Port City Crossfire (A Brandon Blake Mystery, Book 1) Read online

  “Hey, it’s your business.”

  “Except that I mentioned the murders. The bikers and this Sash kid.”

  “You mentioned it?”

  “Yeah. She freaked.”

  Davey listened, waited.

  “Said she thought I was her friend and here I was investigating her and Clutch.”

  “Don’t know about the friend part but hard to argue with that last thing.”

  “I said I was a cop. It’s what we do.”

  Davey looked toward the road, the headlights streaming past. His radio barked and he turned it down.

  “Not my business, but isn’t it what you’re supposed to not be doing?”

  Brandon looked away and when he turned back Davey was staring at him like he was waiting for an answer. It was Brandon who broke the gaze and looked out at traffic, two lanes moving slow. When he looked back, Davey still was waiting.

  “I touched a nerve,” Brandon said. “It was like I jabbed a knife right in.”

  “What? She and her boyfriend killed all three of them?”

  He was quick.

  “I don’t know. I just know her face went white. Then she got all pissed off to cover it up.”

  “They had money after that,” Davey said.

  “Maybe they just picked over the proceeds. Maybe they saw Sash was dead, knew where cash was hidden. Or more drugs. Maybe they just capitalized on the situation. Like looters.”

  “Be a project and a half to prove that.”

  “I have time,” Brandon said.

  The look again.

  “Do you?” Davey said.

  The motors idled, white vapor wafting into the night air like dry ice at a heavy-metal show. Davey looked preoccupied, staring through the mist at the highway, a distant neon sign in the shape of an ice-cream cone. This stretch of road was a ghost town, the ruins of a playground from a distant past. Danni and Clutch were throwbacks, too, Brandon thought, people right out of the Thirties. Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Where do you think she went?” Davey said.

  “I don’t know. Home? She said Clutch was down in Mass. doing repos.”

  “Or he was home. He sent her to see you. Said, ‘Get this freakin’ cop off our backs.’ Instead she has to go back and report to him that you’re not off their backs. You’re on their backs now. If it’s anything like you think, you’re a huge problem.”

  Brandon didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t have to tell them. Could have just told me. Maybe we could have worked it some more. I’ll still ask around but now they know you know.”

  “I wanted to see her reaction.”

  Davey hesitated, then said, “I think you just wanted some action. Distract you from everything that’s happened. Catch a bad guy, even up the score a little.”

  “It wouldn’t be even,” Brandon said.

  “It won’t be even if you get yourself killed,” Davey said. “In case that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “Get killed?”

  “Think,” Brandon said.

  They sat for a moment, then another. Headlights came up fast from the south, a loud jacked-up Dodge pickup passing them at way past 60. The driver saw the cruiser, eased off the gas, then hit it hard. Davey flicked on the blue strobes.

  “Gotta work,” he said. “You don’t.”

  And then Davey hit the throttle and the cruiser shot out of the lot and hissed, taking off down the road like a jet. Brandon sat in the dark, watched the blue lights recede. “Sure, I do,” he said. And then he pulled out of the lot—and turned south.

  Clutch Auto was four miles down, take a left onto Western Highway, a mile up on the right. Brandon slowed 50 yards shy of the lot, killed the lights, and coasted into the lot of a boarded-up diner. He let the truck roll to a stop and shut off the motor. No brake lights.

  But lights were on in the little house. He leaned over, opened the glove box, and took out a pair of binoculars. Rested his elbows on the steering wheel and focused on the lights. Two windows on the end of the house, lights on and shades down. He moved the binoculars to the right. Waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  At first it was all blackness. And then a shape materialized slowly, like an apparition. A glint from glass. Windshield. A rectangular blotch, something protruding above it.

  Brandon reached up, flipped the switch for the dome light. He opened the door and slid out, reached back for his Glock, slipping it out from under the seat. He tucked the gun into the back of his waistband, let the door fall back noiselessly. Then he walked slowly to the side of the diner, into the darkness. There was a stake fence at the back of the lot, the top covered with vines. He stayed close to the fence, in the shadows, and moved toward the little house.

