Big Bad, page 19
“Okay,” Emma said. “Now think for a second. Don’t tell me what you did. Tell me what you saw. Anything seem out of the ordinary? Did you see anything that caught your eye?”
“Like what?” Scotty asked.
“People, cars, sounds. Anything,” Emma said. “Don’t leave anything out just because you think it’s too small to mention.”
“No. There was nothing. The park was empty.” Scotty shrugged when Emma didn’t avert her gaze. “What? It was a friggin blizzard outside.”
“Do you know where my nephew lives? Which house, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you see anyone come out of it while you were in the park?” Emma asked.
“No one that I saw,” Scotty said. Then he hesitated. A thought had crossed his mind.
“What?”
“There was a truck.” He nodded. “A plow truck. That’s right. I remember the flashing lights.”
“There are plows everywhere. Why would that one stand out to you in a snowstorm?”
“Because it was just sitting there at the corner, a few houses down from the house you asked about.”
“Describe it to me.”
“I don’t need to. I know who it was. His name’s Mike Harrow. I see his truck all the time around town.”
She’d heard the name earlier that day when Ben had mentioned it. He’d told her that he and Molly had run into Mike at the grocery store while getting supplies for the blizzard.
“You sure that’s who it was?” she said.
“I’m sure. A hundred percent,” Scotty said, nodding enthusiastically. “It says it right across the side of his truck in friggin huge green letters.”
3
“You get your pound of flesh?” Guppy asked, grinning, as Emma got back in the cab. He removed his headphones and started winding them around his hand.
“Something like that. Here,” she said, and handed him the to-go box with his slice of pizza in it. The corner was sopped with grease.
“Thanks. Don’t know what you said to the poor kid, but I could see his face. When you turned and left, he looked like someone just did a dance on his grave.” Guppy shook his head. “Yeesh.”
Maybe she had gone too far, making fun of a kid. Some of it had been necessary to get what she was after, but some of it had been about her wanting to make Scotty hurt a little. She had accomplished both. Scotty was collateral damage she could accept.
“I said as much as I had to,” she said.
“I ain’t judging. So long as you don’t judge me as I stop up my arteries with meat and cheese. What the doc don’t know won’t hurt him, right?” He opened the box and took a huge bite of the greasy pizza. “I’m supposed to watch my cholesterol, but what fun is that?” he said, his mouth full. He reached into the center console, pulled out a napkin, and wiped it across his chin.
“You know where I can find a guy named Mike Harrow?”
“I know where you can find his shop. He owns a tree service. There’s a chance he might be there. Although it is Saturday”—he pronounced Saturday with the last syllable coming out as dee instead of day—“so he might not be, either. We can check if you like. It’s not far. Just let me finish up my lunch and we’ll head out.”
Emma sat back and looked out the window at the sidewalk bustling with townsfolk dressed in their winter clothes. “Do you still like Rockcliffe?”
Guppy looked at her in the rearview a beat—perhaps contemplating her use of the word still in her phrasing—before moving his head from side to side in a comme ci comme ça gesture. “It’s a place to live.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Emma said as she watched a little girl cross the street while holding her mother’s hand.
More seriously, more nakedly—and this was the side of Guppy that Emma liked—he said, “You mean, do I resent this place for taking my son?”
Emma pulled her gaze away from the window and found Guppy’s eyes in the rearview. “Do you?”
“Do you blame Rockcliffe for taking your sister?”
“I don’t know,” Emma said steadily. “I haven’t decided yet.”
Guppy gave her a knowing smile. “Me either.”
4
After a fifteen-minute drive across the island, they arrived at a gray metal building with a large green garage door. It looked like one of those prefab workshop jobs. As Guppy pulled off the road and into the parking lot, Emma squinted to read the sign hanging above the garage door: HARROW’S TREE SERVICE 1-978-555-TMBR.
Guppy leaned across the seat and peered out the passenger-side window. “I don’t see his truck. We can come back. Or you could jot that number down and give him a buzz, leave a message.”
Emma surveyed the scene. Cold. Desolate. The parking lot was a landscape of frozen tire ruts and tall mounds of dirty snow pushed to the side. Toward the back sat a mountain of firewood. At its base, a poorly painted plywood sign read SEASONED FIREWOOD, $350 A CORD.
“I won’t be long,” Emma said.
“Doesn’t look like he’s here,” Guppy said. “You know something I don’t?”
“Just playing it by ear. I’ll be right back.”
Guppy shifted in his seat, adjusted his cap, rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, and cleared his throat.
“Something wrong?” Emma said, staring at the rearview and waiting for his eyes to meet hers there.
They did, and the look in them was sincere. “I don’t mind being your driver—or whatever it is I’m doing for you—but I’m really not comfortable being involved in anything illegal. Like breaking and entering, if that’s what’s on your mind.” Guppy lifted his hands as if showing he was innocent. “Just, I dunno, keep that in mind while you’re playing it by ear.” He dropped his eyes.
She hesitated a moment, then decided he deserved her honesty. “You asked if I was a cop yesterday. I said I wasn’t… which is only sort of the truth. I used to be an agent for the FBI.”
