House Standoff Read online

  “You know she tried to kill DeMarco last night.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  Of course, he’d heard. The story of Hiram Bunt’s wife being arrested for shooting a man would have gone through Waverly like a flash flood.

  Pat said, “What time did you get back to your house the night Doyle was killed?”

  “About midnight.”

  “And your boys and your wife will confirm this?”

  “No. My sons were in Denver. One of our friends took them to see the Rockies play. They stayed in Denver overnight.”

  “And your wife?”

  Jim hesitated and Pat said, “Jim, don’t lie to me.”

  Jim said, “When I got home, Carly wasn’t there. She’d been out drinking with her girlfriends. She got home about one o’clock, maybe a little later.”

  “Aw, shit,” Pat said.

  “Carly, I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions but I don’t have a choice.”

  Pat had told Jim he’d be driving to his house to question Carly and suggested that Jim make himself scarce when he got there. He said he wasn’t going to allow Jim to be in the room when he talked to Carly.

  He was now sitting at the table in Carly’s kitchen. He noticed a bunch of photos of her sons, two handsome, happy-looking boys, taped to the refrigerator door. He also noticed that like her husband, Carly didn’t look good; her blue eyes tinged with red, as if she might have had a few too many the night before. Which he could understand if Jim had told her the reason he’d been suspended.

  Pat said, “I need to know where you and your husband were the night Shannon Doyle was murdered. Your husband told me he was in Rock Springs until about eleven p.m. and he got back home about midnight.”

  There was no reason to tell Carly what Jim was doing in Rock Springs if he didn’t have to. Plus, he figured that Carly probably already knew. Wives usually knew when their husbands were cheating on them.

  “But Jim said when he got home, you weren’t here. He said you didn’t get home until about one. Is that true?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what time Jim got home but when I got back at one, one thirty, he was here.”

  “Is there anyone who was with you between, oh let’s say, eleven p.m. and one thirty a.m. when you returned home.”

  “No, I was by myself. Since Jim and the boys were both gone, I went down to the Grill. I got there about seven and started drinking. At some point, I don’t know the exact time, I went out to my car and passed out. When I woke up it was about one and I drove home.”

  Pat could tell she was lying.

  “Carly, you know I’m going to ask folks at the Grill to confirm you were there. You need to tell me the truth.”

  She eventually did. She said she went to a dive called the Desert Bar, not the Hacienda Grill—and Pat could understand why she’d initially lied. The truth was embarrassing.

  But the truth also didn’t disprove that she’d killed Shannon Doyle.

  Pat thought: No one has an alibi. Not Lisa Bunt, not Jim Turner, and not Carly Turner. And they all had a motive for killing Doyle.

  Lisa could have driven to Waverly and killed Doyle then driven back to the motel in Rock Springs. Jim Turner could have killed the woman after he left the motel and before going home. And Carly Turner, who thought Jim was having an affair with the writer, could have left the bar, drunk as a skunk, and killed her before going home. So one of them was lying. Or maybe all of them were lying. Or maybe none of them were lying.

  There was one thing, however, that distinguished Lisa Bunt from the Turners. Lisa had proven that she was capable of killing someone when she took a shot at DeMarco. And if she had killed Doyle, even if he couldn’t prove it, at least she’d spend some time in jail and by the time she got out, her looks would have faded and Hiram would have divorced her. She’d end up completely broke, with a felony conviction on her record, and would have a tough time finding a decent paying job. Her life would be pretty much ruined so justice would be at least partially served.

  Pat left the Turners’ home and as he did, he saw Jim sitting in a lawn chair out on the patio, drinking a beer, staring off into space. Which made him think that if one of the Turners had killed Doyle, justice would be served in another way. He was about ninety percent sure Jim Turner was going to lose his job with the sheriff’s office and it wouldn’t be easy for him to find another that paid as well. Yeah, Jim and Carly were both going to suffer and he couldn’t help but feel sorry for their two boys.

