by Jon Land
A hand grasped her ankle. Panicked, Liz kicked away desperately, then looked down. Blaine was directly beneath her, bubbles from his severed hose churning up the muck and stirring the blackness. Another section of the barbed wire that had killed Rentz’s divers had snared him as well.
Liz dropped down and pushed her regulator into his mouth. He drank the air in gratefully, his breathing returning to normal as she began carefully to extract him from the tangle of steel. Her eyes wandered slightly and made out the remains of more bodies, some little more than skeletons, caught by the wire and blanketed by silt. The barbed wire waited like a great basking monster. Once snared, there was almost nothing a diver could do to free himself, especially if his air hose was punctured. Panic, inevitably, would follow, and a legend was born. She imagined what a person would feel dying that way and shuddered, as she worked Blaine free of the final prongs.
When McCracken was finally freed, he and Liz started upward, steering over the deadly entrapment of wire that seemed to occupy the whole center of the lake’s floor. Only a few feet beyond it, and already the tangle of silt and rusted metal was invisible again, ready to sink back into the bottom to await the next unlucky victim.
They exchanged breaths from her mouthpiece on the way up and broke the surface together ten yards from Sal Belamo’s outboard.
“I guess this makes us even,” Liz told him as they treaded water facing each other.
“Not exactly,” Blaine corrected. “You haven’t given me mouth-to-mouth yet.”
“I saw Rentz’s divers down there,” she said, recalling their severed air hoses and wet suits marred by puncture wounds. “Some of the others too. It was the barbed wire that killed them, not a monster.”
“You sound relieved.”
“I am.”
“Don’t be,” Blaine warned. “That barbed wire was sprung off some kind of trap.”
“A trap?”
“Pretty simple process: just a few springs and pulleys, and very easy to disguise with all the silt down there.”
“Sprung by trip wires?”
“You know your stuff.”
“Not really; I thought I felt one just before the barbed wire snapped out at me.”
“There you go.” Blaine nodded.
“The question is why. What’s down there that somebody doesn’t want found?”
Blaine fingered the diving pouch on his waist. “I’ll show you when we get inside.”
They had barely reached shore when Liz happened to look up and caught a glimpse of a figure in the swirling mist on the rise on the western side of the lake. A broad-shouldered man with very strong features that included a gaunt face and what looked like a thick handlebar mustache visible under a wide-brimmed hat. Liz glanced down to get her footing, and when she looked up again the figure had disappeared.
“What is it?” Blaine asked, noticing her stiffen.
“I thought I saw a man watching us from up there.”
“A man?”
“Well, not exactly. More like a …”
Blaine followed her line of vision with no result. “A what?” he prodded.
“A ghost.” Liz shrugged and started on again.
TWENTY-FIVE
Will Thatch left Crest Haven Memorial Park with a list of the eight funerals that had taken place the morning Jack Tyrell paid his visit. He took a New Jersey Transit local back to the city and walked to the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue to find the obituaries.
Some of the newspapers were being transferred onto microfilm and took a while to track down, lengthening what should have been a short process. Normally Will wouldn’t have minded, having nothing but time. But today he was impatient, because he had a job to do. And why not? He’d waited twenty-five years for this opportunity and couldn’t even be sure the obituaries would provide any clue at all. Maybe Jack Tyrell had come to the cemetery just to meet with the four men he had ultimately murdered.
No, Will decided, meeting in the open didn’t fit his style at all, even if it was in a cemetery. Tyrell hadn’t been expecting the four men to appear any more than they had been expecting to die.
The setting was convenient, if nothing else.
The thing that kept nagging at Will was the men with official-looking IDs who had shown up at Crest Haven later the day of the murders and left with the bodies in tow. They didn’t care what Sunderwick had to say because there was nothing he could tell them that they didn’t already know. That much was clear.
What wasn’t clear was who they were and what their connection to Jack Tyrell was. If they had been on his trail, if those were their men he had buried, why did the whole incident suddenly become hands-off to the media?
Will didn’t know what was going on here, but it had to lie somewhere in the obituaries for those buried that morning just over a month ago. He made photostats and studied them in the library for what seemed like and then became hours. None of the three women and five men had been members of Midnight Run; Will felt certain of that much. Four had died of old age, two from illness; one had been in a car accident and one had been shot to death.
What was he missing?
Will checked their ages again, remembering a picture that hung on his memory wall, as faded and curled as all the rest of them.
What if …
The thought had crossed his mind a long time ago, dismissed because it had no foundation. Now he started to wonder.
Will gathered up the photostats and rushed for the exit. Get back to his room, tear the picture from the wall, and see if his suspicions had any foundation. If they did, oh boy, things were going to be even worse than he originally thought.
He jogged almost the whole way back to the hotel, panting and sweating as he pounded up the stairs. Opened up his door intending to head straight to his memory wall.
