Black River

by G. M. Ford

  He lay there for a moment and then rose to his knees. He crawled to the port side of the step, hooked a frozen hand into one of the indented footholds, and pulled himself upright, where he could grab the handrails. He stood leaning against the transom. He couldn’t feel his legs or his feet. And then the boat rocked…twice. His heart threatened to tear his chest. They must have been nearby…watching…waiting.

  Rogers felt it too. She looked up, read the expression of helplessness on Corso’s face, and began to sob. They were on the stern now, just above his head. When he looked up, he was staring down the barrel of a gun. He closed his eyes and waited to die.

  “Frank Corso,” a voice boomed, “you’re under arrest for the murders of David Rosewall and Margaret Dougherty. Anything you say can and will be used against you. You have a right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney…”

  Another voice was muttering in the background. “This is Sorenstam. Get me an Aid Car,” it was saying. “Forty-seven-ninety Fairview. Send two if you’ve got ’em.”

  26

  Saturday, October 21

  2:04 a.m.

  Wasn’t till one of the uniforms came up with Rogers’s wallet that Detectives First Class Troy Hamer and Roger Sorenstam begin to take what Corso was telling them seriously. They didn’t give a damn about the damage to the boat. They were stuck on crimes of passion. All they knew was they had a witness to Corso’s fight with the boyfriend, a nurse who said he’d objected to Corso’s presence in Dougherty’s room, and an LPN who saw a tall man with a black ponytail exiting the ground-floor side door of the hospital at the time of the murders. Dead to rights. Hold the sirens.

  Corso sat on the couch wrapped in a wool blanket. The last of the EMTs were up front with Rogers when the uniform handed the wallet to Hamer. “She’s telling the same story he is,” he whispered, and shot a glance at Corso.

  Hamer made a sour face. “We better get a crime-scene team down here,” he said to Sorenstam.

  Corso got to his feet. “I’m leaving,” he said.

  “We’re still conducting an investigation here,” Hamer snapped.

  “I’m going to the hospital,” Corso announced. “You need anything from me, I’ll be there.” He felt like the Tin Man as he shuffled across the carpet.

  His exit stalled at the top of the stairs. The stairway and the hall were littered with exploded wood. Fresh splinters poked up like teeth. Corso used a foot to roll a pair of boat shoes out from under his writing table and then slipped them on.

  The refuse snapped and popped beneath his feet as he made his way to his berth. His body ached as if he’d been beaten all over, and his fingers felt thick and clumsy as he struggled into a shirt and a pair of jeans.

  The EMTs had immediately thrown them in the showers, Rogers up in the guest head and Corso in his own. Left them sitting under warm water until the water heater couldn’t handle it anymore.

  “There’s nothing you can do up there,” Sorenstam said.

  “I’m going anyway.”

  “Don’t be such an asshole,” Hamer said. “The more I look around, the more I’m feeling like you don’t want to burn any bridges here.” He swept an arm around the boat. “Whoever wanted your ass, wanted it real bad.” He left a little silence for Corso. “Looks to me like the kind of people who just might try, try again, if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  “Maybe you guys better get to protecting and serving.”

  “Maybe it’s time you got straight with us,” Sorenstam said.

  “How’s that?”

  Hamer made an elaborate move to scratch the back of his head. “Let me see here. We got your girl-friend”—Corso opened his mouth to argue the point, but the cop waved him off—“taking her little pictures, until a pair of skels in a black Mercedes chase her down and damn near kill her. Somehow or other they find out she’s still among the living and hustle their bustles down to Harborview Medical Center, where they off both her and her boyfriend and then”—he paused again—“they come down here and make a very determined effort to pop your scrawny ass.”

  “You want to give us a hint here?” Sorenstam asked. “Sounds like you may have rattled somebody’s cage.”

  Corso looked from one to the other. Despite his best efforts, a sneer crept onto his lips. “You don’t have shit, do you?”

  “We’ve got you,” Hamer said.

  “You’ve been on this for four days, and you haven’t got a goddamn thing.” He tried to keep the disgust out of his voice. Tried to say something neutral. What came out was, “What the fuck have you been doing with your time, anyway?”

  “We’ve been looking at you and the boyfriend,” Sorenstam snapped.

  Sure. That was the protocol. Eliminate those closest to the victim before widening the investigation. For the first time since he’d been given the news, he could feel the loss burning like a cold flame. Inside his head, a familiar voice said that another pair of cops was already looking into Donald Barth. Said there was no reason to put it together for these two bozos—except. And then the voice changed. Except that Dougherty was dead, and the way things were shaking out he might have inadvertently been a player. The new voice asked him what might have happened if he’d shared what he knew with the cops.

  “It’s got something to do with the guy they found buried in his truck,” he said.

  Sorenstam pulled out a notebook and a pencil.

  “His name’s Donald Barth.” It took Corso a full five minutes to lay it out for them. “Now you know everything I do,” he said as he finished. “I suggest you talk to whoever caught the truck squeal and whoever they’ve got looking for this Joe Ball character. Maybe one of them has come up with something useful.”

