Thai Die

by Monica Ferris

  Betsy suggested, “This silk business may have been their first venture into high-end stolen artifacts.”

  But Mike shook his head. “This is far too high end for them to have trusted it to an untested crew.”

  “Wait, Carmen wasn’t involved in the import business,” Betsy pointed out. “Besides, she was out of town when the silk was sent to the United States.”

  “We don’t know what her level of involvement was,” said Mike. “And she didn’t have to be here to have a role in that silk smuggling deal. Remember, she was supposed to go to Bangkok with Doris.”

  “All right, but how could she be the one who shot at Doris?” asked Betsy. “She was in the house with her husband, and the shot came from outside.”

  “She was in the kitchen by herself,” said Mike. “And her husband was in his den by himself. Easiest thing in the world to sneak out the back door, around to the side, and shoot. Then toss the gun into the garbage can to be taken away the next morning, come back around and into the kitchen to tell everyone you had been ducked down beside the refrigerator, too scared to move.”

  “Did you find it, then?” asked Godwin. “The gun?”

  “Yes. In the neighbor’s garbage, actually. No fingerprints, of course.”

  “Not even on the bullets?” asked Godwin.

  “But she missed,” said Betsy.

  “Yes, well, we’re talking amateurs here.” Mike made a sly grimace at Betsy, because her methods were here shown to be rubbing off on him. “Also, Doris was a friend, a good friend of some years’ standing. Perhaps at the last instant she jerked the gun just a little.”

  Betsy said, “I still don’t believe this happened the way you’re saying, Mike. I saw the two of them together, and they were very close friends. Carmen would never shoot Doris.”

  “When your life’s on the line—”

  Godwin burst out, “Carmen wouldn’t shoot Doris for any reason! They were like sisters!” He turned to Betsy. “You have to do something! They’re getting it all wrong!”

  Mike looked at her, too, and seemed about to say something, then didn’t.

  “Mike?” said Betsy.

  “All right, I don’t like it, either. I don’t know how close those two are, but it doesn’t feel right to me, either.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “It’s not my place to second-guess detectives in other jurisdictions. I’m going to go over to the Larson place and tell Lars that an arrest has been made and that his assignment as guardian of Mr. Galvin and Ms. Valentine is ended.”

  “I don’t think you should do that, Mike.”

  “I’m acting under orders, Betsy.” With tired gestures, he pulled on his coat and shoved his hands back into his gloves, and went out.

  “ ‘I am a man subject to authority,’ ” murmured Betsy, watching him go.

  “What?” said Godwin.

  “It’s from the New Testament. A man was sent to Jesus to ask for a cure for his slave. Jesus started to come to his house, but the man sent others to tell him never mind, he was not worthy to have Jesus come under his roof, because he was ‘a man subject to authority,’ meaning he had other bosses he had to obey and people he must boss around.”

  “Poor Mike,” said Godwin, looking at the closed door Mike had just gone through. Then he turned to Betsy. “Okay, this puts it back in your arena, girl. It isn’t a big, international crime ring doing this but a local amateur. And that means you can figure out who Mike should be arresting instead of Carmen.”

  Betsy sat down.

  “I’ll bring you a cup of tea,” said Godwin.

  Betsy bent sideways and pulled the skinny pink XOXO scarf out of the needlepoint bag on the floor at her feet.

  GODWIN silently set a cup of strong black English tea—with extra sugar for energy—in front of Betsy, then slipped away to sort and stack sales slips at the checkout desk. He kept a covert eye on her.

  As he watched, her movements with the knitting needles, at first sharp and jerky, became smooth and regular, and then small and very even. Her lower lip, which had been thrust outward, began to to relax. When that happened, he got out a pair of number six knitting needles and a hank of Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light yarn. It really was very light; a 144-yard hank of it weighed just one and three-quarters ounces.

  He had found Berocco’s Web site and a set of instructions for tiny sweaters just thirteen or fourteen stitches across. They were actual sweaters, with a front and back and open sleeves, and were meant to be used as Christmas tree ornaments. Godwin wanted to try them out—the instructions said one could be completed in an evening—and if that were true, he wanted to offer a class in knitting them in the fall.

