Riptide (17 page)

Which left Daniel Cunningham to face the law alone. “I told you, we partied a little and went home.”

“Just an ordinary night,” McManus said.

Jackson shifted his stance, which made a scratching noise on the bare concrete cellar floor.

Cunningham shrugged. “Pretty much.”

“Except Jason Cardiff wound up dead.”

Dan Cunningham stared at a spot on the shelf near McManus’s head. “Too bad.”

“Another customer bites the dust,” Jackson remarked softly.

It begged the question that this sort of thing happened a lot in Cunningham’s sphere.

Cunningham did not so much as glance Jackson’s way. “It’s late,” McManus observed. “We’re all tired.” It was as close to the good cop routine as Cunningham was going to get. “Let’s finish up, so we can all go home and call it a night.”

Cunningham lifted an eyebrow. Nothing else moved on his stone face.

Waiting to see what, if anything, would be put on the table. Frank didn’t need his Spidey sense to tell him this was a guy with prior convictions, who knew the value of cutting a deal. “You reside in the Springs?”

Cunningham nodded. The Springs was located north of East Hampton along the Island’s South Fork, a modest neighborhood of aging ranches rented out each summer to the migrant workers from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, who cleaned houses, cleared tables, and harvested the vineyards.

“You spend the winter months in Florida?”

Cunningham gave another tight nod, staring straight ahead.

“And your primary occupation is painting houses?”

“Plastering,” Cunningham corrected him in a sullen tone. “I do high-end restoration. All custom jobs.”

Jackson spoke. “That’s what you did for the Cardiffs, a custom job?”

Cunningham shrugged, not bothering to take the bait.

McManus watched him. “No trouble with the law, Mr. Cunningham, is that correct?”

This time there was a tiny pause.

Cunningham gave a tight nod. “That’s right.”

Lie. McManus and Jackson looked at each other.

“Just some unpaid parking violations, according to what you’ve told us,” McManus said. “That’s all we’ll see when we run your name through our nationwide database, Mr. Cunningham. Is that correct?”

“Yeah.”

Jackson and McManus exchanged another “my ass” look.

The hard steel of the folding chair was causing McManus’s back to stiffen up. He changed position and leaned forward. “And you were subcontracted to do some plaster repair at the Cardiff home back in early spring, is that correct?”

“Correct,” Cunningham replied.

“You completed that work to the satisfaction of Mr. and Mrs. Cardiff?”

A flicker of something tripped across the sharp planes of Daniel Cunningham’s face. Blink and you’d miss it.

McManus did not blink.

“Right,” came Cunningham’s reply.

“And you finished that work, you said, about a month ago? Is that right?”

“Right.”

“And after that, you went on to work at other locations and undertook other jobs?”

Daniel Cunningham’s powerful shoulders hiked in a small shrug. “Yeah.”

“You were paid, and that was the extent of your financial dealings with Mr. Jason Cardiff?”

There it was again. That flicker on Cunningham’s face. He swallowed. “Right.”

Tsk, tsk, another whopper. McManus allowed his voice to turn sharp as a saw blade. “What about the drug deals you arranged, up to and including the night of Mr. Cardiff’s death?”

Daniel Cunningham stared straight ahead.

The basement was so quiet you could practically hear the boards of the dance floor settling overhead.

A stray mosquito must have worked its way inside and landed on Jackson’s arm because he slapped it. Hard.

It was enough to make McManus’s gun hand twitch.

This time Cunningham flinched.

“Give us a break, Dan,” McManus said softly. “Bobby Baldwin already gave you up.”

Cunningham jutted his chin the way McManus’s son did when he was young, after he’d been caught doing something wrong. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

Lie number three. McManus was grateful for every time he’d ever put his son in a time-out. Spare the rod and spoil the child, he thought. The proof was sitting right in front of him.

Jackson leaned over and propped his hands on his knees.

He was a big man, and when he did that, it had the effect of lowering his face, along with his massive shoul
ders, down to Cunningham’s eye level. He hung there, like some bogeyman and when he spoke the tone in his voice left no doubt that it was a role he could play. “We have you on dealing.” Jackson paused to let that sink in. “We’ll get you on more, much more.”

“Like sleeping with Jason Cardiff’s wife.” A mosquito whined, zeroing in on McManus’s neck. He swatted it a moment too late.

The slapping sound bounced around in the small space.

The bite was worth it, because this time Cunningham twitched.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Cunningham shifted around, so the folding chair let out a metal cracking sound.

“You were at Cardiff’s house the night he died,” McManus pointed out. “You procured drugs for him. You have a known record of trouble with the law. You were sleeping with his wife. And you expect us to believe you had nothing to do with it?” McManus let incredulity show in his voice.

