“I’m done arguing,” Ellen said. “I’ve told you what I’ve done and why. All that’s left is for you to squirm like a gaffed fish. Good luck, brother.”
“How do you know I won’t just kill you now?” Bill asked. “What have I got to lose?”
“Two reasons. First, I don’t think you’re capable. You couldn’t finish off Davis, and you couldn’t take care of Rosa when the time came. Yes, Pardo told me you left him to do it. And you wouldn’t have the guts to kill me, either.”
“This is different.” He took a step toward her. “I can kill you right now. Pardo will back me up. Nobody will know any difference, only that you disappeared. Hell, you might even look guilty. Like you ran.”
He was nervous, jumpy, but Ellen wasn’t afraid. Her hand had slipped into her purse as Bill spoke. Her fingers now wrapped around the handle of a .38 pistol, which she removed. “This is the other reason.”
Her voice, so calm. Inside, she was bursting with fierce joy that she’d come back and done this thing. She’d rehearsed this moment so many times in her mind that she knew that if necessary she would lift the gun and shoot him in the head.
Bill stopped, took a step backwards. He stared at the gun. “You’d do that?”
“Oh, happily. You’d deserve it. In fact, I’m almost hoping you make a move. I’ve practiced with this thing enough. I’m more than a little curious about how well I’ll handle it under pressure.”
His shoulders slumped as if he knew he were defeated. “But what am I going to do?”
“That’s up to you,” she said. She allowed a smile, although she felt her joy fading, even in her moment of triumph and revenge. “I know how I handled it, when I was stabbed in the back.” She looked out the window at the equipment lit up by the security lights. “But it’ll hurt like hell for you, seeing all this stuff sold off. Once you’re arrested and I file my claims in court, company business will grind to a halt. No new bids, you can count on that. And any existing clients with half a brain will start calling around. Your competitors will be delighted to pick over the corpse, including poaching your best men.”
She pointed to the gravel crusher and separator. “Remember when that guy threw himself into the crusher? Dad said it was his best foreman. Can’t remember what that was about. Did his wife leave him or something? Anyway, that’d be a way to go. Over in a few seconds. Might even become part of one of the roads. That’s a funny thought.”
Ellen turned to go, leaving her brother staring out the window. She felt deflated. No matter what Bill did now, she had taken her revenge. There was nothing left.
When she was climbing into her car, a few minutes later, she heard the crank of machinery coming to life. The conveyor belt crawling away from the crusher. A machine that pulverized stone could do the same with bones.
Chapter Twenty-five: Wes and Becca walked down the hall until they were out of sight of the nurse’s station, but could still see the door to Team Smile’s room. One of the elderly residents shuffled to the bathroom, muttering to herself. Wes saw Becca watching, unable to help herself, to make sure the woman made it to the bathroom and back without help. He remembered her cynical tirades about Riverwood and the futility of working with these people. Her actions belied those words.
“Let me see that card,” Becca said.
He handed over the index card where he’d written Davis’s message, or the part of it that they’d captured.
“DRP?” she said. “He must be getting tired if he’s skipping vowels.”
“What does it mean?” Wes asked. “Drop? Drop something?”
“We might have messed up a letter. That P might be an O.”
“Which could leave us with ‘drown.’ He might want to talk about what happened.” He thought about that fumbled end of the sentence. “Maybe that bit where it looked like he was saying the end of the sentence was a letter that we missed. Where was that? After the D or after the R?”
“After the R. But we’re not going to figure it out with three letters. We’ve got to get back in there. What’s taking Dr. Pardo so long?” She chewed on her fingernail.
“Maybe we should have just told him,” Wes said. “We could have shown him how my uncle was blinking, and then we wouldn’t have had to sneak him out of here. You think we could trust him, don’t you?”
“Yeah, probably. Come on,” she muttered. “His eye is fine.”
Wes looked down at the card, and suddenly thought of that fumbled double blink that they’d dismissed. Supposing he put it back in there. That would leave DR.P.
