Deadly Pursuit (14 page)

24

Albert Dance, father of Jack, had died four years ago, at the age of sixty-six. Social Security records listed his last address as a retirement community in Fort Lauderdale.

Briefly, Lovejoy had allowed himself to speculate that Jack had visited his father often. Being familiar with Fort Lauderdale, he’d gone to ground there.

A phone conversation with the director of the retirement home killed that slight hope. Jack, she reported, had never come to see his father. Not once.

“Do you happen to know who administered Mr. Dance’s estate?” Lovejoy asked. There was a chance Jack had inherited a house or condo, perhaps in Florida: another possible hideout.

“As I recall, it was his lawyer. We’ve probably still got his address on file.”

Lovejoy’s pen scribbled busily, recording a street and number in Pompano Beach, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

Dennis Gibson, the attorney in question, answered his own phone on the third ring. Yes, he remembered Al Dance. Yes, he’d probated the estate. Lovejoy arranged to meet with him in a half hour.

“Think this will pan out?” Moore asked from the passenger seat of their borrowed motor-pool sedan, speeding north on Interstate 95.

“In all probability, no.” Lovejoy shrugged. “But it’s slightly more productive than chewing our nails.”

“Jack could be anywhere by now. Could have boarded another plane and left the country.”

“From what we understand, he doesn’t have a passport.”

“You don’t need a passport to enter Mexico or Canada.”

“I know.”

“Or Bermuda, the Bahamas ...”

“I know.”

“Besides,” Moore said, “he might have a phony passport. The rest of his escape was planned well enough. He’s got connections. He could have bought whatever paper he might need.”

“Well, what the fuck do you want me to do about it?”

Moore puffed up her cheeks and let the air out in a hiss. She was silent.

Lovejoy didn’t speak until they were rolling down Thirty-sixth Street in Pompano Beach. Then he said, “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m overtired, that’s all.”

“We both are.”

“And I’m ...”

“Worried.”

“Yes.”

“Of course. This isn’t exactly going to put you on the fast track, is it?”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“Your career. Drury must have told you—”

“Is that what you think I’m concerned about?”

“Well ... yeah.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t had time to even consider it.”

“You haven’t?”

Her startled tone amused him. “I see. You think that’s all I would ever have time for. Peter Lovejoy, the ladder climber, the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat.”

“No. That’s not how I—”

“Sure it is. And ordinarily it would be true, too. On any other case I’d be primarily engaged in my normal cover-your-ass mode of operation. Which has worked quite well for me so far, I might add. Why do you think they made me task force leader? It wasn’t just seniority. I know how to play the game.”

“But not now?”

“Not now. This is different. This is Mister Twister. This is someone who kills for pleasure. Even animals don’t do that.” He turned to her. “What worries me is that he’s still on the loose. And ...” He swallowed. “And it’s my fault.”

“If I’d been supervising the raid,” she said with unaccustomed gentleness, “I would have handled it the same way.”

“Possibly. But you weren’t. I was. The failure was my responsibility. And if he kills again, while he’s on the run—that will be my responsibility, too.”

“You’re being way too hard on yourself.”

Lovejoy chuckled, a dry sound, without humor. “I was raised that way. Catholic school. Those nuns ... they really drill it into you. The four R’s. Religion being the fourth. I thought I was a lapsed Catholic till yesterday, during the raid. Then I found myself praying.”

“My knowledge of Catholicism is fairly limited,” Moore said. “But doesn’t it involve forgiveness?”

“Yes. But also punishment.”

“You’ve punished yourself enough.”

“Have I? I doubt that’s what the nuns would have said. Not under these circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“Jack Dance is the devil. And I let him get away.”

* * *

The door to Dennis Gibson’s office was open, his secretary apparently out to lunch.

“Come in, come in,” Gibson said, rising from behind a clutter of legal documents on his desk. His face was a study in monochrome: jet black hair, gray steel-rimmed glasses, white beard. “You must be the feds.”

Morse smiled. “That’s us.”

Lovejoy was all business. “We don’t want to take up too much of your time, Mr. Gibson.”

“I’ve got plenty of time to talk about Jack Dance.”

Lovejoy and Moore seated themselves in response to the lawyer’s gesture of invitation.

“I take it you’ve heard the news,” Lovejoy said.

“Yes, I heard. Wasn’t as surprised as you might think, either. I knew that guy had a screw loose.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Let me start at the beginning.”

He told his story quickly and well, with the practiced conciseness of someone trained to summarize complicated material.

A widower of many years, Albert Dance took early retirement in 1985, sold his split-level in New Jersey, and moved south to the Gold Coast. For six years Gibson handled his affairs and investments.

