Very Bad Men (48 page)

“She was living there at the time of the Great Lakes robbery. Matthew sped away from the bank that day, heading for the interstate. That's where he crashed into the patrol car and killed Scott White. He would have panicked then; he would have gone to his mother. We know he got help from someone, because the police found the black SUV abandoned, but they never found him. So when Terry Dawtrey's trial came along, it must have weighed on Madelyn's mind. Terry shot a cop. Everyone understood he was going to prison. Charlie Dawtrey was going to lose his son. But Madelyn's son had been spared. She couldn't stay away from Charlie. She felt sorry for him, but more than that—she felt guilty.”

Madelyn had told us part of the truth, that day we went to see her in her farmhouse up north.
When they sent Terry to prison, it broke Charlie's heart,
she'd said.
I thought I could change things by giving him another child.
She had given him Nick, a new son to replace the one he'd lost.

“There's more to the story,” I said to Elizabeth.

“Of course there is.”

I tapped the page I was holding. “Matthew Kenneally was conceived out of wedlock.”

“That's right.”

“I have my doubts about whether Richard Kenneally was the father.”

“So do I,” Elizabeth said. “It's been staring us in the face. Madelyn Turner was a beauty in her day. And she was attracted to older men, the kind of men who had something more to offer.”

I had some fine times when I was young,
she'd said to us.
If I had a mind to, I could tell you stories.

“Men like John Casterbridge,” I said.

Elizabeth nodded. “Madelyn was twenty when she gave birth to Matthew Kenneally. That was thirty-seven years ago. Back then, John Casterbridge was a congressman with ambitions to run for the Senate. He traveled to cities all over the state—including Sault Sainte Marie. He was married and had a young son already, but that wouldn't have stopped him. And if he was Matthew Kenneally's father, that goes a long way toward explaining why Kenneally was never linked to the Great Lakes robbery. I think you were right: the senator's son was the fifth robber, and the senator used his influence to cover it up. You just had the wrong son.”

Something more than guesswork had led Elizabeth to connect Madelyn Turner to John Casterbridge.

“I think they've kept in touch all these years,” she said, picking up the folder again. “Two and a half weeks ago, Kyle Scudder was still being held in the murder of Charlie Dawtrey. Scudder is Madelyn Turner's current beau. On Monday the twentieth, Madelyn was calling everyone she knew to try to get him released. Remember?”

I remembered. Nick had told me so, and I had told Elizabeth, and she had recorded it on her timeline. Now she passed me the relevant page.

“That was Monday,” she said. “On Tuesday night, Scudder was released. The charges against him were dropped. Look what happened in between.”

It was right there.
Monday night, July 20: Senator John Casterbridge in auto accident.
He'd said he was on a mission; his wife needed his help. We'd assumed he was talking about his dead wife. He'd been talking about Madelyn Turner, the mother of his son.

The place I need to go is a long way off,
he'd said to me. It was true. Madelyn lived in Brimley near Sault Sainte Marie.

He didn't get there that night. But the next day he must have come to his senses and realized he didn't need to go north to have Scudder set free. All he needed to do was make a phone call and ask a favor of a prosecutor.

“It's far from conclusive,” Elizabeth said. “It doesn't prove that John Casterbridge had an affair with Madelyn Turner, or that he's Matthew Kenneally's father.”

“He is,” I said. “I'm sure of it.”

Her eyes studied me. “How can you be sure?”

“Because Amelia Copeland drives a blue minivan.”

 

 

I HAD ALMOST LET her drive away, because the sight of the van caught me off guard. But when she pulled out of the parking space, I rushed to the driver's window and rapped my knuckles on the glass. I thought she should have been startled. My movements felt wild. My mind was racing. But she powered down the window and looked at me calmly.

“Who's been driving this van?” I asked her.

Deep lines etched themselves into her brow. She didn't answer.

