A Fountain Filled With Blood (33 page)

The priest he knew spoke in a clear, well-organized way, one thought flowing coherently into another. But this garbled story…He couldn’t tell if she was drunk or delusional, or maybe had been hit on the head.

“He just stayed there on the phone, with the music going, and I needed to leave, because all I could think about was that I’d be in deep trouble if a drug lord found me in his shower stall while he was peddling his wares. Not to mention the way he was talking about how they were going to take care of the other man. So I climbed out of his bathroom window and—”

“You did what? Are you nuts?”

“It was the only way out. So I climbed out of his bathroom window, jumped onto a porch roof, and made it back to my car. I thought I had better call you, because you can get a warrant and search Malcolm’s room. He keeps the stuff under his bed. Oh, and he has a gun, too.”

He pocketed his keys. “And why is it you can’t go back into the house?” His mom had given up pretending to do work and was staring with undisguised interest at him.

“I threw away my sandals. And I lost two buttons on my top, and wiped off most of my makeup. I’m a complete mess.”

It was the first time he had ever heard Clare say anything that indicated she had any awareness of how she looked at all. If her story hadn’t been so completely bizarre, he’d have teased her about it. But she spoke with an earnest literalness that undoubtedly came out of a bottle but made her sound like a kid.

“Where are you right now?”

“In the passenger seat.”

“No, I mean where is Peggy Landry’s house?”

“Um, on the Old Lake George Road. You turn off at a place called Lucher’s Corners.”

“I know where that is. What’s her house number?”

“I can’t remember. Wait—” He heard the sound of papers flipping around. She came back on. “Okay, I got the directions she gave me. Number two thousand twelve.”

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. You stay put in your car. I’m going to come get you and take you home.”

“No! That’s not why I called! You have to come and arrest him! I wouldn’t have called for a ride. That would be imposing on you.” She said “imposing on you” in the same tone of voice someone might use to say “sacrificing your firstborn child.”

“I’ll just stay here until I feel sober enough to drive safely. Do not come out here to give me a ride,” Clare told him.

He wasn’t going to waste time arguing with a woman under the influence. Not over the phone, with his mom hanging on every word. “I’ll be there in about a half hour. Stay put.” He turned the phone off and replaced it in its cradle.

“Trouble?”

He nodded. “She needs a ride. And she thinks she may have some information about this murder we’re working on.”

His mother’s face changed from amused to worried. “Maybe you should call for backup.”

He shook his head. “It’s not like that, Mom. And Clare’s a little under the influence. I don’t want to embarrass her in front of anyone else. I’ll take her to her house and then head home from there.”

Margy got to her feet and wrapped her arms around him. He squeezed her hard and dropped a kiss on her springy white curls. “Don’t worry, Mom. There aren’t going to be any bad guys.”

She tipped her head back to look him straight in the eye. “That’s not the only sort of trouble out there.”

The Old Lake George road was familiar to him, part of the regular patrol route. When he had been in school—back around the Civil War, it felt like—the road had been mostly undeveloped, except for a few scraggly cabins inhabited by cranky loners. It had been, as its name suggested, a shortcut over the mountains toward Lake George, not a place anyone with a lick of sense would build on, back when the surrounding area was all devoted to dairy farming. Things started to change in the eighties, when a “pristine mountainside between a quaint Adirondack village”—he had seen the language in an ad his mother had sent him—and the old resort area of Lake George suddenly became a hot commodity. Overnight, neo-Adirondack lodges that would have given Teddy Roosevelt nightmares had sprung up along the road, interspersed with fake Swiss chalets and Frank Lloyd Wright Falling Water rip-offs. One of the latter, whose architect had insisted on flat roofs to “blend in with nature,” had come to a spectacular end when a twenty-four-hour storm dumped three feet of snow on the area and the whole house collapsed in on itself.

