Dreams in the Key of Blue (34 page)

“Most of them were working girls off the strip.”

“You in on that one?”

I shook my head. “It has always bothered me that no one caught him.”

Jaworski consulted his notes. “The second reason was that Baker’s name came up in a murder investigation,” he continued. “Victim was an off-duty cop, Robert Harper. He moonlighted as a doorman at one of the clubs on the strip. Baker had been hanging out there.”

I looked at Jaworski. “Lily heard her father’s name.”

Harper the doorman.

I watched as he made the connection: “Oh, Jesus.”

She kills people she knows, but don’t forget the strangers.

“What else have you got?”

Jaworski flipped his hat into the backseat and stared out his window at the rain. He was unnerved. I had hammered him with the reality of just how volatile Lily Dorman was, that anything could trip her into killing mode.

After a moment, without a word, Jaworski returned to his notes. “Winston tracked down Dorman, who said she hadn’t seen her roommate in a couple of weeks. That was it. Nobody saw Baker again, and she didn’t show up in the computer after that. Winston checked with Dorman half a dozen times in the next two years, until Dorman disappeared.”

“She went to Portland, Oregon?”

“Reifer says the timing is about right. Dorman was at the university for five years, and lived at the same address the entire time. She held a driver’s license, never got so much as a traffic ticket, but there was no trace of Baker. The transcript office records show that when Dorman graduated, she paid for five certified copies of her grades. The college sent them to her address in Portland. There were no requests after that.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m not finished. Reifer ran all the names through the
national databases. Nothing current on Janine Baker, Lily Dorman, or Amanda Squires.”

“She’s using another identity,” I muttered.

“Jesus Christ,” Jaworski grumbled. “When this is over, I may write my own book.”

JAWORSKI SLOWED THE CRUISER AS WE APPROACHED A
state police checkpoint. He pulled to the right, switched on his strobe, and stopped.

“That you, Newman?” he called.

“Hey, Chief,” the cop said, approaching the car. “Jasper ever catch up with you?”

“Talked to her on the phone.”

“She and a couple of feds went through here an hour ago. They’ve got a search warrant for the Martin outfit in Portland.”

“Norma Jacobs meeting them?”

“She’s the lead at that end. Not too happy about having to work with Jasper.”

I imagined the squat, acerbic detective hitching up her jeans and escorting Karen Jasper through the vacated MI building.

Jasper drove south as we drove north, a perfect highway choreography. I had no interest in sparring with our laptop-packing representative of the information generation. The detective possessed what Sergeant Joe Friday had sought weekly on
Dragnet,
“just the facts,” but she did not have a hint about how to apply her data.

“You got the mad doctor in shackles?” Newman asked, peering into the cruiser, a broad grin creasing his face.

Jaworski snorted.

“Hi, Doc,” the cop said.

I nodded.

“You two better get going. Jasper was close to putting a hold order on him.”

“Thanks, Newman,” Jaworski said, and guided the car slowly onto the highway.

“Are we the toast of police radio?” I asked.

“Ain’t quite like the last
Seinfeld,”
he said, “but it’s close.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jaworski pulled to the roadside at the intersection that led to the Ragged Harbor flats.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Monhegan Island,” I said.

“You were serious.”

“Melanie Martin has a cottage there. Gilman said that she seldom leaves the island.”

“Don’t mean she’s there now.”

“Indulge me, Herb.”

“That’s all I’ve been doing,” he said as he considered my request. “We’ll go to Pemaquid Point. My cousin keeps his boat there. This wind won’t bother him. He’ll take us to Monhegan.”

On the drive east, Jaworski received another call, this one from his dispatcher. The cell phone number Katrina had given me to reach Lily Dorman was assigned to Martin International.

JAWORSKI’S COUSIN, AL LODGE, REFUSED PAYMENT FOR
risking his forty-foot boat in the high seas.