He looked up at Becca with a frown and a nervous tickle at his stomach. “Where is Dr. Pardo from anyway? Is that a Persian name?”
“No. You mean you didn’t recognize the accent?”
The nervous tickle spread. “It’s not much of an accent. Please don’t tell me he’s from Costa Rica.”
She looked from the door to meet his gaze and her own frown deepened. “No, I think it’s El Salvador. He…wait. You don’t think—”
Wes lifted the card to show her. “Put a period between the DR and the P.”
“Dr. Pardo.”
It made sense, now. Wes had seen his uncle and Pardo walking down the hall that day. And who was that doctor anyway, who’d made arrangements with the Solorios? Uncle Bill would have needed a doctor again, when they’d flown Davis via air ambulance to the United States. Someone to declare him dead and create false medical records for Chad Lett. Pardo, a doctor and a Spanish speaker, could have made things happen in both Costa Rica and the United States.
Wes and Becca started toward the door to Team Smile’s room. But at that moment it swung open and Pardo came out. His hand was in his pocket. He looked and met their eyes and reversed course, headed in a swift walk instead toward the west wing exit.
“Stop him,” Wes cried. Pardo ran. Anne Wistrom stared from the nurse station, eyes wide, as he and Becca chased the doctor. Wes caught the man by the shoulders as he reached the doors. Pardo turned with a snarl and slammed his fist into the side of Wes’s head. He fell back, ears ringing.
“You son of a bitch,” Wes said, grabbing again. The man stumbled through the doorway and down the stairs with Wes holding his lab coat. They tripped and landed sprawling in the snow. Both men came up swinging.
And then Becca joined them, grabbing Pardo’s right arm and holding it while Wes swung glancing blows. One of them finally connected with Pardo’s nose and a shock rolled through Wes’s arm. Blood streamed down Pardo’s face onto his white coat and the snow.
Ann Wistrom burst through the doors. She was a tall woman, strongly built, and she dragged Becca back from the doctor. “What the hell are you doing?”
Pardo tried to reach his feet, but Wes grabbed him around the legs and pulled him down again.
“Stop the doctor,” Becca said. She tried to free herself from Wistrom.
Wes was almost spent, but Pardo couldn’t land any of his own blows, either.
“What are you talking about? Why?” Wistrom’s voice was hysterical.
“He’s euthanizing residents,” Becca cried.
Wes got on top and leaned in with his elbow, pressing into Pardo’s throat. Pardo panted. Blood trickled from a cut on his face.
“You’re out of your mind,” Pardo said. “I was checking his eye, you idiots.”
Wistrom let go of Becca who threw herself on top of the doctor’s kicking legs. A moment later and the two of them had him pinned in place.
The nurse studied something on the ground. She bent to pick it up. It was a bottle of medicine. “This is digoxin.” She looked at Pardo. “And it’s empty. Were you giving this to one of the residents?”
“Digoxin? What does that mean?” Becca asked.
“That’s not mine,” Pardo said.
“Like hell it isn’t,” Wistrom said. “I saw it fall out of your pocket.” To the others, she said, “A whole bottle of this stuff is lethal. It’ll stop your heart. We need an ambulance right away.”
&nbs
p; “We’ll hold him here,” Wes said. He rummaged through the man’s lab coat, but only found a pair of keys. The fight had left him wiped out. “And call the police too. Hurry.”
Becca lifted herself partially and came down on Pardo’s groin with her knee. He cried out. She said. “That’s for Rosa. You’re the one who killed her, aren’t you?”
#
Two weeks earlier, Bill Carter had parked in front of the trailer where Dr. Pardo waited for him. The trailer sat propped on cinderblocks, near Hancock at the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest. Northrock was regrading Route 125 over the Green Mountains in the spring; they’d moved a construction trailer that fall to do some preliminary surveying and left it there for the next year’s work.
