Big Bad, page 38
“It’s all set,” he said, and blew into his hands. His cheeks were flushed from the cold. “He wasn’t there. Place is usually dead Sunday afternoons, though.”
“That’s okay. Make the call,” Emma said. “He’ll show.”
Jim took out his phone, dialed Chief Bayard, and sold him the story, just as they’d planned it. Then they sat and waited.
5
Bayard’s cruiser pulled into the police station’s parking lot fifteen minutes later. From a distance, Jim, Guppy, and Emma sat and watched as a frantic Bayard, not in uniform, hustled his tall frame across the snow-dusted asphalt and into the front entrance. He was inside for twenty minutes or so, before exiting the building, getting back into his cruiser, and leaving.
“Well, shit,” Jim said, stunned. “I think it worked.”
“It worked,” Guppy said assuredly. “That was a fella with an agenda.”
“Only one way to find out,” Emma said, looking over her shoulder at Jim.
“Right,” he said. “Be back in a sec.”
Jim got out and jogged up the street to the station. He returned a couple minutes later with the Go-Pro camera. He leaned forward into the front seat so they all could view it, then pressed the play button to see what the camera had captured in the evidence room. The video was almost an hour long, but only about three minutes of it mattered.
When the video was finished playing on the Go-Pro’s little LCD screen, Jim sat back and said, “I don’t believe it. The son of a bitch is dirty.”
“You act surprised,” Emma said. “Seemed like you already knew it.”
“It’s one thing to think it,” Jim said, shaking his head. “But it’s another to see it in action. Man, I trusted that guy. He could be a hard-ass, but he was always decent to me.”
“Guy was desperate,” Emma said. “His wife was dying. He probably is a decent guy.”
“Everybody’s got a reason they think is good enough.” Jim scoffed, looking out the window. Then he set his angry, searching eyes on Emma. “And of all people, why the hell would you make excuses for him? He probably covered up your sister’s murder.”
“I’m not making excuses for him,” Emma said.
“Sure seems like it.”
“You really think I’m not pissed off?” Emma said. “But anger gets us nowhere. I need you to get in the right mindset. If we go to him with this video, acting like a lynch mob that wants to string him up, he’ll just shut down. If he’s gonna be of any use, we gotta treat him like a person, not a criminal. Appeal to him as if we understand. You corner an animal, you better offer a way out… unless you want a fight.”
Silent tension filled the car for a moment.
“She’s right,” Guppy said, neutralizing the charged atmosphere.
“Yeah, I know she’s right,” Jim said, begrudgingly accepting it. “So what now?”
“Let’s go pay your boss a visit,” Emma said. “See if he’s looking for a way out.”
6
They were parked in front of Bayard’s home. White Christmas lights were still wrapped around his porch rails. A dried-out wreath on the front door with a crinkled red bow. His cruiser sat in the driveway. Fresh boot prints in the snow. Fresh tire tracks behind the vehicle. Jim had taken his own SUV cruiser and led them there. He stepped out, pulled his sweatshirt over the gun on his hip, and looked toward Guppy’s cab. Squinting against the snow, he gestured to Bayard’s house with a little nod.
Guppy let out a breath he didn’t seem to know he’d been holding. It looked like he was contemplating the house, but Emma had an idea it was more like who and what were waiting inside that was on his mind.
“Everything okay?” she said.
After a reluctant beat, he said, “I think I’ll sit this one out.”
Hand on the door latch, about to step out, she turned and looked at him. “You sure?”
“Yeah, you guys are the professionals. I’m a cab driver, not a cowboy. And definitely not a cop.”
“And I’m just a sculptor with a broken hand. Remember?”
Guppy forced a laugh. “This ain’t the movies, and I got no business in there pretending I do.” He shrugged. “No, I’ve been happy to help you, ma’am, but I’m a little too old and a lot unqualified for where it looks like this’s headed.” He looked at her directly and smiled genuinely, but something was troubling him. Authentic turmoil churned behind his eyes. “Truth is, I don’t think I want to see his face. When a man’s caught, it’s a hard thing to watch, and I don’t think I wanna see it. There’s not much satisfaction in a thing like that, ma’am.”
