The Merchant of Death (Playing the Fool, #2) Read online

  Mac opened the file. Saw the crime scene photographs of a shooting vic with a hole in his forehead. He was pretty sure he didn’t know the face. He turned to the guy’s name on the autopsy report, which shed no light on things at all. “So why is John Doe on my desk and not some cop’s?”

  “Because, look close at the chest.”

  He looked. Another hole, right through the guy’s breast pocket.

  “The head and the heart.” Mac ignored the chill that settled in him. “Just the way Rasnick used to do it.”

  “Yep. You also received this.” Val passed him a sheet of paper. On it was a photocopy of Rasnick’s obit, and underneath, in cutout letters, “THIS IS ON YOU, PIG.”

  “Still getting mail from my secret admirer?” Mac asked. He’d received his share of threatening letters since putting Rasnick away.

  “Seems like it.”

  “I’m not even a cop. Why are they calling me a pig?” He met Val’s gaze. “You think there’s a connection?”

  “I don’t know. Homicide shared John Doe with us. They think the murder might be a signal from one of Rasnick’s former cohorts.”

  Mac closed the file. “I’ll look into it.”

  “From your desk,” Val said.

  “What?”

  “You’ll look into it from your desk. You’re injured, Mac. You probably shouldn’t even be back at work. You’re certainly not going out into the field.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Val rolled her eyes and left him to it.

  Mac went through John Doe’s file again, then put it aside and checked his email. He found himself picking up the sticky note where he’d written Viola Hanes’s Zionsville address and staring at that instead.

  Finding Henry had to be his first priority, and heading out to Zionsville surely didn’t count as fieldwork. It was more of a friendly visit.

  Mac’s attention was caught by the sudden hush that descended. He saw two men and a woman he didn’t recognize out on the floor.

  OPR. Office of Professional Responsibility.

  Their reputation was enough to shut down conversations in midlaugh, but Mac didn’t hate them—had no reason to. He’d always played by the rules. Sure, it was a pain in the ass when they investigated some bullshit complaint, but there was no point getting defensive about it. In light of the news Val had broken when he’d arrived at work, Mac half expected it to be about Jimmy Rasnick.

  It wasn’t.

  “Mac.” Val appeared in his doorway again. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.” Mac stood up and slipped the sticky note into his pocket, then followed Val to the conference room. Sat down beside her.

  The two men were studying files and didn’t look at Mac. But the woman was staring at him. She had dark hair pulled into a ponytail at her nape and wore a navy suit. “Agent McGuinness?” she said. “Agent Janice Bixler, OPR. This is Agent Lawrence and Agent Talbot. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “All right.”

  Agent Janice Bixler didn’t ask him any questions, though. She left that to one of the guys—Lawrence or Talbot—and sat taking notes on her sleek black tablet while Mac went over, in painstaking detail, what exactly had happened at the cabin in Altona.

  Well, not exactly. There was some stuff that Mac was keeping to himself. The impromptu Shakespeare performance. The stolen groceries. And especially the way Henry had just fucking melted against him when they’d kissed.

  It was strange to have a name to put to the guy he’d killed. Robert Jones. And such a prosaic name. A schoolteacher name. A guy-in-the-street name. Not a hired-killer name.

  For an hour and a half, Mac went through the sequence of events in the cabin. And didn’t even get pissed when one of them asked him if he’d considered using an alternative to lethal force.

  “He was a hit man. He was there to kill my witness.”

  His witness.

  “The witness you then lost,” the guy said.

  Okay, Mac was keeping his cool, but he officially did not like this guy. He was even more creeped out by Janice Bixler, who sat making notes, her expression never changing. Every few minutes, though, Mac could feel her gaze on him. “After I got shot, yes, I lost him. He ran. Anyone would have.”

  “Your office seems to have some trouble holding on to this particular witness,” the guy said. “Where is he now?”

  Val bristled. “Mr. Page is staying nearby. If you need him brought in for questioning, that’s certainly something that can be arranged, but I assure you that his version of events matches Agent McGuinness’s. I took his statement myself.”

