The group crossed over the fence a second time and headed across the rolling meadow toward the inn. He heard a chorus of high-pitched, frantic barks as they approached, and he thought he might get down and kiss every one of those mop head–size dogs. And when Stephen Obrowski and Ron Handler appeared at the back door, waving and hallooing, it felt as good as seeing his own men greeting him from the squad room at the station house.
They lugged Waxman around to the front of the inn, where Karl and Annie, two of the regular Millers Kill EMS team, were waiting to drive him to the Glens Falls Hospital.
“What’n the blue blazes happened to him?” Karl asked while Annie checked his vitals.
“He fell off a cliff,” Clare said.
“Then he crashed in a helicopter,” Russ added.
“Sounds like a bad comedy sketch,” the ambulance driver said. “You sure a marching band and a steamroller didn’t go over him, too?”
Standing beneath the shade of the big maple, watching them pull away with Waxman, Russ was still shaking his head. “I can’t believe that guy has survived to this point,” he said to Clare. “Maybe there is something to this God thing of yours after all.”
Up on the porch, the paintball–playing bankers were regaling Obrowski and Handler with the exciting tale of their adventures. The younger man was ushering them in through the double doors. “Chief, come on in,” Obrowski said. “It’s too hot to stay outside. We’ve got fresh lemonade.”
Russ shook his head. “I’ve got a squad car coming for me,” he said. “I’d better wait for it here.”
“Reverend Fergusson?”
“I think I’ll stay out here with the chief. You’d just have to burn any furniture I sit on anyway.” She plucked at her clothes. “I would surely appreciate some of that lemonade, though.”
“Coming right up.”
She plodded up the porch steps and collapsed into one of the wicker chairs. Russ followed her, dropping the backpack to the floor before sitting down. Beyond the shady maples and the thin gray road, the valley rolled away in pastures and cornfields and distant farms, a crazy-quilt landscape stitched by rocky outcroppings, steep rises, and stony brooks. The valley shimmered in the heat, oddly one-dimensional under the colorless sky, and for a moment Russ felt that he was in a dream, that the wicker furniture and the wooden floor and the far-off farms would disappear with a shake of his shoulder and he would be back in the green leaves, looking for death over every nameless, numbered hill.
Obrowski brought out lemonade, a whole pitcher of it, and two blue glasses stacked with ice. He arranged them with a flourish on a round teak table midway between their chairs. “Unbelievable,” he said, pouring their drinks. “Were you really flying the plane that went down, Reverend Fergusson?”
Clare accepted one of the glasses. “Helicopter,” she said. She had a look in her eyes that made Russ think maybe she, too, was uncertain how much of this was real.
“Those bankers of yours are quite something. I’ve never thought much of the paintball crowd that shows up on the weekends around here. I remember once when Bill Ingraham went with his business partner. He told me it was the most pointless exercise he had ever undertaken in his life, and that included his draft-induction physical.” He laughed. Russ took his glass from Obrowski and drained it so fast, all he was aware of was the slide of the cold and tart-tasting liquid over his tongue.
Obrowski looked at Russ, then at Clare, then back at Russ. “I’ll leave you two to catch your breath, then, shall I?”
The screen door banged behind him and they were alone. He poured himself another glass of lemonade and drank it more slowly. Thinking about the whole incident with the helicopter made his stomach ache, and thinking about the whole thing with Clare made the rest of him ache. So he propped his feet on the backpack, looked at the slightly unreal scenery, and thought about Waxman. Waxman taking Peggy to the gorge and hitting her up for money. Threatening her, fighting with her, a lucky push or punch—lucky, because she wasn’t a big woman and Waxman must outweigh her by quite a few pounds—and he goes over the edge.
With his backpack.
Christ.
“Clare,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Waxman’s backpack was down in the ravine with him.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
He took his feet off the pack and bent forward. This was the reason his subconscious mind had ragged at him to keep the thing with them, from the ravine, to their wild ride, to their headlong flight through the forest.
