The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  Had she switched flights during one of the stops? Had she deplaned during one of the stops and jumped on a bus? Or rented a car? They’d come to an awkward junction. O’Hare was one of the busiest airports in the world. No way could they check every inbound flight. It was enough of a job to watch one gate, let alone dozens. That was too big a waste of manpower and time, but there was another choice, a more efficient use of both. Whether she came by land, air, or sea, Brooke Weaver was coming to find Jefferson Peel. They’d find Peel first. And let her come to them.

  Desmond radioed Porter and Lewis. They met up next to an enormous span of towering windows that looked out onto the outside world. A hundred feet away a series of escalators delivered travelers to the airport’s various levels. Carmichael had finally shed the brown wig and looked professional with her trim blond hair, jeans, and sports coat. Porter and Lewis looked pensive. They didn’t care for Eamon Desmond. He was Stott’s crony, and just the thought of Stott spooked them. Thinking of him gave them the sensation of walking down creaky wooden stairs into a musty, pitch-black basement at two in the morning; nothing pleasant could come from such a situation. Neither Desmond nor Stott bothered Carmichael. And Albertwood simply gave her the creeps. She made sure to rarely be alone with her employer. She was all-business, but gross was gross.

  “She wasn’t on the plane,” Desmond said, working a sliver of peanut from between two teeth with his tongue.

  “What if we missed her?” Porter said.

  Desmond ignored him. “The last flights of the day are coming and going. If she’s coming through O’Hare tonight, we’ll never pick her out of the crowd. She might have caught a connecting flight somewhere. Or she might have hopped off at a stopover, and may be coming the rest of the way by ground. She may be on to us. Whatever the case, we’re wasting our time here. Porter, you’ll stay behind, just in case she happens to wander in. And we may need you for air support. The general aviation hangars around here should give you plenty to choose from.”

  Porter crossed his arms over his chest and nodded.

  “We’ll take two cars out of here. Lewis and I will take the lead. Carmichael, you’ll follow.”

  Carmichael nodded, pleased with the prospect of having her own space for a change. Lewis’s expression sunk. Time alone in a car with Desmond was not high on his list.

  At the Hertz desk, Carmichael presented fake Canadian papers and rented separate cars for her and her husband. Desmond and Lewis waited outside. Lewis lit a cigarette and stared off away from his new partner. Carmichael came through the door and pitched a key to Desmond. He in turn pitched the key to Lewis.

  “You’ll drive,” he said.

  Lewis shrugged and discarded the cigarette.

  They found their respective forms of transportation and proceeded out of the rental lot. They had agreed to meet up at a Texaco station five miles west of the airport. They had an errand to run first.

  Carmichael was in a gold Toyota Camry. Desmond and Lewis had been dealt a white GMC Yukon. Both vehicles proceeded to long-term parking. Separately, they wound their way slowly through the parking lot.

  The Camry was the first to stop. Carmichael turned out her headlights, and hurried on foot to a row of parked cars. The gold Camry she approached was not as well maintained as her rental. She whipped a flathead screwdriver from a coat pocket and quickly removed the Illinois plates. In just over a minute, the highjacked plates replaced the rental’s plates. She turned out of the lot and disappeared down the highway.

  The GMC followed suit. It took them an extra ten minutes to spot a parked vehicle in the long-term parking that matched theirs. Desmond removed the rental’s plates while Lewis stood between parked cars and worked his flathead like a goon in a chop shop. By 9:45P .M. they were on the highway.

  A bedside lamp blinked on in the upstairs bedroom, and David Hayweather reached to answer the phone. He’d been deep asleep, and it took a few seconds for his mind to determine what planet he was on, that he was in bed with his wife, and that the telephone beside his head was ringing. He answered the phone in a gruff tone.

  “Hello?” His mind was clouded, more asleep than awake. His wife, Clara, had rolled over, facing away from him. She buried her face in her pillow. She was a mother of two and had tucked her little ones in bed hours ago. Now it was well after ten at night.

  David set the receiver on the bulge of his stomach and patted his wife on the hip.

