Widowmaker (20 page)

Amber reached for her lighter again and her pack of Capri cigarettes.

“Did you end up going out to Don Foss's place?” she asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

“I did.”

“That self-righteous asshole. I don't trust him, and neither did Adam. What kind of person takes in sex offenders like stray puppies, then works them for slave wages? There's something weird about that man. Holier-than-thou, my ass.”

The tobacco fumes swirling around the room had begun to make me light-headed.

“Maybe Foss really does believe in redemption,” I said.

“Adam hated living there. Said it made him feel even worse about himself, sleeping in the same bunkhouse with
actual
perverts. There was one guy who had done twenty years for raping a toddler. And another guy who used to be a wrestling coach. He'd molested dozens of boys. You know what Adam said to me? He said, ‘Mom, someone should take a match to this place and burn it to the ground.'”

I remembered what Davdison had told me about Adam's having a black eye.

“Did Adam mention anyone in particular to you?” I asked. “Anyone he was afraid of at Foss's?”

“He said prison burned the fear out of him. It was true, I think. How can you be afraid if you don't care if you live or die?”

“Maybe
fear
is the wrong word, then. Did he have any enemies?”

When she laughed, she opened her mouth wide, revealing her missing molar. “My son didn't have anything
but
enemies!” She leaned her head back to study the smoke-stained ceiling. “What does it matter? It's too late anyway.”

“We don't know that.”

“It's too late,” she repeated. “Adam is dead. I'm his mother, and we've got a special connection. As soon as I heard the news tonight about the truck, I felt the knife go through my heart. He's dead, and I'm done.”

I wanted to shake her. “Amber, you asked me to help you find Adam, and that's what I'm still trying to do. I'm not giving up hope yet, and you shouldn't, either.”

“What do you care?”

“I care because he's my brother.” I rose to my feet and stood over her limp body. “If you're telling the truth.”

She measured me with her eyes, all the way from head to toe. Then she stubbed out the cigarette and climbed awkwardly to her feet. “Do you want to see his room? Come on, I'll show it to you.”

 

19

“I had to sell my old condo to pay for Adam's lawyer,” she said, leading me down a darkened hall. “That's how I ended up in this dump.”

She opened a door at the end and turned on a light inside.

The room obviously belonged to a teenage boy with two absolute passions: deer hunting and ski racing. The bed was covered with a camouflage-patterned comforter, which matched the drapes. Three mounted deer heads stared down from the wall, their real eyes having been replaced with obsidian marbles. A dozen ski medals hung from the antlers. Ski posters covered every other inch of the walls.

“I thought he was going to stay here,” she said, letting her arms fall slack. “I fixed it up just like his old one. Then the neighbors heard he was coming and complained to the landlord, and that was that.”

“Do you mind if I look around?” I suspected she would be receiving a similar request from Detective Clegg very soon.

“Knock yourself out.”

On the bureau I found two framed photographs. One showed a younger Adam and Amber with a man I assumed to be A. J. Langstrom. It must have been taken after one of the little boy's first ski victories, because he was holding a gold medal. A.J. was big and blond and blocky and looked nothing like Adam. Nor was he smiling.

The second, newer photo showed a dozen celebrating skiers posed atop a mountain in various stages of undress. Adam was in the forefront, shirtless, his abdominal muscles bulging, his strong arms raised triumphantly above his head, holding two bottles of beer. Two girls lay in the snow at his feet in their sports bras, arms curled around his ski boots, posing like harem slaves. Josh Davidson hung in the back. He had kept his shirt on and was staring at something beyond the camera's range, as if he had caught sight of a potential threat: an adult headed their way to break up the party.

“I'm surprised he kept this picture,” I said, handing the photograph to Amber.

“Why?”

“Because it has Josh in it.”

“Josh is in most of the photos Adam has from school. I told you they were best friends.”

“What about Alexa?” I asked.

Her mouth twisted. “What about her?”

“Did Adam keep any pictures of her?”

“Of course not!” she said. “That bitch ruined our lives.”

But I noticed that her eyes had darted toward a stack of magazines beside the bed.

I made my way along the wall of deer mounts, pretending to inspect them. Each had a more impressive rack than the next. Pulsifer had told me Adam was a natural-born deer slayer.

Just like my father.

Just like
our
father, I thought, correcting myself.

Maybe it was having seen the gore-drenched truck, but something had changed for me over the past twenty-four hours. My absolute certainty that Adam Langstrom couldn't be my half brother had steadily eroded until it had become a real possibility. Now it seemed closer to a likelihood. I was almost, but not fully, convinced. What else did I need to find before I could accept Amber's claim as the truth?

When I got to the stack of magazines, I knelt down and shuffled through them. Under the ski mags, I found a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue that was four years old. Convicted sex offenders in Maine are prohibited from possessing pornography. Did bikini shots qualify? There was something sad and touching about the thought of Amber saving this magazine for her son's return.

I found the yearbook at the bottom of the pile. The cover was blue and silver, the colors of the Alpine Sports Academy. One page was dog-eared. I turned to it and came upon Adam Langstrom's senior portrait. He had never looked more handsome than he did in his blazer and tie, with his thick hair expertly cut and his eyes as blue as sea glass. Other pictures of him—racing downhill through the gates, laughing in a pool with friends—surrounded the posed photograph. The quote beneath his list of athletic accomplishments read: “Waking up is the second hardest thing in the morning.”

My brother, the philosopher.

Amber had begun to cry. “That yearbook came out a week before he was arrested. His missed his final exams, so no diploma. I told him he should get his GED in jail, but he didn't see the point.”

