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Miles Lovell sat tied to the motor of a septic pump in the center of the shed. He’d been fastened to the motor by a thick electrical cord wrapped tight around his waist and tied off behind his back.
The gag in his mouth had darkened with blood that seeped past the corners of his mouth and down his chin.
His arms and legs had been left untied, and his heels kicked the floorboards as he writhed against the metal block.
His arms, however, hung immobile by his sides, and the man who’d done this to him hadn’t been worried Miles would use them to untie himself because Miles no longer had possession of his own hands.
They were on the floor to the left of the silent motor, chopped off above the wrists and neatly laid, palms down, on the floorboards. The blond man had applied tourniquets over both stumps and left the ax embedded in the wood between the hands.
We approached Lovell as his eyes rolled back to whites and the hammering of his heels began to seem less like pain and more like shock. Even with the tourniquets, I doubted he could live much longer, and I willed myself to put the horror of his maiming in the back of my mind and try to get him to answer a question or two before either the shock or death set in permanently.
I pulled the gag from between his lips and jumped back as a mouthful of dark blood spilled out onto his chest.
Angie said, “Oh, no. No fucking way. You have got to be kidding.”
My stomach slid east, then west, then back east again, and a soft, warm buzzing found my brain.
Bubba said, “Wow,” again, and this time I was sure I detected awe in his voice.
Miles, shock or no shock, death or no death, wouldn’t be answering my questions.
He wouldn’t be answering anyone’s questions for a long, long time.
And even if he lived, I wasn’t sure he’d be happy about it.
While we’d waited in the trees and the mist had ridden gently over the cranberry bog and his BMW had sat waiting on the shore, Miles Lovell’s tongue had gone the way of his hands.
19
Three days after Miles Lovell was admitted to ICU, Dr. Diane Bourne walked into her Admiral Hill town house and found Angie, Bubba, and me cooking a very early Thanksgiving dinner in her kitchen.
I was in charge of the thirteen-pound turkey because I was the only one of us who liked to cook. Angie lived in restaurants and Bubba was strictly takeout, but I’d been cooking since I was twelve. Nothing spectacular, mind you-after all, there’s a reason you rarely hear “Irish” and “cuisine” mentioned in the same sentence-but I can handle most fowl, beef, and pasta dishes, and I can blacken hell out of any fish known to man.
So I cleaned and roasted and basted and spiced the turkey, then prepared the mashed potatoes with diced onions, while Angie assigned herself to the preparation of the Stove Top stuffing and this green-beans-and-garlic recipe she’d found on the inside of a soup can label. Bubba had no official duties, but he’d brought plenty of beer and several bags of chips for us and a bottle of vodka for himself, and when he came upon Diane Bourne’s blue Persian cat, he was nice enough not to kill it.
Roasting a turkey takes a while, with very little to do during the downtime, so Angie and I availed ourselves of the upstairs quarters and ransacked Diane Bourne’s house until we found one thing of particular interest.
Miles Lovell had gone into shock not long after we called the ambulance. He’d been rushed to Jordan Hospital in Plymouth, where he was stabilized and airlifted to Mass General. After they’d worked on him there for nine hours, he’d been placed in ICU. They’d been unable to reattach his hands, but they would have had a shot at reattaching his tongue if the blond man hadn’t either taken it with him or tossed it into the bog.
My gut feeling was that the blond man had taken it with him. I didn’t know much about him-not his name or even what he looked like-but I was getting a sense for him. He was, I was sure, the man Warren Martens had seen at the motel and described as the man in charge. He had destroyed Karen Nichols, and now he’d destroyed Miles Lovell. Merely killing his victims seemed to bore him-instead, he preferred to leave them wishing they were dead.
Angie and I returned downstairs with the treat we’d found in Dr. Bourne’s bedroom, and the plastic thermometer popped up from the turkey just as Diane Bourne let herself into the town house.
“Talk about your timing,” I said.
“Sure,” Angie said, “we do all the work, she reaps the rewards.”
Diane Bourne turned into the dining room, separated from the kitchen by nothing but an open portico, and Bubba gave her a big three-finger wave with the same hand that held his bottle of Absolut.
Bubba said, “What’s shaking, sister?”
Diane Bourne dropped her leather bag and opened her mouth as if about to scream.
Angie said, “Now, now. There, there.” She crouched on the kitchen floor and slid the videocassette we’d found in the master bedroom into the dining room, where it came to rest at Diane Bourne’s feet.
She looked down at the videocassette and closed her mouth.
Angie hoisted herself up onto the counter and lit a cigarette. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but isn’t it unethical to have sex with a client?”
I would have raised my eyebrows at Dr. Bourne, but I was busy pulling the roasting pan from the oven.
“Damn,” Bubba said. “Smells good.”
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“Anyone remember cranberry sauce?”
Angie snapped her fingers and shook her head.
“Not that I particularly care for the stuff. Ange?”
“Never liked the cranberry sauce,” she said, her eyes on Diane Bourne.
“Bubba?”
He belched. “Gets in the way of the booze.”
I turned my head. Diane Bourne was frozen in the dining room over her dropped bag and the videocassette.
“Dr. Bourne?” I said and her eyes snapped my way. “You a fan of the cranberry?”
She took a long, deep breath and closed her eyes as she let it back out. “What are you people doing here?”
I held up the roasting pan. “Cooking.”
“Stirring,” Angie said.
“Drinking,” Bubba said, and pointed the bottle in Dr. Bourne’s direction. “Taste?”
Diane Bourne gave us all a tight shake of the head and closed her eyes again as if we’d disappear by the time she reopened them.
“You,” she said, “are breaking and entering. That’s a felony.”
