It was a raccoon, standing in a corner and eyeing the three men suspiciously.
“He was fooling around with that stuff,” Shaughnessy said, pointing to a large bundle of bedding on the floor in front of a cold fireplace.
Buell was puzzled. “I thought they hibernated.”
“Not exactly,” Ron told him. “They wake up from time to time to eat. The way bears do. Probably in here looking for food.” Ron looked at the raccoon. “He’s scared. Let’s let him escape, shall we?” He opened the door again, and stood away from it. The raccoon scampered across the cabin and out.
Ron took a quick survey of the cabin. One big room, but a nice one. A stove and a refrigerator (probably warmer inside that, he thought), three beds, stripped, a rough-hewn wooden table, two wooden chairs, and by the far wall, a big rectangular affair with a subdued metal-flake paint finish. A gas heater. It looked fairly new, but there were big dents around the bottom of it, as though it had been kicked in anger. The used contents of a box of wooden matches were scattered on the floor around it.
“As long as we’re here, we might as well have a look around,” Shaughnessy said. “How about if I turn on that heater and try to get us some heat?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but strode across the room to do it.
Ron was trying not to think of his disappointment. He thought instead of how strange they looked, dressed the way they were. No wonder the raccoon had been scared. He laughed, adding a new layer of ice to his mask.
Shaughnessy was having trouble. “How the hell do you ... Oh, I see.” There were instructions printed on the inside of the little metal panel that opened to reveal the controls of the heater. “ ‘Saf-T-Lite,’ ” Shaughnessy read. “ ‘One. Strike match. Two. Press green button at top of panel to allow gas flow and unlock regulator handle.’ Okay, where the hell is the green button? Oh, here it is, like in the doorjamb part of the top of the panel.” He pressed it. “ ‘Three. Turn regulator handle to right as far as it will go.’ Oh, great, somebody busted the handle off!”
It didn’t prove to be much of a handicap, though; there was enough of a stub left to let the sergeant turn the handle with little trouble. “ ‘Four,’ ” he said, “ ‘drop match in hole marked with arrow.’ ’Bout time! My glove is about to catch fire.” He dropped in the match, and there was a satisfying whoosh! of the fire taking hold.
The heater was surprisingly efficient. Considering the temperature the room was, it was practically no time at all before the three men could remove their masks and gloves, though coats were still required.
“I’ll get this stuff from the floor,” Buell volunteered, bending over the sheets and blankets the raccoon had been playing with. He grabbed a corner of a quilt and pulled, then yelled and jumped back as though he’d gotten an electric shock.
Ron had been checking the cupboard for signs that the cabin might recently have been occupied and had just about decided it had been, when Buell yelled. “What’s the matter?” he said.
“Look!” The reporter was pointing. They followed his finger to the line of the blankets. Buell had disarranged the bedding enough to reveal a pair of men’s shoes. With a man in them.
Shaughnessy and Ron joined Buell at the bundle. They had trouble separating the body from the blankets—not only had he frozen to death, he had very nearly frozen solid. When they finished, they had the body of a well-built young man, who appeared to be curled up for a peaceful night of sleep.
“That’s Terry Wilbur, isn’t it?” Ron asked.
“It sure is,” Shaughnessy said. “Damn, I wanted to take him alive.”
“We all did,” Buell said.
“Easy enough to see what happened. He put all this stuff on the floor, and curled up in front of the fire. The fire went out, and he froze to death in his sleep.”
Ron was sitting on one of the wooden chairs. He was shaking his head adamantly. “No. It’s not that simple at all. For one thing, there’s no more firewood in the bin in this cabin. For another thing, this is a big table, you can bet there’d be more than two chairs along with it. Obvious inference, he busted up some chairs for firewood.
“Then he curled up in front of the fire under the blankets and quilts from all three beds, to try to keep as warm as he could.”
Buell was impatient to interrupt “But—”
Ron nodded. “Exactly. All we’ve got to do is figure out why Wilbur went through any of that—why he even bothered to build a fire in the fireplace when there was a perfectly good gas heater here a child could operate—one that would have kept him as warm as his mother’s embrace.
