I stood at the entryway to the kitchen, which was combined with a family room. To the right, a large central island, bar stools, all the usual appliances, and then opposite that a high-ceilinged room with skylights decorated with easy chairs, a couch, a fireplace, and a TV angled in one corner.
The kitchen floor was smooth. Some kind of tile, crisscrossed with what looked like a million tiny scratches. I bent down for a closer look.
“Dog,” I said to myself.
“What?” Grace said. “There’s a dog there?”
“No. I was just noticing all the scratches on the floor. Probably from a dog’s toenails. From its claws.”
“Oh.”
The countertops were cluttered with a toaster, Cuisinart, regular coffeemaker, Nespresso coffeemaker, waffle iron, bread maker, pretty much every gadget Williams-Sonoma carried. I lowered the beam, slowly scanned the floor again, saw more scratches. I figured that if Stuart, or anyone else, had been shot, they wouldn’t have ended up on the countertop. There’d be evidence—blood—on the floor. As I rounded the island, getting closer to the window, I held my breath. I had a very bad feeling that there was something around the corner, and I steeled myself for the discovery.
But there was nothing.
I came around the fourth side of the island, the space between it and the stove, and still nothing caught my eye.
“I’ve been through the kitchen,” I said. “I don’t see anything.” No response. “Grace?”
“I’m here. I heard you.” A pause. “Dad.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a police car going by.”
Son of a bitch.
I killed the flashlight and held my breath.
“Grace?”
“I’m just hiding behind the corner of the house. It just drove by real slow. I think it’s going down to the dead end.”
My car was parked out front. Was that what had attracted some officer’s attention? Had he wondered what it was doing there, the only car on that whole stretch that wasn’t pulled into a driveway? Would he take note of the license plate? Would he stop and do a check of the house?
“You want me to see where he—?”
“No! Grace, just stay where you are.”
“Okay.”
We both waited. I was tempted to run to the living room at the front of the house, peek through the drapes, but with the flashlight off I’d probably end up tripping over something.
“I see headlights coming back,” Grace whispered. “He must have turned around.”
Shit shit shit shit.
“He must be going real slow so—there he is!”
Drive on by. Just drive on by.
“He’s stopping, Dad.”
“Where?”
“He’s . . . he’s stopped next to your car.”
“Is he getting out? What’s he doing?”
“I can just sort of—It’s not a guy cop. It’s a woman. She’s got the light on inside her car.”
“What’s she doing?”
“I don’t know. Don’t they have, like, computers in their cars?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe she’s running my plate.”
“She’s starting to—I think she’s getting out of the car. Dad, you have to get out of the house.”
And go where? To the car? The cop was sitting on it. Suppose I could escape out the basement window, grab Grace, and cut through the property that backed onto this house? Once the police found the broken window, found out who belonged to the car out front—
We’d be toast. Grace and me both.
“Just sit tight, hon,” I said, trying my best to tamp down the panic I was feeling. Droplets of sweat were forming on my forehead. Even if Grace managed to hide, if that cop walked around the back of the house, saw the open window—
“Wait,” Grace said. “She’s getting back in the car. I think she’s on the radio or something.”
“Is she leaving? Is she—?”
“She’s driving away! Dad, she’s going! She’s going!”
I clicked the flashlight back on, kept it pointed to the floor, and found my way to a living room window. Through some sheers, I saw the Milford police car drive up the street, round the bend, and disappear.
“That was a little too close,” I said.
“Can we go now? Can we get out of here?”
The second time in as many hours that she wanted to get the hell away from this house.
“I’ve only checked the kitchen,” I said. “Before I leave, I’ve got to take a quick look through the whole house.”
SEVENTEEN
THE car, an oversized GM SUV, rolled to a stop, the engine continuing to rumble. Vince was in the passenger seat, Gordie behind the wheel. The backseats were folded down, an extension ladder stowed there. Behind them, in the old Buick, was Bert. He’d come to a stop barely a car length behind them.
“Bert’ll help you when he’s done, but you get started,” Vince Fleming told Gordie. “Every location. See if anything looks out of the ordinary. If no one’s there, go in tonight. If the place looks occupied, we do it tomorrow through the day. Everything—fucking everything—has to be moved by tomorrow.”
“What if the people are home? What if—?”
“Figure it out!” Vince said. He reached for the door handle, fumbling a couple of times. His hand was shaking.
“What about Eldon?” Gordie asked.
“What about him?” Vince snapped.
Gordie tried to hide how taken aback he was by the question. “When are you going to tell him?”
“I want to know a hell of a lot more before I talk to him. Take a run by his place, too. See if he’s there. I want to know if he’s home. You may end up running into him at one of the other houses.”
Gordie looked uncomfortable. “What are you saying? You saying Eldon’s in on it? That he did this? That doesn’t make any sense. He’s hardly going to—”
“Maybe not,” Vince said. “But maybe he’s got his kid and others helping him. Maybe things went wrong at one house. Who knows what the fuck is going on at the others? This is a nuclear meltdown, that’s what this is.”
