Very Bad Men Read online

  He was alert and cheery, but his wife watched over him protectively from her perch on the edge of the gurney.

  “Can this wait?” she said to Elizabeth.

  “It’s better if it doesn’t.”

  News of the assault had come to Elizabeth while she was still at the Bell house. Rosalie Bell insisted on driving straight to the hospital, leaving her daughter with the nanny. Elizabeth took a detour; she knew the doctors would need time to work, so she drove by the Eightball Saloon first and talked to the bartender and Bell’s friends. They told her about a woman who had witnessed the attack. Silk blouse, gray skirt, heels. She had lingered until the ambulance came, and had followed it in her car.

  Elizabeth had looked for her in the ER waiting room, but hadn’t seen her. Now, in the exam room with Bell and his wife, Elizabeth felt like an intruder. It was plain that Bell’s wife wished she had stayed away.

  “He has a concussion,” Rosalie Bell said.

  Sutton Bell spoke up. “It’s a mild concussion.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Rosalie Bell. For Elizabeth’s benefit, she added, “The doctor said we have to be cautious. Sometimes all the symptoms don’t appear right away.”

  “The hand took the brunt of it,” Sutton Bell said mildly. “Fractures to the middle phalanges of the index and second fingers. I should be worried about playing the guitar again.”

  Rosalie Bell shook her head. “He plays terrible guitar,” she said. “He only ever bothered to learn three chords.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “Fortunately I have a beautiful singing voice.”

  “You have a singing voice that sounds like Bob Dylan’s,” she countered. Then, to Elizabeth: “Couldn’t you talk to him tomorrow?”

  Bell laid his good hand on his wife’s knee. “I’ll talk now. The concussion’s not serious. If it were, I couldn’t say ‘fractures to the middle phalanges’ without slurring the words.” He nodded to Elizabeth. “Ask me whatever you want to ask.”

  She sat in the room’s only chair and took out her notebook. Started with a request for a description of his assailant, then stepped back and had him lead her through the events of the evening, from his band’s performance at the Art Fair to his encounter with the man who had attacked him.

  She had him repeat as much of their conversation as he could remember, especially the part about Callie Spencer.

  “It didn’t make sense,” Bell said. “He wanted to know if I ever thought about her. If I had her picture on my wall.”

  Elizabeth jotted this down without comment, but Bell was watching her closely.

  “That means something to you,” he said.

  No harm in telling him the truth. “Henry Kormoran was found dead in his apartment earlier today. He had a picture of Callie Spencer in his living room.”

  She could see it was news to him. He looked down at the brace on his hand.

  “You think the man who attacked me killed Kormoran.”

  “It looks that way.”

  His eyes came up. “Why?”

  “I’m hoping you might be able to shed some light on that. Have you talked to Kormoran recently?”

  “I haven’t had anything to do with him for seventeen years.”

  “What about Terry Dawtrey?”

  A confused expression passed over Bell’s face. “Terry Dawtrey’s dead. I read it in the paper. You think that’s connected to what happened tonight?”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “Let’s say the possibility intrigues me.”

  “The paper said Dawtrey tried to escape and got shot by a sheriff’s deputy. How could that be connected to this?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Let me ask you something else. Did the man who attacked you seem familiar? Is it possible you’d seen him before?”

  “I saw him at the bar. And maybe at the Art Fair.”

  “What about seventeen years ago, at the Great Lakes Bank in Sault Sainte Marie?”

  More confusion. “I don’t follow. You think he might have been at the bank? A customer?”

  “Or a robber.”

  Bell let out a short breath that might have been a laugh. “Floyd Lambeau’s dead. Dawtrey’s dead. And you just told me Kormoran’s dead. That leaves me, and I didn’t slug myself tonight.”

  “You’re forgetting someone,” Elizabeth said. “The getaway driver.”

  He stared thoughtfully across the room. “You think it was Jimbo?”

  “Was that his name? I don’t remember that from the reports I’ve read.”