“In other words, we have to figure out why Terry Wilbur chose to freeze to death.”
TWENTY
THERE WAS A MESSAGE from Diedre waiting for them back at the lodge. Mac Dougald told them she said it was urgent, so Ron let Buell make the first call, with the stipulation that he would mention nothing of what they had left back at the cabin. Benedetti had to be the first person in Sparta to hear about that.
Buell wasn’t on the phone long, only about three minutes or so, but in that time Ron heard him come out with three whoops of triumph, laughter, and one “Love, that’s great!” It clashed badly with the detective’s mood.
Buell looked ten years younger when he stepped out of the cubicle that housed Mac Dougald’s antique telephone. He hugged Ron and patted him on the back in sheer exuberance.
“I made it, Ronny!” he said. “Diedre got the word only a little while after we left, but she had to ask the professor where we were.” He laughed. “And he didn’t want to talk to her on the phone because he’s expecting a call from you, and doesn’t want the phone tied up!” Buell slapped Shaughnessy on the back. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
The sergeant seemed to be in no more of a mood for celebration than Ron was. “What was it she got word of?” he asked dryly.
Nothing could bother Buell. “My dear Uncle Willy finally went to join the devil, where he’s belonged for years.”
“Oh,” Ron said. Normally, he would have said such happiness at any man’s death was not in the best of taste, but knowing the history, he could understand Buell’s reaction. The world didn’t cry when Hitler died; Uncle Willy had been Buell’s personal Hitler.
“Then he never found out, right? About Diedre? Didn’t leave a will?”
“That’s right,” Buell smiled. “I am a rich man, Ron. This money will give me the power to do so many good things.” He clapped his hands, walked to a window to look out at the snow, then turned back to Ron and Shaughnessy. “But you know the best part? The best part is now I can stop all the lies and deceit; I won’t have to go skulking around any more—”
“It wasn’t that bad, was it, Buell?” Ron asked. “After all, it isn’t like your Uncle Willy was having you watched.”
Buell seemed a little taken aback. “Uh—of course, of course, that’s very true,” he said, then made himself smile. “In fact, Diedre says the authorities down there are starting to look for me already. It—it’s just—well, you know you’re hiding, even if nobody else does.”
“That,” Ron said, “is probably very true.” His mind presented him with a very clear image of Terry Wilbur, and what had happened to him in his hiding place. He gave Buell hasty congratulations, and placed a call to the professor.
Ron wondered why it was that he always got a better connection calling long distance than calling another office in the Bixby building from twenty feet down the hall. He had the leisure for such speculations because the professor was off on an extended spate of his rapid, incomprehensible Italian incantations. They had started immediately after Ron told the old man the news that Terry Wilbur was dead. That was the first time. This current monologue was the result of Ron’s telling him of the circumstances.
Benedetti came to the end of whatever he was saying; the unexpected silence that followed startled Ron.
“Maestro?”
“I am here, amico,” the professor said softly, and a little sadly,
as though his innermost desire was to be somewhere else.
He sighed heavily, like a Venetian escaping his mistress’s husband on that bridge, Ron thought. The detective asked his mentor, “What do we do now, Maestro?”
“La storia, una volta piú, per favore,” he said. “You have no doubt Wilbur died of the cold, eh?”
“There wasn’t a mark on him, Maestro. It could have been natural causes, or even poison, but Wilbur was young and healthy, and who was around to poison him? For what it’s worth, Shaughnessy, who’s seen plenty, says it looks like a freezing to him.”
The old man sighed again. “Basta, basta, I accept the sergeant’s word. The denting in the body of the heater, the breaking off of that handle, had no effect on the function of it, eh?”
Ron shook his head at the phone, realized the futility of that and said, “No, Maestro. Shaughnessy had the thing lit in fifteen seconds, even without the handle.”
“I see chaos, amico. I do not like it. Niccolo Benedetti can see nothing but chaos. Evil will keep this day a holiday, Ronald.”
