Mike McCabe 01 - The Cutting Read online

  The only response came from Jack Batchelder. ‘Don’t break your leg,’ he said. ‘It’s dark, and the rain’s made that sucker slippery.’

  ‘Thanks, Jack. I’ll do my best.’ McCabe stepped backward over the edge and began working his way down the wet, weedy embankment. Rivulets of water trickled past him, cutting small indentations in the soil. He had no rain gear, and water was soaking through his thin jacket to his skin. Drops of rain slid behind the collar of his shirt and traced their way down his back. Holding the flashlight in his right hand, he created handholds with his left wherever he could find them. He crisscrossed the slope, shining his flashlight left and right, not quite sure what he was looking for. He was breathing heavily, a little surprised by how tricky the descent was proving to be. He made himself a promise to cut down on the Scotch and to hit the gym at least three times a week. Well, two anyway.

  About fifty yards from the top, a small rock outcropping McCabe was using as a toehold gave way, and before he could stop himself, he slid a good ten feet on his chest through muddy, stony soil. He came to a painful stop against a tree root. His flashlight landed about three feet to his right. It was still on. About ten feet beyond the flashlight, reflected in its flickering beam, two black eyes stared back at him. He lay perfectly still, slowing his breathing, carefully watching whatever it was that was watching him. He could hear the voices of the others shouting from the top. ‘Hey, Mike, are you alright?’ ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

  He didn’t shout back for fear of startling the animal or whatever the hell it was. A cat? Maybe a big rat? With his left hand he scooped up a small handful of wet soil and tossed it in the direction of the eyes. Nothing. He gingerly nudged his body a foot or so toward the light. Still nothing. He slid another foot. Then another. He wrapped his hand around the barrel of the light and lifted it up. Still no movement. The shouts from the top grew more insistent. He pointed the light directly at the eyes. They shone back brightly. Now he could see the shape of a face. A white muzzle. A black nose. He crawled toward it. Not wanting to shout, he pulled out his cell and hit Maggie’s number. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he told her. ‘I found her dog. It’s dead.’

  4

  The throbbing beat of a headache provided the accompaniment to Lucinda Cassidy’s slow return to consciousness. She was alive. She was certain of this, but she wasn’t sure where she was or why. She opened one eye. Then the other. She was looking straight up into bright overhead lights that forced her to squint until her pupils adjusted. She was lying flat on a bed with raised sidebars in a small, nearly bare room. Practically everything in it seemed white except for the hospital gown she was wearing. It was the kind that opens at the rear with little blue flowers printed all over it. Hospital bed. Hospital gown. She supposed that’s where she must be. In a hospital. Had there been an accident? She couldn’t remember. The headache didn’t make it easier.

  The room didn’t look like any hospital room she’d ever seen before. There was no TV or telephone. No privacy curtain hung from the ceiling. No buttons or buzzers to summon a nurse. Nothing but the bed, a small bedside table, and a single chair that stood against the wall near the door. Lucy tried to lift her hand, wanting to rub away the throbbing pain behind her eyes and in her temples, but her hand wouldn’t move. She pulled harder and realized that what she thought were bandages wrapped around her wrists and ankles were, in fact, restraints tying her to the bed. Both her hands and her feet were secured with canvas straps. No. Not a hospital. A prison. She wasn’t a patient. Someone was holding her prisoner. But who? And why?

  Slowly, as grogginess receded, she began to remember. She remembered the fog. She remembered running along the Western Prom, and meeting the man with the hypodermic, the one who called himself Harry Potter. With a kind of despair, she remembered Fritz.

  The man must have brought her here. Wherever here was. Okay, that was who. The why, she supposed, must have something to do with sex. It certainly couldn’t be ransom money. Sex slavery? Jesus Christ. That happened to girls from the Ukraine. Not Bates graduates with good jobs in New England ad agencies.

  She supposed Harry Potter would rape her. The juxtaposition of the name and the act made it seem ridiculous. To be raped by an adolescent fictional wizard. A British adolescent fictional wizard. ‘Officer, it was ’Arry Potter what done me wrong.’

