The Price of Malice Read online

  At the same time, Joe eased the door up, just in time to see Nick straighten suddenly—phone still in hand—stare out the window, and begin looking around in a near panic.

  “You lied to me,” he shouted on the phone, before throwing it away and running down the hall, straight toward Joe, his eyes glued to the far end.

  Joe waited until the last possible moment, the young man’s hurtling body growing to absurd dimensions, before he threw the trapdoor back on its hinges and stood up to his full height—a super-sized gopher abruptly leaping from its hole.

  Nicky’s eyes popped wide just as Joe seized him around both knees and brought him down like a tree stump—hard and with a single resounding crash. The boy hit the floor with enough force to stun him momentarily, making Joe fear that he might have fallen on his knife.

  But it wasn’t quite over—in the sudden, startling silence, Joe heard a motion over his shoulder, in time to turn and see Becky running toward him, brandishing the very same knife.

  She never closed the gap. Through the trailer’s front door to her left, a member of Ron’s team appeared like a charging Ninja and simply catapulted her into the opposite wall like a human-sized rag doll.

  In all, it took under ten seconds, leaving everyone—as Joe had promised Richard—alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  She came at you with a knife?” Lyn asked him, her eyebrows high.

  “I thought she was the victim.”

  “She was,” Joe told her. “But in more ways than one.” They were in a car, driving toward Bangor, where they were to meet with Cathy Lawless and members of ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal cops whose jurisdiction included most crimes involving the nation’s borders.

  Joe took his hand off the steering wheel to count off on his fingers. “First, by her own family dynamics, including two brothers acting as knee-jerk fathers; an all-but-invisible jailbird stepfather; a real father no one seems to remember; and a nearly totally dysfunctional mother. Second, by Wayne Castine, who was either sleeping with her mother to get to her, or just discovered her in the same house and decided on a two-for-one conquest. And third, by the head game Nicky played with her after he caught her with Wayne in that apartment, and forced her to watch him butcher the guy.”

  “What was that all about?” Lyn asked.

  “This comes from the HCRS shrinks, the SA’s office, and our own interviews, but it looks like Nicky figured out about Wayne and Becky, which not only offended his sense of order, but further diminished his place in the family pecking order by adding another male, as if there weren’t enough already. So, one night, he followed her to Babbitt’s apartment, waited until they got comfortable, and then pounded on the door, calling out Wayne’s name. That must’ve surprised the hell out of him, even if it didn’t catch the ear of a single one of the neighbors—at least supposedly. Of course, as soon as Wayne opened up, that was it—and the beginning of Nick and Becky’s strange trip.”

  “What did he do to her?”

  “Nick?” Joe asked. “As I see it, where Wayne won her over with flattery and painted nails, Nicky brainwashed her with how she was the one really responsible for Wayne’s death. Nicky had her believing that she’d seduced Wayne, and had forced Nicky to act as a result.”

  “No wonder she was self-mutilating,” Lyn said quietly.

  “In the end,” Joe continued, “she flew at me because I was threatening the last defender she had left—the only one of the whole bunch who’d sacrificed everything to protect her.”

  “So, the hostage thing in the trailer was bogus?”

  “On that level, yes,” he answered her. “Although, given Nicky’s thinking, who knows what he might’ve done if we hadn’t found that trapdoor. He could’ve rationalized killing her to guarantee protecting her virtue. Funny,” he added a moment later, “that we figured most of it out from a single drop of blood. Wayne hit Nicky in the nose as he was going down—barely, but just enough.”

  Lyn stared out the window at the passing landscape. They’d been on I-95 for hours, and were nearing Bangor’s outskirts.

  “How do people get so messed up?”

  He glanced at her. “Are we talking about the Putnam clan, or yours?”

  She gave him a faint smile. “Good point.”

  “For what it’s worth, Lyn,” he told her, “and I know we haven’t gotten the whole story yet, I think your father was a straight arrow. I’m not saying he didn’t screw up. But I’ll almost guarantee you he was doing the best he could for his kids, right up to the end. People can be stupid, and it can cost them their lives. But I’m not a big believer that they change personalities just because the situation demands it. Keep your good memories of him alive. He deserves that.”

