I slept on the couch that night with the help of the vodka and, around six A.M., with Laura still sleeping, I called the intensive care unit at the hospital for Dad’s status. They must have gotten instructions about me, because they were very polite and told me he was still alive and still breathing on his own. I told them I’d be there in the afternoon. They said thank you, as if I was warning them.
Then I turned on the shower in Laura’s bathroom to get it hot, dragged her out of bed, and pushed her through the door.
“I hate you,” she mumbled.
“Good, we can use that. Don’t come out till you’ve showered and put on some workout clothes,” I said, shutting the door. While I checked in with Mom at the hospital (Dad maybe a little better, good, I’d be there in the early afternoon) I nosed around a bit, pocketing just one picture of the three kids, and an extra set of house keys that Laura had in her top desk drawer. I took those in case I needed to get back into her apartment fast at some point, in case for some reason she decided not to answer the door the next time. Not that I thought she was suicidal or anything.
“How did I get an anchovy in my hair?” she asked when she was dressed. “And why are my car keys in the bed?”
“I think you were going to kill Alison Samuels, but I could be wrong,” I said. “Come on, we’re going.”
Laura groaned, but was still in too weakened a condition to protest. I got a couple of water bottles from the fridge and a handful of protein bars from her pantry, loaded her into the car, and let her direct me to her neighborhood gym. On the way she tried to talk.
“That was really stupid last—”
“No talking. Not yet.” I unwrapped one of the protein bars and handed it to her. “Here, eat this.”
She took a few bites, chewed listlessly, and said, “Oh jeez, I’m gonna throw up.”
“Well, let me know if I should stop. Hertz frowns on vomit in their cars.”
We got to the gym without incident, where I steered Laura gently toward the ellipticals. Nothing rough, just twenty minutes level seven. I did it, too, on the machine next to hers, where I could monitor her progress. “Keep your rpms over a hundred,” I said when she started to lag. “Those tendons doing okay?”
She didn’t speak, didn’t even look in my direction, just nodded, her whole focus on the circles her feet made on the pedals. The perspiration was coming now, even in the cold temperature of the gym. I could smell the soured port wine from four feet away. After a while a stray endorphin even made her smile. “I take it you have some experience with hangovers,” she said.
“Some. Okay, enough warmup. Let’s see what you got.”
We moved out of the area with the cardio equipment, bypassed the fancy machines, and ended in the free-weight room. There were a couple of guys in there, one of them displaying his loud grunting technique more than his strength.
I walked past the rack of weights to the corner where the boxing gloves were thrown in a box and picked up a set that would fit Laura’s hands. I didn’t intend to spar with her. She was in such a mood that I thought even with a hangover she could actually hurt me. So I picked out the pads for myself and held my palms out to receive her punches.
“I get your point,” Laura said. “We don’t have to do this.”
“Humor me,” I said. “Come on. Cross. One-two-one-two-one-two.” She couldn’t resist giving it her all; she was disciplined to the point of obsessiveness, remember? After a couple of dozen crosses I did a variation with uppercut, a dozen more. Good thing I had myself firmly planted or she would have knocked me over. She was sweating profusely now. The wine aroma had grown fainter. We took off the gloves.
“We done now?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Bad sign.” I led her back to the free-weight rack and picked up a fifteen-pounder, did a couple of curls in a silent challenge, and handed it to Laura. She put it back on the frame, picked up a twenty-pounder, and did the same.
“Show-off,” I said to her. “Now you can talk.”
Only she couldn’t talk so much while she was curling, and I kind of knew that, so I waited until she finished another ten reps on her left arm and we walked to the bench-press table.
“I’ll spot first,” I said, and she sat on the table. But she didn’t lie down immediately.
“Marcus Creighton was a flawed man,” Laura started. She looked at me as if she expected this was the moment I’d go all Wise Old Woman on her.
“What weight do you want?” I asked.
