Shotgun Lullaby (A Conway Sax Mystery) (12 page)

I thought about him. Fast Freddy Sax: stock-car racer, welder, drunk.

I had experience on the receiving end of an inheritance, all right.

Now I was on the giving end, which turned out to be a lot harder. By the time you understood how important it was, you'd already screwed things up a dozen ways.

Maybe your kid was waiting for you to die.

Maybe your kid wasn't taking your phone calls.

Fathers and sons.

“Hell,” I said out loud in the empty kitchen. Heard a V8, looked out the window, watched a black BMW SUV tear down the gravel drive faster than it needed to.

“Welcome to my world.”

I spun. It was Haley, without baby and with sweatpants now. She'd catfooted up the hall.

I said, “What's his story?”

“He's got a hundred million dollars or more,” she said, “and he feels like a failure.”

“Why?”

“His father was Gustav Biletnikov the First, the man Gus was named for. Does this ring a bell?”

“No.”

“He may be the reason we're not speaking German. He worked as a nuclear physicist for the Nazis during World War II. They worked on their bomb while we worked on ours. A lot of smart people say they were on track to beat us to fission, thanks primarily to Gustav Biletnikov's brain.”

“What happened?”

“He defected in early '44, with help from Richard Feynman. There are books about it. By then it was nearly impossible for anybody, let alone a key scientist, to get out of Berlin.”

“Who's Feynman?”

“Not important. Gustav Biletnikov became one of
our
Russians. After the war, Cornell wrote him a blank check to start a physics department.”

“What's all this got to do with Peter?”

“Peter grew up in a house of titans. Feynman, Oppenheimer, Bethe, and Lawrence dropped by whenever they could. Albert Einstein gave Peter a Batman comic book for his eighth birthday.”

“Son of a great man,” I said, thinking of a few I'd known. “Not an easy thing to be.”

“Precisely.”

“But Peter's done okay for himself. And then some.”

“That's how I see it, too,” Haley said. “That's how most
anybody
would see it. But he grades himself on a different curve, and he sure didn't save the world from Hitler.”

I started to answer.

But was interrupted by the longest, loudest scream I'd ever heard.

It made my neck hairs stand up, and that hadn't happened for a long time.

We stared at one another, frozen for half a beat.

Then we pounded down the back stairs, me in the lead. Exited the walk-out basement to the wildflower-lined yard that separated the main house from the guesthouse.

I paused. I thought the scream had come from farther back in the yard, to my right as I stood now, but it was hard to be sure.

Haley pulled up behind me, put a hand on my back.

Another scream. It had less shock this time around, but maybe more pain. It was definitely coming from my right.

We ran.

“Path,” Haley said. “Angle left just a little.”

I did, found it, led her over pine needles at a dead sprint. A corner of my head wondered if this was the motocross track Gus had cleared when he was a kid, the one that'd pissed off his father.

We popped into a ragged clearing piled high with compost—mown grass, storm-wrecked branches: the place the landscapers brought yard junk—and there she was.

Rinn Biletnikov.

Squatting, her back to us. Tiny sneakers, off-white slacks, a thin kelly-green sweater riding up.

She turned, looking in our direction but not seeing much—had the thousand-yard stare.

The smell in this clearing: rot under sweet, like a dead rat in a candy shop. It was the mown grass, I knew: dumped here for years, composting, collapsing in on itself.

We stepped toward Rinn. Whatever she was screaming about was mostly hidden by her body, by tall grass, by scrub oak.

It became clear as we drew closer.

Basketball shoes.

Blue-jeaned legs.

Sweatshirt.

“Oh God,” Haley said, and stopped walking.

I didn't.

Couldn't.

It was Gus.

On his back. Eyes open wide. One lazy fly walking his cheek.

His black sweatshirt said
FLATOUT.

His middle, from the bottom of the word to the button of his jeans, was just a red-black mess.

“Shotgun,” I said to nobody.

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“
I
need help.”

The last thing he said to me.

I helped by throwing him down a flight of stairs.

