The Silent Bride (36 page)

Mike snorted and moved through the house, checking it for himself. April took out her notebook.

"Is Wendy all right?" Lori brushed the hair from her face and sank down on a sofa.

"How long have you been here, Lori?" April asked.

"About a week, I guess. Can't you tell me what's going on?"

April ignored the question. "Don't guess. Tell me exactly"

"I guess I came last Sunday."

"You guess? How did you get here?" April picked up a greasy Subway sack, then put it down.

"I took the bus to Woods Hole and then the ferry."

"Before or after the Schoenfeld wedding?" April turned on a light.

Lori squinted. "I didn't have to go. Wendy was doing it herself."

"I thought it takes a lot of people to pull off a wedding like that." April turned on some more lights.

"Not when it's only one site. That always keeps the glitches down, and sometimes Wendy likes to do them herself. She's very efficient. Why are you asking?" Lori twisted around to look at her.

April spun around, startling her. "She gave you these two weekends off, why?"

Lori recoiled. April noticed the hickey on her neck. A big one. She saw April looking at her and shifted uneasily; clearly she hadn't seen herself in the mirror.

"Why the two weekends off? Did you have another job Wendy wanted you to do?"

"Like what?" Lori was surprised by the question.

"Did you know Tovah Schoenfeld was murdered at her wedding last Sunday?"

Lori looked down at her hands. "Yes."

"How do you know if you don't have a phone?"

Her voice got very low. "I have a cell phone."

"And what else made you know?"

"She came up on Tuesday night."

Good. That was true. "Did she tell you she was coming?"

"Yes. I had to clean up for her. She would have killed me."

"Wendy's very particular, isn't she?"

Lori put her lips together and nodded.

"She wouldn't like to see her house like this. Why did she come, Lori?"

"She brought some things for the summer."

"In the middle of a busy week? What things?"

"I don't know." "Where did she put them?"

"I don't know. I was asleep when she got here." Lori's eyes traveled up the wall to the ceiling.

"In the attic?" April said.

Silence. The thin girl got smaller, younger-looking. "I said I don't know."

"How old are you, Lori?"

"Twenty-four," she said softly.

'Twenty-four. Where were you yesterday?"

"Here." She frowned. "Why?"

"Lori, have you ever been in any kind of trouble before? Tell me the truth, because I can check it out."

"No," she said in a faint voice.

"You're in a lot of trouble now."

"I didn't know about Tovah until Wendy told me," she said, a plea in her voice.

"What about Prudence, did you know Prudence?"

"Prudence?"

"Prudence Hay. Another one of the weddings you didn't work. Prudence is dead, too."

"What?" Lori looked confused. "I didn't know about that. What happened?"

"Someone shot her on the way into St. Patrick's."

"God, I didn't know that." Her mouth fell open in amazement. "Is Wendy all right?"

"She's fine."

Mike came back into the hving room. "Nothing in the bedrooms or the closets," he said. "There's a deck out back and an outbuilding of some kind, like a tool-shed. What about the kitchen cupboards? Let's do inside first."

"They're in the attic," April told him quietly. "Lori, get your things together. You're going back to New York."

Forty-eight

"Hey, Mike, take some gloves' April said. "Just in case."

She pulled some thin rubber gloves out of the bottom of her purse and handed them over. Mike stuffed them in his jacket pocket. This wasn't a crime scene. He cocked his head at the ceiling panel in the hall over his head. It had a handle at one end just out of his reach. A pole with a hook on the end rested in the corner, and Mike used that to lower the panel. Attached to the panel on the inside was a crude ladder on springs. He turned to the girl in the living room, twisting a handful of skirt in her hands.

"Anybody up there?" he asked.

She shook her tangled hair. "No, of course not."

"You sure?"

"Who'd be hiding? No one expected you. Can I pee?"

"Yeah, you can pee. I'll come with you," April said.

"Jesus," she muttered. "What do you think I'm going to do?"

"Hush the dope."

Mike changed his mind about the gloves. He pulled them on, then climbed the ladder. Upstairs, he pulled the string on the single bare lightbulb. It gave off just enough weak illumination for him to make out a surprisingly large and murky space. First thing he noticed was that it had been swept recently, so there were no footprints for him to disturb.

A pile of dust and mouse droppings filled a corner under the eaves. An ancient-looking broom lay beside it. The house wasn't insulated, so the dampness and smell of mold in exposed wooden beams was intense. Mike cast his eye quickly over the haphazardly placed contents. Closest to the stairs were ten oversize shopping bags filled with bulky tissue- and newspaper-wrapped objects. Beyond that, folded plastic deck chairs, a beach umbrella, two old suitcases, a hot-water heater, a clambake pot, a Weber barbecue, a trap machine and canvas bag filled with clay discs, and an old camp trunk with a broken lock.

Mike moved quickly, checking the shopping bags and suitcases first. While he worked, he could hear the murmur of voices downstairs. April's and the girl's. The sheriff must still be outside with the weirdo. Unwrapping the contents of the shopping bags as fast as he could, he found new candlesticks, crystal objects, glasses, linens, silver, small appliances in the bags. In the suitcases, quilts and pillows and summer clothes. The attic became a flea market, the evidence Wendy was a thief. But this was not what he was looking for.

