A Blood Thing Read online

  He looked at the elegant Waterford crystal clock on the corner of his desk, a parting gift from his colleagues when he left the state attorney’s office—a time when he could never have imagined crossing an ethical line—then picked up the phone and dialed. Henry answered on the second ring. “Hey.”

  “What have you got?” Andrew asked.

  “Nothing. I’ve been checking out the people who visited Torrance during his time in prison. There were only four, remember? Including his public defender.”

  “And there’s nothing there?”

  “Nothing I can see. His PD’s name is Wesley Jurgens. He visited a few times in the months after he lost Torrance’s case—presumably to talk about an appeal. Next up were a couple of old college friends.” Andrew heard papers rustling over the phone. “Samuel Ordway and Scott Figgis. They each paid him a visit in the first year, separately, and Figgis came back once in the second. Next up was Derek Closterman, an old high school classmate, who also visited in the second year. Then no one until almost a year ago, when Jurgens went to see him again. Probably to talk about an appeal again. Or maybe clemency.”

  “Probably. Whatever it was, it’s privileged,” Andrew said, referring to the confidential nature of communications between an attorney and his client.

  “Yeah, that’s what Jurgens told me when I called him.”

  “I’m not surprised. You tell him why you were calling?”

  “No.”

  “He tell you anything else?”

  “Nothing useful. I caught him between appearances in court, so he was a bit abrupt, but he was willing to tell me what a fine guy Torrance is, how he got screwed on the sentence, blah, blah, blah. Said he hadn’t seen him in at least a year.”

  “Which we knew.”

  “Right.”

  “And you said you looked into those three school friends?”

  “As deep as I could,” Henry said. “And I spoke with them each by phone. Kept my reason for the calls vague.”

  “And nothing?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t see any reason someone would want him out of prison so badly.”

  “Damn it.”

  “Don’t forget the good news, though.”

  “Which is?”

  “We’ve also found no reason to worry about the guy when he gets out. He was clean as a whistle before his accident and a model prisoner after. No reason to think he’s gonna do bad things. That’s not much comfort, but it’s something, isn’t it?”

  Andrew sighed. He was right. It wasn’t much comfort.

  He ended the call, then glanced at his desktop computer before reaching into a desk drawer for his laptop. After powering it up, he opened a word processing program and typed a letter to himself from Southern State Correctional Facility prisoner Gabriel Torrance, seeking executive clemency. Writing as Torrance, he expressed deep regret for the accident that resulted in the injury to Craig Whitworth, the other driver—though Andrew knew that at least one witness had blamed the accident on Whitworth. He wrote that he regretted leaving the scene. He promised to never touch another drop of alcohol. He dated the letter seven months ago and sent it to the printer in the corner of his office.

  He sat for a moment with the printed letter facedown on his desk, unwilling for a moment to turn it over, to see what he had created. Instead, he studied Torrance’s signature on a copy of a form Torrance had signed when he was first sent to prison, which Henry had procured from his file. Andrew practiced signing Torrance’s name several times on a scratch pad, then flipped the letter over and, quickly, before he could stop himself, forged Torrance’s signature. Then he deleted the document from his laptop.

  Next, he held the forged letter roughly in his hands, forcing the paper to bend back and forth. He even folded over the upper right corner, creating a tiny crease. He thought the document now looked older than five minutes. He was appalled to realize he was better at this kind of deception than he wanted to be.

  Using the intercom, he asked his assistant to come into his office. A moment later, there was a small knock as the door opened.

  “Sir?” Peter said.

  He kept his eyes on the letter in his hands so he wouldn’t have to meet the younger man’s gaze. “I was going through these petitions for clemency, and I noticed that this one doesn’t have a date stamp like the others.”

  “I’m so sorry, Governor,” Peter said, sounding abashed. It was his job to stamp every piece of mail that made it into the governor’s in-box. “I can’t imagine how—”

  Andrew held up a hand and, filled with shame, said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. It’s just that this one interests me. I’m considering it.” He looked up and caught the mild surprise on Peter’s face. “But I don’t think I should act on it if we don’t have all our i’s dotted and t’s crossed.”

  “I’m not sure what . . . I mean, what would you . . .”

  “Can you just backdate it? Can you change the date on your stamp and go back seven months? Date the stamp a few days after the date on the letter?”

  Peter hesitated.

  “Is that something you could do for me, Peter?”

  “Uh . . . sure, I could do that, sir. Absolutely.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  He handed the letter to Peter and dropped his eyes quickly to the open file on his desk. It was one thing to cross an ethical line; it was quite another to drag someone across with you.

  Peter returned a minute later with the backdated document. Andrew knew he didn’t need to ask his assistant to keep this incident to himself. Such discretion was part of his job.

  Soon, various offices, agencies, and individuals would be notified of the pardon, including, among others, the office of the Secretary of State, the commissioner of the Department of Corrections, the parole board, the judge who originally had sentenced Torrance, and of course, Torrance himself. Andrew would meet resistance, he knew, given how unorthodox it would be to rush the process, but he’d never pardoned anyone before and had never asked anything of the officials involved, so he believed that with some coaxing—and, where necessary, a hint of reciprocal cooperation down the road, should it be needed—Gabriel Torrance would soon be a free man.

