A frozen corpse. A missing witness. Strange voices that aren't there.
One cold night, Lainie Goff, a glamorous young attorney on the fast track to a partnership at Portland's top firm, is found frozen in the trunk of her BMW on the local fishing pier.
Detectives Mike McCabe and Maggie Savage quickly uncover a long list of suspects: Lainie's boss, who was also her lover; an ex-priest who runs a shelter for runaway teens; an abusive stepfather who raped Lainie as a teen; and a creepy landlord who seems to know more than he should about her private life.
Still, there is no hard evidence until a mentally ill young woman who hears voices gives an island cop an eyewitness account he doesn't take seriously.
But when she too disappears, McCabe and Savage find themselves in a desperate race against time to stop a vicious killer before he rids himself of the only person who knows who he is
EXCERPT
One
Portland, Maine
Friday, December 23
Had Number Ten Monument Square been set among the skyscrapers of New York, or even Boston, no one would have noticed it. In a town like Portland it stood as one of the defining features of the skyline. Twelve stories of reddish brown granite with black windows set between vertical piers, Number Ten towered arrogantly over the east side of the square, a big player in a small town. At its top, large white letters proclaimed to anyone who cared to look that the building was the headquarters of Palmer Milliken, the city’s largest and most prestigious law firm. It was also, according to Palmer Milliken’s partners, one of the best anywhere in New England, including, they insisted, Boston. The firm’s 192 lawyers plus appropriate support staff occupied all but two of the building’s twelve floors.
At seven forty-two in the evening, on the Friday before the long Christmas weekend, a young woman stood at the window of her modest office on the seventh floor, gazing down at the activity in the square. Elaine Elizabeth Goff, Lainie to those who knew her well, was one of Palmer Milliken’s senior associate attorneys. She’d already finished her work reviewing terms of a pending merger agreement between two small Maine banks. She’d pored over the documents half a dozen times, made a few changes, and sent in her recommendations an hour ago. Now she was ready to begin her winter vacation, a two-week jaunt, away from the bone-numbing cold of Portland, to the small, elegant Bacuba Spa and Resort on the southwest side of Aruba. Only two last things remained. A FedEx envelope on her desk that needed to go out tonight, and a phone call that should have come twelve minutes ago. Its lateness was making her edgy.
Six years out of Cornell Law, Lainie was still in her twenties, though, as she recently and frequently began reminding herself, just barely. But even as the dreaded thirtieth approached, she took pride in her conviction that she, Lainie Goff, the scholarship kid from Rockland, Maine, was about to become one of the youngest partners in Palmer Milliken’s fifty-seven-year history. The offer, though not certain, was now so close she could almost taste it. She hoped word of the lucrative partnership would come tonight with the call she was waiting for. If only the damned phone would ring. She’d planned her life around that happening. Begun spending money she didn’t have. The $500 Jimmy Choo shoes that were a torture to wear. The gleaming $40,000 BMW 325i convertible waiting in the garage downstairs. Not the bright red she really wanted but the platinum bronze metallic she thought more lawyerly. And now the expensive vacation on Aruba. All that money ponied up in anticipation of greater rewards lying just around the corner.
It wasn’t that Lainie was such an exceptional lawyer. Her intellectual and legal skills, while formidable, ranked her no higher than half a dozen others among Palmer Milliken’s ambitious pack of associates. But in the race for the top, Lainie enjoyed a key advantage not shared by any of her eager competitors. She was not only an able lawyer, she was also an exceptionally beautiful woman with shoulder-length dark hair, a slim athletic figure, and penetrating blue eyes that most people, but men in particular, found impossible to forget. And she was sleeping with her boss.
Lainie glanced at the old-fashioned electric sign atop the Time & Temperature Building. Seven forty-six. Four minutes since the last time she looked. The temperature was fourteen degrees. Down five in the last hour. The cold that had gripped the city for the better part of the past four weeks was showing no signs of letting up. It was a good time to be taking off for the sunshine. A good time to celebrate. Or would be if only Hank would get off his ass and call. Henry C. ‘Hank’ Ogden, managing partner in charge of Palmer Milliken’s lucrative M&A practice. Her mentor. Her boss. Her lover. Elegant, rich, fifty-three years old, and very, very married.
Hank told her he’d call at seven thirty. She didn’t know why the call was late, but she didn’t like it. The Partnership Committee meeting should have been over hours ago. She strummed her long nails on the sill in front of her. Maybe Hank was just stuck in another meeting. He’d call as soon as he got out. Maybe. That was the charitable assumption. The best of three possibilities. The second was that he was keeping her waiting just for the hell of it. To provoke a little extra anxiety. One of the power games Hank liked playing. His way of letting her know who was in charge. Stupid and pointless, like a little boy poking a stick at a hamster in a cage. Well, she could handle his games, she told herself. She was tougher than that. The third possibility, the disaster scenario, was the one she wasn’t sure she could handle – that, in spite of Hank’s promised sponsorship and strong support, the partners, in their infinite wisdom, had decided not to extend an offer. If that was the case, then Hank wasn’t calling because he’d be nervous about her reaction. He hated scenes, public or private, and knew there’d be one. She took a deep breath. She’d give him ten more minutes. Then she’d call him.