Cunningham blinked.

Jackson’s voice was a low growl. “Why in hell should we think you left when everyone else did?”

Daniel Cunningham’s jaw was working hard now.

It was enough to give Frank McManus his second wind. He loved his job, he really did.

“There were other people there, man,” Cunningham burst. “Ask them.”

“One’s dead, so he ain’t talking,” Jackson said softly, leaning in closer to Cunningham, so his big frame was well inside Cunningham’s zone of personal space.

Blocking Cunningham’s light.

“That leaves five. We talked to them,” McManus pointed out. “Now we’re talking to you.”

“We just hung out.” Cunningham swallowed. “I left with everyone else.”

McManus let out a long breath to give the impression of a weariness he did not feel. “So, you did some work for the man, a multimillionaire, who gets to like you so much he invites you back to his house?”

“Yeah.” An arrogant little smile formed on Cunningham’s lips.

As sociopaths went, this guy rated right up there with O.J. “Two nights ago, he has you over for a party,” McManus stressed the word “party” so it sounded ridiculous, out of place. “And he winds up floating facedown in his pool with enough drugs in his belly to put him under.” McManus’s version of events had the intended effect.

The smile faded from Cunningham’s face.

“You scored drugs for him all summer, we hear you were doing his wife,” McManus continued, “you were one of the last people to see him alive, and you expect us to believe Cardiff’s death was an accident?”

Jackson stood up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, like a bull waiting to be released into the ring.

“That’s right.” Despite the damp cool air of the basement, a thin sheen of sweat was forming on Daniel Cunningham’s face.

“I doubt it, bro,” Jackson said softly.

“I’m telling you.” At last, Cunningham’s voice had lost its Joe Cool edge. “I had a few beers by the pool and went home. That’s all.”

The night was turning out okay. Jason’s headache was gone, thanks to the Tylenol he’d washed down with champagne and the premium-grade cocaine Dan Cunningham had cut into lines on the glass-topped table inside the pool house.

Jason didn’t want to do more if he could avoid it. Coke gave him rubber dick.

Things were going swimmingly in the shallow end of the pool, where all three girls were going at each other.

“Jason, come on.” They took turns calling his name.

Bobby Baldwin and his friend tried to pile on and were rebuffed. One of them disappeared into the bathroom, probably to jerk off.

Dan Cunningham had better luck, sliding off his jockey shorts to reveal what had to be the world’s biggest cock.

The girls tittered nervously while Jason rose to his feet, interested now.

Dan Cunningham looked at Jason and smiled. He stood on the top step in the shallow end, fondling himself. He took a step down.

The girls squealed.

Bobby Baldwin at the other end of the patio grew quiet.

Cunningham lowered himself into the pool and waded over to Lisa.

Jason Cardiff’s girl.

Lisa stopped giggling.

She glanced at Jason, uneasy now.

A silence hung over the pool.

Dan Cunningham glanced at Jason.

Jason nodded.

Dan Cunningham smiled. Without missing a beat, he reached down and grabbed Lisa by the chin.

She gave a little shriek. “Hey.”

Cunningham tapped her on the cheek with two of his thick fingers, hard.

“What?” Lisa frowned, tried to get up.

The other girls were quiet.

Cunningham grabbed her firmly under the chin and yanked her mouth around to his cock.

Lisa opened her mouth to protest but all she got was a mouthful of Dan Cunningham’s dick.

Jason Cardiff grabbed his crotch and crossed the steps to the edge of the pool, where he dropped his swim trunks.

The two girls smiled nervously.

Daniel Cunningham smiled.

Even Bobby Baldwin and his friend, back now from the john, were smiling. Waiting for a show.

The only person not smiling was Lisa. She bared her lips and gasped for air.

Jason Cardiff stroked himself while the girls frolicked, vying for his attention.

But Dan Cunningham was the one Jason watched as he teased his erection.

Dan Cunningham chuckled softly.

Jason Cardiff stepped swiftly down into the pool and positioned himself at Lisa’s ass.

Dan Cunningham rocked up and down on the balls of his feet, pulsing slowly in and out of Lisa’s mouth.

Jason Cardiff, panting now with excitement, dropped low.

Lisa managed to give off a squeal of protest that was cut short when Dan Cunningham squeezed her jaw
with his fist. Only the muscles in his forearm moved, nothing more. “Hold still,” he ordered.

Jason Cardiff mounted Lisa from behind.

Lisa’s eyes bulged so the whites showed. She squirmed.

Jason Cardiff slapped her. Hard.

Dan Cunningham gave another little chuckle, his eyes never leaving Jason’s.

Jason eased himself in.

Now Lisa was holding very still.

Jason pumped faster and deeper as his excitement grew.

Lisa gasped with pain.

