The image seemed to dissolve in the haze, not back off or even walk away — but rather melt away. Maybe the vision was from my lack of sleep, living on the extreme edge, stress and fatigue causing hallucinations. I blew out a breath, took my hand off the gun, and lowered my eyes to the headstone. It read:
Katherine O’Sullivan
1943–2013
A mother, a wife, an artist
I turned away from my mother’s grave and walked in the rain back to my Jeep. As I was unlocking the door, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: UNKNOWN. Maybe it was Andrea calling from an undisclosed number. I answered. The voice was deep, smooth as silk, exuding coolness. He said, “Hello, little brother. This is Dillon. You left your number at our mother’s house. On the kitchen table, I was told. So, I assumed you wouldn’t mind if I called it. Did you bury our sweet mother today?”
“Where were you?”
“I was rather indisposed. Couldn’t make travel arrangements. Sean O’Brien — what a fine Irish name, although I like Sean Flanagan better. You’re somewhat late to the clan, little brother. So, let me make myself very clear. You have no claim to mother’s estate and property, including the land in Ireland. So, just turn around and go back to whatever world you came from.”
“Where’s Courtney?”
“She’s none of your business as well. And she, too, has no rightful claim to mother’s property. You probably didn’t know Courtney was diagnosed with acute paranoid-schizophrenia. Mother tried to hide it. Unfortunately, it seems to run in the family. How’s your head, Sean?”
I said nothing.
“Give me time, I will get in your head if you get in my way. Head trips are my specialty. If you’re in contact with our delusional little niece, tell her to relinquish any claims on mother’s property, and her allegations against me are a sad by-product of her pathetic mental state. My attorney will handle all probate proceedings. Poor thing, Courtney, when off her medication, believes I did an injustice to her and her parents. So now she has this vendetta for me. It’s one that will be quite dangerous for her.”
“The injustice you did to Courtney’s parents — our sister and her husband, is called murder. And you raped Courtney when she was a child. In my book, there’s a special place in hell for men like you. You touch Courtney, and you’ve just bought yourself a one-way ticket to that special place. Now, big brother, do I make myself clear?”
His voice changed. It dropped into a throaty whisper, his threat coming from someplace deep and dark where absolute evil dwelled. “Our sweet mother, the whore, might have told you she thought of me as a distant cousin to Cain. Well, the neurotic bitch was right. Like Cain, I’m a wanderer. Like Cain, who committed the first murder on earth, slaying his brother, I will do the same to you. You don’t want me getting into your head, little brother. Because once I move in … I never leave.”
He disconnected. I looked across the cemetery, the fog rising above the tombstones, the puffin barely visible, like a bird surfing the crest of a cloud, catching a holy wave to a better place.
80
The thunderstorm followed me on the drive back from South Carolina to Florida and Ponce Marina. Once in Florida, I made a call to Miami-Dade PD. When I got Detective Mike Roberts on the line he said, “Sean O’Brien, it’s been a long time. I’d ask how the hell you are, but I know your ass is in deep shit. You’re a household name. What’s all this stuff about you and Senator Logan’s wife and a daughter? Is that suspect, Courtney Burke, really your daughter?”
“No, Mike, and I wish I had more time to explain. I spoke with Dan Grant, Volusia County S.O., and he told me how you ran the prints on the carny worker and you found one that matched the latent pulled from the ice pick on the carnival homicide in Volusia.”
“Yeah, the homicide that’s causing this political train to become a run-away-train. You don’t think the girl did it, huh?”
“No, the question is do you believe the perp you’re holding did the killing and maybe the other two?”
“Could be. He says he can’t remember doing it, although he was working at that carnival when the homicide happened. I can’t sniff out bullshit from him. My deception meter isn’t reading crap coming outta the perp’s mouth. It’s damn weird, Sean. This guy is telling me he doesn’t remember doing it … but he sort of remembers some guy telling him to do it.”
“Dan Grant said the perp admitted he’d been hypnotized to deal with his fear of riding a motorcycle in the Cage of Death.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said.”
“Did he say who hypnotized him?”
“Says he can’t really remember. He said it was someone who’d worked the carny circuit. A guy who supposedly could mass hypnotize an entire audience. The perp said the rest of it is like bits and pieces of a dream that he can’t remember the whole picture. It might not be enough to get your girl off the meat hook, but it does establish that at some time and some place the perp had his hands on that ice pick. Right now we can’t prove when and where.”
“How long can you hold him?”
“Bond’s been set at a half mill. The guy’s a habitual criminal, flight risk, plus we got him on enough stuff to send his ass to Raiford for a long damn time. Gotta go, Sean. Late for a depo.”
Two hours later I arrived back at Ponce Marina, skirted around the news media in the parking lot, and made my way down L-dock. I sat in the cool salon on Dave’s trawler, Gibraltar, the air-condition humming, Max half asleep on my lap, Dave in his canvas director’s chair nursing a cocktail, and Nick sitting at the three-stool bar. They listened intently as I shared with them the events I’d gone through the last four days.
When I finished, Nick looked at me, his black eyes wet, absorbed in the story. He was speechless, which was saying a lot for Nick. Then, like coming out of a trace, he sipped from his bottle of Corona and said, “Man, I’m so damned sorry to hear about your mother.”
Dave said, “That goes for all of us, your marina family.”
Nick blew air out of his cheeks, his face flush. “Sean, what happened to you is so unfair. You met your mother, and you had to bury her. You find out you have or had a sister who was murdered, and the guy who did it is your freakin’ brother, the brother you never even knew you had. Heavy shit, my friend. A heavy load to tote.”
Dave said, “Based on what you told us your brother said, it’s apparent he’s as mercenary as the guy who shot through the window of your Jeep … maybe even more so because an assassin-for-hire is playing by his employer’s rules. If your brother has some God complex, and he’s a full blown sociopath, he believes the rules, the laws of a civil society, don’t apply to him. A man like that shares many of the same mental traits associated with Hitler, and, in his own sphere of influence, can be just as deadly. The allusion to Cain and Abel isn’t a stretch.”
Nick drained what was left of his Corona and said, “From the day that the girl Courtney first walked on this dock … the girl we now know is your niece … I told you shit was gonna happen. I just didn’t know how deep it was gonna get.”
Dave grunted. “That’s not exactly what you said, Nick. The Forrest Gump suggestion is well-founded, though. Sean, to say how sorry we are for your loss doesn’t scratch the surface of what you just experienced — you find your mother and give her a funeral all in the same week.” He shook his head and sipped his drink, gesturing toward the book on the table, and he cut his eyes back up to me. “I’m reading Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Joseph Campbell was influenced by some of what Mann had to say. Campbell, of course, distilled it down to the hero’s journey. And a lot of it is exactly what you went through — what you’re going through. But when that journey takes you into the bowels of a dysfunctional family you never knew existed, I’m not sure how you return from a quest so intimate, so personal, without experiencing profound change akin to surviving a war.”