She pointed at the inert body. “Why is he still unconscious? The initial shock would have worn off fairly quickly, wouldn’t it? But he’s still comatose hours later.”
Or wasn’t it hours later? Could the assailant have left just minutes before she’d arrived? Maybe he heard her approach? Not a comforting thought.
Patten had more immediate problems. Eyeing the young trooper dusting the battery charger for prints, he flapped a hand in her direction. “You get that windshield off, undo the belt, so the medics can help this man.”
She was already pulling a socket and rachet from the drawer. Four layers of local police clustered around to watch her work: Speedway Police, Marion County Sheriff’s department, Indianapolis City Police and the State Police. The last seemed to be the alpha dogs, which didn’t sit well with Patten.
When she finished, she escaped from the bustle under the tent and rejoined Henry. It was seven forty-five. That didn’t seem possible. Time had slowed down and sped up simultaneously. Ian and the photographer from the Star should arrive any minute. She hoped Hagan would be tagging along and that he’d be allowed to take her home. From past experience, she knew that was unlikely. Once again, she asked Henry for his phone, this time to call her lawyer.
She was listening to the unanswered ring when Ian arrived. Ignored by the police and medics, he gravitated to her side, fidgeted until she finished leaving a message. “What’s going on, Reb? Who’s in the bloody car?”
“Peyton.”
“What? Why?” Ian turned sheet white, not a good color for news photographs. He begged for details. Hearing them, he fell silent, stared at his car as if it had come to life like the toys in The Nutcracker and been responsible for the heinous act. Or been violated by it. She touched his arm, asked where he’d been, he mumbled, “Out jogging.”
“Did you see Hagan?”
“Don’t ask.”
He was having trouble taking it all in. He started several sentences then aborted them, letting his thoughts fade like ripples dissolving on the shore. She gave him a hug, which he barely returned. It was understandable. She was nearly two hours ahead of him in assimilating the incident and its impact on the race tomorrow. Until contradicted, she was proceeding as if Peyton would recover and want the team to race as scheduled.
The EMTs lifted his limp body from the cockpit and onto a stretcher. It was done smoothly, with no damage to the car. After a good scrubbing, the Lotus would be ready to run. Assuming Ian felt up to it. When she asked, he shrugged and walked away.
Nineteen
By ten o’clock, Mick was pacing. Moore hadn’t returned from the photo shoot. He’d been disappointed to find her gone and the house empty when he finally rolled out of bed, but took heart when he read her note: Back by eight-thirty or nine. The rest of the day is ours.
Okay.
He’d dressed and was nosing in the refrigerator when Browning appeared, looking much too well rested. Obviously he hadn’t tossed and turned all night. His sunny smile rankled. Mick leaned back against the counter. “So, Browning, how come you weren’t booked on a drug charge when your sister overdosed? Too young? No prior offenses? Or was your daddy too well-connected to mess with?”
Browning blanched like someone had gut-punched him. Orange juice trickled down the corner of his mouth as he set the carton down. “Occupational hazard, Hagan? Can’t keep your nose out of other people’s business? I thought you were here to protect Rebecca? I’m no threat. I wouldn’t hurt her.”
He tried to storm from the room. Mick caught him by the elbow. “Why is that? You two have a special relationship I should know about?”
The minute the words were out of his mouth, he bit his cheek. Idiot.
A—it was none of his business. He had no claims on Moore; she was an adult and free to chose her own partners. B—he didn’t believe it. There was no chemistry between her and the driver. He would know; Moore couldn’t act. She was too transparent. Every expression registered on her face.
Besides, he’d tiptoed through the house for a room check in the early morning. Browning was passed out on one of the twins in the third bedroom.
Color returning to normal, Browning waded in for round two. “You know so much about my past, Hagan, you should be able to figure out Rebecca’s attraction for me. No? Well, let me show you.”
He fled the room, bare feet slapping down the hallway. When he returned, he was holding a dog-eared color photograph of a teenage girl, presumably his sister, Katherine. Mick took it. There was a superficial resemblance to Moore, something about the eyes, slender neck and the tilt of her head. No way identical, but close enough to strike a chord in someone who still blamed himself for his sister’s death.
