“You must have felt something for them.”
“No more than what they felt for me.”
“Were they so awful?”
“Not awful. Just not—not parents. I mean, they raised me, sort of, but I was basically just an inconvenience.” She stepped away from the counter. “Forget it. I’m not having this conversation.”
He didn’t move. His chair blocked the kitchen doorway. “You never open up, do you? Never let anybody in.”
“Works for me.”
“Does it? You’re self-sufficient, I know. But you’re also hard.”
“Like a turtle. I got that.”
“I’m serious.”
She shrugged. “It’s a hard world. As you ought to know.”
“Why me? Because of this thing?” His fist smacked the armrest. “That’s no big deal.”
“It’s all what you make of it, huh? Life gives you lemons ... Sorry, I don’t buy that happy crap.”
She moved decisively toward him, and he yielded, rotating the chair so she could get by.
“You’ll tell me someday,” he said, “when you feel you can.”
She understood he was using psychology, offering her a challenge, and the really irritating part was that it worked. He knew she wouldn’t back down from a fight.
“You want me to talk about my childhood? Okay, it won’t take long. I didn’t have a childhood. How’s that?”
“Everybody has a childhood.”
“Yeah? Well, I spent mine moving from one fleabag motel to another. My parents never raised me, never gave a shit about me. I was just one more item they had to remember to pack.”
“Why’d they move around so much?”
“Because my dad was a crook. Not a very successful one. Strictly smalltime. He operated all over the Northeast, never stayed long in one place. He was always on the run from gambling debts and bad choices.”
She had memories of her father, but not good ones. He stayed out all night drinking and playing cards, and sometimes he was gone for days, only to return with wads of cash that he doled out sparingly to her mom, keeping most of the money for himself. Bonnie didn’t know where he got it, though she could guess it was nowhere good, and she didn’t know what he did with it, but it never seemed to last.
“How about school?” Desmond asked.
“I went to a bunch of different schools, wherever we happened to land. There were long stretches when I didn’t go at all.”
“Friends?”
“Making friends is hard when you’re always the new kid and you wear thrift-shop clothes. And when you cop an attitude, which I did.”
“You had your reasons.”
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, when I was fourteen, I quit that life. I left a good-bye note for mom and dad, and went off on my own.”
“And did what?”
“Bummed around the country, got a lot of mileage out of my thumb. Occasionally did some things that weren’t strictly legal. Learned a healthy disrespect for authority.”
“And you never saw your folks again?”
She shrugged. “My dad must’ve finally messed with the wrong people. Him and my mom turned up dead in a motel room in Pennsylvania. Shot execution-style. It was on the news. Pretty big story. Imagine that—my dad had finally made it big.”
“How did you feel when you heard about it?”
“I felt—they’re dead, and I’m not. Sucks for them, good for me.”
“That’s all?”
“A couple of outlaws on the run get whacked. Happens every day.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“Outlaws on the run. Does that remind you of anybody in particular?”
She knew what he was saying. She didn’t want to go there. “Give it a rest. Seriously, I don’t have any depths.”
“Maybe they’re just unexplored.”
“Let’s leave them that way.”
“You don’t think it’s significant that your parents—”
“Christ, Des. Just drop it. I don’t give a shit about my mom and dad. You think I’d shed a tear over a couple of losers who never gave a damn about anybody but themselves?”
“I think losing them hurt you more than you’re willing to admit.”
“Well, I think you were right the first time. I’m hard and cold, like you said. And I like it that way. Okay?”
His eyes lowered. His voice was very soft. “Okay, Parker.”
“Don’t say it like you feel sorry for me.” She brushed past him, flaunting her mobility, her legs. “You’re a goddamn cripple, for Christ’s sake. Feel sorry for yourself.”
She left the house, pulling the front door shut behind her, not looking back.
CHAPTER 11
Dan Maguire had spent an hour disinfecting his car after work, muttering curses the whole time. Dogshit all over the front seat, and a festival of flies. And it must have happened just after his little talk with a certain local PI.
