“Yeah.” The other’s voice was kindly now. He stooped and put an arm under Rollo. “Come along. We’ll get you to a hospital.”
On the island’s far shore, four rowboats were drawn up. Three of the deputies dumped Karl’s body into one of the boats. Rollo and the sheriff got into the stern seat of another.
In the early morning light, the voice of one of the deputies drifted across the mists rising from the lake surface. “Water’s high.”
Another voice answered. “Cloudburst at Haven Springs early this morning. Nobody killed, but it washed out half a dozen houses.”
The full boats shoved off, grating against the gravel beach. A deputy took up the oars in Rollo’s boat and headed it toward the dark line of trees on the opposite shore. The oars made misty circles in the black waters, and the rowing sound reminded Rollo of the cavern and the river disappearing beneath the ledge. Under the overcoat that had been thrown over his shoulders, Rollo shivered.
“He didn’t fool me a minute,” Sheriff Jenkins was saying. “He went upstream a ways, leaving marks, then doubled back. That was it, wasn’t it?”
Rollo nodded his head dumbly. Yes, that would have been Karl’s way.
“We didn’t see the fire on the island, but we drove around the lake, and one of my men smelled wood smoke. After that it was easy. We just …”
The sheriff broke off. “Hey! What’s that over there?” He pointed to an object floating in the lake to one side of their path and almost obscured by the mists.
The deputy at the oars changed his course, and the man in the bow picked it up. It was the yellow coat, arms still tied, but the ends open and its contents gone.
Dimly, Rollo imagined the swollen river picking his clothes off the ledge, the yellow coat with them, and swirling them up the same channel he had taken.
The deputy turned and threw the coat on the floor slats at the sheriff’s feet.
“Just an old coat,” the sheriff said. He picked up the limp cloth and dropped it over the side.
Rollo turned and watched the yellow splotch on the water for a moment, a kind of dull despondency settling over him.
Then he turned toward the sheriff and in a low voice began telling the whole story, the true story: his four years with Karl, the other jobs, then this bank robbery, the car getting stuck, the flight into the woods and the journey through the cavern, his dive into the underground river and passage to the lake surface.
Sheriff Jenkins heard him through in silence. The deputy facing them at the oars—his face seemed familiar somehow—smiled once or twice.
When Rollo finished, the sheriff began to chuckle, then to laugh coarsely. “Ho, ho, ho, ho! Rollo, you slaughter me! Same old Rollo, all right. You, a bank robber! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Rollo, you haven’t changed a bit!”
For the rest of the journey, Sheriff Jenkins chuckled intermittently.
When they reached shore, they told the story to the rest of the deputies. They looked at him often and laughed. Rollo ignored them, keeping his eyes downcast, his mind on the yellow coat waterlogged in the lake.
The Heat’s On
Arson squad Lieutenant Barnie Ellis strode across the fire-blackened hotel room in five angry steps, leaned out the window. He took a deep gulp of the early morning air.
It should have smelled sweet at 4:00 AM. It didn’t. When dirt burns, its stink is pervasive and unmistakable.
Four stories down, on the sidewalk, he saw Fire Captain Coddington talking to a slender man in a dark suit. “Captain!” Ellis bellowed.
The fat fire captain tipped his head back, shaded his eyes with one pudgy hand. “Yeah?”
“Where in the blithering hell is McCoy?” Ellis shouted. He put his arm on the charred windowsill, drew it back again.
“Up there,” called Coddington in a high, wheezy voice. “Or he damn well should be.”
Ellis spread his big hands in an empty gesture, shook his head. “Come on up!” he bawled, and pulled his head back into the room.
He strode across the blackened shell, stepped into the hall. “McCoy!” he yelled. “McCoy!” Where had that eager beaver got to?
Ellis had been jerked out of sleep by the telephone at 3:30 AM—McCoy with a “suspected arson.” That made three times in six months McCoy had suspected arson.
Ellis had dragged himself out of bed, hustled down here, and now—no McCoy.
He looked up and down the dingy hotel hall. Again, he yelled, “McCoy!”
