“Stand up.”
He spoke with his face mashed into the rug. “I can’t.”
“What did you do with Chief Broward?”
“He wasn’t even supposed to be here.”
“Why? Why wasn’t he?”
“You should have killed me . . . please . . .”
“Where is he?” she screamed.
“In the pond,” he whispered.
She was running, not thinking, out the door and through the back woods, branches clawing at her, until she reached the edge of the water. The light from Payton’s cabin was just enough to see the shape floating twenty yards offshore.
She removed her winter parka. Wading into the water brought a shock to her legs and soon turned them numb. Up to her hips, calling his name, and she was shaking, her breathing fast and shallow. If she swam out after him she was going to freeze to death but there was a chance he was still alive and so she went. Kicking furiously, keeping her head up and scanning and feeling the pain sink into her muscles and bone, pain from the cold that drilled down, the water a living thing that tore at her, more burning than frigid, catching her lungs on fire, crackling in her head until she reached out for him and had a hold of his jacket.
Scissor-kicking her legs and heading back for shore, a vision of Danica Payton came to mind. She saw an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a woman in a skintight cap who dove and cut through the water.
Kelly fought against the blackness circling her vision, her thoughts, and pulled Broward behind her. He was face down and floating and she touched down on the bottom of the lake and pulled him to shore, dragged him as far as she could through the wet sand and sticks and rocks until she collapsed, panting, feeling the water turn to ice on her skin.
Get up. Keep moving.
She yanked open Broward’s soaking coat and started chest compressions. The warm salty tears carved through the mask of frozen pond water on her face. She pumped his chest and then she breathed into his cold lips but Rob Broward was dead.
PART THREE
Knowing these things, and that there is still choice,
makes what we choose all the sweeter.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They drove out of the wilderness, no stores around at first, and then what was around wasn’t open. She’d opted to put Payton in the front seat where she could keep an eye on him and had used more zip ties to link him to the seatbelt. She wore her parka and had the heat blasting in an attempt to thaw herself but it was barely enough and she knew she was hypothermic. A headache drove through her thoughts like a freight train. They bulleted east on route 30, splitting the dark countryside and she kept their speed at eighty miles an hour. They came into Lake Clear where the general store was closed, houses dark. She could start knocking on doors but that could burn more time than just continuing on to Saranac Lake. Less than ten minutes later she saw the lights of a twenty-four-hour gas station.
“Can I help you? You all right?” The clerk was a skinny guy in his thirties with a bad beard and a worried look on his face as she came rushing in.
“I need your phone.” She slapped her ID on the counter, water oozing out from the leather seams of her wallet.
Before he could hand it to her, she heard the sirens. They emanated from deeper into the town, growing louder — maybe headed for Green Pond. She took the phone and realized she didn’t know the number for Uschi’s parents. “Do you have a phonebook?”
“Uh . . .” He looked out the window as a state police vehicle went rushing by, lights flashing and strobing.
“Your phone. Please let me see your phone.”
The clerk dug into his pocket and pulled out his smartphone and Kelly grabbed it from him as a second state trooper vehicle hit the brakes and hooked into the parking lot. Must have seen the Mazda. She tried to Google Dieter and Mischa Drabenstott and get an address but she was shaking so violently she could barely hold the phone — her core temperature was still way down. Finally she found the number in the online White Pages and dialed. Walking to the windows fronting the street she saw two state troopers get out of the dark blue troop car and approach her Mazda. When they saw Payton, they both drew their weapons.
She knocked on the glass and a trooper looked around at her.
Someone answered at the Drabenstott residence in Lake Placid, sounding sleepy. “Hello?”
“Rick — it’s Kelly. Is everyone okay?”
“Kelly . . . what?”
She raised her voice. “Is everyone okay?”
“We’re fine . . . we’re fine.”
“You need to get out of there. He’s targeted you. He probably tracked your car.”
“Kelly, calm down, I can barely — who’s tracked us?”
