Nobody's Fool, page 4
I get out of the car. The night is crisp, the tang of autumn in the air. The stars are bright out here in a way you never get in the city. I’m holding the app like a compass. The tracker I put in Anna’s pocket is two-tenths of a mile from where I now stand, but the entire trek is through the woods.
No reason to dawdle.
I start into the trees. I debate turning on my phone flashlight, but out of an abundance of caution, I’d rather leave it off for now. It is hard to see more than a few feet in front of my face. I walk Frankenstein style, arms lifted and parallel to the ground, hands stretched out so I don’t walk into a tree face-first.
Once I’m inside the woods, the trees thin a bit, making my trek faster. I don’t know what kind of security they have out here. The manned gate was impressive, but that didn’t mean you could guard an entire estate that way. It may have been for show. They could have trip wire in the woods, I guess, or motion detectors, but that’s unlikely. There are many deer and squirrels and assorted suburban wildlife out here. There would be too many false alarms.
I keep moving. I’m not quiet about it, hearing twigs and leaves beneath my feet, but what else can I do? When I am within a tenth of a mile of the tracker, I start seeing lights filtering through the trees. I move closer and, as though on cue, a huge estate begins to rise on the horizon. I stop and look at the tracker. According to the help section on the app, the tracker is accurate to within ten meters. Assuming that’s correct, Anna and/or her coat is inside the estate.
The tracker battery is down to eight percent. I am at the clearing now. I stay on the edge, half in the woods, half on the start of a large expanse of lawn. The house itself is a jaw-dropper—an enormous Colonial-style stone castle that looks like something out of The Great Gatsby. The landscape lights illuminate sprawling symmetrical gardens with matching topiary on either side. There is a pool and a glass-house cabana. Two cars are parked near the door—a Porsche and a Mercedes, both black.
No other movement. No guards patrolling the grounds.
As I watch, debating what to do, a light goes on in an upstairs bedroom on the left. I duck down, even though I’m still a good one hundred yards away from the house. I get my breathing back under control and look toward the window.
Anna walks by it.
I check my watch. Almost eleven p.m. I quickly run through my next possible moves. Should I just knock on the door or ring the bell or whatever? Just be direct? That seems weird and I don’t know how security, assuming there is some, might react. Still, it’s a possibility. I could also maybe, I don’t know, grab some pebbles and toss them at her window. That feels a little too “movie,” if you will—and the most logical outcome from such a move would be her screaming for help.
But do I care if she does?
I want to get to her. I want an explanation.
It is then, as I stand there and consider my options, mere seconds after I saw Anna at the window, that I hear dogs.
I should point out that I love dogs. When Henry is a little older, Molly and I want to get a friendly little Havanese for our family.
This doesn’t sound like a friendly little Havanese.
This sounds like—and now looks to be—several snarling Doberman pinschers. They are hurtling full speed right down the center of the symmetrical gardens.
Toward me.
My heart leaps into my throat. No need for Impulse Me to tell me what to do. I snap-turn to run back through the woods, knowing I have no chance of outrunning the dogs. Zero. I jump two steps back into the woods and I can tell by the barking the dogs are mere seconds away. I take one more step and then one of the Dobermans leaps up and he knocks me down.
I scream as I crash to the ground.
I don’t know if I should try to fight my way out of this, but I distantly recall my police training on dog attacks. If you’re already down on the ground, stop moving. Curl in a ball and cover your neck and head with your arms. I do that now, go into a protective shell, my phone still in my hand.
The dogs are on me now, surrounding me. The barking has stopped. They are low-growling, staring at me with black eyes and bared teeth. They look ready to pounce. I stay very still and wait. It is, to put it mildly, terrifying.
Then a man shouts, “Down!”
The growling stops immediately. The dogs’ teeth vanish. Their tails wag as they back away. I risk a look and see the silhouette of two men standing near me. One of them is pointing a gun in my direction.
I blink up at them and say, “I’m sorry for the intrusion. I was just taking a walk and got lost.”
