I made my way back upstream, where the drama had begun, sticking close to the bushes. Not only did that reduce the odds of my being spotted against the night sky, but it gave me a place to duck into and disappear if I was spotted.
I didn’t have to worry. I reached the spot where I had parked Wayne’s car. It was gone. He may have driven farther down river to see where I ended up. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t there, and he wasn’t up by where I had fallen in.
He wasn’t, but Dianna was. I saw her before I reached her, saw her prone shape on the triangular ledge, pale in the moonlight. The scenario was obvious. I had gone over the edge and been written off as dead. Wayne, shaken after our struggle, dropped Dianna with a single shot, the one I had heard after hitting the water. He hadn’t bothered to tip her body into the water. He hadn’t bothered with anything, except running.
I came up to her. One leg hung over the edge of the rock formation, dipping playfully into the water. I smoothed her pale hair, dampened by the mists of the falls, away from her face. The bullet had struck her high in the chest. I hoped she had died instantly.
I lifted her and carried her onto the grass eight or ten feet back.
I put her on her back, looking at the nonexistent stars, and lay down beside her. I wanted to rest. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up in the morning in my queen-sized bed at the Holiday Inn City Centre, between the stiff, heavy sheets, and find that this night had all been a dream. A nightmare.
Well, it had been that. A nightmare. One that I lived through and Dianna Castelli did not. I pulled myself to my feet and looked down at her. You’d have thought she was sleeping. One leg was straight and one leg was bent a little, one arm lay a little to one side and the other was draped across her stomach. Her face was turned to one side, her lips were parted and her eyes were closed. You’d have thought she was sleeping, except for the bullet wound that stained the front of her sweater black-red in the moonlight and which showed slightly above the sweater’s scoop neck.
The hotel wasn’t far from the falls. Maybe a mile, maybe more. I was almost there before I knew that’s where I was headed. The streets were deserted. Between the falls and the hotel I spotted only one moving car, a white police cruiser. The cop must not have seen me or he surely would have stopped to investigate a bloodied, soaking-wet man limping along the city streets at three, three-thirty in the morning.
I’m guessing the time. My wristwatch had taken a licking, all right, but it hadn’t kept on ticking.
The parking ramp at the hotel could be accessed from the street, without going through the lobby, so that’s what I did. I got in my car and headed toward the Interstate.
How long between the time I fell into the water and the time I heard the gunshot? Minutes. Five? Six at the outside? How long between the gunshot and the time I came upon Dianna? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Impossible to say. Let’s call it thirty to forty minutes between the time Wayne killed Dianna and the time I found her. Another twenty to thirty minutes for me to stagger to my car. Ten minutes for me to thread through town and onto I-29.
At best, if Wayne had dawdled, wasting time, looking for me, he had an hour’s head start. At worst, if he had hit the road immediately and my time estimates were off—for all I know, I could have hung on that four-by-four for ten or fifteen minutes—he had a couple of hours on me.
Part of my brain said it didn’t make any difference. Where was Wayne going to go except back to Omaha? Things had gone wrong for him tonight, and so he might have to disappear, but he would not have planned for them to go wrong so he wouldn’t be ready to disappear immediately. He would have to go home first and make quick arrangements before he could amscray.
I hoped.
I hoped real hard, because if I was wrong then Wayne was already out of my reach. He could have taken I-29 north, to Canada, rather than south to Nebraska, and if he had, he was gone; if he had headed anywhere other than Omaha, he was gone. I-90, which intersects with 29 near Sioux Falls, could take him west across South Dakota and into Wyoming or east across Minnesota and into Wisconsin. From I-90, or I-29 if he chose that route, he could link up with interstates or other major and secondary highways that, with no effort, could take him into Minneapolis-St. Paul, Des Moines, Madison, Chicago. He could be in any of them before noon. You can’t deal with that, with the “anywhere factor.” He could be going anywhere, and you can’t be everywhere. So you toss a coin and make the decision to be not everywhere but in one good place.
Omaha.
