Dead Level (17 page)

Like, for instance, escaping. “Right,” said Bob. “No genius, and not very stable, either, according to the guys at the prison who ought to know. They were surprised he had the wherewithal to make a plan like he must’ve had, and keep it together.”

“Yeah? Unpredictable, was he?” Wade asked distractedly. As he spoke he gazed out the bank building’s front window to where a tugboat was pulling in at the fish pier, down the block and over on the other side of Water Street, in the harbor.

Sam wasn’t there. “Nope,” said Bob. “The opposite. And that, see, is what turned out to be his special talent.”

Bob gazed around the old bank interior. “My understanding is that Hooper spent seven long years being a good little inmate who never gave anyone any grief.”

Huge old double-hung sashes, each four feet high, sent thin, slanting October sunshine into the high-ceilinged room. Bob liked those windows, and particularly liked the bank’s high, marble-topped counter that he could stand behind or emerge from behind, depending on whether the person who’d come in to talk to him was a serious visitor or just a run-of-the-mill pain in the butt.

“And the night he skedaddled,” Bob went on, “he did all the things he ordinarily did, and no other things.”

Except for slipping through the open bay door and into a waiting ambulance, of course. “He walked out into the fenced yard, and then he didn’t show up again, but the guys viewing the monitors were so used to seeing his routine—emptying the trash in the Dumpster, for instance—that he’d become invisible, kind of.”

Bob sighed heavily. “So they didn’t notice when he really wasn’t there, either, and it just happened to be that time, the
only
time when it really mattered, that the trash he was dumping was a dead body.”

Bob took a breath. “Which he replaced in the ambulance with his
own
body, for long enough to get outside the fence.”

Whereupon he had either jumped from the moving vehicle or somehow gotten out of the hospital morgue, and by the time anyone figured it out, Dewey Hooper was gone like a wisp of fog.

“Not that he was normal,” Bob added. “Guards who knew him say all you had to do was look at his face an’ you’d know he was going to blow up sooner or later. Guys get an expression, they say, doesn’t look like any other facial expression, when they’re getting ready to lose it. Medical staff, social workers …”

Sure, now they all said so, now when it was too late. But Bob didn’t guess anyone would’ve listened to any of them before, anyway, institutional hierarchies being what they were.

“I guess that look was one more thing they got used to about Hooper,” he said. “Which maybe was the idea in the first place.”

Wade nodded, charitably not remarking on what a balls-up mess the whole situation had been. But then, he wouldn’t; Wade wasn’t the type to state the obvious.

Bob didn’t quite know what Wade might do, though, with the information he’d just gotten from the Rusty Rudder’s proprietor. Hell, he wasn’t sure what to do with it himself.

He turned to Wade. “I remember Dewey. Arrested him many a time, drunk and disorderly and so on. He had the same look then. Our Mr. Hooper is the kind of guy gives the other 99.9 percent of unusual people a bad name. Hell, I knew it long before he did away with his wife.”

Maybe not anything a psychiatrist could diagnose, but just the same … Bob felt uneasy simply remembering Hooper. “Come on, take a walk with me,” he told Wade, getting up.

His old office chair let out a horrendous creak; in the new place, he would have all new office furniture, tables and file cabinets and bookcases that were on their way right now from the Office Depot in Bangor. Place was going to have restrooms, brand-new ones, and a locker room with a shower, even.

But he was going to miss that old chair. He’d take it with him, but he knew it wouldn’t look right in the new place. That it wouldn’t fit in; he wondered yet again if he would.

Outside, the sky was still blue but a new crop of huge, dark storm clouds lowered to the east; the weather of two days earlier was backing around for another whack at the coast. He crossed the street with Wade, between a pickup whose fenders were patched with silver duct tape and a Toyota whose inspection sticker was three months out of date; Bob made a mental note of the Toyota.

“The thing is,” Wade said, “I bet Jake a hundred bucks that she couldn’t finish the deck we’ve been building up there at the cottage. Now, if I go up there myself, if she’s having trouble with it she might feel like I’m rubbing it in, and if she’s not, she’ll wish I’d waited so she could surprise me with how well she did it.”