I tried again. “Did Alan Beckett borrow it the week before last?” Beckett. That's the way my mind was working. That's the rut I had fallen into.

“No,” said Amelia Copeland. “Not him.”

 

 

“IT WAS THE SENATOR,” I said to Elizabeth. “He borrowed her minivan on the twenty-second, two days after his accident. His own car was in the shop. And Lucy Navarro disappeared that night.” I got up and joined Elizabeth by the railing. “The senator looked after Kenneally seventeen years ago. Cut a deal with Harlan Spencer, so Spencer would forget what the getaway driver from the Great Lakes robbery looked like. And the senator's still looking after Kenneally. He found out Lucy was asking too many questions about the robbery, and he did something about it.”

Elizabeth brushed her fingertips across my brow. “I assume you're not telling me the senator drove to the parking lot of the Winston Hotel on the twenty-second and dragged Lucy into a van.”

“No,” I said. “I don't think he had to drag her.”

 

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING we packed for a short trip, one suitcase for both of us. We left Ann Arbor around nine o'clock. My car, Elizabeth behind the wheel. The heat seared the road ahead of us. We figured it would cool down as we went north.

Two hours in, we traded places. The radio station we'd been listening to began to fade, and I scanned through the dial looking for something else. I found Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run.” When it ended, a commercial came on and Elizabeth reached over to turn down the volume.

“You know,” she said, “she'll probably refuse to talk to us.”

She meant Madelyn Turner. And I knew she was right. But if we wanted to establish that the senator was Matthew Kenneally's father, Madelyn seemed like the person to talk to.

I would have tried talking to the senator himself, but I didn't know where to find him. His condo in the Bridgewell Building was empty. It was the first place I'd gone after my conversation with Amelia Copeland.

The kid behind the concierge desk spotted me as soon as I walked into the lobby.

“Good evening, sir,” he said. “You can go right up.” He wore a more expensive suit than last time.

I stopped at the desk. “You're supposed to say the senator doesn't want to be disturbed.”

“Things change.”

“So he wants to be disturbed now?”

“Hardly. But you won't disturb him, I'm sure.”

I stood listening to the murmur of the fountain. “He's not here, is he?”

“No, sir.”

“What if I told you I don't believe a word you say?”

“It would cut me to the quick.”

“I bet it would,” I said. “I'll need to see for myself if he's here.”

He waved me toward the elevators. “Go right up.”

I went up, all the way to the top. The door to the senator's condo stood half open. Inside, a woman in a maid's uniform pushed a vacuum over the carpet. She switched it off long enough to tell me that the senator was gone and she didn't know when he'd be back.

“Do you know where he went?” I asked her.

She looked me over and came away unimpressed. “That's not my business,” she said. “Or yours.”

 

 

A FEW MINUTES AFTER ONE, Elizabeth and I pulled off I-75 and crossed over the Au Sable River into a town called Grayling. We passed a canoe livery and a tavern called Spike's and found a café with a carving of a moose above the door. We bought sandwiches and apples and ate them in a shaded spot by the river, on a blanket spread on the grass.

Elizabeth strolled down to the water and I sat cross-legged on the ground, studying a road map. A white moth flitted over the grass. After a while I folded the map and gathered the sandwich wrappers and the blanket. Elizabeth met me at the car.

“Have you got the route worked out?”

She said it playfully, because we both knew the route. North on I-75 for another hundred and thirty miles, then west toward Brimley. No need to look at a map.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

I looked off at the sunlight on the river. “The senator,” I said. “He's got a house in Grosse Pointe and an apartment in Lansing—”

“Those are both a bit out of our way.”

“—and a bungalow in Saint Ignace. We'll be passing right by it.”

“You think he's there?”

“He could be.”

She touched my shoulder. “What will you say to him if you find him?”

“I'll figure that out when we get there,” I said. “The problem is finding the place. It's supposed to be by the lake, but I don't have a street address.”

