Old Chaos (9781564747136)

by Simonson, Sheila

  He didn’t reply.

  “Prentiss killed that woman.”

  He stared at her over a spoonful of chili, his eyes very dark gray. “She killed herself.”

  “If he hadn’t chased her—”

  “Let it go, Meg.” From the weary disgust in his voice she knew he agreed with her, so she said nothing. She supposed state patrol officers must have a primitive attachment to high-speed chases, given the nature of their experience with speeders. She did not know Lt. Prentiss. She could only hope he felt remorse. It was obvious that Rob did, along with guilt and anger and other less well-defined emotions.

  She thought about Catherine Bjork, or tried to. It was hard to imagine all that brittle energy snuffed out, but if she had murdered Inger and Fred Drinkwater, as Rob seemed to believe…

  A sharp rap at the kitchen door interrupted her reflections. It was Charlie.

  He let himself in, looking a little sheepish.

  “Late for a social call, isn’t it?” Rob sounded sour. She was tempted to smack him.

  Charlie sat down opposite his cousin.

  “Come to gloat?” That was just plain vicious. She stared at Rob. He didn’t meet her eyes.

  Charlie frowned. “Gloat about what?”

  Meg said, “There are developments, Charlie. Catherine Bjork is dead.” She explained, and Charlie expressed shock. While she talked Rob ate mechanically. Load spoon, stuff in mouth, swallow.

  As she wound down, he shoved his bowl back. “Thanks, Meg. I’m going upstairs to phone Beth. She wants a report. It’ll take a while. Good night, Charlie.”

  Meg said, “Sit back down and shut up, Robert. You feel rotten. Don’t take it out on your cousin. Or on me,” she added as he opened his mouth to respond.

  Charlie, looking uncomfortable but determined, drew a sheaf of papers from his jacket. “I just came from the hospital. They finally let me see Larry Swets.”

  Rob shifted in his chair. “You helped Meg. I ought to thank you for that.”

  Charlie shrugged. “No thanks necessary. By the time I got to Larry this morning, he’d already… well, he wasn’t in his right mind. He gave me these, told me to give them to you.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “Rob—”

  “It’s okay, Meg.” Charlie’s chair creaked. “That’s a legitimate question. I read them. The thing is, they’re personal. Larry’s judgment was impaired. I wanted to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind.”

  “Concealing evidence,” Rob snarled.

  “I’m not sure they are evidence. Well, they are, but evidence of what?”

  “I’m the best judge of that.”

  “Maybe,” Charlie acknowledged. “But Larry’s wife wrote them. I talked to him. He seems to think Mrs. Swets had a lover, that she quarreled with the man, and that he killed her. Larry wants you to arrest the killer, only there’s no way of telling who the guy was from these papers. And he…Larry could be wrong. I wanted to discuss them with the poor bastard, in case he had second thoughts.”

  Rob stared. “You don’t think like a cop.”

  “Nope,” Charlie said cheerfully. “I’m not a cop. I’m also not a Neill.”

  Meg held her breath.

  The corners of Rob’s mouth twitched. He didn’t smile, but the steam went out of him. “I take your point.” It was not quite an apology.

  He held out his hand, and Charlie gave him the sheets. They were ordinary copy paper of the sort used in most computers, but they looked as if they had been crumpled and then smoothed and refolded. She could see scrawled handwriting. She remembered that Lt. Prentiss had confiscated Inger’s personal computer.

  Meg wondered whether there was a bit of Red Label left in the bottle she had bought the day she arrived in Klalo last October. Since she met Rob she had been drinking single malt. She went to her liquor cupboard and rummaged while Rob read. Charlie sat very still.

  KAYLA CALLED CHARLIE at midnight, fired up, demanding to be taken back to the hospital Tuesday morning.

  “No. Can’t do it. Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry.

  “But I’ve got to leave.”

  “Have your mother drive you.”

  “I want you to drive me.” She had quarreled with Dede again. Dede was down in the bar, probably complaining to her husband on her cell phone.

