The Girl Next Door (34 page)

But McNabb knew it wasn’t going to work forever. All those twisted little lies were eventually going to get straightened out.

So he spent the afternoon preparing for a visit to “the bar,” finding the ideal place for everything to go down, planning the route, thinking about what he’d say, anticipating how his adversary might react. They were only a few hundred yards away from their destination when the e-mail came in.

The e-mail was, admittedly, a wrinkle. McNabb couldn’t simply make Ross disappear now, as he had planned. There was too much of a trail that might be followed—if someone started looking at Ross’s e-mail, if someone plied answers from the NLRB, if someone pulled all those loose strings …

But no, Ross was the only one who was even close to tying them together. And the poor sap wasn’t going to be alive to tell anyone about it.

So McNabb—aka Caesar 710, J.M., Big Jimmy, whatever anyone wanted to call him—just needed to improvise a bit, to orchestrate the reporter’s death in a way that made it look like it was something other than what it really was. Just as he had done with Nancy.

A new scheme was already forming in his mind. And the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. He relaxed and reminded himself to breathe again. He was the one with the gun. He was in control. Total control.

CHAPTER 9

It’s surprisingly difficult to look at a gun out of the corner of your eye while driving, especially when it’s being pointed at the side of your head. But from what little I could see, McNabb’s piece was short, black, and made for the express purpose of ruining someone’s day. Gun enthusiasts go back and forth all the time about the merits of various calibers and bullets, chamber types and trigger actions. Not being a gun enthusiast, all I knew is this one would likely leave a significant portion of my brain splattered on my driver’s side window.

In my previous thirty-two years on this planet, despite brushes with some unfriendly people, I had never had a gun aimed at me from this short a distance. Or any distance, for that matter. I tried to keep walls, or at least bulletproof glass, between me and anyone inclined toward discharging a firearm in the general direction of my person.

Now here I was, with nothing but three inches of air between this gun barrel and some body parts that I preferred to keep unsplattered.

And perhaps it should have been unnerving. Or disconcerting. Or at least mildly off-putting. I certainly don’t fancy myself some kind of big tough guy impervious to bullets. I’m not especially brave in the face of danger. I have no illusions about my own fragile mortality.

Yet the only thing I felt was this strange calm. Maybe it’s just because it was all so foreign, I didn’t know how to react.

A few raindrops—big, fat, heavy ones—thwapped on the roof of the car. Then a gust of wind lashed us with another band of rain. The storm had arrived.

“Keep it nice and steady,” McNabb instructed. “Don’t try anything silly. If I feel even an ounce too much brake or accelerator, I’ll shoot.”

Up until the moment he had pulled the gun, McNabb had been his usual gregarious self. Now he seemed jumpy, on edge, neither of which were qualities I appreciated in a man with a gun.

I studied him, as best my peripheral vision would allow. His mouth had gone into the same ugly pout he had worn when I first told him that Nancy’s hit and run was no accident. At the time, I thought the reaction was because of his friendship with Nancy. Now I knew it was because he realized he had not gotten away with his crime.

He almost did. If not for one El Salvadoran woman who liked to watch sunrises, neither of us would be in this spot right now.

McNabb had turned his body toward me, his eyes staring a hole in the side of my head where a fast-moving projectile might soon follow. I could see, now that he was twisted slightly, that he had been wearing a small shoulder holster. I’m not sure how I missed it before, except of course that it had never occurred to me to look.

Had he been unbelted, I would have simply jerked the wheel and crashed into the railroad trestle we were approaching. At sixty miles an hour, I’d take my chances. But he was wearing his seat belt. Crashing the car wouldn’t necessarily improve my situation. Sure, it might make it more likely he would get caught for killing me, because the crash would attract attention, and he might be incapacitated enough he wouldn’t be able to escape. But he’d probably shoot me as soon as he figured out what I was doing. And while it might be some small consolation for my loved ones that my killer got caught, it wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good from six feet under.

So I kept it steady. Like the man with the gun said.

