The man who’d once arrived in Port Hope, Maine, to get people to talk to the police now refused to do so himself.
“I hate to do this to you,” Barrett told the state police lieutenant who’d come in after Barrett declined to make a statement to the first officer on scene. “But I will need a lawyer present before I talk.”
“What in the hell for? You’re an FBI agent! You know all about this shit!”
“You just answered your own question,” Barrett said. He knew enough to understand that he had left physical evidence behind at a death scene, that it would not be hard for someone to imagine a motive for his desire to settle old scores with Kimberly Crepeaux even before he’d been driven off the road by a man with a shotgun in hand, and that he probably had more enemies than friends in the Maine law enforcement community.
“It looks like just an overdose, man. All I need is for you to explain how you got there and walk me through the scene,” the investigator implored.
“I’ll do that through an attorney,” Barrett said. He’d taught this class long before he’d become a cop. No matter how badly you wanted to believe otherwise, there was legitimate risk for an innocent person eager to help an investigation.
Kimberly Crepeaux could have testified to that.
They didn’t charge him with anything, although they threatened to. Once his Boston-based criminal defense attorney, Laura Zaltsberg, got through with her first phone call, Barrett found himself being escorted quickly out of the police station. This was not unusual for Laura’s clients.
“You’ll be back here,” the state cop promised him. “With Zaltsberg or without her, you’ll be back.”
“I intend to be back,” Barrett said. “But it will only be with her.”
After he drove off, he made a few extra turns and watched the mirror, and when he was sure he was not being followed, he pulled to the curb and got out of the car. He lay on his back on the pavement and checked the frame, feeling with his hands for another tracker. When he was certain there wasn’t one, he got back behind the wheel and drove to Howard Pelletier’s home.
He knew that word of Kimberly’s death and his presence at the scene was circulating by now. Roxanne would know, and the police he’d worked with in Maine and those he hadn’t, and Colleen Davis, the prosecutor who’d put such faith in him, and Jeanette Crepeaux, whose slap he could still feel on his cheek—all of them would know by now.
And maybe the man who’d driven the black truck with the grille guard and held the shotgun at point-blank range would also know. In a perverse way, Barrett was grateful to that man. He had dozens of stitches and a few pints of strangers’ blood in him because of that man, and he was also lacking a few things he’d once had: his own cell phone, his rental car. He’d been put adrift by that attack, but right now, that didn’t feel so bad. The tether between him and the real world had been severed, and at this moment, he was glad. He didn’t want to hear rational, reasoning voices. Standing above Kimberly Crepeaux’s tiny, lifeless body, he’d felt the real world recede and a black, comforting rage surge forward.
He didn’t want to let go of that just yet.
Howard came out of the house at the sound of the Mustang’s engine and looked at the car with suspicion until Barrett got out. Then he hurried down the steps. When he drew close enough to see Barrett’s head wound, he stopped and studied it with interest.
“You go through the windshield?” he asked, curious but not horrified. Lobstermen were rarely impressed by wounds.
“Nope. I’m not quite sure what was responsible for the redecorating of my dome. The roof of the car, maybe. It got smashed down pretty well.”
“You have any luck finding her?” Howard asked, and the question took something out of Barrett, like a bloodletting. Howard Pelletier had lost his mother, his wife, and his daughter. He seemed like a man who truly had nothing left to lose, and yet here Barrett was, about to take something else away from him.
“Howard, can we go inside?”
“Sure, sure.”
He led Barrett to the garage instead of the house. He seemed more comfortable there. Howard took the stool by the workbench and slid another one over to Barrett. A stack of traps was piled near the door, and they smelled of salt water and old bait.
“I thought she’d have called me,” Howard said. “After what happened to you, I was sure that I’d hear from—”
“Howard, she’s dead.”
Howard Pelletier blinked at him as if he’d misheard. “Ayuh, I know. But that don’t mean there’s no point in trying. I thought we all agreed on that.”
“I don’t mean Jackie. I mean Kimberly.”
Barrett hadn’t believed this could be worse than the trip he’d made out to the island to share Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession. Somehow, though, the look on Howard’s face made this one worse. That day, he’d resisted. Today, he merely accepted, and Barrett couldn’t remember seeing a man look more broken.
“Aw, no. Aw, shit, no.”
