To her credit, Donna didn’t think twice. “How can we get down?”
He took in the lay of the land. “This drop narrows down to just a couple feet if we follow it west a few more yards. We can jump from there.”
“West?”
“Go left.”
They trotted as fast as they could along the gash in the mountainside until they reached the area Lawrence had spotted from above. Donna jumped first and was splashing through the shin-deep water of the brook before he had eased himself over the rocky ledge. “Shoo! Shoo!” she yelled, windmilling her arms as she charged the ravens. With a chorus of croaks and calls, they lifted into the air in a dark whirlwind and settled in the stand of birch trees. Their shiny black bodies tipped the thin branches down, and they looked so much like a caricature of vultures that Lawrence would have laughed if it hadn’t been so damn creepy.
“Honey…” Donna’s voice was uncharacteristically hesitant. “I smell something.”
The tent, the narrow one-person kind ideal for long hiking trips, was zipped up tightly. But Donna was right. As he got closer, he could smell it, too, sickly sweet. He wrinkled his nose. They looked at each other. “I’ve got my cell phone in my backpack,” she said. “We could…”
Lawrence shook his head. “We can’t just leave.” A few feet in front of the tent, ashy stones enclosed a scorched circle. He bent over and placed his palm on top of the crumbled charcoal. “It’s cold.”
Donna took a deep breath. “Okay, then. Let’s open it up and see.” Before he could say anything or stop her, she unsnapped the flap covering the zipper and unzipped the front of the tent.
“Oh, my God!” They both recoiled—Donna turning her head, eyes watering; Lawrence covering his mouth and nose with one hand. The smell from the confines of the overheated tent was like the worst-ever rotten egg. Inside, in the dim, dun-colored light, he could see—
“Mmmmmph!” Donna spun away and retched.
The only dead people Lawrence had ever seen were his own parents, antiseptically clean and laid out in satin-lined coffins. They had been made up, their sunken cheeks padded and rosy, looking bizarrely as if they had fallen asleep while dressed for church. They bore no resemblance to the smoothly bloated body in the tent, but Lawrence knew he was looking at death, the real thing, without any prettying up or euphemisms.
“We should—” he started to say, and then he watched, horrified, as a single greenfly buzzed through the overheated air, entered the tent, and settled delicately on the dead man’s open eye.
Lawrence grabbed his wife’s arm and hauled her away, their stumbling steps turning into a run, and they splashed across the brook and clawed themselves up over the low rock ledge.
Running through the forest toward the trail, Donna’s hand clutched tightly in his, he remembered the collective nouns he had been searching for earlier: A conspiracy of ravens. A murder of crows.
Lights in the darkness. Heat radiating off the tarmac. The inescapable thwap-thwap-thwap of rotors and the dust devils rising in the downdraft. Russ folded his arms across his chest, aware of the damp fabric clinging to his skin and the hopelessly sweaty patches under his arms. Last Wednesday night, he had been watching one of these damned machines take off, and now here he was this Wednesday night, only a week later, watching and waiting as the chopper eased down and its skids touched the sticky black asphalt of the landing pad at the Glens Falls Airport.
Only this time, he didn’t have Clare’s exhilaration to distract him. Instead, it was Kevin Flynn and Mark Durkee leaping out in a display of youth and machismo, followed more slowly by Lyle MacAuley and Dr. Scheeler, who, Russ was pleased to notice, eyed the slowing rotors above his head and walked bent nearly in half until he was well beyond their range.
“You should have come, Chief! It was great!”
Russ sighed and fixed Flynn with a baleful glare. “I keep telling you, Kevin, we don’t describe felonies as ‘great.’ ”
“The helicopter ride! That’s what was great. You ever been on a helicopter?”
“Yes, I have.” Russ turned to Lyle and Dr. Scheeler. “Well?”
“He was carrying a driver’s license and cards that ID’d him as Chris Dessaint. Looked sort of like the picture on the license. Kind of hard to tell,” Lyle said.
“Two days sealed in a hot tent will do that to you,” Dr. Scheeler commented. His sardonic tone reminded Russ of Emil Dvorak. Maybe it was a pathologist thing.