  The only thing Pat could do at this point was a lot of time-­consuming, strenuous, good old-fashioned police work—the kind of work Jim Turner should have done. He was going to have to do everything he could to see if Lisa Bunt had left the motel in Rock Springs before Doyle was killed. He’d question everyone he could find, look at all the surveillance cameras in the area. He’d get search warrants to search the Turners’ home and Hiram Bunt’s ranch to see if he could find the murder weapon or Doyle’s laptop. The likelihood of finding anything was practically zero. All the people involved were too damn smart to leave evidence lying around where he could find it. Not to mention, how was he going to search the thousands of acres that made up the Bunt ranch? Which then made him wonder how Hiram Bunt would react when presented with a search warrant. Well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

  The other thing he should do was talk to DeMarco and tell him everything he was doing before the bastard came up with another hair-brained scheme on his own. DeMarco had already proven he wouldn’t stand idly by if he didn’t think law enforcement was doing its job.

  Hiram Bunt lay on the floor in his den because of the pain in his back. Since Sonny and Lisa had been arrested, it had gotten even worse. He wouldn’t be able to get up without someone helping him, and with Lisa in jail, the only one left in the house to help was the housekeeper. It occurred to him that with both his wife and his son in jail, and the way his back had practically turned him into a cripple, there wasn’t much reason to get up off the floor.

  His son was going to spend the next thirty years in jail if he was lucky. If he wasn’t lucky, the judge would give him the death sentence or he’d spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. As for Lisa, his lawyer said she was probably going to spend at least half a dozen years in prison.

  Goddamnit, Lisa, why did you do it?

  He’d known in his heart that she’d been screwing someone. All those late nights when she didn’t get home til eleven or twelve, all those trips she supposedly made to Denver to see old girlfriends or to go shopping where she’d have to spend the night. The truth was, he’d been willing to overlook her infidelity because if he didn’t overlook it, for the sake of his pride, he’d have been forced to divorce her—and the last thing he wanted was a divorce. He loved her and he really couldn’t blame her. She was a beautiful, young woman and he was a broken-down old man who could hardly move.

  He never would have guessed that she’d been getting it on with Jim Turner, however. He could understand her being attracted to Turner but he would have thought that Turner would have been afraid to fuck his wife, knowing he would destroy Turner’s career if he ever found out. He supposed that Turner couldn’t help himself any more than he could when it came to Lisa.

  But why did she try to kill DeMarco? There’d been no reason to do that. If DeMarco had claimed she was having an affair with Turner, all Lisa would have had to do was deny it—and Hiram would have pretended to believe her. Now he couldn’t pretend anything. All he could do was wonder how he was going to spend the rest of his miserable life.

  The housekeeper came into the room and said, “Mr. Bunt, you want me to help you up? You been lying there for almost two hours.”

  “Go away, God damn you. I’ll call you when I want you.”

  42

  Pat Morse called DeMarco and asked him to meet him over a
t the municipal building in what used to be Jim Turner’s office. DeMarco decided to bring Tommy with him.

  Morse told them how he’d questioned everybody, that Lola Clarke had a solid alibi for the night Shannon was killed but that he couldn’t pin down where Jim Turner, Carly Turner, and Lisa Bunt were that night.

  He concluded by saying, “I’ve got a lot of work to do, Mr. DeMarco, to see if I can prove any of these people killed your friend. I don’t know how long it’s going to take but I can guarantee you I’m going to keep digging until I either have a case against someone or decide I never will. You can do what you want, but I’d suggest you go back to D.C.”

  As DeMarco and Tommy were leaving the building, Tommy said, “He seems like a good cop and I think he’s right. There isn’t anything you can do that he can’t do better. He knows the area, he’s got the force of the law behind him and putting criminals in jail is what he does for a living.”

  DeMarco hated to leave before Shannon’s killer was found, even though he knew Tommy was correct. And he’d gotten what he wanted: a competent, unbiased cop to investigate her murder.

