Chapter 66
To his credit, Teal didn’t panic when Kenney told him about the undercover DEA agent they’d killed, but not unexpectedly, he wasn’t pleased about it either.
Already he was working through the implications and, as Kenney had done, going back over their interactions with Cotter, from abduction to disposal.
“Her cell phone will lead them to Fishkorn,” he said.
Cotter had been carrying a Samsung phone, which Teal destroyed as soon as she was safely in the car.
He’d put the phone in a cloth bag and used the heel of his boot to smash it to pieces before tossing the battery and SIM card out the window at intervals.
As far as Teal could establish, the DEA would be able to trace its last-known location to the general Fishkorn area, if not the specific street from which the woman was taken, although they might get close enough depending on the distribution of the local cell towers.
But they’d need a warrant to obtain that information, which would take time.
As for Teal and Kenney, neither had brought phones with them that night, not even burners; they were too practised to make that kind of mistake.
To track them, the police would have to knock on doors looking for eyewitnesses—Teal wished them good luck in Fishkorn—and try to access footage from fixed security cameras or any dashcams that might have been in the area that night.
He and Kenney would have to ride their luck on that score, but they’d ridden it before and come away unscathed.
The main complication was that the searchers wouldn’t give up, not with Cotter being a federal agent.
But for the present, they’d be operating on the assumption that she might still be alive.
Cotter was a missing person, not a murder victim.
All of this he and Kenney went through as they sat in their respective vehicles, each with the driver-side window down, Teal’s hood pointing toward the storage units, Kenney’s outward, so they could speak softly and still be heard.
“If they find a body,” said Kenney, “we’re screwed. They won’t ever stop.”
“I wonder what she was working on,” said Teal.
“If she was a decoy, they’d have been on us before she hit the ground.”
“So she was working alone, and then they let days go by before they lit the beacons. Must have been something, or someone, big.”
“Meaning that’s where they’ll start,” said Kenney, “with the target of the investigation. I’d say that it buys us more time, but it’s not like we can do anything with it. All we can do is hope.”
“What about the Saint?”
“What about him?”
“Do we tell him?” asked Teal.
“That we raped and killed a DEA agent? Like hell we do.”
Teal was silent.
“What?” asked Kenney.
“Uh, I spoke to him on the phone, a couple of days back. Spero stuff.”
“And?”
“He asked how Detroit went. You know, in passing.”
“What did you say?”
“That it was good. Clean. I told him she was colored.”
“Is that all?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
Teal hesitated again.
“I might have mentioned a name,” he said. “I can’t be sure.”
Which meant he was sure, but didn’t want to say. Kenney’s eyes fluttered closed. The Saint knew, because Cotter’s dual identity had been revealed to the media as part of the ongoing efforts to locate her.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Teal continued. “We’ve always been open with one another before now.” He assumed a hurt expression. “I mean, I always like to hear how the Game went for others. Even if I didn’t get to play, I get to experience it vicariously.”
Kenney couldn’t chastise Teal for that. He’d done the same himself, but he wished Teal had kept his mouth shut this once.
In the past, they’d all been playing by the same rules, which bound them together.
But if the Saint was playing a game of his own, it meant the rules had changed without consultation.
Kenney recalled the glance that had passed between the Saint and Renders at the school when Kenney mentioned Mallory Norton’s disappearance.
Kenney had been up to the Spero for one of his bi-annual visits and gave no sign that he’d spotted the interaction between the Saint and his assistant principal, but he’d filed it away nonetheless, and Renders’s expression in particular.
He was familiar with that look because he’d seen it on his own face in the days immediately after the Game.
If the Saint had killed the Norton girl, Renders had helped him do it.
So the Saint had played close to home, which was a transgression all its own, and then hadn’t even invited his old friends to join in the fun, which was, you know, selfish of him.
Instead, he’d shared her with Renders. If the Saint was no longer abiding by the rules, and was additionally shortchanging the original players, how could he be trusted about anything?
Should the police connect the Saint to Mallory Norton, they’d begin tearing the rest of his life apart, digging in corners better left unexplored, and hiding in one of them would be Edward Kenney and Roger Teal.
What if the Saint offered to sell them out in return for a better deal?
Twenty-five years, the minimum for murder in Maine, was better than a life sentence.
But that was a worst-case scenario. Each man held the fate of the others in his hands, which was one of the beauties of the Game, and one of its guarantees.
Just as the Saint could theoretically offer testimony against Teal and Kenney, so too could Kenney turn on Teal and the Saint, or Teal seek to save himself by sacrificing the others.
If it came down to it, they’d all sink together, right?
In theory, perhaps, but now there was the Renders factor to be taken into account.
“Did Mallory Norton come up in this conversation?” Kenney asked.
“Not then,” said Teal. “But I’ve been thinking: She may have come up before, indirectly.”
“How?”
“Way before you and I went to Detroit, the Saint mentioned that one of the boys at the school was sneaking out to meet a local girl. He said something would have to be done about it.”
“And?”
“I think you’re right,” said Teal. “Something was done.”
“You’re only telling me this now?”
“It didn’t register then. Nobody had died or gone missing, and you hadn’t said anything about being worried.”
But Kenney wasn’t annoyed. He was grateful to Teal for confirming any remaining doubts about the Saint’s activities.
“I still haven’t spoken to the Saint about her,” said Kenney.
“I’m starting to think you shouldn’t.”
“Because if we forget about Norton, the Saint might not lie awake at night worrying about whether our dead DEA agent is going to damn him? We forget if he forgets?”
“I didn’t say nobody should talk to the Saint. I just said it shouldn’t be you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the one who killed Hurvich when he stepped out of line.”
Kenney absorbed this.
“And what I did once, I might do again?”
“Wouldn’t you be thinking the same, in the Saint’s shoes?”
“Are you scared of him?”
Teal stared at Kenney.
“Aren’t you?”
“Not scared. Wary.”
Kenney didn’t enjoy playing the Game as much with the Saint. There was always more suffering when the Saint was involved, and Kenney couldn’t even look the women in the eyes toward the end. What he saw there drained the Game of any pleasure.
Kenney spotted that Teal was toying with his wedding band.
Teal never took off the ring, not even when he was deep in the Game.
He was afraid he’d forget to put it on again afterward.
Kenney, by contrast, always left his ring in the next room, on top of his clothes; that way, he’d only forget it if he also forgot to get dressed.
Kenney supposed that the men’s differing attitudes toward their rings reflected disparate attitudes to their marriages: Teal’s showed how little respect he accorded his vows, whereas Kenney tried to keep his marriage and the Game separate.
While Teal played with the ring, he was debating whether to inform Kenney of the visit from the private investigator.
Teal had never told Kenney about the misappropriation of departmental funds, or the deal he’d cut with the Saint to divide the proceeds.
It was none of Kenney’s business, and anyway, it was in the past, or had been until Berrien made one last attempt to screw Teal over by bringing Parker into his life.
But if Teal didn’t tell Kenney about Parker, and Kenney found out about it later, there’d be hell to pay.
Kenney surely had a right to know, because what threatened one of them—or, in this case, two—threatened all.
“There’s another problem,” said Teal.