“When it’s a police matter, I think folks should do
what they can to help,” he said, and spat a thick stream of tobacco juice into the Atlantic.

Jaworski stood beside Lodge at the helm. The cousins—a short, wide police chief and a tall, wizened lobsterman—engaged in an encrypted conversation that involved much pointing and gesturing. The men fell into a New England, seafaring argot that consisted of grunts, shouts, whistles, and occasional words.

The boat powered into the wind and the three-foot swells. I stood aft waiting for my stomach to erupt. When it never did, I realized that I had not eaten for nearly the same length of time that I had not slept.

As we approached the island, Jaworski joined me at the stern. “Al says the MI launch left Pemaquid a couple of hours ago. He didn’t see it come back.”

Lodge guided his boat to a dock at Lobster Point, which Jaworski assured me was within walking distance of Horns Hill Road, Melanie Martin’s address on Monhegan. The MI launch rocked in an adjacent slip. Painted in gold on the stern panel was the boat’s name,
Lily D.

“Another coincidence, right?” Jaworski muttered, following my gaze.

We left Lodge to secure his boat, and climbed the ramp to the pier. A tall African-American man wearing a dark suit and topcoat strode toward us. Circuits in the dim recesses of my mind completed a clicking and snapping routine as the man veered toward the
Lily D.

I remembered Gretchen Nash’s words.

Shaved head. Lots of neck. White shirt, black pants. Maybe thirty-five. He wasn’t interesting. You see guys like that all the time selling sneakers.

I appraised the man I believed was Edgar Heath, Lily’s driver. He was powerfully built. The gray at his temples suggested that he was also past his basketball-playing prime.

“Edgar Heath?” I asked.

At first, he moved only his eyes, from the chief to me. Then his hands drifted toward his chest.

“Don’t,” Jaworski said, drawing his ninemillimeter.

“Hey, no need,” Heath said.

He grasped his lapels and slowly opened his coat so that we could see his empty holster. “She took my gun,” he said, holding his pose.

“Pat him down, Lucas.”

I did as instructed and found no weapon.

“Where is Lily?” I asked.

He cocked his head to one side. “I escorted my passenger to the cottage. I don’t know who she is now. I can’t help her anymore. I did what I could, cared for her, saved her from her… indiscretions. It’s gotten steadily worse for two years.”

“You don’t know who’s at the cottage?” I asked.

“Can we sit on the bench?” he asked, pointing to the edge of the dock where a dauntless flounder fisherman packed his gear and walked quickly out of the frigid wind.

Heath sighed and seemed lost in his thoughts as he sat facing the Atlantic. “She told me to expect the cops. She said I should answer your questions, tell you the truth. When I was hired, I received a limo, a Glock semiautomatic, a pager with a set of codes, and a salary that allowed me to live comfortably. I have a condo in Portland with a view of the harbor. Not bad for a glorified cabbie, huh? I had one assignment, to respond immediately whenever summoned on the pager. At first, it was easy. I’d go out once or twice a week. Danforth Street, Commercial, High Street, whatever. My passengers were always female. It took me months to realize that they were the same person.”

“Lily Dorman?”

“She answers to Lily,” Heath said, extending his hands
in a gesture of helplessness. “She also calls herself Myra, Bobby, Angel, Molly. I don’t know all of them. Most of the time she opened the car door and slipped into the back. Sometimes she waited for me to come around and open the door. One day she’d be dressed in jeans and a shirt. The next day she looked like a million bucks. I never knew which it would be, but it was always her.”

He smiled ruefully and stared at his hands. “I remember when it clicked for me. She called late, said it was Lily, and gave me the address of a bar in the Old Port. I knew that she was in trouble. It wasn’t the first time that I’d hauled her out of a shithole, but this time it was bad. Two guys were hitting pretty hard on her. They bought her drinks, pawed at her, wouldn’t let her leave. Her eyes were big and watery, like a frightened child. She didn’t know how to say no. I took her out of there. In the car on the way back to Danforth, she argued with… the people inside her head.”