  He returned to negotiating the thickening traffic as she went back to watching the scenery.

  “Thanks, Joe,” she said after a couple of minutes.

  They parked by the side of a large modern office building, overlooking the Kenduskeag Stream, which Lyn immediately recognized as being close to Dick Brandhorst’s place.

  “What exactly’s going to happen here? They going to arrest him?” she asked, climbing stiffly out of the car.

  “They already have,” Joe told her. He pointed to the building looming alongside. “He’s in an ICE holding cell in there. ICE and the MDEA are cooperating on this, since it involves both drugs and the border. They’re allowing us to watch as a courtesy.”

  She considered that a moment before stating, “They’re allowing you.”

  He circled the car and slid his arm across her shoulders, kissing her cheek. “There are too few of us north of Boston to not be friendly, Lyn. Everybody knows what this cost you, and what you mean to me. I may be dead wrong, and if I am, I’ll apologize later, but I’m hoping that seeing this interview might help you out—and maybe answer a few of your questions.”

  Joe escorted her inside, rode the elevator up, and was met by a thin, somewhat dour woman whom he introduced as Dede Miller, the ICE agent assigned to neighboring Washington County. She had been part of the same task force of weeks earlier.

  Miller led them down a hallway, talking as she went. “We only picked him up a half hour ago. He waived his rights, of course, cocky bastard. Probably thinks we got nothing on him. Cathy and I were thinking of playing good-cop-bad-cop on him, hoping two women in the same room will mess him up.”

  She opened an unlabeled door, using her security pass to get them deeper into the building, and waved them in without uttering another word.

  The room was dark, lighted solely from a large glass window overlooking a similar space next door. It was a standard, if high-end, interrogation setup. Already there were two men, standing before the one-way window, who turned upon their entrance.

  The older of the two stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Joe and Lyn, right? I’m John Ferraro—the SAC for this area.” He waved a hand at the other man. “And you’ve already met Dave Beaubien, Cathy’s partner.”

  Silent Dave merely nodded his greeting. Beyond the glass, trying to look bored but with his eyes moving nonstop, sat Dick Brandhorst.

  “He say anything yet?” Joe asked, joining the first two in a single line—like spectators at an execution.

  “Just the usual innocent one-liners: Who me? This is an outrage, etcetera,” Ferraro said.

  They heard, over the speaker mounted on the wall, the opposite door’s lock suddenly snap, and both Cathy Lawless and Dede Miller stepped in, the latter carrying a slim file, which she placed before her as she sat across from Brandhorst. Cathy remained standing, leaning against the wall beside the viewing window.

  Brandhorst smiled affably. “How many others are hiding behind the mirror?” he asked. “They should come out and join the party.”

  Miller merely opened the file and said, “Not sure I’d look at it that way, Dick. You’re in deep trouble. You know a man named Wellman Beale?”

  “Am I supposed to?”

  “Not goo
d, Dick. When you avoid a direct answer, we call that a lie.”

  His eyes flicked between the two of them, although Cathy hadn’t moved. The smile stayed in place. “I meet a lot of people. I don’t always catch their names.”

  “Mr. Beale says he knows you.”

  Brandhorst nodded agreeably. “I don’t doubt he does.”

  “You don’t know the people who work for you?”

  His eyes widened slightly. “I don’t know the people at the phone company or the people who pack my groceries. You could say they work for me, too. Tough question to answer.”

  Dede Miller remained unperturbed. She slid a piece of paper across the table at him. “Speaking of the phone company, these are your office records, showing that you call Mr. Beale on a regular basis, and have for years.”

  Brandhorst didn’t look at the record. “You sure he uses that name when he deals with me?”

  Miller slid a photograph over, covering the phone bill. “That’s a picture of you and Beale. We’ve got others.”

  This time, he glanced at it, if only briefly. “Oh, yeah. Okay. Maybe I do know him—as John Clark.”

