Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train (24 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

Lacy woke to a scuffling sound and couldn’t remember where she was. Opening one eye, she saw the rectangular outline of a curtainless window and eliminated her apartment in Virginia and her tent in Turkey as possibilities. Hard mattress. Thin sheet. Cold buttocks. Hospital gown? Then she remembered the car wreck from which she’d been lucky to escape with her life. She closed her eye and drifted. Bit by bit, yesterday came back to her.

She’d been thinking about something important when she’d nodded off. Now what was it? Why had she wrecked the car? Why was she here? She tucked the sheet under her backside and tried to put things in order. She was thirsty. Did she have a nightstand or something within reach? She thought she’d probably make a mess pawing around in the dark for a water pitcher. She could buzz for a nurse. Where was her buzzer?

She wondered if the scuffling sound that woke her up was of orderlies bringing in another patient. There had been an empty bed between hers and the door to the hall. All was quiet now. She felt around on the left side of the bottom sheet where the nurse had clipped her buzzer.

Suddenly a weight bore down on her head and shoulders and she couldn’t breathe. Her eyes flew open but she couldn’t see. A hand covered her mouth and pinched her nose shut. Lacy kicked and bucked. She strained to get up. A pillow was smashed over her face, but the hand was still holding her nostrils closed. She managed a cry but it sounded pitifully weak and muffled even to her own ears. Now she felt as if her assailant crawled into bed with her and was lying on top of her. She kicked and twisted but the extra two legs in her bed corralled hers and immobilized them.

Her brain became foggy.

Her lungs burned and her chest felt crushed. A panicked ringing in her ears built to a screech inside her head. Her hands clawed at the bed sheet in desperation as she fought against oblivion. Her fingers felt something hard. The buzzer? Her thumb found a button and pushed it. Or maybe not. Maybe she hadn’t pushed it. Maybe this was all a dream. She couldn’t tell.

Ne burada gidiyor?
Scuffling. Shout
s. Onu yakala!

Her heart pounded, frantic to deliver what little oxygen remained to her fading brain. Then she felt air and could breathe again. The pillow and the heavy weight were gone and an overhead light nearly blinded her.

She gasped, “Someone tried to smother me!”

“Some men are chasing him now,” a woman’s voice said. “Don’t worry. He won’t get out of the hospital. They will catch him.”

“It was a man, then?”

The nurse hovered over her face but looked at another nurse who was checking Lacy’s pulse. “Was it a man? I assumed it was but I didn’t get a good look.”

“It was a man,” the other one said.

* * *

“He got away?”

“We had five men chasing him through the halls and out of the building, but somehow they lost him. They think he may have hidden somewhere and escaped when they were not looking.” The nurse doing the talking was the head nurse on the morning shift.

“But how? Didn’t he have a car or something? Didn’t they at least get a license number or something?” Lacy mumbled past the thermometer in her mouth.

“It was still dark.” The nurse extracted the thermometer and looked at it, her face revealing nothing.

“They said it looked like a blue car, but under the lights in the parking lot
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
” a junior nurse standing in the doorway couldn’t finish her sentence.

The head nurse glared at her. “We don’t know what color the car was. Under those lights you cannot tell what color anything would be in the daytime.”

“I know,” Lacy said, thinking of the color matching work she’d done yesterday.
Was it only yesterday?
“But it doesn’t matter. I know who it was.”

* * *

When a nurse brought her breakfast tray, Lacy asked her to look up the number for the gendarmerie. She picked up the phone Paul had left with her and called the station. The officer who answered recognized her voice.

“Yes, Dr Glass.”

How embarrassing. I’m so notorious they know my voice.
“I understand Henry Jones helped you identify the American man killed on the train, and his name was Clifford Craven. Have you notified his next of kin?”

The officer paused as if deciding whether he should answer her question, then did so. “His brother, Michael Craven, is on his way now. He wants to take the body of his brother home where it can be buried with the family.”

“Thank you very much.”

* * *

At nine that morning, Paul and Bob dropped by on their way to the gendarmerie station and suggested they could pick Lacy up on their way back to camp. Bob acted as if he were on speed, talking a mile a minute.

“We haven’t been to bed yet,” he said, illustrating with a stretch, a sigh, and a crack of his back against the knuckles of both fists. “But we got the son of a bitch.”

Paul said, “It was Todd Ma—“

“Todd Majewski,” Bob interrupted, “now securely in the hands of the local gendarmes.”

