Code 61 ch-4

by Donald Harstad

  “What'd he look like?”

  “He's just a man in a gray sweatshirt with a hood, I think. Not much more. Anyway, I yell at him, and he just stares at me. I holler 'Who're you?' and he just motions like he wants me to go away.”

  I hate to admit it, but my heart rate was elevating.

  “Where'd he go?”

  “Well, he sort of disappeared, Carl. But I think he went back toward the top of the bluff.”

  “And where's Tillman?” My heart sank. Tillman was about twenty-five or so, and had been a reserve for about three months. A great kid, but I was pretty sure he didn't fully appreciate some aspects of the job. Like risks, for example.

  “He took up the hill after him,” said Knockle. “Told me to stay here, and call for help.”

  I looked up the bluff. There was a ravine that was full of big rocks and old, fallen trees. But it looked passable, at least up into the tree line.

  “How'd Tillman get up there?”

  “He went up the ravine, Carl. Didn't look too easy. You better watch your step.”

  “No shit.” It was no time for pride. “Did he have a walkie-talkie?”

  “No, we only got one, and he told me to keep it 'cause he'd need both hands.”

  I looked as Hester went by me, toward the ravine. “Coming?”

  My good slacks. My better shoes. Damn. “Yeah, I'm coming.” I reached into the car, and pulled out the walkie-talkie, and slipped it into my back pocket. “The team you were going to relieve still up in the woods?” I asked Knockle.

  “I ain't heard from 'em, Carl, and I called three or four times.”

  “Did you use your walkie or the car radio?”

  “Oops. Sorry, I used the walkie.”

  As I headed toward the ravine, I said, “Use your car radio, get some more people up here, and get your shotgun out and keep your eyes open. I don't want you getting hurt on me. You're too old to bury.”

  He grinned. “You bet.”

  The damned ravine was really wet, to start things off. The rain had soaked the rotting timber that was crammed into the rocky waterway, and there was still a thin trickle of runoff flowing down from the hill. On top of that, everything was covered with soggy, moldering leaves. And I could catch the occasional whine of a mosquito as I took my first steps onto the big rocks. Great. My good slacks.

  Hester was ahead of me, and I wasn't able to gain on her at all. It took both hands just to stay upright, and the handholds I found among the decaying branches were treacherous because the sodden bark just peeled off in my hands. Underneath, the smooth wood was slippery as the rocks under my feet. But, up I went. I was pretty certain that, as we passed the limestone bluff and went up into the wooded area, the footing would get better, and the slope would be less steep. I was half right.

  After about three or four difficult minutes, I saw that Hester was stepping spryly from a boulder and into the tree line. About a minute later, I went for the trees at the same place. The footing was a little better. The slope, unfortunately, was steeper.

  I kept losing sight of Hester as she moved about among the big maple and walnut and pine trees. I stopped to catch my breath, and heard her call out.

  “What?” It was difficult to get much volume, I was breathing so hard.

  “Here…,” she said.

  Well, swell. Two more gulps of air, and I headed upslope again. Then I heard another voice, and realized she was talking to Tillman. They seemed to be stationary. Good. I slowed a bit, as the tone of their voices didn't seem especially urgent. By the time I got to them, I was only breathing sort of hard.

  They were on either side of a rock outcropping that jutted out from the hillside about twenty feet. It was a good ten feet high, and seemed to be split about down the middle by a fissure that was about four feet wide.

  I've been around long enough to realize that, when there's an officer acting really alert on either side of an opening, with a gun in his or her hand, that there's a very good chance there's somebody inside that opening. Somebody who's being difficult, at best.

  “What's up?” I said as I moved to the right, or Tillman side, of the split.

  “I think he's in there,” he said. “I saw him go in. I don't think anybody could climb up the inside of that to the top up there, do you?”

  I thought of the wall outside Alicia's apartment.

