A Face at the Window (2 page)

Marky wouldn't care if Anthony's body was only half dead when he shoved it out of the car. And Anthony had a feeling that if you got lost here, shot or otherwise, you might never get found again; that the absence of paths, park benches, and cages for the animals was the least of it.

The very least of it. As he thought this, something moved way back there among the trees where sunlight angled in wavery golden patches surrounded by green gloom. Anthony tried to see what it was and especially if it was coming any closer.

But by that time they'd already gone by, and when he craned his neck to look back, it wasn't following them. Or if it was, it was hiding in the underbrush where Anthony couldn't see.

"Hey, whoa, what
the freak is this?" Marky demanded as the pavement ended suddenly and the car began bouncing violently.

"End of the line," Anthony replied. "That was the last turn, back there. We should see the house, coupla minutes."

The news seemed to cheer Marky. "Man, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore," he said, his fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel, cigarette dangling from his lips.

Grinning, suddenly lighthearted. He snapped on the radio, a blare of country music filling the car. Marky sang along with the tune in a sarcastic falsetto, ridiculing the words and the down-home country twang, making stupid faces.

"Oh, she broke mah heart so ah broke her jaw," Marky sang in his curiously high, nasal voice. "Ah cut ‘er up with a big chain saw."

Anthony wasn't comforted by the sudden show of good humor, though, because that was another thing about Marky, that you couldn't tell when he meant it: the grin, or the lizard look. As if to prove this, Marky snapped the radio off abruptly.

"Christ," he exhaled in sudden disgust. "People listen to this crap around here?" They rode in silence a little more until, in half a mile or so, the dirt road got worse.

A lot worse. Loose stones clattered against the underside of Marky's beat-up Monte as they jounced over the uneven track. The muffler banged a rock sticking up out of a pothole.

Bam!
Anthony looked back, wondering if the rock had torn the Monte's muffler right off. Marky cursed eloquently, coming up with words and combinations that even Anthony had never heard of before, and his eyes grew cold and reptilian again as he glared over at Anthony accusingly.

Be there,
Anthony thought at the house that was supposed to be hidden away around here somewhere, imagining Marky getting too frustrated and tired to be able to keep a lid on it. Shooting Anthony in the knee, maybe, just to let off steam.

He hoped it would be only the knee. But then around the next curve, a house did appear, first the roof and then the rest of it huddled there under the low branches.

"About time," Marky said grimly, as if it were Anthony's fault that the trip had taken so long. They stopped in a graveled turnaround and got out into an enormous, waiting silence.

In juvie, the noise had been constant, like living against a background of heavy demolition. And afterward, the rooms in the boardinghouses he'd lived in had been loud, too, right over the street in the kinds of neighborhoods where nightfall only got the quiet people to go indoors. Here, though:

Trees and more trees. Through them Anthony glimpsed the bay again, blue and glittering and…big. Much bigger than anything he was used to. The silence all around kept enlarging as well, as if it just might suck Anthony right up into it.

He'd never felt so small, so at the mercy of something. Battling panic he waited for Marky to decide their next move,
while his gut churned sourly and sweat prickled his armpits. Then a bird cried out raucously overhead:
chukka-chukka-chukka!

Anthony's heart hammered and his mouth went dry. The smell of sun-warmed pine needles filled his head again, flooding into it like the ether they'd used on him for his tonsils, clapping the mask harshly to his face.

If Marky killed him here, no one would find him. It would be like when he first disappeared into the juvie home, and then his mom died.

No one would know. No one would even ask. Pretty soon wild animals would come along hungrily and eat his body. His eyes, his ears…even the tongue he'd used to cry out with, at the end.

Leaving only bones.

D
o you suppose you could explain to me again why
you think this Campbell fellow is coming after you?" asked Eastport police chief Bob Arnold in tones of barely repressed skepticism.

It was a bright morning in August, a week before Labor Day The warm air drifting in off Passamaquoddy Bay smelled sweetly of chamomile and sea salt. A seagull soared lazily over
the spot where Bob's squad car sat parked under the maple tree, in front of the big old white house on Key Street.

Two tourists pedaled by on rented bicycles. "I told you. I think what I said about him made him mad," replied the dark-haired, jeans-and-sweater-clad woman crouched by the jagged hole in the front sidewalk. "Wrote about him, I mean."

Her name was Jake Tiptree, and when she first came to Maine and moved into the huge, ramshackle old dwelling on Moose Island, seven miles off the downeast coast, she thought that at least the concrete walk from the porch to the street looked indestructible.

But ten years and hundreds of old-house repairs later, she knew she might as well have believed in the tooth fairy. Nothing was indestructible; not windows or doors, not plaster or flooring or plumbing or wiring or, God forbid, the furnace.

Not even herself, which was her other problem on this fine late summer morning in Eastport, Maine, three hours from Bangor and light-years from anywhere else.

Not far enough,
she thought. She dug more crumbly concrete pieces out of the walkway, using a hand trowel to scrape at the edges of the already gaping hole. Later she would widen its base even more but for now she just wanted to get the loose stuff out.

"That's why he's vanished. So he can sneak up on me. I feel like I'm in a horror movie, waiting for the monster." Lately, the mere thought of Ozzie Campbell gave her the creeps.

Bob Arnold leaned against the squad car, an aging off-white Crown Victoria with the city's emblem, a stylized blue-and-orange sunrise, stenciled on the door. Beneath the few strands of pale hair stretched over his forehead, his scalp gleamed in the sun.

"Yeah. You told me that on the phone, Jake," he said. Plump and pink-faced, Bob didn't resemble the kind of quick-on-the-
uptake cop who could nab up a bad guy so fast that the guy was deposited in Bob's squad car and locked behind the perp screen before he even knew what hit him.