“And if you tell her what you just heard about Sam, she’ll be upset, but if you don’t tell her …”

“Yeah. That, too,” Wade agreed. “Man, and this started out to be a good day, you know?” he added as they walked on.

Past the granite riprap that formed a wall along one side of the walkway running along the edge of the harbor, the tugboat
Ahoskie
bobbed gently at the fish pier, her crisp, new blue-and-white paint job making her resemble a child’s bathtub toy.

“Yeah, well,” Bob said. “That’s women for you. Damned if you do or if you don’t.”

Which wasn’t really what either of them thought, just shorthand for how dumb a guy could get to feeling sometimes, not knowing what to do. Bob tried to remember when he hadn’t felt that way about something or another, and couldn’t.

On their right, Passamaquoddy Bay spread blue and calm. Too calm, Bob thought, its surface glassy-flat. He made another mental note, this time to put a deputy in a squad car on the end of the causeway later if the weather really did blow up again.

Between nabbing speeders and reassuring everyone else of a police presence, a cop visible in a storm was smart, safety-wise and politically. After all, having the city council on his side now didn’t mean he wouldn’t do or say something unpopular later.

In fact he almost certainly would. At the end of the walkway stood the small, white wood-frame
Quoddy Tides
building, where the easternmost newspaper in the U.S. was published, and next to it a terraced perennial garden rising up to sidewalk level. The garden was a community project, miraculously unmolested by local youngsters;
so far
, Bob thought with a realism born of long-term experience. All it took was one dumb thug, but so far, so good.

Past the garden they turned left, onto Water Street between the granite-block post office building and a long row of red-brick, two-story commercial buildings with fancy galleries and art shops on the first floors, apartments above.

The shops were all closed, now that the tourist season was mostly over, and the apartments soon would be. With a view of the water out the back windows and lots of exposed brick inside, they were charming in summer. But in the winter with the wind blowing, you might as well try heating a lobster trap.

Bob glanced at each one of the doors to make sure none of the locks had new pry marks on them, then stopped, scanning the length of the street. Eastport in the off-season was another kind of place entirely: less noise, less activity.

Less of everything, including money, and when budgets got tight the copper pipes had a way of disappearing out of vacant buildings. So all winter he’d be checking those doors regularly.

“Listen, Wade,” he began, taking an inventory of the street. But no unfamiliar faces or strange cars were in sight; so much for nabbing the credit card crooks before they left town.

Wade looked out across the water, the muscles in his jaw twitching as a series of emotions chased one another across his face. Sam Tiptree’s triumph over his own demons had nearly killed him. But he’d beaten them, or at any rate wrestled them to a draw.

Until now. “It’s a symptom,” Bob said. “Of the disease. Not a disaster.” A relapse, he meant, of the kind Sam had apparently had.

“He’ll be okay,” Bob went on. “You all will be.” Being a small-town cop was the only job he’d ever wanted, but sometimes it was the pits.

Wade squared his shoulders. “Yeah. All right. Guess I’ll be on my way, then. Better track the kid down now, before his mom comes home and hears about this.”

Clearly the phone call to Jake, much less a visit, had been put on hold. Wade would want to find Sam, find out what was going on and what he could do to fix it, before he broke the bad news.

They turned back down Water Street. “I’ll keep an eye peeled for him, call you if I see him,” Bob said as they parted.

Wade nodded, still looking distracted. Funny, Bob thought, how a couple of hours—less, in this case—could make all the difference. A little
while ago Wade had been debating taking a ride up to the cottage, wanting to ease his mind about a wife-killing prison escapee who by all reports was actually about three hundred miles away.

But now if he didn’t find Sam and get a handle on the kid’s newly relapsed drinking habit—

Well, if that happened, the only murder Wade would have to deal with was the bloody murder his wife, Jake Tiptree, would start screaming when she heard about her son Sam’s first alcoholic slip in a couple of years, last night with his new pals in the Rusty Rudder.

If at first you don’t succeed …

Perched on a marshy hummock at the edge of the beaver pond, about fifty yards upstream from the culvert, Dewey Hooper wiggled the big log blocking the stream’s flow.

