Fatal

by Michael Palmer

  Her meeting with Police Chief Grimes wasn’t scheduled for almost three hours, and except for a doughnut and the coffee she had brought in a thermos, she hadn’t had a thing to eat since leaving Glenside. Her hangover was essentially gone, but the pledge she made about drinking wine in the morning would, she hoped, live on forever. She thought about driving through Belinda and into Tullis, just to check out what the place might look like, but the Belinda Diner, a classic, railroad-car eatery on the edge of town, was just too inviting to pass up. The place was nearly empty. A competent-looking, middle-aged waitress in jeans and a T was serving two elderly women in one booth and two grizzled men in another.

  “Anyplace you like,” she called out cheerily.

  Ellen took a copy of the Montgomery County Weekly Bugle from a rack and brought it to a booth in the corner, well away from the other patrons. She ordered the meat loaf special and turned to the police report, as she inevitably did when reading any small-town newspaper, including her own. Barking dog . . . Stranger lurking . . . Fight . . . Deer hit by truck . . . Disturbance . . . Drink dispenser vandalized . . . Patient kidnapped. Tucked in among two dozen or so police calls was a two-sentence report of the kidnapping of a hospital patient from an ambulance. Ellen found the article dealing with the crime on page 1 and read the skimpy account until the waitress came with her meal.

  “What’s this kidnapping thing all about?” Ellen asked.

  The waitress shrugged. “No one knows,” she said with a pleasant twang. “Rumor I heard is that her doctor did it. Doc Rutledge. The patient was a doctor herself. Now she’s gone an’ he’s vanished, too. Maybe he jes got obsessed with her—you know, couldn’t live without her. So he hired a couple of thugs to snatch her, then acts like he’s as surprised as the next fella.”

  “And I thought I was coming into a sleepy little town. Doctor kidnaps patient. Sounds like a TV miniseries.”

  “Poor Doc Rutledge. Ain’t been the same since his wife died a few years back. He’s a darn good doctor, though, from what I’ve heard. If I ever went to a doctor I jes might ’uv gone to him. So, what brings you here?”

  “I . . . have a business appointment. This sure is a beautiful town.”

  “Thank you. We think so. Your appointment here in Belinda?”

  “Actually, no,” Ellen replied after pausing while deciding if any harm could come from trying to determine where Vinny Sutcher lived. “It’s in a town called Tullis.”

  “Well, heck, that’s jes the next town over. Parta Belinda more or less.”

  Ellen consulted a pad she took from her handbag.

  “Deep Woods Road,” she said, reading back the address they had gotten from the passenger manifests.

  “Never heard of it,” the waitress said.

  “I have,” called out one of the old men, who was sitting four or five booths away. “Take Main Street all the way inta Tullis. Then go rot through Tullis, left onta Oak, then ’bout two mile up inta the hills. You’ll be lookin’ fer a gravel road on the rot. I don’t b’leive it’s got no sign, but some a the mailboxes at the corner say Deep Woods on ’em.”

  “Thank you,” Ellen called over.

  “Belinda Road is jes the continuation of Main Street into Tullis,” the waitress said. “Go right out the parkin’ lot an’ jes keep on goin’. You’ll see a little sign for Tullis.”

  “Place don’t deserve nothin’ no bigger,” the eavesdropper hollered.

  His tablemate and the two ladies in the booth near them hooted and whooped at his humor.

  Not surprisingly, given Ellen’s experience with such diners, the meat loaf was commendable and the mashed potatoes and gravy appropriately decadent. She left a decent tip and walked out into the late afternoon sun. There were still almost two hours to go before she was to meet with Grimes. From the moment the old eavesdropper gave her directions to Deep Woods Road, she was obsessed—driven by her own anger and curiosity to want even a glimpse of Vinyl Sutcher. If he was as Grimes described, it was back to the drawing board and the other passenger names for her and Rudy. If Grimes’s memory was off, if she could determine that Sutcher’s cinder-block head featured a flat face and distinctive scar, she was on the verge of sweet, succulent revenge. She just needed to be careful and stay in the car. All she wanted now was one look at the man or at least the place where he lived.

