Over the next half hour, she watched the place slowly fill up, mostly couples or foursomes, with only the very occasional single male easing his way to the bar, getting his drink, lighting up a cigarette or cigar, and then turning in the swiveling bar chair to scan the room. She was careful to return no appraising looks from across the room, because all of the men so far looked like professional lounge lizards. A couple of the more presentable men had given her the once-over, unfortunately while looking over the shoulders of their dates. When she realized that she was the only female sitting alone in the entire lounge, she decided she should cash out and leave. Just then, a striking Hispanic-looking woman in a black dress almost identical to her own came in and sat down at a deuce about midway up the dance floor, on the other side of the room. She ordered a drink and then looked around, saw Connie, gave a small smile, and then looked away. Okay, so what was that? Connie wondered. A sign of recognition from another lonely hunter, or a tentative hit from the Sapphic sisterhood?
Connie stood up and started walking toward the bar, but then the Hispanic woman motioned to the empty chair at her table. Connie hesitated. She didn’t know this woman, and she sure as hell wasn’t here to meet other women. But it was a gracious gesture, and to ignore it would be rude. So she changed course and went over.
“Hi. I’m Carla,” the woman said. “You do not have to join me if you do not want to.”
Connie smiled and hoped her discomfort wasn’t too obvious. “I’m Connie. Thanks for the offer. I just came down for a drink.”
“So? You are not here for sport? There are so many beautiful men in this place.”
“There are?” Connie said, looking to see what had changed. “Where, exactly?” Then she saw that the other woman was kidding her. “Oh, yeah. Right. Beautiful men. Not.”
Carla laughed—a throaty sound. She was porcelain-pretty, and Connie, the surgical nurse, suddenly wondered if Carla had had work. If so, they’d screwed up on her lumpy nose. Her dramatic front, on the other hand, was another story, because only made-to-order movie stars were that perfect. From across the room, she’d looked to be in her twenties, but now, up close, definitely thirties. Maybe cosmetically thirties, but actually older than that. Intense dark eyes. And makeup—lots of makeup.
Carla reached into her large bean-shaped purse for some cigarettes. “Do you mind?”
Connie didn’t. Cat had been a smoker, and so had she, a long time ago, until she’d seen one too many blackened, cancer-ridden lungs flopped out into bloody stainless-steel bowls in the OR. “Feel free,” she said. “It’s a bar.”
“Yes, it is,” Carla said. “In America, smoking is almost everywhere a crime, yes?”
“Almost,” Connie said as Carla blew a blue stream skyward. Definitely work, Connie thought, seeing the tiny scars under Carla’s chin. But not at our clinic. Whoever’d done this had made her look almost mannish. “I used to smoke,” she said. “But I quit. Where are you from, Carla?”
“Germany, actually,” Carla said. “I work for a German business in Washington, D.C.”
“Really,” Connie said. “I would have made you out to be Hispanic, not German.”
“Only in the movies are all Germans fair-haired and blue-eyed,” Carla said with a laugh. “Especially German women. I am a Berliner.”
I’ll bet you are, Connie thought, remembering some posters she’d seen once at a photography exhibition—depictions of the ladies of the Berlin cabaret scene. Carla baby here would have fit right in, with that slicked-down skullcap hairdo and the plaster-and-lathe makeup. She could imagine Carla in an SS uniform, with some wicked spike-heeled boots. “That’s fascinating. What do you think of the States?”
The waitress swept by and shot Connie an inquiring look, but she shook her head and passed her the tab and a twenty. “It is so-o interesting,” Carla began, scanning the room while she talked. The waitress came back with Connie’s change. Connie passed her a fiver and gathered her things. “It’s been a long day,” she said, getting up. To her surprise, Carla reached out to take her hand. Stronger grip than Connie would have expected. “Ladies’?” she inquired. “Do you know where?”
Connie flipped her head in a “Come with me” gesture. “I’ll show you.”