  Of all the things that Mac admired most about Val, it was her ability to bald-faced lie. He leaned back in his seat and let her take over.

  “In addition, Agent McGuinness has my full support in this matter.” Val closed her folder. “And I would advise him not to continue this interview until he is medically cleared to do so.”

  “We’ll talk again soon,” the guy said.

  “Actually, I have one more question,” Bixler said, looking up at Mac.

  He waited. Nothing warm in her eyes. It was like staring into a hole in the ground.

  “How well do you know your witness, Agent McGuinness?”

  He couldn’t speak for a moment. His mind was caught on an image of Henry, lying on Mac’s bed, his pants around his ankles, his cock hard and straining his underwear.

  “Not very well. We didn’t know each other prior to the Maxfield case.”

  “But you had some time to get to know him at the cabin?” Janice was still staring at him.

  He didn’t understand the point of the question. There was no way OPR could know how Mac and Henry had spent their time in Altona.

  “Mr. Page is a difficult man to get to know.”

  And wasn’t that the truth?

  Janice stood. “We’ll be in touch.”

  They left.

  “Those assholes.” Val glowered at the door after them. “Did you see the size of that report? We would have been here all day.”

  Mac stretched carefully, mindful of pulling his stitches. “But I’m good, right? With the shooting?”

  “Of course you are.” Val put a hand over his and squeezed. “You’re alive and a bad guy is dead. That’s a good result. You know what OPR’s like. It’s easy in hindsight to pick apart a decision that you made in milliseconds. We’ve all been there, Mac. The worst thing you can do is start doubting your own judgment.”

  “I know that,” he said, but knowing it and feeling it were two different things.

  “Mac.” Her voice was low. “I might have gotten a look at that report when Thing One was staring at my ass.”

  “Yeah?” Mac frowned.

  “I saw Louie Gallo’s name.”

  Louie Gallo.

  Shit, that was going back a few years now. Louie Gallo had run an illegal fighting ring. Mac had taken the lead on the case. Louie, an ex-boxer, had fought like a cornered dog during his arrest. Bloodiest mug shot ever. The picture of Louie with his nose pushed halfway across his face had held pride of place in the field office meal room for weeks, until Paula had complained it put her off her lunch and it was taken down.

  “Why the hell would OPR be interested in Louie Gallo?” he asked, and then groaned. “Shit. They’re interested in me.”

  “Yeah, it seems that way.”

  “Why? Because of the shooting? Or because of something else?”

  Louie Gallo. Jimmy Rasnick. Yeah, Mac occasionally took suspects down hard.

  When it was necessary.

  When they started it.

  “I don’t know.” Val’s face was drawn with concern. “Look, it’s probably nothing. After Jeff, they’re probably investigating all of us, right?”

  “Sure,” Mac said dryly. “And they’re starting with me just because.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mac rubbed a hand across the gauze underneath his shirt. He didn’t want to deal with this shit at the moment. What
he wanted was to find Henry, remind him that he’d agreed to testify and couldn’t just fuck off whenever he wanted.

  And to find out what was going on with Henry. With Henry and him. If it was anything at all, or just another game. If those few times he’d looked into Henry’s eyes and seen something, if those moments were real. If Henry was real.

  Henry, Sebastian, or someone else entirely.

  His chest ached, and he grimaced.

  “Okay?” Val asked.

  He sighed. “Val? Is it too late to put in for sick leave?”

  Henry had four missed calls from St. Albinus by the time he arrived there. Viola had been missing for twenty-four hours, and they’d only made four attempts to call her next of kin. Barbara Eiling had run a tighter ship than that. Back when Viola had first been placed at St. Albinus, she’d run off several times, and each time someone had called Henry within the first twenty minutes. Sometimes he’d missed those calls; he’d been between towns or between phones—but they’d always called.

  “Mr. Hanes,” Barbara had told him after that first month, her voice arch with barely muted disapproval, “perhaps if you wish to be a part of Viola’s care, you should make more of an effort to be available to us.”

  He’d felt as small and guilty as he had in first grade when his teacher had made him apologize in front of the whole class for taking Jason Hall’s Transformer toy without asking.

