Bad Things Happen Read online

  Elizabeth blinked at hearing Loogan’s real name. She looked through the driver’s window at the front seat and saw the usual detritus of a stakeout: a tall thermos and a half-eaten sandwich, a folded newspaper with a crossword mostly filled in. No sign of a weapon, and Denham didn’t seem to be wearing a holster under his suit jacket.

  “You don’t have to worry,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts. “I don’t have a gun. Haven’t carried one since I retired. I don’t plan to try any cowboy stunts. If I see Malone I’ll call it in.” He flashed a cell phone and slipped it back in his pocket. “Technology,” he said. “When I was young we had radios and nightsticks. Now you’ve got Tasers and cell phones.”

  He tipped his chin up at Loogan’s porch. “Who were you talking to there, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Chief McCaleb,” Elizabeth said. “And before that, Loogan—or Malone, if you like. I’m trying to lure him in. But he’s got his own agenda. He thinks he’s going to fi nd out who really stabbed Michael Beccanti, and he thinks that’s going to tell him who killed Tom Kristoll.”

  “You think he’s telling the truth—he’s not the one who stabbed this fellow Beccanti?”

  “Yes. Though that puts me in the minority around the department, especially since you showed up and we found out about Jimmy Wade Peltier.”

  Denham produced a pack of cigarettes from a shirt pocket. Shook one loose, but didn’t light it. “It may surprise you,” he said, “but I tend to agree. 2 3 4 h a r r y

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  Like I said yesterday, I never expected to find Darrell Malone mixed up in something like this. I don’t think he’s a violent man, not at the root of him. What happened that night—up there on that parking deck—it was a fluke. Peltier provoked him.”

  Elizabeth watched him roll the cigarette between his finger and thumb, consider it, and slip it back in his pocket.

  “Do you think you got the real story?” she said. “About what happened that night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I listened to your briefing, and I read the file. Loogan—Malone—

  stabbed Peltier, and Peltier went down. He was no longer a threat. Malone went to call for help. Then came back and stabbed Peltier a few more times for good measure. Do you think that’s really what happened?”

  Denham turned his face up to the dark sky, considering the question.

  “That’s the story Malone told, and the wounds were consistent with it. What’s the alternative?”

  “It occurs to me that it wasn’t just the two of them up there,” said Elizabeth. “There was the woman—Charlotte Rittenour. She was unconscious for a time, but suppose she came to while Malone was calling for help. And there’s Peltier lying right nearby, the knife in him. She’s disoriented, terrified. Maybe he moves. She grabs the knife and stabs him.”

  “And then Malone takes the blame for it?”

  “He’s being noble,” Elizabeth said. “He figures she’s gone through enough.”

  Denham set his weary eyes on her. “It might be easier to take, if it happened that way. But we interviewed Charlotte Rittenour, and we questioned Malone every which way. His story was always the same. There’s no reason to think it didn’t happen the way he told us.”

  His smoker’s voice dropped low. Elizabeth heard sympathy in it. He said, “You like him—Malone. It’s all right. There’s no shame in it. I got to like him too. I think he’s an honorable man, in his way. But there’s no question about what he did to Jimmy Peltier.”

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  Loogan crossed through the empty lobby and rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The doors opened and a man with a briefcase stood waiting. For a second Loogan froze, but the man gave him a bored look and stood aside to let him pass.

  Loogan had the key ready when he reached the Gray Streets door. He listened for a moment with his ear close to the pebbled glass. No sound, no light inside.

  He turned the key, went in, and locked the door behind him. Sliding his glasses into his pocket, he made his way to Sandy Vogel’s desk and switched on her lamp. A stack of envelopes rested on her blotter: stories from eager writers, unsolicited and probably unpublishable.

  At the edge of the blotter lay a leather-bound notebook: Sandy’s day planner. Loogan opened it and glanced through some of the entries. Many of them were personal—a meeting at her daughter’s middle school, a reminder to pick up her son from band practice. Out of curiosity, Loogan paged back to the day Tom Kristoll died. No dark secrets were revealed to him. He paged forward and spotted an entry for Saturday, November 7. Tomorrow. Brunch at 11 with board at LK’s.

  He closed the book, rolled the chair back from the desk, and spun slowly in a circle, thinking. After a moment he tapped the space bar on the keyboard of Sandy Vogel’s computer and watched the monitor come to life. Ten minutes later he had what he needed and was back in his car heading out of town.

  The moon glowed full overhead as Elizabeth made the turn onto her street. She had spent a while with Denham, trading stories, and then she had left him behind at David Loogan’s house. He promised her he wouldn’t stay much longer; he would get something to eat and get some rest. She had her window rolled down a few inches as she coasted along her 2 3 6 h a r r y

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  street, barely touching the gas. A cool current of wind took her hair. She saw her house from a distance: the silhouette of the elm out front, the light of the porch, framed by the eaves and the posts and the railing. There were figures in the light. One of them was Sarah, the other was distinctly male. She knew at once it was not Loogan. It was a tall, skinny sixteen-year-old boy with unruly hair. Billy Rydell.

