Very Bad Men (52 page)

I watched Elizabeth nodding. She knew. Paul Rhiner's obsession led to Walter Delacorte's death, and to Rhiner's suicide.

Half a minute passed with only the ticking of the grandfather clock. Then in a gentle voice Elizabeth asked, “What do you want to do, Sam? Where do you want to go from here?”

“Me with my clean hands?” he said, looking off across the room. “Do you know they reinstated me? With Walt and Paul dead, they figured my suspension had gone on long enough. The county administrator told me he would have liked to make me acting sheriff, but in light of the Dawtrey incident it wouldn't look right. That's what it is now, an incident.” He turned to Elizabeth and the rueful smile appeared again. “Where do I want to go? I want to go back in time. I want to get my wife and kids back.”

“What made them leave?” she said. “Did you tell your wife the truth?”

“I couldn't. But she knew something was wrong these past few weeks. She kept wanting me to talk. She wouldn't let it drop. The other day I raised my voice to her, told her I just wanted some peace and quiet. When she didn't back down I pushed her away. She tripped and fell.” He turned the gold ring around his finger. “She's at her sister's now. She says I'd better get right or she's not coming back.”

“That sounds bad,” said Elizabeth. “But not so bad that you can't recover from it.”

“I talked to my priest. He said I need to confess everything. I've confessed twice now, to him and to you. I don't feel any better.” Tillman sighed. “What do you think I should do?”

“Things might go easier for you if we could prove who hired you,” Elizabeth said. “You might be able to make a deal with the prosecutor.”

“Walt never gave me a clue about that,” Tillman said, frowning. “It had to have been someone with connections, if they knew Dawtrey was going to try to escape.”

“I think you're right about that.”

I thought so too. It must have been someone with connections, someone who could afford to spend a hundred thousand dollars. Someone who had a reason to want Dawtrey dead. Someone like John Casterbridge.

From the look Elizabeth sent my way, I knew she had reached the same conclusion.

Tillman glanced at me and then back at her. His brow furrowed beneath his curly hair. “You know who it was, don't you?”

“I have an idea,” she said. “But it's someone we can't accuse without proof.”

The furrows deepened. “Now that Walt's gone, I don't see much hope of finding proof.” Tillman rubbed a hand across his mouth. “It's frustrating, because he was a careful man. I can't help thinking he would have covered himself.”

“What do you mean?” Elizabeth asked.

“I mean if somewhere down the road someone had to take a fall for Dawtrey's death, it wouldn't have been Walter Delacorte. He would've made sure of that.” He stared across the room again. “I went to his funeral. He looked peaceful. I didn't expect it, the way he died. Stabbed with a tire iron. That must've been a sight.”

Elizabeth nodded silently.

“I wonder,” Tillman said, “did you find a pen on his body?”

“A pen?”

“A black aluminum ballpoint. He usually kept it in his shirt pocket.”

“I don't remember a pen. Not on the body. There could have been one in his car.”

“You should check,” Tillman said. “It wasn't an ordinary pen. It had a voice recorder built in. Walt used it in meetings, instead of taking notes. I looked for it after he died. I didn't find it.”

“You think he used it—”

“When he talked to the client. Whoever it was. If Walt met with him, or even if they just talked on the phone, I think Walt would've had a recorder running. That pen—you could download a recording from it as a computer file. You'll want to check his computer at the sheriff's office.”

Tillman took a breath before continuing. “He didn't have a computer at home, but you should check there too—see if you can find the pen. I don't think you will. I went there after he died, got in with a spare key he kept in his office. I looked everywhere I could think of, but I didn't find the pen, or anything else.”

“What else did you expect to find?” Elizabeth asked.

“Money, naturally. I don't know what the going rate is for setting up a hit, but I'm sure Walt didn't do it for free.” His tone turned thoughtful. “Still, if there's cash in that house I couldn't find it, and I tried. I did everything but tear out the walls.”

“You shouldn't have gone there.”

Tillman laughed softly. “That's the least of the things I shouldn't have done.”

