by Louise Penny
Cassie held up her gun. “I’m looking for some answers,” she said. “Are you going to try to stop me?”
“I am,” said David, behind her. He’d used Holt’s key to come in the back door.
Cassie whirled, but David wasn’t where she thought he’d be. He’d moved as soon as he’d spoken. Holt, who’d begun moving with me, leaped behind Cassie and took her in a chokehold. Cassie clawed at Holt’s arm with her free hand and tried to bring the gun to bear with her other.
Holt made Cassie release her gun by slamming her hand with the butt of his own. Anne heard a bone crack.
And just that quickly it was over, without a shot fired.
Anne had broken a finger once (or twice), so she knew how painful it was. Cassie did not scream. Fairly impressive.
“You’re unarmed,” David said. “You’re under our control. If this was a training situation, what would you tell yourself?”
Cassie did not speak. Her rage filled the room like a red cloud.
“You’d say, ‘Bang, you’re dead,’” David told her. “Did you follow me all this way to try to kill me? Are you trying to prove I stole the money?”
“You did,” Cassie said. Though they were all liars by trade, Cassie believed what she said.
David’s dark face was impassive as he said, “I never took a cent.”
“I didn’t either.” Suddenly Cassie launched herself backward, drawing up her knees to explode forward in a kick that hit David’s chest. He staggered back. Since Cassie’s whole weight was suddenly hanging from Holt’s arm, his hold broke.
With a beautiful precision, Anne pivoted on her left foot and kicked Cassie in the temple with her right. Cassie’s head rocked back, her eyes went strange, and she crumpled.
David had regained his feet by then and he was striving to catch his breath. He held his gun on Cassie, but after a few seconds he was sure she was out. His arm fell to his side, and he sat heavily.
Holt had stepped away from Cassie in case David shot her.
“She sounded like she was telling the truth,” Holt said, after a moment of silence.
“She did, didn’t she?” David looked troubled. “I was so sure it was her.”
“She was sure it was you,” Anne said.
David appeared both confused and angry. “Do you believe I’m an embezzler? Twyla, Greg?”
Twyla said, “Anne,” at the same moment Greg said, “Holt.”
“Does it matter what we think?” Holt continued. “One of you will take the blame. I hope it’s her.”
Anne began to pick up the items that had scattered from the grocery sack. Among them was a knife. Anne smiled. She retrieved her own from her jacket. Then, just in case, she got her gun out of the drawer and put it in a handy spot. After all, everyone else in the room was armed.
She was waiting for the inevitable question. Holt obliged by saying, “What do you want to do with her, David?”
“The options are limited,” David said slowly. “We call Camp East and tell—who, Jay Pargeter, I guess?—to come get her. Or we wait until she wakes up, and we ask her some questions. Or we let her go. Or we kill her now.”
“We’re not part of the system anymore,” Anne told David, pointing from Holt to herself. “We shouldn’t take part in an interrogation.”
“You can’t let her go,” Holt said.
David looked down at Cassie unhappily. “If she was anyone else, I’d put her down. But she’s earned some respect. She’s done a good job since you left, Anne. Until now.”
Holt glanced at Anne and then said, “There’s another choice. You could take Cassie up to Camp East yourself.”
David looked at Holt with narrow eyes. “Why?”
“Enough people know where Anne is already,” Holt said. “Someone had to tell Cassie. If you call from here, at least ten more people will know. Anne, did Cassie say how she found you?”
“Gary Pomeroy in tech support. She also knew you were here, so she figured David might visit.”
“Son of a bitch,” David said, disgusted. “I’ll pay Gary back. Maybe officially. Maybe on my own time.”
“If you don’t, I will,” Anne said. “I don’t want to have to start all over again. It seems to be too easy to pry the information out of Gary. At least we’ll assume it was him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” David tensed.
“You knew all along where I was. You sent Holt here.”
“You were getting death threats!”
