He located them in the closest corner of the southeast vista: two women standing, one old man falling off the edge.
Mick released the camera and the photographer. He pointed where he’d been looking. “There’s your story, pal. An exclusive.”
Forty-three
Carlson had underestimated her strength, or the senior’s fitness program. Or maybe her hatred wasn’t as strong as his will to live. Madison didn’t fall to his death. The body blow knocked his torso backwards over the railing, his weight carried him into empty air, flipped his legs over the side. But his left hand seized an upright stanchion and held on.
For the moment.
Rebecca watched in horror as the gnarled hand with its age spots began inching down the pole, the weight of his dangling body pulling him lower and lower. A piercing yowl, like a cat in heat, escaped from his throat.
She leapt forward onto a bench, headed for Madison before his grip released. She was within grabbing distance when Carlson reached into a leg pocket on her cargo pants, straightened and spun. In her hand was a padded handle. One snap of her wrist and thin metal bars flew outward, locking into a rod. With barely a flick, she lashed out.
The rod sang as it whizzed through the air. It struck Rebecca across her thighs, knocking her to her knees then off the edge of the bleacher. She bounced into the catch fence, rebounded. Her upper body banged onto the seat, flopped forward, draped like a rag doll as the burning tore through the fronts of her legs.
Carlson glared, a demented instructor of the damned. The rod twitched in her hands. “You shouldn’t be here. This is personal.”
Rebecca sank onto her knees. “It’s not worth your life, Elise.”
“What life. Haven’t you done your homework? I’m a bastard spawned by an Aryan guard. A by-product, a regrettable reminder.”
Stepping off the bleacher, she turned toward Madison. “Did you know that your teenage girlfriend, Sophie Franks, had survived the war and reproduced, Herr Kauffman? Or did you never think about the Jewish families your parents betrayed?”
Rebecca yelled at her back. “Your mother did what it took to survive.”
Carlson glanced over her shoulder; a lazy smile twisted her mouth. “My mother let men defile her to stay alive. Let herself get pregnant to make them stop. She survived because she was lovely and a mischlinge, a half-Jew. The guards could fornicate with her and pretend she wasn’t filth like the others.” Carlson hunched down to make sure Rebecca was paying attention. “Mother couldn’t pretend. When it was rumored that the Allies were coming to free the camp, she tried to commit suicide. She was too weak to succeed. Unbelievable. Sophie had survived four years in a concentration camp, but wanted to kill herself rather than live with her shame in the real world.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Would you say she survived?”
Rebecca searched the eyes sunk deep in the face above her. Dark smudges set off the white surrounding amber irises. Crystal clear except for a tiny mote in the one. Intelligent and once perceptive, they’d lost focus on this world, real or not. They could see only the past.
Twenty feet away Madison still dangled off the edge.
Rebecca pulled back from Carlson. She had to distract her long enough for Madison to regain his footing. Together they’d have a chance to overpower her. Their only chance.
They wouldn’t be rescued. There were no spectators wandering the empty stands. Once racing resumed, all eyes would be focused on the track. Unless a security guard or nosy fan noticed Madison hanging over the edge, no one would suspect anything was amiss—until the bodies were discovered.
Rebecca harbored no illusions about her own safety. Carlson had walked a lonely, twisted road through the past to get to this point. She’d already come to the crossroads and made her decision—the Madisons/Kauffmans would be destroyed by her hand. An interfering mechanic would be just a minor irritant, a gnat to be squashed against a wall.
What Carlson hadn’t counted on was having to eliminate two opponents at the same time. Her attention was divided. That might be their only advantage. Rebecca intended to use it. Nine years of interviewing people in turmoil for newspaper stories had to be good for something. If she could goad Carlson into talking, she might get her to reconsider. Talk was therapeutic. At the very least, it would delay the final act.
Rebecca pressed her forearms on the bleacher, raised up to make eye contact. “Your mother didn’t hate you, Elise. You were part of her. She educated you. Gave you a future.”
Carlson sighed, shaking her head. “The only reason for my existence was to exact vengeance for the past. Today, I’ll do that.” She pirouetted, headed for the old man struggling to hold on.
