Very Bad Men (32 page)

“Good Samaritan.”

Shan nodded. “It gets better. She saw him again—it would have been after he tangled with Delacorte and Rhiner. But he seemed perfectly normal. He told her he was going away, but he didn't want to leave without saying good-bye.”

“That's smooth,” Elizabeth said.

“He's cool under pressure. Too cool. It makes me think he's not hooked up right.” Shan spun his chair around to face her. “That apartment was eerie, even if you ignored the body on the floor. No furniture, the cupboards just about empty. It almost would have been better if he had pictures of Callie Spencer plastered to the walls. It would have given the place some personality.”

“He left in a hurry though. He had to have left something personal behind.”

“Just books, and clothes.” Shan turned back to his computer. “And this.” The photos had finished transferring, leaving rows of thumbnail images on the monitor. He reached for his mouse and clicked on one of them.

Elizabeth studied the image. It showed a small tin box of the kind that would hold breath mints, with a white label stuck to the lid.

“Where did you find this?” she asked.

“In the bedroom.”

The label had a word written on it. She recognized the handwriting as Lark's.

“‘Imitrex,'” Shan said. “It's used to treat headaches.”

“He stole a bottle of Imitrex from the pharmacy, the same night he stole the Keflex.”

“He must have done it because his own stash was running out. There were only five pills left in the tin.”

“That's an odd way to carry them around,” Elizabeth said. “Do you think he bought them on the street? Is there a black market for Imitrex?”

“I don't think so. But we can ask him when we find him.” Shan got up from his chair. “How are you feeling?”

She gave him a noncommittal look. “What do you mean?”

“You know. After what happened—David getting shot.”

“I'm fine, Carter.”

“Because the chief had some concerns. He's gone home now, but I talked to him earlier. He wanted my opinion.”

“About what?”

Shan lifted his shoulders a fraction of an inch. “About whether he should keep you on the case. Lark shot your—” He paused, and she could see him considering possibilities:
boyfriend, partner, lover.
He decided to start again. “Lark shot David. So there's a question about how it would look, and whether you can be objective—”

Elizabeth smiled. “Is that right?”

“I told him he was worried about nothing—that you would conduct yourself professionally, like you always do. I kept the rest of my opinion to myself.”

“What's the rest?”

The same little lift of his shoulders. “That if you wanted to take revenge on Anthony Lark he wouldn't stand a chance.”

She reached to straighten his tie. “That may be the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Carter. Now how are we going to find him?”

“It shouldn't be hard,” Shan said, picking up his jacket from the back of the chair. “I figured we'd start with his mother.”

HELEN LARK LIVED in Dearborn, in a house with peeling yellow paint on the porch. The sidewalk in front was cracked and uneven, but the grass had been cut and there were flowers growing in a garden ringed with stones.

At nine-thirty in the morning, young mothers were on the move through the neighborhood, pushing infants in strollers, with toddlers ambling along in their wake. Many of the women wore scarves to cover their hair.

“They're Lebanese,” said Helen Lark. “They get married young and start having babies fast. Sometimes I want to ask them what their hurry is, but it's not my place. I wish them luck.”

She sat in one of two folding chairs on the porch and offered Elizabeth the other. Carter Shan leaned against the railing nearby.

“You think I'm a terrible mother,” Helen Lark said, raising a hand before Elizabeth could reply. “You don't have to deny it. I've seen the news this morning. Those two policemen you found in Anthony's apartment, one of them beaten, the other dead. The man in the parking lot. And the other one, Corrigan.”

“Kormoran,” Elizabeth said.

“I've been waiting for you to come, wondering what I should say. I thought about telling you you've made a mistake. It couldn't be Anthony. I know he's not capable of . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

“But you think he is,” Elizabeth said gently.

The woman turned away. She had blond hair shading into white, and fine wrinkles in the skin of her face. Her clothes were unassuming: pleated slacks, a blouse with a well-worn collar and a mended tear in the sleeve. She wore glasses with tortoiseshell frames.

“I don't know anymore,” she said. “He's a stranger to me now. He hasn't been the same since—I want to say since his father died, but it started before that.”

“What did?” Elizabeth asked.

“His obsession with that girl. The girl with the pretty smile.”

“Callie Spencer?”

Helen Lark bowed her head. “No. Not her. At least not at first.”

Elizabeth exchanged a quizzical look with Shan.

To Helen Lark she said, “Maybe you could explain.”

The woman rose from her chair. “It would be easier to show you.”

 

 

“THIS IS MORE LIKE IT,” said Shan in a low voice.

The Lark house had a basement that seemed to have been finished in the 1970s. Shag carpet, walls paneled in wood. Banks of fluorescent lights overhead.

“When he was a boy, Anthony had a bedroom upstairs,” said Helen Lark. “But when he came home after college, he moved down here.”

One paneled wall was covered with a patchwork of photographs and news articles. On the right the photos were of Callie Spencer, most of them clipped from magazines. The articles were printed from the Internet; they chronicled the Great Lakes Bank robbery and its aftermath. There were pictures of Floyd Lambeau, long-haired and goateed, wearing a rogue's grin. Mug shots of Terry Dawtrey, Sutton Bell, and Henry Kormoran.

But on the left the photos told a different story. They started out as snapshots of a teenaged girl: she smiled shyly and hid behind an armload of schoolbooks. She got older, went to parties and football games. Sometimes she had her arm around Anthony Lark. In small stories clipped from a newspaper, she won an art award, graduated from high school, enrolled at Michigan State University on a scholarship.