“I know Rebecca isn’t Katherine come back to life, but it makes me feel good seeing her around, talking to her openly, the way I imagine I would have talked to Katie. If I thought Rebecca was at risk, I’d force her to leave here. How could I live with myself if something happened to her because I’d ignored the potential danger? Again. I was an immature brat when Katie and I went to that party. I don’t have that excuse now.”
Mick returned the photograph. “Is that why you race? Keep putting yourself in harms’ way waiting for the fatal crash and instant oblivion?”
“I guess.” Browning slumped into a chair at the table. “That, and the expense really annoys my father.”
Mick leaned over. “Don’t count on a quick death, boy. The gods are sadistic sods. They get a kick out of letting you live with your nightmares.”
Browning was still staring at the dingy linoleum floor when Mick left the house in search of an all-American, midwestern breakfast. After that he planned to check out area motels. He was ashamed of how hard he’d come down on the race driver, but he wasn’t going to let Browning get in the way of time alone with Moore. If the driver was going to camp out in the third bedroom, alternative private lodgings would be desirable. Make that mandatory. Somewhere with locks on the door, room service and a guarantee of anonymity.
A short walk from the diner, he stumbled upon a fifties motel tucked away on a side street. A time-warped relic, it was a place Jack Kerouac would have included in a travelogue. No room service, but it had plenty of ambiance. Only six tiny cabins separated by irregular swatches of grass. A single window box was nailed to the front of each one, festooned with plastic mums stuck in the dirt. The end unit was masked from the houses on the neighboring street by a row of white pines. You could smell them through the open window. He gave the hobbling Dolores a deposit and said he’d need the room for three nights.
He’d been working on rationalizations for Moore. Using the motel tonight would allow Browning to be alone at the house, get a good night’s sleep before the race. Tomorrow night, he’d want to celebrate with friends, or drown his sorrows; both better done without them as audience. And Monday, well, that was backup in case the rent on the house ran out once the race was over. There was no reason he and Moore had to scurry back to Maryland. Maybe they’d see something of Indianapolis that didn’t smell of gasoline.
His planning presupposed that she wanted to be alone with him. Last night she seemed to.
He was feeling pretty smug until he got to the curb. In the ten minutes he’d chitchatted with Dolores, hoodlums had smashed the driver’s side window. The safety glass had shattered into a thousand glass pellets. A brick lay in the gutter next to the tire.
He swept the shards from the seat and drove to Patricia Street, where he called the insurance company. They didn’t sound any more broken up about the heap than he was.
At ten fifteen, when a bell sounded, he nearly lunged for the phone, then realized it was the front door. He opened it to the feisty coot he’d met at the shipping store the day before. Forty pounds overweight, cigarette dangling from his lips despite talking through a trach tube in his throat. The guy had agreed to deliver Zimmer’s return fax as soon as it came in. He licked his lips as he handed over two pages and took thirty dollars for his tro
uble.
No surprise that two sets of fingerprints got hits in AFIS. He was betting that both Tom, the yuppie Rastafarian, and Chet Davis would show up in the federal data banks. But Davis was either law-abiding or he’d never been caught. Tom, whose last name turned out to be Benedictine, was less than monk-like. Or maybe closer to it. His offenses were minor and involved purchasing substances that might induce mystical meditation. No wonder Tom was perpetually smiling.
Wayne Evans was a surprise, though maybe he shouldn’t have been. He turned out to be a convicted pugilist, printed a decade before for a drunk and disorderly in Connecticut. Bar brawl over a woman who was dating a member of a rival car team. That fit. Evans still liked to drink and preferred flashy women who exuded pheromones. Booze and a temper could make Evans something of a liability around race cars.
Mick made a note to ask Moore about Evans’s past work experiences. If he had a history of losing jobs because of the bottle, it could explain his don’t-rock-the-boat attitude. Peyton might be his last chance at steady employment. Or, conversely, it could justify his buttering up Whitten as a safety net. The old swinging monkey theory: Don’t let go of one branch until you’ve got a grip on the next.