“And in all that time,” Gibson said, “his son Jack—his only child, only close living relative—never visited him, never wrote or called. Albert didn’t even know Jack’s phone number or address after a certain point.”

He paused to sip his coffee and, with a touch of embarrassment at his belated hospitality, offered his guests the same refreshment. They declined.

“Well, anyway, a heart attack killed Al in ’91. Completely unexpected; he’d seemed to be in excellent health for his age. He died intestate, unfortunately. I’d pressed him to make out a will, but he never seemed to get around to it. The court appointed me administrator of his estate. Jack, as Al’s sole issue, was entitled to everything. I had to track down his address in L.A., then call to inform him that his father was dead. His reply: ‘So?’ That’s it. He was interested in the estate, though. His father didn’t matter to him, but money did.”

“How large an inheritance are we talking about?” Moore asked.

“Three hundred thousand dollars, most of it in mutual funds and tax-free bonds. Jack instructed me to convert everything to cash, sell the furniture and family heirlooms at auction, and transfer the funds to his bank account. His
checking
account. The assets of a lifetime, and he meant to spend it all. But that wasn’t the worst part.”

Lovejoy leaned forward. “Then what was?”

“In going through his father’s effects, I’d found scrapbooks, photo albums. Pictures of his father in the Army, of his mother as a small girl. His parents’ wedding portraits. Vacation snapshots. I told Jack I’d send the items to him. He said not to bother. ‘Just throw all that shit out’—those, I believe, were his exact words.” Gibson shook his head. “No human feelings whatsoever. A true sociopath. It’s not a long step from there to serial murder, is it?”

“No,” Lovejoy said quietly. “Not necessarily a very long step at all. So you’re saying that all the assets you transferred were liquid? No house, no condo, not even a time-share?”

“Nothing like that. Albert was only renting his apartment in the retirement complex. He owned no real estate.”

Lovejoy moved to rise. “Very well, Mr. Gibson. Thank you for your time.”

“Those scrapbooks and things,” Moore said without getting up. “Did you comply with Jack’s instructions?”

Gibson smiled. “Couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought that would make me as bad as Jack.”

“What did you do with them?”

“Kept them. Here, with my files.”

“May we see them?”

“I don’t see why not. Though I can’t imagine what you’d find in there to concern you.”

“Vacation snapshots. We’re interested in places Jack would know about. Places he might go.”

Gibson rummaged in a file cabinet and returned with four thick, leather-bound albums. Lovejoy and Moore took two apiece.

Then there was silence, broken only by the flipping of cellophane sheets and stiff cardboard pages.

“Here’s something.” Moore angled the scrapbook in her hands to show Lovejoy a collage of postcards. Mangrove islets, blue herons, hooked marlin: the Florida Keys.

“Check the postmarks.”

Moore peeled back the page’s acetate cover and removed the cards. “Islamorada. All of them. But the dates are different. The years, I mean. 1976, ’77, ’78 ...” She looked up. “August. Every time.”

“It’s August now.” Lovejoy felt his fingertips tingle.

Moore was reading the scribbled messages on the cards. “Jack went along on each trip. His father keeps referring to him. ‘Jack and Steve and I took the boat out yesterday ...’ Wonder who this Steve was.”

“Personally, I’m more interested in the boat,” Lovejoy said.

“Oh, I can tell you about that,” Gibson broke in. “Al owned it for years, then finally sold it shortly before his retirement. Had some good times on that boat. I can’t recall the name …”

Lovejoy, studying the photo album in his hands, plucked a snapshot from its cellophane pocket and held it up. “Would this help?”

A man in his late forties—an older, heftier version of Jack Dance—posed on the deck of a flybridge cruiser. On the hull, part of the name was readable: light fan.

“Yes,” Gibson said. “I remember now. The
Light Fantastic
. But Al never mentioned any trips to the Keys. Guess he didn’t want to bring up anything that would remind him of Jack.”

“Do you know who bought the boat? Where it’s berthed now?”

“No, I didn’t handle that transaction. But I can give you the name of a tax attorney Al had retained in New Jersey prior to relocating. He might know.”

Gibson went back to his file cabinet. Lovejoy and Moore continued to turn pages.

“Look at this.” Lovejoy tossed a snapshot into Moore’s lap.

At the end of a pier, near a disdainful pelican roosting on a post, stood a teenage Jack Dance: longhaired, muscular, shirtless, smiling a smile of easy confidence, eyes concealed behind mirrored sunglasses.

“He could be any kid,” Moore whispered, then lifted her eyebrows, surprised at herself. “For some reason I wouldn’t have expected that.”

