The Last Kind Words (30 page)

“Does her father own a boat?” I asked.

“Yes. A twenty-four-foot Wellcraft cuddy. Keeps it docked at a marina but apparently hasn’t taken it out in years.”

“Cord in the garage?”

“We’re not discussing this further.”

I thought of Sharon, the youngest sister, who would now be coddled obsessively by her parents. They were going to hold her close but not close enough, because the ghosts of her sisters were always going to get more attention.

“Did you find the .45?” I asked. “Or any gun? She was tough. She knew how to fire a gun. Check her hands for gunpowder residue.”

“I don’t need a career thief to teach me how to do the job of a police officer. She didn’t pull the trigger on you. You managed to talk your way out of it.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to talk her into showing up here. Was she done on the spot or strangled elsewhere and left here?”

Gilmore snapped his fingers under my nose. His expression had hardened. His eyes weren’t full of sadness anymore, they were like shale. “Focus now, Terrier. You don’t ask the questions. You answer them. You assure me of your sincerity and maybe I won’t throw you in jail tonight. Or maybe I will. Did you have anything at all to do with this?”

“No. How long’s she been dead?”

“Get out and go home.”

“Tell me, all right?”

He turned away for a moment, and when he turned back he stared deeply into my face, trying to read whether I was someone he could trust. I wasn’t, of course, but he was still giving me leeway. I knew why. On some level he was acting like I was his younger brother, the punk always getting his nose dirty but who was forgiven for it. He looked away again, and when he faced me I could see that he’d come to a decision.

“Early this morning,” he said. “And just so I know, Terrier, where were you this morning?”

I didn’t want to drag Eve Drayton into this but there was no choice. I told him about Eve and even my father’s figurine collecting, but I left out the bit about Higgins. Gilmore nodded.

“Your old man, he likes his Toby mugs.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“He’s showed them to me before. Now, give me the names of all the antidepressants again and exactly where I can find them in her room.”

I told him about the false outlet and the five-inch-deep cubbyhole.

Gilmore nodded. “She only had legal prescriptions for the Zoloft and Valium. All of those others, in combination—self-medicating on stolen pills, maybe expired—who the hell knows how someone will react with all of that in their system.”

“So you think she really offed herself?” I asked.

“That’s what it looks like so far,” he said.

“I don’t think she would do it.”

He frowned at me, his face mottled with emotion. “How do you know?”

“I just feel it.”

“You met her for what? All of fifteen minutes?”

“It was enough,” I said.

He scoffed. He seemed to take a dim kind of pleasure in schooling me on the realities of the world. “No, it’s not. Twenty years isn’t enough for you to really know someone, or do I need to remind you of that?”

I held my hands up in a gesture that might have been anger or helplessness. “No, you don’t.”

“She was a screwed-up kid taking powerful meds in dangerous amounts. With all the renewed coverage on the case of her sister’s murder, she was probably hurting worse than ever. And you showing up in the middle of her bedroom couldn’t have helped any.”

“Listen to me, she was sharp, she was on the ball, she—”

“You don’t know a thing, Terrier. Now go home. Don’t mention any of this to your journalist girlfriend or I’ll—”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“—pull you in on obstruction. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then go.”

I got out. I walked toward the crime-scene tape. I glanced back at Cara. Figures in blue uniforms and white gloves worked over her excitedly. Who had iced her? Why now? I thought, My Christ, has he been watching me? Is he following me? Is he that close even now? Her dead eyes were aimed in my direction.

I
headed back to my car. I sat heavily behind the wheel. I scanned the faces in the crowd. The only one I recognized in the area was Gilmore’s.

Is he that close even now?

The dead girl continued to watch me. My body was a little ahead of my mind. I glanced in the rearview and saw that my face was pale.

I imagined Gilmore sitting with my father, playing cards with my uncles, being friendly with my brother. I saw the two of them out at the Elbow Room together, sharing stories, frustrations, fears. I thought of him opening up to Collie about his marital troubles. Gilmore had told me,
Anytime you get too curious about what was going on in his head, remember where that kind of thinking leads
. Maybe he’d gotten close enough that the underneath had swallowed him too.

My father had said,
He’s got too much time on his hands. I don’t know what he does with it all
.

I gripped the steering wheel, my thoughts burning. I tried to turn myself away from what I was thinking, but I couldn’t.

He’d tracked me to the Elbow Room. He hadn’t worked the cases, he’d told me, but he’d looked into them. But what if he was already familiar with them? The whores, the drug addicts, the women presumably murdered by their boyfriends. Gilmore would know exactly what to do to make those cases look like accidents or suicides. He’d know how to plant evidence to point at a husband or a pimp.

I shook my head to shake the questions off or to line the pieces up in place. Was that why his wife had left him? After he’d killed Rebecca Clarke in the park, did she know her husband had gone off the big ledge?

I thought about Gilmore wanting to become a part of my family and what that might actually mean. What if he’d been following Collie?
He was always around, always in our business. He’d spent so much time projecting that big-brother vibe that I was starting to pick up on it.

Except my big brother was insane.

Gilmore could’ve been shadowing Collie around that night. He could’ve sensed what was going to happen. He was going to lose his wife and kids. He was already heading out onto the edge.

I said the name once out loud. “Gilmore.”

Christ, it was crazy. I shook my head again. Collie had me so twisted up I didn’t know what to think anymore. Gilmore. Was it possible? Why was I wasting time even considering it?

My cell phone rang. I’d never heard it ring before and it took me a second to figure out which button to push to answer.

“Hello?”

