Chapter 48
Edward Kenney was having a good day. Two potentially lucrative contracts that threatened to go south had instead soared thanks to a lot of effort on his part; and not alone that, but the other parties involved were so happy with the outcome, they’d already committed to further partnerships with him down the line, commitments to which he planned to hold them.
Already he was assembling the deal memos in his mind, and with the application of only minimal pressure he might be able to get ink on paper within a week.
To celebrate, he would book a table for a family dinner at the Tarratine on Park, one of Bangor’s best restaurants, and pick up a shiny token of affection for his wife at Day’s Jewelers.
Buying his wife a gift was something Kenney always did after playing the Game, though he took care to ensure he could offer a good reason: a bet that paid off, or like today, a business plan come to fruition.
Unlike Roger Teal, Edward Kenney loved his wife and adored his children, but he also enjoyed every facet of the Game, from the planning to the resolution.
He felt no guilt about raping and killing a stranger, but like many husbands who strayed, his failings only made him value his home life more, which led him to increase the general store of his wife’s happiness.
Kenney did not view his participation in the Game as an act of betrayal.
He was not cheating on his wife by playing, and felt nothing for the women involved beyond a passing lust. If he was addicted to the Game, it was a controlled addiction, which hardly counted as an addiction at all.
It was, in spirit, closer to the pleasure he took in his biannual visits to the Hollywood Casino and that was before one took into account charity volunteers, landlords, creditors major and minor, and pimps.
It was hard to pass through this world unnoticed, and harder still to quit it with an involuntary version of an Irish goodbye.
Kenney tried to let it go. He was searching for problems where none existed.
He and Teal had managed to abduct a woman from a city street, enjoy themselves with her, kill her, dispose of the body, and all without anyone paying the blindest bit of notice.
It was as if the universe had wanted Nola Maddick excised from memory, and the agents of that erasure were not to be punished for doing what was required.
But Edward Kenney had lived too long to believe in a just universe.
If proof of its nonexistence were needed, a just universe would not have allowed an individual like himself, a murderer of women, to thrive.
Kenney’s father, a gloomy man who would take a full glass and empty it to save life the trouble of doing it for him, liked to say that the world started every day by pulling on a fresh pair of boots with which to kick the unwary.
The old man had been full of helpful sayings: If shit were wealth, the poor would be born without assholes.
Be friendly to many and a friend to few.
Never trust a man who gives you his phone number unbidden.
(On women who might do the same, Kel Kenney had not expressed a view, but doubtless he wouldn’t have approved of them either.) All of which was to say that some of the father’s fatalism had rubbed off on the son, because an optimist—and this was another of Kel’s old saws—was someone yet to receive a proper schooling from reality.
Edward Kenney made the reservation at the Tarratine before browsing the Day’s website for a suitable gift.
He then worked his way through a backlog of emails and performed a much-postponed tidying of his desk and office.
Only when he was about to quit early, and with an eerie and mounting feeling of trepidation, did he check the by-now familiar homepages of the Detroit Free Press, Bridge Michigan, and MLive.
Each was running the same main story about a missing woman, using the same picture.
From Kenney’s screen, the face of Nola Maddick stared back, not dissimilar to how she’d looked as Kenney and Teal took turns with her.
But the name beneath the pictures was not the one on her driver’s license. Instead, the pictures identified her as Gai Cotter. Or in full, Special Agent Gai Cotter of the Drug Enforcement Administration.