The Kind Worth Killing Page 23

  “What about the money?”

  “You’re never going to see that money, Brad. Never. You’re going to go to prison, and I’m offering you a way out. If Miranda’s gone, then you are safe.”

  He nodded rapidly, like he’d just been scolded. “How are you going to kill her?”

  “I’ll take care of that,” I said.

  “I could do it,” Brad said, and there was something new in his eyes. Not fear, anymore, but hatred, plus maybe a little bit of craziness. I wondered if he’d slept at all since killing Ted.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I could send her into the house, and then I could come in through the back patio entrance and sneak up on her. I have this big wrench. I could hit her over the head with it. That way you wouldn’t have to do it. You don’t want to know what it’s like.”

  It was perfect. It solved my biggest problem, that if I was the one to kill Miranda, there would inevitably be some sort of forensic test that would prove a five-foot-eight-inch female had dealt the deadly blow and not a six-foot-two-inch man.

  “You won’t need to sneak up on her,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell her that you’re planning on killing me because I know everything. Tell Miranda that you’re going to sneak up on me and hit me with the wrench. Then, even if she hears you coming into the house, she’ll think you’re after me. She won’t even know it’s coming.”

  “Okay.” He nodded.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  He told me he was, and I believed him. We talked more, going over every detail of the plan. I reassured him several times that everything was going to be okay. When I left his house, I was convinced that he would do everything he had told me he would do.

  And he had.

  I had wondered, as I was standing in the dark with Miranda, whether I had been stupid, and Brad was going to kill me instead of Miranda. But at the last moment, when Brad lifted that massive wrench, I knew. I knew that I had won, and Miranda, like others before her, was going to die, and that I was going to live.

  With the windows of the truck rolled up, and Brad smoking, the cab filled with pungent smoke. “So she was willing to kill me?” I asked Brad, needing to know.

  “Yeah. Like you said she’d be. She was surprised, though . . . she said you guys weren’t that close in college.” He rubbed at his lips with his spatulate fingers. “How’d you know about everything? How’d you know so much about what happened with Ted? I never asked you last night.”

  “I met Ted Severson on a flight back from London. He told me that his wife was cheating on him with his house contractor. He watched you through binoculars from the path out along the bluff. We continued to meet. He decided he wanted to kill Miranda. And you, as well. I told him I’d help.”

  Brad took another long drag on his cigarette, but it was down to the filter. He cranked the window down and flicked the cigarette away. I heard it sputter out as it hit a puddle. “You’re shitting me,” Brad said, swinging his head in my direction. The chloral hydrate was kicking in. Brad’s speech was starting to slur, and his eyes were drooping.

  “No. I wish I was. Ted was planning on killing Miranda and she was planning on killing Ted, but she got there first. Well, you got there first. It’s all over now, though.”

  “It is,” he said. “It is.” His words were heavily slurred—is sounded like ish—and I could just barely understand what he was saying. His head was angled down, and he reminded me of a boxer trying to stay awake in the ring, not realizing that he’s already been knocked out. He started to lean a little toward me, and I moved back in my seat, the bags on my feet rustling against the floor of the truck.

  “Why do you . . . why do you have bags on your feet?” His words were almost complete mush and I would never have known what he was saying but I could see where he was looking. He fell forward, slumping sideways so that his right shoulder landed hard on my thigh. I grabbed two handfuls of his thick denim jacket and managed to move him upright in his seat. His head tipped backward, his mouth open. I unlatched my door and got out of the truck, shutting it quickly so that the light didn’t stay on too long in the cab. I looked up. The night sky was filled with clustered stars, brighter now than when I had parked the car. The ocean shushed unseen. I allowed myself ten seconds of just standing there, and then I got to work.