When the phone finally rang, Mick knocked it off the table grabbing for it. He shouldn’t have bothered.
It was Delacroix, sounding as mellifluous as James Earl Jones’s younger brother. Clearly audible, even as a loudspeaker made a garbled announcement in the background.
Yes, Mick muttered, he’d arrived safely. Yes, Moore was fine so far. The belle of the track, the queen of pit lane. No one had shot at her in days. The only tension seemed to surround ridiculously heavy wagering on the F1 race. Sure, he would let Jo talk to Moore, only she wasn’t there. No, he didn’t know precisely where she was, or when she would return.
He could hear a chill like Montreal in January settle in the lawyer’s voice. “I thought you were there to protect her, Hagan? Isn’t that difficult to do when you can’t find her?”
“Don’t get testy. She’s fine. At the track posing for front-page publicity.”
“She’d better not be posing as a corpse. Have her call me.” Delacroix hung up.
The phone rang again before Mick could find a house key to lock up. He expected it to be Delacroix annoying him again with more words of sagacity. The term fit the lawyer to a tee—from the Latin, all wise and foreseeing. It even contained the word saga, as in a long tale of heroic deeds. Nothing Delacroix liked better than an epic with a moral.
Mick snapped hello into the receiver. Heard nothing but empty air, light breathing. Finally there came Moore’s voice, barely a whisper. She asked if he would join her at the track, in the historic cars’ paddock area. Please. Very formal: clipped tight sentences, emotions being held in check.
He forgot about Delacroix. Forgot about how late it was, how annoyed he was because she’d slipped out. Kicked himself for planning a sexual interlude while Moore was off somewhere getting into trouble. Hell of a bodyguard.
He whistled softly into the receiver. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Just come. Please.”
He ran the three-quarters of a mile to the track. It wasn’t likely to kill him. Once a year during PT quals, he was pretty good at the timed-mile, which frosted a lot of his coworkers, especially the ones who did five miles a day just to stay limber. Barely panting, he stumbled into the crime scene eight minutes after Moore called.
She was sitting cross-legged on a concrete wall, mesmerized by the length of crime scene tape that had come loose at one end and fluttered straight out from a tent post. A stoop-shouldered security type—about sixty, with Egg McMuffin crumbs on his stomach—guarded her like a pit bull. There were five police officers hanging around: two Staties, a local cop and two very local Speedway uniforms. The head trooper had Browning cornered inside the tent. Evans and Elise Carlson were conferring with an earnest youngster representing the Speedway. Everyone else stared as he entered the pit area.
Moore jumped down from the wall, trotted over, gave him a soulful look before burying her face in his shoulder. His arms went around her; he squeezed gently. When she made no move to pull away, he nuzzled her hair, relishing the feel and smell of it before whispering, “Somebody dead?”
She mumbled into his shirt front. “No. Not yet. Maybe not. It’s Peyton.”
“Your boss? What happened?”
She led him to the retaining wall and introduced the security guard. She asked Henry if he thought he could find two cups of coffee. He said he could probably find three and went off to fetch them. Mick sat. Moore paced, related the macabre details of discovering Peyton’s unconscious body in the race car with the battery charger nearby.
“Mick, he was strapped in, the buckle frozen shut with epoxy. The EMT thinks someone was torturing him, shocking him with the boost voltage from the charger. There are clamp marks from the jumper cables, bruises, singed hair. Who would do that? Why? What was he doing here in the pitch dark?”
He gave up searching pockets for a toothpick. Picked up one of Moore’s hands and played with her fingers. “Didn’t Browning say he was locked out of the motor home? It’s reasonable that Peyton was the one inside. It’s his RV, right? Maybe he woke up restless, walked to the pits for exercise. Sat in the race car to see how it felt?”
“Slid into the car and then what? Some demented psychopath happened by? Intrigued by the theory of electrical conductivity, he decides to experiment on Peyton?”
“You have a better explanation?”
She raked her fingers through the hair he’d just nuzzled. She agreed up to a point. Peyton might have fretted over more sabotage to the car, so decided to play it safe by spending the night at the track. “It doesn’t look like he planned to sleep. He was dressed, well, half-changed into a crew neck sweater over the tuxedo pants and dress shoes.”