“Slow down. Take a right here,” he said as we passed under the railroad. “Right after the bridge.”

There was an entrance to a warehouse about a hundred feet ahead. Just short of it was a small, packed-dirt road.

“Right here?” I asked.

“That’s the one,” he said.

“I’m braking now to make the turn,” I said, because I didn’t want to get shot until it was absolutely necessary.

The Malibu, not exactly an off-road vehicle, left the pavement with a jolt.

“Keep it slow,” he said. “Nothing cute.”

“You got it, Caesar.”

I used the name to try to get a small rise out of him—to see if he would rattle a little—but he didn’t show any reaction. As I gently pressed the brake pedal, the first peal of thunder boomed from somewhere nearby. I didn’t see the lightning strike that preceded it, but the storm was definitely close. Then, just as suddenly as the thunder, the rain came, hammering the car from every direction, like I had driven into a car wash.

“Can I turn on the windshield wipers?”

“Do it slow.”

I eased my hand to the side of the steering wheel and turned the wipers on the highest setting.

In the meantime, all the mistakes I had made were raining down on my head as well. Some of them were now so obvious. Example: McNabb told me Jackman made those threats against Nancy on Thursday night. But Mrs. Alfaro said the killer started stalking Nancy on Tuesday morning, two days earlier.

“There never was any meeting at a bar with you and Jackman on Thursday night, was there?” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the rain. “There were never any threats.”

“Nope,” he admitted, without changing the position of anything but his mouth.

Of course there weren’t. That’s why McNabb would never tell me the name of the bar, why he was always so guarded about the whole thing—there was no bar. Jackman’s appointment book just said “IFIW.” It had been a negotiating session, nothing more.

“I can’t believe I thought it was Jackman,” I said, mostly to myself. “Maybe I just wanted it to be Jackman.”

That had been another massive mistake, of course. I had allowed my bias against Jackman to cloud my judgment, never stopping to think that merely being a jackass and a foppish, non-newspaper-reading hatchet man didn’t necessarily mean he was a murderer—even if he had once used a seven-iron in a way not endorsed by the United States Golf Association. Tina tried to tell me that. I hadn’t listened.

Then there was Gus Papadopolous. I still had no idea what business he and Jackman had together, but it hardly mattered anymore. I mean, sure, Papadopolous went a little short-fused when he found out a reporter was in his office. But a lot of people didn’t like reporters hanging around. Heck, maybe he sensed I had the hots for his daughter, and had kicked into overprotective daddy mode.

But there were more mistakes. I had badly misjudged McNabb, assuming that because he had one obvious agenda—positioning his union in its renegotiation with the paper—he didn’t have any other agendas that he kept hidden.

McNabb said it himself, in a small bit of conversation that was now coming back to me:
a powerful man facing the loss of his power will do just about anything to protect it.
I thought he was talking about a different powerful man, but he was talking about himself.

More than that, I had allowed myself to rely on his information too much, without stopping to scrutinize it that extra layer. I definitely subscribe to the “one great source” theory of reporting—that all it takes is that one person on the inside to illuminate a subject for you. Of course, you still have to make a good decision about who that one great source should be. And at risk of stating the obvious, I had chosen poorly.

And shouldn’t I have known? McNabb was constantly asking me about what I had or hadn’t told the cops, always pumping me for information. I had dismissed it as an outcropping of his dirt-mongering personality, never thinking that I was keeping the murderer fully apprised of my investigation.

There was also some bad luck and lousy timing involved. If I had gotten more immediate cooperation from Anne McCaffrey—or if Anne had put Jeanne in the know earlier—I would have discovered the sexual harassment sooner. I would have had time to read the complaint a little more carefully and come to some different conclusions, ones that would have led me away from Jackman.

One example that was suddenly obvious: the complaint said Caesar touched Nancy under a table. When would Jackman ever have been sitting close enough to Nancy to do that? The only time he would have ever seen her was during a negotiating session—when he would have been on the
opposite
side of the table.

