A Tap on the Window

  I looked out at the lake.

  “What’s over there?” I asked.

  “We have to get him to the hospital,” Claire said quietly. “We have to get a doctor.”

  “Claire, Dennis is dead. I have to get you out of here. The other side of the lake, it looks like it’s only a mile away. What’s over there?”

  “Union Springs,” she whispered.

  “A town?”

  “A little town.”

  I grabbed her by the wrist with my left hand, the gun still in my right. “We’re going to take the boat. We’re going to run like hell to the dock and get in the boat. Do you know if there’s gas in the tank?”

  “How do you know he’s dead?” she said. “How can you be sure?”

  “Claire!” I said sharply. “Is there gas in the boat?”

  “I . . . I think so. Dennis and I went out in it yesterday. Just wandering around.”

  “Come on.”

  We ran down the hill to the dock. I got her into the boat first, put her in the middle of the three seats. I stepped in, lowered the motor so the prop was in the water, gave the rubber bulb on the fuel line several squeezes, put the motor in neutral, pulled the choke, and yanked on the cord.

  It started on the first pull. I shoved the choke back in, powered the throttle back, then untied the stern and bow lines from the dock. I pushed off, put the gear lever into forward, and cranked it. It was cold out on the lake. Claire had no jacket. I slipped mine off and gave it to her. She put her arms into it robotically, her eyes glazed.

  It only took about five minutes to cross Cayuga. There was a marina up ahead. Lots of docks, but only a few boats still in the water. A huge building just up from the shore where people stored boats for the winter. I found a spot to tie the boat up, jumped onto the dock and helped Claire out.

  “Is there a business area?” I asked her.

  She raised a weak finger. “That way, I think.”

  We walked briskly up Basin Street to North Cayuga, which seemed to pass for the main drag around here. I saw a used-car dealer across the street. I didn’t have to hold on to Claire’s wrist all the time; she was keeping up with me. But she was so dazed I held her hand as we crossed the road. She wasn’t in a state of mind where I could trust her to look both ways.

  We went straight into the sales office. A heavyset man in an ill-fitting blue suit got up from behind his desk, turned on a smile like he’d just flipped a switch, and approached us. But his smile didn’t last long. We didn’t look like typical customers, Claire’s eyes red from crying, and me sweating profusely.

  There was also the small matter of the Glock strapped to my waist.

  “We need a car,” I said.

  His eyes on the gun, he said. “Take whatever you want.”

  “I’m not stealing one,” I said. “I’ll rent one.” I got out my wallet, showed him my private investigator’s license, and handed him my Visa card. “How’s five hundred?”

  He took the card. “Sure. And I’m going to need to see your driver’s license.”

  “You’re going to do this fast,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  He did, too. Within two minutes he was handing me a set of keys to a white Subaru sedan.

  I said to him, “Call the police. There’s been a murder directly across the lake. Brown cottage, front doors on the lake side open. Tell them the shooter may still be in the area. Male, five ten to six feet. He’s driving a dark-colored pickup truck. Black, dark blue, tinted windows. You got that?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I hustled Claire into the front seat of the Subaru and got myself behind the wheel.

  “We’re going home,” I told her.

  * * *

  We went north through the village of Cayuga, then headed east through the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. Once we’d driven out the other side of it, I found my way back to the thruway. It was the same interchange where I’d gotten off. Before I rolled through the tollgate and picked up my ticket, I asked Claire if she needed anything.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  I pulled into a gas station—as it turned out, I’d rented a car that had less than a quarter of a tank in it—and filled up. Then I ran into the convenience store and loaded up on bottled water, candy bars, potato chips. Anything to keep us going.

  “Help yourself,” I said when I got back into the car.

  As I was grabbing my ticket and speeding up the ramp to get back on the thruway, Claire looked into the bag and pulled out a Mars bar. It pleased me when she peeled back the wrapper and took a bite.

  “I’ve got questions, Claire. Can you handle some questions?”

  She chewed some candy, swallowed, and looked blankly at me. “I guess.” She sounded like she was in a trance.

  “Do you know who it was? Do you know who killed Dennis?”

  “I didn’t see him,” she said.

  “But do you have an idea?’

  She nodded.

  “Who?”

  “Phyllis Pearce’s son,” Claire said.

  “What? She has a son? Who’s that?”

  “You don’t know?” she asked.

  I waited.

  “Ricky Haines,” Claire said. “The cop. Maybe the creepiest guy on the Griffon force, because he’s all nice, but when he starts feeling you up, you start thinking maybe he’s not what he pretends to be.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  He’s driving so quickly, when he has to make a turn from a gravel road to pavement, the truck skitters on its back wheels, nearly flips over. But he wrenches the wheel, manages to right the vehicle, and once he hits blacktop he floors it.

  Now, driving in a straight line, he can manage the phone. He grabs it with his right, places a call, puts the phone to his ear.

  “Hello?” his mother says urgently.

  “It’s me,” he says.

