Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101)

by Jance, Judith A.

  I saw Marc position himself right in the middle of the observation deck. With his feet spread to maintain his balance, his elbows extended on either side of his head as he focused his camera. Then, as the door at the front of the car swished open once more, the car was plunged into total darkness as the train entered what I would later learn was called Tunnel Mountain.

  As the train roared into the tunnel, I caught one final glimpse of Marc Alley, standing there with his attention focused entirely on his camera. I heard the door to the observation platform swish open and closed once more. In the darkness, I hoped that meant Marc was coming inside. Just then, I saw a flash go off, not once but twice. Worried that someone else had come down the aisle and bumped into Marc without seeing him, I started out of my seat to go check. Just then I heard the observation platform door swish open one more time. As I stepped into the aisle, someone crashed into me with enough force that it knocked the wind out of me and sent me sprawling back into my seat.

  Struggling to regain my breath, I heard a long, piercing scream. The sound ended abruptly as the observation platform door slid shut once again. Heart pounding, I staggered back to my feet and charged down the aisle. I reached the observation platform just as the train burst out of the far side of the tunnel and into blinding sunlight.

  Out on the platform, Marc Alley was on his hands and knees, scrambling to regain his footing and his camera. He crawled over to the rail and pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. Lars, clinging to the guardrail, was holding Mike Conyers’ coat and pointing back through the tunnel. As for Mike Conyers? He was nowhere to be seen.

  “What happened?” I shouted, over the clatter of iron wheels on the track.

  “Someone hit me,” Marc shouted back at me. “They hit me from behind. And when I fell . . . Oh, my God!” The dawning horror of realization washed over Marc’s face. “Where is he?” he demanded. “Where’s the other man who was standing right here?”

  “He fell,” Lars shouted back. “I caught hold of an arm of his coat, but it came away in my hands. It happened just as we went into the tunnel.”

  “But is he all right? We weren’t going all that fast. Maybe he landed on the track and he’s okay or just bruised up a little. Somebody stop the train! Pull the emergency brakes! We’ve got to go back and check.”

  Lars reached over and laid one hand on Marc Alley’s shoulder. “He didn’t fall on the tracks.” Lars said the words quietly. Despite the din of the moving train I heard every word as distinctly as if he’d been speaking with a microphone from the pulpit of a deathly still church. “He fell a long way—a long, long way.”

  Just then someone did yank the emergency brake. The sudden slowing sent Marc, Lars, and me tumbling into one another and grabbing desperately for the rail to keep from falling ourselves. By the time the train finally stopped, the conductor came careening through the door.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded, his voice trembling with righteous anger. “What the hell is going on here? Can’t you read the sign? It says no one’s allowed beyond this point!”

  “Someone fell,” I said.

  “Fell!” he repeated. “You mean someone fell off the train? When? Where?”

  “Back there,” Lars told him. “Just on the other side of the tunnel.”

  Behind us the door opened again. Lucy Conyers staggered out onto the observation platform. “What happened?” she asked.

  “Go back,” the conductor ordered. “No one’s allowed out here!”

  But Lucy wasn’t listening to him. She looked from Lars to Marc to me with a questioning, horrified expression that none of us wanted to answer.

  “Where’s Mike?” she demanded. “Tell me. Where did he go? He was right here a minute ago. Where is he now?”

  The conductor’s face passed through a myriad of expressions—angry, impatient, outraged—before settling on one of concern. “You know this man?” he asked with surprising gentleness. “You know the man who fell?”

  “Fell!” Lucy repeated. “Mike fell off the train?” She ran to Lars and grabbed his jacket by the lapels. “Is it true?”

  Shaking his head, Lars handed her Mike’s coat. “I tried to catch him,” he said. “I caught the arm of his coat, but he fell right out of it. I’m sorry.”

  Lars looked as though he himself were about to burst into tears, and I knew exactly how he felt.

  “How far did he fall?” Lucy demanded.

  “I’m not sure,” Lars told her. “It seemed like a long way.”

