Late Rain (10 page)

Gramm suddenly slammed the top of the desk. “Maybe you don’t think much of me. I’m just a guy owns two titty bars, a few restaurants, a little land. I’ve made some money over the years, maybe not so much as some, but I’ve always paid my own way.”

Gramm paused, eyed the bottle of Beam, poured another drink, but left it sitting at his elbow. “Let me ask you something. Is it wrong for a man to want to hold on to what is his? Or you one of those who believe everything has a price tag?”

“No,” Ben said. He started trying to work his right hand out from under his leg and flex some life back into his fingers.

“A man can’t call himself anything unless he’s got some claims on him,” Gramm said. “No different for a woman either. Or for that matter, a country. You got to answer to something bigger than you or you’re nothing.”

He picked up Ben’s badge, looked at it, then tossed it in Ben’s lap.

“Get out of here,” he said. “I don’t need your kind of help.”

Ben slowly got up from the chair.

Gramm lifted the tumbler and rested it for a moment against his forehead.

“Make sure you lock that door on the way out,” he said.

IF THE UNITED STATES COAST GUARD had not dropped the Beretta M9 Semi-automatic as its standard-issue firearm and gone on to adopt the Sig Sauer P229 .40 Caliber, Ben Decovic’s wife might yet still be alive and not forever bleeding out in the parking lot of Central Dry Cleaners in Ryland, Ohio, and he would not be sitting in St. Katherine’s in Magnolia Beach, South Carolina on an empty Saturday night, afraid to go back to his apartment and five rooms of blunt-edged insomnia.

But the layered quiet that, if he was lucky, approximated a temporary respite, had gotten away from him a few moments after he sat down in the nave.

Ben had not expected the perfume.

At first he thought he was imagining it, and then got caught up in wondering if it was actually possible to imagine a smell, but it lingered, persistent, refusing to go away.

Ben recognized the smell. In their bedroom, it had ghosted his wife’s pillow, and he had found it most times he’d leaned in and kissed her neck. It had been his wife’s favorite perfume, the one she’d worn most frequently, and someone sitting in the nave earlier in the evening had been wearing it too.

He closed his eyes for a moment.

Ben tried to summon the name of the perfume but failed.

That wasn’t the case with the other names that followed him around. Ben would never forget who they belonged to or their addresses or what their owners had done for a living or, finally, the order in which they’d died.

The black-market Baretta that Greg Hollinger eventually ended up with had been traced back to Orlando, one of a dozen pieces missing and unaccounted for at the Coast Guard Amory after inventory when the new Sig Sauers were issued.

Fourteen months ago, on one of those clear, achingly cold January afternoons that only the Midwest can produce, Greg Hollinger finished his shift at Assurance Plus, a health insurance company where he worked as a claims processor, and made five stops, shooting someone at each, before driving home, parking in his driveway, and then putting one carefully placed bullet in his own head.

Greg Hollinger did not leave a note. He did not maintain a blog or personal website. He did not leave an angry explanatory videotape or DVD. He did not have a Facebook account. His parents were dead. He had no siblings or close relatives. He had never been arrested. He had not served in the military. He had never been married nor had anyone in his life who could even remotely be seen as a girlfriend or significant other. He was a good student, but one who never generated an impression beyond well-mannered, studious, and quiet. He did not belong to a church or any professional organizations. He had no known ties to extremist or hate groups. He had no one inside or outside of work who qualified as a friend. His neighbors gave the customary scripted answers when interviewed by the media:
Greg Hollinger kept to himself. He wasn’t exactly unfriendly, just quiet. A nice young man. Who would have thought.

On the first stop, Greg Hollinger shot Karl Metz, a line supervisor at the county recycling plant.

On the second, he shot Suzanne Raschella, an elementary school teacher.

On the third, George Gearhart, a bartender.

The fourth, Thomas Linnet, a CPA.

And the fifth, Diane Decovic, a veterinarian.

A Beretta M9 held fifteen to a clip. Karl Metz was a large man and had taken two to finish off. Everyone else took one. That left eight in the clip after Hollinger took himself out and no clear reason why those eight were left unfired.

