Page 64 of The Murder Inn

He’d picked it because it stood alone. A young pine with a wide base, separated from its brethren by ten feet on all sides. He liked that about it. That it didn’t fit in. He reached out, pointed, and lay his tired head on the ground.

“It’s there,” Nick said. “At the base, on this side. It’s not deep.”

Breecher paused, examined the tree at the edge of the forest, its roots half in and half out of the pale sand.

“When I dig it up, am I gonna need some other kind ofgoddamn password or code to open it?” she barked. Nick gave a little laugh despite the agony he was in.

“I guess you’ll find out,” he said.

She went to the tree, dropped to her knees, and started digging with her hands. When Nick tried to roll himself onto his side to take the weight off his leg, she popped up, grabbing the gun and training it on him.

“Don’t,” she snapped. “Stay back. Well back.”

“I will.” He nodded. “I will.”

He listened to her fingers digging in the sandy soil. The rustling of the duffel bag as she prized it from the grip of the earth.

Nick heard the zipper jangle and whizz as she pulled it.

He tucked his head beneath his arm and felt the explosion thump through the ground beneath him.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

THE MOTEL HAD been revamped since back when Clay had started as a lieutenant in Gloucester. As a rookie, he’d attended domestic disputes here, a couple of suicides, reports of suspicious activity. Now as he knocked and entered April Leeler’s room, he found the crisp whiteness of everything almost unsettling. Laboratory-like. Joe was curled up on the small twin bed, playing with his iPad, his feet wiggling off the edge of the mattress. April was waiting for Clay, sitting on the edge of the bed, her eyes full of concern.

Clay went and sat beside her, and just like the supportive and caring wife that he’d envisioned in his fantasies, she took his head against her shoulder and played with the curls behind his ears.

“Urgh,” he said, a single encore note to the miserable phone call he’d finished with her only ten minutes earlier.

“How long can you stay?” she asked.

“Not long,” he said. “I just swung by to tell Angelica that Vinny’s dead. I don’t want her to hear it somewhere else. She’s down in room seven.”

He closed his eyes and counted off seconds in April’s delicious embrace before he had to get back out there. In truth, he didn’t even know exactly where he should go after he left the little motel at the edge of town.

Most of his officers were manning the inn, waiting for a forensics unit to come up from Boston to deal with the crime scene there. Three dead bodies in the house, one on the road leading in. And then there was the explosion and secondary crime scene in the woods. Nick had called Clay from the edge of the water deep in the forest to alert him to the explosion scene and to get him to send an ambulance out for a devastating gunshot wound to the knee. There was another body there, Karli Breecher. Nick had assured a stunned Sheriff Clay that the hand grenade he’d taken from Effie’s room and rigged to the inside of the buried bag was the only explosive in the woods. But Clay had protocol to follow. More vans from Boston.

Neddy, Susan, and Nick were all in surgery. Clay had stopped by the hospital to find Bill tearing his hair out, with only Effie there to comfort him. Shauna Bulger was still out there somewhere, running around with a rifle that could take out an airplane.

Clay pulled away from April and held his throbbing forehead. Joe looked over.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Clay asked the child.

“I’ve been saying that for the last four hours,” April said. Clay frowned at the boy, who paid them no mind.

Clay sighed again.

“What can I do?” April asked, one hand still lifting and twirling those curls behind his ear. “Is there some way I can help? I don’t know Angelica well, but maybe I could go with you to her room. I’ll comfort her after you have to move on.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to do that,” Clay said. He had to laugh despite it all. “Man. You wait so long for a wonderful person to turn up in your life, and when she does, it’s in the middle of a catastrophe.”

She held him again.

“Dooooon’t start kissing!” Joe warned from the other bed. Clay looked up. The kid hadn’t lifted his eyes from the iPad yet. “It’s gross-gross-gross!”

“That reminds me. Clay, I think I left a pair of sunglasses in the cruiser yesterday,” April said, rising from the bed. “Can I just—”

“Sure, sure.” Clay waved her away. He went and sat beside Joe as April left the motel room. There were pillow mints on the nightstand. Clay unwrapped one and popped it in his mouth, thinking he probably wouldn’t get a minute to eat again before daybreak. Joe’s index finger was dancing over the screen, helping a cartoon kangaroo hop over obstacles on an outback landscape.

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