I paged through the yearbook until I found the section devoted to the underclassmen. Alexa Davidson was with the other freshmen. She resembled her brother—same wavy hair, big eyes, and an olive complexion. Her teeth were perfect. Her lips were very full; if she had been an adult, they would be described as sensuous. But you could see she was just a kid here.

“I still can't believe he threw everything away for that,” Amber said with venom.

“She was pretty,” I said, as if speaking of someone dead.

“His other girlfriends were prettier.”

I found another picture in the yearbook of Alexa and her brother at a race. They were wearing helmets, dressed in skintight ski suits, and had their arms around each other's shoulders. She was beaming. He looked seasick. I flipped back to Josh's senior page and found his portrait. Unlike all the others, it had been taken in black and white, giving it a somber, old-fashioned look that might have been intended to be ironic. His quote: “Victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” It was a strange sentiment coming from a student about to graduate from a school devoted to competitive athletics.

“Do you know where Josh lives?” I asked.

She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Why? You just talked to him.”

“I might have more questions for him down the line.”

“He has a house over in Rangeley, on the lake. Adam told me his dad bought it for him. That family is loaded.”

Maybe I had been too quick to believe Josh Davidson. I had only his word about having met Adam outside the bowling alley that night.

The glass eyes of the deer kept catching my gaze the way the eyes of a portrait seem to follow you around a room.

“Whatever happened to Adam's guns?” I asked.

“His guns?”

“Gary Pulsifer told me Adam was a serious hunter. He shot all these bucks, didn't he? What happened to his rifles?”

She cleared her scratchy throat. “Adam's not allowed to own firearms. He's a felon.”

“I know. I'm just wondering where they went. Did you sell them for him?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of rifles were they? How much did you get for them?”

Her hands flew up into the air. “Who cares? Why does it matter? You saw the inside of that truck.”

“Amber, the detective is going to want to know if Adam had access to a firearm.”

“That fucking Pulsifer,” she said with a bitterness that shocked me. “I could tell you stories about Gary back in the day. You wouldn't believe some of the stories I could tell you.”

She'd recognized how curious I was about the guns and was trying to divert my attention.

“Where are the guns, Amber?”

“I told you he doesn't—”

“I'm trying to help you both. Please let me help you.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Adam's past help. I know he is.”

“Maybe, but you're not.”

Without a word, she turned and left the room. I switched off the light and followed her into her own bedroom. She had a fish tank that projected aqueous light on the ceiling and filled the space with the sound of bubbles. But I didn't see any actual living fish behind the glass.

She went down on her hands and knees beside the bed. She pulled out a long plastic box, the kind a person might use to store sweaters for the summer. Inside were two rifles: a scoped, bolt-action Ruger and a lever-action Winchester identical to the one I'd used to shoot my own first deer.

“Adam gave these to me,” she said, sitting up again. “They're mine, and no one can prove otherwise.”

I knelt down beside her and inspected the bin. The rifles had recently been cleaned. I could smell the bore solvent and lubricating oil. There were boxes of rifle cartridges in .30-06 and .30-30 calibers. Also a smaller box that had once contained 9mm rounds. But when I shook it, I could tell it was empty.

I held the box in my hand. “Where's the pistol?”

“What pistol?”

“The one that fires these rounds.”

She drew her lips back from her teeth in an unsuccessful attempt to appear affronted. “A friend of mine left those in my Jeep. We went target shooting once behind the Sugarloaf snowmaking ponds.”

“Why would you keep an empty box of ammo?”

She leaned past me and snapped the plastic lid back down on the bin.

My legs were stiff from driving all day as I rose to my feet. “Does Adam have a key to your apartment?”

“What? No. I told you he's not allowed to be here.”

“But he has been here. He came here, and he cleaned his guns, and he took a pistol that was also stashed inside that bin. Don't deny it, Amber. I don't know why you keep lying to me. I don't know if you just can't help yourself or if you're keeping a secret you don't want anyone else to know.”

She stretched out her legs on the floor and leaned against the bed for support. “I told you he has enemies.”

“Who? You've got to give me a name, Amber.”

“I told him not to take that gun,” she said. “I told him he'd be sent back to jail if he was caught with it. But he wouldn't listen. He said he needed it for protection. He said he'd rather risk being arrested again than get shot in the back of the head. He wouldn't tell me who was after him.”

“Do you know what kind of handgun it was—the make or model?”

“Why?”

“The police are going to need all the information they can get. If a gun turns up before—” I stopped myself from saying “before his body is found.”

But she knew what I meant. “A Glock. I think that's what he called it. Or maybe that's from a movie. I don't know.”

“Is there a box for it? Papers?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

I extended my hand to her. “Get up.”

She looked at my hand as if reluctant to touch it. Then, slowly, she stretched out her arm. I gripped her by the wrist and pulled gently until she was on her feet. She was wobbly but standing.

“I offered to help you find Adam if I could. But that was before they found the truck he was driving covered in blood.” I put my hands on her shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Tomorrow, we're going to have a conversation with Detective Clegg. You're going to tell him everything you've told me about the threats and the gun. You're not going to hold anything back.”

She had a way of pouting that reminded me of a little girl. “I thought you were on our side.”

“I am on your side. That's why I'm telling you to come clean. I don't know what happened to Adam, but it looks bad whatever it was. I am not going to lie for you, Amber. And I'm not going to withhold information.”

“But he's your brother!”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “I swore an oath to uphold the laws of the state of Maine. I'm not going to break my oath.”

“You never had a problem breaking it when Jack was in trouble.”

“I told you the night we met,” I said, “I'm not that person anymore.”

She shoved me in the chest. She wasn't particularly strong, but she caught me off balance. “Get out!”

“Amber—”

“Get the fuck out of my house!”

There was nothing left to say. She followed me to the living room. She yanked open the door, letting in a blast of cold air that passed through me as if I were a ghost.