  I had brought extra bags, and I had my knife, but before resorting to either of those, I hoisted myself onto the bed of the truck to check out the toolbox that was secured with a bungee cord against the rear of the cab. The corrugated metal lid was unlocked and I used my penlight to look inside. There were all the tools I’d expected—hammers, handsaws, a tire iron, a plastic box that contained a drill—but what caught my eye was a length of coat hanger wire that had been repurposed into a long hook, for jimmying the lock when the keys were left inside. I picked it up and straightened it out. It would be perfect; I didn’t want any blood in the truck.

  I slid back onto the passenger seat, and shut the door behind me. I rolled down my window; the smell of Brad’s last cigarette still lingered in the cab, plus there was something else . . . the chemical odor of distilled alcohol coming from Brad’s breath. Maybe also his body. He had begun to snore—high nasal rasps on each outtake of breath. I grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him as hard as I could, and he showed no signs of coming out of his deep sleep. I wondered if the combination of alcohol—how much had he drunk today?—and the chloral hydrate would eventually kill him, but I couldn’t take the risk that it wouldn’t.

  I got onto my knees on the passenger seat. I pushed Brad’s head away from me so that it fell facing the driver’s-side window. It was still tipped back and there was space between his thick neck and the truck’s headrest. I circled the coat hanger wire around his neck, and twisted the ends together so that the wire was tight against his neck. I took out the Leatherman from my backpack, and clipped the excess wire from the coat hanger so that the twisted-together part was only about an inch long.

  I gripped the ends with the tip of the Leatherman pliers and I twisted, tightening the wire until I knew that Brad was dead.

  PART III

  Hide the Bodies Well

  CHAPTER 27

  KIMBALL

  I couldn’t sleep.

  This was nothing new to me, especially when I was working on a case. I checked the clock on my bedside table. It was a little after three in the morning. Pyewacket the cat was sleeping on my discarded clothes on the floor. He looked cold, curled into a ball like a woolly bear caterpillar that’s pretending it’s dead. He probably wondered why those metal strips along his apartment’s floor hadn’t started making burbling sounds and getting warm. Late October had turned cold, but I liked to hold out till November, at least, before turning the heat on.

  I thought of getting out of bed and going to see what was playing on Turner Classic Movies but knew that if I did, I would never get back to sleep again. I needed to be at least a little sharp for the following day. Ted Severson had been murdered on Friday night, and it had now just tipped over into the following Wednesday. Almost a whole week. We had a prime suspect—this Brad Daggett character—but he’d pulled a runner, and no one could find him. I’d spent the day up in Maine, in the company of the mostly helpful Kennewick police force, keeping an eye on Daggett’s house, checking any and all leads as to his whereabouts. He was our man, for sure. After Miranda Severson identified our sketch as possibly being Brad Daggett, I’d checked the system, and Daggett was there. He’d been arrested twice. Five years earlier on suspicion of domestic assault, and two years ago on a DUI. I’d called him with the number that Miranda had given me, but he didn’t pick up. Then I called the local police, and asked them to swing by and check to see if Brad Daggett was home, maybe do some initial questioning, ask him if he had any information on the death of Ted Severson. They did as I asked, but he wasn’t at his house. I told them it could wait till the next day, that I’d be questio
ning the primary witness in the morning and we’d know more then. I printed Daggett’s most recent mug shot, and took it to Rachel Price’s apartment in Somerville the following morning. When she looked at the picture, she hopped a little on her toes, and said, “Oh, that’s him. That’s definitely him.”

  “That’s the man you saw entering the house at six o’clock on Friday night?”

  “Yes, that’s him. I’m sure of it.”

  That had been Tuesday morning. I’d called the sheriff, then driven up myself. Daggett was still nowhere to be found. Not at either of the construction sites that he was supervising, and not at his home, one of a string of rental cottages that he owned along Kennewick Beach. White paint and green trim. Made me think of my own childhood vacations at Wells Beach, just a little farther north. When it was clear he wasn’t home, and wasn’t coming back anytime soon, I tried out the key I’d found hidden in Ted Severson’s bedroom drawer. It fit Brad’s cottage door. Why did Ted have a key to his general contractor’s house? Had they been having an affair? I peered into the tiny, immaculate cottage but didn’t enter yet. A local judge granted a warrant just after his lunch break and we searched the place, finding nothing.