  The two figures leaned into each other. Sarah put her arms up, clasped her hands at the back of the boy’s neck. It was a practiced gesture; this was not the fi rst time. A second later, when they kissed, Elizabeth knew that it was not their first kiss.

  She eased her foot onto the brake. This needed thought. It was better not to overreact. Teenage girls had boyfriends. She had joked with Sarah about having an affair with Billy Rydell. She should have seen this coming. She looked away for a moment, because it was awkward, watching. But she wasn’t sure how she felt about not watching either. She knew all the theories about parenting, about respecting a child’s privacy, trusting her to make good decisions. But there were limits, and sitting in a car at night and waiting patiently while your daughter made out with her boyfriend on the porch was somewhere on the far side of the limits. It was over the border and past the minefield and beyond the razor-wire fence. Time to move then. She would drive on, let them see she was home, and sort it out from there. She looked up and Billy Rydell had his hand on her daughter’s waist. They were still kissing. Elizabeth released the brake and the car rolled along and Billy’s hand went under her daughter’s shirt. He walked her a step backward until she was against the screen door. Sarah broke the kiss and wriggled sideways. She grabbed his wrist and pushed it down and away.

  He moved in for another kiss and she braced her hands against his chest and shoved him away. He spread his arms in a gesture that said, What’s the big deal?

  Both of them turned then. Elizabeth had borne down on the accelerator and then the brake. The car screeched to a stop at an angle to the curb. The b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

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  headlights washed over the lawn. She had the presence of mind to put the car in park, but not to cut the engine. Then she was out of the car. Billy Rydell saw her coming. He understood his situation. He thought about running—Elizabeth could read it in his face.

  To his credit, he didn’t run. He came down the porch steps, palms out, mouthing apologies. He tried to skirt her only at the last moment, when she reached for him. She got hold of his shirtfront, used his own momentum to spin him around. Walked him backward three paces and slammed him into the trunk of the elm tree.

  The impact knocked the wind out of him. His eyes
stared. The fist of her left hand clutched the fabric of his shirt. Her right hand was down at her side. Her pistol was in it. It took an act of will to keep herself from pressing the muzzle into Billy Rydell’s ribs.

  There ought to be shouting, she thought. There ought to be neighbors coming out of doors. There was nothing but Billy whispering, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  Her own voice was scarcely louder.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Chapter 31

  On a yellow legal pad, with a cheap ballpoint pen, David Loogan composed a story.

  An ocean of cars surrounded him. He had parked in the lot of a cineplex south of Lansing, sixty miles from Ann Arbor. Behind him, on the backseat, lay his duffel bag and his leather coat. The guitar case and Wrentmore’s shotgun were in the trunk.

  On the passenger seat beside him there were three small items arranged in a row. The first was his cell phone; the second, a thin canister of pepper spray. The third was the flashdrive that Michael Beccanti had recovered from Sean Wrentmore’s condominium. The flashdrive figured into the story Loogan was writing.

  He had looked through Sandy Vogel’s e-mail and read the memo she’d written about finding Beccanti in Tom Kristoll’s office. The memo had gone to Laura Kristoll, Nathan Hideaway, Casimir Hifflyn, and Bridget Shellcross—the members of the Gray Streets board. He knew the board would meet for brunch tomorrow at Laura’s house. He planned to join them there and tell them his story.

  The story was a simple one, but Loogan was a fastidious writer. He drafted and redrafted and edited. He tore pages from the notepad and tossed them over his shoulder into the backseat.

  Shortly after eleven, he produced a final draft. He read through it one last time, put the pad aside, and thought about settling in for the night. He had a reservation at a bed-and-breakfast in Okemos, east of Lansing, fifteen minutes away.

  He had stayed away from hotels. There were bed-and-breakfasts every-b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n 2 3 9

  where, and their owners were glad to take cash and didn’t require a lot of paperwork. He had searched for listings on a computer at an Internet café, and had made his reservations from pay phones, using the names of his old high school teachers. His pattern was to arrive late and leave early and never stay at the same place twice.

  The owner of the place in Okemos had assured Loogan that he and his wife would be up at least until midnight. That gave Loogan some leeway. He glanced at his cell phone, lying dormant on the seat beside him. He could turn it on and check his messages, and then turn it off again and be on his way. He debated for a few seconds and then pressed the power button. The screen showed him two missed calls, both from Elizabeth Waishkey, both within the last hour. He considered the wisdom of calling her back, and his curiosity got the better of him. She answered on the third ring.

  “Mr. Loogan,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “I like hearing you say that,” he told her. “It reassures me that you haven’t caught up with me yet. If you didn’t say it, I’d have to assume you had me surrounded.”

  “You’re not surrounded. Why don’t you tell me where you are?”

  He opened the car door and got out to stretch his legs. “I’m standing in a parking lot,” he said, “an undistinguished parking lot, in an unspecifi ed city.”

  “Do you see lights flashing, red and blue?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then you’re safe for now.”

  He walked along the side of the car. The marquee of the cineplex hung suspended in the distance.