There was a man already hovering before it, another standing by the window. Both well dressed, with holster bulges just inside their hips.
“Close the door, please,” the one by the window said.
Will did as he was told, trying to remember if Sunderwick had described the men who had come for the bodies.
“Nice collection,” the man near his memory wall said.
“Mean anything to you?” Will wondered.
“Should it?” the one near the window, the bigger one, asked him.
Will shrugged. “It’s just that if you’re thieves, I think you’re going to be disappointed.”
“We want to talk to you about Jack Tyrell,” said the smaller man.
“Go ahead.”
“You seem to have quite an interest in him.”
“With good reason.”
“Really?”
“I let him get away.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Third row from the right, fourth picture down,” Will said.
The man at the wall shuffled sideways and looked closely at the yellowed tear sheet. “This is you?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
“Had him right in my hand and let him get away.” Will tried to make himself laugh. “You boys come all this way without knowing who I am?”
“We knew you were FBI,” the bigger one said.
“We didn’t know you had a connection to Tyrell,” added the smaller one. “Your interest in him makes sense now.”
“So now that you know my connection, how about telling me yours?”
The man by the wall moved toward Will. “What we want to know is where you went after you left the cemetery this morning.”
“It really matter to you?”
“Who else you might have spoken with on this subject,” elaborated the larger man.
Will looked past the smaller man toward the picture he had been thinking of at the library. Couldn’t get a close enough look at it from this far away. He turned toward the bed, the blue-steel .38 tucked neatly beneath the mattress.
“You mind if I sit d
own first? I’m a little tired.”
“Go ahead,” the smaller man said.
Will moved to the bed and sat down with his legs straddling the .38’s position. “I’ve got to figure we’re colleagues on this. I mean, you guys must be looking for Tyrell too, right?”
“Sure.”
“The four guys he buried in Crest Haven were your people. They got close but must have underestimated him. Easy mistake to make. Am I figuring this right?”
“Who else did you speak to after you left the cemetery?” the smaller one asked.
“You boys mind telling me who you work for?”
“We’re colleagues, remember?”
“But you’re not Bureau. Hell, if you were Bureau you probably would have knocked instead of letting yourselves in.”
Will knew they were going to kill him. Find out everything he knew and then make it look like an accident. He inched his hand toward the mattress.
“Thing is, if you’re looking for Tyrell, I can help you. I can help you find him.”
“What makes you think we’re trying to find him?” the bigger man asked.
“How’d you find me?”
“It wasn’t hard. We can find anyone.”
“Nice to be good at something.”
The smaller man came a little closer. “Who else knows you went to the cemetery?”
“Maybe the Bureau’s on the case now.”
“You haven’t been there.”
“Maybe I called. One of those anonymous tips. Give up the man who left four bodies in the ground. Tell them Jackie Terror’s back.”
“It’s not their jurisdiction.”
“Making it yours,” Will said, just a snatch and grab from the .38 now. “What I’m still wondering is who you are.”
The smaller man poured some scotch into a dirty glass and brought it over to Will. “Why don’t you have a drink?”
Will took the glass. It wasn’t hard to make his hands tremble.
“Thanks.”
He guzzled it down, but it tasted terrible. Last thing in the world he wanted in his gut right now, for the first time in longer than he could remember.
Will held the empty glass upward. “’Nother be nice.”
The smaller man took it. “Who else knows Tyrell was in that cemetery?”
“You’re protecting him, aren’t you?”
“You’re making this hard,” said the bigger man. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“We want to find him as much as you.”
“In that case, you wouldn’t be wasting your time here with me now.”
The smaller man poured Will some more scotch and started to bring it over, the bigger man following his movements. One not watching, the other with a hand tied up with a glass.
Will went for the .38.
He yanked it from under the mattress in a motion too awkward to be threatening. The men didn’t realize what was happening until he brought it up, intending to do no more than hold them at bay. But the larger man went for his gun and the smaller man let the glass crash to the hotel room floor to go for his.
Will started firing. There was no real discretion to his aim, but at this distance there didn’t have to be. Instinct took over, and before he could think or breathe, both men were going down, blood spurting in all directions. They hit the floor as the .38’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
Will realized only then that he was still sitting on the bed. He rose with considerable effort, backed away, and moved to his memory wall. He stripped off the picture he’d remembered in the library and stuffed it into his pocket with the photocopied obituaries, as pushpins clattered across the floor.
The two men had stopped moving altogether by the time he started for the door. Blood spread in pools beneath them, mixing with the scotch near the smaller one. Will saw it had splattered against the wall behind the bigger man, barely visible amidst the mold and mildew.
Outside, Will didn’t leave the area, not right away. Dressed as he was in nondescript clothes, it was easy for him to blend into the scene, walk about the block without anyone giving him a second look.
