Dead Even (10 page)

The vacuum handle fell from Unger’s hand and hit the ground. Slowly, the body crumpled, falling where it had stood. Archer opened his eyes and saw Al Unger’s head hit the floor, facedown. Backing away, Archer stuck the gun back into his jacket pocket. Refusing to think about what he had just done, he walked halfway up the side aisle and through the closest exit into the deserted parking lot.

His breathing coming harder, faster, he went around the building and, pausing to get his bearings, leaned flat against the hard brick wall. Tears streamed down his face.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the night. “I’m sorry . . .”

A rustle from the dark, a soft scurry among the discarded chip bags and candy wrappers had Archer scurrying off as well. He wiped his face on his sleeve, swatted the popcorn off his pant legs, then walked to the end of the alley and crossed the street to the bus stop. Grabbing onto the sign, he held on for dear life and prayed his legs would not give out on him.

He’d just killed a man. God, he’d really done it.

He stood at the corner—staring straight ahead and trying to keep from crying—until the next bus arrived. He hopped aboard, took a seat near the back, and shook like a man who’d just come in from the cold. Once the bus reached the terminal in Cincinnati, he sat quietly while he waited for morning and the bus that would take him on to his designated stop, the refrain running over and over through his brain:

I killed a man. I put a bullet in the back of his head, and he fell down and died. I didn’t even know him, and I killed him.

He’d boarded the bus he’d been told to take, once again huddled in the back, his head in his hands, the sound of his heart pounding loud in his ears. Crying silent tears, he begged forgiveness from a God he’d never really believed in, and from the old man whose life he’d taken that night.

And he knew that if he didn’t come up with something fast, he’d be forced to do it again. And again . . .

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Will Fletcher tossed the newspaper onto the recycling pile in the corner of his kitchen, noting that the pile had grown considerably over the past few days. He made a mental note to bundle up the papers and get them outside in time for the next scheduled end-of-the-week pickup. He’d missed the past few weeks, once because he’d gone into the office early to check up on something regarding a case, and once because he’d simply forgotten until it was too late. This week he’d make the pickup. He found a ball of string to wrap the papers in and set it on the counter. The doorbell rang before he could begin his hunt for the scissors.

Miranda stood on his front porch, her color pale and her eyes vague and distant.

“Hey, Cahill. This is a pleasant—”

“We fucked up.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He did it. The son of a bitch did it.”

“Who . . . ? You don’t mean Lowell . . . ?”

“Yes. I do mean Lowell. Unger is dead. So much for the combined smarts of that all-star FBI panel that convened last week.”

“What happened?”

“I got a call this morning from the Telford police.” She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and recited the facts. “A passing patrol car noticed the lights in the theater were still on at two-thirty this morning, so they stopped in. They found Al facedown on the floor, a bullet through the back of his head.”

“Damn,” Will muttered. “
Damn
it. I thought they were going to keep an eye on him.”

“Apparently their idea of surveillance is limited to twice-nightly drive-bys.” Her shoulders dropped. “May I come in?”

“Of course. Sorry.” Will stepped back to allow her to enter, then closed the door.

“I feel like an idiot. We were all so sure Lowell was such a pussy he’d never do something bold like kill a man. God, we are so stupid.”

“Whoa, take it easy, Miranda. Even Annie, who is usually right on the money when it comes to figuring people out, thought Archer would be a no-show when it came to finishing up the game.”

“Well, it just goes to show you, like Annie always says, profiling is not an exact science.”

“Do we know for a fact that it was Lowell? Or are we assuming?”

“Well, wouldn’t it just be the biggest coincidence in the world if someone other than Lowell pulled the trigger?”

“Good point.” Will took her arm and led her through the house to the kitchen. “Come on. You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”

“Bastard had us all fooled,” Miranda said. “No one figured him for a cold-blooded killer.”

“Here, sit down.” He pulled a chair out from the table, and offered it to her. “What exactly did the police say when they called?”

She sat, turning the chair slightly to the left when he sat down next to her.

“A cruiser passing by the theater early this morning noticed the lobby lights were still on, which is not normal for that hour. So the cops stopped to investigate, found the door unlocked, went into the lobby, heard the vacuum cleaner running. They entered the theater, saw the vacuum but not Al. When they walked down to the front, they found the body. There was no one else around, and a canvass of the neighborhood has turned up nothing. No one saw anything; no one heard anything.” She blew out a long, exasperated breath. “And the Telford police are telling me they have no suspects.”