At Michigan State, she got a new wardrobe and a better haircut. She posed for the camera on the steps of a lecture hall.

At some point she and Lark took a trip out west. They stood side by side in a forest of redwood trees.

At twenty-four she got engaged, but not to Anthony Lark. She made a beautiful bride. A newspaper photo captured a wide, gorgeous smile.

There were far fewer snapshots after that. In one of them she wore a cast on her hand. In another she crouched beside the wheelchair of a man who may have been her father. She still had a pretty smile, but it was dimmed and looked forced.

At twenty-eight she died. The obituary said she had passed away suddenly at home. Her name was Susanna Marten.

W
hat happened to her?” Elizabeth asked Helen Lark.

“Just what you're thinking,” the woman said. “Her family tried to cover it with code words, but that never really fools anyone, does it? ‘Passed away suddenly.' She killed herself. An overdose of sleeping pills.”

She went quiet, standing with her hands behind her back like a patron in a museum. Carter Shan peered at the man in the engagement photo: blond hair, wide shoulders, an athletic build. A smart-aleck grin. The caption identified him as Derek Everly.

“The husband—” Shan said.

“Yes, the husband drove her to it,” said Helen Lark. “They went to high school together: Anthony, Susanna, and Derek. Susanna was the sweetest thing you could imagine. Anthony was in love with her. He never had much ambition as a boy, and I thought it would be a battle to get him to go to college. But when she went to Michigan State, he went too.

“She majored in Fine Arts, and I think he would have done the same, if he'd had any talent for it. He wound up in the English department.

“They dated, Anthony and Susanna. In high school, then in college. She's the one who broke it off. I couldn't tell you why; he never wanted to talk about it. But it happened during their senior year at Michigan State, and after that she stayed on to get a master's degree. Anthony came home, because there was nothing holding him there anymore.

“He coasted along for a couple of years, working temp jobs. He spent most of his free time in this room. Then she came home one summer and he started to come alive again, but it didn't last. She took up with Derek Everly.

“Derek had never gone to college. His family owned a landscaping company here in town. He pursued Susanna; they were engaged before the year was out, and married in the spring. I don't think he started hitting her right away.”

Helen Lark let out a weary breath. “You see the picture there, where she has her hand in a cast. Derek slammed her fingers in a door. That was before he got smart, before he learned how to hurt her without leaving marks that people would see. I know about it because Anthony told me. He heard it from Susanna. He heard the reasons too. The excuses. The landscaping business wasn't doing well. Derek wanted a baby, and Susanna couldn't get pregnant fast enough to suit him. Derek thought she was having an affair with Anthony. Which wasn't true, though I know there was nothing Anthony wanted more than to be with her.

“He begged her to leave Derek, but she thought the man would change. Derek promised her he would. Every time he hit her, he told her he was sorry and it would never happen again. And for a while it would look like he was sincere. For a while.

“When Anthony couldn't stand it anymore, he went to Susanna's father. That's the gentleman in the wheelchair there. He wasn't in a wheelchair at the time. He was a bear of a man who worked construction jobs all his life. He went to see Derek at the office of the landscaping company. Said he was there about his daughter. Derek told him they had nothing to talk about. ‘We're not going to talk,' he said. Then he took Derek apart. Left him bruised and bleeding on the floor. Told him if he ever had to come back again he would kill him.

“You can guess what happened next. Derek acted like he'd learned his lesson. And, god help her, Susanna stayed with him.

“A month later her father drove out to meet a friend at a bar. Four men jumped him in the parking lot. They had baseball bats. They broke his legs and his arms and his ribs. The police never caught them, and no one ever connected them to Derek Everly.

“But Susanna knew he was responsible. She finally left him and took out a restraining order against him. Moved in with her father so she could take care of him. He seemed to improve, but his breathing was always a problem. Pneumonia was what got him in the end. He was too weak to fight it off. She was with him when he died.

“Anthony went to the funeral. Derek turned up at the cemetery. He waited until the reverend said the final prayer and people were heading to their cars. Then he approached Susanna. Anthony stood between them. ‘You shouldn't be here,' he said. Derek ignored him and spoke directly to Susanna. ‘You think a restraining order's going to stop me?'

“She stayed here that night. But the next day she went back to her father's house. She told Anthony there were things she needed to attend to. She wouldn't let him go with her. ‘I'll be fine,' she told him. ‘You can't be with me every minute of the day.' She promised she would come back here before it got dark. When she didn't, he went looking for her. He found her in the spare bedroom of her father's house, an empty pill bottle beside her on the bed.”

 

 

HELEN LARK TURNED her back on the wall of photographs. She looked around as if she didn't know where to go, and ended up moving toward the bottom of the basement stairs. Elizabeth joined her there.

“All this,” Elizabeth said, gesturing toward the wall, “when did it start?”

“A few weeks after she died,” said Helen Lark. “At that point, Anthony was too depressed to work. He dug out all the pictures of Susanna he had ever taken. I tried to talk to him. His father—I don't like to say it, but his father wasn't any use. When Anthony was younger he hung on every word his father said, but over the years they grew apart.”

She took off her glasses and polished the lenses with a tail of her blouse. “My husband was a reserved man. He had a boat. He liked to fish. Anthony didn't care much about fishing, so his father didn't know what to do with him.”