Blood Relations (54 page)

“I’m in my study,” he said. “I’ve got some work to finish.”

“And when Mom gets home, tell her to go see you.”

“No. It’s all right. It’s getting late.” The clock on the VCR said 8: 10. “What time did she get home from work?”

“She didn’t go today.” Melanie sighed. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you. She took the day off.”

“Never mind.” He said, “Hey, is that one of your mother’s good sofa pillows from the living room?”

“I can’t find the one I like to use.” Melanie sat up and smoothed the wrinkles out. “It’s gone. I think she threw it out. She said it was dirty.”

Sam had closed the door to his study and was unsnapping his briefcase before he heard what she had said.

Gone. The little green pillow that Melanie liked to use was gone.

He went back to the family room. She was on the sofa.

“Mel? When was the last time you saw your pillow?”

She shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, I guess. Why?”

“No reason.”

He returned to his study. As soon as his vision cleared, he reached on top of the bookcase and found the key to his gun cabinet. He unlocked the door. His Colt pistol and one clip full of hollow-points were gone.

He stared at the empty box.

The pistol wasn’t there. He grabbed at an explanation.

Somebody had broken into their house. Dina couldn’t have committed murder. Not Dina. She didn’t know the victims. Didn’t know they’d been involved with Matthew.

Sam wondered if he had mumbled their names in his sleep.

Then he thought of Frank Tolin. Frank had known Marty Cassie. He had known Sullivan and Fonseca through Caitlin. Or from hearing things said in conversation. Gossip. Then Frank had inadvertently passed this knowledge to Dina? Incredible.

But the facts themselves thudded into Sam’s consciousness like perfectly hewn blocks to form a logical, irrefutable structure. The pistol was gone. And so was the pillow. Dina had taken the pillow. She had used it to muffle the noise when she had shot Charlie Sullivan in the chest. One in the chest, then one through the back of the head. The blow-out had imbedded bits of green cloth and pillow stuffing in his scalp. She’d carried the gun in a bag. Natural for a woman to carry a bag. Why had he gone with her? What reason had she given?

There would have been another reason for George Fonseca. A party to plan? Drugs to buy? Then the poison in his beer. Appropriate. He must have felt it working, and she had to kill him to get away. And Marty Cassie. But why? Why Marty Cassie?

Sam remembered Dina at the dining room table, balancing accounts. Looking for the money, twenty thousand dollars, that Matthew had spent. Money stolen, she had said. And Marty Cassie had taken it?

His head reeled, and Sam’s laugh came out as a groan.

Matthew had blown every last dime, had wasted it all, but Dina couldn’t believe that. Dina believed that Marty Cassie had stolen it, sending her son a little farther toward the rocky shallows of Biscayne Bay. So Dina had shot him in the back, then had tried to hack off his thieving hand.

Maybe she had used her clippers. Or the trowel. Or whatever gleamed most brightly across the dim shed when she opened the door.

Dina had killed them all, each one guilty of destroying her son. Then she had come home and cleaned the [email protected] She knew how. Sam had showed her at the gun range how to clean it. How to fire it. As if the gun might reappear, Sam stared once more into the empty box.

She had his pistol. She was somewhere on Miami Beach with a Colt pistol fully loaded with .45-caliber hollow-points.

Sam staggered to his feet. “Caitlin!”

Mrs. Costas said to keep going straight on Alton Road.

“I thought you lived on one of the islands,” Caitlin said.

“We’re picking up my son’s girlfriend first. I told you.

No, I guess I didn’t. Sorry, it’s been so hectic today.” Her voice was melodious and self-assured. “Take the next left.”

Caitlin drove into a quiet residential area north of Forty-first Street. The street led past some two-story houses, then onto a narrow road marked No OUTLET.

Through the trees Caitlin could see the Miami skyline a mile or so west, broken by the outlines of the small, uninhabited islands in Biscayne Bay. Slightly south, the lights of the causeway extended across the dark water.

“Park there.” Mrs. Costas pointed to the turnaround at the end of the street.

The headlamps picked up the mottled trunks of the pine trees, a tangle of underbrush, and a glint of broken glass.

In the rearview mirror the nearest house was at the other end of the block. Caitlin put on the brakes. “Wait a minute. Nobody lives down here.”