Pardo had driven down earlier in the evening and found it unlocked as Carter had promised. He flipped on the lights in the front room. The inside was bare except for a folding table, a pair of chairs, and a couch. Nothing in the bedroom. The floor throughout was fake wood linoleum, heavily scuffed. The walls, wood paneling. The trailer held the odor of stale cigarette smoke and it was cold. He returned to wait in his car with the heat running.
The lights from Bill’s car had awakened Pardo from a semi-slumber and he stepped into the night air, feet crunching on the snow, to greet his old friend. Bill Carter looked grim. He popped his trunk. And there was Rosa, still alive, her wrists taped behind her back and tape wrapped around her face, covering her mouth. She stared at him with bugging eyes.
Dr. Pardo looked away. “Thought you were going to take care of her.”
“I was. Soon as I got on Route 100, I was going to pull over and shoot her. But it took forever until that nurse took her break and I could move my brother back to his room. By the time I got back to the car my blood had cooled. In more ways than one.”
“So what? You want to burn her alive?”
Bill made a face. “Of course not. No need to torture her. But I’m wondering if you could take care of her for me.”
“After you’re gone, of course.” Pardo thought of that day at the hacienda and the men he’d shot in the head or hacked to death with a machete. This would be different. He had no stomach for it.
Bill nodded. “Give me a couple of minutes until I get back on 125. Then take care of her and leave her inside when you burn the trailer. This place is so wooded and isolated, nobody will see the fire. And it’s dark, so they won’t see smoke, either.”
Pardo understood more about the decomposition of the human body than his friend. “Doesn’t matter if the trailer burns to the ground, Bill, any decent investigator will find bone fragments and teeth.”
“Nobody will be up here for two months. I’ll make sure the road to the trailer won’t be plowed again till spring. Just in case. I’ll come up to check out the job site in April, discover the arson, then have my guys clean up the wreckage. We’ll haul in another trailer. This piece of junk is worth what? Couple thousand bucks? Why even bother reporting it to the police?”
The two men shook hands on it. Pardo grabbed Rosa under the arms, Bill her legs and they hauled her into the trailer and threw her on the couch. He remembered those campesinos in Peru when the Shining Path guerillas had pulled their bus over and lined them up outside. They’d known they were going to die, yet they hadn’t moved a muscle.
Rosa was the same way, now. She watched them, unmoving, as they took cans of gas from Pardo’s car and splashed it throughout the interior of the trailer until the linoleum floor was slick and the fumes were so thick Pardo felt nauseous. And still she didn’t move, just lay there, trembling, now turning her nose into the couch away from the smell. She was a smart girl. She would understand what they meant to do to her. Hell, they’d spoken aloud.
What was it that made these people incapable of acting? Was it their Catholic upbringing, teaching them they were helpless without God? That whatever happened was His will? Or was it nothing more than cowardice?
They soaked her clothes with gasoline and poured the rest into the couch. A moment later, they were outside and Pardo took deep, cold breaths to clear the awful smell of gasoline. He got a box of matches from his car and Bill retrieved the gun. He handed it to Pardo. “You’ll shoot her before you light the fire, right?”
“Of course.”
“You’re sure? Because she’s not—”
Pardo lost his temper. “You want to be sure? You want to do it yourself? No? Then shut up.”
Bill nodded. “Right. Sorry.” He returned to his car.
You owe me, Pardo thought as he watched Bill turn his car around and ease his way down the road. Again.
He almost lost his courage as he stepped toward the trailer. He didn’t want to kill Rosa. Maybe he could just threaten her, tell her to leave the country or else. That would mean doublecrossing Bill, but he’d half decided to do that anyway.
No, that wouldn’t work. Because she’d made that horrifying discovery. Davis Carter was still conscious inside his body. She’d told Pardo, explained how he’d blinked in response to her questions and Pardo had believed her. And when he’d talked to Bill they’d agreed. They needed to silence Davis before he could communicate with anyone else. Blind him, then kill him, if that didn’t work.
Rosa had told Pardo and when he hadn’t done anything, had told her, in fact, to keep her mouth shut, she’d gone to Bill Carter. Who would she tell next? And so Bill and Pardo had made a second agreement. They’d make Rosa disappear.
