The River Killings (34 page)

One night I studied one of the articles that insisted Nick had to be guilty. The angle of Annie’s bullet wound was wrong for a suicide. And it had been on the wrong side of the body. Why would right-handed Annie twist the gun to the left side of her body before firing?

“So what do you think?”

I jumped, startled, trying to cover the screen, push a button, close the window all at the same time. “Nick . . . you scared me.” “What are you doing?”

He looked wounded. Or worried. Oh, damn. What could I say? I searched for an excuse, couldn’t find one. “They acquitted me, you know.” I nodded. “Of course they did.”

“So why are you down here in the middle of the night reading about it?”

I dodged his eyes. They were too blue, confusing me. “If you want to know something about Annie or what happened, why don’t you just ask?” There was an edge to his voice.

I nodded again. “I didn’t want to bring it up.” “Zoe, every night you’ve been getting out of bed and sneaking downstairs. Is this why? What for? What are you trying to find?” “Heather said some stuff. It’s stupid. I should just let it go.” He sat. “Heather talked to you?”

We’d tried to spare Nick the grisly details because he’d been so weak. He knew only that Heather had been killed as we were struggling over her gun.

“She said it wasn’t a suicide.”

He blinked rapidly.

“Tell me. What else did she say?”

I told him everything. What she’d said. How she’d shot herself.

He sat head in hands. “Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamn.”

I watched him, waiting, not sure what to do. He pulled a chair over, sat beside me, took my hand.

“Zoe—you and Molly—I’m sorry this came home to you. This had nothing to do with you.” He touched my cheek. “But, believe me. Heather . . . Heather was jealous of her sister. All her life. And she had a crush on me. It got out of control. After Annie died, she stalked me. I guess, in her fantasy, with Annie dead, I’d marry her or… “

“Or?”

“Oh, Jesus.” He slapped his forehead and slumped onto the desk.

“What?”

“Oh, man.” “Nick?”

“She must have been there. She had to have been there.” I’d thought so. “Tell me, Nick.”

“Shit. Heather had to have been in the house. I never saw it until now. I swear—I don’t really know what happened. It’s like I told you and like I told the investigators. Annie and I fought over the gun. She shot me. I passed out, so I don’t know how she died. But if Heather was there, she’d have seen Annie shoot me and— oh, shit. Maybe Annie didn’t shoot herself after all.”

Blue eyes the color of ice met mine, waiting while the information filtered through my brain and formed a coherent thought. Slowly, I began to understand why Annie’s fatal wound had been at an odd angle on the wrong side of her body. And how Heather had known her sister’s death hadn’t been suicide.

T
HE
D
AY
OF T
HE
R
EGATTA
A
RRIVED
B
EFORE
S
USAN
O
R
I W
ERE
ready. Susan had spent the morning arguing with electricians; she arrived at the boathouse in full fighting mode. Rowers crossed the dock, carrying oars and boats and bow numbers for their races, wishing each other good luck. A few who recognized me asked how I was, but the slave cartel, Harry and Tony and the circumstances of their deaths weren’t the topics of the day. people were there to race, and their attention was on the water conditions, the weather, the level of competition in their events. Despite the recent death of the head coach, the water-ice man, and the house manager, rowers maintained their priorities; it was race day. Energy was focused.

“You scared?” Susan asked as she pulled a pair of oars off the rack. “You look green.”

As usual lately, I felt green. Not just nervous. Sick to my stomach. “Scared? Me?”

“It’s not fear,” Susan explained. “It’s adrenaline. Your body is prepping for a challenge, so you feel an adrenaline rush. It feels like butterflies in the stomach, but it’s really strength. You’re gearing up.”

She went on as we carried our oars onto the dock. She was, after all, the bow. “Just remember to relax your shoulders and square at the catch and we’ll be fine.”

I watched a quad of men shove off the dock, their heads wrapped in bandannas, their oars moving in perfect synchrony.

“We’re not ready for this, Susan. I still have a bump on my head and bruises all over.”

“Just remember to swing your body and push with your quadriceps.”

My quadriceps?

“Zoe. Relax. It’s our first regatta; all we want to do is finish upright.” “Great.”

