Stranger on the Shore - lanyon Josh - Страница 42
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Griff acknowledged that with a faint smile. “Maybe not.”
“That’s what I thought. Look, I have to tell you something.” She took another restless turn around the room. “I’m not particularly proud of this.” Her lip curled. “But then I’ve done a lot of things I’m not particularly proud of.”
“What?”
It took her a few seconds to work herself up to it. “When Brian disappeared, I was a different person. I was, let’s say, unreliable. Irresponsible. Hell, I was a goddamned mess. Half the time I was stoned. The rest of the time I was thinking about how I could get stoned.”
He nodded.
“I hurt people.”
“I know you had a relationship with Odell Johnson.”
Michaela looked startled. “You have been doing some digging. I did. That’s true. It was...stupid. For a lot of reasons. But I didn’t have any inhibitions. No boundaries back then. So I couldn’t be sure. I could never be sure.”
“Sure of what?” Then he realized what. “You thought you might have had something to do with Brian’s disappearance?”
Astonishingly, tears glittered in her eyes. Astonishing because she did not look like someone who cried. Ever. Certainly not easily. Michaela wiped her arm across her face. “I don’t know. Yes. I wasn’t sure. I could never be sure. I didn’t want to believe it, but Odell wouldn’t have killed Brian. He was a lot of things, but not that. He wasn’t a good man, but he wasn’t a bad man.”
“But you thought you were that bad?”
“Like I said, half the time I didn’t know what I was doing. The other half, I didn’t care. I’ve been living with the fear that I might have...I don’t know...for two decades. So when you came snooping, I panicked. Until you, Daddy always refused to cooperate with anyone poking into our past, but he believed you were somehow going to get to the bottom of Brian’s disappearance. And...I lost it.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
She took a deep breath and then expelled it. “I told Ring what I was afraid of. All of it. Everything. And he promised to take care of it.”
“Take care of it? Or take care of me?”
At that Michaela looked exasperated. “Oh please. Whatever bullshit Chloe told you is just that. Bullshit. Ring was only trying to scare you off. Period. He weakened the bridge. He thought you’d put your foot through a board. He didn’t intend for the center section to give way.”
Griff gaped at her. “He deliberately sabotaged the bridge?” It was one thing to theorize and another to be confronted with the fact.
“Yes.” Her expression grew sheepish. “And there’s more. He’s the one who’s been phoning you during the night. Except you didn’t answer last night.”
“I wasn’t here.” He was still trying to comprehend what she was telling him. Could they have honestly believed he would be scared away by such heavy-handed tactics? On what TV channel did they live?
“That’s it. That’s all.” Michaela seemed relaxed now. Relieved. Her conscience unburdened of all sins. “I wanted to tell you so you didn’t have to worry whether someone was stalking you. It was me. I was afraid you’d find out that I had done something to Brian.” She smiled, looking years younger. “But Brian’s home now and everything is good again.”
* * *
After Michaela left, it took Griff a while to settle down enough to be able to work. He felt keyed up, restless, and as ever, anxious.
He tried calling May Chung’s, but reached the answering machine again, and hung up without leaving a message. The person you should be talking to is Nels Newland. What had she meant?
The Nassau police had discovered that Newland played the ponies—and that he was not particularly lucky. Bad debts? A gambling addiction? Even if both were true, that was still a long way from masterminding a kidnapping. Nels Newland did not seem to Griff like a man who would turn to crime to fund his gambling habit. Not that you could go by personality types. Especially not twenty years later. Age had a way of blurring, softening the jagged edges of character.
Which didn’t change the fact that it was one thing to investigate someone on paper and another to meet the person, talk to the person. Sometimes the chain of evidence, whether direct or indirect, led in the wrong direction. And sometimes it didn’t matter what portrait the evidence painted. Griff had never met anyone who didn’t believe they were a good judge of character. And he’d observed all too many trials where the verdict had ultimately been decided by the jury’s feelings about such things as whether the defendant smiled too much or not enough. He had seen juries be wrong time and time again in such assessments.
You could instruct, you could even train people to ignore their biases, but that didn’t erase the existence of those biases. Everyone had their prejudices, their “natural inclinations.” They persisted like the faded stain of mineral deposits, even after education and experience raised the waterline.
Even if Odell Johnson had not sent that ransom note, he’d have been the first and foremost suspect in any investigation. That wasn’t just bias, it was also common sense. Had Johnson been exonerated, the police would have turned their attention to the rest of the staff, to Newland.
But Johnson, with his attempt at extortion, had guaranteed that the police had looked no further. Through the years, Jarrett Arlington had hired private detectives—there was even a rumor he had hired a medium—but no one had come up with a better suspect than Johnson. And despite many diligent searches, Brian’s body had never been found.
Griff rubbed his forehead. It felt like he was going in circles.
If Pierce was correct, and a member of the family was behind Brian’s reappearance, didn’t it follow that person was behind the real Brian’s disappearance? If that was the case, then that really only left two viable suspects. Marcus and Muriel.
Griff believed Michaela’s relief and happiness were genuine. She had lived with the fear that she was responsible for Brian’s disappearance, and now that guilt, that fear, had been lifted. For that relief and happiness to be genuine, Michaela could not have anything to do with Leland Alvin showing up. She needed to believe he was the real thing.
But what about her psycho husband? What about Ring Shelton, the ex-con, ex-biker restaurateur? If he’d been willing to make creepy anonymous phone calls and sabotage a bridge in the hope of scaring Griff off Michaela’s trail, who was to say he wasn’t devoted enough to produce a fake Brian? The one foolproof means of ending any and all investigation was to have Brian show up at long last and claim it had all been a mistake.
Ring could have hired an actor. A quarter of the Arlington pie was a pretty nice commission. A lot of people would jump at the opportunity. And with an accomplice on the inside, the possibility of pulling off the charade was much higher. Only a family member could possibly know that this time Jarrett wouldn’t demand a DNA test. That Jarrett was either feeling his mortality or was unhappy enough with his remaining children to take a chance on a complete outsider.
Yes, the more that Griff considered this theory, the better it looked.
He signed back onto his laptop and began to search the web for information on Ring Shelton.
He quickly discovered that there was no real intelligence on Ring previous to his marriage to Michaela. In fact, almost all information on him was post factum Michaela. You had to expect some revisionist history there.
Knowing how and where to search, Griff was able to locate the original story of the bar fight where Ring had killed another biker. It was bare-bones reporting. A brawl had erupted between rival biker gangs at a remote canyon lodge in Southern California. Ring had originally been convicted of manslaughter. He had appealed and eventually he’d got a second trial and the charges reduced to self-defense. All told, he had done slightly less than three years in prison.
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