  He was doing the striped one, four rows of one color, two of a contrasting color, then four of the first color again. It only took four double rows of the contrast color to reach the arms of the doll-sized garment.

  He was casting on an additional six stitches on one side for the sleeve when he heard an exclamation from Betsy.

  “What, what is it?” he asked.

  “Mashan silk!” she said. “I never said Mashan silk!”

  “What’s Mashan silk?” asked Godwin.

  “Mashan is a place in China, the place where that Han Dynasty silk came from.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I think only people familiar with archaeological digs in China, or a particular piece of ancient silk, know about Mashan.” Betsy picked up the cordless phone from the middle of the table and punched in a number. She listened, punched another number, then said rapidly, “Mike, it’s Betsy. Please call me right away.” Then she cut the connection and started to make another call. “Goddy, could you go get my coat, please?”

  When he came back with the coat, she was saying, “Yes, Jenna told me she thought it was awfully early for that to be starting. Thank you.” She put the phone down.

  Godwin helped her into the coat. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Over to the Larson house. I tried calling Mike’s cell, but he must have it turned off.” She pulled her knit hat on as she hurried to the door. “If Mike calls, ask him to call me right away.”

  She waved her cell phone at him and was gone.

  Twenty-three

  THE sun had not set, but the temperature had fallen nearly to zero. In just the minute it took Betsy to cross the tiny parking lot out back to her car, the tip of her nose began to sting and the movement of her legs brought icy air up inside her long coat past her knees. She wished she’d worn a pantsuit.

  The sky had glowed whitely all day behind a thin, uniform cloud cover which now was darkening as the sun—a mere lighter blur above the clouds—dropped in the southwest.

  Betsy started her car and turned the defroster to high as the windows quickly fogged over. It had snowed just an inch last night, not enough to make her summon the man with the little plow on the front of his pickup but enough to freshen up the layers already sagging tiredly over the landscape. Severe cold made the snow whine and groan under her car’s tires as she drove out onto the street.

  She turned right and went up to where Excelsior Boulevard came in at an angle to Second Street, and then turned left. Past Maynard’s, the nice waterfront restaurant, she turned left again, onto St. Alban’s Bay Road.

  She drove past the boat sales and service stores, past a pair of identical cottages near where the Stanley Steamer had blown up, past six finer houses behind a row of leafless trees, to Weekend Lane. The little street was only three houses long, ending at Jill and Lars’s home on the shore of Lake Minnetonka. The property was over an acre in size, irregular in shape, and set with mature trees. The house had been built as a small cottage, but Lars had built an addition that doubled its size and gave it an attached garage. Lars had also built a big heated shed with a concrete apron in front for his antique Stanley Steamer automobile.

  More recently he had surrounded the property with a cyclone fence, for now there was a toddler in res
idence. Emma Beth could swim, after a fashion, but she was curious, fearless, and inclined to forget instructions when excited—such as not to swim alone. The huge lake at the bottom of the lawn was a glittering attraction to the little girl. And now there was to be another little one with eyes to gleam at the sight.

  Not that there was any chance of swimming today; the lake was an immense meadow of snow-covered ice.

  The gate that normally blocked the driveway was open, and Betsy drove through. The drive was not plowed, but tire tracks in the snow showed it wasn’t very deep. Past a dense set of gray-brown sticks that would bloom with lilacs in a few months, she could see the barnlike shed and off to the right, the cottage. Both were painted a rustic red-brown and had dark brown shingles on their roofs. The driveway split near its end, one part going to the attached garage, the other to the shed.

  She looked for, but didn’t see, the modest sedan that Mike drove when on official police business. He must have already come and gone. She followed a set of tire prints up onto the apron in front of the shed and stopped. Shutting her engine off, she pulled her cell phone from her purse to make sure it was turned on. It was. So why hadn’t he called?