Because some sixteen-thousand-dollar-a-year counselor once told me tough love was the way to go.

“For God's sake, Conway, what should we
do
?”

I snapped to.

It was Rinn. She'd risen from her crouch, was hugging her arms.

“She's doing it,” I said, nodding in Haley's direction. She had dialed 911 and was saying the address.

“What happened?” Rinn said, looking down at the body.

“You tell me.” She'd made a pretty quick transition from helpless screaming to analyzing the situation, hadn't she?

I stepped toward Gus's body. I made myself a camera. Needed to suck up info now, while I had a chance. The cops would hustle us out of here in a hurry.

I looked. It's a sucker bet to play
CSI,
but common sense can tell you a lot.

Common sense told me right off the bat that Gus hadn't been killed where he lay. His back arched across a slab of protruding stone the size of a card table, and there wasn't enough blood for him to have been blown open there. But that didn't mean he hadn't been killed nearby, on his father's grounds.

I turned to Rinn. “Did you hear it? The gun?”

She shook her head.

“Maybe overnight?” I said.

She shook it again.

“You?” I said to Haley, who'd finished her phone call. “Middle of the night, maybe? Anything?”

“No,” she said, biting her lip. Then, firmer: “No. We're only a hundred feet from Emma's bedroom window, and she's easy to unsettle. A gunshot would have woken her.”

I nodded, turned back to the body, made myself look hard at the belly.
Camera. Capture info. Anything else comes later.

The blood was three or four different shades, running from crusty near-black through rose. So try common sense again: Gus had been killed, then moved—to a car, maybe—then moved a final time, to the spot I was staring at. With each movement, crusted blood would crack and fresh blood would flow.

Maybe it was a
CSI
sucker bet, but I didn't think so. It felt like a starting point.

Sirens. From the road. All three flavors: cruiser, ambulance, fire.

“They won't know how to find us,” Haley said. “I'll show them.” She backtracked up the path.

“Gus,” Rinn said. “Sweet Gus.”

My head swiveled, sharper than I meant it to. She'd only said three words, but they carried backstory.

She caught me staring, hugged her arms again, shivered.

It was a fake shiver. A good one, but a fake.

The sirens died, which meant we had a minute or two, no more.

Camera.
I took a step to my right, changing my angle to make myself see things differently. Gus's big eyes, wide open. That brown hair, not really parted. That goddamn fly, still cheek-walking. Gus's back arched across the flat gray stone he'd been dumped on. Deep-green moss creeping up the stone's edges where it protruded …

There.

In the moss.

A heel print, clear as day.

And another next to it.

Deep prints. Prints you'd make if you were dragging a body by its armpits, walking backward—awkward, stooped over. You had dragged the body quite a way already. You were tired. Maybe you had sweat in your eyes. You wanted to get this the hell over with. By now, you were just digging in your heels and hauling.

“Huh,” I said out loud.

“What?” Rinn said.

“Nothing,” I said. Behind me: trotting footsteps on the path, cop radios, the rattle of a gurney on uneven ground.

What were those heel prints from? I knew, but I didn't know. Who looks at shoes?

They were small, but not spiky like high heels. No, call them the shoes of a small-footed man.

Click.

Not shoes.
Boots.

Tiny cowboy boots.

I was thinking about stomping the prints to get rid of them—I wanted to handle this
my
way, not the official way—when a dozen cops piled into the clearing.

And that was that.

*   *   *

“Tiny cowboy boots,” Lima said to me ninety minutes later.

I leaned back in my thousand-dollar patina'd chair, stared at him, said nothing.

It wasn't the first time cops had given me the hot-box, hurry-up-and-wait business. Not by a long shot. But it was the first time they'd done it in a place this pretty.

The way it had played out: the crew that had first crashed the clearing was led by a sergeant with smart eyes and a voice like a cement mixer. The moment she saw the body, she hollered, “Stop right where you are,” and believe me, everybody did—that voice. Then she snapped cell phone pics of me and Rinn where we stood, I guessed to show the techs when they rolled in, and she had us step back to the clearing's mouth. No cuffs—not for the lady of the house, not in this town—but each of us got our elbow held by a patrolman.

