A Welcome Grave

8

The sun was a smashed ball of red in my rearview mirror when I reached Cleveland. I made one stop for lunch, as I’d missed out on a tasty jail breakfast, but otherwise stayed on the road and kept the speed up, not really caring if I got pulled over. When you’re a suspected murderer, tickets don’t mean a damn thing. Lincoln Perry, highway rebel. I needed to get a tommy gun, be ready to go down in a hail of gunfire if it came to that.

I came up I-71 into the city, heading for the west side, and home. When I got to Brookpark, though, I pulled off onto I-480 and started east. I was wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before, unshaven and tired and stiff, but I wasn’t ready to go home just yet. After seeing a guy blow his brains into a pond and spending a night in jail, waiting for some cop to lock his fingers into my arm and call me a murderer, I had a few questions of my own. A detour to Pepper Pike seemed very much to be the order of the evening.

The house and all its windows were gleaming in the sunlight when I pulled into the drive, the glass reflecting a crimson glow back into my eyes. I got out of the truck and laid my hand against the hood, feeling the searing heat of an engine that had been driven long and hard. The longer you spend around a machine, the more human it begins to seem. Like that old Steve McQueen movie where he’s the engineer on the navy ship. Sand Pebbles, was it? Good movie. He loved that damn ship engine. McQueen dies at the end, though. Trying to save a woman, if I recall correctly. Probably should have stuck to the engine room.

I walked up the path to the house and onto the porch with my head down, thoughts of McQueen and engines running through my head, and when I reached the door I saw it was already open, Karen looking at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“I heard you drive in.”

“Yeah?” I went in without waiting for an invitation, walked past her, and into the living room. I dropped down into the same couch I’d taken on my last visit and waited for her to join me.

She came in a minute later, after shutting the front door and fastening all the locks. I heard her do it—the snap of the dead bolt, the rattle of the security chain. I listened to that and thought about the way she’d rushed to the door at the sound of my truck and how she’d spilled the wine during my last visit when the phone rang. Pretty damn jumpy.

“They told me what happened,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but they were the sort of jeans and sweatshirt that you pay three hundred bucks for in a store where all of the employees have their nails done weekly and none of them has ever purchased a rock album.

“Who did?”

“The police in Indiana. They called me last night.”

“Did they tell you they were keeping me in jail?”

Her eyes went wide. “No. What? No. They just said . . . the detective said that he needed to get your statement and needed me to verify that what you said was true.”

I grinned. “They took their time verifying it. Thoughtful enough to allow me a comfortable cot behind bars while they sorted it out, though.”

She tugged the sleeves of the fancy sweatshirt down past her wrists.

“Lincoln, I’m sorry. I didn’t know this would happen. You hadn’t even told me you were going to Indiana.”

“For the amount of money you were throwing around, I thought I should make the notification in person.”

“I understand. I just can’t believe what happened.” Her hands now out of sight, tucked into the sleeves, she folded her arms across her chest, hugged them under her breasts. Her eyes passed over me only in flitting glances before settling on some more reassuring, inanimate object in the room. The base of the floor lamp seemed to be her favorite.

“It was pretty surprising,” I agreed, watching her with a hard stare. “The crazy bastard put the gun in his mouth and blew out a nice chunk of his skull. He was closer to me than you are now when he did it.”

Her eyes rose, surprised by my description. “How awful.”

“Hell of a strange thing,” I said, and realized I was echoing exactly what Brewer had said to me the previous night. I’d taken his role now. We’d see if I had any better luck at it.

Karen didn’t say anything, just sat there, eyes on the base of that floor lamp.

“Imagine,” I said, “killing yourself just before you inherited a few million. I mean, what the hell, you know? Talk about bad timing. The really crazy part, Karen? He knew his father was dead. Told me that as soon as I saw him, sitting there with a gun in his hand and a bottle of whiskey beside him.”

She pulled her head back, gave me the wide eyes. “What?”

“Didn’t know that?”

“No, of course not. How could he possibly have known?”

I looked at her for a long time. She held my eyes, but she wasn’t comfortable doing it.

“You must be pretty damn stupid,” I said, “to think I wouldn’t be able to tell when you’re lying to me, Karen. If there’s one thing I remember about you, it’s what you look like when you lie. That’s pretty well ingrained in my memory.”

