First Lady

by Michael Malone

  “Roid, he’s the killer. Believe me. Call Nancy, tell her what I just told you.” I disconnected, phoned Room 105. When Bunty answered, I told her to get some FBI out to Tartan Drive as fast as she could. She said Rhonda and another agent were already on their way out there with a warrant to search the Norris house. I asked her, “You already got a warrant?”

  “We’re Feds,” she told me in her soft wry twang. “We don’t care about mayors and D.A.s and city councils.”

  • • •

  I found Cuddy standing under the gaudy yellow awning, looking worried. He wore his khaki suit and Carolina blue tie—his uniform for city council meetings. His new white Taurus was parked beside him at the curb. I yelled at him to drive me to Balmoral Heights, that Norris had tried something else, that the FBI had a federal warrant to search and seize.

  As he wheeled us onto Main Street, Cuddy slapped the flasher light from under the seat onto the roof of his car by its suction cup. Quickly as I could, I explained that Norris had broken into Mavis Mahar’s hotel suite.

  “Why the hell would he mess around with her now?” Cuddy looked at me. “Unless he saw you two together and it’s just to get at you. In which case, thank you, Elvis, for keeping Alice in the mountains. And that’s all I’m saying on that subject.”

  I had another idea as to why Tyler Norris would wish to extinguish Mavis Mahar, but I didn’t want to discuss it, or even believe it was true. But it had occurred to me that Mavis had actually seen Norris on the grounds of The Fifth Season at some point in that drunken night when she’d brought Lucy Griggs back to the bungalow, that there’d been if not a brief encounter with Norris at the resort, then at least a glimpse of him. That would make Mavis a witness that Tyler was in the area at the time of a homicide. He may have just realized that she was a witness—perhaps because of Shelly’s reporting yesterday in the Star that the police had a prime suspect and an arrest was imminent. Mavis had returned to Hillston just before the article’s appearance, and maybe he assumed that she’d talked to the police.

  If I was right, Mavis had lied to me when I’d first questioned her, and she’d done so in order to protect herself from any involvement in the case. Being a witness in a homicide meant depositions and court appearances and other tiresome responsibilities for which the fast-moving star had no time. I didn’t want to think there was a ruthlessness in her as cold and dark as space. A careless self-interest that had helped to cost Margy Turbot her life.

  I said none of this aloud, but explained to Cuddy what we’d now set in motion: a search of Norris’s house to check for evidence that he’d kept Kristin Stiller’s body in a deep freeze. A search to learn whether he and Lucy Griggs had used the Haver email system to correspond. A search to prove that cat hairs found on the seat of the Explorer that he had driven matched hairs of the Persian cat we’d seen in Margy Turbot’s kitchen.

  Cuddy told me he had gone to see Isaac. Reaching in his jacket he pulled out a rectangular box. “He said Tyler came over to his place the night after they won and smiled the scariest smile he’d ever seen and handed him this box as a thank-you present. He said he now thinks Tyler just couldn’t resist boasting about how he’d gotten away with murder and had used Isaac to do it. I’m telling you, the old man was pretty shaken up. Could be he suspected Tyler killed Linsley, but he was totally blindsided by this Guess Who stuff.”

  I opened the box. It was full of ribboned marksmanship medals from a place called Stillhurst Academy, most of them first prize medals. Rifle, pistol, trap shooting—there must have been a dozen of them.

  Cuddy said, “Right. Tyler Norris testified he never shot a gun in his life. That he had no idea how to load a shotgun. And we didn’t catch it.”

  I said, “There was no record of his being at Stillhurst Academy. The family must have buried it. Like I told you yesterday, my mom just happened to mention how they sent him somewhere after the fire (which I bet you anything little Tyler started), but she thought it was a Georgia boarding school, not all the way to—this place is in Mississippi! There was no way we could have known.”

  Cuddy frowned. “There’s always a way if you work hard enough.” We sped off the bypass at the North Hillston exit. “Learned Hand,” he said sadly.

  “What?”

  “Margy’s cat, Learned Hand, named after the fellow they call the Tenth Justice of the Supreme Court. Nice cat.”

