Outwitting Trolls (20 page)

“Your case.”

“Yes. My case. My client. I'm not going to talk about it with you.”

“Because it might be connected to this case?”

“Because I don't talk about my clients,” I said.

“Horowitz can fill me in,” he said. “He doesn't have client confidentiality to worry about.”

I shrugged.

Wexler handed me a business card. “If you think of anything.”

I stuck his card in my shirt pocket without looking at it.

“You got one for me?” he asked.

I took out my wallet and handed him one of my cards.

“Thanks,” he said. “You're free to go.”

“You're done with me?”

He smiled. “You sound disappointed.”

“Not hardly,” I said.

“You're not a suspect,” Wexler said, “if that's what you were thinking. I assume your alibi will check out, and we've already got plenty of suspects. Horowitz said not to waste our time with you.”

“Well,” I said, “good. Guess I'll go home, hug my dog.”

Detective Wexler got out of the cruiser, spoke to the officer who'd been babysitting me, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and headed across the brown lawn to Wayne's house. I got out, too. I nodded to the uniformed cop who was still leaning against the side of the cruiser, and he nodded to me. Then I climbed into my car, got it started, and eased around the vehicles that surrounded it. Once I'd driven out of Wayne's cul-de-sac, I remembered that my cell phone had buzzed while I was talking with Wexler, so I pulled over to the side of the road, fished out my phone, and saw that I had a message.

It was from Horowitz. “Mrs. Nichols ain't home,” he said. “I need to talk with her. Any idea how I can get ahold of her? Call me.”

I rang Horowitz's number. He didn't say, “Hello,” like a normal person, when he answered. Not Horowitz. What he said was “Where the hell is your client, Coyne?”

“I don't know,” I said, “but I can give you her cell phone number.”

“Gimme,” he said.

“You're going to tell her that her son got murdered this afternoon, huh?”

“Benetti's with me. I'm gonna make her do it.”

“You planning on treating her like a suspect?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Should I?”

“You better not,” I said. “Not without her lawyer present.”

“Thanks for telling me my job,” he said. “What's her number?”

I recited Sharon's cell number to him.

He repeated it back to me, and when I said, “That's right,” he disconnected. No “Thank you,” no “Good-bye.” Typical.

I pulled away from the curb, drove back to downtown Websterville, and turned onto the two-lane highway heading east.

I stopped at a convenience store cum gas station a few miles outside of town, where I filled my tank and got a foam cup of surprisingly good coffee, and I'd been driving through the Sunday evening darkness for about an hour and a half, and had just crossed the state line into Massachusetts, when my phone vibrated. It was Sharon.

“I don't think I can do this anymore,” she said when I answered. I heard the tears in her voice.

“I'm sorry” was all I could think of to say.

“You know what happened,” she said.

“Wayne?”

“Yes. My son.”

“I do know,” I said. “I'm so sorry.”

“Marcia and Roger were terribly nice,” she said. “They came to tell me personally. They just left a minute ago.”

It's “Marcia and Roger” now,
I thought. Telling a mother that her son had been murdered was a little different from interrogating her. The yin and the yang of the police officer's job.

“Are you at home?” I asked.

“I'm still here at the hospital,” she said.

“Huh?” I said. “What hospital?”

“I'm sorry,” Sharon said. “I don't know why I thought you knew. It's the Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg. Ellen and I have been here since, oh, around five o'clock. Charles—Ken's father—he was admitted to the ICU this afternoon. He's in a coma. They don't know whether he'll come out of it or not. They think it's his aneurysm. The facility where he's living called Ellen, and she called me, and I met her here. So we sat with Charles, and then the officers called, and they came here, and they told us about…about what happened to Wayne, and…oh, Brady. This is the worst thing. I'm a mess.”

“Why did they call Ellen?”

Sharon hesitated. “Well, I guess, now that Ken's gone, Ellen would be Charles's next of kin. He has no brothers or sisters. She's his eldest grandchild.”

“Are you going to be there for a while?” I asked.

“Here at the hospital, you mean?”

“Yes. When are you leaving?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I guess we're going to stay here with Charles. It's—he's in pretty bad shape. He might not make it through the night.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said.

