Susan was standing at the window of the halfway house, holding a valise, watching for him. A gray-haired woman waited at the door while Susan came to the taxi cab and McGuire handed her DeLisle’s letter. She returned to the residence and gave it to the matron, who read it, nodded approval, and shook Susan’s hand, before passing her a small valise that had been resting on the floor nearby.
“I can’t believe it,” Susan said when she was in the cab. McGuire looked past her to the halfway house, where someone was standing with the curtains slightly parted, watching McGuire and Susan drive away.
He stopped the cab twice, once at his bank to deposit most of the law firm’s check and take the rest in cash, and again at a travel agency, where he purchased two return airline tickets to Tucson via Chicago while the cab driver stared at the fare meter. Then they continued north to Revere Beach with Susan beside him.
He hadn’t felt this good in years.
The noise assaulted his ears from the second floor, a metallic wail above a staccato beat that reminded McGuire of a wobbly steel wheel, kaching-ching-bang, kaching-ching-bang, over and over.
“What the hell is that?” he said. He was holding the door open for Susan to enter. The buzzer sounded from Ollie’s room. “Wait here,” he said to Susan, and he climbed the stairs two at a time until he was at the door leading into Ronnie and Ollie’s former bedroom, now occupied by Liz Worthington. When he rapped loudly on the door, the volume of the music dropped.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called from inside.
“It’s me. I live here, remember?” McGuire said. “So put the gun down.” He pushed open the door to find the nurse standing in her bare feet, wearing black leotards and a pale blue tunic. The gun was in her hand, and she placed it on the dresser while McGuire watched. On the dresser sat a massive portable stereo, and the scratchy beat of the music spilling from the unit sounded to McGuire as though an autistic animal were trapped within, trying to claw its way to freedom through the speakers.
“What do you want?” Liz Worthington said.
“I want you to put a bullet through that son of a bitch,” McGuire said. He pointed at the portable stereo.
“That’s my music,” she said. “It’s a statement of angst and alienation.” She smoothed the front of her tunic. “It’s also fun to dance to.”
“You dance to that shit?”
“I dance to keep me fit and make me happy.”
“You turn every one of those CDs into beer coasters and I’ll be so goddamn happy I’ll dance across Massachusetts Bay!”
“It’s not just music, you know. It’s artistic expression.”
“Well, you got the first part right. And how’d you like to see me express myself artistically with a fire ax?”
She rested her hand on the gun. “If you enter my room without my permission and armed with a weapon, I’ll shoot you, and that’s a promise.”
McGuire muttered to himself and returned to the top of the stairs to see Susan looking up at him, her eyes wide and her expression distraught. “Is everything all right?” she asked as he descended the stairs.
“Just normal insanity,” he said. He took her arm and guided her down the hall to Ollie’s room.
“You’re like the cavalry riding over the hill just when the bad guys’re ready to burn the virgins.” Ollie’s bed was propped to a sitting position and his moon face was red and creased. “I couldn’t take it anymore. The more I pressed this damn buzzer, the more she turned up that crap until she couldn’t hear me . . . and who the hell is this angel?”
McGuire introduced Susan, who grasped Ollie’s good hand as it flopped across the bed sheets towards her.
“Joe, you gotta do something about that woman upstairs,” Ollie said.
“Like what?”
“You gotta kill her, Joe.”
“I can’t kill her, Ollie . . .”
“Yes, you can. It’ll be justifiable. Tell you what, you do her and I’ll confess to it . . .”
McGuire turned to look at Susan. “He’s joking,” McGuire said.
“No, I’m not.” Ollie’s eyes swung to Susan’s. “I’m serious. I’ve got a forty-year-old butch nurse who says my biggest problem isn’t that I can’t walk, it’s that my life’s dull, with no inspiration.”
“So maybe the music’ll inspire you.”
Ollie turned his head to mumble at the wall.
“What’s that?” McGuire said.
“I said it’s inspiring me to explore her ass with a loaded shotgun.” He flashed a smile at Susan. “Sorry.”
