The problem was, there was no accomplice in the hall to see the guy come. The hall was empty.
“Start it up again,” he said.
He watched morosely as the hotel detective disappeared into the room, alerted by the husband’s shouts. Almost immediately the killer stepped out again and headed for the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button, waited a minute, and then—as if changing his mind—walked the rest of the way down the hall, exiting through the stairwell door.
Moments later, the elevator doors opened and three men in suits stepped out.
“Stop,” D’Agosta said. “Let’s see the feed from the thirteenth floor. Begin at the same time index.”
“Sure thing, Loo,” said Hong.
They had already reviewed the tapes of the fourteenth floor—at that particular moment there had been several cleaning ladies at work, their carts blocking the corridor. Now D’Agosta watched as the killer emerged from the stairwell onto the thirteenth floor. He strode over to the elevator bank, pressed the DOWN button again, and waited. He let one elevator go by, then pressed the button again. This time, when the doors opened, he stepped inside.
“Stop,” D’Agosta said.
He had been through this again and again. Where was the accomplice? In several instances, there was nobody around to observe, and in other situations, where there were people who might be spotting, he could find no physical matches between them. Nobody could turn himself from an old, stooped gentleman of eighty into a fat Dominican cleaning lady in fifteen seconds. Unless the killer had half a dozen accomplices.
This was seriously, seriously weird.
“Lobby camera,” D’Agosta muttered. “Same time index.”
The image on the monitor jittered, then came into focus again, showing a bird’s-eye view of the hotel’s discreet and elegant lobby. The elevator doors opened, and the killer emerged—alone. He began to walk toward the main exit, then seemed to reconsider, turned, and sat down in a chair, hiding his face behind a newspaper. Seven seconds later a uniformed man—hotel security—went running past. Immediately afterward the killer got up, and—instead of heading for the main exit again—made for an unmarked door leading to the service areas. Just before he reached it, the door opened and a porter emerged. The killer slipped in as the door was closing again—he hadn’t even needed to extend an arm.
D’Agosta watched as the form was obscured by the closing door. Other cameras had shown him going out an exit in the hotel’s loading zone. Repeated viewings of the lobby and other video feeds again showed no sign of a possible partner in the murders.
Hong stopped the video of his own accord. “Anything else you’d like to see?”
“Yeah. Got any Three Stooges reruns?” And D’Agosta pushed himself wearily to his feet, feeling even older than when he’d first come in.
But as he was leaving, he was suddenly struck by an idea. The accomplice didn’t need to be in all those places. If he had access to the live video feeds, he would have seen everything D’Agosta had. And could have warned the killer accordingly. So he was either someone in the security department itself, or someone who had hacked into the CCTV system and was diverting a private feed for himself, in real time—perhaps, if those cameras were networked, even over the Internet. In that case, the accomplice might not even be in New York City.
With this brilliant stroke in mind, D’Agosta immediately began thinking about how to exploit it.
24
THE CABIN DIDN’T BELONG TO HER FATHER AND NEVER had. Jack Swanson wasn’t really the kind of person who actually owned things. He talked his way into borrowing them, took them over, and then over time acted as if they were his own. As was typical of Jack, he had somehow stumbled across the run-down tar-paper shack years ago, in timberland owned by Royal Paper on the New Jersey side of the Delaware Water Gap. The story Corrie heard was that he’d made friends with some Royal Paper executive he’d met on a fishing trip, who apparently agreed that if Jack wanted to fix the place up he could stay there whenever he wanted as long as he kept a low profile and didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Corrie was sure the transaction involved many beers and fishing stories, and a big dose of her father’s apparent charm. The cabin had no heat, water, or electricity; the windows were broken and the roof full of holes; and nobody seemed to mind that Jack went up there, slapdashed the shack into something barely habitable, installed himself as its proprietor, and used it as a base for occasional fishing trips to nearby Long Pine Lake.