“Get out of there,” she said, and the state trooper stepped into the gas station. “Hang on,” she said to Rick, and she told the trooper what was happening and gave him the address. “People are coming,” she told Rick. “You have any weapons there? Dieter have a rifle, something?”
“No, Kelly, I don’t think — are you talking about him? Your case?”
Her vision was blurring around the edges, her teeth chattering. She leaned against the glass with her shoulder, and her legs began to buckle. As she slid toward the floor she said, “I’m so sorry, Rick. I’m so sorry . . .”
It had been a house fire started by paper jammed in a radiator, keeping the state police busy on the other side of Saranac Lake, putting them an hour away from Green Pond at the time Blanchett reported losing her signal. Two troopers stayed at the gas station, put Payton in the back of the troop car and waited for the ambulance while the other pair headed for Green Pond. She wanted to go to Rick, but for the moment she was wrapped in a thermal blanket and sitting on the curb outside the gas station, talking to Dixon on the phone, explaining about Haig’s confession and his plan to attack her family.
“They weren’t home this weekend,” she told Dixon. “They were up at Uschi’s parents’ home in Lake Placid.”
“First troopers just arrived,” Dixon said. “Found everyone in good health, house is secure.”
She closed her eyes and pulled in a tight breath. “That’s good. That’s really good.”
“You sound hurt. Troopers said you’re in bad shape.”
“Broward’s dead.” Her eyes popped open and she felt the tears springing up. “I pulled him out of the lake behind Payton’s house. Payton killed him.”
“And the state police have Payton, I’m told.”
“They’re taking him in now.”
“You put him in your car? Kelly you’re something else.”
“He’s been communicating with Blake Haig.”
“And he’ll sign a statement? He’s going to cooperate?”
She looked at him through the windows of the troop car, just a dark figure in the back seat. “He was hoping this would all be over for him. Tried to provoke me . . . I think he’ll talk, but he didn’t know it was Haig. Never met him in person. Haig was at Dani’s funeral but they didn’t speak then.”
“Wait for the ambulance, Kelly. I want you to get looked at. You go with them—”
“I can’t do that—”
“Kelly you go with them and let them check you out, you’re no good to anyone if you’re dead of hypothermia.”
“It’s my family.”
“I know, Kelly. I know. We’ll take care of them. We’ll take care of them.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Tuesday, December 4
When the FBI and Auburn police surrounded Haig’s home at seven o’clock that morning, Kelly was riding in another state police car. They escorted her from the Adirondack Medical Center back down to Syracuse.
A prepaid phone had arrived for her while still in the emergency room.
“Haig came quietly,” Dixon said over the phone. “Acted like he didn’t know what the hell was going on, like there’d been some sort of big misunderstanding.”
“I bet he did,” Kelly replied.
“
A first look at his phone shows no outgoing calls last night. He’s got another one around, though — we’ll find it.”
“Or he destroyed it.”
“Yeah, maybe. What else do we got that’s solid besides Payton?”
“Was there a tracker on the car? On my brother’s car?”
“Troopers checked, nothing they could find. They questioned your sister-in-law per my instructions. She doesn’t recall seeing anyone suspicious, being watched or anything. If he was tracking them at one point, he got rid of that evidence, too. I got to be honest with you, Kelly — at this point it’s not looking good.”
She visualized the agents in their black armored vests, yellow “FBI” stenciling on the back, the local Auburn cops — Orzo there too, Dixon said — taking Blake Haig from his little white house with black shutters, Haig coming out and looking like Billy Bath had, showing no fear, no remorse.
* * *
At the US attorney’s office in Syracuse she listened to Haig’s first interview with Orzo with her eyes closed, focusing on the voice. Payton had hit her over the head and she’d blacked out — her medical examination concluded she’d been concussed. She needed to confirm it was the same voice she’d heard on the phone, with Starkey expressing doubts over her mental state. She’d awakened in Payton’s bed and he’d put the phone down beside her on speaker. Her head throbbing, her mind going in a dozen directions at once, she’d listened to the killer. Now she was trying to match that tinny voice with one of the three men she’d interviewed, and it wasn’t working.