  Silence. She heard him inhale. “I can’t take you this morning. I have an eight o’clock class.” That meant he’d leave Klalo at six.

  “So?”

  “So. I don’t get back until five, and I teach a class here in Klalo after that. I’ll drive you to the hospital Wednesday.”

  “But I want to go this morning, and I won’t ride with my mother.”

  “She loves you, Kayla.”

  “No, she doesn’t. She loves Señor Marquez.”

  “She has a lot of love in her.”

  Kayla choked on a sob. “I thought you loved me.”

  Long silence. At last he said, “I do. But there are times when I don’t like you very much. Shall I tell you about Commissioner Bjork’s death?”

  “What? Oh no!”

  He told her. His account was brief but horrible. Questions rose in her mind like bubbles that burst on a new surface of awareness. Charlie was very sad and very tired.

  Kayla swallowed. Her jaw ached. “Charlie?”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t need to go back tomorrow. Really. I can stand another day of Mother if I have to. If not, I’ll make her drive me to Portland. You get some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow between classes.”

  They didn’t talk long after that but his voice warmed. Even so, when she hung up, Kayla was shivering, and not just from the tale he had told. It was time to think hard about Charlie O’Neill. She had been putting that off.

  Jake Sorenson, heavy-eyed but game, showed up at six A.M. in a clean Jeep patrol car. He had volunteered for the search in spite of his long stint the day before, and Rob took him at his word. Rob was ready, wearing boots and a hooded jacket with gloves tucked in one pocket and his cell phone in the other. Meg didn’t twitch when he left. He’d made himself drink a cup of coffee and eat half of a rather dry bagel. Then he poured the rest of the coffee into a Thermos. It was going to be a long, miserable morning.

  Ed Prentiss was off supervising the raising of Cate Bjork’s car. He was afraid they would find Lars’s body in the trunk or the back seat. Rob didn’t think so.

  He and Jake rendezvoused with Jack Redfern and two vans full of search and rescue people at the Bjork mansion before seven. Sunrise came at six-forty-five, but it was fairly light out by six-thirty A heavy, fortyish woman, whom Jack introduced as Bitsy Thomas, gave them a pair of pajamas Lars had worn. Search and Rescue had brought the two dogs, who looked more enthusiastic than the human searchers.

  Rob thanked the S and R team for coming and gave them a description of Lars. He asked Bitsy what the elderly man had been wearing.

  She cocked her head, unsmiling. “I didn’t look close. Gray slacks, I think, blue cardigan, dark blue anorak—nylon with a hood. Not a warm jacket. Want me to make coffee?”

  Rob looked at Bat Quinn.

  Bat beamed at Bitsy. “We brought our own, thanks. You’re Leroy Thomas’s mom, aren’t you? Nice kid.”

  Her features relaxed in a slight smile. “Lee’s a pill, Mr. Quinn, and we both know it.”

  Quinn patted her arm. “He’ll be all right.”

  She sighed. “He will be when he’s done growing up. Good luck with the search. The mister’s a sick old man. Hope you find him.”

  Quinn was methodical. He sent one team through the woods around the house, although it wasn’t likely that Cate had put her husband out of the car that soon. The other team, with the two dogs, set out to cover both sides of County Road 2, working south from the Bjorks’ private road.

  The previous evening when Rob set up the search, he had told Bat of Cate Bjork’s flight, that there hadn’t been time for her to take her husband very far off the ro
ad herself, though he might well have wandered. Rob had also explained the need for haste. That was redundant. It had chilled to forty-two degrees during the night, snowed at higher elevations. At least it wasn’t raining now. Although Jake was eager to join the search, too, Rob posted him at the mansion to relay information as needed. Rob left him drinking a mug of Ms. Thomas’s coffee.

  While all this was going on, Jack stood quiet in the background. As the searchers went off, whooping and calling back and forth, the dogs giving a yelp or two from sheer exuberance, Rob turned to Jack.

  “I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay.”

  “I might learn something.”

  Jack nodded. He never did say much.

