The Dead Room (6 page)

11

Darby waited for the boy to speak, afraid that if she pressed him, he’d shut down.

Two minutes later he did. He wouldn’t look at her.

‘I promised my mother. I promised her I’d tell the truth only to Thomas McCormick.’

‘The truth about what?’

‘About my grandparents,’ he said. ‘About why they were killed.’

Don’t push or you’ll lose him.

She waited.

‘I know who did it,’ he said. ‘I know their names.’

‘Look at me, John.’

When he did, she said, ‘You’re not alone in this any more. Whatever it is that happened, I can help you. You can trust me.’

‘Sean.’

‘Is that the name of one of the men who murdered your grandparents?’

‘No. That’s my real name. Nobody is supposed to know. Only your father knows. My mother –’

He stopped talking, snapping his attention to the voices shouting outside his room. He looked frightened.

The door opened. The boy jumped, hitting the back of his head against the wall.

A searing anger lifted Darby off the bed. She got to her feet as the lights were turned on.

Pine and the patrolman crowded the doorway. They seemed out of breath. They were speaking to her but she didn’t hear them, her attention locked on the man standing near the foot of the bed. He wore a crisp tan suit and a floral tie, his short black hair damp with the rain.

A Federal agent. The smug expression on his face gave it away, even before he flashed the tin.

‘I’m Special Agent Phillips,’ he said in a calm and somewhat effeminate voice. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room, Dr McCormick. I’m officially taking over this investigation.’

Darby pushed the Fed away from the bed and got in his face. ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

‘I beg to differ. His mother is a fugitive. They’ve crossed state lines, which makes this a Federal investigation. And you should know better than to question him without an adult present.’

‘He’s not a suspect, you idiot.’

Phillips looked at the boy. ‘I’m taking you to the Albany field office in New York. We’ll place you –’

‘I’m going to give you a choice,’ Darby said. ‘You can walk out of here standing, or you can be thrown out of here.’

Pine stepped forward, clearing his throat. ‘He’s got a fugitive warrant, Darby.’

‘I don’t have time for this,’ Phillips said, and pushed her to one side.

Mistake.

She grabbed his wrist, twisting his hand behind his back. She grabbed the back of his shirt collar, dragged him across the floor and shoved him face first against the wall.

The Fed yelped in pain. She didn’t let go. She applied more pressure to his arm, wanting to snap it. Instead, she leaned in close to him and said, ‘You don’t listen too well, do you?’

She pulled him away from the wall, dragged him to the door and threw him into the corridor. He fell against the floor, gritting his teeth and sweat popping out on his forehead as he glared up at her.

‘Keep your ass out of here,’ she said.

What she saw in his eyes she had seen in too many men – an insecure boy trapped in a man’s body. A guy like Phillips would lay in wait, nursing his wounded ego and pride. He’d take his embarrassment and then channel it into his only real talent: finding
the
most spectacular way to screw you over.

‘Calm down,’ Pine said behind her. ‘Nobody here wants to hurt you.’

Darby turned and saw Patrolman Rodman reaching for his sidearm.

The boy was holding a gun – a small .38 revolver, aimed at Pine.

Where the hell did he get the gun?

‘
Stay back
,’ John –
Sean
– screamed. ‘
I’m not going with him
.’

Darby moved in front of Pine, raising her hands near her head. ‘You’re right, you’re not going with him.’

‘
You can’t make me. YOU CAN’T MAKE ME
.’

‘Look at me,’ Darby said. ‘
Look at me
.’

He did, lips quivering. Tears spilled down his cheeks and the gun shook in his hand.

‘You don’t have to go with him, I promise.’ Her heart was beating fast but she wasn’t afraid. ‘And I promised I’d help you, remember? You can trust me.’

He didn’t answer. He scanned each of the faces staring at him.

Darby cocked her head over her shoulder and said, ‘Everyone, out of the room.’

Pine hesitated.

‘Do it,’ Darby said. ‘
Now
.’

When everyone had left, she backed up slowly and shut the door.

The boy’s frightened gaze shifted to the recorder lying on the tangled blanket.

‘It’s off,’ Darby said. ‘It’s just you and me, Sean.’

He started sobbing but didn’t lower the gun.

‘You’ve been through a lot tonight,’ Darby said. ‘You’re scared, you’re angry and upset. I understand what you’re going through. My father was murdered. Whatever this is about, I’ll help you solve it.’

‘You can’t.’

‘I can. I
will
. I gave you my word. Whatever this is about, you can trust me.’

He kept sobbing.