Standing at Jack’s side was another boy of the same age. He wore a New York Giants T-shirt, loose on his gangly frame, and prescription eyeglasses, the thick lenses shrinking his eyes. His hair was cut shorter than Jack’s, his smile less natural, suggesting the self-conscious embarrassment of someone nervous around cameras.

“Steve?” Moore wondered.

“Could be.”

Gibson gave Lovejoy a slip of paper filled out in his neat hand. “This is the lawyer Al used. Wallace Hardy of Montclair, New Jersey. May have retired by now. Unfortunately, I have only his business address and phone number, so you may have trouble tracking him down.”

Lovejoy smiled. “That’s what they pay us for.”

Back in the sedan, rushing south on 95, Moore used the car phone to dial Hardy’s number. She got a video-rental store. New Jersey information listed no Wallace Hardy in Montclair.

“Best option is to let the New Jersey field office handle it,” Lovejoy said. “They’ll find him if he’s still alive.”

“Think Jack bought that boat from his father?”

“Improbable, given the fact that the two of them were obviously estranged. Then again, Albert sold the boat before he ever met Gibson. There’s at least a small chance that he and Jack were still on friendly terms at that time.”

“If he did get hold of the
Light Fantastic
, and had it berthed in south Florida—

“It could explain why he came here. But all of this is strictly hypothetical. With luck, New Jersey will be able to give us some facts.”

“I’ll call them.”

“They can reach us at the car-phone number when they have to. I don’t plan on going back to the office.”

Moore looked at him. “Islamorada?”

Lovejoy nodded, eyes on the road. “Islamorada.”

25

Funny how it felt to have your world collapse.

Steve lay in bed, fully clothed, stretched supine on the taut bedspread; he hadn’t bothered to climb under the covers. With empty eyes he gazed at the ceiling, whitewashed with afternoon sun rays, speckled with the gently waving shadows of palm fronds.

Somewhere, either in the room or just beyond the open window, a solitary insect droned. It sounded like the hum of a distant lawn mower in his Connecticut neighborhood, a Saturday morning sound.

He wished he were in Connecticut. Wished he had never come to Pelican Key.

At dawn he had been a man with a wife, a job, a home, even a dog. And with a guilty secret, too; but he’d carried that guilt so long, he was wearily familiar with it. It was a pain he’d grown accustomed to, a dull ache from an old wound.

Now, only a few hours later, he had lost everything. Everything except the guilt, which was of a new and different order, not familiar anymore.

His life had taken on an unreal quality, a strange remoteness. Since returning from the reef, he’d found himself touching things—doorknobs, countertops—merely to feel the small shock of contact with something solid and firm.

In a dream there was no sensation of touch. So this was not a dream.

A sigh shivered through him. He thought about the gun. About using it. First on Jack. Then on himself.

It would be the best thing.

But he didn’t have the courage. And Jack knew it.

When you lied for him last time, he told himself as the palm shadows rustled in a breath of breeze, when you backed up his phony alibi, it wasn’t for friendship or loyalty or any other noble bullshit.

You did it out of fear. Fear of Jack.

He didn’t even know what he had thought Jack might do. Nothing specific, really. The mere prospect of disobeying and displeasing him had seemed as awful in its implications as angering some cruel, dark, tribal god.

Was that what Jack had been to him? And what, in some irrational way, he still was?

A god?

My private god, Steve thought. My personal deity.

His eyes squeezed shut. He moaned.

“Steve?”

Blinking alert, he saw Kirstie standing in the doorway.

“Steve, are you all right?”

“Sure.” Vaguely he was pleased to hear that his voice sounded normal. “Just resting.”

She approached the bed. He didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see how beautiful she was, couldn’t help himself. He took mental snapshots of her features, focusing first on one detail, then on another—the line of her jaw, the bridge of her nose, the sunlit shimmer of her hair—storing up memories for his long exile.

“You never take naps,” she said, her mouth pinched in a worried way.

“Guess the diving tired me out.”

“You weren’t asleep.”

“I was just nodding off when you came in.”

She sat on the bed, took his hand. Her touch was gentle, her fingers very soft. He remembered kissing her hand on the night he proposed.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“Cold? No.”

“Then why are you wearing your jacket?”

Before lying down, he’d changed back into his long pants and shirt, then donned a blue nylon jacket to conceal the Beretta tucked into his waistband.

“Thought I was getting a little sunburned,” he said lamely.

“Indoors?”

He feigned a smile. “You can’t be too careful. Where’s Jack, anyway?”