  “You mean he’s not all right then.”

  “No, he won’t be all right.”

  The conductor turned on Lars. “You all know each other?” Lars and I both nodded. Marc said nothing. “All of you stay here,” the conductor continued. “Don’t touch anything. The engineer and I will decide what to do.”

  Lucy, with her face buried in Mike’s coat, fell into Lars’ arms and sobbed her heart out against his chest. Since he was busy comforting her, I turned my attention on Marc Alley, whose face had turned pasty-white.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Somebody pushed me,” he said. “They tried to kill me.”

  “You’re sure it was deliberate?”

  He nodded. “You warned me something like that could happen. You told me those people were going to try to kill me. But did I listen? No, I did not, and now my stupidity has cost that poor man his life. I fell, and as I did, I must have shoved him. I couldn’t see anything, but I’m sure that’s what happened. What am I going to do, Beau? A man is dead, and it’s all my fault.”

  “You’re sure this was done on purpose?” I asked. “I mean, someone could have just come through the door and bumped into you by accident. It was dark enough that they wouldn’t have been able to see anything, either.”

  Marc shook his head grimly. “No,” he declared. “Whoever hit me did it on purpose.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I felt two hands on my back. They hit me right at the base of my ribs, just above the belt and hard enough to knock the breath out of me. I was standing close to the door because I wanted to get a shot of the canyon that would be framed by the walls of the tunnel as the train went inside. But because I was standing so close to the door, I fell to the floor and landed inside the rail instead of falling over it. I felt someone against me then, as I fell. That must be when I hit Mike. Oh, my God. I’m the one who knocked him off the train. But even if I didn’t, it’s still all my fault. Whoever came after me caused this to happen. You warned me to play it safe, and I didn’t pay any attention. It doesn’t really matter who pushed Mike. What’s happened is all my fault.”

  That’s when I remembered the person who had come mowing down the aisle from the observation platform and who had knocked me aside as easily as if I’d been a ninepin. Whoever it was had to be the killer, but when I was hit, the train had been engulfed in total darkness. I never caught a glimpse of the person.

  “Did you see who it was?” I asked.

  Marc shook his head. “By the time I landed, we were in the tunnel. I couldn’t see a thing.”

  The door opened again. The conductor stepped back outside. “Everybody inside,” he said. “We’re going to back through the tunnel and see if we can see where he landed. I’ve notified the Alaska state troopers. They’ll be sending a pair of investigators up from Skagway. We’ll try to catch sight of the victim and see if there’s a chance he’s still alive. We’ve asked for a Search and Rescue team.”

  As ordered, we made our way back inside. I returned to my seat and motioned Marc Alley into the empty place beside me. Then, moving almost imperceptibly, the train began to inch backward. It took a long, long time for it to back into the tunnel. It took even longer for us to creep through Tunnel Mountain until finally we eased back into daylight on the far side.

  “Come on,” the conductor said to Lars and Marc. “Show me where it happened.”

  I wasn’t officially invit
ed on this little excursion, but I tagged along anyway. Once back outside the tunnel, we all stood hanging on to the guardrail and peering down at the floor of the canyon a good thousand feet below us. Naturally, hawk-eyed Lars was the one who spotted what was left of Mike Conyers.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “See him? Right there next to the stream.”

  After several minutes I, too, was able to sort out exactly where it was Lars was pointing. By then, someone on the train had produced a pair of field glasses and passed them along outside. As soon as I took a look at the limp figure sprawled across a man-sized boulder, I knew it was all over.

  I passed the binoculars along to someone else and went back inside to where Lucy Conyers was curtained off behind a protective barrier of womanhood. My grandmother caught my eye and raised her eyebrows. When I shook my head, she stepped aside and allowed me access into that inner circle. Inside, Lucy Conyers turned her tear-filled eyes on me, and for the second time in two days, retired or not, I had to pass along the bad news.

