I need to talk to you. I’ve just seen Waits’ son, Ira. He’s—
The message was cut abruptly, mid-sentence. Evan figured Arturo had ended the call inadvertently as he ran, thinking he was still leaving a message. Otherwise he’d have called back. Said the rest of what he wanted to say about Ira Waits.
He’s—
It could be anything.
He’d just hit Guillory’s number to call her back when a memory of something Arturo said in the bar flashed across his mind. He killed the call before she answered. Arturo told him Valentine Waits had two sons, Ira and Garrett. Garrett was dead and Ira was in prison. But if Arturo saw Ira not much more than two hours ago, it meant he wasn’t there anymore. The unfinished sentence might have been, he’s out of prison. Or it could just as easily have been, he’s after me. The way things turned out, it looked like it was both.
He got in his car and was about to drive off when his phone rang, Guillory returning the missed call. He told her Arturo’s message, word for word. Then he told her his ideas about the ending.
‘Looks like I need to look into the Waits family.’
She sounded as if she was about to end the call immediately, get on it that second.
‘Don’t forget you were going to check on Kristina Kincade’s death as well.’
He felt her shaking her head adamantly all the way from his end of the line.
‘That’s going to have to wait after what you just told me.’
He understood the need for her to concentrate on the immediate task in hand, the murder of Arturo Rivera. He knew all about the first forty-eight hours being the most critical in the investigation of a homicide, he watched TV as well, after all. But she was missing the big picture. Not only that, she wouldn’t have the Waits lead to pursue if not for him. Despite being safely on the other end of the phone, he chose not to point out either of those things to her.
Ivanovsky’s cryptic comment about the group photograph including Waits kept going through his mind
As a reminder to us all.
The implication was clear. As a reminder of something bad that happened in the past. Something bad had happened to two people in that photograph. Kristina Kincade had been killed and her husband Jake had disappeared. His gut told him it was the death of Kristina that held the key to everything that came afterwards.
‘It’s all connected. She was married to Waits. I’ve got a feeling about Kristina.’
She didn’t exactly tell him what he could do with his feeling, but it was close enough.
He took one last look at Ivanovsky’s house with its shattered window and was surprised to see the front door open. Ivanovsky stepped out, still looking very frail after the twin shocks he’d had that morning. He looked as if he might be seeing his ex-colleagues down at the morgue sooner rather than later. He gripped a manila folder in his right hand. He waved at Evan with it, started down the path.
Ivanovsky was holding the folder in front of him, his arm extended as he approached, as if he couldn’t wait to get rid of it now that he’d made up his mind. Maybe he hoped he’d be giving away all the troubles that went with it.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said.
Evan didn’t say anything even though the first thing to go through his mind was what had happened to the last person who decided to speak to him. But you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Ivanovsky glanced both ways up and down the street as if he expected the van to suddenly appear from nowhere and run him down just for saying those words.
‘They’ve won, Arturo will have died for nothing, if I don’t say anything.’
Evan watched him as he slapped the folder against his open palm. Having walked down the path with it held in front of him like it was radioactive, he was keeping a firm grip on it now until he’d said what he wanted to say. He was justifying his actions to himself, that was all. But there was another reason as well, Evan was sure. It was to do with the call Ivanovsky just made to his sister, Eva.
‘What did Eva say?’
‘She hasn’t had a . . . message. Yet. She knows Arturo’s dead. The police were there when I called. I don’t know if she knows what they did to him. I didn’t think it was my place to tell her. Not over the phone.’
‘What else did she say?’
Ivanovsky stopped slapping the file against his hand.
‘She said he’s out.’
Evan knew then it was what Arturo was about to say in his truncated voicemail message.
‘Ira Waits is out of prison.’
Ivanovsky thrust the folder at Evan. Evan took hold of it, Ivanovsky keeping hold of the other end, like it was a bond between them.
‘Eva doesn’t always know what’s best for everyone. The reason I betrayed my profession and abused my position of trust to the point where I’m no better than a common criminal, was so that the same thing didn’t happen to Lauren as happened to her mother.’