He recognized Peggy Landry’s house when he pulled into the long drive. She couldn’t have owned it long—it had been purchased and expensively renovated by a dot-com millionaire from New York City just a few years ago. He remembered the guy because he was constantly calling in intruder alerts during his summer stays, until Mark Durkee went up and pointed out that the open-air kitchen he had installed at the end of the pool house was attracting a steady stream of black bears.

The drive was still full of cars, but it was easy enough to pick out Clare’s god-awful Shelby Cobra. He pulled his truck into the nearest empty spot and got out. He glanced up at the facade of the house, three stories of vaguely rustic clapboarding rising up to a modern-cladded roof. He tried to picture Clare dropping out one of the windows, three sheets to the wind, and the image made him wince. An adrenaline addict, she had once described herself as. How she ever made it through a seminary and into the priesthood was a mystery to him.

He crunched over to her car. There was no sign on life until he bent down and peered into the shadowy interior. She had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. He knocked on the driver’s door and opened it.

“I’m here,” she said loudly, bolting upright.

“Take it easy. You’re not asleep on duty.” The light from the house reached the interior of the car dimly, but even in the shadows, he could see she hadn’t exaggerated. She looked like she’d been dragged through the bushes backward.

“No, of course not, I was just—” She blinked several times. “Russ! What are you doing here? No, wait, I remember. Are you going to arrest Malcolm?”

He squinted past her into the tiny sports car. “I don’t think I can fit inside this tin can. Why don’t we get into my truck? We can talk there. Grab your purse and keys.”

She nodded, and a moment later they were crossing the gravel drive to his pickup, Clare muttering quiet “Ouch” noises as she, barefooted, picked her way across the stones.

As soon as they were both inside, he fired up the ignition and shifted into gear.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“Taking you home,” he said, craning over his shoulder to see as he backed up. “Fasten your seat belt.”

“You’re supposed to be searching Malcolm’s room! Didn’t you hear anything I said on the phone?”

“Yep.” He threw his pickup into first and headed down the drive to the road.

“You can’t just drive away! There are illegal drugs in that house. And persons with knowledge of a murder!”

“You been watching
Law & Order
again, haven’t you?” He grinned at her. “Listen. I’ll give you a free tutorial on the way the criminal-justice system works in our country. I am a law enforcement agent. Before I go into anyone’s house and search it, I have to get permission from a judge, called a warrant. I convince the judge to issue me a warrant based on evidence I can show or information I can give that will persuade him that there’s a reasonable chance I can find some evidence of a crime. Now, while it’s true that there are some jurisdictions where an honest cop can get a warrant based on his say-so, here in Washington County I have to deal with Judge Ryswick. And Judge Ryswick likes solid evidence before issuing a warrant. Especially when he’s asked to issue warrants against well-heeled businessmen. Judge Ryswick would be very unhappy with me if I woke him up and asked for a warrant to search Peggy Landry’s home based on a drunken woman’s statement that she overheard what she thinks was a drug deal while going to the bathroom. Although I admit that the fact you’re a priest is good. The DA always likes to tell juries that priests and bishops don’t normally witness crimes. To explain the scumball witnesses he has to put on the stand, you see?”

“I wasn’t going to the bathroom! I was hiding there. And I’m not drunk. I only had four drinks. Or five. I’m just a tad…tipsy.”

He laughed.

“Don’t patronize me!”

“I’m practically old enough to be your father. That gives me the right to patronize you. Plus, I’m sober and you’re not.”

She clicked her seat belt buckle into place. He gunned the truck and turned onto the Seven Mile Road as she opened her mouth several times, inhaling sharply, as if she were about to light into him but couldn’t make up her mind where to start. Finally, she said, “You are not old enough to be my father.”

“I’ll be forty-nine in November.”

“Well, there you are. My father is fifty-eight.” She crossed her arms.

The fact that he was a lot closer to her father’s age than to hers was not a comfortable thought. “What the hell were you thinking of, leaping out a window onto a porch roof? You could have broken both your legs.”

“Believe me, it wasn’t my first choice. I was planning—” She stopped and thought for a minute. “Actually, I have to confess that I didn’t go into Malcolm’s room with any plan for getting back out again. I wasn’t thinking very far ahead.”