Her friends looked away, scared.

The pool was quiet now, except for small splashes and grunting sounds from the two men.

B
ottles of Grey Goose were lined up in the freezer like soldiers ready for battle.

“No!”

Christina slammed the freezer door shut.

The sound echoed hollowly around the empty kitchen.

She had never felt so alone in her life.

The humming sound inside Christina’s brain grew louder.

In the living room, the answering machine picked up. The phone had been ringing all afternoon and into the night.

There had been calls from TMZ and The Insider. Now it was a reporter from the
New York Post,
seeking comment about her husband’s death.

Christina stuck her fingers in her ear and slid down the counter till she came to rest on the floor.

The freezer beckoned from six feet away.

“No,” she murmured. “No.”

“Everything is okay the way it is,” Matt had told her earlier.

Christina tried desperately to remember how good it felt to believe that, but she couldn’t muster her faith again now no matter how hard she tried.

There had been calls from the rehab in Minnesota. Peter, her counselor, reminding her to take it one day at a time.

A message from Sylphan, her roommate from rehab. “This whole thing sucks. Big-time,” the young girl said. “Look on the bright side. You don’t have to be nice to anybody or even wash your hair if you don’t feel like it. Nobody’s going to expect you to act normal anyway. You can sit around in pajamas all day, and nobody will stop you.”

Christina smiled. The rest of Sylphan’s message pierced through to the center of Christina’s heart.

“I’ve been through some tough times myself.” Sylphan’s voice, so young and girlish, combined with the understatement of her words to bring tears to Christina’s eyes. “Just know that no matter what, Christina, we’re all here for you. I can’t say I can truly relate to exactly what you’re going through, but there were times when I hurt so bad, I didn’t want to live.” Sylphan’s voice broke, and there was a pause while she collected herself. “Just hang on,” she continued. “We’re all on your side, thinking about you. Call me anytime you need a shoulder to cry on.”

“I want to be you when I grow up,” Christina whispered. She would save that message.

There were a couple of more messages from patients in rehab, wishing her well and telling her to hang in there. Don’t drink and go to meetings.

Not a word from her in-laws.

She was angry, angry and ashamed that her in-laws were treating her as though she was a criminal.

She should call someone. Lois or Peter or Sylphan or Matt. But she was too embarrassed to ask for help.

The humming noise inside her head grew worse.

A drink would help.

The freezer was right there, within arm’s reach.

She couldn’t stay here.

Christina stood, went to the living room, and picked up the phone.

She dialed her in-laws’ town house.

Nobody answered.

She left a message, demanding that Tyler call her back.

She pressed the
END CALL
button. Then called again, telling them she was coming in to get him.

Christina sat on the couch, felt the humming noise grow louder until the couch started to spin.

The beginnings of another panic attack.

She was not capable of driving anywhere in this condition, she knew that. Defeated, she curled up against the couch cushions and began to cry.

Detectives Jackson and McManus were ready to call it a night.

The pine forest at the edge of Hang Ten’s parking lot twisted and moved under a steady rain as they headed for the Crown Vic.

The parking lot was deserted. The place was silent as a tomb.

Except for Daniel Cunningham, sitting alone in the dark inside his late-model Toyota.

Even Ross Middleton and his red Jaguar were gone.

Jackson checked his watch. It was late.

Still, Cunningham did not move.

Muttering something under his breath, Jackson angled the Crown Vic so its strobe lights hit Dan Cunningham
and his Toyota full on. “You’re free to leave now, Mr. Cunningham,” he boomed over the loudspeaker.

This prompted Dan Cunningham to make a move.

The Toyota’s engine sputtered and caught in an explosion of sound.

“Ouch,” said Jackson.

“Midasize!” McManus called.

“Loud enough to wake the neighbors,” Jackson remarked.

“Or at least the neighbor’s dog.”

The Toyota rumbled inside Frank’s head for a long time when he tried to fall asleep that night.

Christina Cardiff lay curled in a fetal position on her couch while her mind raced, turning over the news that her husband had been planning to divorce her. Jason had cheated on her many times over the years. He had been discreet, at least, until recently.

Christina, on the other hand, would have lost everything if she had cheated on him, and so she hadn’t. Until she met Daniel Cunningham…

Sex had never electrified her the way it did with Dan. There was something scary and wrong about it. Not just the fact that she was married to someone else, but the way they were with each other. And yet Christina gave herself over to being what Dan called his fuck buddy in a way she never had before.

Dan had taught her a whole new language, made her ask for it. “Dan,” she would say, “fuck me harder…”

Dan urged her forward, making fun of her when she protested at the start of their affair.