“Were you now?” one of the men, the smaller one, replies, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Get up.”
I manage to lift myself up and move back onto the edge of the grounds. Yep, two men. The bigger one, the one with the gun, has a moon-shaped head, complete with old-zit craters.
“Nice place,” I say.
“Who are you?”
“I’m a cop.”
“Can we see your badge?”
“Ex-cop actually.”
“An ex-cop hiking in the dark on private property,” Smaller Guy says. “Is that what you’re telling us?”
I try a smile. “Well, I have had a bit to drink,” I say, hoping that explains it. His face tells me that it doesn’t explain a damn thing. Gun Guy looks at Smaller Guy and nods. Smaller Guy takes out his phone.
“Spell your name,” Smaller Guy says to me. I do. Gun Guy keeps the gun on me while Smaller Guy types into what I assume is his phone’s search engine. While he does, Gun Guy strolls over to me and, without the slightest warning, punches me deep in the stomach with his free hand. The air whooshes out of me. I drop yet again to my knees, trying to gather a breath.
Gun Guy grabs me by the hair. “Can’t leave us alone, can you?”
I try to gather a breath. Gun Guy looks back at Smaller Guy. Smaller Guy says, “Sami Kierce, ex-NYPD detective, fired for endangering civilians and incompetence.”
Gun Guy still has his hand in my hair. “Who hired you, Sami?”
I shake my head, the breath finally returning. “No one,” I manage.
“One way or the other,” Gun Guy says, “you’re going to tell us why you’re here.”
I decide to go with something close to the truth. “I’m an old friend of Anna’s.”
I check their faces for a response, but the lighting makes it difficult to see expressions. I am still on my knees. He still grips my hair.
“I could just shoot you,” Gun Guy says. “What do you think, Tee?”
“Hmm.” Smaller Guy Tee is reading off his phone, his face aglow from the screen. “Whoa, check this out. This is the guy who messed up the Burkett case.” He looks up at me. “Do you know we’re friends with the Burketts?”
I say nothing.
He looks back down at his phone. “Kierce here was fired for violating police protocol. Multiple times, it says here, including the Burkett case. Being sued up the wazoo for putting a civilian in the hospital. Lots of his arrests are now being challenged, including—get this—the murder of his own fiancée. Described as erratic and dangerous.” Smaller Guy Tee looks up from the phone and grins. “Yeah, we could definitely kill him and claim self-defense. I mean, he’s erratic, dangerous—and trespassing.”
“Right,” Gun Guy says. “Exactly. Oh, and guess what? I have another gun on me. Untraceable.”
Smaller Guy Tee is warming up to this. “So we just say he pulled it on us. Our word against the word of a dead man.”
“Yes. And once we shoot him—once he’s dead—we can put the gun in his hand. Fire it even, so he has powder residue.”
Smaller Tee nods. “No one will question it.”
“No one,” Gun Guy agrees. “We make it look like we had no choice.”
They both smile at me, clearly warming to this plan.
“So”—Gun Guy aims the gun at me—“what do you say to all that, Sami Kierce?”
Now it’s my turn to smile. I have a good smile. You should know this about me. It’s far and away my best physical feature. Molly said she fell for me when I smiled. But that’s not the smile I’m displaying now. This smile of mine is far more maniacal. This smile is just south of sane. It makes both men, even the one holding a gun on me, step back.
“Say it louder,” I say.
Gun Guy looks confused. “What?”
I shake his hand off my hair. Then I lift my other hand into view. My phone is still in it, only now they can see a face on the screen. While they talked, I managed to hit my FaceTime.
“Come on, Tee,” I say as I rise to my feet, the maniacal smile still plastered on my face. “Or should I call you ‘the Tee-ster’? I’m not sure my friends at the NYPD heard you clearly. Say how you’re going to kill me louder.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Smaller Guy Tee and Gun Guy escort me back to my car.
