A Fatal Frame of Mind

by William Rabkin

  “This way,” Malko said.

  Gus couldn’t imagine which way Malko was talking about, but since two of the four possible choices entailed passing through the solid flesh of either Shawn or Kitteredge and the third would mean unlocking the closet door just in time to meet the local constabulary, he chose to step toward the back wall.

  Toward, but not to, as it turned out. The back wall had disappeared, and now the closet seemed to go on forever. Before he could figure out exactly what was going on, he was shoved forward by Shawn and Kitteredge.

  Gus took a step, then two, keeping his arms outstretched in case the back wall had merely moved ahead a couple of feet.

  “Everybody out?” Malko said, and received grunts of assent in return. “Good.”

  Gus heard a door closing behind him, and then a string of lights glowed into existence overhead. Gus couldn’t believe what he was seeing in the faint illumination—a low, rounded tunnel carved through the bedrock of the hills. He couldn’t tell where it went or how long it would take to get there. It seemed to stretch on forever.

  “Now get moving,” Malko commanded, and set off down the tunnel.

  It wasn’t like there were many other options at this point. But if the rest of them had any doubts about the course of action, they were quickly convinced by the muffled sound of Low’s voice behind the door, apparently explaining to a policeman that the room they had just entered was indeed nothing more than a broom closet.

  So they set off. How long they’d been walking and how far they’d gone Gus couldn’t say. At one point he contemplated counting the light fixtures they had passed under, figuring out how many feet there were between them and using that to calculate distance. But he kept losing count every time Kitteredge banged his head on a bulb, there didn’t seem to be any consistency in their spacing, and he realized he had no idea how many feet there were in a mile, so he gave that up and just kept moving.

  Finally the tunnel walls fell away and disappeared into the darkness outside the radius of light pumped out by the bulbs.

  “I think I understand now,” Kitteredge said. “This is a natural cave in the hills. Whoever built the tunnel started here and worked back toward the house. I’d guess this is an artifact of the Prohibition days.”

  “Mr. Low’s father had it made,” Malko said.

  Kitteredge peered back down the way they’d come. “Truly astonishing,” he said. “Even if it had been dug after 1956, when the first successful tunnel-boring machine was deployed in digging the Humber River Sewer Tunnel, a passage this long would have been an astonishing feat. But to think of the work that must have gone into construction without such a machine—it must have taken years.”

  “Wasn’t around then to know,” Malko said.

  “Do you know how long it is?” Kitteredge said.

  “Unless it’s long enough to reach across the Mexican border, we’re still in trouble,” Shawn said.

  “It’s not,” Malko said.

  “So we are,” Gus said.

  “But it’s got something just as good,” Malko said.

  The hunchback took two steps forward and disappeared into the darkness. Before anyone could move, another set of lights switched on, and they could see where they’d arrived.

  The cave was the kind of place Gus had dreamed of as a kid. It was so vast that even with the illumination of a hundred ceiling lights, its corners faded away into darkness. Stalagmites jutted up out of the ground around the walls—unless they were stalactites; Gus could never remember which was which—but the center of the cave had been cleared and the floor had been blasted and sanded until it was a solid slab of rock hundreds of feet across. It was, Gus thought, big enough to house a 747.

  Which meant it was several times larger than it needed to be, since the only plane it housed was a Learjet.

  Malko walked quickly to the plane. He turned a handle on the door, yanked it open, and pulled down a flight of steps. “Get in,” he growled.

  Kitteredge wasted no time in racing up the stairs and into the plane. Shawn and Gus held back.

  “Do you know how to fly one of these things?” Shawn said. “Because I’m pretty sure Gus doesn’t.”

  “I don’t,” Gus said.

  “Then you’d better hope I don’t have a heart attack when we’re at ten thousand feet,” Malko said. “Now get in.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  It had occurred to Gus to worry that their takeoff might be noticed by the police. If that happened, their brilliant escape would have been for nothing. He didn’t know what kind of technology was available for tracking planes these days, but he was pretty sure it was good enough to tell the cops where they were going before they got there.

  If Shawn shared Gus’ concerns, he didn’t show it. Once he climbed into the jet’s cabin, his attention was completely focused on the luxurious surroundings. Four giant reclining chairs faced one another in the center of the cabin, solid mahogany tables jutted out of the walls in front of each seat, and a flat-screen television swung out of the bulkhead above each table. In the back there was a spacious galley, although there wasn’t anyone to cook in it.

  Shawn buckled himself into the seat farthest away from the one Professor Kitteredge had taken, and a smile crossed his face that suggested all his troubles had just eased away. Gus took the recliner next to him and fastened his own belt, but even the softness of the leather didn’t make him feel much better.

  “Where are we going?” Gus said to Shawn.

  “Wherever he wants.” Shawn jerked a thumb at Malko, who had latched the cabin door and then headed into the cockpit, slamming that door behind him. After a moment they heard the whir of jet engines starting up, and the jet began to roll across the cave floor.

  Gus winced as the plane passed through the cave’s mouth, but the wings cleared the walls with at least an inch to spare on either side. He tried to look back to see how the entrance was camouflaged, but he couldn’t tell in the dark.