“We’re going to Arizona,” McGuire said.
“You wanta take Dizzy Miss Lizzy with you in a trunk?” Ollie asked.
“She looking after you? Really?”
“Yeah, yeah. She does what’s needed to be done. She’s pretty good at that, I gotta admit. She knows the ERA of the Sox pitching staff, and what a naked reverse is.”
“A naked what?” Susan asked.
“Football talk,” McGuire said. “Ollie, we’ll be gone two or three days. We’re going to find Susan’s kids. You’ll be stuck with her, the nurse.”
“Go, go,” Ollie said.
McGuire and Susan left the room to find Liz Worthington in the kitchen. “In case you’re wondering, I only cook for him,” the nurse said.
“Try to keep it that way,” McGuire said.
He led Susan upstairs, carrying her valise. In his room he closed the door and stroked her hair and inhaled the aroma of her.
They left early in the morning, the cab weaving through the light Saturday traffic to the airport. McGuire wore his brown tweed jacket over a blue Oxford-cloth shirt, khaki trousers, and Timberland deck shoes. Susan chose a deep-blue polished cotton skirt, pale blue jersey top, and beige suede jacket, her hair pulled back and held by tortoiseshell combs. During the flight to Chicago, and while they waited at O’Hare to begin the second leg to Tucson, she swung back and forth between excitement and anxiety.
In Tucson he rented a car, and with the help of the rental agency’s map he found Highway 19 heading south towards Nogales, the highway weaving among low brown hills studded with saguaro cactus. The sky shone like a blue crystal and the air was dry, warm, and benevolent. Within half an hour they encountered Green Valley, an affluent development stretching away on both sides of the highway, extending outward from a low-rise shopping mall that seemed to be its epicenter. McGuire pulled into the mall, found a pay telephone, withdrew the notepaper Pratt had provided, dropped a quarter in the telephone slot, winked across at Susan, who remained in the car, and dialed the number.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice. McGuire asked if Tom Schaeffer was in. “No, but I expect him back in an hour.” She asked who was calling; McGuire said it was a friend, and he would call back.
A waitress in a nearby coffee shop gave him directions to Schaeffer’s house, and when McGuire returned to the car he said, “You sure you can handle this?”
“I have to,” she said. “I’ve been dreaming about this for two years. I have to.”
They drove west among tidy houses with red-tiled roofs and manicured lawns. Late-model minivans were parked in most driveways, and the tops of swimming-pool slides projected above backyard fences. Dark-skinned men with thin mustaches, wearing khaki shirts and trousers, washed cars and trimmed lawns in front of some homes, and dark-skinned women with black hair that shone like coal swept the front walks or shook dust from rugs and blankets.
Schaeffer lived in a cul-de-sac among a half-dozen other homes, and almost as soon as McGuire turned the corner, Susan leaned forward in the seat and her hand flew to her mouth.
Ahead of them, in the shade of a low tree on the lawn of the house, which faced down the short street, were two children. A boy wearing blue jeans and a San Jose Sharks T-shirt, lying on his back, tossed a baseball into the air and caught it, over and over. A girl stood talking to him, a small Navajo blanket gathered around her shoulders like a cape, her expression somber. She raised one hand from beneath the cape to brush a lock of hair the colour of bleached straw from her eyes and looked up as McGuire’s car approached.
“It’s them,” Susan whispered.
McGuire pulled the car into the driveway while the children watched, the boy sitting up. “What do I do?” Susan said, and McGuire told her to go to them.
She walked from the car and around the front of the vehicle. The girl, whose age McGuire guessed as eight, stared open-mouthed as she approached. The boy, perhaps two years older, rose to his feet and leaned against the tree as though ready to dart behind it for protection.
McGuire opened his door and stepped out onto the driveway.
“Belinda.” Susan dropped to one knee, her arms outstretched. “It’s me,” she said to the girl. “It’s Mummy.”