  “Babe, it’s for you,” he said, already nearly zonked out again.

  There was no response from her side of the bed.

  “Come on, Babe, take the phone.”

  Clara mumbled something into the pillow. Finally, she felt around for the receiver, then put it to her head.

  “…ullow,” she mumbled, her voice muffled by the fluff of the pillow.“Uhh?…”

  Clara Hayweather slowly pivoted onto her back, her eyes still shut tight. Then they ever-so-slowly opened, staring up at the ceiling.“Brooke?” she said. “Brooke Weaver? Sugar, you haveany idea what time it is? Where in the worldare you?”

  David Hayweather was already snoring.

  Clara sat up, a poof of tangled hair crowning her face. “Where?Detroit? What are you—sure, I’m listening. Hold on, hold on—slow down, Sugar. Let me get a pen and paper.” She squinted her eyes against the light and leaned across her husband to open the drawer in the bedside table.

  “Okay, Brooke, now slow down and tell me what’s going on.” Clara Hayweather listened carefully. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the light in the room. She scribbled on the pad of paper on her lap. Suddenly she straightened rather abruptly.“Who? You want me to contactwho?”

  53

  DAVIDHAYWEATHER WAS DRESSED IN HIS TERRY CLOTHrobe, standing barefoot at the front door to his house. His trim haircut stuck out at all angles, and he was bleary-eyed. The baby was asleep, but the three-year-old had come wandering out of her bedroom, dressed in pink pajamas, her golden-blond hair pulled back in a scrunchy. She rubbed at her eyes as she wobbled sleepily down the hallway to the front door and wrapped her tiny arms around David’s left leg.

  “Where’s Momma?” She could barely hold her eyes open.

  Hayweather had one hand on the doorknob, and the other was atop his daughter’s head. He was looking out across the front lawn, waiting for the garage to open. When it did, light from within spilled out at oblong angles onto the snowy driveway. Clara’s red Accord slowly backed out, easing down the drive and backing into the street. Clara waved at them. David waved back for himself and his daughter, and then closed the door and locked it. The car’s headlight disappeared into the night.

  They had met on the first day of class, their freshman year at Harvard. The class was A Survey of the History of Western Civilization. It was a required course and couldn’t have been more unbearable. Clara Hodgson stumbled into class late, and because prompter students had quickly taken all the seats in the rear of the classroom, she’d been forced to take an empty desk up front near the lectern. She sat beside a pretty blond-haired girl named Brooke Weaver.

  Their backgrounds differed, as did their interests, but they clicked just the same and remained good friends throughout the four years of undergraduate studies in Cambridge. Not long after graduation, Clara married David Hayweather, a med student from Wheaton, Illinois. He was attending school in Boston. They moved back to his hometown after he completed his residency.

  Her life had truly flourished in the five years since graduation from Harvard. David had a thriving upscale practice in Wheaton. The children, both girls, were beautiful. The house was less than two years old, mostly brick, with high gables and a large garage. They both drove new cars. Clara didn’t work. Besides the kids, her schedule was filled with charity work. Chicago society was rife with fund-raising, and she’d found herself neck-deep in it ten to twelve months out of the year.

  The fund-raising was a great source of pride for her, and she’d excelled at it. David’s practice generated an enormous income;
they’d never be in want of money. So there was not much reason for her to find a full-time job that would drag her away from home and force her to stick the kids into day care. Over the past couple of years, in the letters she and Brooke had exchanged, she had mentioned her involvement in the community.

  One pet project in particular she’d mentioned was a small school in a suburb of Chicago called the Nash School for the Deaf. NSD specialized in speech therapy for children who were either completely deaf or severely hearing impaired. In the past decade the underpaid faculty at NSD had made quite a splash in the world of speech therapy. Children from across the country had been referred to them, as well as a handful from Europe. The school was a nonprofit organization, which relied heavily on support from medical organizations as well as independent donors.