  With the same tiny voice that had lost the battle over Rudy’s letter begging her to wait until her meeting with the police chief, Ellen eased the Taurus out of the parking lot and headed for Tullis and Deep Woods Road. The directions were fairly accurate, but the mileage was off on the low side. The far end of Tullis was nearly six miles away, and Oak Street snaked upward for three miles more before she spotted the cluster of ten or eleven mailboxes, several of which had “Deep Woods Road” painted on one side. One of the boxes had the number 100 in neat stick-ons, and beneath it the name SUTCHER. Maybe Grimes was right after all, she thought. This was hardly the place one would expect to find a world traveler, who had made at least four trips to an obscure country in West Africa over the past three years. But then, if she and Rudy were right, the trips, along with a dozen others, were strictly business.

  Deep Woods Road, graded dirt and pebbles, coursed gently upward through a continuous arch of dense foliage. It was one car wide, with shallow drainage ditches on either side, and periodic spots to pull over so that an oncoming vehicle could pass. Ellen inched ahead, feeling a strange, almost perverse pleasure at operating on the edge of a situation she knew might be dangerous. Despite the mailboxes, there were no houses visible. Instead, there were dirt drives wending off into the forest on either side, most with a board nailed to a tree announcing the house number.

  62 . . . 70 . . . 83 . . .

  Ellen slowed even more. Several dirt drives had no number. Was one of them to Sutcher’s place?

  90 . . .

  Her heart pounding, Ellen stopped and, using one of the unmarked drives, turned her car around. Then she carefully opened her door.

  This is stupid, the tiny voice was saying. This is absolutely dumb.

  She dropped the keys into the pocket of her slacks, shut the door softly, and cautiously made her way up the narrow road. Ahead the natural light was considerably brighter.

  100.

  The number, painted in black on a plain piece of pine board, was nailed head high on the trunk of a small birch. Just past the birch, the forest fell away, yielding to a clearing, beyond which was a spectacular vista—a broad valley streaked with rivers, stretching out to lush foothills and gray-blue mountains. In the center of the clearing was a new house, or an old one that had recently been extensively renovated—one story, modern, with large picture windows and mahogany-stained cedar siding. There were remnants of the construction still lying about. The lawn had not yet been laid, although the piping for an underground sprinkler system was piled up and ready to be installed. There was no garage, but to one side of the lawn-to-be was a gravel parking space large enough for two cars.

  Despite her certainty that the property was empty, if not unoccupied, Ellen stayed in the relative safety of the forest for more than five minutes, watching. There was no movement.

  Desperate now to glimpse the inside, she stepped from the shadows and moved toward the house, her pulse still hammering. The construction-in-progress notwithstanding, the place was clearly someone’s home. Through the windows she could see that it was fully furnished in a manner that was quite masculine—thick leather couches and easy chairs, heavy unadorned end tables. Encouraged, Ellen pressed her face to the glass and peered more intently inside. There was a huge bull-elk head mounted above the mantel, and several shotguns hooked on the wall. She scanned the interior, looking for photographs. There were none. A window at a time, she worked her way around to the side of the house.

  The panorama was truly magnificent, made even more so by the sun, now in descent toward the mountains. The house, while not built on a sheer drop, was set on the top of a steep slope. Ellen
stepped to the edge. The slope was mostly dirt, weeds, and rocks, littered with boards, strapping, and chunks of concrete from the construction, left to be cleaned up when the place was finally landscaped. It was then she realized that the house wasn’t one story as it appeared from the road, but two and possibly even three, the others having been hewn into the hillside. She took a few tentative steps down the hill and gasped. There were two stories of living space—the floor she had examined and another beneath it. Each featured a solid wall of tinted glass, running the entire length of the house. And underneath the lower story was a garage—also built into the hillside, and accessed by a narrow driveway that arced far out to her right, then undoubtedly upward to a spot not far from where she had parked.

  In the garage was a large, black Jeep 4x4.

  Ellen felt a sickening tightness in her chest at the sight of it.