  Behind the mirror, Joe nodded approvingly. Dede Miller was starting well.

  “Why did you say you didn’t?” she asked.

  He considered his response before smiling and spreading his hands wide. “I guess he was protecting his identity for some reason. Wellman, you say? Weird. Yeah, I’ve known him forever. Bit of an asshole but a good fisherman—knows where to find the big ones.”

  “You’re saying for the record that you only know him as a fishing guide?”

  A tiny but telling hesitation was followed by, “Yeah.”

  Without comment, Cathy Lawless left her position and moved to the opposite wall, just enough out of Brandhorst’s line of vision that he had to glance over his shoulder to see her.

  “Remember,” she said softly, speaking for the first time, “we only need confirmation for what we already know, and that’s for your sake. The prosecutor will be looking at this video later, to see how straight you’ve been. Could be a jury’ll do the same thing, down the line.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he told her.

  Miller acted as if Cathy’s small exchange had never occurred. “When did you last see Mr. Beale?”

  Brandhorst faced her. “I don’t know. When was the last time you saw your dentist?”

  “Would you say it was a week ago, a month, or a year?”

  He licked his lips. “It might’ve been a few weeks.”

  She made a pointed effort to write a note to herself on a pad beside the open file.

  “How ’bout when you last saw Abílo Silva and his son José. Was that in the company of Mr. Beale?”

  No hesitation this time. The response was almost too fast. “Never heard of them.”

  Dede Miller sat back to study him. “You know, for a man who’s trying to be careful, you sure have some sloppy habits. Do you really think if we got your office phone records, we didn’t get everything else—including a long talk with Lyn Silva?”

  “What’s the difference if I met some lobsterman and his kid?” Brandhorst challenged her.

  “The difference is they died in your company.” She leaned toward him again before concluding, “Because you killed them.”

  Joe felt Lyn stiffen. “I thought he was just the moneyman,” she whispered.

  Brandhorst’s face reddened. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “Interesting answer,” Cathy said from behind him, making him whirl around.

  “It’s the truth,” he insisted.

  She smiled. “No, it’s not,” she said quietly.

  Joe took hold of Lyn’s hand. “You okay?” he asked her.

  She nodded once, not taking her eyes off the scene before them.

  “There were three of you that night,” Miller intoned next door. “You, Beale, and Beale’s sternman, Dougie O’Hearn. We already have Beale in custody.”

  “You need to be straight with us, Dick,” Cathy said, almost into his ear. “This is not the time to screw up.”

  “Beale’s lying to save his own ass,” Brandhorst said, all pretense abandoned. “He had an ax to grind with Silva I knew nothing about. One minute we’re talking—the next, he opens up. He’s the one who killed them.”

  “The evidence could support that,” Cathy commented.

  Brandhorst half rose in his chair, until Cathy laid a hand on his shoulder. “You know I didn’t shoot those two.”

  “Then tell us what happened, Dick,” Cathy urged him. “ ’Cause right now, you’re an accessory.”

  He hunched forward to stare directly at Dede. “It was a simple dope deal. No big shakes. A few pills for a few bucks. I was along for the ride. I barely knew Silva. His kid owed me for gambling debts and the old man figured he’d square the books. I was the bank, Beale was the dealer, and Silva was the mule. I introduced them a while back, after Silva asked me how to raise extra cash. Turns out they’d met a few years ago in Jonesport, on vacation or something. Anyhow, that’s all I knew till Beale invited me out for a boat ride—that’s what he called it. And then, there we were, meeting up with Silva. I was bummed—I try to keep a low profile, you know? I was angry at Beale, but what could I do? So, I hung back, trying to be inconspicuous, but then, all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose—they start yellin’ at each other, and before I can move, Beale shoots them both. I have no clue what triggered it.”

  “Where did this happen?” Dede asked.

  This time, Brandhorst was direct. “At sea. Like I said—boat-to-boat, off Grand Manan. We were standing on Silva’s stern. O’Hearn was on Beale’s boat, manning the wheel.”

