Shattered Shell (29 page)

“What the hell is this?" Doug asked, looking sullenly up at us. His hair was brown and thick and combed back, and he had a two- or three-day-old growth of beard. His nose was red and runny, and his eyes were weepy.

I said nothing and Felix poked through another door, which led to a bathroom that had a toilet and stand-up shower, and another thick mass of clothes on the floor. I walked through the mounds of trash and clothes to the rear door, which I closed, and Felix came back and stood next to me.

"Any other rooms?" I asked.

"This is it," Felix said, holstering his pistol. "Man must haw to sleep on the couch, which must be damn uncomfortable unless it's a fold-out. Is that what it is?"

"Who are you guys?" Doug demanded, his voice quavering, I looked around the room again. No other chairs. Oh, well, I opened up my coat, making sure that Doug could see my own 9mm, and I reached into a side pocket and took out a thin piece of cardboard. I smiled at him as I tossed my business card into his lap.

"We're your worst nightmare, Doug," I said.

"Hunh?"

I motioned to the card. "We're magazine writers, and we're here to talk."

Chapter Eighteen

He didn't seem impressed. Doug picked up the card and examined both sides and tossed it to the floor.

"The hell you're from some freakin' magazine," he said. "What do you want?"

Felix moved around so we were flanking him, and Felix had this odd little smile I've seen before on a few occasions, when he's in his working mode. Doug was looking at me, and I wished he was looking at Felix. He would definitely be more impressed.

"Information," I said. "We're looking for some information."

He sat back. "You should get the hell out of here, 'fore you get into trouble."

"What kind of trouble?" I asked. "Word is, you're not friendly with the cops."

By now he was smirking. "I didn't say anything about cops now, did I? But you still can get into the shits, if you don't watch yourself . So why don't you get out?"

"We sure will," Felix said, and Doug turned and looked at him and the smirk wavered. "But after you tell us what we need. We want information about your sister."

"Hunh?" and he looked back to me. "All this action, coming in here, wearing metal, and pulling me around, and you want to talk about Kara?"

"That's right," I said. "Kara, You know what happened to her a couple of weeks ago, light? Well, we're working on an article about the whole matter. We've interviewed her, the cops, her neighbors, her landlord, the place where she works, and even your parents. You're the last one on the list, Doug, so tell us what you know."

He rubbed at his nose, sniffled some. "You're whacked. I haven't seen her in months, and the only thing I know is something my dad said, about her being attacked or something." He smiled up at us. "Why don't you go talk to a detective up in Tyler? She probably knows a lot about Sis."

"You said your dad told you about Kara?"

He nodded. "Yeah, a week or two ago, when I was over there for a visit."

"Funny thing," I said. "I saw your parents last week and your mother says she hasn't seen you in years."

"That's right," he said. "Can't say you can blame her. Look at her two kids. One's a freak and the other turns out like me. So I stay away, but dear old Dad, he feels guilty. So we have a beer about once a month, and he slips me a Ben Franklin note, and that holds him for another month until he starts feeling guilty and he calls me up again."  He shrugged. "No matter. I stay and talk and listen to him whine for an hour about his empty life, and I get II couple of free beers and a hundred bucks. Not a bad deal."

Such a sport. I looked around the cluttered room and said, "So that's all you know, that she was attacked. Did you call her, write a note or something?"

He laughed. "Man, Kara is a lot different from all of us, but she and the old lady share a common gene, one that has an intense dislike of males. Nope, haven't seen nor spoken to her in ages. Dad told me she was doing fine, and I said that was good, and then he got weepy about all the Red Sox games we took in when I was a kid and left it at that."

Felix spoke up. "How are you keeping busy, Doug? Job market all right?"

He crossed his arms. "I'm doing okay. I got a setup in Boston, working in the harbor. Off the books but the pay is all right."

"Really?" Felix asked. "How's the pay in your extracurricular activities? Broken into any cottages on Plum Island or Tyler Beach lately?"

Another gaze, back and forth. "You guys are from a magazine.  The hell you say."

"Let's just say we're thorough researchers," I said. "So, how's your career path? Staying on the straight and narrow?"

"Piss off. And while you're at it, get the hell out before I call my lawyer."

Felix said, "Gee, now I'm trembling."

"Okay, piss off and get the hell out before I call some friends of mine, some friends that can put you two in a world of hurt."

"These good friends of yours?" I asked.

Another smirk. "No, not good, but tough."

I looked over at Felix, and he gave me a half-shrug. Not much to go on. We could stay longer and beat up on Mr. Miles and see what else happened, but it didn't seem like much. I nodded to Felix and he surprised me by sticking out his hand, and Doug, surprised, too, I guess, shook Felix's outstretched hand.

“Sorry to waste your time," Felix said. He motioned in my direction, "Lewis, there, he gets worked up on a story and he tends to go in pretty tough. Sorry again."

He looked over at me and said, "Time to leave, right?"

“Sure, why not?” I turned to leave, and then, for one searing moment, I wished I had done a better job of looking around earlier. I had missed something important, very important indeed, resting on the bookshelf with the paperbacks and souvenirs.

It was a ceramic dragon, rearing up, talons extended and mouth opened, looking like it was seconds away from spewing death upon a knight.

A knight, kneeling in terror and holding up his shield, in an apartment on the other side of the city.

We were parked in the same store lot again, watching the plows do their night work, scraping and moving tons of snow into piles that were beginning to dwarf the surrounding buildings. I had the heater on and we had cups of coffee, taken from a drive-up window at a Dunkin' Donuts. The coffee tasted fine, but I was in a foul mood.

