by Jack Lynch
“Who’s that?” Welch called.
“That’s a ranger going on out to tell the sheriff’s people where we’re at. There isn’t any way you can get out of here now. They’re going to come in and get you and take you to jail. Think about that for a minute.”
I had my revolver out now, trained at the spot where Welch had stepped from behind the wall. “And in a matter of weeks or months you’ll be going to trial, Welch. If you show some mercy with Bobbie here it’ll be in your favor. And you’ll be needing all you can get in your favor. How about it?”
“No. There’s not going to be any trial. Miss Bobbie here is going to die, that’s the first and foremost thing here. After that, well, we’ll just have to see. Maybe I’ll die, or maybe I’ll hire out and do some more killing. God knows I’ll have the reputation for it.”
I studied the ruins, searching for a place where I could get a clear shot at the man. It would have to be inside the shell of the house, opposite the recess Welch was in. Over by Bobbie somewhere would be good, but there was no upper concrete flooring there, as there was at the entryway where Welch was. So it would have to be down on the lower level, and from there I didn’t know what sort of firing angle I might get, if any.
I moved several paces down from where I had been when Welch had peered around the corner. I braced the revolver on the wire fencing, pointing it toward the entryway I hoped Welch would step from again.
“Why the killing, Welch? Why murder all these innocent people? I’d like you to tell me that man to man, face to face.”
I heard what sounded like a chuckle. “No, Mr. Bragg. You probably have some sort of weapon with you. If I show my face again you’ll probably try putting a bullet through it. No, you won’t see me again until I’m through. That might be right after Miss Bobbie there strangles to death, or it might be never. To tell you the truth, I’m feeling pretty immortal these days.”
Bobbie made a coughing sound.
“Welch, you didn’t answer my question. Why all the killing? You lost a son. In turn you’ve killed a dozen people that we know of. Why? Good God, man, come out and tell me about it.”
“I made a promise. I promised Teresa.”
“Who’s Teresa?”
“My wife. My dead wife. See, she couldn’t stand the loss of our son. He isn’t the only one, though, who died in that fire. He and my brother-in-law, Teresa’s brother. They both died in that fire. Clifford Junior, our boy, was getting a special treat, you see. A weekend at the ranch, with the horses. He loved horses. That’s one of the reasons he died. Going in to help save the horses. The other reason is they didn’t have any water. None to fight the fire with. And Teresa, she took her own life not too long after that. And I promised her then, that morning I found her body. She had hung herself, Mr. Bragg. She had walked over to a little glade in Golden Gate Park where we and our boy used to picnic, and she hung herself.
“I promised her then. I promised I would make all these people pay. I would make them pay for the whole rest of their lives. Bobbie here, when she goes, she’ll start the meter ticking over for her aunt. Paying the price that’s her due.”
“But these people have done nothing to you. They did nothing to your wife or your boy or your brother-in-law. These are all innocent people you’re killing.”
“Yes, that’s unfortunate, but they are my way of punishing the people who aren’t so innocent. Double trouble, you could call it.”
“But why do you say the others are guilty? Just because they were at the ranch when the fire started?”
“It was the water, Mr. Bragg. Those people at the ranch, they used so much water there wasn’t enough for the stables there. Water to the stables had been shut down. If they hadn’t wasted so much water, there would have been enough to fight the fire. I learned all about that. Don’t think I haven’t been doing my homework on this thing.”
I stared across at Bobbie. The girl was straining, her back arched. I studied the fence in front of me, wondering if I could scale it quickly enough and quietly enough to make my way over to where Welch was hiding before the man spotted me and shot me or Bobbie or both of us with his rifle. One thing was certain, I couldn’t let Bobbie strangle. I would have to make a move and risk her taking a slug from the rifle before I could let that happen. I stood up.
“Welch, look. No matter what your reasons, no matter your justifications, you’ve made mistakes in this thing. You’ve killed innocent people. You’ve killed people who weren’t connected in any way with that fire.”
“Don’t you listen to me, Mr. Bragg? I realize the people I’ve killed weren’t up there at the ranch.”
“I don’t mean them. There was a woman named Karen Ellis registered at the ranch. Remember her, Welch?”
“Yes, I do. The modeling lady.”
“She was registered, but she wasn’t at the ranch the night of the fire. She hadn’t been using any water. She had dinner over in Occidental that night and ran into an old friend. She spent the night with him.”
Welch didn’t say anything immediately. “Is that the truth?”
“It is. But you still killed her business partner, Nancy Dobbs. Nancy Dobbs and Karen Ellis were both innocent of what you’re accusing these people of, Welch. How does that make you feel?”
He hesitated. “Regretful. I am sorry about that, but when you’re dealing with so many people, mistakes will happen.”
“That’s a mistake you can make up for. Let the girl go.”
“No. It doesn’t add up that way, Mr. Bragg. Your friend the psychic has to be made to pay, I’m sorry. She wrote a newspaper story about that fire. Jim’s widow sent a copy of it to my wife. Teresa must have read that story, oh, a dozen times. I think that contributed greatly to my wife going off into Golden Gate Park and doing what she did. No, Mr. Bragg. Your psychic friend has to pay. She has to pay hard. But I am truly sorry about the Dobbs woman. You can tell Miss Ellis that for me if you would.”