  “Nancy’s got him,” I explained. “He’d gotten up into an attic crawl space and was hiding from all the chaos.”

  Cuddy shook his head, fretful. “I wish Nancy would go over to River Rise and find Martha Mitchell for me.”

  I was surprised. “Where’d Martha go? She never goes anywhere.”

  “I know. Just steps out through her doggy door and uses the facilities and then back in she comes. Tell you the honest truth, sometimes, every now and then, Martha doesn’t even step out.”

  “You think this is news to anybody?” Cuddy’s blind adoration of his old dirty white poodle was an HPD joke.

  “She does her best. Give her a break. When you’re her age, you’ll be in diapers. But I’m worried, okay, Martha’s wandered off and it’s dark. I know she can get in on her own, but her eyesight’s sort of bad.”

  “She’s blind!”

  “Okay, real bad. Cleopatra called me before she left, said she couldn’t find her anywhere in the apartment.”

  “Cuddy, I’m sorry to say it, but Cleopatra Skelton can’t seem to find your vacuum cleaner or your washing machine either. I know, I know, give her a break. Hey, see the lights up there, turn, turn.”

  We swung in through the Balmoral Heights entrance. It wasn’t a gated community in the sense that admittance was controlled by locks and guards, but on either side of the access road there was a distinctive stone wall with a huge bronze sign embedded in it announcing “BALMORAL HEIGHTS.” A van that I recognized as an unmarked HPD vehicle sat parked beside the wall under the floodlights. Hopping out, I learned from the driver that a car with government plates and a young tan woman in the shotgun seat had just driven through the gate.

  “Goddamn it!” I ran back to Cuddy’s car. “It’s Rhonda. They’re going to get there before we can secure the rear! If he’s home and they push him, he’ll take off for the woods! He’s got a racing bike. Gun it!”

  But as we skidded around the corner of the intersection, still half a block away, I saw Rhonda in her gray pants suit already at the opened door of the big fake chalet. The entry light shone down on her and a huge young man who looked as if he’d left a career in pro-football to join the FBI. Rhonda was holding up her agent’s badge to someone inside the house. Then I saw Norris step forward into view to look around, drawn by the screech of Cuddy’s tires. He saw us, jumped back, and slammed the door shut in Rhonda’s face. Rhonda kept knocking, then stepped aside for her fellow agent. He raised a gigantic leg and kicked open the door.

  There was no way to maneuver Cuddy’s car in the dark through the thickly landscaped lot to the rear of the house. I jumped out running, but by the time I reached the back door it was wide open and Norris had already disappeared—on his racing bike I was sure—into the heavy black wall of pines that sloped away from me. I ran all the way down into the woods. Dark dead silence in all directions.

  Returning up the slope toward the open back door of the house, I heard Rhonda yelling at Cuddy, “Christ almighty, Honch, get in here! Good god!”

  I could see the two FBI agents through the window of the utility room where they’d turned on bright lights. Rhonda had the large white lid of the deep freezer raised over her head and she was looking inside.

  Chapter 34

  Mate

  The huge white metal box looked grotesquely like an ancient sarcophagus. But that was because of the dead body frozen inside it, the human being hidden beneath an international variety of frozen vegetarian dishes. The dead woman was bent at the leg
s, just as Tyler must have lowered her into the freezer, although she was short enough to have lain straight in her curious tomb. Her dark skin and jet black hair made a startling contrast with the white ice around her. It was Lupe Guevarra, the Garifuna woman. Her skull was crushed, much as we’d found her sister Maria’s in the garbage bag at Southern Depot.

  Rhonda moved aside for us. “She’s been in here a couple of days. Probably since the night she left Trinity.”

  Cuddy said, “Norris probably told her he was bringing her here to her sister. Goddamn it, how many more?”

  “No more,” I promised him. I left Rhonda and him on phones calling for an HPD SWAT team to help search the woods. The other agent was already out there with a big flashlight following the bicycle tracks. The ID people, forensics, photographers, the medical examiner, they’d all be here soon. No one—not even Norris family friends on the city council—was going to tell us to leave Tyler alone anymore.

