At Jackson Memorial Hospital, Alexandra parked the car in the underground lot, not far from where she’d seen Jennifer McDougal pull out the night before. She sat for a moment, the car idling, while her father worried over a loose thread he’d found on the sleeve of his jumpsuit.
Then she switched off the engine and sat listening to the concrete echoes of the parking garage. Her body felt emptier than seemed possible for someone still alive. She sat for several moments listening to the hollow thunk of her pulse.
The morning’s rage had burned itself out and left nothing but char where her heart had been. Her exhaustion was compounded by a sleepless night, lying in their dark bedroom at that unaccustomed hour, listening to the saw and flutter of her father’s snore through the wall.
“We going to sit here all day or what? Not that I mind. One place is as good as another.”
She heaved the door open and plodded around the car to free her dad.
“What about this?” He patted the duffel.
“Leave it.”
“Leave it in a parked car in a public parking lot in Miami? A million buckaroos?”
“Somebody steals it, fine. More power to them.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“I’m not mad at you, Dad. No.”
“Have I done something I should be ashamed of? I mean, yes, I know there was the breaking-and-entering incident. And I suppose I’ve tampered with evidence now. Removed items from a crime scene. Some smart young lawyer could make something of that.”
“It’s okay, Dad. You’ve been good. You’re not in any danger.”
“I don’t know about those leaves, either. Leaving them in piles like that. Some kid could come along, little tyke who doesn’t know better, and hide inside one of those piles, and who knows what could happen? I could be liable.”
“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “We’ve got it under control, Dad.”
“I told you, didn’t I? The minute I saw it on the news, I knew it was Stan’s work. I’ve got a nose for crime.”
“Yes, you do.”
In his attack of fidgetiness, Lawton had unzipped his jumpsuit down to the brim of his small potbelly, leaving the coarse white hair on his chest exposed. She helped him zip it up and then led him over to the elevator and they rode silently to Stan’s floor.
Her fingers felt numb, the prickly insensate feeling of frostbite. Her toes were going, too. Everything below her neck seemed to be sliding into shutdown.
But her mind was sharp, every synapse clicking clean and hot. This man whose sophomoric pranks had once been the talk of the high school hallways had graduated to the national news. This man with sea blue eyes and a bullish determination to prolong his boyhood as long as possible. This was her husband, adulterer, thief, and perhaps even a killer.
“Should I wait here?” her father asked just outside Stan’s room.
“No, come in. We need to stay together.”
When she eased open the door, Stan was dialing the last two digits of someone’s phone number. Then he leaned back against his pillows, his chin tucked down, eyes intent on the noise in his ear. His expression was smooth, joyless, flattened by the drug perhaps, robbed of its coarse vitality. She had a moment to study him in this unguarded repose, to witness the bland and bestial muscularity of his face. With a grim objectivity she’d never exercised, she noted how his forehead broadened near the hairline as if he had battered his head once too often against a skull more unyielding than his own. And she saw the piggishly narrow set of his eyes, their implacable flatness. His neck was too short, too wide. His ears tilted out a few obscene degrees too many, as if he were perpetually eavesdropping on the secret affairs of his neighbors. This was the man who had hauled her out of high school obscurity, crowned her with his spurious status, promoted her to the upper ranks of adolescent aristocracy. It had meant nothing then and now it meant even less. That the lingering love she’d felt for this man could have ended so abruptly and completely did not shock her as much as the idea that she had ever loved him at all.
When he looked up and saw them standing in the doorway, his wooden composure barely altered. Without a word, he reached out and set the phone aside.
“Pretty clever, aren’t you?” her father said, jabbing a finger at Stan as if he were a delinquent Lawton had nabbed. “Had it all figured out. Cause a big ruckus, get yourself injured, and no one would ever suspect. Pretty damn clever. Except you didn’t put us in the picture, Mr. Smart Guy. Me and Alex here. That was your mistake.”
“Get that old fool out of here.”
“He stays.”
Stan shifted against his pillow. His IV bag wobbled on its stand.
“Where’ve you been? Why haven’t you come to see me until now?”