Her hands still on the wheel and the motor idling, Caitlin turned to look at Mrs. Costas. Pale face, framed by heavy waves of hair. Full lips, hollow cheeks. And her hand around the grip of a gun whose barrel, like a single eye, looked directly back at Caitlin.

The woman’s mouth moved. She said something.

Caitlin’s hands would not loosen from the steering wheel. She stared into the barrel of the gun. It was a heavy, squarish gun with a silvery sight rising up from the half-inch circle of black pointed at her face. The raised barrel sloped down and down to the curve of a hammer.

The gun gleamed dully in the light from the dash.

A thumb moved onto the hammer and pulled it back, a hideously smooth clicking of metal.

“Caitlin. I said, take the keys out of the ignition and give them to me.” When Caitlin didn’t move, Mrs. Costas’s hand turned the keys, then withdrew them, jingling softly in the now-quiet car. She dropped them into her bag.

Caidin began to tremble.

” I’m going to get out now. You come across the seat this way. We’re going to take a walk, not far. We’ll talk for a while; then you can go home.”

The tires on Sam’s Honda slid, then grabbed, screaming, around the corner to the Palmetto Expressway, and a car behind him blew its horn. He shot up the entrance ramp and scattered gravel swerving around a truck. Taillights seemed to hurtle toward him, then flash past to the left or right.

He would go east across town, then over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach. And then-and then where?

Hitting a clearer stretch of road, Sam grabbed the car phone with his injured hand and nearly dropped it. Wedging it between his knees, he punched in Gene Ryabin’s number. He would be home having dinner with his wife.

Had to be.

No answer. Sam hit the numbers for a call-back.

He dialed the number at the DeMarco house, where Caitlin had been staying. He had called her an hour ago, or less, and he still remembered it.

A young voice answered. A girl.

Sam forced himself to speak slowly. Where was Caitlin Dorn? This was an emergency.

She didn’t know. A birthday party. Taking pictures.

Yes, for a woman. No, I don’t know her name. No, no, she didn’t say where she was going.

The girl was on the point of hysteria when Sam hung up.

Over the high-pitched noise of the Honda’s four IL

7 cylinder engine, he could hear himself shouting aloud, unwilling to accept this, even now. Dina had gone out to the firing range. Or she had thrown the gun away, fearful of having it in the house.

Impossible that he could live with her and not know.

Who would believe that? When she went to trial-if she was declared competent to stand trial-he would also be judged. His career was over. He would have to resign. It would take everything they had to keep her out of the electric chair. Better to have her declared insane. Save her life.

Sam slammed his right fist onto the console between the seats, wanting the pain, but barely feeling it. Where was she?

if he found them in time-please, God, let me find her-he could save Caidin. He could see himself holding out his hands. Dina. Give me the gun. He would plead with her, tell her to think of Melanie. Everything would be all right. Caitlin would go to New York. Forget this happened. Then he would take care of Dina. They would move to Tarpon Springs together. No one would know.

He laughed out loud. It would never happen that way.

He didn’t know where in hell she was. It would be a deserted place. Dina would take Caidin there, reach into her bag as if for a cigarette, slide her hand around the pistol, and pull the trigger. Then she would drive home. She would ask Melanie, Where’s yourfather? And Sam would arrive soon afterward. And then what? Whatever his decision, their lives would be over. But Caitlin might survive.

Again and again he muttered a prayer: Please, don’t let her die.

The toll plaza on the Dolphin Expressway was directly ahead when his car phone rang. Toll booths stretched across the highway, a row of green and red lights. Sam aimed his car for an unmanned lane in the middle and took out the wooden arm as he went through. The spot lighted buildings of downtown Miami moved toward him in the windshield.

He picked up the phone. It was Gene Ryabin.

The shore on the west side of Miami Beach, unlike the gentle, sandy incline on the east, was a rocky shelf of [email protected]

shallow water, warm as a bath this time of year. It smelled of salt and algae and seaweed. Except in rare patches, there was no beach, only dark and pitted coral rock and crushed shells. It was these that Caitlin walked on now in her canvas sandals, a few yards out from the shore, in water to her knees. The hem of her green dress dragged behind her. Mrs. Costas walked just along the edge of the land. She had her bag over her shoulder and the gun at her side.