  “Don't be too sure,” I said. “You heard anything since you saw him go in?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hey, you in the rocks!” I shouted. “Out, now!”

  Nothing.

  “Police! Come out now, and keep your hands where we can see 'em!”

  Still no response. I remembered when I was a kid, and we would think there was something fierce or ferocious in a hole. We'd grab a stick, and poke it in the hole to see what might come out. Nothing ever had. Buoyed by memories, I nevertheless realized that poking a stick into the crack between the halves of the outcropping wasn't quite the solution we needed. I looked around, and saw several small rocks that had flaked off the limestone over the years. I picked up three nicely shaped ones, hefted them, and decided they'd do admirably. I whistled softly through my teeth. When Hester and Tillman glanced toward me, I held up the rocks and made a tossing gesture. They both nodded, and returned their gaze to the target area. I holstered my gun, and lobbed the first one at the ffssure. It bounced off to the side. Close, though. I tossed the second one about seven or eight feet higher, and saw it enter the crack. It clattered off the sides twice, and then I heard a muffled thump.

  “Hey! Stop throwing the damned rocks!” came from the split.

  I was grinning from ear to ear at that point. “Come out slowly and with your hands where we can see them!”

  “Okay, okay.” With that, there was a shuffling and a grunting, and a man emerged, hands up, head down, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans. His head was down more to avoid thrown rocks, I thought, than for any other reason.

  While Hester and Tillman covered me, I approached slowly, gun back in my hand, but pointed down. “Stop right there.”

  He did. I still couldn't see his face.

  “Who are you?”

  He looked up at me. “Bill Chester. You know me.”

  Honest to God. Our intrepid vampire hunter. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

  “Can I put my hands down?”

  “Yeah, go ahead. So, what the hell are you doing up here?”

  “Can't a man just take a walk in the woods?”

  Tillman spoke up. “I told you to stop. I got a uniform on. You saw us down at that car, with a marked cop car. Why'd you rabbit on me?”

  I thought that was a pretty good question.

  “I'm not sure I have to tell you that.”

  I was getting a little tired of Mr. Chester. “That your car?”

  “No, it belongs to a friend of mine.”

  “Your friend here, too?” I asked.

  “No. I'm alone.”

  “You drove over here just to take a walk up a bluff?”

  “There's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing. I can drive and walk just about anywhere I want to. I don't see any 'No Trespassing' signs.”

  “That car's got an expired registration,” I said. “You just admitted to driving it here. We're going to have to charge you, and impound the vehicle.”

  “What?”

  “And your fleeing obvious officers will suggest to a court that you were fully aware that the registration was expired, and were trying to avoid capture.” It was a moment.

  “That would be chickenshit. I am appalled!”

  I just smiled. It would at least make up for my good wash pants.

  “Care to tell me why you're really here?” asked Hester sweetly. “I do have some influence with these two officers.”

  “You might have him start with that,” I said, indicating the edge of a dark green backpack protruding from the ffssure.

  Chester stepped back, and moved as if he was going
to reach for the pack. He glanced at us, to see what the reaction would be, and found himself staring down the muzzles of three handguns.

  “Freeze,” said Hester. “Don't move a muscle.”

  He stopped. “I was just going to hand it to you.”

  “I'll get it,” said Tillman. He moved slowly past Chester, reached down, and retrieved the backpack.

  A long time ago, the Supreme Court ruled that we could make searches “incidental to arrest.” In this case, that meant that we had every right to examine the contents of the backpack before we handed it back to him. Just in case there was a “weapon contained therein,” as we say.

  “Look through it,” I said to Tillman, as Hester and I lowered our guns again. I stepped closer to Chester.

  “I told you to steer clear of this case,” I said, “and I meant it.”

  “I haven't interfered. Not once.”

  I decided not to mention my suspicion that it was him who had leaked the vampire stuff to the press. Instead, I said, “You're less than half a mile from the Mansion right now, and there's nothing else on this bluff but the scene of a possible crime.”