The girl dropped the blanket and ran to Susan’s open arms, and they cried together while the boy and McGuire watched. Then both swung their eyes towards the front door of the house where a dark-haired woman wearing thick glasses, a yellow dress, and a shocked expression stood on the threshold, staring at Susan and the girl.
“Jamie?” Susan said, stretching one hand in the boy’s direction. “Jamie? Please come and hug Mummy.”
The boy hung back, his eyes on the woman in the doorway. At the sight of the woman Susan stood, one hand pressed against the back of the little girl’s head. “I’m Susan,” she said to the woman. “I’m their mother.”
The woman nodded and tried with little success to smile. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
The woman invited McGuire and Susan inside. Susan carried Belinda, who wore a blue two-piece bathing suit beneath the blanket. The boy tagged along, looking as uncomfortable as McGuire.
Inside, the house was furnished in Santa Fe style. The white-washed walls were hung with oversized abstract paintings, the sofas and chairs were overstuffed and covered in Navajo blankets, and the wooden furniture was either dark and heavy or constructed of bleached saguaro wood, painted in pastel greens and blues. The ceilings were high, the layout open, and McGuire was struck by the awareness that a good deal of money was needed to create a mood the Hopis and Navajos and Mexican tribes had refined through centuries of poverty.
The woman introduced herself as Sylvia, Thomas’s wife. She watched Susan indirectly, swinging her eyes away when Susan glanced in her direction. She explained that Thomas had gone to the hardware store for gardening supplies, and should be back any minute. “May I offer you something to drink?” she asked. Her posture was stiff and unnatural, like someone awaiting punishment. Susan, settled on a sofa with Belinda on her lap, declined. The boy stood near her, his expression solemn. When Susan reached for his hand, he remained as rigid as a rake handle.
McGuire said he’d love a beer, and Sylvia nodded and walked like a zombie through a wide archway towards the kitchen area.
“Tell me what you’ve been doing,” Susan said to the children, who looked at each other and weighed their responses.
McGuire strolled away to a location from which he could see through the archway into the kitchen. Sylvia was standing at the sink, her hands forming tight fists and resting on the counter, her shoulders hunched, her eyes squeezed shut.
Outside, a car door slammed. McGuire looked to see a slim, bearded man emerge from a Lexus SUV and glance at McGuire’s rental car in the driveway. The man’s forehead was high, above aviator-style sunglasses, and his graying hair was close-cut; he wore a long-sleeved denim shirt and loose cotton trousers, and he walked to the side of the house, where Sylvia opened the door to greet him. As McGuire watched, the woman spoke in a low voice, then clung to him, while Thomas Schaeffer stared over her shoulder at McGuire from behind his sunglasses.
“He’s here,” McGuire said to Susan.
Schaeffer entered the house and walked across the tile floor, his eyes flashing briefly at McGuire. “Belinda, Jamie,” he said. “Go into the kitchen and help Sylvia, will you?”
“Go ahead,” Susan said, and she kissed her daughter’s cheek.
The adults watched the children leave. “How are you?” Schaeffer asked Susan, who said she was fine and introduced McGuire. Schaeffer kept his eyes on Susan. “How long have you been out?”
“A few weeks.” Susan moved closer to McGuire and reached for his hand. “Nearly three months. Your beard looks good, Thomas. It suits you.”
“How did you find us?” Schaeffer asked.
“Ways and means,” McGuire said.
“Joe used to be a policeman,” Susan said. “A detective.”
“You can’t take them back, you know,” Schaeffer said to Susan. “I won’t let you.”
“I know.” Susan released McGuire’s hand and toyed with her own as she spoke. “I know.”
“Sylvia’s getting something to drink,” Schaeffer said. “She’s a little surprised. And upset.” One hand stroked his beard as he spoke.
“She seems very nice,” Susan said. “When were you married?”
“A year ago last month.” Schaeffer slid his hands into his pockets. “You look good,” he said to his former wife. “Really good.”
Susan thanked him and reached for McGuire’s hand again. “Joe’s been helpful. Things have not been good. Orin Flanigan was murdered last week, did you hear?”
