The Wrong Man (42 page)

She smiled. “I think you should ask yourself, did Michael O’Connell
need
to kill Murphy? He might have
wanted to.
He had a weapon. He had the chance. But had he not done enough, already, by mailing all that confidential information to so many different people to achieve the desired end? Could he not be reasonably confident that someone, in that list of people, would react violently? Wasn’t that O’Connell’s
style,
to act obliquely? To create events and situations? To manipulate the environment? He needed Murphy out of his way. Murphy came from a world that Michael O’Connell knew, and knew intimately. He was well aware of the threat that he posed. Murphy was not unlike O’Connell in his predictable reliance on violence to achieve results. He
had
to excise Murphy from the situation. And that happened, didn’t it?”

She looked at me and lowered her voice, almost to a whisper. “What do we do? How do we act? It’s not hard to know what to do when the enemy levels his weapon at you. But aren’t we often our own biggest enemies because we do not want to believe what our eyes are telling us? When the storm gathers, do we not just as often think that it won’t thunder? The flood won’t burst the dam, will it? And so, it catches us, doesn’t it?”

She took another deep breath and once again turned to stare out the window.

“And after it catches us, will we drown?”

29

A Shotgun on the Lap

H
i, Michael. I miss you. I love you. Come save me.

He could hear Ashley’s voice speaking to him, almost as if she were sitting in the passenger seat of his car. He replayed the words over and over in his mind, giving them different inflections, one time pleading and desperate, another time sexy and inviting. The words were like caresses.

O’Connell imagined himself on a mission. Like a soldier maneuvering through mine-infested territory, or a rescue swimmer diving into turbulent waters, he was heading north, crossing the Vermont border, drawn inexorably toward Ashley.

In the darkness, he ran his fingers over the gashes on the back of his hand and his forearm. He had managed to staunch the bleeding from the bite in his calf with gauze from a cheap first-aid kit he kept in the glove compartment. He was really goddamn lucky that the dog hadn’t grabbed his Achilles tendon and shredded it. His jeans were ripped, and, he suspected, they were streaked with dried blood. He would have to replace them in the morning. But all in all, he thought, he had come out on top.

O’Connell reached up and flicked on the car’s overhead light.

He looked down at his map and tried to do the calculations in his head. He knew that he was less than ninety minutes away from Ashley. This estimate even allowed for a wrong turn or two when he got onto the rural roads leading to Catherine Frazier’s home.

He smiled inwardly and again heard Ashley calling to him.
Hi, Michael. I miss you. I love you. Come save me.
He knew her better than she knew herself.

Cracking open the window slightly, he let some crisp air into the car, trying to cool himself down. O’Connell believed there were two Ashleys. The first was the Ashley who had tried to get rid of him, who had seemed so angry, so scared, and so elusive. That was the Ashley that belonged to Scott and Sally and the freak, Hope. He frowned when he thought of them. There was something truly sick and perverted about their relationships, and he knew that Ashley would be far better off when he had rescued her.

The real Ashley had been the Ashley across the table from him, drinking and laughing at his jokes, but mesmerizing as she slid along the route of loose invitation. The real Ashley had connected with him, both physically and emotionally, in a way far deeper than he had ever thought possible. The real Ashley had invited him into her life, even if only briefly, and it was his duty to find that person again.

He would set her free.

O’Connell knew that the Ashley her parents and lesbian stepmother thought existed was a shadow Ashley. The student, artist, museum-drone Ashley was all fiction, created by a bunch of wimpy, liberal, middle-class nonentities who only wanted her to be like them, to grow up and have the same stupidly insignificant lives they did. The real Ashley was waiting for him to arrive like some fairy-tale knight and show her a different life. She was the Ashley who longed for adventure, an existence on the edge. The Bonnie to his Clyde, an Ashley who would operate right beside him, outside the rules of life. That she was reluctant, afraid of the freedom that he represented, was only to be expected. The excitement that he was bringing to her was bound to be frightening.

It was just a matter of showing her.

Michael O’Connell smiled to himself. He was confident. It might not be easy. It was likely to be tricky. But she would eventually see.

Feeling a renewed sense of excitement, O’Connell punched at the gas and felt the car leap forward. Within a few seconds he was out in the left-hand lane, accelerating hard. He knew there would be no one to stop him. Not that night.

Not far to go, he thought. Not far to go, at all.

Hope let the night wrap around her, cloaking her misery in shadows. She had let Sally drive home. Hope’s silence seemed pale, ghostlike, as if she were only some spectral part of herself.

Sally had the good sense to simply steer the car and leave Hope alone with her thoughts. She felt a little guilty that she didn’t feel as bad as she probably should have. But thoughts were rushing toward her, and as awful as the loss of Nameless might be, how he died and what that all meant were far greater considerations. She had an undeniable need to take some action, as she tried to piece together what had really taken place that night.

The car crunched to a halt in their driveway, and Sally said, “I am so sorry, Hope. I know what he meant to you.”

It seemed to Hope that those were the first soft words she’d heard from her partner in months. She breathed in deeply and wordlessly got out of the car and walked across the lawn, fallen leaves kicking up around her feet. She stopped at the front door and took a second to examine it before she turned back to Sally. “Not here,” she said with a deep sigh. “Unless whoever it was can pick a lock, which he probably can. But someone, like one of the neighbors or a delivery guy or someone, would have seen him out front.”

