by Graeme Hurry
Ann didn’t ask why. She was a very good assistant, he thought, as he went out.
The cemetery was forty miles into the countryside. It was early spring and the fields he passed were dusted with wildflowers, the leaves on the trees a brilliant new lime green.
The stone marker had been put in place just three days before. It was a nice one, not pretentious but elegant all the same. He should have brought flowers, he realized, a plant maybe. He’d remember next time. He bent down and ran his hand over the granite and the message engraved on it: “Richard Atherton, bright spirit, gone too soon.”
“I haven’t done very well by you, have I, Rick. I took this job because she was here. Ironic they put her so close to you, isn’t it? I was supposed to keep an eye on her. To make sure she never had the chance to do to anyone what she did to you. Top marks in the failure department. It’s like she was waiting for me to show up. Maybe she was.”
He stood up and glanced around. A pretty place it was, old oaks and landscaped lawns. Even the elm tree that had been split in two by lightning had somehow survived and extended its branches of green leaves.
“Any thoughts, best brother? I’m bone dry in that department. Like the bottom fell out of my life, you want to know, when you died, and I’m in a cell every bit the way Sammy Peters was, only this one’s inside my head and there’s no way out.”
On impulse he walked over to the small lily pond that lay thirty yards away. The surface was smooth and still in the mid afternoon light. A sudden splash marked where a frog had jumped in, its shape invisible before on the lily pad.
Like the bottom fell out.
He almost laughed at the thoughts that rushed into his brain. He spun around and went back to his brother’s grave.
“Thanks, Rick. I think I know how she did it. I think I know! I’ll be back soon and tell you all about it.”
He exceeded the speed limit for back country roads but no one stopped him.
“Ann, no interruption for a half hour,” he said as he rushed into the office. “This time, I mean none, zip, even if it’s the President calling.”
“You got it.”
Once inside his office he locked the door and went over to his wall safe and opened it. He hadn’t touched the key when he’d checked the safe earlier. He grabbed a tissue from the box on his desk, lifted the key out and laid it on the desk. He took a kit from his file cabinet and dusted the key for fingerprints. There weren’t any, just as he had expected.
“Round one, success, Rick!”
He went back to the safe. The interior was hard plate steel, solidly built, just the way it was supposed to be, twelve inches high, nine inches wide and three and a half inches deep. He knew it was a bent box, no welding, designed specifically to mount within a wall space and anchored to support studs. He got the small flashlight he kept in the top drawer of his desk and used it to study the inside, moving his fingers over all the surfaces again. He smiled with quiet satisfaction.
“Round two, success. You’re my inspiration, Rick, old boy.”
He opened his door and to his secretary’s surprise walked over the left side of her desk and began exploring the wall facing his office with his hands. He sighed in frustration, and then noticed a hairline crack in the baseboard. He bent down to look. There were two cracks, ten inches apart, in line with panel strips.
“Ann, hand me your letter opener.”
“Don’t have one,” she said, opening the top drawer of her desk. “Someone took off with it. I use a bread knife for now.”
He looked up as she handed over a knife he was pretty sure he could use to skewer more than one felon at a time, but it would do the job. He wedged it under the section between the two cracks. Something clicked and the panels slid aside. The back of the safe appeared several feet above.
He sat back on his heels, astonished. So was Ann.
“What on earth?” she said.
The warden laughed in spite of himself. “To think I’m using a safe that’s about as protected as if I’d left the door to it wide open. Call Maintenance. Tell them I want to see Bill Coyt. Wait. Make sure someone escorts him. Get Steward. He’s been working here as a correctional officer a long time, hasn’t he?”
“Six years.”
“You know everything. Good.”
He stood up. With sure motions he tapped the top and bottom. He wedged the knife into several points and tapped some more.
“Ann, come here, please. Keep your hand on the back plate. I’m going to push from the other side so catch it when it falls.”
Back in his office he gave a small punch inside the safe and the back fell out into Ann’s hands. He went back to her.
“Interesting. In its original form, this back plate was molded to the sides. Someone cut it out and then welded it at points, and not very well at that, more for speed than accuracy. You’re here in the morning before I am. Anyone else have a key to this office?”
“Well, there’s the guard out front, but he’s not here until I am,” Ann said. “The cleaning crew only shows up when I’m here, too. That leaves just Maintenance, for emergencies.”
“Yes. Of course.”
The phone rang and she handed the plate to Harry as she answered the ring and listened. “Bill Coyt just left for the day,” she told him as she hung up.
“Of course he has.”
He could explain some of it to the governor. The safe had been installed by the same company Bill Coyt had once worked for. The whole building had been built according to the company’s standard spec, including the paneling. The former salesman had known how to get to the safe in the warden’s office and he’d helped Sammy Peters escape. She’d been gone before Owens had arrived, the key replaced long before Ann got there. Perfectly timed. No one would question seeing Maintenance personnel anywhere. But why had he done it? The governor would ask.