  He said, “I’m going to go play golf and think things over, but you can head back to Boston. I don’t think anyone else is going to try to kill me at this point.”

  Tommy said, “I wouldn’t be too sure about that, the way you tend to piss people off. But it’s too late for me to leave today. I’ll take off tomorrow morning.”

  “If you’re not leaving until tomorrow, you want to go play with me? There’s a nice course in Rock Springs called White Mountain. We can rent clubs.”

  “Nah, I’ve only golfed a couple of times in my life and I thought it was a stupid game. I’m thinking I’ll go for a ride and see if I can spot some of these wild horses you were telling me about.”

  White Mountain Golf Course is a picturesque, twenty-seven-hole course with mountains visible in the distance, striking rock formations, and a couple of small ponds that DeMarco assumed were man-made. It was cheaper than comparable courses he’d played, which he appreciated considering the current state of his finances. He bought a cigar—he liked to smoke a cigar occasionally while he golfed—and three beers which he put in the cooler attached to the cart. Now fully equipped for strenuous athletics, he drove to the first tee box.

  His first drive ended up in a bunker on the right side of the fairway, which he attributed to playing with rented clubs. He took a mulligan, drove again, and ended up in the same bunker. Things didn’t go much better after that.

  As he played he tried to decide if he should take Tommy’s advice and head on home. As Tommy had said, Morse was much more likely to track down Shannon’s killer than he was. On the other hand, Morse would play by the rules, something that DeMarco didn’t think was necessarily advantageous. But when he tried to come up with something he could do that Morse couldn’t do—or wouldn’t do—he drew a blank. Yeah, it was time to head on home. Not to mention that at some point, Mahoney was going to wonder where he was.

  On the fifth hole, DeMarco sunk a twenty-foot putt, the second miracle putt he’d made. He was thinking that he liked the putter he’d rented better than his own and was wondering if he could buy it. His phone rang. He looked at the screen. Aw, shit. It was Mahoney.

  “Hello, boss,” he said.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  DeMarco said, “Didn’t Mavis tell you? My mother broke her hip and I’m in New York. I’m trying to get her set up with someone who can come in and take care of her until she’s able to get around on her own.”

  Right after he said this, he remembered that he’d never told Mavis his fictitious reason for leaving D.C. because before he could tell the lie, she’d told him that Mahoney was in China. That was the problem with lying: keeping all the lies straight.

  “No, she never told me,” Mahoney said. And being Mahoney, he also didn’t make a sympathetic comment about DeMarco’s mother’s hip. “But you being in New York is good. There’s this freshman congresswoman from the Bronx and she’s becoming a major thorn in my side. She’s constantly shooting her mouth off on TV and twittering a bunch of nonsense.”

  DeMarco knew the congresswoman Mahoney was talking about. She was a young Hispanic woman and DeMarco liked her passion. He also knew what had raised Mahoney’s hackles. Last night, MSNBC had shown a clip of Mahoney in Boston, comforting the survivors of the mall shooting and saying how it was time for action. But immediately following the clip, the newscaster interviewed the congresswoman, who let loose with both barrels, calling Mahoney a hypocrite who’d never really done anything when it came to passing meaningful gun legislation. The kicker was her saying that there were five firearm manufacturers in Massachusetts and she claimed that someone close to Mahoney had told her that Mahoney was taking under-the-table contributions from all of them. DeMarco had no idea who’d told the congresswoman this, but he knew she was right. He knew because he was the one who collected the money from the gun makers.

  Mahoney said, “I need you to do some research on this woman. She’s completely out of control.”

  By “doing some research” Mahoney meant that DeMarco was to find something damaging that Mahoney could use to hold over her head. DeMarco also knew that he probably wouldn’t be able to find any dirt on her because if there had been any, the Republicans would have already found it. She was more of a pain in the ass to the Republicans than she was to Mahoney. At least normally she was.

  Then, just because he felt like screwing with Mahoney for disturbing his golf game—and for giving him an assignment he didn’t want—he said, “What about the leaker? You know, the one who talked to Anderson Cooper about you supporting the merger? Don’t you want me to keep going on that?”