  “It wouldn’t be in the reports,” said Bell. “It’s just my little joke. I never knew any of their names, not at the time. Except for Floyd. Everybody knew Floyd. But he thought it would be better if the rest of us didn’t know each other’s names.”

  “That must have made things awkward. You had to meet with the others beforehand, to plan the robbery. How did you refer to each other?”

  “Floyd gave us nicknames. He used to call me Sunshine. Dawtrey was Moonbeam; Kormoran was Rainbow. We only met the driver once before the day of the robbery. He wasn’t in on the planning. So he never got a nickname. But I thought of him as Jimbo.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because it rhymed with Lambeau and Rainbow. I never called him that to his face. I don’t think I exchanged two words with him.”

  “And in the years since then, you’ve never seen him again?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it could have been him tonight?”

  “If you hadn’t suggested it, it would never have occurred to me.”

  Elizabeth rose from her chair. “Is that a no?”

  “I don’t know. We’re talking about someone I saw seventeen years ago. He’d be around thirty-seven now. The guy from tonight—I’d say he’s younger than that, but I can’t be sure. Both of them were white. Not tall, not short. Average. I don’t know. Do you really think it could have been him?”

  “It’s something we have to consider.”

  Sutton Bell looked up at the ceiling. He asked a question of no one in particular.

  “Why would Jimbo want to kill me?”

  His wife took hold of his good hand. Elizabeth said nothing.

  Bell went on in a mystified tone. “He’s the one who drove off that morning. Saved his own neck. Left us all stranded there. If anything, I should want to kill him.”

  THE ER WAITING ROOM at University Hospital is an orderly place, at least on a Wednesday night in July. No shouting, no frantic motion. When Elizabeth finished with Bell and his wife and went out past the reception desk, she heard a tired-looking man complaining to an administrator about his insurance coverage. She saw a pair of EMTs wheeling in a gray-haired woman on a gurney. She saw Carter Shan come through the sliding doors behind the EMTs.

  “The chief sent me to check up on you,” he said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Actually, I volunteered. How’s Bell?”

  “He seems all right. It looks like they’ll keep him a while, for observation.”

  “When he leaves, he might want to try a different exit. There’s a news crew outside.”

  “Lovely.”

  Shan started to ask what she had learned from Bell, but Elizabeth was only half-listening. She had spotted a woman sitting at the end of a row of chairs, in the shadow of a tall artificial fern. She wore a white silk blouse and a gray skirt. She matched the description of the woman from the Eightball Saloon.

  Shan had noticed her too. “What’s she doing here?” he asked.

  Elizabeth answered automatically. “She followed the ambulance that brought Bell in.”

  “Does she know him?”

  “I don’t know, but she saw his attacker. We need to question her.”

  “She witnessed the assault on Bell?” Shan said. “She’s a busy little thing, isn’t she?”

  Something in his tone made Elizabeth frown. “What are you talking about?”

  He raised his hand in a wave, and the woman waved back.
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br />   “She was at Kormoran’s apartment,” he said. “She’s the one who found the body.”

  They watched the woman rise under the shadow of the fern.

  “That’s Henry Kormoran’s sister.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The woman in the silk blouse had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She had tried to cover them with a layer of foundation, but they had managed to fight their way through. Elizabeth estimated her age at twenty-five.

  “I’m afraid I lied to you,” the woman said, looking at Shan.

  “That’s unusual,” said Elizabeth.

  “Is it? People never lie to you?”

  “They lie all the time,” Shan said. “What they don’t do is admit it. It’s disappointing.”

  “I shouldn’t have done it. I apologize.”

  Elizabeth traced a finger along one of the plastic leaves of the fern. “It’s disappointing because Detective Shan here would much rather catch you in a lie. If you’re just going to admit it, there’s no challenge. You could at least make him work for it. What you should have done is let us take you back to the station, put you in a room alone—”

  “Under glaring lights—” added Shan.

