Death Under the Lilacs (12 page)

Captain Norbert paced up and down before the tomb.

“What are you doing, Norbie?” Rocco asked.

“We don't need civilians at the crime scene, Herbert,” Norbert snapped as he waved a deprecating hand at Lyon.

“For Christ's sake, he found the crime scene.”

“I don't need any meddling, Rocco. This is state police jurisdiction.”

“Knock it off,” Rocco mouthed as he walked inside the vault.

Lyon followed Rocco inside. “Why isn't he following us?”

“One of Norbie's quirks. He wouldn't come in here if his life depended on it. In fact, he wouldn't even be in the cemetery if his job didn't demand it.”

“A state police officer who's probably pried dozens of cadavers from wrecked cars is afraid of cemeteries?”

Rocco shrugged. “Everyone's got his thing. I discovered mine on the flight to London. I hate airplanes.”

The interior of the vault was crowded. Photographs were being taken, men were bagging the remains of food and water tins for evidence, and a fingerprint expert was dusting the whole area.

Lyon looked at the stone platform where Bea had been bound and found that he had to turn away. Suddenly the small room seemed oppressive, and he found himself gasping for breath.

“I give you a thou to one that we don't find anything useful here,” Rocco said. “The guy's not going to make that kind of error after he's done everything else so well.”

“I think you're right,” Lyon said as he bolted for the door. Outside he bent over and retched into the tall grass.

“That's why I don't go into those things,” Norbert said with a harsh laugh from behind him. “You know, Wentworth, I guess I have to hand it to you. How in the hell you found this place using some damn jingle gets me. This cemetery isn't even on the maps.”

Lyon straightened up. “What did you just say?”

“Even if I had cooperated with you, we wouldn't have searched here. This place isn't on the new maps.”

Lyon turned eagerly. “Do you have a copy of the map you're talking about?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Perhaps a great deal. Please,” Lyon asked with urgency, “let me see your map.”

Mumbling something under his breath about cereal boxes and luck, Captain Norbert strode down the hill toward his cruiser parked near the front gate. He rummaged through a thin attaché case on the rear seat and silently handed Lyon a map. Lyon spread it out on the car's hood and used Norbert's flashlight to examine the coordinates of the cemetery's location. The area appeared as second-growth timber. He checked the date on the map and found that it had been drawn last year. He refolded it and handed it back to Norbert.

“What's it mean?” the state police captain asked.

“I'm not sure.” Lyon looked out across the dark valley toward the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains that rose in the distance. The cemetery had been on his map! “How do they prepare those charts?” he asked aloud.

“Who the hell knows? Aerial photographs, or maybe now they use satellites to take strip photographs. Something like that.”

Lyon turned to look out over the small cemetery. The trees had grown in the last few years until they now formed a heavy canopy over the monuments. From the air the whole area would appear wooded, unoccupied by either the living or the dead.

The charts he kept in his flight case atop the hot air balloon were years old. He had been meaning to replace them, but had never gotten around to it. He recalled the constant chore of computing magnetic declination shifts from such old charts as he moved the magnetic north location a certain number of degrees for each year of the chart's age.

The kidnapper had planned each move of his crime with such care that it was doubtful that he would have used maps as old as those in Lyon's flight case. The kidnapper had not used a map to select this particular location.

Lyon ran possibilities through his mind: The kidnapper lived in the region and knew the area well … careful men do not foul their own nest, he argued to himself and discarded that line of thought. He had discovered the location accidentally … nothing in this matter smacked of chance. It was all well rehearsed and planned. That left a third and final possibility—the abductor knew of the cemetery by another means.

The newer cemeteries were often visited, but this one had been abandoned years ago … unless it contained a family plot that held particular significance to one family.

“Can I borrow this flashlight?”

“You on to something?” Norbert snapped.

“I don't know. I just want to look around.” He walked along the rows of stones and shone the light on each legible name. He mentally cataloged them as the light flicked over the inscriptions.

