“So, I understand, have you and Buell, Sergeant,” the professor said.
Buell made a face. “Don’t forget,” he said, “Fleisher’s got almost twenty years on me, and I’m not exactly a boy.”
“Not only that,” Shaughnessy said. “This case just got to him. Sometimes they get to you, you know?”
“Indeed,” the professor said. “And I understand now the case will have a chance to ‘get to’ that ciuco, the commissioner.”
“Yeah, he’s taking personal charge of the case,” he said with a bitter grin. “He even chased me. He goes, ‘Rafferty’—didn’t even know my right name, the jerk—‘Rafferty, you look like you could use a few days off. Come back Monday, maybe I’ll have the case wrapped up by then.’ Then he patted my ass and laughed.”
Shaughnessy then launched some speculations about the commissioner that would probably have resulted in a libel suit, if they ever got back to him.
The professor cut him off. “I can sympathize with your frustration, Sergeant, but it might be for the good after all. Had you any plans for this weekend? No? Excellent. Perhaps you might like to accompany my young associate.”
“Where?”
“To the place where Terry Wilbur is, I have every hope.”
Buell was excited. “You know where he is?”
The professor shrugged. “I have an opinion; Ronald is planning to check its validity.”
“Where is he?” the reporter asked. “This is big. A whole lot of people are convinced Wilbur is Hog.”
“It’s my belief Wilbur is holed up in a cabin in the Adirondacks that is used by the father of Leslie Bickell on his hunting trips.”
Now Shaughnessy was excited. “Yeah, but where is it? We can call the troopers and get them to haul him the hell out of there!”
“No,” Benedetti said. “I do not want a show of force. I do not want Wilbur killed in a gun duel (since he may have a gun), and I do not want him to commit suicide. If I cannot solve the puzzle of Terry Wilbur, I may never solve this case.
“Perhaps I was unwise.” The old man narrowed his black eyes. “You do have your duty, after all, Sergeant. But I ask you, in all humility, to follow my wishes in the matter. Ronald knows the place; he will tell you just before you depart. Will you agree?”
Shaughnessy’s freckled face broke in a grin. “Try and keep me home. My wife’s not going to like you for this, though.”
“Diedre won’t either,” Buell said. “I’m coming along.”
The professor looked at him. “It may be extremely dangerous, Mr. Tatham.”
Buell laughed. “I think I should feel insulted.” His face became serious. “Look, professor, I was in on the very beginning of this case—if you remember, that’s why our boy gave me the dubious honor of being his go-between. I am going to be in on the end, if Terry Wilbur is the end.”
Black eyes met blue eyes for a long moment. Finally the old man said, “I understand. Go along, of course.”
Diedre’s eyes grew wide. “Where did you get that?” she asked breathlessly.
Buell was cleaning a gun that looked like something that should be carried by Wyatt Earp or somebody. “It belonged to my granddaddy, who carried it up Kettle Hill in the Spanish-American War. I took it when I left home.”
“But, I mean, why are you cleaning it?”
“It’s dirty,” he said.
“But you told me the professor said—”
“The professor is not going to knock on the door of a man who has killed ... Besides, he said we should protect ourselves if necessary. Shaughnessy’s bringing his gun, too.”
“I don’t like the idea of you getting in danger like that. What would happen to me and Ricky?” She sniffed.
“Hey,” Buell said softly. “Don’t worry, Love, it probably won’t even be necessary. I’m sure it won’t.” He held her. “He probably won’t even be there.” He gave a little reassuring laugh, but his eyes were worried. He tilted her head back, pinched her chin. “Help me pack, all right, Love? It’s going to be cold out there.”
“You’re getting pretty good with the cane,” Ron said.
“I can get around, at least,” Janet conceded. “Want me to come help you pack for the trip?”
“All packed,” he said. “The evening is free. The professor is busy on another painting.”
Janet, finished with her walking practice, took a chair. “What’s on the canvas this time?”
“Too early to tell.”
