruiser, I asked, “Where’s Portland State University?”

“Ain’t one,” he said. “Not here anyway. There’s one in Portland, Oregon. Why?”

Perhaps collecting Portlands was not a fruitless hobby for a cop. I handed Jaworski the photo.

“This Squires?” he asked.

The hair color was different, but that did not mean much. “I can’t be sure. It’s old, and not a good picture.”

He returned the photograph. “Where are you in such a hurry to get to?”

I gave him directions to Julia Westlake’s office.

WESTLAKE WAS WITH A PATIENT, SO I SAT IN THE
waiting room, thumbed through a
New Yorker
to catch up on the cartoons, and endured stares from the psychiatrist’s secretary, Jordan.

“I just figured out who you look like,” Jordan said.

I gazed up from my magazine. I was alone in the waiting area, so it seemed safe to assume that she was addressing me. I was less than eager to hear what media-enhanced person she thought I resembled.

“Blackbeard,” she said. “You know, the pirate. He’s all hairy and grizzled like you. Same eyes, too.”

“His name was Edward Teach,” I said. “He was an English buccaneer best known for his savagery.”

“Isn’t that neat?” she chirped. “Someone else must have told you, too. How else would you know so much about him?”

Westlake emerged from her office and rescued me. “It’s good to see you again, Lucas, but I have only about ten minutes.”

“This won’t take any longer than that,” I assured her, following her into her office.

The room’s informal decor reminded me of my Boston office, a space that I occupied for twenty years. Westlake’s desk was a solid-core oak door sitting on two filing cabinets. Rough-hewn maple planks rested on bricks for bookcases. The shelves were filled with familiar titles, including several issues of the
Journal of Psychiatry and the Law.

“You’ve done forensic work,” I observed.

“Custody cases, mostly. I don’t do them anymore. Nobody wins, but the children always lose.”

I handed her the photograph that I had found in Melanie Martin’s safe.

“That’s Lily Dorman,” Westlake said. “God. I don’t believe it.”

“You said she left the hospital with a friend.”

Westlake tapped the photo and looked at the ceiling. “Who was her friend on the ward?”

I waited, knowing that many facts float in the air above our heads until we remember them.

Westlake lowered her gaze. “Janine Baker,” she said. “She was from up north somewhere. One of the border towns, I think. The main thing I remember about her is how angry she was. The ward staff had a horrible time with her. If she wasn’t seducing the males, she was attacking the females. It had to be her idea to run. Lily would have followed along.”

I thanked Westlake and went hunting for Jaworski. I found him double-parked on the next block, and ducked into the cruiser.

“Lily Dorman is all grins in the photograph,” I told him.

“Why would Melanie Martin have pictures of this kid and a killer in her safe?”

“They were left for us,” I said. “Let’s make a quick run out to Bayberry Trailer Park. Then I may want to go sailing.”

“You crazy? Couple more hours and we’re gonna get whacked by that storm. The wind’s already blowing like a sonofabitch.”

“Any other way to get to Monhegan?”

“Lucas, why do I always feel like I’m a step or two behind you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, grinning. “There’s a good shrink down the street if you want to check it out.”

Jaworski glared at me, then pulled into traffic.

WIND WHIRLED THROUGH BAYBERRY’S COURTYARD. A
rolling black sky gave the place an Alfred Hitchcock feel.
All the set needed was a hill, a Victorian manse, and the silhouette of an old woman rocking in her chair.

“Which one?” Jaworski asked.

“Three. I think it’s best if you wait here.”

He nodded and pulled out his pack of gum.

“Here’s something to keep you busy,” I said, handing him the scrap of paper with the phone number Lily Dorman had given her mother. “Find out who that is, and where it is.”

“I’m also going to call a friend of mine, a detective in Portland, Orgeon. I met him on a trip out there.”

“Dorman, Baker, Squires,” I said.

“Got ’em.”

“Excellent.”

“Lucas, you know how city cops do that debriefing stuff after a big case?”

“My daughter’s a New York City detective. She’s mentioned it.”

“When this is over, you and I are gonna do some serious debriefing.”

“Whatever you like, Herb,” I said, “provided that you’re still chief and I’m not in jail.”

It was shortly after one
P.M.,
prime time for soaps, but this was one afternoon that Katrina Martin would have to tolerate an interruption. I knocked on the door, then glanced at the louvered window. The blue TV glow was absent. I raised my fist to knock a second time, and the door opened.

“I asked you not to come back,” Katrina said.

“Lily thinks I’m her father.”

She hesitated, then sighed deeply. “Of course,” she said, backing away from the door. “Come in.”

She stared at the floor like a child caught in a misdeed. “We needed a dream. I shared mine with Lily.”

Katrina slowly met my gaze. “What harm did it do?”

I ignored the question and gave her the photographs.

“That’s Lily. Where did you get this?”

“At Martin International.”

She continued to stare at the picture. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Did Lily tell you where she worked?”

Katrina shook her head. “She’s so young. I missed all those years. Where was this picture taken?”

“Possibly Portland, Oregon.”

She shook her head and glanced at the second photo. “I don’t know who this man is.”

“Katrina, did Lily tell you anything about where she had been, or people she had met… anything at all?”

“Lucas, talk to her. She was just here. I told her you wanted to see her. She said that was fine, that she’d wait for your call.”

I examined Katrina’s eyes, wondering if I had lost her to one of the many worlds that occupied her mind. “Lily was here?”

“We had coffee,” she said, pointing at two cups on the table. “She didn’t stay long. She apologized, said she was going to be busy for a while, but would keep in touch.”

Dazed, I nodded and backed out of the trailer.

