The Devil May Care (25 page)

“What about Maurell?” I asked.

“Nothing on him—whoever he is. You say he's the one who turned up in the Twin Cities?”

“He's the one.”

“I'd like to speak to him.”

“You and me both, Chief.”

“What I don't get—why park the car?” Nina asked. “McKenzie, you and I have driven across the border, why not him? Why not just drive across the bridge into—what's the city on the other side of Laredo, Texas?”

“Nuevo Laredo,” Hasselback said. “Maybe he wanted the cops to find the car, wanted his mother to know he wasn't lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“He could have done that by picking up a phone,” I said.

“Yeah, he coulda.”

“Maybe he did,” Nina said.

*   *   *

We agreed to visit Collin Baird's mother together. Chief Hasselback warned that she didn't expect anything would come of it.

“I've spoken to her on and off over the years, mostly about her son,” she said. “The woman's a walking ten-ninety-six.”

“What's that?” Nina asked.

“Mental case,” I told her.

The chief gave us directions to Mrs. Baird's house and then told us to follow her. Nina and I were sitting in the Lexus waiting for her to pull out of her parking space when I decided I could no longer hold it in.

“What was that all about before?” I asked. “‘Is she pretty, too?' Where the hell did that come from?”

“Chief Hasselback is an attractive woman,” Nina told me.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I was just wondering if you noticed.”

“Nina, she's a cop.”

“I thought you'd like that about her.”

“I don't believe it. Are you jealous? You need to tell me, because I've never seen you jealous and I'm not sure what it looks like.”

“I'm not jealous.”

“It kinda sounds like you are.”

“I'm sorry. I've never been a sidekick before. I don't know how to behave.”

“You're not a sidekick. What do you think, that we're Batman and Robin?”

“I was thinking more like Sam Spade and Effie Perine.”

“Sam didn't sleep with Effie. She was his secretary.”

“We don't know what they did after hours.”

“All right, all right, Rule Number Two—”

“Should I write this down?”

“You are forbidden to be jealous and we must never have a conversation like this again.”

“Is that two rules, or one rule with two parts?”

“This is why couples should never work together. What?”

Nina leaned across the seat and buzzed my cheek.

“I like that you said couple,” she said.

“Couple, not partners.”

“We'll see.”

*   *   *

Mrs. Baird lived in a small two-story house in a heavily wooded area on top of the hill, not terribly far from Galena's senior high school, home of the Pirates. She met us on her front stoop, and I immediately noticed her nervousness. I marked it down as a consequence of Chief Hasselback's presence. When I was a cop, I used to make people nervous, too, especially when I appeared unannounced on their doorsteps.

Mrs. Baird demanded to know why we were there. The chief told her we wanted to talk about her son. She brought her hand to her throat and moved backward until she bumped into her closed screen door. The words came out in a rush.

“I don't know where he is,” she said. “I haven't seen him. Why are you coming here now? I haven't seen him, I tell you.”

Chief Hasselback set a hand on the woman's shoulder. It was meant to be a gesture of comfort, yet Mrs. Baird flinched just the same.

“These are the investigators from Minnesota I told you about,” the chief said. Nina brightened at the word “investigators.” I was more interested in the phrase “I told you about.”

“They're the ones who found David Maurell in Minneapolis,” Hasselback added. “They want to ask a few questions about him.”

Mrs. Baird stared at me with such intensity that I found myself cautiously reaching behind my right hip and patting the Beretta beneath my sports coat.

“You're McKenzie,” she said.

“Yes.” I offered my hand. She refused to accept it. Her eyes had the obstinacy that comes from seeing too many changes in life and not being able to change with them.

“David,” she said. “Yes. We want to talk about David. Let's go inside and talk about David.”

She turned her head and gazed through the screen door inside her house. After a moment, she stepped back and opened the door. “Please, come inside.”

I was last across the threshold. There was a wooden staircase to my left that led upstairs. What caught my eye and held it, though, was the pictures on the wall, all of them religious, and so many that I thought they must be her first line of defense against the world.

Mrs. Baird led us away from the staircase to the corner of her living room that she had reserved as a sitting area. There were books stacked on a coffee table and next to the chairs; books with titles like
God Has a Dream, Fasting and Prayer,
and
Reading the Bible Again for the First Time,
as well as
Mysterious Ways
and
Give Us This Day
magazines. She sat facing the staircase. We fanned out on either side of her.

“Tell us about David,” she said.

Us?
my inner voice asked.

I reached inside my pocket and produced the smartphone. I called up Navarre's photo and showed it to her.

“Mrs. Baird,” I said, “is this the man you know as David Maurell?”

Her mouth formed a sneer and through it she said, “That's him. That's the man who…”

“Who what?

“Who ruined my son's life.”

Chief Hasselback leaned back in her chair and made herself comfortable as if she expected a long story. Nina hunched forward, resting her forearms on her knees, as if she expected the same thing.

“How did he do that?” I asked.

“Ask him. David's up in Minnesota, isn't he? Do you know where?”

“He was in Minnesota. I don't know where he is now.”

Mrs. Baird snorted. “Oh, he's still there. We know that much.”

We?

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“We just do.”

“What do you know about Maurell?”

“When he came to visit that one time, he seemed very shy. Very polite. I remember that Collin kept teasing him because of a classmate they had at Macalester. A girl. David thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, only he was afraid to speak to her. I thought it might be because of David's accent. Collin said it was because the girl's family was extremely wealthy and David's was poor.

“Perhaps not poor, exactly. David's people had escaped from Cuba when Castro took over. They became American citizens and started a company that sold sugarcane, but they weren't rich by any means—at least that's what David said. He said his family's dream was to return to their native land. David didn't want to go to Cuba. He was born in America. Cuba was a foreign country to him. So he and his family were at odds. That's why he came here with Collin on break instead of going home.”

