Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  He tried to conceive of the layout, and decided the kitchen would be at the back of the house, the bedrooms and bath to his left.

  He moved to his right and through an open doorway.

  Another, even smaller, room.

  The dull light, with its bizarre pattern caused by the gauze, played over the walls and across the table—a dining table, he realized. It was littered with opened envelopes, stamps, a box of paper clips, and a yellow legal pad.

  But no briefcase.

  Kort edged past the table toward the end used as a desk. Where was it? Daggett couldn’t have brought it into the bedroom with him! Was he that careful with it?

  He trained the soft light to the floor. He hadn’t realized how nervous he would feel. Sweat trickled down his ribs.

  Standing on edge, alongside the end chair—exactly as it would be if you had worked with it, closed it, and put it aside—was Daggett’s briefcase. It was closed.

  Kort had hoped to find it open.

  He hoisted it quietly to the table, surprised by its substantial weight, and studied the front latches and lock combination.

  The latches were springed. They would make noise as they snapped opened if he wasn’t careful.

  Was it locked? He was about to try one of the latches when the dim light caught the combination number and froze him:

  102003

  Ten-twenty-three: A number as significant to Anthony Kort as to Cam Daggett.

  He was certain it would open.

  He blocked the latches with his thumbs, and opened the briefcase. He stuffed the light into his mouth and began to read.

  A gold mine! On top of all the papers, scribbled hastily in pencil, he read the name of his bed-and-breakfast and the address. Although he should have been prepared for this, he wasn’t. A drip of his sweat splattered onto a red folder. Kort mopped it up frantically: he had no intention of leaving a calling card behind. It didn’t dry very well. It wrinkled the paper. He leafed through the briefcase’s contents, one by one, his attention fixed on the sweat-stained folder. Examining the file marked “Rosen” he found three black-and-white police artist’s sketches of his face—surprisingly accurate. There was a grainy photograph of Monique in a scarf and glasses. Dozens of reports, notes, memos, and message slips.

  He removed the red folder and turned it over. Printed in black block letters around the entire perimeter of the envelope were the words EYES ONLY.

  The folder had been last signed off by Richard Mumford. Daggett’s name was printed on a cover sheet, his signature alongside.

  Kort carefully opened the envelope’s string fastener and withdrew the material. The first things he came across were the itineraries! He recognized the names: Mosner, Goldenbaum, Sandhurst, Grady, Fitzmaurice, Savile. He had no interest in flight numbers or carriers, he wanted only the dates of arrival and departure. Four of the itineraries shared a common date: September 21. The thrill of his discovery filled him with an uncanny sense of power. Although arriving on different days, two were departing the evening of the twenty-first. It had to be the twenty-first.

  He was going to kill Mosner in two days.

  As he quickly scanned the other papers in the briefcase, he suddenly felt ill. The more he read, the more it seemed impossible. He paid no attention to time. The minutes rushed by. Impossible! Daggett knew everything! This memo covered the possibility of explosives on board flight 64. The next addressed the repeated simulator tests at Duhning. There was a photo of Monique. They had a detailed explanation—even a drawing—of Bernard’s detonator. What nearly took his breath away was the FAA lab analysis of the fire extinguisher: carbon monoxide. They knew everything! Or did they? Did they know his target? The actual target? If they knew his target, he was finished. All his preparation would prove useless. They would be sitting at the airport waiting for him. There would be no way to do what it was he had come to do. He might as well be dead.

  The living room light came on. It cast a white rectangle of light into this small dining room. In one clean motion, Kort extinguished the beam of his flashlight and quietly closed the briefcase, leaving it on the table. He crouched, took two steps toward the invading harshness of light, looked quickly into the living room, and, seeing no one, charged through the light and reached the far wall, tucking himself behind the room’s open door.

  In one quick look at the briefcase, he saw that a section of the red folder protruded from its edge. It appeared hastily closed.

