I locked the porch door behind me and kept very close to the side of the house. Ducked through deep black shadows and made it back to the courtyard wall. Found the dip in the rock and wrapped the chisel and the bradawl in the rag and left them there. I couldn't take them with me. They would tear the trash bag. I followed the courtyard wall onward toward the ocean. I aimed to get down on the rocks right behind the garage block, to the south, completely out of sight of the house.
I made it halfway there. Then I froze.
Elizabeth Beck was sitting on the rocks. She was wearing a white bathrobe over a white nightgown. She looked like a ghost, or an angel. She had her elbows on her knees and she was staring into the darkness in the east like a statue.
I kept completely still. I was thirty feet away from her. I was dressed all in black but if she glanced to her left I would show up against the horizon. And sudden movement would give me away. So I just stood there. The ocean swell lapped in and out, quiet and lazy. It was a peaceful sound. Hypnotic motion. She was staring at the water. She must have been cold. There was a slight breeze and I could see it in her hair.
I inched downward like I was trying to melt into the rock. Bent my knees and spread my fingers and eased myself down into a crouch. She moved. Just a quizzical turn of her head, like something had suddenly occurred to her. She looked right at me. Gave no sign of surprise. She stared directly at me for minute after minute. Her long fingers were laced together. Her pale face was lit by moonlight reflected off the lapping water. Her eyes were open, but clearly she wasn't seeing anything. Or else I was low enough down against the sky that she thought I was a rock or a shadow.
She sat like that for maybe ten more minutes, staring in my direction. She started shivering in the cold. Then she moved her head again, decisively, and looked away from me at the sea to her right. She unlaced her fingers and moved her hands and smoothed her hair back. Turned her face up to the sky. She stood up slowly. She was barefoot. She shuddered, like she was cold, or sad. She held her arms out sideways like a tightrope walker and stepped toward me. The ground was hurting her feet. That was clear. She balanced herself with her arms and tested every step. She came within a yard of me. Went right on by and headed back to the house. I watched her go. The wind caught her robe. Her nightdress flattened against her body. She disappeared behind the courtyard wall. A long moment later I heard the front door open. There was a tiny pause and then a soft clump as it closed. I dropped flat to the ground and rolled onto my back. Stared up at the stars.
I lay like that as long as I dared and then got up and scrambled the final fifty feet to the edge of the sea. Shook out the trash bag and stripped off my clothes and packed them neatly into it. I wrapped the Glock inside my shirt with the spare magazines. Stuffed my socks into my shoes and packed them on top and followed them with the small linen towel. Then I tied the bag tight and held it by the neck. Slipped into the water, dragging it behind me.
The ocean was cold. I had figured it would be. I was on the coast of Maine in April. But this was cold. It was icy. It was jarring and numbing. It took my breath away. Inside a second I was chilled to the bone. Five yards offshore my teeth were chattering and I was going nowhere and the salt stung my eyes.
I kicked onward until I was ten yards out and I could see the wall. It glared with light. I couldn't get through it. Couldn't get over it. So I had to go around it. No choice. I reasoned with myself. I had to swim a quarter-mile. I was strong but not fast and I was towing a bag, so it would take me maybe ten minutes. Fifteen, at the absolute maximum. That was all. And nobody dies of exposure in fifteen minutes. Nobody. Not me, anyway. Not tonight.
I fought the cold and the swell and built a kind of sidestroke rhythm. I towed the bag with my left hand for ten leg-kicks. Then I changed to my right and kicked on. There was a slight current. The tide was coming in. It was helping me. But it was freezing me, too. It was coming in all the way from the Grand Banks. It was arctic. My skin was dead and slick. My breath was rasping. My heart was thumping. I started to worry about thermal shock. I thought back to books I had read about the Titanic. The people who didn't make it into the lifeboats all died within an hour.
But I wasn't going to be in the water for an hour. And there were no actual icebergs around. And my rhythm was working. I was about level with the wall. The light spill stopped well short of me. I was naked and pale from the winter but I felt invisible. I passed the wall. Halfway there. I kicked onward. Pounded away. Raised my wrist clear of the water and checked the time. I had been swimming for six minutes.
I swam for six more. Trod water and gasped for air and floated the bag ahead of me and looked back. I was well clear of the wall. I changed direction and headed for the shore. Came up through slick mossy rocks onto a gritty beach. Threw the bag up ahead of me and crawled out of the water on my knees. I stayed on all fours for a whole minute, panting and shivering. My teeth were chattering wildly. I untied the bag. Found the towel. Rubbed myself furiously. My arms were blue. My clothes snagged on my skin. I got my shoes on and stowed the Glock. Folded the bag and the towel and put them wet in my pocket. Then I ran, because I needed to get warm.
I ran for nearly ten minutes before I found the car. It was the old guy's Taurus, gray in the moonlight. It was parked facing away from the house, all set to go, no delay. Duffy was a practical woman, that was for sure. I smiled again. The key was on the seat. I started the motor and eased away slowly. Kept the lights off and didn't touch the brake until I was off the palm-shaped promontory and around the first curve on the road inland. Then I lit up the headlights and turned up the heater and hit the gas hard.
I was outside the Portland docks fifteen minutes later. I left the Taurus parked on a quiet street a mile short of Beck's warehouse. Walked the rest of the way. This was the moment of truth. If Doll's body had been found the place would be in an uproar and I would melt away and never be seen again. If it hadn't, I would live to fight another day.
The walk took the best part of twenty minutes. I saw nobody. No cops, no ambulances, no police tape, no medical examiners. No unexplained men in Lincoln Town Cars. I circled Beck's warehouse itself on a wide radius. I glimpsed it through gaps and alleys. The lights were all on in the office windows. But that was the way I had left it. Doll's car was still there by the roller door. Exactly where I had left it.
I walked away from the building and came back toward it from a new angle, from the blind side where there was no window. I took the Glock out. Held it hidden low down by my leg. Doll's car faced me. Beyond it on the left was the personnel door into the warehouse cubicle. Beyond that was the back office. I passed the car and the door and dropped to the floor and crawled under the window. Raised my head and looked inside. Nobody there. The secretarial area was empty, too. All quiet. I breathed out and put the gun away. Retraced my steps to Doll's car. Opened the driver's door and popped the trunk. He was still in there. He hadn't gone anywhere. I took his keys out of his pocket. Closed the lid on him again and carried the keys in through the personnel door. Found the right key and locked it behind me.
I was willing to risk fifteen minutes. I spent five in the warehouse cubicle, five in the back office, and five in the secretarial area. I wiped everything I touched with the linen towel, so I wouldn't leave any prints behind. I found no specific trace of Teresa Daniel. Or of Quinn. But then, there were no names named anywhere. Everything was coded, people and merchandise alike. I came away with only one solid fact. Bizarre Bazaar sold several tens of thousands of individual items every year, to several hundred individual customers, in transactions totaling several tens of millions of dollars. Nothing made clear what the items were or who the customers were. Prices were clustered around three levels: some around fifty bucks, some around a thousand bucks, and some much more than that. There were no shipping records at all. No FedEx, no UPS, no postal service. Clearly distribution was handled privately. But an insurance file I found told me that the corporation owned only two delivery trucks.