  “In a chair that wobbles, because we’ve filed down one of the legs. And once you’re there, we’d let you wait. For an hour—”

  “Maybe two.”

  “And then Detective Shan would come in and slap a thick folder down on the table. And just when you’re prepared to admit everything, he’d find an excuse to leave—”

  “I usually pretend I forgot to bring a pen,” Shan confided.

  “That’s a classic move,” said Elizabeth. “And by the time he gets back with a pen, you’re so anxious that you blurt out a confession before he even sits down, because you’re afraid he’s going to leave again.” She paused, shaking her head. “And it could have been like that, you would have made his night, but you had to come out and admit that you lied.”

  The woman in the silk blouse looked back and forth between them, a faint smile on her lips. “I’m almost sorry I missed all that,” she said.

  “It’s a lost opportunity now,” said Elizabeth. “What did you lie about?”

  “I’m not really Henry Kormoran’s sister.”

  “Who are you?” Shan asked her.

  She reached into her handbag and passed Shan a business card.

  Elizabeth glimpsed her name, LUCY NAVARRO, and the title of the paper she worked for—The National Current.

  “A member of the press,” Shan said.

  “The rest of what I told you was true,” said Lucy Navarro. “I arranged to meet Henry Kormoran for lunch yesterday, but he never showed. So I went to his apartment tonight. I told the manager I was his sister so he’d let me in.”

  “Why did you want to meet Kormoran?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Isn’t it obvious? Callie Spencer’s running for the Senate. Terry Dawtrey gets shot down at his father’s funeral. Kormoran’s connected to both of them by a seventeen-year-old bank robbery. There’s a story there somewhere.”

  “Is that why you went looking for Sutton Bell? Because he’s part of the story too?”

  “I’ve tried to contact Bell before,” Lucy Navarro said. “After what happened to Kormoran, I figured I’d better track him down.”

  “How did you find him?”

  “I Googled him. Saw that his band was playing at the Art Fair. I got there too late to hear them, but they’re musicians, right? I figured they’d go for a drink after. The Eightball Saloon was the third place I tried. I wanted to talk to Bell alone, so I waited at the bar. I slipped off to the ladies’ room while he was playing pool, and naturally that’s when he decided to leave.”

  “So you followed him,” Elizabeth said. “Did you get a look at his attacker?”

  “I saw him in the bar, but the lighting wasn’t the best. He had a bandage on his hand. He wore a baseball cap.”

  “What color were his eyes?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “What about his hair?”

  It had been dark rather than light, the woman thought. Her description of the suspect’s car turned out to be similarly vague. A sedan. Gray or green, or maybe blue. American rather than foreign. She hadn’t seen the license plate.

  When Elizabeth ran out of questions, Lucy Navarro had some of her own.

  “Do you think he’s the same man who killed Henry Kormoran?” she wanted to know. “He would almost have to be, wouldn’t he?”

  Elizabeth agreed, but she said, “I really can’t comment.”

  “The bandaged hand tends to connect him with Kormoran, doesn’t it? There was a knife and blood at Kormoran’s apartment.”

  “I can’t comment on that either.”

  “Will you be interviewing Callie Spencer about this case?”

  Elizabeth turned to Shan. “Now that’s a good question—”

  He nodded. “It’s a shame we can’t comment.”

  ANTHONY LARK PRESSED a cardboard cup against his brow. The ice inside had melted but the soda was still cool, and the cool helped to loosen the knot behind his eyes.

  His car idled in the hospital parking lot. Through the windshield he could see the sliding glass doors of the emergency room, the bright lights within.

  The doors opened and a woman walked through. Even at a distance he recognized her as the woman from the bar, the one who had come running after Sutton Bell.

  Two people came out with her: a tall woman with black hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a slim Asian man in a tie and shirtsleeves. They looked like cops, Lark thought. They acted like cops too, waving away the reporter and the cameraman who approached them from a news van parked by the curb.