‘Put the gun down on the bed,’ Darby said. ‘Just put it down and then you and I will talk. Just me and you, okay? I promise –’

He slammed the muzzle underneath his chin and pulled the trigger.

12

Jamie Russo popped the boot, then considered the two handguns lying on the passenger seat: her .44 Magnum and a Glock with an extended magazine. She went with the Magnum, slid it inside her shoulder holster and stepped out of the car. The right side of her face throbbed and she could still taste blood on the back of her throat.

A full moon hung in the sky above the rock walls of the old Belham Quarry. She had left the car headlights on and could see the edge of the cliff. She wasn’t worried about being seen. No houses for miles and she doubted anyone came out this way any more, especially at this time of night.

She walked to the back of the car, her sneakers sinking in the soft, muddy earth.

The man she knew only as Ben lay on his back inside the boot. His clothes and swollen, cut face were smeared with blood and covered with shards of glass. His icy-blue eyes were open, squinting underneath a pale square of dim light.

Thank God
, she thought, sighing with relief. Before leaving the house, she had quickly bound the gunshot wound on his thigh with duct tape to keep him from bleeding out. During the long, slow drive through the back streets, then navigating her way through the maze of winding trails that led to the quarry, she had choked on the possibility that he would die.

A sick fear mixed with excitement rushed through her veins as she gripped him by his Celtics jacket and hoisted him up into a sitting position. She wasn’t worried about him hitting her again. She had duct-taped his hands behind his back and tied his ankles together before dragging him across the kitchen hall to the garage.

Thick strips of duct tape covered his mouth. She yanked the tape down across his lips, taking skin and hair.

Ben’s eyes clamped shut. He gritted his teeth, hissing back a scream. She stared at him, taking in his features again: the dishevelled black hair matted against his sweaty, tanned face; his broken nose; big ears sticking out from the sides of his head; perfect white teeth.

Caps
, she thought, and then stared at his neck. The first time she had seen him, that night in her home, he’d had what she called ‘rooster neck’, a wrinkled curtain of flesh dangling underneath his chin. It was gone now, and the skin along his face was smooth and tight, not a wrinkle anywhere.
He’s had a facelift. And his eyes… I could’ve sworn they were brown
.

Ben opened his eyes. They were bloodshot and rheumy. After he had hit her back at the house, a good solid right cross that had nearly knocked her off her feet, she had wrestled him to the kitchen floor and slammed his head twice against the broken shards of glass.

Ben rested the back of his head against the opened boot lid. Moths batted against the lid’s single bulb.

‘How long have you been following me?’ he croaked.

Hearing his voice released the vice-like grip on her heart. For the first time in years, she felt as if she could breathe.

‘You going to answer my question?’

‘Today,’ she said. ‘This… morning.’

‘Where?’

‘Drugstore.’

‘Drugstore… drugstore… The one in Wellesley Center?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve been watching me all day?’

She nodded. He’d left the drugstore and climbed into the passenger seat of a black BMW with tinted windows. She tailed the car on the highway as Ben and his partner drove to Charlestown. An hour later, when the BMW pulled into the narrow driveway of a small corner home, she watched, from the minivan’s rear-view mirror, Ben and the driver step out of the car. The driver was a few inches taller than Ben, maybe six two, and had grey curly hair and a dark tan. He wore white shorts and a bright floral Hawaiian shirt that couldn’t hide his enormous stomach.

She found a parking spot at the far end of the street and watched the house for the rest of the morning and afternoon. She left the minivan once to run across the street to the drugstore to buy a couple of energy bars, a bottle of water and a box of latex gloves.

At half past eight the BMW pulled out of the driveway. It stopped once, in front of some shitty tenement in Dorchester to pick up the white man in the suit, and then the three of them drove straight to the house in Belham.

‘You followed me all day and not once did I see you,’ Ben said. He shook his head. ‘I must be getting soft in my old age. What’s your name, hon?’

‘Say… it.’

‘If I knew your name, don’t you think I’d tell you?’

He blinked several times, then squinted as he tried to focus on her face. Fine white scars from the multiple corrective surgeries covered her jaw line, cheek and forehead. The side effects from the steroids and seizure medication gave her face a puffy, bloated look that no amount of dieting or exercise could diminish.

‘Five… ah… years,’ she said. ‘Five years… ago, you… ah… ah… came, ah…’

‘What’s with your voice? You retarded or something?’

‘No.’

‘Then what is it? Some sort of birth defect?’

