Outwitting Trolls (19 page)

“Websterville, huh?” he asked. “Christ, Coyne. How do you keep doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Stumbling upon corpses. Finding trouble.”

“It's a gift, I guess,” I said.

“So whaddaya want me to do?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I figured you should know. It's fairly unlikely that this isn't related to what happened to Ken, don't you think?”

“You call the locals?”

“They're on their way.”

“Shot in the chest, you said?”

“That's right.”

“Not stabbed, huh?”

“No.”

“Murder weapon?”

“I didn't see one.”

“And you're there why?”

“He called me,” I said. “Said he had something to show me.”

“What was it?”

“He didn't say. I don't know.”

“Connected to our other murder,” he mumbled, talking to himself, not me. “Might've been a God damn clue. Woulda been nice.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “How it goes sometimes. It's never easy.”

I heard the wail of sirens in the distance. They were growing louder.

“The cops are on their way,” I said to Horowitz. “The place has been tossed. Desk and file cabinet drawers dumped on the floor. Laptop's missing, and maybe his cell phone, too. I don't know what else. I'm guessing they got whatever it was that Wayne was planning to show me.”

“There's your motive right there,” Horowitz said. “You find any drugs?”

“Tylenol.”

“No ketamine, huh?”

“I didn't look that hard,” I said. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Do what you're supposed to do,” he said. “Cooperate with the authorities. Answer their questions. Tell the truth.”

“Yeah, well, I'm a lawyer, and I've got a client who happens to be a suspect in another homicide.”

“Do what you gotta do, Coyne. You don't need my guidance.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“Me?” he asked. “I'll do what I'm supposed to do, too.” Then he disconnected.

“You're welcome,” I said into my dead phone. I snapped it shut and shoved it into my pocket, and that's when the two black-and-white cruisers, with their sirens screaming and their blue lights flashing bright in the gathering gloom of an April evening, came careening around the corner and slammed to a stop in front of Wayne Nichols's house.

Websterville police was printed in big block letters on the sides of the cruisers. Two uniformed officers jumped out of each vehicle. One of them stayed there at the side of the road, one went around to the back of the house, and the other two approached me where I was sitting on the front steps.

They were both male, both, I guessed, somewhere in their forties, one black and one white. The white one stood in front of me and said, “You the one who called it in?”

“That's right,” I said.

“Sir,” he said, “if you'd come with me.”

I stood up and followed him to his cruiser. He opened the back door. “We'd like you to wait here,” he said.

“Wait for what?” I asked.

“The state detectives will be here pretty soon. They'll need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said. When I bent down to get in, he put his hand on top of my head.

He left the back door open and leaned against the side of the cruiser, guarding me, or making sure I didn't try to get away,
or maybe both. After a few minutes, more vehicles appeared, and pretty soon the cul-de-sac at the end of Blaine Street looked like a multicar pileup on the Mass Pike during an ice storm, with ten or a dozen vehicles—cruisers and vans and unmarked sedans—parked at odd angles in the street and nosed up onto the front lawn, their doors hanging open, their red and blue lights flashing, and the static from their radios crackling in the twilight.

Uniforms and plainclothes people milled around the yard, talking with each other and moving in and out of Wayne's house. A woman led a German shepherd out of the back of a van and took him inside on his short leash. A pair of uniformed officers strung yellow crime-scene tape around the property.

At one point a white-haired guy in a brown suit came over and spoke to my personal guard. After they'd exchanged a few sentences, the white-haired guy turned and went back into the house without even looking at me.

When the cell phone in my pocket vibrated, I fished it out, opened it, and saw that it was Alex. “Hi, babe,” I said.

“I'm home safe and sound,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said. “Thanks for calling. Uneventful trip?”

“Totally uneventful. Thanks for a lovely weekend. I had fun. I know I was kind of moody. Please don't take it personally.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I understand. You're a writer. Goes with the territory.”

“I'll make it up to you, I promise. Next weekend, right?”

“We'll be there. Me and Henry.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Alex said, “Brady? Is everything all right?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“Where are you? What's going on? Something's going on.
I can hear it in your voice. There are background noises. What is it?”

“I can't talk about it right now,” I said, “but don't worry. I'm fine. Really.”

“Call me when you can talk, will you?”

“I will.” I looked out of the open car door and saw the white-haired guy headed in my direction. “I gotta go now. I'll call you.”

“Take good care of yourself,” Alex said.