  “He's less than a quarter mile from there, Carl,” said Tillman, who probably hunted in these woods.

  “I had no idea… ” said Chester, just as Tillman held up a small gray case with an LCD screen in its face and a keypad. It looked like a hand calculator.

  “This is a GPS receiver, Carl,” said Tillman, “and it works.” Tillman was young, and his father owned a large, modern farm, so I took his word for it. They used them a lot these days, to place herbicides and other things with amazing accuracy.

  I gave Chester a disgusted look. “Wanna try that again?”

  “Is this guy a priest?” asked Tillman, holding up a crucifix that looked to be about a foot long.

  “Nope,” I said. “He's a vampire hunter.”

  “No shit?” said Tillman. “Way cool.”

  On the way back down to the cars, with Tillman toting the pack, I asked Chester why he had tried to defy my order to stay away from the scene.

  “In the first place, I was lost,” he said, without much conviction. “In the second place, I hardly think it's fair that you have patrols out just to keep me from my job.”

  Aside from the fact that only a dedicated egocentric would think our patrols were meant for him, it was the first time I had heard him refer to a job.

  “Just what would your job be?” I asked between mossy limestone stepping blocks.

  “To bring the vampire to justice,” he replied.

  “That's our job,” said Hester. “Just ours.”

  “God's justice,” he said. “Not the laws. The justice of the righteous.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that's just fuckin' swell.” I stumbled, and made my usual graceful recovery. “In the first place, he's probably not anywhere around here.”

  “Who? The one you were all chasing?”

  “Whoever it is you're looking for, Chester,” I said.

  When we got to the cars, I told Tillman and Knockle to get a wrecker for Chester's car, and then escort it and him to the jail. I reiterated the traffic charge.

  “Aren't you going to charge me with interference?” asked Chester.

  “No. But don't push it. I'm willing to cut you some slack, because you weren't actually in contact with anybody but us. But, like I said, don't push it.”

  “Of course.” He was smiling.

  “Knockle,” I said, “do not give this gentleman a ride back to this area. Keep his car in Maitland as evidence, and take him directly back to his motel over in Wisconsin, as soon as he posts bail.” I paused. “And tell Harry that he's over there, and what happened.”

  “You bet, Carl. Hey, too bad about those pants. You looked pretty good before you went up the hill.”

  NINETEEN

  Monday, October 9, 2000

  13:21

  When we finally got headed up to the Mansion again, Hester and I tried to come up with a game plan. To begin with, we wanted to know what Edie's five housemates knew about who had been upstairs when we went to the third floor. We were virtually certain that it was this Peel, but we needed to be sure. It was apparent that he'd been up there a while, possibly since Edie's murder. Had they known? I was willing to bet that at least some of them had. So was Hester.

  We were pretty sure that the unknown called Peel had killed Edie, probably killed Baumhagen, and had been the window peeker at Alicia Meyer's. It looked like we were going to have to find out about Peel from the group at the house, though, since Jessica Hunley had split too soon to be interviewed. It was a case where, the more we knew about Peel, the more we'd probably know about the why and where of the killings.

  We also wanted to determine two things about the movement of Edie's body. First, we needed to make sense out of the bloodstains. Both the stains on the carpet and those on the servants' stair had been explained by the action of setting down Edie's body in the body bag. Whoever was moving it needed either a rest, or a way to open the doors. Either way, the problem was determining why the stains were at the bottom of the servants' stair, which only went to the third floor; and on the second floor in front of Edie's door. If she'd been killed on the third, and we certainly had no real evidence that she had, it might explain the movement. Except to get her down to the second, the logical way was to go via the main stair, which we had gone up. To go down from three all the way to one via the back stairs, then right back up to two via the main staircase… Illogical. Not to say not possible, but not logical.

  As Hester said, “Especially since it doesn't look like she was killed up on the third, anyway.”

