As the Crow Dies

by Kenneth Butcher

  He felt a moment of panic. He took another hit on his drink, getting used to it. Trying not to show too much haste or attract attention. He pulled a bill out of his wallet, left it on the bar. He walked to the side of the room, where he found himself at the head of the stairway. He could not see where the stairs led. It was not until he reached the landing and turned the corner that he saw he was in a bar called Jack of the Wood. Even at this early hour, a small crowd filled the place and a band brought instruments and mikes up on a stage. Worse yet, the front door led out to a street. It was easy to forget, with all the buildings distorting the landscape, that Asheville was a mountain town with lots of elevation changes.

  Where had the lady cop gone?

  He swung around and confirmed what he already knew. She was not there. He saw the couple from the Laughing Seed winding their way through the crowd and walking out the door into the sunshine. He followed and found himself on the busy sidewalk of Patton Avenue. He scanned the street and started walking west, pulling out his cell phone to make a call he did not want to make.

  CHAPTER 31

  Protective Custody

  “Am, I being held in protective custody?” Lucile Devroe asked. She lay beneath a set of tan sheets and had yet to open her eyes for daytime use. She wore one of his white T-shirts. That was all.

  They were in Segal’s apartment, where he stayed for the morning, ostensibly to update reports away from the distractions of the squad room. To be sure, he had reporting to do on the rapid developments in a case that had started simply enough with the body of one man floating in the river. Now, it was quite complex. Well, more than complex. It was a mess. The captain had barked at him to “tie up loose ends.” That was a laugh. A huge snarl of loose threads was more like it. Not only that. With various federal agencies involved, he knew that anything he committed to writing would be scrutinized and possibly used as evidence against him. It made him nervous.

  And yet, on a deeper level, from his decades of experience, he felt confident that it all somehow made sense and that he and Dinah had the ability to figure it out. That was the payoff for all of this. To be the ones to put all the pieces together and to be the first to see the truth of the picture. The more complex and difficult the pieces, the more beautiful and profound the moment when they clicked into place.

  With Dr. Gold, he had explained this feeling of security in solving cases more than once.

  The first time, she’d asked him, “Why do you think you carry those old books around with you all the time?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I like to read in my spare time. It makes me feel good.”

  “But why those particular books?”

  “I don’t know. They’re good books. Things make sense in these books.”

  “I think you’re on to something there. I think your basic perception of the world is that things need to make sense. Things happen for a reason, if only you can figure it out. And you’re the person who’s supposed to figure those things out.” Dr. Gold sighed.

  “I guess that’s my job.”

  “But you can’t see the reason for getting shot,” Dr. Gold said.

  Segal said nothing.

  Dr. Gold spoke gently. “Segal, your body is healing. You are making great progress on dealing with PTSD. This is your last hurdle. You had one of your core beliefs blown away on that day. You’re not sure the world does make sense anymore, at least in the way you used to think. The remainder of your life will come anyway, and you’ll figure out how it makes sense when it does.”

  For the first time in a long while, he felt and believed that himself. Based on what exactly, he wasn’t sure. Having Lucile Devroe in his bed made him more certain than anything else. Life came together. Mostly for the “good.”

  He had risen early and resisted the temptation to check news or email, as he generally did to start his day. He had slipped out on the balcony with his laptop and phone and orange juice and begun to type away. On this morning, his apartment was not without distractions. Lucile had awakened and called to him, and the task of writing was no competition for what he saw when he looked toward the bed. And there he had returned. After some time, he was dressed and passing the bed again when Lucile asked the question about protective custody. He was trying to frame a reply that contained both lighthearted humor and sincere affection when his cell phone sounded from the table on the balcony.

  He stepped through the sliding glass door. As he picked it up, he said “Crap” under his breath. He saw it was Dinah, and he saw he’d missed a call from her a few minutes earlier. How often had he stressed the importance of partners being available to each other?

  Dinah said, “Segal, I need you to pick me up. I got a look at the shooter. We need to follow up, and I don’t have wheels.” She told him her location and asked how soon he could be there.

  “Five minutes, tops,” was his answer.

  Four and a half minutes later, Segal pulled up in front of the restaurant where Dinah had taken refuge. She flew out and joined him, her bare legs doing a scissor kick when she jumped in.

  “We need to turn around. Our guy was headed west on Patton,” she said, all business.

  Segal nodded at the way she was dressed, before shifting into gear and moving out.

  She noticed and said, “I don’t have my piece or my badge with me. This thing came on fast. I could either follow or lose the guy. I followed.”

  “Sort of a come-as-you-are kind of affair,” Segal said as he swung around the block. He didn’t feel like giving any lectures this morning. In the first place, she already knew she had taken a chance and almost found out the hard way what the consequences could be. Second, he did not feel on especially high moral ground, having missed her first call for assistance. Mostly though, he wanted to hear what had gone down. “When you saw the guy, did he see you?”

