The Man From Primrose Lane Part 40

"It's too easy," he said. "I don't trust it."

"Let it go," I told him.

A few minutes later, Larkey pried himself away from Erin, who sat wrapped in a red blanket in the back seat of a Berea cruiser, and joined us by the Cadillac.

"What's going on?" David asked.

"We got a car at the Galts' home," said Larkey. "My guys. They just saw Dean walk inside. It's about a mile from here."

"Let's go," said David.

Larkey shook his head. "You guys go home. We'll handle it. We got the girl. With your help, David. Now let us get Galt."

David sighed.

"It's over," said Larkey. "Go home. Be with your kid. We'll work out the murder charge in the morning. Clear you up. Oh, and don't talk to the press. Okay? At least not yet."

David was shaking his head, his brow furrowed.

"Go home," Larkey said again. "It's over."

Back in the car, it was quiet. David was lost in his head.

"What?"

"My mind is fried," he said. "I can't get my thoughts straight. But there's something..."

"Postpartum depression," I said. "You've spent a long time thinking about this guy. I've spent much longer. I built my life around that man, Dean Galt. I feel it, too. So anticlimactic. The Man from Primrose Lane used to say these cases make ghosts out of the living. Don't let that happen."

"It doesn't feel right."

"It's not supposed to feel right."

David stopped talking and instead called his dead wife's aunt, Peggy. He asked her to pick up Tanner and bring him home.

"Can I meet him?" I asked. I thought that today of all days it would do me some good to be around innocence instead of further loneliness and fear. Maybe David would let him call me "Uncle."

"Sure," he said.

"And you owe me some more interviews," I said. "I'd like to understand your thoughts, your motivations about all this."

"So you can turn it into a book?"

"Now it has an ending."

"Fine," he said. "But not today."

But, for David, there would be no tomorrow.

Detective Lieutenant Tom Sackett came to regret ever having met David Neff. He'd trusted him, had given him information about the Man from Primrose Lane's case that he shouldn't have. But then they'd found his dead wife's fingerprints on the bed. They'd dug up her body and discovered she had been murdered, strangled. There was only one suspect. Only one man who could have committed both crimes. David Neff.

It was the simplest explanation, and they'd taught him at the academy to always look for the most elegant solution.

Then, somehow, he'd lost Dan Larkey. David had corrupted the agent's confidence somehow. Larkey had called him that morning, said, "I have some doubts." Based on what? A gut feeling? Please.

That was the problem with FBI, Sackett knew. They were academics, p.r.o.ne to seek out more poetic story lines. They even consulted with psychics. Not sometimes, either. Like, all the G.o.dd.a.m.n time. FBI agents, even retired ones, were dreamers. And dreamers didn't belong in Homicide. That was a dangerous mix.

And yet Sackett had his cruiser lights on as he flew up I-480 to meet with Larkey at this new suspect's studio, this Dean Galt. There was something about that writer, he granted that much. Something that made you want to believe him.

Just then Sackett got another text from Larkey's cell phone: We got Erin. Alive. Forget studio. Proceed to Galt residence. 1181 Parkman Drive. Berea.

Twenty minutes later, Sackett turned onto Parkman, a side street in a section of town submerged in tall oak trees. He saw Larkey leaning into the window of a black sedan. Quickly Sackett parked his cruiser and jogged up to join the agent.

"Dan, what the f.u.c.k is going on? Did you really find Erin?"

At the sound of his voice, Larkey turned to him.

Sackett stopped abruptly. His blood pressure rose so quickly he saw dancing specks form on his periphery, as his body overloaded on adrenaline.

Larkey tried to speak but could not. There was a deep gash in the middle of his throat. Rushed air and thick gobs of blood shot out of the opening. To Sackett it sounded like feedback from an electrolarynx, one of those voice boxes cancer patients sometimes use. Larkey collapsed against the driver's-side door. Sloped against the wheel behind him was another dead agent, her eyes glazed and unfocused, a bullet hole in her temple.

He knelt beside Larkey. "What the Christ happened?" he asked.

Larkey's mouth was working like a goldfish. He was trying to say something. Sackett understood that Larkey was dying.

"What?"

"T-t-t."

"Shhh. Don't speak."

"T-t-t. T-t-t. T-trap," he said.

"What's a trap? Was this a trap, Dan? Dan? Is someone walking into a trap? What's a trap? Whose trap?"

"T-t-t. T-t-t."

"Shhh. I heard it. I heard, 'Trap.'"

Larkey stopped. The blood continued to pour out of his neck. He looked up at Sackett and smiled. It was the smile of a good chess player who has suddenly seen checkmate, eight moves away.

"What?" asked Sackett again.

"T-t-t. T-t-tanner," he said. And then he died.