For that matter, Caesar was asking her out on dates. There was no way the publisher of a major newspaper, locked in a tense negotiation with its largest union, would have done anything that outrageous with one of the union’s shop stewards.

And there was Jim McNabb, calling one of his employees “candypants,” right in front of me all along. But I still couldn’t see it.

Yep, I had screwed up every way but good. And because of it, it might be the last story I ever worked.

*   *   *

We bounced along the dirt road, splashing through flooded ruts and potholes, going no more than fifteen miles an hour. The lightning flashes were providing more illumination than my headlights. The wipers beat furiously but still couldn’t keep up with the torrent of water gushing down from the sky.

On our left, we passed the loading warehouse and a parking lot, then a small trailer on our right. Then we were in no-man’s land. Beyond the waist-high weeds that lined the road, I had a railroad track to my right and some sort of retention pond to my left. It was a body of water that had probably been the recipient of enough heavy-metal-laced runoff and landfill leachate to make it glow in the dark.

I briefly considered yanking the steering wheel to the left and taking us for a swim in that yucky stew—I could take my chances with the elevated cancer risk two decades from now. But we were moving too slowly. McNabb might be a little surprised, but he’d have ten chances to shoot me before the water closed over the car and forced him to bail out.

No, the simple fact was, in the middle of the most densely populated metropolitan area in America, I had managed to find myself in a totally isolated spot with an armed killer. Yet another genius move on my part.

“Okay, stop here,” he said.

I pressed the brake until the car halted.

“Put it in Park,” he instructed.

I moved the shifter up from the Drive position.

“Now put your hands on the ceiling, palms up.”

I did as instructed. A thick lightning bolt lit the sky, followed quickly by an enormous thunderclap. I could briefly see a large power transfer station perhaps a hundred yards ahead, then the elevated road surface of the New Jersey Turnpike a few hundred yards beyond that. Traffic was probably crawling in a storm like this. I wondered if any of those drivers could see me, this strange little car parked along a railroad access way. But I doubted it. The visibility had been reduced to nothing. We might as well have been in an underground bunker.

“Why don’t I just drive us down to the Pine Barrens,” I said. “I know a spot that’s got to be ten miles from anywhere. You dump me off there, and by the time I get out, you could be a hundred miles away in any direction.”

“And live like some damn runaway the rest of my life? I don’t think so.”

“Jim, you’re not going to get away with this,” I said.

“Yes I am. You didn’t tell anyone about me. You told me so yourself.”

“Someone else is going to figure out who ‘J.M.’ is. That complaint makes it pretty obvious.”

“Yeah? If it was so obvious, how come
you
didn’t figure it out?”

Because I’m a total moron,
I wanted to say.

“I didn’t, but Kevin Lungford will,” I said. “He’s a brilliant, Princeton-educated reporter, one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with. He’s probably already put it together.”

I put as much force behind it as I could, but McNabb wasn’t fooled.

“Yeah, that’s why you call him Lunky, huh? Because he’s so smart?”

Natch.

The rain slacked off for a few seconds, then pounded on the roof with renewed intensity, like a thousand tiny percussionists all doing a drum roll at the same time. The windshield wipers thumped from side to side, with little effectiveness. Our breath had fogged over the inside of the windows.

“Look, killing me is only going to make things worse for you. You could spin Nancy as manslaughter. They’d give you ten years, and you’d be out in five for good behavior. You kill me and it’s a double homicide. First degree. They’ll put you away for the rest of your life.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, and I felt myself getting hopeful until he finished: “You’re going to commit suicide.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because, Carter Ross, at this point, you have one choice to make in what is left of your short, miserable little life. You can die quick and painless—and I’ll make it look like a suicide. Or you can die the slowest, most agonizing death you could possibly imagine.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll take the mystery prize behind door number three.”

In one fast move, McNabb chunked me on the head with the butt of his gun. He didn’t have enough room in the car to get any momentum behind it, but it still wasn’t the most pleasant feeling in the world.