  “Not at first. Later on, he did for sure. I’ll give you details in a minute. Right now, let’s see if we can get any clues where this guy was headed.”

  After he got them pointed the right way on Patton, they cruised down three or four blocks before Dinah said, “Turn left here. I got a call from one of the chess players at the park. He thought he saw the guy hang a left, definitely down one of these streets. Trouble is, you can barely see from where the boards are.”

  Segal did as she told him, taking them onto one of those odd, mixed streets that had probably been residential until a few years ago. Much of it still was. In the first block off Patton Avenue, businesses had displaced some of the homes, and other homes had been converted into offices for doctors and accountants.

  They cruised down the block on high alert but saw no sign of their man. The second block was more solidly residential, mostly large houses, many broken into apartments.

  “What do you think?” Segal asked.

  “I think we’re going too slow,” Dinah said. “Let’s not attract attention.”

  He saw she was right and sped up a little.

  Then he pointed.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  In front of a nondescript house on the left was an old and majestic oak tree, and on the topmost branch, a large crow perched. Segal tried to keep his head forward as they drove by. Dinah, who was less visible from the house, ducked down. She read the house number out loud.

  “Turn left at the corner,” Dinah said. “I think an alley runs behind these houses.”

  “If you told me a week ago we’d be taking our cues from crows, I would have thought you were crazy,” he said. He turned into the alley. He let the tires roll slowly, and when they approached the rear of the house in question, he saw something glinting up in a tree. In a small black walnut tree was a platform, much like the one Lucile had shown him on the Biltmore Estate.

  They circled and made one more pass in front on the street. Segal explained about the platform. “Let’s get to the station and look up some information on that house,” he said.

  “Get me a bagel on the way,” Dinah said. �
�Sesame seed. Toasted. Cream cheese.” She finally settled in the seat and blew out a long breath of decompression.

  Segal didn’t press her until he put a bagel and a bottle of juice in her hands and they were at the station. She wolfed the food, still in her shorts and tank top. He wanted a detailed account, and he planned to hash out how this helped shape the picture.

  With her cheeks full, she recounted the call from the hot dog vendor and the first part of her pursuit. “Then I turned onto Battery Park, and thank God Mattie was there. That was the only way I knew to follow him into Wall Street.” She described how going into Wall Street brought her back to the creepy feeling of street patrols in Afghanistan. “Then I never would have seen him on top of the parking garage if Mattie hadn’t called.”

  “Yeah, thank God for Mattie,” Segal echoed. His brain traced a shadow in his mind. There was something odd about that detail. After a moment, he said, “You know, I was thinking about that list of people we came up with the other day. The street people we asked to be on the lookout.”

  Dinah nodded; her mouth crammed with bagel.

  “I don’t remember putting Mattie’s name there.”

  She swallowed. “Mattie wasn’t on the original list. I assumed you thought of her later.”

  Segal’s eyes narrowed. “Dinah, I didn’t call her. Are you saying you didn’t either?”

  “Nope.” She cleared her last bite of bagel and took a drag on the juice bottle. “Then, to ask the obvious question, how did she know what was going on? How did she know I would be tracking this particular guy on this particular morning?”

  Segal had the sense they had just been handed a major piece of the puzzle. It would take some care to use it correctly. He thought about Mattie, what he did know about her, what he didn’t know, and how he felt about it all. What he did know was very little. She came and went, as many musicians do. Come to think of it, he didn’t have a clue about her last name. What he felt about her, though, was much more than facts could bring to the table. He felt she followed a path of her own—her own style of dress, her own style of music. There was a solidness to it and a depth that always struck him as unique in an intelligent and self-assured way. It was as if Mattie was aware of things others didn’t see or experience and she was letting them in on the secret one musical note at a time.

  Then Segal thought of the night of the roller derby match. “How well does Mattie know Emily Elah?”

  “They’re friends,” Dinah said. “It was Mattie who sent Emily and Suzie to me for protection.”

  “I saw Mattie talking to Emily Elah at your roller derby match. It didn’t seem like a casual conversation either.”

  Dinah moved her jaw side to side as if it were aching. “This is Asheville,” she said. “People know people.”

  Strange as it sounded, he understood what she meant. It was a characteristic of the city that locals cultivated acquaintances with a wide range of people with various backgrounds and interests, as if they were building and storing collections. It was one of the things that added strength and vigor and character to the place; a web of people interconnected in all sorts of ways. “Yeah. People know people. I wonder what people Miss Mattie knows?” Segal asked.

  At that point, a uniformed officer came in and handed Dinah a piece of paper. It was the information on the house. It listed the deed holder and details about the last time the property had changed hands.

  “I already called the owner like you asked,” the officer said. “She told me she leased the place to a security company a few weeks ago. Here’s the name.” He slid a piece of notepaper across the table.

  Dinah tapped it with her finger and slid it to Segal.