Schaeffer nodded. “Boston Police called here. They asked a few questions. I couldn’t help them, of course.” He looked at McGuire with a curious expression. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’d better go help Sylvia.”
When he was gone, Susan pressed herself against McGuire and wrapped her arms around him.
McGuire asked how she was holding up. “I’m all right,” she said. “But Sylvia seems nervous, doesn’t she?”
“She has good reason to be,” McGuire said, and when Susan looked up at him, McGuire said, “Her husband’s still nuts about you.”
They sat on a patio shaded by the wide overhang of the house. A light breeze danced with the hanging plants, and the afternoon sun heated the red hills till they were almost incandescent. The conversation was awkward, the pauses lengthy and strained. Sylvia dropped first a glass and then a tray before she retreated to the house, where McGuire saw her watching them through the window.
Thomas Schaeffer described his job as a development executive with a Tucson communications firm and speculated on the impact of digital transmission, a topic McGuire found desperately boring. Belinda sat on her mother’s knee. Jamie remained aloof on the pool diving board, swinging his legs and looking stricken, glancing sidelong at his parents and this stranger, avoiding their eyes.
“How long are you staying?” Schaeffer asked McGuire.
“Until tomorrow,” McGuire said.
Schaeffer nodded, as though in approval. “I’m not sure what my legal rights are,” Schaeffer said.
“About what?”
“About, I don’t know . . . restricting access to the kids, visiting rights . . .”
“Thomas,” Susan said, and both men turned to look at her. “I’m their mother. I want them to grow up happy and I want them to understand me. I want them to know what I did and why I did it. But I would never try to come between you and them.”
Schaeffer looked away, west to the low scrubby hills.
“That’s a Lexus you’re driving?” McGuire said, standing up.
“Yeah.” Schaeffer was pulling at his beard again.
“You mind showing it to me?” McGuire said. “I’m thinking of buying one. Some street punk beat up my old Chrysler.”
The two men walked around the side of the house, and McGuire paused at the Lexus, one hand on its hood.
“You don’t want to talk about my car,” Schaeffer said.
“No, but I’d like you to cut Susan a little slack,” McGuire said. “It’s not your kids you’re worried about, is it? It’s your marriage.”
“Sylvia’s falling apart in there.” Schaeffer tilted his head towards the house. “She’s been afraid of this happening since before we were married. Susan showing up, I mean.”
“What did you do, brag to her about your glamorous and notorious ex-wife?”
“I guess.” Schaeffer smiled, embarrassed. “I guess I did.”
“She thinks she can’t compete with Susan. She thinks you’ll fall all over her.”
“Sylvia’s a good woman,” Schaeffer said. He shrugged, unsure of how to continue. “She’s a good woman,” he repeated, agreeing with himself, and McGuire felt a wave of sympathy for these people, a man unable to sever emotional ties with the mother of his children, a woman whose husband could say nothing more flattering about her than that she was “good.”
“You happy here?” McGuire asked.
“Hell, yes.” Schaeffer swept his arm to encompass the desert landscape. “Who wouldn’t be?”
“Susan meant it when she said she wants happiness for her children.” McGuire walked along the side of the car, tracing its lines with his fingertips. “And you know it.” He stopped and looked back at Schaeffer. “Something wrong with Jamie?”
“He’s kind of my favourite. And he’s the oldest. Maybe he remembers things I told him about his mother.”
“Yeah, well.” McGuire shielded his eyes and stared through the window glass at the interior of the Lexus. Leather upholstery, CD player. Hell, he’d never be able to afford one of these. “You still feel that way? About Susan?”
Schaeffer shook his head. “You’re a bright guy. You can figure out how I feel about her.”
“Yeah.” So can your wife, McGuire thought, walking to the rear of the car. “Well, you know, maybe you could tell your son that. Because he looks like he’s having a hell of a time dealing with this woman who’s his mother, the one he hasn’t seen for a few years. She doesn’t have a wart on her nose or ride a broom, maybe like he expected.”
“You have kids?”
“No. Just a long memory.” He continued walking around the car, the other man a few steps behind.