He let go of his end of the folder, stepped back.
‘That’s a copy of Kristina’s autopsy report.’
He gave the impression that by not actually talking to Evan, not telling him what happened, but giving him the means to find out for himself, they wouldn’t sew his mouth shut.
They can always cut your hands off, Evan thought, but kept to himself.
Ivanovsky held up one of those hands even though Evan had made no attempt to say anything.
‘I didn’t perform the autopsy, so you don’t have to worry about its authenticity.’
He spat the words out, the bitterness and self-loathing behind them more damning than the words themselves. He would never forgive himself, despite the stand he was now taking. Some things can’t be taken back, can’t be made good.
‘It won’t tell you everything you want to know. It’ll point you in the right direction, though.’
He suddenly smiled a wintry smile. It made Evan wonder if the Roman emperors smiled at the gladiators before they set them at each other’s throats.
Chapter 43
EVAN KEPT HIS IMPATIENCE in check, forced himself to drive away rather than read the autopsy report outside Ivanovsky’s house. But when he saw the shoulder where he’d parked earlier, the appeal of reading how Lauren’s mother died sitting in the very same spot her daughter faked her own death was too much to resist. Other people would have called it morbid or ghoulish, but what the hell, he had to read it somewhere.
He opened the folder feeling like a spoiled kid opening a birthday card to see how much money was inside. There were half a dozen photocopied sheets of the autopsy report itself as well as a folded newspaper cutting. He started with the autopsy report, skipping straight to the cause and manner of death. The cause was listed as head trauma, consistent with a head-on car crash. The trauma included multiple skull fractures and severe intracranial bleeding. It must have been a hell of a collision. She hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and had gone straight through the windshield. In addition to the head injuries, there were severe injuries to a number of the internal organs. The aorta, the largest artery in the body, was ruptured. So were the liver and spleen. The list went on forever.
He stopped reading and took a few deep breaths, thankful to be reading it in the open air. He felt a little queasy. It was also making him more than a little confused. It seemed like a hell of a lot of injuries from a car collision. What speed were they going at? It was as if her whole body had been shaken violently until everything inside it burst.
His eyes dropped to the manner of death, expecting to see accident. He was wrong, did a double-take when he saw how it was listed. Homicide. Had they charged the drunk driver with murder?
He flipped quickly back to the previous section, the Case Summary and Comment, where the pathologist explained in detail what the circumstances were that led to the death being a case for the Medical Examiner’s office. The first thing that jumped out at him was what was missing. There was no mention of an automobile anywhere in the report. Nor was there anything about a drunk driver. Sh
e was found by a group of retirees hiking in the hills, the nearest road over two miles away.
He returned the autopsy report to the folder and took out the newspaper cutting, praying it wasn’t a twenty-year-old advertisement for cheap flights to the Caribbean. His hands shook slightly as he read it, a vague sense of dread inching up his throat.
The cutting was from 1998. The first thing he saw as he unfolded it was a picture of Kristina Kincade. He recognized her from the group photograph in both Ivanovsky’s and Eva Rivera’s houses. The headline above it read:
Two men convicted of the murder of Kristina Kincade.
He felt suddenly very cold despite the warmth of the sun through the windshield. He skimmed the article, looking for a name, or names, that he knew would be there, names that he’d heard for the first time less than twenty-four hours earlier from the lips of Arturo Rivera. He wasn’t disappointed.
Garrett and Ira Waits sentenced to 15 and 20 years respectively for the murder of Kristina Kincade.
He continued reading, the excitement building steadily inside him. Then he read a sentence that stopped him dead, left him with a dull ache in the back of his throat, the elation turned to ashes in his mouth. He read it again in case the faded ink on the yellowing paper had conspired to trick him, praying he was mistaken. But the words were the same and everything fell into place, the awful truth dispelling the confusion he’d felt as he read the autopsy report, the reason for Kristina’s extensive injuries now all too clear.
