Bert looked disbelievingly at his boss. “Wait. Are you saying... you fucking killed Eldon?”
“We’ll have to deal with him later,” Vince said. “Right now, we got other priorities. You two need to pay the dog walker a visit. He’s the only one I can think of who’s got a key and knows the security code for that house. See if he got a little too ambitious. And I’m gonna have to call an old girlfriend and try to talk her out of calling the cops if it’s not already too late.”
Forty-one
Heywood Duggan parked his car on the street behind a row of downtown Milford storefronts. His office was tucked in back of a shop that sold wedding dresses, with a ground-floor entrance a few steps from a Dumpster. It wasn’t much more than a ten-foot-square room, with a bathroom he had to share with the women who ran the dress shop. He had a desk, a computer, two chairs, and a filing cabinet, and never met prospective clients here. But it was a good place to get paperwork and research done.
As he got out of the car and headed for his office entrance, his cell phone rang. He glanced at the screen, saw who it was, and answered.
“Mr. Quayle,” Heywood said, phone in one hand, keys in the other.
“I did it,” Quayle said. “I called the son of a bitch.”
Was there any point in telling him he shouldn’t have done that? Not now. “What’d he say?” Heywood asked.
“He was spooked. I rattled his cage, no doubt about it.”
Heywood fiddled with his keys, singled out the one for his office. “Rattled because he didn’t know what the hell you were talking about, or rattled because you’d found him out?”
“Definitely the latter. Once I told him about the vase being dusted for fingerprints.”
“You didn’t really tell him that.”
“I did. I told him you were doing that right now.”
Heywood sighed as he slipped the key into the lock. It didn’t turn the way it usually did. Had he forgotten to lock up the night before?
“Mr. Quayle, that was a foolish thing to do. Listen, I just got to my office. I’ll call you back in an hour or so.”
He slipped the phone back into his jacket and pushed open his office door.
There was a woman sitting in the chair behind his desk. She looked at him and smiled.
“How the hell did you get in here?” Heywood asked.
That was when he felt something cold and hard, but no broader than a dime, press up against the back of his head. When Heywood went to turn around, the man holding the gun said, “I wouldn’t.” And then he closed the door.
The woman said, “I’m going to ask you a question, and I’m only going to ask it once. So I want you to listen very carefully to it, and then I want you to think very carefully about how you answer. What I do not want you to do is answer my question with a question. That would be very, very unproductive. Do you understand?”
Heywood said, “Yes.”
The woman said, “Where is it?”
Forty-two
Terry
Grace was ecstatic about the text messages from Stuart Koch. Cynthia, only recently up to speed on our troubles, was eager to put a good spin on them, too.
“So she didn’t do it,” Cynthia said, unable to conceal her enthusiasm. “Grace didn’t shoot that boy. And no one else did, either. He’s okay.”
We’d left Grace in her bedroom and gone into our own, closing the door almost all the way. “So it seems,” I said.
“And you said Vince told you that he was going to see that the broken window at that house got fixed. So it’ll be like it never happened. No one ever has to know what a stupid thing our girl did. And she’s going to learn from this — I truly believe that. She’ll never do anything like this again.”
Cynthia shook her head in exasperation. “And there’ll have to be some new rules around here. Strict curfews. When she goes out someplace — when we let her go out someplace — we’re going to know where she’s going, who she’s going to be with, how long she’s going to be there, when—”
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll have her fitted with one of those ankle bracelets. We can sit on the computer all night and watch where she goes.”
“You’re mocking me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This happened on your watch,” she reminded me.
“I’m aware of that,” I said.
“I’m not saying it’s your fault,” she added quickly. “It’s as much mine, because I haven’t been here.” She took a seat on the edge of the bed. “I’m just glad we’re past this part. At least now we don’t have to spend the day getting Grace a lawyer.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You don’t see this as good news?”
“Sure, yes, of course it is. I don’t want to be the one who bursts the bubble. But it was just a text.”
“What are you saying?” Her face started to fall.
“It’s not like Grace actually talked to him.”
“Yeah, but it came from Stuart’s phone,” Cynthia said.
“I know.”
“Grace seemed to think it was him. These kids, they probably have their own kind of ‘voice’ when it comes to texting. You can tell who it is by the short forms they use and everything.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Let’s say Stuart’s okay. He’s hiding somewhere until things blow over. What’s that got to do with someone trying to break into the house?”
Cynthia looked off to the side, as though the answer were written down on a pad on the bedside table.
“Maybe the two things aren’t connected,” she said. “This mess happened with Grace, and someone tried to break into our house.” She paused. “A coincidence.”
“Which would mean we should call the police,” I said. “Because the reason Grace and I wanted you to hold off is because we thought it had something to do with her, and we didn’t want police involved until things had sorted themselves out or we had Grace a lawyer. You want to call the cops now?”
I could see her struggling with it. She rubbed her mouth, then briefly put both hands on the top of her head, as if she had the world’s worst headache and was trying to keep her brain from exploding.
“God, I have no idea. If that man really has nothing to do with what happened to Grace, then we should call the police. He could return, or break into someone else’s house, or — hell, I don’t know.”
“But...”
She stood, went into the bathroom, ran some water into her hand and scooped some into her mouth. I followed, stood in the doorway.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “If Stuart’s alive, why didn’t Vince just tell me? He could have said the kid’s okay, but instead ordered me to let the matter drop. If he’d just told me Stuart was fine, I probably would have dropped it. I wouldn’t have gone looking for him this morning, at the hospital and his apartment.”
I paused, thinking it through. “Maybe that’s why we got the text. Vince found out — don’t ask me how — I was nosing around, and came up with that idea.”
“So it was Vince texting Grace, on Stuart’s phone.”
“Vince, or one of his bunch.”
“Oh shit,” she said, bracing herself on the countertop with her hands, looking at me in the mirror.
“We still have to know,” I said. “With certainty.”
The phone in the bedroom rang, startling both of us. I got to it first. The ID declared the caller to be unknown.
I picked up. “Hello?”
“Is your wife there?”
I knew the voice.
“What do you want?”