The lock released, the door opened. Kyle Byrne stepped inside, into the darkness.
CHAPTER 54
BOBBY PEEKED OVER the hedge and saw the Byrne boy get out of the car.
He could pop the little bastard now, one pump, one shot, and he’d be free to take care of the two Truscotts inside. Ram the shotgun up their throats and fire away and away and away, spattering their flesh and blood on the walls and columns until it was only the spatters that were getting ecstatically spattered. His breath quickened as he imagined it.
But taking out the Byrne boy now would be sloppy. They might hear the gunfire from outside and call the police. They might hide the money before he made his grand entrance. Even as Bobby lay in the mud, his clothes stained with rotted vegetables and his hair stinking of garbage, even as the flies buzzed around him as if he were a pile of feces, he prided himself on not being sloppy.
But wait a second, there was someone else in the car. How could he have missed it at first? Because the second man had been ducking down to avoid the camera at the gate, that’s how. Bobby watched as Byrne leaned toward the car window, reached in, and pulled out something. A file. The file. So this was the other man, the accomplice. And what was the accomplice putting on now? Earmuffs? No, headphones.
Which meant that Byrne would be wearing a wire. How delicious was
that? A wire. The only disappointment was that Bobby hadn’t thought of it first. The whole enterprise would be recorded for posterity.
The Byrne boy straightened up with the file in his hand, hesitated for a moment before heading for the front door of the mansion. Bobby would wait until he got inside, then scuttle over to the car and kill the accomplice. He’d do it quietly, silent as a ninja, just a quick slice of the neck so as not to alert the primary players inside. When Byrne entered the house and closed the door behind him, Bobby rose to his knees, opened the bag, pulled out a knife the size of a squirrel’s tail, a knife still stained with Malcolm’s blood. With blade in hand, he slithered through an opening between two of the boxwood plants and crawled toward the car.
Halfway there he stopped and stared. It was the man in the car, there was something familiar about him. Round face, a mop of gray hair, something knowing in the tilt of the head. At the house, before the fire, Bobby had seen only the outline of the figure, and yet even that had seemed familiar. But now he knew he had seen this face before. Where? Where?
When the answer came to him, his body tensed with such excitement that he almost stabbed his own chest with the knife.
It was impossible. He was dead. Robert had even gone to his funeral. But Robert hadn’t killed him, he knew that, despite what he had led his aunt to believe, so the impossible was indeed a possibility. And in its own perverse way, it made so much sense. How else could the boy have gotten his hands on the file? How else could the boy have known exactly what to do with it? Because he had been guided all the time by the venal hand of his father.
Liam Byrne had known he was targeted after the O’Malley girl drowned and his car was run off the road. He must have taken the half million paid out by the senator, faked his death, and run away with the cash. Amazing. And for his long run to end at Bobby’s hand fourteen years after he had first escaped Robert’s grasp . . . well, the irony was too perfect to ignore.
With renewed purpose Bobby crawled closer to the car. He would come around to the passenger side, rise onto his haunches, jerk open the door, and grab the old bastard by his forehead with one hand as he slid the knife across the neck with the other. It was so simple, so tasty.
He looked up again, could see the old man’s head through the windshield, his eyes closed as he tapped one of the headphones, trying to hear. He was the one listening, the one charged with making the tape. Bobby could just imagine it all as it imprinted itself on the magnetic ribbon. Her sweet and deceitful mewings, the senator’s fraudulent oratory, the Byrne boy’s demands for money, the whole story of the rape and its cover-up spilled to the waiting tape. And then Bobby Spangler arriving heroically to punish all for their sins, to save a grateful nation, to raise again the banner of the Spanglers. The tape would be played nationwide, all day long, over and over again on cable television. Even as he ran off with the money, first to wreak havoc on the Truscotts and then maybe to Mexico, maybe to Peru, his legend would rise.
But if he killed Liam Byrne now, who would take care of the tape? If he killed Liam Byrne, who would make sure the truth was known? And wouldn’t the pain he inflicted be all the sweeter if Liam Byrne were forced to hear the death of his son through the headphones?
Bobby took a deep breath and then backed away, backed away, slithered through the grass and back between the boxwoods, where his black bag awaited.
CHAPTER 55
THE HOUSE KYLE BYRNE found himself inside smelled ancient, dank, and strangely like licorice. There were no lights burning in the hall, but a sliver of light slipped out around a door frame back through the house to the right, so he made his way toward it. He banged a knee into some hunchbacked piece of furniture placed smack in the middle of the hall, felt his way around the piece, and kept going.
When he reached the wide door, he heard the low hum of conversation coming from the other side. There was no handle, but he placed his hand into the gap and slid the door open.
“Ah, there you are,” said an old woman in a voice Kyle recognized. She was sitting regally on a high-backed chair, her bony body twisted and shivery, arms and neck jerking hither and yon as she sat there. She looked vaguely familiar, with her tall gray hair and twitching limbs, and he stared a bit before realizing he’d seen her before, sitting next to the widow at Laszlo Toth’s funeral.
“No need to be shy,” she said. “Come in, come in. We’ve been discussing you. Would you like a drink?”
“Not really,” said Kyle. “I only drink with friends, or at least with people who haven’t been trying to kill me.”
“Oh, you must be exaggerating, Mr. Byrne. Why would anyone want to kill you? Now, your father always loved a stiff drink. I admired that in him. But come in, come in, dear, and let us get our business out of the way.”
The room was a large parlor, with blue walls, twin crystal chandeliers, fancy French furnishings perched on dark, delicate legs. There were grand landscape paintings on the walls, thick rugs on the floors, vases the size of ponies. In its day that room had been quite the fancy place, but its day was not this day. The paintings were browned with grime and age, the rugs in some spots were worn through. And the smell of licorice was overpowering.
When he stepped into the room, he looked to his left and then did a double take. Standing by a fireplace, his arm on the mantel, was Francis Truscott IV. Above the senator was a painting of a blustery man in hunting clothes and with a bully’s lip leaning on that very same mantel.