Lacy’s brain swarmed with conflicting images. Todd, the smuggler, arrested. That fit. She already suspected as much. But how does Henry Jones fit in? Clifford Craven? Jason Rennick? She didn’t know what to say or how to react so she listened silently while Bob recounted their overnight stakeout and Paul stood at the window, an indulgent grin on his face. Should she tell them about her near-death experience now or later? She decided she’d rather get out of the hospital first and then tell them, lest either Paul or Bob react in a way that caused a scene and delayed her departure. “I want to go with you now. They said I could leave.”

“But we don’t know how long we’ll be at the gendarmerie.”

“I need to go to there as much as you do.” She looked at Paul and tilted her head toward Bob, eyebrows raised.

Paul understood. “He knows. I told him.”

“Huh?” Bob looked from Paul to Lacy and back again.

“I told you about the man on the train and about what Lacy did in Istanbul.”

“Oh, right.” He scowled at Lacy. “You should have told me to begin with! I can’t believe—”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Paul said.

“Did you tell Bob that Henry identified the man on the train as Clifford Craven?”

Both men nodded. Paul told her they’d already called the museum and confirmed everything Henry Jones had told her.

“Speaking of Henry, was he at the camp last night?”

Paul’s head jerked back at this apparent
non sequitur
. “I didn’t see him.”

“Was his car in the parking area?”

“I didn’t notice.” He looked at Bob. “Did you?”

“I don’t think it was. Why?”

Lacy sat up and swung her feet to the floor. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll tell you in the van. But we have to get to the gendarmerie station before Clifford Craven’s brother leaves the country with that body.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

The crumbling little gendarmerie had never in its long history seen this much action at one time. They’d had to call in all available men to handle the confusion. In its only cell, an alleged big-time antiquities smuggler cushioned his shattered coccyx with a folded jacket and awaited the arrival of a lawyer. Everyone awaited the arrival of various officials from the Turkish government and from Interpol Ankara. A body, recently buried in a nearby plot, was soon to be exhumed. Within the memory of anyone at the station there had never been an exhumation, and no one knew whether to call an imam, a mortician, or a backhoe operator.  But, to a man, they all wanted to work on the smuggling case, or the still-unsolved attack on the beautiful American called Sierra Blue.

Their prime suspect—or the woman who had been their prime suspect until yesterday—was there now and decidedly uninterested in that whole affair. She was interested only in the exhumation and the arrival of the dead man’s brother, expected at any minute.

Bob Mueller was itching to dash down the short hallway to the cell where Todd Majewski was locked up and deliver the sermon on integrity he’d practiced on Paul and Lacy in the van. Lacy, now battle-scarred from head to toe with her black eye and abrasions sustained in Istanbul fading through various hues beneath a dense crop of new ones picked up in yesterday’s fiasco, had told them about the man who tried to suffocate her while she slept. Paul had been stuck in the van’s back, behind Bob and Lacy, unable to grab her and hold her when she told them the story. Lacy glanced over the seat back and caught the flushed face, the jaw muscles working. He’d reached through the gap between the seats and clutched her hand.

From the front stoop of the gendarmerie Lacy watched as four men lugging shovels and a man in a suit jacket appeared out of nowhere. They followed the station’s highest ranking officer, Captain Kemal, to a spot on the rocky slope just west of the station.

Paul stepped out of the gendarmerie and joined her. “Is that where they buried the body?”

“I assume so.”

The men set to work. Using their boots, they pushed their shovels into ground not yet completely settled after the burial. The jacketed man and Captain Kemal stood back, watching.

“Does Bob have a weak stomach?” Lacy asked. “He needs to see this.”

“What? Why?”

Lacy didn’t answer right away. Instead she looked toward the road. Between the gendarmerie and the road lay a small parking area where their van sat. “The van. We need to move the van.”

“What?” Paul sounded confused, as if he’d missed Act One and Act Two.

“I’m not exactly sure what’s about to happen, but we need to keep the van out of sight. It’s a dead giveaway that we’re here.”

Paul grabbed her by both elbows and made eye contact. “You need to clarify that.”

Lacy started to explain but Bob popped out and banged the front door into both of them. Lacy took his arm as she quickly checked the highway in both directions. No vehicles approaching. “Give Paul your keys. He’s going to drive the van behind the building while we go back inside and demand to see the photos they took of that man they’re digging up.

“What?”

“Unless you prefer to see a corpse that’s been in the ground for a couple of weeks with no embalming and no casket. I can’t imagine it myself, but I don’t think it’ll be pretty.”

