“Confessed what?”
Another long, even shakier breath, and Latovsky said, “Killing the women in the woods.”
Shock flashed through Meers’s eyes. It took him a moment to regain his normal imperturbability, then he asked gently, “More cop instinct, Dave?”
“Yes, and I know exactly how it sounds, so don’t bother telling me.”
Meers gazed at the man he’d known for twenty years. Dave Latovsky was the best he had, the best there was short of the Bureau, and maybe even better than thetr best. In another time and place, with more to do than clean up the debris of human greed, lust, stupidity, and bad temper, Latovsky would have been a legend. But this was here and now and Dave’s personal life was a wreck. He lived alone on a backwoods lake, fished alone, spent two weekends a month with his beloved daughter, one day a month with his beloved mother, and a few nights in between with his girlfriend, who was not beloved. His best friend had been shot in the face on Sunday, planted today, and it wasn’t such a stretch to see how Dave could mistake loneliness, anguish, and thirst for vengeance for good cop instinct.
Maybe Meers had made a mistake giving Latovsky the Bunner case after all, and he looked hard for a trace of murkiness in his old friend’s eyes.
But they were as cold and clear as ever, icily perceptive eyes that saw everything they looked at, whether they wanted to or not. An admirable trait in a cop, not so great in a husband or lover, Meers thought. For instance, Allison hadn’t been a bad woman. She’d had her petty, bitchy moments just like most people, maybe a few more than average, but she was also gorgeous, with eyes like a Byzantine mosaic and tits like footballs. She was a good housekeeper, a conscientious mother, and she’d been mad about Latovsky. Another man would’ve discounted her lapses or never seen them. But Latovsky had turned the icy white light of those eyes and the mind behind them on his wife’s behavior, had seen every small mean thing she’d ever done for exactly what it was—small and mean—and couldn’t not see, forget or forgive.
Now that brutal clarity had turned itself on a down-home doctor—a healer, a white hat—and seen a killer. Dave believed it to his core or he’d never hang his ass out to dry like this. And because he believed it and because he was Dave (and there was nothing wrong with his mind, even if his emotions were as husked out as a long-dead beetle), Meers had to believe it a little, too.
Latovsky didn’t have Meers’s permission to go after Fuller when he left Meers’s house, but didn’t have his interdict either; a very important point and they both knew it. Meers had called a buddy of his at Quantico, gotten access to the big computer without forms and faxes, and found nothing on Fuller, but Latovsky hadn’t expected him to: Adam Fuller was a choirboy... with a glitch.
It was starting to get dark, the town was shut down, and from now until seven tomorrow morning there’d be plenty of parking places on Main Street. Rose’s was closed, the lights glowed invitingly through the windows of The Loft, and Latovsky thought of stopping for dinner and a drink—or five drinks—but he kept going, trying to figure out what to do next.
Sleep, he thought. Go home, put a frozen pizza or chicken pie in the microwave, try to relax in front of the tube for an hour or so, then sleep and wake up clearheaded.
He was through town, at the far end of Main Street where buildings petered out and the in-town two families started, when he realized he was kidding himself.
This was the day of Bunny’s funeral and Latovsky knew who killed him. He could not go home and pretend it was a day like any other and he hit the brake and pulled into the IGA parking lot. A few late shoppers were trundling carts to their cars, the vapor lights were on and the first flies of the evening massed around them.
He stopped the car and picked up the phone. The station was only three miles away; the phone worked and he got Barber.
“I need an address for Adam P. Fuller.”
“D’ja try the phone book?” Barber asked. He really meant it, and Latovsky said, “God, what a brilliant idea; I might even do it if I had one.”
“Sorry,” Barber mumbled, and put Latovsky on hold. A couple of minutes of dead air and Barber came back with an address on Rusty Pond, about ten minutes from the IGA. Latovsky fished for his pen to write it down, then realized 48 Rusty Pond Road had burned into his brain the second he’d heard it and would probably stay there long after he’d forgotten his current address or his mother’s. Only Eve’s would stay with him longer—Tilden House, Old Warren Road, Bridgeton—and the picture of her that went with it, with her greeny brown eyes sparkling with half-drunken tears when she’d seen Bunner’s busted tape recorder.
He put the Olds in gear, drove out of the lot exit, and turned left, away from his house. As he fed the Olds gas, the ridiculous phrase The hunt is up went through his head and his heart beat a little faster.
Rusty Pond was a cul de sac with state land on one side and a block of builders’ Colonials on the other that probably had pink tile bathrooms and pistachio green toilets, tubs, and sinks. Some building conglomerate must’ve made a killing on closeouts of pink tile and pistachio green bathroom fixtures in the fifties, Latovsky thought.
The houses were small and neat and Fuller’s was the neatest, with a crew-cut front lawn and shrubs trimmed to wooden perfection.
Latovsky went to the end of the street, turned around and parked in the lay-by the state had cut for hikers and fishermen. He waited until the sky went from dove gray to gunmetal, then sprayed himself with Cutter’s bug-off and walked back along the road to number 48.
The house was dark but Fuller could have returned from the hospital and be eating his solitary supper in the back. Latovsky knew from Cohen, who knew from Bunner’s file, that Adam Fuller lived alone.
He went along a side path between Fuller’s land and a hedge that bordered the lot next door to Fuller’s garage. He looked in the side-door window and saw his reflection, backed by the sky; cupping his hands around his face, he looked again and still saw nothing. The door was unlocked; he opened it and shone his penlight around an empty, immaculate garage that didn’t even have an oil stain on the concrete floor.
He closed the door and went along the path to the back yard.
“Don’t shit on the Constitution any more than you have to,” Meers had pleaded with him. But he was already doing it and whatever he found—such as an oil drum in which Fuller had burned clothes stiff with Abigail Reese’s blood or a soft patch in the earth where he’d buried the “big-mother” gun he’d used on Bunner—would be tainted fruit of the tainted tree: toxic fruit.
He could claim that he just happened to be next door, looked over and saw... whatever he saw. But even that meager fiction went to hell when he got past the house to the back yard because it was ringed with evergreens so thickly planted you couldn’t see a bonfire from the next yard.
There wasn’t anything to see anyway; a back porch, dark windows, a hose wrapped around a caddy and attached to a spigot in the side of the house. Not even a barbecue or outdoor table; Adam P. Fuller, M.D. and serial killer, didn’t do much outdoor entertaining.
Latovsky flashed the penlight across the back porch and got a gleam of glass in the back door. He went up the wooden steps to a decklike porch and looked through the glass into a kitchen lit from the hall. It was the dim, solitary light people leave on so they don’t come back to a dark house and it showed a room of regimental neatness: no orange juice or milk carton had been left out, no coffee pot waited to be washed later, no box of cereal sat on the counter or dishes to be rinsed for the washer. The kitchen was perfect—like Latovsky’s kitchen.