Red Means Run

by Brad Smith

  “What happened?”

  “We just got snookered by the dashing Rafael de Costa,” Claire said. “That’s what happened. By the way, I did some digging on that guy. His real name is Ralphie Cox. He’s from Cleveland.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yes, I’m kidding.”

  “Well, I’m going to indict Boddington again,” Daniels said.

  “That might not be easy,” Claire told him.

  “Why not? It’s not double jeopardy. We never made it to trial.”

  “Yeah, but we had trouble the first time around,” Claire said.

  “You weren’t here yet. There was a whole to-do about whether or not he was in control of what happened to the horses, or if it fell to his underlings. Boddington tried to say he was totally hands-off, that he had no idea how the animals were being treated. And then he threw his foreman to the wolves, saying it was all his fault. We had to argue that everything was in his name, so he was responsible. So there’s that. And now the case is tainted with what went down today. Thanks to Rafael and his Sixth fucking Amendment.”

  “You think he got to her?”

  “The judge?” Claire asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “No. What he got was shit lucky. He came in swinging for the fences and he happened to connect. Harrison wouldn’t have dismissed.”

  “That’s because Harrison was the judge who granted the continuances,” Daniels said.

  “That’s right. But somehow Boddington knew we had a fill-in and he took a shot. Like when you had a substitute teacher in school—you always had to see what you could get away with. He probably had a ten percent chance of dismissal and he won. Santiago should have held it over until next month and let Harrison rule. But how old is the woman, thirty-five? She’s a rookie judge and she must have figured, you know, she needed to make her mark. First day here and all. And twenty-five months is twenty-five months.”

  “You’re a lot calmer about this than I expected,” Daniels said.

  “I’m a lot calmer than you,” Claire said, smiling.

  “But it was your case.”

  “Yeah. But I knew all along that I wasn’t going to get any great satisfaction out of it. What were they going to do, put Boddington in jail? Not fucking likely, Alex. With a guy like that, sometimes all you can hope for is that his reputation takes a big hit, and he stops doing whatever he was doing. He’s looked pretty bad in the media over this. Everybody loves horses, even people who have never been within a mile of one.”

  “You think Boddington cares about that part of it?”

  “About his image?” Claire asked. “Did you see the outfit on the guy today? That’s all he cares about. How he looks.”

  Daniels got to his feet. “Speaking of image, this thing today doesn’t do much for my office. What the hell do I do about that?”

  “In the short term? Not much.” Claire smiled. “Bear in mind the words of a great American philosopher. ‘Keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.’”

  “Who said that, Dale Earnhardt?”

  “Jim Morrison.”

  Daniels was too young and too buttoned-down to be hip to The Doors. “Right. I’ll let you get back to work. You got your stakeout tonight?”

  “I’m still thinking about it.”

  “You want to tell me what it is?”

  “I’m still thinking about that too.”

  Claire packed up and left a few minutes after Daniels. When she got home, she plugged her cell phone in to charge and slid a frozen mini pizza in the oven. She showered and changed into jeans and an old Everlast T-shirt. She put a couple of water bottles and a banana in a knapsack, along with her Beretta, her badge, and her cuffs.

  She opened a beer and sat in the living room and ate the pizza. She had been trying to decide for two days the best way to approach the farmhouse. If she showed up when it was still daylight, she risked being seen, either by Cain if he was in the area, or by somebody else. Like Mary Nelson, for instance. And she was pretty sure where Mary Nelson’s loyalties lay, especially after the incident at Hopman’s. Damsels in distress tend to stand by their rescuers. Claire knew that she herself would, if anybody ever rescued her. Of course, no one ever had. Not even close.

  She had been back and forth in her mind on whether she should take someone with her. But she couldn’t do that without alerting the department as to what she was up to. That much surveillance could blow the whole deal. She was fairly certain of one thing: if Cain knew they were aware he was still in the area, he’d be gone. And he was smart enough, Claire was convinced, that he wouldn’t head north into Canada. In fact, he was smart enough that they might never find him. Which meant that the prevailing opinion that he was guilty would not change. The department would consider the case solved, with the suspect still at large.

  She knew she had to go alone. Even one uniform would be one too many. She was, she knew, feeling a little possessive about Virgil Cain, and that part bothered her. But part of that was his doing. He hadn’t chosen to call Joe Brady at home. She told herself he’d called her not because she had good legs but because he’d considered her to be smart as well. Maybe she was going this alone because she was determined to prove she was smarter than him. Nothing that had happened so far would suggest that was true.

  She finished the pizza and leaned back and drank the beer, trying to decide whether to go or to stay. It would help if she knew what time he would be showing up. It would help if she knew if he would be showing up at all.

  She was still deliberating when there was a knock on the door. She opened it and Todd slouched in, wearing his hangdog look as if it were a novelty mask.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  He either missed her tone or chose to ignore it. He walked over and flopped on the couch. Stretching out his legs, he put his feet on the coffee table. “Oh, what a day.”

  Claire stood looking at him. He was wearing his usual outfit. Dockers and a knit shirt with the name of his flooring company on it. Top-Siders with no socks.

