Harry Dolan (39 page)

Not much encouragement there. She was already thinking of this as her disappearance. But what else could it be? Her chances of walking away from the clearing seemed slim. No reason to suppose Nathan Hideaway would let her leave, once his errand was done.

She listened to the sound of the shovel slicing the earth. David Loogan had sunk into the excavation to his knees, and little mounds were growing all around him. Nathan Hideaway prowled at the edge of the clearing, the black revolver ever-present in his oversized hand. A meager rain had begun to fall, specks of it passing between the branches of the trees. Loogan turned his face up to it.

Hideaway came to sit on a fallen tree trunk a few feet away from Elizabeth. He kept his eyes on Loogan, held the revolver between his knees. The rain seemed to glitter in his hair.

“A few years ago,” he said, to either one of them, or both, “a tourist went hiking on a glacier in the Austrian Alps. He found a body that had been almost perfectly preserved. Perhaps you heard about it. The body was dressed in leather clothes. It had an axe in its belt and a quiver of arrows. It was a Stone Age hunter who had fallen into a crevasse. He’d been there for more than five thousand years. His skin was intact, and so were the elaborate tattoos that covered his back.”

Hideaway used his sleeve to wipe the rain from the revolver.

“Poor Sean would never last that long,” he said. “Still, his skin might take years to decompose. Burying a body delays things—it keeps the animals and the insects away. If Tom had dumped him in a field, the tattoos might be gone by now, picked away by scavengers. But here we are. I wish it hadn’t come to this.”

At the center of the clearing Loogan laughed, shaking his head.

A smile passed over Hideaway’s face. “Mr. Loogan finds me amusing,” he said to Elizabeth. “I can hardly blame him. He imagines I’ve killed three people already—Tom and Adrian Tully and Michael Beccanti—so why should I balk at digging Sean up and slicing away chunks of his hide? That would be the least of my sins.”

Hideaway’s expression turned serious. “But as it happens, I haven’t killed three people. Mr. Loogan would realize that if he gave it some thought. Consider Michael Beccanti. I’m supposed to have killed him because he was looking into Tom’s death. But he and Mr. Loogan were working together, and they were both there in Mr. Loogan’s house that night. Why would I kill one of them and let the other live?”

The simple logic of the question caught Elizabeth off guard. She looked at Hideaway curiously, wondering if he might be telling the truth.

He continued: “Mr. Loogan told a tall tale about Michael Beccanti’s murder this afternoon. But he may have been closer to the truth than he realized. He said Sandy Vogel killed Beccanti because they were having an affair and he left her for another woman. Beccanti was stabbed, of course, and some might wonder whether a secretary in her forties would make a good suspect in a crime like that. But Mr. Loogan had an answer for that too. What do we really know about Sandy Vogel? Maybe she used to be a stuntwoman, or a Navy SEAL.”

No reaction from Loogan. Only the steady rhythm of the shovel.

Hideaway said, “I happen to know that Sandy has never been anything but a secretary, and I have no reason to believe she ever had an affair with Michael Beccanti. But I know Bridget Shellcross did.”

That caught Loogan’s attention. He paused for a moment to glare at Hideaway.

“I saw them together once, at a coffeehouse downtown,” Hideaway said. “Later I asked her about it, and she told me. Bridget trusts my discretion. Some people mistake age for virtue.”

Elizabeth tipped her head back against the trunk of the birch. “So you’re saying Bridget stabbed Michael Beccanti? Do I have to point out the obvious? Bridget Shellcross was never a stuntwoman or a Navy SEAL either.”

Hideaway smiled, acknowledging the point. “No, Bridget wouldn’t know what to do with a knife. But you’re forgetting the Amazon she lives with. Rachel Kent used to be a martial arts instructor.”

He turned to watch Loogan. “I think she found out about Bridget’s affair with Beccanti by accident. Tom’s death was what triggered it. Bridget took it hard. She and Tom had been involved in their college days. Rachel knew about that, and I think she wondered if there was something more to it—if they had been involved more recently.”

Elizabeth thought suddenly of her last conversation with Bridget Shellcross. She remembered the cool reception the woman had given her. Shellcross had learned about a detective who’d been showing her picture at restaurants, asking questions. She had been offended. Elizabeth had assumed that the detective was one of her colleagues from the Investigations Division. But there was another possibility.