“Wait till you hear what we brought back with us,” MacAuley said. From around the corner of the nearest hangar, Russ could see the meat wagon pulling up to the now-quiet chopper. “Kevin, Mark,” MacAuley yelled at the pair, “you two collect the evidence bags and meet us at the cars.” The two younger officers ambled back the way they had come, dancing out of the way of the two mortuary attendants, who were sliding a shiny black body bag out of the belly of the beast.
Don’t go there.
He turned on his heel, forcing Lyle and Dr. Scheeler to accelerate to keep up with him. “Why don’t you two fill me in on the whole picture?” he said. “From the beginning.” He knew he should have been there that afternoon. He wouldn’t have needed a hand-holding briefing from Lyle and the medical examiner if he had just been able to get into the chopper and go with the rest of them. Lyle frowned at him from under his bushy gray eyebrows but didn’t comment on his abrupt departure. They headed toward the squad cars, which were parked behind a chain-link fence near the North Country Aviation hangar. “We were able to put down a half mile or so from the scene. The two Cornell professors who found the body showed us where it was. Kind of an out-of-the-way spot. If there hadn’t been a bunch of birds attracting their attention, he could have been there for a lot longer.”
“You get statements from them?”
“Yeah. They didn’t have much that was helpful. They were shook up pretty bad, as you can imagine.”
Yeah, he could imagine it.
“We offered to fly them back,” Lyle went on, “but they decided to walk out. I’ve got contact numbers for them if you want to talk with them yourself.”
“What was the scene?”
“Looks like Dessaint hiked in and pitched camp. I’m guessing he knew what he was doing. His equipment was top-of-the-line, but a few years old, well used. He was ready to travel light. A single-man tent, a bedroll, a couple changes of underwear. But he had a lot of food with him—that fancy dehydrated crap—and two bottles of purification tabs for water.”
“He was going to disappear into the mountains?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
MacAuley was right. Any number of people had hiked into the Adirondack State Park and disappeared, intentionally or not. An experienced camper with enough food and water could stay out of sight a long time in the summer. Dessaint might have hoped to lie low until things cooled down. Or hike west to Route 30, the narrow road running more or less north through the million-acre park, and from there hitch and hike his way over the Canadian border. The Adirondacks were a wilderness, but a wilderness with small towns, camps, and settlements.
“Any money on him?”
“A little over three hundred bucks.”
Russ snorted. “That’s not much to start a new life with. Even with the Canadian exchange rate.”
MacAuley shrugged. “He had maybe another four, five thousand in drugs—meth and coke, and enough OxyContin to fill one of those economy-sized vitamin bottles.”
They reached the chain-link fence. The shadows from the hangar swallowed them as they went through the gate into the parking lot. Russ unlocked his car and opened the door, spilling light onto the gritty asphalt below their feet. “So what was the cause of death, Doctor?”
“Obviously I don’t have either a toxicology screen or an autopsy to go by. But I feel safe in giving you a first opinion that he shuffled off this mortal coil due to an overdose.” Scheeler beeped his car with his remote key. Russ could hear a dull thunk as the doors unlocked. “Based on
the fact that he had a needle in his arm and his works spread out on the tent floor next to him. I’m guessing—and it’s just a guess, mind you—that he gave himself a highball.”
Russ leaned against the top of the squad car. Out of sight of the helicopter, he felt more relaxed, more thoughtful. “That doesn’t jibe with what his weasely little friend McKinley told me. He described Dessaint as a sort of fitness buff. Hardly the kind of guy to shoot up heroin and injectable cocaine.”
“Yeah,” MacAuley said, “but according to McKinley, Dessaint was the one handing out the goodies as well as the cash after they’d had a party.”
Russ frowned. “Were there any signs he was a regular user?”
“I didn’t see any tracks on his arms,” Dr. Scheeler said. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t an occasional user.”
