No Safe House

  “What list?”

  “A list, okay? That my dad’s got. They try to keep it up-to-date, when people are on vacation, that kind of thing. I check out places where people are away, see what kind of wheels they got. One time I took out a Mercedes, just for, like, twenty minutes, and no one ever knew. Not a scratch on it. Put it back in the garage just the way it was.”

  “Who keeps a list like that?” Grace asked. “What’s your dad do? Does he do, like, security stuff, too?” The thing was, she had an inkling of what this boy’s father did and would have been surprised to learn it had anything to do with making people feel safer in their homes.

  “Yeah,” he said offhandedly. “That’s what he is. Security.”

  Grace kept thinking about the call and the text from her father. When she’d left the house, she’d told him she was going to a movie with another girl from her class. Her mom was going to drive. It was a seven o’clock show that was supposed to get out around nine, and she’d get a lift home after.

  What would her dad do if he found out she’d lied? Because as lies went, this was a doozy. Grace wasn’t with that girl, and they weren’t at the movies. Stuart—not her friend’s mother—was going to drop her off a block from home. Her father would never have let her go out with a boy who was old enough to drive.

  And certainly not this boy, this onetime pain-in-the-ass know-nothing student in her father’s class. With, as Grace suspected her father knew, a kind of questionable home background.

  “What you’re talking about sounds like stealing,” she said.

  Stuart shook his head. “No way. Stealing is when you take a car and keep it, or sell it to someone who packs it up in a big cargo container and ships it over to some guy in Arabia or something. But we’re only going to borrow it. Won’t even try to see what it can do, because the last thing you want when you’re borrowing somebody’s car is get a speeding ticket, you know?”

  Grace waited a long time before she said, “I guess it would be fun.”

  He started up the land yacht and headed west.

  FIVE

  DETECTIVE Rona Wedmore was about to collapse into bed when she got the call that they’d found a body.

  Lamont was already under the covers, and asleep, but began to stir when he sensed his wife was putting her clothes back on.

  “Babe?” he said, turning over in bed.

  She never got tired of hearing him talk, even a single word like that. Didn’t matter what he said, not after she’d been through that period when he didn’t speak a word. Traumatized after coming back from Iraq, the things he’d seen, he’d gone kind of catatonic on her. Not speaking for months, until that night three years ago when she got shot in the shoulder and he showed up at the emergency room and said to her, “You okay?”

  It was nearly worth taking a bullet to hear those two words. No, actually, it was worth it.

  “I gotta go out,” she said. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “’S’okay,” he said, the side of his face still pressed into the pillow. He knew better than to ask how long she was going to be. She’d be gone as long as she had to be gone.

  She locked up the house, got in her car, and, as she drove to the scene, thought this was just what Milford needed. Another murder. As if people here weren’t already on edge. Wedmore hoped it was something simple, like some guy getting stabbed in a bar fight. People dying in bar fights did not spread fear through a community. One idiot kills another idiot at a bar and most people shrug and think, What do you expect when a couple of yahoos have too much to drink? Sitting in the safety of their homes, the good people of Milford didn’t feel threatened by a crime like that.

  But the Bradley double homicide, that was a horse of a different color, as Wedmore’s late father liked to say. Two retired seniors shot in their living room? For no apparent reason?

  That freaked people out.

  Damned if Wedmore could get a handle on it. Neither Richard nor Esther Bradley had had any kind of criminal record. There wasn’t so much as a single unpaid parking ticket registered against either of them. They had a married daughter in Cleveland, who checked out just as clean, too. There was no marijuana grow op in the basement, no meth lab in an old Airstream out back.

  Yes, earlier in the evening Richard Bradley had stormed over to the house next door to tell some students to keep the noise down. At first, the kids were the only suspects Wedmore had. But the more she checked into them, the more convinced she became that they had nothing to do with killing the Bradleys.

  So who the hell did it, then? And why?

  The daughter had flown in from Cleveland, and when she wasn’t going to pieces about losing her parents, she’d helped Wedmore go through the house in an attempt to determine whether anything was missing. As far as the daughter could tell, nothing had been stolen, and besides, her parents didn’t have anything all that valuable anyway. And the killer, or killers, hadn’t even bothered to take cash or credit cards out of Richard Bradley’s wallet or Esther Bradley’s purse.

  Which tended to rule out drug addicts looking for a way to pay for their next fix.

  So maybe it was a thrill kill.

  But there was nothing ritualistic about the murders. No writing of “Helter Skelter” in the victims’ blood on the living room walls.

  Rona wondered whether the fact that they had both been teachers was a factor. One possible scenario: Some kid one of them had flunked years earlier believed that Richard or Esther had ruined his life. He’d come back for revenge. It seemed a bit out there to Wedmore, but in the absence of any other theory, she found herself reaching. And overreaching. But revenge killings were not generally so tidy.

  Richard and Esther Bradley had each been killed with a single bullet to the head. A cool and efficient double hit. No fingerprints left behind. People who killed for revenge tended to overdo it. Twenty stab wounds instead of three. Six bullets instead of one.

  So, okay. If it was a professional hit, why? Who the hell would put out a contract on two retired teachers?