Corrie had never seen the place, of course, but she knew it existed, because her mother complained bitterly when she discovered that his “fishing cabin on the lake in New Jersey” did not actually belong to him when it came time to divide up their (nonexistent) assets in the divorce.
The cabin, Corrie felt sure, was where her father had holed up. He didn’t own it, so officialdom couldn’t trace him there. And she was pretty sure news of his seamy little bank robbery would not likely have traveled very far from Allentown, certainly not up into the little hamlets about the Worthington State Forest of New Jersey.
How many Long Pine Lakes could there be in that area? According to Google Maps there was only one, and Corrie sure as hell hoped it was the right one as she got out of the horribly expensive cab she’d hired from the bus stop in East Stroudsburg, which had taken her to a country store known as Frank’s Place in Old Foundry, New Jersey, the closest commercial establishment she could find to Long Pine Lake.
Counting out a hundred and twenty bucks, she paid off the cabdriver, then sauntered into the store. It was just as she’d hoped, one of those cramped places selling fishing lures, bait, cheap rods, coolers, boating supplies, bundles of firewood, Coleman fuel, and—of course—beer. An entire wall of beer.
Just her father’s kind of joint.
As she walked up to the counter, a silence fell among the beer-guts hanging out around the cash register. No doubt it was her purple hair. She was tired, she was irritated, and she was not happy to have spent a hundred and twenty dollars on a cab ride. She really hoped these good old boys weren’t going to give her a hard time.
“I’m looking for Jack Swanson,” she said.
More silence. “Is that right?” came the eventual response from the apparent self-appointed clown of the group. “What… Jack knock you up or something?” The man guffawed and looked to his friends, left and right, for approval.
“I’m his daughter, you mentally defective asswipe,” she said in a very loud voice that reached to the farthest corners of the store and brought a sudden hush to the place.
Now the laugh came from the friends. Beer-Gut colored deeply, but there wasn’t much he could do. “She got you that time, Merv,” said one, a little less simian than the others, nudging his pal.
She waited, arms crossed, for an answer.
“So you’re the kid he’s always talking about,” the less simian one said, in a friendly tone.
This business about her father always talking about her surprised Corrie, but she didn’t show it. She didn’t even look at Merv, who was clearly hugely embarrassed. “So—you all know my father?”
“He’s probably up at his cabin,” the nicer one said.
Bingo, thought Corrie. She’d been right. She felt a huge relief this hadn’t been a wasted effort.
“Where’s that?”
The man gave her directions. It was about a mile up the road. “I’d be happy to give you a ride,” he said.
“No thanks.” She hefted the knapsack and turned to leave.
“Really, I’d be happy to. I’m a friend of your dad’s.”
She had to stop herself from asking him what he was like. That wouldn’t be the way to go about it—she had to find out for herself. She hesitated, gave the man a once-over. He looked sincere, it was freezing outside, and her knapsack weighed a ton. “All right. As long as Perv, I mean Merv, here doesn’t tag along.” She gestured at Beer-Gut Number One.
This elicited laughter.
“Come on, t
hen.”
She had him drop her off at the spot where a shortcut trail to the cabin left the main road. It was just a steep track in the pinewoods, which started out in a big puddle of mud she had to skirt around. She had what looked like a half-mile walk to the cabin, and as she went along the track—now and again crossing one of the switchbacks of Long Pine Road—she felt herself start to unwind, to really relax, for the first time in ages. It was a typical early-December day: the sun was shining through the branches of the oaks and pines, dappling the ground around her, and a smell of resin and dead leaves hung in the air. If ever there was a great place to hide from the cops—or Nazis, for that matter—this was it.
But as she thought about her father, and what she would say to him, and he to her, her stomach began to tighten up again. She could hardly remember him physically, had no real idea of what he looked like—her mother had thrown away the scrapbook of pictures of them together. She had no idea what to expect. So, he was now a bank robber? God, he might be an alcoholic or a drug addict. He might be one of those criminals full of whining self-pity and justification, blaming everything on bad parents or bad luck. He might even be shacked up with some horrible sleazy bitch.