The old man was giving up. Ron couldn’t blame him, but he wanted to cry.
“There was sufficient fuel?” Benedetti asked in a hopeless voice.
“Ninety-eight percent of capacity, Maestro. We checked it before we left.” If only the professor hadn’t shot off his mouth about catching Hog in a week, Ron thought. That was the worst of it. People do fail occasionally. It’s no big disgrace.
And still, Ron couldn’t get over this last inexplicable horror in a case that seemed to be nothing but inexplicable horrors. “If it’s any consolation, Shaughnessy and Buell are convinced that Wilbur was the man.”
“Hog?” the professor said.
“Of course!” Ron said. “Who else?”
“What are their reasons?”
Ron snorted. “Analogy, Maestro. Hog is obviously demented, and what could be more demented than sitting in front of a dying fire and freezing to death when all you have to do to light the heater is open the panel, read the instructions, and drop in—”
To this day, Ron swears he received an electric shock at that moment, that the telephone transmitted Professor Benedetti’s brain impulses to him. Janet scoffs, and says if it was anything, it was telepathy—that Ron had become attuned to the old man’s psyche. The professor says nonsense to both of them—that Ron, at that moment, was doing subconsciously what the professor was doing consciously: solving the case.
“Come home,” the professor said.
“What?” Ron said taken aback.
“Come home,” the professor said again. “At once.”
“We haven’t even told the authorities about Wilbur yet.”
“Shaughnessy can deal with authorities. I need you.”
“Buell will probably want to come with me.”
The professor thought it over for a second. “Let him come, by all means,” he said at last. “But no word of our discussion on the trip home. I will be expecting you.”
“I’ll leave immediately, Maestro.”
“Va bene,” the old man said. “And, amico,” he said confidentially, “we will let evil find its holidays elsewhere, eh?”
The sky over Sparta was lightened by a false dawn when Ron and Buell finally arrived there. A couple of hours had been added to the trip by the traffic pileup behind a truck that had jackknifed across the, highway south of Watertown.
“Where do you want me to drop you?” Ron asked. “The paper?”
Buell rubbed his eyes. “Not necessary,” he said. “I called the story in after you spoke to the professor. The Courant has its scoop on Wilbur’s death. I can do the follow-up in my column for tomorrow. Sell more papers that way.”
“Where then?”
“Better make it my apartment. I’m too tired to do anything but sleep—I’m going to phone Diedre, tell her everything’s all right, then I’m going to sleep as long as I can, then I’ll write my column, then I’ll get me a lawyer and see about that estate.”
“Does that mean you’re through with the case?”
“Of course not,” Buell said. “I’ll stick through the formalities. But I think we’ve seen the last of Hog with the death of Terry Wilbur. I have a feeling about it.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ron told him. Buell knew nothing about the professor’s brainstorm, not even that the old man had told Ron to come home. Not wanting to arouse anyone else’s curiosity before his own was satisfied, Ron had put it to Shaughnessy that Buell had to be home to handle his important business and it would be safer if two people went, to share the driving. He pointed out that the sergeant would be the logical one to leave behind to talk with his fellow law officers.
Ron attributed his getting away with it to fast talking and a blithe disregard for what the state police and upstate local officials would think about his disappearance. They left Shaughnessy grumbling, but agreeing.
The trip back into town took them under that unfinished overpass where the first two girls had died. Ron could sense a shudder from the man beside him. Buell had really been through a lot, Ron thought. Well, if the professor knew what he was talking about, the case would soon be over. If? O, ye of little faith—the professor always knew what he was talking about. Just ask him.
Then what had the old man seen? Who was Hog? Ron would have to bludgeon his instincts into submission before he could get them to accept the idea that Terry Wilbur had been unfindable in Sparta for days on end, then had run off to the Adirondacks to hide after the seventh death—the very day the professor had decided to look for him there. But if it isn’t Wilbur, what do those books mean? What was his “project”? And, in the name of God, how had he come to die the way he had?