I was heading southeast toward Boston on Route 3. I'd just passed a sign that said that Route 495 was two miles ahead of me. I pictured the map in my head—495 south to Route 2, west to Fitchburg where I'd come to a capital
H
sign on the highway. “I can be there in about an hour,” I said.

“You'll come here?”

“Sure. For a little while, anyway. Hold your hand, if you'd like.”

“That would be lovely,” she said. “I'm…I'm touched, Brady.”

“Ellen's there with you, you said?”

“She is,” Sharon said. “I don't know what I'd do without her.”

“She knows about Wayne, then.”

“She was here when Roger and Marcia told us. We've been crying together.”

“Where will I find you?”

“I guess we'll be in the ICU with Charles,” she said. “You'll have to ring the bell.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll find you. I'm on my way.”

 

The visitors' parking area at the Burbank Hospital in Fitchburg was bathed in a weird bluish light from halogen lamps on tall metal poles. The lot was virtually empty, with just a few vehicles scattered here and there. It was after midnight on this Sunday night, and visiting hours had ended a long time ago.

I followed the sign to the main entrance and went in, half expecting somebody to stop me, but the white-haired woman who was sitting at the round desk in the lobby talking on the telephone didn't even look up when I pushed through the glass door. I went to the bank of elevators, where a directory indicated that the ICU was on the third floor.

When I stepped out of the elevator on the third floor, I found myself in an open square area with closed doors on the walls and a corridor heading east and west.

One of the doors had
INTENSIVE CARE
printed on it. Beside the door was a doorbell.
RING FOR A NURSE
, read a little sign above the bell.

I rang the bell, and after a while, the door opened, and a gray-haired woman in a white jacket looked out at me. “Yes?” she asked.

“You have Charles Nichols in there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“His daughter-in-law and granddaughter are with him, I believe,” I said. “Would you mind telling Mrs. Nichols that I'm here? My name is Brady Coyne.”

“Coyne?”

“Yes. I'm a friend.”

“All right,” she said, breaking her streak of monosyllables. Then she pulled her face back, and the door shut and latched with a solid-sounding click.

A minute or two later the door opened again, and Sharon and Ellen came out. Both of them were red-eyed. Their faces looked swollen.

Sharon came over to me and put her arms around my waist and pressed her face against my chest. I patted her shoulder and mumbled something inane like “It's all right. It's okay.”

Ellen stood there hugging herself and shaking her head. She looked bewildered.

After a minute, Sharon pulled back and looked up at me. “Thank you so much,” she said.

“I haven't done anything,” I said.

“You're here.” She found my hand with hers and gripped it hard. “Come on. There's a waiting room over there. Let's go sit.”

Sharon tugged me over to a closed door. It opened into a little room with two sofas, three or four soft chairs, and a coffee table with a dozen or so old magazines scattered over it.

Sharon sat on one of the sofas and pulled on my hand to signal to me to sit beside her.

Ellen stood awkwardly inside the doorway. “Why don't I go get us something to drink,” she said. “Mr. Coyne? Coffee? A Coke?”

“A Coke would be good,” I said.

“Mom?”

Sharon looked up at Ellen. “A Diet Coke, dear. Thank you.”

After Ellen left, Sharon slouched back on the sofa and gazed up at the ceiling. “It's absolutely surreal,” she said. “I thought nothing could be worse than what happened to Ken, finding his body, being accused of it—but now? Wayne? I don't know how to feel, Brady. I don't—I'm numb. That's how I feel. I mean, here we are in this hospital, and poor Charles should be getting our attention, our prayers. But my son is dead. Could anything be worse than that?”

“What did Horowitz tell you?”

“It was Marcia who did the talking,” Sharon said. “She just said that somebody had shot Wayne in his house up there, and that you were the one who found him.” She turned her head and frowned at me. “Why were you there, Brady?”

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

“What was it?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. He didn't say. I was going to ask you if you had any idea.”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No. Not a clue. Who'd want to kill him?”

“According to the police up there,” I said, “Wayne was dealing drugs. He'd make a lot of enemies doing that.”

