Page 128 of I Will Ruin You

Marta was shouting over the sound of the waves breaking against the shore. “Stop!” she cried. “Stop!”

At the other end of the beach, flashing lights. There were more police coming from the opposite direction. If Andrea kept running that way, she’d be handing herself to them.

My eyes having adjusted to the darkness some time ago, and with the help of a half-moon and a clear sky, I could make her out, pumping her legs about fifty feet ahead of Marta. She’d reached the base of the pier and, clearly having run out of alternatives, started running toward the end of it.

What did she think she could do? Swim to freedom?

I could hear her footsteps on the wood decking, then Marta’s in pursuit. I’d reached the point where the pier met the beach, but was hesitant to go any farther. Just as well.

There were more shots.

Marta went down. At first I was worried she’d been shot, but she was taking a defensive posture. She flattened herself onto the deck, arms outstretched in front of her, and aimed at the silhouetted figure that was almost to the end of the pier.

And fired.

Andrea went down.

It was over.

Or so we thought.

Sixty-One

Three days had passed since the shoot-out at Walnut Beach, and Detective Marta Harper was still mired in paperwork and loose ends and plenty of departmental oversight and second-guessing. That was what you could expect when you shot and killed two people and got your cruiser totaled in the process.

She’d been taken off regular duty and put on the desk while all the circumstances surrounding that night of mayhem were scrutinized. A bunch of armchair quarterbacks, the lot of them, she thought, but she’d been around long enough to know this was the way things always played out.

Even more upset than Marta was her wife, Ginny, who was outraged at how much bullshit Marta had to endure for doing her job. She was also a total wreck about how close she’d come to losing Marta, and not for the first time in the last week, either. It was all Ginny could do not to talk Marta into taking up a less dangerous line of work. Lion-taming, for example.

Even though she was off the street this week, Marta had learned a great deal about what had led to Walnut Beach.

What was known: Gerhard Waldheim and Andrea Falluci, who worked for a fentanyl-producing operation in Mexico, distributed product to various dealers in the Connecticut area, and even sold some of it to line their own pockets, were dead.

Gerhard died behind the wheel when Marta fired at the Audi as he tried to run her down. Moments later, Marta had brought down Andrea during the pier shoot-out. Andrea, Marta already knew but had since confirmed, had sold that deadly dose of fentanyl to Cherise Fowler, and was the one who’d assaulted Marta outside of Jim’s. And the bitch was still wearing her Converse sneakers when she’d shot her.

Stuart Betz, a somewhat dim-witted, but dangerous nonetheless, friend of Billy Finster’s, was fatally shot by Andrea while attempting to sell back a carry-on bag full of drugs he’d swiped from Finster’s garage. He’d been blackmailing Richard over something that had allegedly actually happened to Finster, although there was no evidence to suggest Richard had done anything to anyone. (This was from Richard’s account, of course. Marta could not question Finster or Betz for further clarification.)

Betz shot and killed Herb Willow when he’d interfered with Betz’s plan to force Richard to do the exchange with Gerhard and Andrea.

Oh, and Marta found her gun. It had landed in the grass near the base of a tree.

Finster’s wife, Lucy, whom the police had been searching for, walked into the station voluntarily the day after the Walnut Beach event and asked for the detective in charge of the investigation into her husband’s death. She had quite a story to tell, and was able to fill in some of the blanks.

After she’d found Billy’s body, she’d gone on the run, fearing she might be next. She hadn’t seen Billy murdered, but assumed Gerhard and Andrea had done it.

Lucy sought out Stuart, thinking she could hide out with him until things cooled down. She told Marta that Stuart had always planned to double-cross Gerhard and Andrea—to keep the money and sell the drugs himself and shoot the two with the gun Billy had recently acquired—and that she believed the drugs were still someplace in his apartment.

That checked out. Marta found the drugs in pillowcases stashed in the closet at Stuart’s place.

Lucy admitted knowing Billy was helping smuggle drugs into the country through his airport job, and added that an orderly at the Bridgeport hospital where she worked, a man named Digby, also knew. He’d been threatening her—he’d already sexually accosted her—with violence if she did not steal from the cache and give it to him. She did.

That part checked out, too. The candy-like fentanyl was found in the top of his locker. Digby was arrested. The hospital fired him.

The local district attorney didn’t think there was a solid enough case to charge Lucy, and there was a host of mitigating factors, like Digby’s threats of violence and fears of retaliation from her husband had she gone to the police about his role in the drug operation. Lucy said she was going to move back to Utah to live with her mother and look for work in some other cafeteria. A school, a hospital, didn’t matter. Cubed Jell-O was pretty much the same everywhere.

Despite the DA’s decision, there were parts of Lucy’s story that never sat well with Marta. Digby, for example, had said she was lying, that he’d been framed, that she had a key to his locker and had planted the stuff. And when Marta got back to Lucy about that, she’d said, “Yeah, well, what would you expect him to say?”

She was a crafty one, this Lucy, Marta thought. But she didn’t think she’d killed Billy, which was the big, outstanding riddle. Not that she’d written off Lucy as a suspect completely, but her gut said it was someone else.