It had to have been set up for a while. Sammy Peters had been transferred there a year ago. Bill had come on board two months ago, a month before Harry Atherton had arrived as the warden. What was their connection? It was obvious her threat of suicide and getting the light fixture installed had been a way for them to communicate and work out the details of the plan. But when the time to set everything in motion arrived, Bill still had to get past two electronic gates where he wasn’t supposed to be, and Sammy had to scale an electrified fence.
“Was there any kind of power failure this morning?” he asked Ann.
“Not that I know of. But I’ve been in conference a lot with my intern Meg here planning how to transition old files.” Meg smiled in acknowledgement from her corner desk, which was piled high with folders.
“I mean a report of one before you came in. Get Owens in here.”
The warden had the impression his first-line supervisor wasn’t happy to be there when he showed up. “Did we have a power failure before seven a.m.?” he asked him.
The man looked so uncomfortable Harry almost felt sorry for him. But not quite.
There was no answer. Then Owens gave in as the warden kept his own silence.
“I was told we’d had a situation. Maintenance fixed it right away. Like you saw, no way she could get out of there. We got a report of two short ones, a couple of minutes, that’s all.”
“When?”
“Around 4 a.m., I think.”
“How far apart?”
“I don’t know. Half hour, maybe. Li would know more.”
“She didn’t bring it up when I talked with her. Tell her to call me right away.”
Owens turned to leave with visible relief at getting out of the warden’s office.
“Wait. What caused the outages?” Harry asked.
Another pause. Then Owens faced him.
“We don’t know.”
“I want a better answer than that. I’m also wondering why you didn’t mention any of this before.”
“I told you, it was just a minute each time! Nothing could’ve happened! I wasn’t even here! And besides, n
o alarms went off!”
The man was sweating it, but right then the warden had other things to think about. “I expect there were no alarms because they run off the electric grid, as well. Find out,” was all he said, and Owens left the office so fast the door swayed back and forth in his wake.
“Nice. Looks as if maybe there was a little window of time for Ms. Peters,” said Ann.
“Yes, it does,” the warden mused as he went back into his office. He went over to the safe again and could see Meg at her desk in the next room. Twenty minutes, that was all it would have taken Bill Coyt, using a small blowtorch to open up the back of the safe, grabbing the key, then shifting the panels back. He would have let Sammy out, returned with the key. A quick spot welding, close the panels. Job done. No one to see.
But only ten minutes for Sammy to escape? He recalled his conversation with Bill Coyt and went back out to Ann. “Get hold of Owens again. Tell him to meet me at Sammy Peters’ cell. And to bring a ladder.”
He ordered an override on the electronic gates. They were, after all, guarding no one.
Owens looked as if he would rather be anywhere else. He was probably wondering why he hadn’t already been fired, the warden thought.
“I need to know how Sammy Peters got out. It wasn’t magic. Your Maintenance man told us Peters could have done a drop roll from the roof. That second power outage could have shut down the inside fence. Let’s say that happened. How did she get to the roof in the first place? That’s what I want to know. Put the ladder under the light.”
Owens did so without comment.
The warden climbed up and felt around the fixture, but the light was too bright. “Where’s power to this come from? Can you turn it off?”
“Yeah. Hold on.” Owens spoke into his phone and the room went pitch dark.
The warden took his flashlight out of the pocket of the light jacket he was wearing. He hadn’t taken it off when he returned from the cemetery. After some of the heat dissipated he played the light over the fixture. Using a small pair of wire cutters he pulled back a section of the mesh covering it. Then he pulled out Ann’s kitchen knife, which he’d kept with him.
“Some screwdriver,” Owens said.
“It’ll do the job,” the warden said. He handed the flashlight down to Owens. “Keep the beam on the right side.”
He’d seen what he was looking for, a small hinge that was molded almost seamlessly into the groove between the light and the ceiling. He wedged the knife into it. There was a small click and the fixture swung down, letting in late afternoon daylight through a short two-foot tunnel of foam core and strand board that Bill Coyt must have drilled out when he made the installation. The space was wide enough for a small-boned person, like the prisoner.
“I’m guessing getting to the roof wasn’t a problem for Sammy Peters. A quick boost from your Mr. Coyt and she was gone,” the warden said.
He climbed to the top of the ladder until he could survey outside. He could see most of the prison from there. The edge of the roof was ten feet away. The electrified fence was a good fifty yards further on, and another one with barbed wire beyond that. Not too far for a good runner, and no doubt Sammy Peters was just that. The warden was pretty sure he’d find a section of barbed wire had been cut. Nothing like an inside job.
He climbed down. “What about security monitoring, video surveillance?” he asked his supervisor, who still gaped at the hole in the ceiling.
Owens dithered and finally explained, with reluctance. “The monitors all over the prison went down, just for a minute, with that power outage.”
“And somehow no one thought to notify me?”
“It all came back on. I mean, we thought it did. Now we see there’s two cameras still not working.”
“Let me guess. The ones to the corridors. You left a lot out of our conversation earlier.”
“I just found out. There’s a repair guy coming out. I told you, I wasn’t here!”
“It doesn’t look as if anyone was around except the two people planning her escape.”
Back in his office, the warden mulled it over. Shutting down the power twice was no problem for Bill Coyt, once for Sammy Peters to get through the ceiling, with his help, and once when she went over the first, electrified, fence. It wasn’t until Owen did his rounds for the usual count that she was found missing at 6:45, the cell door open.
