Page 53 of A River Red With Blood
“But he suspects.”
It was Levesque who had told Santopietro about Scott Theriault and Mallory Norton, ratting out his schoolmate to avoid punishment for some infraction that Santopietro could no longer recall.Were he to reveal this to another—say a loquacious classmate, or the police—Santopietro might be asked why he hadn’t shared this knowledge following Norton’s disappearance, especially after Theriault’s body later turned up in a tributary of the Kennebec River.
“The price of his silence,” Santopietro continued, “is to be allowed free run of the school, for now.The beating of Anthony Marshall was a way of testing the waters.”
“So let him be top dog,” said Renders.“Top dog in a pound of mongrels.”
“I said ‘for now.’This is a form of blackmail, and blackmail escalates.An adult might grasp how far and hard one can push, but not an adolescent.Levesque will overstep the mark again—if he even knows what a mark looks like, which I doubt—and we’ll be forced to rein him in.When we do, he’ll bring up Mallory Norton once more, and we’ll be right back where we started.And if he were to inflict serious harm on a fellow student, harm requiring a formal investigation by police, he could use the girl as a bargainingchip.”
“I always thought Levesque was surplus to humanity’s needs,” said Renders.“It would be a shame if nothing happened to him.”
“If something does, it can’t happen here.”
They’d just about gotten away with Scott Theriault.Losing two students in as many months would bring serious and unwanted attention: from the law, the media, and the handful of parents who gave enough of a damn about their children not to want to leave them in the care of an institution that appeared unable to keep its charges alive.
“Could Levesque have been the one who put Theriault’s body in the water?”Santopietro asked.
It was certainly a possibility, thought Renders, if one he hadn’t considered until Levesque started dropping nasty hints.Could the boy have been fucking with them from the off?Levesque tells Santopietro about how Scott Theriault is seeing a Bingham girl who drives up to the school after dark, then waits to see how the principal reacts.Maybe he’s watching when Santopietro and Renders find Mallory Norton, and when she doesn’t show up again, Levesque has a good idea why, so he starts tormenting Theriault by whispering in his ear that Santopietro and Renders may know more than they’re saying about the disappearance of his girlfriend.Theriault reacts, forcing Renders to deal with him.Finally, Levesque somehow discovers where Renders has buriedTheriault, but instead of calling 911, anonymously or openly, he puts the body in a stream to see where it ends up, like a kid playing with a stick on the current.
But that was where it fell apart for Renders.He couldn’t figure out how Levesque might have known about Theriault, not without shadowing Renders into the wilderness.Yet somehow Scott Theriault’s body, buried in a hole by the bank and covered with dirt, had washed downstream to be discovered.
“No,” said Renders at last.“I’m still of the belief there must have been a collapse.I buried him within sight of the stream so if the ground did fall in, the body could have tumbled down the slope to be taken by it.I mean, Levesque aside, what other answer is there?That someone else found Theriault and decided to give him a water funeral?”
Santopietro didn’t reply.He only had Renders’s word that Theriault’s body had been disposed of properly.He didn’t want to doubt the man, but it might be that without proper supervision, Renders flirted with negligence.
“So what do we do?”Renders asked.
“We wait.We control Levesque as best we can for the time being, until we find an opportunity to get rid of him—away from the school.”
Renders didn’t look happy, and Santopietro couldn’t blame him.What he was proposing was less a solution than the kicking of a can down the road, with all the attendant risks of dealing with a creature as unpredictable as Leonard Levesque, but the reasoning was sound.The school couldn’t afford any more dead students.
“Do you regret Mallory Norton?”Santopietro asked quietly.
“Not at all,” said Renders.“I enjoyed it.I enjoyed her.I’d very much like for us to do something similar together again.”
Which brought them back to the Game, and Renders’s potential introduction as a player.It would mean longer gaps between games for each player, but as Santopietro had explained to Edward Kenney, that might protect them all in the long run by further disrupting the pattern.The option was to continue what he had started with Renders: a separate game for two, meaningthat Santopietro would no longer have to endure a time-out one year in three.But by taking Mallory Norton, he had broken one of the cardinal rules agreed with Kenney and Teal, and they would be entitled to feel aggrieved.It might be better were they to remain ignorant.
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” said Santopietro.
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 & Raceway, a small slice of Vegas glamor in Bangor.He loved waiting on the turn of a card, or watching the roulette wheelbefore the ball settled.In those moments, it wasn’t about winning or losing but the possibility of both, held in perfect balance.(Schrödinger might have understood.) For Kenney, the Game truly was a game, but he cared about winning only because the consequences of losing were so grave.(Schrödinger’s cat might have understood.)
The only shadow on the horizon was the one cast by the Saint’s suspected extracurricular activities.Kenney wasn’t due to visit Spero for a while, but he felt the need to confront the Saint face-to-face.With that in mind, he’d contacted the manager at Sworley’s Garden Center in Jackman to let her know he was planning a road trip to catch up in person with valued, long-term customers, and a date and time for their meeting had been agreed.To further support the road-trip story, Kenney made similar appointments as far south as Lewiston, Portland, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, requiring a few nights away from home.The journeys wouldn’t be wasted—nothing, with Edward Kenney, was ever wasted—because in some cases it was a long time since he’d pressed the flesh and picked up the tab for a lunch or dinner.It would be a way to revisit his early years, when he’d lived out of his car for days on end, and slept in it when money was tight.He’d let the Saint know he was coming to town only at the last minute.Kenney had contemplated bringing Teal along for the ride, but Teal had a habit of shrinking in the presence of the Saint, even at the best of times.Kenney couldn’t picture him openly accusing the Saint of unsanctioned murder.
As for the recent sanctioned murder, that of Nola Maddick in Detroit, it was a textbook example of the Game played well, which provided Kenney with no small satisfaction.He’d like to have awarded himself all the credit, but had to admit the snatch was the riskiest part and Teal had executed it expertly.Kenney might have set up the play, but Teal made the touchdown.Right now, all things being well, Maddick was lying in a pit, entombed by construction waste.
But it nagged at Kenney that no one had yet come forward to report her missing.Even whores and junkies had friends and family, people who cared about them, if not a lot.And shouldthese dregs have been disliked or unloved, the agents of the state remained to be considered: social workers, mailmen—or police, because the good ones kept track of all the faces on their blocks; 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 theDetroit Free Press,Bridge Michigan, andMLive.Each wasrunning 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.