Too many questions. He’d be better off asking them of the professor than of himself. He forced himself to think of other things until he dropped Buell off and went home.
Ron heard a very unprofessorial gasp as he let himself into the house. Before he even had a chance to wonder about it, he had arms around his neck, and was being kissed by a very relieved psychologist.
“I’ve been so worried,” Janet told him.
“Why?” Ron asked. “Not that I mind. What are you doing here? Not that I mind that, either. Shall we repair to the sitting room and discuss it?”
She smiled at him. “No, I’d like to, but we can’t. You’re supposed to go upstairs and see the professor as soon as you get in. He’s painting. He called me up a few hours ago—woke me up. He said you would be home any minute, and when you did, he was going to start the last phase of the Hog case, and that he thought I might like to be in on it.”
“I told you you were part of the team,” Ron said. “How’s your leg?”
“Not bad, as long as I use the cane I’m all right. What about you? I was afraid something had happened, you were so late.”
“Something happened, but not to me,” Ron said. He told her about the truck on Route 81. “Has the professor filled you in?”
Janet nodded. “He told me about Terry Wilbur. I—I can’t understand about his death. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What does make sense about this case?”
“Nothing,” Janet said. “It seems physically and psychologically impossible.” She smiled sadly. “Frightening, isn’t it?”
“Yes. What else did the old man say?”
“He said Wilbur was the Hog.”
“He said that?” Ron was surprised, for more than one reason. For one thing, he never really believed it. For another, it just wasn’t like Benedetti to state the solution to a case straight out. He liked to build up to it, deviously. Ron asked Janet for the professor’s exact words.
“Well, he said, ‘The death of Terry Wilbur brings the case to a conclusion,’ and he said, ‘Wilbur fled because he knew he was a killer.’ ”
I’ll be damned, Ron thought. He said, “I’d better go see the professor.” He took his arms from around Janet and ran up the stairs.
He found the old man (yet a
gain) bent over his easel, painting by the feeble sun that had just struck its rim over the horizon. The old man looked up smiling at Ron and said, “Ah, buon giorno, amico! You arrive at precisely the right moment. I have finished.” He gestured at the painting.
Ron looked at it. Against a neutral, translucent purple-grey background, the professor had painted two spheres in collision, one black and one white. The painting showed in great detail the flattening and fragmenting of the spheres at the point of impact. Huge gouts of red spurted from the openings. It would probably turn up in a museum—it was one of his better canvases. Simple, but powerful somehow. And a little frightening.
“What is it, Maestro?”
Benedetti beamed. “What is it? Why, it is a portrait of the killer’s soul.”
By this time, Janet and her cane had made their way up the stairs. Ron heard her voice behind him say, “Terry Wilbur’s soul?”
The professor scowled. “Of course not,” he said. “Hog’s soul.”
TWENTY-ONE
JANET’S CONFUSION WAS GROWING by the second. The professor happily admitted making the statements, “Terry Wilbur’s death ends the case,” “Terry Wilbur was a killer,” and the seemingly contradictory, “Terry Wilbur was not the Hog.” That wasn’t logical.
And he wouldn’t explain, either. He was apologetic about it, saying, “You must keep in mind that my colleague is still my pupil. In fairness to him I must give him every possible opportunity to arrive at the solution. Usually, all that is necessary is for me to point him in the right direction, eh?”
The right direction, apparently, was the one that led to St. Erasmus hospital; that’s where the professor had told Ron to drive them. He sat in the back seat, puffing on a cigar. Once, Janet turned around to look at him, and he winked at her. Ron had said he was a rake, but that had been a little raw, she thought. Unless he was kidding.
Ron drove grimly, deep in thought. Janet sat beside him, feeling strangely lost. She strove desperately to see the sense in something, so she worked on the coincidental puzzle of why the streets of downtown Sparta were so deserted at the start of what should have been the morning rush hour, until she realized that it was Sunday. She had lost track. Sunday, the eighth of February. The end of the Hog case, according to the professor. I wonder—
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