  He heard the wheelchair before he saw the boy. The sound of wheels running on carpet was distinctive. He hoped for the sound of the television next. He hoped for a bout of boyish insomnia to be filled with the late, late show so he might be given the cover of noise to escape out the back. But as the boy’s mechanical shadow stretched, turned, and filled this room like hand games on a projectionist’s screen, Kort realized the boy’s destination was the kitchen beyond, a course that would require he pass within a foot or two.

  The wheelchair’s complex shadow shrank as the boy propelled himself through the doorway and into this room. Kort changed his plan: Once the boy was in the kitchen he would return the briefcase to the carpet and make for the front door.

  The boy stopped.

  He looked to his right—toward the briefcase—straightened his head, and sniffed the air. “Carrie?” he said softly.

  The cigarettes! Kort had smoked half a pack at the donut shop.

  The boy’s head rotated slowly to his left. Kort tightened his fist, waiting. At the moment they met eyes, Kort slugged him and crushed that nose. The kid’s head snapped back and went slack.

  He hurried to the briefcase, reopened it, ordered the contents, and was placing it onto the carpet when the idea struck him with a ferocity that he equated with genius. What better way to insure he controlled the operation from here on? He let go of the briefcase and headed over to the boy.

  He was heavier than he would have guessed. But then again, dead weight always felt heavier.

  25

  * * *

  Daggett awakened earlier than usual, charged with a renewed energy from his victory with Mumford, and fully aware of the responsibility now placed upon him. He decided a morning run was in order. One or more of the chemical executives was Kort’s intended target. Who, and how Kort intended to kill him—them—remained a mystery he had less than seventy-two hours to solve.

  He took little notice of the spectacular sunrise, the melodious trumpeting of the songbirds that nested in his neighbor’s apple tree, or the pungent fragrance of fresh-cut grass that hung heavily in the air. Dressed for his run, he passed Duncan’s room quietly and slipped out the front door, as always, equally quietly. Just after six, there was very little activity, except that of fellow runners, their faces, even their clothing, familiar, their names unknown. He put in an effortless four miles, paying little attention to his route, even less to the color and magnificence of the sharp September day, instead calculating and recalculating where to focus his energies and resources.

  His first sign that something might be wrong came when Duncan’s alarm rang out and failed to be silenced. Daggett, by this time dressed and in the process of knotting his tie, investigated. Finding his son’s room empty, the bed slept in, he stopped the alarm and called out, “Dunc?” The first time he tried this, it was delivered with a father’s exploratory uncertainty. There was a half-bath down the hall; he didn’t want to intrude on the boy’s privacy. But as he stepped back into the hallway, he saw this door standing open, and the second time he called his son’s name it carried with it an added degree of concern. One of Daggett’s greatest fears was his son striking his head while climbing off the toilet.

  The hallway bathroom was empty.

  The chin-up bar—that had to be it. “Duncan?” he called out stridently, as his step quickened and the first warm flush of worry crept electrically over his skin. His imagination was running wild by the time he charged around the corner and crashed into the wheelchair. He fell fully over it, rode it int
o the wall, and collapsed with it. His worry transformed itself into anger—it wasn’t the first time Duncan had abandoned his chair with no regard for his father. But the anger gave way to pure terror as his hand went sticky with room-temperature blood. He sat there on the floor, the overturned wheelchair trapping his legs, staring with stunned horror at his open hand. Later, he would not remember anything at all about the next few minutes. Minutes spent frantically searching every conceivable spot his boy might be found.

  The cop in him soon took over. Blood in the chair. He checked the kitchen thinking, The boy comes into the kitchen for a midnight snack, cuts himself … but he found no knife, no sign in the kitchen of Duncan having been there at all. He’s in bed; he awakens to a bloody nose, regular occurrence for him; he heads to the kitchen for some ice. He’s in his independent phase and doesn’t want to wake me.