There was no clear reason to anything connected to Greg Hollinger. His life was a null set, Greg Hollinger himself a rock that when overturned revealed another rock. He was an absolute cipher. The snake swallowing its own tail.

Ben Decovic wanted clear reasons. His career and reputation had been built on them. He had the eye and instinct at a crime scene or witness interview. He believed in motive. A motive was ultimately something as basic and fundamental as a pulse. Ben knew if he looked long enough he’d find one.

He’d believed that until Greg Hollinger had shown him otherwise.

In the nave pew, Ben lifted his hand.

Jesus.

His face was wet.

Five more names crowded in.

They were names as ephemeral as the lingering scent of the woman’s perfume and as holy in their own way as any of the icons or frescoes crowding Ben in St. Katherine’s.

Nicholas. Meredith. Andrew. Laura. Emily.

Diane and he had done the math, looked at both sides of their families and calculated the odds of them having a girl or boy and had come up with three to two. The names had quickly followed, possibilities waiting for Diane and Ben to breathe life into them.

All that was before Greg Hollinger.

The names had become envelopes, stamped and addressed, but forever empty of the letters they were supposed to hold.

And Ben was left with what Greg Hollinger and his black-market Beretta M9 had shown and not shown him.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

MID-MARCH and Corrine Tedros had her killer.

Three days ago, she’d driven to Raychard Balen’s office in Conway and sat across the table in the conference room with a man named Croy Wendall.

Even if Raychard Balen had not insisted that Corrine, Croy, and he meet face-to-face, emphasizing his one-sin-fits-all policy by keeping each of them equally implicated and making sure Corrine understood her money had bought a killing but not full immunity, Corrine Tedros would have shown up anyway.

She wanted the opportunity to meet the last person Stanley Tedros would ever see on earth.

At first, she had not been able to fully hide her disappointment. Perhaps it was too many movies, she thought, too many stylized renditions of hit men, all dark tailored suits and icy souls and practiced ease with weapons, or the other side of the killing coin, the garden-variety psychos, all devil tattoos and stringy hair and rock-and-roll mayhem.

Corrine had been expecting something other than a Croy Wendall.

There was a blank quality about him, the suggestion that something fundamental was missing or irretrievable. He was short and thick-shouldered with a boyish face whose features were slightly flattened, and his hair was prematurely gray. He had a child’s small, tightly-spaced teeth and milky green eyes. He’d sat impassively, hands folded in his lap, while Corrine had gone over the details for Stanley’s murder. At Balen’s, then her, request, Croy had repeated Corrine’s instructions about the murder, but he spoke slowly and gave back what she’d said without any inflection whatsoever. It was as if language had nothing to do with where he lived.

At the end of the meeting, Croy had pocketed the envelope with half his fee up front and then asked Corrine if she wanted Stanley killed with a knife or gun.

Once she’d set Croy Wendall loose on Stanley, Corrine had started building her alibi, which was how she’d come to be sitting next to Terri Iles at the mall cineplex in Magnolia Beach watching
Any Day Now
during the heart of a Saturday afternoon.

Corrine knew Stanley was a man of ingrained habits and routines. He worked a half-day each Saturday, returning home to fix and eat lunch, head upstairs for a short nap, and then take his boat out for a little fishing before returning home to watch a couple pre-dinner segments of the History Channel. Afterward, one of Stanley’s Greek cronies came over for an evening of drinking ouzo, listening to music, and playing gin rummy.

Croy Wendall was going to drop into the middle of Stanley’s Saturday routine. He’d make it look like a home invasion, a simple burglary gone awry when Stanley, awakening from his nap, supposedly surprised and panicked the intruder.

Corrine’s husband, Buddy, would be occupied by having to dutifully squire a foursome through eighteen holes at the country club. They were some suits from Wachovia Bank that Stanley was courting to help finance his plans to expand the distribution lines for Julep.

