“Michael Carston? I don’t think he has a link to Beverly Dell, do you?”

  He paused, but I again didn’t have an answer for him.

  “Come on, don’t be shy,” he said, his voice full of sarcasm, “I want to know what you think,” then the sarcasm dropped away and the menace was back, “because he told me you questioned him about their relationship the day after Patricia was murdered.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  “Oh, and here’s something odd. His wife, Samantha. She says someone identifying himself as a Dunboro police officer spoke with her also.”

  “I didn’t . . .”

  “Identify yourself as a police officer? Boy, I sure hope not, because you would be in a heck of a lot of trouble if you did.” He stood up and came around the desk to lean over me. I felt myself involuntarily shrinking back in my seat, like a mouse trying to make itself look smaller when the shadow of a bird of prey passes overhead. “When you went to the house fire in which Patricia died, you wrote in your witness statement that the front door was locked, that you had to break it open. Is that correct?”

  The question threw me and my mind tried to look at it from every angle to see if there was some hidden meaning in it. I couldn’t find one and my delay in answering him was becoming obvious, so I went with the truth. “Yes.”

  “What about the back door?” He said quickly.

  It was then that I saw the jaws of the trap looming in front of me. I was coming to realize that regardless of what some people thought about him, Bobby Dawkins wasn’t stupid. “I didn’t check it.”

  “I did. It was locked with a floor cleat. Only I went back the night after the fire and it wasn’t locked. What do you think about that?”

  He knew! Somehow he knew! He had seen me? Or my truck? I shook my head slowly.

  He opened his mouth, and while I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say next, I was sure I wasn’t going to like it, that it was very possibly going to end with the phrase ‘you’re under arrest.’

  But before he could say whatever it was, he was interrupted by the appearance of a man at the office entrance. “Sheriff Dawkins?” the man asked.

  The Sheriff stood up and I instantly found myself breathing easier, as though I had been under some great atmospheric pressure which had just eased. “Yes?”

  The man came forward, presenting his business card with the flourish of a magician pulling a bouquet of flowers from a hidden tube in his sleeve. “G. Franklin Tolland. You called my office earlier concerning a patient list for Beverly Dell.”

  As the business card changed hands I caught a glimpse of raised black and silver script, the words ‘Attorney at Law’ against the ivory of heavy, high-quality card stock. Snazzy.

  G. Franklin Tolland reminded me more than anything else of the government legal eagle that had swooped into the lab of a naïve twenty-six year old graduate student and bludgeoned all his plans for making the world a better place with a thick stack of legal documents and governmental edicts. The recollection ignited an instant dislike for him within me.

  The G-man was dressed in full legal formal wear with a dark blue perfectly tailored suit, crisp white dress shirt, and red power tie. The reading glasses perched on his nose were a surprisingly cheap plastic pair, like something you would buy off the disposable rack at Rite Aid. His chiseled features, ice blue eyes, and perfect hair must have been a problem for him at any trial with women on the jury, as I’m certain they had to stop the proceedings every time one of them swooned. I wondered if his friends addressed him as G., Franklin, or Mr. Tolland.

  The Sheriff seemed torn between dealing with the lawyer and finishing with me. He took several moments to decide. “Yes, of course. Thank you for coming down.” The Sheriff turned back to me and uttered a single word, “Out.”

  My desire to launch out of the seat and dash for freedom as though shot out of a cannon was tempered by my need to hear about Beverly Dell’s patient list. It seemed so clear to me that the murderer would be one of her patients. Whoever it was had killed Patricia, and then later, perhaps because they had confessed to her, killed Beverly. That was the connection.

  I picked up my coffee cup and walked out of the office area as casually as I could, so casually in fact that I probably presented some peculiar air of exaggerated casualness, walking stiffly and prominently upright like a poorly-mechanized robot. Down the hallway I opened the exterior door, but then instead of leaving I stepped back quickly and let it sigh closed on its hydraulic arm. I tiptoed to the bench on the left hand side of the hallway and silently took a seat, placing the cup on the floor at my feet. Leaning back with my head against the partition wall I closed my eyes and opened my ears.

