Secret letter. Stored with a bloody knife in a cigar box. Frank would love to hear Ted’s pitch on the story.
One thing was clear. This young girl, Karen, loved and trusted Ted way back in 1970. That Ted had saved the letter all these years spoke volumes about how he felt about her. In the safe, the cigar box sat on top of what looked like a fresh eruption of ammunition boxes. Why had Ted so recently dug it up?
And what camp? Was there, by some lucky streak, a Loon Lake up in Michigan, near where this address in Lake Ann was? Judge Gables might know and could answer the question, maybe a lot sooner than Frank could find out, even with the internet. But Frank wasn’t about to bother a hospitalized judge, not at oh-two-hundred, and not for the second time in one night, with a question like that.
In any case, between Kathryn Gables, Neil from Ann Arbor, and Lloyd, Ted’s situation involved weird deaths all over the place.
Frank pictured a camp counselor burning up in a fire.
“Heart problem, my ass,” he said to no one.
CHAPTER 38
Mr. Gray stood next to his partner on a boat ramp somewhere, facing a wide-enough river. The minivan and the young man’s pick-up stood side by side on the boat ramp, as though ready to drag race into the water. The truck’s owner rested in the van, just behind the front seats, freshly strangled and curled like a fetus. The guy’s prescription was for an antibiotic—not rubbers at all—so maybe no one would miss him, at least for a few hours. When Mr. Gray shoved the prescription bag down the back of the dead man’s pants, he tried not to wonder whether the guy had a sore throat or an earache or whether or not he was a daddy. Lewis stashed the last of their gear in the truck’s extended cab, shutting the door.
“Mr. Green’s gonna call any minute,” Mr. Gray said, looking at his watch. It was one in the morning.
Lewis didn’t respond. He opened the van’s windows enough to flood the vehicle but not enough for a slimy, bloated body to squish its way out and to the surface. He put the shift in neutral and hopped clear of the van. He and Mr. Gray watched it idle into the river. As the current pulled the sinking front end downstream, the van rolled onto its side, then its top. Wheels up, it bobbed while drifting into the darkness. Beneath one final slurp of wave action, the van disappeared.
The duo sped west in the dead young man’s pick-up.
~~~
Frank sat on the couch, still mired in his holding pattern. The weight of his limp hand pinned Karen’s letter to his lap. Images of her lecherous uncle drifted through his mind. Alcoholic. Pedophile. Dead. A hand-drawn, psychedelic rabbit with long eyelashes hopped through an imaginary landscape.
Letter to Ted. Hidden, cherished. Frank’s eyes opened, and the rabbit disappeared.
The clock told him it was well after two in the morning. After a cup of coffee, he’d be able to remember what he was doing. He was supposed to search for something on the internet, some kind of weird animal, he remembered. But the computer was all the way over there. And the coffee? Well, it’s clear down at dispatch. And probably cold.
He’d take care of that in a second. He needed to read the letter again. Poor girl. He hoped Karen was okay as his head dropped back, into the couch’s soft cushions.
~~~
Lewis drove. Fifteen minutes west of the boat ramp, he and Mr. Gray trolled some po-dunk burg that straddled the Indiana-Ohio line. His most immediate concern was how soon their current travel accommodations would be reported stolen or its driver missing. He aimed to find another midnight-blue, extended cab Chevy pick-up to swap out their current license plate.
It was a time to search his soul, shallow as he knew it was. After they got the new plate, Lewis wasn’t sure what he’d do. Maybe Mr. Gray should leave the one-ring calling card to throw off Mr. Green, at least for a few hours. Then the two of them would cut their losses, go their separate ways, and disappear. That’d leave Lewis on a beach somewhere and Mr. Gray shackled to the kids he kept talking about.
“You think Mr. Green knows?” Lewis asked, turning from a road straddling the state line onto a little street called Kingery.
“Does he know what, exactly?” Mr. Gray asked, wiping a drop of blood from his right eyebrow, “That we missed the doctor again? And made national news? Again?”