Corrine, for her part, settled on Terri Iles. Terri was the wife of one of the regional sales managers at Stanco Beverages, and Corrine had always found her company insufferable, but Terri could be counted on to make her presence known, and thus remembered, wherever she went. She wore too many tanning bed sessions and her hair short and dyed a citrus-yellow, had outsized ambitions for her husband and was forever talking about the “richness” of life and “bonding” opportunities, and tried to dress like someone twenty years her junior. She never stopped talking and was sure that everyone in the vicinity was interested in her observations, most of which were fourth-rate truths culled from fifth-rate self-esteem gurus on obscure cable channels.

An afternoon of clothes-shopping, some woman-to-woman bonding over yogurt and decaf, and a matinee at the mall cineplex. A long trail of witnesses and time accounted for.

Any Day Now
was one of those earnestly heartfelt dramas about the joys and tribulations of being a single parent, the blonde female lead in her late twenties, perky and resolute and engagingly quirky, forced to work at a job for which she was overqualified in order to make sure her standardly winsome and precocious little girl had everything she needed to stay winsome and precocious. There was lots of coping as well as tender mother-daughter moments while the lead fended off advances from a variety of ill-suited men until she inevitably found one who appreciated her for who she was and who just happened to want to spend the rest of his life helping raise a standardly winsome and precocious six-year-old step-daughter.

Needless to say, Terri Iles loved it.

The film, though, unearthed a core of resentment in Corrine that she had worked hard to keep buried. On more than one occasion, after Terri had leaned over to whisper her appreciation of a scene, Corrine had wanted to slap her and then tell her what a place like Bradford, Indiana did to the childhoods of winsome and precocious little girls who’d been dumped on their grandparents by a part-time mother and her approximate husband as they put one of those precocious and winsome little girls in their rearview mirror once and for all. And then slap her once again and tell her what those winsome and precocious little girls had to do later to get out of places like Bradford so that they could eventually end up sitting in a theatre on a Saturday afternoon with a pampered, self-absorbed bitch watching a movie that celebrated the richness of life and family.

Instead, Corrine surreptitiously lifted her arm to check her watch.

Stanley would be just settling in for his nap around now.

Corrine sat in the dark next to Terri and thought about what she was going to wear to Stanley’s funeral.

JACK CARSON looked into the next room where a girl in a green T-shirt did her homework at the kitchen table, and then he got up from his recliner and turned off the television and in the ensuing silence began to move through the rooms of his house. Something tugged at him, but it was as if he were caught in a tedious game of hide-n-seek, and Jack moved haltingly, slower and more deliberately than whatever was tugging at him demanded, and he’d find himself standing in front of the refrigerator, and he would suddenly pause as if he’d heard a sound he couldn’t identify, and he would try to chase it down, only to find himself in his daughter’s bedroom standing over a stack of library books piled on her nightstand, and when he picked up the top one and opened its back cover, the due date made no sense, the year off, some kind of mistake, and then he realized he hadn’t put on his shoes and he needed them for what he had to do, and he started down the hallway and moved to the bathroom and brushed his teeth, and the sound of the water pouring from the faucet was like an urgent whisper telling him he needed to hurry, and he moved back into the living room and turned on the television, and he listened to a man in a blue suit gravely explain that two new fires had started in west Magnolia Beach, and then Jack saw the note taped to the front door. He looked over toward the girl at the kitchen table. She looked back at him.

The note was from someone named Anne who’d written she’d be back in two hours, and underneath in all caps was: STAY IN THE HOUSE. GO BACK AND SIT IN YOUR CHAIR, DAD. PAIGE WILL FIX YOU A SNACK.

Jack turned the knob. The door was locked.

He walked back into the kitchen. He looked for the girl, but she was gone and so was the homework. Behind him he heard the man’s voice talking about the fires and saying there were no suspects and that three fire units were trying to get the fires under control and reminding everyone of the burn alert.

Jack started down the hall, and then he found his shoes and put them on, and the house suddenly went quiet, and when he walked into the kitchen there was a sandwich on a white plate sitting in the middle of the table, and then Jack heard a noise, one small and compact, like loose change in a pocket, and he crossed into the living room where the television was on but with the volume turned low as a pulse, and on the screen, a car raced across a flat summer landscape at dawn, and then Jack stepped over to the front door and turned the knob, and the door opened and the screened one after it, and he walked out onto the porch and then down the stairs and across the front lawn.