by David Stout
“Still your choice, Shafer. I’ll do what I need to do. You know that. I can kill. You know that. Whatever I need. They’ll never execute me. Shafer?”
Raines’s voice was from a different direction now, and closer. Slowly, Will maneuvered himself around the tree, away from where he thought the voice had been.
“There’s still time, Shafer. I can tell you where the money is, tie you up, and be on my way. They’ll never know, Shafer. I offered your friend a deal. I did. He said yes, but he was a lousy actor. Ran away. Come on, Shafer. Let’s be a sly dog.”
Sure, Will thought. Fran ran away because he knew you’d kill him. He wasn’t stupid, wasn’t drunk.
“John Raines! John Raines! We have you surrounded. Lay down your weapon at once. We have you surrounded.”
“Shafer? I can see you, Shafer.…”
Raines’s voice was much closer, and Will could hear his steps. But a tremor in the voice told Will that Raines was lying, desperate, that he couldn’t see him yet.
“John Raines, we have you surrounded!” A voice through a loudspeaker. A familiar voice?
“Please, Shafer. We can be partners. We’re both better than they are. Don’t you see that, Shafer?”
Will slid around the tree a little more.
“These people aren’t even professional cops, Shafer. Don’t you see that, you sly dog? Where are you?”
Something made Will turn his head slowly around the tree. Raines was standing about fifty feet away but looking away from him.
“Raines, drop your weapon.” The loudspeaker voice was familiar.
The sensation was like watching a movie. Will saw Raines drop to one knee, saw him bring the rifle to his shoulder, this time in a sure, deft shooter’s motion, and begin to aim in the direction of the voice.
Another rifle shot, and Raines was knocked back. His head rolled to the side, toward Will, who turned away when he saw the steam rising from the brains on the wet leaves.
“Will? It’s all right, Will.”
Something cool and wet being held to the side of his face. Still in the woods.
“It’s all right, Will. You’re safe. You just fainted, that’s all. You’re going to be fine.”
Will was aware of blankets across his back and gentle hands on his shoulders, He tried to say something.
“Relax, Will. It’s all right.”
Will recognized the voice, and he summoned all his strength to say, “Thanks for coming back.”
“I never left,” Jerry Graham said.
Thirty
Will thought he was dreaming. Then he felt the bruises from the fall, and he knew that the noises were those of the hospital waking up. Then he remembered everything that had happened, and he wished he could go back to sleep.
“Mr. Shafer? Mr. Shafer, good morning.”
Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and looked into one of the loveliest faces he could remember. Copper skin, crow black hair, eyes deep and dark, like ponds. From India or Pakistan, he thought dully.
“Mr. Shafer,” she said. “I need you to wake up for me, please. I need to draw a few bloods.”
Damn; he hated needles. “I was just here for the night,” he said. “I should be going home today.”
“I still need a few bloods, please.”
He lay on his back, endured the needle with his eyes closed, relaxed.
“You can sleep again if you want to, please.”
“You’re lovely. Do you know that?”
She was gone. Had she heard him? Lord, what kind of drugs did they give me to loosen my inhibitions? Am I going home?
He closed his eyes again, and when he next opened them a tray was on the table next to his bed.
Breakfast.
He sat upright, saw that he was alone in the room, although there was an empty bed on the other side. He wheeled the table arm around so that the tray was over his lap, then removed the plastic covers from the dishes. Coffee, orange juice, bacon, soggy pancakes. He was famished. After a couple of painful starts, he figured out what moves not to make with his sore arm. He ate everything.
“Good morning. How’re you feeling?” The doctor was no more than thirty, at least six four, powerfully built.
“Linebacker?” Will said.
The doctor chuckled. “Tight end. Holy Cross. Tore my knee up senior year. Nothing wrong with your appetite.”
“Am I going home?”
“We’ll see. Probably. Do you hurt much?”
“Here and there. Guess I’m lucky to have a room to myself.”
“The guy who was in it died just before you got here.”
“I hope that isn’t bad luck.”
“He was eighty-six. Your blood pressure and heart are fine. You’re up to having some company.”
The doctor went out. A moment later, Jerry Graham came in. He was wearing casual slacks and a sweater. “How are you, Will?”
“Alive. Lucky to be, I guess. You?”
“Hanging in there. I needed a heavy sedative last night, though. I wanted to thank you again, Will.”
“For what?” Feelings had welled up inside him; Will was surprised at the anger he felt toward the FBI man.
“Everything. For being honest. For being such a digger and helping us get at the truth.”
“Sometimes we get lucky, Jerry. Even when we’re groping in the dark. Which I was. Far more than I realized.”
“Right. Right. I’m sorry, Will, but I didn’t have a choice. Or I didn’t think I did. Maybe we can square things.”
Will tried to empty his face of emotion. He felt like a fool, and the presence of the man who had made him feel that way didn’t help.
“Will, would you like me to lay it all out for you?”
Ah, the big test. Will’s pride wanted to say, Shove it, Jerry. His curiosity said something else.
“Will?”
“Only if you give it all to me, Jerry. Otherwise, screw it. I don’t want to be treated like a kid again. If you can’t give it to me straight, I don’t want it.”
