Very Bad Men (56 page)

“What?”

“He told me Terry wasn't a rat.”

I stood over him and watched it sink in. It wasn't easy to tell in the moonlight, but I thought he understood: that everything he'd done was for nothing, that none of this had to happen, that no one had to die.

When I'd seen enough of him I turned away. I didn't say good-bye.

 

 

PICTURE IT THIS WAY if you like—the final scene. Nighttime on the shore of Lake Superior. A man walks along the beach, making slow progress through the sand. That's me, the hero of the piece. The senator's there in the murky background, a small figure getting smaller with distance. There are hushed noises of water and wind and then a crack like sudden thunder—the sound of a gunshot.

Maybe it makes me flinch. I'm only human.

Maybe I pause, but it's a tiny pause, barely a hitch in my stride.

T
here was no shot, of course.

Picture it this way instead. After a couple minutes I stopped at the water's edge. I looked down at Tillman's pistol in my left hand, at the blood on the barrel where Nick used it to lash out at the senator. Grains of sand clung to the blood. I rinsed the gun clean in the water.

The fingers of my right hand were clenched around something hard as stone. I drew my arm back and whipped it forward again, and something flew out over the lake. It was lost in the blackness of the sky and when it fell to the water it made no sound. It was the bullet I slid into the chamber of the revolver and then slid back out again, under the cover of the handkerchief.

When I resumed my walk, I saw Elizabeth approaching. She had Hannagan with her, and Sergeant Cooper too. When we were still a dozen feet apart, Hannagan started asking questions.

“It looked like you threw something in the lake just now. What was it?”

There was nothing wrong with his tone, but I wasn't in the mood to answer. When I got close enough I handed him the pistol. “That's Tillman's,” I said.

He held it with his fingertips. “Why is it wet?”

I didn't answer that one either. “You'll find the senator down there,” I said, glancing back along the beach. “He's fine, apart from a cut on his temple.”

“How did that happen?”

There was an edge in Hannagan's voice now, and I had a fleeting desire to punch his square-jawed face. But he wasn't really the one I was angry with.

“He tripped in the woods,” I said. “You should go get him. He's thinking about killing himself. He's got a revolver, but it's not loaded.”

Hannagan frowned at me. “Jesus. Where did he get a revolver?”

“Let's stand here and discuss it. Maybe he'll drown himself in the lake while we're at it.”

Hannagan had heard enough from me. He went scowling down the beach. Cooper followed him.

When they were gone Elizabeth brushed a hand along my cheek. “What I like about you,” she said, “is how well you get along with people.”

 

 

THEY FOUND JOHN CASTERBRIDGE where I'd left him, the revolver lying in the sand at his feet. He came back with them without any fuss, strolling barefoot along the shore with Hannagan at his side. Cooper trailed behind, carrying the senator's shoes.

Elizabeth spoke to Hannagan before he took the senator away. I watched them from a distance, lingering by a fire pit in the sand, a circle of rocks surrounding a few charred sticks of wood. The senator held his head high, seemingly untroubled and undefeated. He didn't look in my direction. He said something to Elizabeth before Hannagan and Cooper led him up the beach and into the woods.

She came back to me and we sat together on the shore.

“Tell me they're arresting him,” I said.

She gave me the answer I expected to hear. “They're taking him to a hospital to have someone tend to the cut on his head. They won't arrest him. Not tonight.”

“He more or less confessed to me.”

Elizabeth dug her heels into the sand. “It would have been better if he waited and confessed to Hannagan. Whatever he said to you, he can always deny later. Your word against his. But don't count Hannagan out. He's going to build a case. It'll take time. He's got Delacorte's notes and the recording, but it may be difficult for a prosecutor to use them as evidence in a trial. Delacorte's not around to authenticate them.”

“I don't like the sound of that.”

“Give Hannagan a chance. Let's see what he can do.”

She tipped her head back to feel the breeze off the lake. I studied her profile.

“What did the senator say to you?” I asked.

“Just nonsense. He wanted to know if my passport was in order.”

I nodded absently at that. “He talked to me about passports too.”

We watched the water lap the dark sand and I told her everything I could remember about my conversation with the senator. I described my trick with the bullet too. But the thing that got her attention was what he had said about Lucy Navarro.

“It doesn't make sense,” she told me. “He made a deal with her in order to get her to drop her investigation, so she wouldn't find out the truth about Matthew Kenneally.”

“That's right,” I said.

“But he didn't hold up his end. The stories he fed her were invented. So what did he hope to gain? He had to know she would figure it out eventually. And there would be nothing to stop her from picking up her investigation where she left off.”

“He was just buying time,” I said. “In the long run it wouldn't matter—because in the long run he wouldn't be around.” But even as I said it, I realized it didn't add up. The senator wouldn't be around, but Kenneally would.

Elizabeth was way ahead of me. “He wasn't stalling Lucy for his own sake,” she said. “He was doing it for Kenneally. So it must have been Kenneally who needed time.”

She didn't say anything more. She was waiting for me to catch up.

Finally I worked it out. “Kenneally needed time to get his passport in order.”

 

 

WHILE ELIZABETH WAS on the phone with Carter Shan, I walked up to the woods and gathered fallen branches that seemed dry enough to burn. I brought them back and piled them inside the ring of stones.