She motioned with it toward the south. “Keep going.”

Ahead of them a hundred yards, the land took a sharp turn to the right. A seawall held back a grassy slope planted with trees-royal palms among flowering oleanders with their long, pointed leaves. Lights blinked in and out among the foliage.

Keeping her eyes on the gun, Caitlin stumbled when a rock shifted under her foot. She caught herself on her hands, feeling the sting of salt. “What do you want?”

“Listen to me carefully. Before we reach the road, I want you to understand why you’re here.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Caitlin said.

“Why are you doing this?”

The woman glanced at the ground, stepped over a piece of rotted, barnacled lumber, then said, “You really don’t know who I am, do you?” Amusement played through the rich voice, In the shadow of the trees the woman’s face was indistinct, but even so, the knowledge flared in Caitlin’s mind.

She stood still for a few moments, looking at her. “You’re Sam’s wife.”

“Yes. Dina Hagen. We met a few times. Where? Do you remember?”

Caitlin’s mouth was dry and her voice shook. “I saw you-at Frank’s office. It’s been a long time.”

The barrel of the gun motioned Caitlin on. “But you do recall. I wonder. When you shook my hand, had you already touched my husband?”

Her left shoe, which had come untied, now slipped off entirely. Rocks scraped at the sole of her foot. “We’re not having an affair! I swear to you. I’m leaving Miami.” Her legs swirled through the water. “If you’re getting a divorce, it isn’t my fault.”

“He told you we’re getting a divorce?”

“I swear to Christ, I’ll never see him again.”

“Be quiet, Caidin. I want to tell you something.”

“Look. If you do anything to me, you’ll go to prison.

Sam will probably lose his job. Is that what you want?

What about your daughter?”

Dina Hagen raised the gun and cocked it. Caitlin gasped and backed up.

“Stop there! I’m ready to pull this trigger. Do what I tell you. Keep walking. We will have our talk. Then you can flag down a car. Do whatever you like. But for now, listen to me.” The barrel of the gun, with its staring eye, gestured toward the road.

Caitlin walked, limping.

Dina Hagen pushed a branch aside, then looked back at Caitlin. “We’re not here because of Sam. It’s someone else. Let’s see how smart you are. Can you guess who it might be?”

“No! Who? Frank?”

“Not even close. Someone considerably younger.”

Her legs buckling under her, Caitlin fell on her knee, grinding the skin against crushed shell and rock.

“You know who I mean, don’t you? Get up.”

“No. I can’t.” She sat in the water, leaning on her hands, weeping now.

“I told you. We’re walking to the causeway. Then you can go. I’m sorry about the gun, but you wouldn’t have come with me otherwise. Now. Stand up. And when we get there-before I let you go-I want your apology for what you did to him. So think about how you’re going to phrase it. I want to hear you tell me-the mother of this young man, this boy, whom you ruined-how sorry you are.”

Ryabin begged Sam to slow down; he could hear the engine roaring over the car phone. Did he want to kill himself? Sam hit the brakes coming off the MacArthur Causeway Bridge, keeping just ahead of the flow of traffic.

“Gene, can you call in a bulletin for her car? It’s a Toyota, a blue one. Damn, I don’t know the model.

Dina’s, then. It’s a 1992 white Volvo sedan. Four-door.”

He was quickly approaching South Beach. The line of bright streetlights would lead past the private islands on the left, then past the Coast Guard station and the marina.

The road would dead end on Ocean Drive. He would have to turn before that to avoid the traffic outside the restaurants and clubs. Dina could be anywhere from the park at South Pointed to the big hotels five miles north.

Ryabin’s voice was low and measured. “Are you certain this is all correct? I was so sure about Frank Tolin.”

“No, I’m not certain. I may be going crazy.” With the P hone pressed to his ear, Sam said, “What did Caitlin tell you this morning? Where was she supposed to go?”

“Wait. Let me remember.” There was a pause. Then some words muttered in Russian. “A birthday party, which you know about. A live rock band. His twentieth birthday. I’m sorry, that’s all she said.”

The narrow, curving flyover to Alton Road was approaching on the left. From the far right lane, Sam hit his brakes and cut across the street. Two other cars swerved and nearly collided.

Coming down off the ramp, heading north, he said into the phone, “Gene, I think I know where they are.”