Fresh Kills (28 page)

“Shut up, kid,” I murmured. “Let's not advertise, shall we?”

“Too late,” a laconic voice said. I jumped a foot, then turned in dismay. Kyle Cheney stood five feet away from me, a silver gun glinting in his hand.

“You don't want to hurt the baby,” I said quickly. Hoping it was true.

“No,” he said. “I don't.” But before I could breathe a sigh of relief, he added, his tone regretful, “I don't want to, but I will.”

“You didn't before,” I pointed out. I was shaking so hard I grabbed at a reed to lean on; a bad choice, since it bent over and nearly landed me in the swamp. A part of my mind was totally awed by the way I seemed able to carry on a normal conversation while trying very hard not to look at the gun pointed at my midsection; the other part of my mind knew I'd taken leave of my senses. That I was babbling in hopes that if I kept my mouth moving, I'd stay alive.

He gave the accusation some thought. “I didn't want to hurt anyone,” he said at last. “But Amber wouldn't leave me alone. She kept saying all she had to do was go to court and she could take Erin away from us.”

“So you gave her money,” I finished the thought. “You must love your daughter very much.”

Kyle's face wore a pinched look I suspected wasn't just the result of his recent troubles. He looked like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a man who took far too many things far too seriously.

“I do,” he said. “And so does Donna.” He squinted into the bright overcast sun. “We lost so many babies,” he went on, speaking as much to himself as to me. “So many dead babies.”

“Miscarriages?” I asked. “Is that why you adopted?” I had to keep him talking, had to keep him from coming any closer. He could still shoot at five feet away, but the more distance I kept between us, the better my chances of survival were. And maybe, just maybe, if he focused on his love for his own child, he'd see that he couldn't insure her happiness by killing someone else's baby.

“Two stillborn, four miscarriages,” he recited. “And one baby that lived for six days. Six days, twelve hours, and forty-one minutes.” He swallowed; his oversized Adam's apple bobbed like a piece of food caught in his throat. “That one was Kyle, Junior,” he added.

His eyes swerved away. “I really think Donna would have killed herself if we'd lost another one,” he said. His voice was thin, strained, repressed, as if it had been years since he let his lungs fill to capacity. “She tried once, with pills. So when Betsy said Doc could get us a baby—” He broke off and swallowed again. “It was a miracle. She was a miracle.”

I recalled the sun glinting off her copper hair, hair that was going to go brown and wind up the color of maple syrup, like her mother's. “She's a great kid,” I agreed. “I can see where Amber's threat to take her away from you would make you crazy.”

Poor choice of words.

“I wasn't crazy,” he snapped. He raised his gun arm just a little, pointed the weapon a little straighter. “I was doing what I had to do to protect my family.” He gave me a look that begged me to understand. “I gave her money,” he said, his voice a plea. “I gave her whatever she asked for. And then she came back and said there was a father who could screw up the adoption, that I had to pay him off, too.”

“It wouldn't have been that easy,” I objected. “She'd have had to admit she helped Doc fake Erin's death. She'd have risked prosecution herself.”

It seemed more than a little late to start giving Kyle Cheney legal advice.

He shook his head. “Look at Baby Jessica,” he pointed out. “Those parents lost their daughter and there wasn't anything about fraud. As soon as I saw that birth father, I knew it was all over.”

He saw the father? When? When could Kyle have seen Jerry Califana?

Then I remembered Sonia Rogoff's account of the night she saw the Cheneys with Amber.

“Oh, no,” I breathed. I closed my eyes; the picture Sonia had so vividly painted came back to me. “Amber pointed to a booth in the front and said the man sitting there was the father, right?”

Sonia thought Amber meant the father of the baby who lay next to her in the car seat.

But that wasn't Amber's meaning. She was pointing to a man she identified as the father of the child Kyle and Donna had raised for four years and eight months. Erin Cheney, born Laura Marie Califana.

“She told you Scott was the father,” I whispered, “and that's why you killed him.”

