When Barrett stepped back into the hospital, Liz rose to greet him, but she didn’t reach for him. Even Roxanne Donovan had touched him, but Liz did not. She just floated close, tantalizingly close, but kept the distance between them.
“Your old boss doesn’t like reporters,” she said.
“It’s why I may quit.”
She held up a hand. “Spare me.” Her eyes drifted up from his, and her face darkened and he knew she was looking at the ghastly wound across his skull. “How you feeling?”
“Conspicuous,” he said. “I would like a hat.”
“What about a ride?”
“I’d like both.”
“You know the right woman.”
They left the hospital and walked to the battered Ford Mustang that was the worst possible car for a Maine resident, rear-wheel drive and torque-heavy. Naturally, Liz had persisted with it for years.
“I didn’t think to bring your suitcase down here with me,” Liz said, “but you’ve got some clothes at my house. Until then, I can help with a hat.”
The backseat of the car looked like a cross between a mobile office and an abandoned storage center, and it took her a few minutes of rooting around before she emerged with a New England Patriots cap.
“There you go.”
He stared at it and shook his head. “You know better.”
He’d been a Giants fan since birth.
“You look like someone from The Walking Dead, but you won’t put on the hat?”
“No.”
She sighed, tossed the cap into the backseat, and found another.
“This is the other option.” She held it out—it featured a cartoon moose in a yoga pose and said NAMOOSTE. “You tell me what you’d rather be seen in.”
He took the moose hat.
When they were in the car, she gunned the engine to life—it made a clatter more befitting a boatyard than a parking lot—then turned to him and said, “Kimmy’s in the wind.”
“What?”
“Howard Pelletier told me. As soon as word spread about you, the media came looking for her. She took off. Stole her grandmother’s car and went AWOL.”
“Shit.”
“Media scares her.”
“Media scares her, maybe, but that’s not why she ran. She’s afraid of Mathias.”
“He’s happy to give quotes. He told me that the police should be awfully interested in what happened to you after you visited Bobby Girard.”
Barrett closed his eyes and took a breath. “And Howard?”
“He told me to wish you well,” she said. “He didn’t want to be on the record.”
“Right.”
“Rob, who do you think came after you?”
“I don’t know.” He was checking the side-view mirror compulsively and wondered how he’d do the next time he was behind the wheel, whether he’d be able to keep his eyes off the mirror, his mind off memories of the black truck with the grille guard that looked like bared teeth.
“The state police haven’t bothered to talk to me,” he said, “but the DEA dropped by, apparently because they found a tracking device on my car.”
She turned to him, wide-eyed.
“Watch the road,” he said. “My last wreck was enough to hold me for a while.”
She turned away. “The DEA.”
“Yeah. And I was encouraged to think bigger. To ignore small-ball issues like the murders of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly. Bigger, to them, is drugs and money. They didn’t mention sex or rock ’n’ roll, but I assume those are in the mix.”
“Mathias has no drug history. Girard did.”
“I’m aware,” he said, and then realized that he sounded like a total prick and added, “Sorry. I’m trying to get my head around it. You’ve listened to Kimberly, and you came away with the same thought as me: She’s not lying. Not completely.”
“No.”
“But…”
“But she’s telling a story that doesn’t fit with the rest of it.”
“Exactly.” He paused. The Maine landscape loomed ahead, dark and shadowed as storm clouds moved in, meeting a thin fog that was drifting in from the coast. This state of impenetrable fogs and deep woods and deep snows and deep oceans could hide a lot from you when it wanted to. He thought about what Roxanne and Nick Vizquel had told him and he felt the old fear again.
“Maybe Kimberly did lie,” he said softly. “Maybe she told me what I wanted to hear and so I believed her, just like every cop who has ever put a conviction ahead of the truth.”
“You haven’t stopped asking questions,” Liz said. “If you were a bad cop, Rob, you wouldn’t bother.”
“I’m asking the wrong ones, according to Nick Vizquel.”
“And you almost died because of it. I hate to say it, but…they can’t all be wrong.”
He watched the road pass by and wondered about that, about which question had been right, or closest to it. A few raindrops big as nickels splattered off the windshield, and Liz turned on the wipers as the sky darkened around them and they headed farther north.
“I hadn’t thought about Cass Odom in a while,” he said. “She wasn’t much use to me, considering she was dead when I arrived. Maybe I was wrong about that.”
Liz glanced at him. “I don’t follow.”
“I’m not sure that I do either,” he said. “But the DEA thinks there’s only one question I’m supposed to ask Kimberly, and it’s about Cass.”