So much for small talk. Rebecca threw herself onto the bench, slid along it, snagged Carlson’s ankle. She clutched it one-handed, nails digging into tendons. Yanked backwards.
Carlson tottered but remained upright.
Stretching her other arm, Rebecca gripped Carlson’s ankle with both hands. Strained, pulled. Until the rod slashed across her wrists. With a gasp, she recoiled and let go.
Carlson swung again, striking the bleacher. “Revenge begins as a tiny maggot, Rebecca. It writhes and feeds off decaying flesh. It’s voracious. Taunting Peyton was satisfying only at first. I gloated watching him squirm as his financial schemes soured, as he felt failure reaching out to pull him under. Brian was a genius at planting rumors and bad tips, at manipulating reporters to print suggestive news items. My cousin thought we were naughty kids playing a game. It was never a game. There was ever only one goal.”
“Peyton was—”
“A puffed-up little toad.” She went down on one knee. Her face hovered just out of reach. “That night in his motor home, he tried to seduce me. Can you believe it? He was arrogant enough to assume I would succumb. He imagined that having sex with his new partner would give him power over me. That it was good insurance.” She sat on the bench. The rod swayed between her knees. “Consider the irony: He thought sex was his tool, his advantage. Instead, it was his undoing. His fumbling brought back my mother’s tragedy: sex as a means to survival.
“At that moment, I wanted to kill him.” She stilled the rod. “I settled for torturing him. Perhaps a bit longer than necessary, as it turned out.”
Rebecca nodded; she understood, wanted to hear more. “How did you lure him to the tent?”
Carlson turned her head. “Are you still with us, Herr Kauffman. Heinrich? Are you listening to your son’s gullibility? He was paranoid about his material possessions. A family trait, perhaps? He was so certain the saboteur would try again to destroy the car that he hitched up that silly monitor to listen in on the pits. After we toasted the partnership, he dragged me into the bedroom to show off his cleverness. And to attempt seduction. Even with a willing partner, I can’t imagine he was a good lover. What do you think, Heinrich? No offspring. It makes you wonder. Was that one more way in which he failed you?”
Other than a slight sneer, Madison did not respond. His right forearm lay along the platform, fingers scratching like chicken claws for something to grip. His left hand was turning blue.
Carlson turned back to Rebecca. Grinned. “I think I enjoy having a captive audience. You know how to listen. It is a gift.” She crossed one leg over the other, a casual instructor lecturing alfresco.
By her interpretation, Peyton had been annoyed at his lack of success in bedding her. He saw her to the car then went back inside the motor home to sleep off the champagne. She’d remained in the lot, smoked in the dark, quivering with rage. Angry over his advances, but more incensed that she’d even contemplated buying back art her family once owned. By the time her fury subsided, she had a plan. She would give Peyton what he anticipated—an intruder. She drove to the paddock.
“I didn’t plan to kill him. I wanted information, and for him to beg. The stage was set for me: spare coveralls, helmets, the battery charger, a large puddle pooled under the car. Even the epoxy. I merely arranged the props and called him
like so.” She smacked the heel of her boot down on the metal bleacher. Madison cringed at the noise. Rebecca absorbed the reverberation in her arms. “Of course, I used a wrench on the side of a tool chest to sound the alarm. Peyton came running. You know the rest.”
She made sure Madison was still hanging, hearing every word. He now clutched the pole with both hands. Elbows braced against the sides of the foot well. The veins in his wrists were bulging. He was growing paler by the minute.
Carlson shook her head, silver hair glistened. “Your son was a disappointment, Heinrich. I played the tape of my mother’s final hours. It had no impact other than to confuse him. He never learned German. That was a surprise. He couldn’t understand the demented woman crooning over lost masterpieces while she condemned his grandfather, father and all products of their loins to a hell worse than the one she’d known. Still, eventually, he gave me what I needed: assurance that you continued to own my family’s art.”