"Well, we learned a lot tonight," Felix said, and I grunted in reply. He went on. "See the little scam I pulled with him, just before we left, when I shook his hand?"

"Sure. What were you trying to do, see if he belonged to the same lodge?"

"Hardly. The man says he has a job at the docks in Boston, working under the table. Those guys work hard in all weather, and even if you wear gloves, it does a number to your hands. The guy's hands are soft, soft as a virgin's butt. There's no way he does outside work. And did you notice the other thing about him?"

Amber lights flashed from the growling plows. "No, what was that?"

"Jesus, Lewis," Felix said. "The guy was coked up to the gills. Sniffling like that, his hands shaky, eyes watery. I bet you that's where his business interest lies, not with the docks. Our Doug was seriously strung out. Couldn't you see that?"

I turned and looked over at him. He was being polite, but he could tell he was chiding me, and I said in return, "No, but I saw something else."

"Oh? Like what? Like Doug doesn't do laundry?"

I raised up my coffee cup. "No. Our Doug was lying. He's been to Kara's place."

Felix shifted in his seat, to get a better look at me. "Say again?"

"Doug's been there, and probably recently. When you and 1 were at Kara's, do you remember her living room? What was there, besides furniture and books?"

He thought for a moment. "Tapestry hanging from one wall. Coffee table and such. Closed-off fireplace, some junk on the mantelpiece."

"That junk was three ceramic sculptures, showing a fantasy world. Knights and trolls and horses. Two of the sculptures were a matched set. The other showed a knight, kneeling in fear, waiting to be attacked. But there was nothing attacking him. Nothing."

"You saw it at Doug's place," he said, no more chiding in his voice.

"That I did. A sculpture of a dragon, waiting to move down to kill something, and a perfect match to the knight sculpture. It belongs at Kara's place, but it's at her brother's dump. He says he doesn't know where she lives and he says he's never talked to her. Felix, the man's lying about the first and I'm sure he's lying about the second."

Felix's voice sounded bleak. "Are you saying he raped his sister?"

The coffee seemed to back up my throat. "I don't know. I do know he's been to her place. Look, we've tracked this one down pretty far. We talked to Kara, cops, neighbors, parents, employers, and the landlord, who later gets his throat slit. He was the closest thing we had to a witness, someone who said he heard two sets of voices that night. Now he's dead and, as someone once said, that's I hell of a coincidence."

"That it is. Go on."

"Now, here's another coincidence. Kara's brother has a record, and as you've pointed out, he's probably working something illegal with pharmaceuticals. I'm not saying he's a suspect. I just think for the first time in a long time, we've got someone we want to talk with again, someone with an interesting background."

"Tonight? We could be back there again in ten minutes."

A plow rumbled by, the driver up in his cab looking down at us, probably wondering what in hell we were doing out here on a cold January night.

"No, not tonight," I said. "I want him to think about things, maybe get him nervous. If you got the time, maybe I can convince you to do some surveillance."

"More money involved?"

“Yes.”

"Then I can get convinced, until it's travel time. Then what?"

"Then we come back and ask him some more questions. Play good cop, bad cop."

Felix yawned, rubbed at his face. "I don't know if I like that."

"Why?"

"Because I always have to play bad cop, that's why."

I finished my coffee and shifted the Rover into drive, and we ambled out of the parking lot. "That's the curse you have, Felix. You have a gift. You should be proud."

Felix muttered something about what I could do with the gift and I drove us both home. When I got back into my house I had a message on my answering machine, and it was from Paula Quinn, and she sounded out of breath.

“Lewis? It's Paula. I have to see you tomorrow. I've got Mike Ahern's personnel file and there's something in there I've got to show you. Something very important."

The next day Paula and I shared sandwiches in the front seat of my Rover, parked next to a crowded sub shop in Falconer on Route 286, looking out across the marsh and the snow and ice, leading all the way up to the concrete and steel structures of the Falconer nuclear power plant. As we ate she nodded in the direction of the' plant.

"Story I'm working on now involves that place," she said, munching on a vegetarian sub. "Something about the siren poles."

“What about them?" I said, picking out onions from a plain steak and cheese.

"There's over a hundred utility poles set up around a ten-mile radius of the plant, each with a siren that can blast your eardrums if you're standing underneath them. Part of the emergency evacuation plan. Thing is, some radical anti-nuke group that no one's heard of before --- called the Nuclear Liberation Front --- they've started taking potshots at the poles, chopping them down."

"Let me guess," I said, giving up on my now-cold sub. "They figure if they take out the poles, the federal government will say the emergency plan is flawed, and that the plant's operating license will be pulled. Right?"

"Yep," she said, taking a swig of iced tea. "But our radical geniuses either don't know or don't care that each pole has been wired. You knock out the siren mechanism, the plant automatically gets notified by a radio signal, and they call the cops and roll a repair truck, and in about a half-hour, the pole's either back in business or they drive in a truck-mounted siren to fill the gap if the pole's been cut."

"Demonstrating yet again the power of big business to over-come every obstacle in order to maintain operations," I said. "Look, enough of the nuke. What do you have?"

She picked up a slim leather case and zipped it open, pulling out some documents.

"You would not believe the heat I went through to get into his file," Paula said. "I had to remind Kristie how I saved her butt back in college. Still, she was scared, and I don't blame her. She could have gotten fired, letting me look at a personnel file."

"But still you asked her, right?"

She looked at me. "You feel so guilty about it, why don't you hand it back?"

"I don't feel that guilty," I said, beginning to flip through the sheets. "At least not yet. Tell me, what am I looking for?"