  Her headlights cut a path through the dreary late-night fog as she headed across the city to the home of Dr. Eucinda Omheimer. The snow seemed to have finally blown past them, heading on east, but had left low-hanging clouds in its wake. The morning sun would likely burn off most of it, but sundown meant hazardous road conditions. She turned on the car radio. It was set to an easy-listening station.

  It had been nice to hear her old friend’s voice again. Had it really been a year since they’d last spoken? It seemed impossible, but there was no denying the frantic edge to Brooke’s voice. She was in a world of trouble and had asked her for help. Brooke had been fairly brief and guarded on the phone. Clara couldn’t even begin to guess the severity of the situation, but after hearing her friend so distraught, she didn’t hesitate to jump out of bed and take action.

  And she would have never dreamed that something she’d mentioned in one of her letters to Brooke would come back to her in such dramatic fashion. But Brooke had been specific and unflinching. She knew what she needed, and Clara wasn’t about to deny her friend this one crucial favor.

  She turned through an intersection into a neighborhood of modest homes. She could barely make out the street signs in the fog. Dr. Omheimer’s home was on down just half a block on the left. As the Accord sped down the two-lane avenue, Clara could see that the porch light was on. She parked in the short driveway behind Dr. Omheimer’s ancient car. She unbuckled her seat belt and grabbed her purse from the passenger’s seat. She had called ahead. Dr. Omheimer slept only four or five hours a night, spending most of her off hours either with her nose in a book or cooking. She was rotund and jolly, and impossible to upset. She’d told Clara to come on over.

  Brooke had been fairly vague on the phone. But one thing she’d been very clear about was the fact that Clara had the connections that just might save her life.

  The road was an elongated horseshoe that rose gradually for several miles, and then took a sudden dip, came within a few hundred feet of Lake Michigan, then curved around and away, returning you in the general direction that you’d come.

  Just beyond the sudden dip in the road an iron fence began. They followed the flow of the road for a quarter mile, then cut in and out through a lovely piece of wooded acreage, then reappeared to meet the road just before the road curved away from the water.

  Behind the fence stood an enormous home, a twelve-thousand-square-foot fortress constructed mostly of river stone. The front lawn was bordered by woodland on either side, and the back lawn gave onto a small inlet of Lake Michigan. The estate was entirely enclosed by the iron fencing save for the natural barrier of the lake. The gate at the end of the drive functioned electronically, and was monitored by closed-circuit camera. This was the home of Jefferson Peel and his family.

  The Camry parked back up the road a ways, above the rise in the hill. Carmichael killed her headlights, but because of the cold, left the engine running. She picked up her radio. “Echo-One. I’m ready and waiting,” she said.

  Desmond and Lewis cruised on down the lane, descending the easy slope, which leveled off and swept past the Peel estate. They continued on, following the liberal curve of the road, eventually heading back the way they’d come. Much of the acreage that filled the inside of the horseshoe was wooded. A few hundred feet beyond the sweep of the curve, Lewis pulled off the road and gently steered in among the trees. The traction was less forgiving here, and the tires began to spin in the mushy blanket of snow and pine needles.

  Desmond gave the word, and the GMC eased to a halt. The sudden darkness and silence were abrupt. They moved through the trees. The snow was only ankle deep. It was just less than a quarter-mile walk to the far edge of the horseshoe. When they resurfaced, they were careful to stay in the shadows. It was a cold night. Clouds of breath rose from their faces. Desmond raised the night-vision field glasses to his face, bracing against a tree to keep his arm steady.

  Lewis spoke into his radio. “Echo-Three, you read?” He spoke in a low, controlled tone.

  “Roger.”

  “We have visual, over,” he said.

  “Roger that,” Carmichael said. “All clear from this end.”

  It was after 11P .M. From their vantage point, few lights were visible inside the house, but enough to suggest that not much was going on. There could be lights left on all night for security, or just to keep from stubbing your toes when you got up for a drink of water, or to use the bathroom, or to grab a snack in the kitchen. For the moment, the night-vision field glasses didn’t offer much more than the naked eye was capable of seeing. Desmond held them at his side, thinking through his options. If it kept up like this, it would certainly be a long night.