  Segal sighed and put his hands over his ears. “I guess I’ll go up and explain to the captain why we should raid a house in downtown Asheville because we saw a crow in a tree.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Den of Thieves

  The man pulled at his green shirt as he walked down Patton Avenue at a medium pace, a pace calculated to move him along without drawing attention. He passed the federal building, surveyed the roof, checking for any unusual surveillance, whether by human, animal, or electronic device. He saw no movement up there. He was aware the building was inhabited mainly by the NOAA and several other seemingly innocuous agencies. You never knew who might be on site.

  He really wanted to know what that woman cop was up to, the one the roller derby fans called “the Dinosaur.” In the interim, he’d learned a bit about her. She was no longer tailing him. Of that he was certain. Something had put the fear of God in her. He felt pleased with himself for picking up on her and then losing her in that narrow street, although he realized there was an element of luck, too. That move at the restaurant was weird. Before going in, she’d answered a call, and there was no mistaking the fear that crossed her face. He wondered what the call was and thought again about that girl with the long legs up the street, the street singer who dressed so weird. There was something off about how she was standing there and talking into a phone at the same time as the cop, even though they weren’t in sight of each other. He had noticed her before, mostly because he liked girls with long legs. After that, he had lost her—the woman cop, that is; Dinah Rudisill. The colonel would not be pleased with that. He would not be pleased with any of this. Still, he wasn’t psychic. How was he supposed to know she would recognize him and start following? How was he supposed to know she would be tipped off to his maneuver up the side of the parking garage? And above all, how the hell was he supposed to know that she could walk down the stairs from a vegetarian restaurant and end up in a Patton Avenue bar? What kind of freak show city was this, anyway? Tough. It was the colonel’s own fault for not letting him eliminate the threats when he wanted to. That would surely change now.

  He kept moving, feeling the need to get off the streets before the woman cop enlisted other resources. He darted left and picked up the pace, even though his ribs were killing him. He walked past the house, pretended to drop something in the mailbox at the next corner, then did a half circle and walked up onto the porch. He saw no sign of anyone watching.

  At the door, he looked up at the security camera, expecting to hear the door unlock, but nothing happened, so he had to fumble for his key. They were getting slack and lazy in there, no one watching the security cameras on their own site. The military sucked in a lot of ways, but at least it was good for discipline—better than the private sector. The whole homeland was getting slack, and this town was a prime example. Good thing the countdown showed only a few days left. Then maybe he could get out of the country and into some real action someplace where they took things more seriously.

  When he pushed through the door, the technician called to him from another room. The rest of the house was too silent, seemed deserted. The place was getting to be a mess, beer cans on the dining room table, boxes packed and unpacked, and the man was glad that, one way or another, they would be leaving soon.

  He walked into the large room where the technician was working. When the house had been a private residence, it would have been the formal dining room. Now, instead of hosting guests or relatives, it was their main operational center. The technician had his monitoring equipment set up there. Taking up most of one wall was the big whiteboard where they posted pictures, wrote notes, and, in the upper right-hand corner, kept their daily countdown, lest anyone forget the timeline was tight. The technician, as usual, worked with a screen and a keyboard and barely acknowledged him when he came into the room.

  The man pulled out his phone and called up the archive of photos. “I’ve got a couple of pictures for you to print out,” he said. “One showing your girlfriend cop, and one of some hippy-chick. So far, the hippy-chick has not been on our radar.”

  This got the technician’s interest.

  As the man knew well, the technician had developed quite a thing for Dinah. The technician took the phone and downloaded the pictures of Dinah and Mattie to his computer. He exported
them to the printer, then walked over to retrieve the first as it emerged. He held up the shot of Dinah and admired it, even sighing a little. “Shorts and a tank top,” he said. “Daddy like.”

  The man frowned and went into the kitchen for a bottle of grapefruit juice.

  The tech’s voice followed him. “What were you doing? Waiting outside the gym to get me some good pics?”

  The man returned. He took a drink and checked the monitor for the house security cameras. “No, I think she was hanging out waiting for me somewhere. Either that or someone put her on to me. One way or another, she was on my tail.”

  “On your tail? Jeez!” the technician said. Then he, too, checked the monitor. The technician panned out with one of the cameras and repositioned it to see more of the street.

  “Why’s that one off?” the man said, pointing to a blank square on the screen.

  The technician muttered something under his breath and then tilted a box with several cable connections so he could see the back. He pushed on one of the cable connectors, and the square on the screen came to life.

  It was the colonel’s face looking into the lens; intense blue eyes and short neat hair. The technician jumped.

  In the background of the video feed, the man could see a white van in the parking place off the alley. It was the camera at the rear of the house.

  “Looks like the colonel is home,” the tech said. He hit the button to unlock the back door.

  A moment later, the colonel was in the room with them, followed by the fourth man of their crew. The colonel set his briefcase on the table and opened it. “You have pictures for me?”

  “Yes,” the tech said, handing them over.

  “What do you have to report?” he asked when no one spoke up.