A Fountain Filled With Blood (43 page)

“But you don’t need to know much about any machine to know putting water into the gas tank is going to screw it up.”

They looked at each other. He thought about Ingraham’s bloody death and Dessaint’s bloated corpse. He thought about Todd MacPherson and Emil Dvorak. People treated like disposable lighters. He thought about what might have happened if they had been a shade less lucky, if Clare had been slightly less skilled as a pilot, if the sparks had caught fire a few minutes earlier.

He stood up so abruptly, his wicker chair skidded back half a foot.

“What?”

He turned to the inn’s door. “I’m getting out an APB on Landry and her nephew. And telling Kevin to get here now.” She had tried to kill
Clare
. And had almost succeeded. “I don’t want anyone else to make this collar. I want to be the one to strap that woman to the gurney.”

Russ tried to get rid of Clare, of course. First, he wanted her to stay at the inn and accept Ron and Stephen’s offer of a shower and a room to rest in. Then, when Officer Flynn arrived and drove them up to the construction site to reclaim their cars, he ordered her to go home, a direction he emphasized by driving past the rectory on his way to the Landry house and pointing his finger out his window at her driveway. When they got to the imposing modern house—Clare still dogging Russ’s Ford 250—and discovered that Peggy, her laptop, and two suitcases were gone, she could see he was tempted to leave her there, with the nearly hysterical bride-to-be and the poor confused Woods. She crossed her arms and simply ignored everything he said that didn’t involve her sticking around. His heart wasn’t really in it anyway. Maybe there was something about throwing up on another person’s shoes.

“I know why you’re doing this,” he said as he rifled through Peggy Landry’s home office. He, Kevin, Noble Entwhistle, and a friendly cop introduced as Duane were searching the house. “You’re an adrenaline junkie. I’m here to tell you that the only way to get over that is to live a life of quiet contemplation.” He tossed several folders on the floor. “Here, make yourself useful.” She sat on the Oriental rug and began paging through the documents. “Quiet contemplation,” he went on. “Like the priesthood.”

Officer Entwhistle stuck his head in the doorway. “Thought you’d like to know. We pulled a suitcase full of goodies from under the nephew’s bed. Meth and ecstasy, and some heroin, too. We’re leaving it in place until the lab guy can get here. It may be another hour.”

“Speedy as always. Any indications where Wintour might have gone?”

“Nothing yet. We’re still looking.” Entwhistle glanced over at Clare, who sat cross-legged on the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “Helping out, Reverend Fergusson?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’ll, uh, leave you two to it, then.” He retreated down the hall.

“That’s great,” Russ said under his breath.

“What?” The folder held an endless correspondence between Landry Properties, Inc., and its insurance carrier, dating back several years. Even letting weekend warriors play paint ball on your mountains was apparently a potential pitfall of litigation.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just another misunderstanding.”

“Huh,” she said, trying to decipher the arcane agreement that had BWI paying a portion of Peggy’s insurance on the land not leased for the spa. Statements for January, February, March…then something different in April.

“Russ. Come take a look at this.” He knelt beside her. She laid the paper on the rug and they both bent over it. “If this says what I think it does, Peggy’s share of the BWI insurance was canceled in April.”

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Would that include that provision Opperman told me about? Where she gets paid out of insurance money if the project didn’t go forward?”

“I’m guessing so.” She flipped through another few pages. “Look at this. Her insurance company writes her that they’ve been refused payment because BWI’s dropped her policy.” She underlined the words with her fingernail. “Hugh Parteger,” she glanced at him, “a financier I met at Peggy’s party, he told me BWI was overloaded with debt and looking for cash.”

“Her insurance situation wouldn’t be that big a deal so long as the construction was going through,” he said, sitting back on his heels. “But if she thought Ingraham was going to pull the plug on the project…”

“She’d be left with nothing except a hunk of cleared land and a reputation as someone who had a major deal drop through her fingers. She’s spent years trying to make something of that property.”