As soon as Bob handed over the keys, Lacy nudged him back inside. She found the young Sergeant Osman standing in a small room off the hall behind the front desk. He was talking with the American woman who’d helped with the translation when they’d interviewed Lacy at camp. They’d need the translator soon.

To Osman Lacy said, “I want you to show Dr. Mueller the photos of the dead man. The same ones you showed me the first time I came in. I’m not certain, but I think he may be able to help you.”

“The man’s own brother is coming in. The identification should come from him.”

“I know, but this won’t hurt, will it? Just show him the photos. What harm can it do?” Lacy gave the sergeant a sweet smile.

At this point, Kemal walked in and the translator mumbled something to him. Kemal lifted his gold-trimmed cap and ran his fingers through his hair. He settled the cap back on his head and gave an order to his sergeant. While they waited, Kemal let out a huge sigh and rolled his eyes at no one in particular. Lacy figured he was wondering,
What next?
This morning had undoubtedly swamped them with more activity than they saw in a whole week. Or more.

Bob, giving the translator a nod of recognition, popped a breath mint into his mouth. Osman slipped around them and handed the photos to Kemal, who spread them out on a desk and waved them over.

Bob stepped forward and looked. “That’s Max Sebring.”

* * *

Lacy’s heart bounced. After all her hard work she was afraid to let herself think she finally had the mystery nailed. It was all coming together at last, and one wrong move could allow two killers to escape or, equally unacceptable, two murders to remain forever unsolved. “It’s not the man you called Max Sebring when he was in camp with you,” Lacy said. “Are you sure this is Max?”

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Then why did you call the other man Max?”

“Well …” Bob thumped one of the photos with his forefinger. He furrowed his brow. “I’m not very good with faces. I’m good with,” he heaved a sigh, “other things, I suppose, but not with faces.” He seemed to be searching for an explanation he himself could accept, as if he knew he’d done something unforgivable but didn’t know why. “I worked with Max Sebring at his museum, but that was several years ago and I didn’t see him every day. I worked in one of the back rooms, where we did cataloging and documenting. Max had a dozen projects going at the time and he stopped by only now and again.”

“You’re saying you knew Max but not that well.” Lacy tried to help him. This was embarrassing for Bob, but the important thing was to get at the truth.

“Right. I didn’t know him that well, but what about Henry? He knew Max like a father. How could Henry be fooled? Plus, we were talking to folks back at the Sebring offices every day. They knew everything we were doing. They were approving his checks and making sure he had his Pepsis. This makes no sense!”

“Can you call the Sebring offices now? We could fax them one of these photos.”

“It’s the middle of the night in New York.”

“What about that guy Alan? The office manager. Do you have a home number for him?”

Bob thumbed down the contact list on his phone and found a cell phone number for Alan Davis. “Do you think we should call now? Wake him up?”

“Of course!” Lacy wondered about Bob’s mental state. Had his brain processed the significance of these photos? That the body in the casket the Sebring Foundation had eulogized in its low-key-no-press-allowed memorial service was not that of their employer. Their employer was dead, true enough, but lying in an unmarked grave in central Turkey. “Let’s hope he has his phone turned on. Call him!”

While Bob was making the call, Paul slipped in and sidled up to Lacy. She pushed him into the hall and whispered a quick explanation, shushing him before he made a scene and drowned out the call to Alan Davis.

She returned in time to hear Bob ask someone, presumably Alan’s wife, to put Alan on the phone. Itching to go back outside and see if the alleged brother had shown up yet, Lacy grabbed a memo pad off a desk, wrote
FAX?
in large letters, and stuck it in Bob’s face.

Bob frowned at her.

Lacy mouthed, “Ask him if he has a fax machine at home with its own number.”

Bob asked and relayed Alan’s answer: Yes.

“Get the number and tell him to go and sit beside the machine until the photo comes through but don’t hang up!”

To Lacy the next few minutes felt like one of those dreams of running with weighted legs. With the interpreter in tow, she took the best of the photos to the fax machine at the front desk and asked the American woman to explain the situation to Kemal and Osman, who had followed them in from the back room. Osman made the call and they all waited. And waited.

Lacy darted from the fax to the front door and back. Outside, the diggers were standing in the hole up to their knees. No new vehicles had driven up. The photo slid through the machine, and Kemal grabbed for it as it slowly emerged as if being able to return it to its assigned folder was a great relief.

At length, Alan Davis’s response came through on Bob’s phone, yelled so loudly they heard it across the whole room.
Oh my God!