Redheads (21 page)

When he came downstairs, Julissa was hanging up.

“They’ll go?”

“I didn’t let them say no. They’ll drive to San Antonio tonight, then Santa Fe tomorrow. They’ve got a friend they can stay with until I call to explain more.”

“You ready?”

She tossed her purse over her shoulder and grabbed her gun.

They went out the front door and Chris locked his house. Then they went to the garden shed. Crossing the lawn, Chris felt how exposed they were. One of the other two men could be in the trees, hiding in the undergrowth or in one of the deep stands of ginger. They moved quickly and Chris kept himself between Julissa and the trees.

The fish bag was where he’d left it. They loaded it into the gardener’s wheelbarrow, one of them on each end of the bag. It hung off the front of the wheelbarrow but didn’t tip out. Chris pushed it from the shed, and led them across the lawn to the dock. Then they dropped the body into the dinghy. The little boat listed enough to take on a few gallons of water, but Chris jumped in quickly to right it. Julissa climbed in after him and sat on the gunwale, looking at the water.

“At least we don’t have far to row,” she said.

“You get seasick?”

“Don’t know. I’ve never sailed.”

He rowed until they reached the transom of the sailboat where he tied the dinghy’s painter line to a cleat at the swim platform. He stepped aboard and held his hand out to help Julissa.

“Why aren’t they here already? That’s what I don’t understand,” she said.

“Westfield said they were tracking us with credit cards. I just used my card for the beers at the Hyatt. My card, your hotel. Maybe they put two and two together, think we’re both in Waikiki.”

Julissa took his hand and stepped to the boat’s swim platform. They pulled the dinghy alongside and, lifting together, brought the fish bag aboard. Chris used a length of rope and a bowline knot to secure the bag’s nylon handles to the boat. Then he hoisted the dinghy to its davits.

In less than ten minutes, they were underway. Chris had not unfurled the sails yet; Julissa was steering the boat between the channel buoys under engine power.

He slid back the companionway hatch and went down the stairs into the salon. The things he’d brought from his house safe were in his pockets; he pulled them out and put them in a drawer in the galley, except for the new satellite phone, which he took out of the envelope and put back into his pocket. He opened the envelope with Cheryl’s old documents and looked at the contents. He never thought he was keeping them for any useful purpose. Just something to take from the safe at night after he’d had a couple glasses of whiskey, so he could turn her old documents over in his hands, feeling their edges, the places she touched. He put the envelope into the drawer and slid it shut, then climbed the steps back into the cockpit.

“You okay?” Chris asked.

“Yeah.”

Chris came behind her and looked at the row of instruments behind the wheel. The wind was blowing steady at twenty knots and they’d already had a gust up to thirty. Looking ahead of the bow, out in the channel between Oahu and Molokai, he could see white caps on the waves.

“It’ll be a wet ride once we get out there and get the sails up.”

Julissa nodded. For now, they were still in the ship channel leading out of Kaneohe Bay. The water around them was calm and clear.

Julissa pointed at one of the flat-screen displays behind the wheel.

“What’s that?”

“AIS—an automatic identification system for shipping. The transceiver shares with the VHF antenna. It broadcasts the ship’s name, course and speed and picks up the same from any ship with the same system. It’s a good way to avoid collisions.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Can we turn it off?”

“Why?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t be broadcasting our name and position for the whole world on this trip.”

“Shit, you’re right. Turn that off.”

“The transceiver won’t keep broadcasting if I just kill it with this switch?”

“No.”

They were just one stupid mistake from getting themselves killed. How many others would he make? Everyone on Chevalier’s email was being hunted down and murdered, and who had given Chevalier the list of names and email addresses in the first place? Now that Mike and his family were gone. Mike, who hadn’t even blinked when Chris asked him to retire from HPD and help him track Cheryl’s killer. Who’d sat on this boat with him and helped him map a path to revenge. Whose kids called him Mr. Chris and whose wife sometimes left home-cooked dinners on his doorstep.

