Chat - A Novel Part 16

Everyone in the room looked at her, drawn less by her words and more by the leading tone of her voice.

"What're you thinking?" Lester asked first.

"I'm not sure, but when you're talking about coincidence, that seems pretty big to me. Everybody drives around here."

"Bald Rocky's room looked like it might belong to a guy who rode a bus," w.i.l.l.y mused.

"Right," Joe agreed. "If maybe just recently. From his clothes and appearance, he seemed like a man heading down the social ladder, but not like he'd been that way for long." He recalled Hillstrom's appraisal of the man's toenails, but kept it to himself. "Hairy Fred's room was middle-cla.s.s fare. Did you circulate both head shot pictures to the bus people?"

Sam nodded, adding, "Not to all the drivers, though. That'll take longer." As she spoke, she was pawing through the photographs they'd printed of both crime scenes. She held up a picture of the man who had identified himself as R. Frederick-the body found in the more upscale motel. "Look at the back of his right shoe," she suggested, displaying it for all to see. "Just above the heel, on the leather."

Like trained pets, they all leaned forward in their chairs, including w.i.l.l.y. Lester was the first to notice what she was talking about. "It's worn from where he rests his heel on the floor of a car when he's pus.h.i.+ng the accelerator. He drove a lot."

"Nice," Joe said. "Okay. Let's back up a bit. What you just said, Sam, about both of them arriving on foot. Why have them leave their cars behind?"

They knew what he was after-he'd been using this Socratic method for years.

"Ident.i.ty," Lester chimed in first, just as w.i.l.l.y muttered, "Oh, for Christ's sake."

Lester forged on: "Our cars have everything about us-papers, fingerprints, DNA samples, you name it."

"You're saying Fred pulled a fast one," Sam said, her excitement building. "Disobeyed orders. Either stashed his car and walked, or just took the bus for the last leg of the trip."

"I'm saying," Joe expanded, "that we love our cars and we tend to bend the rules out of habit, especially if we're already breaking the law."

w.i.l.l.y said in a bored voice, "I already checked with the parking division downstairs. No abandoned cars in the last week."

"That still leaves a possible short bus trip," Sam countered.

w.i.l.l.y shrugged, but Joe followed up. "Issue a BOL to all munic.i.p.alities within fifty miles. What we're after is an abandoned car in a lot or parking s.p.a.ce near a bus depot or train station, maybe with out-of-state plates."

Sam began writing herself a note as Joe pointed at Lester. "I'm having Rob Barrows send you a copy of the hard drive we collected from Steve's Garage. Like I said, they'll be concentrating on the drug deal between CarGuy and SmokinJoe, but I'd like you to find out what you can about Rocky from that-retrieve what he said and who he said it to, or at least do the best you can."

Lester looked doubtful. "I'll give it a shot, Joe, but it may be slim pickings. You know that."

"Yeah, Barrows already warned me. But until we can either locate Rocky's computer or find whoever he was talking to in that chat room, we're reduced to grabbing whatever straws float by. Which includes John Leppman, by the way," he added as an afterthought. "If you can pull him on board sooner than later, he might be able to help you profile this guy, even with the little we get off the hard drive. Not to mention," he suddenly added, "that he might have a file with N. Rockwell already on it-this is his line of work, after all, and my guess is that a name like that is a whole lot rarer than Ready Freddy or all the other playful c.r.a.p out there."

"Roger that," Lester acknowledged.

There was a momentary lull in the conversation, after which w.i.l.l.y asked, "Who do you want me to chew on?"

Joe pressed his lips together. "I haven't forgotten you," he finally admitted, adding, "but I'm of two minds about using you for what I'm after."

"Don't tell me," w.i.l.l.y said with a pitying smile. "It's the car thing up north, right? Your big family drama?"

Joe barely heard the tone in his voice, being so used to the man's unrelenting style. "It may not be only about me anymore, as the Rocky reference just made clear. Still, I won't deny I'd love to get to the bottom of what happened to Mom and Leo."

"Want me to torture Dan?"

Joe shook his head, not doubting for a moment that w.i.l.l.y could and would do it if properly encouraged. "Tempting, but no. Dan's too hot right now. Go after the old man-E. T. Cozy up to him somehow, get under his tent flaps. In his prime, there was nothing that moved in that whole towns.h.i.+p without his knowledge, and he ran his family like a full-bird colonel. That's changed. I need to find out what happened, and I'm too involved and too well known to do the kind of job you might. And I'm not just after the car crash-think more generally than that. Barrows could benefit from this, too, if you get lucky."

w.i.l.l.y's response was eloquent in its brevity. "Sure."

Volunteering to do the unorthodox was an easy response. What Joe sensed here, however-never to be publicly recognized-was w.i.l.l.y's implicit personal loyalty to him. That was a trickier trait for an avowed hard case to acknowledge.

Joe honored the message with a single nod of the head. "Thanks," he added quietly before addressing them all. "Okay, let's break it down into pieces, so n.o.body's stepping on anyone else's toes."