“When I go back into the house, it’s Sylvia’s emotions I’ll have to deal with. What can I say that’ll calm her down? Tell her Susan won’t come around anymore? That she should get over her idea that Susan’s some kind of competition?”
“Nice car.” McGuire was walking back towards the pool area again. “Nice house, nice location. Good family. Sounds like you’ve got a great career. You’re not really dumb enough to throw it all away by making a play for your ex-wife, are you?” He smiled at Schaeffer. “Maybe that’s what you tell her. That’s what I’d say.”
McGuire and Susan declined a half-hearted invitation to a barbecue dinner, but they accepted Schaeffer’s offer to return the next day, and his invitation to take them for a drive through the desert and show McGuire how his Lexus performed. Belinda cried when they left, but Jamie hung back, and when his mother pleaded with him to come and kiss her goodbye, he turned on his heel and returned to the pool.
They found a motel outside Tucson and registered for the evening. In bed, Susan sobbed against his shoulder, then brightened again and spoke of her children, how healthy they looked, how well they seemed to be doing in school. Around dusk, McGuire walked across the highway to a restaurant, returning with fried chicken, and they sat in bed, watching local news stories, wiping the grease from their fingers on towels from the bathroom.
Belinda ran laughing across the lawn to greet her mother when Susan and McGuire arrived the next morning. Jamie walked to her, smiling and embarrassed.
In the car, with Schaeffer driving, McGuire sat up front and listened to the other man rhyme off the vehicle’s various features and specifications, while Susan and the children chatted behind them. Sylvia had begged off, saying she had so much to do that day.
They stopped for ice cream, Susan and the children lining up at the takeout counter while the men remained in the car.
“You had a talk with your son,” McGuire said.
“Yeah, I did.” Schaeffer was watching his former wife as she bent to speak to Belinda. “Sylvia too.” He turned to McGuire. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s harder to give up your enemies than it is to give up your friends.”
McGuire thought it was probably the most profound observation Schaeffer had made in many years.
“Can we go see the babies?” Belinda asked. Her lips were smeared in strawberry ice cream. When Susan asked what babies, the young girl said, “The Indian babies, painted on the wall.”
“It’s called the Chapel of the Sky,” Schaeffer said. “Because the artist decided not to rebuild the roof that had fallen in.”
They drove north to an adobe building among groves of saguaro cactus. Behind the chapel rose terracotta hills scattered with mesquite and other ragged foliage. Belinda ran ahead, leading her mother into the chapel, which was no larger than a suburban bedroom. Schaeffer stood at the entrance, watching Susan and the children. To the south and below, the city of Tucson stretched like the embodiment of all that could go wrong among a landscape that was harsh and beautiful and true: tall rotating signs announced the location of gas stations and fast-food outlets, and the sounds of diesel trucks down-shifting through the city disturbed the sense of peace that otherwise blanketed the chapel. McGuire sat on an outcropping of rock, closed his eyes, and absorbed the sun’s warmth.
“You really a detective?”
McGuire opened his eyes to see Jamie seated next to him. The boy was round-faced and blue-eyed, and a cowlick of his sand-coloured hair stood at attention, crowning his head.
“Used to be,” McGuire said.
The boy pondered the news. “Sylvia’s afraid of you.”
“Why?”
Jamie shrugged. “Do you like it here? In Arizona?”
“Yes. I like it a lot.”
“So do I.” The boy scooped a handful of dust from the ground and sifted it through his fingers. “Do you think my mom’s pretty?”
“Your mother is very pretty,” McGuire said. “She’s more than that.”
Jamie rubbed the dirt from his hands. “Sylvia says, if my mom stays, she’ll leave.”
“How do you know that?”
“I heard my dad and her talking last night. They thought we were asleep.”
“What do you think of Sylvia?”
“She’s okay.”
“We’re not staying.”
Jamie shrugged. “If my mom needs me, like you said she does, and she goes back to Boston . . .” He left the words hanging in the air.
