Very Bad Men (15 page)

A spark of understanding lit up Spencer's eyes. “You want to talk to her.”

“Yes.”

“She's in Lansing tonight. She and Jay have an apartment there.” Jay would be Jay Casterbridge, Callie Spencer's husband. “She's coming to Ann Arbor tomorrow. We're hosting a small get-together here.”

“I've left messages for her,” Elizabeth said. “She hasn't returned my calls.”

“She's very busy, but I'm sure she'll want to cooperate in any way she can.”

Elizabeth looked at Spencer steadily and didn't say anything.

“Did that sound unconvincing?” he asked her.

“A little.”

His mouth lengthened into a smile. “It sounded very unconvincing to me—like something the father of a politician would say. We both know that Callie's first instinct will be to keep her distance from you. She won't want her name and the words ‘murder investigation' spoken in the same breath.”

“Tell her I understand that,” Elizabeth said. “But I need to talk to her.”

“I'll do what I can.”

 

 

HARLAN SPENCER OFFERED to show Elizabeth out; he had an elevator that opened into a room off his studio. She thanked him and told him she could find her own way, and when she left him she heard the hum of his motorized chair rolling back to his canvas and his paint.

She paused on the landing halfway down the stairs and through the tall window saw Ruth Spencer working in her garden. Descending the remaining steps, Elizabeth crossed through the entry hall. She went out the front door and drew it shut behind her.

She spotted the basket right away: round, made of wire mesh, brimming over with ripe tomatoes. It rested on the hood of her car. She walked over and lifted it up, intending to take it around to the back of the house so she could thank Ruth Spencer for the gift.

Then she saw the note: a sheet of paper folded in half beneath the blade of the windshield wiper. As she reached for it, Ruth Spencer appeared at the corner of the house, peeling off her gardening gloves. Elizabeth held the basket up, calling out her thanks, and the other woman waved and said, “You're quite welcome. It's nothing, really.”

Elizabeth returned the basket to the hood of the car and unfolded the note, expecting to find some pleasantries written there. Instead she saw seven words in black ink, the letters ragged and coarse, as if they had been scratched onto the paper with the point of a blade.

T
he sign glowed in red neon, but to Lark the letters and numbers were a soft, cool blue:

The letters shimmered in the night air. Lark stared at them across an expanse of parking lot. The air blew warm through the open window of his car. Sweat dripped down through Lark's hair and along his temple.

His notebook lay on the seat beside him, open to the page he had torn out. The note he left for the lady cop had been an impulse. But he wanted to make it clear he wasn't some crazy person who intended to go on killing. Dawtrey was dead, and Kormoran too, and Bell would be the last. Lark wanted that understood.

After leaving the note, he had slept the afternoon away. The apartment where he was staying was a quiet place with thick walls.

He had rented it at the beginning, when he first made his plans. He knew he might need to stay in Ann Arbor for a while. He couldn't be sure how long Kormoran and Bell would take.
Hope for better, plan for worse,
his father used to say.

An apartment would be safer than a hotel, he thought. The one he chose was off State Street, a skip and a jump from I-94. The complex catered mostly to graduate students; he had gotten a cheap rate for the month of July.

He had crashed through the long afternoon and into the evening, on a mattress laid on the floor in the bedroom. He woke around ten and took some aspirin, washed down with water from the tap. He believed the aspirin might be keeping his fever in check, and it helped a little with the pain in his hand.

He thought the hand was getting worse. The wound seeped. When he changed the bandage he noticed a yellow stain in the gauze.

Quit stalling,
he told himself.
If you let this go on, you'll miss your chance. If the fever runs higher, you won't be good for anything. You know what you need to do.

So he had driven here, and now he saw the sign in the distance. The cool blue letters called to him.

He picked up his baseball cap from the seat beside him and put it on. The rifle he had used at Whiteleaf Cemetery was in the trunk. He turned off the engine and pulled the key from the ignition.

 

 

ELIZABETH PARKED HER CAR next to Carter Shan's and stepped out into the warm night. Shan popped the lock on his passenger door so she could slide in next to him.

“How come you get all the excitement?” he said.

Through the windshield she could see the entrance to the Urgent Care clinic where Sutton Bell worked. A neon sign glowed in the window.

“Bell's inside?” she asked.

Shan nodded. “Ron's in there with him.” Ron Wintergreen was a fellow detective from the Investigations Division. “Let's see the note.”

Elizabeth took a photocopy from her pocket and passed it to him.

“He sounds almost reasonable,” said Shan. “Like he's trying to bargain with us. I suppose it's wrong of me to wish we could make the deal. I've had about enough of this. I'd like to get home.”

Shan had an ex-wife who lived outside Detroit, and a son he only got to see on weekends. Elizabeth knew he resented anything that kept him from spending time with the boy.

He passed the photocopy back to her and she slipped it into her pocket. After finding the note this afternoon, she had talked to the neighbors up and down the Spencers' street. One of them—a schoolteacher in her forties—said she had seen a man on the sidewalk, but hadn't paid him any mind. Ruth Spencer said the note had already been in place when she left the basket of tomatoes on Elizabeth's car.

From the Spencer house, Elizabeth had gone to City Hall to make her report to Owen McCaleb. The note had been sent to the county lab, though she didn't think it would do any good. So far, the man in plaid had left no fingerprints behind.

By the time she left City Hall, the downtown streets were beginning to return to normal. The Art Fair had ended and most of the vendors had packed up their booths. She drove home for a late dinner with Sarah and David, and now she sat with Shan watching the entrance of Bell's clinic.

As they watched, the door opened and an ancient-looking man came out, leading an equally ancient woman who hobbled along with a cane in either hand.