  Six steps. Stop. Raise the binoculars. Still too far. Six more steps. Then six more. A dog started to bark in the house, a frantic yipping. Brand hurried the next six steps and then he knew. He walked six more steps to make sure. Raised the binoculars.

  It was there, backed deep into a space between the house and the garage.

  Clutch’s wrecker.

  Danni was wrong. They couldn’t have been friends.

  Twenty

  Or maybe Clutch was right. Danni liked to screw around, made up the story about the Range Rover in Brockton just so Brandon wouldn’t worry about Clutch bursting in on them.

  Brandon didn’t think so.

  He was on Route 1, headed from Scarborough into South Portland. Traffic was steady and he leaned deep into the seat, his arm up on the driver’s side window. Hiding, in plain view. He was turning onto Broadway—sandwich shops, service stations, hair salons—when his phone buzzed. He picked it up, looked at the number.

  “Hey,” Brandon said.

  “Hey, Blake,” Kat said. “Where are you?”

  He told her.

  “Come over the bridge. Commercial. East side of Harbor Marine.”

  “Gimme ten,” Brandon said.

  Kat was in the cruiser with Park, backed into the blackness. Behind them shrink-wrapped boats loomed like giant white cocoons. Brandon pulled in, did the door-to-door thing again.

  “How you doing?” Kat said.

  “Fine,” Brandon said.

  “Keep hanging in there, Blakesy,” Park said, leaning forward to see.

  “No choice.”

  “Where you been?” Kat said.

  “Here and there,” Brandon said, wondering, even as he said it, why he could confide in a Woodford cop he hardly knew but couldn’t do the same with his partner. “Any more on our sniper?”

  She shook her head, looked to Park. They both got out, no lights showing inside the SUV. Kat walked past Brandon, nodded for him to follow, out of the range of the cruiser’s voice recorder. They walked under the bridge, stood in the rubble: broken glass, soiled clothes, an upturned shopping cart. Park joined them as Kat said, “They’ll get him. Detectives are rousting the usual haters.”

  “Rawlings, the dad, he’s some sort of big-game hunter.”

  “Yeah, but I heard he always has an alibi. Home with the wife.”

  “Maybe it’s not him. Feel bad saying it, kind of.”

  “Could be any number of these assholes, just waiting for an excuse.” Park said.

  “Stay safe out there,” Brandon said.

  “We keep moving,” Kat said. “Don’t give anybody time to set up.”

  “Any other news?”

  “Carew is working it hard, trying to get them off your back,” she said.

  “Bad enough what’s happening,” Park said. “Don’t need to fight your own department.”

  Brandon smiled, barely.

  “And we walked the route this afternoon, from the bar to the alley. Thought maybe we’d see a memory card on the ground.”

  “Didn’t CSI do that?” Brandon said.

  “Sure, but another set of eyes.”

  “Two sets,” Park said.

  “And?”

  Kat shook
her head.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Brandon shook his head.

  “With you, Blakesy,” Park said. “Gotta keep the blue line like a fucking wall.”

  “Appreciate it,” Brandon said.

  “This too shall pass,” Park said. “It’ll blow itself out. These dipshits, they’ll get bored, find some other freakin’ thing to march about. You’ll be back on, everything back to normal.”

  Like that could ever happen, Brandon thought. He nodded. Kat put her hand on his arm, led him away from the cars over toward the boats. It smelled like mud flats, rotting seaweed, gasoline. Kat reached over and took his hand, opened the palm. She dropped something in it. He looked down.

  A phone, cheap and light. A burner.

  “Keep it on,” Kat said. And then she turned, walked back to the cruiser. Brandon followed, stood as she slid in, equipment rattling and creaking.