“Oh,” she said. Something wasn’t exactly right. She felt cheated of helping Ron pack. It was ... it was almost like he was going away to war or something, which she didn’t want to think about. It would be just her luck, just after he had (finally) turned up in her life for him to get himself—but she made herself stop.
Ron snapped his fingers as though he just thought of something. “Do you have any Vaseline?” he asked.
Janet thought, hmmm. “Why?” she asked.
Ron had his head back, laughing at her. “Janet,” he said, shaking his head, “never change, all right? Please?” He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “I need the Vaseline for my trip. I don’t have any at home.”
She told him, with a blush (could she ever stop that?), that he was welcome to the Vaseline. She wanted to ask him if he had to go, but stopped herself. It would do neither one of them any good if he had the “yes” dragged out of him. Instead she said, “I hope you’re bringing a gun.”
“Wouldn’t help me any,” he told her. “I never fired a gun in my life. I was never in a situation where I’d be justified in shooting anybody.”
Janet didn’t know what to say. She had thought private detectives carried guns the way nurses carried thermometers. “Well, you just be careful!” she snapped.
He laughed at her again. “You can count on that,” he said.
The time was coming, Janet knew, when she would have to say it, not as a joke the way he had this morning, but seriously. She would have to look him in the eye and say “I love you”—but not yet. Because then he would have to say something, and there were thousands of things he could say, from “Goodbye,” to “Oh, my God,” to “That’s nice,” to what she hoped she would hear. And she wasn’t ready to buck those odds. Yet. Whatever the relationship they had now could be called, she liked it too much to risk making it grow too fast, or trying to.
Ron looked at his watch.
“You’re leaving very early tomorrow morning, aren’t you?”
“Five o’clock. It’s a long drive.”
“When will you be going back to your place?”
He looked at his watch again. “Pretty soon,” he said.
“Not too soon?” she asked. She had her pretty, wistful, self-conscious, little-girl smile on. She didn’t know it was there. Janet had no wiles.
Ron could not refuse that smile anything. “No, not too soon, Funnyface.”
They drank coffee from Shaughnessy’s thermos as they headed east into a rising red sun. Ron squinted at it, took a hand from the wheel to lower the sun visor. He owned a pair of prescription sunglasses, but hadn’t thought to bring them along—Sparta residents don’t see enough of the sun to worry about it.
There was a little bit of trivial conversation when they first got underway. Shaughnessy had the morning’s Courant, and held forth for a while on the fortunes of Sparta’s minor league hockey team, but that soon died out, and they rode in silence.
Ron left the Thruway for Route 81 in Syracuse, and followed that north and east until Watertown, where again he pointed the car dead east. The sun wasn’t so bad now, it had risen above the windshield.
About fifteen miles from the small motel that was their destination, Ron said, “Buell?”
The reporter had been gazing out the window at the snow. It covered everything; the world looked like a Christmas card gone wild.
“Buell?”
Buell turned away from the window. “What?”
Ron said, “I just wanted to tell you I
wasn’t being vicious the other night, and I’m sorry if I caused you any trouble.”
Buell was a man about it, a gentleman, “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” he said. “I was worried about what Diedre would think, that’s all. You don’t have to apologize to me, I know what this case can do to your mind.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Ron told him. They rode on a few more miles. Once, an animal darted from the trees on one side of the road to those on the other.
“What was that?” asked a startled Shaughnessy. Ron and Buell had thought he was asleep.
“I don’t know,” Ron said. “It went by pretty fast.”
“If I didn’t know better,” Buell said, “I’d think it was a mountain lion.”
“It’s just barely possible that’s what it was,” Ron told him. “There used to be mountain lion populations all over North America, but they’ve mostly been wiped out here in the East. Still, there are parts of the mountains up here that are wilderness as wild as you can find anywhere. There are eagles up here, bears, even the occasional wolf. All kinds of predators.”
“Just as long as there are no hogs,” Shaughnessy said, and they all laughed.
“You know, Mike, you’ve given me a thought,” Ron said. “Buell, did it ever occur to you that Hog might be aiming this whole thing at you?”