She closed her phone and knelt beside me. “How are you going to light that?”

“I've got my pocketknife,” I said. “I could carve a trench in one of the thicker branches and rub a sharpened stick back and forth along it.”

“Really?”

“Or I could go down the beach and see if the senator left his matches behind.”

We went together, with a flashlight. It took us half the matches in the box to get the fire going. As we sat watching the flames, Elizabeth's phone chirped—Shan calling back.

She listened to what he had to say and then gave me the news. “The Kenneally house is empty. Carter drove there himself. He found a neighbor up late, and she told him the Kenneallys left for Europe this morning. He already checked with the airlines. They flew from Detroit Metro to Amsterdam, with a connection to Geneva.”

Another reason Kenneally needed time,
I thought. He had to convince his wife to uproot their family and move to Switzerland.

“It's smart,” Elizabeth said. “It puts him effectively out of reach. If he were indicted for murder, the Swiss could extradite him—in theory. But in practice it could take years. Only a prosecutor with a very strong case would go to the trouble.”

I focused on a tendril of rising smoke. “And after all this time, there's not likely to be a very strong case.”

We stayed by the fire long into the night, sometimes silent, sometimes talking. I wanted to know what would happen to Nick, and Elizabeth told me she thought he would come through all right. “He'll have to answer for the break-ins at Delacorte's and Tillman's—there's no getting around it—but I'll make sure Hannagan watches out for him.” I told her I didn't like the idea of Madelyn hauling him around tonight, following the senator to the hospital. “They didn't go to the hospital,” she said. “When I brought Nick to the cabin, she drove him home. As far as I know, that's where they are now.”

It was a small thing, but it raised my opinion of Madelyn Turner. I watched a branch in the fire crack and throw off sparks, and I let myself hope that I'd been wrong about her, that she hadn't really sold out Terry Dawtrey.

Later on, I stretched out on the sand, resting my head on Elizabeth's lap. She answered a call from Hannagan and learned that Jay Casterbridge and Callie Spencer were driving up from Ann Arbor to collect the senator. An ER doctor in Sault Sainte Marie had stitched up his cut, and Hannagan had him hiding out in the office of one of the hospital administrators. Word of his injury had leaked somehow, and a stringer for the CBS affiliate in Traverse City was lurking outside the hospital with a video camera. A reporter from the local paper had been asking questions—oddly detailed ones. She wanted to know if it was true that the senator had been staying in a cabin in Brimley that once belonged to Terry Dawtrey's father.

“Hannagan's a little ticked off,” Elizabeth said. “He asked me if you'd been calling reporters. I told him you're as innocent as a lamb.”

“Maybe it was Sergeant Cooper,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” she said, but there was something enigmatic in her tone, and it occurred to me that she'd been on her phone a long time while I gathered wood for the fire.

I smiled up at her and she traced her fingers along the line of my jaw.

The news about the senator must have spread quickly, because before long my phone started to buzz. I fished it from my pocket and saw Lucy Navarro's name on the display. I could imagine what she'd say:
What's going on up there, Loogan? Why are you holding out on me?

I let the call go to voice mail.

When the fire faded, Elizabeth asked me if I thought it was time to make our way back through the woods to the car. Before we left, I took off my shoes and socks and waded a little in the lake. The cold made me gasp, just like the senator said it would.

 

I'm tempted to say that working with Amy Einhorn is like being edited by a basket of kittens—but those would have to be some very smart, insightful, generous kittens. For my literary agent, Victoria Skurnick, a different metaphor is in order: She changed my pumpkin into a carriage, and my mice into horses. Amy and Victoria are two women you want to have on your side, and I'm grateful to both of them.

Thanks also to Ivan Held, Leslie Gelbman, Tom Colgan, Heather Connor, Matthew Venzon, Halli Melnitsky, Lance Fitzgerald, Melissa Rowland, Lindsay Edgecombe, and Miek Coccia.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my family: to my mother and father, Carolyn and Michael Dolan, who waited a long time to have a book dedicated to them; to my brother, Terry, and my sister, Michelle, who are still waiting. And to Linda: Stick with me, kid.

The
National Current
is a tabloid of my own invention. The
Ann Arbor News
is a real paper—or it was, until it ceased publication in 2009. I've kept it alive in this novel, for purposes of my own.

The Great Lakes Bank and Whiteleaf Cemetery are, likewise, inventions. You won't find them in Sault Sainte Marie. What's more, I've occasionally taken liberties with the geography of the state of Michigan and the street map of Ann Arbor, all for the sake of advancing the story. To cite just a couple of examples: I've borrowed a bit of Brimley State Park in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and used it as the setting for Charlie Dawtrey's cabin, and I've made the woods around the cabin deeper and more extensive than the woods you'd find in the park. In Ann Arbor, I've placed the Bridgewell Building next to the Seva Restaurant on Liberty Street, where it has no business being, since there's already a perfectly good building there.

Last, I should mention that in chapter 23, when Senator John Casterbridge refers to his constituents' “black, flabby little hearts,” he's quoting the late Robert Heinlein.

Harry Dolan is the best-selling author of
Bad Things Happen
. He graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. A native of Rome, New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his partner, Linda Randolph.