Pardo pushed the box of matches into his left pocket, then lifted the gun with sweaty hands and pushed open the door. Go in, pop, pop. Light the match. He’d be in his car in sixty seconds. But when he stepped into the trailer Rosa was gone. He could still see the indentation where she’d lain on the couch, the cushions slowly rebounding to their previous shape.
Pardo rushed through the trailer. There was a back door in the darkened bedroom, now wide open. He’d seen it when they’d dumped their gas. He’d been so convinced of Rosa’s helplessness that it hadn’t occurred to him she might try to escape with her wrists and mouth taped.
There were no stairs on this back side, just a drop of several feet. He looked down and was confused to see no mark in the snow where she’d landed. There wasn’t much light spilling out, but he’d expected to see footprints, too. Too late, he understood.
Movement behind him. He turned, just as Rosa slammed into him with her shoulder. She hadn’t left at all, but had thrown open the door and then waited in the shadows against the far wall. The blow knocked him off-balance and he went flying. He landed in the snow.
Pardo should have run around the far side to catch her coming out the front door, but his mind wasn’t working fast enough and he hoisted himself back into the trailer before thinking of it. Several more seconds passed before he found her footprints running at an angle from the front of the trailer into the woods. Pardo ran back to his car to get a flashlight out of the glove compartment.
He followed her footprints through the snow. She crashed through the trees maybe sixty or seventy feet ahead. The odor of gasoline lingered where she’d passed. Before long, he grew confused, having accidentally doubled over on his trail and now started retracing his own footsteps. He stopped, listened. The crashing came from his right this time. He followed.
Rosa moved faster than he’d have expected with her mouth and wrists taped. She headed away from the highway. On a cold night like this, without gloves or a heavy coat Pardo could get in real trouble if he got lost. What about Rosa, wearing nothing but jeans and a scrub top with no flashlight? And that gas soaking her clothes would evaporate and chill her further. Pardo lifted his gun and fired several shots shouting, “I’m going to kill you, bitch.”
He listened until he was satisfied that she continued to run away from the road. It was already below ten degrees. It would probably bottom out at ten below before the night was over. Rosa might have an hour or two before she collapsed from hypothermia. Some hiker might find her after the snow melted. Fine. That just meant P
ardo had to leave the country by spring. He thought about Bill Carter and how best to extract what he deserved from the man.
Pardo had returned to the trailer and set it on fire. Flames shot into the sky, so hot that he had to keep stepping farther back and snow melted and ran in rivulets down the hill. He got in the Mercedes and drove down the hill, wondering if even now Rosa had collapsed in the snow, gasping through her nose, trying to work free the tape at her mouth.
Chapter Twenty-six:
The police arrived at Riverwood and arrested Dr. Pardo. An ambulance came for Davis Carter. Wes wanted to go with his uncle, but Lieutenant Stiles insisted he and Becca come to the station to answer questions. Though it was late at night, the place bustled with officers from Waterbury Village as well as state troopers. Stiles interrogated them for two hours before sending them home. They were not to leave Vermont under any circumstances.
They drove straight to the hospital to see Wes’s uncle. Paramedics had taken him to Barre, about twenty minutes away, and with the empty bottle of digoxin as guide, had treatment waiting for his arrival. The overdose of digoxin would have shorted out the electrical signals to Davis’s heart, but the doctors set him on an IV of digibind, to counteract the digoxin as it hit his bloodstream. They hadn’t even needed to pump his stomach.
Wes called his Aunt Charlotte and she was at the hospital forty-five minutes later, dressed in sweats, a t-shirt, and wearing her glasses. Her fiancé, Christopher, came with her, looking slightly more together. Christopher stayed outside while Charlotte cried over Davis, apologizing again and again. Wes and Becca told her about their system with the cards and she set about at once to emulate it.
“What about the fiancé?” Becca asked Wes later, when the two had retreated to the cafeteria for coffee and pastries. “I talked to him for a few minutes and I’ve got to tell you I liked him.”
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