“Wait till you see the real jackpot item, though,” MacAuley added. “Remember I told you that it was a flock of birds that brought the Cornell folks down for a look-see? Well, most of ’em got scared off when all of us arrived and started working the site. But there were five or six of them, big buggers, that kept hopping around and pecking at one spot nearby, underneath a tree. So I went to take a look at it, and it’d been dug up recently and smoothed over. It was shaped like a drop pit. You know, for—”
“I camp, Lyle. I know what a drop pit is. But birds aren’t going to be pecking at someone’s latrine.”
“That’s what I thought. So we dug it up. Guess what we found.”
“Jimmy Hoffa.”
MacAuley crossed his arms and leaned back. Russ had an idea what he was going to say, but he wanted to give him his moment. Lyle loved a little drama. “No, really, I don’t know,” Russ said. “What?”
“Clothes. They had been rinsed out, but there were still visible bloodstains on ’em. And a tear in the sleeve that looks like a match to those threads we found at the scene.”
Russ looked at Scheeler. “Could they be what Ingraham’s killer was wearing?”
The medical examiner spread his hands. “Could be. I didn’t want to examine them at the site, for fear of losing possible hairs, fibers, or skin flakes. The blood traces we could see were very faint, which would certainly be the case if the killer went into the river after he garroted Mr. Ingraham. Most of the blood would wash away in the cold water, but not all.” He clasped his hands together like a man savoring the prospect of a good meal. “I think going over those clothes with a microvacuum and some Luminol will be very informative. First thing I’ll do is type the remaining blood, of course. If I were a betting man, I’d put money down that it’ll match Bill Ingraham’s.”
Russ reached under his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So it looks good that Dessaint is our killer.”
“Yep,” MacAuley said.
“And that he conveniently offed himself while sampling his wares.”
“Yep.”
“We can pretty much look forward to marking this one closed.”
“Yep.”
“Except”—Russ looked at MacAuley over the tops of his glasses—“we still have McKinley’s story about Dessaint’s mystery contact, handing off drugs and money in exchange for beating up on a few selected targets.”
“Maybe he was making that up for the benefit of his audience. Dessaint, I mean. Covering himself in advance by putting the blame on some evil overlord. He might have guessed that McKinley or Colvin would turn him in within five minutes of getting picked up.”
“I considered that. Problem is, his actions are consistent with McKinley’s story. Neither Emil Dvorak nor Todd MacPherson was robbed. And that video store had a lot of walking-around money in it.”
MacAuley plucked at his uniform shirt in a hopeless attempt to air it out. “Maybe he was a freak. Maybe he really did believe he was destined to wipe out homosexuals or something. Maybe he’s got a bunch of pamphlets tucked away in his apartment, with his manifesto and a call to arms on ’em. We haven’t cataloged near everything yet.”
Dr. Scheeler interrupted. “Gentlemen, you’re getting well out of my area of expertise. I’m going to bid you good night. Chief Van Alstyne, I’ll have my report to you as soon as possible.”
“Thanks, Doc. And thanks for being available to go to the scene on such short notice. We’re usually not this busy.”
The medical examiner’s teeth shone whitely in the darkness. “That’s okay. My patients never complain.” His car door thunked behind him and he backed out of his parking spot. Russ could hear Faith Hill on the radio, wailing away about breathing as the doctor drove away.
He turned back toward MacAuley. “I want to keep Noble tracking down anyone who knew Chris Dessaint. I want to know the people he ran with, what he liked to do, and whether or not he might have played McKinley and Colvin. First thing in the morning, we’re going back to his trailer and taking apart everything we didn’t touch the first time. Maybe we’ll find something that’ll let us close this case.”
“You don’t sound very hopeful.”
Russ sighed. He took off his glasses and tried to find a clean, dry spot on his shirt to polish them. “We still have that APB out on Jason Colvin?”
“Yeah.”
“We need to update it. Let everyone know the suspect we’re looking for may already be dead.”