Swamp crunched down the country road at a steady thirty miles an hour, the Land Rover’s four-wheel drive handling the snow with ease. Fortunately, it hadn’t sleeted first, so it was all just snow. The boxy vehicle’s air conditioner wasn’t anything to write home about, but the heater worked fine, and he had taken off his coat. His cell phone screen was reporting that he was definitely on his own for the moment, so he’d had no word from Cullen as to whether or not they’d found Connie Wall and had her covered. He’d passed only one other vehicle west of Interstate 81. The road was typical of the hill country, one switchback after another and a steady climb. Coming back down would be more interesting. The deer were all bedded down out in the woods, and he’d seen only one coyote in his headlights in the past hour.
If Cullen had managed to get through, he should be able to go directly to the local sheriff’s office in Garrison Gap and find out where she was. Probably at her room in the lodge. He knew the lodge, having stayed there himself on one of his occasional weekend trips. He wasn’t a skier, but sometimes he’d get in the Rover and head west, if only to escape Harpers Ferry. Much like Connie Wall, he thought. Sometimes it was necessary to hit the road, just to make sure you still could. He looked at his watch. This was going to take longer than he’d thought, and that was beginning to bother him.
Headlights flared in his mirrors from a mile back, then were blocked out by a curve. Then back again, much closer. Brights, too. He flipped his rearview mirror down to negate the sudden glare, and then whoever it was came right up behind him and flashed his brights! What did this idiot expect him to do—go faster? Drive off the road into a snowbank? The lights flicked again, but Swamp couldn’t see what was back there because Shit for Brains left them on high beam. He began to slow, his standard cure for tailgaters. The car closed in close enough that Swamp could finally see that it was some kind of sports car, with a low humped shape and round lights. Two silhouettes in it.
He slowed some more, and this time he got a double beep from the guy’s horn. Horn works. Try your brakes, asshole. He grinned. Good. Pretty soon the guy would become extremely impatient and come roaring around him. He slowed some more and saw brake lights flaring behind him, and then the car finally dropped back. For the next five minutes, Swamp resumed what he considered safe road speed in the blowing snow but as he came around another curve, he saw the beam of the headlights swing out into the other lane. There was a fairly straight section ahead, maybe two hundred yards long, so Swamp put on the brakes. The sports car obligingly came zooming around him in a whine of accelerating machinery. A Porsche, from the looks of it, although Swamp wasn’t up on model numbers. He caught a brief glimpse of a mop of platinum blond hair in the passenger seat and then, as the little car fishtailed ahead, one gloved hand flipping him the bird out the open window on the driver’s side. Then it was gone around the next curve.
He wondered if Connie Wall would agree to return to Harpers Ferry with him. She might not, and he had no legal authority to make her leave the lodge. He checked the cell phone again. One bar of signal. Getting closer to something, he thought. Then the single bar disappeared and he dropped the phone back into its hook in the center console. Swamp realized he was going too fast, so he let the big beast slow down as he went into a deep turn over a stone bridge. The creek below appeared as a black crack between fluffy snow-banks on either side. A pair of gleaming eyes flashed briefly from the woods as he steered left and up the next climb. He dropped the Rover into second, realizing there might be some ice out here, and was rewarded with a minor skid and then renewed traction. He climbed the next hill and then eased through a steep cut, passing several car-size boulders down along the side of the road, one of which was lying on top of the FALLING ROCKS sign. Got that ri
ght, he thought as he let the Rover coast down the hill in second. It made for a noisy ride, but he had seen the ice this time. At the bottom of the half-mile-long hill, the road bent to the right, and he almost missed the two tire tracks leading straight off the road on the left side and disappearing into a stand of tall spruce. He sighed, dropped into first, and then stopped in the middle of the road.
He reached for his coat, hat, and gloves, then retrieved the yellow emergency beacon he carried in a box in the rear seat. He had a blue one back there, too, but this was Good Samaritan business, not police business. Not yet anyway.
He was really going to be delayed now. He put the yellow beacon up on the roof of the Rover and went down into the snow.