“Has it been like this all night?” Elizabeth asked Shan.

“Like this, but less lively.”

“He's not going to come here. Not tonight. It won't be so easy. The whole thing is probably pointless—”

“Maybe not,” Shan said. “Look behind us, one row back, two cars to the left.”

Elizabeth folded down the visor on the passenger side. There was a mirror mounted there, and she adjusted it until she could see the car Shan had described. A figure sat behind the steering wheel—wearing a baseball cap, his face hidden in shadow.

“How long has he been there?” she asked.

“A few minutes. I thought he might go shopping, but he's just been sitting there.” The parking lot served both the clinic and a grocery store.

The figure in the mirror stirred, and the car door opened. The dome light came on, but the bill of the cap obscured the man's face.

“Let's see what he's up to,” Elizabeth said.

She got out of the car before Shan could respond, and began walking as if she were heading to the grocery store. The man in the baseball cap went to the trunk of his car and opened it. Elizabeth cut to her right and approached him along the row of cars.

“Police,” she said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.” She had her nine-millimeter out of the holster and down at her side.

“What did I do?” said the man in the cap. He was bent over the open trunk.

“Hands where I can see them,” she repeated.

He was going to try to flee—either in the car or on foot. She could see it. He slammed the trunk and stepped toward the driver's door, but Shan stood there blocking it. The man in the cap pivoted and took off west across the lot.

He kept to a straight line along the row for twenty yards, then dodged south behind a parked van. Elizabeth chased after him, passing through the narrow channel between the van and a dented Honda, then cutting west again, coming up fast on the street—Industrial Drive—busy with traffic.

The man in the cap charged on, his footfalls muted in the heavy air. Elizabeth had begun to close on him when she heard Shan come up beside her, breathing in a steady rhythm. The man in the cap came to the strip of grass that separated the parking lot from the street and he didn't break stride. A squeal of brakes as a pickup swerved to avoid him and at the last moment he spun around and lost his balance. Then they were on him—she and Shan. They caught him and hauled him back, threw him sprawling facedown onto the grass.

Elizabeth holstered her pistol and planted her knee on the small of his back, and Shan got a handcuff around one of his wrists and yanked the other from underneath him.

“Take it easy,” said the man in the cap.

Shan closed the cuff around the other wrist. “Is it him?”

Elizabeth pried apart the man's curled fingers. No bandage on either hand. No wound. She grabbed the baseball cap and tossed it aside.

“It's not him.”

Shan pulled the man's wallet from his hip pocket. “Who is he, then?”

She cursed softly and got to her feet.

“He's a sheriff's deputy from Sault Sainte Marie,” she said. “His name is Paul Rhiner.”

 

 

SIX MILES AWAY, in the city of Ypsilanti, Anthony Lark pushed a shopping cart through a near-deserted parking lot. His rifle lay in the basket of the cart, the barrel facing forward and down, the stock resting near his right hand.

Automatic doors swished open to admit him.

The baseball cap shaded his eyes against the lights as he rolled the cart all the way to the back of the store. He came to a counter with a sign above it that said DROP OFF. The letters were a pleasant pale green.

Behind the counter, a heavyset woman in a white coat counted out pills in a plastic tray.

“Thank God you're open,” Lark said.

The woman stared down at the pills and answered him in a bored voice.

“Twenty-four hours a day. What can I do for you?”

“I need Keflex,” he said. “I have an infection.”

Finally she looked up. “Can I see your prescription?”

He pulled the rifle from the cart one-handed.

“I don't have a prescription.”

S
han drove Paul Rhiner to City Hall and sat him at a table in the break room of the Investigations Division. Elizabeth joined them a few minutes later, after having a look at the deputy's car.

When she sat down next to Rhiner, she could smell beer on his breath.

“I've never understood it before,” he said.

“What's that?” she asked him.

“You know how sometimes you'll be looking for a guy—maybe somebody called in a complaint, or there's a warrant out for him. And when you find him, as soon as he sees you he starts running. So you chase him down, and when you've got him on the ground he always says the same thing: ‘I didn't do anything.' And you have to ask him, ‘Why did you run, then?' And it's always the same answer: ‘Because you chased me.'”

Shan had taken off the cuffs and poured Rhiner a mug of coffee. Rhiner sat with his elbows braced on either side of the mug.

“I always laughed at guys like that,” he said. “But this time it's true. I didn't do anything, and I only ran because you chased me.”

“How much have you had to drink, Paul?” Elizabeth asked him.

Rhiner rubbed his temple. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“Why don't you tell me.”

“If you searched my car, you know.”

She had found a pint of Jim Beam on the passenger seat, a third of it spent. Five empty beer cans on the floor in the back, another seven unopened in a cooler in the trunk.

“How long has this been going on, Paul? I saw you yesterday at Whiteleaf Cemetery up north. Were you drunk then?”

“I wouldn't say drunk.”

“Did you come to the cemetery to talk? Why didn't you stay?”

“That reporter was there,” Rhiner said. “She started asking questions. It got to be annoying.”

“Last night, someone left a bullet outside the door of her hotel room.”

“You think I did that?”

Elizabeth reached into her bag and brought out a nine-millimeter pistol. She had found it, loaded, on the seat of Rhiner's car beside the Jim Beam.

“The bullet was a nine-millimeter,” she said. “Somebody left one outside my door too.”

The pistol was unloaded now. She laid it on the table.

“I didn't leave any bullet outside your door,” Rhiner said. “What would be the point?”

Elizabeth leaned back from the table. “It could be seen as a warning that I should stop looking into what happened to Terry Dawtrey.”