“That’s a cop,” Katrina said, staring from the doorway at Jaworski’s cruiser. “Is Lily in some kind of trouble?”

“We need to find her,” I said, and could not say anything more.

“WE HAVE TO WAIT ON THAT PHONE NUMBER YOU GAVE
me,” Jaworski said as I slipped into the cruiser. “It’s a cell phone. They take a little longer.”

“You got one?”

“What? A cell phone? I just used it to call Reifer, my friend in Oregon.”

Jaworski reached into his jacket pocket and gave me the small plastic device. “They’re standard equipment these days, but I can’t say that I use it much. The radio’s usually all I need.”

When I stared at the phone, Jaworski instructed me in its operation.

“What’s the number on that slip of paper?” I asked, and punched the digits as he recited them.

I heard a click, then a woman’s voice. “I expected to hear from you before now,” she said. “You’re slipping.”

“Where are you?”

“You will find me. It’s taking you longer than I expected, but I’ll wait. I’ve waited for years.”

She broke the connection.

I redialed the number and reached a recorded message. The party I was calling was out of area or had switched off their phone.

“So?” Jaworski asked.

The voice did not belong to the woman who had called my house, the same woman I had heard on the police tape log. The voice was familiar, but I could not place it.

“I don’t know who that was,” I told Jaworski. “Lily Dorman, but who the hell is she?”

She was confident that I would find her. I had only to follow my instincts, which told me that, whoever she was, she was familiar with my intuitive leaps.

“Lucas, I hate to tell you this, but Jasper and the feds have lost their patience. Jasper ordered the Markham patrols to continue, but now they’re looking for you. We’ve got to go in.”

“What the hell is she thinking?”

Jaworski stared at me. “I don’t know what Jasper thinks. I do know that she’s going by the book.”

I shook my head. “We’re close, Herb. We can’t back
off now. We’ve been playing parts in a theatrical production, surrounded by actors and props. Gilman said, ‘Nothing is as it appears.’ Eloquent.”

“Are you talking about the murders or this MI business?”

“It’s a play within a play. Think about it. Why kill Weatherly?”

“He couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut. MI is cleaning house. They’re liquidating, turning everything into cash, and vanishing.”

“So, who killed him?”

“Who’s left? It wasn’t Gilman. One of Gilman’s foreign contacts? The driver, Edgar Heath, sounds like muscle. Squires shot up Portland. Melanie Martin would be another guess.”

“My benefactor,” I muttered as Jaworski guided the car from Bayberry Park and drove to the interstate.

“MI supported Amanda Squires,” I said. “Weatherly set up the arrangement. Gilman handled the money. Lily wanted to kill Harper Dorman. Jaycie Waylon was the target on Crescent Street. She was probably Norma Jacobs’s money-laundering contact, but that isn’t what got her killed. I had time for her but not for Lily. Her roommates had the misfortune of sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time. Steve Weld brought heat to MI’s operation. He must have been getting close to pay dirt.”

“Luther Peterson saw a young guy walking on Crescent. You saw him tear out of there after killing Weld, and you said he’d been on your road.”

“At night, or seated in a car, wearing a ball cap… a young woman could pass for a young male.”

“What about Markham?”

“I’m saving him for last,” I said. “Beckerman was more housecleaning. He could identify Squires. Same with
Gretchen Nash, but Nash was too quick on the draw. Beckerman’s mother was on the MI board of directors. She had a set of computer tapes from the college, copies of all the illicit transactions. Her son had the misfortune of inheriting the tapes with the rest of her estate.”

“And Lily Dorman wants you dead.”

“She grew up thinking of me as her father. I failed to rescue her and her mother. I cared for hundreds of patients, but never took the time to drive here from Boston and make them safe. Lily learned about me from magazines. One of the articles she mentioned in her journal described my work on the Markham case, how I was able to determine his characteristics and help police find him. The daughter did her old man one better. She found the serial killer without any help, and she killed him.”

“Smart and tough,” Jaworski said. “There ain’t much that scares her.”

Jaworski’s pocket squealed. He yanked out his cell phone and flipped it open.

“Hang on,” he said to his caller as he pulled the cruiser to the side of the road and flipped open his narrow notebook.

I shifted my attention to the black sky. Scrawny pines heeled wildly in the wind from the approaching storm. I drifted with the arrhythmic snap of raindrops as they collided with the windshield, then dispersed in lingering smears.

Lily Dorman commanded my thoughts. Lines from a poem drifted aimlessly through my mind—lines about a phantom woman who caressed the world with a long blade.

“Tough,” the chief had said.

Nothing scares her. I wondered why that bothered me. “That was my friend Reifer,” Jaworski said.

What am I missing?

“He made some calls, ran database searches on the names I gave him. Lily Dorman graduated from Portland State University. On her personal information sheet for the college, she listed Janine Baker, her roommate, as the person to contact in case of emergency. Reifer also ran a records check. Baker surfaced first. She’d just arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area when Oakland P.D. arrested her for solicitation. She posted her fifty bucks bail, then never appeared in court. Ten months later, Seattle P.D. caught her plying her wares on the SeaTac strip near the airport. A youth officer named Winston worked with the underage hookers on the strip, so Reifer called her. Winston’s one of those cops who keeps everything. Said she kept her file on Baker because she’d never seen a kid so pissed off at the world. Baker’s roommate, Dorman, washed dishes in a Chinese joint and spent the rest of her time in the library.”

“Becoming brilliant,” I muttered.

“Baker suddenly stopped showing on the strip. That bothered Winston for two reasons. One, they had the ‘Green River Killer’ dumping bodies all over the county.”