by Noel Hynd
No psychic message this time. No sharp crackle in the fire or creak on a floorboard. Just an overall sense, a menace as huge and cold as the New Hampshire winter.
That. . . or he was nuts.
O'Hara quickly sidled into his car. He wanted to be out of there before the lock froze again.
The reliable old engine cranked over obediently. O'Hara found a plowed driveway and turned his car back toward Nashua, alternately cursing the winter, trying to sort out everything Rose had told him in general, and specifically wondering how the falsification of evidence could have occurred-if it occurred at all-in the Ledbetter case.
He further tried to figure how it could have helped send an innocent man to the electric chair. If in fact, Gary was innocent. And if he had really gone to the chair.
Chapter Ten
Three miles from home. Just three miles. And now this.
Stacey Dissette stood by the side of her stranded automobile and felt like crying. This was something out of a nightmare.
Stacey had tried to take the short route from her job at the bank in Nashua to her home in New Preston. The hilly, winding back road through Devil's Glen. She had lived in the state for four winters. So she should have known better. But the unseasonable earliness of the storm, plus its intensity, had ambushed a lot of people.
The snowdrifts on the county road were as high as two and a half feet in certain spots, and the undercarriage of her Ford Fiesta, when it came down a steep hill in Devil's Glen, had gotten stuck. The vehicle was mired in the snow, and there was no way to move it. It wouldn't budge six inches now, either in forward or in reverse.
It was 6:10 P.M. on a Thursday, five days after the massive November storm. Daylight was long gone, and few other cars travelled this route, particularly after dark. And she would soon be out of gas if she kept the car's engine running. Out of gas meant out of warmth from the car's heater. Stacey was in deep trouble with the fifteen-degree weather predicted overnight.
She was alone and terrified. This was a great way to freeze to death.
“Don't panic,” she told herself. “Think. Think. Do the smart thing. . . .”
She stood by her car, feeling the frigid air of the New England night close in on her. She rallied her spirits and tried to remain calm. But she knew she had to make a decision. Soon.
She could set out on foot and hope to make it through a mile of snowy, unpopulated highway-no house anywhere in sight. Or she could stay with the car and pray that another vehicle happened through the same road.
It was one hell of a decision to make. She cursed her own foolishness for having tried to cut through Devil's Glen. Never, never, ever again in the winter, she promised herself. This had been just plain idiotic.
Game plan: She would wait for fifteen minutes and pray that another car came by, someone who would help her. After fifteen minutes, she would start out on foot, walking back in the way she had come, toward the main road that led back to Nashua. More likely to find help in that direction.
She waited. Her car idled. She kept the radio on low and tried to imagine a better plan. There wasn't one. Her eye drifted to the gas gauge. The needle was on one quarter.
Then she nearly jumped out of her skin when there was a knock on her side window.
She whirled and almost screamed. A man! Where had he come from? He smiled at her.
“Hello!” he said. “You okay? You stuck? You need help?”
Her heart fluttered, then settled. Had God sent her an angel? She stepped from the car and almost cried in gratitude. But she withheld the tears.
“Oh, I'm so glad to see you!” she said. “I'm stuck!” She motioned at the car. “I don't know whether if you gave me a push I'd be able to move or what.”
He glanced down at the vehicle. Snow up to the bumper. He shook his head. He was dressed in a heavy parka with boots and gloves, but the hood of the parka was pulled back. His hair was shaggy and dirty blond. He was slightly unshaven, but Stacey wasn't complaining.
“Impossible to push,” he said, quickly assessing her predicament. “You'd just get stuck again.” He thought about it for a moment longer. “You're going to have to get a flatbed tow truck in here after the road's clear.”
“Well, then . . .?” she asked. He offered her a hand, which she didn't take. He smiled again. His face was now kind. Reassuring.
“Walk back this way with me,” he said. He motioned in the direction in which she had planned to walk, back toward Nashua.
Then she looked for his vehicle. None. She looked for his bootprints in the snow.
