Page 23 of The Murder Inn
“Don, for God’s sake, can’t you use a plate?” Kylie said as she snatched the snack from his hand.
“What’s with the suitcase?” Don asked, inspecting the suitcase in the hall by the garage door. “You going somewhere, Mrs. Bulger?”
“I am, as a matter of fact,” Shauna said. “I’m off to Gloucester.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NICK DIDN’T SPEAK our entire ride back home to the inn. Neither did I. We’d left Karli Breecher with strained goodbyes, promises to be in touch when we’d had time to think. Thinking about what my friend had told me, about what it could possibly mean for him, me, the people of the inn, sent me into a daze. The highway before me melted away. I played Dorrich’s message over and over in my mind.
They know what we did.
Somebody knows.
And they’re coming for payback.
Our best-case scenario was that the “somebody” Dorrich was talking about was a journalist who had a tip about the massacre of the family in Afghanistan, that it had been planned and brutally carried out and was not a legitimate response to an act of aggression. In that terrible but nonetheless “best” case, Nick and his team would be exposed to the world as war criminals.There would be trials, inquiries, the great military justice machine churning into action. I saw camera crews surrounding the Inn by the Sea. Nick, grim faced, wearing his dress uniform in a courtroom, trying to explain why, in the years since, he hadn’t spoken a word about what happened. Trying to convince the world that in spite of that incriminating silence, he was not the monster that he seemed, but a good man and a faithful soldier tricked into witnessing and then covering up something obscene and reprehensible.
The worst-case scenario was that it wasn’t justice for the crime someone wanted, but revenge. A relative of the murdered family, perhaps, who had tracked down the men and woman involved in the slaughter. I knew that the likelihood of this scenario was tightly bound to whatever the reasons were that Dorrich and Master had killed that family in the first place, why they’d chosen to trick Nick and Breecher into participating.
My experience as a cop in Boston told me that mass killings like this unfolded for three possible reasons. First, that the perpetrators were sick, twisted psychopaths who enjoyed senseless murder on a grand and violent scale—the work of active shooters and spree killers. Then there were the gangs who killed as a show of power—massacring whole families to establish their territory, or make a revenge statement, with intentional collateral damage because someone had ratted them out, or because there was a stash of drugs, weapons, or money in the house. And finally, there were those killings that occurred because the shock and horror of all-family murders was meant to disguise something far more mundane. I’d just made detective when I responded to a case like this, where a jealous teenager had wanted to punish his girlfriend for carrying on with anotherman, so he and a friend had donned balaclavas and come at the family with baseball bats. They’d tried, unsuccessfully, to make the crime look like a robbery gone wrong.
Was the massacre in Afghanistan the work of two monsters, two criminals, or two masters of deception? The hardest part in answering this question, I knew, would be summoning the patience required to get all the answers from Breecher and Nick.
Nick was staring out the car window at the pine trees and the sea beyond as we pulled up outside the house.
“I bet you feel like a ton of bricks just fell on you,” he said.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Exactly.”
“You have to decide what you’re gonna do now,” Nick said. His eyes followed a fishing trawler making its way slowly across the bay. “This is now your secret too. You asked for it and you got it. So you can decide to keep that secret, or you can turn us in.”
“Keeping it to myself makes me complicit in what Dorrich and Master did,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“But turning you all in would mean losing my best friend. It would mean destroying your lives. You, Breecher, Master. It would mean disgracing Dorrich’s memory.”
“Maybe not Breecher,” Nick said. “It would be tough, but she wouldn’t take it as hard as the rest of us. Her dad would soften the blow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her father is a command sergeant major,” Nick said. “That’s half the reason she got to the front line. Not a lot of women make it there, but she passed the training and her dad gave her a nudge. I’ve always thought that’s maybe why Master…”
“Why he what?”
“Never mind,” Nick said, waving me off. “I’m tired, man. Whatever you decide to do, I can’t hear it right now. I feel like if I don’t get some shut-eye soon I’m gonna lose my head.”
“Go.” I nodded toward the house. “We can talk later.”
Nick hung back at the passenger side door before he closed it.
“You wake me up by throwing more water in my face, I’ll make you sorry you were born, Cap,” he said.
“Try it.” I managed a smile. The exhausted veteran slunk from the car toward the house. I exited the car to the sound of gentle rumbling waves and took a few steps into the bed of pine needles beyond the parking area to look out at the gray slab of water and the harbors to the south.
I didn’t realize how hardened my facial expression had become until I turned at a sound and felt it crack into another smile. A small blond boy was approaching me, with some caution, a brown bundle of fur clutched in his small hands.
“Oh, hello,” I said.