  But around the subdivision there were at least five hundred acres of undeveloped woodland bordered by only partially cleared land where new houses were under construction. If G.I. Jane could lie undiscovered for two months a mile from the access road, how likely was it that in this dense forest we would find a man in black riding a black bicycle, even in full moonlight?

  Unless we knew exactly where he was going.

  I closed my eyes, listened to the conversation with my mother in the hospital:

  Finally they found him hiding in this little tree house he had on their lake property. He’d gotten himself all the way out there on his bicycle.”

  “Where’s this lake property?”

  “Oh honey, you know. Right next to that new resort, what’s it called? Something about Vivaldi.”

  Sprinting to the frontyard, I was already opening the door to Cuddy’s car (where I knew he’d left the keys in the ignition), when I saw a red Jeep slam to a stop right behind it. Nancy was driving, Zeke beside her in the front seat; behind them I could see the huge dark head of Zeke’s shepherd Heidi. Nancy was yelling at me out the window, “Roid called. You get Norris?”

  “No! Turn around!” I ran back through the house to the utility room where I’d seen a wicker basket of dirty clothes; I grabbed a Haver sweatshirt off the top and raced outside again. Zeke pulled the dog over when I jumped in beside him. The jeep took off with me shouting directions at Nancy as she skidded out of Balmoral Heights on two wheels.

  We were on our way to North Cove on Pine Hills Lake. If I was right, Tyler Norris was headed for his family’s lake property. He was still doing what he’d done as a child, escaping to his “safe place” when threatened with danger. And once we’d looked inside his freezer, he was in fatal danger and had to know it. If I was wrong about where he’d gone, the HPD team would be walking the Balmoral woods all night and maybe they’d find him there.

  As we drove, I phoned the stables where I boarded Manassas. The teenage girl whose parents owned the place sounded as if I’d interrupted her favorite television show. (It was eleven at night.) But finally I talked her into saddling Manassas and waiting with him by the croquet lawn of The Fifth Season. The resort shared a boundary with the stables on one side and the Norris property on the other. By crossing the terrain that hid the luxury bungalows, we could reach the bridle path beside the lakefront and approach the Norris house from its blind side without the sound of a car engine.

  Speeding north, I briefed Nancy and Zeke. We agreed that we’d have a better chance if we came at Norris from more than one direction. Zeke and I would come in through the woods. He hadn’t wanted me to borrow a horse for him, claiming he could move faster on foot. Nancy would block the driveway into Norris’s family’s home in case he tried to flee by car or bike, but I told her not to get out of her Jeep and not to attempt to approach Norris if she saw him. “Listen to me, Nancy, what he said in his trial about never using a gun. Not true. He’s got a fistful of marksmanship medals.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No, I’m not. So forget being Annie Oakley.”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus, okay, forget about being Mel Gibson. Just block the road.”

  “You hear him?” Zeke asked his wife.

  “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  Nancy dropped us off on The Fifth Season’s circular drive. We found the teenage girl beside the lush clipped green of the croquet lawn with an unsettled Manassas dancing on the lead she held. I took him and gave her two twenties which cheered her more than she acknowledged as she left.

  Up on Manassas, I had to calm him from twisting in a circle to keep his wary eye on the large Malinois shepherd Zeke had on its leash. Zeke shook out Norris’s dirty sweatshirt and let the dog Heidi smell it. Then he set out with her at an easy loping run into The Fifth Season’s woods. I followed them. Zeke was remarkably fast, and he proved right about the terrain. Manassas and I, picking our way through the uneven and branch-cluttered forest floor, could do little more than keep Zeke in sight as the big man and his dog threaded their speeding way through the trees. He made no more noise in this familiar land than his Cherokee ancestors might have hundreds of years ago, before my ancestors harried them westward.

  Suddenly ahead of me, Heidi began lunging and growling. Zeke must have then unsnapped the leash, for I saw the dog streak away into the night with Zeke racing effortlessly along the path after her.