She glanced at the rack and lay back on the table. “Oh, let’s go with the seventy-five. I think that’s all I’ve got left in me.”
With little effort I hefted the weight and slid it onto the bar extending from one side of the table to the other, over her chest. Laura grasped it, took a breath that filled her whole lungs, and released it as she raised the barbell slowly, with good control.
“You probably knew more about him than anyone did for the past decade,” I said. “I’ll bet you know the name of his boat,” I said, wanting to introduce more peaceful thoughts.
“He told me once, I don’t remember just now.” Then memory clicked. “Sea Breeze. It wasn’t creative. He never brought it up except to say they had a boat that he had sold when money had gotten … son of a bitch.”
She sat up.
“Brigid. Something.” Laura blinked, as if that would help her get to the spot in her mind where something important was hidden just beyond her reach. And then she got there. “The place where the children’s bones were found. The bridge to that place was only built two years ago. Sixteen years ago it was an island. Inaccessible by car.”
I had done this myself. Thought over and thought over and thought over scenarios until I got one I liked. It could drive you crazy, and I wanted to help her stop, even if it meant incriminating Creighton. “Coleman. He could have gone by boat.”
“I told you he didn’t own a boat by that time.”
“He rented one. He planned things in advance and had it waiting at the marina.”
“Okay, you want to go with that story, let’s go. We both know that Shayna Murry was lying about him being at her place, because of the cell phone call and because Marcus wasn’t stupid enough to take the chance that she would lie for him and be the willing alibi for him murdering his family. So he comes home from her place in the late evening. We know it was late enough, after dark, because the children had all gone to bed and the wife had taken a sleeping pill. He had the wife’s murder planned well in advance of that evening, but hey, if he had planned everything in advance he would have done a much more logical job of getting rid of the kids. No, one of the kids sees him, and now he has to quickly improvise. Somehow, oh never mind how, he kills them all, leaves the wife in the tub, and loads the children into the trunk.”
I said, “Laura, stop it. It’s over.”
Laura had got off the bench by this time and was pacing back and forth in the weight room as she spoke. “He drives to the well-lighted marina and manages to put all three bodies into a boat without being seen. No, that’s not it. He drives to the nearest marina and is able to rent a boat in the middle of the night. If anyone had checked the marinas, would they have found a record of the rental? Good question. So then he takes the boat, runs it three miles to the dock at the back of his house, and loads the bodies in there where there’s more privacy. He’s remembered to bring a shovel, too, so he can bury them.”
I parked my butt on the bench and watched her go back and forth, but said in one of her passes by, “You’re just making up stories, Laura. I promise you there’s no good to come out of doing this to yourself. You have to stop.”
She barely took notice of my words with “Not stop. He runs the boat out to the island, totally undeveloped land with soft sand close to the water’s edge, but far enough up the bank so the tide won’t uncover the bodies. He can tell the high-tide spot from the lack of vegetation. There’s no place to dock, so he drops anchor and wades to shore. He digs the grave, just one big one, cutting through the grass with the shovel. It has to be deep to bury three bodies. When it’s deep enough, he wades back to the boat.
“Three trips, one for each body? Or maybe bring the twins at once to save some time. Then he runs the boat back to the marina, drops it off in its sloop, still without being seen, gets in the car … oh, right, he remembered to bring a plastic tarp to put on the front seat so he wouldn’t get it wet with his clothes. He’s such a cold-hearted killer he even remembered to bring a towel. Then he drives back to the house, calling nine-one-one on the way. No, wait. He’s all wet, and would have to change into a similar shirt and trousers once he got back to the house. He puts the wet things into a plastic garbage bag and hides it somewhere, I don’t know where, figures he’ll destroy the clothes later. They’re never found. He places a dry pair of shoes next to the couch where he had thrown his jacket upon coming into the house. At the last minute he remembers the shovel in the trunk and hangs it up in the garage.
“Now you tell me, Brigid. How long?”
“It doesn’t matter. Can’t you see it just doesn’t matter anymore? We lost.”