  Park put the cruiser in gear as Kat said, “Take good care, partner.” The cruiser pulled away, lights off until it hit the road. Brandon walked back to his truck, got in and buzzed the window closed. He laid the phone on the seat beside him. He pulled out, drove a hundred yards, then pulled off the road again. He was under the bridge, the concrete piers standing around him like redwoods. He shut off the motor and sat in the darkness, this place as good as any. He waited.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark. Lights flickered from cars above him. Down the road sailboat masts were reflected in security lights. If he listened hard he could hear rigging jingling in the wind. He looked over at the phone, a black spot on the seat. And just then it glowed, pale green like a firefly. Brandon picked it up.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s me. Maddie.”

  “Hey. How you doing?”

  “Good. Sorry about the cloak and dagger, the phone thing. I don’t think I should be seen with you. And you know how phone records are.”

  “First thing they subpoena,” Brandon said.

  “Anyway, I had a productive day.”

  “That right?”

  Brandon waited.

  “I went door to door. In Moresby. For Maine Equality. Tried to talk to people about gay rights.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Pretty well. I think some of the old folks were actually kind of excited to meet a real live lesbian,” Maddie said.

  “So now there’s Ellen DeGeneres and you.”

  “Right. I expanded their horizons a hundred percent.”

  “Good math for an English professor,” Brandon said.

  He waited.

  “And I got some interesting stuff.”

  “About—”

  “The Rawlings family.”

  “How’d you bring that up?”

  “Worked my way down the street toward their house,” Maddie said. “Then I started asking people about the next place. You know. ‘Who’s across the street? Should I stop there?’ Everybody loves giving the lowdown on their neighbors.”

  Brandon thought of the marina. Boat gossip.

  “What’d they say?”

  “The family is screwed up.”

  “No surprise.”

  “Dad is some sort of financial advisor in town, acts like he’s Gordon Gekko. When he isn’t Mr. Macho. Goes around the world shooting exotic animals and hanging their heads in his man cave.”

  “Huh,” Brandon said.

  “A couple of people said he was a real jerk. Looks down on them, always making references to how his mother was wealthy, like they wouldn’t even get how wealthy she was. Tiff Rawlings is a social climber. From some hardscrabble family in northern Maine and isn’t going back. Latches on to people, then drops them when she gets another rung up the ladder.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The last part? This woman who got dropped. One week it was all hugs and muffins and then it was like Tiff Rawlings didn’t know she existed.”

  “Tiff. Short for—?

  “Tiffany. I Googled her. Used to be spelled T-I-F-F-A-N-E-E. She changed it to a Y.”

  “Went upscale.”

  “Right.”

  “What else?” Brandon said.

  “Son is—I mean was. Sorry. He was kind of a geek. Picture emerged is he didn’t play sports. Had one really close guy friend, they were into computer games and stuff. And old movies.”

  “Blade Runner.”

  “Right. Kinda quirky. But not going around acting suicidal,” Maddie said.

  “He was when I met him.”

  A car went by slow, hit the truck with high beams and kept going. Brandon waited as the dark fell over him.

  “Here’s the thing,” Maddie said, her voice lowering “About a month ago—August 9, to be exact—the husband’s mother comes to visit. From a nursing home. A place in Deering. Twin Oaks. They’d bring her over for a day once in a great while.”

  “Sounds normal.”

  “Until she OD’d. Tiff Rawlings told one of the neighbors she had some sort of dementia. Story is she went in the bathroom, took a bunch of pills.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to lock that stuff away?” Brandon said.

  “Maybe they did. Maybe they put it up high but she stood on a chair.”

  The cars rattled above him. A tractor trailer passed, headed for the container port. Something scuffled in the weeds.

  “So she dies,” Brandon said.

  “Neighbor said they had an oxygen mask on her when they took her to the ambulance. So I guess she was alive that long.”

  “O.D., they might’ve gotten a heart beat,” Brandon said.