  Desmond was certain that the Weaver girl would try to make a go of it—and probably tonight. It occurred to him that she might wait until morning, and confront Peel at work. She might suspect a stakeout, and the arrival of nightfall most likely had her spooked. If she made a run at the Peel estate tonight, it would all be over, quick and easy. If she tried an end run at Peel’s office in the light of day, she’d never make it across the parking lot. And if she did get to Peel with the tape, that would simply mean that a bigger mess would have to be made.

  54

  STATEHIGHWAY7BECAME US 23,AND BY MIDNIGHT,R’mel had found his way to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The drive had taken longer than he expected, and he still had over an hour to go. The AM radio was driving him mad; the only stations he’d managed to dial up were phone-in shows, backwoods preachers, and country music. He listened to the rantings of fire-and-brimstone preachers for three hundred miles.

  By midnight, the gas gauge was needling into the red zone. He exited at Stockbridge, pulling the Dodge pickup into a twenty-four-hour Sunoco station. Through the glass, he could see a black woman sitting on a stool behind the counter. He pumped in thirty dollars’ worth of regular unleaded, and crossed the rutted and patched pavement to pay. He slipped down an aisle and grabbed a handful of candy bars, then grabbed a bottled Diet Dr Pepper from the cooler along the wall.

  The attendant never made eye contact. She clearly wished she were somewhere else,any where else but wasting her time pulling in five bucks an hour. R’mel was certain he’d never seen a more obese human being. He dumped his items onto the counter. He cast a glance at the folds around her waist and shoved the candy bars aside.

  “Just the soda and the gas,” he said.

  It was at least another hour to Pittsfield. Onota Lake was not far from there. He hoped to be done with this mess by around 2A .M. He hurried out across the pavement, circling around the rear of the truck. He unlocked the door to the camper shell, twisted the latch, and lifted it up on its pneumatic arms. Both of the detainees were still in there, bound from head to foot in mover’s blankets and duct tape. The girl was petite, but the Benjamin character had enough size to him to require quite a bit of extra digging. R’mel frowned. He dreaded the work ahead of him. He considered whether to dig separate graves, or to just dig one but make it extra big. Neither option sounded promising.

  Desmond had drugged the girl again; he had in fact given her double the dose from earlier. She’d be out for at least several more hours. But he figured Benjamin
had likely already shaken it off. Neither of them were moving. R’mel lowered the door and locked the latch.

  Ten miles down the road, the heater went out. He pulled the Dodge off to the side of the highway and found that the heater fuse beneath the dash had blown. It was too freaking cold to roar down the road at seventy mph without the heater blowing on him. He scrounged through the glove box but found nothing. He didn’t want to backtrack to Stockbridge, and wasn’t sure how much farther he’d have to continue on until he found another all-night station. For the moment he’d have to grin and bear it.

  The drive in the cold made him dread digging the graves even more.Perhaps, he thought,I’ll just let Benjamin dig the graves himself. Yes. That way he can make some use of himself before he dies.

  The idea warmed him slightly.

  They took turns. One would keep the watch, staying in the shadows of the trees across the road from the Peel estate, while the other spent a half an hour warming up in the GMC. Desmond was sitting in the driver’s seat, nearly thawed, when Lewis’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “A fog light came on above the garage,” Lewis said. “Looks like some activity.”

  Desmond was on his radio in an instant. “Can you see anyone?”

  “Not yet…wait,”Lewis said.

  “What? What? What do you see?”

  “There are headlights. Headlights coming up the driveway from around the side of the house.”

  A silver Infiniti sedan approached the iron gate, and when it was within fifty feet, the gate separated at the center and slowly spread apart. Lewis could just hear the soft whirring of the gate’s motor. The car passed through and turned onto the street. Its headlights glowed in the fog and lightly falling snow. It appeared to Lewis like a mythic creature abandoning its cave.

  “It’s a silver sedan,” Lewis said into his radio. He had taken refuge behind a massive walnut tree. He pressed against the tree, its bark grating at his face. “Heading your way, Echo-Three.”