She recoiled, pulling back into the couch and releasing her arms from that squeeze she was giving herself. “Excuse me?”

“Do not lie.” My voice was ice. “I watched someone die who could just as easily have shot me as himself, and maybe was thinking about doing just that. Then I spent a night in jail, and now some Indiana detective wants to throw my ass back in there for good. My temper, Karen, is going to be pretty damn easy to trip. So don’t you dare tell me another lie.”

She looked like she was about to cry. “Lincoln, I haven’t been—”

“You knew Alex and his son had been in contact. When I told you the man knew his father was dead, you pretended to be surprised. That was stupid. First of all, because I know when you’re lying, and, second, because the cop that called you would have told you already. He’s a good cop, and he would have been awfully curious about that detail. He would have asked you about it. Asked how the kid might have found out. So why are you lying about it now? Because you already knew they’d been in contact. Yet for some reason you sent me to look for the son, and I’m damn lucky I didn’t end up dead.”

By the end my voice was rising and she was crying. I sat where I was and let her cry. The hell with her. I could close my eyes and see that gazebo again, see the gun moving in the shadows and hear the sound of the hammer pulling back, and I could feel the bullet heading for me, just like I had in that half second before Matthew Jefferson dispatched himself to places unknown. She wanted to cry? Shit.

My chest was rising and falling, a hit of adrenaline working through me. I sat there, watched her cry, and took deep breaths. Eventually, I spoke.

“Tell me something that’s true, Karen.”

She wiped her eyes. “It was all true.”

“Bullshit.”

“It was true! They’d been estranged. For years. I had no idea where Matthew lived. None. I didn’t have a phone number for him, or an address.”

“You knew they’d been in contact recently. Why didn’t you just check the phone records?”

“All I knew at the time was that he had called Alex. Incoming calls don’t show up on our phone records, only what you pay for.”

We sat and stared at one another. The room was growing dark, but the pale hardwood floors still glowed with a faint hint of red. A clock ticked on the wall, and a mild breeze scattered leaves out on the deck, but otherwise it was silent.

“You’re a very rich woman now that your husband and his only other heir are dead,” I said.

The fear and apprehension went out of her eyes, replaced by anger.

“What? Surely, Lincoln, you’re not trying to say—”

“I’m not. But some other people might try to say some things, Karen. The things that people say when a woman becomes rich amidst a pair of mysterious deaths. And if I believed those deaths were unconnected incidents, and unconnected incidents that you know absolutely nothing about, I’d tell you to ignore the talk and go on with your life.”

“But you don’t believe that,” she said slowly.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe it, because it’s not true.”

“I don’t know what’s true, either, Lincoln. I really don’t.”

“You know more than me.”

“And you want to hear it?”

“I’ve got cops trying to pin a murder charge on me, Karen. Yes, I damn well want to hear it.”

She stood up from the couch and walked into the kitchen. I stayed in my chair and watched while she took a bottle of wine from the rack on the counter. She lifted it free, hesitated, and put it back before crossing to the refrigerator and returning with a bottle of mineral water. I waited while she sipped it, her eyes on the floor.

“There’s something very wrong with this family,” she said.

I almost laughed. No shit, Karen? Something wrong with this family? Where in the last week of torture killings and bizarre suicides did you get that idea?

“I met Alex through work—”

“I know,” I interrupted, and I couldn’t keep the cutting quality out of my tone. I knew awfully well how she’d met Alex Jefferson, though, and I didn’t need to be told again. Karen had been working in records with the district attorney’s office when she’d made the switch to the private sector and taken a nice salary boost to work as a paralegal for Cleveland’s most prestigious business law firm. Yes, I remembered that well, indeed. I’d splurged on champagne the night she took the job, bought a bottle of Dom on a cop’s salary, and toasted to her future success with Alex Jefferson.

She looked at me with sad eyes. “If you want to hear what I can tell you, you’ll have to listen to me talk about Alex. I can’t sit here and give you facts, because I don’t know any. All I can tell you are the changes I saw in my husband.”

I didn’t realize I was grinding my teeth until I had to loosen them so I could speak.

“Tell me, then.”

She took another drink of the mineral water, then put the top back on the bottle and set it on the table beside her.

