Sunrise Highway Read online

  All he could do was cut his headlights and wait, with the engine idling. He saw her lift one bare foot and then the other. Even from twenty yards’ distance, he could see how dark and wrinkled the soles were from walking in the street. She was pregnant. Why hadn’t Joey told him? The water was getting deep again, lapping against the sides of his vehicle. This was it. They were done for. No one would turn away a woman carrying a baby in the middle of a hurricane.

  She sank into a squat. Whatever pity he’d felt for her turned inward. Why had he been put in this position? Why was it his job to clean up this mess after so many years? Hadn’t he paid up already? Didn’t he have a right to go on and live his own life, give or take a few lapses of his own? Why was he being forced to go back to where he’d been?

  In an instant, the girl on the porch became the monster again. A bitch, really. Who wouldn’t stop running her mouth, so someone had to stop it for her.

  She stood up and leaned against the door, lips moving, trying to make her problem into the problem of whoever was inside. Then she looked over her shoulder, knowing he was out in the street, waiting for her, even with his lights off. His engine heaved and grumbled, restless from all this idling. She put a hand against the door, like she was starting to plead. The engine revved, as he accidentally touched the gas pedal. She looked back at him, turned to the door, said something else, threw her head back in despair, and darted back out into the street, trying to stay ahead of him in the blackening rain.

  48

  OCTOBER

  2017

  Even during apple season, with trees along the highway turning umber and crimson and Kendrick popping on the speakers, Lourdes hated driving upstate. Nothing against nature. But the smell of gas fumes made her carsick as she remembered the endless bus trips with Izzy and her mother to see Papi in the prison, where he was just beginning his twenty-five-to-life bid for killing another dealer. If shame and bad memories weren’t enough to keep her guts constantly agitated, a general sense of paranoia would do the rest.

  No one else on the task force wanted to make the three-hour-plus drive because (A) there and back was the better part of a day tour; (B) most of them had already reached their overtime caps; (C) it seemed like a long shot that anything would come of visiting either address; and (D) the Chief of D’s had just laid the lumber to her, so anyone with a lick of sense was keeping their distance.

  The first stop was a large, bright yellow house in Saratoga Springs on what looked like a horse farm, near the National Museum of Racing. It had tall hedges, a Western-style fence and gate, a corral in back, a dog kennel big enough for a family in Sunset Park, and a garden that was twice as big as the one Delaney Patterson had been tending in the Bronx, with a watering system elaborate enough that it could have kept Papi and his fellow inmates hydrated all day long.

  There was a security system with a camera by the gate, but Lourdes happened to catch the lady of the house easing a white Lexus SUV out of the two-car garage.

  “Excuse me.” She came up to the driver’s side. “Are you Beth Carter?”

  She’d gone in blind, with no ID photo on file, just a common name, a birth date, and a forwarding address from a forwarding address, thoughtfully provided to the NYPD by the U.S. Postal Service.

  “Who are you?” the woman at the wheel said. “What do you want?”

  She was a blonde and a little horse-faced, Lourdes thought. The darkness of her sunglasses emphasized the whiteness of her teeth. A lady in her sixties who’d had some pretty good work done, cosmetically speaking, and took some care with her body.

  “We were hoping you could assist us with an investigation.” Lourdes showed her badge. “I promise it won’t take long.”

  “I was married to a police officer,” Beth Carter said, removing any doubt that Lourdes had the right woman. “I know what a cop’s promise is worth.”

  “We wouldn’t be bothering you if it wasn’t for an important case—”

  “Is this about the chief?” Beth Carter interrupted her.

  “Not necessarily.” Lourdes tried the soft sell. “We’re just looking at some things that happened on Long Island—”

  “I’m not interested.” Beth Carter cut in again, refusing to let Lourdes get into a rhythm.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, I’m not interested in speaking to you. And if you had a warrant, you would have shown it to me already. I haven’t lived on Long Island for a long time and I don’t talk about Joseph Tolliver.”