  He lowered the cup and rested it on his knee. His hand ached beneath the bandage. Antibiotics. That’s what he needed. Keflex. Sutton Bell had told him so. They would have it right there, in the hospital, but he couldn’t go in. He couldn’t go to a doctor’s office or a clinic either. They’d be watching for him.

  He would wait a day or two. Maybe the hand would get better on its own. If not, he’d figure something out. For now, he would have to lie low. He had been overconfident with Bell. He should never have written that line: Sutton Bell is next. That was tempting fate. He should never have left the manuscript outside the Gray Streets office—though to be fair to himself, he had left it after hours. He didn’t think anyone would find it before the morning, after Bell was already dead.

  We all want to be known. To be seen for who we really are. But he had been too eager.

  He could still get to Sutton Bell. They would watch the man now—at his home, at his work. But for how long? Lark could afford to wait. Things would be harder, but it could still be done.

  It was all for the sake of Callie Spencer, the woman with the wondrous smile.

  He needed rest, a good night’s sleep. He put the car into gear and drove slowly out of the parking lot and into the street.

  CHAPTER 9

  In the heat of summer, the front door of the Waishkey house swells in the frame; it takes a solid push to open it. The sound of its opening woke me after midnight. I heard Elizabeth extracting her key from the lock, wedging the door back into the frame.

  I heard her unclip the holstered pistol from her belt. Her footsteps crossing the tiled foyer to the threshold of the living room. She came in and laid the pistol and her bag on the coffee table and sat in the chair across from mine.

  “David, I thought we agreed you wouldn’t wait up.”

  “That’s not the way I remember it,” I said.

  She turned to look at the sofa where her daughter was sleeping. Sarah Waishkey—tall, slender, sixteen years old—lay curled on her side in denim shorts and a loose white T-shirt. She wore a braided leather band around her right ankle. Her long black hair fell across her forehead onto her pillow, and her hands rested palm-to-palm beneath her cheek. I’d seen the pose before. She slept like a girl in a Renaissance painting.


  “She should be in bed,” Elizabeth said in a hushed voice.

  “I tried to tell her she shouldn’t wait up. She didn’t go along.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “She’s strong-willed.”

  The girl is not my daughter, just as Elizabeth is not my wife and her house is not my house. But it’s a near thing. It’s close. It’s almost.

  A great many things about my life are almost.

  One night a long time ago, I got into a fight with a very bad man on the top level of a parking garage. He died, and I was almost convicted of murder. Last year, Elizabeth and I got tangled up with another very bad man in the woods of Marshall Park, and I almost got her killed, and almost died myself.

  These days I spend most of my nights in her bed. I eat at her table. I’m teaching her daughter how to drive. And though her house is not mine, it almost is. I come and go as I like. I pay half the mortgage every month. I keep a toothbrush and a change of clothes in the Gray Streets office, and on nights when I work late I sometimes sleep there, on a sofa in the storage room. But apart from that, everything I have is here, in this house.

  I try to keep my distance from her work. Her colleagues in the police department have accepted our relationship—almost. But they’d rather not be reminded of me. Crime in the city of Ann Arbor is Elizabeth’s business, not mine. Technically I shouldn’t ask her about cases, and she shouldn’t tell me.

  Tonight, as Elizabeth sat back in the chair across from me, as her daughter slept a few feet away, I almost kept my curiosity in check.

  “What did you find out about the man in the plaid shirt and the safari hat?”

  Elizabeth touched the string of glass beads at her throat before she answered me.

  “He wore a different hat when he assaulted Sutton Bell tonight,” she said.

  “That’s devious.”

  She gave me the details of the attack on Bell. It didn’t sound like she held out much hope of finding the man in plaid.

  “We could’ve had his fingerprints,” she said, “but the Eightball Saloon has what must be the most efficient bartender in town. He wiped down the bar after Mr. Plaid left, and sent his glass to the kitchen to be washed.”