A Killing Sky

by Andy Straka

  “I was speaking with your daughter,” I said.

  “I thought I told you this morning we didn't know anything more about your questions,” she said.

  “I know, I know. But Averil here seems to have developed a sudden interest in E-mails.”

  Roberta Joseph's eyes narrowed. Then she turned to the older woman. “Can you excuse us, Lena? Thanks for coming to get me.” The woman shot me a look that could've melted lead and disappeared again into the kitchen.

  “There's a private dining room over this way,” Roberta said. “We can talk there.” She turned to her daughter. “Averil, you okay?”

  The girl nodded.

  Her mother took her by the hand, leading us toward a far corner of the cafeteria. The elderly couple seated in the corner stared, but most of the other diners ignored the three of us.

  We came to a closed door on which was a sign that read CONFERENCE ROOM. Most likely it was used by various departments within the hospital for meetings, at lunchtime and otherwise. At this particular moment, however, it stood vacant. We went in, Roberta closed the door behind us, and we all took chairs around a long table.

  Averil had begun to grin again.

  “Before we go any further, I want to know just exactly who you are working for,” her mother said.

  “Cassidy Drummond,” I said.

  She stared at me and said nothing, but she swallowed. Hard.

  “Look, I know Drummond's behind your little foundation, all right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I have sources at the bank,” I lied. Truth was, I didn't even remember what bank Second Millennium used, although that information was probably buried somewhere in the reams of background material Toronto and Nicole had printed out

  She must have bought it. Her shoulders slumped, and the fight seemed to drain out of her. “This is not good,” she said. “Tor's not going to be happy.”

  “Why not? Because I've exposed his philanthropy? What's the harm in that?”

  She shook her head. “You don't understand. You've opened a real can of worms.”

  “Okay. Tell me about it.”

  “I can't. I shouldn't even be sitting here talking to you.”

  “Look, Ms. Joseph. You know Cartwright Drummond is missing, right?”

  “Of course.” She pushed a stray wisp of hair off her face.

  “I've got copies of two messages sent from your foundation's E-mail address to Cartwright the night she disappeared, one of which looks like an invitation for Cartwright to come meet someone, someone she knew. Did you send those E-mails?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “Do you know who sent them?”

  “I do not.”

  “You said your daughter has access to your account.”

  “Yes, but that's ridiculous—” Roberta turned to face her daughter, who was seated next to her, and took both of the girl's hands in her own. “Averil,” she said, “do you remember someone named Cartwright Drummond?”

  The girl stared blankly at a spot across the room.

  “Look at me, Averil.”

  The girl obeyed and focused on her mother.

  “Have you ever heard of Cartwright Drummond?”

  It took maybe three or four seconds, but eventually Averil gave a slight but distinct nod. She remained expressionless.

  “Have you sent mail with the computer to Cartwright Drummond?”

  We waited, but Averil gave no indication that she even understood her mother's words.

  “Your daughter ever write poetry, Ms. Joseph?” I asked.

  “Write poetry? No, not that I know of. She did attend a speech class at her developmental learning center last year. I think they may read poetry to the classes sometimes. In fact, I remember them saying they thought it might help stimulate language development in the students.”

  “Can you get the address and the name of the teacher for me?”

  “I suppose. Maybe this is all just some mistake. If Averil sent some random E-mails, I'm sure she meant no harm.”

  “If you don't mind my asking, where's Averil's father?”

  She folded her hands on the table and stared at me. “He's not in the picture. We never married. I've raised Averil on my own.”

  Suddenly, quite deliberately, her daughter reached over and placed a hand on top of her mother's. The nurse smiled.

  “Averil understands quite a bit, it seems,” I said.

  “She understands my gestures and my emotions.”

  “Back to the foundation. Are you sure you're the only person who ever uses that E-mail box?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you be willing to supply me with the foundation's address list?”