  Lourdes consciously ducked her head low, so she appeared to be looking up, asking for help woman to woman. “Can I ask why not?”

  “No, you can’t.” Beth Carter reached for her gearshift. “You’re on my property, in my driveway. I expect you gone by the time I get back. If you’re not, I’ll call the police on you.”

  * * *

  The second stop was even more of a long shot. A ramshackle farmhouse just outside the town of Colonie, with a fire-damaged roof, a small patchy lawn, and unsupervised chickens wandering around like recently paroled prisoners who didn’t know what to do with their freedom.

  The woman Lourdes was talking to was decidedly more welcoming. Although Shauna Martinez lived only a little over half an hour away from Beth Carter and was at least twenty-five years younger, she looked like someone from another, harder country. A weather-beaten face, thatchy, home-cut hair, and a body thick from bad diet and hard farmwork.

  “I have to be honest,” she told Lourdes in a husky voice, turning her squint toward the sun. “I never really understood what my mother was up to.”

  She looked about as likely a Martinez as Lourdes would have been a Kelly or an O’Connor. All the Spanish must have been on the father’s side. Another jailbird, according to Lourdes’s preliminary research: like her own papi.

  “She never mentioned this Long Island case to you?” Lourdes asked.

  “Oh, she talked about it all the time.” Shauna let out a raspy laugh. “But if you ask me, was anybody listening? I’d have to say no.”

  “What’d she say about it?”

  “To be honest, I don’t remember much.” Shauna wagged and turned her face to the afternoon sun. “I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old while most of this was going on. I didn’t want my mother to solve Watergate. I wanted her to be my mom and take me to the mall, help me buy makeup. But that’s not what I got from her.”

  “That must’ve been really hard.” Lourdes gave her a sympathetic nod, even though she was impatient to get down to business here.

  “She wasn’t what you’d call a real girly girl.” Shauna waved dismissively. “Even when she loosened up, she was more into playing ball with my brothers. I’d have to say she was driven. Especially since she was surrounded by men who she felt she had to prove herself to. In fact, there’s something about you that reminds me of her.”

  “Is there?”

  Lourdes forced a smile.

  “Not that I’m saying you’re not feminine or a good mother or anything.” Shauna patted the air apologetically. “I hope you don’t take that the wrong way.”

  “Of course not.” Lourdes wrinkled her nose at the smell of hay and goat shit from the animal pen beside the house.

  “It’s just a certain fixed look in your eye.”

  “Anyway, we were talking about Long Island,” Lourdes prompted.

  “Yeah, she was obsessed with that case. Every night after dinner, she’d disappear upstairs with her files. And every morning, I’d come down for school with my brothers, and she’d be at the kitchen table with her coffee and folders. To tell you the truth, I think it’s part of what drove her and my father apart. Because she was spending all this time reading police records and looking at these disgusting crime scene photos. And it was left to him to make us lunch for school and help us with our homework. Which he had no business doing, let me tell you. He was a mechanic, not a scholar. And then, after they got divorced, he was just a mess. But instead of stopping and asking what she was doing,
she just got deeper into the case. Like the work was sustaining her as much as her family. I guess you think that sounds harsh, right?”

  “It is what it is,” Lourdes said: the police officer’s koan. “If you don’t mind my asking, how long after she passed was it before your father got locked up?”

  “Not long.” Shauna glanced over, momentarily distracted by the desultory braying of the goats. “The police zeroed in on my father right away. He’d been fighting with my mom about alimony and child support. He left all these stupid threatening messages on her voicemail, and they buried him at the trial.”

  “He got found guilty?” Lourdes said. “He didn’t take a plea?”

  “On his deathbed, he swore to me that he didn’t do it. And it’s only now that I believe him.” Shauna shook her head. “For twenty years, I wouldn’t go see him. Tore our whole family apart. Or whatever was left of it. Me and my brothers turned on each other, fighting over what was left. That’s how it is with family, sometimes. Right? The less there is to share, the more you fight over it.”