He seemed surprised. “Me?”
“You get the notes,” Shaughnessy pointed out.
“And you were the only witness to the first murder,” Ron added.
“If you remember the first note, though,” Buell said reasonably, “the fact that I was a witness is why he sent the notes to me in the first place.”
“Even so,” Ron countered, “it was one of his more miraculous crimes, followed by a miraculous escape—he got away without leaving a trace on the overpass or anywhere else. Maybe he hoped you’d be watching. Then there’s Jastrow; you were a big thing in his past. And your Uncle Willy with his GOA, formerly HOGS. Somebody might be arranging things with you in mind.”
“Nah, that won’t work,” Shaughnessy said. “You’re saying Hog maybe knew Buell would be on that road the day of the accident. Okay, maybe he did. We know he knew the girls would be there. But it’s not possible he knew they’d both come under that bridge at the same time, with Buell just far enough behind to see the accident. That kind of thing can only be worked out by God.”
Ron supposed he was right.
Buell said, “As for Jastrow, I’ve been twenty-five years a reporter in Sparta, and you meet a lot of people in the newspaper business. I bet if you picked any seven people in Sparta at random, the chances’d be better than even I knew one of them.
“And as for my Uncle Willy, well, you got into it the other night. There’s a hog tie-in for everybody if you look hard enough.”
Ron was glad the professor wasn’t there to see this. Defeated on all fronts. Maybe I’m slipping, he thought. Or just distracted. Maybe the old man is right about staying away from women while he’s on a case. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, though. There was the sign—
Mac Dougald’s Adirondack Inn, then below, FISHING, HUNTING, GUIDES, BEER, FOOD, and painted sloppily below everything, SNOWMOBILES. “We’re here,” Ron said.
Ron had the old tube-filled radio on the scarred bedside table warmed up enough just in time to hear a nasal-voiced over-friendly announcer saying, “... North Country weather, clear and cool today, with a high of about minus fifteen”—cool, for God’s sake, thought Ron—”but with the wind-chill factor, it feels more like minus fifty-five.”
For a mad moment, he wished he was back in balmy Sparta, where it rarely got colder than ten below, but he put aside the thought as unworthy of him. He had a job to do.
Last night he had checked his companions’ gear to make sure they had brought everything he had told them to bring, then had held a quick lesson on how to dress for the cold.
They tried to tell him that they’d lived in Sparta long enough to qualify as experts at dressing for the cold, but he pointed out that Sparta was full of buildings you could duck into to warm up, and that buildings around here were kind of sparse, and that improperly protected, you could lose fingers and toes to frostbite in a surprisingly few minutes.
So Ron dressed, following his own advice. He started with a loose fishnet t-shirt. Over this he put a regular cotton t-shirt, then another fishnet, then another cotton shirt. He was building up bulk, with very little weight. Most people equate heavy clothes with warmth, but Ron knew that fabric doesn’t insulate you from the weather, the air it traps does. If you can isolate enough air between you and the outside world, to be warmed by your body heat, you can stay warm.
Ron followed with tops and bottoms of thermal underwear, rolling the legs in with thick white socks. Then came a shirt and pants, then the artic survival gear developed by the Air Force, the parka part of which is popularly known as a snorkel coat. With that, and fleece-lined, waterproof snowmobiling boots, he was almost ready to face the outdoors.
He walked down the hall, checking on his two companions, just in case. They’d been able to buy or borrow all the stuff they needed in Sparta, but there was still a chance they’d put it on incorrectly.
They were all right, though, and Ron went back to his room to finish up. He rubbed Janet’s Vaseline on his face, especially around his nose and lips, pulled a black ski mask with an oblong opening for both eyes over his head, slid his glasses between mask and head, placed dark-yellow bubble ski goggles on (he’d had a hard time finding a pair that fit comfortably over his spectacles), pulled on his fleece-lined gauntlets, and was ready to go.
Buell and Shaughnessy were similarly ready, except, Ron knew, somewhere in there, they had bundled lethal weapons in with them. They just had to hope they didn’t need them, he thought, or if they did, that no fast-draw work would be required.