Sharon shook her head. “It's surreal. I haven't seen Wayne for a long time. I can't even picture him in my head. That's how long it's been. At least with Ken, we'd been talking, and I felt like I knew him. With Wayne, I didn't even have that. I love him just as much, you know?”

“I do know,” I said. I put my arm around her shoulder, and she kind of snuggled against me.

A minute later Ellen pushed open the door and came in. She handed cans of Coke to each of us—Diet in a silver can to Sharon
and regular red to me. Then she sat on the sofa across from us with her own can of Diet. She looked at me. “What happened to Wayne?”

“Somebody shot him. I don't know who or why.”

“You found him?”

I nodded.

“You're the only one of us who's seen him or even talked to him in such a long time,” Ellen said. She looked at Sharon. “It's been years.”

Sharon nodded. “Since he went off to school.”

Ellen turned back to me. “Do you think Wayne…?”

“I only saw him once when he was…alive,” I said. “It's not like I knew him.”

“I was thinking about what happened to Daddy,” she said.

“The New Hampshire police don't think there's necessarily any connection,” I said.

“No connection?” asked Ellen. “They think both of them being murdered is just a coincidence? I mean, first Daddy and then Wayne? Really?”

“Aside from the fact that they were father and son,” I said, “there was nothing similar about their…about what happened.”

“But,” she said, “I mean, they
were
father and son.”

“A father and a son,” I said, “who had been out of touch with each other—and with the other members of their family—for a long time.”

Ellen nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” She looked up at the round clock on the wall. It was after one o'clock in the morning. “Mom,” she said, “I've got classes tomorrow morning. I don't know—”

“Go, honey,” said Sharon. “Go home, get some sleep. You can't do anything here.”

“You're going to stay?”

Sharon shrugged. “I guess so.”

“I can be with you.”

Sharon smiled. “I'm okay, dear. Really. Go ahead. I'm so grateful you came here. If…when…your grandfather wakes up, I know he'll be pleased.”

Ellen stood up. “You'll keep me posted on Grampa?”

“Of course.” Sharon stood up, and the two women hugged each other.

When they stepped apart, I saw that both of them had wet eyes.

“I better get going, too.” I turned to Ellen. “I'll walk down with you.”

She smiled and nodded. “Thank you. That's nice.”

Sharon came over to me, smiled, and gave me a hug. “You're a wonderful friend,” she said. “I appreciate all that you do. This, tonight, was special.”

“You have my numbers,” I said. “Call anytime, for any reason.”

She smiled. “I guess that's what I've been doing, isn't it?”

“It's fine. I'm glad.” I patted her back. “I'm so sorry about all of this…what you've had to go through.”

“Well,” she said, “if it wasn't for you and Ellen, I don't know what I'd do. It's just horrible. My husband, and now my son. You can't imagine. I feel like I'm going to be all right, though, I really do.”

“You're a tough lady,” I said. I looked at Ellen. “Ready?”

Ellen and Sharon hugged again, and then all three of us left the waiting room. Sharon went over to the ICU door and rang the bell, and Ellen and I went to the elevator.

Outside the hospital entrance, I said to Ellen, “Where'd you park?”

She pointed to an area not far from where we were standing.
There were three or four cars there. “Mine's the old beat-up Honda.”

“I'll walk you over,” I said.

She hooked her arm through mine. “Thank you. That's sweet.”

“How are you holding up?” I asked. “This has to be pretty tough for you, too.”

“I'm doing okay,” she said. “I've been so focused on Mom that I guess I haven't thought much about me.”

“It's going to hit you,” I said.

She squeezed my arm. “When it does, can I call you?”

“I'm not sure what good I could do, but…”

“You're a kind man,” she said. “I feel like I can talk to you.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “You can call me if you want. Of course.”

We arrived at Ellen's car. It was an old sand-colored Honda Civic with missing hubcaps and a long scrape along its side. A graduate student's car. She leaned back against it. “I feel awful about Wayne,” she said. “I was having bad thoughts about him. I even told Mom that I thought Wayne could've been the one who…” She shook her head.

“Who killed your father?”

“Yes. And now…”

“You feel guilty about what you were thinking?” I said. “Is that it?”

“Kind of. I mean, what it really is, I feel bad about saying those things to Mom, putting thoughts like that in her head.”