“What do you mean, they have no suspects?” Will frowned. “We told them who to watch for, even gave them a picture of Lowell.”

“Yeah, well, they’re saying there’s no evidence to tie Lowell to the murder. We can’t even prove Lowell was in Telford last night.”

“They think this whole thing is one big coincidence? Who else could it have been?”

“Do you think there’s a chance there could have been a fourth person in on this game?” Miranda asked.

“I don’t see how. The only time we can place Lowell, Giordano, and Channing together was in the police van one morning back in February, and even then, according to the guards and the driver, they did not speak to one another. There was one other inmate in the van that morning, but he’s spending the rest of his life behind bars.” Will paused, then added, “As a matter of fact, on the morning in question, this other prisoner had escaped into the courthouse and held up things for hours. Put the entire courthouse on lockdown for a good part of the day until they found him.”

“I don’t recall hearing about that.” Miranda frowned.

“It was in an amended report that Evan Crosby filed. It’s in the packet of material Jared put together for us.”

“What were the other three doing while the courthouse was on lockdown?”

“I don’t know. Good question, though. Maybe we should give Evan a call and see if he knows.”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll bet he can find out.”

“I have his card in my desk. I’ll be right back. In the meantime, think you could throw together a pot of coffee? The coffee maker is there on the counter. Coffee and filters are the same place they were the last time you were here.”

By the time Will returned to the kitchen, the coffee was just beginning to drip and Miranda was leaning into the open refrigerator, searching for a carton of milk.

“I had to leave a voice mail for Crosby.”

“He’ll call you back. He’s real good about returning calls. He’d make a great agent. Bet it wouldn’t take much to convince him, either. I think he’s really got a thing for Anne Marie.”

“Has anyone notified the Fleming police?”

“I called them on my way here. God knows I had plenty of time. Honestly, could you have found a house farther out than this?”

“There was a time when you liked my little bungalow in the woods.” He turned his attention to pouring coffee into two mugs that had souvenir of nags head, n.c. in faded blue paint on the front and a pair of equally faded pelicans on the back.

“It has a lot of promise, I’ll give you that. But I’ll bet those narrow roads up the side of those hills are hell in the winter.”

“Guess I’ll find out over the next few months,” he said, handing her a mug.

“Guess you will.” She opened a cupboard and surveyed the contents. “No artificial sweeteners?”

“Sorry. Only the real thing. Sugar’s in the bowl on the counter.”

She opted for milk only, stirring it as she spoke. “Anyway, Fleming sent a patrol car to the Lowell trailer. If he’s there, we’re going to have to consider the possibility that it wasn’t him. I should be hearing from them soon.”

“It’s not impossible to drive from Telford, Ohio, to Fleming, Pennsylvania, between midnight and eight or nine in the morning.” He dumped a teaspoon of sugar into his mug and stirred it thoughtfully. “But would you really expect to find him there? You think he’d be dumb enough to go right back home?”

“Do I think he’s dumb enough to shoot someone we expected him to shoot, and then go right back home where we can find him? Two words, Fletcher.
Archer Lowell
.”

“So you think he’s home.”

“It’s a starting place. Where else would he go?”

“On to victim number two?” Will asked.

“I suppose that is a possibility,” she conceded. “It would sure help if we knew who that was going to be.”

“It would help, too, to know how Archer’s getting around. We know he doesn’t have a car, he can’t rent without a license, and I don’t think he’s smart enough to steal a car. So he’s either gotten a friend to drive him—unlikely, that would require some explanation—or he took public transportation.” Will paused, mentally picking through the possibilities. “My guess would be a bus. A train would be faster, but it’s also more expensive, and as far as we know, Archer has no source of income.”

“You might be on to something.” She set her coffee down on the counter and rummaged in her bag for her phone. “I’m going to call Veronica Carson back and ask her to check the nearest train and bus terminals in and around Fleming. But that’s a little crazy, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that like taking a bus to your prom?”

She punched in the numbers, and, while she waited, Will opened the back door and stepped outside onto the small porch he’d rebuilt over the summer. It had rained overnight, and the birdbath the previous owner had left in the yard overflowed water onto the slate patio, the construction of which had followed the porch. There were two chairs and a small table. The patio was too narrow to accommodate anything else.

The air was thick with autumn, the sky dark with leftover storm clouds. Crows screamed at one another in the trees at the back of Will’s property. Will stood on the bottom step and felt a little like screaming himself.