“No, there isn’t,” she said. “Most things aren’t black and white, good versus evil. It’s never that clear a line. No shame in understanding that.”
Guppy nodded. “I known his wife, Karen, forty years… Leslie Bayard even longer. None of this is right coming from me. I shouldn’t be involved in this. It’s different for you two.”
Emma considered the complexity of the man sitting beside her. Guppy, who had just shot a dead man in an act of closure—or compromise, as he’d put it—who had made sure the man who had killed his son was dead before he had put a bullet in him, who was also too considerate to step outside what he felt was his place in the small community of Rockcliffe. All this because of an unflappable moral compass, and Emma respected the man deeply for that. For being so decently human.
“Why don’t you head out. You don’t need to be here for this.” She didn’t want him to have to say what she knew he so desperately wanted to but pride would not allow.
“Can’t do that, ma’am. We made a deal.”
“You’ve more than held up your end. Go on. It’s fine. I need anything, I know who to call. You’re my man, Guppy. He and I can handle this. You don’t have to wait,” she said, then looked at Jim, who was standing in the falling snow, shoulders pulled up to his ears, face scrunched and starting to look impatient.
Guppy smiled and offered an appreciative little nod. “You need me, don’t hesitate. Call and I’ll answer first ring.” He paused, then added, “I appreciate it, ma’am.”
“I know you do,” Emma said, and opened the door and stepped out. Guppy had already begun pushing in his earbuds as she closed the door. A moment later he drove away.
“Where’s he going?” Jim said as he came walking over, hands tucked in the front pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.
“He didn’t have any business going any further with this,” Emma said.
“Your idea or his?” Jim said. He didn’t ask in a spiteful way. It was honest curiosity.
“He knew it,” Emma said, and started toward Bayard’s front door.
“He know not to say anything to anyone? Especially not about what we got on this camera?” Jim said, sidling up alongside her. “Because who the hell knows who else the Pelkeys got on their payroll. He could blab to the wrong person and—”
“He really strike you as the type who’s gonna go blab?” Emma said as they walked up the porch steps.
“No. Guess not.” Jim raised his hand to knock on the front door. But on the downstroke, Emma put out her arm and stopped him. “What?” he said.
Emma pointed. “Use the doorbell. A human, not a criminal, remember? We’re not serving a search warrant.”
Jim rang the doorbell.
A few moments later, the door opened and a petite woman with a short pixie cut of baby-fine gray hair greeted them. “Hi, Jim,” she said, and smiled warmly, if a little puzzled. She had a sweet face and eyes that had weathered a hard life. “Looking for Les?”
“Hi, Karen,” Jim said, shoulders slumped. He had the look of a guilty child who knew he was about to disappoint a parent with news of something bad he’d done—or something he’d broken. Or in this case, perhaps, something he was about to break. “He in?”
She folded her arms, then looked between Jim and Emma and at her husband’s car parked in the driveway. “Everything okay? Not much on a Sunday ever important enough can’t wait until Monday. Have something to do with why he just ran out and back?” She flicked her eyes to Emma.
Emma stuck out her hand. “Emma Shane, ma’am.”
Karen met it. Her grip was somehow weak and strong at the same time, like fragile bones worked by determined muscles that refused to quit. “Forgive me, but who are you, Ms. Shane?”
“Your husband helped out on my sister’s case,” Emma said.
“Your sister?”
“Molly Rifkin. She committed suicide last week,” Emma said, and for the first time, it felt perfectly easy to say those words. She supposed it was because she no longer had that itch of doubt in the back of her mind, daring her to consider the possibility that maybe her sister had actually taken her own life. Now if she had to pretend to believe the lie, so be it, because she knew it was exactly that: a lie.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Karen Bayard said, and breathed in deeply and slowly, then stepped back. “Well, if you’re making a house call, must be important, Jim.”
