“Yep.”
***
Donnie sat in the interview room with his arms folded across his chest. Ike sat opposite and stared at him for a full minute. Donnie squirmed and finally could not endure the silence.
“You got nothing on me,” he said.
Ike shrugged. “You’ve been read your Miranda rights?”
“Yeah, yeah. Big deal.”
“So why did you force Deputy Billingsly off the road?”
“Who says I did?”
“I say you did. There is red paint on the damaged side of your truck. We have a witness who will testify it was not there the day before the crash. You slammed into him that night and forced him into a tree. You killed him just as surely as if you’d shot him with your pistol.”
“You can’t prove it. I scraped against some red-painted buffers at the Exxon station.”
“No, that won’t work. See, you’d have to identify the station and then there’d be witnesses who would say you were never there and, from where you are sitting, just figuring out which gas station to pick might pose a problem.”
“It don’t matter. Red paint is red paint.”
“Not this time. The man whose car you smacked into spent hours restoring it. It is, or was, a collector’s car, a show car, and he painted it himself.”
“So what?”
“When he went to buy paint, he got a deal, a bargain. He painted it with paint from a Harley-Davidson motorcycle supply house. You want to calculate the odds of another car being in your area that night painted with red motorcycle paint? See, the formulas for paints are fairly specific. Now, if he’d been driving a Ford, you might argue the paint could have come from any of the cars in the line—Lincoln, Mercury…But a motorcycle red Chevy Chevelle? No, you’re cooked, Oldham. The best you can do is plead out—an accident, slippery roads, all that.”
Donnie looked stricken. “Motorcycle—”
“Paint. Right. You will be remanded for that here in Floyd County. As soon as the lab work comes back on the paint, you can expect to be rearrested on at least three charges relating to Deputy Billingsly’s death.”
“Well, does that mean I can go now?”
“Oh my, no. Is that what you thought I said? No, there’s still the credit card theft. We’ve spoken to your friend Bolt, and though he would rather not, he will testify you knew about the cards.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hollis talked. His brother practically wet his pants when the police hauled him in. He talked, too. We have surveillance camera photos of you at several banks using them. Since you went over the state line to do so, and since bank robbery is technically a federal offense, you will spend some time with the FBI soon. Special Agent Hedrick is on the phone with them now. He’s having a good week, as it turns out, but that’s not your concern. The FBI will want you to stay put, so no, you aren’t going anywhere.”
“Federal? Hey, it was all Hollis’ idea.”
“I don’t think so. No, that seems very unlikely. No one will believe Hollis came up with that idea. It seems so unfair, doesn’t it? Who’d have thought a couple of credit cards would get you in so much trouble.”
Donnie Oldham was never very big, but at that moment he seemed to shrink down to the size of a ten-year-old.
“How did you come by the cards?”
“I found them. I figured, finders keepers.”
“Wrong answer. Here’s what I think happened. You worked out the deal with Bolt to break in and take the cards after Harris left for Richmond, but you got greedy. You decided to rob Harris one day early, only you didn’t figure on him being a problem because he looked old and out of shape.”
Oldham ran his fingers through his thin hair and started to speak.
“Not yet, kid. So, you figure you’ll wait until he gets his cash and then you’ll rob him, only instead of handing you his wallet, he moves in on you. I knew him, he would have. So, what happened? Nothing to say…?
“Okay. What next…? He grabs your gun and in the struggle, it goes off. Naturally, you panic and pump four more rounds into him. You put the body in your truck and haul him out to the country. Am I close? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. The problem is—you dumped the body of the man you knew as Randall Harris in my backyard. Very stupid of you. If you’d dropped him anywhere else, another six feet farther west, even, you might have gotten away with it. But I recognized the man, see? His real name was Alexei Kamarov and he was, shall we say, connected. You wouldn’t believe all the people and agencies that have been looking for him.”
“You don’t know what you’re—”
“Spare me the tough guy crap. We dug bullets out of him and we have your pistol at ballistics. They will match. Then we have the shoe.”
“Shoe?”
“The dead man’s shoe. It must have been dark when you dumped the body. When we found him, he was missing a shoe. It wasn’t on the path from the road to the spot where you dumped him, so it had to be somewhere else. Guess what we found in your truck? Deputy Billingsly must have seen it that night. That’s what he was doing in your truck, but you couldn’t know that. You probably thought he was after you for the credit cards.”