Joe parked his car on Oak Street, appreciating that the plows had kept the curbs clear, and got out into the still falling snow. This had turned into an old-fas.h.i.+oned snowstorm. Forecasters were calling for six inches by morning.

He paused by his car, looking up the street, noticing a few forlorn electric candles in windows, and the odd wreath or two on a door, left over from Christmas. This was familiar territory. Not only was it a major backstreet thoroughfare in a town he'd known since his days as a rookie, decades earlier, but he'd once lived a hundred yards to the south, on the corner of Oak and High, before he and Gail even met, when she'd been merely a successful local Realtor and he'd been a lieutenant on the detective squad.

The coincidence was ironic, since he had parked opposite Lyn Silva's address-a two-story, two-apartment Victorian rental. There was an argument in times like this, he thought, for a small world being just a little too tight for comfort.

He glanced up at the upper apartment, its lights blazing behind the soundless, s.h.i.+fting veil of falling snow. She'd given him her phone number, but he hadn't called ahead. For reasons he didn't ponder, he'd merely used the number to cross-index her address on the office computer and driven the one block from the munic.i.p.al building.

Joe walked up the central path, already softened by the new snow, and climbed the broad porch steps to the front door. That led to a heated, well-lighted lobby with a carpeted staircase, which he climbed to the second-floor landing and an age-darkened oak door.

He pushed the doorbell near the k.n.o.b and waited, a small part of him hoping no one would be home.

His reaction to hearing her footsteps approaching was hardly disappointment, however. As the k.n.o.b turned and the door opened, he felt his heart beating as fast as a teenager's.

She smiled up at his slightly reddened face. "There's a sight for sore eyes."

His color darkened further. "Same for me."

She leaned in and brushed his lips fleetingly with her own, a gesture combining friends.h.i.+p with intimacy while overstating neither. "Would you like to come in?"

"Is that okay? I know I should've called."

She took his hand and tugged at it. "It's a pleasure. Plus," she added, looking at him over her shoulder as she led the way through what might once have served as a dining room, "I need a break. I've been spending so much time at the bar, getting ready, that I'm still living out of boxes here. It's a drag to be unpacking no matter where I am."

She wasn't exaggerating. The room looked like a s.h.i.+pping depot, with cardboard boxes alternating with loose bundles of crinkled newspaper and bubble wrap, piled up in almost every nook and cranny.

"Impressive," he said softly, half to himself.

But she heard him. She laughed, still walking toward the front of the large apartment. "It is bad, but you'll find out why in a second. There's method to my madness-at least, I hope so."

They reached the far wall of the cluttered room, and Lyn slid open a pair of double pocket doors to what turned out to be a s.p.a.cious living room.

"This is why I took the place, even though the rent was more than I wanted."

It was a beautiful room, with hardwood floors and detailed window frames, a coffered ceiling, elaborate moldings, and gleaming antique fixtures. Along the narrow wall, under an intricate mantel, was a built-in wood stove with gla.s.s doors, currently alive with a robust fire. The warmth of it all, both physical and psychological, surrounded them both in an embrace.

"Holy smokes," he said, looking around, reaching out to stroke the hardwood door frame beside him. "It's like a museum."

She groaned good-naturedly. "Yeah-of the wrong century, since all my junk is a museum to the eighties."

He saw her point. The setting was deserving of antique knickknacks, overstuffed English furniture, and framed oil paintings. Her belongings, though attractive and comfortable-looking, clearly harkened to a different era.

"Maybe," he didn't argue, "but it's not like you have beanbags and cinder-block shelves."

In fact, she'd done wonders. With all packing materials banished to the room they'd just left, the furniture and rugs had been more or less permanently placed, over half the hangings were already on the walls, and even a few stand-arounds had been distributed along windowsills and shelves.

"You've made it feel like a home," he told her honestly.

Her smile broadened. "Yeah. That's what I was thinking. It kind of works." She waved with a flourish at an oversize armchair near the fire. "Have a seat. Would you like something to drink? Or maybe some tea?"

He hesitated, embarra.s.sed that he'd come by unannounced and caused a commotion, but he yielded to her obvious good mood. "Sure. Tea would be great."

"Deal," she said. "Sit there. The kitchen's still a wreck, so it's better I go there alone. Be back in a sec."

He watched her vanish through a side door leading to a hallway. Suddenly alone, he eyed the armchair momentarily but yielded to taking a small tour of the photographs newly on the walls and lining the baseboards, still awaiting hanging.

Some were family pictures in which he thought he could see, in the freckled face of a laughing child, the woman he was beginning to know, surrounded by a tired-looking mother, two older brothers, and a dark-complected father with a thick mustache, rough hands, and a steady, unsmiling look to his eyes. The pictures, taken at picnics, a restaurant, and-one-on a small, weather-beaten fis.h.i.+ng boat, were snapshots only, slightly blurry, the color fading, and, despite their careful mounting and framing, eloquent of an economically marginal existence.