“Nick and Molly will be cheering us on with Tim and the girls. They are all excited to watch the race.” That only made me more nervous.

“Zoe. We’ll be on the water for maybe an hour. The race will take less than five minutes. No big deal. What’s the worst that could happen?”

I blinked at her, but she saw no irony in her comment. Together we went to the boat bay and lifted the
Andelai
off its rack, then walked it down to the water. While Susan gave me a nonstop last-minute course on how to row, we locked our oars in, adjusted our shoes, stepped into the boat, sat and shoved off the dock.

We were on the way to our first race. The whole way up to the starting line, Susan chattered. We were good enough to do well, she said. We’d worked hard. We’d practiced. We knew what to do. I told myself I shouldn’t be nervous.compared to being shot at or hit on the head and chained into an unventilated overheated van, racing a shell down the river was nothing. I was a mature woman. A mother. A professional and almost a wife. In the scope of life, an event as insignificant as a thousand-meter sculling race shouldn’t affect me, shouldn’t make me blink. It wasn’t an event; it was too minor to be an event. It was a nonevent.

At the top of the river we turned and approached the starting line. Susan had stopped yammering; she sat at attention, uncharacteristically quiet.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Look,” she said. “The other boats.”

I turned and looked around the river. An official’s launch and
several other doubles—five, in all—floated above Strawberry Mansion Bridge, waiting to be called to line up at the start. Women wearing matching unisuits sat in their doubles, looking large and intimidating. Muscular. Beastlike.

I looked off to the shore, focusing on a row of happy turtles lined up on a log, telling myself that the race was only a few minutes of our lives, shorter than a commercial break, shorter even than many a bowel movement, less important than either. When the official in the launch yelled for our race to move to the start, I made myself take deep breaths and willed myself not to faint. We can do this, I told myself.

At the starting line, the officials yelled for one boat to move up three feet, another to move back half a stroke, trying to even us out. I sat with my oars squared in the water, ready to take off.

The official called, “Attention.”

I sat ready, and when he yelled, “Go,” I pushed my legs down, pulled my oars up, feeling the rush on either side of us as boats shot out of peripheral vision. I took a second desperate stroke, a third. Our shell shuddered but went nowhere. Susan sat frozen, her oars not moving.

An official yelled at us from a launch, and I kept stroking, forgetting about technique, frantically pushing my legs and pulling on my oars, tugging us away from the starting line, barely managing to shout, “Row, dammit!”

Susan finally sprang to life. I heard her grunt as her oars slapped the water behind me, and soon afterward, realizing that I was going to faint, I remembered to breathe.

After that, I was out of my body, watching from the clouds as our boat plowed ahead. Somehow, cold water was splashing even in the clouds, and voices were yelling, “Go, Mom!” Susan and I each assumed that we were the moms being cheered for, so we rowed even harder, beyond exhaustion, beyond pain. At some point, my lungs began to throb, and my mouth to taste coppery like blood. At some point I prayed to God that, if only he’d let me survive this race, I’d never ever get into or even close to a boat
again. At some point I thought of death, how merciful it would be never enduring another agonizing stroke or searing breath. “Pick it up!” Susan yelled.

“Go, Humberton,” someone called from the shore. I kept my eyes ahead and rowed, hoping my heart would finally explode so I could stop.

“Power twenty,” Susan coughed.

Somehow, the thousand meters had extended into an endless loop, but, muscles screaming, I pulled my oars, accepting that I was in hell and that it was always going to be this way. There would be no end, no relief.

At some point in the maze of experience we think of as time, the race ended. From eons away came the toot of the finish as we crossed the line, and Susan and I were both alive, still in the boat, still above water. I remember leaning over the side and donating my lunch to the fish as Susan began shrieking, jubilant and surprised. And then, recovering, wiping sweat out of my eyes, I looked to the shore to see Nick and Molly near the grandstand with Tim and Susan’s girls, waving and cheering. Dimly, I heard another toot as another boat crossed the line.

Not only had we survived the race; we hadn’t come in last.