“Sure,” I said. “You, too.” I shut my phone and slipped it into my pants pocket.

Neither of us had said “I love you.”

The white-haired guy walked up to the open cruiser door and spoke to the uniformed officer. Then he bent down, poked his head in, and said, “Shove over, Mr. Coyne.”

I slid over, and he got in beside me. He held out his hand. “Wexler,” he said. “Homicide, New Hampshire state cops.”

I gripped his hand. “Coyne,” I said. “Lawyer, Massachusetts bar.”

He smiled quickly. “Who were you talking to?”

“On my phone? Just now?”

“Yes.”

“My, um, just a friend.”

“You tell him what's going on here?”

“It was a woman,” I said, “and no. I know better than to do that.”

“That's your vehicle?” He pointed at my green BMW, which I'd parked directly in front of the house. It was now surrounded by other vehicles.

“Yes, it's mine,” I said.

“Just so you know,” he said, “I've talked with your buddy Detective Horowitz. He filled me in. I understand that you're a
lawyer with a client who's involved in a homicide case in Massachusetts and there are things you probably won't be able to talk about.”

“I'm glad he told you that,” I said.

Wexler took a leather-bound notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it on his leg. He had a ballpoint pen in his hand. “So tell me what you can tell me,” he said. “Like, for example, how come you happened to be here to find Mr. Nichols's body.”

“Wayne called me,” I said, “asked me to come up. Said he had something he wanted to show me.”

“Show you what?”

I shrugged. “He didn't say.”

“You didn't ask?”

“I didn't actually talk with him,” I said. “He left me a phone message.”

“When was that?”

“Last night. On my home phone. That's in Boston. He just said he had something he thought I'd be interested in, and I should come up the next day, which was today, sometime after seven. I got here a little after seven.”

“Not till seven? Did he say why then?”

“He just said he had things to do before that.”

“You didn't call him back, ask what it was all about?”

“He said not to in his message,” I said. “Wayne's not big on returning calls. I figured if I tried, he wouldn't pick up and it would just annoy him. So, no, I didn't.”

“Is that message still in your voice mail?”

“No,” I said. “I always erase voice mail messages after I listen to them.”

“Why do you do that?”

“To keep things neat,” I said. “I don't like junk piling up.
When I lived in the suburbs, I loaded all of the week's trash in the family station wagon and went to the dump every Saturday morning. I took the dog, and afterward we went to a bagel place.”

“Every Saturday?”

“Every single one.”

“A ritual.”

I shrugged. “I like getting rid of junk.”

“Like old voice mails.”

“Exactly.”

Wexler smiled and glanced out the window. Then he turned back to me and said, “Any idea what our victim wanted to show you? You must've thought about what it was?”

“I did think about it,” I said, “but nothing occurred to me.”

“What time did you say you got here?”

I shrugged. “About a quarter, twenty past seven, I think. I didn't check the time.”

“And before that?”

“Before I got here?”

Wexler nodded.

“I was on the road. It takes a little over two hours to get here from my house, which is where I was before that.”

“You were in Boston,” he said.

“Right.”

“Alone?”

“No. My, um, girlfriend was there. And my dog.”

“Your girlfriend being the one you were just talking to on your cell phone?”

“That's right,” I said. “She lives in Maine. She left a little before I did. She called to tell me she got home all right.”

“This afternoon, before you were on the road? Where were you then?”

“Look,” I said. “What time do you need my alibi for?”

He smiled. “Between one and five this afternoon ought to take care of it, according to the ME.”

“Well, that's easy,” I said. “We rented a canoe at the South Bridge Boathouse in Concord—Concord, Massachusetts, that is, not your state capital. That was around noontime. We turned it in around four. Paid with a credit card. Talk to them. They should have those times on their paperwork. They rent the canoes by the hour.”

Wexler wrote something into his notebook, then looked up at me. “What's your girlfriend's name?”

At that moment my cell phone buzzed in my pants pocket. I decided to let it go. If it was important, they'd leave a message.

“My girlfriend's name is Alexandria Shaw,” I said. “She lives in Garrison, Maine. She's a writer.”

He wrote that into his notebook, too. “Okay, good,” he said. “We'll check it out.” He stuck his pen in his shirt pocket but kept the notebook open on his leg. “So when you got here, Mr. Coyne, you went right into the house?”

“I rang the bell and knocked on the doors. The back door was unlocked, so when nobody answered my knock, I went in.”