  “Should I get you a highball and your slippers, honey?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Claire practically shouted it.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled and took his feet off the table.

  “Just thought I’d stop and say hi.”

  “Hi,” Claire said with mock gaiety. “Now hit the road. I have to go to work.”

  He sat there glumly for a few more seconds and then got to his feet. He was like a mopey teenager. “I might have to sell the house,” he told her. “If things don’t pick up, I’m going to have to do something.”

  What does this have to do with me, Claire wanted to ask. Talking to him was like watching the same rerun, over and over. It was like that movie Groundhog Day. Claire was a real-life version of Bill Murray in the film. Too bad it wasn’t a movie; at least then she could hit the mute button whenever Todd started talking.

  “I don’t know how things got so screwed up, Claire,” he said. “I keep thinking that everything was good when we were together. Why couldn’t I see that?”

  “Did you hit your head?” she asked. “Things were a mess when we were together. You were always broke and I had to bail us out. Look at you now. Who the fuck told you to buy an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house? And a cottage. And all the rest of your toys. Who’s going to come to your rescue now? Miss Implants? I don’t think so. You need to start living in the real world, Todd.”

  “See? You can talk sense to me.”

  “For the love of—” Claire said, offering her palms in surrender. “I have to go to work. You want to talk to somebody but you don’t want to listen. You don’t need a counselor, you need a dog. But knowing you, you’ll pay ten grand for the mutt.”

  He started for the door and stopped. She thought for a moment that she had gotten through to him. At long last. Then he turned to her. “Do you
want to have lunch tomorrow?”

  “Go home, Todd.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  By morning Virgil’s clothes weren’t quite dry, and his boots weren’t even close. The motel had no laundry facilities and even if it did, he had nothing to wear while he washed what was on his back anyway. He could find a department store and buy new clothes and shoes, but his money was dwindling. And a man wearing everything brand-new was conspicuous. He would have to go back to the house.

  He waited until late afternoon and then drove to the woods at the back of the farm. He’d been hiding the truck on an old snowmobile trail deep in the woods, out of sight of anybody who happened down the side road. The lane was muddy from the rain the previous day, and pulling in, he immediately got stuck. It took him half an hour to free the truck, after piling pine branches under the back wheels.

  Carrying the binoculars, he walked past the cattle herd to his lookout point in the cedars. There were no vehicles in the vicinity of the house or barns, but then he hadn’t expected there to be. He watched the windows of the house for a time, and the road out front, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was dry under the evergreens. After a while he stretched out on the needles and waited for darkness.

  At dusk, he got up and started along the lane, staying close to the fencerow. As he walked, he thought about the prospect of dry feet. He had bought a new pair of work boots six months earlier but hadn’t worn them as he’d wanted to get as many miles as possible out of the pair he was wearing. But now he was looking forward to the new boots as well as dry socks. Funny how a man never gives any thought to dry feet until he doesn’t have dry feet.

  Arriving at the house, he went in through the basement window again. It took him a while, fumbling in the darkness, to find the new work boots, still in their box on a shelf above the furnace. Feeling his way up the stairs, he went to the second floor and into his room. He searched through the dresser for jeans and underwear and socks. Walking across the hallway into the bathroom, he ran the shower while he stripped down.

  As he was stepping into the tub, he heard an approaching vehicle and glanced out the window to see car headlights illuminating the road out front, moving past the farm. When he saw lights on the roof of the car he did a double take, but then he realized it was a taxicab, not a police cruiser.

  He had a long shower in the dark, washing his hair and scrubbing the scratchy beard. He wished he could shave but knew he shouldn’t chance it. Turning the water off, he pulled the shower curtain back and, as he did, it occurred to him that he had never seen a taxi this far out of town before. He was still thinking about it when the bathroom light clicked on.

  Claire Marchand was standing just inside the doorway, holding a towel in her left hand and a Beretta semiautomatic in her right. She offered Virgil the towel and pointed the muzzle of the gun at his chest.

  “I don’t want to shoot you, Virgil Cain,” she said. “But I will.”

  Claire knew that the thing to do was just call it in. Have a couple uniforms come out and take him back to Kingston and lock him up. And maybe even make a concentrated effort to keep him locked up this time. But for reasons that she couldn’t fully identify, even to herself, she didn’t choose to do that. At least not right away. She remembered the last time they’d had him in custody, how he’d clammed up. Not willing to talk, not wanting a lawyer even. He had been a lot more communicative the night he had called her on the phone.

  She let him dry off and get dressed, although she had to admit he looked pretty good not dressed. He looked like a guy who worked out, although she doubted he did. Maybe farmers didn’t need to.