Garrett and Ira Waits threw Kristina Kincade to her death from an aircraft flying at 12,000 feet whilst her husband, Jake Kincade, was forced to watch . . .
Evan felt an uncomfortable burning sensation building strength in his chest, the car suddenly claustrophobic. He kicked the door open in his rush to get out, stood staring out at the expanse of blue sky Lauren’s car had sailed out into, drawing great chunks of air into his body.
A thousand thoughts bounced around inside his head. He knew now why David Eckert refused to allow Lauren to fly the jump plane. It explained his outburst, the way he’d jabbed his finger angrily at the photograph of it on his office wall, referred to it as that plane. Had Lauren been aware of the plane’s history, its pivotal role in her family tragedy?
It was obvious she’d been fed the same story about her mother’s death, the supposed fatal road accident at the hands of a drunk driver. Had she learned the truth subsequently? He didn’t think Ivanovsky had told her. He had the feeling he was the first person to see Ivanovsky’s folder and its contents.
Ivanovsky’s justification for falsifying Lauren’s autopsy report, risking his reputation and his liberty, made sense now.
So that the same thing didn’t happen to her as happened to her mother
What the hell did Kristina Kincade do twenty years previously to get thrown out of an aircraft? And what had her daughter done fifteen years later to risk the same fate? Whatever it was, he understood now the need to disappear, leaving her husband behind, faking her own death to avoid it becoming a reality.
And what about Jake Kincade, forced to watch as his wife was thrown to her death? Why had he run away? And why had he come back? Because Evan was convinced now that he had, that he was the man who stepped into Eckert’s hangar and backed out again before Evan saw his face.
He needed to talk to David Eckert again. If Kristina was thrown from the aircraft he owned jointly with Jake Kincade, he must know why, just as Jake Kincade must have known. And Eckert was easier to find. The trouble was, if he’d received the same image of Arturo Rivera with his lips sewn shut, he’d be reluctant to share what he knew with Evan. If he had any sense he’d be in his plane on the way to Mexico by now.
Chapter 44
IT APPEARED ECKERT DIDN’T have any sense. Or at least he wasn’t on his way to Mexico or anywhere else. Seemed the guy lived in his office. From where he was sitting in his car beyond the airfield perimeter fence, Evan saw him clearly through his binoculars, moving around inside his office. It was almost dark and Evan had been watching the office and hangar for the past hour. There had been no sight of anyone else. It would have been too good to be true if he’d caught sight of Jake Kincade, ignoring for the moment that he didn’t know what he looked like. And the fact that there was only one car parked outside the office.
His plan was to wait for Eckert to leave and follow him home. He didn’t want another run-in with security and there was no way Eckert would let him in voluntarily, even if he hadn’t received a picture of Arturo’s final indignity.
He tracked across from the office to the hangar. The door was closed but a thin strip of light showed at the bottom. He started to pan back to the office when a movement caught his eye. Somebody was sliding open the hangar doors from the inside. He quickly swept back to the office, saw Eckert standing at the window looking out. Somebody else was in the hangar.
The left-hand hangar door was fully open now. Evan saw the Grand Caravan jump plane sitting inside it. His stomach turned over as he remembered the large exit door, the one he’d been so concerned about, the one he’d thought it would be easy to fall out of. He thought back to the conversation he’d had with Eckert about how safe or unsafe it was, and how Eckert had known all along that Kristina Kincade had been pushed out of it, falling to her death.
He closed his eyes momentarily as he tried to imagine what Kristina must have felt as she was pushed towards the gaping door by Garrett and Ira Waits, the wind seemingly in league with them as it plucked at her. He pictured them, one on either side of her, holding her arms as she kicked and thrashed in their grip. Then the long hysterical wail of her scream as she fell to her death, plummeting towards the ground as it rushed at her, faster and faster until the awful impact.