Most of the newer pictures were of a different young girl growing up. She was accompanied by a handsome, distracted-looking man in the early shots only, and then alone or with Lyn. These mother-daughter shots tended to show Lyn with the watchful look of the novice photographer, wondering if the camera's self-timer was going to work-suggesting there was no one either behind the camera or in their lives.

Joe studied the ascent of the child through grade school and p.u.b.erty, as caught on stage, in a cheerleader's outfit, at the high school prom, and at the desk of what looked like a newspaper office, where she was gazing perplexedly at a computer screen. She was a pretty girl with long hair, slim like her mother.

"That's Coryn," Lyn said from behind him.

He turned and saw her standing by the open door to the hallway, two mugs on a small tray in one hand-a practiced stance for someone used to delivering drinks and snacks to tables.

"She's very pretty," he said, crossing over to take the tray and set it on a coffee table between the armchair and the sofa, by the fire.

"Pretty," her mother agreed. "Also smart, stubborn, opinionated, and private. I love that child like nothing else on earth, but I'm not so sure I'll ever figure out what makes her tick."

"Gave you some troubles over the years?" he asked.

Her answer surprised him. "Never. A completely even keel. Everybody kept expecting her to flip out, especially as a teenager, only because she was so steady, we all a.s.sumed she was building up for a huge blow. But it never happened. She's twenty-three now. I don't think it's going to happen."

Lyn sat in the middle of the sofa. Also on the tray were small containers of milk and sugar. "What do you take in your tea?"

He took the armchair opposite and chuckled at the question. "A little of both will work."

But she paused. "You're hedging somehow. How do you usually take it?"

"You're going to think it's like a bad Vermont advertis.e.m.e.nt. But if there's a choice, I put maple syrup in with the milk."

She immediately rose and headed back toward the kitchen. "I have some, right out in the open. Won't take a second."

She was back in almost that time, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a gla.s.s bottle as she entered. "This I've got to try. I love maple syrup, but I've never tried it in tea."

"Coffee, too," he said, adding, "but I may be alone there. n.o.body else I know does that."

She sat again and prepared the mugs, smiling up at him. "You've got a sweet tooth."

He accepted the proffered mug. "Yeah, I've been told that." He took a sip. "Perfect."

She tried her own and nodded approvingly. "That's great. I wouldn't have guessed."

"Where's Coryn now?" he asked, settling into the armchair's embrace, enjoying watching her on the sofa.

"She works for some newspaper in Boston, learning the ropes and hoping for something bigger soon."

"The Globe Globe?"

Lyn shrugged. "No-that she would've mentioned. I did ask her, but that's what I meant. She keeps her own counsel. For all I know, she'll be calling me tomorrow from the she would've mentioned. I did ask her, but that's what I meant. She keeps her own counsel. For all I know, she'll be calling me tomorrow from the L.A. Times L.A. Times. I hope not, though. I would really miss her."

"You see a lot of each other?"

"Not as much as a mother would like, but we talk on the phone pretty often."

"Is she it for your family?" he asked, nodding toward the photographs.

Lyn gazed in that direction, as if the subjects pictured had suddenly stepped into the room, which, after a fas.h.i.+on, they had. Joe kept his eyes on her. He had always enjoyed watching her, from the first time he'd seen her. She had a magnetic effect on him that he was only now beginning to appreciate.

"No," she answered quietly. "I have my mom and a brother, Steve."

"The other boy in the picture isn't a brother?"

She nodded slowly, still gazing off. "He was. He and my father died at sea."

He was taken aback, and felt badly for leading her there. "I'm sorry."

She turned toward him again, her expression sad but open. "I am, too. I loved them both, in different ways. Jose was wild and funny and full of beans; my father was just the opposite. A rock. I see a lot of Dad in Coryn-both of them so steady. Losing them pretty much kicked my family in the head. Steve and my mom never recovered."

"Where are they now?" Joe asked softy.

"Mom still lives in Gloucester," she said briefly.

He considered asking more but realized that either it wouldn't matter or that he'd find out later on. He hoped for the latter, if only because it meant some future for the two of them.

"Steve's in jail," she then added, almost as a challenge.

"Ouch," he reacted. "That's tough. I see what you mean-did all that start after the boat went down?"

She looked at him in silence for a couple of seconds, her mug cradled in her lap. "I guess that's right," she then said. "You're used to these sob stories."

She hadn't said it harshly, but he answered with care nevertheless, feeling his way. "They aren't sob stories, but I wish they were more rare."

She nodded silently and took a meditative sip of her tea. "I'm sorry," she murmured afterward.

"For what?"

"That all came out wrong. My dad and Jose died years ago, when I was still in my teens. It's not like it's fresh-or how Mom and Steve turned out. I don't know why I threw it at you like that."

"No damage done. We've got to get to know each other somehow. It won't always be just right."