“I’ll make you beg for it.” Dan pinched her thighs and slapped her. “‘ Fuck me, Danny,’” he said in a falsetto
voice. “‘Please, please, baby, I want your big cock!’” He wouldn’t let up until she said the things he wanted her to say so he could get off.

And Christina had gone along with anything Dan suggested, discovering she liked it. Every time in bed with him was different, exciting. Christina had imagined she was falling for him, whatever that was, a fact she kept to herself.

Because she knew Dan Cunningham would never allow that.

Instead, he moved them further along each time they had sex, changing things so she never knew what to expect, bringing them closer to something she refused to think about.

It seemed to Christina now, curled on her couch in her living room at the edge of the storm-swollen Atlantic, that she and her lover had indeed crossed a line.

The realization caused her panic attack to worsen. She should call someone, she knew that. But who?

“Shit,” Christina said out loud.

Her voice sounded like a radio with the volume turned up too loud, reminding her she was alone in a house whose owner had just died.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

Snatches of thought and bits of memory spun through her mind like a wheel of chance at a carnival.

A carnival from hell.

The wheel slowed. Random pieces coalesced into images that were, mercifully, blurred around the edges.

Images she dared not bring into focus.

Christina Cardiff was having, in the parlance of Alcoholics Anonymous, a moment of clarity. A moment, looking back, when every drunk sees just how far down
the scale of human depravity they’ve slid. It’s enough, most would agree, to scare them sober.

Christina grabbed one of the throw pillows on the couch and kneaded it, holding on for dear life. She was trapped in the house with her worst enemy: her thoughts. She couldn’t take even one more minute of this. The paparazzi, in all likelihood, were still parked outside the front gate. She was in no shape to drive anyway. Looking out at the heavy darkness that pressed up against the dripping windows, Christina Cardiff opted for Plan B.

She headed out into the storm.

Wind whipped her hair into strands that clung to her face and neck.

Christina shivered.

It felt good to be cold, more alive than sitting alone in that house.

She picked her way across the wet stones of the patio, careful to steer clear of the pool’s inky surface, which beckoned like a siren’s call at the gates of the netherworld.

She forced herself to look away.

Her feet were soaked by the time she reached the back gate, hewn from thick cedar planks. She pushed it open and stepped through.

The wind was much stronger here. It whipped around her in gusts, pushing at her every which way.

What she noticed most was the ocean, thundering and pounding in the darkness just across the dunes.

It sounded closer than usual.

Christina hesitated. She hadn’t listened to a weather report, hadn’t done anything as mundane as that for as long as she could remember.

A hard gust of wind slammed the gate shut, and she
jumped, propelled forward along the narrow path that wound its way through the grass to the top of the dunes.

Here she paused, buffeted by the forces of the night.

The temperature was twenty degrees lower out here.

She shivered as raindrops pelted her bare skin, pushed by the gusting wind.

Unseen waves pounded nearby, shaking the ground beneath her feet.

Spray flew through the air, mixed with rain.

Christina opened her mouth to catch her breath and tasted salt.

She squinted her eyes shut against the spray and the foam that pelted her.

There was no moon.

It was impossible to see where sky met water, or waves met sand.

She should go back.

Something slithered across the sand and wrapped around her bare ankle.

Christina hopped around from one foot to another, trying to get the thing off. It wouldn’t let go. She screamed.

The sound was lost to the night and the wind.

She forced herself to reach down and pull the thing off. It was a long strand of wet saw grass.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that snakes were slithering around her bare feet. She ran, leaving the relative shelter of the dunes behind, emerging onto the open expanse that was the strand.

Normally, the strand stretched forty feet, from the bottom of the dune to the tide’s edge.

Not tonight. Something was wrong. Her feet landed in water mere steps below the dune.

The waves shouldn’t have been breaking so close to shore.

The wind and the rain made it too dark to see.

Breathing heavily, Christina retreated a few steps into the soft heavy sand at the base of the dune.

The beach moved and groaned with shifting shadows and wind. Bits of white flashed on top of the line of breakers, close by in the dark.

Too close.

Cold spray flew through the air, stinging her eyes.

The beach was alive with sound and blowing, twisting sand.

A shape emerged from the darkness, looming large and moving fast.

Fear gripped the base of her neck and fired through her nerve endings with the sizzling heat of an electric current.

The shadow moved, coming swiftly at her across the sand.

She opened her mouth to scream, but instinct warned against it.

The sound would make it easy for the thing to find her.

Christina’s breath stalled in her lungs. Her feet grew wings, propelling her back up into the rising dune. She scrambled through the thick sand, calculating how many steps there were to the cedar gate and its landside lock.

At least twenty feet, all of it uphill.

And she was no match for the form moving swiftly across the sand along the high-water mark.

Coming straight for her.

She stumbled and fell.

This time she screamed.