He blinked out of it. Now wasn’t the time for this.

“When we get to the mouth of the channel, hold this course, dead to windward. I’ll raise the sails and then we’ll fall off the wind to the southeast. That’ll give us a heading straight to Molokai and we won’t have to tack.”

Julissa nodded.

“Weather’s okay for this?”

“It’s kinda stiff, but it’ll be okay. Nothing this boat can’t handle.”

Julissa steered to the right side of the channel as a sport fishing boat came in from the sea. The two vessels passed port to port, thirty feet apart. The men on the flying bridge of the other boat were looking at Julissa and not the bulging fish bag on the swim platform. The man driving the other boat, a local charter captain whose face was familiar but whose name Chris couldn’t remember, flashed them a shaka sign. Chris returned it, thumb and pinkie out, a quick shake of the wrist.

“Is it true you can track a person with his cell phone, even if it’s not being used?”

“I already threw mine over the side, while you were getting the boat ready,” Julissa said. “If that answers your question.”

Chris took his cell out, checking to be sure it wasn’t the satellite phone. Then he tossed it over the rail.

“Cell phones and credit cards, most bank transactions. Smart phones are the worst because they have GPS installed, so if anyone hacks your phone, they can figure out exactly where you are. They can track you with your email if you don’t take precautions. You mentioned you had a laptop on the boat, but don’t bother bringing it. We can find a new one somewhere, with a unique ID number not already associated with you.”

“Okay. You should be an FBI agent or something.”

“I do contract work for the FBI. Or I used to. I don’t know how that’s going to work out after all this.”

“One thing at a time, I guess. You okay with steering?”

“Yeah.”

Chris sat next to Julissa on the bench behind the helm. For a while, he just sat there, his eyes closed and his thumbs on his throbbing temples. He felt Julissa’s hand on his left shoulder. When he looked, she was crying noiselessly. He nodded and she leaned against him, resting her cheek on his shoulder.

They didn’t speak because everything that mattered was unspeakable. Allison and Cheryl. Mike and his family. The dozens or hundreds of murdered women; the dark path ahead. After a moment, Julissa lifted her head from his shoulder and corrected their course, centering
Sailfish
in the channel.

Chris counted his breaths and watched the boat’s progress. If he’d been calculating and cold for this long, he could keep it up a little longer. There’d be time later, but only if they made it out of Hawaii. For now they had a difficult sail in front of them, and he still had to find a way out of the islands. Chris took the satellite phone from his pocket and showed it to her.

“It’s an Iridium I bought a couple years ago. Paid cash and set up an account under a false name, billed to a credit card that’s also under a false name. That card gets paid from an offshore account under the same name. There’s nothing to trace it to me.”

“You set this all up—for what?”

“I’ve spent years tracking someone down to murder him. So at some point I started planning what happens the day after I get him.”

“We pick up the rest of our lives. In a world without him. Without
it
.”

“What if we murder him in broad daylight in front of a crowd of witnesses? Or get caught on video? Or we don’t have time to hide the body, and the police start following the traces we leave? Or his hit men are still looking for us even after we’ve killed him?”

“So you’ve been planning all along to disappear afterward, under a fake name.”

Chris nodded.

“For the short term, I have an ID you can use. We probably shouldn’t count on using it too long, but it’ll get us out of the country.”

“What ID?”

“Cheryl’s passport. It’s in the galley. How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“She was twenty-nine when the picture was taken. You look almost exactly like her.”

“It’s still valid?”

“For two more years. They don’t cancel a passport when a person dies. A lot of countries do, but the U.S. doesn’t.”

“Because we have no national ID database, so there’d be no way to keep track.” She nodded her head, understanding his plan. “It’ll work, if I really look like her. What about you, what’s your new name?”

“Jarrett Gardner.”