 

 

THE SHEER CURTAINS on the northern windows billowed into the room and then retreated until they were flat against the screens. Tillman sat without speaking while Elizabeth made a call to Carter Shan and confirmed that Delacorte's pen had not been found on his body or in his car. When she got off the phone she started to relay her plans to Tillman: she mentioned getting a search warrant for Delacorte's house, but I was only half listening. I was thinking about something Nick Dawtrey had told me.

Nick had spied on Delacorte, had followed him once on a shopping trip. It hadn't seemed important at the time, but I remembered Nick telling me what Delacorte had brought home with him. “Paint,” I said aloud.

They both turned to me.

“When you searched the house,” I said to Tillman, “did you find paint cans?”

His eyes narrowed. “There were some in the cellar.”

“What about drywall tape or joint compound?”

“Maybe. . . . I think so.”

Elizabeth smiled, understanding. “We'll need to tear out the walls.”

I
thought things would move slowly; it was getting late on a Saturday night. But while I stayed with Tillman, Elizabeth went out in the yard and made a couple of calls on her cell phone. She talked to Owen McCaleb and let him know what she wanted to do. From McCaleb she got the number of someone he had once served with in the army, a man named Brian Hannagan who lived in Sault Sainte Marie and was now an inspector in the Michigan State Police. She needed someone with jurisdiction, and she didn't want to involve the sheriff's office.

I'm not sure how much she told Hannagan. It must have been a hard sell, convincing him to take seriously the idea that a U.S. senator might have paid to have Terry Dawtrey killed. The story was a tangled one, and as I sat watching Tillman I tried to work through it myself. If I'd had a notebook like Lark, I might have written it down.

Lucy Navarro had unknowingly set things in motion when she went to see Dawtrey in prison. He hinted that he would tell her the name of the fifth robber. I knew there were people who could have overheard their conversation: guards, other inmates. Word could have gotten around. An inmate tells a guard, a guard tells the warden. Maybe the warden told Harlan Spencer, because Spencer had an interest in keeping tabs on Dawtrey, the man who shot him. And Spencer would have told John Casterbridge. Spencer had been protecting the senator's secret for years.

Casterbridge had a good reason to want to keep Dawtrey quiet, because the fifth robber was his son, Matthew Kenneally.

When Casterbridge heard that Dawtrey had been talking to a reporter, what would he have done? He wouldn't have ordered a hit on Dawtrey—that wouldn't have been his first reaction. But he would have warned his son.

Once, Matthew Kenneally might have thought the Great Lakes robbery was behind him, but now people were talking about it again, because Callie Spencer was running for Senate. Kenneally had been under his father's protection for seventeen years, but he must have known that John Casterbridge wouldn't be around forever. So Kenneally would have been worried, even before he heard that Dawtrey was talking to a reporter.

And by then Kenneally had already found Anthony Lark, a man who was obsessed with a dead girl. A girl who'd had a beautiful smile, like Callie Spencer's.

Kenneally lacked the courage to go after Dawtrey himself. Instead, he aimed Lark toward the Great Lakes robbers. He convinced Lark that they were a danger to Callie, and that he needed to save her.

It worked. Lark couldn't get to Terry Dawtrey in prison, but he did the next best thing: He killed Dawtrey's father so they'd let him out for the funeral. Then something happened that no one expected. Nick came up with a plan to help Terry escape.

Back at the farmhouse, Elizabeth and I had talked to Nick about the plan. He told us how he arranged things with Terry. Between the day their father died and the day of the funeral, they had only one chance to communicate. A single note passed between them in the visitation room at Kinross Prison.

Someone must have seen that note: maybe an inmate, maybe a guard. Somehow John Casterbridge got word of it—maybe the same way he got word about Terry Dawtrey talking to Lucy Navarro.

The senator might not have thought seriously about killing Dawtrey before, but now he saw an opportunity. He made a deal with Walter Delacorte to ensure that Dawtrey would die trying to escape. Casterbridge didn't tell his son about the deal, and Kenneally didn't tell his father about Anthony Lark. So on the morning of the funeral at Whiteleaf Cemetery, Terry Dawtrey was doomed twice over: Delacorte and Tillman were conspiring to kill him, and Lark was waiting with his rifle on the hill.