“Like that’s new. I never believed that’s the only reason he came.”
David looked at Holt. “So you’ve never told her why you left?”
“We never talked about it,” Holt said calmly.
“We don’t talk about the past a lot,” Anne said, which was absolutely true.
“Well, Anne, you might be interested to know that Holt here, back when he was Greg Baer, was suspected in the disappearance—and probable murder—of a doctor in Grand Rapids, Michigan,” David said.
“And?” Anne was unconcerned.
“I got tipped off Greg was going to be arrested,” David said. “We couldn’t let the police come to the facility, obviously. They believe it’s a wilderness camp for adults, but if they had a closer look, that wouldn’t fly. I had to drive Greg into town to meet with them. They’d flown in from Michigan.”
“They took me to the local police station and put me through the wringer,” Holt said, smiling. “But considering where I work, it was nothing.”
David stared at him. “Man, they were going to arrest you!”
“Maybe.” Holt didn’t sound worried.
“Oversight voted to hide him, on my strong recommendation,” David told Anne, though he sounded as if he considered that was a mistake just at the moment. “Otherwise his background might raise a red flag, though I swore to them that Greg wouldn’t talk about the program. His background fit the opening here. He had his ears modified and his tattoos removed. A nose job. I figured you wouldn’t recognize him right away. You two hadn’t actually met, as far as Greg could remember. You could get to know him as Holt.”
“You’re right, I didn’t recognize him.” He’d made her vaguely uneasy, though, and it had explained a lot when he let her know who he’d been.
David nodded, pleased. “Oversight charged me with arranging your identities. No one else knew.”
“Except Gary in tech support,” Holt said in disgust.
“Except him.”
“Thanks, then,” Anne said. She smiled brightly. Holt was going to have some talking to do after this. From his face, he knew that.
David looked from Holt to Anne. “All right, I’ll take Cassie with me. I’ll call Pennsylvania once I’ve gotten a couple of hours under my belt so no one can find out where I started. I disabled the GPS on the rental. It’s a seven-hour drive?”
“Yes,” Anne said. “Thereabouts. One of us could go with you, fly back. You might need help.”
“No, thanks,” David said. “I need to think. Someone took that money. It wasn’t me, and I believe it wasn’t Cassie. But we both might lose our jobs.”
Holt and Anne glanced at each other, quickly looked away. Yes, they needed to talk.
“Where’s your car?” Anne asked David.
“We drove over here in it,” Holt said. He was staring at Cassie, sizing up her shape and weight. He was a practical man.
“Good. We need to find her car.”
“Search,” Holt said briefly. Since it was possible Cassie was playing possum—though Anne didn’t think so—Anne stood a safe distance away, with Holt’s gun aimed at the prone figure. Holt knelt to search her. In a practiced way he rolled Cassie to one side, then the other. He pulled two sets of keys from her pockets and stood. “Rental,” he said, “and personal.”
“She’s got a cabin five miles from camp,” Anne said. “If she hasn’t moved.”
“She won’t stay out for much longer,” David said. “If I get stopped . . . I’m a black man. Just
saying.” He was saying that not only might he get stopped no matter how carefully he kept to the speed limit, but also that he didn’t want to have to kill policemen. But it would be very, very awkward if he was arrested with a tied-up white woman who was screaming bloody murder.
“I have something to keep her out until you get there,” Anne said. “You sure you don’t want me to come? I could manage her. But I’d have to be back by Monday morning for school.”
“You have no idea how weird it is to hear you say that,” David said, smiling reluctantly. “I’ll take her solo, if she’s drugged. What do you have to keep her quiet?”
Anne ran up the stairs to her attic to open her carefully concealed stash of things she’d figured might prove handy. She was a “waste not, want not” kind of person.
“This should be two doses of thiopental,” Anne said when she returned. She handed the vials of freeze-dried powder to David, along with sterile water and two hypodermics.