He nodded. “Could be she decided that if Bill Ingraham was out of the way, the spa could be built without him. Opperman said pretty much the same thing to me. With the design all in place, all Ingraham was doing at this point was acting as the lead contractor. Could be she thought she could safeguard her investment.” He shook his shoulders. “Remind me to stay away from real estate speculation.”

There was a screeching noise outside, and the sound of flying gravel. Someone shouted from the main floor.

“What the—” Russ was on his feet and pounding down the hall before Clare had a chance to get up. She followed him, two steps at a time, up the stairs to the main floor, guided by the shouts and slamming doors. The elderly Woods were huddled beside a grandfather clock in the foyer. “Which way?” Clare said.

Cyrus Wood pointed to the front door. She burst outside in time to see both the squad cars gunning down the sloping drive, wheels spinning, stones
rat-tat-tatting.
Russ was flinging open the door of his pickup. She put on a burst of speed and ran headlong into the truck, banging on the hood. “Let me in! Let me in!”

The passenger door unlocked with a sharp click and she fell into the seat, clutching at the oven-hot leather as Russ spun the vehicle around and slammed on the accelerator. She couldn’t believe he had actually fallen for it and let her get in.

“What is it?”

“The nephew pulled right into the driveway. He saw our black-and-whites and backed out of there, but not before Kevin spotted him. Hang on.”

They took the turn onto the road on two wheels. His hand twitched where the radio would be in his squad car. She could hear the sirens wailing, the sound shifting, growing higher and fainter as the lightweight cars drew farther and farther ahead of Russ’s heavy truck.

“Will they be able to catch him?” she asked.

“Eventually.” His focus was all on the road as he leaned into his accelerator.

“What if he drives through town like that? That fast?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It was a stupid question. She could picture the tourists jaywalking across the streets, the kids biking. She squeezed her eyes shut and prayed the best she knew how, scarcely coherent, all her fear and belief laid out in the open.
Please, God. Please.

The sirens cut off. Russ swore. The truck flew over the road, heading toward the intersection, lofting over bumps and jarring high and wide over asphalt patches filling last winter’s potholes.

“Hang on!” The two black-and-whites were catercorner across the intersection, blocking a Volvo sedan that had, from the skid marks, spun around in the turn and nosed into a ditch thick with daylilies and Queen Anne’s lace. Russ jammed down on the brake, throwing both of them forward until her shoulder belt caught and bit into her neck. The back end of the truck danced across the road but stopped safely in the breakdown lane. Great, she thought. Now I’ll have matching bruises on both shoulders.

The uniformed officers spilled from their cars, taking protective stances behind their open doors. Russ opened his own door, drawing his weapon at the same time.
“Stay here,”
he said.

She nodded.

Officer Entwhistle was yelling at Malcolm Wintour to get out of the car with his hands showing. She couldn’t see any movement inside the sedan. Lord, what if he was dead, too? The awful toll of human life and pain was already too high. And for what? To get a lousy piece of land developed. To make more money for a woman who already had more than anyone really needed.

Russ closed in on his men, staying low, his gun out in front of him. She saw him signal Nobel Entwhistle, who ducked behind his own car and edged around toward the back of the Volvo, which was angled up so that the tires were barely touching the asphalt.

“Wintour,” Russ bellowed. “We’ve got your aunt. We’ve got Waxman. We know everything. Get out of the car.”

The door on the driver’s side shuddered, opened a few inches, and then stuck fast in the side of the ditch. Clare rolled her window down. She had to hear what was going to happen. A hand emerged from the opening. “It wasn’t my idea!” The thin, frightened voice she heard was not at all like the one she had heard from the bathroom. “She made me do it!”

“Get out of the goddamn car!”

“I can’t!”

Russ looked at Nobel Entwhistle and nodded. The uniformed officer crept closer to the Volvo’s trunk as Russ sidled closer toward the driver’s door. Clare wanted to scream,
Stay away from there, you idiot! He’s got a gun!
But he knew Malcolm had a gun. He knew what he was doing. She forced her fingernails out of the palms of her hands.

She still couldn’t see the interior of the car, but from where he stood, Russ must have had a bead directly on Malcolm. He stood there, gun pointed at the car, while Nobel slid into the ditch and opened the back door. It wasn’t until he had hauled Malcolm out, literally by the collar, that Clare realized she had been holding her breath.