  The plane moved ahead a couple of feet, then stopped. Malko’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to take off. Please make sure your seat belts are securely fastened.”

  Gus peered through the window to see if the cave led to an airfield, but it was too dark.

  “If my knowledge of smugglers’ routes is any guide, I’m going to assume that the tunnel led us through the hill and the cave mouth empties onto a valley on the other side,” Kitteredge said. “No doubt Flaxman’s father owned this valley, too, probably under a different name to keep investigators from looking at it too closely. Then it’s a simple matter to disguise the runway as a country road. I suppose Flaxman keeps it hidden this way out of a sort of sentimental tribute to his father’s spirit.”

  “No doubt,” Shawn said.

  This was a side of Kitteredge Gus had never seen before. It was so obvious that everything Shawn had said about Low was the truth—he must be the smuggler and probably even the forger the “spirits” had accused him of being. But the professor, who knew everything about every subject, seemed completely blind to this obvious truth about his friend.

  Well, it was obvious to Shawn, anyway, and now that it had been pointed out to him, to Gus as well. Not that Gus knew how Shawn had figured it out. They hadn’t had a chance for a private discussion since it had come up.

  Still, it didn’t seem to be the time to school the professor on his old friend’s true nature, especially since that friend’s servant was at the controls of the jet they were using to escape the police. And since that jet was accelerating to liftoff down some darkened runway.

  “Well, this is quite an adventure,” Kitteredge said. “Once again, I apologize to the two of you for dragging you into my mess. But I think when all is said and done, you’ll find it was all worth the trouble.”

  “Uh, no trouble at all, Professor,” Gus said.

  “Now you stop that right now,” Kitteredge said.

  “What’s that?” Gus said, wondering what h
e had done wrong this time.

  “You must stop calling me Professor,” he said. “We’ve been through so much together that I’ll be hurt if you don’t call me by my first name.”

  Gus felt a surge of pride flow through him. Even if he had studied for that midterm, even if he had been able to name every one of those slides, he wouldn’t have been offered this privilege.

  “I’ll be happy to . . . Langston,” he said. “And you call me Gus.”

  “He has been,” Shawn said. “And speaking of hasbeens, maybe we should talk about what we’re going to do now, since it’s pretty clear that Langston here can’t go back to teaching, and we’re going to look pretty silly trying to run a detective agency from inside a prison.”

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” Kitteredge said. “I imagine that with your unique abilities you could be tremendously useful to the other inmates. After an initial testing period, they would be coming to you with—”

  Even Kitteredge, who frequently became so enraptured by his own thought process he had no idea what effect it was having on others, was stopped by the glare on Shawn’s face. “Although I can see why you’d prefer not to be in a position to start such an enterprise,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Shawn said. “So let’s figure out how we’re going to avoid that.”

  “It seems perfectly obvious to me,” Kitteredge said. “We know the Cabal was behind the murder of Clay Filkins, so all we have to do is expose them and let the truth come out. It will be a grand adventure.”

  “That would be great,” Shawn said. “Except that the real truth about the murder is back in Santa Barbara. And since we’re climbing almost straight up, I think our flight is intended to go a little farther than thirty-five miles.”

  “If the proof is in the picture, why do we have to go anywhere?” Gus said. “Why can’t we just figure it all out right here on the plane and then turn it over to the police?”

  Kitteredge looked surprised, as if he’d expected Shawn and Gus to understand what he’d been thinking all along. “The picture, even now that we know about the crucial verse, isn’t enough to convince a doubting world,” he said. “We need to retrieve the sword.”

  “And just where would all that be?” Shawn asked warily.

  “That we still need to figure out,” Kitteredge said. “It’s in that verse, but we may have to compare it with some of Morris’ and Rossetti’s other works, along with those of some of their contemporaries, to understand the meaning. Those works are scattered far and wide.”

  “How far?” Shawn said.

  “And how wide?” Gus said.

  “I believe in terms of those pieces freely available to the public at large, we’ll find several of them at the Tate Gallery,” Kitteredge said as he checked through a mental catalogue. “They’ve got both the Waterhouse Ophelia and Burne-Jones’ The Golden Stairs, which I believe together announce the Cabal’s manifesto. There are the Arthurian frescoes at the Oxford Union. Lizzie Siddal’s grave, of course, is in Highgate Cemetery. Those are the clues that seem the most compelling, although I’m sure now that we have the key, each one will lead to a discovery previously unimagined.”

  As Gus listened to the list of locations, something was nagging at the back of his mind. He knew he hadn’t been to any of those places, but even aside from that, he was sure he was missing a connection. Then it hit him.

  “Professor,” he started, then corrected himself. “Langston. The Tate Gallery, the Oxford Union, Highgate Cemetery—aren’t they all in England?”

  “Of course they are,” Kitteredge said. “And we will be, too, in about ten hours.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Even after all his years on the force, there was almost nothing Carlton Lassiter didn’t like about the institutions of law enforcement. He loved the ritual of the morning briefing, the ceremonial bonding of the post-shift cop bar, the rigid adherence to standards of excellence. Unlike most of his peers, he even welcomed strictures like the ones placed on police by the Miranda rules. Working within a rigid set of restrictions only forced you to be smarter, better, and stronger.