She pushed fears about the Partnership Committee from her mind and decided to think, instead, about her upcoming vacation. Far more pleasant to think about that. Two weeks of being pampered in the sunshine. Two weeks to either celebrate her triumph or salve her pride. Massages. Facials. Mud baths. Hanging out on the beach by herself with a bunch of trashy paperbacks. Well, to be honest, not all by herself. She’d find someone to play with. Someone with no connection to Maine or to Palmer Mil-liken. Someone European might be fun. Maybe she’d have a chance to practice her French. Patti LaBelle’s rendition of ‘Lady Marmalade’ riffed through her brain.
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
If the news was good, she supposed, Hank would want a ‘performance review.’ He’d probably want one anyway. He found the term amusing. Ms Goff, could you stop by, oh, at five thirty or so? We need to do a performance review. Thank you very much. We’ll see you then. Not an elaborate review either. Just forty minutes of snatch-and-grope on the red leather couch in his office. That was really all there was to this so-called affair. That and the occasional ‘nooner’ back at her apartment or a rare business trip to some out-of-the-way hotel. Lainie wanted more. She wanted a real relationship. If it was with Hank, fine. If not, that was fine, too. There were others she found interesting. One in particular she occasionally spent time with. Either way, she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep this bullshit going.
It started a year ago as a one-night stand after a few drinks on an overnight trip to East Millinocket to do due diligence on the sale of a paper mill, but it had long since become a regular thing. For him, she knew, it was totally casual. For her, things were more complicated. Sleeping with Hank as a means to an end was fine. She’d always been attracted to older men, powerful men, and, when they had enough time, Hank could be a skilled and attentive lover. Intelligent. Charming. Attractive. She knew he liked her. She toyed with the idea that she could somehow close the deal. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Lainie Goff as the second Mrs Henry Ogden. Elaine Elizabeth Goff Ogden. The trophy wife. It was a role she could play to a farethee-well and one she would thoroughly enjoy.
Deep down Lainie knew it would never happen. Divorce for Hank wasn’t an option. He was married for good or ill, till death do them part, to the plain, plump, immensely wealthy Barbara Milliken Ogden, the only granddaughter of Edward A. Milliken, one of the firm’s founders. Once the partnership was safely tucked away, it would be time to think of a good way to end the relationship without damaging her career. The idea of being free to pursue new adventures pleased her.
Lainie watched the activity below her window. Banks of dirty snow were pushed to the side, and the center of Monument Square was filled with people. Small groups, mostly twos and fours, scurried in and out of the shops and restaurants that lined the pedestrian plaza on the south side of the square. On this last Friday before Christmas, they were open late and busy. In the middle, near the monument, a brilliantly lit, sixty-foot blue spruce commemorated the season. A big, beautiful decorated tree. Not a Christmas tree, though. Lainie remembered reading that in the Press Herald. These days calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree wasn’t done. A city spokeswoman told the reporter that Portland was calling it a holiday tree. ‘We want it to sound denominationally neutral,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to offend anybody.’ Lainie snorted. She hated such PC stupidity.
At the base of the tree, a troupe of carolers in faux Victorian garb sang. A few dozen people gathered around to listen and sing along. Most were bundled up against the cold and looked, from where Lainie stood, like little round Michelin men and women. Some held the mittened hands of even smaller Michelin children. Down near the entrance to Longfellow Books, she spotted Kyle, the hot-dog man, tending his pushcart, his trademark white apron wrapped tightly around a heavy woolen jacket. On his head he wore a leather aviator’s cap with the earflaps pulled down over his gray hair. He seemed to be doing a brisk business selling the gyros, hot dogs, and Italian sausages he grilled over an open charcoal fire.
Lainie smiled. Kyle was her buddy. He always asked how she was doing, when they were going to make her a partner, and, with a wink and a smile, when she was going to go out on his boat with him. He talked about his boat a lot. A twenty-eight-foot Chris-Craft. He’d have to sell a hell of a lot of hot dogs to be able to afford a thing like that. Then again, Lainie knew, because she was a customer, Kyle sold merchandise more profitable than snacks. Need a little happiness? Need a little joy? Go see the hotdog man. Either way, she enjoyed his flirting, enjoyed his easy Irish charm. Sometimes, when she was making a buy, she caught him looking at her a little too directly. Sometimes he looked away. Sometimes he didn’t. Once or twice he said with that wry little smile of his that he might let her have a bag or two for free. God, what a thought. Lainie and the hot-dog man. There was no way in hell she would ever let that happen. Not now. Not ever. Still, he wasn’t bad-looking.