I try to get them to talk, but they clam up. I ask about the woman in the upstairs window, no longer using Anna’s name. They still don’t talk. After they let me out of their SUV, Smaller Guy Tee rolls down the window and says, “You stay away from her.”
Then they drive off.
Craig is still on my phone’s FaceTime, and no, he was never a cop. There was no time to scroll around for Marty’s number or anyone’s number really. I just hit the redial and since the last person I called was Craig to tell him I was picking up my car, I got lucky he picked up.
“What was that all about?” Craig asks me.
“What did you hear?”
“Not a word. It was all garbled.”
“What did you see?”
“Same. It was too dark.”
I thank him for staying on the line and tell him I’ll call him later. I get in my car and start down the road before they have a chance to change their mind and come back. I dropped a pin when I was near the edge of the grounds. When I hit a red light back on Main Street, I text the pin’s location to Marty with a brief message:
Need to know who lives here ASAP.
I check the car clock, but then I remember that it doesn’t work. I check my phone’s clock instead. It’s late. Marty is a health nut who is in bed every night at ten p.m. and wakes up precisely at six. He’s annoyingly regimented, which is to say he’s anal, and I know a stronger word for anal, but I love him too much to call him that. At the time of my firing, Marty was my junior partner, foisted on a reticent me by a boss who sarcastically insisted Marty would benefit from the wisdom of an older, more experienced officer.
He didn’t.
I debate calling Molly to let her know I’m on my way, but it’s late and a call may wake up Henry and I just don’t know what to say to her right now. I settle for a text. I take the car back to Craig’s driveway. He is waiting there for me.
“You okay?” Craig asks.
“Fine.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Yes, I think, but not with you. “I’m fine, Craig. Thanks, man.”
“Want a brandy before you head home?”
“Not tonight,” I say.
I head to the subway station. My app says the train is one minute away, so I hurry down the stairs. By the time I’m home it’s nearly one in the morning. The house is silent. Molly left one of those plug-in nightlights on for me. I tiptoe down into the nursery and peek in on Henry. My son—man, just those two words: my son—sleeps peacefully. I watch him for a minute, maybe two. My chest grows tight. My eyes water. If you’re a parent, you know the feeling, that heady mix of wonder and fear.
Molly is asleep in the dark in our tiny bedroom. I get ready for bed with as much stealth as I can muster and slip under the covers. I immediately feel the heat from her body. I like that. I scoot closer to her because I sleep better when part of me is touching her skin. Molly stirs. She wiggles into the spoon, and I melt into her.
All the dumb things I’ve done in my life, all the mistakes and oversteps, and yet I ended up with this spectacular woman as my wife. I am never not awed by this.
Molly is my warmth and my center and yes, she makes me talk in clichés and greeting-card jingoism and country-song lyrics. But that is the thing with my wife. She makes my life better, yes, but she makes every room she enters better. Her love is effortless. It is just who she is. The fact that she chose me is what I want to be the defining moment of my life. It is also a rationale, an excuse, a get-out-of-jail-free card—how can I possibly be bad when this woman chose me to be her life partner?
I expect sleep tonight to elude me. It does not. I conk out immediately and sleep like the dead. When my phone rings at seven in the morning, I startle awake. The spot in the bed next to me is empty.
My phone was put on quasi-silent—that setting where the phone will only make noise when people on a certain list call. I have six people on this list, including Molly, my dad, my brother, Marty—and this morning’s caller, Arthur from White Shoe Law. Hardly a surprise.
“What do you want first,” Arthur says without preamble, “the news more important to me or the news more important to you?”
“You choose.”
“Let’s make it about me to start, shall we?”
I’m pretty sure I know what he’s going to say. “Go ahead.”
“At eleven this morning, Peyton Booth—and more importantly, our client his lovely albeit vengeful wife Courtney—will be ensconced in our fanciest conference room on the forty-seventh floor for their divorce negotiations. You know this.”
Yep, no surprise. “I do.”