The preliminary raindrops revealed themselves as harbingers then, and a drenching, car-wash rain welcomed them north. Liz slowed down while setting the wipers at their highest.
“You have sources with the medical examiner, don’t you? I remember your stories.”
She’d won an award for a series of articles about the overwhelming burden overdose deaths put on medical examiners and coroners. “I’ve got people who will talk to me,” she said with a touch of wariness. “What am I supposed to ask them?”
“I need the medical examiner’s reports on Cass Odom and J. R. Millinock. Julian is his full first name.”
“Why do you need that?” Liz asked.
“Because Vizquel said that he’s interested in the drug that killed Cass and wants to know where it came from. I already know where the drug that killed Millinock came from—Jeff Girard. If they match…that would answer his question, maybe. Or tie some loose ends together, at least.”
“The tox reports would show that?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need to see them. Think you can work some magic for me?”
“I can try.”
“Remember what she said about…shit, what was the name?” The pain meds were putting up a fog between his mind and his memory. “I don’t remember the name. But Kimberly told us about some girl who’d drowned, but it turned out she really hadn’t drowned…something like that. You said you wrote about her?”
“Molly Quickery. Her body washed up on the beach out by Owls Head. Nowhere near the Kelly family place, which is what Kimmy was telling us.”
“But she was in that group.”
“What group?”
“Users. Addicts.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you can pull that one too?”
“I’m not sure they did a full toxicology panel. I just know the coroner said Molly was unconscious when she went into the water or something. There was no evidence of drowning. He was sure of that.”
Barrett had more questions, but the pills he’d taken were settling into his brain now with a comfortable numbing, like a soft whisper telling him that he didn’t need to stay in this moment, didn’t need to worry about a thing, just needed to close his eyes, and the drugs would take it from there. He didn’t like the feeling, but those whispering voices were powerful persuaders.
The rain was pounding on the car in a ceaseless staccato, and Liz’s attention was on the road, so he allowed his eyes to close just for a moment. No more than that, he promised himself, because he needed to think of the memory that had eluded him in those early minutes in the hospital. The memory came from being in the water, from a faint, dizzy thought that had come to him as the blood ran down his face and he looked for help, but he couldn’t identify it. Think harder, then. Concentrate.
He wasn’t sure when he fell asleep, but he stirred awake just before she stopped the car. It was nearing sunset and they were pulling into her driveway.
“Sorry,” he said. “Drifted off, didn’t I?”
“Just a bit.”
She got out of the car and he followed, moving stiffly, every muscle seeming to have its own twinge and ache. She unlocked the door and led him into a small but bright kitchen and a room with a wide bank of windows that caught the fading sunlight.
“I was expecting you’d get a lot of calls, but I gather your phone was confiscated,” she said.
“I’d say so. It sank first, so it doesn’t matter either way. Problem is, that’ll be the number Kimberly tries. I need to find her. Need to talk to Howard too.”
Liz touched him for the first time then, stepping close and clasping her hands together behind his neck.
“You could’ve died over this,” she said. “Do you actually realize that?”
He thought of the way it had felt in the car with the water rising up and his blood pouring down, and he nodded. “I got pretty acquainted with the idea.”
She leaned her face against his, cheek to cheek, like they were dancing. She didn’t speak. He put his hands around her lithe lower back and closed his eyes and felt at home in a way he had not felt in months. His throat was tight, nerves tingling. He’d known her for nearly twenty years and she could still do this to him. Hell, the thought of her could do it to him, let alone actually having her in his arms.
“Bed rest was prescribed,” she said. “I heard it straight from the doctor’s mouth.”
She stretched up and kissed him then, and at the touch of her lips, the idea that he’d just been asleep in her presence or ever could be again seemed laughable, every nerve ending awake now, awake and urgent. He was pulling her closer just when she pulled back, shaking her head, and for a terrible moment he thought she was going to say being with him was a mistake that she wasn’t willing to make again. Then she said, “I’m sorry, but you’ve got to take off that stupid hat.”
He laughed and took off the baseball cap with the moose logo. Her eyes went to his scalp, a tender glance at the ghastly wound.
“You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” she said. Then she reached for his hand. “So I’ll have to be careful with you.”
She was. Excruciatingly, exquisitely careful, in graceful erotic motion while telling him to lie still, lie still, lie still—instructions he followed for as long as he could, and when he finally disobeyed, there were no objections until after they were done, her head on his chest and their bodies damp with sweat. Then she said, “You need to work on your patience.”
“I promise I will. A second chance, maybe?”
“I suppose that’s only fair.”