The Kind Worth Killing (30 page)

“That's the man you saw entering the house at six o'clock on Friday night?”

“Yes, that's him. I'm sure of it.”

That had been Tuesday morning. I'd called the sheriff, then driven up myself. Daggett was still nowhere to be found. Not at either of the construction sites that he was supervising, and not at his home, one of a string of rental cottages that he owned along Kennewick Beach. White paint and green trim. Made me think of my own childhood vacations at Wells Beach, just a little farther north. When it was clear he wasn't home, and wasn't coming back anytime soon, I tried out the key I'd found hidden in Ted Severson's bedroom drawer. It fit Brad's cottage door. Why did Ted have a key to his general contractor's house? Had
they
been having an affair? I peered into the tiny, immaculate cottage but didn't enter yet. A local judge granted a warrant just after his lunch break and we searched the place, finding nothing.

I'd been kicking myself all day that I hadn't acted faster after Miranda gave me Brad Daggett's name. I should have brought his mug
shot immediately to Rachel Price, but Miranda's halfhearted identification hadn't left me with much hope. Of course, now it seemed abundantly clear that Miranda only identified Brad because she felt she had to, and she was covering herself. And she must have been the one who had warned Brad to stay away from his house and turn off his phone. It was the oldest story in the book. The wife had had her boyfriend kill her husband. The curveball was that hidden key in Ted's drawer, the key to Brad's cottage in Maine. Was it Miranda's key and she had hidden it in her husband's drawer? Possible, I supposed.

By early afternoon, we'd put an all-points bulletin out for Brad and his vehicle. His ex-wife had been interviewed, plus several employees and work colleagues. No one had seen him since the previous day at lunch, when he'd bought a large meatball sub at a pizza place in York that he frequented. He'd disappeared.

I left Maine late in the afternoon, taking I-95 back down toward Boston. On the way, I received an excited call from Billy Elkins, the officer I'd tasked with looking into Lily Kintner, the woman that Miranda Severson said she knew in Winslow, Massachusetts. He'd found out a lot. Lily Kintner worked at Winslow College in the library department, apparently under the name of Lily Hayward. But she owned a house on Poplar Road in Winslow under her real name. Most importantly, Ted and Lily had shared a flight back from London on the twentieth of September. I pumped my fist in the car, then took down her address.

Asking Billy to check passenger manifests had been a total hunch, but an educated one, and I couldn't believe that it had paid off. As soon as Miranda had identified Lily Kintner as the one person she knew who lived in Winslow, I had wondered if Lily Kintner was the same Lily Kintner who was the daughter of David Kintner, easily my favorite living novelist. I didn't know much about Kintner's daughter, just that her name was Lily, and that she was born in America while David had been living in Connecticut, married to an American artist named Sharon Henderson. Mather College was in Connecticut, and
if Lily was Miranda's age, then she'd be just about the right age to be Kintner's daughter.

The thing about David Kintner was that he wasn't just famous for being a novelist; he had become infamous for accidentally killing his second wife in a drunk driving accident in England. It had been huge news in England, less so in America. I followed it because I was a fan of his books. He'd done time and just been released, less than a month ago. It would make sense that his American daughter had flown over to London to see him. I had also learned from Miranda Severson that Ted had flown to London recently for work, so it occurred to me that Ted and this Lily Kintner had possibly met on an airplane. I had Billy take a shot and check the manifests, and got a hit. After a fruitless day trying to find Brad Daggett, it felt good that some detective work had actually paid off. She
must
have been the reason he traveled to Winslow that day, even though she probably had nothing to do with his death.

When I reached the I-95/I-93 split, instead of getting onto I-93 to head into Boston, I stayed on I-95, looping west toward Winslow. I didn't expect much to come from questioning Lily Kintner, but I needed to check it out.

She'd been home, and she did turn out to be David Kintner's daughter, just as I suspected. She lived in a book-filled house on a pond with only a few other houses on its leaf-plastered shore. She greeted me at the door, looking a little disheveled, her eyes taking a moment to focus on my face. I wondered if I'd woken her from a nap. She invited me in. I asked her about Ted Severson and she told me she knew him, but only from the newspaper reports of his death, and from knowing that he had married someone she knew from college. She offered coffee and I accepted. While she made it, I looked over her bookshelves, finding a row of all of David Kintner's novels. I ran a finger across their spines, remembering pictures I'd seen of him. Tall and angular with a thatch of white hair. A drinker's face—sallow and hollow-cheeked. Lily returned with the coffee, her hair pushed back
behind her ears, her sleepy eyes now sharp and watchful. I told her I knew her father's books, was a fan actually, and she seemed unimpressed, as though she'd heard way too much about her father's genius. I told her I knew about the situation in England, and that allowed me to bring up the flight she'd shared with Ted Severson. Something clicked in her luminous green eyes, and she told me that she
had
met a man on the plane, and that he'd seemed familiar, and it was probably him. They'd spoken at length, and it was possible she'd told him who she was and where she lived. We found a picture on the Internet and she confirmed that it was Ted Severson she had spoken to, but she claimed to have no idea why he would have come to Winslow.

I believed some of what she told me. I believed that she hadn't known Ted Severson had come to her town to look for her, and I believed that she was surprised that I'd shown up at her house, but I didn't believe that she hadn't figured out that the man on the plane was the husband of a friend of hers. It made no sense. But why would she lie to me about such a thing?