And what would happen if he were caught, and there she was living in the cabin with him? She had already looked up the federal statute on the web, 18 USC § 1071, which required them to prove she’d actually harbored or concealed him and had taken steps to prevent his discovery or arrest. Just living with him wasn’t enough. Still, how would it affect her future law enforcement career? It sure as hell wouldn’t look good.
In short, this was a stupid idea. She hadn’t really thought it through. She should have stayed back in his house where she was perfectly safe, and let him live his own life. She slowed, stopped, shrugged off the knapsack, and sat down. Why had she ever thought this was a good idea?
What she really should do now was turn around and go back to Allentown, or rather West Cuyahoga, and forget all about this bullshit. She rose, slung the knapsack back over her shoulder, and turned to leave. But then she hesitated.
She had come too far to run away. And she wanted to know—really wanted to know—about those letters in the closet. The postmaster at Medicine Creek was about as dumb as they came… but she didn’t think he was that dumb.
She turned around and trudged on. The shortcut trail left the road for good, went around a bend, and there, in front of her in a sunny clearing, was the shack, all by itself, no other buildings even remotely nearby. She stopped and stared.
It was not charming. Tar paper had been tacked on with irregular strips of wood. The two windows on either side of the door were curtained but broken. Behind and through the oaks she could see an outhouse. A rusted stovepipe poked up through the roof.
The yard in front, however, was neat, the grass trimmed. She could hear someone moving inside the house.
Oh, God, here we go. She walked up to the door and knocked. A sudden silence. Was he going to bolt out the back?
“Hello?” she called, hoping to forestall that.
More silence. And then a voice from inside. “Who is it?”
She took a deep breath. “Corrie. Your daughter. Corrie.”
Another long silence. And then suddenly the door burst open and a man tumbled out—she recognized him immediately—who enveloped her in his arms and just about crushed her.
“Corrie!” he cried, his voice choking up. “How many years have I prayed for this! I knew someday it would come! My God, I prayed for it—and now here it’s happened! My Corrie!” And then he dissolved into great hiccuping gusts of sobbing joy that would have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been so completely flabbergasted.
25
INSIDE, THE CABIN WAS SURPRISINGLY COZY, NEAT, AND even charming in a beat-up, rustic sort of way. Her father—she called him Jack, unable to bring herself to say Dad—showed her around with no little amount of pride. It consisted of two rooms: a kitchen-living-dining area, and a tiny bedroom just big enough for a rickety twin bed, bureau, and washstand. There was no plumbing or electricity. An old Franklin stove supplied heat. An upright camping stove on legs, supplied by bottled gas, was used for cooking, and next to it an old soapstone sink was set up on two-by-fours, its drainpipe simply dumping water onto the ground under the floorboards. Drinking water came in plastic jugs lined up by the front door, filled, he said, at a spring half a mile from the cabin.
Everything was in its place, clean, and orderly. She noted no liquor bottles or beer cans anywhere. Red paisley curtains added a cheery note, and the rough wooden kitchen table was spread with a checked tablecloth. But what surprised Corrie the most—although she didn’t mention it—was a large cluster of framed photographs that dominated the wall above the table, all of her. She had no idea so many childhood and baby pictures of her even existed.
“You take the bedroom and get settled in,” Jack said, opening the door. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
Corrie didn’t argue with him. She dumped her knapsack on the bed, and rejoined her father in the kitchen. He was standing over the stove.
“Are you staying for a while?” he asked.
“If that’s okay.”
“More than okay. Coffee?”
“Oh, my God, yes.”
“It ain’t French press.” He laughed and dumped some coffee grounds into an enamel pot filled with water, stirred it, and put it on to boil.
So far, after the initial effusive greeting, both of them had somehow refrained from asking questions. Although she was dying to—and she knew he must be, too. It seemed neither one wanted to rush things.