She already knew it was Haig. He’d talked about his wife’s affair. They’d talked about Grumett’s book, and she knew his voice, it had to be him.
But she’d been wrong about things on this case — too many times to ignore.
Dixon stood arms folded next to Starkey and the assistant prosecutor, Giovanetti, plus Genarro, who’d flown in that afternoon.
“Did he ever say his name?” Genarro asked.
“It was him,” Kelly said.
“Did he ever admit it to Payton?”
She ripped off the headphones and dropped them to the ground. They’d been over this half a dozen times already. “It doesn’t matter what Payton says.”
Starkey moved closer. “You’re right, it doesn’t. The defense will say Roger Payton is unreliable, a grieving alcoholic. We’re the prosecution and we have the entire police force at our disposal, the FBI, acting as investigators, but all they need is reasonable doubt. Haig is in custody — on your word — and we’ve turned his home upside down, but there’s no evidence of any crimes. There’s still no gun, no vehicle, no DNA evidence, no phone, no crime scene witnesses. Unless we get proof of the affair — either Grumett changes his story or we find some trace evidence of Tammy Haig in his car, or we get a witness — we’ve got no motive for Haig. And he’s got an alibi for every single murder — he’s at work every time, logged into the system and occasionally even caught on video.”
Dixon looked at the floor. “Grumett still says no on the affair. He’s agreed to cooperate with everything — he’s got a lawyer with him but he’s submitting to swabs and fingerprinting.”
Kelly said, “That won’t tell us anything. That’s why he’s doing it.”
“I know.”
“Paternity test on Tammy’s baby was positive for Blake Haig.”
“Right. It’s a dead end. The baby was Blake’s, whether she was having an affair or not, and unless there’s something he can’t wriggle out of, Grumett’s going to stick.”
She thought about it. “What about Jason Sandaker?”
Starkey looked between Kelly and Dixon. “The co-worker?”
“He works at Xylem,” she reminded them.
“Yeah. The one you rolled up on outside his house.” Starkey walked to his desk and pushed some papers around. “Okay — right — you found him and Blake Haig and the Harbaugh brothers meeting at a diner. The Harbaughs we talked to — they say no way it was Haig. He’s been actively investigating his wife’s death for weeks.”
“Because he did it.”
The prosecutor’s eyes were sharp. “That may be so. But right now, Russell and Matthew Harbaugh are on for the defense. They’re now convinced Payton is the guy, and all the rest is smoke and mirrors. And the facts on the ground are, Haig claims he’s innocent. I get the strong feeling from his counsel there’s no way he’s going to take a plea, because they hold all the cards. All we’d have at a trial is your testimony, and you’re on the record as concussed — you were unconscious for approximately two hours. If it goes how I think it’s going to go with this lawyer of his then we’ll be lucky if they don’t sue.”
“Who’s his lawyer?”
“A guy named Lance Tomlin, and he is a pit bull. Tomlin was friends with Haig’s late father, so he’s got family ties, he’ll fight all the harder — he’s even doing it pro bono. Bail hearing is tomorrow. We’ve thrown everything at this, but the evidence is underwhelming and Blake Haig’s record is so clean there’s a solid chance the judge will set bail low, or just ROR him, and that’s it, he walks.”
She felt crushed.
“The Harbaugh brothers must’ve seen something, heard something. Maybe we can turn them,” Genarro said.
“They’re already crowing about police entrapment,” Starkey said. “Rabble-rousing about this being an instance of police ginning up a suspect — Haig — in order to close a case.”
Blake Haig had gone to work on them, Kelly thought, just like he’d worked on Roger Payton and Ted Archer, getting into their heads, twisting things around. Maybe others, too.
“Sandaker did something,” she said. “He’s covering for Haig, lying for him. We need to find out everything we can about him. Maybe he does more at Xylem than operate a forklift.”