It was then that I heard a very light drumbeat of fingers on wood. I turned. Rachel was standing at the top of the stairway. She made a questioning gesture. I pointed to where Welch was concealed. She made the same hurried survey of the ruins I had, then shook her head, her mouth in a tight, thin line. She stepped to the wire fencing and stared at Bobbie’s predicament. She moved quietly past me down the length of the platform. I followed. Rachel was staring first at Bobbie then down toward the bottom of the stairway at that end of the platform. I raised my revolver and trained it toward Welch’s niche.
“Will you do that for me, Mr. Bragg? Will you tell the Ellis woman I apologize?”
“Yes, I’ll tell her, Welch.”
“You’ve moved along the platform, Mr. Bragg. Don’t try anything tricky.”
“I’m not trying anything tricky. I want to be closer to Bobbie.”
“Sure. Get a good look at her, Mr. Bragg. You can tell her aunt how she looked when her face starts turning blue. The way I imagine my wife’s did. If she wants to see more, your psychic friend, tell her to be sure and watch the TV tape I’m shooting.”
Rachel turned to me and made a circular motion with one finger pointing at her head before she started down the platform stairs. At the bottom she glanced up again at Bobbie, who now was almost dangling free, then stepped out to where the low split-rail fence resumed at the outer wall. She climbed over it and disappeared around the corner.
“Another thing I’d like to know, Welch,” I called. “Why did you choose a state park as your burial ground?”
“I guess it was part of the statement I wanted to make. It adds to the drama, I think. Adds to the grief for those I wanted to get to. Get them focused on the magnitude of the killing, don’t you see, then whap! One of their own loved ones is dug up and becomes a part of it.”
Rachel now was scrambling through the four-foot-high stone window opening into the basement area just beneath Bobbie.
“But how did you get into the park?”
“I have a knowledge of padlocks,
Mr. Bragg. And the tools to open most kinds of them.”
Where Rachel now stood was a roomy area with another tall concrete wall a dozen feet or so in from the outer wall. It served as a natural shield from where Welch was. Rachel had her long barreled revolver out and was staring up at Bobbie. She moved across to sit down with her back against the interior wall and raised her pistol, but then stood almost immediately to look around for a better position to do whatever she had in mind. I hoped it wasn’t to put Bobbie out of her misery. I had to stall some more.
“Something else,” I called to Welch. “Where did you get the names of the people you killed? The people close to those at the ranch when the fire started?”
“By talking to neighbors, people they worked with. But I found out about little Bobbie here from you, remember? The Robbins woman was the last one on my list. I never would have known about Bobbie, maybe, if you hadn’t happened along.”
I glanced back down at Rachel. She had left the inner wall and settled against the outside wall some distance away from Bobbie. She had a two-handed grip on the revolver and braced the right arm against the wall.
Bobbie made a quarter turn at the end of the rope. She stretched one toe desperately to regain purchase atop the ice.
“For God’s sake, Welch, let me stop it,” I yelled. “You’ve made your point. You don’t need another death. Maybe you can still get out of here before the deputies arrive. Get away, but let me help Bobbie.”
“Deputies be damned. Do you have any idea how much work I put in on setting this thing up?”
But by now I was making my way down the platform stairs as quietly as I could manage. It was one of those times my body told me that’s enough talk; get on with it.
“Mr. Bragg?” Welch called. “Mr. Bragg?”
I hit bottom, went over the low rail fence and bellied my way through the same window opening Rachel had.
That was when Rachel opened fire.
She made it sound like a burp gun. It was the most rapid fire I had ever heard from a revolver, and her shooting parted the rope above Bobbie’s neck. I scrambled over to get below her just as Bobbie slipped from the ice to the hearth then lost her balance and tumbled off the narrow ledge.
Nobody had taught me how to break the fall of someone, not even of a slightly built girl. The momentum knocked both of us to the concrete. Bobbie rolled over, hands still bound, gasping for breath.
Smith had been right about Rachel. She was a shooter. She’d emptied her gun but she’d kept her eyes up, in the direction Welch might come from, and by touch alone she’d removed the used cartridge cases then used a speedloader to simultaneously ram six more rounds into the revolver cylinder.
But it wasn’t quite fast enough.
Welch had come out of his recess and scrambled across the concrete supports to the wall just above us before Rachel could slap shut the cylinder.
He had his rifle and took dead aim at the crouching detective, but by then I’d grabbed for my own .38 and now fired twice at the man looming overhead. One round missed, the other hit him in the shoulder.
Welch faltered, eyes wide in surprise, then Rachel shot him twice in the stomach. He buckled and fell and his rifle clattered to the concrete floor beside him.
TWENTY-FOUR
One of the ambulance attendants wanted to transport Bobbie to a hospital in Santa Rosa for a checkup and treatment of rope burns around her neck, but she said no in words that brought color to the attendant’s face.
Another ambulance had already departed with the critically wounded Clifford Welch. A general alarm had brought other emergency and official vehicles to the parking lot by the House of Happy Walls and down to the Wolf House itself.