“I had a feeling it was something like that,” Guppy said. “Not anymore, though?”
“Not for the last year.”
Guppy strained, turning as far as he could in his seat, and looked at her. “What happened?”
“Short version?” Emma said, her hand resting on the door latch.
“Up to you.”
“I opened a closet and a ten-year-old boy shot me with a load of birdshot.”
“Ouch. That where you got the scars from?”
“That’s where I got the scars,” Emma said, as if tired of owning that part of her. She lifted her hand off the door and dragged her fingers across the side of her neck, feeling the dimpled scar tissue.
He shook his head in disbelief. “Shot by a ten-year-old? What’d make a kid do something like that?”
“His father told him to,” Emma said flatly, as if it made perfect sense. And to the boy, it had.
“Some kind of father.”
“Some kind of father,” Emma repeated back under her breath.
“So who was he? The father, I mean. Couldn’t’ve been anyone good.”
“He was a guy named Steve Kenny. A construction worker from Tennessee. He raped and murdered seven children in the Memphis area over a two-year period. All of them between the ages of five and twelve. We were there for him.”
“Jesus Christ. That’s… Did you get him?”
“He had every inch of his property covered with cameras. Saw us coming a mile away. By the time we made it in the house, he was gone, left his kid behind as a surprise for us.”
“What a piece of work.” Guppy’s head continued to shake disapprovingly. “So is this guy still out there?”
“No. As careful as he was, he ended up getting himself caught a few weeks later because of a busted taillight, of all things.”
“Thank Christ! I was gonna say…” He trailed off. “How’d it go for you?”
“One of the pellets nicked my jugular. I spent a week in the hospital. It would’ve been a lot worse if the kid had known the difference between birdshot and buckshot when he was loading his father’s gun.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“Thank someone,” Emma said.
Guppy seemed to stall, and his brow slowly began to knit together as he focused in on a thought.
“What?” Emma finally asked.
“I guess I’m wondering what made you call it quits. You don’t strike me as someone who gives up.”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe that.”
She contemplated for a second, then said, “There are any number of people who can do the job. I could. I was good at it. But it takes a certain type to keep going once you figure out the way it really is.”
“And what way is that?”
“There’s no end,” Emma said. “Catch one today, and there’ll be a hundred more Steve Kennys tomorrow. So what’s the point?”
“If you can stop just one, isn’t that enough?”
Emma shrugged. “I guess not.”
Guppy finally turned back around and put the car in park. “You didn’t really expect to save the world, did you?”
Emma felt as though she had just been flicked in the center of her forehead and told: Don’t be so naïve. She opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be here. Don’t do anything stupid.” Guppy grabbed his thermos and started unscrewing the cap.
“Don’t worry.” Emma stepped out. The air was cold and smelled like pine.
5
Emma’s sneakers crunched in the snow as she crossed the parking lot and went to the entrance on the corner of the building. It was a white door made of metal and had a steel doorknob. She knocked, her knuckles feeling inconsequential rapping against the slab, then tucked her hands—her right one throwing off a dim, reminding ache—into her coat pockets and waited. When no one answered, she turned and looked at Guppy sitting in the car. He was looking down at something. Probably a crossword puzzle. Or perhaps he was fiddling with his iPod, listening to whatever it was that he listened to while the car radio simultaneously played jazz.
She knocked again, waited another ten seconds, then stepped away from the door and peered down the side of the building. A fifteen-foot-wide strip of packed snow, covered in bits of tree debris and different-sized tread marks, led around back, where the property seemed to open up into a small field.
She started along the building and stopped when she reached the end. The strip continued on into the back field, becoming something like a road that wandered through pyramidal stacks of tree logs and long piles of tree branches and stumps. A backhoe and a small excavator sat off to the side like workers on break. Parked beside them was a yellow truck, fitted with a plow. On its door HARROW’S TREE SERVICE was stenciled in dark-green letters.
When she walked beyond the back corner of the building, she came upon a second garage door. This one was standing open and she went toward it, her eyes shifting between it and the truck as she went.
She stepped inside the building. “Hello?” Her voice echoed in the open space of the ceiling above her.
No one answered.
The place was full of equipment, but what caught her eye the most was the large assortment of chainsaws. It was viscerally unsettling, the way that tool whined and shrieked like a rabid schizophrenic when it was in use. She’d never liked them. Her father used to use one in the springtime when he was cleaning up the property from the winter storms, and it had always drummed up a sense of unease in her. She felt that same feeling now.
To her immediate left, what looked like maybe an office or a storeroom had been built into the corner. She couldn’t tell which because it was windowless. The door was covered in smudges of grease around the knob, and more smudges that looked like prints from fat fingers ran up and down the white jamb.
She tried a knock on this door. “Hello?”
More silence.
“No one’s home, I guess,” she said, and turned around.
“Can I help you?”
A tall man with a big beard was standing in the garage door. For a split second, he resembled something close to her father—it was the beard—but her mind quickly dispelled the association. Emma’s first impression put him in his mid-forties. He was handsome, with a winter-tan complexion and curly brown hair, and looked to be in good shape for someone at middle age. But something was hidden below the surface of his face. Something that hurt. Whatever it was, he seemed to wince and bury it deeper when he saw Emma.