  “What’s happened, Richard? Did you find them?”

  “I found them,” Ricky Haines says.

  “And?”

  “I got them.”

  “You did?”

  “I got Mullavey. And I’m pretty sure I got the girl, too.”

  “Pretty sure?” Phyllis Pearce likes to deal in absolutes. “What do you mean, pretty sure?”

  “I saw her go down. I couldn’t exactly check her pulse, with Weaver shooting at me.”

  “What about him? What did you do with him?”

  “I told you. He was shooting at me. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t get a good shot at him.”

  “What about the notebook?”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “God, you’re hopeless! Where are you now?”

  “On the road. I’m coming home.”

  “No!” she says. “You have to go back! You have to finish this!”

  “No, listen. I waited, a little while, at the end of the road, the only way out, figuring Weaver’d drive out eventually. I hid the truck and I was in the woods. When they didn’t show up, I drove back past the place, saw that the boat was gone. Decided then I better get out of there.”

  “Boat? What are you talking about, a boat?”

  “I followed them to a cottage on Cayuga Lake. Weaver must have took off in a boat.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. And I don’t know what Mullavey and the girl told him before I got there.”

  “My God, what a mess,” Phyllis says.

  “It’s not that bad, Mom. The only one left who might know anything is Weaver.”

  “And he’s probably got the book, too.” She can’t hold back any longer: “You should have gotten Mullavey that first day! That’s what you should have done!”

  Ricky thinks she’s losing it. But he knows his mom. He knows she freaks out at first
, but then she calms down, thinks things through. Mom usually has a plan. When he hears nothing from her for several seconds, he’s pretty sure that’s what is going on.

  “I know all that,” he says. “I know I’ve made some mistakes. But some things I got right, you know that.”

  “Shut up,” Phyllis says. “Just shut up and let me think.”

  He waits. He feels tears coming on, blinks a few times to clear his vision. He thinks of all the things that could have been done better, the different decisions that could have been made. And not just by him. She deserves plenty of the blame, too, but she gets so angry when he reminds her of that.

  Finally she says, “You come home. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ricky tosses the phone onto the seat next to him. He’s not relieved, but he feels slightly better.

  Mom will figure something out.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Ricky Haines.

  Tumblers fell into place.

  If it was Ricky who’d followed us to Cayuga Lake, it was most likely Ricky who’d planted the tracking device in my car. It had to have been Ricky’s idea to seize my car. To avoid suspicion, he’d said that he’d been told to do it by Quinn, who in turn had been told to do it by Augie.

  Once the car’d been brought in, Ricky could have had access to it and planted the trackers. And since no one had actually given an order to have the car searched, no one was going to find them before the car was returned to me.

  Brindle, I was guessing, wasn’t in on it with his partner. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been so pissed when I got sprung by the chief on the Tapscott business. It also explained why Haines had offered to call my lawyer for me. It wasn’t in his interest that I be held in custody. He needed me on the outside, leading him to Claire and Dennis.

  What else had Ricky probably done?

  I felt I should be calling Augie, but I still had what you might call trust issues. I wanted to hear what Claire had to say before I called anyone with the Griffon police.

  She started her story, more or less, from the beginning.

  “I had a job for the summer working at Smith’s. The ice cream place? Down by the water?”

  I nodded. We used to go down there, Donna and Scott and I, after dinner on a warm summer’s evening.

  “That’s kind of close to Hooper’s office, and Dennis would drop by every day after work and get an ice cream. He kept coming so often, I could tell he was kind of into me, and things weren’t going so well between me and Roman anyway. You know Roman?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking there. He’s kind of a douche, to be honest, but I guess I kind of thought it was cool that he wants to be a movie writer, you know? But he was into some sketchy stuff, like—okay, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Roman’s twenty-one and he makes money by buying beer and—”

  “I know all about it,” I said. “And that he had Sean and Hanna delivering for him, and they got to keep a share of the profits.”

  “Wow, okay. Anyway, I didn’t like the way he’d send Hanna out there to deal with stuff. And there was other stuff with Roman. I mean, he creeped me out sometimes.”

  “The texts.”

  “God, did you see that on my phone? It wasn’t just the picture. He was always asking me to send pictures of myself and I didn’t want to do it. So, I started going out with Dennis, and Roman was pretty pissed.”

  We were booting it down the interstate, cruising at eighty, Buffalo nearly an hour away, Griffon half an hour after that.

  “Things between me and Dennis were pretty serious. I mean, we really liked each other, even talking about whether he’d go back home after the end of the summer or what, and then one day he’s just gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One day he just disappears. Sends me a message that it’s not working out between us, that whole thing about it not being me but him, right?” She sniffs, looks in the glove box for tissues, but the Subaru is clean. The glove box, the ashtrays, the console, everything is empty.

  “I grabbed some napkins. Look in the bag.”

  Claire finds them, blows her nose and wipes away tears.