“Why would his backpack be in the ravine with him? If you’re extorting someone or fighting, would you be carrying your backpack?”
There was a pause. Her ice cubes clinked in her glass, another off-kilter piece of normality. “No,” she said finally.
“It wasn’t on him. It wasn’t even near him.” He unbuckled the flap and flipped it open. Inside, atop dirty T-shirts, plastic jars filled with algae-speckled water, and a dog-eared copy of Topographical Maps of New York State, was a plastic bag the size of a woman’s clutch. It was full of white powder. He heard Clare breath in sharply.
The backpack, thrown into the ravine. Evidence to be found with the body. Except he and Clare had stumbled on the scene too soon.
“What was it you overheard Malcolm saying to his mystery visitor about Peggy?”
“He told him to stay away from his aunt.”
One good hard shove into the gorge. Just enough evidence to link Waxman to Dessaint. He was tempted to give the powder a taste and verify that it was horse or coke, but he’d bet good money it was already cut with the same stuff that had killed the other man.
Stay away from his aunt. No kidding.
And they had met her coming down the trail. And offered to help her. And she had helped them. He remembered seeing her backing out of the cockpit door while he was pulling his headset on. He fished into his pants pocket, and sure enough, it was still there, the broken piece of plastic that had rendered the radio useless. All she would have needed was a screwdriver to jam into it. Easy to swipe one from the office and stick into that big bag of hers. Right there under the bottles of cold water. Evidently, Peggy Landry could think on her feet.
And she had been alone and unwatched with the chopper for what—ten minutes? While he and Clare were breaking into the shed.
“What do you think caused the crash?”
She kept staring at the white powder in the bag, then at the black plastic in his palm. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Something with the fuel lines?” She looked at him for the first time. “I thought I must have rushed my preflight check. I thought I’d missed something.”
He shook his head. “No. You did just right.” He reached for her hand and pressed the splintered radio control into it. “Peggy Landry,” he said.
“It can’t be.” She looked at the knob. “Helos are complicated creatures. And that ship flew. For what—twenty minutes after we had left her? That sort of delayed…”
“Sabotage,” he said, supplying the word.
“That would take a great deal of knowledge about the helo’s systems. You’d need to be a mechanic. And you’d have to open the ship up, get into the engine or something. She couldn’t have—” She stopped, frowning. She slid her fingers absently up and down her sweating glass. “Unless…All those water bottles.” She turned to him. “She could have squirted water into one of the tanks. We were low on fuel, and I switched from the first tank to the second after we made our ascent to spot the Hudson.” Her face, dirty and sweat-streaked, shone with revelation. “It would have been pretty much dumb luck, getting the second tank. If she’d put it in the first, we wouldn’t have made it to the ravine.”
“But you don’t need to know much about any machine to know putting water into the gas tank is going to screw it up.”
They looked at each other. He thought about Ingraham’s bloody death and Dessaint’s bloated corpse. He thought about Todd MacPherson and Emil Dvorak. People treated like dis
posable lighters. He thought about what might have happened if they had been a shade less lucky, if Clare had been slightly less skilled as a pilot, if the sparks had caught fire a few minutes earlier.
He stood up so abruptly, his wicker chair skidded back half a foot.
“What?”
He turned to the inn’s door. “I’m getting out an APB on Landry and her nephew. And telling Kevin to get here now.” She had tried to kill Clare. And had almost succeeded. “I don’t want anyone else to make this collar. I want to be the one to strap that woman to the gurney.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Russ tried to get rid of Clare, of course. First, he wanted her to stay at the inn and accept Ron and Stephen’s offer of a shower and a room to rest in. Then, when Officer Flynn arrived and drove them up to the construction site to reclaim their cars, he ordered her to go home, a direction he emphasized by driving past the rectory on his way to the Landry house and pointing his finger out his window at her driveway. When they got to the imposing modern house—Clare still dogging Russ’s Ford 250—and discovered that Peggy, her laptop, and two suitcases were gone, she could see he was tempted to leave her there, with the nearly hysterical bride-to-be and the poor confused Woods. She crossed her arms and simply ignored everything he said that didn’t involve her sticking around. His heart wasn’t really in it anyway. Maybe there was something about throwing up on another person’s shoes.