When he heard the sound of rain falling on the roof above him, he checked his watch. One o'clock already. Over an hour had passed and he didn't hear voices downstairs anymore. Maybe April was outside with the sheriff searching the shed, the space under the deck. Finally he opened the trunk lid and exhaled. The gun cache was in the camp trunk: two revolvers, three shotguns recently cleaned and broken down, smelling of oil, variously emptied boxes of .22-, .38-, and ,45-caliber ammunition, both regular and hollow-point. As well as ammunition for the shotguns and several homemade silencers. If Wendy had been shooting recently, the silencers would be the reason there hadn't been any complaints from the neighbors. He got to his feet, threaded through the mess he'd made, and climbed down the ladder.

While Lori sat sniveling in the cruiser with her duffel bag on her lap, April and Mike brought the trunk downstairs and cataloged its contents. Then they took two umbrellas from the stand by the front door and paced out the grounds in a steady downpour. They found a pile of discharged shell casings, bullet-pocked trees, and clay shards. They gathered some shell casings to see if there was a match with the one they had from the Tovah shooting.

Then paperwork, paperwork. Dealing with the law-enforcement issues surrounding the seizure and shipping of possible evidence of a crime committed in New York from a private residence in Massachusetts took a long time as the DAs and officials in BAFT were consulted. They missed their three P.M. flight.

Most disturbing to Sheriff Whitmore were the silencers, one of the most illegal things in the gun world—unless you had a permit. You could buy a machine gun or an assault weapon, but not even members of organized crime had silencers on their handguns. He'd never seen one for sale, and couldn't believe they might have been constructed in the cottage.

Most disturbing to April and Mike were three things: First, they did not find Wendy's takedown .22-caliber survival rifle or the .38 revolver that went with the ammunition boxes. Second, the next flight to New York was canceled. They finally got out at nine P.M. on a Cape Air flight to Boston in what looked like the smallest plane ever made. They caught the last shuttle back to New York and got into the city at midnight. Third, Lori Wilson was with them all the way so they had no time alone.

Forty-nine

D
own at One PP in the Hate Unit when Lori Wilson finally understood she wasn't going home anytime soon, she broke down and admitted that she'd known about the guns.

"But I never shot one. They scare me shitless; I'm not kidding," Lori insisted.

Lori was bleary-eyed weary, but so was April, and she wasn't letting the girl loose until she gave up everything she had. April and Mike had split up. April was doing the questioning with the tape recorder on, for the record this time. Mike and Inspector Bellaqua were having a preliminary conversation with the Manhattan DA about the recovery of the guns and options vis-a-vis Wendy Lotte. Everything was heating up.

"When were the guns transported to New York?" April asked for the thirtieth time.

"I don't know. I told you. I didn't like them. I stayed away from the whole thing." Lori glanced at the tape recorder. Since the morning, she'd cleaned up. She was wearing jeans and a jacket now. April could see that she was a pretty girl with that WASP look so many Americans aspired to. Straight blond hair, blue eyes, pug nose, high cheekbones. She didn't know which end was up, though. The girl had no street smarts.

"How could you stay away from the guns if they were around all the time?" April tried not to tap her foot.

"I told you. They weren't around all the time. I never saw one in New York. Only on the Vineyard that one time." Lori yawned, then belatedly remembered to put her hand over her mouth.

"When was that?"

"Back in April."

"What were you doing on the Vineyard in April?"

"I told you that, too. We did a wedding there. At the Charlotte Inn."

"Who was
we,
Lori?"

"Wendy, of course. Louis, Tito, that creepy guy, Ubu. They decorated the whole first floor with lilies and roses and hydrangeas. White, red, and purple were the colors. They did the garden, too, and it was freezing even with the heaters on."

"So how many vehicles were involved?"

"I don't know. They had to bring everything in from the city. The Vineyard has nothing."

"How many vehicles traveled up?"

Lori threw her hands up. "I don't know. Ask Louis. I only saw his van. That's it. Maybe they shipped the rest."

"Okay, who else was with you?"

Lori rubbed her nose. "Only Kim."

"Kim?" April said.

"Kim Simone. He makes the dresses."

The new piece punched April in the gut. This late at night it was dead in the squad room, pretty dead in the whole building, in fact. She and Lori were sitting all the way in the back at a detective's desk by a window that overlooked some of the Wall Street area, and, beyond it, the Statue of Liberty.

"The wedding dress?" she said, taking it real slow.

"Uh-huh. It was a Tang Ling dress, but Kim copied it for her. Sometimes he did special orders for us as a favor. He wasn't supposed to knock off the dresses. I told you this already."

April didn't tell Lori that no, she hadn't mentioned this at all. Sometimes they had no idea what was important. Tang Ling. She shook her head. So Wendy stole some of the wedding gifts just to keep her hand in, Louis had the flower concession, and Kim knocked off the dresses for those clients who didn't go directly to Tang. A racket all the way around.