The man had a little orange-and-white corgi on a leash by his side. It looked suspiciously at her and barked twice.
He gave the leash a gentle tug. “Elvis, zip it.” Then to her, he said, “Sorry about that. He’s all butt and no bite. You got nothin to worry about.”
Elvis zipped it as he’d been told and started sniffing around a puddle of slush on the concrete floor, his bulbous hindquarters waggling from side to side as he circled it.
“I’m looking for Mike Harrow,” Emma said, stepping forward, keeping her hands in her pockets.
“You found him,” Mike said. He squatted down, undid Elvis’s leash, and patted his side. “Go on, buddy, go get some lunch.”
Elvis’s face lit up. He licked his chops and then started a high-speed waddle across the shop toward a mound of dry dog food in a blue plastic bowl. He began to eat at once.
“My name’s Emma Shane. I need to talk to you about something.”
From his squatted position, Mike seemed to consider her. After a moment, he stood and hung the leash on a hook on the wall. With his back still turned, he said, “You’re Molly’s sister.”
“That’s right,” Emma said, wondering if someone had alerted him about her.
Mike pressed a button beside the hook where he hung the leash. A chunky rattle echoed overhead, and the garage door started to come down. “I gotta shut this. The place takes forever to warm up.” He pushed another button on the wall and something ticked on and began to blow air behind Emma.
“I take it you knew her,” Emma said.
Mike turned around. “You look a bit like her. For a second there, I thought I was…” He laughed humorlessly, and his features suddenly looked sunken—a man who hadn’t found sleep for days. “She mentioned she had a sister named Emma once. That’s how I knew. I didn’t mean to sound so creepy about it.”
Emma shrugged and felt the warning flutter in her gut back off some. “I didn’t see you at the service this morning. Were you close with Molly?”
He seemed to be looking through her. “Close? No, not really.”
“But close enough for her to mention me?” Emma said dubiously.
Mike blinked, as if his mind had just returned from somewhere. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“Sorry about what?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “We were friends, but weren’t that close, I guess. Small-town syndrome. Everybody knows everybody, to some degree.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Emma asked.
“I saw her the day she, you know…” He scratched the side of his face, his eyes steeling over. “The day she died. Her and Benji, I saw em both at the store.”
“What’d you talk about?”
Mike smiled dimly, a look of honest reflection. “The weather… literally. There was a big storm headed in, and we chatted about that for a couple minutes. Can I ask why you’re grilling me with so many questions?”
“Just looking for some closure. I heard you were one of the last people to see her alive. She seem okay to you when you spoke?”
“I’m real sorry about what happened.”
“Me too,” Emma said.
“Anyway, yeah, she seemed fine. Normal.” Mike turned, opened the grease-smudged door, and flipped on a fluorescent light. Inside were a couple filing cabinets, a corkboard on the wall, and a gray desk covered in papers and unopened mail.
“What were you doing parked outside her house later that evening?”
It wasn’t lost on Emma that, in her haste, she had put herself in a vulnerable position. She was alone in there with a stranger twice her size, and except for her penknife, which she always kept in her coat pocket, she was unarmed.
Mike’s face wrung into a Who, me? expression. “Who said that?”
“Doesn’t matter. Small town, remember?” Emma said, staying her course. “What were you doing there?”
“Shit.” Mike crossed his arms, leaned against the doorjamb, and shook his head. There was turmoil inside him. He didn't say anything right away, just stared at her. It was a hard look that slowly slid away to something soft and helpless. He closed his eyes and let out a sigh equal to the weight of it all. His lips parted and then his face gave him away entirely, displaying in full what he had been trying to hide since Emma had offered her name to him: Molly meant something to him, and he was grieving her death.
Jesus, Mol, this guy too? Emma thought.
“How long had you been seeing my sister?” she said, trying to take some of the edge off her tone and offer something like sympathy.
Mike didn’t hesitate or deny it. “Almost a year,” he said, and two fat tears spilled from his eyes, disappearing into his beard.
“What happened that night?” Emma asked. “What were you doing there?”
Mike seemed to consider this a moment, then countered: “Why’d you really come here with all these questions? Tell me that first.”
“Not for closure,” Emma said.
Mike nodded approvingly. “Good.” He knuckled the tears from his eyes, gained his composure, and looked at Emma straight on for the first time since their exchange began. “I honestly don’t know what happened after she left, but I don’t believe Molly shot herself. Someone did this to her. I know it.”
6
Done with his lunch, Elvis waddled back over and curled up on the round flannel dog pillow in the corner. The heater had started to warm up the shop. Not much, but Molly couldn’t see her breath anymore.
“I’m gonna make a cup of coffee. You want one?” Mike asked.
“I’m all set,” Emma said. “Just tell me about that evening.”
Mike went over to his workbench, which had a small Keurig coffee maker and bowl of K-Cups on it. He set a mug in the port, popped in one of the coffee pods, set the thing brewing, took a seat on a stool, and interlaced his fingers in his lap. “There’s not a whole lot to tell, to be honest. I’m sure I have as many questions as you.”