He hummed as he worked, brought out a carton of doughnuts, and arranged them on a plate. She suddenly remembered that humming habit of his—something she hadn’t thought of in fifteen years. She examined him surreptitiously as he bustled about. He was thinner and seemed astonishingly shorter, but that must be because she’d grown up. No man could shrink from giant size—which is what she remembered—to a measly five foot seven. His hair was thinning, with one jaunty tuft that stuck out from the top; his face was deeply scored but still strikingly handsome in a kind of sparkling, cheerful, Irish way. Even though he was only a quarter Irish, the other parts being Swedish, Polish, Bulgarian, Italian, and Hungarian. “I’m a mutt,” she remembered him once saying.
“Milk, sugar?” he asked.
“Got cream?”
“Heavy cream.”
“Perfect. Lots of heavy cream and three spoonfuls of sugar.”
He brought the two steaming mugs over, set them down, and took a seat. For a moment they drank in silence and Corrie, realizing she was famished, ate one of the doughnuts. The birds were chirping outside, the late-afternoon light came dappling in through the rustling leaves, and she could smell the forest. It suddenly seemed so perfect she began to cry.
Like a typical man, Jack leapt up in a complete panic. “Corrie! What’s wrong? Are you in trouble? I can help.”
She waved him back down and wiped her eyes, smiling. “Nothing. Just forget it. I—I’m kind of stressed out.”
Still all aflutter, he sat down and went to put his arm around her, but she shied away. “Just… hold on a moment and let me kind of get used to this.”
He withdrew the arm all in a rush. “Right. Of course.” His extreme solicitude touched her. She blew her nose, and there was an awkward silence. Neither one wanted to ask the other the first question.
“You’re welcome to stay here long as you like,” Jack finally began. “No questions asked, free to come and go as you please… Um, do you have a car? I didn’t see anything.”
She shook her head. And then she said, without really meaning to: “They say you robbed a bank.”
A dead silence. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t.”
Immediately, Corrie felt something go cold inside her. Already he was lying to her.
“No, really, I didn’t. I was framed.”
“But you… ran.”
He smacked h
is head, shaking his tuft of hair. “Yeah, I ran. Like a damn idiot. Totally stupid, I know. But I didn’t do it. Please believe me. They’ve got all this evidence, but it’s because I was framed. It happened like this—”
“Wait.” She held up a hand. “Wait.” She didn’t want to hear any more lies—if in fact they were lies.
He fell silent.
She took a long drink of her coffee. It tasted wonderful. Grabbed another doughnut and took a big soft bite. Stay in the moment. She tried to relax, but the real question she wanted to ask, the one she’d been avoiding, kept coming back again and again to her mind, and so she finally swallowed and asked it.
“What’s up with all those packages and letters in your closet?”
Jack stared at her. “You saw them?”
“What went on, exactly? Why did you just leave and… never call? For fifteen years?”
He looked at her, surprise and sadness mixing on his face. “Duette wouldn’t let me call you, said you didn’t want to talk, and… and I understood that. But I sent you something just about every week, Corrie. Presents, whenever I could afford them. As you grew older, I tried to guess what you might be into, what you might like. Barbie dolls, children’s books. Every birthday, I sent you something. Something nice. And when I couldn’t afford to send gifts, I sent you letters. I must have sent you a thousand letters—telling you what I was doing, what was going on in my life, giving you advice for what I guessed might be going on in your own. And it all came back. Everything. I figured Duette stopped it. Or maybe she’d moved and left no forwarding address.”
Corrie swallowed. “So why did you keep on sending me things when you knew I wouldn’t get them?”
He hung his head. “Because someday I hoped to be able to give them to you myself—all of them. In a way, they’re kind of like a diary; a diary of my life, and—this may sound strange—of your life, or your life as I imagined it. How you were growing up. What your interests were. If you’d started dating. And…” He paused, embarrassed. “Having those letters and packages around, even though they’d been returned… well, after a while it almost felt like having you around, too. In person.” Another pause. “I’d always hoped you’d write me, you know.”
Two Graves Page 17