I watched her smile. That was something she could remedy. She got her cell phone out and flipped it open.

“Stick with me,” she said.

 

 

SAINT IGNACE WAS ninety miles north of Grayling, on the far side of the Mackinac Bridge. When we took the exit it was going on four o'clock. We drove east with the windows down, cool air coming in off Lake Huron, the sky a washed-out blue. When the road gave out, we swung north onto State Street, catching glimpses of the water beyond the houses and the trees.

The senator's bungalow had a dark-shingled roof over white clapboard siding. A mailbox on a post at the end of the driveway. No name or number on the mailbox. We might have driven by if we hadn't spotted a familiar car parked alongside the house, half in the shade of a white oak. Not the senator's Mercury. Lucy Navarro's yellow Beetle.

W
e left our car in the drive and walked along a path to the back of the house. From there Elizabeth picked her way along a rocky patch of ground that sloped down to the lake, and I climbed a set of wooden steps to a screened-in porch where I found Lucy at a mission table with a laptop in front of her and the pages of a manuscript spread all around.

She grinned like a child caught at some mischief. “Hello, Loogan.”

The door clapped shut behind me and I sat in a chair across from her. I tossed a small object onto the table. Smooth and cool, almost the color of gold. It was one of the spare bullets from the revolver Bridget had given me. The gun itself was where I'd left it in the glove compartment of the car.

The bullet landed on a stack of printed pages and rolled in a little half-circle.

“I found that outside on the steps,” I said.

Lucy picked it up and closed her fingers around it. Her eyes were bright and she looked well rested. She wore no makeup, nothing to hide the freckles on the bridge of her nose.

Her blouse was a wispy thing that bared her arms. There were no marks on her wrists. There never had been.

She grinned again and opened her fingers, letting the bullet roll onto the table.

“I don't believe you,” she said.

“That's the difference between you and me. That night at the hotel in Sault Sainte Marie, when you told me you found a bullet outside my door, and another outside yours, I believed you. It was clever. It put us on the same side, aligned against unknown forces. It made me want to look out for you.”

Her grin faded. “You can't hold that against me, Loogan. I didn't know you then.”

“No. You were just fumbling around. Trying anything that might work. What was it you said? You were trying to cultivate me as a source.”

“Loogan—”

“I don't think I did you any good as a source. But you did cultivate me.”

“You make it sound worse than it is. I didn't plan this.”

“No. You fell into it. You did pretty well for someone without a plan.” I picked up a stack of pages from the table and scanned a few lines. “This doesn't read like a vampire novel,” I said.

Her voice went soft. “I'm sorry I lied, Loogan. You have to look at it from my point of view.” She brushed at a speck of dust on the laptop keyboard. She didn't want to meet my eyes.

“Let's have it, then,” I said.

“Have what?”

“Your point of view. I'd like to hear it.”

She looked past me, through the screened windows of the porch. I turned to follow her gaze. Down on the beach, Elizabeth had taken off her shoes. She was wading in the shallows.

“This has nothing to do with the Ann Arbor police,” I said, turning back to Lucy. “This is between you and me.”

Lucy thought it over, brushing her fingers over the keyboard some more.

“Whose idea was it?” I prompted. “Yours or the senator's?”

She left the keyboard alone and got up to walk around the room. “He came to me. He showed up out of nowhere in the parking lot of the hotel that night and asked me to take a ride with him. He wanted to talk. How could I refuse?”

“No reporter could,” I said. “But why leave your car running in the lot?”

She shrugged. “I wasn't thinking. It's a wonder I remembered to grab my purse.”

She told me the senator had driven her away from the hotel and down a series of random streets. “He knew about my story,” she said. “Knew that I was looking into the Great Lakes robbery. He told me I should think bigger. Sure, maybe I could find something that would embarrass Callie, maybe even keep her from getting elected. But he thought it was beneath me. ‘If you want scandals,' he said, ‘I can give you scandals.'”