Blood Foam: A Lewis Cole Mystery (Lewis Cole series) (13 page)

I moved away and, silently, Felix kept beside me.

Herbert Street soon regained its collection of well-lit homes as it gently swerved to meet up with Atlantic Avenue. A few cars passed us by—none of them a Tahoe—and for a moment I wished I could take one more deep breath and keep on walking all night long, and forget the bloody horror that was splattered back in that quiet New Hampshire home.

“You know,” I said, “if this was for Mark Spencer, and Mark only, I’d say to hell with it.”

“I like the sound of that. So it’s for his fiancée, your former girlfriend. Why not say to hell with it? You’ve done a fair amount of work, you rescued the fair princess from certain torture and death, and you’ve just seen up front what they’re willing to do to get the information they’re looking for.”

“Because it’s for Paula.”

“A statement, not an answer. Why?”

The answer came quick. “Remember what I was like when I first moved here?”

“Sure. Bundle of nerves, spent most of your time hiding out, reading. Quick to laugh a lot, or get angry. First time we really met was over . . . well, you remember. I gave you what I thought was a fair and respectful warning to butt out. And you came over and blasted away four tires of the Benz I was driving that year.”

“I was trying to send a message.”

“No, you were sending something else,” Felix said, hands in his coat pockets. “That message I got loud and clear, which is why I invited you in for a beer after you de-tired my car. But what does that have to do with Paula?”

My throat ached, thinking an old memory of an old love. “Once I came here, Paula was the first woman I was with. She helped me . . . brought me part way out of my shell, brought me back to the land of the living. I owe her that.”

We were approaching the intersection of Herbert Street and Atlantic Avenue. The gray waters of the Atlantic were ahead of us.

“Fair enough,” Felix said. “Latest message received, loud and clear.”

At the intersection we trotted across the street, which led to a sidewalk that paralleled the seawall on this stretch of the road. The sidewalk was uneven, sprinkled with beach sand and small rocks that got tossed over the seawall by storm waves. Felix said “We can start walking left, get up to North Tyler and my house.”

“That’s a long walk,” I said. “We turn right, we’ll go past the Samson Point Wildlife Preserve, and then we’ll get to my house. Quicker all around.”

“Don’t want to rub it in,” Felix said, “but your house has seen better days. Hell, better centuries.”

“But I have the Lafayette House across the street. With a phone. To call Paula, find out how she’s doing.” My footsteps sounded loud on the sidewalk. “She’s all right, don’t you think?”

“She was sitting in the driver’s seat with the key in the ignition, ready to bolt at anything unusual. Chances are pretty high that’s exactly what happened. If Reeve and his buddies wanted Paula, they’d just take her out and leave the Tahoe behind.”

“Unless they climbed in, put a gun to her head, and carjacked her.”

“My, aren’t we the font of happy thoughts tonight.”

“I left my happy thoughts back at Carl Lessard’s house.”

The road curved again. Bicyclists with flashing lights fore and aft sped by us, along with the occasional car or truck, sometimes temporarily blinding us with their headlights as they hugged the curving road.

“We should call Tyler dispatch when we get to the Lafayette House,” I said.

“No, we shouldn’t.”

“We owe it to Carl.”

“To be brutal, Lewis, no, we don’t. We owe it to Paula and her man. Poor Carl . . . he’s dead, he’ll still be dead in an hour, will still be dead tomorrow. You call from the Lafayette House, dispatch will know within seconds where the call came from, and any surveillance video will instantly put you at the hotel at the time the call was made. You looking to be arrested tonight?”

“No, I was looking to do the right thing. Like warning Carl’s partner and their secretary to get the hell out of town.”

Felix let out a breath. “That we can do. Give me a few minutes to figure something out.”

Up ahead were the welcoming lights of the Lafayette House. I had a thought about Hurricane Toni, gathering wind, speed, and destruction, aiming right for this stretch of coastline and what remained of my house.

Felix said “Thanksgiving isn’t that far away.”

“Thanks for the reminder. You getting your list of what you’re thankful for in place?”

“I always keep that list updated,” he said. “What I’m saying is that I’m heading to Florida, away from this cold and that approaching storm, and I’m going to have Thanksgiving with my Aunt Teresa and her current boyfriend.”