She stepped up to the foot rail of his bed.
“Who were you calling, Stan?”
“I was calling you.”
“Bullshit.”
“What’s going on, Alex? What the hell’s with you?”
“Tell me, Stan; I think I deserve to know. Why did you do it? It wasn’t for us, was it? We didn’t need the money. We were doing all right. Not rich, but all right.”
He was shaking his head, eyes straying to the wall.
“Did she put you up to it, your size-six Jennifer? Was this your nest egg? You were going to run off and start over with her?”
He clicked his eyes to hers and his lips turned ugly.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” But his voice was no longer into the lie.
“Don’t bother, Stan. We’ve been over at the driving range. The Leafy Way Golf and Country Club.”
Lawton chuckled.
Stan’s eyes were working, little flicks of thought happening back there. A cornered weasel trying to remember his escape routes.
Alexandra brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror. A tall woman with smooth white skin. None of it showing in her face, the bombs that for the last few hours had been detonating in her gut.
“You know, Stan,” she said, holding his slippery gaze, “what fooled me was Margie. How caring you were. You loved her so much, it radiated all around you. You were there to protect her, catch her if she started to fall. It was
incredible to see. A high school kid with that much love for his sister. That’s the man I fell in love with. That’s the man I thought you were. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You used it all up on Margie, didn’t you? You just had a little bit inside you and you spent it all on her; then it was gone.”
“You fucking bitch. You have no right to talk about her. No right at all.”
Alexandra stepped back from the bed, a dizzy elation taking her.
“We have your duffel down in the car, Stan. It’s all over, your little caper.”
Stan opened his mouth to speak, but there was wild static in his eyes, everything crossing out everything else.
“Don’t tax yourself, Stan. There’s nothing to say. Nothing at all.”
“Give him hell, Alex.”
“I’ll turn you over to the police, you whore,” said Stan.
“What?”
“I’ll give them you and the old man.”
“Are you crazy, Stan? You can’t dump this off on me. You’re a son of a bitch, and you’re going to jail for a long, long time.”
“No, Alex. No, I’m not.”
With a lazy snort of scorn, Stan turned his eyes away from her, drank in the bare wall for a moment, then turned his gaze back. A triumphant light burned in his eyes.
“Take the money home, Alex. That’s what you’re going to do.”
“You’re confused, Stan. You’re not calling the shots.”
“Listen to me. Jennifer will come by and pick up the money later on this afternoon. She’ll ask you for the duffel, you’ll hand it over to her. That’s how it’ll work. Then everything’ll be okay. When I get out of the hospital,
we’ll stay married for a while, keep up appearances; then when the time is right, I’ll divorce you and go away.”
“Bullshit, Stan. Wake up! You’re deluded. You’re not going anywhere but jail.”
She reached out for Lawton and took him by the arm. He was humming a song to himself, worrying over a thread on his sleeve.
“I know about Darnel Flint,” Stan said.
Her mouth went dry. She dropped Lawton’s arm.
Stan said, “I know about all of it. All the gory details. You’re a murderer, Alex. If I take a fall, you do, too. And the old man goes down with us.”
There was a tightening in her inner ear, a pang of pressure, as if she were on an elevator whose cables had snapped, the floor dropping beneath her.
“Lawton told me the whole thing a couple of weeks ago. Didn’t you, you old fool? Babbling away, he told me how the kid molested you, killed your dog, so you walked next door and shot him in the face. He told me about the cover-up, the drugs on the floor. He even saved the gun you used on the kid. The murder weapon, Alex. He showed it to me, and I took it away from him. I got it put away nice and safe. The pistol you used to murder that kid. I hid it, in case I might need it someday. A day just like this.
“As you know, Alex, they keep the ballistics reports on open murder cases. It’s all still there in the records. I think your friends at Miami PD would be real interested to learn what their father-daughter team was up to back then. Get out their microscopes and look at the slug that killed Darnel Flint and match it to the pistol your old man used for thirty years on the force. Yes, sir, I think they’d be quite interested in that.”
“I told him,” Lawton said. “I didn’t mean to. It just came out.”