She wasn’t sure how old Kyle was but guessed somewhere in his early fifties. It was an age she found attractive. The same age as Hank. The same age as her Contracts professor at Cornell, the one who gave her the A she needed to make Law Review. About the same age, she calculated, her stepfather would be today.
Lainie had been thinking a lot about Albright lately, though she hadn’t seen him in years. Her mind went back, once again, to that time in their old house in Rockport. A year or so before his career started taking off. Two years before he divorced her mother and moved out. Without his income her mother couldn’t afford the old place. She sold it, used part of the money to buy the smaller, crummier place in Rockland, and invested the rest.
She could see that bastard’s face now. The handsome, brilliant Wallace Stevens Albright. A lawyer whose parents named him for a poet, though she’d never known a man with less poetry in his soul. He never let anyone call him Walt or Wally or any other nickname. It was always Wallace. Or Mr Albright. Lainie was seven when he married her mother and they went to live with him. He wanted her to call him Daddy. She never would, though she knew it made him angry. He wasn’t her father. He even wanted her to change her name from Goff to Albright. She didn’t want to do that either. Thank God, her mother said no and made it stick. Otherwise Lainie might be carrying that bastard’s name even now.
A strict disciplinarian and a stubborn perfectionist, Wallace Stevens Albright held himself, he said, to a higher standard. Lainie smiled bitterly at the memory. Yeah, right. A higher standard. Like pulling down her pants and spanking her when she was little for the slightest infraction. Bastard was getting off on it. But, oh, did he ever put on a righteous show. She was never able to please him or earn his praise, no matter how hard she tried – and, though she hated him, she did try. It seemed important to win him over, to impress him. Important but impossible. She remembered how once in ninth grade, she got a ninety-five on an algebra exam. It was an exam half the class flunked, even a lot of the smart kids. When she told him about it, proudly, he mocked her. Oh, really? A ninety-five? What happened to the other five points? She went to bed that night feeling like she had failed. Again. Fuck him.
She was fifteen when the really bad shit started. The day of the Belfast soccer game. Lainie closed her eyes and it all came flooding back, immediate and real. Her sophomore year in high school. Camden Regional, not Rockland, where she had to go after the divorce. It was an afternoon in late October. One of those cold, rainy fall days that in Maine presage the coming of winter. It was an away game, and it had rained on and off all day long. The field was a sea of mud. All the girls were slipping and sliding, and by the end of the game their skin and hair were covered in drying brown gunk. Lainie scored two goals and just missed a third when the ball hit the left upright and bounced back onto the field. She knew, if she told him, Wallace would focus on the one she missed. Maybe if you’d worked a little harder you would have made it, Lainie. You can always improve. You can always strive to be better. Yeah. Just like you, Daddy Dearest.
After the game, Annie Jesperson’s mom offered Lainie and another friend, Maddie Mitchell, a ride home. Both girls accepted. It was a lot more comfortable than riding in the team bus, and they wouldn’t have to stop at school and catch a ride home from there.
‘Get in,’ Mrs Jesperson told the girls, throwing a tarp across the backseat. ‘Just try not to get any mud on the upholstery. This car’s brand-new, and we’d like to keep it looking that way.’
‘We won’t,’ they promised and climbed in, shoving Dudley, Annie’s dopey golden retriever, over the seat top and into the cargo area. The girls giggled all the way home, pulling monster faces and rubbing mud balls into each other’s hair and fending off Dudley’s eager efforts to join in the fun. Mrs Jesperson dropped Lainie off first, in front of her house. The big white colonial with the wraparound porch and black shutters on Mabern Street in Rockport. The house they lived in when they still had money.
It was almost dark when they got there. There were no lights on in the house. That meant her mother and Wallace were still at work. Her mother managing her antiques shop in Camden, Albright tending his growing law practice. He stayed late at the office almost every night. You’ll never achieve anything, Lainie, never amount to anything. Not unless you’re ready to put in the hours. She fetched the key from where it hung under the back steps and let herself in. She pulled off her shoes at the door, stripped down, and tossed her muddy uniform onto the laundry room floor. She walked naked across the semidarkened front hall and climbed the stairs, heading for the bathroom on the second floor.
About halfway down the corridor, the door to her mother and stepfather’s room opened, and Albright stepped out. Lainie gasped. She threw her right arm across her breasts and her left hand over her thatch of pubic hair. He’d never seen her naked before, not even as a little kid, and she wasn’t sure which way to run. Albright just stood there looking at her, surprise on his face. He was blocking her way to the bathroom door. Blocking her way to her own room as well. She turned and thought about running back down the stairs – but where could she go stark naked? She turned back and saw his expression change, morphing from surprise to something very different. She heard his breathing quicken. She knew she’d made that happen. Not to some boy in sophomore class. To him. To Wallace Stevens Albright. The perfectionist. The man guided by a higher standard. For the first time since he’d come into their lives, Lainie felt a sense of power. It was amazing. Intoxicating. It lasted less than a second.
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