Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  The air started to seep out of Franco’s nearly regained posture.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why didn’t she say anything?”

  “That’s my question for you.”

  He shook his head, his haggard face filled with wonderment.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I know anything.”

  I often had the same feeling, I thought, though I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to give Franco another reason to be despondent. I wanted to be the one glimmer of hope in the bleak gloom that pervaded his view of existence. But I had to.

  I took out one of Randall’s satellite photos and used a marker to draw a straight line across the property. I spun it around so I could show Franco.

  “So, here’s the house”—I pointed to it—“and here’s your little private cabin. What’s right in the middle of those two places?”

  He studied the photo.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of stuff.”

  “That’s true. Including the southwest base of Hamburger Hill. The place where you found Tad’s body. Over here’s the woodshed”—I drew a circle around a fuzzy white shape—“way on the other side of Hamburger Hill, where Tad was supposed to be shoveling the roof. Yet this photo was taken the day after he was killed, after the storm cleared the area, and there’s still plenty of snow.”

  “It snowed a lot after he shoveled it off,” said Franco.

  “Ah, but we have a close-up.”

  I pulled out another image.

  “It’s been enhanced as far as possible,” I said, “but enough to tell the tale.”

  Franco stared especially hard at this one.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he finally said, sliding the paper back across the table.

  “It’s the woodshed. It’s collapsed. Tad got there too late. The damage was already done.”

  Franco slid down in his chair—any farther and he’d have slid off onto the floor.

  “Here’s a theory,” I said.

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Sorry, you have to. Tad calls you on your cell phone. He’s home unexpectedly and wondering where Zina is. You think fast and say, ‘I don’t know, Tad, but I was just about to go shovel the snow off the woodshed. I’m worried it can’t take the weight.’ You knew Tad would join in, putting him well out of the way for Zina to run back to the main house. Well, trudge would be more like it, since no one was running through those drifts.”

  He didn’t stop me, so I kept going. “Zina has a head start, but you’re not far behind. You follow her footsteps, down from the cabin, through a corner of the big pergola, then up the rise toward Hamburger Hill. And what do you find? Dead Tad.

  “What’s the first thing you think? Zina ran into Tad and there was a confrontation, which somehow led to Tad turning his back and Zina braining him with a chunk of ice. It was unavoidable. There were Zina’s footprints, heading straight from the cabin to where Tad lay dead, and then on to the main house. So you dragged his body down the hill and walked over her path to the main house, obscuring all the damning evidence. Then you called me. Since I, and later the cops, were totally new to the scene, we never thought to search for footprints coming down from the opposite direction into the pergola. You did a brilliant job of focusing our attention where you wanted us to.”

  Franco just sat huddled into himself, rubbing his hands together and mumbling incoherencies.

  “Tell me,” I said to him, in as deep and determined a voice as I could muster. “Do you think Zina killed Tad?”

  He looked up at me.

  “I don’t know, Jackie, I really don’t,” he said. “She could’ve, that’s all I know. It went down like you say it did. It’s why I moved him. I panicked, like I said, only not for me, like a dope, for her. And it worked, by the way,” he added, with some tattered triumph that barely lasted a second. “Till now,” he concluded, and sank back into a fetid swamp of frustrated hopes, self-loathing, and images of persecution.

  * * *

  When Harry and I got back to the car I asked him how it felt to sit and listen to a conversation and never say a single word.

  “Delightfully refreshing,” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Franco’s finally telling the truth. Though probably not all of it.”

  “Interesting you’d say that. That’s what I think,” I said.

  “Because you’re so smart.”

  “So by inference, as smart as you.”

  “Don’t expect me to argue with that one.”

  When we made it back to his house the sky was still a sooty gray, but so far no snow. By current reports, the storm was on top of Philly and South Jersey and moving more to the east, causing some optimistic forecasters to suggest it might miss the East End altogether. We thought this sounded like a grand idea, but were almost afraid to wish for it too hard in case that brought it on.

  Harry revived the fire and went off to stir up some refreshments. As we ate and sipped wine, I tried to get him to talk more about the Buczek case, but he kept turning the subject to other matters. I noticed.

  “Am I talking too much about my case?” I asked. “Are we getting worried it will cause us to lose happy stuff?”

  “We are. I want to help as much as I can, but since we’ve been back home, we’ve been treading over the same ground.”

  “Obsessively?” I asked.

  “That would be a little too strong.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. You’re right, what do we want to talk about?”

  “Roger Angstrom.”

  One of the unfair things about having a fair Irish complexion is it’s almost impossible to hide an involuntary emotional response. With people like us, you don’t even need a lie detector. You just ask the questions and gauge how much of our face turns pink.

  “Don’t tell me he called you,” I said.

  “You didn’t want him to. I can tell by your face.”

  “Damn the bastard,” I said, taking my cue from his comment. Luckily, anger and shame can look the same. “I thought he was going to leave me alone.”

  “It’s none of my business, but I’m a little surprised you didn’t let me know. Just for the fun of it. The New York Times and all.”

  “It’s ridiculous. I don’t want to talk to the press about what I’m having for dinner, much less an active case.”