  “Since it didn't appear she was killed in the basement, on the first floor, on the second floor, or on the third floor… ” I said. “Unless she was killed on the roof, she wasn't killed at the Mansion at all.” Not a brilliant deduction, by a long shot, but at least logical.

  “Sounds that way,” said Hester. “You really think that's likely? Not the roof,” she added quickly. “But, I mean, if you kill her away from the house, why drag her back at all? Why not leave her there?”

  “Oh, maybe because you'd rather have the cops looking at suicide, instead of a missing person. If it was a suicide, we sure wouldn't pry as much as a missing person case.”

  “I don't think so,” said Hester. “To deliberately cast suspicion, you should kill her there. Otherwise, even a dumb cop is going to figure out that she was done elsewhere, and there goes your plan.”

  “I'll try not to take that personally.”

  “Sorry. Didn't mean it that way.” She chuckled. “So all we have to do is prove who killed her, and why, and then we can explain the evidence.”

  I glanced toward her and smiled. “Simple, no?”

  We drove in silence. Hester had her attache case opened, and as I drove, she was leafing through our preliminary reports, as well as the reports of everybody else at the scene who'd had to write one. As I turned into the Mansion drive, she stacked the papers neatly, closed her case, and said, “I've got another question, that just might at least have an answer attached.”

  “That'll be a relief.”

  “Okay, now you're going to have to go with the flow here.” She leaned her head back against the headrest, and shut her eyes. “We've had a total of two runners: Toby and the Unknown who is probably Peel. Right?”

  “So far.”

  “We have no idea what Toby was up to, do we? I mean, he said he was running to get away from Peel, who was a vampire. Isn't that it?”

  “Yep. That's what he said.” I slowed, to give us time to finish the conversation.

  “But you don't believe him, do you?”

  “Toby,” I said, matter-of-factly as we crept up the drive, “is a lying sack of shit.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Hester, sounding happy. “He sure is. Now, then, hang on. We have the elusive Mr. Peel trucking out the very same door, and also into the woods, right?”

  “Yep.”

/>   “Now think back,” she said. “Don't we assume that Toby was just trying to get away, for whatever reason?”

  “Yeah. I think we can do that.”

  “And don't we think Toby's a general screwup, when it comes right down to it?”

  I chuckled. “Oh, we do, we really do.”

  “Now, and jump with me here, we also think that our Peel dude was fleeing, as well, and basically just trying to get away. Right?”

  “Okay… ”

  “But what if they were not running so much away from something, as running to something?”

  I didn't answer for a second. Then, “And Toby is so much of a fuck-up he couldn't find it in the dark?”

  “You got it.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Damn. I think you might be right.”

  She sat up straight, eyes wide, and said, all perky, “Oh, I am. I know I am.”

  “So now, we just have to find where?”

  “That's it,” she said. “If we find that, I'll just bet we find out a lot more at the same time.”

  Time being short before the wake, we knew we were going to have to target one particular individual first. Did we do one of the innocuous ones first, or go for one who would produce a useful effect that we could use later? We decided to go for the latter.

  “So, who first?”

  She thought a second. “You think that Holly, a/k/a Huck, is the strongest personality up there?”

  “Well, her or Kevin. She strikes me as the more stable one.”

  “I'll go with Huck,” said Hester. “I think Kevin might be her most enthusiastic follower, though. And he might be her 'muscle' with the rest. Strong ally, you know.”

  That seemed possible.

  “So,” I said, “we concentrate on Holly slash Huck for our break?”

  “Don't you think?” said Hester.

  “Well, sure,” I said with some spirit. “Unless it turns out we have to concentrate on somebody else.”

  It's nice to have a plan.

  We relieved the two reserves that were stationed just outside the gate. They were curious about why we'd been summoned to the base of the bluff, and we told them that there had just been some weirdo up on the hillside. It had the advantage of being the truth.