Coincidence? Dan could just imagine himself raising that possibility with his old man, a longtime cop who knew the score. Make like a shepherd, Dan Maguire, Sr., would have told him, and get the flock outta here.
Then the old man would’ve busted out his big-bellied laugh, the same laugh Dan had heard from him right before his heart failed and he slumped over dead in their booth at the Lobster Pot.
Bonnie Parker was responsible for the pile of crap stinking up his Buick, but he couldn’t prove it. He could never prove anything about her. He knew she was guilty—guilty of a whole lot more than vandalism. But as much as he wanted to pin that particular butterfly to his mounting board, she still fluttered maddeningly out of reach.
He reclined in the Barcalounger in his den, nursing a mug of Irish coffee, while some reality crap on Spike TV droned in the background. He wasn’t watching. He stared at the motionless ceiling fan over his head, trying to figure out just how he could nail that blond bitch.
A sociopath. That was what she was.
Not long ago he’d read a book claiming that ten percent of the population were sociopaths. Since then, he’d been seeing sociopaths everywhere. The mayor was a sociopath. The mechanic at the Shell station. That asshole Gertz who was always being insubordinate at the morning meetings. All classic sociopaths. But Parker was the worst, because she was one of the minority of sociopaths who were actively violent. Not just a troublemaker, but a lawbreaker. And not just a lawbreaker, but a killer.
Her stunt with his car was typical sociopathic behavior. So was her blue-eyed innocent act. Even the hats she wore—they were probably a sign of a sociopathic tendency. You know, disguising her appearance, hiding her true self. What did the book call it? Faking normal. Right. She was doing her best to pass as normal, but he could see through her. He knew what she was.
“You’re thinking about her again.”
The voice was Bernice’s. She stood in the doorway, arms folded, disapproval stamped on her face.
“Of course I am. I told you about the damn car.”
“You don’t know she did it.”
He ignored her. “It was hardly out of the showroom. Still had that new-car smell. What you think it smells like now?”
“This will drive you crazy. It’s eating away at you inside.”
“It’s my job,” he said wearily.
“Oh, pish posh. It’s your private obsession.”
He thought about answering, but there was nothing to say. When he glanced at the doorway again, she was gone.
Bernice didn’t get it. She didn’t know how a problem like Bonnie Parker could work its way under your skin and fester and itch. And the more you scratched it, the more you made it bleed.
His wife was calm and practical. She knew how to let things go. Like when they had that row with the Dirksens. Bernice had patched things up with Molly right away, but Dan had held on to his grudge against Phil for months. Held on to it to this day, if truth be told.
Bernice liked to say she’d rather
be happy than right. Dan didn’t grasp that way of thinking. He couldn’t be happy unless he was right. More to the point, he had to be proved right. He had to show the world. Had to show his old man, whose belly-laughing ghost still hovered around him, making him feel that even though he was chief of police, he hadn’t measured up.
Sure, maybe he should just leave it alone. But he couldn’t. It was like a puzzle where the answer was right in front of him, and he just had to see.
Their conversation in the diner hadn’t given him much to work with. Parker played her cards close to the vest, he had to give her that. And he couldn’t shake her, no matter how much he rattled her cage. She was cold, that one. Cold as fucking ice.
Still, there was one thing she’d said. When he’d brought up the subject of her name, she’d said her dad liked outlaws. And that was mildly interesting. Because among the many other mysteries surrounding Miss Bonnie Parker, there was the mystery of her past.
Dan had done his best to research her roots, but his efforts had come up empty. It was as if she had materialized in Brighton Cove at the age of twenty-two, with no history, no background, no family. He didn’t know who her mom and dad might’ve been. There were candidates, though. A list of possible suspects.