“Rachel Kent hired a private detective,” she said aloud.

Hideaway nodded. “I think so. And I think the detective found out that Bridget hadn’t been running around with Tom, but she had been running around with Michael Beccanti.”

With a small shrug Hideaway went on. “It would be natural for Rachel to go looking for Beccanti, and then to start following him. Late one night he goes to Mr. Loogan’s house. She follows him in. It’s a charged situation, sneaking into someone’s house. The senses are heightened, the adrenaline’s flowing. She’s been fantasizing about killing Beccanti all along. Now she sees her chance, and she takes it.”

Loogan spoke up from the center of the clearing, where he stood braced against the handle of the shovel. “You’re lying.”

Hideaway shook his head. “As it happens, I’m not.”

“You’re the one who followed Beccanti into my house. You’re the one who stabbed him.”

“No.”

“You stabbed him,” Loogan said, “and you took the disc he was holding, and the letter. The blackmail letter. Rachel Kent would have no reason to take those.”

Hideaway turned to Elizabeth. “You see how desperate he is to paint me as a villain.” He pointed casually at Loogan with the black revolver. “I don’t know about Beccanti having a disc, or a letter. If he had them, if Rachel saw them, who can say what she might do? She would have to make a quick decision—take them or leave them behind. She would need to get away.”

Loogan said nothing and went back to his digging. Hideaway waved the revolver dismissively.

“That accounts for Michael Beccanti,” he said. “Not my work, I’m pleased to say. Then there’s Adrian Tully. I’m supposed to have tricked him into driving out to a cornfield so I could shoot him in the head. A murder made to look like a suicide. One shot to kill him. Then a second shot, out into the field, to get gunshot residue on his hand.” He looked intently at Elizabeth. “How much luck have you had, finding that mysterious second bullet?”

She lifted her shoulders a fraction of an inch. “We haven’t found it.”

“Because it’s not there,” said Hideaway. “I certainly didn’t fire it. Adrian Tully was a troubled young man. Guilty over killing Sean Wrentmore. Despondent because he loved Laura Kristoll and Laura wanted nothing to do with him. Nobody murdered Adrian. He got a gun and drove himself out to a lonely place and made an end of it.”

Hideaway gazed thoughtfully into the dark woods. He turned the cylinder of the revolver absently and the clicks sounded out slowly in the quiet of the clearing.

“That leaves Tom,” he said after a while. “Tom can’t be explained away. I wouldn’t want to try. I killed him, of course.”

Chapter 39

“SEAN WRENTMORE WAS THE CAUSE OF IT,” HIDEAWAY SAID. “TOM WAS wobbly about Sean from the start. Second-guessing himself. Maybe he should never have buried the body. Maybe it would have been better to own up to what had happened. Then the blackmail letter arrived and set him spinning. It was too much money and if he paid once he’d be paying for the rest of his life. He could lose
Gray Streets
; he could lose everything. Better to tell the truth now, while he still had a chance.”

Elizabeth bent forward, listening eagerly. Loogan stood unmoving in the grave. The rain was no more than a mist in the air.

“I didn’t think he could be serious,” Hideaway said. “If it was a matter of money, I could have given him a loan. Valerie had only asked him for fifty thousand. I could have given him that outright. I offered to do it, that night at his office. But he’d made up his mind. He’d decided to do the right thing. I found him with a notebook open on his desk.

“He’d been writing it down—what he was going to tell the police. Nothing about me, he said. Nothing about Sean writing my books. He would leave me out of it. As if it wouldn’t all come out, once he told his story.

“It was easy to deceive him, to pretend to agree.
Maybe you’re right. Maybe that is the only way. Why don’t you read me what you’ve got so far?
I went around behind his desk, as if to read along over his shoulder. The bookshelf was there within reach. A volume of Shakespeare. I’d never noticed it there before. The symbolism appealed to me—the publisher of a pulp magazine, struck down by the Bard himself.”