  This time the calls were from Dr. Seth Carlisle, who didn’t sound disapproving so much as tired in the voice mail he left after his fourth attempt. “Mr. Hanes. Please give us a call at your earliest convenience. We need to speak to you regarding your sister. Consider it urgent.”

  He’d spent the night at the Court with Vi, then taken the bus to Zionsville this morning. Had walked from downtown to the outskirts, where the care center was tucked in a circle of trees like some cultish compound. He’d never really thought of it that way before. When he’d first seen the place, he’d thought it was beautiful. He’d needed it to be beautiful. Safe, friendly, and loving. He’d needed it to be the opposite of the state hospital where Viola had spent the first year after her injury. That place had been overbooked and understaffed, the nurses short-tempered, the doctors pessimistic. And by that time their mother had already checked out mentally, her mind drug addled, her body collapsing. Henry had felt painfully alone under the fluorescent lights in Viola’s ward, faced with her confusion, the smallness of her bed, her pathetic congealed food, the machines she was routinely hooked to that studied her brain activity.

  He’d tried to picture Viola’s brain. Tried to imagine how brutal the impact must have been to jar it so badly that parts of it went off like a power cut. Tried to picture the injury, the textbook idea of it, while keeping at bay the memories of what exactly had happened. But that never worked. As soon as he pictured her brain, he was back in his room in their mother’s house in Columbus, and two shadows were struggling.

  “Get off him!” Viola had yelled, trying to haul J.J. away from Henry.

  J.J. had grunted as Viola’s fist connected; he turned and threw her off in one easy movement, the same way Henry slung his backpack from his shoulder onto the kitchen chair each day after school.

  The room had been dark except for a soft spread of yellow light coming in through the half-open door. Henry hadn’t been able to see where Viola had landed at first, and one of his legs was still tangled in the sheet. And J.J. hadn’t done anything, even when Henry screamed at him to turn on the light. By the time Henry had found Viola’s body, felt the wetness beneath it, J.J. was pulling on his pants. Henry had stopped yelling at him about the light, because he didn’t want to see. But J.J. had opened the door wide, and suddenly Henry was huddled in a stark spotlight with a tragedy of his doing.

  911. The ambulance. All the while, their mother was passed out. And when she’d found out what had happened, when Henry had called her from the hospital and she was finally sober enough to answer, she hadn’t even screamed or cried until she’d heard the increasing hysteria in Henry’s voice. Until he’d infected her with it.

  Over the next few months, she’d been just as unresponsive. If she was sober enough to visit the hospital, she stared at Viola like a kid eyeing a food she didn’t want to eat. Or she brought things Viola didn’t want or need—a pink plastic hairbrush, chicken nuggets, DVDs that couldn’t be played, a necklace she’d worn in a production of The Taming of the Shrew.

  Henry had started imagining sometimes during these hospital visits that he was in a scene in a play. And even though the writing and the situation were a bit hackneyed, he still had to give it his all as an actor, had to imbue tired words and clichéd gestures with new meaning. If he took Viola’s hand, if he told her things would be all right, he was doing the same thing everyone who’d ever sat bedside at a hospital had done. But he meant it. He meant it when he said he’d help her, that he loved her. That he was sorry. He just didn’t know what to do yet, and his own guilt tripped him up, kept him focused on himself. Giving, truly giving, his energy and resources to someone else would mean accepting that there were things beyond his control. That the past was irretrievable, and that he now had to focus on a present that was neither ideal nor fair.

  Most things nowadays were within Henry’s control. If he needed money, he got it. A new identity? Done. If he was falling for someone he shouldn’t fall for, he bailed. It wasn’t that fucking hard to make life your bitch.

  As he approached the brick building, he ran a hand self-consciously through his synthetic hair. The wig Jo had given him was good—“That’s because it cost three hundred and fifty dollars. Do not let anything happen to it”—and she’d styled it just like Vi’s hair. She’d also given him a shave so close he’d been convinced she was taking off a couple of layers of skin as well. She’d done his makeup, shading the hollows of his cheeks so he looked a little thinner, reddening his mouth in the places where Viola chewed her lip. Then he and Vi had swapped clothes, and even Stacy had been impressed by the transformation. Jo had given him a bra with slight padding to wear under Viola’s T-shirt, as well as a pair of women’s underwear, and Viola had laughed at that.

