Dead Man's Bridge

by Robert J. Mrazek

  Sal Scalise was dead when I turned him over on his back. The water covering the kitchen floor around him slowly turned a tawny red. Two of my .45s had torn holes through his chest, and another had caught him in the stomach. In the beam of the flashlight, his open eyes stared up at the white plaster ceiling as if it held the secrets of the universe.

  Looking down at his body, I saw that Bug had done her best for me. There was a long jagged tear in his left pant leg, probably from the greeting she had given him when he broke into the cabin. There were also deep bite marks in his right hand, and her fangs had torn off a long strip of flesh along his thumb.

  It was his shooting hand, and he had been forced to wrap it in a bloody handkerchief that was still tied around his palm. It had to have affected his aim. Bug had probably saved my life again.

  I stood up and went looking for her. She was out on the porch, lying on her side with the cold lake water lapping at her sodden white coat. I carried her back into the bedroom and placed her softly on the bed. She was still breathing.

  Matted blood covered her left ear as well as the right side of her head. Her right eye was swollen shut, and her left foreleg was broken. Using the flashlight, I carefully examined the wounds. The first one over the left ear looked like it had come from a well-placed kick. At eighteen, she no longer had any mobility to avoid one.

  The second was probably from the barrel of his gun as she was lying helpless at his feet. Her left eye gazed up at me bravely from her trembling jaw.

  I went into the bathroom and found a large towel. Ripping off a strip lengthwise, I took off my waterproof jacket and raised the bloody edge of the denim shirt above the two seeping holes in my side. Squeezing an inch of antibiotic ointment into each of them, I wrapped the towel tightly around my midsection, overlapping it at the wounds. Holding the towel in place with my right hand, I went into the kitchen and found a roll of duct tape over the sink. I ran two lengths of it around my waist to hold the crude bandage in place. A million and one household uses.

  Moistening the rest of the towel with tap water, I took it into the bedroom and lightly cleaned the wounds on Bug’s face, covering each of them with the same antibiotic ointment. She never whimpered.

  In the bathroom medicine chest, I found some Percodan tablets along with a bottle of Ambien I had once been prescribed. I popped two of the Percodan and palmed another along with the Ambien for Bug. With her ruined teeth, there was no way to sugarcoat the pain medicine with a chunk of raw steak. Gently sliding the pills into her throat, I made sure she swallowed them.

  I had no idea if she would survive. There was a lot at stake, and I didn’t think that taking her to a veterinarian at this point would make a difference. I hoped she would understand.

  Her left eye was looking up at me with almost calm detachment, as if the danger had passed. I kissed her on her forehead and told her everything would be all right. My eyes blurred as I left.

  I needed to search Sal’s body. Lying in the lake water, his skin was already getting cold. I went through the zippered windbreaker he was wearing and found a cell phone in the side pocket.

  Sal wasn’t very smart. He had disabled the password requirement for his voice mailbox, and I went straight to it. He had saved Bobby Devane’s last message, along with nine others dating back almost a month.

  I recognized the voice immediately. It was the same one I had listened to back at the campus security office when I left the message for Devane earlier. He slowly gave Sal my address, repeating it twice. Then I heard his voice say, “You know what you told me you wanted to do? Go ahead, Sally, but don’t fuck it up.”

  I had a pretty good idea what Sal Scalise had told him from the Wonderland. He had said it to me three times before I ever left the motel room. Unfortunately for him, he had fucked it up. Putting my waterproof jacket back on, I headed out into the storm.

  21

  The wind had become a living thing.

  Heading across the high bluffs above Wiggins Point, I could barely keep the truck on the road against the sustained winds. Captain Morgo called me on the radio as I descended into the protection of the tree line that bordered the town.

  “Anything new at your end?” she asked.

  If I had possessed the energy, I would have laughed out loud.

  I had already decided not to tell her about Sal Scalise. If I reported his death, Jim Dickey’s investigators would have had me jumping through hoops for the rest of the day, if not longer. And time was running out.