  Having sold his soul to a blackmailer, however, Andrew had to wonder whether he would ever be free again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Five days later, a little after 11:00 a.m., Henry sat in a rented green Jeep in the parking lot of Southern State Correctional Facility, watching Gabriel Torrance walk out through the prison’s front doors wearing a cheap suit and carrying a plastic bag. Mindful of the blackmailer’s admonition against keeping an eye on Torrance, he had rented the Jeep, thinking it looked very little like something a cop would be driving. Across the lot, Torrance looked lost as he squinted into the sun and scanned the parking lot. Henry knew that at this distance, and with the glare off the Jeep’s windshield, he would be virtually invisible inside the car. A moment later, a four-door silver sedan pulled out of a spot and stopped in front of Torrance. A Toyota Camry, Henry noted as he jotted down the plate number. The driver’s window rolled down. Henry was too far away to hear any words exchanged, but Torrance didn’t react with recognition, though he got into the back seat, both of which likely meant he wasn’t being picked up by a friend. Probably a car service.

  The prison was close to the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, like a lot of Vermont was. That was a great deal of its charm—Vermont’s, not the prison’s. More than three-quarters of the state was covered by forest. But the remoteness made it more difficult to follow the silver car without appearing to be doing so. The last thing he wanted was for Torrance to report back to the blackmailer that Henry had broken the no-follow rule. That would be bad for Tyler. But he had to follow. Torrance was their best lead. The caller had been careful so far, but at some point they had to meet up, right? Otherwise, what was the point of all this?

  In just a few minutes, they drove into the nearby town of Spri
ngfield. Henry kept as far behind the Camry as he could without risking losing it. Before long, the car pulled in to the lot of a Holiday Inn, and Torrance got out carrying a canvas bag by its strap, a bag he hadn’t been carrying when he’d walked out of Southern State Correctional. Must have been given to him by the livery driver. Henry would find the guy later and have a chat with him. He found a spot quickly and hurried over to a window near the front doors, where he peeked into the lobby and saw Torrance standing near the front desk, talking on a cell phone.

  If a cell phone had been among the possessions the state had kindly held for him for almost five years until his release, it couldn’t possibly have held a charge all this time. That meant either he had charged the phone in the car or it had been in the bag given to him by the driver, no doubt per the blackmailer’s instructions. Henry was betting on the latter.

  He watched Torrance slip his phone into his pocket and step up to the reception desk, where a woman gave him a professional smile. They spoke for a moment, then the woman handed him a key card. He didn’t sign anything or produce a credit card—which most decent hotels required these days even when guests planned to pay in cash—so Henry assumed that Torrance’s room had already been paid for.

  Henry’s smartphone rang in his pocket. He looked at the screen and saw that the caller had blocked his number.

  “Henry Kane here.”

  “Henry?” the caller said in his familiar metallic tone. “It’s me.”

  Wyatt Pickman sat at the desk in his war room, leaning back in his chair. Through the voice changer, into the burner phone, he said, “Henry, Henry, Henry . . .” as though addressing an ill-behaved child.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “I’ve had it for months.”

  “I’m glad you called. When do we get the evidence you promised?”

  “I was just about to send it when I learned that you aren’t playing by the rules. You broke our agreement.”

  “Rules? What rules?”

  “My rules. You’re not supposed to follow Gabriel Torrance.”

  The slightest hesitation. “I’m not following him. I just pulled out of the lot at headquarters.”

  “That’s not true, Henry. We both know that. See, Gabriel called and told me that you’re following him.”

  Pickman smiled, imagining Kane wondering when Torrance had spotted him. There was no way the cop could know he was bluffing. Pickman actually had no idea whether Kane or anyone else was following Torrance. But he figured someone would be, and the logical choice was Lieutenant Henry Kane. When Torrance had used his phone, he hadn’t called Pickman about a tail. He’d simply followed the instructions in the note inside the bag the driver had given him, dialing a certain number when he reached the Holiday Inn. Pickman hadn’t even answered. But he knew that Kane, if he was watching Torrance, would have seen him on the phone.

  For his part, the livery driver, a man named Larry Aronson, had done well. When he’d arrived at the quiet street corner where he’d been told his passenger would be waiting, there was no one there. He couldn’t have seen Pickman watching around a corner two short blocks away. But Pickman had been given Aronson’s phone number by the owner of the car company, and when he texted the driver and told him that if he wanted to make some good, easy money without doing anything illegal, he should look underneath the nearby park bench for a bag with an envelope taped to it, Aronson hesitated only long enough to make sure no cops were in sight. Pickman watched him read the letter inside the envelope, then surreptitiously pocket the five crisp $100 bills that accompanied it.