“I met Alex when I began working with his firm. He was kind, and he paid attention to me. He took me to lunch my first week with the company, and then that became a regular pattern. I remember thinking how busy he was and being surprised that he’d make time for me every week. He asked about you a lot, and at first I thought that was just his way of reassuring me that his interest wasn’t romantic. Then I began to get the idea that it was just the opposite, that he was feeling me out to see how serious we were.”

To see how serious we were. Apparently, the word “engaged” hadn’t meant a lot to Jefferson. Maybe in his world, though, an engagement—or even a marriage—was no indication of how serious a relationship was at all.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, and I’ll spare you the details. I still feel awful, Lincoln. You probably don’t believe that, and maybe you never will. But the reason I’m telling you this is because I have to explain what I saw happen to my husband.”

I was leaning forward, elbows on my knees, eyes on the floor. I reached out and ran my hand through my hair as she spoke, squeezing it until the roots pulled hard at my scalp.

“You, and everyone who knew us, probably had a lot of theories as to what attracted me to Alex. I’m sure everyone talked about the money, though I’d hate to think they truly believed I was so shallow. I’ll tell you what the attraction really was, though—he needed me. He seemed desperate for me. He used to joke about how much he enjoyed my youth and innocence, but after a while I saw that they weren’t all jokes. That I represented something that he thought he needed very badly. He told me once that I healed him, and he said that seriously. As seriously as anything anyone had ever told me. And it was attractive. Compelling, somehow. Here was this man who seemed to have everything, and yet what he thought he needed was a twenty-five-year-old girl who worked in his office and had aspirations of law school.”

She went quiet. I didn’t want to lift my head and look at her, but eventually I did. I sat there with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped together and looked at her while she said, “I know you loved me, Lincoln. But I never felt like you needed me.”

For a moment silence filled the room, the ticking of the wall clock audible again. Karen looked uncomfortable. I probably didn’t look particularly at ease myself.

“You’re a very strong person,” she said. “You’re so comfortable with your abilities, so . . . assured. That’s probably the right word. Self-assured, I guess. And independent in a way that most people aren’t, either. Those are wonderful qualities, Lincoln, really they are, but . . . maybe they make you seem distanced. I knew I was important to you, I knew you loved me, but I just never had the sense that I was necessary. I never—”

“I thought you were going to talk about your husband.”

She froze with her mouth half open, another thought about ready to spill out, and then she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

“Okay. That’s fair. I’m sorry.” She leaned back into the couch and pulled her legs up beside her. “There was always something beneath the surface with Alex. Something that intensified how he felt about me, but that I never really understood. I thought it had to do with his family, with his son. He told me only that Matthew and he were no longer close. It wasn’t a subject Alex was comfortable with, and I didn’t push. Not until we were making the wedding plans. Then I told him I wanted his son to be there, that it was important to me. He told me Matthew would never come, and he refused to talk about the circumstances at length. That was the hardest I ever pushed him for details, and it was utterly unsuccessful.

“Once we were married, the topic almost never came up. I knew it was sensitive for Alex, and, to be perfectly honest, I never thought about his son. Why would I? I’d never met him, and he’d never been any sort of factor in my relationship with Alex. Every now and then something would remind me of him, and I’d wonder, but that was it. I was happy—we were happy—and Alex seemed at peace.”

“Until recently?”

She nodded. “A few weeks ago, something happened. The change in Alex was sudden, and profound. He was scared, Lincoln, and he wouldn’t tell me of what. He didn’t sleep; I’d find him sitting at his desk or out on the deck at two in the morning, just staring off into space, mostly. He became secretive and guarded. I know you want more details, but I just don’t have them. All I saw was the change in his personality. All I saw was his fear.”

“What was the response when you asked him about it?”

“He denied it at first,” Karen said. “Told me I was crazy, that he was fine, just busy. This went on for a while. Until Matthew called.”

“When was that?”

She frowned, considering. “The first call was two weeks ago, almost exactly. The phone rang very late, almost midnight. Alex was downstairs, and I was upstairs. I came down to see who’d been on the phone, and he said it was his son. He looked more scared than anyone I’ve ever seen, Lincoln. I asked him what was wrong and he just shook his head. Told me that it didn’t involve me and that the most important thing for him was seeing that it stayed that way. Obviously, I was furious, because now he was scaring me, and I didn’t even understand what was going on. I started yelling at him, demanding he tell me what was going on, and he got up and left the house. He didn’t leave in anger, though. He was robotic. Silent.”