  If I stopped now, Jordan was finished at St. Andrews. And so was I, for that matter. Unless the cabin floated away, Sal wouldn’t be going anywhere. And I was carrying his cell phone with the saved messages. I knew I could reconstruct what had happened when the time came. If things turned out all right, I could sleep for a week.

  Captain Morgo had news for me.

  “Ken found Creighton Taylor’s old case file and was able to track down his college application documents in the college archives,” she said.

  “How did he die?” I asked. “It wasn’t in the newspaper.”

  “He was found hanging from the suspension footbridge by a length of braided rope,” she said.

  “Multicolored, correct?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed, adding, “and his blood-alcohol level was incredibly high . . . point three seven.”

  “Anything else?”

  “One odd thing. His right hand was inside the noose around his neck.”

  I could see it all in my mind.

  “You also asked about his parents. As of June fifteenth, 1986, his mother was living in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. His father is listed on his college application as a major in the United States Army.”

  “Can you give me the father’s full name?” I asked.

  “Francis Marion Taylor. His home address is listed as Charlotte, South Carolina.”

  Francis Marion. The Swamp Fox of the Revolutionary War was from South Carolina, and he had been an incredible warrior. Along with ten thousand other Carolinians, Creighton Taylor’s father had probably been named after him.

  It was finally beginning to make sense. I asked Captain Morgo to make a call to the Pentagon and try to track down a lieutenant colonel named Mike Andrews who worked in operations planning.

  “Will do,” she said and cut the connection.

  Less than ten minutes later, the office dispatcher patched me through to Andrews in Washington. By then, I was sitting in the middle of Triphammer Road, stopped in front of a downed tree that blocked the only route across the gorge onto the campus. Thankfully, the cell connection was still working.

  “So what’s the weather like up there in the boondocks?” asked Andrews. “You marooned at home in front of the fire with that feral white wolf?”

  “I need a favor, Mike.”

  “Oh, shit,” he came right back. “Here it comes again.”

  We had served together in Afghanistan. I hadn’t saved his life. He hadn’t saved mine. But we had hated the same brass idiots, and we had gotten drunk together over the time we fought there. And he knew I had gotten the shaft.

  “I need everything you can find out pronto about an army officer named Francis Marion Taylor. He was a major in 1986 and probably served at some point with the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell.”

  “You know how many goddamn Taylors have served in the army from old Zachary to Maxwell Taylor,” he groaned. “Maybe fifty thousand.”

  “That’s why I called you. He was probably born in South Carolina.”

  “Thanks a pantload. All right. Give me a couple weeks and I’ll get back to you.”

  “You’ve got an hour. Call me back at the dispatcher’s number and they’ll patch me through . . . Mike . . . it could be life or death.”

  “Your life?”

  “You never know.”

  “I’ll do my best, Jake,” he said, signing off.

  Francis Marion Taylor. I was wondering where he might be at that moment when an emergency vehicle pulled
up alongside me, and three men began removing cutting equipment from the freight bed.

  I backed the Chevy to the side of the road and parked. While rain continued to pound the windshield, the emergency crew went to work on the tree. I fell asleep to the seductive whine of chainsaws dismantling the trunk.

  Something slammed into the rear of the cab, bringing me up from the blackness. The Percodan had put me out. I blearily checked my watch. I had slept for about twenty minutes.

  By now, the wind and rain should have moderated further unless the hurricane had slowed down or stopped in its path. I didn’t see any hint of the storm abating. The sky was still dark as I started the truck up again. Through the windshield, I saw that the emergency crew had finished its work and moved on.

  I needed to find Evelyn Wheatley. The last I had heard, she was riding out the storm at Tau Epsilon Rho with Mrs. Palmer. Swinging the Chevy around, I turned on the headlights again and headed over there.