  ‘Oh, no, miss, it couldn’t be, he’s such a nice little fellow.’

  Ridiculous. Terrifying. She began to laugh. A little hysterically. She was certain he would rape her. When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it. Isn’t that what all the assholes say? Bullshit. She’d fight the sonofabitch every step of the way. Given half a chance, she’d pull a Lorena Bobbit and bite his cock off. The idea of defiance made her feel a little better. Was it possible he’d already raped her while she was conked out? She didn’t think so. Even unconscious, she was sure she’d have some sense of it if that had happened.

  If he raped her, what happened afterward? She knew what he looked like. He wouldn’t let her go with a promise not to tell anyone. Maybe he’d keep her for a repeat performance. Or a bunch of repeat performances. Like anything else, though, rape would get old. Then he’d kill her. A knife? A gun? He had a hypodermic. Her mind played with the words ‘lethal injection.’

  Never had she imagined life ending this way. She began to cry. Not in great heaving sobs but softly, quietly. This happened to other people. Not to strong, competent people like her. ‘I won’t let it.’ She mouthed the words, a ritual to build conviction. ‘I will not let this happen.’ She didn’t know what she could do – but something. Was this denial? When facing imminent death, isn’t one’s first reaction always denial? What follows in that famous litany? Fear? Anger? Acceptance? She couldn’t remember. Well, if it was fear, she’d just zipped past denial in a hurry. Because now all she felt was deathly afraid.

  How long had she been unconscious? Hours? Days? When she didn’t turn up at the office, Charlie Roberts or John Beckman would have called her apartment, called her cell phone. They knew she wasn’t someone who just didn’t show up for work, especially with an important meeting on tap. Would anyone from Beckman and Hawes have called the police? She didn’t know. Maybe she’d already missed dinner with David. She was ravenously hungry. David would have called, wouldn’t he? David would have reported it, wouldn’t he? David was such an asshole, he might have thought she was standing him up and walked out of Tony’s in a huff. Why did she marry him in the first place? Probably for the sex. He was very good at sex. Don’t be stupid. Nobody gets married for sex these days.

  Would people, even now, be watching reports of her abduction on television? She imagined pictures of herself flickering on the screen. ‘A Portland woman, Lucinda Cassidy, was reported missing today. Ms. Cassidy was wearing blue jogging shorts and a white sports bra.’ No, they wouldn’t know any of that, would they? She remembered that girl a couple of years ago who vanished from some club. Some creep had shot her. Buried her down in Scarborough. Of course, just last week that high school soccer player, Katie something, disappeared. They hadn’t found her yet, either dead or alive.

  Lucy remembered feeling righteous anger sitting safely in front of her TV listening to reports of missing women. She’d never realized how far she was from understanding the awful reality of the thing. How far from understanding the fear that was gnawing at her and wouldn’t let go. Lucy closed her eyes and tried to suppress a rising panic.

  ‘Control this.’ Almost pleading with herself. ‘Don’t give in to it. The only way out is to stay calm, to think clearly.’ She breathed deeply and slowly just like Rebecca taught her in yoga class. She tried to picture herself in a different place. She concentrated on slowing the beating of her heart. She listened. There was no sound but the distant hum of what might be an air-conditioning system.

  She looked around the room again, studying the details. It was a small room, windowless, maybe twelve feet square. The walls and ce
iling were white. Both seemed to be covered with some sort of acoustic tile. Lucy supposed, hopefully, that the purpose of the tile was to soundproof the room. That might mean there was someone outside the room who wasn’t supposed to hear what was going on inside. Who wasn’t supposed to hear her if she screamed. There was a door. It looked solid and heavy. Possibly made of steel or some other metal. It had a silvered knob and a button lock. Above the knob was a dead bolt. She supposed it was bolted, but the opening in the door was too narrow to know for sure.

  Then she became aware of another sound. Breathing that wasn’t her own. Slow shallow breathing from behind the bed. She held her own breath to listen. Yes, definitely breathing. She was afraid to say anything, afraid to move. In the end she began crying again. ‘Who are you?’ she sobbed. ‘What do you want from me?’