“Aunt Teresa . . . I thought she was north of ninety years old.”

“Which is why I said
current
boyfriend. Look, come along, we’ll have some laughs, I’ll introduce you to some of her medical aides, and we’ll have a lot of fun.”

“You think we’ll be done by then?”

“By God, we better.”

The lights grew brighter. “Let me get back to you. I’m still thinking of my house.”

“Yeah, your poor house, but someone should think of poor Lewis. You shouldn’t be alone on that day. You should stuff yourself with turkey and then find some sweet Southern lass to work off your splurging, share some fun times with people.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t overthink it.”

We got up to the Lafayette House main entrance, and as we walked up the paved driveway a vehicle quickly emerged from the rear of the hotel and then braked to a halt beside us.

It was a light blue Chevy Tahoe. The driver’s-side window lowered.

Paula leaned out. “Men. So damn predictable. Hurry up and get in.”

I looked at Felix, and he looked at me, and I took the passenger’s seat and he climbed into the rear.

Paula made a left onto Atlantic Avenue. “What happened that made you leave?” I asked.

“Something unusual,” she said. “I was sitting there, minding my own business, contemplating my sins . . . when this scraggly-looking dude walked by, built like a fireplug, carrying a metal detector. He asked me to roll down the window, he asked me if this was the road to the beach. I said yes and he wanted to talk some more, so I started up the Tahoe, got the hell out of there.”

Felix asked, “What was wrong?”

“This time of the year, guys with metal detectors go out in the morning, not in the afternoon. Gets dark too quick. And any guy with a metal detector, he’s up on treasure hunting. He knows where the damn ocean is.”

Paula slowed down as she came up behind an Audi taking its time. “What did you find out?” she asked.

“Reeve and his friends got there first,” I said. “Carl Lessard is dead.”

Paula flinched, like somebody had just struck her in the ribs. “Christ. How?”

“Long and rough,” I said. “They were looking for information. I hope Mark is smart enough to keep moving.”

She handled the Tahoe well, but I could see that she was shaken up, and she took a hand off the steering wheel to wipe at her eyes. “Shit,” she said; and, a while later, “Shit.”

From the rear, Felix said, “Paula . . . my house is a mile or so up the road. Let’s head there, regroup, get something to eat, figure out our options.”

Paula asked, “You call the cops?”

“Not yet.”

“Damn it, Carl was a good guy . . . okay, a bore, but—”

Felix again. “We’ll let the Tyler cops know soon enough. But we have to do it right. We don’t have time to be interrogated, asked lots of questions.”

Paula handled the big SUV with ease through some of the tight curves that made up Atlantic Avenue. Off to the east I could make out the lonely lights of the Isles of Shoals.

I said “We also have to call Hannah Adams and their secretary, Kenneth Sheen. Warn them what happened.”

“How are you going to do that?” Paula demanded. “Say ‘hey, sorry to bother you, but your co-worker just got slaughtered over Mark’s whereabouts, so you should keep your doors and windows locked’?”

“Something like that,” I said.

I think Paula was going to say something sharp when Felix beat her to it.

“Up ahead, on the right,” he said. “Rosemount Lane.”

She slowed down the Tahoe, switched on the turn signal, and we went onto Rosemount Lane. There are six homes on Rosemount Lane, and Felix lived in the remotest one, on a slight rise that had a great view of the ocean and a closely trimmed lawn. There are no trees or bushes on Felix’s property, the better to see anyone coming up to his house. It’s a one-story wide ranch, and Paula stopped the Tahoe in the driveway.

“Come along,” Felix said. “Let’s get some things out of the way.”

He led us up a stone path to the house, and he unlocked the front door and let us in. His house is clean and spare, with lots of Scandinavian-type
furniture and not much in the way of home decoration, except for two large framed prints from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paula and I got our coats off, and Felix said “Excuse me, just for a minute,” and he took a walk down a hallway off the living room. Paula looked oddly at me, and I took off my shoulder holster and Beretta and slid them under my coat.

I took one couch and Paula took the other, opposite a low coffee table that bore copies of that day’s
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
, along with the latest copies of
Smithsonian
magazine. Both couches were light brown leather. She ran a hand through her hair and said “I don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“Besides all the rumors I’ve heard about what he’s done since he’s moved here, I’ve also gotten the impression that he’s quite the lady’s man, cutting a wide swath through the local lady folk.”