  “That must have hurt, him breaking it off with you all of a sudden, no apparent reason,” I said.

  “Yeah. I thought, what’d I do? I thought everything was great. I was kinda destroyed by it, bummed out, everything. And then, a couple of weeks go by, and I hear from him.”

  “He texted you,” I said.

  “Yeah. He said he had to explain, that he had to leave Griffon because of the cops, that something happened. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I really wanted to see him, at least to find out why he dumped me all of a sudden. This was during all that stuff between my dad and your brother-in-law. We had cop cars watching our house a lot, and Dad figured it was Chief Perry trying to screw with us, you know? Scare us, let us know he and his people were watching us all the time. I figured that’s what it was about, too, until Dennis said in his texts that the cops were probably just watching me.”

  “Because they thought, since you two had been an item, you might lead them to him.”

  “Item?” she said.

  “A thing. A couple.”

  “Oh yeah, exactly.” She paused a moment. “So he said if we were going to get together, I had to be sure the cops weren’t watching me. That was when I got the idea to do the switch with Hanna.”

  “Sean was supposed to pick you up, and when he couldn’t come, you hitched a ride with me.”

  Claire nodded. “I didn’t mean to pick on you, honestly. I’d have gotten a lift with anyone. But when I saw it was you, that you were Scott’s dad, that you’d be a safe person to go with . . .” She paused. “Even if you have been going around scaring the shit out of everybody.”

  “That’s over,” I said.

  “So, you found out who gave Scott drugs?” she asked.

  “No. Go on with your story.”

  “There’s not much more about that night. I mean, the switch worked, at least from my point of view.” She looked out the window, not wanting me to see her face. “Hanna . . . went out and got in your car, I slipped out the back and went off with Dennis. We drove straight to the cottage.”

  “So who was following you in the pickup that night? Ricky?”

  Claire nodded. “I got a look at him a couple of times. Once, when he was in a Griffon cruiser, watching our house, I went right up to the car and looked in the window and said, like, ‘Fuck off and leave my father alone.’ Because then, I figured that was why we were being watched, that it was about my dad, and the chief had probably told everyone on the force to give us a hard time. And then, another time, instead of being in a cruiser, he was in a pickup, and it was Ricky again. But even that time, I just figured he was doing off-duty stuff for the chief. It was him that night you gave me a ride. For a cop, he’s not the greatest at not being seen.”

  He got smarter with me. But Claire didn’t have a car.

  So it’s Ricky who gets played when Hanna gets into my car. Ricky who stays on my tail.

  Ricky who sees Hanna jump out of my car.

  Ricky who sees Hanna tear the wig off her head and toss it.

  Ricky realizes he’s been tricked, that Claire has gotten away, most likely with Dennis.

  Ricky goes after Hanna to find out where Claire has gone.

  More tumblers falling into position.

  I had an immediate question for Claire. “Did Hanna have any idea where you were going with Dennis?”

  “No,” Claire said. “He said it was better that nobody knew.”

  Ricky grabs Hanna, tries to get her to tell, but Hanna hasn’t a clue. Ricky gets angry, frustrated. Ends up choking the life out of her. But he has the presence of mind to strip her from the waist down, plant the notion of sex
ual assault, put the clothes in Sean Skilling’s car.

  Claire continued. “It wasn’t till Dennis filled me in that I realized that Haines was just watching me, not me and my dad. In fact, I never noticed any other Griffon cop watching me.”

  “Tell me about Dennis.”“

  She nodded. “Okay, Dennis, he just didn’t know what to do. He’d been hiding out ever since he’d left Griffon, at the cottage. He saw his dad once, just popped in. He lives up around Rochester.”

  “We’ve met,” I said. “He seems like a good man.”

  Claire’s eyes widened. “Wow, like, you’ve really talked to everybody. But, yeah, Mr. Mullavey is really nice.” Again she looked away. “It’s going to kill him when he finds out about Dennis.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “He told his dad he was in trouble, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that when the police came around looking for him, he had to remember that. He said he needed time to figure out what to do, and he wanted to talk to me about it.”

  “What happened, Claire?”

  “So, one day, Dennis is cutting grass at the Pearce place.”

  “Phyllis Pearce.”

  “That’s right. The lady that owns and runs Patchett’s.”

  “Right.”

  “So Hooper usually sends out a crew, right? Like, there’ll be two of them, but this day, the guy who usually went out with Dennis was sick, so Dennis said he could handle it on his own. And he gets to the Pearce house, and he can tell no one is home because there are no cars there. He’s cutting the grass when he notices what looks like smoke coming out around one of the basement windows.”

  She opened one of the water bottles and took a long drink, kept the bottle in her hand.

  “So Dennis runs up and goes banging on the door, even though he knows no one is there, right? But just in case, because he doesn’t want to barge in, you know? But when no one comes, he figures he better do something, so he kicks in the door, and he can see that the smoke is coming up from the basement. He runs down, and there’s this fire coming from around the dryer.”