The Kind Worth Killing (29 page)

“No, I'm fine. But I'm going to have a drink.” I unzipped my backpack and pulled out the flask of apricot brandy. “Do you mind? I'm freaking out a little.”

“No shit, right,” Brad said, and barked out a short unnatural-sounding laugh.

I tipped the flask at my lips but didn't drink any of its contents. “You want some?” I said. “It's apricot brandy. It's good.”

He took the flask from me and took a long pull, handed it back. “Have another,” I said. “I've had plenty tonight.”

“If we can't drink tonight, then I don't know . . .” he said, and tipped the flask again. I listened to him swallow twice. He'd drunk enough. I'd hoped the apricot flavor would mask what was in the brandy, and it had. I didn't know how long it would take for it to kick in, but I wanted to hear more about Miranda's visit to Brad the night before.

“Tell me about last night,” I said. “Then we'll deal with the body.”

Brad flicked his lighter and lit his cigarette, blowing a blue plume against the windshield. “She scared the shit out of me is what she did. You left the house, and about five minutes later she showed up. I thought it was you returning at first.”

“Why was she there?”

“She came because she didn't want to call me on the phone. She said the police have some kind of witness and that they are going to question me, and I needed to keep my shit together. We didn't talk about that much because she was so freaked out about seeing you.”

“And you told her what we talked about?”

“Yeah. I told her exactly what we planned. I said you tried to convince me to help you kill her, and that I told you I'd think about it, but that I thought we should double-cross you. I told her I'd be willing to kill you for her. She bought it.”

The night before, when I'd approached Brad in the parking lot of Cooley's, my plan had been simply to get Brad to bring Miranda to the house on Micmac Road. That was step one. Once I was alone with Miranda, I knew that I could kill her, using my stun gun first, then either smother her with a plastic bag, or use my knife. But when I began to talk with Brad outside Cooley's, I recognized that he was a man on the verge of breaking. In the dim light of his truck's cab, I could see that his eyes were haunted and scared. I was reminded of an animal with his leg in a trap, half-starved and desperate. I changed plans immediately, telling him that I'd known Miranda since college, and I knew what she had done, and that he'd been set up all along.

“She's going to turn you in, Brad. You know that, don't you?” I said to him.

“I don't know,” he said.

“Brad, I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. Miranda is an evil person. Is there any proof whatsoever that Miranda had anything to do with killing Ted? Besides your word, that is. All she has to do is say that you did it on your own accord. You won't be able to prove otherwise. You're going to go to jail for the rest of your life, and Miranda is going to get off scot-free. You've been used.”

“Oh, God,” he said, and wiped at an eye with one of his large hands.

It had been that easy to get him on my side. It was clear that he
had not been completely fooled by Miranda. Far from it. I told him we should go back to his house and discuss options. I followed him in my car to the rental unit where he lived. Ted had described it to me, telling me how sterile and bleak it was, and he was right. The furniture was solid but uninteresting. Magazines had been fanned across the coffee table, and the whole place smelled of cleaning products. I wondered if it was even cleaner than when Ted had seen it—wondered if Brad, in his distress, had been compulsively straightening his apartment. We sat on the couch. I had turned down the offer of a beer but Brad had got himself a Heineken from the tiny alcove kitchen attached to the living room. He emptied half the bottle with his first sip.

“Are you in love with her?” I asked him.

“I thought so,” he said. “I mean, I don't know. You've seen her. You saw her. She's going to be fucking rich.”

“Yeah, she's going to be rich, but she's not going to share that with you. Trust me. This is how she operates. She gets men to do what she wants them to do and then she eliminates them. She got you to kill her husband for her, and she got you to do it when she was a thousand miles away.”

He nodded at me, his face slack. “That's the worst part,” I continued. “She turned you into a murderer, and that's something that you can never reverse. But it wasn't you, Brad. It was Miranda. She manipulated you. You never stood a chance.”

I watched as tears spilled in two steady streams from Brad's eyes, falling down his leathery face. I had told him what he wanted to hear: I had told him that he wasn't responsible for the murder of Ted Severson, and that Miranda was. I had absolved him. When he stopped crying, I asked him to get me a beer. I wasn't planning on drinking it, but I wanted to give him something to do, and I wanted him to feel like I was now on his side. He came back with two bottles, sat down, and uncapped the bottles with an opener that was attached to his key ring.