“You keep that around? Geez, Anne. What else you got?” David withdrew 20cc of sterile water and injected it into the first vial of thiopental. He shook the solution vigorously and withdrew it into the syringe.
“Oh, this is a holdover from Camp East,” she said. “I picked it up in the infirmary after a trainee broke his leg. I thought it might come in handy someday. I stuck it in my go-kit and I didn’t clean it out . . . in the haste of my departure.” (In the middle of the night. With two armed and wary “escorts.” Not her favorite memory.)
“Thanks,” David said. He gave Cassie the first injection and prepared the next one, capping the syringe and pocketing it. “Is the other side of your garage free?”
“Yes, there’s a control button by the kitchen door. You can drive right in. Might as well leave the kitchen door open.”
In a few seconds—not long enough to have a conversation—Anne heard the garage door rumble up. She nodded to Holt, who squatted to take Cassie’s feet. Anne took her shoulders. Cassie’s body drooped between them like a hammock.
David had lowered the garage door and opened the trunk. “I’ve disabled the safety latch,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on the clock and stop to give her the second shot. Four hours?”
Anne and Holt laboriously dumped Cassie into the trunk. It was lucky she wasn’t tall.
“Four hours should be right,” Holt said. “Sure you can stay awake?”
“Or I make you a to-go cup of coffee,” Anne said helpfully. She predicted David’s reaction.
Sure enough, he stared at her with ill-concealed suspicion. He said, “No, thanks.”
“Let us know when you get there.” Holt clapped David on the shoulder.
“I hope they find out who took the money,” Anne said.
That was as much goodbye as any of them wanted.
As soon as David backed out, Anne closed the garage door. She and Holt stood in the chilly space.
He was waiting for her to say something first.
“When you were Greg, you had a real family,” Anne said. It was not a guess.
He nodded. “Mom, Dad, brother. My father had stomach cancer. He was having a lot of pain. The roads were icy, and my brother was out of state. So Mom took him to the emergency-care clinic at three in the morning, because it was lots closer than the hospital. I drove from my hotel to meet them there. The doctor on duty was either incompetent or sleepy or both. He gave Dad the wrong drug. Dad died. He would have died soon anyway, I know. And he was suffering. But it wasn’t his time just yet. Mom was sure she’d get to take him home.”
“So you took care of the doctor.”
“Waited three weeks and then went into his house at night.” He smiled. “Snatched him right out of bed and vanished him.”
“Did the police really have evidence against you?”
“I’d said a few things to him that night. So they had a lot of suspicion. When they checked into my background, they had even more. And a neighbor saw a car like my rental backing out of his driveway that night.”
“Nothing decisive.”
“Enough to haul me in for questioning. David didn’t let that happen.”
Anne said, “You did the right thing. So did David. Not that you need me to tell you that.”
He nodded. “Was that really thiopental you gave Cassie?” he said.
“If I’d had something stronger I would have brought it down,” she admitted. “All I’d kept was the thiopental. Cassie might not survive the trip anyway. She was out a lot longer than I’d thought she’d be, and I know she’s had more than one concussion over the years.”
Holt looked hopeful. “That would make things simpler.”
They went into the house. Anne opened a cabinet and brought out a whiskey bottle, raising it in silent query. Holt nodded. She poured and handed him a shot glass, filled one for herself. She leaned against the kitchen island on one side while Holt sat on a stool on the other. They regarded each other.
“Cancer treatment is very expensive,” Anne said at last.
Holt regarded her steadily. “Dad had a long illness. That trip to the clinic was only one of many. The bills . . . you could hardly believe how much, and the insurance only covered a fraction of the cost. My mother and my brother were scared shitless. The debt would loom over them the rest of their lives. They think I have some hush-hush military job, and they know the military doesn’t pay well. They didn’t expect I could help much. They were really understanding about that. It burned me up inside.”
“So you siphoned off the money from the enemy fund.”
