45
Home is where they have to take you in, no matter how battered, bruised, or broke. I don’t have that kind of home. I have friends. I have Gloria. I have Mooney.
He met me at a rest stop on Route 3, dropped off by an unmarked unit. Found me barefoot and shivering at a picnic bench, elbows on the table, heels of my hands pressed into my brow. He coaxed me into my car, fiddled with the heater. He waved the officer in the unit off to Boston, then listened to everything I had to say—no interruptions. He waited a few minutes, as though he were chewing and digesting each word.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said.
That’s what I should have said to MacAvoy: It wasn’t your fault. Universal absolution.
“What do you mean, it wasn’t my fault?”
“You want to take credit, go ahead. But MacAvoy messed with the records, MacAvoy took Cameron money. What with you out there asking questions, he was probably thinking about the end of the road, keeping his piece in his pocket when he went beer drinking by the ocean. You sped up the action, that’s all.”
That’s all. I swallowed a lump as big as a goose egg and tried not to see the ocean water change color around MacAvoy’s misshapen head.
“You got something on tape,” Mooney continued.
“I’m not sure,” I said, reluctant to display my drowned recorder. “At first, MacAvoy was giving me nothing but crap, a fairy tale about how he got this enormous reward for making Thea’s suicide look like murder.”
“And that’s not what this is about.”
“Did you find the cross-reference, the file that wasn’t supposed to figure in Thea’s disappearance?”
“MacAvoy never threw out a sheet of paper in his life.”
“You found it.” I almost stopped shivering.
“The Cold Case squad had it. Sooner or later, maybe in a hundred years, someone might have linked it to Thea.”
“Why didn’t MacAvoy destroy it?” I asked. “Or take it home, put it in a safety deposit box, so he’d have a stronger hold over the Camerons?”
“He couldn’t destroy it, Carlotta, because it’s cross-referenced twice, the second time to the FBI. I’ve got a call in to Gary Reedy.”
I rubbed my head. It felt heavy, logy, like I was waking up the morning after a high-octane bash.
“We ought to be heading back,” Mooney said. “Want me to drive?”
“No. I can handle it,” I said automatically. I flicked on the headlights, put the Toyota in gear. Route 3 was practically empty. A few dark trucks hustled along in the middle lane.
“Have they heard from Marissa?” I asked. “Is she still missing?”
“Daily newspaper readings. On tape. She’s okay so far. They’re renegotiating, a new price, a different rendezvous.”
“Reedy seems to be handing you more information.”
“When he feels like it. Back to tonight. You said this guy, Nueves, the gardener, disappeared the same day as Thea Janis.”
“That’s what MacAvoy said. The exact day. MacAvoy was paid off to make sure the two disappearances were never linked.”
“You figure they ran off together? This Alonso Nueves and Thea Janis? That it would have been some kind of political bomb?”
I said, “I don’t figure it at all, Mooney. Six hundred thou is too much to pay just to name suicide murder. It’s way too big a payoff to keep newspapers from speculating that your underage daughter ran off with a guy who’s not listed in the Social Register.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Mooney agreed.
“Dammit, Mooney, I blew this. I should have given MacAvoy to Internal Affairs. If he’d had the chance to come clean, he might not have killed himself …”
“Carlotta, if you can’t drive straight, pull the damn car over. You win some, you lose some. If it went down like you said, you’re not doing jail on this. You even have a witness.”
“Some witness.”
“Get over it,” Mooney said through clenched teeth.
A shiver ran down my spine. “I’ve got blood on me, I’ve still got his goddamned blood on me. I—”
I coasted into the breakdown lane, and we sat. He looked at me once. His hand moved, like he wanted to hold me, comfort me, but I was stiff and miserable, chilled with salt water and failure.
I let him drive me home. That’s how bad I felt.
“Mooney,” I said as I opened the door. “You know how MacAvoy seized control of the case, years ago.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you do that? Since it’s so spread out, over time and space. Dover, and Marblehead, and Marshfield. Weston.”
“State police will have something to say about it.”
“But they know you. And with the FBI connection, they may want nothing to do with it.”
“I may want nothing to do with it.”
“Mooney.”
He shrugged. “They might give me some time with it, hoping I’ll fall on my butt.”
“You won’t.”
“Why’s that?”
I was starting to feel less like a killer. More like a cop.
I said, “You know Marblehead’s searching for a young guy in the Manley death, the one they’re calling a tramp—”
“Seen hanging around the Marblehead shack. Yeah. What about him?”
“How are you at lying to the media?”
“I love it.”
“Tell them there’s been a break in the case. Tell them you’ve got the guy in custody.”
“Just for the sake of lying?” he asked.
“Why not?” I said.
He yanked out a cellular phone, dialed a number, spoke briefly.
“That ought to make the morning editions,” he said.
We sat on the front porch waiting for a unit to come and fetch him. As we spoke I noticed a light in Donovan’s house.
I took a brief inventory. Had I left a nightgown, underwear, anything I cared about at his house? Would I go there again?
How had he learned about the supposed mob hit? Had Mooney betrayed me? Set Donovan up? Mooney would know I could never go back to a man who didn’t respect my ability to protect myself, to live my own life, make my own choices.
I swallowed and stared at Mooney. I couldn’t ask him. I needed him too much.
“Mooney,” I said. “Do you think you can wangle an exhumation order?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “Why?”
“Something MacAvoy said, about the Camerons not being too choosy with the body. And a girl named Heather Foley, who drowned right before the Camerons’ Mount Auburn Cemetery funeral extravaganza. At first, Heather’s family maintained the body was hers. The ME went against them. Heather’s body has never been recovered.”
“Some never are.”
I could tell he was interested. Mooney doesn’t believe in coincidence any more than I do.
“Who’s buried in Thea’s grave, Moon?” I asked.