Having Miranda in his house, sitting at the kitchen table in the morning once again, had unsettled him. He thought he’d done a damn fine job of hiding it, but now, out of her presence, he was having a tough time holding the memories at bay. He’d meant it when he’d told her she was the total package. Her physical beauty was only part of it. When he was with her, it was easy to forget he’d ever been with another woman. And God knew it had been a while since he had. Miranda just had that effect on him. She’d taken his breath away the first time he’d seen her standing in the door of John Mancini’s office on the day she’d reported for work. She still took his breath away. He thought he’d become accustomed to it—to that punch he felt in his gut when he looked at her, when he remembered their time together.

Apparently he was wrong.

The scent of wet earth took him back to a day almost two years ago, when they’d worked a case together in a small western Pennsylvania town where they’d gone to help track a serial killer who left his victims propped up against headstones in the local cemeteries. It had been the first time they’d worked together in months, the first time they’d seen each other in weeks, and Will recalled with total clarity the way he’d felt when he’d seen her get out of her car and walk among the graves that lay between the road and the place where he stood.

He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. Her hair blew around her head in dark ribbons, and the wind plastered her jacket to her body. By then, he’d become intimately familiar with every curve and hollow, and that familiarity burned deep inside him as he watched her approach. She’d acknowledged him with a slight gesture, a small wave of the fingers of her right hand, and he’d had to force himself to concentrate on the business he’d been sent to do.

The first body they’d found that day had been left sitting against a headstone. The victim’s hands had been folded demurely in her lap, and her chin rested on her chest. She’d been a pretty girl before she’d been snatched from her pretty life and stabbed to death. They’d found three more bodies that day, and later, much later, when they returned to the motel where they’d been booked, he’d caught up with Miranda in the bar. They’d gone back to his room, and sought to forget the ugliness they’d seen that day by losing themselves in each other. Later, in the wee hours of the morning, Will had found Miranda out on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, staring up at the sky.

“When I was younger, my sister and I used to do rubbings in cemeteries,” she’d said without turning around. “You know, wax rubbings of headstones. We used to look for old cemeteries, the ones with the really neat stones. Where people have been resting for years. For centuries, sometimes. Some of the stones were so pretty, some of the inscriptions so poignant. We’d walk along and read the names and the dates. We’d find graves of men who fought in the Civil War, and babies who’d only lived a day.”

“Like the cemetery we were in today,” Will had said, and she’d nodded.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that again. Not after seeing what he did to those women . . .”

He’d coaxed her back inside, and they’d made love until the sun came up. Later that day, he took her to another cemetery, this one outside of town, and they walked along the quiet graves, reading the inscriptions to each other. Two hours later, he was on his way to Maine, she to Phoenix. . . .

“Carson is sending someone to the bus terminal with Archer’s mug shot, and they’re also going to get in touch with his probation officer, see if we can get a warrant issued for Lowell,” Miranda announced from the doorway, oblivious to his disquiet. “She’s already had someone out to talk to Archer’s mother. Mrs. Lowell said—surprise, surprise—she hasn’t seen Archer since she left for work on Friday morning. He wasn’t there when she got home yesterday, and he didn’t come home last night. She’s very worried about him.”

“I’d be worried, too, if he were my son. But I thought someone was supposed to be keeping an eye on him.”

“I think the Fleming police might have attended the same surveillance workshop as their brothers in Telford. In any event, the police are going down to the Well to talk to the bartender and some of Archer’s drinking buddies, see if he mentioned to any one of them that he’d be leaving town.” She opened the screen door and stepped outside. “You’ve done a lot of work on the house since the last time I was here. It’s really nice, Will.”

“Thanks.”

She descended the steps and stepped onto the patio. “This is really pretty. I bet it’s nice to sit back here and drink your coffee in the morning, read the paper. Or have a drink at the end of the day.”

“It is. I’d invite you to have a seat, but as you can see, everything’s wet from the rain.”

“Too bad. It’s so cozy.” She looked around the yard. “You put the fence in yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Planted all those trees?”

“Yes.”

“You do all that over the summer?”

“Yes.”

“You were busy.”

“I had some time on my hands.”

“You take any time off at all?”

“Only to dig another hole,” he told her.

“I noticed the inside of the house was all newly painted, too. And there’s real furniture in the living room.”

“I did that back in June.”

“You fixing the house up to sell it?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I like it here. I want to stay here.”

“It’s a great house, Will. You’ve done wonders with it. Hard to believe it’s that same ramshackle old heap of shingles you bought back when.”

“Thanks.”

The phone in Miranda’s pocket began to ring.