  22

  Evelyn Wheatley was sitting next to an attractive blonde woman on one of the leather couches in the fraternity’s chapter room. They were gazing out at the storm through the massive picture window. When she saw me coming, she stood up to face me.

  I’m sure my physical appearance didn’t inspire much confidence in my investigative capabilities. As I stood there dripping water on the floor, I saw the rage flaring in her eyes. It was obvious she had other issues on her mind.

  “I placed my faith in you, Officer Cantrell,” she spat bitterly, “and you allowed Robin to be murdered just like my husband. You are evidently just as incompetent as that idiot sheriff.”

  I noted that she hadn’t included Hoyt Palmer among the dead.

  “Due to the hurricane, the AuCoin agency is unable to fly in their investigative team,” she went on, “but they’ll arrive here as soon as the storm passes over us. In the meantime, why don’t you go back to issuing parking tickets or harassing the students or whatever it is you do.”

  “That will probably be too late,” I said.

  “Too late for what?” she snapped back.

  “To find and arrest your husband’s killer.”

  The other woman hadn’t risen from the couch. She was in her late twenties, at least seven or eight months pregnant, and looked Scandinavian, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

  “Are you Mrs. Palmer?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I believe your husband is the key to finding out who is responsible for these deaths and why, Mrs. Palmer.”

  “I do not . . . speak English so very good,” she said.

  “I believe your husband is still alive, and I think you both know where he is,” I said. “You have no reason to trust me at this point, but if I can talk to him right away, there’s a chance I can find the killer in the next few hours.”

  “Trust you?” shouted Evelyn Wheatley in a mocking tone. “I would sooner trust the Pope to advocate for abortion.”

  She still hadn’t bothered to deny that Hoyt Palmer was still alive.

  “I’m convinced that this man plans to kill again,” I said, “and the victim will almost certainly be your husband, Mrs. Palmer. I don’t care how safely you think he’s hidden, this man will find him and kill him . . . if not today then next week or next month.”

  “Frankly, we don’t care a goddamn bit about what you’re convinced of, Officer Cantrell,” said Evelyn Wheatley. “Go now.”

  Her face had a new hardness to it, which was entirely understandable. I played the only card I had left.

  “It’s possible that the man who committed these murders will never be caught,” I said. “These were revenge murders by someone who is unlikely to ever do it again. This could be the one chance we have to catch him and make him pay for what he has done.”

  “Revenge? Revenge for what?” she demanded.

  “That’s what Hoyt Palmer could tell us,” I said.

  Her eyes dropped to the floor. Looking down, I saw that a small rivulet of blood had trickled down the length of my loose waterproof pants. The red drops had pooled together to form a puddle on the parquet tile.

  “I believe you’re bleeding,” she said in a tone she might have used if her butler was wearing a soiled tie over his morning coat.

  “I was shot, Mrs. Wheatley.”

  That didn’t seem to impress her much either. I wanted to add that I hadn’t slept more than six hours over the last three nights, every muscle in my body was sore, I had a knife slash across my chest, my knuckles were barked and swollen, I had probably lost at least one tooth, my dog might be dying, and I had just killed a man.

  “Was it in the course of investigating the murder of my husband?” she asked next.

  I nodded back at her. Her hard brown eyes connected with mine and stayed there for several seconds. I don’t know what made her change her mind. Maybe she needed to find out for herself if revenge was the motive for her husband’s death, and if so, why. I’ll never know for sure.

  “All right . . . I’ll take you to him.” Turning to Mrs. Palmer, she added, “It’ll be all right, Inge. Stay here and rest. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  After retrieving a hooded slicker from her room, she joined me outside in the old pickup, pretending to ignore the coating of Bug fur that covered the passenger side of the seat.

  As soon as we moved out from the protection of the covered entrance portico, the wind began buffeting the truck again as if we were inside a piñata. I was making my way around some fallen debris in the road when she said, “I knew that something was troubling Dennis. I assumed it had to do with a business matter. I never thought it might date back to something that happened in his college years.”