Chris held up the Iridium phone. “Let me take care of our flight.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was half an hour to midnight when Westfield pulled off Interstate 10 at a truck stop sixty miles east of San Antonio. He drove to the far corner of the lot, out of the glare of the bright fluorescent lights that lit the pumps and the area around the diner. He parked on gravel next to a dark tractor-trailer rig. He leaned back in his seat and looked at the stars through the bug-dotted windshield, listening to the hood and the engine tick as the hot metal cooled and contracted in the night breeze. He’d been driving across Texas in the dark with the windows down and the radio off, keeping to the speed limit and watching the rear-view mirror for state troopers. For the last two hours there had been hardly any traffic on the road at all. Just the amber eyes of deer reflecting his headlights back at him from the side of the highway. In the hours since leaving Galveston, he’d had plenty of time to think about everything that might have gone wrong.

First there was the clean-up job he’d done in his hotel room. The hydrogen peroxide got the smaller stains out of the carpet, but the biggest one, from the man’s bleeding head, had been impossible. Westfield used half the bottle of peroxide, half a gallon of hot water from the sink, and all the washcloths in the room. He called it quits when the stain started to look like someone had spilled a pot of coffee on the rug. Inspired by that, he brewed a pot of coffee with the little machine next to the TV, took a few sips for himself, and dumped the rest onto the stain. Maybe the smell would throw the maids off for a while.

There was no hope of fixing the hole in the rug from the bullet that barely missed his head when he’d hit his attacker with the stun gun. Instead he pried loose the slug with his pocket knife, then used a cigarette lighter to burn the edges of the hole. He’d picked up a cigarette butt in the parking lot and he left it in the burned spot. The room was going to look like a rock band stayed overnight.

After that, he took care of the body. He wrapped it in the futon’s plastic covering, tossed in the dirty washcloths and the blood-soaked pillow, and then wrapped everything in the bedspread. He used a couple of wraps of clear packing tape to keep everything in place before sliding the body into the futon’s cardboard shipping box. He closed the flaps of the box, taped them shut, and then taped a blank piece of paper to the front of the box. With a red permanent marker he wrote,
ANTIQUES—FRAGILE
.

Getting the box onto the dolly had been difficult. Eventually he realized the man’s legs were lighter than his upper body, and the solution was to stand the box on its end with the man’s head facing down. If that caused more bleeding, so be it. The plastic, the pillow and towels, and the bedspread would catch it all before it started to leak out of the box. He gave the room a once-over to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind, then wheeled the dolly to the elevators. He had to favor his left leg while walking, and his right knee could hold his weight only a few seconds at a time before the pain got to be too much. In the elevator, he leaned against the handrail at the back. The car stopped at the sixth floor and an old woman in a mauve-colored pantsuit got on. She studied Westfield and the box carefully until they reached the lobby. He waited for the woman to exit. Then he wheeled the dolly out, limping to the front entrance. The teenaged valet opened the door for him and Westfield came out into the late-afternoon heat.

“You need some help, sir?”

“No thanks.”

Now he was in the parking lot of the truck stop. He had been thinking about murder pretty much nonstop since 1978. But he’d never given any thought to hiding bodies because that wasn’t something Tara’s killer did. For the first couple of hours, while driving through Houston, he’d planned to dump the box in a ditch on a quiet stretch of highway. That seemed like a good, no-nonsense plan until he realized his fingerprints were all over it. He was into dry country now, far from any deep water, and sinking the body in a rancher’s pond or a shallow creek wouldn’t do any good. It would likely be found in a matter of weeks. The clear packing tape binding the dead man inside his wrappings would probably hold on to Westfield’s fingerprints for months underwater. Burying the body on the side of the road wasn’t going to work either. Out here the topsoil was just a thin layer over the limestone bedrock. He didn’t have a shovel in the van, and digging with a bad knee injury didn’t sound too good either. He’d dropped off the dolly at the U-Haul store on his way out of Galveston, so whatever he did with the box was going to have to be within a few feet of the back of the van. The last thing he wanted was a state trooper to roll up behind him while he was using a hubcap to scrape out a grave next to the highway. That would raise an eyebrow.