  It wasn’t until he righted the overturned wheelchair, five? ten? twenty? minutes later, that he found the hand-scrawled note:

  I’ve got him now. Don’t DO anything. Nothing at all.

  —Anthony Kort

  He couldn’t think. His mind filled too fast with thought and played the devilish trick on him of shutting down completely. Too much water to get down the drain, he overflowed, spilling thought, unable to contain it, unable even to mop it up. His first clear thought was: The nerve of the man to sign the note.

  Don’t DO anything. Nothing at all.

  He looked at his watch. He considered calling Mumford immediately, but as quickly ruled it out. He considered calling Carrie, but to what end? He stumbled around the house for the better part of the next hour, unable to sit down, unable to stop walking, unable to pick up the phone. He bumped into furniture and into doors, not seeing clearly through his tears. He ran water, forgetting to turn it off. Twice he stopped before a mirror and contemplated his image, but was too shaken by the face he saw there. One of the mirrors now lay broken in pieces on the floor. He paced the small house endlessly, his mind churning with possible options. Where once existed the shrewd mind of an experienced investigator was now the stomach-knotted panic of a father.

  He checked his watch once again. The minutes ticked off relentlessly. Kort was out there planning something. Duncan was … Could he afford to stop the investigation? To call in sick? He thought not. People knew him too well. Nothing would stop him at this point. It would draw far more attention to him if he missed work, than if he showed up and looked busy. He felt crushed by the weight of the reality of the situation: If he now stalled the investigation, Kort was likely to succeed with whatever it was he had planned, and Duncan would live. Or would he? If he continued with the investigation, if he made enough headway to actually stop Kort, then someone else—perhaps many, many people—would be spared. He couldn’t forget the gymnasium filled with the personal items of 1023’s victims. He couldn’t ignore the devastation caused by the crash of flight 64. And thinking about it now, he couldn’t believe that a man like Kort would spare anyone, even a young boy like Duncan.

  His decision made, he reached for the phone and told Mrs. Kiyak to take the day off. The drive to Buzzard Point had never taken so long.

  26

  * * *

  Having spent the wee morning hours driving circles around the beltway with a paralyzed boy gagged and bound on the floor of the Toyota’s backseat, an anxious Anthony Kort headed into the Virginia suburb where Caroline had taken him house-hunting. After much reflection, this seemed the logical answer to his dilemma: He would use one of the houses that she had shown him as a safe house. There simply wasn’t time to go through the effort of starting the renting process all over again—especially with the boy in the backseat, especially given the FBI had a pretty good sketch of him, especially given his timetable. Having raided the bed-and-breakfast, the FBI would be expecting him to seek a roof over his head. They could be watching, or would have already alerted, hotels, motels, rooming houses, perhaps even property management firms like Caroline’s. There wasn’t a lot of choice: he had to leave the boy off somewhere and get to the business at hand. He would have to improvise.

  Early, early morning, just at sunrise, seemed to him the best time to try it. Any earlier and the darkness itself might raise a person’s curiosity. But right at sunrise is when people experience some of their deepest sleep, and with the air gray and grainy in the limited light, the boy in his arms might appear no more than an awkward bundle from a distance.

  “We seldom show this one,” he recalled Caroline’s having told him, though finding the cabin took him the better part of forty minutes. As he pulled down the long twisting drive lined with out-of-bloom dogwood, lilac, and an unbelievably huge hedge of azalea, his recollection of its near complete isolation proved accurate. The drive was potholed. A low stone wall marking the western boundary fronted a dense acreage of wood. Ahead, the road swung right, then turned abruptly left, and the gravel became deeper under the tires. And there it was. A two-room cabin situated on the far end of a former estate that had since been subdivided, the tiny dwelling wasn’t large enough for a family, was too remote for most young couples. It was so off the beaten track that someone had installed a satellite dish. Seeing it again for only the second time (she had dropped it from her list of repeat attempts to find him a place), he felt mildly confident the cabin would not be shown in the next day or so—at least this was what he convinced himself of as he sat quietly listening to the car engine cool, getting up his nerve to break in.

