“She know all about this?” I asked.
He shook his head as he put the phone to his ear.
“What is it, honey?” he said. But his expression changed from mildly curious to deeply concerned. “Who the fuck is this? This Bryce?”
He listened. His face darkened.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Who the hell is—?”
He said nothing for several more seconds, then exploded.
“If you hurt her, I’ll fucking kill you. I will rip out your fucking heart. I will—”
Someone at the other end was trying to tell him something, but Vince wasn’t done.
“No, you shut up, you — you gotta be fucking kidding. There’s no way I can pull that together, no way! You put her on the phone! I wanna talk to her! I wanna hear her voice.”
He waited. I didn’t know whether he was holding his breath, but I was, and I was pretty sure Cynthia was, too.
“Baby?” he said tentatively.
When Jane came on, she shouted loud enough that we could hear her, too.
She said, “Vince, don’t—”
Nothing more.
“Put her back on!” he shouted. “If you — Okay, okay, just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt her. Tell me what you want.” A pause. I saw color draining from his cheeks. “That could take some time. It’s not all in one place. It’s complicated. I’m not trying to bullshit you. It’s spread out for security—”
He stopped talking, took the phone away from his ear. He’d been hung up on.
Very softly, Cynthia said, “Vince. What’s happened to Jane?”
But Vince was already entering a number into his phone, putting it to his ear. “Come on, pick up, pick up. Son of a — Gordie! Call me! Right fucking now!”
He ended the call, entered another number. Droplets of sweat had broken out on his forehead.
“Jesus, pick up... Bert! Is that you? Okay, okay, look, are you with Gordie? I tried to call and he — what? Slow down! Slow down! How did that happen? A FedEx truck? How the hell did he get hit — and what happened to Braithwaite? Jesus, he walks dogs. He’s not fucking James Bond!”
He put a hand to his forehead, held it there. “Look, look — I don’t care about any of that right now. Just — shut up and listen to me — don’t worry about that now. We’ve got a situation... Yeah, something else... yeah, more important. Somebody’s got Jane!”
More questions from Bert.
“That’s what I said. They’ve got Jane and they say they’re going to kill her if we don’t — Don’t tell me you don’t care!”
Vince’s eyes looked as though they’d pop out of his head. He’d taken his hand from his forehead and put it over his chest. “Are you listening to me? Listen! I’m at the Archer house. Whatever you’re doing, come by here and pick me — What?”
His face was dark like the bottom of a well.
“No, you listen. You still work for me. You get your ass here right—”
And then he stopped. A second hang-up within as many minutes. Slowly, he slipped the phone back into his jeans and looked at us, a man who’d lost all hope.
“They’ve got Jane,” he said. “And I got nobody.”
He reached out to the front hall table to steady himself, but his hand slipped on some mail lying there from the day before.
That was when his legs melted under him, and he went down.
Forty-nine
It was the blood on the train of Claudia Moretti’s wedding dress that prompted the owner of the bridal shop to call the police.
Claudia had the first appointment of the day for another fitting for her gown, which she would be wearing in two weeks when she married Marco Pucic, an out-of-work electrician who Claudia’s parents believed was nothing less than a total schmuck. She’d been zipped into the gown when she noticed she had something sticky on her hand, and, rather than run the risk of getting whatever it was on the dress, slipped through the shop’s back door and into a short hallway, where there were two doors nearly side by side. The first was for the bathroom, the second for private investigator Heywood Duggan.
She went into the bathroom, washed her hands, and when she returned, store owner Sylvia Monroe noticed a dark red mark on the train. When she examined it, she discovered it was still wet. In the hallway, Sylvia spotted the small trickle of blood coming out from under the door of Heywood’s office.
No way she was going in there. But she did call 911.
Rona Wedmore got a call not long after the uniformed officers arrived.
It was an execution.
One bullet to the head. Wedmore figured the killer must have used a gun with a silencer. Even though that still would have made a sound someone nearby might have heard, Joy Bennings, the lead crime scene investigator, figured Duggan had been dead an hour or two before anyone had turned up for work at the bridal shop.
“We’ll work our usual miracles,” Joy told Rona.
Rona said, “I want to know whether the gun that was used here is the same one that killed the Bradleys.”
Joy said, “Those two retired teachers?”
“That’s right.”
“This is connected to that?”
“It might be,” she said. “Same kind of execution.”
“You okay?” Joy asked while Rona stood there and looked down at the body. “You’re not your usual chipper self.”
“Duggan’s an ex — state trooper,” Wedmore said.
“Shit,” Joy said. “You knew him?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I interviewed him last night. He’s been sniffing around the Goemann murder, and Goemann used to live next door to the Bradleys.”
“What a summer,” Bennings said. “I was thinking of taking a week off, going to the Cape. But people are dropping like flies around here lately.”
While the medical examiner dealt with the body, Wedmore searched through Duggan’s desk, then sat down in the office chair and, with a gloved hand, nudged the computer mouse to bring the monitor to life. She handled it gingerly, knowing they’d be dusting it for prints, even though she had zero expectation of finding any other than the deceased’s.
She opened the mail program and sighed.
“We’re going to have to take this in,” she said. “See what we can get off it. All the e-mails — sent, in-box, trash — have been deleted. Might still be something there.”
Like something that would point Wedmore in the direction of Heywood’s client. Find the client, find out what he was working on, find out who’d want him dead.
Yeah, simple as that.
Wedmore noticed there was no landline on the desk. Like an increasing number of people, Heywood must have worked solely with a cell phone, the number she’d used to call him last night after finding contact info on his Web site.
“You find a phone on him?” Wedmore asked Joy.
Joy shook her head.
Shit.
Wedmore would be able to track down his cell phone provider and get a list of calls from them, but it would have been nice if the killer, or killers, had left the phone behind so she could check it out.
She left Duggan’s office and sought out Sylvia Monroe. Wedmore found the bridal shop owner in a closet-sized office off her showroom, which now had a CLOSED sign in the window. She was sitting behind a postage-stamp-sized desk that was obscured by receipts, fabric, and a bottle of bourbon and a shot glass.
“Ms. Monroe?”
She glanced up, grabbed the bottle, and shoved it back into a desk drawer. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a wreck.”
“Of course. I wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“Sure, yes, of course.”
“What time did you open up this morning?”
“Just before ten.”
“You notice anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary?”