  “Right,” Maddie said. “But here’s the thing. Two people told me that’s when the son—Thatcher—went off the rails. Scraped his mother’s car with a knife or something. Broke one of the windows. Some fancy Mercedes. Neighbors heard the alarm go off.”

  “Huh.”

  “It goes on from there. First the car, then he lights a fire in their trash can, burns the siding off the back of the house. Paints the cat with spray paint. Rides his bike up and down the driveway throwing bottles up in the air. Started throwing them against his own house.”

  “Cops?” Brandon said.

  “I think for the fire. Because the fire trucks came. With the bottles, somebody called the parents first. They came home, dragged him inside.”

  “And then he goes and does the fake robbery and gets himself shot,” Brandon said.

  “Very self-destructive,” Maddie said. “Like he doesn’t care about his life anymore.”

  “And some of it’s directed at his parents.”

  They paused, Brandon in the dark, Maddie—

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “Dunkin’ Donuts, Forest Ave. I figured I shouldn’t be home. You know how they triangulate and can trace a cell phone location.”

  “I’ve seen it on TV,” Brandon said.

  Something swooped out from under the bridge. Bats. There was more scuffling in the weeds.

  “And he told Amanda something,” Brandon said. “What was bothering him. And your student there—”

  “I don’t know if they got into specifics. I think my guy just knew something was wrong,” Maddie said.

  “The grandmother, maybe he was really close to her. If the parents are useless, maybe she was his surrogate mom or something. Until she started to lose it.”

  “And she dies,” Maddie said, “because the useless parents were careless about leaving medication around.”

  “Would you kill yourself for that?” Brandon said. “A sixteen-year-old boy?”

  Maddie didn’t answer. Brandon mulled it, too, and then they came to the same conclusion.

  “I don’t know. Adolescents don’t always think straight,” Maddie said. “But probably not.”

  “There was something more,” Brandon said.

  “Unless he was really nuts.”

  “Which nobody is saying he was.”

  “Until now,” Maddie said.

  Brandon sat in the darkness, the cars rattling overhea
d. The rustling had moved behind his truck. He had an uneasy feeling, waited for the reason to slowly emerge. It did: Loose lips.

  “Maddie,” he said. “These people who gave you all this dirt—don’t you think they’ll talk about you?”

  “And say what?”

  He heard car doors closing in the Dunkin’ lot. A motor started. A horn beeped. There was a distant siren but he couldn’t tell if it was nearby or over the phone.

  “I don’t know. I can hear it. ‘This nice woman came to the door today. Some gay rights thing. We talked for a while. I told her all about everybody on the street. The Smiths. The Rawlingses. I told her about the boy, how he went crazy.’”

  “You think that—”

  “It’ll get back to the Rawlingses.”

  “But they can’t tie me to you. That’s why we’re doing it this way. The phones.”

  “Did you use your car?” Brandon asked.

  “Yeah. Kat said I should rent one but that seemed a little over the top. I just parked at the end of the street.”

  A red Honda Civic, plate POETIC, as in license.

  “Give them your name?”

  “I just said I was Madeleine. I didn’t want to lie.”

  Scruples. They come back to bite you, Brandon thought.

  “How long were you out there?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “People coming and going on the street?”

  “I suppose,” Maddie said, the excitement draining from her voice.

  Brandon pictured it. The first person calling a neighbor after Maddie had left. Telling the story. Word getting around the neighborhood, then getting back to Thatcher’s parents, them hearing that their problems are being hung out there for some stranger. Driving down the road to see if they could get a look at this person. Driving to the end of the street and seeing Maddie’s car. Getting her ID off the plate. A friend at DMV. A cop in another town.…Saying, “Blake’s partner. She’s married to this lady. What the hell? What are the chances?”

  Risky, Brandon thought. “Thanks for your help, Maddie,” he said.

  “You’re not happy,” Maddie said.

  “No, I am. It’s all good to know.”

  “I can go back tomorrow,” she said. “There are a few houses I didn’t hit.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I think the grandmother’s dying that way sent him off the deep end.”