Hideaway turned his head sharply toward Elizabeth. “I thought I’d have to work myself up to it,” he said, “but it was easy. Easy to decide that I hated Tom Kristoll, with his summer parties and his hangers-on. His pretentious magazine, trying to pass off crime stories as literature. And then he discovers a genuine talent, and what does he do? Sean Wrentmore was a great writer. He wrote two books for me—
The Heat of December
and
The February Killers
—and they got better reviews than anything I had ever done. He was the goose that laid the golden eggs, and Tom let some third-rate graduate student beat the goose over the head with a bottle of Scotch.

“How long does it take to reach a book down off a shelf? A second? Two? Long enough to determine that Tom deserved to die. The deed itself didn’t take much longer. The first blow wasn’t strong enough. It stunned him and he started to shake it off and ask me what the hell I’d done that for. The second put him down. After that it was automatic: Throw open the sash of the window, lift him to the sill, push him out. No time for thinking.”

Hideaway raised his free hand, brushed thick fingers through his white hair. “I’ve thought about it since, though. I regret what happened, but I can’t quite manage to feel guilty about it. You could say Tom brought it on himself. When he decided to go to the police, he was putting me at risk. My publisher didn’t know about Sean. If the truth came out, my career would be over. So Tom was a threat to my reputation, my livelihood. What I did to him, you could almost call it self-defense.”

Elizabeth saw Hideaway watching her, as if to gauge her reaction. “You’re deluding yourself,” she said quietly. “There was no threat to your life. It wasn’t self-defense.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “But self-defense is a slippery thing. What Mr. Loogan did to that fellow’s son—Peltier. Would you call that self-defense?”

She leaned back against the tree, considering the question. But before she could come up with a reply, Loogan answered for himself.

“No,” he said.

Hideaway turned toward him. “Then how do you justify it?”

“I don’t.”

“But you must have had a reason for doing it.”

“I wanted him dead.”

“A straightforward answer,” said Hideaway. “Let’s leave it at that then: I wanted Tom dead.” He looked candidly at Elizabeth. “I’ll make no excuses, just as Mr. Loogan makes no excuses about stabbing that old fellow’s son, or about leading the man on, promising to tell him his son’s final words. That was a minor lie, surely, but some might call it cruel.”

“It wasn’t really a lie,” said Loogan from the center of the clearing. “Peltier’s son did say something before the end. He said quite a piece.”

“Really? What did he say?”

“I don’t know. He had a mouth full of blood by then and he mumbled. I couldn’t make out a word.” Loogan paused thoughtfully and leaned against the shovel and in a deadpan tone he added: “Do you think I should have told his father that?”

Nothing but the sound of the night wind in the clearing and the silence of the misty rain, and then Nathan Hideaway tipped his head back and laughed. He laughed softly and for a long while, and then he got up and paced and didn’t speak—except once, when he stopped and shook his white-crowned head and laughed again and said, “The remarkable Mr. Loogan.”

Elizabeth fitted the end of the twig once more into one of the handcuff locks. But her movements were mechanical and her thoughts were elsewhere. She thought of her daughter waiting for her at home, thought of the possibility that Sarah might never see her again, living or dead. Because it wasn’t hard to imagine what Hideaway intended to do. He would let Loogan dig to the bottom of the grave, let him excavate Sean Wrentmore. Then the black revolver—a bullet for Loogan, a bullet for her. After that, Hideaway could deal with Wrentmore’s tattoos at his leisure; he had James Peltier’s knife. Then cover up the grave again, with three bodies in it this time instead of one. Then walk down the path to his car and drive away, with nothing to tie him to the crime, nothing but a pair of glass beads that no one would ever find.

Elizabeth looked at David Loogan, up to his waist in the earth. She watched the motion of his arms and shoulders, the blade of the shovel rising. She felt the twig break in her fingers, because a twig is a poor tool for picking a lock. She squeezed her eyes shut then and let herself feel hope.

Because Loogan had given her a message, just after he had begun to dig. Hideaway had been distracted for a moment; he had gone to investigate a noise, some small animal skittering at the edge of the clearing. And then Loogan had spoken to her. He couldn’t risk letting Hideaway hear, he could only mouth the words, but it was enough. The flashlight hung overhead; she could see his lips move.

His words were the same ones James Peltier had said to her earlier that night.

She raised her eyebrows and mouthed back,
I am?