Page 36 of The Murder Inn

Within about ten minutes, Susan and I had set up a dumpster search system that functioned perfectly, as though it was something we’d done together a hundred times before. Being the athletic one, with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat and the work ethic of a mule, Susan clambered into the dumpster and began loading bags into my arms, while I placed them into piles on the cement floor. Among the bags were the random discarded items apartment-block garbage chutes tend to attract. Old shoes. A dead peace lily in a broken pot. Half of a broken broom.

I was interested in bags that matched the pale purple kind Dorrich used in his kitchen, and smaller, white supermarket-style bags like the one in his bathroom bin. Susan voiced her concerns as we worked, and they matched mine. We couldn’t be sure, without asking Dorrich’s family or another resident of the building, when the dumpster was emptied, and therefore if any garbage from Dorrich’s apartment was likely present. We couldn’t be sure Dorrich’s family had even dumped his garbage here, or if they’d taken it someplace else. And we couldn’t be sure the broken tile and mysterious blue gunk in Dorrich’s bathroom even meant anything, or if we were interrupting a more usefulsearch of his personal possessions to follow my hunch. But I had a feeling. A weird, unsettling instinct. I didn’t like the chipped tile. I didn’t like the blue gunk and its proximity to the chipped tile.

My stomach hitched, excited, when I tore open a small white bag and obviously bathroom-related content poured out onto the ground at my feet. I sorted through the tissues, used razors, clumps of hair and empty pill boxes, then seized upon a small plastic bottle of men’s shaving gel. At the bottom of the bottle, a teaspoon or so of gluggy, bright-blue liquid remained. As Susan landed on the cement beside me, having climbed out of the dumpster to take a break, I showed her the bottle and the small but unmistakable bullet hole in the side.

“So what happened?” I asked. “He took a shot at himself and missed?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

IT WAS TWO in the afternoon before Susan and I were evicted from Roger Dorrich’s apartment building by a surly Elloise Sharman, who’d become progressively twitchy about the time we were spending crawling through the remains of Dorrich’s life. We slipped silently into Shauna Bulger’s truck and coasted out of town, both locked in our own minds. There’d been no clue in the apartment as to who was threatening Dorrich. Not the name of a journalist scrawled on a slip of paper. Not the worrisome jottings of a man on the edge, written in a hidden diary. Nothing. Despite Dorrich’s family having taken his phone and laptop, the hub of modern man’s personal life, we’d been optimistic going in. But as we headed back to Gloucester, Susan’s disappointment radiated from her body like a wave of heat, and I couldn’t shake mine either. We drove almost all the way home in silence, Susan turning her watch around and around on her wrist, her eyes on the trees.

Though I’d made fun of her, Susan was right about Dorrich’s behavior on the morning of his suicide. It was unusual. And the bullet that had struck the bottle and the tile in his bathroom didn’t add up. But like the receipts in Dorrich’s wallet, it wasn’t enough to tell us what had happened that morning. The bullet casing from the shot to Dorrich’s head had been recovered from the scene. There was no casing found for the other shot. Which might have meant Dorrich was murdered, and the killer took the first casing. Or it might have meant the shot happened at a different time, maybe days or weeks earlier, and the casing was disposed of then.

Loose ends. Unanswered questions.

Lies. Lies. Lies.

I had spotted the pickup truck that was following us as we pulled onto I-95 just after Stoneham. I’d quickly written off the pair of men in flannel shirts and caps as construction workers heading to Gloucester after picking up supplies in Boston, preferring to focus on the problem of Dorrich’s death than on the road around me. The men came to my attention again as we started to see flashes of Sandy Bay between the trees on the home stretch. They were hanging back, maybe two hundred yards behind us. By the time we reached thick woods only minutes from the inn, a new disquiet was beginning to grow in my chest.

The driver closed the gap between us fast. Susan turned in her seat.

“What’s the deal here?” she asked. “You know these guys?”

I didn’t get time to answer. The driver slammed his foot on the accelerator, and the truck smashed into our tailgate. Susan screamed as our vehicle fishtailed and flipped, crunching and grinding on the empty highway, spraying sparks.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

IT WAS A good hit. Precise. Effective. My thoughts slowed, only the hardest, most rational aspects of the crash coming to mind. It was a trick I’d learned in the academy.Think about the crisis as though you’re observing it from outside your own body. The truck with the two construction workers in it nudged our bumper on the right-hand side, sending us into a fishtail. Our truck spun twice before we flipped and then crashed down the wide slope beside the forest. Two, maybe three seconds after impact, we were off the road, only a handful of glass and some skid marks indicating that we’d ever been there. That was the goal. We were under attack. The airbags smacked into us, knocking me unconscious. When I woke, I was upside down. Susan was unbuckling my seat belt, dragging me from the driver’s side onto the wet grass.

The battered truck that had hit us pulled up beside ours. I was so buzzed from the concussion, I saw the lettering on theside of the truck, but couldn’t read it. Big red letters. A truck bed full of rolls of black plastic and toolboxes. Susan was bleeding from the nose. I shook my head to clear the fog, but that only made things worse. The two men in flannel shirts were on us immediately, one grabbing and lifting Susan by the arms, the other looping a big hand under my armpit and shuffling me into the woods ten yards or so from the crashed truck.

“Where’s the old lady?” my captor asked. He let me go and I stood there, numb, taking in the sight of him. Big black beard. Bucky white teeth. He shoved me, smacked me in the jaw to get me talking. “Hey! Dude! Pay attention. Where’s the old lady?”

I looked around. Had there been another victim of the crash? A passenger in our truck that I didn’t remember? The guy tried to smack me again and I blocked it, pulled my gun out of the back of my jeans. I didn’t even get time to aim it before he had it and was poking the barrel into my chest.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I roared.

The guy shoved me again and I managed to maintain my balance, arriving beside Susan. We were under the gaze of two guns now, the second guy having pulled one from the waistband of his jeans. Susan stuck to my side, trembling gently but quiet, trying as hard as I was to make sense of what was happening.

“What’s this about?” she pleaded. “Who the hell are you guys?”

“Just shut it, woman.” The smaller guy with bucky teeth gave Susan a lazy look. “You’re spitting blood everywhere.”

I looked at Susan. She was indeed bleeding profusely from the nose, the airbag punch to the face having really worked her over. I lifted the hem of my T-shirt and wiped her face, holdingher head close to me so I could pretend to murmur comforts into her ear.

“You got a gun?” I whispered.

“Knife in my boot,” she said. “That’s all. You?”

“Nothing.”

The big guy with the beard was digging through the cabin of our truck, now and then glancing up as cars passed on the highway out of sight of us on the embankment. I watched him take our wallets, check our IDs. He made a phone call, wedging the phone against his shoulder as he searched the glovebox.

I could finally make sense of the lettering on the truck.

DRIVER CONSTRUCTION SERVICES.

“Boss, your contact pulled through with the APB. We got the truck,” the big guy said. “But there’s no old lady. Just a couple of randoms.”

---