  He knew Mahoney had no interest in the leaker whatsoever—which Mahoney confirmed.

  “Forget about that for now. Go look into this congresswoman.”

  “Yeah, I thought that’s what you’d say,” DeMarco said. “I hope you covered your tracks well.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” Mahoney said.

  “I figured out that the person who leaked the story was you, which is why you haven’t been bugging me about it. I’m guessing that someone you know bought stock in both companies before the story broke, you made a killing when the stock prices jumped, and then you had this person sell the stock before it could drop again after it came out you weren’t backing the merger. Like I said, I hope you covered your tracks.” DeMarco had no doubt that Mahoney had. Mahoney could have written a book on how politicians could avoid being convicted for insider trading.

  Mahoney didn’t say anything for a moment, then said, “DeMarco, do you like having a job where you barely have to work?”

  “Yes, sir,” DeMarco said.

  “Well, keep that in mind before you start lipping off to me. Now start digging into the freshman like I told you.”

  Mahoney hung up.

  DeMarco smiled and moved onto the next tee box. As for the freshman, he’d wait a week then call Mahoney and tell him that he’d given it his best shot but struck out. And, by the way, his poor mother’s broken hip was much better and he was ready to come back to Washington.

  When DeMarco finished playing, he tore the scorecard into about sixteen pieces and drove back to Waverly. He took a shower then walked over to Tommy’s trailer to see if he was there and wanted to go to ­dinner—what he’d decided would be his last dinner in the lovely town of Waverly. He was going to let Pat Morse do his job.

  He knocked on the trailer door and Tommy answered.

  DeMarco said, “Want to go get dinner? My treat.”

  “Yeah, but come in for a minute. I want to tell you about something.”

  DeMarco stepped into the trailer and took a seat. Tommy said, “I spent the afternoon reading Shannon’s journal. I figured I was probably the only one who hadn’t read it. Anyway, did you follow
up on this thing with Harriet and whatever Shannon learned from John Bradley?”

  “No. I didn’t know who John Bradley was and I didn’t see any reason to find out. The old lady loved Shannon.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but it seemed like a loose end to me. John Bradley, or at least I think it’s the John Bradley Shannon was referring to, is a writer. He lives in Cleveland and writes true crime books, and he and Shannon have the same publisher. He wrote a book last year about some serial killer in Milwaukee. Why don’t we call him?”

  “How would we get his phone number?”

  “I already got it. I called a pal still working for the Boston PD and he called a cop in Cleveland.”

  DeMarco shrugged. “Okay. Let’s give him a call.”

  DeMarco made the call. Bradley didn’t answer. DeMarco left a voicemail saying, “My name’s Joe DeMarco. I work for Congress and I’m investigating Shannon Doyle’s murder because she was a close friend of mine. I found a journal Shannon kept and she mentioned that she called a man named John Bradley and apparently asked about an old photograph. If you’re the John Bradley she called, I’d like to know what you discussed.” DeMarco left his phone number and disconnected the call.

  “Let’s go eat,” he said to Tommy. “I’m starving.”

  43

  When they walked into the Hacienda Grill, DeMarco felt as if everyone in the place was staring at him. He doubted there was a person in Waverly who didn’t know that Lisa Bunt had tried to kill him, and most of them probably thought DeMarco deserved it. Yeah, it was definitely time to get out of this fucking town.

  During dinner, Tommy told DeMarco about the last case he’d worked on for the security firm that employed him in Boston.

  “Customers at a hotel in Brookline were being videoed having sex with hookers and people they weren’t married to and then blackmailed. I have no idea how many people were blackmailed, though, because I suspect a lot of them preferred to pay rather than have their wives or their bosses learn what they’d been doing. But eventually, when a couple of people did come forward, the hotel manager was worried that word would get out that his guests were being videoed in their rooms, which would definitely hurt his bottom line, and he asked us to investigate.