  To Rob’s surprise, Jack got back into the pickup. He waited for Rob to join him, drove past the searchers, then speeded up. They rode in silence. At last Jack pulled over at a narrow lane that led off to the right. He set the brake and killed the engine.

  Rob looked at him.

  “She was an edgy woman. No patience. And she was in a hurry.”

  Rob digested that. “If he was giving her trouble—”

  “Asking questions,” Jack interposed. “Or the same question a couple of times. They do that.”

  “You think she would have put up with it about this far?”

  “Maybe a bit farther, but this is the first likely place.”

  They got out carefully and stood on the edge of the asphalt surface. The sun shone through a thin layer of cloud. The morning shadows were long and black.

  A few cars whizzed past, people on the way to work in Hood River or The Dalles or even Portland, but there was little traffic. Few families lived out this way.

  Jack knelt down, grimaced, and squinted at the lane that led into the woods. “Old log road. Couple of summer trailers in there. Nobody home now.”

  “No mailboxes,” Rob said.

  Jack smiled. “Maybe you’re not so dumb.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Jack chuckled and forced himself upright. “Reckon she didn’t pull in here.”

  “Should we call his name?”

  “No point.” He got back in the pickup, and Rob followed suit.

  Jack spent maybe ten minutes at the next pullover, a wide space at the edge of the forest that had once been graveled. At last he said a vehicle had stopped there recently, but he could see no sign that anyone had got out. Rob pointed to broken twigs and bent grasses in the undergrowth.

  “Deer.” Jack indicated the obvious deer sign, neat little turds in the grass.

  Rob said ruefully, “Well, I did spot the beer cans in the ditch.”

  They stopped twice more without finding sign of human intruders.

  “Maybe she was calmer than I thought,” Jack said.

  “We passed a couple of roads going off on the other side of the highway.”

  “Naw. She wouldn’t turn around for nothing. Not her.”

  Rob thought he was right. It was eerie, trying to think like a dead woman. They drove perhaps five minutes longer. Then Jack pulled over at another overgrown logging road. He climbed down stiffly.

  Almost at once Rob saw that a car—not a big-tire pickup—had stopped and that someone had got out, more than one someone. The footprints scuffed and overlapped. When the vehicle left, it had peeled out, the tires digging into the soft brown dirt, spraying gravel. That was what Rob saw. He thought Jack saw a lot more.

  “Now here’s something,” Jack said softly. He headed down the overgrown road, bent over. After a brief hesitation, Rob followed him, walking on the grass at the edge more from police instinct than because preserving the scene would do any good. If there was a crime, the perpetrator was dead.

  At last, long out of sight of the pickup, Jack straightened and looked around. “You can call him now.”

  Rob shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “Lars!” he yelled. “Lars Bjork! Where are you?”

  Jack raised his hand for silence. They listened. Nothing. Jack nodded, and Rob called again as loud as he could. He thought he heard something off to the right.

  Jack held his arm. “One more time.”

  So Rob shouted again. The sound was more definite this time, something between a groan and a whimper.

  Jack trotted along a rough track through the brush, skirting a blackberry patch, with Rob at his heels.

  They found Lars Bjork lying beneath a huge old-growth cedar on a thick bed of needles. His hands and face were scratched and bloody, and he had lost a shoe. His eyes fluttered open when they called him, but he didn’t say anything. At least he was alive.

  “Better give me your jacket. He’s damn cold.” Jack shrugged out of his own coat.

  Rob removed the cell phone from his pocket and handed Jack his parka. Cold bit through his shirt.

  He tried the phone. “Goddamn, no signal.”

  “Go back to the truck and try from there. Keys in the ignition if you need em.” Jack was bundling the old man into his jacket. “Hey there, Lars.”

  Lars moaned. Jack wrapped Rob’s coat around Lars’s legs.

  Rob started to walk off.

  “Other way.” Jack smiled.

  Rob found the road and half walked, half ran back on the weedy surface. His arm was sore and his back hurt, and he felt great. Twice he stopped to try the phone, to no avail. When he reached the pickup, he finally got a signal. Jake responded immediately. He promised to send the EMTs at once and call off the search.