Delacorte and Tillman won out, but Paul Rhiner was the one who fired the fatal shot.

It didn't end there. Lark didn't stop; he went after Henry Kormoran and Sutton Bell. That might have been Kenneally's intention all along, if he felt threatened by Kormoran and Bell. Or it could be that Lark, once unleashed, was impossible to control.

There was one final twist. At some point John Casterbridge found out about Lark. It wasn't hard to see how. Elizabeth had discussed Lark's manuscript with Alan Beckett, the Spencers, and the senator's son, Jay. Any of them could have told Casterbridge about Lark. Or Kenneally might have realized that Lark was a loose cannon, and might have turned to his father for help.

One way or another, the senator had decided that Lark had to be dealt with. His solution must have been to set Walter Delacorte on Lark's trail—a decision that worked out badly for Delacorte, and for Paul Rhiner.

If I'd had a notebook with me I might have made a list of all the men who had died because of the choices John Casterbridge had made. Instead, I got up and wandered across the room to the front door. Sam Tillman was still in his chair. The light of the floor lamp made a shadowed mask of his face.

Something about him made me uneasy.

I stood listening to the ticking clock and realized that something had been nagging at me all the while as he told his story. I couldn't put a name to it. Alan Beckett would have called it my active imagination. I expect things to go wrong.

Even now, as I watched Tillman sitting passively, I found it reassuring that his pistol was on the other side of the room. I didn't expect him to try to shoot me, or even to try to shoot himself. I expected him to do whatever Elizabeth told him to do. But I knew one thing for certain: I didn't intend to let him get anywhere near that pistol.

I kept my eyes on him as I opened the front door. Outside, Elizabeth was still on the phone with Hannagan, but I could make out enough of the conversation to know that they were winding down.

Tillman must have sensed we would soon be on the move. He rose and went around behind the chair to the window, drawing aside the sheer curtain and lowering the sash. I knew his silhouette would be visible to anyone lurking outside in the dark woods, and for an instant I felt sure there was someone there. I braced myself for the sound of a gunshot and focused on the center of Tillman's back, expecting a bloom of crimson.

Nothing happened. Tillman let the curtain fall back into place. I heard Elizabeth's footsteps on the porch, stepped aside to let her through the door, and listened as she filled us in on the plans she'd made with Hannagan.

 

 

TEN MINUTES LATER we were driving south and east along the outskirts of Sault Sainte Marie. Tillman had closed the remaining windows and locked up, and now he rode silently in the backseat of the car. Elizabeth watched him from the passenger seat as I drove.

My active imagination would have liked it better if she'd been back there with him, holding a gun against his ribs. But it turned out my imagination had gone off on the wrong track. It wasn't Tillman I should have been worried about.

We found Walter Delacorte's house on a cul-de-sac off Ashmun Street. Low hedges grew along the sidewalk in front. I parked beneath a streetlight and the three of us stepped out into the night air. The neighbors on Delacorte's left had a stereo cranked loud, pounding out something by the White Stripes. Delacorte's windows were dark except for one beside the front door, where a faint glow came through the curtains.

I pointed it out to Elizabeth. “There's a light.”

“It's a lamp on a timer,” said Tillman. “I noticed it the other day when I was here.”

I kept my eyes on the window, waiting for some movement, for a shadow to pass along the curtains. Nothing. Brian Hannagan arrived a few minutes later, along with one of his colleagues from the state police, a lieutenant named Redlake. They pulled up in a long black Dodge, in plainclothes—both of them tall and lean, with square jaws and brush-cut hair. Hannagan in his fifties, the lieutenant ten years younger.

Hannagan and Elizabeth made introductions, low-key, businesslike. I got a clipped nod from each of the newcomers and then they ignored me and focused on the important people. Hannagan explained to Elizabeth that he'd been in contact with his captain, who was even now working on an application for a warrant. They had identified a judge who lived in town, a woman who had known Delacorte and never much cared for him.