  “Did you see him?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  “Mike’s not moving, Lucy,” I told her. “It looks as though he landed on a boulder. Search and Rescue will go retrieve him, but I doubt he’s alive.”

  Lucy Conyers nodded and stiffened her shoulders. “Okay,” she said quietly. “If that’s the way it is, okay. At least now poor Mike doesn’t have to suffer anymore.”

  And neither do you, I thought. At least I had the good grace not to say it aloud, and neither did anyone else, although I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who connected those dots. Mike Conyers was the one who was dead, but at least death had ended the inevitable erosion of his faculties. For Lucy, no matter how much grief she felt, this final loss would be a blessing. However it had come about, at least she would no longer be trapped into trying to hold the line between the person Mike Conyers had once been and the child/man entity and stranger he was gradually becoming.

  Beverly leaned down and touched Lucy’s shoulder. “Are you going to be all right?” Beverly asked.

  Lucy looked at my grandmother and then back at me. “Yes, thank you,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I knew then that she would be.

  14

  AFTER SOMETHING LIKE THAT happens, people go into a form of shock. They talk in hushed tones. They compare what they saw or thought they saw and try to make sense of what has happened. Marc Alley went back to his own car. Lucy was protected by my grandmother and the Wakefield “girls.” Lars, standing alone out on the observation platform, was the one I worried about.

  “I should have caught him,” he said. “When I was younger it was nothing to grab a two-hundred-pound halibut and heave him into a boat single-handed. If I could have caught his arm instead of his coat . . .” He sighed.

  “You did what you could,” I told him. “And the thing is, if you had caught his arm, there’s a good chance he would have pulled you off the train right along with him.”

  “I almost wish he had,” Lars said hopelessly.

  I wanted to console him, wanted to make him feel better. “You know more than anybody what he and Lucy were going through. Don’t you think he’s better off?”

  Lars closed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s not for you or me to say, Beau,” he said. That comment was the nearest thing to a rebuke I ever had from Lars Jenssen, and I knew I deserved it.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  We stayed on a siding at the top of White Pass long enough for the Search and Rescue helicopter to arrive, then the train headed back down the mountain. Two hours later and only halfway back to Skagway, the train pulled over and stopped. Moments later a pair of Alaska state troopers came aboard.

  Detectives Sonny Liebowitz and Jake Ripley were an unlikely-looking and-sounding pair of partners. Sonny was short and wide and sounded as if he had just stepped off the El in downtown Chicago. Jake, on the other hand, was tall and scrawny. He looked like an American Indian, but he spoke with a distinctly Southern drawl. It might have been interesting to have an opportunity to chew the fat with them and find out just how it was that both of them had ended up in Alaska, but by then it was almost three and my mostly geriatric fellow passengers were growing restless and cranky.

  These were folks accustomed to three square meals a day plus occasional snacks. By three o’clock in the afternoon, even those who had partaken of Beverly’s picnic-style “forenoon coffee” were famished and more than ready to be back on board the Starfire Breeze. They weren’t at all happy with the prospect of further delays. I heard grumbling as soon as Detectives Liebowitz and Ripley announced that no one would be allowed to disembark until after they had completed their interviews. As a fellow detective, I applauded any plan that included interviewing all the passengers on board the train, since Mike Conyers’ killer was bound to be among them. As primary caretaker of a covey of aging passengers who had missed lunch and were in danger of missing dinner as well, I was more than a little concerned about how long the questioning process would take.

  First the detectives worked their way through our car, taking names and asking general questions about who was in the car and who was sitting where. After half an hour to forty-five minutes of that, they went into a more detailed mode. For that, they conducted people off the train. Lucy Conyers was the first person designated for that treatment, and her solo interview took the better part of an hour. When Jake Ripley came to collect the next interviewees, Marc Alley and Lars Jenssen, Lucy Conyers didn’t return to the train.

  At the time I noticed her absence and thought it odd, but I didn’t give it all that much consideration. It occurred to me that, after what had happened, maybe she had chosen to spend some time alone. It was possible that the constant attentions of Beverly and the Wakefield “girls” were beginning to get on her nerves. It was also possible that she had found access to a telephone and was using that private time to notify her children of their father’s death. That’s a hurtful job best done without benefit of an audience.