“That’s a . . . fair statement,” I said.

“Last summer, I heard a story about Dolores Palmer, she owns a hotel at the beach, a mini-mart, and was the money behind a new Italian restaurant that opened up on the Exonia Road.”

“Yes, I know the place. Sofia’s, right?”

“The same . . . well, I know the night manager, and she told me that Felix came by one night for a meal, she came by and joined him, and by the time they got to coffee and dessert, she was ready to leave her husband and two kids to go home with Felix.”

“Did she?”

“I didn’t ask . . . but like I said, I don’t see it.”

I looked to the hallway. Still empty.

“Guess you’re missing that certain gene.”

“Or I’ve got additional resistance.”

Felix whistled some as he came back, like he was giving us a heads-up that he was going to re-enter the living room. He was juggling a cell phone in his hand and plopped himself down on my couch. He still had on his shoulder holster, but it didn’t seem to bother Paula. I guess it just looked natural to her.

“All right, folks, keep it quiet,” he said.

He punched in three digits, held the phone up to his ear, and, speaking slowly and clearly, he said: “There’s been a homicide at the Carl Lessard residence on Herbert Street, Tyler, New Hampshire.”

Then he clicked the phone off. “Paula? Any chance you might have the home numbers of Hannah Adams and Kenneth Sheen?”

She dug out her iPhone, gave Felix what he was looking for, and Felix made two more phone calls. The first was pretty straightforward. “Mister Sheen? Hello. Just want to give you a heads-up . . . I’m sorry to say your boss, Carl Lessard, has been murdered. Police are responding to his house at this moment, and the murderer has not been arrested. I strongly urge you to leave your home and go to the Tyler police station.”

He clicked off again. “Poor guy. He’d started wailing by the time I hung up. Okay, one more time.”

This one took a bit longer. “Hannah Adams? Yes? Well, who I am doesn’t matter . . . trust me, ma’am, it doesn’t . . . no, I’m not trying to sell you anything . . . I’m . . . ma’am, give me thirty seconds and I’ll leave you alone . . . ma’am . . . ma’am . . . your partner Carl has been murdered . . . who I am isn’t important . . . ma’am . . . he’s dead, the killer’s still out there . . . you need to protect yourself . . . ma’am . . . this is not a joke. . . .”

Felix shook his head, clicked the phone off. “Well, that was interesting. If Reeve does catch up with her, I’m not sure who would end up victorious. Excuse me for a second.”

He got up and went to the adjacent kitchen, past a granite countertop, and he dropped the phone in a metal bowl after opening it up and taking out the SIM card. He rummaged around in a drawer, came up with a crème brûlée propane torch, which he switched on. He played the flame along the SIM card and the guts of the phone, and there was an acrid stink in the air, until he turned on an overhead fan. It only took a moment or so until he was satisfied, and then he switched off the torch and came back.

“There you go,” he said. “Civic duty satisfied, my outlaw nature satisfied as well. What now?”

I shifted on my couch. While Felix had been at work, I’d been running through options, choices, and what this day had brought us.

“It’s been a long day,” I said.

Paula leaned back on the couch. “Tell me about it.”

I said, “We’ve been on the run, we’ve been playing catch-up, we’re always behind.”

“True,” Felix said.

“I’m tired of it,” I said. “Time to change tactics.”

“You have an idea?” Felix asked.

“I do,” I said. “Let’s get back on the road.”

A
n hour later, we were in Auburn, a small town outside Manchester, the state’s largest city. Felix parked the Tahoe in the rutted dirt parking lot of a bar and restaurant called the Hog Heaven Fan Club. Even in November and with the bitter cold that sometimes swept in from our supposed friends in Canada, the lot was nearly full of parked motorcycles. The place had a wooden porch and flickering neon lights, and it looked like it had started its life as a two-story chicken coop. Additions had been tacked on, each with a different style and color. It was surrounded by tall pine trees, and in the rear were two overflowing Dumpsters.

Paula leaned in between us from the rear seat and said “My, you fellows sure know how to get to a young girl’s heart, all the fancy places you take her to.”