Ellis thought he understood McCoy. The young man wanted to get on the arson squad; it was the reason McCoy had become a fireman in the first place. Ellis sighed. McCoy would find out fast it wasn’t all beer and Skittles.
Especially with eager beavers getting a man out of bed at 3:30 in the morning. Jesus!
Quick footsteps sounded on the stairway. Ellis turned toward the sound. About time. He waited for McCoy to emerge on the stairway.
Instead, a brown felt hat came into view, and then a familiar, lean face—Curt Onstott from the DA’s office.
Ellis met him at the top of the stairs. “Curt!” He knew the tall, thin lawyer well, had worked with him on several cases. “I didn’t know the DA’s office was in on this one.”
Onstott wrinkled his nose. “What’s that stench?”
Ellis swung back toward the fire scene. “A man died in the fire,” he said shortly. “Where’s Captain Coddington?”
Onstott jerked a thumb toward the stairs. “Coming,” he said. “About two flights behind.” The slender district attorney paused in the doorway, glanced around the blackened hole that had been a cheap hotel room. “Well, Barnie,” he asked, “was it set?”
“How the hell can I tell this quick? What’s your office doing on this?”
Onstott was a tall man, but he still had to look up to talk to the bulky Ellis. “We’ve lost two witnesses in fires this past month—witnesses on the same case.”
Ellis froze in midstep. “What case?”
“That damn Tonelli thing—numbers and bookmaking. The man who died here this morning—Yorty—was a key witness.”
Ellis moved farther into the fire room. Half of one wall—where the bed had stood—showed the charred, alligator-hide markings of intense heat. Deep charring reached toward the window. Below the sill lay the soggy, begrimed remnants of lace curtains. He flashed a quick look at the lean DA’s man. “If Yorty was so important, why wasn’t he guarded?”
Onstott had the sort of thin, mobile face that shows its feelings fast. Right now he looked disgusted. “Hell, if we put a guard on every witness, there’d be no one left to mind the store.”
Ellis gave the soggy curtains a kick, glanced out the window. Where the hell was McCoy? Below him in the street, he could see one fire engine—a pumper—pulled diagonally into the curb. Near it, two firemen poured streams of water from a hose onto a soggy mattress. The mattress had stopped steaming.
Ellis turned back to Onstott. “We’ll give the place a real going-over for you, Curt. But I can’t promise we’ll find anything. It looks pretty cut and dried.”
“No arson?”
Ellis grimaced. “I told you it was too early—”
Coddington came wheezing through the doorway of the fire room, paused to catch his breath. “Four flights!” the fat fire captain gasped. “Did I hear you say arson?”
“No sign of a setup,” Ellis said shortly. “Where the hell is McCoy?”
Coddington held up a pudgy hand, took a series of fast, deep breaths. “Wait till I can breathe.” He took several more breaths, then gasped a little as he spoke. “I ran into two of his team on the way up. They said McCoy pulled them off the overhauling and dashed off to the phone. That was the last they saw of him.”
Ellis stared. “You mean he just took off? That doesn’t sound like eager beaver McCoy.”
Coddington spread his hands wide. “That’s all I know.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Wait a minute. His wife’s pregnant—due any minute now. Maybe he got a rush call and took off.”
Ellis looked doubtful. “Maybe.”
“Who’s this McCoy?” Onstott asked.
“You met him in my office once,” Ellis said. “Skinny, blond kid.”
Captain Coddington wheezed a short laugh. “Just a young fireman who sees a pyro behind every smoke.” He turned to Ellis. “What set him off this time?”
“Something about a mark on the floor,” Ellis said slowly. He looked at the assistant district attorney. “What was that about two witnesses dying in fires, Curt?”
Onstott pulled a cigarette package from his pocket, hesitated, then shoved it out of sight again. “We lost the other witness in that Swinburne Hotel fire last month.”
Ellis nodded sharply. He had been sure that’s what Onstott would say. The Swinburne fire was the last time McCoy had suspected arson. Something about a ring mark on the floor, the same thing McCoy had said about this one.