  She punched in Mike’s number at the police department, but before her phone could begin to ring the car door was yanked open. Betsy looked up to see a man standing there, a gun in one gloved hand. Shocked, she dropped the phone.

  He was a tall man, very trim even in a long overcoat of dark gray wool. He wore a stylized dark gray fedora that was almost a cowboy hat, a rakish affectation that made her recognize him at once, though she’d only seen him briefly two or three times before.

  “Joe!” she said.

  “Hi, Betsy. I’m really sorry about this,” he said, and such was the distress on his face that her first impulse was to offer some words of comfort.

  But she managed to hold them back—the gun in his hand was pointing at her face, after all—and instead she said, “What do you want?”

  “Move over, I’ll be driving. We need to go someplace private.”

  Without moving, Betsy asked, “How did you find me?”

  “I followed you from your store. I was hoping you’d stop someplace where I could get to you. I’m glad you did—it makes this so much easier. No, don’t get out!”

  But Betsy was out of the car before he had finished speaking. “Wh . . . why do you have to take me anywhere?”

  “To kill you. Because you know who I am. That is, you know what I am.”

  Edging very, very slowly down the length of her Buick, Betsy asked in as mild a tone as she could muster, “What are you?” Then she broke and ran down the driveway, veering from side to side, trying not to stumble, desperately hoping it was true that handguns in the hands of amateurs are very inaccurate at more than a few yards.

  There was a tiny tug at the sleeve of her coat followed immediately by a loud bang.

  She screamed and ran off the driveway in among the tall trees and snow-clogged shrubs. Her feet crunched the snow loudly. Another report sounded, but this time the shot did not seem to come near her. She fled to the largest tree and stopped, heart pounding. She extended her left arm and turned it to look at the back of the sleeve. She saw a small, frayed tear just below the elbow that had not been there when she put the coat on. He’d nearly hit her! She rubbed the hole with her right hand, as if that could erase it.

  A troubled silence had settled in. Betsy strained her ears for the sound of footsteps, but could hear nothing. Where was he? There’d been no sound of a car starting up. Was he still on the property? Perhaps he had run away. She began to make her way in the direction of her car, trying unsuccessfully to step quietly.

  Here among the trees, the snow had blown into deep drifts. Warmer weather earlier that week had softened the drifts, but now they had frozen up again, just enough to hold her weight briefly. She would step up onto one, and then her boot would crunch through. She had to lift her foot high to get it clear of the crusted snow. Betsy paused very briefly between each step to listen, but still, walking was like working a StairMaster while wearing heavy clothing. In a very few minutes she was gasping for air and prickly with fear-sweat.

  Where was Joe? She felt a pressure on the middle of her back, as if someone were aiming a weapon at her, and whirled around to see . . . nothing. She listened intently—was that a footstep? But now there was only silence. The light was failing quickly, she couldn’t stay out here in the dark.

  Then, all of a sudden, she did hear something. It was like an old-fashioned steam locomotive whistle, except smaller, and not coming from the direction of the one active railroad line near Excelsior.

  But she knew what it meant. She was saved.

  She turned and ran back toward the driveway just as a large, square-built, flat-fendered, forest green car came rolling smoothly through the gates. So that’s why they’d been left open! Lars had gone for a drive with the old car. Betsy stopped before reaching the driveway, looking in both directions. There were a man’s footprints besides her own, black on the surface of the drive. She backed up two steps.

  Lars hadn’t put the top up, and Betsy could see he had two passengers in the backseat.

  They were Phil and Doris, laughing as they were pressed together sideways as the antique car bent around the turn into the driveway. Stanleys, having no transmission, generate tremendous torque; this model’s narrow tires did not lose any of their grip on the snow-covered lane. Lars, behind the wheel, was laughing, too. He reached for controls on the upright dashboard as the old car slowed.

  “Lars! Lars!” shouted Betsy, starting to run after it. The trio in the car, startled, looked around at her.

  But after her struggles in the snowdrifts, she could run no more than a few strides. Her chest ached, it was impossible to take a deep-enough breath. She stopped and, desperate to warn them with as few words as possible, shouted, “He’s got a gun!”