“Clothes he could have pulled on in a hurry, whatever was handy? Have the cops checked out the motor home yet?”
She shook her head, set her waves bouncing. “Too busy interrogating us and pacifying Carlson. They know where their paychecks come from, particularly the Speedway cops. Race revenue. That means bowing and scraping to her. She didn’t wait for the bet to be decided, she bought into the team last night. Committed two million for next season in exchange for fifty percent ownership. Peyton left a message on Evans’s answering machine. He sounded as giddy as a kid at his sixth birthday party. At her insistence, the cops have agreed to release the car in time for us to prep it for Sunday’s race. Everything will proceed as normal.”
“Minus your boss.”
“Replaced by Elise Carlson.”
Twenty
With his nose pressed against the scratched window, Jo watched the approach into Logan Airport. It was much like landing on an island. The plane circled over the Atlantic, banked, skimmed along the water of Boston Harbor and hit the runway facing into the strong off-shore winds.
He disembarked, strode through the airport carrying only a briefcase and looking like a successful businessman who didn’t realize, or care, that it was an unseasonably warm Saturday morning, tailor-made for planning a pre-game cookout.
Only a handful of tourists lined the curb waiting for cabs. His driver was a gaunt Slav who wore a battered woolen cap pulled low on his forehead despite the sun baking the interior of the car. He nodded at the downtown address and activated the meter. Before he’d pulled away from the curb, he began chatting about the Red Sox and kept it up until they cleared the tunnel. When he tired of Jo’s one-word responses, he turned his attention to the pre-game show on the radio. Jo asked him to turn the volume up. He didn’t listen, but welcomed the mindless distraction.
The house at 27 State Street was three stories high, built from old rose brick, with tall windows on the bottom floor. It was set back from the sidewalk far enough to permit four pink tea roses to bloom in the full afternoon sun. A low wrought-iron fence abutted the sidewalk and turned the corner
invitingly, promising a secret garden out back away from prying eyes. The fence wouldn’t keep intruders out, but it clearly separated those who lived inside from the riffraff passing by.
Jo paused at the gate. The briefcase, a near-empty prop for the upcoming scene, dragged at his arm. He was about to meddle in Rebecca’s life without her permission. She would not thank him. She might not forgive him. Still, it was something he needed to do, and he was here now. He strode up the steps and rang the brass bell.
The woman who answered the door was squat, wrinkled and dressed totally in black. Flour dusted the front of her skirt. Without doubt, she was the housekeeper who had doted over the young Rebecca and loved to attend funerals.
Jo smiled. “Mrs. Bellotti?”
Her black marble eyes widened then narrowed. “Don’t have no rich relatives to die and leave me money. So why’s a lawyer’s come calling on Saturday?”
“What makes you think I’m a lawyer?”
Mrs. Bellotti snorted as if it were only too obvious.
He set down his briefcase. “Guilty. But I’m not here to see you. I’m here on behalf of Rebecca Moore. I’m expected.”
The woman’s face sagged and her eyes clouded with concern. She turned and waddled into the house, leaving him framed in the open doorway.
Before Jo could fish out a handkerchief to polish his glasses, Robert Moore emerged from a room at the back of the house. He raised his head and walked briskly toward him. Rebecca’s father was slender, perhaps six feet tall, dressed in weekend khakis and a button-down shirt. His shoulders were squared but bowed downward, as if from years of carrying work back and forth to the office, or weighted down by the deception of Rebecca’s birth. He had dark hair, which was graying in streaks at the temples. Laugh lines were etched on his face by years of sailing. Under other circumstances, his smile might have been welcoming.
They shook hands. Robert led him into the library to the right of the door, then excused himself to fetch his wife. The room, with its dark green walls and white bookshelves, just missed being comfortable. It was too glossy with the sheen of new money trying to pass for old. The Oriental rug was undoubtedly authentic but not worn enough to bespeak of generations of use. Not yet faded by the intense sunlight slanting through the windows.
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