  “He told me it wasn’t about any specific case,” he said. “It was about you.”

  “You didn’t actually say anything, did you?”

  “Sure. I said I thought you were brilliant, passionate, and absolutely committed to your work.”

  “You’re not supposed to say anything,” I said, though in a gentle way.

  “He told me he knew that already, and wanted more specific examples. I told him that would have to come from you. He started probing into your personal life, and our relationship, and I said the same thing. So at the end of the call he’d learned that you’re brilliant, passionate, and absolutely committed to your work. And that’s it. Will make a nice headline, but not much of a story.”

  Relief flowed through me, which I expressed.

  “I think it’s really cool that the Times wants to write about you,” said Harry. “You’ve done some interesting things, had an interesting life. You deserve some recognition.”

  “As if you’re objective,” I said.

  “Okay, I’m not. But they are.”

  This caused me to confront the central question, the one I could openly ask: Why was the prospect of showing up in the newspapers so horrifying? Since I needed a good answer for Harry, I was forced to have one for myself. And with that, it came to me. It was about identity—my identity. The fact that I was riddled with conflicting impulses, that I argued with myself constantly and questioned nearly every thought and notion didn’t change the fact that I knew who I was. My personhood, and everything that went with it, was never in doubt. I’d never be able to describe such a confusing
tangle to anyone else, but I knew inside my head how it all fit together. The idea that anyone outside of that most private realm could think they could render anything close to the truth was absurd. If I went along, I’d only be doing it out of vanity. Just to see my name in type and my face in a little photograph.

  I don’t know exactly what I said to Harry, but it was along those lines. When I was finished, he told me he loved me and that he’d henceforth dedicate himself to keeping my life forever out of the media’s reach. I’d make Thomas Pynchon look like Jerry Springer. Greta Garbo like Lady Gaga.

  Again, the right thing said at the right time, which made me feel a surge of affection although tinged with a pinch of guilt, because I’d spoken the truth, but like we’d accused Franco Raffini of doing, not all of it.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until the next morning that harbingers of the next big storm, a scattered snowfall on the tundra we now called home, made an appearance. While still in bed, we turned on the radio and heard that a state of emergency had been declared in Baltimore, D.C., and Philadelphia. At that moment, the heart of the storm was over the Atlantic off the coast of New Jersey and, gaining energy from the relatively warm waters, was slated to miss New York City and most of Long Island but would hit the East End and the islands off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts like a ton of bricks.

  We’d had a peaceful, lazy night, and I awoke more refreshed than I had for weeks. While Harry reinvigorated the fire, I constructed breakfast. So then for at least another hour, the world felt like a soothing, tranquil place, as it often does in the calm before a storm.

  Still content, but ready to face reality, I got dressed while Harry set up a desk for me in the living room so I’d have room to work on my laptop with a mouse and Randall’s hard drive plugged in.

  I spent the first hour going through e-mail related to my other clients, answering most of them or responding in some other way, after which I realized I hadn’t really let anything slip while absorbed in the Buczek case. Then I wrote a brief description of the nat.net transcripts for Burton, along with my subsequent conversation with Franco. After sending that off, of course, I was hooked again.

  I’d been eager to look at what Randall had pulled from the weather satellite’s archives, though I’d felt intimidated by the technical complexities of such an alien program. These fears were entirely unfounded. Randall had prepared a home screen with all the images, times, and dates catalogued. All I had to do was click on what I wanted and up it popped.

  I decided to start with the Buczek property a few weeks before the storm and move slowly forward from there. I had a choice of speeds—jumping ahead at one-hour, two-hour, or six-hour intervals per mouse click. Or I could see everything at two-times, three-times, or six-times in fast-forward. You could also review in normal time, but that would take weeks. I picked three-times fast-forward and stared.

  Tiny cars zipped in and out of the driveway. Ant-sized people scurried around the grounds, coming and going from the main and staff houses, and in and out of the big storage barn. It almost immediately became pretty boring, but I forced myself to stay alert anyway—not my favorite thing.

  When night fell, darkness filled the screen, and there was nothing to see but pinpricks of light, so I went to six-times speed and raced through the night to daylight, pale as it was, and occasionally too misty to see much detail. Clouds also presented a challenge, and there were days when there was nothing to see but gray and white.

  I went through a few more twenty-four-hour cycles like this with nothing to show for it. Then I saw a pair of people walking up the path to the little building I’d checked out the day before. I froze that image, noted the time code, then went in reverse to earlier in the day until I saw a box van leaving the property. I went forward again and watched the two enter the building, where they stayed until nightfall.

  Presumably, they left during the night. The van returned the next morning. I watched a lot more carefully after that, slowing things down to a stately two-times speed. Which is likely how I saw “the thing.”

  That’s what I called it, as an unidentified mass connected to the area at the foot of Hamburger Hill directly opposite from where Franco had found Tad Buczek. It was large enough to appear as an anomaly within the image, though shadows shifting through the day obscured its true shape.

  I went back in time again with an eye fixed on that location and saw the thing appear again about a week before. It was a mistier day, reducing the shadow effects. I slowed down to real time and watched as long as I could stand it. Then I got up and poured more coffee. When I got back to the screen, the thing was gone.