“Understood. So here’s the whole thing. All of it.”
Graham told him that suspicion had focused early on the chauffeur, Tony Musso, despite official denials to the contrary. But an exhaustive check of Musso’s background had turned up nothing unsavory.
Still, Graham had continued to interview the chauffeur, on the theory that the kidnappers had obviously known a good deal about the boy’s going back and forth between father and mother. After tentatively ruling out other present and former employees of the Brokaw household, Graham theorized that the chauffeur had somehow brushed against the men who would become the kidnappers.
“At some point, Will, we learned that Musso had stopped one day at the Santos brothers’ garage. It was almost by chance. He needed a fuse in the car replaced.”
The Santos brothers had engaged Musso in friendly conversation, finding out soon enough whom Musso worked for—“There aren’t that many chauffeurs around here, Will”—and more than a little about Richard Brokaw, his ex-wife, and their son.
“When I told Chief Howe that the chauffeur had stopped at the Santos brothers’ garage not long before the kidnapping, he suspected them at once. The chief doesn’t pretend to be a genius, but he does know the community, and the brothers had a bad rep.”
“Why weren’t they arrested right away, Jerry?”
“Because we didn’t know where in God’s name the boy was. Then came the fire at the Santos brothers’ garage. We didn’t know what was going down, still didn’t know where the boy was and whether he was alive or dead.”
“But it was too much of a coincidence that the Santos brothers would get killed like that after you’d begun to suspect them.”
“Way too much of a coincidence, Will. Especially after I got some expert advice. From you.”
“Me?”
“I didn’t have time to bring in a semanticist or an outside expert on newspaper typefaces, Will. I had to go with what I had. Someone I could trust tota
lly. You, Will.”
Will closed his eyes and suppressed a laugh. Ah, yes; Jerry Graham could still charm.
“Your instincts about the ransom notes were dead-on, Will. About their having been written by different people, and what that meant.”
“That was so obvious.”
“To you, maybe. You’re a word person. But have you ever digested a sheaf of police reports? Anyhow, the chief and his detective brother figured the Santos brothers didn’t have a full deck of cards between them. So if there was a so-called ‘brain’ involved in the kidnapping, it had to be a third party.”
Graham paused while Will adjusted the height of his bed.
“Another thing, Will. The first ransom demand, fifty thousand, was such peanuts. I mean, why kidnap a millionaire’s son and ask for fifty grand?”
“Unless you’re a petty nickle-and-dime kind of crook to start with.”
“Exactly. The kind of crook who burglarizes a place and steals the coins from the vending machines. Which the Long Creek cops think the Santos brothers did now and then.”
Will asked him why he began to think that a cop might be the third party in the kidnapping. Graham said the ease with which someone had picked up the ransom money from the drop site along the road at the edge of the woods had made him think the “smart” kidnapper might be someone on the inside of law enforcement, someone who knew who would be where, and when, on the stakeout—including which cops would be most likely to be careless.
“In a way, Raines had already drawn attention to himself, Will. From his first day as a Long Creek cop, just about everyone found him a pain in the ass. Show me a person who can’t make friends with anybody—anybody—and I’ll show you a nut.”
“He was making friends with me, Jerry. Or I thought he was.”
“Now you know better. I’m sure a psychiatrist could explain it in fancy language, but the bottom line is that Raines was totally amoral, incapable of compassion or empathy, absolutely self-centered and selfish. Everything he said—everything—was for effect, to gain something for himself. And damn everybody else.”
“It sounds like you knew him.”
“In a way, I did.” Graham said he’d spent a lot of time on the phone with the bureau’s experts on criminal behavior, particularly sociopaths and psychopaths. “Will, are you up to hearing all this right now? I can come-back.”
“I like to take bad medicine in one gulp, Jerry.”
“I’ve got some good medicine, too, Will.”
“How did you zero in on Raines?”
“I didn’t, Will. At least not by myself.” Graham explained that another cop had noticed that Raines was putting more mileage than usual on his patrol car, and that his daily activity log didn’t account for it. So Graham and Howe had begun to wonder why Raines would have been driving all over the county when he wasn’t handing out that many traffic tickets.
Around that time, the ransom notes were being mailed from different corners of the county. “And that’s where you were a big help, Will. When you noticed that funny newspaper typeface.…”
“Latin Condensed.”
“Whatever. When you noticed that funny lettering from the New York Times, and then you told me that the Times used in the ransom notes must have been bought right here in Long Creek. That really made us focus on Raines. Especially since the chief remembered seeing Raines reading the Times now and then.”
“So you didn’t really dismiss what I pointed out about the lettering on the ransom notes?”
“Lord no. Quite the contrary. I was just putting on an act.”
Yes, Will thought. So much of it had been an act. Was I anything more than a prop? “Why did you have to put on an act, Jerry?”
“So you’d be in the dark, Will. I thought it might help in getting Raines to rise to the bait. Maybe you remember how I made a show of closing the door whenever I talked to you and I thought Raines was around.”
“Now I do. Twenty-twenty hindsight.”