“What should I do?” he asked. “Should I just go to the police and confess. Tell them everything that happened?”

“That's not going to help. You're still the one who killed Ted. She was nowhere near when it happened, and she's going to say she had nothing to do with it.”

“So what should I do?” He drank his beer, dribbled a little down his chin.

The way he was looking at me I could have told him to break his own fingers and he would have done it. So I took a chance, and said to him: “I need you to help me get rid of Miranda. It's what she deserves, and it's the only thing that's going to get you off the hook. Can you help me do that?”

“What do you mean, get rid of her?”

“I'm going to kill her, Brad.”

“Okay.”

So I presented the plan. I told him to tell Miranda that I wanted to meet with her, that I knew all about the murder, and that I wanted money. We would meet in the house the Seversons had been building, sometime the next night, after dark. “She'll be suspicious,” Brad said.

“Okay,” I said. “You're right. So instead of telling her that I'm going to blackmail her, tell her that it's a setup, that I told you to tell her it was blackmail, but that I'm planning on killing her, that I've been waiting for my moment since college. She'll come. I know she will. Then I'll get rid of her, and you can help me bury her body. If she gets discovered I'll make sure that you have a solid alibi. I'll say that you and I met up here in Kennewick, and we hooked up, and you came back down to my house in Massachusetts. You'll be fine, I promise.”

“What about the money?”

“You're never going to see that money, Brad. Never. You're going to go to prison, and I'm offering you a way out. If Miranda's gone, then you are safe.”

He nodded rapidly, like he'd just been scolded. “How are you going to kill her?”

“I'll take care of that,” I said.

“I could do it,” Brad said, and there was something new in his eyes.
Not fear, anymore, but hatred, plus maybe a little bit of craziness. I wondered if he'd slept at all since killing Ted.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I could send her into the house, and then I could come in through the back patio entrance and sneak up on her. I have this big wrench. I could hit her over the head with it. That way you wouldn't have to do it. You don't want to know what it's like.”

It was perfect. It solved my biggest problem, that if I was the one to kill Miranda, there would inevitably be some sort of forensic test that would prove a five-foot-eight-inch female had dealt the deadly blow and not a six-foot-two-inch man.

“You won't need to sneak up on her,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell her that you're planning on killing me because I know everything. Tell Miranda that you're going to sneak up on me and hit me with the wrench. Then, even if she hears you coming into the house, she'll think you're after me. She won't even know it's coming.”

“Okay.” He nodded.

“Are you sure about this?”

He told me he was, and I believed him. We talked more, going over every detail of the plan. I reassured him several times that everything was going to be okay. When I left his house, I was convinced that he would do everything he had told me he would do.

And he had.

I had wondered, as I was standing in the dark with Miranda, whether I had been stupid, and Brad was going to kill me instead of Miranda. But at the last moment, when Brad lifted that massive wrench, I knew. I knew that I had won, and Miranda, like others before her, was going to die, and that I was going to live.

With the windows of the truck rolled up, and Brad smoking, the cab filled with pungent smoke. “So she was willing to kill me?” I asked Brad, needing to know.

“Yeah. Like you said she'd be. She was surprised, though . . . she
said you guys weren't that close in college.” He rubbed at his lips with his spatulate fingers. “How'd you know about everything? How'd you know so much about what happened with Ted? I never asked you last night.”

“I met Ted Severson on a flight back from London. He told me that his wife was cheating on him with his house contractor. He watched you through binoculars from the path out along the bluff. We continued to meet. He decided he wanted to kill Miranda. And you, as well. I told him I'd help.”

Brad took another long drag on his cigarette, but it was down to the filter. He cranked the window down and flicked the cigarette away. I heard it sputter out as it hit a puddle. “You're shitting me,” Brad said, swinging his head in my direction. The chloral hydrate was kicking in. Brad's speech was starting to slur, and his eyes were drooping.

“No. I wish I was. Ted was planning on killing Miranda and she was planning on killing Ted, but she got there first. Well, you got there first. It's all over now, though.”