“I know why you’re doing this,” he said as he rifled through Peggy Landry’s home office. He, Kevin, Noble Entwhistle, and a friendly cop introduced as Duane were searching the house. “You’re an adrenaline junkie. I’m here to tell you that the only way to get over that is to live a life of quiet contemplation.” He tossed several folders on the floor. “Here, make yourself useful.” She sat on the Oriental rug and began paging through the documents. “Quiet contemplation,” he went on. “Like the priesthood.”
Officer Entwhistle stuck his head in the doorway. “Thought you’d like to know. We pulled a suitcase full of goodies from under the nephew’s bed. Meth and ecstasy, and some heroin, too. We’re leaving it in place until the lab guy can get here. It may be another hour.”
“Speedy as always. Any indications where Wintour might have gone?”
“Nothing yet. We’re still looking.” Entwhistle glanced over at Clare, who sat cross-legged on the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “Helping out, Reverend Fergusson?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’ll, uh, leave you two to it, then.” He retreated down the hall.
“That’s great,” Russ said under his breath.
“What?” The folder held an endless correspondence between Landry Properties, Inc., and its insurance carrier, dating back several years. Even letting weekend warriors play paintball on your mountains was apparently a potential pitfall of litigation.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just another misunderstanding.”
“Huh,” she said, trying to decipher the arcane agreement that had BWI paying a portion of Peggy’s insurance on the land not leased for the spa. Statements for January, February, March…then something different in April.
“Russ. Come take a look at this.” He knelt beside her. She laid the paper on the rug and they both bent over it. “If this says what I think it does, Peggy’s share of the BWI insurance was canceled in April.”
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Would that include that provision Opperman told me about? Where she gets paid out of insurance money if the project didn’t go forward?”
“I’m guessing so.” She flipped through another few pages. “Look at this. Her insurance company writes her that they’ve been refused payment because BWI’s dropped her policy.” She underlined the words with her fingernail. “Hugh Parteger,” she glanced at him, “a financier I met at Peggy’s party, he told me BWI was overloaded with debt and looking for cash.”
“Her insurance situation wouldn’t be that big a deal so long as the construction was going through,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “But if she thought Ingraham was going to pull the plug on the project…”
“She’d be left with nothing except a hunk of cleared land and a reputation as someone who had a major deal drop through her fingers. She’s spent years trying to make something of that property.”
He nodded. “Could be she decided that if Bill Ingraham was out of the way, the spa could be built without him. Opperman said pretty much the same thing to me. With the design all in place, all Ingraham was doing at this point was acting as the lead contractor. Could be she thought she could safeguard her investment.” He shook his shoulders. “Remind me to stay away from real estate speculation.”
There was a screeching noise outside, and the sound of flying gravel. Someone shouted from the main floor.
“What the—” Russ was on his feet and pounding down the hall before Clare had a chance to get up. She followed him, two steps at a time, up the stairs to the main floor, guided by the shouts and slamming doors. The elderly Woods were huddled beside a grandfather clock in the foyer. “Which way?” Clare said.
Cyrus Wood pointed to the front door. She burst outside in time to see both the squad cars gunning down the sloping drive, wheels spinning, stones rat-tat-tatting. Russ was flinging open the door of his pickup. She put on a burst of speed and ran headlong into the truck, banging on the hood. “Let me in! Let me in!”
The passenger door unlocked with a sharp click and she fell into the seat, clutching at the oven-hot leather as Russ spun the vehicle around and slammed on the accelerator. She couldn’t believe he had actually fallen for it and let her get in.