She pushed off from the bench and stood. “I’m not a barbarian, Rebecca. I didn’t want to make a mistake. There was always a chance that Peyton had sold the Corot on behalf of a third party. But the painting had been his.” She swung around, extending the rod in Madison’s direction. “When did you realize he’d sold it, Heinrich?”
A groan escaped from Madison. His head lolled back and forth. His arms were quivering from either exhaustion or rage. He couldn’t hold on much longer.
Carlson considered him with a cool stare as if she had tired of his existence. Measuring whether a direct kick to the face would release his grip and end it.
Rebecca chanced kneeling on the bleacher. Her legs ached where they had been struck; her neck was tight with tension. She slid sideways, slowly, not to threaten Carlson but enough to reclaim her attention, to keep her talking. “You recognized the Corot when it was offered for sale?”
Carlson almost smiled as she turned her attention away from Madison. “Dreams of recovering the paintings sustained me, as memories of them had sustained my mother. Sophie’s bedtime story was a fairy tale based on family wealth, before…”
Her voice trailed off, drowned out by the whine of the F1 cars accelerating around the turn. The warm-up lap. The race was about to start. The sound seemed to disorient her. She looked dazed as if she’d lost the thread. The story that had consumed her entire life was coming unraveled.
Behind her, Madison took advantage of the noise, struggled to climb onto the platform. One bony knee was up on the stand, right hand flat on the seat. With the left, he still clung to the upright.
He wetted his lips. He’d listened to Carlson with the panicked air of a child overhearing his parents’ plan to put him up for adoption. As Lisa Frankel, her story was inexorably linked with his, but he’d never heard it from her side. Probably never considered it. Even now, he might not digest it. It would take a less egotistical man than he was to accept that the heritage his family claimed was tainted, nearly as abhorrent as the genocide that made it possible.
Carlson faced him, unconcerned that he’d crawled over the edge onto the platform. “You failed to cover your tracks as well as you thought. Don’t you want to know how I made the link between Peyton Madison of South Carolina and Heinrich Kauffman, Nazi collaborator? It wasn’t just the painting.”
Madison swiped away a dollop of spittle, said nothing.
“No?” She raised an eyebrow. “No matter, Rebecca does. She’s a curious little cat. So. The chink in Kauffman’s armor was Ingrid.” At the mention of her name, Madison blinked. Clearly it wasn’t what he expected. “Ingrid was Herr Kauffman’s first wife. He married her not long after my mother was carted off to Mauthausen. We like to think the marriage was Hilde’s doing. Kauffman’s mother was rabid on propagating the pure Aryan race for the Fatherland. She would have hand-picked his Fraulein, don’t you think? Her son did his part, siring Karl on their wedding night.
“When it looked like the Nazis were going to lose the war, Heinrich, Ingrid and Karl trotted off to Argentina with Heinrich, senior. Two years later, Ingrid and Karl died unexpectedly. Inexplicably.”
Carlson swung, stepped closer to Madison. Rebecca inched forward, stopped when Carlson did, tried to look innocent. It was like they were playing the kid’s game where you had to freeze when the leader shouted, “Red light.” Anyone caught moving was out. In Carlson’s version you could be dead.
“Am I boring you, Heinrich? You react badly to being bored, don’t you? I suspect that once you and your father had established yourselves in South America—had your well-paid jobs, security within the Aryan enclave—you grew bored. You were, and here I’m guessing, less patriotic than your father and far greedier. You lusted over the works of art he’d hidden away and dreamed of your own company in America. A business not controlled by stagnating Germans unable to forget their former glory. At that point, I imagine Ingrid and Karl’s days were numbered.”
She whipped around as if trying to catch Rebecca moving. Almost did. She smiled at seeing her frozen, kneeling on the bench one row below.
Carlson sat, swung her feet up on the bench. Stretching out her legs, she leaned back on one elbow, winked at Rebecca. “What do you think? Did our friend here decide that a pro-Nazi, German wife made him too conspicuous? Did her existence proclaim loudly that he was a German expatriate? Or was he simply tired of her and her simpering offspring?”