Rachel wasn’t just a shooter, she’d proven to be a good, intuitive cop. She had felt the same apprehension to do with Welch that I had. When the people at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa told her it would take a while to have somebody look up the ranch fire story she had left word for them to relay the information to Sergeant Barry Smith, then she had climbed into a patrol car and started out for Jack London State Park with lights flashing. On her way to the park Smith radioed her the information from the newspaper. One of the fire victims had been a Clifford Welch Jr. That’s when Rachel had hit the siren.
Ranger Davenport, after galloping back up the road, had radioed the woman ranger at the gate about what was taking place at the Wolf House, and when Rachel arrived, the gate ranger relayed the information. Rachel had left her vehicle at the top of the rise just north of the Wolf House and made her way quietly on foot down to where she had put on the most spectacular display of pistol shooting I had ever seen.
“I sincerely apologize for any bitchiness I might have shown you in the past,” Bobbie had croaked to Rachel, immediately after it was over.
Bobbie told us that Welch had done a smooth job of gaining her confidence with the wine and cheese picnic in Sonoma and a friendly line of patter. So she was willing to go along with his eccentricity of wanting to do the interview inside the Wolf House ruins. Once inside, Bobbie said, Welch had pinioned and tied her wrists behind her back and used a ladder from his van to set up the elaborate hanging arrangement with the rope and block of ice he had also carried in the van.
“I started to scream my head off,” she told us, “but he hit me alongside the head so hard I actually did, for the first time in my life, see stars in front of me.”
Bobbie’s voice still had a croak to it, but she was up and moving around now and talking to people and laughing some. She might be hit later by aftershock, I thought, and I suggested that when she got back to Maribeth’s she try to get a doctor to come by to check her out and give her something to help her sleep that night.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’ll be going to Maribeth’s, but just long enough to pack my things and then I’m on my way back to Carmel, brother. People down there might be a little neurotic, but they’re not out and out crazy!”
And then I noticed the time. Allison might already be waiting for me in the United boarding area. I borrowed a cell phone from one of the other deputies and clambered back up onto the Wolf House viewing platform, praying I could get a message out of that area.
I tried phoning Max Bolero at the Sausalito seaplane base. With luck, I thought, Max could pick me up with one of the amphibians at Shellville Airport, a field a few miles south of Glen Ellen, and fly me down to San Francisco International. The phone worked but the man who answered it at the seaplane base told me that Max and “some of the boys” had flown up to Clear Lake for the day. They didn’t have a number where he could be reached.
I didn’t remember walking back down off the viewing platform. I knew there was no way I could drive to the airport in time.
“Bragg? What is it?”
I looked up. Rachel was watching me closely. I must have looked like a real pip from the expression on her face. But I managed to tell her about Allison and the message Sharon had given me. It took Rachel about two seconds to make up her mind.
“Come on.”
“Where to?”
“My car up there. I’ll get you to the airport before your girlfriend takes off. Now come on!”
I yelled at Bobbie and tossed her my car keys. I hustled up the rise behind Rachel and we got into the patrol car. We took off, back up the dirt road to the lot near the House of Happy Walls then out to the main road. I turned to look at Rachel as we rocketed down off the hill. She could get into a lot of trouble driving off like that. We both had shot a man back there. It didn’t matter how justified it might have been. There was a lot of debriefing to be done; reports to be written. The expression on her face told me she realized all that.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“Because I’m your backup. Same as you’ve been mine. I don’t mean physical presence, gun in hand. I mean bone-deep support. What you and Bobbie gave Maribeth. What Smitty and you again gave me. Now shut up and let me drive.”
She slowed whe
n we got down off the hill, driving through the village of Glen Ellen, but after that she really opened it up. On flat stretches with good visibility and little traffic she pushed the car up close to 90 miles an hour. When she got us down onto Highway 37, a four-lane divided highway that cut west over to U.S. 101, she increased her speed even more and got onto the radio to somebody. I couldn’t hear much of what was said. The roaring car engine and rush of air outside made too much noise. But we were moving. Boy, we were moving.
The radio message, I learned, had been to request that a Highway Patrol car join us when we got over onto 101. The CHP ran interference for us all the way down through Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge. It left us there, but Rachel used the lights and siren to good advantage, getting us over the bridge and along Park Presideo Boulevard, across the waist of Golden Gate Park then down 19th Avenue and out the south end of the city onto another freeway leading to the airport.
I didn’t know if we’d get there in time or not. It was after 5:30 when Rachel swung off the freeway with squealing tires and roared up to the entrance of the terminal Allison would leave from.
Rachel braked to a stop. “CHP said they’d have somebody from airport security inside to usher you through the checkpoints. Now go!”
I went, throwing open the door and lunging across the pavement, jostling people as I went through the doors and then running across the terminal floor, dodging people, eyes searching for an overhead TV monitor listing arrivals and departures. I spotted one, read the boarding gate number and made for it. It was out at the end of the long passenger pier. It seemed the gate I wanted always was out at the end of a long pier.
As promised an airport security official in gray slacks and blue jacket met me at the checkpoint and waved me on through.