  There was the scrape of chairs being pulled back, a slight creak from the one the Sheriff sat down in.

  “When you contacted me early this morning,” Tolland began, “I had my associates compile a list of Mrs. Dell’s clients including everyone she had seen in the past year, though the request is highly irregular.”

  I found it interesting that Tolland thought of 4AM or so, which is certainly when Bobby must have contacted him, as early this morning. I wondered what he would consider the middle of the goddamned night. Maybe the next time I had insomnia I would call him and we could take in a movie together. Maybe not.

  “I’d like you to note that clients she had not seen in the past year will not appear on this list.” Tolland’s voice boomed, like he was addressing an entire amphitheater. It positively echoed off the hard surfaces of the office.

  “I appreciate you responding so quickly given the irregularity of my request,” the Sheriff said, “but I believe the name of someone who has murdered two people in Dunboro is on that list, so if I could see it?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to simply let you peruse this list at your leisure, Sheriff. There are certain client confidentialities that need to be preserved.”

  “But Beverly Dell wasn’t a doctor.”

  “Doctor or not, her clients had an expectation of privacy in the things they revealed to her, even to the fact that they were seeing her at all.”

  “And is dead.” The Sheriff added flatly, which I gave him points for.

  “Mrs. Dell’s death does not alter the state of her clients’ right to privacy.” Tolland answered smoothly, with an oily and practiced lawyerly ease.

  “OK, I understand that. So what can you do to help me?”

  “I would be willing, in the spirit of limited disclosure, to confirm or deny whether or not specific people appear on this list.”

  There was a long pause and I thought maybe Bobby was wondering if he could do better with a court order or if it were worth pushing Tolland for more right now. He must have decided no to both, because I heard him ask, “Patricia Woods?”

  There was the sound of papers being flipped, “No,” Tolland replied.

  “Michael Carston.” Bobby spelled the last name for him.

  “No.”

  “Samantha Carston.”

  “No.”

  As far as I was concerned Bobby was doing a pretty good job; off the top of my head I couldn’t think of anyone else to ask about. But I was worried that the killer was someone whose name we didn’t even know yet, and couldn’t see as this was the way to get it.

  “Rachael Woods.”

  Bobby was just shooting in the dark now. Rachael lived in Vermont. Why would she come to Dunboro to see a counselor? And what possible reason could she have had to kill her sister? He got another ‘No’ for his troubles.

  This stupid lawyer game was infuriating. It may have satisfied some twisted ethical boundary, but it felt a lot like that kid’s game where you take turns guessing positions on a grid to try and find the opposing player’s navy. B-2. You sunk my battleship! That was it. We were playing a game of Battleship over people’s lives. The name of the killer was on that list. I was certain of it. Why did lawyers have to be such pricks all the time?

  I got up and stepped past the end of the wall. “What about me? Jack Fallon.”

  Bobby’s head quickly swiveled and his eyes shot darts at me.

  The lawyer turned around in his chair and looked confused. “What about you?”

  “Am I on that list?”

  The question shocked Bobby. It clearly showed on his face. If I ever held a poker night, he was on the invite list.

  Tolland adjusted his glasses on his face and leaned back in the chair, the folder holding the list open on his lap. He flipped some pages, his lips forming the word, “Fallon, Fallon,” over and over again silently. Finally he looked up. ”Yes,” he said, “you are.”

  Twenty-Eight

  “You’re,” Bobby paused, agitated, his hands grasping at nothing but air, at a complete loss for words, finally settling on “unbelievable,” as he pacing back in forth in front of his desk. “What were you thinking?”

  I was seated behind that desk, feeling something like a school kid being lectured to in the principal’s office. That feeling was reinforced by the fact that I was seated in an unpadded oak office chair very similar to those that had been used in public offices everywhere back when I had been in school. Now everything was probably ergonomic this and Swedish that. Incidentally, it had seemed pretty comfortable when I had first sat down but now was seriously putting my ass to sleep.