  “You called me twice,” he said. “You must be working late.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. Tell me what you were doing in Ann Arbor today.”

  “I already told you, I went to the cemetery. I visited Tom’s grave. Are you all right?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You said you couldn’t sleep. Is something wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “Why did you visit Tom’s grave?”

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  “It’s been a week since Tom was buried. I’m a sentimental man. Did you know there’s a headstone already? A thick chunk of granite. I don’t know why that surprised me, but it did.”

  “So you risked a trip to Ann Arbor just to visit Tom’s grave,” she said.

  “Because you’re sentimental.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth,” she said.

  “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth when you say nothing’s wrong.”

  He stared at the marquee and listened to her silence. Eventually she let out a long breath. “I almost shot a sixteen-year-old today.”

  Elizabeth paced in her bedroom with the phone to her ear. She stopped at the window, pressed her fingers against the glass. Moonlight came from behind a cloud. She heard Loogan ask, “What happened?”

  The glass cooled her fingertips. “He’s a friend of Sarah’s,” she said.

  “Her boyfriend, though I didn’t know that for sure until today. I came home tonight and saw them making out on the porch. He got a little aggressive.”

  “Is she all right?” said Loogan. Sharply, fiercely.

  “She’s fine. She handled him—told him no, pushed him away. He was a little slow getting the message, and I overreacted. Before I knew what I was doing, I had him pinned against a tree, my nine-millimeter in my hand. It was a close thing.”

  It had been closer than Elizabeth would have liked. Sarah had been the one to bring it to an end. She could have panicked, she certainly had cause, but she never raised her voice. She came down from the porch and put her palm against her mother’s back. Elizabeth felt it there, a soft touch between her shoulder blades. She heard her daughter say, “Okay. I’m okay. Let him go.”

  And she holstered the gun and let Billy Rydell loose and sent him home. b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

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  She went inside with Sarah and calmed down enough to talk. The talk was reassuring. Billy had never done anything like that before, Sarah told her. He had never tried to force her.

  They had talked for an hour and then fixed a late supper. Sarah had gone to bed. Elizabeth had been unable to sleep. And now she stood at the window in her room, in a T-shirt and sweats, her raven hair tied up. And now she said to David Loogan, “I wanted to shoot him.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “That wouldn’t have gone over well. There’s a term for it: disproportionate force.”

  “You didn’t shoot him,” Loogan said.

  “If I’d shot him, I might not have stopped with one bullet.”

  “It’s over now.”

  She left the window and paced across the room. “That’s what I keep telling myself, and it’s comforting to think so. But it isn’t really over, is it? Because I know how close I came. This time I’m safe. I got through it. But what happens next time?”

  “You controlled yourself this time,” he said. “You’ll do the same thing next time.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because you’re an honorable person.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “It should be.”

  “But you can be an honorable person and still do the wrong thing. Isn’t that right?”

  The question echoed in the confines of her room. Silence on the line. She imagined him standing perfectly still.

  “Do you know why I wanted to talk to you tonight, David?”

  The smallest of delays before he answered. “Yes.”

  “I shouldn’t say David. I should say Darrell. Darrell Malone.” She braced her back against the bedroom door. “I like David better.”

  “So do I.”

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  “We’ve heard from the Nossos police,” she said. “We know about Jimmy Wade Peltier.”

  No response to that. She realized she had been hoping for
puzzlement—

  Who’s Jimmy Wade Peltier? —or a denial.

  “I’ve talked to Roy Denham,” she added after a moment. “Do you know what he said about you?”

  “What?”

  “He said he thought you were an honorable man.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “He also said you stabbed Jimmy Peltier seventeen times.”

  David Loogan, who had once been Darrell Malone, leaned against the fender of the car.

  “That sounds about right,” he said.

  “Denham said you stabbed Peltier until he went down, then came back and stabbed him some more. I didn’t want to believe that.”

  He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky. “Elizabeth—”

  “I came up with an alternative,” she said. “The woman you were with—

  Charlotte Rittenour. She could have played a part. You started the job, and then went off to call for help. And while you were gone, she finished it.”

  Loogan watched the blinking light of an airplane passing overhead. Slow progress, east to west. “It could have gone like that,” he said. “I’m sure it would have—if it was a story in Gray Streets. ”

  “But it wasn’t a story in Gray Streets, ” she said. He reached for the handle of the car door, feeling suddenly cold and tired. He got in and dragged the door shut after him.

  “I wish I could give you what you’re looking for,” he said. “But there’s no mistake. I did what I did to Jimmy Peltier. I’m not going to try to make excuses now.”

  Quiet on the line. He was about to turn off the phone when she said,

  “Are you getting ready to leave?”

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  He touched the key in the ignition. “I’ll have to, soon. I can’t stay here all night.”

  “I mean leave leave,” she said. “You went to Tom’s grave. That’s the action of a man who’s moving on—who’s not sure when he’ll come this way again.”

  “I’m not leaving yet,” he said. “There are one or two more things I want to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said lightly. “You wouldn’t approve.”