Connie led Carla into the ladies’ room, which was down a short hall from the entrance lobby to the lounge itself. There was an outer and an inner door, and when Connie, going first, entered the bathroom, she saw a lone woman at the sinks. The woman, who was in her forties and definitely not made for little black dresses anymore, if ever, turned to look at the two of them as they came in. She turned off the faucet, grabbed a handful of paper towels, and then openly stared at Carla as Connie headed for a stall.
“What the hell are you?” she said in a surprisingly authoritative voice.
“I beg your pardon?” Carla said, walking toward the sinks. Connie, about to shut the stall door, looked over her shoulder to see what was the matter.
“I said, What the hell are you? You sure as hell don’t belong in the ladies’ room, do you?”
Connie watched Carla stop right in front of the woman, do a little hop in place, and then, to Connie’s total astonishment, kick the woman in the crotch hard enough to double her over. She hit the floor with a tremendous gasp, and then Carla was turning toward Connie, her dark eyes burning with intensity, something glinting in her hand. Connie reflexively raised her hand, but Carla grabbed it with surprising strength and spun her around in the doorway to the stall. Connie was too surprised to fight back, even as Carla put a knee in her back and pushed her face-first into the stall, cracking her head on the partially opened door. Before she could regain her balance, Connie felt a lance of white-hot pain in her back, pain so great, she would have collapsed to the floor, except for the fact that Carla was still holding her arm. It was bent painfully up behind her back, so she couldn’t fall, even though her trembling legs were already giving way.
“I am sorry for this,” Carla whispered. “But I will need your house.”
Then there was a crash and a scream for help as the chunky woman appeared behind Carla and hit her with something. Connie couldn’t see what it was, and she didn’t care now that that iron grip on her arm had been released and she was free to sag down onto her knees, which landed in blood—lots of blood, running down the backs of her thighs, making the floor slippery. She grabbed for the toilet bowl, swaying sideways and bumping her head again, this time on the side of the stall, barely conscious of the noisy struggle behind her in the bathroom. She finally collapsed to one side of the bowl in time to see Carla jab the other woman’s Adam’s apple with the rigid fingers of her left hand while she was attempting to beat on Carla with the metal top of the bathroom trash can. The woman made a gargling noise, dropped the square metal top onto the floor with a tremendous clatter, and clutched at her throat. Carla stepped back and drove a stainless-steel knife shaped like a flattened rocket into the woman’s midsection three times in rapid, grunting succession. The woman whoofed out a large breath and sat down heavily on the floor, one hand still clutching her throat, the other her midsection, her eyes crossing as blood fountained out of her mouth and cascaded over the front of her dress. By then, Connie’s own vision was starting to blur from her vantage point down on the floor. She was still clutching the toilet bowl like some hungover college student, her lower back ablaze with pain. She thought she heard voices from outside the bathroom doors. Carla appeared in the doorway to the stall for an instant and stared down at her with her flashing, almost black eyes, and then she was gone. Connie tried to make a sound as a red haze began to envelop the edges of her vision.
Those eyes…Jesus Christ! Was Carla a man? Oh my God! Was it him?
Then she heard a blur of excited voices, but they were slowly swallowed up by a humming noise that filled her head, then all her senses, and then the whole world darkened mercifully.
By the time Swamp arrived in Garrison Gap and found the Crass County Sheriff’s Office, pandemonium reigned inside. Deputies were sprinting past him for their cars out front, and two dispatchers were yelling at each other and into their radios, calling for backup, ambulances, and EMTs to respond to a double homicide at the Garrison Lodge. He stood to one side as everyone in the central operations room scrambled to deal with the emergency. Two homicides, he thought. Even for a West Virginia mountain town on a Saturday night, that was a bit unusual, especially this early in the evening. That level of cutting and gutting usually didn’t start until well after midnight. Finally, a short, balding deputy who’d been talking urgently to someone on the phone for the past five minutes looked across the room and saw Swamp.
“You the Secret Service guy?” he called across the room, his words turning some heads.
Swamp nodded, and the deputy held up the phone, obviously wanting Swamp to take it. Swamp crossed the room and found Jake Cullen on the other end. “Where you been, pardner?” Cullen asked.