  “Where are you?”

  By that time Rob was pretty sure Jack Redfern walked on water. He yanked the door of the pickup open and peered at the odometer. Sure enough, Jack had set it to zero when he left the mansion. Rob gave exact directions, indicating that a four-wheel-drive ambulance could probably negotiate the logging road, and signed off. He rummaged around behind the seat and found a thermal blanket and a wooly scarf with a pattern of bright flowers. He even remembered his coffee flask. Then he went back to Jack and the man Jack had saved.

  The mystery of Inger’s “suicide note” began to unravel that morning.

  Rob reached his office before ten to find the courthouse under press siege. Beth had drawn up a fact sheet for them that was not only clear and well-worded but properly punctuated. Her husband had had an unaccountable fondness for random commas. After she directed Sgt. Howell to hand the sheet out and promise them a two o’clock press conference, the reporters took themselves off for breakfast at Mona’s.

  Rob called Meg at the library to give her the good news about Lars.

  “I hope you thanked Jack.”

  “Good God, Meg.” What did she think he was?

  “I’m going to ring Charlie. His first class let out at nine-thirty”

  “Why?”

  “It may have escaped your attention,” she said with elaborate patience, “but your cousin feels some responsibility here. When you leave him out of the loop he’s hurt.” She was, too. She didn’t have to say that.

  “Give him my best,” Rob said crossly. He knew he was going to have to build bridges and didn’t look forward to the prospect.

  He had time for a short phone conversation with Larry Swets and a longer one with Karl Tergeson before Ed Prentiss showed up.

  Rob shoved copies of Inger’s papers at Prentiss. No way was he going to let the originals out of his hands. No way was he going to say anything about Prentiss’s disastrous conduct of the high-speed chase.

  “What’s this?” Prentiss sounded glum but not hostile.

  Rob explained.

  “Your cousin—”

  “My cousin went to Meg’s assistance. Larry gave him the papers. Charlie read them, decided they were personal, and waited to talk them over with Larry.”

  “Personal!”

  “I got them late last night. There they are. I gave them to you as soon as I could.”

  “Yeah, okay, I didn’t mean to criticize.” He cleared his throat. “I hear you found the old man this morning. Congratulations.”
>
  “Jack Redfern found him.”

  “Oh, yeah, the chief’s husband.”

  Rob wondered whether Jack minded being known as somebody’s husband. Probably not. He waited while Prentiss deciphered Inger’s scrawls.

  At last he shook his head. “What are they?”

  “Rough drafts?” The papers involved a lot of repetition.

  Prentiss stared.

  “Larry said he found them in Inger’s wastebasket. In her home office. That note in Inger’s track suit—”

  “The suicide note.”

  It would have been like Inger to write several drafts even of a suicide note. She was not wonderfully spontaneous.

  Rob said, “I don’t think it was a suicide note. It was a letter to Cate Bjork that Inger never delivered. Cate killed her and overlooked the letter when she dragged Inger’s body to the river.”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions.”

  “Yes. I think Inger was dead when she went into the water.”

  “That’s what they tell me. Not much water in the lungs.” There would have been other, subtler signs that Inger did not die by drowning.

  Rob waited.

  Prentiss heaved a sigh. He did not want to give up his suicide theory. “And the note was zipped into a pants pocket, not in the jacket.” Easy for Cate to overlook in the heat of the moment.

  “Have the techs been able to read it?”

  Prentiss reached into an inner pocket of his uniform jacket. “See what you make of it.” He, too, had a photocopy.

  The note had been written by hand, fortunately with a ballpoint pen. It was blotched and blurred, pieces of it were missing entirely, and there was no salutation. Rob could see why Prentiss had imagined it was a suicide note. It was clear that Inger felt anger and an enormous sense of betrayal. “After all we had together,” it said. That phrase had been repeated in all three pages of the rough drafts. “…did it to please you.” Another repeated phrase.

  “How long did Inger Swets know the commissioner?” Prentiss didn’t say Cate’s name. Couldn’t, probably. Cate was his victim.