From a corner pay phone, he made an anonymous call about hearing gunshots coming out of the National Hotel. The police were on the scene five minutes later, but that’s not who Will was waiting for.
They didn’t appear for another hour: a pair of well-dressed men in a sedan much shinier than police issue. They flashed their IDs to the officers who had cordoned off the scene and were passed straight through.
Will thought of Sunderwick telling his story to similar men at Crest Haven Memorial Park, only to have it ignored. He ventured close enough to copy down the license plate on their sedan. He still had friends, acquaintances at least, in law enforcement. The kind of people who could trace a plate for him. Maybe help Will figure out who was trying so hard to make sure Jackie Terror wasn’t caught at all.
3
STRATTON’S FOLLY
TWENTY-SIX
“Why would someone want to keep people out of the lake?” Liz asked Blaine when they were back inside the house, Sal Belamo standing guard outside in case whoever Liz had seen watching them from the hillside returned.
“To keep anyone from finding out what’s down there would be my guess.” With her help, he had just finished dressing the wounds inflicted by the barbed wire; nothing very deep, but painful all the same.
“Leaving us where?”
“With this for starters.”
Blaine laid the jagged piece of wood he’d snatched from the water on the kitchen table.
Liz studied it closely. “There’s something carved into it … .”
Blaine lifted the piece of wood up and moved to the counter. He found some vinegar and worked it around through the old grooves to reveal letters forming a name followed by a date:
H. CULBERTSON
January 1863
“It looks like some kind of plaque,” Liz said, as Blaine scrutinized the letters more closely.
“A mounting plaque,” Blaine acknowledged. “This must be the name of the builder and the date he delivered whatever it was mounted onto.”
“So what’s this have to do with my father?”
“I think he figured out what Rentz was up to. This might help us figure out the same thing.”
“Not alone it won’t.”
“I also found these,” Blaine said, and he produced the gold coins his bazooka had stirred up from the bottom.
Liz’s eyes bulged. “So there really is treasure under that lake … .”
Blaine joined her in gazing down at them. “Let’s find out.”
“The entrance is on the other side,” Liz said, when Blaine led her down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the rear of the National Archives building ninety minutes later.
“For tourists only,” Blaine told her. “You want to do some research, this is where you go.”
“Really?”
“Surprised?”
“Most of the men my father trained don’t have much use for research.”
“Hobby of mine,” Blaine quipped. “On weekends.”
“Most of the men my father trained have other ways to spend their weekends.”
Inside, after signing in, they went straight to the eleventh floor, where the military archives were housed. There Blaine explained to an archivist that they were looking for any reference to a master carpenter named H. Culbertson, circa 1862. The man didn’t look terribly optimistic about the prospects, explaining it would take some time to come up with all the required records, until Blaine produced a nondescript ID that looked like a library card. The archivist gave him a longer look, straightened his shoulders, and took his leave.
“Let’s go,” Blaine said, taking Liz’s arm gently.
“Where?”
“Central Reading Room, to wait for our material.”
“Man said it could take a while.”
“Half hour at most.”
“Because of that card you flashed him?”
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“It tends to quicken the process. Standard government issue.”
“There’s nothing standard or government about you.”
“I’ve got friends.”
“After six months away?”
“Cards like that don’t come with an expiration date.”
The archivist delivered a wheeled cart to them in the spacious, woodlined Central Reading Room forty minutes later. The cart contained a dozen sleeved containers called Hollinger boxes, packed with Northern military manifests from the Civil War listing the various orders and shipments produced to advance the war effort. The archivist had flagged a trio of instances where the name of H. Culbertson, a master carpenter on retainer to the North, came up. But none were from the time that fit the mounting plaque.
Blaine and Liz spent the next two hours seated across from each other at a long wooden desk, paging through the manifests in search of a delivery close to the January 1863 date. Blaine was halfway through his third book when he found it.
“A dozen heavy-load wagons,” he said suddenly, tightening his gaze at the manifest open in the shallow light before him. “According to this, Culbertson produced a dozen heavy-load wagons for a work order dated October 1862 and delivered them in January 1863 to a Colonel William Henry Stratton.”
Liz leaned closer and turned the book toward her. “Looks like Colonel Stratton took delivery of something else on the very same day,” she said.
“Four keg chests,” McCracken read.
“Keg chests?”
“Large strongboxes.”
“Perfect for carrying gold coins—is that what you’re thinking?”
“Especially since I saw what looked to be the remains of one of those keg chests on the bottom of your lake.”
On the second floor, they ordered the military records of William Henry Stratton from an archivist in the Microfilm Research Room. Once again the material was delivered to the Central Reading Room; only a single Hollinger box this time, twenty minutes later. But the results were considerably less impressive.