He had the door open. “Just get moving.” Vince got out, slammed the door, slapped the sheet metal with his palm, hard, as if the SUV was a horse he wanted to bolt. Gordie hit the gas, squealing the tires as he took off.
Vince took the few steps to the Buick, leaned over, and rested his arms on the window-down passenger door.
Bert said nothing, waited for orders.
“Soon as you take care of this, work with Gordie.”
“Got it,” Bert said.
“Not a word to Eldon,” Vince said. “Not yet. There’s only so many ways this can shake down.”
“It’s not him, boss,” Bert said. “No way.”
Vince pressed his lips together, shook his head very slowly back and forth. “It was his kid in there. Maybe he put him up to it. Or maybe the kid came up with the idea on his own. Either way, Eldon’s on the hook for this.”
“Yeah, but there had to be somebody else in on it, too. I already told you who I’m putting my money on.”
Vince nodded. “I’ll check him out, but I don’t think he’s got the balls for it.”
“He coulda told somebody.”
“But the son of a bitch doesn’t even know. The cleaning ladies don’t know. The nannies don’t know. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know where to look. But yeah, maybe.” The man sighed. “Clusterfuck City.”
Bert didn’t know what to say. What words could make things better? He just wanted to get moving. He had an unpleasant task awaiting him, and he wanted it behind him. Then he could help Gordie.
“I should get going,” Bert said.
Vince retreated from the open window. “Go.”
Before Bert hit the gas, Vince took a step and stood next to the trunk. He went to touch the broad metal surface with his palm, the way one might lay one’s hand on a casket at a funeral service.
Then thought better o
f it. Bert would wipe down the car, but might not think of the trunk lid.
The Buick pulled away and Vince watched it head up East Broadway, hang a left, and then disappear.
Wearily, he mounted the wooden steps that took him up to the main floor of the beach house. Back in the day, he took these two at a time. Back before he’d been shot. And back before the diagnosis. He was getting too old for this. It was one of the reasons why he’d pulled back on the kinds of jobs they used to do. Warehouse robberies, truck hijackings. Stuff that required a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes, running.
So he started a sideline, one that didn’t take such a physical toll. A service for people who didn’t feel comfortable with financial institutions.
Seemed like a pretty good plan.
Until tonight.
Now it looked like the whole thing was going to blow up in his face. He hoped to know more, soon, once he’d had a chance to talk to an old friend.
EIGHTEEN
TERRY
GIVEN Grace’s confusion about what had happened in the house, it occurred to me that what she thought she’d heard in the kitchen might easily have taken place someplace else. I couldn’t see limiting my search of the house to the first floor.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Standing in the living room, I couldn’t see that anything was amiss, unless someone was jammed in between the sofa and the wall—and I was not going to start moving around furniture. Nor did there appear to be anything out of the ordinary in the adjoining dining room. When what you’re looking for is a body, it doesn’t take long to cross a room off your list. This wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack.
As I was headed for the stairs that would take me to the second floor, I glanced in the direction of the front door and the security system keypad mounted on the wall next to it. The light was red, indicating the system was engaged. If I opened that door without entering the code, alarms would go off, police would be dispatched.
I remembered Grace saying the light had been green when she was in the house.
That was a puzzle I couldn’t solve right now. I was looking for Stuart.
Heading up the stairs, I nearly touched the railing out of habit. I had the phone in that hand and wouldn’t have been able to do more than use the railing to steady myself, but even if I couldn’t grip it, it was best not to touch it at all.
Don’t touch a damn thing.
Off the upstairs hallway, which ran about twenty feet, were three bedrooms and a bathroom, all with doors slightly ajar, so I was able to ease them open with my elbow. I went into each one, shined the light around the beds, and peeked behind the shower curtain in the bathroom.
So far, so good.
I had a brief debate with myself about closets. Should I go back into each bedroom and inspect them or not? I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do. I was freaking myself out enough already, just being in this house, moving stealthily from room to room.
For Stuart, or anyone else for that matter, to be stuffed in a closet suggested there would have been at least a third person in the house to put him there. Maybe even a couple of people. Grace had said she felt someone brushing past her.
Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do. But I was going to need something on my hand before I started turning doorknobs.
I tucked my cell back into my shirt pocket without breaking the connection with Grace and grabbed a fistful of tissues from a Kleenex box in the bathroom. Then I went into the first bedroom, which gave every indication of being a girl’s room, with stuffed animals by the pillows and posters of horses on the walls, and stood in front of the closet.
“Here goes,” I said under my breath. With a tissue-wrapped hand I opened the door and shined the light in.
Nothing special there. Skirts and blouses and shoes and other items of clothing, all small. Barbie boxes. More stuffed animals. A girl maybe seven or eight years old, I guessed. These looked like the kinds of things Grace surrounded herself with at that age. I closed the door and went down the hall to the next bedroom.