He wasn’t angry that his gravel-pit plan had failed. It was really no big surprise that his first attempt at killing the two women hadn’t worked out quite right.

 … try again
. No doubt some witchy premonition of Marianne’s had let them escape, and this only confirmed his opinion: that she was dangerous, and had to be put down permanently as soon as possible. Besides, the avalanche in the gravel pit had been a hell of a lot of fun to create.

This project he had embarked upon now was pretty enjoyable, too, actually. He wiggled the log again, finding it lodged very solidly there where it had floated and stuck. With its roots all still attached and wedged crosswise against the water’s flow, it made an excellent dam.

But he could move it. If he wanted to, he could pull it out entirely. If he wanted a sudden flood, for example, just when the two women were driving over the culvert on a trip whose urgency he would also have to engineer …

But he could do that part easily. Six inches … he’d heard Bob
Arnold say that much flowing water was all it would take. After that, once their truck tires hit the drop-off by the edge of the road, the vehicle would roll over via its own momentum, into the drainage pond.

There was of course the small matter of the truck that was supposed to be coming, town guys set to repair the road. But Dewey had already taken care of that first thing this morning, by sneaking back to one of the houses he’d stolen clothes from.

Choosing one whose residents were at work all day—not a problem for a guy who’d been pulling burglaries since he was eleven—he’d used their phone to call the town offices. Claiming to be a local landowner, he’d said he’d repaired the flooded road himself, with gravel from the nearby gravel pit.

No need for any attention from the city crew, he’d said; no doubt the guys’d be glad to cross that backbreaking job off their list, and the clerk he’d talked to had agreed.

The one thing that bothered Dewey was that his voice had been shaking so bad when he made the call, he’d feared the clerk would know something was up. Nerves … hour by hour, it seemed, he was getting wonkier in the head, almost as if he missed his cell, the smooth featurelessness of it, and the safety of the prison’s locked doors and enclosing walls. But that—Dewey shook himself angrily like a dog, to rid himself of it—that was crazy talk.

He would get over it. He wiggled the log again, careful not to dislodge it. Once removed, it would release lots of water, fast. Like a tidal wave over the road …

Around him the marsh was still, the surface of the pond he knelt by as smooth as if it were frozen solid. Overhead, clouds went on thickening, but he didn’t care; after years in prison, it all felt like heaven to him. The whole thing was going to look like just some tragic, random act of nature, the kind of bad accident that happened sometimes out here in the woods.

The pond’s surface began clouding intermittently with bursts of cold mist. No matter; soon he’d be warm and dry, and free of Marianne
once more, too: her and the big-mouthed pal she had with her, that tattletale Jake Tiptree.

And after that, neither one of them would be running their mouths ever again. He got to his feet, stretched the kinks out of his back, and picked his way easily from one marshy mound to the next until he got to the dirt road.

Then, in the gathering dusk, he set off for the cottage the women were staying at, and for the last part of his preparations. In the near darkness he found where he’d hidden Bentley Hodell’s shotgun, which had turned out to be in good condition despite the drenching it had suffered. Bentley had ammo, too, plenty of it.

And now so did Dewey. Ahead, the pale dirt of the road between the trees divided: one winding uphill, the other a narrow curving track through low huckleberry bushes. With the shotgun over his shoulder and the shells in his pockets, he chose the low path, alert for sounds and careful not to make any himself.

This next part could be tricky. Easing along in silence, not even breathing heavily, he came upon their pickup truck backed in among the huge white pines that surrounded the cabin. From the windows came a warm yellow glow, and a fire in the woodstove scented the air sharply, as it had the night before.

He sidled up alongside the truck until he reached its door. So far, so good. Both women were indoors; the dark-haired one doing something over the kitchen stove, Marianne sitting at the table, clearly visible through the window.

At the sight of her, his hard-won calm fled and an icy fury seized him. There she was, mocking him by her presence, every breath she took an insolent slap in Dewey’s face.

She couldn’t be alive. She
couldn’t
. He’d killed her. And yet there she sat: a travesty, an abomination. And a
dangerous
one, because who else could testify better to the circumstances of her death than the victim herself?