“Nothing serious. Believe me, I know how he feels about pop-ins. But he didn’t answer his phone when I called, so… Won’t take long. Just something we shouldn’t wait on,” Jim said, and faked a smile that was meant to carry the weight his lie couldn’t.
“He’s back in his office,” Karen said, not trying very hard to hide her suspicion. “I think he’s on the telephone.”
Emma could tell that the chief of police’s wife was not a woman easily fooled, but she did seem like someone who knew when it wasn’t her place to get involved.
“Well, come in,” she said. “And wipe your feet. He just mopped the floors this morning, and he’ll have a conniption, you track mud and sand across the new hardwood. He loves that oak more than he does me.” She laughed, but it felt a little forced.
Emma wondered if Karen Bayard had any clue what sacrifices her husband had made for her. She suspected not. Not fully, anyway. At most they might have had an unspoken knowledge between them—how sums of money they shouldn’t have could suddenly appear and be the answer to their prayers was likely something too big to be ignored—but she doubted Bayard had ever sat his wife down and given it to her straight.
Emma and Jim came inside and stomped their feet on the mat in the mudroom. Karen pulled her sweater closed and went into the kitchen, where a teakettle was taking a blue flame on the stove and starting to whistle.
“You know where it is, Jim,” she said, turning off the burner and pulling a mug down from a shelf above the sink.
“Thank you,” he said, and offered her a polite little tip of the head, which she didn’t see.
Emma followed him down a hallway until they reached a door at the back of the house. It was open a crack, and a muffled voice filtered out from the other side. Jim pushed the door open with the back of his hand.
Bayard was sitting at his desk, talking on the phone. He stopped mid-sentence, all the features of his face dropping an inch when he saw the two of them standing in the doorway. “I’ll have to talk to you later… Yeah, uh-huh. Gotta go… Yes, later.” He hung up the phone, his eyes never leaving them. “What’s going on, Jim?” Then his gaze snapped to Emma. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Chief,” Jim said dourly.
Emma offered a sympathetic look and said nothing. She and Jim came into the room and shut the door behind them. Bayard looked tired. Run-down. His white hair was uncombed, his chin covered in stubble. Though it was unzipped now, he still had on the same tan canvas field jacket they’d seen him in when he’d scurried across the parking lot and into the police station a half hour ago.
“Someone gonna say something?” Bayard pushed back from his desk, tossed up his hands, and let them fall into his lap.
“Sir, I have to ask you to keep your hands on the desk,” Jim said with shaky confidence. But he managed to push through it well enough.
“What?”
“I’m afraid I mean it, Chief.” Jim’s hand crept back to his hip.
Bayard’s eye tracked Jim’s hand. “Why are you armed in my house, Officer Highmore? And what in the blue fuck are you thinking reaching for it?”
“Please don’t make me ask you again, Chief. Put your hands on the desk and we’ll talk. You know how I gotta do this.”
“Do what, for Christ’s sake? You’re standing in my home. Your superior officer’s home.”
Bayard and Jim exchanged a hostile beat of silence, eyes locked. Jim’s hand stayed near the bulge on his hip. Bayard’s hands stayed resting on his thighs.
Emma pulled the Go-Pro from her pocket and stepped forward. “Let’s just take a look at this and let it speak for itself.”
“What’s that?” Bayard said, his hard look softened by a glimpse of fear as he tried to study the little plastic silver-and-black cube in Emma’s hand. He didn’t know if it should be a threat or not.
“This is a camera. And on it”—she turned the LCD screen toward him and pressed play—“is you. In case you get any ideas, this isn’t the only copy, and we aren’t the only ones who have it.” The last bit was a lie, but she didn’t want him trying anything foolish.
As Bayard watched, he slowly leaned forward and brought his hands off his lap and set them on the desk. Emma could see his demeanor transform before her eyes: a slow shift from outrage to panic to apologetic guilt then finally to something close to relief. When the clip of Bayard in the evidence room finished playing, he looked toward the window to his right and released a deliberate breath. It was the sound of a heavy weight finally sliding off his shoulders. Emma dropped the Go-Pro back into her coat pocket and watched Rockcliffe’s chief of police internalize the change to his situation.