  I’d been kicking myself all day that I hadn’t acted faster after Miranda gave me Brad Daggett’s name. I should have brought his mug shot immediately to Rachel Price, but Miranda’s halfhearted identification hadn’t left me with much hope. Of course, now it seemed abundantly clear that Miranda only identified Brad because she felt she had to, and she was covering herself. And she must have been the one who had warned Brad to stay away from his house and turn off his phone. It was the oldest story in the book. The wife had had her boyfriend kill her husband. The curveball was that hidden key in Ted’s drawer, the key to Brad’s cottage in Maine. Was it Miranda’s key and she had hidden it in her husband’s drawer? Possible, I supposed.

  By early afternoon, we’d put an all-points bulletin out for Brad and his vehicle. His ex-wife had been interviewed, plus several employees and work colleagues. No one had seen him since the previous day at lunch, when he’d bought a large meatball sub at a pizza place in York that he frequented. He’d disappeared.

  I left Maine late in the afternoon, taking I-95 back down toward Boston. On the way, I received an excited call from Billy Elkins, the officer I’d tasked with looking into Lily Kintner, the woman that Miranda Severson said she knew in Winslow, Massachusetts. He’d found out a lot. Lily Kintner worked at Winslow College in the library department, apparently under the name of Lily Hayward. But she owned a house on Poplar Road in Winslow under her real name. Most importantly, Ted and Lily had shared a flight back from London on the twentieth of September. I pumped my fist in the car, then took down her address.

  Asking Billy to check passenger manifests had been a total hunch, but an educated one, and I couldn’t believe that it had paid off. As soon as Miranda had identified Lily Kintner as the one person she knew who lived in Winslow, I had wondered if Lily Kintner was the same Lily Kintner who was the daughter of David Kintner, easily my favorite living novelist. I didn’t know much about Kintner’s daughter, just that her name was Lily, and that she was born in America while David had been living in Connecticut, married to an American artist named Sharon Henderson. Mather College was in Connecticut, and if Lily was Miranda’s age, then she’d be just about the right age to be Kintner’s daughter.

  The thing about David Kintner was that he wasn’t just famous for being a novelist; he had become infamous for accidentally killing his second wife in a drunk driving accident in England. It had been huge news in England, less so in America. I followed it because I was a fan of his books. He’d done time and just been released, less than a month ago. It would make sense that his American daughter had flown over to London to see him. I had also learned from Miranda Severson that Ted had flown to London recently for work, so it occurred to me that Ted and this Lily Kintner had possibly met on an airplane. I had Billy take a shot and check the manifests, and got a hit. After a fruitless day trying to find Brad Daggett, it felt good that some detective work had actually paid off. She must have been the reason he traveled to Winslow that day, even though she probably had nothing to do with his death.

  When I reached the I-95/I-93 split, instead of getting onto I-93 to head into Boston, I stayed on I-95, looping west toward Winslow. I didn’t expect much to come from questioning Lily Kintner, but I needed to check it out.

  She’d been home, and she did turn out to be David Kintner’s daughter, just as I suspected. She lived in a book-filled house on a pond with only a few other houses on its leaf-plastered shore. She greeted me at the door, looking a little disheveled, her eyes taking a moment to focus on my face. I wondered if I’d woken her from a nap. She invited me in. I asked her about Ted Severson and she told me she knew him, but only from the newspaper reports of his death, and from knowing that he had married someone she knew from college. She offered coffee and I accepted. While she made it, I looked over her bookshelves, finding a row of all of David Kintner’s novels. I ran a finger across their spines, remembering pictures I’d seen of him. Tall and angular with a thatch of white hair. A drinker’s face—sallow and hollow-cheeked. Lily returned with the coffee, her hair pushed back behind her ears, her sleepy eyes now sharp and watchful. I told her I knew her father’s books, was a fan actually, and she seemed unimpressed, as though she’d heard way too much about her father’s genius. I told her I knew about the situation in England, and that allowed me to bring up the flight she’d shared with Ted Severson. Something clicked in her luminous green eyes, and she told me that she had met a man on the plane, and that he’d seemed familiar, and it was probably him. They’d spoken at length, and it was possible she’d told him who she was and where she lived. We found a picture on the Internet and she confirmed that it was Ted Severson she had spoken to, but she claimed to have no idea why he would have come to Winslow.