She stared at the front door as if she were watching him walk out of it again.

“He left, and he was gone for hours. It was about four in the morning when he came back. I was still awake. He got into bed next to me, and I didn’t say anything, but he knew I was awake. He just lay there for a few minutes, and then he told me that he was sorry for upsetting me but that he was thinking of my best interests. He told me that someone wanted to make him accountable for something he’d done a long time ago. ‘For an old sin’ was actually how he put it.”

“There were no other details? No throwaway reference to something you didn’t understand?”

She started to shake her head, then stopped. “Actually, there was one. He said something like ‘When the phone rings at two in the morning, you know it’s either a wrong number or a prank or that it’s about to change your life. For me, it was the latter.’ ”

“He was certainly right about that.”

“But that’s the problem—he couldn’t have been talking about the call from Matthew. It was midnight when Matthew called. I was home, I heard the phone ring.”

“Maybe he misspoke. By the time you had that conversation it was, what, four in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“It probably seemed like the call had come in later than it did. But I suppose there’s nothing to lose by checking some phone records, seeing if there was a call that you missed some night.”

“I already looked, and so did the police. There weren’t any other calls that late. Not to the house or to his cell phone or his office.”

“That was the first time that they’d spoken in how many years?”

“Five years. Alex told me that the night of the call. We were done talking, both of us trying to sleep, and he said, almost to himself, ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard his voice in five years.’ ”

“But the specifics of this old sin? They weren’t given?”

“No. He just said he was going to handle it.”

“He didn’t handle it,” I said, thinking of what Targent had told me about the razor cuts and the burns.

“No,” Karen said, and her voice was faint. “It doesn’t look like he handled it.”

“Did you tell the police all of this?”

“Everything except Matthew’s call.”

I frowned. “Why leave that out? It sounds like he knew something, Karen. Something that could have been valuable.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to him first. Before the police.”

I stared at her, puzzled for a second, and then I got it. She was worried about what her husband had done. Worried about his image, maybe. And hers.

“You wanted a chance to do damage control before the cops and the media got to it. Wanted to make sure the right buried secrets stayed buried.”

Her eyes flashed. “That wasn’t it. I just wanted to know what happened. I just wanted to talk to him first.”

I shook my head. “Well, it was a hell of a bad idea, Karen. Because now Matt Jefferson’s not going to be telling anyone anything. If you’d played it right, and been honest with the cops, they would have gone down there and grabbed him before he had a chance to blow his head off. And, yes, I mean that they would have handled it better than me. Of course, I would’ve handled it differently if you’d been honest with me, too.”

“You think I don’t regret that? You think I’m not feeling guilty?”

I was quiet. She shook her head and blinked at tears that were rising again. She kept them in this time, though. After a minute, she turned back to me.

“I want to know what happened to this family, Lincoln. I’ve got to know what happened to this family.”

“I’m not the guy to help you. Never was. Why the hell did you call me, anyhow?”

“The police told me they’d talked to you, and I . . .” She let her words trail off, staring thoughtfully at nothing. Then she looked back up at me. “Remember those qualities I was telling you about? The confidence, the independence, the—”

“The things that drove you away.”

She seemed to wince at that, but still she nodded. “Yes. Well, even if they made you seem distanced, they bred faith in you, Lincoln. They bred trust. I’m sorry, but that never went away.” She looked at me sadly. “Doesn’t that make any sense to you?”

“As much sense as any of the rest of this.”

“Do you understand that I need to know what happened to this family?”

“Yes. And I wish you luck with it. But I’m not going to help. I can’t. I never should have let myself get involved with this in the first place, and I spent a good portion of the drive home today swearing at myself for making that mistake.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “I’m sorry that’s how you feel. I’m sorry for getting you involved.”

I stood up. “You need to call the police and give them the straight story.”

She followed me to the door. “I’ll send a check. For the amount we agreed upon earlier.”

I shook my head. “You’ll get a bill with my normal fees. Pay that, and we’re done.”

She stood in the entryway as I pulled the big door open and stepped out. The sun was completely gone now, and I was greeted by chill, dark air. I turned back to her, now nothing more than a silhouette framed by the light over the entryway.

“Good luck, Karen,” I said, and then I walked back to my truck and drove away.