  “I can't do that,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the list contains many of the names of the foundation's beneficiaries, and we like to keep that information confidential. You wouldn't believe how many requests we get in that we have to turn down.”

  “I'm running out of time here. The police now have the E-mails too. It's just a matter of time before they subpoena all your records. I'm trying to find Cartwright Drummond.”

  She looked at her watch. “I'm sorry, but I really do have to get back to work.” She let go of her daughter's hand, pushed away from the table, and stood and started toward the door. Like a dutiful puppy, Averil followed.

  “What if it were your daughter who was missing, Ms. Joseph?”

  She hesitated for just a moment, then turned to face me. “Please stay away from me and my daughter, Mr. Pavlicek. I hope we won't have to repeat this line of questioning.”

  “I strive to avoid redundancy,” I said.

  Roberta Joseph took her daughter by the hand again, spun around, and the two of them were gone.

  I called Ferrier this time. From my cell phone on the way back to Charlottesville.

  “Oh,” he said. “Isn't this the private dick who hung up on me earlier today?”

  “Sorry about that, Bill. I was, uh, in the middle of an interview.”

  “I'll bet.”

  “Listen—those E-mails I sent you? They came from a foundation in Richmond. I've been looking into it, and you guys need to get some people on this right away. I—”

  “Save it, Frank.”

  “What?”

  “I said save it. We're shut down.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There are a lot of folks in crisp dark suits walking around our office right now. They're taking over the investigation. They're also convinced this is a kidnapping and they're pretty convinced they know who did it.”

  “FBI?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “And they're sure looking forward to talking to you.”

  21

  The hospital security video was less than clear. Shadow clouded a big chunk of the screen, because the camera lens was positioned so as to pick out license plate numbers of vehicles entering and exiting. It was difficult to say, for example, who for certain had been driving a particular vehicle, but there was absolutely no doubt that at 1:16 A.M. on the night Cartwright Drummond disappeared, her rented Nissan Maxima with the D.C. plates had entered the hospital parking garage. And right behind her another vehicle had entered, a black Jeep Cherokee, bearing California plates and registered in the name of Jed Haynes.

  “I guess if it walks like a duck—” Ferrier shrugged.

  The FBI agent in charge of the case went to switch off the tape. I figured she was in her mid-thirties, although she looked older, with a touch of gray in her hair, small wrinkles around the edges of her eyes, no makeup. She also looked like she could bench-press more than a lot of guys I knew. Her name, she said, was Agent Christine Packard.

  Outside, the night air was sweetened by the smell of sumac and sassafras. Much warmer than the night before. But here next to Ferrier and Upwood's desk in the detectives’ room at Charlottesville police headquarters, we might as well have been inside a concrete bunker on the mo
on.

  “That's not all,” Packard said. “We obtained a search warrant to go over Haynes's Jeep, and we've got particles of her blood dried into a plastic doorknob, more on a piece of rubber under the dash. And as you know, Haynes's alibi gets a little fuzzy after one a.m.”

  “So for some reason Cartwright Drummond drove to the hospital parking garage that night and Haynes followed her in his Jeep,” I said.

  “That's the way we see it.”

  It was only a two-minute drive from the house off Fourteenth Street to the parking garage at the medical center, so it sounded plausible.

  “But Tor Drummond's other daughter says Cartwright left the house out in Ivy just after midnight. It doesn't take an hour or more to get to Haynes's house from there, especially at that time of night, with hardly any traffic. I'd say twenty minutes tops. What was she doing for almost an hour?” I was thinking about the E-mail message—meet me. twelve-thirty a.m.

  “Who knows?” She tapped a thick green file folder she was holding on her leg. “Maybe she stopped for gas. Maybe she had a hankering for some Milk Duds or a Slurpee.”

  “If she did, there would be a receipt, or someone would've seen her.”

  “We're checking.”

  The case was far from airtight, but I had to admit it looked bad for Haynes.