They got him down on the ground and then Duane and Kevin came running. Clare could hear a rumble of male voices, but she couldn’t make out anything. Russ squatted down and spoke directly to Malcolm. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as if the younger man was crying. She looked away, not wanting to see any more, and so it wasn’t until she heard the crunch of his hiking boots on the road grit that she realized Russ was coming back to the truck.

She glanced up. Nobel was ushering Malcolm into the backseat of his cruiser, and as she watched, the red lights whirled atop the other police car and Kevin and Duane were off, headed toward town. She looked at Russ as he opened his door.

“He says his aunt didn’t drive away, because he had her car.” He got in, pinching the bridge of his nose. “He doesn’t know where she’s gone. The only people he knows she might get in touch with are his mother or her other sister. Both of whom live more than halfway across the state. She must have called a friend to come pick her up.”

He crawled in behind the wheel and leaned back against the head-rest. “We’ve got an APB out on her, but it’s not going to do us a damn bit of good if we don’t know what the hell car she’s in. Scuse my French.”

“Could she have rented a car?”

“That was my first thought. The nearest car-rental place is at the Fort Henry Ford dealership. I sent Duane and Kevin off to check it out.”

Officer Entwhistle’s car came to life. He pulled away from the side of the road and headed toward town, waving through the window at Russ.

“We need to get someone to secure that Volvo,” Russ said, sounding weary. “We’re so damned overextended at this point that I’m going to have to call the staties in. God, I hate that.” He reached for his keys and started the truck. “We’d better get back to the house and start calling names in Peggy’s Rolodex. Maybe we’ll find a girlfriend who just happened to have plans to drive out of town today.”

Clare’s mind returned to the party the night before. Sitting in the window seat of the Landry house while the guests swirled around her. The expression of disbelief on Hugh Parteger’s face. The smell of black currants and Thai chicken. Peggy saying, “John Opperman’s flying to Baltimore tomorrow afternoon, and he won’t be back until Tuesday.”

“I know where she is.”

He looked at her.

“No, really. I know where she is. John Opperman’s supposed to fly out of town this afternoon. I bet she called him and asked to come along. I bet he’d pick her up, no questions asked.”

He shoved his hand into his hair, spiking his sweat-stiff locks in every direction. “He would, wouldn’t he? A little freebie business trip.” He slammed the heel of his hand into his steering wheel. “Damn, that woman thinks fast on her feet. We’re not going to find her with an APB because she’s not going to be on the road. Or buying a ticket anywhere.” He threw the truck into gear and pulled onto the road. “Do you know when Opperman’s supposed to leave?”

“She just said he was leaving this afternoon. And that he was headed for Baltimore.”

He heeled the truck hard to the left and stomped on the gas pedal. “If I take the back roads, I can be at the Glens Falls Airport in twenty minutes.” He glanced at her for a split second. “I don’t suppose you have your cell phone with you?”

“In my car. Sorry.”

“Never mind. If they’re still there, we can stop them before he takes off. And if they’ve left, they would have had to tell the airport-control people where they’re going, right?”

“He would have to have filed a flight plan, yeah. And if he’s flying on instruments, he’ll be passed from one flight-control center to another. You’ll be able to call ahead and have someone waiting for her at their destination.” She grabbed the door handle as he took another hard turn onto an unmarked road. They jounced in and out of potholes as they flew through thickets of sumac and ancient overgrown apple orchards. “You know, I like to speed, but isn’t this—”

“Hang on.” He turned onto a one-lane bridge. Steel plates
ca-chunk-ca-chunk-ca-chunked
beneath the tires.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

He grinned at her. “Do you trust me?”

She groaned.

At one point, she was sure they’d passed under the Northway, but other than that, she had no bearing on where they were until they emerged from a tree-shaded road and saw the airport in front of them, its four runways stretched like a top-heavy X past a handful of hangars and a tiny tower. They drove through a gate marked EMPIRE EAST AVIATION.

“Where do you think he’d be?” Russ asked.