  Brakes on antique cars are notoriously weak. Lars stopped the Stanley by the simple expedient of throwing it into reverse. The car instantly gave a little hop backward, dumping momentum, at which point Lars closed the throttle and applied the old brakes. Betsy could hear him shout, “Get down, get down!” while gesturing at Doris and Phil, who vanished into the depths of the capacious backseat.

  He leaped out of the car, unzipping his fur-edged parka as he ran toward Betsy. He grabbed her by one arm and drew a revolver from a shoulder holster with his other hand, pulling her off the drive and into the shelter of a lilac bush.

  “Who has a gun?” he demanded, looking around. He was a very tall man with broad shoulders and big hands. He had blond hair and light gray eyes, and his expression, normally good-humored, was at the moment shockingly grim and preternaturally alert.

  “Dr. Joe Brown. He’s the murderer, Lars. I was coming here to tell Mike, but I missed him, and Joe followed me.”

  “Where is Joe now?”

  Betsy, with a quaver in her voice, replied, “I don’t know. He shot at me, Lars. I’ve been running and hiding. If you hadn’t come back . . .” She stifled a sob. “He said I knew—and he’s right, I do. He killed the antiques store man, and Lena Olson—”

  “You can tell me this later,” Lars interrupted her brusquely. “Let’s get under cover. Come on!”

  He hustled her back to the Stanley—he hadn’t let go of her arm—and said, through the door, “We have a man with a gun here, and need to get into the house.”

  “Oh, my God!” muttered Phil from somewhere within the car.

  Lars wrenched the door open. “Out, fast!”

  Phil came out first, clumsily trying to both hurry and keep his head down. He reached back to assist Doris.

  “Drop that gun!” said a voice.

  When Phil let go of Doris to spin around, she fell out of the car. She gave a cry of pain as her knees struck the icy driveway.

  “Give it up, Joe!” shouted Lars, turning, starting to raise his own gun.

  “I’ll shoot Betsy first!” co
untered Joe.

  Phil, murmuring words of comfort, helped Doris to her feet, then pulled her close beside him, one arm around her waist. Betsy edged sideways to stand beside Phil.

  Then they all faced the man with the gun in watchful, respectful silence.

  “I mean it,” said Joe. His hand trembled, but his face was clenched with determination.

  Lars had not yet brought his gun to bear on Joe. He hesitated, then tossed it aside.

  “Who are you, anyway?” Joe demanded.

  “I’m Sergeant Lars Larson, Excelsior police,” said Lars in an angry voice. “Who are you?”

  “Po . . . po . . .” Joe gaped at Lars in clear dismay, then pulled his mouth shut with an effort.

  Betsy took this opportunity to identify him. “He’s Dr. Joseph Brown,” she said. “A member of the board of directors of the Minneapolis Art Institute.”

  Joe pulled himself together. He grasped his gun more firmly, giving it a little shake and said, “Everybody, just stay where you are!”

  “All right,” said Lars agreeably, spreading his hands. “Fine. But you’re in a lot more trouble now than you were just a few minutes ago.”

  “Yes, I agree, it’s gotten complicated,” agreed Joe, “but I think I can manage.” He sounded calm now. He turned his attention to Phil. “So who are you?”

  “I’m Phil Galvin, retired railroad engineer.”

  “Who are you?” he asked Doris.

  Betsy said quickly, “I’m Betsy Devonshire.”

  “I know who you are,” said Joe. “The source of all my trouble.”

  “She’s not the source, you are!” growled Phil. “Stupid jerk! You’re the one killing people over a piece of old silk!” He had wordlessly conspired with Betsy to keep Doris’s name out of this.

  “You don’t understand!” cried Joe, and the gun in his hand wavered. “Nobody was supposed to die! That wasn’t the plan at all!”

  He began to approach the group, moving at an angle that led him toward the front of the old car, eyes shifting constantly as he kept track of everyone. As he walked, his expression hardened. Betsy was terrified he’d come to a deadly decision.