For some reason, a flash of suspicion seized her. Then fear.
“Where did you come from?” she asked.
He motioned to the endless darkness behind him.
“I have a four-wheel over the other side of the hill,” he explained, indicating the high crest that she had just crossed and slid down. “I had just decided to turn back when I saw your lights up ahead. I came down to see what was going on.”
“I never saw your lights,” she said.
“They were there. But I cut them on the other side of the hill.”
“Why didn't you drive down here?”
“No place to turn around. Hey, there's only so much magic you can do with a four-wheel, you know. They can get stuck, too. They're not snowmobiles. You want us both to be stuck?”
“No,” she said.
But what really bothered her was the stranger's fresh tracks in the snow. It was as if he had just appeared from amidst the dark trees.
He seemed to read her mind. And he could tell that she was afraid of him. “I didn't fly down here like Peter Pan,” he said. “I walked in your tire tracks, okay? I'm not some sort of Abominable Snowman.” He paused. His blue eyes twinkled.
“What's your name?” he asked. His voice was soft now, engaging.
“Stacey.”
“Stacey, honey,” he reassured her. “I have a Jeep Cherokee over that ridge. Chains and four-wheel drive. I got a CB in my vehicle, okay? You can call your husband or your family or whoever you want and tell them where you are. And I can get you to safety in twenty minutes. Sound like a good deal? Or do you want to stay out here in the snow?”
He smiled. A most engaging smile.
She exhaled a long breath. “I'm sorry. Yes,” she nodded. “I didn't mean to. . . . Yes, it sure does sound like a good deal.”
“Good girl,” he said. “That's more like it.”
He looked at her disabled vehicle.
“Lock your car. Leave your flashers on,” he advised. “In case anyone else is crazy enough to drive through here tonight, the flashers will help them see. Maybe your car will avoid being hit. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Don't leave anything valuable in the car. You never know.”
She agreed. He waited as she retrieved her purse and a flashlight from the glove compartment. She locked her car. She was already freezing. She glanced at her savior, however, and the cold didn't even seem to be touching him. Not at all.
Then she was ready to walk. She joined him in the tire tracks, an easier path than clumping through the unpacked snow.
“This will all be over before you know it,” he promised her. When she struggled with her footing, he turned and offered her a hand.
He had beautiful eyes, and by now she trusted him. So she accepted his hand. It steadied her for the climb up for the hill.
“I never got your name,” she finally said.
“I didn't give it,” he said. “But, you can call me 'Gary.'“
Chapter Eleven
The next day began when it was still black as tar outside. Six A.M. The phone was ringing like a fire bell in the darkness.
O'Hara: a sleepy hello from his empty bedroom. He had caught the call on what he thought was the third ring.
On the other end was a male voice, crackling with belligerence. Familiar. Captain Mallinson.
O'Hara struggled to become alert. But nothing is fast before a frozen dawn. “What's g
oing on?”
“We got an ID on Jane Doe.”
“Sheesh. . . .” Sleepily, coming awake, O'Hara: “What can you tell me-?”
“Nothing on the frigging phone, Frank. Get over here.”
“Right,” O'Hara was already rising from his warm bed into the cold room. The phone was in his hand. “Where? Headquarters?”
“Paloheima's chop shop,” Mallinson said, which again told O'Hara that this wasn't the ordinary. The captain continued. “The roads still stink with ice. Should I send a jeep?”
“No. I'll get there.”
“Now, Frank.”
Mallinson hung up. O'Hara climbed into his clothes from the previous day. He stumbled downstairs, the wooden steps moaning under his feet, his own soul moaning under his breath.
He found his way to the kitchen. In the microwave, he nuked a cup of water and juiced it with a double shot of instant coffee crystals. Anything for a quick caffeine fix. He cut the brew with a half cup of milk, tasted it, and winced. Success: It tasted so bad that it had shocked him slightly more awake.
A few minutes later he was in his garage, swigging bitter, ersatz coffee from an open thermos.