  It’s nothing illegal, the note had reassured him. Just wait at the prison for a certain man about to be released, have this bag ready for him, and drive him to the Holiday Inn in Springfield. There, he will give you another $500. Of course, that money was already in the bag. I have your contact information. I will know if you disappear with that money. Trust me, it wouldn’t be worth it. The pickup had been paid for using one of numerous credit cards Pickman had associated with one of several false IDs he had created years ago and still maintained. He’d thought Aronson might have questions, or concerns that the bag contained drugs and he was being recruited to act as a courier, but Pickman was wrong. Not good old Larry Aronson. At the sight of the first $500, he’d jumped right on board. And, as expected, everything had gone perfectly.

  “I’m not following him,” Kane repeated in an obvious lie, though he’d delivered it fairly convincingly.

  “Yes, you are, but I should tell you that if you were hoping to catch me meeting with him at the Holiday Inn in Springfield, you’re destined for disappointment. I’m not there.”

  As he spoke, Pickman allowed his eyes to drift slowly across the mosaic filling the wall opposite him, as he often did when in this room. The colors and connections. The angles and patterns. A seamless web, the labor of a year of his life. It could have been hanging in a museum of modern art, more beautiful by far than anything painted by Jackson Pollock. But where the appeal of Pollock’s work grew from what Pickman perceived to be a chaos barely contained by the edges of the canvas, the beauty of his own masterpiece lay in the fact that the colors and connections and patterns and angles represented order, rigid precision, and efficiency—a study in complex yet flawless perfection. It was stunning in both form and function. It was, by far, his greatest work.

  “Listen,” Kane said, “Your guy is wrong. I’m not—”

  “You’ve breached our agreement, and you’ll have to pay the penalty for that.”

  “Wait a second, we held up our end. Now you have to—”

  “I’m going to release more evidence, Lieutenant Henry. In a very short while. Maybe it won’t matter in the long run. Maybe when you finally stop following Gabriel around so I can send you the recording and other evidence, the authorities will realize that Tyler has been innocent all along. But maybe . . . just maybe . . . another piece of damning evidence coming to light will make it difficult for everyone to jump on the bandwagon and proclaim your brother’s innocence. Maybe some folks might require more convincing, and the case against Tyler might move forward despite the video, and—”

  “I’m tired of this. We had an agreement.”

  “Which you broke. So you suffer the consequences. You don’t get the video or the rest of the evidence yet. And another piece of evidence will come to light. But I’m feeling sporting, Henry. I’ll give you a head start. I’ll tell you exactly where I planted the next evidence to be discovered, and I’ll give you a chance to get there first. From the moment we end this call, you will have one hour before I call the local police anonymously and report finding a white plastic bag with several pieces of jewelry in it wrapped up in a blue Pac-Man T-shirt. The jewelry, of course, belonged to Sally Graham. And, of course, it’s covered with her blood. The shirt . . .”

  Was Tyler’s, Henry knew. He’d seen his brother wearing his Pac-Man shirt several times. “Listen, dickhead—”

  “It’s in a parking lot just off Main Street, in Rutland.” He provided the address. “It’s hidden behind a stack of wooden pallets.”

  “I’m not gonna—”

  “On your mark . . . get set . . .”

  “You son of a—”

  “Go.”

  He pushed the “End call” button, then went upstairs to microwave some popcorn. After it finished popping, he took it to the kitchen table, then placed two empty bowls beside it. He sat down and, piece by piece, checked the popcorn to ensure that each kernel had popped fully. He put those that had into the first bowl, while those that hadn’t went into the second, which he would dump into the trash when he was finished sorting. It took some time to get through the entire bag, but that was okay with him. He had almost an hour to kill.

  Henry had a decision to make. If he left for Rutland, Torrance could walk out of the Holiday Inn and into the wind. Henry might never see him again, which would be bad because he was their best lead to finding the blackmailer. Also, if their dickhead call
er had wanted Torrance released so he could do something illegal, losing him wasn’t a good way to stop that thing from happening.

  But if he stayed here and waited for Torrance to show his face again, the cops in Rutland would find the evidence the caller had planted—more evidence linking Tyler to Sally Graham’s murder.

  He could call Molly and send her to Rutland, but the cops would get there long before she did. He made a quick call to the PI firm with whom he had contracted to watch Torrance round the clock, but he was reminded that he had wanted to take the first shift to get a feel for the situation, and, unfortunately, none of the PIs was free on a moment’s notice.

  He hurried to his rented Jeep. As soon as he was under way, he called Detective Tom Egan.

  “Kane? What do you want?”

  “I need you to watch someone for me.”

  “I’m off today.”

  “Now you’re on.”

  “I was going fly-fishing.”

  “Then I’m doing you a favor, because fly-fishing is boring. I tried it once and couldn’t stand it. Anything’s more fun than that, including sitting in a Holiday Inn parking lot, watching to see if a certain person comes out, and following him if he does.”

  “That wouldn’t be more fun.”

  “Well, after today you’ll have done both, so you’ll be able to tell me definitively.”

  “I said I’d get you some information, but I’m not your errand boy.”

  “You’re whatever I need you to be for now.”

  “Damn it, Kane.”

  Henry softened his tone. No reason to make this harder on Egan than it had to be. “I just need your help for a little while. Then this will all be over, and you’ll never hear from me again.”