She draped her arm around her father’s shoulder, drew him to her.
“So you go to prison, Alex, and the old man goes to the nuthouse, where he belongs. Maybe I can bargain my way down to a year or two. Worth a try, don’t you think?”
“It’ll never work.”
“Oh, it’ll work. Sure it will. A woman with the Miami PD accused as a child killer. Oh, that’ll be a pretty headline. That’ll knock the Bloody Rapist out of top billing. You bet your ass. No statute of limitations on murder, sweetheart. The papers will eat it up. State’s attorney gets the Brinks money back, and in the bargain he solves an eighteen-year-old homicide. Probably be able to run for governor.”
“You fucking bastard.”
He resettled himself against his pillow, smile widening, glancing around the room as if he were basking in the cheers of a dozen of his closest buddies.
“You getting raped by this Flint kid, that explains a lot,” he said, eyes coming back to hers. “Your bedroom behavior, for one thing. Right from the first, me doing all the work while you lay there like you were suffering through it, eyes closed. Like you were afraid of sex or hated it.
“I think you had maybe two orgasms in all the years we’ve been together, Alex. And you were probably faking those. Two. That’s supposed to keep your man interested? But now I see what made you such a cold fish. This Darnel Flint thing. Christ, you should’ve told me up front what happened to you, that you were damaged goods. Full disclosure and all that, you know.”
He looked at Lawton and snorted in disgust.
“Only reason I did this Brinks thing at all was because of you, what a cold, dead fucking fish you are. It never would’ve happened if we’d had a halfway decent sex
life, Alex. And then, like things weren’t bad enough already, you gotta bring that old bastard home. He’s babbling at the door while I’m lying there trying to get my dick hard. Christ, that’s all we needed, him in the next room, pawing on the wall, whimpering. It’s your fucking fault, Alex, the shit we’re in here. All of it. Every little bit.”
Standing near the doorway, she felt the air move in and out of her. She looked at the gray light pouring in the window, heard the bells and voices of the hospital as another shift of healthy folks stepped forward to take charge of the endless onslaught of injured and diseased.
“It’s simple, Alex. You do what I tell you, or you go to jail. They slam the old man away with the criminally insane. You want that, then go ahead, pick up the phone, turn me in.”
Alexandra glanced at her father, then shifted her eyes back to Stan. He was lying back easily against his pillows, like a gambler relishing a well-played hand.
She stepped forward and ran her fingers along the cold white foot-rail of his bed. Lawton hummed and shuffled on the linoleum beside her, doing the box-step, a tight square without his partner.
“I’m already in jail,” she said. “I’ve been in jail as long as I can remember. You can’t do anything to me, Stan, that I haven’t already done to myself.”
He sat forward an inch or two. His smile lost half of its glow, forehead tensing.
“So go on, do it, make the call, Alex. Watch them cart that old man’s withered ass off where you’ll never see him again.”
She felt the heat gather in her face, bands of steel tightening around her chest. She kept her eyes on his, drew a breath.
“You’re good, Stan. You’ve found a very cute way to
turn this all around, make yourself the victim. You rob your employer and kill your partner and this is all my fault and Dad’s. You’re simply doing what we made you do. That’s great. Real slick. It must be wonderful to have such a handy scapegoat for anything you want to do.
“Well, let me tell you something, Stan. When the state’s attorney finds out what you’ve done, they’re not going to plea-bargain. You can forget that. I’m no lawyer, but I watch those people work every day. If you’re determined to take me down with you, then fine, go for it. I’m sure they’ll be happy to oblige. But don’t kid yourself. You’re going to spend the rest of your goddamn life on the other side. Get used to the idea.”
She held his eyes for a moment more, then turned to Lawton and took him by the elbow.
“Come on, Dad. Let’s get the hell out of here. We have things to do.”
Lawton jerked free of her grasp.
“MVP, my ass,” Lawton said, facing off with Stan. “I never bought that story for a second. We’re sending you right back to Raiford, young man, where you belong. And this time, there’s no returning to civilized society for you. No, sir.”