He found the pie on the other side of the hill behind the Trumbull mausoleum. It resembled a large triangle, or pie-shaped plot, with a tall monument dominating the apex of the triangle and rows of smaller stones radiating from the base.

The single word “Stockton” was engraved in the base of the largest monument. The last stone on the right, at the rim of the pie, was also the newest. Lyon flicked the light across its face and read:

Bates Stockton

b 1920 d 1960

Lyon had known a Bates Stockton. He had known him well, and knew that the man had reason to hate him and anyone he loved.

The man dressed in surgical greens stood in the hospital corridor outside Bea Wentworth's room. With the end of visiting hours and the final medication distribution, the rhythm of the hospital had slowed.

He knew that Lyon Wentworth, accompanied by a large police officer, had left the building some time ago. During evening visiting hours he had openly prowled the corridor and had seen no one enter or leave the room with the exception of an occasional nurse.

She was now alone.

He reached under the greens into his pants pocket and withdrew the hypodermic needle filled with succinylcholine chloride. It would be a quick and painless death, a single tremor as muscles ceased to function and the heart went into fibrillation until it stopped. She would be dead seconds after the injection. Then he would run down the corridor and into the stairwell, tearing the greens from his body as he made his way to the first floor and the nearby parking lot where the van waited.

He took a final glance up and down the corridor to ensure that he was alone and then pulled the surgical mask up over his lower face. He opened the door and stepped into the room.

The slightly cracked door allowed a patch of light to fall across the bed while the rest of the room remained in shadows. He watched the slow rise and fall of her chest and knew that she was in a deep sleep. He held the hypodermic before him and gently depressed the plunger until a few drops of liquid trickled from the nose of the needle. He stepped toward the bed.

“Hold it!” A voice from the dark corner shattered the silence of the room. “What do you think you're doing?”

He turned toward the woman in the corner. She had been dozing on a chair as she kept an all-night vigil over her sleeping friend. “Attending's orders,” he replied.

“No way, baby.” Kim stepped between him and the bed. “My friend has had all the medication she's going to get tonight. Why the mask?”

“Out of the way!” He reached forward to knock her away, but she stepped to the side with a lithe movement and kicked out with her foot, landing a painful blow on his ankle. He involuntarily groaned.

“You've got two seconds to get out of here!” Kim said.

He dropped the hypodermic needle to the floor and simultaneously reached under the greens to grasp a spring-loaded switch knife. He clicked the blade into position. “Out of my way, black bitch!” He lunged toward the bed.

Kim shoved a wheeled nightstand toward him with all her force. The top edge caught him in the abdomen as he clawed for the form on the bed, sending him sprawling backward from his off-balance position. Her foot stamped on his knife hand, and the switchblade slithered across the floor. He turned over and scrambled across the room toward the corner where it lay, but she was quicker and snatched the knife from his reaching fingers.

“Okay, bastard! Come get it!” Kim crouched and held the knife firmly in an upward thrusting manner. “Now we see who does the cutting.”

“Black bitch!” he said as he lunged for the door and fled the room.

Kim followed him, but closed Bea's door behind her before she began to scream. “Call security!” she yelled. “Stop him!”

The man in the greens pushed through the swinging doors into the stairwell and took the steps three at a time as he dashed for the lower floor and the parking lot. He cursed the woman on the sixth floor whom he could still hear yelling after him.

9

“All right, you guys, what's up?” Bea stood before the small mirror over the dresser in the hospital room putting the finishing touches to her appearance. Lyon had brought fresh clothing from the house. She had taken a long hot shower and done her hair, and now she gave a final few brushes to her short-cropped hair as she examined the others in the mirror. “Come on, now. I'm a big girl. I'm nearly all recovered and back with it. What's up?”

“You had a visitor last night,” Kim said.

Lyon twitched open the Venetian blinds and appeared to be looking at the parking lot in the rear of the hospital with great care.