  His face, the face from the Prom, came into view. He was holding a hypodermic. He rubbed her arm with an alcohol swab. ‘I’m sorry, Lucinda, but I’m not quite ready for you yet.’

  He plunged her back into darkness.

  5

  Saturday. 4:30 A.M.

  It was nearly dawn when McCabe, muddy, bruised, and hurting in more places than he cared to think about, turned into the parking area behind the large white Victorian on the Eastern Prom. He pulled the lovingly restored cherry red ’57 T-Bird into parking space number three. McCabe and Sandy had scrimped and saved to buy the car the first year they were married. He sat for a minute, nursing his pain, holding on to the wheel, not knowing why those days came to mind. Days of innocence long since lost. There was nothing he and Sandy loved more than cruising around Westhampton Beach on a summer Saturday with the top down. Guys making twenty times as much as the two of them put together – brokers, bond traders, network producers – would walk slowly around the parked car, gazing in admiration both at McCabe’s vintage T-Bird and at McCabe’s wife from every angle. He smiled bitterly at the memory. Michael McCabe, twenty-four years old. Hot shit extraordinaire. Hot car. Hot woman. Hot times.

  Then the hot times came to an end. He always found it funny – painful but funny – that when Sandy finally ran off with one of those guys, it was the car she wanted to keep. Not the daughter they conceived on a blanket in the Westhampton dunes on a moonlit night one of those very same weekends. Knowing Sandy, she might have brought up custody of the car in court if her lawyer had let her. ‘Let’s see. I’ll trade you one forty-year-old classic convertible for one little girl. Even-up trade. No draft choices. No players to be named later. Well, fuck you, Sandy. I’ve got them both, and no, you can’t have them back.’

  McCabe opened the driver’s side door and gingerly climbed out. It had stopped raining. He could see stars in the eastern sky over the bay and the first hints of red on the horizon. He climbed the three flights up to the three-bedroom condo he shared with Casey and, as often as possible, with Kyra.

  Taking off his muddy shoes, he left them in the hall and went in. He opened the door to Casey’s room. He knelt by the side of her bed and watched her sleeping face. ‘Have I lied to you?’ he asked silently. ‘Have I encouraged you to believe there’s safety in a world that knows no safety?’ Of course he had, but it was a loving lie. Harsh truths would intrude soon enough. He could only hope they wouldn’t come in the brutal way they had for Katie Dubois. He brushed a strand of dark hair from over her eyes and gave her a kiss so soft he was sure it wouldn’t wake her.

  Her lids flickered open, and her blue eyes, so like Sandy’s, looked up at him. She was bathed in the faint predawn light of an autumn morning. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘You look really awful.’

  ‘It was kind of a rough night,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘I was sort of awake anyway. Are you okay?’

  ‘You should see the other guy,’ he smiled.

  ‘You were in a fight?’ She sat halfway up to get a better look at him.

  ‘No, I’m only kidding. Go back to sleep. I’ll tell you about it in the morning.’

  She looked out her window at the thin red line slowly widening in the eastern sky. ‘It pretty much is morning.’

  ‘There’s time for more sleep.’ He kissed her again. She put her arms around his neck and pulled him down to give him a hug, ‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll get all muddy.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ she said, releasing him. ‘Kyra’s here. Jane went home.’

  He smiled. ‘Good night, sweetie. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  He went to his own bedroom.

  Kyra’s sleepy voice rose from the bed. ‘I’m glad you’re back. I was beginning to worry.’

  ‘Is everybody in this house an insomniac? A man can’t sneak into his own bedroom without causing a commotion?’

  She flipped on the brass bedside lamp. ‘You don’t look so good.’

  ‘I kind of fell over a cliff.’

  ‘In the line of duty? Or just for the fun of it?’

  He took off his torn jacket, let it fall to the floor, and sat in the birch bentwood rocker in the corner of the room. ‘We found the Dubois girl.’

  ‘I heard. It was on the eleven o’clock news.’