Coddington crossed the room to the window, looked down on the activity below, and sighed. “Happens all the time,” he said. “Guy gets drunk, lights a cigarette, and passes out. The real miracle is when the whole building doesn’t burn out.”
Ellis took a careful look at the floor, pointed suddenly to a brown ring on the ash-stained yellow linoleum near Onstott. “What’s that?”
Onstott moved away from the ring, looked down. “What’s what?”
“That mark on the floor by your feet.” Ellis moved over for a closer look, took a metal tape measure from his coat pocket. Coddington moved in closer.
“What about it?” Onstott asked.
Ellis knelt for a closer look, ran his thick forefinger across the mark. Hardly an indentation. Still, there’d been a mark just like it on the floor of the death room at the Swinburne. He measured the diameter. “Fourteen and a quarter inches.”
Coddington bent closer. “Could have been there for months,” he said. “Doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Ellis straightened, slipped the tape into his pocket. “I’d sure as hell like to talk to McCoy,” he said. “I wonder if he saw anything else.”
Onstott drew his black eyebrows into a worried V. “If you find anything, be sure to keep us posted. I don’t know who the hell we’re going to get to testify against Tonelli now.”
“Witnesses smoke in bed too,” wheezed Coddington. He moved impatiently toward the door. “Let’s get the hell out of here and get some air.”
Ellis glanced again at the ring on the floor, then met the worried look on the face of the assistant district attorney. “I’ve got my men on the way over,” he said. “If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it.”
Onstott stepped around the ring, walked over to the blackened doorway. “Arson isn’t usually a syndicate crime,” he said. “Bullets are more in their line.”
“They can buy talent,” Ellis said.
With a grimace, Onstott moved toward the stairs. Coddington had already started down. Onstott paused. “I’m going to grab some breakfast before I report. Can you get away?”
Ellis nodded. “Maybe by the time I get back, McCoy will have shown up.”
But McCoy wasn’t there when he got back. A call to the firehouse told Ellis that McCoy was off shift. Four calls to McCoy’s house went unanswered.
By lunchtime, Ellis was bone tired. He’d worked late the night before. Today was Saturday—his day off—when he’d promised to take Jane and the kids on a picnic. He felt he should at least go by his home, try to make peace with Jane.
But first—what about McCoy? What else could the young fireman have seen? It would only take a minute to stop by McCoy’s house on his way home. If Mrs. McCoy had gone to the hospital to have her baby, the neighbors would know it.
Nobody answered the front-door chime at McCoy’s tract house. Ellis pushed the bell, waited. Rang again. He turned to go back down the stairs, paused.
What was that sound in the house? It sounded like running water.
Ellis froze, listening, turned, and punched the door chime again. The sound inside stopped.
Ellis was sure there was someone inside. He didn’t like getting the runaround from the young fireman—especially when this was the guy who’d dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night.
Even the street was quiet now. Two boys sat on a curb in the afternoon sunshine, talking in low voices. A dog wandered silently across the lawns.
Ellis muttered his favorite short oath, went down the two steps, and followed the cement sidewalk to the back of the house.
Here, the steps were steeper, led directly to a tiny open porch and kitchen door. In two big steps he was at the back door, looking through the window into the kitchen.
Inside, he could see the back of Mrs. McCoy—a mop in one hand and bucket in the other, peering around the doorway toward the front of the house. Must think she’s hiding from a bill collector, thought Ellis with a grin. He pounded on the door.
She almost dropped the bucket at the sound behind her. From the back, she had looked like a schoolgirl, her brown coil of hair caught in a blue ribbon—but from the front, her smock barely covered her advanced pregnancy.
She spotted Ellis through the window, put down bucket and mop, and walked across the wet floor, heedless of the marks her moccasins made. She opened the door a crack, then wider. “Lieutenant Ellis,” she breathed. “What are you doing at the back door?”
Ellis smiled. “I rang the bell. I guess you didn’t hear me.”
“Come in,” she said in a tiny voice. Her eyes were wide.
Frightened? wondered Ellis. He glanced past her. “Shall I step on your clean floor?”