  Lourdes nodded and watched the goats nudging each other with their horns to get at a tin can in a corner of the pen. She realized now that the original trouble with Izzy had started when she was just a kid, soon after their father got himself locked up. Before she’d just been the adoring little sister, shyly asking to borrow Lourdes’s hairbrush and happy to snuggle whenever Lourdes decided to be generous and lie next to her, reading Goosebumps until they both fell asleep.

  “So sorry to keep coming back to these cases, but I know your mother wrote one report for the state investigations commission and she was working on another one later,” Lourdes said. “As far as you know, did that second investigation end when she died?”

  “Yes, as far as I know.” Shauna nodded. “It’s not like any of her kids were going to pick up the trail. I work at a Walmart when I’m not trying to keep the house from falling down. And one of my brothers just works on his motorcycle in Arizona and I don’t know what the other is doing in New Mexico, but I’m sure it’s not police work.”

  “So that’s it. All that work she put in and there’s nothing left behind?”

  No way to prove that Tolliver might have ruined yet another set of lives, even though Lourdes sensed he was part of this. She should have known it would be a waste of time, trying to retrace another cop’s footsteps. Even another female cop. Twenty-one years since Leslie’s murder. People forget. Time is a beast. It devours everything.

  “Well.” Shauna sighed. “I wouldn’t say ‘nothing.’”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, they were in an attic crawl space, the smell of cedar heavy in the air, yellow foamy insulation hanging down in clumps, a Havahart trap big enough for a raccoon by Lourdes’s feet, and a few stray shoe boxes lined up against a wall.

  “I don’t know why I still keep these.” Shauna aimed a flashlight beam. “I’ve thrown out most of my mother’s files and the fire a few years ago got most of the others.”

  “Still looks like a fair amount of material,” Lourdes said. “Are these her files and notebooks?”

  “Oh my God, it filled the whole attic. You didn’t use to be able to move up here. You’re not getting the picture—when I say my mother was obsessive, I mean she was a pack rat. She never threw anything away. These days, I think we’d call her a ‘hoarder.’ In fact, I’m starting to worry I may have inherited it from her. I’d hate to have you see what I’ve done in the basement.”

  “So you don’t mind if I have a look at these?” Lourdes said, trying to contain the growing excitement that had turned Mitchell off the other day.

  “Knock yourself out.” Shauna shrugged. “You’d be doing me a favor if you hauled some of it away. Just leave any photos of her that you might find. I don’t have that many.”

  “Thank you,” Lourdes said, gripping the daughter’s wrist a little too urgently. “I promise I’ll do right by her.”

  “Make yourself at home.” Shauna handed her the flashlight. “I’ll make us a late lunch.”

  The daughter left the attic, slowly descending the rickety stairs, as Lourdes directed the flashlight at the remnants of the archive, crooked stacks of loose-lidded boxes that reminded her of the charts she’d set up in Mitchell’s spare room. Make yourself at home, Shauna had said. I already am home, Lourdes thought.

  49

  OCTOBER

  2012

  Joey had his head in his hands for an uncomfortably long time.

  At least it was uncomfortable if you were alone in the garage with him and the silence had been going for three minutes and counting.

  “Help me understand what happened here,” he said.

  It was maybe an hour before dawn. Outside, most of the water had receded back into the bay and the ocean, leaving sand dunes in the streets and the beach strewn with kitchen appliances. Soon, people would return and begin the hideous business of looking at where they used to live and figuring out what it would take to get back to the way things were.

  “I’m serious.” Joey finally raised his head. “Explain to me how we got in this position.”

  Plunger looked over at the girl in the rowboat, half-covered in a plastic tarp, gravel spilling out of her mouth.

  “All I told you was find her, bring her back to the house,” Joey said.