The questions punched shards of anger through Lewis, but he decided to hold any reaction and just look for that new license plate. In a place like this, he thought, the pick-up they needed couldn’t be far away.
“Not sure how Mr. Green could know,” he said. “Not yet. That goat rodeo at the truck stop’ll probably just hit the Cincinnati news stations, and that won’t be until about five in the morning.” The truck’s clock said it was two thirty.
“We killed a state trooper.”
“So what? They get killed all the time.”
“This one’s different.”
Lewis let out an exasperated sigh. “No, it’s not.”
“Look, man. It’s one thing for a cop to die in the line of duty, and it’s another thing for a cop to get executed.”
“Oh, fuck. Would you just—Ka-BAM,” Lewis said. “There’s our truck.” He drove to the end of Kingery to a lopsided four-way intersection, where he turned off his lights and circled back, stopping under a clump of trees. He reached back to his toolbox and grabbed a flathead screwdriver.
Mr. Gray pulled the sat phone out of his jacket pocket. The two men sat silently, as though the phone was a bomb to be defused.
“Should I leave the one-ring?” Mr. Gray asked.
“I like how you think. Might buy us a few hours.”
But before Mr. Gray could move his thumb, the phone rang.
CHAPTER 39
It was time to drop the trailer in Toledo. The trucker pulled into an industrial complex. Ted made it first to the door and asked a woman behind a desk for a payphone. Down the hall, she told him. He went, not at all interested in acting casual. When he picked up the phone, the trucker walked in, carrying a clipboard.
Ted checked his watch—2:47 a.m. It’d be just shy of midnight in Missoula—or maybe one in the morning. He placed the third-party call, knew it would leave a record, and he didn’t care. If he’d done it at the truck stop, he could do it at the depot. He finished relaying information to the operator and listened as the phone rang.
Two voices echoed down the gloss-painted, concrete block hallway. Ted couldn’t see the men talking.
“Pick up, Zeke,” he muttered. “Pick up.”
It rang at least five times before an answering machine clicked on. The canned message spoke in Zeke’s friendly, prosodic voice. “Hello. Betsy and Zeke Yasko are not available to take your call—”
“Dammit,” Ted said. He shifted his weight to one foot and put his free hand on his hip. Maybe Zeke just wasn’t home. Maybe Ted couldn’t warn him at all. But maybe since Ted couldn’t reach him, neither could the killers. Ted listened. The greeting ended with the usual beep. “Zeke. This is Ted. Are you there? Zeke?”
The line clicked to an incredulous female voice. “Hello?”
“Hello? Betsy?” The more Ted thought about it, the more he realized Zeke and Betsy shouldn’t be in Montana at all. They’d be in Ann Arbor for Neil’s funeral.
“No. This is her sister. May I ask who is calling? And why at this hour?”
“Yes. This is Zeke’s friend, Ted. Ted Gables. Look. I’m terribly sorry to call so late, but this is… well, it’s an emergency. I don’t even know if he’s… He might be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for a funeral… do you have a way to get in touch with him?”
Ted could fully imagine Zeke and Betsy both being ambushed, in just a few hours, outside a funeral home.
“I need to talk to him,” Ted said. “Very soon. It’s important, and I’m sure he’ll understand.”
Ted listened to the sister-in-law’s answer. In a moment, his free hand slapped the receiver lever down. He dropped the phone. It bucked and swayed from its segmented metal cord.
A couple of men in cove
ralls walked past him. The trucker signed something on the receptionist’s clipboard and exited. Another long-haul type strolled in and dropped some coins into a vending machine. Ted swallowed hard and felt lightheaded, maybe from blood loss, maybe from something else.
Zeke was dead. The sister-in-law had just said so. She cried and said something about a hold-up that went wrong or something. He’d just gone to the bank to get ready for a trip to Michigan. His death was going to look like one of those wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time things. Ted didn’t even ask about it. All he knew was he’d just killed Zeke.
Ted stood up straight, closed his mouth, and checked all his surroundings. Emotions blended together, like colors on a wheel, into some dark smudge that might be fear.