“You can’t figure out how somebody can need you and still be two thousand miles away,” McGuire said, and the boy nodded. “She doesn’t need you in the next room or in the next house as much as she needs you here.” McGuire thumped his chest. “She needs to know you’re there, because that’s where people you love are. Can you understand that?”
Jamie nodded. “I think so.”
They sat in silence for a minute until McGuire said, “So, you ever thought of becoming a cop?”
Schaeffer gave them a tour of Tucson over the rest of the morning, stopping for lunch at a fast-food drive-in, and touring Old Tucson, where actors portraying cowboys engaged in street shootouts.
“You ever shoot anybody?” Jamie asked McGuire a few moments after seeing a re-enacted gun battle. The two were standing next to a corral fence watching horses.
“Yes,” McGuire said.
“Was it like that?”
“It’s never like that. It’s maybe the worst thing in the world.” McGuire’s tone of voice and his expression, suddenly distant, silenced the boy. All the way back to Green Valley, McGuire felt Jamie’s eyes on him.
At Schaeffer’s home, Sylvia greeted them wearing a red satin halter top, balloon pants, and more makeup than the day before. She made another half-hearted invitation to McGuire and Susan to stay for drinks. They declined, and in the driveway Belinda and Susan hugged goodbyes. The girl pecked McGuire on the cheek, then ran sobbing into the house, pursued by Sylvia. McGuire shook hands with Jamie and asked if the boy knew much about the Apaches that had once lived in this area of Arizona. When Jamie said yes, McGuire promised to come back and learn as much as the boy wanted to tell him. He shook hands with Schaeffer and gave him Ollie’s telephone number in Revere Beach. Then he put his arm around Susan’s shoulder, and guided her back to the rental car, her face wet with tears.
They were booked on an early evening flight through Chicago. “We could have stayed a little longer,” he said, but she shook her head and gripped his hand, staring out the window at the passing desert scene.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “Aren’t they lucky to live here?”
McGuire turned off the highway to a side road before the airport, and followed a narrow dirt track leading up into the low hills south of the city. At a sharp turn on the crest of a ridge, the road provided a panoramic view of the desert area to the east of Tucson, and he pulled to the side and switched off the engine.
“I find it harder than ever,” she said, “to believe that I did what I did.”
“You want to get out and walk around?” McGuire asked, and she shook her head. Then she leaned against him, there in the car, her cheek pressed against his chest. “When I was able to read the Boston papers,” she said, “when I’d get them at Cedar Hill, they were usually a week or so old, and I would read the obituary columns, looking for his name.”
“Whose?”
“Ross’s. I’d look for Myers in the death notices. I couldn’t believe he would still be alive. I thought he would be killed in jail or on the street when he got out, but he wasn’t. Or maybe he was. Maybe he’s not down in Annapolis after all. Maybe he’s dead. Did you ever think of that?”
“Who would kill him?”
“Lots of people wanted to. The men who invested in the business school. Two of them lost everything. Everything. Ross spent it on . . . I don’t know . . . gambling, for sure. He spent it on the horses he owned and the clubs he belonged to, the cars. The women. I’m sure he spent much of it on women. The wife of one man who put money into his business, a lawyer, she divorced him over it. The lawyer had given Ross everything he owned, even mortgaged his house, when Ross said he could double his money for him. He was such a controller. You have no idea. He controlled me, he controlled his partners . . . Nobody could believe that anyone was able to lie so often, so convincingly. Honestly, he was a sociopath. And the bookies . . .”
“You don’t tell lies to big-city bookies,” McGuire said. “Not for long.”
“Ross could tell lies to anybody and get away with it.”
Below them the desert was a carpet and a panorama, an unreal vista of shapes and colours and shadows. She snuggled closer to him and stretched her arm across him, resting her hand on McGuire’s hip.
“He would tell the most outrageous lies,” she said, “and people would believe him. Eventually he thought I’d believe anything he told me, just because I wanted to believe it. That’s what a controller does, isn’t it? He figures out what you want to believe, and he tells you the lies you want to hear. He told me once . . .” She laughed without any humour and began again. “He told me that I only imagined what I actually saw, that I didn’t really see what I knew I had seen.”
