H
e wore creased black jeans and a fawn-colored suede jacket over a powder-blue turtleneck sweater. A slender guy, medium height, with short black hair cut military style, squinty eyes, and a slit for a mouth. His face was long and thin, all planes and angles except for an incongruous round piggy nose.
His eyes were as pale as a hot blue flame, and they were boring directly into mine.
“Get your hands off her,” I said.
His lips pulled back over small, pointed teeth into an entirely humorless smile. “Go over there, lock the door,” he said. He gave Julie's hair a tug for emphasis, and she squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced.
I did what he said, then turned back to him. “What do you want?”
“That envelope in your safe.”
“What envelope?”
He yanked Julie's hair again. It lifted her halfway out of her chair, and she took a quick breath. He kept his gun rammed into the soft place under her jawbone. “Right now, pal. It's in your office.”
“Let her go,” I said. “She's just a secretary. She doesn't know anything.”
“Sorry,” he said.
He jerked Julie to her feet. His grip on her hair forced her to arch her neck and bend her head back against him. Her eyes were wide and watery. He pushed her around the desk.
“Okay,” I said. “Don't hurt the girl. I'll get the envelope for you. I'll be right back.”
I turned to head into my office.
“Wait,” said the guy.
I stopped.
“We all go in together,” he said. “And if you think I'll hesitate to shoot her, try me.”
“Sure,” I said. “We'll do it your way. Just don't hurt her.”
I went back into my office, and the thin guy pushed Julie in behind me.
“Now what?” I said.
“Open the safe.”
“Which envelope is it you're interested in?” I said.
He gave Julie's hair another tug and jammed the muzzle of his weapon into her breast.
She closed her eyes and said, “Oh.”
“Don't fuck with me,” he said.
“I'm not fucking with you,” I said. “I've got a lot of envelopes in my safe.”
“The one the professor gave you. Big manila envelope.”
“Ah,” I said. “That envelope.”
“Do it,” he said.
The framed black-and-white blowup of Billy and Joey, aged seven and five, hung on the wall behind my desk, about shoulder high. I went over there, pushed the photo aside, and spun the knob through the six-number combination. Billy's birthday, then Joey's.
I glanced over my shoulder. The guy had come to the other side of my desk. Now he had the muzzle of his gun pressed up
under Julie's chin. Her head was tilted back and her eyes were squeezed shut.
The man's gun looked like a .22 to me. The only person who knew about the envelope in my safe was Jake Goldâplus whoever had tortured him in Ed Sprague's barn before shooting him in the eye with a .22.
I turned the handle, pulled the door open, and reached inside the safe. As my hand touched Jake's envelope, it brushed against the cold barrel of my .38 S&W revolver.
I peered into the safe and rummaged around as if I were looking for the right envelope, and I got my hand around the revolver's grip. The hammer was down on an empty chamber, the way Doc Adams had told me to keep it. I cocked it with my thumb, and as I did, I coughed loudly to cover the click that would echo inside the safe.
“Come on,” said the guy. “The fuck are you doing?”
“Finding the right envelope,” I said.
I got the cocked gun in my hand and wedged Jake's ten-by-thirteen envelope against the side of it with my thumb. Then I slid the envelope and the gun out of the safe with my back to the guy, and with my back still to him, I rotated my hand so that the envelope was on top with the gun hidden underneath it.
I turned around and held the envelope to him.
He let go of Julie's hair and pushed her to the side.
When he leaned across the desk to reach for the envelope, I shot him in the middle of his chest.
The explosion of the gunshot was followed almost instantaneously by the softer report of his little .22 automatic and the simultaneous thunk of a slug smacking into the wall beside my head.
He toppled backwards onto my carpet, moaned and twitched for a few seconds, then lay there motionless. His eyes stared up at the ceiling. The automatic pistol fell out of his outstretched hand.
I went over and kicked the gun away, then turned and took Julie in my arms.
“You shot him,” she mumbled into my chest.
“Yes. He would've killed us.”
“Is he dead?”
“I think so,” I said. “Are you okay?”
I felt her head nodding against my chest. “Who is he?” she said.
“I don't know his name,” I said. “I think he's the same man who killed Jake Gold and Chief Sprague.”
“But whyâ?”
“I don't know.”
“We should get an ambulance,” she said. “And the police. I'll go call 911.”
“No,” I said. “Call Lieutenant Horowitz. Don't talk to anybody else. Just Horowitz.”
“Butâ”
I was still holding her against me. I could feel her trembling. “Call Roger Horowitz, honey,” I said gently. I stroked her hair. “Just tell him I shot a man, and he appears to be dead. Don't mention the envelope. Don't mention the safe. Don't explain anything. Okay?”
“But what ifâ?”
“Horowitz won't ask a lot of questions,” I said. “If he does, just say a man came in here with a gun. He shot at me, so I shot him. You were frightened. It's all a kind of blur. Act hysterical.”
She looked up into my face. Her eyes were wet, but she was smiling. “I
am
hysterical.”
I patted her back. “You're doing fine.”
She nodded, then stepped out of my hug and frowned at me. “What's going on here, Brady?”
“It's better if you don't know. You've got to trust me, okay? The police will be here. They'll ask you questions over and over. Keep it simple. All you know is, this man came in and held a gun on you. He demanded our money and our jewelry.