Ted could only think to do one thing. He dialed 9 - 1 -, then froze with his index finger hovering over the textured, chrome 1 key. An electric wave of fresh paranoia rippled through him as he wondered who Ironman and Trashcan Face really were. Did they work for McDaniel Security? Did they work for the senator himself? Were they monitoring Ted’s every move? How did they know what they knew? He shifted on his feet in semi-panic, looking around him again, first down the painted hall, then the other way, out the door. New stabbing pains came from his knee and left side.
The vending machine man—who’s he, exactly?—pulled his orange peanut butter crackers out of the dispenser and slogged away. The echoing, down-the-hall conversation had stopped. Ted spun around, expecting to see two men sneaking up on him. They weren’t there, but he knew, in his spin to check behind him, he’d made himself conspicuous.
He drew in a deep breath.
Any number of Indiana and Ohio state police and federal law enforcement officers were after him. He could see a big, fat, red and white target on his back and a high-powered rifle bullet spiraling toward him from God-knew-where. He pictured the McDaniel Security commercial. The suit and the dressed officer shaking hands.
McDaniel Security. Partnering to… to kill you, your wife, and all your friends.
One thing was perfectly clear. The senator was headlong into a preemptive string of murders. Zeke and Neil were gone. Kathryn was gone by mistake. Ted thought of his cabin mates. Had McDaniel killed them all?
Buck was such a nice kid. He was a little weak, maybe, a talking-head type of guy—a perfect, malleable thing to throw into the Oval Office, by the way—but he’d been a nice kid. Could he change that much from twelve to middle age? Would Buck really, even after thirty years, have changed enough to be able to do something like this?
No, Ted decided. He wouldn’t kill people. He wouldn’t have it in him. But Hoss would. Two of Cabin 7’s members were sadly accounted for. Buck was out there, too. But Hoss wasn’t.
Who are the rest, and where are they?
Are any of them still alive?
Ted carefully pulled his finger away from the 1 key and hung the phone back in its cradle. A new horror grabbed him. He’d just made a third-party call charged to his home number in Blue River. The enormity of it didn’t occur to him. It had been no big deal to do so from the truck stop. Everyone knew he’d been in Broadbent. But to do the same from Toledo? No one knew he was there. He’d just announced his location.
It still wasn’t the biggest deal, though, because he planned to leave Toledo behind, too. Unless the trucker had left a record that he’d been at the truck stop outside of Broadbent. As busy as that place had been, only one semi driver would’ve been there and in Toledo in the last three hours. It was time to go.
CHAPTER 40
Some time after 1 a.m., the phone rang, and Paul Weatherby, still awake and staring at the ceiling, jumped in bed. As he answered the phone, his wife stirred.
“Hello?”
Barb scooted closer to him.
“It’s me,” Hugh said on the other line. “I need you to—”
Weatherby covered the mouthpiece with the heel of his hand as his wife wrapped around the small of his back.
“Who is it?” she mumbled, still half-asleep. “Time is it?”
He rested his hand on the back of her head. “It’s nothing, hon. Silly stuff at work. Been expecting this call.”
She rested her head on his thigh.
“Give me a minute? I’d like to let Barbara get back to sl—”
“Now, Paul. It’s important.”
“I’ll call you back in under a minute.” He hung up the phone and stroked his wife’s hair. “Honey?” he whispered.
She breathed in coarsely through her nose. “Huh?”
“I’m going to take this call downstairs, so you can—”
“Oh, my God!” she said, sitting up.
“What? Are you okay?”
“Paul! The baby’s kicking! Com’eer! Putcher hand right here, and you can feel her.”
The baby’s kicking!
Now, Paul. It’s important.
Shit.
“Honey,” he said, feeling almost physical pain at the conflict. His daughter was kicking and Uncle Hugh knew the license plate number of the Audi. The sandalwood Audi. “I have to take this call. Be back upstairs in a minute, and I’ll feel that kick.” He kissed his wife’s temple and went downstairs. Without bothering to turn on the lights, he entered the kitchen and called Hugh’s cell phone.