No doubt Bill was headed to wherever Sammy had gone or was going. Both could be out of reach. The two of them had developed some kind of connection, how or when or why he didn’t know. But he wanted to find them. He could leave it to the federal marshal, but that wasn’t the option he liked.
She said you’d be too late. That’s what Li told him Sammy Peters had predicted.
Too late for what?
The warden knew the answer before he finished the thought. She was a consistent killer. She’d make Bill Coyt her next victim, now that he’d helped her escape. That would be her way. The habit, and instinct, was too strong in her. But what could he do about it? Most men seemed to be fools when it came to her, just like Rick had been. It didn’t matter how smart they were. And Bill Coyt was smart.
Where had they met? It was a sure thing it was before her capture and the trial in Missouri. Or was it? He needed a history of the man, but the computer record on file was slim. Coyt had left sales two years before. He had spent some time in security before coming to the prison two months earlier. His last job had been in the Pacific Northwest guarding a lumber mill. Before that he’d worked at a shipyard.
But the file had what he needed, after all. Twelve months ago Bill Coyt had worked at the same court in Cleveland where Sammy Peters was convicted. He had been assigned as one of the guards making sure she didn’t escape, which was unlikely since she was in shackles. Plenty of time to talk. She’d reached him there. Put him in thrall. Maybe there was some magic involved, after all. She never failed.
He looked at the copy of the fax he’d sent Havers. The tower in the Tarot card reminded him of a lighthouse. He remembered one of Bill Coyt’s jobs had been at a shipyard. No. That would be too easy. Still, he looked it up again. The place was in Maine, and it had a lighthouse near it, but that was a thousand miles away, a dead-end.
He studied the file on Sammy Peters that Ann had printed out for him. It listed the men she’d killed and where. He’d had the map, dictionary and Tarot deck brought to his office, intending to send it all to the federal marshal. He opened the plastic bag they were in and took out the Tarot deck and thumbed through the cards.
To his surprise he found a card called The Tower in it. But it was different in style from all the others.
He picked up the fax again. The Tower card she’d sent him as a taunt matched the style of the rest of the deck he was looking at. The woman looked calm, her hands upright, as if she could break her fall. The man looked terrified. The tower was a nice representation of a prison.
But the card he had just taken out of the deck she’d left behind showed a drawing that had to be centuries old from the look of it. He didn’t know when, or need to know. He studied the picture. There was one person in it, alone. Leaves were falling that looked like blood. A small printed logo read “La Fouldre.” There was no tower, only a tree being struck by lightning.
Rick had always insisted the cards told the truth. Maybe not the truth, the warden thought, but they did offer a message, and he was certain then what that message was.
He buzzed Ann. “Get Federal Marshal Havers on the phone. Tell him it’s urgent.”
Waiting for the call to go through, he arranged the evidence in sequence in his mind. Yes, it still made sense. He picked up the phone before the first ring had finished.
“Havers speaking. What is it, Warden? I’m busy here. We have a killer on the loose, remember?”
“I think she’s close by. Still.”
“Really. That would be against her best interests, wouldn’t you say?”
“Listen to me. The places she�
��s left her victims. The next one begins with “R” and it’s going to be her last.”
“You know this because?”
“That Tarot card in the fax? Look at it. Called ‘The Tower.’ Her first one was in Tarrytown, NY. The next in Haverhill, MA. The next in—”
“I know the list, Atherton.”
“The places in sequence spell out the words ‘The Tower.’ All but the last letter, ‘R.’”
“Fine. So she’s planning victim number eight, surprise, surprise. So you’re saying you know where ‘R’ is?”
Was he right? He could only hope his hunch was, for Bill Coyt’s sake. The man would have a prison sentence waiting for him, but at least he’d be alive.
“She left her Tarot deck in the cell.”
“I’m waiting.”
“She’s done. As I said, this is her last. I don’t know why and I don’t care. But I think we’ll find her next victim is going to be buried alive in a cemetery. In Reardon, forty miles east of here.”
“I’m not sending my agents somewhere on a guess you have, or a Tarot card.”
“She had help getting out. Someone she met during her trial. Bill Coyt. He worked here in Maintenance. The fool’s on his way now, or he’s reached there already.”
“Why Reardon?”
“It’s close by. She never intended to escape with him. But she needs one more kill. And Reardon is where my brother is buried. It’s her way of sending me a message.”
“So?”
“So we’re wasting time! A man’s life is at risk. She wants to prove how clever she is. A twist of the knife to me. She killed Rick. She knows I took the position of warden here because of her. She escaped on my watch and it’s the kind of thing she feeds on. Leaving Bill Coyt where I buried my brother is her idea of fun.”
“Maybe. It’s a stretch, don’t you think? I’ll send a couple of agents to check.”
“Tell them to look for a large elm split in half by lightning. That’ll be where she plans to bury Bill Coyt. I’d do it fast, Marshal. I’m on my way, too.”
“Don’t interfere, Atherton. This is a federal matter.”
“I don’t intend to. I just want to see her.”