“I thought he was a fire investigator. He had that red car—”
“He must have seen the shoe and would have asked for a warrant to search your truck the next day. The shoe puts Kamarov in your vehicle.
“The shoe, the ballistics, and Bolt will put you away forever, Oldham, and since murder, even murder two, outranks both bank robbery and hit and run on the big crime hit parade, I get to keep you.”
Epilogue
Charlie Garland had his feet up on the desk when Ike arrived.
“How’d you get here so fast?” Ike said.
“You called. I came—veni, vidi, vici, or something—Julius Caesar.”
“I know. You didn’t answer my question, and how about removing your size eleven triple E penny loafers from my desk.”
“Helicopter.”
“News Channel 4?”
“No, government issue. They had a delivery to make in Roanoke anyway, and I hitched a ride. They will be back for me in thirty minutes. Can you tell me what I need to know in that time or will you have to fly back to Langley with me?”
“There’s not much to tell, Charlie. I called you down here to give you a present and close the file on the Russians.”
“What have you got?”
“Well, they were definitely the men who snatched Bolt. I ran the license plate he gave me. It turns out to be a vehicle leased to their embassy. Not diplomatic plates. Just a car they used for odd jobs, you might say. I’m guessing they were the same ones who torched Bolt’s house and popped the guy in DC. You can check that bit up there. There is nothing either of us can do about that.”
“Right. You said you had a present for me. Couldn’t you have just sent it? Do you know how cold it is in a government-issue helicopter?”
“I didn’t want the Agency mail room to have a shot at it without your seeing it first.”
“Okay…what have you got for me?”
Ike slipped the roll of microfilm from its envelope and laid it on the desk. Charlie let his feet drop to the floor with a crash. He bent over the films. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and looked some more.
Ike pulled open a desk drawer. “There’s a magnifying glass in here.”
“Thanks. Do I dare ask where these came from?”
“Let’s just say they are a gift from our late friend.”
Charlie lurched back and nearly tipped over the chair. “You may have saved the Agency’s rear end, Ike.”
“Oh well, I could have done worse. Here’s the rest. There is a Bureau man you should call named Andover Crisp. He’s the guy who is, or was, running the black program. You should tell him that the game is up and that Kamarov will be buried down here. You should also tell him that whatever Kamarov promised is gone forever.”
“You coul
d tell him, Ike. After all, you’re the policeman with an interest.”
“I am in enough hot water with the FBI as it is. You do it.”
“That’s it?”
“Just about.”
Charlie stood and grinned. “You know, Ike, a while back I thought we should bring you back in. We could make that happen, you know. Now I see you’re going to be much more useful to us on the outside.” He strode to the door, shrugged on his coat, and left. Ike listened to the thwocka, thwocka, thwocka of chopper blades and shook his head.
***
“How many times have you asked me to go away with you for a weekend?” Ruth fixed Ike with an unblinking stare. This had to be important.
“I don’t know. Let’s see, maybe once a week for six months, so that would be—”
“A lot, and I’ve always turned you down, right? Okay, I have a conference to go to in Toronto the second week in January. We can go a few days early and stay over the weekend. You put somebody in charge of your—”
“I just lost my only really experienced deputy. I’m not sure if I can—”
“You find somebody, Schwartz. You are going to the CASE Conference with me next month. That’s it.”
“I…okay. Give me the dates and, wait a minute, Toronto in January? That’s like in Canada, Ruth. They have snow and ice and cold. Can’t you find a conference in someplace warm, like the Bahamas or Maui?”
“I’m giving a speech or I wouldn’t be going at all. So, this is the one I am going to with you and,” her voice softened, “we need time and we need to talk, Ike. Important talk and we’ll never do it if either of us is within fifty miles of our offices. You understand?”
He read the concern in her eyes and there was more—something new.
“I’ll have to buy a suitcase, a necktie and…should I…? Oh my God.”
“What is it? You have a funny look. If it’s about not going—”
“No, no, I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“When all this started—the Kamarov business—Whaite called and asked if I wanted him to shove the body over the state line and let them handle it. It was a funny thing to say at the time.” Ike closed his eyes and shook his head. “It just hit me, everything that went down after that—Whaite’s death, Sam, Karl, even this trip—none of it would have happened if I had just said yes instead of no.”
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