“I can’t let her do that. I’m supposed to raise a daughter to be a woman.”
“Ever heard of Sarah Fisher?” Hank asked.
And so it came to pass that Hank Bauer sponsored Abby Kaplan’s first foray into racing. It was curiosity and amusement at first, and it made for a damn good story; the boys at the poker games loved hearing about how Hank had become the sponsor for his own car thief.
Nobody chuckled after the first races, though. Hank watched her beat older men night after night, and then she went on to the bigger speedways, and when she lost, it was not to better drivers but to better cars. Hank saw that this game, like all of them, had a ceiling that could be cracked only with cash.
Coastal Claims and Investigations became a more serious sponsor then. It wasn’t just because Hank liked the girl and felt bad for her; it was also because he was damn curious to see what she could do with the right machine.
What she did was win. Early, often, and then always. She smoked the drag-racing circuit through northern New England and then got onto the oval and kicked even more ass, and everybody’s bet was on NASCAR or Indy when she’d fooled them all and gone into stunt driving instead. Hank had seen some version of that coming when Abby fell in love with the drift. Even winning a race didn’t put the same light in her eyes that a controlled drift did — a floating test of traction and throttle that looked wildly out of control to the average spectator. If you could control it, though... well, Hank supposed it was a special kind of high.
She’d gone to a couple stunt schools, caught the right people’s eyes, and ended up in Hollywood and then Europe. For a while she’d been shooting commercials in friggin’ Dubai or someplace, bouncing some bastardized supercar turned SUV around a desert. She’d been all over the world driving the finest cars known to man and making good money doing it, and Hank was awfully proud of her.
And now awfully worried about what was keeping her in Maine.
The crack-up she’d had out on the West Coast would have been bad enough if the boyfriend with her had been anonymous. But he was a rising star, his face was on magazine covers, and that crush of attention had made a bad deal worse for Abby. She’d come back to Maine to clear her head, she claimed, but Hank knew better.
Abby was hiding.
Hank had practically begged his way into the Hammel College job when he learned about the girl in the coma. He thought this might be useful for Abby, if for no other reason than it would get her to open up a little, tell him what exactly was wrong so he could go about helping her. That hadn’t worked out, though, and so on the day when Hank arrived at his home to find an unfamiliar white Jeep in his driveway, he was thinking that he needed to get out of this case before it became a real mess.
The white Jeep pushed those thoughts from his mind. Hank didn’t have many visitors.
The rain splattered over the windshield made it look empty, but then the door opened and a kid in a black baseball cap stepped out and waited with a weird half smile. Hank got out of the car into the misting rain.
“Can I help you, fella?”
“Mr. Bauer?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Matt Norris.”
“Okay.” Hank waited, but the kid was quiet, hands still in his pockets, odd smile still on his face.
“So you dropped by just to practice introducing yourself?” Hank said. “You did real well on the part with your name. The rest needs work.”
Norris laughed softly. “No. Sorry, my mind wandered. I’m not real sure I should’ve come by at all.” He took one hand from his pockets and adjusted the black baseball cap. “I couldn’t get the cops to listen to me, though.”
Hank straightened. “Cops?”
Matt Norris nodded without changing expression, as if it were perfectly normal to be standing in the rain on a stranger’s property talking about the cops.
“I go to Hammel College.”
Aw, shit. “Yeah? That’s terrific. But Matt, buddy, I don’t step in front of police, okay?”
“You’re a private investigator.”
“No. I’m in the insurance business.”
“You have a private investigator’s license.”
Hank sighed and rubbed his face with a damp palm. “That’s marketing crap. I’m no detective, I don’t want to play one on TV or in my yard in the rain. You got something to say on that wreck, it should be to the cops, not me.”
“Carlos Ramirez wasn’t driving the car,” the kid said. “How ’bout that?”
I almost went bowling, Hank thought. It was a coin-toss decision back there at the office — head to the alley or head home. Why in the hell didn’t I go to the bowling alley?
Something told him the kid would’ve waited, though.
“Come on in out of the rain,” Hank said with a sigh. “You’re going to cause me enough trouble without giving me pneumonia too.”
The kid laughed too loudly. As Hank unlocked his door and held it open for Matt Norris to pass through, he was frowning. It hadn’t been that funny of a line, but from that laugh, you’d have thought the kid was at a comedy club.
Something’s off with him, Hank thought, and then he closed the door to shut out the rain and the darkening sky.
20
Abby was in the shower when her phone began to ring. She let it go, but then it rang again and again, and so she shut off the water, knotted a towel above her breasts, and went out to the living room, leaving wet footprints behind.
It was Hank.
“Can’t leave a message?” Abby said, the phone held against her damp cheek. “I was in the shower.”
“Sorry, kid.” Hank’s voice was strained, as if he were calling in the middle of a workout. “Think you can stop by here?”
Abby cocked her head, shedding a spray of water from her hair to the floor. “Now? What’s up?”
“I, uh... I guess that Ramirez story might have some issues. You were right, I think. Anyhow, uh, Meredith is coming by with some cop from Brighton, and they want the phones.”
“They’re coming by your house?”
“Yeah.” There was a rustling sound, and Hank gave a quick, harsh intake of breath before he said, “And he’s going to want the phones.”
“Sure thing,” Abby said. “Give me twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.”
“Yeah. Faster the better. Thanks, Abs.” Hank hung up.
Abby lowered the phone, frowning. Hank had sounded tense, worried. Cops coming to your house could do that, though, especially when one of them was from out of state and working on a murder case.
She thought about that as she toweled off and dressed in jeans, a light base layer, and a fleece. She had the window cracked to let the steam bleed out of the bathroom, and she could hear the laughter of patrons at Run of the Mill, a brewery that shared a portion of her apartment building, all of it the reimagined and repurposed site of what had once been the Pepperell Mill, a textile mill that had at one time employed what seemed like half of Biddeford. Now it was a mixture of condos and businesses, and the roof was lined with solar panels — but the Saco River remained, and Abby enjoyed listening to the water as the town found new ways to thrive around it. The river was the constant, and the river ran steady. She appreciated that.
As she tugged a brush through towel-dried hair, she thought of the police waiting at Hank’s, and when she picked up the decaying shoe box of phones and chargers, some of the cardboard flaked off in her hands. She didn’t relish the idea of explaining to police from Boston that she’d transported evidence in a homicide investigation back and forth through the rain in a shoe box. She found some plastic bags and separated the phones and chargers. Savage Sam had been nearly positive that what he’d taken out of the car was an iPhone, so she separated those too, then put the iPhone chargers in with the iPhones, figuring anything that made it look more official couldn’t hurt. For all of Hank’s jokes about his PI license, it carried legal liability, and Abby didn’t want to put him at risk.