“We couldn't let him take our daughter,” Kyle replied. His Adam's apple jumped; a vein throbbed in his forehead. His nervousness permeated his entire being; he looked like a man who hadn't slept in weeks. Maybe years. I suspected Kyle had never been able to forget the gray-market nature of Erin's adoption, had never entirely relaxed since the day the baby was placed in his wife's hungry arms.

“He didn't care about her,” Kyle continued, his voice ragged. “He just wanted money, like Amber. But he could have screwed us, he could have walked into court and taken my child away, just like that Baby Jessica case.”

I looked directly into Kyle Cheney's pale blue eyes, eyes the color of acid-washed denim. “Except for one little thing,” I said, trying for a gentle, believable tone of voice. “Scott wasn't Erin's father. Erin's father is named Jerry Califana and he owns a pizza parlor in Tottenville. He's still alive and he still wants his daughter back. You killed the wrong man.”

“That's bullshit,” Kyle shot back, so quickly I knew he understood the enormity of the accusation. “You're just trying to mess me up. You'd say anything to keep me from shooting you right here and—”

“Yes, I would,” I agreed. I rested my hand on top of Adam's peach-fuzz head in a gesture that soothed me at least as much as it did him. He was a weight, a gentle, breathing weight on my chest; a real living creature connected to me in a way I'd never known before.

I had to keep him alive.

“I sat at a table in Jerry's pizza parlor,” I went on, trying for a calm, conversational tone. “The first thing in his lockbox was a picture of his baby girl. He loved her as much as you love Erin. He's not out for money. He's a father, just like you.”

“That's bull—”

“No, it isn't,” I said firmly. He had a gun; the truth was my weapon, and I wasn't going to let go of it. “Jerry was waiting for Amber at the Native Plant Center parking lot at the same time you picked her up at the mall in your sister's car. You probably drove right past him on your way here.”

Kyle drew himself up and visibly groped for control. “That doesn't matter if the guy never finds out Erin is his child,” he said, trying to convince himself. “And he won't find out if you aren't there to tell him what you know.”

“You aren't going to shoot me,” I said with far more confidence than I felt.

“Actually, I had wondered about that,” I went on, willing myself not to focus on the silver weapon. “I wondered why you didn't shoot Amber instead of drowning her. Then I remembered where we are. Half the cops in the NYPD live on Staten Island. Hell, you shoot off a gun here, you'll have twenty off-duty cops on your tail in a matter of minutes.”

Kyle's eyes narrowed. “I have a silencer,” he said softly.

“I didn't notice a—” I began.

He stepped forward too quickly for me to react; I tried to maneuver my way out of his path, but it was too late. He closed the distance between us, grabbed my shoulder with one sinewy arm, and jammed the gun deep into my abdomen. “If I fire into your stomach, it should muffle the noise.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

Essentially, the advice my self-defense teacher gave regarding guns was to give the attacker whatever he wanted. Unless, of course, he wanted your life. Which was exactly what Kyle Cheney did want. He wanted me dead, and however reluctantly, he wanted Adam dead.

My teacher's advice in that situation was to take the advanced class.

I hadn't.

If I tried to push the gun away, Kyle could pull the trigger and put a hole through me the size of a basketball. If I karate-chopped his throat or jammed the heel of my hand under his chin, the gun could go off by reflex, even if I managed to throw him off-balance. The same was true for the instep-stomp or the knee to the groin. All good defense techniques, but not against someone armed.

But he hadn't shot Amber. He could have, but he didn't. Instead, he'd marched her to the heart of the swamp and pushed her down, then held her underwater till she drowned.

“You're not really a killer,” I repeated, hoping to hell the statement was still true. It seemed a remarkably naive thing to say to a man who'd killed twice and stood ready to dispatch two more innocent people.

“I threw up in the bushes after Amber died,” he said, his voice so thin it sounded as though it hurt him to talk. “I—God, she took so long to die. It was so much harder than I thought it would be. I thought I hated her so much that I could hold her head underwater and be glad her life was ending. But I couldn't. It was horrible. It took forever, and she gurgled and kicked and clawed at my face. It was horrible,” he added again.

He shuddered. I looked at his face and saw that there were healing scratch marks along the acne scars. Why hadn't someone noticed them before?