At her door I put my hand in my pocket, my fingers touching the key we now knew belonged to Brad Daggett's cottage in Maine. Even so, I asked Lily if she'd mind if I tried her door with it. I just wanted to gauge her reaction. She seemed perplexed, but not worried. I left, not really knowing what to think. But I did know why Ted Severson had gone to Winslow that day. He'd met Lily Kintner on a plane, and he'd fallen in love with her. That much was sure. I empathized. In fact, I'd been thinking about Lily Kintner almost nonstop since meeting her the day before. She was beautiful, that much I remembered, but I was having trouble reconstructing her facial features in my mind. I could picture her long red hair, and her green eyes, so much like a cat's, but her face kept slipping in and out of my mind's grasp. But more than her physical presence, I had been taken in by her almost otherworldly self-possession, and by the way she inhabited her book-lined cottage in the woods of Winslow. Was she lonely out there all alone? Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn't need
other humans in her life? It was something that I intended to find out.

My younger sister, Emily, who knows me better than anyone in the world, told me recently that my problem with relationships is that I fall in love with every woman I'm attracted to.

“Don't most guys?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Most guys just want to sleep with all the women they're attracted to. The last thing they want to do is fall in love. You call yourself a detective, and you don't know that?”

“Trust me. I also want to sleep with these women.”

“Yeah, but then you fall in love with them, and either they break your heart, or—”

“Can we talk about your love life now?” I interrupted. It was how I got Emily to change the subject when she was analyzing my failed romances.

Pyewacket stirred, which meant it was 5:00
A
.
M
. He leaped onto my bed, prepared to breathe on my eyelids to wake me up, but I swung my legs out from under the covers before he had a chance. I let him out of my apartment's side door, which led to the fire escape. He darted out, nimbly walking on the metal slats, heading down to the small backyard, where it was his job to protect our kingdom from falling leaves and rogue squirrels.

I got back into bed, now certain that there was no chance I'd get any more sleep. I kept a spiral-bound notebook and a pen on top of the pile of books by my bed. It was supposed to be an idea book, a place to record late-night thoughts about cases I was working on, but also lines of poetry. I still considered myself a poet (something no one in the force knew about), even though I'd lost the ability to write anything but limericks these days. I told myself I was at least writing something, and that maybe it would help me think about cases. Earlier the day before I'd written these two:

        
There once was a husband named Ted,

        
Who met his end in a volley of lead.

        
It was clear he was rich—

        
And his wife was a bitch—

        
So it's not a surprise that he's dead.

        
There once was a girl named Miranda,

        
It was clear that no one could stand her.

        
But beneath all that crass

        
Was an excellent ass,

        
So the rich men all lined up to land her.

To the same page, I added the following:

        
There once was a novelist's daughter

        
Whose eyes were the green of seawater.

        
I hoped to remove

        
Her clothing to prove

        
That naked she'd look even hotter.

I wondered, not for the first time, why my limericks always turned out dirty. I tried to come up with one about Brad Daggett but failed. Instead I got up, made a full pot of coffee, and began to get ready to go to work.

I reached my desk at just past seven, calling up and checking in with the Kennewick chief of police, and finding out that Brad Daggett never returned to his house.

“I'm not surprised,” I said, half to myself. “Keep a patrol car there, though, just in case. Even though he's obviously made a run for it.”

“We talked with a girlfriend of his last night,” said Chief Ireland, his voice raspy, like he was fighting a cold. “Polly Greenier. She's kind of a fixture at Cooley's, the bar where Brad Daggett liked to hang out. They were an on-and-off thing. Years and years, actually. They went to high school together.”

“She know anything?”

“She didn't know anything 'bout where he might be. I asked her when she last saw him, though, and she told me she was with him Friday night.”

“Last Friday night?”

“That's what she said. They were drinking at Cooley's and wound up back at his place. She says she spent the night there.”

“You sure she had the day right?”

“No, not sure, but we can check it. If they were at Cooley's and left together folks in the bar will remember. It's a small town, and people notice stuff like that.”

“You'll check it out for me?”

“Sure will.”

“And one more thing,” I said. “Have one of your patrols swing back to the Severson house that Daggett was building. And any other houses that Daggett might have the keys for. If he's still in the area, it makes sense he might be hiding out in one of them. Check all the cottages, too, that he owns on the beach.”

“We checked them.”

“Okay. Thanks, Chief Ireland.”

“Call me Jim, okay?”

“Will do,” I said.

I sat at my desk for a while after the phone call, worrying about Daggett's alibi, and how solid it might be. It couldn't be real, that much I knew. He must have gotten this girlfriend of his to agree that they were together on Friday night. If that was the case, then the alibi would crack faster than a window in a hurricane. I wrote her name down on the notebook in front of me, circling it several times. Then my partner, Roberta James, swung by, depositing an Egg McMuffin on my desk (“Two-for-one menu item, so I thought of you”), and I caught her up on what I'd heard that morning. After she left, I wrote a few more lines under Polly Greenier's name in the notebook.
Why would she lie for Brad? Why did Ted have a key for Brad's house? Why did Lily Kintner lie to me?

I was about to call Police Chief Jim Ireland back, tell him I wanted to come up and talk with this Polly Greenier, when he called me instead. “You better come up here,” he said. “There's a body. At the house Daggett was building.”

“Is it him?” I asked, already standing, pulling on my jacket, checking my pocket for my car keys.

“No, it's not a
him
at all. It's a woman. I haven't seen her yet, but they're pretty sure it's Miranda Severson. Her head's bashed in.”

“I'll be right there,” I said and hung up the phone. I grabbed James, who had just settled at her desk, and told her we were heading back up to Maine.

After making sure that Brad was dead I removed the coat hanger wire from around his neck. I grasped him by his denim coat and managed to drag him across the truck's front seat onto the passenger's side, where I strapped him in with the seat belt. I tilted the seat a little bit back so that he tilted with it, then zipped his coat all the way up, turning up the sheepskin-lined collar so that it covered the ligature marks on his neck. If someone saw us in the car, he'd look like a dozing passenger. At least that's what I hoped he'd look like.