  A thick and lengthy silence had followed the revelation of my involvement with Beverly Dell. Bobby had looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted a second head, and not some run of the mill second head either but something like the head of a griffin or Pauly Shore. G. Franklin Tolland had squared up the papers in the folder and left the building without another word, surely convinced the Dunboro Police Department was being run by inmates recently sprung from the state asylum in Concord.

  “I was beginning to wonder if he had a real list at all, and wasn’t just looking at his grocery list. Did you think of asking him to check it for eggs and milk?”

  He stopped pacing and leaned over the desk, his hands in fists on the desktop, his shoulders hunched. I had a momentary belief that he was going to slug me, and like a cartoon character I would fly back through the wall leaving a Jack-shaped hole.

  “How long had you been seeing Beverly Dell?”

  I practically choked on my first answer, that I had been seeing her since Patricia’s death, as if just uttering the connection aloud would somehow solidify my role as the link between them. It just wasn’t true in any case; I had waited several days before seeing Beverly for the first time.

  “Well?” Bobby demanded.

  Normally proud of the speed of my mind, I was foundering in conversational quicksand. “Since Friday.”

  “And you didn’t know Patricia Woods before the fire?” He leaned over farther, a presence that blotting out the sky.

  “No. Absolutely not. No way.” I thought I doth protest too much and bit down on my tongue.

  Bobby stood hulking over the desk for another moment, breathing heavily through his nose like a bull about to charge. “Shit!” He pushed himself off and spun away, crossing the office to stare at a poster on the wall showing the procedure for the Heimlich maneuver. Had I been at that moment choking, I suspect he would not have bothered to apply it.

  I got up from the chair and went to the window, not so much because I was interested in the view outside but to put as much distance between Bobby and me in a room which seemed suddenly far too small. It also allowed some blood to flow back to my ass, which I was halfway concerned would need to be amputated if I spent another moment sitting in that chair.

  “What would you say if I told you I thought you were the connection between Patricia and Beverly?” Bobby asked from right behind me.

  I let out an involuntary grunt of surprise. I hadn’t heard a sound as he had come back across the room, not so much as a scuff against the linoleum floor. Did the Dunboro Sheriff have ninja training?

  I spoke to him without turning from the window. I was focusing completely inward, nearly unaware of whatever I was seeing. The Hindenburg could have been burning out there and I would have missed it. I felt like a pool player trying to work out the tricky geometry between Patricia, Beverly, myself, and some fourth person about which I knew absolutely nothing. Was there even a shot there? “How could I be? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s got to be what you decided this morning when you called Tolland: one of her patients.” Of course I was one of her patients, the fact of which I had helpfully just made Bobby aware. “One of her other patients,” I emphasized.

  “Who?” He demanded.

  “Someone from Patricia’s past who wanted her dead. Somebody we don’t know about yet.”

  “We?” He said acidly.

  “What I meant-”

  He grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me, using his strength, his thumb digging into the mass of muscles and nerves in the joint. I felt my knees go soft. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, but there is no we, and whatever it is, it stops now. Are you hearing me?”

  “Yes,” I answered, but I must have sounded insufficiently contrite, because he increased the pressure until white spots flashed behind my eyes and I sagged, his hand the only thing holding me upright. I thought with a small change in his grip he could have snapped my collarbone if he wished.

  “I want you out of my investigation and out of my office,” he said threateningly, lips stretched tight over his teeth. He held on for a moment longer, allowing me to experience the whole spectrum of pain, a subtle pallet with thousands of colors, and then he released me suddenly. I felt lightheaded and grabbed the edge of the windowsill to keep from falling.

  When my knees were up to it I stumbled out of the office and pinballed down the short hallway. On the way past the bench I kicked over my coffee cup and spilled the little bit left in it on the floor, then actually missed the door, colliding drunkenly with the left side of the door jam. Managing somehow to get the door open I went out to my truck and leaned against the bumper, blinking my eyes in the bright sunlight, my forehead covered in greasy sweat.