  “Well, now, what have we here?”

  Vinyl Sutcher’s booming voice was a spear through Ellen’s heart. Startled beyond measure, she whirled, stumbled, and fell to one knee, landing on a jagged piece of concrete. She leapt to her feet, mindless of the pain, the tear in her slacks, and the circle of blood rapidly expanding around it. Sutcher was standing above her, twenty feet or so away, hands on hips, his huge, flat face grinning down at her.

  “I knew it was you,” Ellen said contemptuously.

  “Get up here. . . . I said, GET THE FUCK UP HERE!”

  Ellen hesitated, then slowly did as he demanded. She had made a terrible, terrible mistake and now she was going to pay for it in pain, and then, sooner or later, with her life. If the slope behind her was just a little steeper, she might have ended it quickly right there, or at least have tried to pull him over with her. As things were, the driveway below would stop any fall. All she could do was stand there and face up to him.

  “How did you find this place?” he demanded.

  “Isn’t it a horrible moment when you realize you’re not as smart as you think you are?” she said, as much to herself as to him.

  Sutcher was dressed in black jeans, a black short-sleeved dress shirt, and black boots, and looked to Ellen as malevolent as any person could. His narrow rodent’s eyes glared down at her.

  “I asked you a question,” he snarled.

  He closed the last ten feet between them, grabbed Ellen’s wrist, and, with his other hand, forcefully flexed her knuckles inward until she dropped to her knees, crying in pain.

  “I know who you are and I know what you did,” she managed.

  Sutcher pulled her to her feet, but maintained his grip on her hand.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you get much pleasure out of hurting ladies that are old enough to be your mother?”

  “I get pleasure out of hurting anyone. Now, I’m going to ask you one more time before the real hurting begins, how did you find me?”

  Ellen pictured her granddaughter, sleeping in her room while this monster took photos of her.

  “I just stood downwind and sniffed,” she said. “Then I followed the smell and here you are.”

  Without hesitation, Sutcher hit her—a vicious openhanded slap that spun her around and sent her tumbling down the slope like a rag doll. Battered and bleeding, she came to rest halfway down to the driveway, on her belly, her arms and legs splayed, her gashed cheek grinding into a chunk of concrete. She was awake and alert, but hurting in so many places that in some strange way she wasn’t hurting at all. She remained motionless, her eyes closed. What was next? From up above, she could hear Sutcher’s grunts and the clattering of stones as he worked his way down the slope toward where she lay.

  She opened her eyes a slit. Resting beneath her right hand was a three-foot-long thin slat of wood, and protruding from the far end of the slat was a nail—two inches long, maybe two and a half. She was going to lose to the monster, that was a given, but not without at least trying to hurt him first. Moving nothing but her fingers, she closed them about wood. Her only chance, if there was a chance at all, was to swing at his face and hope to catch an eye. Her hatred for the man was such that the idea of blinding him brought no distaste.

  His labored breathing was getting closer. At least once she thought she heard him stumble. Good! . . . He was there now, next to her, nudging her over with the toe of his boot. If he noticed her hand clutching the slat and stepped on her wrist, her one chance to inflict any damage would be gone. But he seemed more intent on determining whether or not she was alive. To make it more difficult for him, she held her breath.

  “Come on, over you go,” he said, working the toe of his boot underneath her.

  Ellen allowed him to turn her nearly over before she finished the job. With a loud screech, she rolled to her back and swung her weapon in the same motion. The nail sank to the hilt through Sutcher’s cheek, less than an inch below his eye. He howled an obscenity and lurched backward, clawing at the wood. Just as he pulled it free, he fell heavily, tumbling over and over down the steep, rubble-strewn hill. Ellen was on her feet before he reached the driveway. Ignoring the pain of many wounds, she scrambled up the slope.

  “You bitch! I’m going to kill you!” Sutcher bellowed. “You’re dead meat!”