“What is it?”
“The nephew pulled right into the driveway. He saw our black-and-whites and backed out of there, but not before Kevin spotted him. Hang on.”
They took the turn onto the road on two wheels. His hand twitched where the radio would be in his squad car. She could hear the sirens wailing, the sound shifting, growing higher and fainter as the lightweight cars drew farther and farther ahead of Russ’s heavy truck.
“Will they be able to catch him?” she asked.
“Eventually.” His focus was all on the road as he leaned into his accelerator.
“What if he drives through town like that? That fast?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was a stupid question. She could picture the tourists jaywalking across the streets, the kids biking. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed the best she knew how, scarcely coherent, all her fear and belief laid out in the open. Please, God. Please.
The sirens cut off. Russ swore. The truck flew over the road, heading toward the intersection, lofting over bumps and jarring high and wide over asphalt patches filling last winter’s potholes.
“Hang on!” The two black-and-whites were catercorner across the intersection, blocking a Volvo sedan that had, from the skid marks, spun around in the turn and nosed into a ditch thick with daylilies and Queen Anne’s lace. Russ jammed down on the brake, throwing both of them forward until her shoulder belt caught and bit into her neck. The back end of the truck danced across the road but stopped safely in the breakdown lane. Great, she thought. Now I’ll have matching bruises on both shoulders.
The uniformed officers spilled from their cars, taking protective stances behind their open doors. Russ opened his own door, drawing his weapon at the same time. “Stay here,” he said.
She nodded.
Officer Entwhistle was yelling at Malcolm Wintour to get out of the car with his hands showing. She couldn’t see any movement inside the sedan. Lord, what if he was dead, too? The awful toll of human life and pain was already too high. And for what? To get a lousy piece of land developed. To make more money for a woman who already had more than anyone really needed.
Russ closed in on his men, staying low, his gun out in front of him. She saw him signal Noble Entwhistle, who ducked behind his own car and edged around toward the back of the Volvo, which was angled up so that the tires were barely to
uching the asphalt.
“Wintour,” Russ bellowed. “We’ve got your aunt. We’ve got Waxman. We know everything. Get out of the car.”
The door on the driver’s side shuddered, opened a few inches, and then stuck fast in the side of the ditch. Clare rolled her window down. She had to hear what was going to happen. A hand emerged from the opening. “It wasn’t my idea!” The thin, frightened voice she heard was not at all like the one she had heard from the bathroom. “She made me do it!”
“Get out of the goddamned car!”
“I can’t!”
Russ looked at Noble Entwhistle and nodded. The uniformed officer crept closer to the Volvo’s trunk as Russ sidled closer toward the driver’s door. Clare wanted to scream, Stay away from there, you idiot! He’s got a gun! But he knew Malcolm had a gun. He knew what he was doing. She forced her fingernails out of the palms of her hands.
She still couldn’t see the interior of the car, but from where he stood, Russ must have had a bead directly on Malcolm. He stood there, gun pointed at the car, while Noble slid into the ditch and opened the back door. It wasn’t until he had hauled Malcolm out, literally by the collar, that Clare realized she had been holding her breath.
They got him down on the ground and then Duane and Kevin came running. Clare could hear a rumble of male voices, but she couldn’t make out anything. Russ squatted down and spoke directly to Malcolm. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as if the younger man was crying. She looked away, not wanting to see any more, and so it wasn’t until she heard the crunch of his hiking boots on the road grit that she realized Russ was coming back to the truck.
She glanced up. Noble was ushering Malcolm into the backseat of his cruiser, and as she watched, the red lights whirled atop the other police car and Kevin and Duane were off, headed toward town. She looked at Russ as he opened his door.
“He says his aunt didn’t drive away, because he had her car.” He got in, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He doesn’t know where she’s gone. The only people he knows she might get in touch with are his mother or her other sister. Both of whom live more than halfway across the state. She must have called a friend to come pick her up.”
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