“You set me up,” Bayard said, gazing out the window, shaking his head.
“You set this whole damn island up,” Jim said, his temper starting to slip. But he caught himself and dialed it back. He was standing off to the side like a sentry, while Emma took a more front-and-center position.
Bayard looked over at him and nodded slowly. “I know what I did.”
“So you admit it?” Jim said, sounding both appalled and disappointed.
“Would it be your preference that I lie?” Bayard shook his head again and turned back to the window. “Gotten used to that, Lord knows. And I don’t think I really want to anymore. I’m too old and too damn tired.” He paused, then looked at Jim and said, “All that nonsense about running the bullets for fingerprints, that was all some trap, wasn’t it? That’s pretty good, Jim.”
“Wasn’t my idea,” Jim said.
Bayard looked at Emma. “Nancy Drew?” he said softly, almost with a trace of approval in his tone. “Guess I was right to worry about you.”
Emma, hands in her pockets, shrugged. “A community this tight, it was a pretty safe bet you knew Adam Winthrop reloaded his own ammunition. Figured if Jim called and told you the rounds looked like hand reloads and he was thinking of taking them apart and dusting for prints, you might panic that he’d actually find something that pointed toward Adam. That’d be much tougher to cover up. I’m sure the gun and the rounds had already been wiped clean, but only on the outside. If Adam was reloading them himself, handling all the components, he could’ve left a partial print on one of the bullets before he pressed it in. I figured you’d put that together and then try to swap out all the rounds in evidence, replace them with factory-loads, just in case.”
Bayard cocked a mild self-deprecating grin, then ran a hand across his mouth. “Like I said, I was right to worry. Maybe you should’ve been a cop.”
“I thought about it,” Emma said. “The FBI had a bigger sandbox.”
“FBI? No shit. I never even considered it,” Bayard said casually, nodding and frowning with approval. Then something darker dawned on his face. “I should probably call a lawyer before I make things worse for myself.”
“Is that the way you want it to go?” Emma said.
“Shoot, you know another way, I’m all ears.”
“I know the look of a person who’s trying to get a handle on a clean conscience,” Emma said, “and I see that look on you.”
“Is that what you see?”
“When this all gets investigated—and I promise you, it will get investigated—it won’t take long for the state police, the FBI, and whoever else needs to get involved to unravel this. And when they do, anyone who’s close to the top is gonna get it bad. And a chief of police?” Emma shook her head and made an I-wouldn’t-want-to-be-you face. “Juries don’t like it when authority figures abuse their positions of power. You could be looking at spending the rest of your life in jail.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bayard said under his breath. “It was never supposed to be like this. I know everybody says that, but it’s true.”
“I believe you,” Emma said compassionately. “I don’t think you signed on to protect murderers. It probably seemed harmless at first, but once you get involved in something like that, there’s no going back, and when it starts down a path you never thought it would, you have no choice but to follow it where it goes. You think you got a grip on it, but it gets away from you.”
Bayard’s eyes were glassy and red-rimmed. “Isn’t that just about the size of the damn truth?” He gave a little humorless laugh. “Doesn’t make it any easier to know, I guess.”
“I don’t know. You tell me,” Emma said.
“When Karen got sick, I just… I don’t know. I didn’t see any other option, other than doing whatever I could to give her the best odds. And it worked… for a little while.” A tear fell down Bayard’s leathery cheek. “The cancer’s back, and to be honest, I can’t tell you I wouldn’t do it again if I thought it’d buy her some more time.”
“I know.”
“You say that a lot, don’t you?”
“Say what?”
“That you know,” Bayard said, a moodier tone sliding into his voice. “And I bet you do know. I bet everything’s just there for you to see. You got a wolf’s eyes and a mind to match. I guess we’re just all sheep caught under a full moon. Think I don’t know you’re trying to manipulate me right now?”