  I snatched the mouse and used it to jump back to when the thing was in view again. So focused on the thing, I didn’t immediately see the white box van moving down the driveway. It drove past the main house, up a slight embankment, and down a path that led around to the back of Hamburger Hill, where it disappeared into the man-made monument. And the thing swung shut behind it. Not a thing, of course.

  A door.

  22

  I ran into Harry’s office and announced that we had to go back out again. He spun around in his chair and calmly said, “Really.”

  I yanked him out of his chair and brought him by the hand to the living room, where I made him watch a replay of the white box van driving into Hamburger Hill.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “This is bigger than wow. We have to go look.”

  “How bad an idea is that.”

  Goddammit, I thought, not even twenty-four hours later and we’re back at the old dilemma. I swallowed my next thought: Sam Acquillo, older and smaller than you, wouldn’t hesitate a second even if conditions were twice as bad—something I’d never, ever said to Harry, to my eternal relief. Not least of all because Harry had also saved my life when the circumstances called for it, deploying his massive size to good effect. More so because the comparison was irrelevant. I would never tie my romantic heart to a person like Sam, no matter how much I trusted and admired him. I wanted my heart tied to people like Harry.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” I said. “It’s my idea, and I’m going no matter what. I just thought you’d want to come along because being around me makes you happy.”

  Even with him sitting down we were nearly at the same eye level, so I could see him soften and the amused warmth I liked so much spread across his face.

  “I’m sorry. Let’s start that over again. Wow, we have to go look. Who’s driving?”

  “Dayna Red.”

  “The Wood Chick.”

  “The snowplow operator.”

  I ran back to my computer, looked up the number for Specialty Hardwoods, and called.

  “There’s another blizzard coming through,” I said when she answered. “Shouldn’t we be driving in it?”

  “Of course we should,” she said. “Driving where?”

  “Back to the scene of the crime,” I said.

  “You don’t hear that every day,” said Dayna.

  “How many shovels do you have?”

  “One.”

  “Bring it,” I said, and gave her directions to Harry’s.

  While we waited for her to pick us up, I climbed into long underwear, synthetic wicking socks, flannel jeans, and a fleece top. I checked on Harry, who was doing the same.

  “Doesn’t it make you pine for palm trees?” he asked, pulling ski pants over his own very long underwear.

  “You keep promising global warming. How many snow shovels do you have?”

  “Two.”

  “Perfect. And bring your pickax. We might be chiseling through ice.”

  To avoid overheating, we waited for Dayna in the driveway. The snow had graduated to the next level—the flakes were still small and light, but there were more of them and the wind had clicked up a notch from calm to breezy. The two Volvos wore a thin skin of white.

  “Consider yourselves lucky,” I said to them. “It could be worse.”

  �
�You’re talking to the cars,” Harry said.

  “You don’t?”

  Dayna and her truck showed up soon afterward. It was a serious truck with a capacious cab, though I’m sure the sight of Harry gave her pause. I jumped in first, and in a few moments we were in a cozy situation. I introduced the two of them, Dayna threw the wheel-mounted transmission into drive, and we were off.

  “You’re a good sport to do this,” I said to her.

  “Who doesn’t like to go out and play in the snow?”

  The storm’s timing was perverse. Anyone who hadn’t kept track of recent weather reports had made it to work in the early morning, when only the light stuff was coming down, and now they’d seen the error of their ways. The radio was filled with near-hysterical admonitions for everyone to get home and stay home, for God’s sake. All they had to say was this storm was looking to be even more ferocious than the last big one, and people would get the point. Since “home” for ninety percent of commuters was to the west, Montauk Highway was already jammed. Our route was east, then straight north, one blessing.

  After zigzagging our way around the prevailing traffic and maneuvering around cars already slid off the road and locked in place, Dayna asked me if I still wanted to do what I wanted to do.

  “I’m trying to save that dumb son of a bitch’s life,” I said, “no matter how hard he makes it for me.”

  “That’s Jackie’s job,” said Harry. “Saving dumb sons of bitches’ lives.”

  “They don’t all deserve it,” I said. “I’m not sure Franco does, but that’s not the point. Jeez, it’s really snowing.”

  Suddenly it really was, the flakes so densely packed there was almost no air left to look through. The radio had warned of whiteout conditions. Now I knew what they meant. We were forced to drive at impossibly slow speeds just to avoid rear-ending another truck in front of us. Worse, the ground temperature was now out of sync with the wet, fat flakes that froze into sheets on contact, creating a nearly frictionless surface. Even Dayna’s four-wheel drive was barely up to keeping us on the road.

  Which meant the other drivers were really in trouble. Every few yards another car or truck was rammed into a snow embankment, their drivers and passengers either sitting in mute misery or pointlessly trying to push their way out of trouble. These were the biggest hazards we faced, as a fleeting moment of traction would cause the stuck vehicle to lurch out into the street, often sideways to traffic. More than once Dayna swerved an instant before colliding with an oblivious and briefly ecstatic driver, who’d immediately find himself buried in the opposite bank. I’d close my eyes and brace for impact, then open them again in wonder that we were still intact.