  Once he was fully clothed, she tossed her handcuffs to him and instructed him to put them on. She stayed back, keeping the 9mm trained on him as he did so. She was aware that he was bigger and stronger than she was and that he had little compunction against the notion of flight. When he was cuffed, she took him by the collar and directed him downstairs, turning lights on as they went. She sat him down at the kitchen table and took the chair opposite. He spoke for the first time since stepping out of the shower.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  His tone was identical to the one she’d used on Todd a couple of hours earlier, and that alone was enough to set her back on her heels. She didn’t reply for a few seconds. She was feeling strangely shy in his presence, and the feeling both puzzled and aggravated her. She looked at his hair, mussed and still wet from the shower, and at the rough growth of beard. He had a scar on his chin she hadn’t noticed before. The whiskers didn’t grow in the scar tissue, making it more prevalent. She wondered how he got it.

  “I’m investigating an assault in the area,” she told him.

  “That a fact?” He sounded skeptical.

  “Yes, it is. You know a guy named Dirk Hopman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. Friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you won’t be too upset then to hear that somebody kicked the shit out of him a few nights ago.”

  “Now who would do a thing like that?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  “Guy like Hopman, he might’ve deserved it,” Virgil said.

  “That was my thinking too.”

  He twisted his wrists in the handcuffs. They were obviously uncomfortable. Claire saw now that the knuckles on his right hand were raw and bruised.

  “Your hand is a mess,” she said.

  “I was fixing a fan belt on my truck.”

  “We have your truck.”

  “Oh yeah.” He placed his hands atop the Arborite table, turning the knuckles away from her eyes. “So you don’t care about Hopman, then why bother with him? I thought you said you’d try to find out who killed Dupree and Comstock.”

  “I’m working on it,” Claire said. “But I’ve been tracking an escaped prisoner too. Not to boast, but I can do more than one thing at a time.”

  “If you found out who killed those guys, the escaped prisoner would turn himself in. Then you wouldn’t have to be snooping around his farm, sneaking up in a taxicab.”

  “Okay, this third-person shit is beginning to bother me,” Claire said. “By the way—aren’t you supposed to be in Canada?”

  “Supposed to be? Is anybody where they’re supposed to be?”

  “You’re going to get philosophical on me?” Claire asked. He didn’t reply and she didn’t expect him to. “Well, you fooled some of the people. Joe Brady thinks you’re in Canada.”

  “Joe Brady probably thinks the world is flat,” Virgil said.

  “When you get done patting yourself on the back for finding me, maybe you could tell me what you found out. Since you’re so good at doing more than one thing at a time.”

  “You have a lot of attitude for somebody wearing handcuffs,” Claire told him. “You want to know about the murder investigation? I can tell you that I just captured the prime suspect.”

  “But you don’t believe I did it.”

  “Says who?” Claire asked.

  “Me. If you did, you’d have called for a paddy wagon by now. Instead, we’re sitting around the kitchen table like it’s down-home Saturday night. I expect you’ll break out the checkerboard any moment now.”

  “How do you know I didn’t call before I came into the bathroom?”

  “I got a hunch. So why don’t you tell me what you’ve found out? What did Buddy Townes have to say?”

  “How do you know I talked to Buddy?”

  “You told me you were going to talk to him. You don’t remember our phone conversation?”

  “I remember our phone conversation. Every word.” This was going too fast. Claire got up and walked over and looked in the fridge. There were things in there that needed to be thrown away. “As I recall, you were calling from the local diner and letting on you were at the North Pole.”

  Turning, she saw that she surprised him with that. She smiled. “Buddy didn’t tell me a lot,” she said. She
closed the door. “But then, like everybody else, he’s of the opinion that you’re the guy. Problem is, you’re still the best fit for this thing, you know.”

  “He changed his mind, I think,” Virgil said. “When I talked to him.”

  Claire walked back to the table. “You talked to Buddy? When?”

  “Same day you did. Well, later that night. Outside of Fat Phil’s. You were actually in the vicinity. I saw you going into the liquor store across the street.” He returned the smile.

  “You did not.”

  “I did. You bought two bottles of Argentinean red. You were wearing jeans and a V-neck and driving a Honda. You looked very nice. If I wasn’t a desperate killer on the run, I might have followed you home.”

  “And I might have shot you.”

  “I guess,” Virgil said. “We’ll never know.”

  “That’s right. You’ll never know. What did Buddy tell you?”

  “He said there’s a lot of people who—what word did you use? Who fit. Buddy told me he could name a couple dozen people who had motive of one kind or another. Just a matter of finding the right one and then connecting them to the crime scenes. You got nothing that puts me at either place. By the way, I assume you know that whoever killed Dupree went through the park. You know, to get to the golf course.”

  “How would you—” Claire began, then she realized. “You do get around, don’t you? When were you there?”

  “Yesterday. In the pouring rain.”

  “Right. Because you knew nobody would be on the course in a rainstorm.”

  “Actually, it was a coincidence,” Virgil told her. “But you agree with me?”

  “Either that or he could have walked in from the highway, along the ravine,” Claire said.

  “That’s a long, wet walk along that creek. I say he went through the park. Which means the gatehouse would have his license number. Did anybody check that out?”

  “Detective Virgil Cain,” Claire said, smiling. “Yeah, Joe Brady checked it out.”

  “Joe Brady,” Virgil said doubtfully. “What else has he been doing?”