  The one thing that Lassiter didn’t like about the profession was the replacement of thought with procedure. And this was a prime example, he said to himself as he pulled up a few car lengths behind the squad car sitting across from Henry Spencer’s house. When you were searching for a suspect, it was standard practice to post lookouts at the homes of his family and friends, and clearly that’s what was going on here. The department needed to find Shawn Spencer, and they hoped he might show up to see his father.

  But one moment of thought would have made a chimp realize there was no reason to waste a team of officers and a departmental vehicle on Henry Spencer’s street. Or, more precisely, on former detective Henry Spencer’s street. Although he’d been retired for years, Henry was and always would be a pure cop. If a wanted fugitive showed up on his doorstep, he’d find a way to detain him and then call for backup.

  Of course, the brass knew that. But he could practically hear the conversation in the chief’s office. Sure, he was a fine cop, but this is his son we’re talking about.

  If he’d been there for the discussion, Lassiter would have made sure that everyone knew the truth—that would only make Henry Spencer more certain to make the call. Because he’d know that if Shawn was innocent, the fastest and safest way to prove that would be to turn him in.

  Instead, they assumed that Henry was as weak and foolish as the average member of the citizenry. But if he were, would he be standing by the squad car, handing the officers frosty glasses of lemonade?

  If Lassiter had been in charge of this investigation, things would be running differently. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t even allowed in on briefings. All because that quack of a shrink didn’t understand how a man was supposed to react to a bad situation.

  Well, he was going to show her what a real man did when the chips were down.

  At least he would if those two cops would move.

  Lassiter needed to talk to Henry Spencer. He was the only one who would understand. But if he was spotted, word would get back to Chief Vick that he’d been at Spencer’s house, and she would leap to the assumption that he was trying to work the case even though he was on suspension.

  Of course Lassiter could always do what Spencer was doing now—walk right up to the squad car and sweet-talk the surveillance team. In normal circumstances that would have been his first move. But he knew what he’d feel about any other cop—particularly one as high in the command structure as he was—who’d allowed himself to be taken hostage in his own station and been responsible for freeing a suspect wanted for murder. Lassiter wouldn’t be in a mood to do any favors for that loser. He couldn’t imagine that these two would be, either.

  If only there was a burglary in the area. Or a hit and run. A flasher, even. Anything to pull those two away from Henry’s door. But this was a good neighborhood, and the presence of a squad car only made it safer. There was no way Lassiter could get to see Henry without Chief Vick finding out. He couldn’t even call. With Shawn on the wanted list, the cops would have put taps on Henry’s home and cell phones.

  Henry was heading back to his house. In a second he’d be back in his comfortable living room, and Lassiter would have lost his chance. But before Spencer reached his front door, he made a hard right turn and disappeared into his garage. After a moment, Lassiter saw a glow of red. Henry’s truck was backing out.

  Lassiter put his Impala back into drive and eased away from the curb as Henry headed down the street, shielding his face with his hand as he passed the two cops in the squad car. But they didn’t even glance up in his direction as he cruised past. If this were my case, I’d have those two on report, he thought. There’s no excuse for that kind of sloppiness.

  Henry’s street was residential and quiet; there was no traffic in either direction. Which made it easy for Lassiter to keep Henry in sight, but also for Henry to spot him. Which might be a
problem. Lassiter was certain that Spencer would be cooperating with the police in every way possible, but he was also sure Henry would draw the line at being followed wherever he went. If he called Chief Vick to complain about the tail, he was cop enough to give her Lassiter’s plate number. And there was no way he could claim this was part of his therapy.

  Henry wasn’t making it any easier for Lassiter to remain inconspicuous. He couldn’t have been going faster than fifteen miles an hour. Any normal driver would have passed him right away, and all but the most saintly would have flipped him off as they did. The fact that Lassiter considered to dawdle along behind him had to look suspicious.

  Henry did the full grandpa down the street for two blocks. Then he reached an intersection, and instead of slowing further to check for cross traffic, he accelerated furiously, taking the right turn at thirty-five. What the hell was he doing? Lassiter hit the gas and screamed around the corner.

  And then slammed on the brake to keep from hitting Henry’s truck. It was sitting at the curb, exhaust chugging from the tailpipe. Lassiter could see Henry sitting completely still behind the wheel.

  Again, Lassiter wondered what he was doing. It was possible he’d pulled over to take a cell call, but both hands were on the steering wheel, and his head wasn’t moving in the way most people’s do when they’re talking. He was just sitting in his truck.

  And then he wasn’t sitting anymore. He snapped off the ignition and opened his door. Lassiter assumed he’d come to see a neighbor, although it surprised him to see that Henry would drive rather than walk such a short distance. The cop in him wanted to watch Henry to see which house he went to, but the suspended-cop part of him won out, and he slid down in his seat so that Henry wouldn’t see him.

  Since he couldn’t tell which direction Henry would be going in, Lassiter decided to give it a slow ten-count before rising to look out the window again. Before he could get to eight, there was a loud rapping on the passenger’s window.