He would be observing the speed limit. He couldn’t afford to be picked up and ticketed. Once I was clear of the city and its double-nickel speed regulation, I nosed the needle on the speedometer to seventy miles an hour. When I looked down a little while later I was surprised to see it was at seventy-five. I left it there until I hit the Iowa border. Iowa cops are reputed to take their speed laws seriously. I dropped to a prudent sixty-nine miles an hour until the tangle of ramps at Sioux City slowed me down to fifty-five again. I had to put gas in the car at Sioux City—it’s a wonder the truck-stop attendant didn’t call the cops on me, but, come to think of it, I didn’t look much worse than he did—and once I cleared the city I inched back up to sixty-nine again.
I had the heater on in the car and my clothes were drying in that stiff, uncomfortable way wet clothes have of drying on you. And, of course, my back and my butt and the backs of my legs weren’t drying at all, thanks to my vinyl car seats. My head was pounding steadily and my body was exhilarating in all kinds of aches and pains it had never before experienced and, in all, it was the longest drive of my life.
Shortly after six, with the sun painting the bottoms of the gray eastern clouds pink, I turned off onto I-680, “the Nebraska side,” as interstate aficionados have it. I-29 continues south through Iowa, through Council Bluffs, at which point you can get off and onto 480 into eastern Omaha. I-680 takes you into Nebraska, around the north side of town, and down the west side. It was the fastest route to the Waynes’ place.
Alexander Wayne’s car was in the driveway.
I pulled in behind it and let the bumpers kiss. He wasn’t going anywhere, not in that car, not unless he could coax it up over mine.
I fished the gun out of my glove compartment, checked the cylinder, and got out and moved toward the house.
The sun was up. The sky was heavy with clouds—honest-to-goodness clouds, not the solid grayness that had hung there for days on end—but the light found an occasional gap to peer through kind of sidewaysish. Despite the clouds, the world had that hard, unreal look that the morning sun gives things.
The Waynes’ overhead door was down but the front door was open. That bothered me. I tightened my hand on the gun and moved laterally up the stoop, trying to stay out of the range of the big window in the storm door.
I came up even with the door and waited. Nothing happened.
I peeked around and looked through the screen over the window. There was a wide, short entryway that led from the front door past the kitchen and into the living room. From there, only the very end of the living room could be seen. But what I could see of it was a disaster. Furniture was tipped, breakables were broken, junk was scattered everywhere.
Raising my weapon, I tried the storm door. It was unlocked. It swung open easily, soundlessly, and I went in.
The kitchen was to my left, the dining room beyond it, the living room, which also was accessible via the entryway, beyond that. I paused near the open doorway to the kitchen, brought the gun up in both hands, took a breath, and peeked around the corner.
Neat as a pin.
I stepped onto the linoleum. After being soaked and dried improperly, my shoes squeaked on the hard floor. But I needed only three long steps to cover the distance to the pocket doors separating kitchen and dining room. The doors were parted six inches. I glanced through into the formal dining room. It, too, looked like a page from a magazine.
Liking the silence of carpeting better than the kitchen’s linoleum or
the dining room’s parquet, I slipped out and back into the entryway and padded softly to where the entryway turned into the living room in one direction and a long hallway to the bedrooms in another. It was there that the carnage began. But that was only the beginning. I glided around the corner into the big room. It had high white walls and a vaulted ceiling and tall windows on the southern exposure. The carpet was thick and powder blue, blue, that is, where it wasn’t stained purple-red with blood.
I took a breath and held it and let it out again. It was a good thing my stomach was empty.
The room was a disaster. I’ve said that already, but it bears repeating. Except for the big sofa near the windows, there wasn’t a stick of furniture in its proper place. Most of it was knocked over, much of it was broken. Books, photographs, little mementos and all the bits and pieces of this and that which people are apt to collect and display—strewn and shattered.
In the center of the room was Alexander Wayne. He was on the floor, on his knees, cradling the body of his son. Thomas Wayne, Tommy Cott, was bound hand and foot. His ankles were tied with yellow nylon cord and his wrists were tied with the same cord, another short length of which attached his wrists to his ankles. A white cloth had been twisted into a thick gag and stuffed between his teeth and tied around the back of his head but someone, presumably Alexander, had removed the gag and pulled it out of his mouth, down around his chin.
The younger man lay in the older man’s arms, his head flopped grotesquely to one side. His forehead was a mass of bloodied, torn gristle. A goodly portion of the back of his head was missing.