Sally had joined her. “Around back. By the basement. Or maybe one of the side windows.”

Hope nodded. “I’ll check the back. You check the windows, especially over by the library.”

It did not take Hope long to find the shredded doorjamb. She stood for a moment, simply staring at the shards of wood that littered the cement basement floor. “Sally, down here!”

There was only a single bare overhead bulb, which cast odd shapes into the musty corners of the old house’s basement. Hope remembered that when Ashley was young, she was always scared to come downstairs alone to do her laundry, as if the corners and cobwebs hid trolls or ghosts. Nameless had been her preferred companion on those occasions. Even as a teenager, when Ashley knew she was far too sophisticated to believe in such things, she would collect all her too-tight jeans and skimpy underwear she didn’t want her mother to know she was wearing, then grab a dog biscuit and hold the basement door open for Nameless. The dog would clatter eagerly down the stairs, making enough of a racket to scare away any lingering demon, and wait for Ashley, already sitting, his tail sweeping half-moons of enthusiasm on the floor.

Hope turned when Sally came down the stairs. “This is where he got in.”

Sally eyed the splinters and nodded. She stepped aside as Hope moved past her.

“Then he would have come up the stairs. He probably had one of those little miniflashlights. Then into the kitchen.”

“That’s where Nameless must have heard him. Or smelled him,” Sally said.

Hope took a breath. “Nameless liked to wait for us in the vestibule, so he would have reacted to the sound behind him and known right away it wasn’t you or me or even Ashley coming home.”

Hope glanced around the kitchen. “This is where he made his stand,” she said softly. Last stand, she thought to herself. She could see the old dog, the gray hairs on the back of the neck raised, worn teeth bared. His home, his family. No one was getting past him, even if his eyesight was weak and his hearing almost gone. Not without paying a price, this she knew. She coughed back some more tears and dropped down to the floor, inspecting the area carefully. “See,” she said after a few seconds. “Right here.”

Sally looked down. “What is it?”

“Blood. Got to be blood. And not Nameless’s either.”

“I think you’re right,” Sally said. Then softer: “Good dog.”

“But whoever it was that broke in, what was he looking for?”

This time it was Sally who inhaled sharply. “It was him,” she said quietly.

“Him? You mean…”

“The creep. O’Connell.”

“But I thought…you said he was out of our lives. The private eye told you…”

“The private eye, Murphy, was killed. Murdered. Yesterday.”

Hope’s eyes widened.

“I was going to tell you, right when we got home.” Sally didn’t need to continue.

“Murdered? How? Where?”

“On a street in Springfield. Execution-style, or so the paper said.”

“What the hell does ‘execution-style’ mean?” Hope asked, her voice rising.

“It means someone walked up behind him and put two small-caliber bullets into the back of his brain.” Sally’s voice was cold, mingling detail with fear.

“You think it was him? Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. I can’t tell. A lot of people hated Murphy. Any one of them…”

“We’re not interested in anyone else. I mean, do you think…” Hope stared down at the splatters of blood on the floor. “So, it might have been anybody in Springfield. But you think this break-in was…”

“Who else?”

“Well, it could have been any burglar. It’s not like it’s unheard-of in this neighborhood.”

“It’s still pretty unusual. And even when there is a break-in, it’s usually just teenage kids, anyway. This doesn’t feel like that. Do you see anything stolen?”

“No.”

“Then who else?”

“If it was O’Connell, that means…”

“He’s back after Ashley. Obviously.”

“But why here?” Hope finally said.

Sally shuddered. “He was searching for information.”

“But I thought Scott had invented this story and sold it to the creep. You know, Italy. Studying Renaissance art. Long gone and out of reach.”

Sally shook her head. “We don’t know,” she said coldly. “We have no idea what O’Connell knows, or what he thinks, or what he’s learned. Or what he’s done. We know Murphy was killed and we know Nameless was killed. Are the two the same? We’re the ones in the dark.” She sighed, then clenched her fists and pushed one up against her head in frustration. “We don’t know anything for sure.”

Hope looked down at the floor and thought she saw another droplet or two of blood, by the door leading into the house. “Let’s look around for a minute, see if we can trace his steps.”

Sally closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall for a moment. She gave out a long, slow breath. “At least there’s nothing here that would tell him where she is. I was really careful about that.” Opening her eyes, she continued, “And Nameless, just fighting him, you know, the way he did, that was probably more than enough to chase the son of a bitch out of here.”

Hope nodded, but inwardly she was less sure. “Let’s just look around.”

Another splatter of blood was in the hallway leading into the small library and television room.

Hope let her eyes sweep about, searching for telltale signs that O’Connell had been in here. When her eyes fell on the telephone, she gasped and took a step forward. “Sally,” she said quietly, “look there.”

Several crimson blood drops were on the telephone.

“But it’s just the phone…,” Sally started. Then she realized that the red message light was blinking. She pushed the playback button.

Ashley’s cheerful voice filled the room.

“Hi, Mom, and, hi, Hope. I miss you. But I’m having a great time with Catherine. We’re heading out to dinner, and I was just wondering if I could sneak down there in the next couple of days. Catherine will let me borrow her car, you know, maybe pick up some warmer clothes? Vermont is beautiful during the daytime, but at night, it’s getting chilly, and I’m going to need a parka and maybe some boots. Anyway, that’s the idea. I’ll talk to you later. Love ya.”