  Sorenstam checked his notes. “So you’re saying the missing person, this Joe Ball guy, the dead guy in the truck, the assault here, and the murders at the hospital are all tied together somehow.”

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “Any idea about the connection?”

  “None.”

  “So how does any of that help us?” Hamer asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Corso said.

  “Where’d he get the forty thousand?”

  “No idea.”

  “You think any of these women was pissed off enough—”

  Corso was already shaking his head. “No.”

  Corso stepped around the cops and pulled a black leather jacket from the closet. He stuck one arm into the coat. “Find these guys,” Corso said. “Find ’em before I do.”

  “What you’re going to do”—Hamer jabbed a finger at him—“is keep the hell out of an ongoing investigation.” Corso settled the jacket on his shoulders and started toward the bow. “Do you hear me?” Hamer bellowed after him.

  Hamer was angry. Corso didn’t blame him. They’d wasted a lot of manpower going around in circles. Last thing they wanted was to hear from some jive-ass writer about how they’d fucked up.

  The forward passage was still clogged with cops and EMTs. Corso shouldered his way to the front. Renee Rogers sat on the bed, wearing the outfit she’d come aboard in. She looked small inside the clothes, as if the outfit belonged to an older sister.

  “How you feeling?” Corso asked.

  She had to think it over. “Like I’ll never really be warm again.”

  “I’m going up to the hospital.”

  She reached out and touched his cheek. “Oh—your friend. I’m so sorry.”

  Corso nodded. “You walking okay?” he asked, after a moment.

  “My legs feel like rubber bands, but they work.”

  “Let’s get out of here. They’ve got a forensics team on the way. The place is about to be crawling with cops.”

  She put her hand on his. “You saved my life.”

  “We got lucky,” he said.

  Her eyes said she didn’t believe a word of it but was too tired to argue.

  “I’ll drop you at the hotel.”

  She searched his eyes. �
��You sure you want to go up there?”

  “It’ll never be real to me if I don’t,” he said.

  She said she understood and got to her feet. “Let’s go,” she said.

  The walk started off shaky; she nearly fell off the stairs. Leaning on each other, they got steadier as they made their way up the dock to the gate. Corso’s legs would barely push him up the steep ramp. When he looked back, Renee Rogers was having the same problem. She stood at the bottom shaking her head. He took her hand and pulled her to his side. Then walked to the top and repeated the process.

  They were still holding hands when the flashbulbs began to pop and the reporters stepped from behind the cars, firing questions from the darkness. They’d had word of a shooting. Could he elaborate? Was he involved? If there was a shooting, did the police have a suspect? “That’s the Rogers woman,” he heard somebody say. “You know, the U.S. Attorney from the Balagula case.” Her name joined his in the air as they pushed their way through the crowd toward the car.

  Ten yards from sanctuary, Rogers was jostled by the crowd and dropped her purse, which burst open on impact, spilling some of the contents out on the ground.

  Corso straight-armed the nearest photographer, setting off a stumbling chain reaction as she bent to retrieve her bag. Flashbulbs rendered him nearly blind as he led her to the car, let her in, and threw himself into the driver’s seat.

  Saturday, October 21

  2:40 a.m.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t. . . .” Corso ducked under the yellow police tape and started down the stairs. They’d fixed the elevators so they wouldn’t go to the basement and strung enough plastic police tape across the stairwells to circle the globe.

  She couldn’t have been more than twenty. “Please, sir,” she whined at his back as he held on to the handrail and walked deliberately down the stairs. At the first landing, he looked up and saw her still standing at the top. “The police—” she began.

  At the bottom, he pulled the door open, poked his head out into the hall, looked one way and then the other. In both directions, the corridor was full of people. To the left, it was mostly hospital employees, people the police would want to interview before allowing them to go home. To the right was One-oh-nine, where a pair of medical examiners, in bright yellow jackets, sipped coffee from plastic cups while they stood talking with a couple of county mounties.

  His eyes stopped on a pair of metal gurneys, end to end along the wall. Resting, larvaelike, on top of each cart was a black rubber body bag, red straps around the chests and ankles. He felt like he always felt in the face of death, light and disconnected. Like he was coming unglued from the earth.

  His legs ached as he started down the hall. A voice behind him called, “Hey!” He kept going. The door to One-oh-nine popped open. Rachel Taylor stepped out into the hall. As the door eased shut, Corso could hear the sound of angry voices coming from inside. She caught sight of Corso and stopped. “Oh,” she said. “Miss Dougherty—”

  The door opened again. Crispin, Edward J.: red-faced, disheveled, looking like he’d been rousted from his bed. Followed by what had to be a couple of cops.

  He went slack-jawed at the sight of Corso coming his way.

  “She’s not here,” he said. Corso stopped. “Your friend,” Crispin tried. “She’s not here anymore.”

  Corso’s eyes moved to the body bags.

  “No,” Crispin said. “That’s…” He looked to Nurse Taylor for help.

  “Mrs. Guillen,” Taylor said. “Ruth Guillen.”

  “I found her a room,” Crispin blurted.