  The only tricky part had been the shoes. Henry’s feet were bigger than Vi’s, so he’d had to borrow a pair of purple sneakers from Jo that looked sort of like a pair Vi had. And even though Jo’s size was closer to his, the shoes still pinched when he walked.

  For a moment, he’d let himself get swept up in the fun of the disguise. On the bus, he’d been relieved and pleased when someone said, “Excuse me, miss.”

  Now he was nearly as anxious as he’d been showing up on Mac’s doorstep the evening before. What was he thinking? Just because the cross-dressing thing worked for Shakespeare’s characters didn’t mean he could pull it off in real life.

  He focused on the landscaping. Beautiful work. Pumpkins and vines in the mulch where the summer flowers had been. The front lawn was raked, and the maples had turned red. Before he could get close to the entrance, a woman came running out.

  “Viola!” she exclaimed. “Viola, where have you been?”

  Henry lost track of the “We’ve been worried sick”s and the “You know you can’t go wandering off like that”s as he was led inside. He was actually pulling this off. This woman believed he was Vi.

  “It’s really not safe.” The woman took Henry’s hand. Viola’d had gloves in her jeans pockets, and it was cool enough out that he had felt he could get away with wearing them to hide that his hands were slightly larger, more masculine than Vi’s. “And without a coat!” He caught a glimpse of the woman’s name tag. Sarah Metzger. He didn’t think he’d met her before on past visits. “Where did you go?”

  “For a walk.” He made his voice soft, high, like Viola’s.

  “You can walk on the grounds,” Sarah said firmly. They went inside. The reception area was cheery—a sort of atrium with a round front desk. There were signs behind the desk with arrows pointing to the right for residents’ rooms and le
ft for staff offices. They turned right and went down a long, carpeted hall with doors on either side. Each door had a name tag designed by the resident, or sometimes the staff, if a resident couldn’t or didn’t want to do his or her own.

  They passed one door where the name tag had been removed. All that was left was a sticky square where the tape had been.

  “Now, I know you miss Mr. Crowley,” Sarah said. She looked tired. “But you must stop wandering off. Dr. Carlisle was going to call the police!”

  He should have, Henry thought. Weren’t there procedures in place for this sort of thing? What the hell had happened to their duty of care?

  “Sorry,” he murmured.

  “Okay.” Sarah sighed. “Here we are. I’ll go and tell everyone you’re back.”

  Henry stepped into Vi’s room.

  It was a good room, but nothing could disguise the fact that this was a medical facility first and foremost. The bed had rails, and what looked like a television remote control hanging from the side so that Vi could make the bed go up or down. It was a reminder that most of the patients at St. Albinus were elderly or infirm. He’d only ever seen Vi adjust the bed for fun, like when they were kids in cheap hotels, shoving coins in the slot to make the Magic Fingers work.

  “Sebastian,” Viola had said, wide-eyed when he’d first brought her here, “you don’t need quarters for this one!”

  He crossed to her dresser. It was white and covered in stickers. Even the mirror was almost obscured by them. He pulled his gloves off and ran his fingers over the plastic veneer of the dresser. It was only cheap plywood underneath, but Vi had picked it out of a catalog as the one she wanted. It was covered in little trinket boxes. Henry opened one, and found hair bands with baubles inside. Strands of Vi’s hair were tangled in the elastics.

  He saw Viola’s plastic ring, the gold paint flaking off it, and smiled. Smiled right through whatever seeing that did to his guts. He glanced in the mirror in time to see Sarah returning, another woman in tow. The second woman was about sixty—short with wide-set breasts that rested on a round stomach. Curly, woodchuck-brown hair set in tight curls. Fuchsia lipstick that bled slightly into the wrinkles around her lips. She wore a pink Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt over a red shirt. Her wrists were covered in bangles, and her earrings were two dangling miniature Pooh Bears with tiny honey pots.