Oh, he's good,
my inner voice told me.

“He and Collin were great friends,” Mrs. Baird said. “They met in college, you see. David would buy him gifts—and me, too. David seemed always to have plenty of money on hand. I said, put the money in a bank. Only Castro confiscated everything, all of their money and property, so his family didn't trust banks. This was America; the banks can be trusted here, I told him. Then the financial crisis hit and we found out, no, we can't trust our banks, either.”

Very, very good.

“But he was a liar,” Mrs. Baird said. “He lied about everything.”

“What do you mean?”

Mrs. Baird rose abruptly from her chair and crossed the room to what could only be described as a knickknack shelf. At the same time, I heard a creaking sound on the staircase. So did Nina. She rotated her head to see. She turned back when Mrs. Baird said, “Look.” Mrs. Baird found a photograph of a young man dressed in black high school graduation robes not unlike the ones Jax Abana had worn and carried it back to where I was sitting. She thrust it at me.

“Look,” she repeated. “Collin was a good boy. He never did anything to anybody. He never did anything wrong.” Mrs. Baird was looking at Chief Hasselback when she said that last part. “People said he did things, but that wasn't true. He was a good boy. A good student and athlete. People were jealous of him.”

I took the photograph and stared at it for a moment. It might have been taken eight years earlier, yet I recognized the young man instantly.

Sonuvabitch.

“David, David was such a liar,” Mrs. Baird said. “He lied to Collin. He showed Collin money that he had, thousands of dollars, and he said he and Collin would go to Iraq and invest the money. He said that Iraq was the new land of opportunity because the people there needed so much help to rebuild after the war. He said that they could invest the money and Collin would help and they would become rich and split the money fifty-fifty.”

“Iraq?” Chief Hasselback said.

Sonuvabitch.

Chief Hasselback shifted her position in her chair so that she could look into Mrs. Baird's eyes.

“How do you know this, Mrs. Baird?” she asked. “How did you know they went to Iraq? When I called Saturday, and all the times we talked before that, you thought Collin had gone to Mexico. We all did.”

There was another creak from the staircase.

“What is that noise?” Nina said. She stood and moved toward it.

“Where did this information come from, Mrs. Baird?” Hasselback asked.

“Nina, wait,” I said.

Nina cocked her head in an effort to see around the corner at the top of the staircase.

I stood, letting the photograph of the man who had assaulted Anne Rehmann, the man who had raped and murdered Mrs. Rogers, slip from my fingers. It bounced against a book on the coffee table and rattled to the floor.

That's when I saw him.

On the staircase.

I reached for the Beretta. My hand closed around the butt and I yanked it from the holster.

Collin Baird gripped the banister with his left hand and leapt over it.

Nina gasped and brought her hand to her mouth the way someone might when startled during a horror movie.

Baird had an automatic in his right hand. As he jumped, he swung the gun in a high arc. It crashed against Nina's temple just as his feet hit the floor.

The force of the blow spun her body. Nina caromed off the wall and slid to the floor.

Baird pressed his free hand against his ribs and grimaced as if the jump had hurt him, and I wondered if that was where he had been hit during our shootout.

He waved his gun at us.

I brought the Beretta up.

“Not again,” Mrs. Baird said.

She shoved at me.

“Police,” Hasselback shouted. “Don't move.”

Collin Baird threw a wild shot in our direction and ran for the door.

I shoved Mrs. Baird away and took off after him.

I paused for a beat when I reached Nina's side. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was twisted in an ugly grin. She had brought her hand up and was covering the wound on her head. Blood seeped between her fingers.

“Nuts,” she said.

I left her there.

I hit the screen door with my shoulder. It flew open and I dove across the lawn, landed on my shoulder, and rolled into a crouch. I brought the Beretta up with both hands and swept the muzzle over the front yard and street and surrounding houses. Collin Baird was not there.

I thought I heard running behind me and turned toward the noise. I moved quickly to Mrs. Baird's house and began to move cautiously around it. The two sides of my brain were shouting at each other. “He's getting away,” said one. “Go slow,” said the other.

The back yard opened up onto a wooded area. I took cover at the corner of the house. I waited. I listened. I saw and heard nothing.

I dashed across the yard into the woods and paused again.

Training and experience had quieted the shouting. I told myself, this was his ground. He grew up here. Following him into the woods would be a fatal mistake.

Rule Number One,
my inner voice said.

I slowly backed out.

Sonuvabitch!

*   *   *

I listened to the sound of sirens approaching, sirens that almost always came too late. I didn't want to be the one standing there with a gun in my hand when the cops arrived, so I holstered the Beretta and made my way back into the house. I found Nina sitting in a chair near the door. She was pressing a folded handkerchief to her temple. A trickle of blood ran down her hand and wrist and spotted her blue shirt and black skirt. Her eyes were wet with tears, yet she made no sound. I knelt before her.

“Let me see,” I said.

She shook her head and gestured toward the sitting area. Chief Hasselback was kneeling next to Mrs. Baird. She had doubled up her hands and was applying pressure to an area just above the woman's breasts—standard procedure for treating a sucking chest wound. Her hands and wrists and shirt were soaked with blood.

“Stay with me, Mrs. Baird,” the chief said. “It'll be all right. Help is on the way. Help will be here soon. Stay with me.”

I moved to the chief's side and looked over her shoulder. Mrs. Baird's eyes were closed, and if she was breathing, I didn't notice.

“Stay with me,” the chief said. “Just for a few more minutes. Help is coming.”

The front door opened and paramedics filled the room. They relieved the chief. She stood and watched them work. Blood dripped off of her hands onto the floor. She didn't seem to notice the blood until the paramedics confirmed what we already knew.