  Even if he had the key to his Jeep in his pocket, there was no way he could get to her before she reached her car. Half stumbling, half running, gasping for air, she charged across the dirt lawn to the Taurus. Moments before she reached it she was seized with the fear that he had flattened a tire or in some other way disabled the car. Neither was the case. Turning her car around before leaving it stood out as the lone bright spot in an afternoon of stupidity. She scrambled awkwardly behind the wheel and in seconds was skidding off down the road.

  With her eyes darting from the narrow roadway to the rearview mirror and back, she negotiated the dirt track as rapidly as she dared. Nearing the end, she chanced fishing out her cell phone from her purse. Praying she was in range of a transmitter, she dialed the number Chief Grimes had given her. She was surprised when he answered himself.

  “Mrs. Kroft, that certainly wasn’t a very wise thing to have done,” Grimes said after she gave him a quick summary of her situation.

  Tell me something I don’t know, she thought. “I think he’s coming after me,” she said. “What should I do?”

  “I’m in the cruiser right now,” he replied. “Just keep driving as fast as you can until you see me coming the other way, then pull over. I’ll have the flashers on so you can pick me up.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Ellen said, feeling her pulse rate begin to recede into the thousands.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Kroft. You’ve done a really dumb thing, but luckily you’re okay. I’ll take over from here. Just take a deep breath and let it out real slow. You’re safe now.”

  “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT ! We’ve got a baby sleeping in here. Now go away, please. No more interviews.”

  Don Cleary slammed the door shut and stalked back into his apartment, cursing the locked downstairs door and buzz-in security system, neither of which had been functional for a year or more. Damn, but it was going to be good to get out of the projects once and for all, he thought.

  “More reporters?” Sherrie asked sleepily, from her spot on the sofa.

  “They’re crammed on the stairway like rabbits, and there’re camera crews on the walk outside.”

  He, Sherrie, her mother, and some friends had watched the Omnivax television program after being told about it by a woman named Tricia from Lynette Marquand’s office. As the woman promised, in order to protect their privacy for the moment, their names weren’t broadcast on the air. Of course, after the actual injection was given, things were going to change. That, they could count on. Mrs. Marquand, Tricia said, would be happy to provide them with a publicity person who would help them after the injection to deal with the press and also to benefit financially in any way possible—and there were bound to be a number of offers.

  Then, just an hour or so after the program ended, the phone had started
ringing. No one who called seemed to know exactly how they had gotten the Clearys’ phone number or Donelle’s name. At first, he and Sherrie had been excited. They gave a taped interview to a reporter from one of the Washington television stations and allowed a photographer from the Post to come in and take a photo of them with the baby. After that, as the media crush intensified, they began saying no. Now they were getting angry.

  In her cradle by the sofa, Donelle began crying.

  “Damn, I woke her up,” Don said. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  He hurried to the cradle, lifted the precious bundle in his arms, and sat down next to his wife. The baby’s bleating stopped immediately. Her dark eyes opened widely and seemed to fix on his face.

  “Is she lookin’ at you?” Sherrie asked. “What a flirt.”

  “Yeah, just like her mother.”

  “You get out! Donny, look, isn’t she perfect?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think she’ll be? A dancer? Or . . . or a doctor? Or maybe a famous athlete?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” Don said. “The truth is, there’s only one thing I want her to be.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Healthy.”

  Over in the corner, the phone started ringing again.

  CHAPTER 30

  IT WAS JUST TEN-THIRTY WHEN FRED CARABETTA arrived at Hal’s place—a rustic but expansive lodge with half a dozen bedrooms, three fieldstone fireplaces, and a boathouse, built atop a high ledge over a pristine, five-mile-long lake. Matt and Nikki watched through the kitchen window as he maneuvered his considerable bulk out of what appeared to be a Cadillac of some sort.

  “Carabetta’s here,” Matt called out. “It’s going to be a tight squeeze in some of those tunnels, but I think he’ll make it.”

  Hal came in from the kitchen, a camera case looped over one arm and a shotgun nestled in the crook of the other. He was dressed for their expedition in black, as Matt had suggested, and was clearly keyed up. But if he was the least bit frightened or tense, he hid it well. Knowing his uncle’s sense of adventure, Matt wasn’t at all surprised.