Heath crossed his long legs and ran his hand over his bald head. “They have different voices, different accents. When I stopped in front of the building, she got out and ran up the steps. I don’t know why, but I looked in back. The seat was covered with blood… blood on the carpet, blood smeared on the door. I followed her. She was curled on the floor in the hallway, crying. She had puncture wounds on her arms. I held her until she fell asleep.”

“You left her there?”

“I took her to my place. She was gone in the morning.” Heath looked at me. “Please don’t hurt her.”

“Did you ever drive Lily, or any of them, to Ragged Harbor?”

“I know where the town is. I’ve never been in the village. I took her as far as the flats a couple of times, to a souvenir shop, I think. I didn’t go inside.”

“Loudermilk’s,” I said.

“I don’t know. Could be.”

“What about Portsmouth, New Hampshire? Did you take any of them there?” He shook his head.

“The night that Harper Dorman was murdered…”

“I picked her up on Mellen and drove her to Danforth.”

“Did you see any blood that night?”

“The only time I saw blood was what I told you.”

“Who paid you?” I asked.

“Norton Weatherly. Tall, lanky man. He hired me. Once a month he showed up at my place, gave me an envelope with three thousand dollars in it. After the first six months, it went up to four each month. After a year, five. ‘For loyalty,’ he said. I knew that meant silence, and I knew that he and I had different notions of loyalty.”

Heath shivered and jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “Weatherly considered Lily a liability,” he said with a bitter laugh.

“Weatherly’s dead,” Jaworski said.

Heath looked at the chief. “Murdered? I’m not surprised. Weatherly thought he could do business with street scum the same as he did with bankers. He traded only in money, so he thought he was exempt from the stink of drugs, the violence.”

“Did you ever drive Lily to Martin International?” I asked.

“Not Lily. I don’t know who that one was. I picked her up there two or three times. Took her to the jetport. She always waited for me to open the door for her.”

“Her appearance was that different from Lily’s?” I said.

“Don’t you get it? They are different people. They’re locked inside one body, but they wear different clothes, talk different, walk different. They don’t understand that if
the body dies, they all die. They think that each of them has a body. They can describe each other.”

“Is she at Melanie Martin’s cottage?”

He nodded. “There’s some connection there. Weatherly was a boss at Martin International.”

“Why did she want your gun?”

“I don’t know. Look, I’ve got to go.”

Heath stood and buttoned his coat against the wind.

“No,” I said.

“No, what?”

“Your devotion to Lily is apparent. I think you know that she is dangerous.”

“To herself, maybe,” he said. “She’s a killer.”

Heath shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

I waited.

“I think we have an accessory here, Lucas,” Jaworski said.

“Oh, Jesus,” Heath said, and looked at the clouds skidding by. “She broke into pieces for a reason. Do you understand that? The pieces… the
people
keep her whole, allow her to live.”

I said nothing.

“One of them is anger. That’s all she is. Rage. She terrifies the others. They try to keep her locked up inside, but sometimes…”

“She gets out,” I prompted.

“At the cottage, she said that everything was spinning out of control.”

“Who killed the students?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Harper Dorman?”

“I read the paper. I could figure out what happened to him. Damn it, you were supposed to save them all.”

His eyes flashed with fury.

“How do you know who I am?”

“She’s been waiting for you,” he said, his eyes fixed on mine.

“I’m not her fucking father.”

He backed away and stared. “She says you are.”

JAWORSKI HANDCUFFED HEATH AND LEFT HIM IN AL
Lodge’s capable hands. We walked from the landing and headed north.

As far as it went, Edgar Heath’s assessment was accurate. Lily Dorman’s world consisted of compartments filled with secretive people who emerged, darted from one task to another, kept their earth spinning and all their planets in the proper orbits. The organism could kill at night and be at work in the morning.