  I kicked Manassas into a canter as the path took its curve past the clearing in the pines and opened onto the small pebbled beach owned by The Fifth Season. In the moonlight I could make out the shadowy gray outline of the wooden dock where I’d seen Mavis Mahar diving into the lake on a summer dawn that now felt very long ago.

  We’d gone over two miles now, and neither Zeke nor Heidi showed any sign of strain as they ran along the moonlit gravel. All at once, they turned off the path into thick woods. Deep in the pines I could see a strange flickering light. I followed the back of Zeke’s broad white polo shirt into the dark. Suddenly he stopped, grabbed Heidi’s collar and, leaning down, spoke to her. I pulled Manassas over beside him and looked where he was pointing.

  Forty feet away from us, the woods ended in an unkempt lawn leading to a large gingerbread Victorian house whose pale yellow paint was cracked and peeling. Lights illuminated a screened-in back porch. The lights were bright enough to show blood splattered against the siding.

  At the lawn’s far edge, an immense old sycamore tree, its white bark glowing in the light of the full moon, shadowed two cars. Tyler Norris was throwing kerosene from a large red can onto the tree base where small branches had been stacked. About twenty feet above his head, I saw the weathered flooring of a tree house that had been built in the fork of two huge boughs. On this platform, an American flag draped over his body, and kindling wood stacked neatly beneath and around him, lay Fulke Norris, the killer’s father. I could tell who it was because of the beautiful white hair haloed in the moonlight. I could even see the red of the blood in his hair.

  I calmed Manassas. “Jesus, he shot his dad and hauled him up there,” I whispered to Zeke, who was straining to hold back the lunging dog.

  About to dismount, I checked for my gun in the back of my belt. Suddenly I heard a woman’s voice. “Tyler Norris! Halt! Police!”

  “Goddamn it,” I whispered.

  “You’re under arrest,” Nancy shouted. “Put your hands behind your head! Do it! Now! Do it!”

  But Tyler dropped to the ground and started rolling. My eyes shot ahead of his motion and spotted the double-barrel shotgun against the sycamore. Next to me, Zeke saw it too. His hand flew up from Heidi’s lead and the dog surged forward. With a long low growl, she was on Norris, her jaw clamped on the hand inches from the stock of the shotgun. The two of them twisted kicking in an indistinguishable blur of noise and motion. Zeke was running onto the lawn, yelling at Nancy, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  Norris had remarkabl
e strength, the force that madness gives to rage. He kicked free of Heidi and scrambled up to the closest tree branch, swung onto it with a scream of pain. One of his hands was bloody and the dog had probably broken bones. With Heidi leaping and snapping at his feet, Tyler pulled himself by pure will up onto the branch and then climbed quickly higher, from bough to bough, following a path through the tree that he’d climbed since childhood.

  He reached the platform and squatted beside the improvised funeral pyre on which his dead father lay.

  Kicking Manassas forward, I gestured for Nancy and Zeke to keep back out of range as I shouted up into the tree. “Tyler, you got any weapons up there, throw them down! Game’s over!”

  In the still night air, I could hear his rasping open-mouthed gasps for breath. Finally he called down to me, “Think so?”

  “You’re under arrest. You have a right to remain silent, you have a right—”

  “Savile, you people have been so stupid, it almost wasn’t fun.”

  “You think murdering six women and now your father is fun?”

  He laughed in an eerie childish way. “You think that’s all there is?”

  All at once, a whoosh of fire leapt in a red arc beside him as if lightning had struck the tree bough. He shouted, “Checkmate!”

  The kindling on the platform must have been soaked in kerosene too. In seconds, a ring of fire circled the body of Fulke Norris. Smoke quickly engulfed the platform.

  I kicked Manassas to the tree trunk as he fought me to keep away from the fire. Reaching up, I grabbed the bough and swung onto it. Pulling my shirt up as a mask against the smoke, I started climbing the tree. If Norris had another gun, he was going to use it on himself or on me or on both of us. It was impossible to see where he was. All I could do was keep climbing, hoping that if I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me either.