  Dede cupped her cheek in her hand and looked at him pityingly. “Yeah—O’Hearn. He is the fly in the ointment, isn’t he? The guy who really messes up a nice and tidy story.” Her face became serious when she added, “Because we got him, too, and he says things went down a lot differently.”

  Brandhorst scowled. “Well, duh. O’Hearn works for Beale. What the fuck do you expect him to say?”

  “We got Beale, Dick,” Miller countered. “We got the gun, we got the bullets—one of them even has Silva’s DNA on it. And O’Hearn fingered Beale as pulling the trigger.”

  Brandhorst straightened, spreading his hands wide. “Well, there you have it.”

  “Not quite. You said you didn’t know why it happened—that it was just a dope deal gone south.”

  “So?”

  This time, Cathy produced the evidence, dangling a small plastic envelope before his eyes. Even from the observation room, they could see the same small computer component that Lyn and Steve had discovered in the old barometer.

  “So,” Cathy said. “We were wondering why this doesn’t look like dope.”

  Brandhorst froze at the sight of it, inches from his face. Then his shoulders slumped, his eyes dropped to the tabletop, and he muttered, “Shit.”

  “Talk to me, Dick.”

  He shook his head. “If that greedy bastard hadn’t held that back for more money, we would’ve been fine. But he wanted the whole debt wiped clean—his kid off the hook.”

  “So you ordered them killed,” Cathy stated, “like O’Hearn and Beale claim you did.”

  Brandhorst almost sounded sad. “It was the principle of the thing. The deal was for the dope. That”—he indicated the contents of the envelope—“was a favor—something Silva was supposed to bring over for free. But we couldn’t find it afterward, when we went through their pockets. I didn’t make a big deal about it then, ’cause I’d kept Beale outside the loop. I figured I’d search the boat later. But the stupid jerk told me it sank in a storm. He sacrificed a fortune for the value of a goddamn boat. Whole thing was a fucking disaster.”

  “Until Silva’s daughter walked into your office.”

  “Yeah,” he mourned. “I couldn’t believe it—looked like the break of a lifetime.”

  Lyn broke away from the line at
the window and walked unsteadily toward the door. “I feel sick,” she whispered.

  Joe grabbed her by the waist, dance-stepped her into the hallway, and down two doors into a unisex bathroom they’d passed earlier. There, she hovered before the sink, her hands resting on its edge, her breathing coming fast and deep.

  Joe rubbed her back with one hand and held her hair back with the other. “Feel free if you need to,” he urged her.

  “It’s not like I didn’t know,” she gasped. “It was just listening to that son of a bitch. I’m just a little dizzy. I’ll be okay.”

  She reached out and ran the cold water, cupped some in her hand and splashed it on her face. She looked up and caught his eye in the mirror. “He will go away for this, won’t he?”

  Joe nodded, handing her some paper towels from the nearby dispenser. “ ’Cause of the border involvement, it’s a federal rap; O’Hearn says Brandhorst ordered Beale to shoot; and both Beale’s and O’Hearn’s stories are perfect matches. Pinning the computer piece to Brandhorst was the final nail. Whatever it is, it’s clearly worth a lot, and once they analyze it and find out where it came from, that should guarantee his going away for a long, long time—he and Beale, both.”

  She straightened and vaguely mopped her face dry.

  “Would you like to leave?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  She looked surprised. “That’s okay?”

  “Of course,” he told her, and led the way.

  Outside, he steered a course across the parking lot toward the nearby Kenduskeag Stream, which in this section of town was mostly a concrete canal. The sun felt good on their shoulders after the air-conditioning behind them, and the water’s noisy rush to meet the broader embrace of the nearby Penobscot River added to Lyn’s recovery.

  She stood by the bank, lost in the gentle tumult before them, as Joe slipped his arm around her waist.

  “I read something once,” she commented at last, “probably an article in a doctor’s office—I don’t remember. It was about distant fathers. How they become larger than life because we never get to know them. They grow to be godlike, guaranteeing that, sooner or later, their kids will pay the price.”