“Yeah. I did.”
So there it was.
“You did a good job covering your tracks. How’d you plan it?”
“It helped that David’s never been confident with numbers. He always sweated budget time, needed a lot of help from me. I remembered a genius accountant, a guy I’d roomed with in college,” Holt said. “Tom was doing the books for a lot of the wrong people. That was how I knew where he was. Tom was glad to help; he’s one of those people who loves to beat the system, any system.”
“Is Tom still around? Can they interrogate him?”
“He began doing bookkeeping for the wrong people. He disappeared a year ago.”
Anne eyed Holt narrowly. “Really?”
“Yes, really.” Holt managed a small smile. “Nothing to do with me. But convenient.”
“So what now?”
Holt’s smile vanished. He looked very grim. “When David showed up today, I felt like the bottom had fallen out. I hated that he was suspected of something I’d done when he’d done nothing but back me up. As people like us go, he’s a good man.”
Anne had thought of suggesting they follow David and run his car off the road. She was glad she hadn’t said that out loud.
Anne had the feeling they were stepping on thin ice, new and fragile territory in their relationship. The two regarded each other in silence.
Finally Anne said, “Do you think David suspects you?”
“No,” Holt said immediately. “He would have tried to take me out. An honor thing.”
“Your family does not know where the money came from. They couldn’t reveal anything accidentally?”
“I told them I’d invested money in an online shopping program and it had taken off. They were too relieved to ask for any details.”
“You think Oversight will come back with questions about your dad’s bills being paid off?”
“If the bills had been paid in one lump sum, it would be suspicious. But I paid in irregular amounts spread out over two and a half years, some of it channeled through my family’s accounts. Less conspicuous.” His mouth twitched in a smile. “And I haven’t worked at Camp West in more than two years. I live on my coach’s salary.”
“And the money’s stopped disappearing. No one’s stealing from the enemy fund now.”
“They’ll still be looking. No one makes a fool out of Oversight.”
“But they might be glad to find a scapegoat.”
; “What are you thinking, Anne?”
“I’m thinking we can find Cassie’s rental. We can drive it to Pennsylvania and get there ahead of David. Two drivers instead of one.”
Hoyt looked interested. “Then what?”
“Then we plant money in Cassie’s house, gold or bearer bonds. Untraceable stuff.”
“Anne, I don’t have anything like that. I don’t even have much cash stashed away. Not enough to make them believe she stole everything.”
“I have some backup funds,” Anne said. She looked away.
Holt leaned forward and took her hand. She couldn’t avoid his eyes. “You’d do that?”
“Yes,” she said stiffly. “I would.”
“No regret?”
“No regret.”
Holt struggled to find words of gratitude, but Anne held up her hand to keep him silent. “If they find unexplained money in Cassie’s house, David’s in the clear, Cassie will vanish, and they’ll consider the theft explained. It’s all good. I know where her house is, and we’ve got the keys.”
“Let’s get on the road,” Holt said.
Anne retrieved half of her escape fund from its secret hiding place—the same place the thiopental had been stored—and she was back down the stairs in less than two minutes.
“If we find the rental quickly,” she said, “it’ll be a sign that we’re doing the right thing.”
Anne and Holt knew where to start looking. Using the key fob to make the lights blink, they found it in four minutes, parked behind a house for sale on the other side of the street.
During the long drive north they made some plans for spring break.
Those plans involved Gary Pomeroy.
Rob Hart
Takeout
from Mystery Tribune
Harold was dozing, his head rested against the tiled wall behind his chair, when Mr. Mo placed the brown paper bag in front of him. The bag was nested inside a milky-white plastic shopping bag, through which Harold could make out plastic utensils, packets of soy sauce, napkins, and a folded-up menu. Stapled to the top was a slip with an address on Mott Street.
“Crispy-skin fish rolls,” Mr. Mo said, his high voice cracking like a whip.