Jamie couldn’t get the words out. She knew what she wanted to say:
Five years ago, you came into my house and shot me in the head. You shot my two children while your two partners were downstairs torturing my husband
. Her problem was actual speech. The .32 slug that had entered through her lower jaw, shattering her cheekbone and severing the optic nerves of her left eye, had lodged itself in the front lobe – Broca’s area, the neurologists had told her, the brain’s central processing system for language and speech. While she could understand language just fine, could form and process complex sentences easily inside her head, the brain damage had saddled her with expressive aphasia, this maddening, incurable condition that limited her speech to no more than four words at a time, mostly nouns and verbs delivered in a slow, telegraphic manner. On a good day.

‘Shot,’ she said.

‘Someone shot you in the face?’

‘You… ah… did.’

Ben staring like he didn’t recognize her. Like he didn’t remember.

‘You… ah… shot me… and… ah… my children. Carter and… ah… ah… Michael. Your… ah… two partners… ah… murdered… my… ah… husband. Dan… Dan Russo.’

‘Can’t say I know anyone by that name.’

‘He… ah… ah… a contractor. Wellesley.’

‘That his company name? Wellesley?’

A slight grin on Ben’s face, having fun with this.

‘Lived… ah… in… ah… Wellesley. You’re… ah… two… ah… partners, they… ah… ah… killed him. Rope. Tied it and… ah… ah… neck. Strangled him. Waste disposal… my house. Wellesley. Five… ah… years… ah… five years… ago.’

‘I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.’

No. No, she didn’t.

This morning, after she had dropped off her prescription, she had turned around and seen, at the far end of the aisle, a man looking over shelves stocked with pain relievers. This man had the same thin, almost feminine lips as the man who had forced his way into her home. The organizer, the man she knew only as Ben.

No… No, it can’t be him
, she had thought. Why would Ben come back to Wellesley after all this time? Ben and his two partners, the ski-masked men who had murdered Dan in the kitchen, had disappeared from the face of the earth five years ago. Those men were never found and never would be.

And Ben, she remembered quite clearly, had had a blond crew cut threaded with grey. The man standing in the aisle wore a dark blue baseball cap over long black hair that curled around the ears. Ben had had pale skin. This man had a dark tan and was dressed like someone who spent his days lounging on a boat Sperry Top-Sider shoes, khaki shorts and a pair of aviator sunglasses hanging in the V of a white untucked Oxford shirt. He wore a thick gold wedding band and a gold Rolex Yacht-Master watch. Ben hadn’t worn a wedding ring.

Jamie remembered watching as the man reached for something on the top shelf. On the wrist of his right hand and stretching across his palm was a thick rubbery white scar shaped like a mutant starfish.

Ben had had the exact same scar. She had seen it when he wrapped the duct tape across her mouth. She hadn’t seen the two men who had entered the house. Later, she’d heard one of them call upstairs: ‘Let’s go, Ben.’

‘Partners,’ Jamie said, reaching inside her windbreaker for the Magnum. ‘I want… ah… their names.’

Ben hawked a gob of bloody phlegm over the side of the car, then leaned back against the boot lid. Nothing lived behind those eyes. Just two glassy lifeless balls polished to a bright shine. Soulless.

‘Partners,’ she said. ‘Names.’

He didn’t answer.

She pressed the muzzle against his forehead, blood pumping through her limbs.

Ben didn’t flinch.

‘I… I… will… ah…

‘Oh, I definitely think you’ll kill me. You shot your way inside the house, shot me in the thigh – and you did one hell of a job taking down my friend. You’re a regular Calamity Jane, blazing new frontiers.’ His voice was surprisingly calm. ‘Nobody learns to shoot like that unless they’re a cop. You still on the force, sweetheart? I’m assuming you are, since you go around carrying that big gun you’ve got.’

She didn’t answer. She had retired from her patrolman days after Carter was born. After Dan had died, she carried the Magnum with her everywhere. For protection.

‘Why… ah… woman and… ah… boy… ah –’

‘Are you asking me what I was doing inside the house?’

She nodded.

‘That’s confidential information,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Man… ah… ah… who drove… ah… you, was… ah… he… ah –’

‘Take a look at this from my point of view. I have something you need – the missing pieces of the puzzle, you could say. I give it to you and you blow my brains out and you, what, leave my body in the boot? Is that the plan?’

Jamie didn’t answer. When she had indulged in this fantasy, she’d always imagined Ben begging for his life. She’d imagined him crying and screaming. Sometimes she’d imagined him pious and remorseful, reduced to a blubbering, child-like state where he confessed all of his sins. But now, in real life, out in the hot, dark woods buzzing with mosquitoes, Ben was acting as if having a gun pressed to his head was normal. As if he’d been in this exact situation before and knew how to play it.

‘I’m gonna let you in on a secret,’ Ben said. ‘I’m a cop.’