  Time was everything.

  27

  * * *

  How to contact her?

  The FBI would have her apartment phone trace-and-trapped, her BMW bugged or under tight surveillance, her office watched. It was a matter of isolating those few moments when she would not be under surveillance, and then deciding if he could find any way safely in and out. A few ideas came to mind.

  First, the elevators at her apartment complex. She would ride an elevator from her apartment to the parking garage, and it seemed unlikely that the FBI would have any way of listening in on her once she was inside the elevator. They would know her every move in her apartment; they would follow her car; but in between?

  Likewise, in the BMW between her apartment and office building, they could follow—perhaps even listen in—but only from a distance.

  Her office would be treated the same way: They would know when she entered and left; they might even have her phone wired; but without an agent lording over her, they could not follow her every move. It was unthinkable they would follow her into a restroom.

  All windows of opportunity, but none without risk.

  Killing her might be easier.

  She had the only key to the storage locker that held Bernard’s fire extinguisher. He needed her.

  He had to think of something.

  He arrived at the modeling agency of Bernstein and Wright five minutes before the appointment he had scheduled. He spent these five minutes leafing through dozens of photographs, from which he singled out three candidates who had Monique’s general look and body. His first choice turned out to be pregnant. Apologies all around. “She should have been pulled from the book months ago.”

  His second choice agreed to come right over to discuss the “shoot.” For the sake of pretense, Kort was a free-lance fashion photographer.

  Cindy Axtell arrived twenty minutes later. The face was perfect, the bust a little flat, the hair too short, but that could be dealt with. At his request, they were shown to a conference room where they could discuss the job “in private.”

  He closed the door. “Miss Axtell, I selected you in part because your resumé included a few minor acting credits. I’m short on time, so I’m going to be very direct. I am not a photographer. No fear,” he said, raising his hand. “I’m not what you’re thinking. Nothing like that. What I have in mind will require some acting skills, and I’m prepared to pay for that. I can only hope there is a touch of romance in your heart, for without it, I doubt you will agree to what it is I hav
e to propose.”

  She crossed her arms and her legs, immediately suspicious. She looked like an insect fighting off the cold. “I’m listening, but not for long.”

  “Nothing sexual whatsoever. Furthermore, you get to spend the entire afternoon driving a brand new BMW around town.”

  Now he had her.

  “Before going any further, I have to know right now whether or not you are seriously interested in the work. As I said, I have very little time. I can’t waste it on you unless you’re willing to go forward.”

  “Interested in what?” she insisted.

  “Acting. An afternoon of acting is all. Nothing sexual. Completely alone. Twice your going rate. Four hours minimum. Cash, up front.” That raised her eyebrows.

  “Cash?” He nodded. “You’ll double my rate?” He gave another nod. She studied him. “There’s something in the car, isn’t there? Drugs, something like that? No thanks. I don’t think so.” She reached out for her tiny purse.

  “Drugs?” He laughed. “You don’t like the car, you leave it wherever, and whenever you want. You can keep the keys or throw them away. I don’t care.” He could see he had her good and confused. He decided to push on. “There’s a woman I’m very much in love with. She is also in love with me. Her husband is having her every move watched. He’s very rich and he hasn’t accepted their separation well at all. You may know the type.”

  She squinted, but he saw sympathy behind the attempt. He exhaled and relaxed.

  He had her in the palm of his hand.

  Monique braced herself for another wave of panic.

  It came as a burning, twisting contraction that nearly buckled her over. She understood the importance of maintaining an appearance of calm, of continuing with her day-to-day activities, of avoiding paranoia. At the same time she saw conspiracy over her shoulder at every turn: the garbage man; the randomly parked car; the repairman fixing the office copier. All suspects.