“Around.” She leaned closer, and he could smell her fragrance—not perfume—salt and perspiration and the indefinable scent of her hair, hair that had been his pillow so many times. “I wanted to talk to you about him.”

He waited, gazing up at her, marshaling his strength for more lies. The wash of sunlight on the ceiling haloed her in a golden aureole. Silly thoughts of angels flitted like schoolboy fancies through his mind.

“He took his pocketknife with him to the reef,” she said.

“How did you know that?”

“I went through his clothes.”

His head lifted. “What?”

“It was wrong, I know, but ... well, some money fell out of his pants pocket. Seven hundred dollars in cash. I thought that seemed suspicious. It made me curious.”

“What’s suspicious about carrying cash on a vacation?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

“You think he stole it or something?”

“Of course not.”

“Jack Dance, the notorious bank robber, on the run from the law.” He laughed, but it came out wrong, not laughter at all. Dry coughing sounds.

“All right,” Kirstie snapped, “maybe I was being ridiculous, but I searched his damn pockets and the knife was gone. He took it. Why did he do that?”

“He always carries a knife when he dives. Safety precaution.”

“Did you know he had it?”

“Sure. I saw him strip some gulfweed off the anchor line.”

Jack’s own lie had come out of his mouth. Steve felt slightly sickened, as if the two of them had shared a kiss.

“Oh.” Kirstie frowned. “Guess I was wrong, then.”

“Were you afraid he was going to ... attack me?”

“I don’t know what I was afraid of.’

“Jack’s harmless. Stop worrying about him. He’s a great guy.”

Ribbons of images threaded his thoughts: Meredith Turner as she’d looked in her yearbook portrait, newspaper photos of the women Mister Twister had picked up in bars.
Harmless. A great guy.
His stomach knotted.

“I looked for the gun,” Kirstie said quietly. “It wasn’t under the bed.”

“I already packed it.”

“Where?”

“One of the suitcases.” He deflected further questions by asking one of his own. “What do you want it for? You planning to shoot Jack the next time he does something
suspicious
?" He put a nasty sarcastic lilt in the last word.

“I just want to feel safe,” she answered coldly. “And I don’t.”

“Because of your overactive imagination.”

“Because I don’t trust your friend—and because I can’t seem to communicate with you.”

“We’re communicating right now.”

“No. We’re not.” She got up and stood looking down on him. “What’s going on here? Why are you acting this way?”

“What way?”

“You’re not yourself.”

“I told you, I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“Your behavior is ... off. Strange.”

“Christ, all I’m trying to do is lie down for a while.”

Kirstie studied him for a long moment. A glimmer of dampness trembled on one eyelash, her only confession of pain.

“I’ll leave you alone, then,” she said finally. “Sorry to disturb your rest”

She did not slam the door when she left. The cold snick of the latch bolt was worse. It conveyed the quiet finality of a death rattle.

Steve shut his eyes again.

God, he wanted to be out of here. Wanted this to be over.

He pictured himself on the flying bridge of the Black Caesar, speeding recklessly toward the Bahamas in a stinging cloud of spray.

Despite Jack’s best salesmanship, the escape plan still struck him as a crazy fantasy. He had no confidence it would succeed. But the alternative was prison, prison for life, and he couldn’t face that. Death would be better. He would kill himself before he let a cell door clang shut behind him forever.

So those were his options now, the total range of possibilities open before him, shaping the rest of his days. A fugitive’s hounded existence or a bullet in the head.

Rolling on his side, he curled into a fetal pose, shivering all over, his face buried in his arms.

* * *

He’s lying.

Kirstie strode into the living room, circled it twice, and flopped down on the sofa.

He’s lying. The words beat in her mind with the repetitive insistence of a song lyric. He’s lying. He’s lying.

A gossamer fall of sunlight burned white stripes on a fern’s glossy leaves. Outside, a breeze shivered through the hedges and set the garden gate creaking. Anastasia, sprawled before the cold fireplace, favored her mistress with a cool glance and an interrogative whine.

All right, so he was lying. That much was certain.

But what exactly was he lying about? And why?

A vague scenario took shape in her imagination like the outline of a movie plot. Jack had found the gun. Somehow he was using it to intimidate Steve, forcing him to go along with something Steve didn’t like.

Great theory.

Except Jack was absent at the moment. Nothing prevented Steve from hustling Kirstie and Anastasia onto the motorboat and fleeing to Upper Matecumbe Key.

No, whatever he was doing was of his own free will.

Besides, there was no longer any particular reason to suspect Jack of criminal behavior. Had he wanted to hurt Steve, he could have done so at the reef. Could have stabbed him with the knife. Could have killed him.