  “How about inside the girl's car?” I asked. “You have any evidence there that you can tie to the swimmer?”

  “Not yet. We figure he cut her in the Jeep, then drove her someplace in the Nissan, which was when she spilled the little bit of blood there.”

  “You think she's still alive, then?”

  “Absent a body, we're still going on that assumption.”

  “You pick up Haynes yet?”

  The agent nodded. “Got him down the hall. We've already questioned him for close to two hours. He's sticking to his story for the time being.”

  “Look at it this way, Frank,” Ferrier said. “You did a good job of bird-dogging the kid for them.”

  I said nothing.

  “That's right,” Packard said. “You talked to Haynes before anyone else did, didn't you, Pavlicek?”

  “So?” I said.

  “Seems kind of odd, don't you think? You're in early on the case, claiming to represent Cartwright Drummond's twin sister. Now, according to Detective Ferrier here, you claim your client doesn't want to be found. Oh, and the mother suddenly seems to be missing too.… You make a deal, did you, with this Haynes kid? The two of you split the ransom?”

  “What ransom? What are you talking about?”

  “C'mon, Frank, let's drop the charade. You're caught.”

  I looked at Ferrier, who was staring blankly at his hands. “You guys are in fantasyland—you know that?”

  She pulled a plastic bag containing a piece of paper from the folder she was holding.

  “So this little note you left demanding two million dollars in bearer bonds—that's a fantasy?”

  “I don't know what you're talking about. Where did you get that?”

  “I suppose you don't remember leaving it on the desk when you went to try to intimidate Congressman Drummond in his office.”

  “Whatever it is, I didn't write it.”

  “I suppose that's why your fingerprints are all over the paper.”

  Stupid, I thought. Really stupid. I'd lost my temper and Dworkin had aced me.

  “Pretty good scheme, though. Take a wealthy public figure like Drummond. His daughters are just back from out of the country. You and Haynes must've been planning this one for a while. And, hey, you've got to admit, Pavlicek, your public service track record hasn't exactly been star caliber. Was it more than just the money? Maybe revenge too?”

  Another detective passed through the room, trailed by Haynes's roommates, both of them looking a lot more serious and respectful than the last time I'd seen them. Nobody noticed me. The detective led them down the hall, around a corner and out of sight.

  “You talk to any of those jokers yet?” I said.

  “We're just about to take their statements,” Packard said.

  Ferrier stood up. “Look, Agent, I don't know what's going on here, but I've known Frank for a couple of years now, and as far as I'm concerned, he's clean. Looks to me like someone's trying to set him up to take the fall for this.”

  “Your opinion is duly noted, Detective.”

  A door slammed around the corner and footsteps approached the big room. Jed Haynes appeared, being led by another agent.

  “Potty break,” the FBI guy snickered in our direction.

  “Hey!” Haynes said, catching sight of me. “Ask this guy. He'll tell you. Pavlicek, you talked to me before these turkeys did and I told you the truth—I didn't do anything to Cartwright. I wouldn't. I—”

  “Can it, pal.” The agent strong-armed Jed down the hall in the direction of the men's room.

  I didn't have anything to lose at this point, so I called after them. “Hey, Haynes, you ever hear of someone—a swimmer, maybe—calling himself the secret amphibian?”

  The young man turned with his escort. “The what?” he said.

  “The secret amphibian.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You write poetry, Mr. Haynes?”

  “Huh?”

  “Poetry—you know, ‘admittedly an eloquence so soft,’ that sort of thing.”

  “What do I stinking care about poetry?”

  “I didn't think so,” I said.

  They turned and continued along the hallway.

  “What is that?” Agent Packard said. “Some kind of code between the two of you?”

  “No, ma'am. Part of my investigation.”

  She snickered.

  “What about these E-mails and the newspaper articles and other stuff that Frank has come up with?” Ferrier said.

  She dismissed the idea with a wave. “We'll follow up on them. Looks like some kind of a smoke screen, if you ask me.”

  Ferrier sighed, shaking his head.

  Willard Abercrombie just happened to trail by, his eyes flaming, his face capillary-rich with venom.

  “You,” he said, pointing a finger at my face. “I always knew it.” Then he turned and fled.

  “Am I under arrest or something?” I said.

  Packard glared at me. “Give us the girl, Pavlicek. And tell us where her mother and sister are too. It'll go a heck of a lot easier for you if you do.”

  “I want an attorney,” I said.

  22

  Armistead rose upwind, her talons extended, and parachuted onto my fist. I fed her the morsel for which she'd come. Her amber eyes were fixed on a point on the hillside above where Nicole and Toronto were attempting to flush a squirrel we'd sighted almost half an hour earlier as it scrambled to blend in among the bark and branches. After stalking the quarry from various treetop vantage points for several minutes, Armistead seemed to be trying to tell me it was time to move on in search of easier game.

  I'd spent more than three hours the night before under detention at the Charlottesville Police Department. An hour for my lawyer to get there, and another two being cross-examined by Agent Packard and a couple of tall characters who looked like they were fresh out of the academy. Once, when I told them about the paper trick Dworkin had pulled on me, I thought I saw a seed of doubt enter Packard's eyes, but it passed. I refused to divulge the whereabouts of Karen and Cassidy Drummond. The lawyer did a good job of blustering on about civil rights. In the end, they had to let me go, if only because they had no other physical evidence to link me to Cartwright Drummond beyond the fake ransom note. I'm sure they also figured that if they kept me under surveillance I'd eventually lead them to Cartwright, her mom, and her sister. When it came to Cartwright, at least, whether she were dead or alive, I was hoping to oblige them.

  The day was a carbon copy of the one before— bright blue sky with little wind. Toronto and I had been up since dawn trying to piece together the information we had on Second Millennium. We needed to
clear our minds, so we decided to take Armistead out to a patch of woods I knew near Lake Albemarle to hunt squirrels. Nicole showed up as we were about to leave and she wanted to tag along.

  There had been a silver Ford Taurus, two men inside, parked just around the corner from my apartment since I'd gotten home last night. Toronto said he caught sight of them again, a couple of hundred yards behind us, as we drove past Foxfields, out Barracks Road toward the lake.

  Toronto and Nicole came crashing through the thickets down the hill.

  “I'll bet she'd've had him by now,” Toronto said, “if it weren't for the three of us stumbling around down here.”

  Maybe, but maybe not. Normally, there was a natural selection aspect to any hawk's hunting. Birds of prey, like all wild hunters, are opportunistic. The young or the old, the weak or the diseased, often become their targets, which, in the balance of things, tends to strengthen particular species populations overall. But this bushytail was obviously at the height of his evasive prowess. A team of dogs might have been more successful in flushing the intended quarry from his den, but they might've had difficulty with such a survivor.

  Secretly, I even felt relieved. Hunting fox squirrels wasn't even legal here in Albemarle County, the only exception being if the hawk happened to stalk one while after gray squirrels, as was the case now. Fox squirrels, much larger and stronger than the grays, represented the outside limits of the hawk's abilities. Armistead had taken one other fox during our time together, and it had been a fierce battle to the death.

  Still, if the redtail could down this kind of prey, she could easily handle almost any other potential game when I returned her to the wild in what we hoped would become her future habitat. A mature, healthy female, Armistead was ready to find a wild mate and begin sitting her own nest.

  From the spot where we stood we could see across to the lake, where a few early-season anglers were casting their lines.

  “Why don't we head on down through that pasture up ahead? Looks like prime rabbit ground to me.” I cast off the redtail. She flew on ahead to perch on the speckled limb of a dead oak that had been stripped of almost all its bark. Nicole jogged along to stay close to Armistead while Toronto and I hung back along the side of a well-worn trail.