Barrett sat there in the garage that smelled of salt and rust some ten miles from the studio that had smelled of fresh primer and clean sawdust and watched a tear work its way down Howard’s wrinkled cheek and into his beard. He was crying over the loss of a woman he believed had helped hide his daughter’s body.
Barrett understood it. Others wouldn’t, but others didn’t know what it was like to live with questions of innocence and guilt. They didn’t know how much hope you could put in anyone who promised to replace the questions with answers.
“I shouldn’t care,” Howard said, as if reading Barrett’s thoughts. “After what she did and what she put me through, I should be happy to hear it. But she seemed to want to make it right so bad. She seemed to be trying, and it wasn’t any good for her to try. It was worse for her to tell the truth than to just be a liar. But she decided to tell the truth.”
Howard blew his nose into a rag and then shook his head savagely, as if he needed to rattle something loose in there, needed to knock silent some tired, creaky gear that simply wouldn’t stop turning.
“How’d Mathias do it?”
“I’m not sure he did it.”
“Oh, bullshit! Stop with the damned dancing and say what we both know! That son of a bitch—”
“The DEA tells me I’m looking the wrong way,” Barrett said, and that silenced Howard.
“DEA?”
Barrett told him about the hospital visit from DEA agent Nick Vizquel and about the one question Vizquel had hoped for help with.
“Kimberly can’t answer that anymore,” Barrett said. “But if the toxicology report matches Odom’s, then she’s still got answers.” He felt a little sick, and then for some reason he found himself holding his head in his hands and telling Howard Pelletier the details of the scene, right down to the child’s bed with the ship’s wheel and the phone by her cheek and the soft, gorgeous song it had been playing when she died.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether she put the needle in her arm or someone else did,” he continued. “Either she was murdered and it was made to look like an overdose, or she took her own life because she wanted to go on her own terms, and she didn’t think she’d have that option for long. You tell me, Howard, does it really matter?”
“No.”
Barrett nodded and rubbed his jaw and stared at the floor. “It could be hard to inject somebody and make it look like an accident,” he said. “If they were resisting, you’d have to fight them. But what if they weren’t resisting? What if they didn’t know what they were taking, but you did?”
Silence. Howard watching him.
“I need to find out who she got it from,” Barrett said. “That is what I need to do.”
“There are four of them now,” Howard answered.
“What?”
“My daughter and Ian. Then both of the girls who helped Mathias. And you damn near made five yesterday, didn’t you?” Howard tugged on his beard. “He’s going to have an easier time now, with Kimmy dead. Your way of settling this hasn’t worked. I don’t believe it ever will. But that doesn’t mean there’s no way to settle it.” He released his beard, and his voice was exhausted when he said, “I’ve tried to give you time. Tried to do it the right way. But I got nothing left. Not with Kimmy gone too. There’s nobody to say the truth in the courtroom, and the evidence you find only helps him.”
“Howard, before you let yourself even think about doing something, I need you to make me a promise.”
“No! I’m not giving you any more promises, no patience, and I don’t want to hear any more of the ‘Give it time, it’s a process’ bullshit. Don’t ask me for that again!”
“I’m not. I’m asking you to let me help you if you decide to settle this in a different way.”
“You don’t get what I’m sayin’.”
“Oh yes, I do. And if it comes to killing him,” Barrett said, “then we’ll do it together.”
Howard Pelletier stared at him, mouth agape.
“We will bury him,” Barrett said, “and walk away clean. People may wonder. They may talk. But we will walk away clean.”
“You don’t sound quite like yourself.” Howard’s eyes were locked on his, and they were hungry. “You ain’t kidding. You mean to do it.”
“Yes. Will you promise me that you won’t do this alone? If he’s got to be killed, then we kill him together.”
He hadn’t intended to say this. Hadn’t believed himself capable of saying it. And yet it felt good. Felt more natural than any words he’d ever said.
“Okay,” Howard Pelletier whispered. “We’ll kill him together.”
“I need your help, though. You’ve got a cell phone and a landline, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need to borrow the cell if that’s possible.”
“No problem.”
“And I’ll need a gun.”
Howard didn’t question him. He left the garage and went into the house and Barrett stood beside the stack of battered lobster traps, breathing in their scent, until Howard returned and gave him a cell phone and a Taurus nine-millimeter with an extra magazine.
“That work for you?” Howard asked.
“That works.”
“Where are you headed?”
“To take a last swing at doing this the way I always wanted to. I’ll call tonight. Stay close to the phone.”