But he hadn’t. Which proved he was no threat, regardless of her intuitive forebodings.

Of course it did.

She got up, paced. Anastasia watched her, fascinated by her restless prowling.

The living room was normally her favorite spot in the house. Today it was a cage. The decorative ironwork on the windows had become the bars of a cell. The thick, moist air was suffocating; it clogged her lungs.

She found herself drawing rapid, shallow breaths and forced herself to stop. Hyperventilating wouldn’t help.

Too much nervous energy. That was her problem. Well, there ought to be some way to work it off.

The garden. She’d amused herself several times in the past two weeks, pulling weeds and trimming shrubbery. The work was by no means necessary—the Larson heirs paid a maintenance crew to attend to the upkeep of house and garden—but she’d found it relaxing.

Some relaxation was precisely what she needed right now;

In the kitchen she collected scissors, work gloves, and a small plastic bag for cuttings. She carried the stuff into the garden and set to work, humming to herself.

The tune, she realized with a small shock, was “Stranger in Paradise.”

It fit. But who was the real stranger? Jack ... or Steve?

* * *

Jack switched off the radio when he heard Kirstie’s footsteps in the kitchen. He sat stiffly in the straight-back chair before the worktable, listening to the rattle of drawers, a hummed melody that diminished with distance, and finally the muffled closing of a French door in the dining room.

Then there was no sound but the throb of the generators through the thin wall and the answering beat of his heart.

He had spent the past fifteen minutes in this narrow hideaway that Steve, in his guided tour, had somewhat incongruously referred to as the maid’s room, though there was no maid in residence at the Larson house now. The radio room—that was what it should be called, since the two-way radio on the worktable was the sole object of interest in the place.

Part of his time had been occupied with a small but important operation requiring some minimal mechanical skill. Only when that chore was done had he switched on the radio, dialed the volume low, and found a news channel. Ear pressed to the speaker, he’d waited for an update on the manhunt.

According to leaks from anonymous sources “close to the investigation,” the FBI had tracked him at least as far as Miami International Airport. Meanwhile, Sheila had achieved the status of a minor celebrity, peddling her story to a tabloid television show for $25,000.

There had been more, but he hadn’t heard it. He’d been afraid to leave the radio on with Kirstie in the next room. His behavior—sitting alone by the radio with the door shut—would only deepen her suspicions and perhaps prompt her to listen to the news herself.

He wondered what she had been doing in the kitchen ... and what she was up to now.

Rising, he crossed the room and eased open the door. The kitchen was empty.

He remembered the sound of the French door shutting. She’d gone out onto the patio. Perhaps she was sunbathing.

His blue jeans, which he’d donned again after the trip to the reef, swelled slightly with the beginning of an erection.

Voyeurism was not his usual mode of operation. But he wouldn’t mind a glimpse of Mrs. Kirsten Gardner stretched in a lounge chair, wearing a swimsuit, skin oiled with suntan lotion.

Cautiously he passed through the kitchen into the dining room and approached the French doors, their square panes dappled with sun. He peered through the glass and felt a brief plunge of disappointment.

She wasn’t sunbathing. She knelt in the garden, her back to him, pulling dandelions.

No swimsuit, either. Her outfit was the same one she’d worn all day: sandals, shorts, yellow tank top.

Still, even that attire was revealing enough. Save for the tank top’s straps, her shoulders were bare, the upper part of her back exposed. Her muscles flexed as she worked. Firm, well-toned muscles.

He watched as she leaned forward, still humming the same melody he’d heard in the kitchen, and uprooted another weed. He thought of kneading her shoulders, her back.

Her lean, sinuous arms reached for a clump of ragwort. The weed was unexpectedly stubborn. She pulled hard, muscles stiffening. Jack thought of Ronni Tyler in her last living moment, her body snapping taut, head thrown back, arms extended like rigid poles. And years earlier, Meredith thrashing in the pool—her muscles had been well-toned also—she’d reached up for the surface, grasping desperately for life ...

A shudder moved through him, the shock wave of some internal explosion, and abruptly he knew what he had to do.

His need was suddenly too strong, the blind, raging need that had been building steadily throughout the day. He had no choice but to satisfy it. Will, self-control, his very sense of self melted away in the furnace heat of the fever within him.

Distantly he recalled Steve’s warning, but the memory seemed remote and unreal. Steve wouldn’t shoot him. Little Stevie? No way. He didn’t have the nerve.

The door opened soundlessly under his hand. No creak of hinges. No squeal of wood.

He stepped into the humid air, heavy with flower scents. For a moment he stood in the shadowed coolness of a portico, peering out at the garden like a predator lying in ambush in its den.