“Good morning,” Hugh said.
“Do I need to go outside and down the block for this?”
“No. They don’t have you bugged. Not yet, anyway.”
“What do you mean, ‘Not yet’?”
“Looks like we have a little problem. Little one.”
“How little?”
“And a bigger one.”
Weatherby was silent for a moment. Not the slightest bit hungry, he opened the refrigerator anyway. Its light glinted off the tile floor and traced the veins on his bare feet with shadows. He shut the fridge and said, “Are you recording this?”
“Here’s the deal. I haven’t received my confirmation call on the Blue River subject.”
“Yeah? So? Maybe they’re just waiting for the right time.” Don’t tell me Ted got away again. Weatherby kept his voice low and a sight line on the empty stairs. Barb was still in the bedroom.
“We got some ears on a police scanner in Ohio. Looks like Broadbent’s police—state police, too—are going nuts about a friendly little car chase and shooting in their downtown.”
“Uh… a car chase? And a…”
“And a shot-up car and dead cop outside of some truck stop north of Broadbent.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right.”
“Who was in the chase?” Weatherby eyed the stairs again.
“As if you don’t know.”
“I mean, the police can’t know any of the names yet, right?”
“Guess whose name keeps coming up on the scanner.”
“No. Blue River?”
“Yep.”
“I presume that’s the big problem and you’re going to tell me the little one now.”
“Wrong again, friend.”
Weatherby had never wet his pants in his life, at least not out of fear, but he thought he might. “Tell me.”
“Your buddy. Your Hoss Cartwright? And I’m not talking about the TV show.”
“I understand. What about him?”
“We found him. At least on e-mail. We got a little note from a guy with an address, Willard underscore Cartwright at A-O-L dot com.”
“What’d it say?”
“Let me ask you this. You know how everybody up there that summer had nicknames?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me what yours was. Your nickname.”
Weatherby checked the stairs again. No one. He breathed deeply and exhaled with a shiver. “Sunny.”
“Okay. That’s definitely our bigger problem.”
Weatherby paced. Hugh read Cartwright’s short e-mail message to him. With Hoss’s phrase, You’re not going to stop us all, Weatherby’s designs and hopes for his future vanished. Replacing them were images of
humiliation, destitution, and divorce. Maybe even jail. A baby girl with a father in prison.
“What do you think he’s going to do?” Weatherby asked. “What can he do?”
“I’ll start this way. I’ve met this Willard Cartwright before. Twenty years ago. Before you joined our little family. He and Denny spent a lot of time together when they were young, okay? They were fast friends ever since they met at camp that summer. I even offered him a job.”
“You did?”
“Yep. But he didn’t take it. In fact, he just kind of became unreachable and stayed that way. It was like he died, only there was never any death certificate. Had a lot to do with his royally screwed-up family, a lot of media attention. His brother, Jake, killed his parents, then himself, all right? Then Willard’s oldest brother killed himself.”
“What’s that have to do with—”
“Just wait. Your friend Hoss disappeared. Twenty years ago. We just found him in two ways. First, he replied to the e-mail one of my boys sent. If no one knows anyone’s nicknames from back then, the e-mail has to be from him, okay?”
“You found him another way?”
“Sure did. Willard Cartwright is living under the name Maximilian Blocker in Carbondale, Illinois.”
“That’s great!” Weatherby said, checking the volume on his voice and glancing at the stairs. “Isn’t it?”
“Would be if he were home, but he’s not.”
“Tell me you know where he is.”
“I don’t, but I’ll bet he’s out, trying to identify your cabin mates.”
“Where? How would he do that?” Weatherby’s heart pounded. But they still had a chance.
“Look. The guy’s a private investigator, okay?”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”
“What’re we going to—”
“I told you he’s the bigger problem. Say he sees the announcement last night. Denny on TV, all right? He puts it together, only he needs… Paul? Are you still there?”
“Yes. Still here. I’m listening.”
White Birch Graffiti Page 16