Grunting, he heaved himself forward in the chair and leaned down to open the bottom drawer of the desk beside him. Inside was a manila folder, unlabeled. It contained everything he knew about Bonnie Parker, every scrap of information, innuendo, and speculation that he had acquired over the past six months. There wasn’t much, but among the clippings were several news items, obituaries, and police reports pertaining to people who might have been her parents.
He riffled through the papers until he found the clipping he wanted. It was a newspaper story from the Patriot-News, dated fourteen years ago, and it reported the murders of Tom and Rebecca Parker in a motel in Conover, Pennsylvania, a rural area in the central part of the state.
The crime had never been solved. Dan knew that much from following up with the Conover authorities. And he knew something more. A teenage girl was with the pair when they checked in. This was confirmed by another guest and by the desk clerk, though neither witness could offer a decent description. It stood to reason that the girl in question was their daughter Bonnie, known to be traveling with them.
Their daughter was fourteen that year. And Bonnie Parker—his Bonnie Parker—was twenty-eight now. The timeline fit.
What’s more, the girl hadn’t been found in the motel with the bodies. Hadn’t been found anywhere else, either. She had simply disappeared.
The newspaper story featured only a photo of the motel’s exterior, which was of no interest of him. But the Conover Police Department had sent him a copy of their file on the case, which included a mug shot of Tom Parker from an arrest a year earlier. In the photo he regarded the camera with a quizzical, sly, half-amused expression. The arrest was a big joke to him. Maybe everything was a big joke.
Dan squinted at the photo, doing his best to see Bonnie Parker’s face in Tom Parker’s features. No luck. Tom Parker had been a scrawny, grizzled little guy, prematurely balding, rheumy eyed, snaggle-toothed. If Bonnie was his daughter, she got her looks from Rebecca, whose photo wasn’t in the file.
But Tom sure looked like the kind of guy who admired outlaws. Hell, he had been an outlaw himself. Could have named his daughter after the most notorious female criminal in American history, the distaff half of Bonnie and Clyde, the white-trash matriarch of a gang that gunned down bank clerks and cops for fun? Dan thought so.
The authorities in Conover assumed the couple’s daughter was long dead. Their hypothesis was that the killers, having finished with the mom and dad, took the kid and used her in unsavory ways until they got tired of her, then left her corpse to rot in the woods.
But suppose fourteen-year-old Bonnie hadn’t died. Suppose she’d escaped somehow. Given that she’d never turned up anywhere, she must have gone off on her own, fending for herself. He pictured her, a feral wildcat of a girl, traumatized by whatever hell she’d been through, roaming the fields and the streets, learning to be cruel, to be indifferent to human life.
It was enough to almost make you feel sorry for her. But he was more interested in bringing her to justice. For the murder of Jacob Hart—and probably other crimes.
Once he’d figured out why Bonnie Parker’s name was familiar, he’d taken the time to read up on her namesake at the library. He didn’t care much about Clyde Barrow, a slick little dime-store crook, so gutless he’d hacked off his own damn toes to get out of chain-gang duty, a nobody in a pinstriped suit whose only skill was driving fast. Bonnie Parker was a more intriguing figure, famous for posing for her picture with a cigar clamped in her mouth, a waitress turned outlaw who shocked and titillated a nation. No one knew for sure if she had done any killing. Some said she murdered a state trooper, but the story was thin. Didn’t matter anyway. She’d been Clyde’s accomplice and a permanent, integral part of the ever-changing Barrow Gang. Any blood spilled by Clyde and his buddies—and there had been plenty—was on her hands. She had deserved no mercy.
And neither did Brighton Cove’s Bonnie Parker. Dan was very damn sure about that. And he intended to show her none.
The show on Spike TV was ending. It made him aware of the time. No wonder he was tired. Bernice must have already gone up to bed, and he hadn’t even noticed. All he’d been thinking of was Parker.
What the hell did happen in that motel room anyway? Dan Maguire pondered the problem as he replaced the folder in the desk drawer. Probably it didn’t matter. Probably it wouldn’t explain anything.