Another girl, but older, probably midteens. A poster of what looked like the latest hot boy band on one wall, and while there was the odd stuffed animal, everything was a little less “itsy.” An iPod dock on the table next to the bed, a hodgepodge of earrings and other jewelry on the top of the dresser. Bottles of nail polish remover, hairspray, body lotion.
I stood before the closet, took a breath, and turned the knob.
“Shit!”
I managed, even startled as I was, to keep my outburst to a whisper, but it was loud enough for Grace to hear.
“What?” said her voice, coming from my shirt pocket. “Dad? What’s happened?”
I took out the phone. “You know how sometimes, when we ask you to clean up your room, you just dump everything in your closet and keep stuffing it in until you can get the door closed?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not the only one.”
I put the phone back into my pocket. A stack of clothes had tumbled out and was covering the toes of my shoes. I set down the flashlight, shoveled the mess back into the closet—hoping fingerprints wouldn’t show up on a pile of jeans and tops and underwear, since I couldn’t do this with a wad of tissues in my hand—and managed to get the door shut once more.
I didn’t run into Fibber McGee’s closet in the master bedroom. And even at that moment, I thought, Where the hell did that reference come from? I wasn’t old enough to have ever seen, or heard, the old Fibber McGee and Molly movies or radio shows, but it was a phrase my grandparents always used to describe a closet that was jam-packed. Whenever Fibber opened the hall closet, a hundred things cascaded out onto his head. Hilarity, evidently, ensued.
I could use a laugh right about now.
The master had a walk-in closet, so nothing rained down on me as I opened the door. It was tidier than either of the children’s closets, with nothing on the carpeted floor. Shoes, and there were dozens of pairs of them, about ninety percent of them a woman’s, were all neatly stacked on shelving. I noticed eight small rectangular impressions in the carpet, clustered in groups of two and each about the size of a domino, which, if you were to draw a line between them, would have made a square roughly two feet by two feet. Given that I was looking for a body, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them.
I left the closet and did another inspection of the en suite bathroom. Glanced into the tub to see whether anyone had been dumped there.
I reached into my pocket for the phone.
“I’m almost done,” I told Grace. “I’ll take a quick look through the basement before I come back out. Everything okay out there?”
“Yeah. So you haven’t seen Stuart?”
“Haven’t seen him or anybody else, sweetheart.”
“Thank God.”
I thought it was premature to be offering up those kinds of thanks yet, but I hoped she had reason to be optimistic.
On my way to the basement I aimed the flashlight back into the kitchen for a final sweep, then went down the last flight of stairs. In addition to the rec room, where I’d come through the window, there was a furnace room, a laundry room, and a small workshop. Tools of every description hung on one wall, a table saw, a drill press, a small lathe bolted to the workbench. An aluminum ladder leaned up against the wall. And while there was a faint scent of sawdust in the air, there wasn’t a trace of it on the painted concrete floor.
There, on the far wall, a chest freezer.
Waist high, about six feet long. A small amber light on the side to indicate that it was running.
“Oh no,” I said under my breath. If I didn’t open it, I might end up kicking myself later. And I was not—ever—coming into this house again.
I approached the freezer, held the light in my left hand, raised above my shoulder, angled down, and lifted the top with my right.
Lots of frozen food.
As I came back out of the workshop, I felt somewhat
encouraged. The home looked to me to be corpse free. Not the sort of thing generally mentioned in a real estate listing, but a good thing nonetheless.
Stuart Koch—dead or alive—was not here. But if he was okay, why wasn’t he answering his phone?
I could think of any number of reasons, but the first that came to mind was that he was a chickenshit little weasel and didn’t want to take a call from the girl he’d dragged into a terrifying situation. He didn’t have the guts to apologize. He didn’t have the guts to admit he’d done a pretty goddamn stupid thing.
I didn’t want to have to come up with another reason. That one suited me just fine.
The trouble was, it didn’t explain what had happened in this house an hour and a half or so earlier.
Something was nagging at me.
It wasn’t the business of trying to figure out what had gone down here. I’d seen something, and it was only now registering.
When I’d waved the light past the kitchen on my way down, something had caught my eye. I hadn’t really thought about it until I’d gotten to the basement.
Something not quite right. Something shimmery.
Something on the kitchen island. Not on it, exactly, but on the side of it.
“Are you done, Daddy?” Grace asked.
“Just another minute,” I told her.
I went back up to the first floor, stood at the entrance to the kitchen, aimed the light at the base of the island. The sides were done in paneled wood. Light in color, probably a bleached oak.
About a foot up from the floor, the finish was marred. Droplets of something that had hit the vertical plane and then trickled down.
Something, in the glow of the flashlight, that could have been, say, spaghetti sauce.
I knelt down and brought the light up close. The drops were fresh to the touch, and when I put the tip of my finger to within an inch of my nose, I detected no whiff of tomato or spices.
My heart sank. Something had definitely happened here. But—if this was any consolation—there was so little blood my guess was that whoever suffered an injury had managed to leave the scene.
The hospital. That was where we should go next. Milford Hospital.