“He was dressed in a surgical gown and carried a hypodermic needle,” Rocco said.

“Filled with what?” Bea's brushing motions stopped, but she watched them closely in the mirror.

“A powerful muscle relaxant,” Rocco continued. “Luckily Kim was still in the room and drove him off.”

“Which explains why Jamie Martin is sitting in front of my room with a shotgun on his lap and practically followed me into the shower.”

“It would be easier for us if you stayed here,” Rocco said. “I'm putting you under twenty-four-hour guard, but the house is too remote. There are too many hidden approaches through the woods.”

“And the hospital room has one door and one window.”

“You would be safer,” Rocco said. “Why did he want to kill you now, Bea? He certainly had plenty of opportunity while he held you.”

Bea's face turned chalk-white. “Because the last time he saw me he came in without his mask on. Lyon, did you ever get a letter or call as to where I was?”

“No,” Lyon replied without turning from the window.

“He thought I would die in there. He intended for me to die in there.” Bea sat heavily on the bed.

Rocco took a small pad from his breast pocket and hurriedly turned pages. “Give me his description. We'll put out an APB and then spend the rest of the day going through mug shots.”

Bea looked desolate. “I can't.” She shook her head. “He was only with me a few minutes, and when he lit the Coleman lantern the bright glow made everything turn hazy for me. I had been in the dark so long that my eyes didn't have time to adjust. He could be a dwarf with flaming red hair, for all that I know.”

Lyon let the blinds fall back to their original position. “Except that he doesn't know that. He must have inadvertently forgotten the mask on his last visit and later realized you had seen him.”

Kim's eyes widened. “And he left her in there to die.…”

“But I didn't die, did I? And now he wants me dead.”

“You've got to give us some sort of description, Bea,” Rocco insisted.

“I can't give you what I don't have.”

“We'll try hypnosis. Sometimes that can help.”

“You can't hypnotize out of me something that isn't there. I tell you, I couldn't see anything because of my eyes.” Bea started for the door. “I'm going home now. Tell officer Martin to pack up his popgun and follow me to Nutmeg Hill.”

They drove to the house in convoy. Rocco's cruiser was first, then the small station wagon, followed by Jamie Martin in another police car. Lyon knew that Rocco's magnum would be unholstered on the seat beside him. Jamie's shotgun would be loaded and cocked.

He hadn't spoken to Bea since they'd begun the drive, and now they were both occupied with their own private thoughts.

Lyon remembered a Bates Stockton Junior fifteen years before.…

In those days he had been an associate professor of American Literature at Middleburg College and Bates had been a graduate student in one of his seminars. Lyon was also Bates' faculty adviser.

“You're full of shit, teach,” said the voice a decade and a half ago.

Lyon had been standing at the window of his third-floor office looking down at the grassy quadrangle below. They were attacking the ROTC building again. The yard below was filled with several hundred yelling, screaming students carrying placards and flags.

“I said, you're full of it, professor,” the voice behind him insisted.

Lyon knew without turning that Bates Stockton was sitting on the edge of his desk in the narrow, cramped office and was probably rumpling a dozen student themes with his body. “I am not a professor,” he said quietly. “That is a matter of fact. I will not be called names, and that is a matter of privilege.” He momentarily wondered why Bates wasn't in the quadrangle protesting with the others, but that would have been out of character for the insolent graduate student. Lyon turned to face him. “Get off my desk!”

Bates Stockton glared at him a moment and then stood. Both men stood a few feet apart, with their eyes locked. “I have the right to submit an original work of fiction in place of my master's thesis.”

“I advise against it,” Lyon replied. “Your work in my seminar has shown talent, but it is fragmentary and indicates to me that you are not ready for longer work, much less a novel.”

“I've finished the book.”

“I know,” Lyon said tiredly. “That's why I want you to withdraw it from consideration by the committee.”