  Once Liebowitz and Ripley had finished with Lars and Marc, I wasn’t the least bit surprised that I was next on their list. They led me off the train and into a small guard shack which came equipped with a desk, a noisy but effective electric heater, and three rickety folding chairs. Sonny Liebowitz, seated behind the desk, motioned me into one of the two remaining chairs. Jake leaned his lanky frame against the door and stayed there, making me wonder if he was keeping me inside or keeping others out.

  “So, Mr. Beaumont,” Sonny Liebowitz said. “You’re the retired cop Mr. Alley was telling us about?” I nodded. “What’s this about the FBI and some off-the-wall murder plot?” Sonny continued. “Any truth to that, do you think?”

  “If you want official confirmation, you’d be better off contacting the two FBI agents assigned to the case, Rachel Dulles or Alex Freed. They’re registered as ordinary passengers on board the Starfire Breeze under the names of Phyllis and Kurt Nix.”

  Sonny seemed surprised at that news. “So Alley wasn’t making this up? There really are two FBI agents on board the ship?”

  “By actual count there are three,” I told him. “You may know Todd Bowman.”

  “You mean that young, fat-necked baby fed from up in Juneau?” Jake Ripley asked.

  From my point of view, Todd Bowman wasn’t all that much younger than Jake was, but age, like beauty, is relative. “That’s right,” I said. “Bowman’s on board, too. He’s investigating the death of Margaret Featherman.”

  “That’s the lady who supposedly fell overboard day before yesterday?”

  I took exception to the way Sonny Liebowitz spoke and to the question itself. I didn’t like his use of the word “supposedly.” Margaret Featherman was gone. There was no “supposedly” about it.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Sonny clicked his tongue. “Sounds like this cruise has been nothing but a barrel of laughs. I guess the Love Boat’s
leaving fantasyland. You wonder why people around here are tired of cruise lines and all the people and shit they drag up here? I’ll tell you why. They dump their raw sewage and garbage and bilgewater into our waterways and figure it’s no big deal. As for the passengers, some of them decide they’re back in the Wild West and think anything goes. Wrong!”

  Obviously Detective Sonny Liebowitz wasn’t a card-carrying member of the Alaskan Tourism Board. Furrowing his thick brows, he studied his notes for some time before he spoke again. “So, from what you’re saying, I’m assuming that the FBI is taking this whole situation seriously. What about you, Mr. Beaumont? Do you think someone came through the car, ran out onto the observation platform, and pushed Mike Conyers over the side when what they really meant to do was off Marc Alley?”

  “That’s what I believe happened,” I said. “When we went into the tunnel, I know Marc was standing right in front of the door, lining up his camera to take a picture. Then, in the dark, I remember hearing doors open and close.”

  “You say doors. As in at both the front and the back of the car?”

  I nodded. “That’s right, and it worried me. Marc was out there, and I was afraid that in the dark someone might stumble into him without seeing him. I was on my way to check when someone coming back up the aisle—back from the observation platform—crashed into me running full-tilt. The blow was hard enough that it knocked the wind out of me and sent me flying ass-over-teakettle right back into my seat.”

  “But you didn’t see who it was?”

  “No, it was dark.”

  “Any chance this unknown assailant might have been Lucy Conyers?”

  “Lucy?” I repeated in surprise. “Of course it wasn’t Lucy.”

  “Why not?” Sonny returned. “It’s happened before. Some old person goes off his rocker. Next thing you know, it gets to be too much for the relatives—you know, for whoever’s supposed to be taking care of him. Matter of fact, we had an incident just like this a little over a year ago. Middle of August last year, a woman pushed her husband out of their motor home and left him stranded in the middle of nowhere on the Al-Can Highway. Claimed they stopped along the road to take some pictures and she drove off without knowing he was out of the vehicle.