John Lutz - Torch

“That’s your job, I guess. Seeing the patterns, the real shapes of things in the fog.” She sounded sad.

Maybe she sensed what he was thinking, what had emerged from the fog. Maggie, Beni Ho, Carl Gretch-they formed a tighter and tighter pattern. He knew now they were all connected in some meaningful way with Nightlinks. Mark’s lover, Donna’s lover, and a killer. And Donna and Mark and Gretch were dead. Maggie should be more frightened than she was. She should be scared sick.

He could think of only one reason why she wasn’t. He swiveled on his stool and stood up. Laid some ones on the bar to pay for the beer he’d only sampled.

“Thought you were gonna hang around,” she said.

“Changed my mind. Work to do.”

“Don’t mention to anyone at Burnair and Crosley you saw me here, okay?”

“Sure. There’s not much chance I’d run into someone from there anyway.”

“Well, you never know.”

“I’m trying to change that.”

“Fred!” she called, as he was leaving. When he turned around she was smiling at him.

“You scare me, too,” she said.

He returned to the shoe store doorway across Gull and waited less then five minutes before Maggie came out of Shellie’s, blinked at the sunshine, then strode to her car.

She was walking a straight line and didn’t seem the least bit drunk. Maybe she’d been scared sober.

She was carrying the briefcase.

He hurried to the Olds and climbed in and followed her, first to the Florida Federal Bank of Del Moray on Blue Heron Drive, then to Burnair and Crosley.

Carver drove to his office and fielded phone calls and correspondence until almost four o’clock. It was cool and quiet and peaceful there. The view out the window was of the wind off the sea ruffling the tall palm trees beyond the buildings on the other side of Magellan so they looked like towering, absurdly thin women shaking their heads so their hair flew. The only sound was the soft, monotonous hum of the air conditioner doing full battle with the relentless heat and winning for the moment. He almost would have resented a prospective client walking in.

He sat staring at the glaring view beyond the window, thinking about how he seemed to be learning more about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Donna and Mark Winship, and about how little of what he’d learned was sufficient proof for an indictment. A sharp attorney would call most of it circumstantial, hearsay, and assumption. The sharp attorney would be right.

But that same attorney would have difficulty explaining the relationships of the people involved, the dead and the survivors. Somewhere in those relationships lay the impetus for suicide and the motive for murder, if only it could all be reasoned out.

Explaining it wasn’t a job for an attorney, Carver had to concede. It was his job. And he was sure that if he didn’t do it well, there would be at least one more murder.

He hated all violent death, but especially homicide. Hated the arrogant presumption, the loosing of chaos, and then the ruins that inevitably spawned more tragedy, that were always pieces of the puzzle of murder. He hated the sudden transformation of someone alive into something no more animate than a piece of furniture. He hated the death of beauty and the return to dust.

Another thing he didn’t like was the workable parts of his lower body falling asleep. His pelvis and the base of his spine were numb from sitting too long in his chair. He stood up, leaning first on the desk and then on his cane, and waited for the tingling of returning circulation to stop and full feeling to return to his lower extremities.

He was standing that way, staring across Magellan at two potbellied elderly men in white slacks and pastel golf shirts talking animatedly with each other, maybe arguing, when the phone rang.

He didn’t move, letting the answering machine pick up the call after the fourth ring.

Beep!

“Beth here, Fred. When you get a chance call me at the cottage. Or if you happen to be in the office-”

He lifted the receiver and sat back down in his chair simultaneously, cutting in on the machine to speak direct: “I’m here, Beth.”

“Seen the evening edition of the Gazette-Dispatch ?” she asked. The Dispatch was the newspaper of choice in Del Moray, after the Miami Herald , which covered much more than the Dispatch’s regional news.

Dreading what she might tell him, he said he hadn’t read a paper since this morning. Across Magellan, one of the elderly men was emphasizing a point by rhythmically poking the other in the chest with a forefinger. The other man stood calmly with his hands at his sides, like a fixed object in a flooded wild stream, waiting patiently for the water to recede.

“You were right about who hired that photographer, Fred. Looks like it was Cindy Sue, and she didn’t waste any time. She filed for divorce from Reverend Devine this morning. She must have been waiting to move as soon as the film was developed.”

“Were the photographs mentioned?”

“No. Cindy Sue claimed incompatibility. No details. It’s a small item on page six of the front section, a sidebar to a story about Reverend Devine and his flock obstructing entry into a high school that was scheduled to show a sex-education film titled Sex in and out of Marriage .” Beth paused, then chuckled with satisfaction. “Don’t you just love irony?”

“Unless I’m the one getting ironed.”

“Well, even a hypocrite’s private life should remain private, unless he or she makes a hypocritical public issue of it. Then the rules change. Reverend Devine is getting what he deserves, and I hope his wife makes those photos public.”

“You’re an uncompromising woman.”

“Way I feel about it, Fred.”

“I think I’ll always be honest with you.”

“Wisest choice.”

After hanging up, he went outside to buy a newspaper from the vending machine on the corner. He inserted a quarter, wrestled a Gazette-Dispatch out of its blue steel enclosure, then carried the newspaper back to the office to read.

The news item was as Beth had described. And there was a photo of Devine that had been shot at some sort of protest demonstration. A man and two women behind him were leaning angrily toward the camera with their mouths open, snarling something at the photographer. The man and one of the women had what looked like stick handles of signs resting on their shoulders. In the photograph’s background was a parked car and a blurred flurry of activity involving several people moving fast in the same direction. Devine looked younger than he had the night Carver had glimpsed him at the motel, a sternly smiling man with a slightly bulbous nose and the gaze of a crusader. There was also a photo of Cindy Sue, a round-faced brunette who was attractive despite a hairdo that resembled a Buckingham Palace guardsman’s tall headgear.

Carver folded the newspaper in half and laid it on the desk.

He understood now what Nightlinks was really all about. Something so simple, even if devious, that it was a miracle it wasn’t done more often. Or maybe it was, and only some of those involved were aware of it.

Carver now understood why Donna and Mark had died, and why Gretch had been made to follow them in death.

And he knew what his next move should be and didn’t like it. Not completely.

After using his cane to slide the phone across the desk to him, he called McGregor at Del Moray police headquarters.

He felt like a man reaching into a hole for a snake.

“Odd,” McGregor said, “you phoning me. Usually I’ve gotta run you to ground and yank conversation outa you like it was back molars.”