She looked down. “Oh. No, better come around to the front.”
But Ellis had seen something that interested him—a ring on the fresh-mopped floor. He pointed. “What made that mark, Mrs. McCoy?”
She turned, startled. “What mark? That ring?”
“Yes. What made it?”
She managed a tiny smile. “The bottom of the mop bucket. The water was too hot, and it made a mark in the wax. It’ll fade. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondered.” Ellis pulled his gaze from the ring. Smaller, but the same sort of mark. He met Mrs. McCoy’s puzzled look. “Is your husband here?”
She looked over her shoulder quickly, then back. “No, Chris isn’t here.”
Ellis knew she was lying. “I think he is,” he said flatly.
She bit her lip, looked up at Ellis. “You’re right,” she said. Her voice was barely audible. “Lieutenant, can I talk to you?”
He nodded.
She came out on the tiny porch with him, pulled the door almost shut behind her. “Lieutenant, I’m worried sick. Chris has been hurt, and he won’t let me call a doctor.”
Ellis felt his hands close into fists. “Hurt how?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in the fire he was on last night. But he was—was being sick in the bathroom most of the morning. When I asked him about it, he said he had the flu.”
“Maybe he has,” Ellis said.
She shook her head so violently that the brown coil of hair flipped from one side to the other. “No. There’s a big bruise on his stomach. I saw it.” She looked down. “And he won’t let me answer the phone—” She blushed. “Or the door.”
Ellis stared over her head, thinking. So someone had gotten to McCoy and he had chickened out. “Where is your husband now?”
“In the bathroom, I think.”
“Can he hear us?”
She shook her head again. “No. Not from here.”
Ellis nodded. “Okay. I’ll go around to the front again and ring the bell. This time let me in. You can always say I saw you through the front window and you had to open the door.”
She nodded, threw him a grateful look.
At the front door, she opened it wide, beckoned him in. “Lieutenant Ellis,” she said in a high clear voice. “What a surprise! I’ll tell Chris you’re here. Sit down.” She waved toward a lumpy armchair, then left Ellis alone.
Ellis lowered his
big frame into the chair, hoping she wouldn’t overdo the surprised bit. In another room, he could hear a murmur of voices, and then McCoy appeared in the doorway.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” McCoy said. His smile was tight. What Ellis thought of as McCoy’s puppy friendliness was entirely missing. “Would you—would you like a beer?”
Ellis could sense McCoy hoping he’d say “no” and leave. He obliged. “No, thanks. I just stopped by on my way to make out my report. I wanted to get a few points cleared up.”
McCoy perched tentatively on the arm of the couch as Ellis studied him carefully. If he hadn’t been watching, he would have missed the twitch of pain that crossed the blond fireman’s face.
McCoy forced a smile. “I’m sorry about that goof, Lieutenant, getting you out of bed and all. I don’t think I can help you very much. I … well, your squad must have the whole picture by now.”
Ellis took a deep breath. McCoy was scared. He could almost smell it. “What made you think of arson in the first place?” he asked carefully.
McCoy looked over Ellis’ head. “The—the speed of the fire, I think. But then I found that can of lighter fluid. I guess your sergeant told you about it. It probably spilled and spread the fire.”
Ellis wrinkled his forehead, looked down at the rug. “You mentioned a ring—a mark on the floor—like the one in the Swinburne Hotel fire. What about it?”
“It was just a funny coincidence, I guess,” McCoy said.
Ellis narrowed his eyes. They’d sure put the wind up with McCoy, he thought. The kid was as white as a ghost. “You don’t look well,” Ellis said.
“Flu,” said McCoy. “Hit me suddenly. That’s—that’s why I didn’t wait for you this morning.”
Ellis decided abruptly not to challenge McCoy right now. Hell, he thought, there’s even an outside chance he’s telling the truth—but I doubt it. Ellis wanted more facts, and this scared boy wasn’t going to give them to him. Mentally, Ellis crossed off any chance of seeing Jane that afternoon. He wanted to get back to that hotel.
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