They'd set up the backyard as their command post, had even made a cozy arrangement of Adirondack chairs and a picnic table. Somebody brought a pitcher of lemonade down from the kitchen.

Sherborn.

The politeness didn't mean they were dimwits. Lima had rolled in not thirty minutes after the local cops. He led a full-court press of staties, and before you knew it the place was a bona fide crime-scene nuthouse.

Just like Almost Home had been.

I passed the time looking at Google Earth on my phone, trying to figure how Gus had ended up where he did. The bird's-eye view didn't help much. Sherborn was woodsy, but it wasn't Green Acres: Biletnikov's house was close enough to schools, ball fields, and a cemetery that whoever'd dragged Gus here could have come from a half-dozen spots without drawing attention.

After letting me simmer a good long time, Lima had stepped from the path, walked straight to the picnic table, poured himself a lemonade, and sat next to me.

And said: “Tiny cowboy boots.”

There was no sense playing dumb. “In the moss,” I said.

“He tried to be careful. But he had to be beat by then. You ever drag a body a long way, Sax?”

I said nothing.

Lima laughed. “I had to try. Seriously, though. We're talking a couple hundred yards. From the school parking lot, probably.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But check the cemetery first.” Held up my phone, showed him Google Earth.

“Dammit, you're right. That little spur road's the shortest route. As the crow flies, anyway.” He sipped lemonade. “You're not stupid, are you?”

I said nothing.

“Most of the crooks I run across are dumb as a post.”

I said nothing.

“Tiny cowboy boots,” he said. “Just right for the tiny black guy you ate lunch with yesterday.”

“You're not so stupid yourself,” I said.

He smiled.

“Most of the cops I run across are.”

Lima's eyes went stormy, then cleared. He put his free hand behind his back, pantomiming like his arm was being twisted. “Uncle,” he said, and maybe he even tried to smile. But he didn't try hard. “Now tell me about Donald Crump.”

“Who?”

“Cut the shit. From yesterday.”

“Businessman from Houston.”

“There's a little more to him than that, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections, the Louisiana Registry of Motor Vehicles, and the IAFIS.”

“What's that last one, fingerprints?”

He nodded. “FBI database.”

I said nothing.

“We picked him up forty minutes ago, you know. They're sweating him at the Framingham barracks right now.”

I said nothing. Noticed that Peter Biletnikov had shown up. He stood near the driveway's edge, gray and deflated.

An ambulance backed to the very end of the gravel drive, making that obnoxious
beep-beep-beep
while it was in reverse, then onto the lawn.

I saw that not only had Rinn slipped away from my area, which felt like the suspect holding pen—she'd had Haley bring her the baby to boot. Peter, Haley, Emma: brave family in tragic circumstances.

“We'll talk to her, too,” Lima said, following my gaze. Goddamn cop knew what I was thinking. “Bet on it. In a town like this, it's tricky. Takes finesse. But we'll get to her.”

Two uniformed staties trundled the gurney, now topped by a sturdy-looking navy zipper bag, up the path and into the yard. The Sherborn sergeant with the cement-mixer voice tried to gentle Peter away from the ambulance.

But he wouldn't be gentled. He rushed the gurney and sort of half-collapsed onto it. He moaned. He stroked the body bag.

All the while, though, I had the feeling he was cutting his eyes our way. Putting on a show. Doing his damnedest to act the way he thought he was supposed to act.

Rinn stepped to her husband, who by now was crying loudly into a forearm that rested on the gurney. When she shifted the baby to her right arm so she could rub Peter's back with her left, she damn near dropped the kid, and wound up holding Emma like a schoolbook. In my head I contrasted this with the natural, million-year-old way Haley had held the baby on her hip.

“Huh.”

Didn't realize I'd spoken out loud until Lima said, “Don't read it too close.”