Because he was a landscaper. Because his face was constantly scratched by tree branches, thorns, whatever.

I swallowed. The gun was becoming a familiar presence now, its hardness bruising my sensitive stomach. “You must love Erin so much,” I said again. “How will you ever explain to her what you did?”

He shook his head; his lank hair fell across his scarred forehead. “I never will; she'll never know,” he said firmly.

A kick and a push. Kick straight into his shin, then jab my elbow into his arm, shoving the gun away. Or was it dug too deeply into my flesh for that? Could I swing away from him, drop to the ground, swerve out of the way of the barrel?

I doubted it. He'd pull the trigger before I got out of the way and the bullet would embed itself in my body, maybe not directly in my stomach, but somewhere painful and lasting. I'd crumple to the ground, clutching my oozing belly, screaming in agonizing pain, bleeding my life away in the muddy water.

I had been shot once—not in a vital organ, but my shoulder still ached when rain was on the way.

It was aching now. I glanced up; the clouds that had loomed all morning were more threatening, gathering with sinister purpose overhead. It was going to pour any second.

Would that help?

I didn't see how.

The only weapon I had was my mouth. I resolved to keep it moving as long as I could, to keep Kyle talking instead of shooting, to force him to relive the horribleness of Amber's death, hoping it would deter him from killing again.

It wasn't going to be enough. Not when weighed against his love for a little red-haired girl.

My hand still rested on Adam's peach-fuzz scalp. He was so small, so defenseless. He'd fallen asleep in the snuggly, his head drooping to one side like a sunflower.

Keep him talking, I told myself. Talking isn't shooting. Maybe there's a way out of this somehow. He can't keep killing forever.

“She had papers somewhere,” I speculated. “Papers that would prove Erin was really her child. And I don't think you knew she had a car stashed at the Native Plant Center, or you'd have broken in and found the documents in the glove compartment.” The ones Detective Aronson hadn't let me examine. The ones I was guessing had a connection to the adoption of Erin Cheney. I pushed that thought aside and kept talking.

“Which means you probably went to your sister's house and ransacked the apartment.”

His pale blue eyes widened. His thin mouth tightened. He jammed the gun one more millimeter deeper into my gut. I'd struck a nerve. I kept speculating.

“So when Scott came home looking for Amber, you followed him and ran him off the road.”

Kyle opened his mouth to protest, then squeezed it shut. “Yeah,” he admitted, but his eyes didn't meet mine. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed convulsively.

And the truth dawned on me. “You know, you're a terrible liar,” I said, keeping my tone light.

His voice was a croak. “What are you talking about?” He shoved the gun in deeper. I grunted and tried to move back. He tightened his grip on my shoulder and pulled me closer to him.

“Tell me what you mean,” he ordered.

“You were still in the swamp with Amber,” I pointed out. “And then you took the baby to your house, where Betsy was. You drove Betsy home and she went inside with the baby. So you were nowhere near your house when Scott came home. It was your wife who searched the apartment and followed Scott, wasn't it?”

“No!” he said, the sharply emphatic tone of his voice enough to tell me I'd hit a nerve. “She had nothing to do with it! She doesn't know anything about all this. She—”

“She was driving your landscaping van,” I cut in, raising my voice to override his protest. I recalled its white bulk in the driveway of the Cheney house, recalled the red lettering, the rosebush design.

“It had a logo on it, Kyle,” I pointed out. “Someone somewhere is going to remember that a big white van that said “
Our Business Is Growing
” was driving along Victory Boulevard when Scott's motorcycle went off the road. And if the cops examine the bumper, they'll find traces of the cycle's paint job.”

I stopped for breath. The skin around Kyle's eyes went white; the rest of his face went a deeper red.

“They won't find anything,” he said, his voice ragged. “The van's being painted. I ordered a new bumper.”

I shook my head. “Maybe,” I said. “But even so, the van's distinctive. Somebody's going to remember seeing it at Betsy's the night Amber died; somebody's going to ask too many questions and get answers that don't add up. And when they do, it won't just be you who goes down. It will be Donna, too.”