“Making a nice mountain drive through the snow. And rescuing two idiot Yuppies from themselves about seven miles out of town. Their Porsche, contrary to popular opinion and all the ads, cannot, in fact, fly. But why—”
“You don’t know?”
A cold feeling spread into Swamp’s stomach. “I know they’re going nuts up here in the sheriff’s office. What’s happened?”
“Bastard got to her, that’s what’s happened. In that lodge. Attacked her in the ladies’ room, stabbed her in the back, killed another woman who was in there.”
“Judas Priest! When did all this happen?”
“Apparently, thirty minutes ago. I’d been talking to the cops up there, trying to see if they’d found her yet, but they hadn’t. There’d been this three-car collision in front of one of the ski resorts, so they had everybody out working that. Next thing they know, Garrison Lodge security is calling in two homicides.”
“She’s dead?”
“Well, they’re not sure about Ms. Wall. First reports said two, but then the EMTs got into it and took one to the hospital. The description of the dead woman is of someone older and heavier than Connie—Ms. Wall.”
“Goddamn it! Any description on the killer?”
“Nope. They’re still all going bananas up there, from what I’m hearing. One story was that a woman did it. But since you’re on the scene…”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll work it. Anybody official here know why I’m here, or what this is all about?”
“Yes. I spoke to the sheriff himself. That was just before all this shit went down. His people may or may not know anything.”
“Okay, I got it,” Swamp said. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have something.”
Swamp handed the phone back to the deputy, who listened for a moment, but Cullen was already gone. He peered up at Swamp, taking in the Stetson and Swamp’s green Air Force winter jacket with the leather name tag on the left side. Trying not to stare at Swamp’s face, he asked, “Got some ID?”
Swamp fished out his OSI credentials and told the deputy about the two squirrels in their Porsche. The deputy told one of the dispatchers, who rolled his eyes. Then Swamp asked where the sheriff might be.
“Sheriff McComb’s at the scene, last I heard. That’s the Garrison Lodge. Go right out of our lot, down the main drag, three blocks. Look for lots of blue lights.”
“Okay, and where’s the hospital?”
“Other way, six blocks. Go right at the Burger King, big ugly building up the hill.”
“I assume you have people at the hospital. Can you contact the
m and tell them I’m coming over there? And if the sheriff can meet me somewhere, maybe there? I’ll give him the background on this mess.”
“Y’all know what’s behind this?”
“Theories, Deputy, theories is what we’ve got at this stage. And at least one of them went wrong tonight.”
As he drove over to the hospital, he wondered how he was going to explain all this to his boss. Had their German found himself some hired help? Or were there two of them? A cell? It had been his idea to use Connie Wall as bait; unfortunately, it was beginning to look like the bait had been swallowed. So far, this killer had been kicking their asses. If she died, they were truly back to square one.
He spotted the hospital building up on the hill. If she didn’t die, they might have one more chance to break their losing streak. If she could give any kind of description, maybe the thing to do would be to announce that Wall had died of her injuries, then try something else. They still had nearly a month to go before the speech to the joint session. Surely they could improve on this mess. He made a mental note to call McNamara in the morning, but now he steeled himself to go inside and face what might be really bad news. And if it turned out that a woman had done this, he would have the double pleasure of informing his bosses that they were now dealing with a terrorist cell, not just some lone wolf. Good deal.
Heismann’s escape from the lodge had been a combination of quick thinking and good luck. “Carla” had bolted from the bathroom as soon as the fat woman went down for the last time, but not before making sure the damned nurse was done for. Based on the amount of blood and the glazed look in her eyes, she was as good as dead. He’d taken ten seconds to wash his hands and stow the knife. Coming out of the ladies’ room, he’d seen a manager and a security man with a radio hurrying down the hall toward the ladies’ room. He’d backed out of their way, put both hands to his face in mock horror, and gibbered incomprehensibly in really bad Spanish while pointing with his chin at the door to the bathroom. They pushed right past him and dashed into the ladies’ room, while he backed up to the door of the men’s room, made sure there was no one watching, and then slipped inside.
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