“What was that?” McGuire was watching an aircraft on its final approach to the airport, gliding down, down, its landing gear lowered.
“I was coming home one evening, and I saw his car parked in the driveway of the condominium. I saw something moving inside, and I didn’t know what it was, or who it was. I thought it might be Ross, in trouble or something, so I went to the window and looked in.” She sat up and looked through the windshield at the descending aircraft. “He was in the car, on the front seat. Doing it, right there in our driveway, with some woman friend of his. I mean, there he was with his pants down and her legs . . .”
McGuire, remembering a similar scene, made a fist and pounded the steering wheel. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, and started the engine. “Damn, damn, damn.”
Susan was frightened at his sudden outburst. “Why do you get angry when I talk about Ross?”
“I’m not angry with you,” McGuire said. He swung the car around on the narrow road. “I’m pissed at myself for not making a connection.” He removed a hand from the steering wheel to squeeze hers in reassurance.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To the airport. To make a telephone call and change my flight.”
“Why?”
“Because I think I want to go back to Annapolis. Right away. Soon as I can.”
“You think?” she said.
McGuire covered one ear with his hand and pressed the receiver against his other ear, trying to catch every word of Ollie’s scratchy voice over the din of the airline terminal.
“Brunell, Burnell, something like that,” Ollie was saying through the speakerphone by his bed in Revere Beach. “Sounded like some young pecker anyway.”
“He’s okay,” McGuire said. “What’d he say?”
“He said Doitch told him he’d probably have gotten around to it anyway, but with his workload and under the circumstances and all, place the body was found, backlog, no suspect . . .”
“Well, is it or isn’t it?” McGuire almost shouted into the telephone.
“There’s no way that all the water in the lawyer’s lungs came from the river. No way at all. Some entered, but it was mostly salt water. The guy didn’t drown in the Charles. He drowned in an ocean somewhere and was dumped in the goddamn river.”
“Okay, okay.” McGuire was feeling the familiar excitement.
“How you doin’?”
“Listen, if Burnell calls back, tell him to check the car they found in Weymouth . . .”
“They got a match,” Ollie interrupted. “On fibers on the body, probably in the trunk. I thought about it already and asked Burnell. How many times I gotta tell you, I’m only paralyzed from the neck down? You goin’ back down there?”
“If I can change my flight from Chicago, yeah.”
“How about Susan? She comin’ back on her own?”
“If she agrees.”
“Give her a kiss for me. Then send her up here, and I’ll tell her some tales, straighten her out about you, make sure she knows what she’s getting into.”
“What about your nurse?”
“Susan’ll be an antidote.”
McGuire promised to call when he had news, and hung up. He turned to kiss Susan on the cheek. “That’s from Ollie,” he said. He scanned the terminal, looking for the airline counter. Then he stopped, turned to her again, and pulled her to him, pressing his mouth against hers and stroking the back of her head with his hands, weaving his fingers through her hair, never seeing the stares and smiles of passersby. When he finished he looked at her eyes, which were smiling back at him, and said: “And that’s from me.”
He explained it to her on the flight to Chicago, telling her that all he wanted to do was fit the pieces together and place the puzzle in the lap of the police. “You go on to Boston, stay at the halfway house. I’ll rent a car in Washington and drive to Annapolis.”
“Can’t it wait?” she said. “Can’t you take a flight tomorrow?”
“If I have to, I will. But if I do, I won’t sleep all night. Besides, he must be getting spooked, ready to move on.”
“Can’t you just give everything he knew to the police, and let them take it from there?”
“Donovan’s liable to blow things. He’ll resent having to use raw information from me. Besides, this one I want to see through for myself, because I was so damned blind to it until now.”
She rested her head against him, the Arizona desert far below them, while McGuire admitted to himself there was another reason to wrap things up on his own, a reason that connected him with Orin Flanigan: because he wanted to see Myers pay. He wanted to be there to see the man turn pale.