“It’s that way for all of us. So when Raines started pumping you, trying to learn what you knew about me—”
Lightning flashed in Will’s mind. “You had his car bugged, you bastard!”
“—trying to learn what you knew about me,” Graham went on evenly, “we knew we were closing the ring.”
“And you couldn’t just grab him?”
“No. Certainly not when the boy’s fate was up in the air. And the involvement of Steven Sewell—a one-in-a-million accident—really had us scratching our heads. We didn’t know how many kidnappers there were. So we had to let things take their course.”
Graham said the tape recording of the call to the Deer County Sheriff’s Department by the “hunter” who reported spotting a man and boy in the woods had been analyzed. The analysis had indicated a strong probability, based on comparisons with recordings of Raines’s voice from routine police calls, that the “hunter” and Raines were the same man. Raines had only partly succeeded in disguising his voice; Graham’s remark to Will that the “hunter” sounded like an old man with bad dentures had been a lie for Raines’s benefit.
“You already know about the poor pathetic hermit and his dog,” Graham went on. “He saved that boy, Will. It’s my theory that Raines was going to kill that boy. Maybe take his picture first to get more ransom money. Then kill him, one way or the other.”
“Unbelievable.”
“For people like you and me, yes. Not for someone like Raines, who doesn’t—didn’t—function like a human being.
Graham was red-eyed and looked tired. He poured himself some water from the pitcher on the little table. “We didn’t know what to make of your friend’s auto accident, Will. How it tied into the kidnapping, I mean. Or even whether it did. But the Long Creek cop who investigated it, Ted Pickert, was suspicious early on. He got to the scene quickly, and he thought he saw another car making haste out of the area.”
“Raines.”
“We think so. We know so. But it wasn’t until you found the schnapps bottle—”
“When did I tell you about finding the bottle?”
“Last night, when you were drifting in and out after being sedated. It wasn’t until then, when we knew about the schnapps bottle being there, that we surmised that your friend had stumbled on the kidnappers and the boy in the garage. Under hypnosis, the boy gave us an almost dreamlike account of a strange man coming into the garage, scuffling with some other men, knocking over a green tank and a red tank as he ran out. But we, well…”
“You didn’t know how much to believe him.”
“No, we didn’t know how much to believe the child,” Graham said. “Especially considering what he’d been through.”
Will sat up and poured himself some water. He felt tugged from two directions: He wanted to hear what Graham had to say, yet he was eager to get out of the hospital. After a long moment, he said, “I’ve wondered what Fran went through.”
“That’s another thing. Early on, the chief picked up on the fact that Raines was showing a lot of interest in the accident involving your friend.”
Graham said Howe had seen Raines sneaking a look at the accident report, perhaps to see if the investigating officer had indicated any doubt that Spicer had been drunk. The chief had then made sure the investigating officer was unavailable, to Raines or anyone else.
“I feel badly about misjudging Howe,” Will said. “He’s not as dumb as I thought. Worse than that, he’s a better man than I thought.”
The agent shrugged. “We make mistakes. Go see him before you leave town.”
Will pressed the buzzer on his bed, told the nurse he wanted to leave, so if any doctor needed to check him out, now was the time.
“Hmmm,” the nurse said. “Your blood work isn’t back, and you had quite a stressful experience. A man your age, it might be best if you stayed another night.”
“No,” Will said.
As Will got dressed, he and Graham talked about the things that would never be known: how an
d at what stage Raines had found out about the kidnapping and muscled in on the Santos brothers; when and why he had decided to do away with them, and exactly how he had done it; why Raines had decided to eliminate Carmine Luna, and whether Luna might be alive if Will hadn’t gone after him.
“Don’t dwell, Will. I’m trying not to. I killed a man, after all.”
Will felt badly for him, but there was nothing he could say to help. Then he remembered something. “You told me you never left town, Jerry. Where the hell were you?”
“At the chief’s house. His wife is a hell of a cook.”
“The money, Jerry. What about the ransom money?”
The agent shrugged. “We tossed Raines’s apartment and his car. Nothing.” He went on to explain that Raines had been watched when the hermit’s cabin had been discovered. Graham reminded Will that Raines had seemed eager to stay there. “It occurred to us that he might have had a small amount of the ransom money with him, maybe tucked in a boot—”
“And might have intended to plant it in the cabin to make it look like the hermit was part of the kidnapping.”
“Right. That’s all conjecture. We’ll probably never know.”
“I just remembered. Near the cabin, it looked like someone had started to build a snowman.…”
“And Raines stepped on it. Howe and I noticed that, Will. Of course, that made us wonder all the more if the hermit was just an innocent outsider. But we, we…”
Graham paused, shook his head. His eyes filled, and suddenly Will understood. He waited for his old friend to go on.
“We thought about trying to pass the word among the search party that this strange guy with the kid might be innocent. But we weren’t a hundred percent sure. And how would we have passed the word without tipping off Raines? How, Will?” The agent held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness.
“Jerry, you just told me not to dwell. You had to make a life-or-death decision. This guy Sewell, he was probably paranoid, and he might have had some leftover problems from his days as a heavy drug user. And he had a gun.”
“Which he used, unfortunately. Which made it easier for Raines to shoot him.”