But the question still itched at him, itched like a bastard, and he still wanted to know.
CHAPTER 12
Okay, she had been a stone cold bitch to Des. Bonnie admitted as much to herself as she cruised down Highway 35 on the way to the Roach House.
She hated being mean to him, because Des was pretty much the only person she knew who was worthy of admiration. Well, she might add Lizbeth the waitress, who cheerfully did her crappy job day in and day out without complaint. That was about it. People were basically animals. Few of them were as good as they pretended to be, and most were a whole lot worse. The world was a bleak and brutal place. There was a reason babies cried when they were born. Nobody wanted to be here, dealing with this shit.
And so what if she was hard, cold? Whatever her damage, it was her problem, not his. He had no business prying into her past. It wasn’t like she was an oyster and all he had to do was claw her open and a goddamned pearl would drop out.
If she had open wounds, she’d earned them. And earned the right to keep them hidden.
“So fuck him,” she muttered. “Fuck everybody.”
She hooked left into the motel parking lot, checking the time on her phone, because she never wore a watch and the Jeep’s clock was busted. It was 11:15. The sign outside announced VACANCY, a claim easily verified by counting the vehicles in the nearly empty lot. There were six, not including her own. One of them was an SUV with New York plates positioned head-out in front of room thirty-two.
She parked well away from the room and dug in her glove compartment for the forty-dollar throwaway cell phone she’d purchased a few months ago. It was one of those items that could always come in handy. She’d installed a neat little app that uploaded the phone’s GPS coordinates to a password-protected website. When the phone was turned on and in motion, its position was updated every five seconds and displayed as an icon on a map. Even if the phone wasn’t moving, its position was updated every sixty seconds as long as it remained on.
Of course, the app’s fine print made it very clear that it was not to be used for covert tracking. But she had this problem with rules. She tended to break them. It was something she really needed to work on.
She switched on the phone and approached the SUV. It was a Lexus RX, and it was black. No surprise. Bad guys always went for black. She planted the spare
phone underneath the rear bumper, securing it with a lump of putty, then shined her keychain penlight on the interior of the vehicle, picking out a large satchel in the rear compartment and a map of the tri-state area on the front passenger seat.
Pocketing the keychain, she approached room thirty-two. The drapes were pulled shut, but one end of the drape was starting to fall off the rod, leaving a small triangle of glass uncovered. It glowed with yellow light from inside the room. If the guy was in there, he hadn’t turned in yet, unless he was frightened of monsters under the bed.
Kneeling by the window, she peeked inside.
He was sitting on the bed, his bald head bent low, his thin shoulders hunched. It took her a moment to realize that he was cleaning a gun.
Apparently he expected to have a use for it.
She watched until he shifted his position, allowing her to get a glimpse of the firearm. It was a Beretta 9, just the thing she would expect a pro to carry.
He wore the black leather gloves she’d seen in the photo. She wondered if he ever took them off. The matching jacket was draped over a chair.
There was no sign that anyone shared the room. A single suitcase lay on the luggage rack. It was no surprise that he was traveling alone. Most killers weren’t very sociable. She ought to know.
Silently she withdrew from the window. Back in the Jeep, she brought up Sammy’s web browser and logged on to her GPS tracking account. The position of the throwaway phone was correctly displayed on the map.
She looked up the number of the Roach House and placed a call to the motel. Someone at the front desk answered, sounding sleepy.
“Can you connect me with the guy in thirty-two?” she asked.
A classier establishment would have made her give the guest’s name, especially this close to midnight. The Roach House didn’t adhere to such elevated standards. Calls came in at all hours, and names were seldom used.
“Hang on,” the listless voice said.
The room phone rang five times before the occupant picked up. “Yes?”
A cultured voice, quiet and calm. And yes, there was an accent, possibly Latin American as Alan Kirby had claimed.
“I know why you’re in Brighton Cove,” she said.