Everyone in the room looked at her.
Genarro moved closer. “Kelly, you need more rest. You don’t look—”
She brushed him away when he tried to get an arm around her. “Haig’s got another vehicle somewhere. He’s got a rifle. Let’s look at his mother in Utica. Find all his relatives. And that book . . .”
The room was starting to spin, faces elongating and twisting. “That . . . goddamned book is . . . somewhere.”
And then Genarro caught her as her legs gave out.
* * *
Alone in her hotel room she plugged in her speakers and opened iTunes, selected Country Down by Beck and flopped onto the bed and let the music wash over her. Dixon and Webber and the rest of them were out hunting for anything they could find on Haig while she was relegated to her room. She closed her eyes and thought about the memorial benches in Onondaga Park, thought about death, identity, and what it all meant to people.
Payton was probably now just finished processing into County and about to spend his first of many nights behind bars. And for what? Because he thought he deserved it? Payton was talking, admitting he’d been called and that he now believed it had been Blake Haig, but it was just one man’s word against the other. And Kelly had been under duress, beaten and confused, incapable of sound judgment. If there even had been a phone call, the defense would say, it could have been anyone. Desperate to put a face to the serial killer, she’d chosen Haig. An unscrupulous attorney might even call into question her character and insinuate that Blake Haig reminded her of her attacker from when she was eighteen, that she held a grudge against men.
That seemed to be the point for Haig — demonstrate that free will is an illusion, that human beings were ruled by emotions, incapable of making truly free choices. Because he lacked any real empathy of his own, he thought people were reactive animals at the mercy of outside forces.
But he hadn’t predicted Rick’s last-minute trip to the Adirondacks — Haig had screwed that one up. He’d gotten cocky and sloppy. It was random chance that Rick’s family had decided to take a long weekend away from home at the same time she’d chosen to visit Roger Payton.
As if there was a balance to things, a barte
r — sparing her brother and his family had cost Broward his life.
It was also possible Haig never meant to kill them and this whole thing was just a set up for her, a way to play with her like he’d played with Ted Archer and Roger Payton. See what she would do, study her like watching a worm writhe on a hook, get off on predicting how she would react.
After a little while, she fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wednesday, December 5
Kelly’s small suitcase was on her bed, packed and ready to go. Dixon came in and dropped the papers and photos on her table in the hotel room. She looked at the photos and drew a fresh lungful of air that felt good to breathe in.
“White Jeep Cherokee. Found in Utica, parked in the space where his mother lives at the elder care center.” Dixon fanned out the photos and pointed to one showing a jumper cable compartment in the back. “Winchester Model 94. Box of Federal Premium .30-30 150 grain Centerfire Rifle Ammunition, purchased at Walmart in the same city. Cherokee is registered to a relative down in Pennsylvania, so is the gun.”
She bent and moved some more photos around as Dixon continued to narrate. “Those are latex gloves in his trash, that’s a bottle of baby powder, probably used to keep his hands from sweating, but they also kept prints from sticking to the inside plastic. No prints anywhere on the gun, but then we’ve got three eyewitnesses from the Utica gun range who will testify that Haig was there shooting, and he was shooting that gun.”
She picked up a picture and Dixon said, “That’s his computer, and he’s wiped it, but he never added any new files to complete the wipe so we’ve got a partial search history and it’s loaded with good stuff about game hunting and ballistics, plus a few YouTube videos that have you talking to that reporter, Oxley, then headlines from back when you had your assault. We found links to a website that sells tracking devices and an emailed receipt of purchase.”
“No book?”
“No book,” Dixon said. “Talked to some relatives, though, the uncle in Pennsylvania. He says Haig grew up mostly in Rochester, his dad worked at Kodak, mother who may’ve been a bit on the rambunctious side. Used to tell little Blake Haig he was an accident. So, I don’t know. By the time they moved here the father was working himself to death and the mother was losing her marbles. Haig just kind of did his own thing. The uncle said he was smart.”
The Husbands Page 24