The latch on the garage door had frozen. Not unusual. The temperature was about twelve Fahrenheit. He picked up an ax and butt-ended the latch from within. He heard a tinkle of frozen chips falling on the other side. Winter music: shattered ice cascading onto more ice. The latch gave, the door lifted and, along with darkness, a blast of cold air swatted him in the kisser.
He climbed into his car, backed up, and felt the crunch of his tires on the jagged chunks of ice in his driveway. He tried to use the electronic switch in his car to close the garage door, but that, too, had frozen to death.
Out onto the road. Car lights on. A brutal morning. He joined the rural two-lane which would meet the highway to Nashua. No other car in sight. Who else was insane enough to be out?
“Screw it,” he growled. He had forgotten the tape deck. Couldn't even play Sinatra.
“Screw it,” he said again. All he could get was programmed drivel on the car radio, a half-wit early morning shock-jock from New York. There was also a Jesus-blaster, a Christian station from Vermont which was even worse, plus some incomprehensible French crap from Quebec. His fingers worked the dial. He found All-News from New York: the gory account of a murder at an ATM in Queens.
Then, a white knuckler of a drive. Black ice all the way-the thin, invisible sheet of the stuff on top of the asphalt. An engraved invitation to land in a ditch.
Seat belts, he thought, occasionally sipping coffee. He buckled up: If he were going to skid off the highway somewhere, he'd just as soon not stick his skull through the windshield.
Halfway to Nashua he caught up to an oil truck. In his mind, Captain Mallinson was already barking at him for the time it would take to get to the chop doc's office. So O'Hara steered the Pontiac into the wrong lane and passed the oiler, looking up to see if the truck driver happened to be awake. A surprising number of six A.M. vehicle operators weren't. This one was. . . . Wide.
One good fishtail gave O'Hara a sweet reminder of his own mortality. He hooked the Pontiac into the truck's lane, too close in front of the oiler. The trucker gave him a self-righteous blast of twin air horns.
Then the truck tailgated him. Fifty miles an hour, bumper to rusty bumper, on black ice. An up-all-night sorehead trucker.
O'Hara had an impulse. He would slam on his brakes and then hit the blockhead truck driver with his state police shield as soon as the indignant asshole jumped out of his cab.
But instead, O'Hara pulled up a beacon that he kept down low beneath the radio. He plopped it on the dashboard and flipped it on, filling his entire world with pulsating blue. The trucker took the hint and dropped the bumper-to-bumper crap.
“There you go, buddy,” O'Hara mumbled. “Good morning, get off my ass and screw you, too.” O'Hara flipped the man a finger and pulled away toward Nashua.
There were three cars in the M.E.'s end of the parking lot when O'Hara pulled in, all cozily nestled together. The first was Paloheima's Buick. As nondescript as the man itself. Dull brown. Like an old hockey glove or an ice skate.
The second car was Mallinson's bad-weather car, the one with the illegal studded tires. It was a big, purple, 1984 Colony Park station wagon. It featured a 402-cubic megadeath engine which could do 120 m.p.h., a number which Mallinson claimed to have hit from time to time on the Massachusetts Turnpike west of Springfield. On the license plate there was bolted a medallion proclaiming, “Captain-New Hampshire State Police.” Meaning: Don't go pulling this old white dude over. Professional courtesy.
The station wagon was purple, but had two replacement doors that were black. A purple-and-black Colony Park. A great New Hampshire vehicle, O'Hara concluded: A car the color of a bruise.
Then there was the third car. A big blue Mercedes-Benz, as fancy a set of wheels as existed since the death of the Deusenberg. It was a Benz from the 500 series: a land yacht. The Benz was brand-new and must have borne sticker numbers which looked like triple O'Hara's annual pay stub.
O'Hara could tell instantly: the Benz spelled trouble. Big, expensive, fancy wheels were always a pain in conjunction with a homicide: They meant someone had money and thus influence. A few moments later, by the time O'Hara was in the building, in the quiet corridor leading to Paloheima's ice box room, these observations were still washing around inside him. What he didn't know was that it would get even worse.