  There was a parking ticket on the windshield, a two hundred and fifty dollar fine for parking in a space reserved for a police car. In a trick that would have made Roscoe P. Coltrane proud, a moveable ‘No Parking’ sign embedded in a concrete block had been placed in front of my truck sometime while I was in the office. How the hell had he managed that?

  Twenty-Nine

  I hooked the cup of tea on the counter in front of me with my left thumb and turned the mug ninety degrees clockwise, the tip of my right index finger sliding along the curve of the rim as a guide. I then hooked it with my right thumb and turned it ninety degrees back.

  The tea was cold. It had been cold something like four hours ago when Valerie had asked me if I was coming to bed, which I assured her I would in just a few minutes. Lies, all lies.

  When I had been at Columbia University, a number of students had gone on a hunger strike to protest the University’s investment in companies which in their view supported apartheid in South Africa. A friend of mine, one of the hunger strikers, later told me the first week or so without food was hard, that thoughts of food and hunger pangs constantly dogged him. However somewhere in the second week, he claimed, his desire for food had just kind of faded away. His body, having realized no food was forthcoming, had resorted to some new biochemistry, likely something that involved self-cannibalism of whatever muscles or organs the body deemed of lower importance.

  In a similar way, now passing into my eighth sleepless day, I felt as though I no longer needed to sleep. My body somehow had altered itself to encompass this new sleepless reality, though I was concerned at what form my self-cannibalism might take. What parts of me would be devoured as a replacement for sleep? I wondered if it might turn out to be my sanity.

  On the kitchen windowsill sat an old-style radio scanner, a chase of red LEDs on the face illuminating as it swept a pre-programmed block of frequencies. I had set them for the fire departments across the Souhegan Valley: Milford and Brookline, Amherst and Bedford, Mason, Wilton, Hollis, and of course Dunboro. The region was for the most part quiet, the LEDs running freely, pausing only for moments at anomalous signal packets, off-frequency bits of electromagnetic communications ricocheting off the troposphere from hundreds of miles away, ghostly echoes of other emergencies, other tragedies, taking place in Vermont or western Massachusetts or southern Maine.

  I splayed the fingers of my left hand, resting the tips along the rim of the mug like the perching of some nimble, exotic spider, and turned the mug one hundred and eighty degrees clockwise, then adjusted it fifteen degrees back.

  I envisioned it as a gear, a part of some large, complex machine, one that wrecked families and destroyed lives for some horrible unknown purpose. The individual gears represented Patricia and her sister Rachael, the boyfriend past whom I knew only as Dan, Michael and Samantha Carston, myself and Beverly Dell, and other gears not yet named. They appeared to spin freely, their teeth unmeshed, but that was just an illusion, a consequence of my lack of understanding of the mechanics that drove them. They were all somehow connected, they must be, and if I could only get the mug into the correct orientation these linkages would appear and all the other gears would fall into alignment around it, and the purpose, the awful reason of that machine, would become clear to me.

  The scanner locked up on Brookline’s frequency for a single motor vehicle accident, no PI or entrapment. The PI was short for Personal Injury. Why they abbreviated personal injury but then always said entrapment instead of simply saying something like ‘no PI or E’ was a mystery to me. Brookline Fire units signed on a few minutes later responding to the call.

  I trapped the sides of the mug with the flattened palms of both hands and rolled it between them, seesawing it forward and back, twenty degrees each way, feeling the minute grate and scrap of the bottom edge against the surface of the countertop as it moved.

  One of the largest gears held the face of Bobby Dawkins, who was probably a heartbeat away from chopping a hole in the floor of the police department and burying me under it. I had to admit that through my meddling I had been a distraction for him, and was forced to consider the possibility that the investigation would fail because of me. That thought was sudden and jagged, and freighted me with a new, fresh burden of guilt I didn’t know how to bear. A whole new facet I could have explored with Beverly Dell were she not dead.

 

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