  It was driving Detective Rona Wedmore crazy.

  Maybe another murder, if not what Milford needed, was exactly what she needed. Something to clear her head of the Bradley case. Focus elsewhere. That sometimes worked for her. It might mean that when she went back to the double homicide, she’d notice something she hadn’t seen before.

  It wasn’t, as it turned out, a bar that Wedmore had been summoned to, but Silver Sands State Park, forty-seven acres of sandy beaches, dunes, marshes, wetlands, and forest on the sound. She went south on Viscount, past the seniors apartment building on the right until the street ended, then turned left onto the roadway that paralleled the beach and the boardwalk. She took it right to the end, where three Milford police cars with rooftop lights twirling were parked.

  A uniformed male officer spotted her unmarked car and approached.

  “Detective Wedmore?” he asked as she got out of the car.

  “Yeah. What’s up, Charlie?”

  “Same old. Wife and me just had a kid.”

  “Hey, no kidding? Congrats. Boy, girl? Something else?”

  “A girl. Calling her Tabitha.”

  “So, what’ve we got here?”

  “Dead male. White, early twenties. Looks like he took a couple in the back. Maybe he was running away.”

  “Witnesses?”

  Officer Charlie shook his head. “Not even sure it happened here. Think he might have been dumped.”

  Wedmore was pulling on a pair of gloves. “Lead the way.”

  She followed the cop down along the boardwalk. It had taken quite a beating during Hurricane Sandy, just like everything else along here, but had now been pretty much repaired.

  “Over here.” Charlie pointed into the tall grasses to the left of the boardwalk, away from the sound.

  There were several other cops there already. Some lights had been set up on stands.

  Wedmore made her way through the waist-high grass. She caught a whiff of decom
position, but there was a breeze coming in off the water, so she didn’t feel the need to rub some Vicks beneath her nose.

  “Who found him?” she asked of anyone who would answer while she got a penlight out of her jacket pocket.

  A uniformed woman said, “Couple kids, making out, wandered this way. They ran out, called us, waited around on the boardwalk till we got here.”

  “You let them go?”

  “We got names, all that. Their parents came and got them.”

  The body was facedown. The man was probably two hundred pounds, short blond hair, oversized blue T-shirt and khaki shorts with half a dozen pockets. White socks and running shoes. Wedmore knelt down, caught a glimpse of something in a lower pocket. She fished out a wallet, opened it up, shined her penlight on a driver’s license visible behind clear plastic.

  “Eli Richmond Goemann,” she said. Wedmore studied the two bullet holes in the back of the blood-soaked shirt. “Roll him over.”

  A couple of officers did the dirty work.

  “Hardly any blood,” she said. “He didn’t bleed out here. So yeah—where’s Charlie? Anyway, what he said, that he was moved here, that seems likely. Joy been called?” The forensic examiner.

  Someone said, “Yes.”

  Wedmore took a look through the wallet. Sixty-eight bucks in cash. Credit card receipts from bars, liquor stores. That’d give her a place to start.

  She took another look at the Connecticut driver’s license. The man was born in March 1992, so that made him twenty-two.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “What?” said someone.

  Wedmore kept staring at the license. At Eli Goemann’s address.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  She knew the street. She’d been there recently. Eli’s former address was just two numbers off from the house where Richard and Esther Bradley had been murdered.

  Wedmore was pretty sure that was the house where the students lived.

  SIX

  “YOU look all freaked-out,” Stuart said to Grace on their way to the house where they were going to find a Porsche. “But believe me, it’s going to be fine. There’s, like, no risk at all.”

  “How are you going to start it? Like on TV, you touch some wires together under the steering wheel?”

  “Shit, no, that’s totally unrealistic. Like, the guy, he gets under there, finds the wires, and in two seconds he’s got the car going. Doesn’t happen. And even if you could get it to start, how are you supposed to unlock the steering column, right? You need a key for that. In the movies, yeah, maybe you could get the car running, but you could only drive it in a straight line. I hate stupid stuff like that in movies.”

  “So you’ve got the key?”

  “Not yet.” He patted her thigh with his right hand. “Okay, it’s just up the street here, but we’ll walk up half a block.”

  She hadn’t paid much attention to where they were going. But they were on a dead-end street now, in a nice part of town. Well-manicured lawns, mature trees, houses set back from the curb. Big driveways.

  “Come on,” Stuart said as she got out of the car slowly. They were a few steps away when the boy stopped suddenly. “Wait here a sec. Forgot something.”

  He went back to the Buick, opened the passenger door, put one knee on the seat, and leaned forward, as if rummaging around in the glove box for something. Whatever he found, he tucked it into the front waistband of his jeans and pulled his jacket over it.

  “What did you get?” Grace asked when he rejoined her.

  “Flashlight,” he said.

  He was reading house numbers. He stopped out front of a two-story Colonial. “This is it. Come on. We can’t stand around staring at it. People notice.”

  Except there was no one around.

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her up the drive. There was one light on over the front door, another at the side of the house, but he was pretty sure no one from any neighboring houses could see them.

  “Whose place is this?” she asked.