  Plunger laced his hands behind his neck, elbows out like bat wings. His joints were aching and his clothes still felt cold and damp from being out in the flooded streets.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, J. I did the best I could with circumstances. You weren’t there. I was.”

  “I wasn’t there because I had a thousand fucking jobs to do at once, keeping people in my community safe.” Joey raised a finger. “You had one job. One.”

  “I know…” Plunger rubbed his long white hands together, wondering if the chill would ever leave his bones.

  “Jesus.” Joey rubbed a corner of his eye. “If you just left her facedown in the street, like she’d drowned, no one would’ve questioned it…”

  “Got it…”

  “Instead she’s got these rocks stuffed down her throat that we’ll never get out? What were you thinking?”

  “I said, I know. What do you want me to do, J?”

  “Again. How could it have happened again?”

  Plunger got up and made himself go over to look at her. It wasn’t necessarily true that she could have passed as a regular drowning victim. Her face was too bruised and abraded from the struggle after he’d finally caught up to her in the neighbor’s gravel driveway. Her clothes were torn from his thrashing around in the water with her. His right index finger was cut and throbbing from one of the many times she’d bitten him.

  “I was just trying to control her when she started screaming her head off and I was afraid someone was coming out of the house. So I grabbed whatever was around me to shut her up.”

  “Twice.” Joey’s voice rang out. “How could it happen twice? They say history never repeats.”

  “I don’t know, J. I panicked. I guess maybe I even flashed back.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, you flashed back? Where do you think you were? Vietnam?”

  “Feels that way sometimes,” Plunger mumbled.

  “What was that?”

  Plunger bit his lip, still trying to sort through it all himself. At the moment, everything was blended together and mixed up in his mind, like it was all going on simultaneously. What happened with Kim and what happened with the one last night. Girls with red open mouths screaming bloody murder. J said they had to shut her up that night behind the football field. Especially since Plunger had already hit her over the head with a rock, and she didn’t go down. She was yelling that she was going to tell everyone everything. It would have brought the whole shit house crashing down on all of them. A hand over her mouth couldn’t keep her quiet. She sank her teeth into Plunger’s palm and drew blood. And even Joey strangling her didn’t stop the noise. So Plunger had
panicked and grabbed a handful of grass. She looked so shocked when he shoved it in her mouth that she didn’t have time to close her teeth. She’d started thrashing and fighting him, so he grabbed another handful of twigs and leaves and pushed them inside. By then, Joey was on top of her, holding her down, as they both went into a frenzy, shoveling more and more. Stop her up to shut her up. When she tried to clamp her jaws shut, Joey pried them open. Always was a strong bastard.

  And the truth was, Plunger had gotten sort of turned on doing it. They both had, though they never talked about it. But man, it was a powerful feeling. That look in her eyes when she knew they were going to keep jamming things in until she couldn’t breathe. Nothing had ever gotten him off like that since. Thirty-five years.

  “I want to ask you something,” said J, taking a deep breath like he was having a hard time with this. “And I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “What?”

  “Did you do it on purpose?”

  “No, J. I told you. I saw her. Then she ran away from the house screaming and I went after her, trying to get her to calm down and be quiet. Then what happened … happened. She wouldn’t stop fighting me. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m saying, did you do it this way deliberately?” J was pointing at the girl’s mouth. “With the stones. So people would know.”

  “What are you asking?” Plunger bunched up his fists close to his chest, his voice geeky with outrage.

  “You did it on purpose. Didn’t you? So people would remember Kim and you could point the finger at me and say I did both of them.”

  “J, what are you talking about? That’s nuts.”

  Joey pulled a Glock 17 from his waistband and aimed it at Plunger’s head. “Then tell me why you did it.”

  “I don’t know, J. It was an accident.”

  Joey pulled back the slide and took a step, so the barrel was less than a foot from Plunger’s face. “Tell me the truth. You did it because you’re jealous.”

  “Joey, no. I wasn’t trying to fuck it up.”