  Rachel Taylor walked to Corso’s side and took hold of his arm. She cast a baleful stare at Crispin. “Mr. Crispin circumvented the normal room-scheduling procedures.” Another stare. “Second shift saw the room was empty and put Mrs. Guillen in it.”

  “She’d been in a head on-collision,” Crispin added, as if her condition somehow mitigated whatever the problem was.

  “Mr. Rosewall didn’t know either,” Taylor said. “He just walked in at the wrong time.”

  “I don’t understand,” Corso said, feeling himself beginning to sway.

  “Miss Dougherty is upstairs in surgery,” Rachel Taylor said.

  27

  Saturday, October 21

  6:10 a.m.

  They cut a hole in her head. “Not very big,” the post-op nurse said with a smile. She held her fingers about an inch apart. “About the size of a stamp.”

  She busied herself changing an IV bag and straightening the covers. “Her vital signs are better this morning,” she announced. “I think doctor is going to be pleased.” Not the doctor or Dr. Something-or-other. Just doctor. Corso grunted.

  He was holed up in a brown leatherette chair under the window, sipping lukewarm coffee through an articulated straw, trying not to wonder if things could get worse.

  The door opened and another nurse marched in and dropped both morning papers in his lap. She stood with hands on half-acre hips, waiting for him to have a peek. Without looking down, Corso thanked her, folded the papers in two, and stuffed them between the cushion and the armrest. She huffed once, looked at the post-op nurse as if to say Some people, and left. Post-op was still chuckling when she completed her tasks and squeaked out of the room.

  Corso waited a minute and then crossed to the bedside. Her rest was more troubled now. Her extremities twitched and, just after the last doctor had left, she groaned once, as if to say enough was enough, and tossed her head back and forth. He had the urge to pull the covers up over the spiraled words and images that encircled her bare arms, but she seemed so fragile, and her hold on life so tenuous, he couldn’t bring himself to touch a thing.

  He returned to the chair and looked down at the papers. He used two fingers to pry the top paper off and turn it face up on the seat. The Seattle Times. Lunar-landing-sized picture. He and Rogers, hand in hand at the top of the dock ramp, looking like they’d been rode hard and put up wet. Banner headline: EASTLAKE GUN BATTLE. He winced. Turned it over and grabbed the other paper. After the Times, how bad could it be?

  Bad. MARINA SHOOT-OUT. The Post Intelligencer photographer had caught them by the car: Corso snarling at a cameraman, Renee Rogers, down on one knee, gathering her things back into her purse. You could see it plain as day, the strap and one cup of her brassiere hanging out on the asphalt. And the little wet bundle still nestled inside the bag that you knew just hadda be the panties. Warren’s really gonna hate this, he thought.

  Corso deposited both papers in the bathroom wastebasket and was on his way back to the chair when Detective Sorenstam poked his hat in the door and gestured for Corso to come out in the hall.

  Hamer leaned against the wall, picking his teeth with a blue twist tie. Sorenstam had his notebook out. “We talked with Jonesy and his partner,” he said. “They caught the Barth squeal.” Corso waited for him to get to the point. “The number crunchers read it like you do. Guy’s living like a mouse for years. Sending all his cash back east so’s his kid can get an education.”

  “Then, last year, he gets behind,” Hamer offered.

  “Med school’s a bitch.”

  Hamer chewed the piece of plastic like a cigar. “He tries to borrow thirty grand from his credit union, but they turn him down. Back in Boston, the kid’s trying to finagle a loan for himself.”

  “And then, bingo!” Sorenstam snapped his fingers. “All of a sudden he pays off the whole damn thing. All the way to the end of the year.”

  Hamer dropped the twist tie to the floor. “And while that’s going on, this Barth guy is leaving the house every day, kissing the little woman good-bye and going where?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “ ’Cause he sure as hell wasn’t going to his job at the school district. He’s on leave June through September of ’ninety-nine.”

  “Neighbors say everything was status quo. His truck came and went as usual.” Sorenstam shrugged. “Wife swears it was same-old same-old.”

  “So where did he go?” Co
rso asked.

  “Someplace you could get forty grand,” Hamer said.

  “What about this Joe Ball guy?” Corso asked.

  “Still missing,” Hamer said.

  “Missing Persons has a guy says your friend Miss Dougherty was the last person to see Mr. Ball before he turned up lost.”

  Corso held up a hand. “So let’s assume our friend Mr. Ball was responsible for burying Donald Barth and his truck.”

  “Why would he want to do that?” Hamer asked.

  “Probably because somebody paid him to.”

  “Okay.”

  “And whoever paid him is unhappy when the truck turns up.”

  Hamer bumped himself off the wall and wandered over. “And you’re thinking your girlfriend here walked in on them expressing their displeasure.”

  “Could be,” Corso said.

  “There’s a chase,” Sorenstam prompted.

  “She crashes.”

  “One of them gets out to finish the deal, but civilians show up.”

  “How’d they know she was still alive?” Corso asked. “How’d they know which hospital to find her in?”

  “Maybe they followed the ambulance,” Hamer said.

  “Maybe,” Corso muttered, without believing it for a minute.

  “Doesn’t explain their beef with you, though,” Hamer said.