  A moment later, a spasm of grief hit her. She began to rock back and forth on the seat, her eyes tightly shut, her hands squeezed together in her lap.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said huskily.

  I decided not to tell her that her husband had pancreatic cancer or what I had learned about the murders. If he was still alive, Hoyt Palmer would fill in some of those answers. And she would believe them coming from him.

  Opening her eyes again, she told me to drive to the college bell tower, which stood next to the library on the arts quadrangle. The bell tower housed the chimes that rang on the quarter hour.

  I had been up in the tower only once, and that was as a student. As well as I could remember, it was about a hundred feet high. The bell chimes rested in wooden racks just below the clock in the belfry, each one controlled by a bell clapper from the room below. The chime masters could play everything from Mozart to the Beatles during their Sunday afternoon concerts.

  Six inches of standing water covered the promenade between the library and the bell tower. I drove over the curb and parked on the grass next to the door that led to the iron staircase inside the tower. The solid oak door was locked, but I had a master key on my ring that opened most of the entry doors on the campus. It worked.

  Inside, the noise of the wind was muted by the stone walls. I told Evelyn Wheatley to stay behind me, and we began to climb the steep narrow stairway. My joints and muscles were silently screaming at me, and I had to rest about halfway up, sitting down on one of the cold iron steps. Evelyn Wheatley glared at me with obvious impatience. I asked her if we were going up to the room where the chime masters operated the bells. She shook her head.

  “Have you ever heard of the Plume and Dragon Society?” she asked.

  “No,” I grunted, standing up to resume the climb.

  “It’s made up of the most extraordinary students at St. Andrews. Dennis was a member. So was Hoyt Palmer. You can’t ask to join it. The seniors in the society vote each spring on who will be tapped to carry on their sacred traditions. Its very existence is a secret from the rest of the student body.”

  I could imagine the sacred traditions. The new initiates bent over bare-assed while the rest of them used the sacred paddle. I was glad that no one had ever tapped me on the shoulder, but I wondered if Jo
rdan Langford had been a member.

  “They have a secret chamber up here,” she said, starting to breathe as heavily as I was. “It’s where Hoyt thought he would be safe until the murderer was caught.”

  The wind was whistling through hairline cracks in the mortared stone walls when we finally reached the landing below the chime masters’ room. Evelyn Wheatley motioned for me to stop. Glancing around the landing, I saw no indication of a door or entryway in the stone facade.

  She walked over to a heavy bronze lighting fixture that was mounted on the far wall. Rotating it to the side, she gripped the fixture in both hands and pulled hard on it. It must have been some kind of latch key, because a three-foot-square section of the lower wall suddenly slid open.

  The door panel had a stone facade to match the rest of the wall. Its frame was made of wood and hinged on one side. We had to get down on our hands and knees to pass through the opening. I went first, carrying my flashlight in one hand and my cocked .45 in the other. Evelyn Wheatley shut the portal door behind us, and I heard it lock into the closed position.

  Four candles were guttering on an elaborately carved table in the middle of the chamber. Against one of the walls, two stone gargoyles flanked an enormous upholstered throne chair. A leather couch sat along another wall surrounded by leather club chairs and floor lamps, none of them lit.

  Above our heads, heavy oak beams vaulted across the ceiling. A single leaded casement window provided the only natural light. It was too small for a man to climb through, even if he had scaled the hundred feet of stone to reach it. The room was cold and damp.

  “Hoyt?” Mrs. Wheatley’s voice rang out.

  On the other side of the room, a heavy oak door led into a second chamber. The door stood ajar, but there was no light coming from beyond it. I shined my flashlight into the room. It was smaller than the main chamber and contained a clothing rack holding Druid-like blue velvet cloaks.

  I heard a sudden movement and shined my flashlight toward it. The beam found Palmer cowering on his knees behind the clothing rack.