“And yesterday you took photographs that will untangle the Booth prenup.”
“I did.”
“So why don’t I have them?”
I switch hands holding the phone. “You will.”
“Why the holdup?”
“I’m developing them.”
“Developing them?” Arthur repeats. “What is this, 1987? Are you going to bring us video on a Betamax?”
“Betamax,” I say. “That’s funny.”
“No, not really.”
“Most people might have gone with DVD or VCR. But Betamax is far funnier.”
“Kierce.”
“No worries, Arthur. I’ll bring them today. I promise.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you would,” I say, and then I try to move this along. “So what’s the news more important to me?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
I also don’t like the way his tone has suddenly shifted. Molly appears in the doorway. She smiles at me and lifts a cup of coffee in my direction as if to ask whether I want one. I assume this is a rhetorical question because I always want one.
“What is it, Arthur?”
“Do you remember how upset you were when Judith and Caroline Burkett were released on bail?”
The sickening power of money. “Yes,” I say.
“This is worse.”
“Just tell me, Arthur.”
“I just got word. They’re releasing Grayson this morning.”
My heart sinks. Molly spots the expression on my face. Grayson is Tad Grayson, the man who has—or, I guess, had—been serving a life sentence for murdering a police officer named Nicole Brett.
At the time of her murder, Nicole Brett and I had been engaged.
“He’s…” I can barely say it. “He’s going to be free?”
“Yep, the judge ordered his release last night.”
I see the concern on Molly’s face. She’s heard enough to figure out what Arthur is telling me. We knew this was a possibility, and I had tried to brace myself for it. After my dismissal for cause from the NYPD, attorneys and activists started poring through my old cases, searching for or making up “misdeeds” to claim I was being, to quote that article, “erratic and dangerous,” not to mention, I guess, corrupt. So far, three people who had been serving time—guilty people, no matter what the court now says—had already been released. Worse, an advocate group called the Equitable Liberty Initiative (ELI, like the name, for short) had started poking into the seemingly solid Tad Grayson conviction, especially when it was discovered that I had participated in the investigation and conviction of my own fiancée’s murderer. Attorneys working pro bono for ELI claimed any evidence recovered by the police, even if it hadn’t been collected by me personally, should be deemed fruit from the poisonous tree and thrown out.
I swallow. “So when does Grayson get released?”
“At eight.”
“Wait.” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Eight this morning?”
“Yep.”
I check the clock on the nightstand. It’s almost seven. I swing my legs out of bed.
“Don’t go, Kierce,” Arthur says to me.
“Okay.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?”
“Maybe a little,” I say before disconnecting.
Molly moves toward me. “Are you okay?”
I am sitting on the edge of the bed. I nod.
“You’re going to watch him walk out of prison?”
“I have to.”
“What good will it do to see that?”
“None at all,” I say.
Molly sits next to me. She takes my hand. For a moment or two, we don’t move. Then Molly asks, “Does this have something to do with where you were last night?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing.”
She stares out, stays silent.
“I know this sounds crazy,” I continue, “but last night involves something that happened to me when I went to Europe after I graduated college.”
She makes a face. “You went to Europe after Bowdoin?”
“It wasn’t for long.”
“Like a backpacking kind of thing?”
“Yes. I went with a few friends. But something happened. It has nothing to do with us, I promise, and I want to tell you all about it.”
“But not right now.”
“I want to be there at eight. I need to see his face.”
“Go get dressed,” Molly says. “I can wait.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Tad Grayson steps through the prison gates.
The sky is gray. The building is gray. The street pavement is gray. I don’t want to say the mood is gray, but that’s what we are left with, aren’t we? I count three news vans and about ten members of the press standing outside the prison gate. His release is a story but not a huge one. It might have been a few years ago, but nothing is a huge story anymore. We read about something awful, we get pissed off, a new outrage comes along, we move on. The cycles of news, like the cycles of life, are getting faster and tighter with time until eventually we reach oblivion. But now I’m getting deep.