She sat in her car, eyeing his house with disdain and jealousy and hatred.

She would never be a journalist in the true sense of the word, Cindy Nottingham knew. Had known for quite some time. And that was fine, because true journalists didn't make real money. The real money came with gossip, and she knew gossip. She had ways of drawing out secrets from people. People trusted her. Men trusted her more. Most men, anyway. Not David.

She enjoyed watching him fall. She knew this and accepted it, not as something evil, but as a natural response to his hubris. She was no journalist. But neither was he. And now the world would see that, too. David was a hack. A onetime author who'd gotten lucky. That story had fallen into his lap. She should have written it. It had been hers to begin with. Brune, she knew, had wanted it to be hers.

But men always took advantage of her, stealing her stories, stealing her rent money, stealing her virginity. Such was life in a man's world. They deserved what she brought down on them.

For about ten minutes Cindy had sat quietly in her car, across the street from David's home-paid for by the book that should have been hers-wis.h.i.+ng him ill. She had watched as Tanner got out of the car, led by his Aunt Peggy into the house. Such a beautiful kid. David didn't deserve him, either.

A black Cadillac pulled onto the street and Cindy hastily a.s.sembled her camera, snapping the long lens into place. She crouched behind the wheel and aimed it at the house. But the car didn't pull into the driveway. Instead, it pulled up alongside hers.

Busted, she thought. He must've recognized the car.

The Caddy's pa.s.senger window rolled down. The man behind the wheel looked strikingly familiar, but it was not David.

"Who are you?" the man asked.

"I'm a reporter, who the f.u.c.k are you?" she spat.

"You don't recognize me?"

"No."

"Then you're not a very good reporter."

And then she did. It came to her in a flash. The only reason she hadn't recognized him right away was because he was so out of place. He shouldn't be here. This was wrong. Dangerous.

He lifted his hand and in it was a s.h.i.+ny gun with a grip the color of old bones. It went off with a thunderous roar.

Cindy never heard it.

The bullet ripped through the portion of her brain devoted to auditory perception before the sound could be processed.

At the precise moment David was untying Erin McNight's bindings, Katy Keenan sat down to eat at Larry's.

It was an early dinner, but there was no time to waste. They were rebuilding their relations.h.i.+p.

This can work, she told herself. I know it.

And really, Ralph had his moments. Sure, he didn't read for pleasure. And he hated movies that didn't contain explosions. But he was a companion on her long jogs in the evening, when she just wanted someone to listen. He was a great lay.

David could never work, she told herself. Too wrapped up in himself. Literally, as it were, in his own Neverending Story. To even consider believing that story he'd told her the other night was to surrender to delusion. Poor man. Poor lonely man.

Still.

He was fascinating. Endearingly egotistical, yet insecure. Naive, almost. Like a teenager. His mind full of constant wonderment. That was intoxicating to her.

Ralph sat across from her in the same booth she'd shared with David not long ago. She ordered a mushroom basket.

"I want to take you to Italy," he said. "Next month. For a week."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

Her entire life had been a struggle for money. Her parents had never made enough for her to go on field trips. How much of this was wrapped up in her admiration for Ralph? She didn't care to know.

While her fiance sipped his beer, Katy looked over to the framed photographs of Akron residents with clown noses. Black and white. Big and small. Was it some artistic statement that we all take ourselves too seriously? What was the real story behind it?

And what was that written on the bottom-right corner of the nearest photo? She hadn't noticed that before.

Katy leaned closer.

"Fabulous Pics," she said.

"What?"

Her mind was working. Cobwebby synapses were dusted off in the furthest recesses of her memory.

BAM!.

Katy's eyes snapped open.

"What?" Ralph asked again.

"Fabulous Pics!" she shouted. She grabbed her purse. Thank G.o.d she'd driven. "Call a cab," she said as she ran out the door.

"Hey!" he shouted after her. But she ignored him and fled as quickly as her feet could take her.

David pulled into his driveway at just past eight in the evening. We didn't see Cindy Nottingham slumped down in her car across the street. I didn't notice the other black Cadillac parked just beyond it. We were discussing the nature of obsession. And how to be satisfied with an anticlimactic resolution. Cerebral j.e.r.k.-.o.f.f. stuff.

"You coming in?" he asked.

"You bet," I replied.

There was a loud squealing of tires as a car took the turn up the street from David's house at top speed. For a moment it looked like the car might tumble into the neighbor's centuries-old oak, but it corrected and pulled into David's driveway. Katy, her face flushed with excitement, leapt out. She had never looked so beautiful.

"Fabulous Pics!" she screamed. "I know who it is!"

David took her by the shoulders and held her at arm's length. "Calm down," he said. "Breathe."