A twenty-year-old, open-topped Jeep Wrangler was parked next to the jump plane. The lights in the hangar suddenly snapped off. Evan watched a man, unidentifiable now in the darkness of the hangar, get into the Jeep and drive it outside. The floodlight on the front of the hangar was off, the light spilling from the office windows not sufficient to reach the Jeep where it parked while the driver closed the hangar doors behind him.
Evan followed the man’s movements with the binoculars. With his collar turned up and a baseball cap pulled low over his face, Evan wouldn’t have been able to make out his features in broad daylight. He didn’t even want to hazard a guess at how old he was. He moved quickly and confidently like a young man would. It didn’t mean a thing. There are a lot of fit sixty-year-olds and a man who used to run a skydiving school would look after himself.
The guy got back in the Jeep and pulled away with a wave to Eckert. Eckert waved back and disappeared from view.
It was a no-brainer. Evan could come back to Eckert any time. He might never get another chance at the other guy. He slumped down in his seat as the Jeep drove past him on the other side of the security fence, following the perimeter road towards the gate. He tracked it all the way to the gate, thankful when it made a left turn, heading away from him on the outer perimeter road. Leaving his lights off, he headed after it.
He followed the Jeep for a couple miles, flicking on his lights when he left the perimeter road, keeping a constant distance between them. The route they were taking suddenly seemed very familiar. They were headed back the way he’d come earlier, back towards Ivanovsky. But it was just a coincidence. A couple miles before they reached the point where Lauren’s car had gone off the road, the Jeep made a right turn onto a smaller road. Evan dropped back, then turned in after it. The road immediately started to climb. Ahead of him he saw the Jeep’s taillights disappearing around a curve. He stomped on the gas to make up some of the distance. As he rounded the curve he saw the Jeep make another right onto an even smaller road.
When he got to the turning, the Jeep owner’s choice of vehicle became obvious. It was barely more than a dirt trail. Deep ruts ran either side of a grassy mound that wound its way up into the trees. You’d need a 4x4 vehicle to get up that without doing some ser
ious damage to the underside of your car. This was as far as the Corvette went. He saw the Jeep’s taillights above him in the distance and then the flare of brake lights. A second later the lights went out altogether.
He parked the Corvette tight into the hillside twenty yards beyond the turning and got out, taking his jacket with him. He stood still listening for a few moments as he pulled the jacket on, zipping it up all the way to the neck to cover the whiteness of his shirt. Up the hill he heard the distant sound of a door slamming. There must be a cabin up there. If this was where Jake Kincade had been the last twenty years, he hadn’t gone far.
He set off towards the cabin, keeping inside the trees that lined the track and made his way cautiously uphill. Despite his best attempts to keep quiet, it sounded as if a herd of buffalo was on the move. Twigs snapped under his feet, dried leaves rustled. Small animals scurried in the undergrowth. On the other side of the road a bird screeched in startled indignation, then flapped away into the night. Walking up the road would’ve been quieter, but he wanted the cover of the trees.
A hundred yards up the hill the road opened out into a wide clearing. On the far side of it stood a log cabin with a stone chimney at one end and a porch running along the front. There were a couple of wooden rocking chairs lit by a bare bulb hung over the door. A light was on in one of the downstairs rooms, the curtains closed. Off to the side was a wooden building that had been used as a stable in another, simpler lifetime, its doors open. The Jeep was parked at an angle in front of it.
He skirted around the clearing keeping to the deep shadow of the trees, his progress much quieter now. He stopped twenty yards from the cabin, as close as he could get without leaving the cover of the trees. Through one of the uncurtained windows he saw the Jeep’s driver moving around, indistinct in the poorly lit interior. He needed to get closer.
Behind him, something moved in the trees with a sound like stealthy footsteps. Instinctively, he spun around, his hackles rising, pulse quickening. Two pale green eyes stared back at him, reflecting the porch light. Alert ears quivered, black nose twitching as they stared at each other a long moment. Then it was gone in a frightened bolt through the undergrowth. By the time he turned back to the cabin, the light behind the curtains had gone out.
Resurrection Blues Page 25