  I believed some of what she told me. I believed that she hadn’t known Ted Severson had come to her town to look for her, and I believed that she was surprised that I’d shown up at her house, but I didn’t believe that she hadn’t figured out that the man on the plane was the husband of a friend of hers. It made no sense. But why would she lie to me about such a thing?

  At her door I put my hand in my pocket, my fingers touching the key we now knew belonged to Brad Daggett’s cottage in Maine. Even so, I asked Lily if she’d mind if I tried her door with it. I just wanted to gauge her reaction. She seemed perplexed, but not worried. I left, not really knowing what to think. But I did know why Ted Severson had gone to Winslow that day. He’d met Lily Kintner on a plane, and he’d fallen in love with her. That much was sure. I empathized. In fact, I’d been thinking about Lily Kintner almost nonstop since meeting her the day before. She was beautiful, that much I remembered, but I was having trouble reconstructing her facial features in my mind. I could picture her long red hair, and her green eyes, so much like a cat’s, but her face kept slipping in and out of my mind’s grasp. But more than her physical presence, I had been taken in by her almost otherworldly self-possession, and by the way she inhabited her book-lined cottage in the woods of Winslow. Was she lonely out there all alone? Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn’t need other humans in her life? It was something that I intended to find out.

  My younger sister, Emily, who knows me better than anyone in the world, told me recently that my problem with relationships is that I fall in love with every woman I’m attracted to.

  “Don’t most guys?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Most guys just want to sleep with all the women they’re attracted to. The last thing they want to do is fall in love. You call yourself a detective, and you don’t know that?”

  “Trust me. I also want to sleep with these women.”

  “Yeah, but then you fall in love with them, and either they break your heart, or—”

  “Can we talk about your love life now?” I interrupted. It was how
I got Emily to change the subject when she was analyzing my failed romances.

  Pyewacket stirred, which meant it was 5:00 A.M. He leaped onto my bed, prepared to breathe on my eyelids to wake me up, but I swung my legs out from under the covers before he had a chance. I let him out of my apartment’s side door, which led to the fire escape. He darted out, nimbly walking on the metal slats, heading down to the small backyard, where it was his job to protect our kingdom from falling leaves and rogue squirrels.

  I got back into bed, now certain that there was no chance I’d get any more sleep. I kept a spiral-bound notebook and a pen on top of the pile of books by my bed. It was supposed to be an idea book, a place to record late-night thoughts about cases I was working on, but also lines of poetry. I still considered myself a poet (something no one in the force knew about), even though I’d lost the ability to write anything but limericks these days. I told myself I was at least writing something, and that maybe it would help me think about cases. Earlier the day before I’d written these two:

  There once was a husband named Ted,

  Who met his end in a volley of lead.

  It was clear he was rich—

  And his wife was a bitch—

  So it’s not a surprise that he’s dead.

  There once was a girl named Miranda,

  It was clear that no one could stand her.

  But beneath all that crass

  Was an excellent ass,

  So the rich men all lined up to land her.

  To the same page, I added the following:

  There once was a novelist’s daughter

  Whose eyes were the green of seawater.

  I hoped to remove

  Her clothing to prove

  That naked she’d look even hotter.

  I wondered, not for the first time, why my limericks always turned out dirty. I tried to come up with one about Brad Daggett but failed. Instead I got up, made a full pot of coffee, and began to get ready to go to work.