“That's when you saw the body?”

“That's right.”

“Then you called it in?”

“Not right away.”

“No,” Wexler said. “you didn't. You didn't make the call until seven fifty three. You were in there for about half an hour before you called it in.”

“I looked around first,” I said. “After I saw that Wayne was dead, I went through the whole house.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked. “You're a lawyer. You know time is of the essence. You should've called it in immediately.”

“I was thinking,” I said, “that another few minutes wouldn't make any difference to Wayne. I was thinking that he'd wanted to show me something that might've had a bearing on…on my case, not to mention on what happened to him, and I wondered what it was, and I thought I might know it if I saw it. So I decided to look around.”

“A few minutes makes a difference to us.”

“I know,” I said. “I wasn't thinking about you.”

He shrugged. “So did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you see it? What you were looking for? What Mr. Nichols wanted to show you?”

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

“What did you touch and move when you were in the house?”

“The only thing I touched was some light switches,” I said. “I used a handkerchief. I didn't move anything. Oh, and Sparky.”

“Huh?”

“Sparky the cat. I patted her.”

He grunted a humorless laugh. “The cat. That's it?”

“I didn't disturb your crime scene,” I said. “I know how to behave in a crime scene.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that's what Horowitz said.” Detective Wexler blew out a breath. “You went down to the cellar?”

I nodded. “I saw that the office down there had been tossed.”

“I bet you figure that whoever shot Nichols was looking for whatever it was he wanted to show you.”

“That occurred to me,” I said.

“Looks like they took his laptop,” said Wexler. “We didn't find a cell phone on his person or anywhere in the house, either. He didn't have a landline.”

Wexler had been half turned on the backseat of the cruiser to face me while he talked with me. Now he leaned back against
the seat and tilted up his face so that he was looking at the roof of the cruiser. “I doubt if this has got anything to do with your case, Mr. Coyne.”

“You don't think so?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We're not discounting anything at this point, of course—but we've had our eye on Wayne Nichols for a long time, waiting for something like this to happen.”

“Waiting for someone to shoot him?”

“Shoot, stab, strangle, club. Guys like him, sooner or later something happens to them.”

“Guys like him,” I said.

“Small-timers,” he said. “Marginal players who think they can mix it up with the big-timers. You know what he was into, don't you?”

“Not really.”

“Drugs,” Wexler said. “He supplied the college kids. Wayne Nichols was crawling around down there at the very bottom of the food chain. He owned the little corner grocery, you might say. He worked the longest hours, took the most risks, had the thinnest profit margin, and reaped the fewest rewards.”

“So you're saying that what happened to him, getting shot and killed, it was business.”

“His business,” he said. “Retailing drugs to college kids. Yes. That's what it looks like.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“A little of this, a little of that. Whatever the kids wanted. Weed, coke, pills, acid.”

“Ketamine?”

He turned his head and looked at me. “What do you know about ketamine?”

“Ask Horowitz,” I said.

He smiled. “Sure. I will.” He took his pen out of his pocket, clicked the button, and wrote something in his notebook.

“Whatever it was that Wayne wanted to show me,” I said. “You think it was related to his, um, his business?”

“I don't know. What else could it be?”

“Something related to my case,” I said. “That's what I assumed. It's the only thing that makes any sense.”

“What, then?”

“I don't know.”

“What if it
was
something else?” Wexler asked. “What if it was his, um, business?”

“Why would he want to bring me into that?”

“You tell me,” he said.

“Because I'm a lawyer, I suppose.” I hesitated. “Because his business was connected to my case. Is that what you're thinking?”

Wexler shrugged. “We're coordinating with Detective Horowitz. Which reminds me. You are not to talk to your client about this until after we have.”

“That's harsh,” I said. “You know who my client is?”

He nodded. “Our vic's mother. Getting it from the cops is a lousy way to hear your son is dead, I know, but it can't be helped.”

“I should be with her when she hears about it, at least.”

“She needs her lawyer for this?”

“She needs her friend,” I said. “Anybody would.”

Wexler glanced at his wristwatch. “Well,” he said, “it's probably too late anyway. When I talked to him, Horowitz said he and his partner were on their way, and that was, oh, an hour ago.” He turned on the seat so that he was facing me. “Is there anything I should know that you haven't told me, Mr. Coyne?”

“I don't think so. Not that I can talk about, anyway.”