But just a week earlier, a couple of out-of-towners had decided that Eastport would make a great export center for bulk metham-phetamines. Right on the water and only a few hundred yards from the Canadian border, they rigged waterproof bait boxes and attached them to Styrofoam buoys, then went on "fishing trips" and left the boxes floating, to be picked up by their cohorts on the far side of the imaginary line dividing the two nations.

They hadn't figured on (a) an informant willing to trade his pals for a break on his own legal problems, and (b) Bob, sitting out there in a dory with two arrest warrants and a .410 shotgun in his lap.

Bob always said cop work was ninety percent knowing and ten percent doing, as if to imply that anyone could be good at it. "But you didn't say how come he'd be
that
mad," he told Jake now.

And you still haven't,
he was obviously thinking. But he was a friend in addition to being Eastport's only full-time police, so he'd driven over practically the minute she called. Which in turn was barely a minute after Sandy O’Neill, aide to Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Lawrence Trotta, had finished telling Jake the bad news: that Ozzie Campbell was AWOL.

She shoved the hand trowel's tip in under the big chunk of concrete still lodged in the hole. Experimentally, she pried at the chunk. It shifted a little, but not enough.

"All I know is, I sent in my victim's impact statement two weeks ago, just the way they asked me to. And now it's been read, processed, and—"

This was the bad part. "—copied to the defense attorneys," she finished. "Ozzie Campbell's lawyers."

It had been Sandy's other news, on the phone from his tiny office in downtown Manhattan, overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge: that her "vic statement," as Sandy had called it, detailing the many negative effects upon her of her mother's murder thirty-five years earlier, had been placed in discovery.

In other words, revealed to the defendant, too, if he wanted to read it. "So there are no surprises later," Sandy O’Neill had explained patiently in his thick Brooklyn accent. "We got enough problems with this case," he'd said.

Listening, she had practically been able to see the sunshine glittering on the East River, hear the traffic's clamor and smell the cooked-hydrocarbon reek of lower Manhattan on a hot day.

"If we do get a conviction," Sandy had told her, "we don't want any grounds for appeal. We don't want them quibbling over one thing, saying how maybe it suggests that we didn't show them other things. Also, this guy's got a bad temper; we don't want him going off half-cocked for some wild-hair reason, screwing us up some way we didn't anticipate. So," he'd finished, "we're just showing them
everything
right up front."

Including her victim's impact statement. It was a development Jake hadn't anticipated, and now with Ozzie Campbell doing his thin-air act right afterward—well, Sandy could say whatever he liked. It was still too coincidental for comfort.

"Twenty years in the bar business in Atlantic City, he's as regular as a bank clerk," she told Bob Arnold now. "Never a break or a vacation, guy never even takes a sick day. Two weeks before trial, though, suddenly his lawyers get my thing and…poof!"

Gone. Like a magic trick. Or a plan. It was another thing Sandy O’Neill had told her, that Campbell was a detail-oriented, hands-on type of person who'd pored obsessively over every single
filing, motion, and court memorandum in the proceedings so far.

Also, you didn't run a bar successfully for all those years without being a good planner, a guy with a sharp eye for the small stuff and a habit of not letting even the slightest thing slip. People like Campbell took care of business.

And finally, though she didn't know much else about Campbell—Sandy had offered to tell, but at the time the minutiae of the killer's life hadn't interested her—she knew that when people's routines changed dramatically, there was always a reason.

Thinking this, she gripped the concrete chunk's edges with her fingertips. Roughly rectangular, it was about a foot long, nine inches wide, and six inches thick.

Difficult, in other words, and in need of attention, like the rest of the place. She wondered briefly why she'd chosen to take on a massive old dwelling every inch of which required constant maintenance. It was what living on an old wooden boat must be like, always scrambling to keep it from going under. Only when left to their own devices, old houses sank into the earth instead of the sea.

But she knew why she'd done it, really. The constant needs of someone or something kept people from sinking, too; ones like herself, for instance, who thrived on something useful to do. And it hadn't hurt that she'd loved the place the moment she saw it.

Still did. But that concrete was
heavy.

"Jake." Bob stepped forward, ready to help. "Just ‘cause the guy's not down there where he usually is, that still doesn't mean he's necessarily up here, trying to get on your case. ‘Cause like you say, where'd be the sense?"

"Yeah, right. Things always make sense, don't they?" she
retorted. "They just fall into place like jigsaw puzzle pieces, fit together right off the bat. And nobody's following me, or watching me, either."

Because that was the worst thing, the crawly sense of being observed like a bug under a lens. Or a target in the crosshairs. She'd been trying to get Bob to take her seriously about it for a few days now, earning in return the kind of looks that the attendants gave to the inmates in the really securely locked-down asylums.

She hadn't told anyone else, though; not her husband, Wade Sorenson, for example, or her best friend, Ellie White. Because what could they do? And she didn't want them worrying about her; about her safety, or more likely, her sanity.

But back to the dratted sidewalk; for something that rocked so alarmingly when stepped on, that concrete chunk was solidly in there. Rising, she crossed the yard to the tool shed under the maple tree, returning with a garden spade.

"Jake." Bob's tone was excessively patient. "So you've got an odd feeling? That you're being watched? Because it's what you said. But what the hell am I supposed to do with that?"

Right,
she thought again. Tell it to the judge: "Your Honor, the hairs on the back of my neck are prickling and I feel something bad coming." Heck, half the world felt something bad coming, and mostly they were right.

But that didn't mean Bob Arnold could help them, shotgun or not. He went on: