by Stuart Woods
Scully shook his head. “Nope. Nobody around here by that name. Not a MacDonald in the county.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, Mr. Sutherland found a credit card from a store with that name on it, right at the door to his office. Card was bent, sort of. Looked like it might have been used to jimmy the lock. Tell me, what did you do after the Sutherland party the other night?”
“Came back here, cooked a steak, ate it, passed out pretty early. We had a lot to drink at Sutherland’s.”
“Scotty with you, then?”
“Yep, for dinner.”
“What about after dinner?”
“Is that an official question, Bo?”
“Not really.”
“None of your business, then.”
“Did you go out at all after you came back from the party?”
“Nope.”
“Take your boat out?”
“I just said I didn’t go out again.”
“Sorry, John, I don’t mean to make this sound like a third degree.”
Howell grinned slightly. “That’s just what it sounds like.”
Scully chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it does. Why did you want the maps?”
“Oh, I just got to looking out the window, there, a lot, and I wondered what was under the lake, that’s all. I’d about forgotten it until you brought it up.” Howell leaned forward. “What is under the lake, Bo?”
Scully threw back his head and laughed. “So that’s it, John. Well, you’re not the first. People seem to think that when a big lake like this gets built, there’s all sorts of stuff under it. There are still stories among the schoolkids around here about houses and farms and trees being down there. They used to say that when the lake got down low in the winter, when they were using a lot of water for power, then an old bridge and a church steeple would surface again. That the sort of thing you had in mind?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, let me tell you what they do when they build a lake, buddy. They tear down all the houses and sell what scrap they can; they cut all the trees for timber and pulp, and to keep ‘em from being hazards to navigation later, and they painstakingly demolish every standing thing in the whole area that’s going to be underwater. So if you want to know what’s under the lake, the answer is a plain, old-fashioned nothing.”
“What about the O’Coineen place?” How-ell asked, and watched Scully closely for his response.
The sheriff didn’t bat an eye. He shrugged. “Well, I guess that was a little different. By the time Mr. Sutherland and Donal O’Coineen had done their deal, the water had already risen against a roadbed that cut across his place. Right after that, before the crew could get in there to break the place up, the roadbed gave way, and the place was flooded.”
“That’s Sutherland’s story, is it?”
Scully blinked. “I never had any reason to doubt it. Do you?”
Howell leaned back in his chair and locked his fingers behind his head. “Well, let’s see, now,” he said. “O’Coineen, who’s held out bitterly against Sutherland for years, suddenly gives in and sells; his house vanishes under the lake, then he and his whole family disappear and are never heard from again. Come on, Bo, you’re a lawman; doesn’t that sound just a little too convenient?”
Scully looked at him in surprise. “But they were heard from again,” he said.
Howell sat up straight. “By whom?”
“By me, for one. Listen, I don’t know whether you knew this, but I was engaged to marry Donal O’Coineen’s oldest daughter.”
Howell sat back in his chair. “Joyce? The blind one?”
“That’s right. We went together since high school, then started making plans to marry after I got out of the service. I was working for the county by then – I was a deputy – and that meant Eric Sutherland to Donal O’Coineen. He was pretty much of a hard case. Anyway, the whole business about the lake started to get in our way. Old Donal looked at me as being on the other side, which I guess I was, technically, but I never went against him; I stayed out of it. Still, things got tenser and tenser, and finally, Joyce backed out of the engagement. I guess it got to the point where she figured she had to choose between her family and me, and she made her choice.”
“How long was this before O’Coineen finally sold out?”
“A couple or three weeks, I guess. Less than a month, anyway.”
“And you heard from them afterwards? Personally?”
“That’s right. A couple of weeks after they left the county I got a letter from Joyce – her little sister wrote it for her.”
“Kathleen?”
“That’s right. She was Joyce’s eyes in a lot of ways. Anyway, I got this letter from Joyce saying goodbye. It was postmarked in Nashville, and she said Donal was taking them further north, maybe Virginia or Kentucky, to look for some land, and we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. Donal had money in the bank here, of course. What Sutherland had paid him for the land. But Joyce said he was bitter and wouldn’t touch it. He’d drawn out just about everything else he had – and believe me, he was pretty well off – several months before he left. They’d stopped doing business in town, they took Kathleen out of school, and they just wouldn’t have anything to do with anybody local anymore.”
“And the money’s still in the bank, I hear.”
“So it is, and with a lot of interest on top of it. ”Course the bank don’t give a shit if Donal never turns up and asks for it. They got a nice, fat deposit, just sitting there.“
“Bo, is there any possibility that somebody else could have written the letter? I mean, since it wasn’t in Joyce’s handwriting, couldn’t somebody have forged it to make you think the family was still alive?”
“No, no. It was in Kathleen’s handwriting. She’d written all of Joyce’s letters to me when I was in Korea. There must have been a hundred of them. I’d know that handwriting anywhere.”
“Then there’s no chance at all that the O’Coineen family could have been drowned when the roadbed gave way and let the lake in?”
“Absolutely none. Look, John, now I see what all this interest in the maps was about. People like to think the worst, and that story has been making the rounds periodically for years, but I’m in a position to know the truth of things. First of all, I know the money’s in the bank; I’m a director of the bank. Second, Joyce communicated with me after the family left, and I know for a fact the communication was genuine. I was in a position to know; there was some personal stuff in that letter, stuff that only Joyce and me – and Kathleen – could have known.”
Howell felt badly deflated, and he must have looked it.
Scully leaned forward. “John, I can see how this tale of the O’Coineens must’ve looked pretty sexy – especially with somebody like Eric Sutherland being the villain. But there’s just nothing to it. Oh, Sutherland was the bad guy, all right, putting pressure on people to sell land they’d owned for generations, but he did it legally all the way, and at the end of it all, it’s meant a whole new world for the people who live here. And let me tell you something else. If I thought for a minute that Sutherland had been involved in something like a murder, I’d of had him long ago. I respect the man, but I don’t like him much, and I loved Joyce. I wouldn’t be a party to covering up her murder. I hope you believe me.”
Howell did believe him and said so. “I’m sorry, Bo, if I’ve ruffled feathers around here with all this, especially Sutherland’s. I know that can’t make life any easier for you.”
“Well, you’re right about that, John. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sutherland quite so riled. Look, I’m going to run down this credit card – like as not there’ll be some perfectly logical reason why it was there, somebody from out of town at the party, I expect – then I’ll do what I can to quiet him down. I don’t know if you were in there the other night, but even if you were, I think I understand why, and the hell with it as far as I’m concerned. So just forget this visit, okay? But listen, if y
ou get the old man flustered again, he’s going to start making life difficult for me, and I can’t have that, and I’ll have to do something about it. Do you understand me?”
“Sure, Bo. Believe me, I don’t want to make life difficult for you.”
The sheriff left, and Howell went to the phone.
Scotty moved through the files with almost reckless speed. She knew she might miss what she was looking for at the rate she was going, but she also knew that, with events closing in on her, she might never have another chance. Still, after three quarters of an hour, she was only finished with one drawer and half finished with another. She was aided, though, by the neatness of the files. Nothing seemed mixed up or out of place. Finally, it was color that led her to what she wanted.
In a file marked “Miscellaneous,” full of one standard form used for domestic disturbances, peeping toms, and other minor concerns, she saw something green. Everything else in the file was white. She fished half a dozen sheets of loose ledger paper from the file and looked at her watch. Ten past two. She had been luckier with time than she could have dared wish for. The telephone rang.
“Sutherland County Sheriffs office.”
“It’s John. Sutherland found your credit card outside his office.”
“I know, you sonofabitch. Bo has already written to Neiman’s to find out all about it.”
“He was just here, asking questions. Just so our stories match, I told him we cooked a steak and got to bed early.”
“You told him I slept there? Thanks a lot.”
“He asked, but I told him it was none of his business. We had what you might call a very frank discussion about what’s under the lake, and I think maybe I’ve been on the wrong track.”
“Well, judging from what I’ve got in my hand, here, I’m not on the wrong track. There were some ledger pages stuck in a file where they shouldn’t be. That’s not like Bo.” She glanced quickly through them. “There are a lot of figures on them.”
“Well, you’d better get a copy of them quick. Bo’s already been gone from here a couple of minutes, and if he’s headed for the office, that means you’ve got very little time.”
“See ya.” She hung up the telephone and ran for the copying machine. It hadn’t been used yet that morning, and it took a couple of minutes to warm up. She drummed her fingers restlessly on the machine, waiting for the green light to go on. She had copied only two of the pages when the front door opened. She froze. The filing cabinet was still unlocked, the file was on Bo’s desk, and papers were in her hand that shouldn’t be.
“Thanks, sugar, how do I look?” Mike, the radio operator sauntered by, stroking his hair.
“Slick, Mike,” Scotty managed to croak. She kept making copies. “You’re gonna knock ‘em dead.”
“You know it, sugar,” Mike said, arranging himself in his chair and opening a Playboy.
Scotty grabbed the last copy and, as quickly as she could without seeming to hurry, walked back toward her desk. When she was around the corner and out of Mike’s sight, she ducked into Bo’s office, stuck the sheets back into the file, got it into the drawer, and locked the cabinet. She had been back at her desk, the copies safely in her purse, for five seconds when Bo walked in.
“How’d you like Sutherland’s party?” he asked, casually, as he strolled past her desk.
“Not bad. He was, really pretty nice.”
“Stay late?”
“No, I went back to John’s for a steak.”
“Stay long?”
She looked at him sideways. “None of your business.”
He laughed and went into his office.
In her mind, Scotty ran through what she had just done, just to be sure. She’d replaced the ledger sheets at exactly the place in the file where’d they’d come from; She’d put the file in exactly the same place in the drawer; and, this time, she’d made sure the lock was firmly engaged. Then she stopped in the middle of a sigh of relief. There was something wrong, something out of order, something she hadn’t done properly. The copying machine. In order to make copies, she placed the originals, one at a time, under a flap on top of the machine. The machine drew a sheet of blank paper from a stack on one side, and spat out a copy on the other. She had, she now realized, made the first five copies in the ordinary way, placing an original under the flap, pushing the button, then replacing the original with the next page. She had her own copies, now of all six pages. But, she knew in her bones, she had left the last original under the flap. It was still there.
Bo came out of his office, a letter in his hand, and headed for the copying machine.
“No!” Scotty practically shouted.
Bo stopped and turned. “Huh?”
It was hard to talk with her heart in her throat. “Uh, don’t use that just yet. The paper isn’t feeding properly, and I haven’t had a chance to get at it.”
“Well, I’ll take a look at it. I need this right away.”
Bo never liked to wait for anything, she knew that. She walked over and muscled between him and the machine. “Get out of the way, Bo,” she said, playfully. “You’ll just screw it up. You know you can’t fix anything.” She popped open the side of the machine and removed the stack of blank paper.
“It looks all right to me,” Bo said, impatiently.
“It would look all right to you if it were upside down.” She rapped the stack sharply against the side of the machine, squaring the corners. “Give me that,” she said, snatching the letter from his hands, “I’ll do it.”
“Jesus Christ, Scotty, you’re beginning to act like nobody else around here can work any of this stuff but you.”
“That’s exactly right,” she said. Scotty lifted the flap on the machine slightly and slid Bo’s copy underneath, at the same time, flicking the green ledger sheet already under the flap with her fingernail. It slid across the glass surface, under the back edge of the flap and down between the machine and the wall. She pressed the button, gave Bo his copy and original and went back to her desk, hoping against hope he had not seen what she had done.
“You know, Mike,” Bo said to the radio operator as he strolled back to his office, “I don’t know why we have all these service contracts with the office machine people when we’ve got our own mechanical genius right here.”
Scotty put her hands on her desk and pressed, so that no one could see them shaking. She had pulled that off all right, but now Bo’s files were missing a sheet, and it was stuck behind a machine that weighed a ton.
21
Howell huddled over the ledger sheets and studied them for some minutes. “Look at this,” he said to Scotty.
“You bastard. How could you leave my credit card there for Eric Sutherland to find?”
“Listen, Scotty, if you’d stayed with the boat like I told you to, it never would have happened. But no, you had to sneak up behind me and scare the shit out of me and make me drop the card. I might also add that if you’d done what I told you to, we’d have saved ourselves a cold swim in the wee hours.”
Scotty pouted. “You know, I think it’s extremely rude of you to point out a person’s little mistakes and make a big thing of them. That’s all in the past.”
“Good, now look at this.” He rattled the pages.
“Except my credit card isn’t in the past, it’s in Bo Scully’s pocket, and my charge account application is on its way to him!”
“Well, just intercept the goddamned letter, all right? Don’t you handle the mail around there?”
“Usually.”
“Well, just make sure you handle it every day until the letter comes. Now, for Christ’s sake, come here and look at these pages, and help me figure this thing out.”
Scotty heaved herself off the sofa and came to the desk. “What, then?”
“Okay, look. The letters LSCA and a number are written here alongside a date in the margin. There’s a long list of them. The dates go back for just over three years, and they’re numbered one through twenty-eight. T
hen, out here in the margin, there is another number opposite each LSCA. Now, I don’t think this is any sort of a code. I think it’s a schedule.”
“And the numbers in the right margin?” Scotty asked, pointing to a matching column.
“Well, they’re two-digit numbers, varying from fifteen to sixty, but always increasing or decreasing in increments of five.”
“Could be money. Add some zeros, and it would be a lot of money.”
“Good thought. So what have we got here? A schedule of deliveries and payments, maybe?“
“Sounds good to me. Deliveries of drugs.”
“We’ve nothing to indicate that, unless the right margin numbers are money. If he’s either paying or receiving sums from fifteen to sixty thousand dollars per shipment, it’s drugs.”
“That doesn’t seem so much. I thought drug deals went into millions.”
“Sure, but what if these numbers represent commissions?”
Scotty ran a finger down the pages, pointing out another series of letters and numbers. “What about these? They’re interspersed after every four or five of the LSCA dates.”
“I don’t know,” Howell said. “We’ve got an A and a number, an F and a number, Z, number, F, number, A, number. The numbers are all seven digits, group of three, group of four. There’s a date next to each letter, too. Probably some other sort of schedule, but not as frequent as the other one.”
“Could be. But a schedule for what?”
“Who knows? But it’s important enough for him to hide it very carefully. Tell me about your original tip, the one that put you onto Bo.”
“Not much to tell. Let’s just say that it was somebody in state law enforcement, who would be in a position to pick up some scuttlebutt.”
“Is somebody running an investigation on Bo, then?”
“Nope. That was his point. Somebody should be running an investigation, but nobody is.” She smiled. “Except me.”
“Somebody’s protecting him, then? Heading off any investigation?”