He grabbed your hair, jammed his gun barrel into your throat and breast, dragged you into my office. I got my gun out of my deskâI keep it in my desk, that's our storyâthe top right-hand drawerâand when he saw it, he fired at me, so I shot him. He shot first. Stick with that story. You were very frightened. It happened so quickly. You don't remember exactly what was said. It's all kind of a jumble. Play it like that. Okay?”
“You want me to lie to the police?”
“Yes.”
“Brady ⦔
“I'm a lawyer, kiddo. Don't worry about it.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes. “Right. Of course. You're a lawyer. Nothing to worry about.”
“Trust me on this.”
“No ambulance? No 911?”
“Horowitz will ask if you called them. Tell him no, I told you to call him. I'm pretty shook up, too, tell him. He'll take care of the rest of it.”
She shrugged. “I assume you know what you're doing.”
“Of course I do.”
“What's in that envelope, Brady?”
“I don't know. I haven't looked. It doesn't belong to me. Forget the envelope. Don't mention the safe. There was no envelope, okay?”
Julie nodded, gave me a quick hug, and went back out to her desk in the reception area. I closed my office door and knelt beside the guy sprawled on my carpet. He hadn't moved since he went down. His eyes were glazed over, and a dark stain the diameter of a softball had seeped over the front of his powder-blue turtleneck. I felt for a pulse under his jawbone and, as I expected, found none.
My office smelled like the indoor handgun range at Doc Adams's gun club. I realized I was still holding my .38. I put it on my desk. Then I picked up Jake's envelope from the floor where I'd dropped it, took it over to the sofa, sat down, and opened it.
It held about a dozen eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. They were grainy and imperfectly focused and printed on cheap paper, but there was no mistaking what they depicted.
Brian Gold was in some of them. A pretty young girl with long pale hair and a slender childlike body was in the others.
They were naked in all the photos.
They looked painfully young, those two kids. More like children than teenagers. Brian had a sturdy little athlete's body, but his skin was smooth and hairless, and he had the face of innocence.
The girl had tiny little breasts and boyish hips. It was Jenny Rolando. I remembered her from the soccer-team photos on the wall in the Reddington police station.
In some of the photos, Brian and Jenny were togetherâjust the two of them in one shot, these two naked children, coupling on a bed. In a few others, the two of them were with a third person. In the rest of the photos, it was either Brian or Jenny with somebody else, different people in each photo, it looked like, some male and some female. Except for Brian and Jenny, all the other figures were adults, many of them half-dressed, and all the adult faces were turned away from the camera.
The photos were hard to look at. These two children on their knees with their arms wrapped around the hips of fat, hairy men with their pants down around their ankles, with their heads between the legs of flab-thighed women, on their hands and knees with a man wearing a T-shirt mounted behind them, with a big-butted woman with her dress bunched up around her hips sitting astride them, sandwiched between two middle-aged people, one male and one female â¦
No wonder Brian had fled. No wonder he was ashamed and guilt-ridden. No wonder he couldn't face his mother.
I heard a deep voice from Julie's office. I hastily crammed the photos back into the envelope, took it over to my safe, shoved it in, shut the door, twisted the knob, and adjusted the framed picture of Billy and Joey over it.
I was back sitting on my sofa smoking a cigarette when Horowitz came in.
He stopped in the doorway, stared down at the dead body on my floor, then looked at me. “Jesus Christ, Coyne,” he muttered.
“You recognize him?”
He squatted beside the dead guy and frowned down at him for a minute, then looked up at me. “Yeah,” he said. “I know who this is. You've done mankind a great service.”
“Who is it?”
“Name of Bobby Klemm. Freelancer. Started out with the Capezza mob down in Providence, got himself a reputation, went independent, oh, eight or ten years ago. Been working all over New England. He's slick. Uses twenty-two long-rifle cartridges. Slices a big
X
on the tips of his slugs. Nastier than hollow-points. That's his signature. We figure him for about a dozen hits from Burlington to Springfield to New Haven. He's been picked up a few times, but no one's ever had enough on him to go for an indictment.”
“If he was that slick,” I said, “he wouldn't be lying there looking up at my ceiling.”
“Don't kid yourself, Coyne,” said Horowitz. “He got careless, underestimated you, and you got lucky.” He stood up, then nudged Klemm's leg with his toe. “Wish you didn't have to kill him, actually.”
I nodded. “He could've explained it all, probably.”
Horowitz nodded, gave Klemm's leg another halfhearted kick, then came over and sat on the sofa beside me. “I called it in a few minutes ago. I figured you wanted to talk to me first. Boston homicide's on their way, and when they get here it'll be their case, so you better talk fast. This has gotta be connected to the Sprague thing, and assuming it is, Gus Nash'll be all over you like a full-blown case of genital herpes.”
I told him what had happened, about the envelope Jake had given me for safekeeping, how Klemm had known about it, known that it was in my safe.
Horowitz puffed out his cheeks and blew out a long breath. “The professor told him,” he said. “The business end of a cigar butt'll do things like that to a man. So what was in that envelope the guy was so hot to get ahold of?”
I told him.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Kiddie porn.” He glanced over at Klemm's body. “Fuckin' scum. He died too easy. You shoulda aimed lower.”
I nodded. “I'm sorry I didn't.”
“What a world,” he said. “You're gonna have to give Nash that envelope, you know.”