“It is,” he said. “It is.” His words were heavily slurred—
is
sounded like
ish
—and I could just barely understand what he was saying. His head was angled down, and he reminded me of a boxer trying to stay awake in the ring, not realizing that he's already been knocked out. He started to lean a little toward me, and I moved back in my seat, the bags on my feet rustling against the floor of the truck.

“Why do you . . . why do you have bags on your feet?” His words were almost complete mush and I would never have known what he was saying but I could see where he was looking. He fell forward, slumping sideways so that his right shoulder landed hard on my thigh. I grabbed two handfuls of his thick denim jacket and managed to move him upright in his seat. His head tipped backward, his mouth open. I unlatched my door and got out of the truck, shutting it quickly so that the light didn't stay on too long in the cab. I looked up. The night sky was filled with clustered stars, brighter now than when I had parked the car. The ocean shushed
unseen. I allowed myself ten seconds of just standing there, and then I got to work.

I had brought extra bags, and I had my knife, but before resorting to either of those, I hoisted myself onto the bed of the truck to check out the toolbox that was secured with a bungee cord against the rear of the cab. The corrugated metal lid was unlocked and I used my penlight to look inside. There were all the tools I'd expected—hammers, handsaws, a tire iron, a plastic box that contained a drill—but what caught my eye was a length of coat hanger wire that had been repurposed into a long hook, for jimmying the lock when the keys were left inside. I picked it up and straightened it out. It would be perfect; I didn't want any blood in the truck.

I slid back onto the passenger seat, and shut the door behind me. I rolled down my window; the smell of Brad's last cigarette still lingered in the cab, plus there was something else . . . the chemical odor of distilled alcohol coming from Brad's breath. Maybe also his body. He had begun to snore—high nasal rasps on each outtake of breath. I grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him as hard as I could, and he showed no signs of coming out of his deep sleep. I wondered if the combination of alcohol—how much had he drunk today?—and the chloral hydrate would eventually kill him, but I couldn't take the risk that it wouldn't.

I got onto my knees on the passenger seat. I pushed Brad's head away from me so that it fell facing the driver's-side window. It was still tipped back and there was space between his thick neck and the truck's headrest. I circled the coat hanger wire around his neck, and twisted the ends together so that the wire was tight against his neck. I took out the Leatherman from my backpack, and clipped the excess wire from the coat hanger so that the twisted-together part was only about an inch long.

I gripped the ends with the tip of the Leatherman pliers and I twisted, tightening the wire until I knew that Brad was dead.

I couldn't sleep.

This was nothing new to me, especially when I was working on a case. I checked the clock on my bedside table. It was a little after three in the morning. Pyewacket the cat was sleeping on my discarded clothes on the floor. He looked cold, curled into a ball like a woolly bear caterpillar that's pretending it's dead. He probably wondered why those metal strips along his apartment's floor hadn't started making burbling sounds and getting warm. Late October had turned cold, but I liked to hold out till November, at least, before turning the heat on.

I thought of getting out of bed and going to see what was playing on Turner Classic Movies but knew that if I did, I would never get back to sleep again. I needed to be at least a little sharp for the following day. Ted Severson had been murdered on Friday night, and it had now just tipped over into the following Wednesday. Almost a whole week. We had a prime suspect—this Brad Daggett character—but he'd pulled a runner, and no one could find him. I'd spent the day up in Maine, in the company of the mostly helpful Kennewick police
force, keeping an eye on Daggett's house, checking any and all leads as to his whereabouts. He was our man, for sure. After Miranda Severson identified our sketch as possibly being Brad Daggett, I'd checked the system, and Daggett was there. He'd been arrested twice. Five years earlier on suspicion of domestic assault, and two years ago on a DUI. I'd called him with the number that Miranda had given me, but he didn't pick up. Then I called the local police, and asked them to swing by and check to see if Brad Daggett was home, maybe do some initial questioning, ask him if he had any information on the death of Ted Severson. They did as I asked, but he wasn't at his house. I told them it could wait till the next day, that I'd be questioning the primary witness in the morning and we'd know more then. I printed Daggett's most recent mug shot, and took it to Rachel Price's apartment in Somerville the following morning. When she looked at the picture, she hopped a little on her toes, and said, “Oh, that's him. That's definitely him.”