Not “missing,” exactly. Just not where it should have been. Where it was was on the walls and the furniture and all over the carpeting. It’s the effect you achieve when you tie someone the way Thomas Wayne had been tied and you put a pistol against his skull and you pull the trigger. What they call execution-style.
Thomas Wayne had been executed, in a big way, and I didn’t have the slightest doubt in my mind who had taken care of it. Not Michael Berenelli, of course; he wouldn’t be found within six hundred miles of this place. Not even Paul Tarantino. Someone much, much further down the list—but someone who could be trusted, nevertheless, to handle the job and keep it to himself—had pulled the trigger, but on the Baron’s orders. I didn’t know whether his people simply accumulated the same circumstantial evidence as I had and deduced Thomas’s guilt from that, or whether one of them had followed me yesterday despite my precautions and reached the same conclusion. It didn’t much matter and I didn’t much care. Thomas Wayne may have been innocent of the murders of Stacy Eitrem and Meredith Berens, but he surely knew or strongly suspected that his father had been guilty—his evasiveness indicated that much—and consequently shared in that guilt. Shared responsibility for the deaths of Stacy Eitrem and Meredith Berens and Dianna Castelli. I had no tears for him.
Alexander Wayne looked up at me. From the look on his face, the look in his eyes, he may not have recognized me. Probably didn’t. He had been there for some time like that, judging from the way blood had soaked into his jacket and trousers.
“My son,” he said. “My son is hurt.”
I said nothing.
He looked back at the younger man’s ruined face. “Who did this to you, Thomas,” he moaned. “Who would do this to you? My son …”
Martha Cott had been right. Prescient, but right. Alexander Wayne had killed her son. Not directly, and not quickly, but certainly.
I said, “The man who did this may have drawn the erroneous conclusion that Thomas killed his daughter. Or perhaps he meant to have you killed last night but, you being unavailable, settled on this instead. A son for a daughter. Either way, Wayne, the man responsible for Thomas’s death is in this room with me.”
He looked at me again, bewildered, and only then seemed to recognize me. His face hardened and his lips pulled away from his teeth in a hideous parody of a grin. “You bastard,” he said, his voice a growl. “This is your fault.”
He moved then, going for his gun. After so many years in this business, you get to where you can judge intent just from the movement, the set of the body, the look in the eye. But the gun must have been in a pocket in the side of the jacket that was under Thomas. He couldn’t draw it without letting go of Thomas, and he wouldn’t let go of Thomas.
Anyway, long before he could have gotten to the gun I had mine up and aimed at his head.
He looked at me, and the death’s-head grin was back. “Go ahead,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t care.”
I could have done it. Pulled the trigger and ditched the gun and let the cops speculate about why one of the corpses had been tied up and shot in the back of the head and the other had been shot from the front, untied, and each from a different gun. It would be little enough in return for what he had put Dianna through last night, and me, and for Dianna’s murder, and Meredith Berens’s, and Stacy Eitrem’s.
“Go on,” he repeated. “I don’t care.”
I lowered the gun and uncocked it.
“I do. I care about Meredith Berens and Dianna Castelli and Stacy Eitrem, the ones you killed and the one you tried to kill—me. And I even care about your ‘son,’ who was in many ways your biggest victim. Caring like that means it would be real easy to honor your request. Too easy. Even pleasurable. But, corny as it sounds, I also care about being able to look myself in the mirror in the morning and distinguish myself from people like you. And I care that Meredith’s father is one of the biggest Mob bosses in the country, and that he’d be disappointed to find out he’d whacked the wrong man and I didn’t give him a chance to set it straight.”
I pocketed the gun and turned to leave, pausing where the living room met the entryway.
“Good-bye, Mr. Wayne,” I said to the big white-haired man, who hadn’t budged from his position on the carpet. “I doubt we’ll be seeing each other again.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William J. Reynolds, a native of Omaha, has been a magazine editor, an advertising and marketing executive, a college instructor, and a communications director, as well as the author of a number of books, short stories, magazine articles, and poison-pen letters. His début detective novel, The Nebraska Quotient, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America. His novels have been published in five countries and in three languages. Reynolds and his wife live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 29