  ‘Any details?’

  ‘Not really. Just that she’d been murdered and maybe raped.’

  Kyra was lying on her side, looking at him, head propped up on one arm. She was covered only by a thin cotton sheet that revealed the curves of her long, slender body, and in spite of his weariness McCabe found himself wanting her. In fact, needing her.

  ‘You’d better take a shower,’ she said, sensing his desire. ‘I’m not making love to anybody who looks like he finished on the wrong side of a mud wrestling tournament.’

  She slipped out of the bed, naked, and walked to him. ‘Here, let me help you,’ she said.

  She pulled him to his feet and began unbuttoning his torn shirt. He let her undress him, holding out his arms like a child so she could unbutton his sleeves and pull off his shirt. She unzipped his trousers and, along with his underpants, they fell to the floor. He stepped out of them. She ran her fingers, teasingly, up and down, along the underside of his erection. He reached for her.

  She backed away. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Not till you’re clean.’

  They got in the shower together. The hot water played over them and stung the scraped, reddened skin on his chest and arms. She gently washed his body and then his hair, commenting, as always, on how many more gray hairs there were than the last time. Then he washed her. After that they just stood for a while in the hot water and stroked each other.

  When they had dried, McCabe lay on his back on the bed and Kyra climbed on top of him. He entered her and they made love, slowly, sweetly, silently, for what seemed like a long time. Then he fell asleep, watching the horizontal patterns of light and shadow play against both floor and walls as the new morning sun shone through the slats of the wooden blinds.

  He woke around seven thirty. His bruises hurt, and he was disappointed that the other side of the bed was empty. Kyra must have gotten up early and gone off to her studio. He wanted her here. He hadn’t yet had his fill of her. He pushed the sheets back. He was still naked, and with the windows open the morning air coming through the blinds felt soothingly cool on his scraped skin. He grabbed a pair of ancient red sweatpants that lay in a heap on the floor behind the bentwood rocker and pulled them on. The words ST. BARNABAS TRACK running down one leg represented the last remnant of Mike McCabe’s less than heroic career as a middle distance runner on his high school squad. He walked to the window and pulled the cord to open the blinds further. He stood, looking out at Casco Bay and the islands. That view and the fact that it was less than a mile’s walk to police headquarters were the primary reasons he’d paid more than he could afford for the three-bedroom condo when he signed on, three years earlier, as chief of the PPD’s Crimes Against People unit.

  It was one of those golden September mornings. Not the kind he would have chosen either for investigating a murder or attending an autopsy. Cool
air and a good breeze. He watched the down-bay ferry chug toward Portland and a small sailboat, its yellow-and-red-striped spinnaker billowing, move left to right across his field of vision. Absentmindedly he fingered the old scar that ran seven inches across his abdomen, a souvenir from his days as a newbie, still wearing a uniform. He’d been careless making a collar, and a drugged-out teenager slashed him with a four-inch switchblade. He hadn’t seen it coming, but he didn’t shoot the boy. He was proud of that. He brought the kid in. He was proud of that, too, but he’d vowed never to be so careless again.

  There was a knock at the bedroom door. ‘Yeah,’ he called.

  Casey came in and flopped down on the bed. ‘You looked pretty beat up when you came in last night.’

  ‘I was pretty beat up.’

  She positioned the tattered remains of Bunny, a stuffed animal she’d had since she was a baby, on her lap. It was now little more than a fuzzy rag with ears, but she refused to give it up.

  McCabe lay down next to her. ‘Did you have a good night?’ he asked.

  ‘It was okay. Gretchen and Whitney were here till about eleven. We just messed around till Whitney’s mom came and got them. Kyra came in about ten thirty. She’s gone?’

  ‘I think she went to her studio.’

  ‘Are you going to marry Kyra?’ Casey asked, a serious expression on her face. She was fiddling with Bunny’s ears.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe, but not right now.’ He had no idea where this conversation was going. ‘How would you feel about that?’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘How you feel? Yeah. It’s real important.’

  ‘I dunno. I like Kyra. Would that make her my mom?’