SUDDENLY,
I
T
W
AS
S
UMMER
. M
OLLY
L
IKED
D
AY
CAMP,
E
SPECIALLY
swimming. She’d stopped worrying that the Gordo was chasing her, no longer seemed concerned that a woman was following her. Nick was almost ready to start work again, and so was I. My two-week so-called vacation had extended to four-plus, and it was time to go back.

Life was moving on. Susan’s deck was finished, but her bathrooms were still not complete. She was packing up Lisa and Julie for six weeks of camp in Maine while defending a man accused of suffocating his invalid mother, so she hadn’t had time to row since the regatta. That was fine with me. I wasn’t feeling well, and I doubted I’d be rowing for a while.

We went on, trying to continue life as before, but of course that was futile. I could never again look at a windowless van or truck without wondering what—or who—was inside. And I couldn’t make coffee without seeing Heather slurping from a mug. Still, we had to recover. We made changes, adapting. Instead of brewing coffee, I walked each morning to the Pink Rose to get takeout with fresh scones. Instead of battling bad memories, I avoided them, starting new routines, focusing on the future. I made arrangements to have Molly’s belated graduation party at the zoo, began to plan our wedding, thought about taking a year’s leave from work.

In truth, the horror wasn’t over. The world remained dangerous, and people were not always who they seemed. The smugglers we’d run into were gone, but others were out there somewhere,

still trafficking human cargo. Foreign governments, even our own FBI, didn’t seem able to stop them. From time to time I thought of Shu Li, wondered where she was, even if she was still alive.

On the last day in June, after breakfast, as I was fixing Molly’s lunch, I felt queasy from the smell of her peanut butter sandwich and wondered if I were going to heave. Taking a deep breath, I looked out the kitchen window and saw the bus for day camp at our curb. It was early, waiting out front.

I ran to the door to wave to the driver and yell that she was on the way. Molly came running, stuffing her bathing suit into her camp bag, dragging a towel. Nick tossed an orange and a drink into her lunch, passed the bag to me, and I thrust it at Molly as she flew out the door and down the steps. I blew her a kiss from the doorway as the bus grumbled off, noticing only vaguely the woman in the blue car idling behind it.

No, I didn’t think much about her that day. I might have, but after Molly left I sat down to read the newspaper, and my attention was diverted by the report of a murder in northeast Philadelphia. I almost overlooked it, turning the page. But some detail nagged at me, made me look again. His picture was there. A bald man with a ponytail, heavily tattooed, wearing earrings. I stared at it, recalling Molly’s description of the Gordo. Bald on top. With a ponytail. And jewelry. And tattoos. No, I thought. Couldn’t be. But there he was; tattoos ran all the way up the dead man’s neck. And my eyes caught on his name. Gordon. Gordon Terrell.

I scanned the story, hoping to find out that he’d died in a lover’s quarrel. Or that he dealt drugs and owed some kingpin millions of dollars. Instead, I read that his throat had been slit and that his face had been cut three times, in curved parallel lines. I closed my eyes and saw the small Asian woman unlocking my chains, saving me. Shu Li, I thought. She was still alive, still avenging the dead, still chasing down cartel members.

Shu Li, the twentieth slave, had found the Gordo.

A
LMOST
E
VERY
E
VENING
D
ETECTIVES
S
TILL
D
ROPPED
IN TO S
EE
Nick and keep him in the loop during his recovery. The night after Terrell’s murder was no exception. Three of them were visiting in the living room when I came downstairs after tucking Molly in. I meant to get them some pretzels, but I didn’t make it to the kitchen. I stopped in the hall, eavesdropping, when I realized what they were talking about.

“So Terrell was a slave trafficker?”

“Had to be. Why else would the perp go after him?”

“Maybe it wasn’t the same perp. With all the press, it could be a copy cat.”

“No way. I saw those cuts. It was the same perp, no question. The slices on his face weren’t just similar. They were a hundred percent identical. Same curves as the guys in the van. Same as Ellis and the others. Nobody would know how to do that except the perp. It’s a signature, unique.”

“Well, that’s it for us then,” Nick said. “If you’re right and Terrell was in the cartel, the FBI’ll grab the case just like the others.”