“You heard about Cara Clarke?” Lin asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you really believe that I’m killing those girls in an effort to somehow help your brother?”

“No,” I said.

She let out a deep breath. “Then you accept there’s a murderer out there?”

“No,” I said. “I’m still not sure about that.”

“What? Why not?”

I wondered if I should mention Gilmore. But I wasn’t sure of a damn thing. “It looks like Cara Clarke committed suicide.”

“That’s just the killer covering his tracks and obscuring the facts!”

“Maybe,” I said. And again, “Maybe. But you don’t know for sure.”

I could hear the tremor in her voice. “But it’s—it’s so—”

“Don’t say ‘obvious,’ Lin. Nothing about this is conclusive.”

“Will you go to the police anyway?” she asked.

“I already have,” I said.

“Do you want my files? Something here might help them.”

“They’ve already gone through your files, right? They’ve already written you off as a nut. I might stop by to go through them again. I’ll call you if I learn anything more.”

The anger and disappointment seemed to have tightened her mouth. She could barely get the words out. “Thank you, Terry.”

I snapped my phone shut, sat in my car, and watched the mob thin as the cop cars came and went. I kept thinking I should have done something differently. Cara had been a kid in pain and I could’ve reached out to her more. I could have advised her better. The same was true about my own sister. I needed to watch over her more carefully. I couldn’t make the same mistake again.

Gilmore.

I’d memorized his address from the rent receipt in his desk at the precinct. I thought of Gilmore working my kidneys, full of fury but trying to control it. Hating me, maybe the same way that Collie did. A man on the edge who’d been dipping his toe into bloody puddles.

I drove over to the complex. It was nicer than I remembered, with a large open court full of flowers and trimmed hedges. He had a one-bedroom corner apartment. There were three locks on the door, looked like two of them were fairly fresh. Did that prove he had something to hide? Gilmore should know that putting in your own locks often made it easier for someone to break in. Locksmiths got sloppy, didn’t cut out the perfectly sized holes for the latches and bolts. The work sometimes loosened the door in its frame, giving a little extra play in the setting. There was no one around. I felt strangely calm considering my suspicions. It took me fifty seconds to get through all three locks.

I crept the place. I searched for anything that might tie Gilmore to the Clarkes or the other women. I checked all the obvious and inconspicuous places. I searched for kill trophies. I checked his cereal boxes again. No cash, nothing. He’d wised up. He wouldn’t keep money around the place anymore. So where was the extra cash that he made off Danny Thompson? Was he flying straighter now or did he have a secure lockbox someplace?

He didn’t take his work home with him. There were no files, no paperwork. I went through his computer and discovered nothing encrypted. All I found were photo albums of his kids, hundreds of pictures of better times with them and his wife at the beach, trick-or-treating,
opening Christmas presents. I found the photos that my old man had taken of Gilmore’s daughters, the two of them standing near their mother’s car, as if waiting to be driven to school. What did that say about Gilmore? Was he obsessing over his kids? Over girls or women in general? And what the hell did it say about my father? Was it as creepy as it seemed? Or was it just further proof that lonely men with too much time on their hands will do strange things to alleviate their average sorrows?

It wasn’t hard to push a good man off the big ledge. It happened every day. Heartbreak could make you a murderer. So could losing your job, drugs, or having one beer too many. Or maybe nothing at all, like Collie kept saying.

An hour after I’d entered, I relocked his door and got back to my car. I phoned information and got the number for the television station where Eve and Vicky worked. It took me ten minutes to wade through the menu and finally get Eve. She answered on the first ring.

“You’ve heard about Cara Clarke?” I asked.

She wasn’t someone who needed the quiet hellos and the after-sex small talk. I wondered if I did, if I normally would want it if I hadn’t just seen the body of a murdered teenage girl.

“Vicky’s been on scene,” Eve said. “We’re busy here now, Terry. Your brother’s story was big before, but now—”

“Off the charts.”

“Yes.”

I had difficulty saying it. “I need your help.”

“Anything,” she said.

“In exchange for an in-depth on-camera interview, right?”

“No, Terry. I know you’d probably agree to sit for one, but it would be a lie. I’m a professional but not a shrew. Hopefully we’re at least a few steps along the road to being friends. So what can I do to help?”

“The cop I mentioned. His name is Detective Gilmore.”

I could hear her perk up in her seat. In the background there was a din of voices, the sound of a lot of activity. I wondered what other kind of fallout Cara’s death would bring.

“You said you still needed him. That you didn’t want me to do an exposé.”

“I just want you to dig. Find out what you can about him.”

“Why?”

Because
, I nearly said,
my brother is manipulating me into being suspicious of everyone, and it’s making me as crazy as he is
.

“A screwy hunch. It’s probably nothing, but I’ve got a gut feeling I can’t shake loose.”

“And what am I looking for?”

“I’m not certain. See if his jacket has gotten sketchy in any way over the last five years. If there’ve been any off-duty collars in places where he shouldn’t be. If there’s been any kind of internal investigation into him. If he’s had a psych evaluation.”

I could tell that she held the phone a little tighter to her lips, got herself away from the noise of the newsroom. Now there was something like concern in her voice. “You suspect him of something. What is it?”

“First let me know if anything pans out, then I’ll fill you in if I can.”

“You ask a lot,” she said.

“Everyone does.”

“Give me a couple of hours.”

I disconnected. I had to keep moving. I was close to the address that had been on Butch’s suspended driver’s license. I had to keep an eye on the punk and his crew and see if Dale needed something more than a butterfly knife to protect herself. I had to see who his connections were.