Mac Dougald had cheerfully rented them snowmobiles, good powerful big ones, which (Ron was thankful) all three of his little group knew how to operate. The machines, two Ski-Doos and a John Deere, had key-start ignitions, Ron was happy to see. There is no lonelier feeling than being miles away from anything, pulling again and again on the rope of a snowmobile motor that won’t kick over.
“All set?” he asked. Getting two nods in reply, he said, “Okay, let’s go.” They roared off, leaving the frozen air smelling faintly of gasoline fumes.
“There it is,” Buell said. His words, carrying the moisture in his breath, froze instantly against the wool of his ski mask. Dressed according to Ron’s instructions, he was comfortable enough, but you could tell just how cold it was. The air seemed not so much to part against him as he chugged forward on the snowmobile, as it seemed to crack open under his momentum.
“Yeah,” Ron said, “Bickell gave good directions.”
For obvious reasons, Ron had declined Mac Dougald’s offer to guide them. Buell was all for that, of course, but he’d been a little nervous about getting lost up here. Ron had been right about wilderness. This was God’s country, all right.
But here they were, at the edge of a surprisingly large and surprisingly flat (after what he’d seen today) clearing, and there at the other edge was a strong-looking stone cabin that stood up bravely under the weight of snow several feet deep on its roof. The snow on and around the house, and the drifts in the clearing, looked decorative, sculpted by the wind into graceful curving shapes.
“What do you think?” Buell asked. “Tracks outside, looks like,” Shaughnessy said. “Old ones,” Ron said pessimistically. “And no smoke coming out of the chimney. It could be he’s been and gone, and it could be the old man was just full of hot air.”
“No smoke from the chimney doesn’t mean anything,” Shaughnessy said. “My brother-in-law’s got a place like this with gas heat; has a tank in back of the house, gets it filled up at the end of the summer.”
“True,” Ron admitted. He started His snowmobile and started forward.
It was no use, Buell knew, to try to sneak up on
the house. The noise of the snowmobile was unavoidable, and the snow was too deep to walk in. A snowmobile is built to ride on the surface of snow the way a boat rides on the surface of water. It will take a man places where a man trying to walk without snowshoes would disappear under the snow.
The prevailing wind was from the far side of the house, so the cabin formed a windbreak. Consequently, there was a teardrop-shaped area in front of the cabin where the snow hadn’t drifted as deep. Where Buell dismounted, it came only up to his calves.
In case of a shot, Shaughnessy suggested they spread out to approach the house. They did so, with Ron in the middle, Shaugnessy on his left, and Buell on his right.
Buell was afraid. He could admit that to himself. It was a feeling of being in the wrong place. The trail of Hog had begun on superhighways and in city and suburban streets. He felt out of his element knowing it had taken him here, where there were no roads, only depressions in the snow.
Ron walked up to the door. He pounded on it, and yelled, “Wilbur!”
Inside, Buell heard panicky, tentative scratching noises. He zipped his parka partway down, not feeling the cold.
“Wilbur!”
That Gentry boy has more courage than smarts, Buell thought. He pulled his grandaddy’s gun out of his belt, and saw it tremble in his hand. He closed his eyes and offered a silent, sincere prayer. The trembling had stopped by the time he was finished.
Ron called one more time, getting only more scratching in reply. What is he doing in there? Buell asked himself.
Shaughnessy also had his gun out. “I’m going in after him,” he said. “Follow me, Buell.”
It wasn’t locked. The cop crashed in, yelling “Freeze!” Buell, holding the gun ready, followed, holding his breath.
Inside the door, Buell saw Shaughnessy lowering his gun. The disgust on the sergeant’s face was discernible, even behind a ski mask and goggles.
“Oh, for crysake,” the sergeant said.
There was no shock of warmth as Ron went inside the cabin; the only difference he could feel was that he was shielded from the wind. Ron closed the door behind him and saw what Shaughnessy hadn’t shot at; what had made the scratching noise.
Hog Murders Page 18