“We’ve only lost if we don’t figure out who actually murdered that family. How long?” she demanded.
I couldn’t know where this would end, but she was right, and I admitted it. “Hours,” I said. “Just hours and hours. I have to clock it myself, but four … five?”
“Even if he hadn’t gone to Shayna Murry’s house, but done anything else at all after coming back on the five o’clock flight, and arrived home after nine o’clock on a summer’s night when the sun would finally be down, there’s no way Marcus Creighton would have the time to kill his wife, load his children into the car, drive to a marina, get a boat, come out here, bury the bodies, take the boat back—”
I put a hand up to stop her narrative. “You’re looping. I get it.” My brain was tumbling over on itself, looking for a way for Laura to stop arguing the case for Marcus Creighton, to end this craziness. And if I had to prove Creighton guilty, so be it. She started to speak again, but I interrupted her.
“Hold on a second, I’m thinking, and I’m not as fast as I used to be. Let’s look at every single angle. What if he did the deed before he ever left on his trip?”
“Kathleen had only been dead for a few hours when her body was found.”
“What if he killed Kathleen that night, then the children, then hid the bodies and buried them at a more convenient time?”
“Let’s say he did that.” She kind of stammered that, and I could tell she was so excited her teeth were chattering. “Even with small bodies, where do you hide all three? Plus, there was no convenient time. First he was questioned. Then the crime scene techs were all over the place. His alibi was blown the same night, and he was taken into custody the next morning. In the meantime he was watched so he couldn’t get away.”
I almost laughed with the insane feeling that I was getting sucked back in against my will. “Could Murry have been an accomplice who buried the bodies? And then she chickened out?”
“Even if she had the guts, she’d have the same timing issue that night. And if the bodies were hidden at her house? No, we’ve already agreed that killing the children wasn’t part of the original plan. Something went wrong. And there was no way they could have communicated about it. Creighton was being watched so carefully he couldn’t take a dump without the cops knowing about it.”
If Laura’s eyes had been like blood yesterday, today they hardened into ice. “The key thing is, if Creighton didn’t kill the children, he didn’t kill the wife. The case falls apart. But no. They wanted to believe the mistress so bad because that made the case very easy. They didn’t want to see anything else.”
“And the contract with a paid killer?”
“We went over all that, remember? We decided Marcus would have turned him in.” She stopped to think. “And sometime around the murders, up to the day before, there would have been a suspicious number on his phone, maybe someone we couldn’t identify. I don’t remember seeing anything suspicious in the records. All I remember is that he called his wife’s cell from Miami the afternoon of the crime.”
I watched this woman who had done a one-eighty in front of my eyes, going from immobilized depression to an almost manic state, pacing wildly, talking fast. She had repeated the facts as she saw them for what may have been the third time, and it was tiring me out. But what can you do? It felt to me like even dead Marcus Creighton was still pulling at her, as if he was drowning and clutching on to her.
She brought my attention back with “I’m all right, Brigid. You can go home now. Go back to…”
“Carlo,” I said.
“Carlo. Listen. I need to go home and ice myself.” She forced herself to look at me and smile reassuringly.
I looked at her, trying to get under the smile. Thought about the colleague who ate his gun. “And when you say ‘ice yourself,’ you mean…”
“Soak my ankles in a bucket of ice water, for Pete’s sake! And I’m not going to murder Alison Samuels, either. Go home. Or take care of your parents or whatever you need to do.”
“Are you sure?” I said. Of all the qualities I might have inherited from my mother, I’ve hated that one the most. What is someone going to say, after all? No, I’m not sure? Laura answered my question with a small sigh, and I backed down.
“Speaking of parents,” I said, “I do need to get over to the hospital again.”
With some doubts, I dropped Laura off to spend the rest of the day with an ice pack and her continuing obsession, preparing her prosecution of someone she didn’t know and her defense for the trial of a man who was already dead.