Then everyone and everything converged at once.
Vincent Paloheima, M.D., stood in the anteroom before his examination chamber. His buttoned white lab coat hanging like a tent over his belly, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. O'Hara spotted him at almost the same instant as the faint but evident stench of pickling fluid accosted O'Hara's nose.
Paloheima turned toward the detective as O'Hara approached. Paloheima looked as if he was about to warn O'Hara about something, but Mallinson emerged from a doorway.
“Here's the detective now,” O'Hara heard Mallinson say to someone still inside a conference room. “Best man on our force. We'll give him whatever he needs.”
If there was a response from someone, O'Hara never heard it. Paloheima stopped in his tracks. The only warning he could give was a wary look. Then Mallinson was in the hall between them, motioning, indicating that O'Hara should join him.
O'Hara did. Wordlessly. Seconds later, O'Hara was in the conference chamber. A man in a deep navy suit, much too fine for the weather, sat at a table. The man was thick, jowly, and dark. A little pear-shaped. O'Hara knew him somehow. Nasty face: the type that pulled over your toes in that big road locomotive of a Benz and hogged a handicapped parking place. But O'Hara's mind was not yet churning fast enough. Tough to peg strange, hostile faces so early in the A.M.
O'Hara, though, knew the obvious. The man was related to the Mercedes-Benz by ownership, and he was related to the victim by either blood or lust.
The man's gaze rose and assessed O'Hara. Reproachful gaze, mixed with a lethal combination of anger, indignation, and bereavement. And coldness. Big-time chill.
“Frank,” Mallinson said in funereal tones, “this is Mr. Wilhelm Negri. As I'm sure you know, Mr. Negri is the publisher of the New Hampshire American. “
Simultaneous to Mallinson's introduction, O'Hara had pegged the face and uttered another strong profanity, a good hearty, “Oh, fuck it.” But only in his mind.
O'Hara extended a hand. Negri's half-reluctant handshake matched the weather. So was the look he gave by way of greeting.
O'Hara said, “Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Negri said nothing. It passed through O'Hara's mind-as strange thoughts do at such moments-that silence was an ominous commodity from a man who had five right-wing gabfests a week on syndicated radio, and whose vocal delivery ranged between Ronald Reagan fake-homespun to Times Square crackpot.
O'Hara waited for the shoe to drop. It dropped quickly. And hard.
“Frank,” Mallinson continued in overly formal tones that he hauled out only for such occasions, “we've identified the woman found last week in the cabin on Monadnock. The victim was Abigail Negri. Abigail was Mr. Negri's wife.”
There was a silence in the room. O'Hara used it to find his textbook voice.
“Oh, God,” he then said. “I'm deeply sorry, Mr. Negri.”
O'Hara's words were automatic. He had developed the art of using one part of his mind to process the events that unrolled before him, while a separate part sought their historical connection. He already knew that something was even further off-kilter about this case than he could have possibly imagined.
“Detective O'Hara is in charge of the investigation,” Mallinson explained in his most unctuous voice.
Negri's gaze rose to the captain, his voice following. “I thought you were in charge.”
“Detective O'Hara is directly under my command.”
After a split beat, during which Negri's overall dissatisfaction registered, Mallinson saw fit to add a convenient lie. “We confer every day. I oversee every action Detective O'Hara makes,” Mallinson said.
“I don't want any half-wit cop on this case,” Negri said.
“O'Hara is our best man,” Mallinson said.
Negri's attention snapped back to O'Hara. “How are you doing, Officer? What are your leads? Have anything yet?”
O'Hara floundered for something positive. “The case is already on the top of the department's priority list. It's my only case,” he said.
“No leads, in other words.”
“Leads, but nothing I can share with you.”
“Bullshit,” said Negri. “You have no idea who killed my wife. Is that what you're saying?”