  “Somebody named Cummings or something. What a name. Someone says, Who are you?, you say, I’m Cumming. And they say, Oh, you that happy to see me?” He snorted. “Let’s double-check the garage first, make sure it’s there, that we haven’t come here for nothing.” He tightened his grip on her wrist.

  A garage big enough for two cars was around back, attached to the house. Four rectangular windows ran horizontally along the door at eye level. “I just want to make sure,” he said.

  He reached into his jacket for his cell phone, used the app that turned it into a light, and put it up to a window.

  “I thought you went back for a flashlight,” Grace said.

  “Jackpot,” he said, staring into the garage. “Can you see that? Look in there.”

  She looked. “I see a car.” Two, actually. A plain white four-door sedan and a low two-door sporty number in red.

  “That’s not a car,” the boy said. “That’s a 911. A goddamn Carrera. Now we just have to get inside and get the keys.”

  For the first time, Grace was starting to think this was a really, really bad idea. Her stomach started to float. “I don’t think so. I don’t like this.”

  “I told you, it’s okay. They’re away. We get in without tripping the alarm. Word is, they’ve got a dog—they’ve got it boarded or something for the week—but it means they won’t have motion detectors inside. Stupid pets set them off all the time.”

  She wrenched her wrist from his grip. “No. No way.”

  He whirled around. “What are ya gonna do? Walk home? Do you even know where we are? You gonna sit on the curb till I get back? Come on. I wasn’t able to get the key or find the pass code with my dad’s stuff, but that’s okay—we’ll get in through a basement window.”

  Grace’s phone dinged. Another text from her father.

  “Your old man again?”

  She nodded, then put the phone away as he turned away from her and knelt by a basement window.

  “The sensor should be in the corner here,” he said. He kicked in the glass. Grace jumped, put both hands to her mouth. “Just sounds loud because you’re standing there. No one’ll hear that. And there’s carpet on the basement floor.” Shards of glass lined the edge of the frame like sharks’ teeth. “I could fit through here, but I’d bleed to death after.”

  He reached into the pocket of his jeans and came out with a credit card that had a couple of short pieces of duct tape stuck to it, and then something shiny about the size of a matchbook. He looked back at the girl, unfolded the shiny item, and grinned. “Tin foil. We just slip that over the contact and hold it in place . . .”

  He had his hand inside the window, working on the upper right corner.

  “. . . and now, when we open the window, the alarm does . . . not . . . go . . . off.” His arm still snaked into the house, he cranked open the window, creating a larger opening, without any shards to catch him on the way in. “I gotta be honest—that’s the part that always scares me. I was ready to run if I had to.”

  He dropped his legs in first, supporting himself with his elbows, then dropped about a foot. “Piece of cake,” he said. “Come on.”

  She felt chilled, even though the summer night air hadn’t dipped below seventy. She tilted her head back, scanned the heavens. Despite the light pollution, she could make out stars. She remembered the telescope she used to have when she was a little girl. How she used to study the stars from her bedroom window, searching for asteroids, worried one of them would strike and wipe out her and her parents.

  The whole planet, too. But once you’d lost your whole family, the rest of the world seemed incidental.

  Lost families. Something of a theme in her household.

  And now her family was less than whole, what with her mom living in an apartment in an old house on the other side of Milford. Grace thought she’d have moved back by now, but nope. Was she trying to make a point, staying away this long? Was all this talk that she needed some
time to “get her head together” the truth, or just some bullshit story to cover up the fact that she just didn’t love Grace and didn’t want to be in the same house with her?

  Not that things weren’t a little more calm these days, with just her dad at home.

  Her mom was so uptight, so worried some calamity would befall her daughter. Freaking out all the time. Wanting to know where she was every second of the day. Who she was seeing. Making her phone home every couple of hours. Wasn’t that all supposed to be over? Years ago? After her mom had finally found out the truth about what had happened to her when she was a teenager?

  Well, I’m fourteen now, Grace thought. How long was this going to go on? Would her mom want her to wear one of those ankle bracelets when she went to college so she could monitor her every move?

  Grace sometimes thought her mother had her so convinced something awful would happen to her that she just wanted to get it over with. Bring it on. The anticipation was always worse than the event.

  Was that, Grace wondered, why she was with this boy now, about to do something very stupid? Because it would create some kind of crisis, force her mother to come home?

  That’s nuts. Like I want my mom to find out about this.

  “Hey!” Stuart whispered, his head framed in the window. “You coming or what?”

  She got on her knees, back to the window, and worked her legs through. The boy grabbed hold of her and eased her down gently.

  “Don’t turn on any lights,” he said.

  “Like that’s the first thing I’m gonna do,” she said.

  They were in a basement rec room. Leather couch, two recliners, big flat-screen TV bolted to the wall. They crossed the carpet, glass crunching underfoot, and found their way to the stairs.

  From what she could see, it was a nice house. Modern furniture and decorations, plenty of leather and aluminum and glass. Not like her house. Her parents bought used, sometimes went to Ikea in New Haven.

  “Aren’t the people gonna know someone was here when they find the window broken?” Grace asked.