Chapter Twenty-One
It was fifteen minutes after they left Robert Corlew’s boat slip in the marina that Clare finally understood, really understood, why someone would voluntarily live through winter after brutal winter in the north country. They had motored out past the docks, the mainsail billowing, until they passed some unmarked point and Corlew turned the boat away from the wind, swung out the boom, and told her and Terry Wright to run up the jib. The forty-two-foot boat surged forward like a thoroughbred let out at the Saratoga racetrack. Clare stood clutching the mast with one hand, half-sheltered from the brilliant sunlight by the red-and-white curve of the jib sail, as the boat surged and rose repeatedly beneath the soft soles of her old Keds. Ahead of her, the long lake stretched out forever. Its water, a forbidding slab of black in the winter, was dancing blue now, a thousand sparks of spray and sunlight flashing all around her. And at the shoreline, the mountains rose up out of the water, smoky blue and alpine green. It was like living in a fairy tale. She half-expected to see a white-towered castle rearing out of the forest.
“I think Story Land amusement park is over there somewhere.” Terry Wright waved in the direction of the opposite shore, where a little town emerged from the forest in a clutter of bright-roofed houses that ran down to the water’s edge. The rotund banker eased himself down until he was sitting on the deck, his feet braced against the low lip running beneath the rail line. Clare followed suit.
“I was just thinking it looked as if there ought to be a castle here somewhere.”
“There are. Fort Ticonderoga, at the head of the lake, at the point where it meets with Lake Champlain. And behind us, Fort William Henry. Fought over by the French and the Indians, the British, and the colonists. This place was called ‘the key to the continent’ in the eighteenth century. There’s been a lot of blood spilled into these waters at one time or another.” He smiled, his round cheeks sunburned underneath his enormous mustache. “That’s not, by the way, a hint that there will be today.”
Clare laughed. “Fair enough.” She leaned back on her elbows, closing her eyes and letting the sun sink into her bones. “Hard to imagine wars here at the moment. It seems like heaven to me.”
“There was a war over heaven, too, wasn’t there? And now look. The place is overrun with tourists, just like Lake George. Of course, heaven isn’t closed between October and May. I hope not anyway.” He laughed. Terry’s infectious laugh gave him a reputation as a comic because it made listeners join in even if what he said wasn’t particularly funny.
“What are you two nattering on about up there?” Mrs. Marshall’s voice cut through the rush of the water and the wind. “Come down here and join us. Robert’s breaking out
the drinks.”
Clare followed Terry along the edge of the deck and dropped beside him onto a well-padded bench in the boat’s cockpit. Mrs. Marshall and Sterling Sumner were occupying the opposite bench, Sterling holding the wheel steady with one hand. His ever-present scarf, in deference to the eighty-degree weather, was of jaunty striped silk rather than wool, and one long end fluttered in the breeze.
As she bounced into place, Robert Corlew leaned out of the hatch, his wide shoulders nearly filling the space. The developer had unusually thick hair that sprang with suspicious abruptness from his forehead. Clare had thought today might be the day when she would finally be able to verify that it was a rug, but Corlew had a captain’s cap jammed firmly onto his head, hiding everything underneath. He handed two tall glasses up to Mrs. Marshall. “Lacey, gin and tonics for you and Sterling.” He turned his attention to the other bench. “Reverend Clare, Terry, what’s your poison?”
“Beer,” said Terry. “If I don’t keep working on it, this belly will disappear.” He laughed again.
“Same here,” Clare said. Corlew ducked out of sight and reappeared a moment later with two bottles, ice-cold and dripping. Clare handed Terry Wright his bottle and tilted hers back, drinking down a third of the beer at one go. “Boy, this sun sure makes you thirsty,” she said, lowering the bottle.
Mrs. Marshall was staring at her with exactly the same expression Grandmother Fergusson used the time she caught Clare in a burping contest with her cousins. Too late, Clare noticed the pair of glasses Corlew was holding in his other hand. Silently, he handed one to Terry, who proceeded to pour his beer. Corlew proffered the other glass to her.
“Unless you’d rather…” Swill it down like that, Clare thought, finishing the sentence for him. She smiled weakly and accepted the glass, then dutifully poured and handed her bottle back to Corlew.
I’m thirty-five years old, she reminded herself. I’m these people’s spiritual adviser. I’m not going to be intimidated by the fact that they’re all old enough to be my parents. She glanced at Mrs. Marshall. Or grandparents.
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