Her insouciance was unnerving. Madison had both knees on the platform, both hands wrapped around uprights, yet it didn’t phase Carlson. True, his only way down to safety was past her to the stairs. He might risk it. He might make it, unless she’d smuggled a handgun or a knife into the track. From that distance, she couldn’t miss.
Rebecca wiggled backward, slid her knees off the bench to standing.
The movement prompted Carlson to sit up, return to the story. “Hindsight. I have no proof, Rebecca. Though the fact that Kauffman worked in the experimental lab at a chemical company is suggestive. Their death certificates read unknown illness. Possibly chemically induced? Then there was the speed with which he remarried and left the country. More about that later. We’re talking about Ingrid Thierman Kauffman.”
She stood, rotated her shoulders, linked her hands behind her back. The rod, held loosely in her fingers, swayed. The pose was too reminiscent of Nazi officers to be coincidental. She was savoring her little drama, hamming it up for her audience, unconcerned about how long the performance would run. That too, was unsettling.
“After my mother’s death, I hired an investigator and sent him to South America. He searched for family groups that had arrived from Germany with a young bride, Ingrid, and infant son, Karl. I was optimistic that even if papa Kauffman had changed the surname, he would not think it necessary to erase the faded, and fated, daughter-in-law. He should have.
“Because their deaths were suspicious, the Fraulein and son were remembered, even decades later. An aged interviewee thought the name was Cottman. Close enough for a zealot willing to alter his name for protection, but reluctant to relinquish his Teutonic heritage. The wife and son fit the pattern; the husband was the correct age to have been a young man engaged to my mother in the early forties. And there was an older father who’d arrived with enough collateral to buy a compound for his family. I authorized the investigator to keep digging after Señor Cottman’s past. Which brings us to the other woman you married. Both bad choices, Heinrich.”
She had strolled almost to Madison. Now she paced back. Keeping both of them within striking range. A cat with two mice. Easy pickings if she didn’t rush.
“Did I tell you that when Heinrich remarried, it was to an Argentinian? Teresa. She was supposed to have severed all ties when they came to the States. But when a portrait of the successful Madison family appeared in a national magazine, the proud Teresa just had to send a copy home. She wanted her family, the entire town, to witness her success. The photograph is still in a scrapbook of prominent citizens compiled by a local archivist. So, a minor bit of vanity provided t
he missing link.”
It’s the little things that trip us up. Rebecca recalled the blurred photocopy Hagan had shown her of the Madisons in front of their Southern, gracious-living home. It was only human that Teresa had wanted to boast of her good fortune to those she’d left behind.
Madison’s face drained of color, a good indication that he’d been unaware of his wife’s slipup. Carlson didn’t see. She was looking down the stands. Annoyance flitted across her face.
Rebecca heard the banging of feet below her, felt the vibration. Someone was coming to help. She was loathe to take her eyes from Carlson, but risked a quick glance over her shoulder.
She shouldn’t have. If she hadn’t twisted around, she wouldn’t have seen Jasmine racing up the stands, arms pumping, camera smacking her narrow chest, thin legs struggling to mount the steps. Wouldn’t have seen her bicolored face burst into a Christmas-morning smile and then collapse in nearly the same instant when she saw Carlson looming over her hero.
If she hadn’t turned, she wouldn’t have known that the child was grabbing up her camera, fiddling with knobs, rushing headlong into danger.
Rebecca screamed for the girl to stop.
Jasmine either didn’t hear or had no intention of obeying. She scrambled up onto the higher bleacher and ran along it, full tilt. Raised her camera at Carlson. Her tiny fingers activated the strobe light. Flashes of brilliant white burst from it, meant to blind the devil.
Rebecca leapt up to grab the child.
Carlson had anticipated her move. Eyes shut, she lashed out, the rod aimed at the clamor.
The thin baton whirred, connected, slashed Rebecca’s arm open. She cried out.
Carlson swung again, higher, going for her voice, her face. She connected with Rebecca’s palms. She slashed backhanded, again and again, forcing Rebecca farther away from Jasmine until she heard her stumble. Only then did Carlson open her eyes. Reaching down, she clutched the back of the girl’s shirt and yanked her high into the air.
Driven to Murder Page 23