“There’s a surprise,” he said under his breath.

She twisted in her seat. “Mal Wintour is selling drugs,” she said. “He’s got a stash in a suitcase under his bed. The man who was in the room with him said it must be worth a million.” She jabbed her hands reflexively at her French twist and whatever had been holding it in place slid and a quarter of her hair tumbled down. “Darn it.” She fumbled with a clip. “Just because I wasn’t in the same room with them doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear them.”

“Okay. I believe you thought you heard what you did. I’ll even accept that you may be right that he is holding. I’m still not going to get anywhere based on your say-so.”

“Russ—”

He held up a hand. “Let me finish. I’ll put Mark on him, do some background checking, see if we can connect him to any known dealers or buyers.”

“But it’s more than that. I think he’s connected to the murder.”

“Which one?”

“What do you mean, which one? Bill Ingraham’s, of course. Why? There hasn’t been—has there been another murder?”

“Maybe. We found Chris Dessaint’s body. He’s the guy I told you about—the one McKinley fingered as the ringleader of those punks. Looks like he OD’d. Scheeler’s doing an autopsy to see what he can find out.”

“Wasn’t he the one who was supposedly giving the others drugs and money?”

“That’s him.”

“It makes perfect sense!” She smacked her hands together. “Malcolm gave him drugs and money, and he did the dirty work. Mal said something to the other guy in his bedroom—‘I know what you were told.’ Doesn’t that sound as if there was someone else involved?”

“Huh.” He glanced away from the mountain road to look at her for a moment. “Did you hear the other guy’s name?”

“No.” She bit her lip and dropped her eyelids, as if she were concentrating intently on remembering. “He said, ‘I didn’t sign up for anything like this.’ He told Mal he wasn’t in it for the money, and Mal laughed at him. Then Mal gave him the…well, whatever it was and told him it was worth ten thousand dollars, and he—Malcolm, that is—would arrange a sale for the other guy. So he could take the money and leave the state. ‘Until this business about Bill blows over’—that’s what he said.” She opened her eyes and looked at Russ. “What do you think? Do you have an idea of who it might be?”

He returned his attention to the road. “Dunno if it’s an idea. A possibility, maybe.” He tapped the steering wheel with two fingers. “According to Elliott McKinley, there was a third man involved in the beatings. Jason Colvin. No priors on him, although we know he used to hang in the fringes of our little local hate-mongering group. We’ve tracked him to his girlfriend’s house, but the last time she saw him was Monday morning.”

“The morning after Bill Ingraham was killed.”

“Yep. Noble’s checked his work, hangouts, family—no one’s seen him since then. He’s disappeared off the face of the earth. Since we found Dessaint, I’ve been wondering if he took a camping trip, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dessaint. He was camped out in a remote location in the woods. If he hadn’t died and attracted a flock of carrion birds, we wouldn’t have found him on a bet.”

Clare wrinkled her nose. “That’s awful. And he died of an overdose? Accidentally?”

“Don’t know. It’s mighty convenient that the only person who knew who was passing out drugs and money in exchange for the assaults happened to OD a couple days after Ingraham’s death.”

“But if you think it might have been this Jason Colvin guy who was talking to Malcolm, then Chris Dessaint couldn’t have been the only one to know.” She brought one leg up and tucked her foot under her other leg. “If Malcolm Wintour’s been pulling the strings, maybe he’s trying to tie off all the loose ends. Maybe he adulterated whatever it was that he gave to Dessaint. And now Jason Colvin’s come to him. Maybe the package he gave to him wasn’t a payoff. Maybe it was meant for personal use.”

“If Colvin is a regular user, it wouldn’t stretch the imagination to think he’d dip into the goods. Even if he did plan on selling most of it.” He slowed the truck down as they approached a T-junction, then turned left and headed back into town. “The problem I have is seeing Malcolm Wintour as the bad guy. Why? What’s in it for him? Even granted the spurned-lover scenario, this is way too complicated. People who are enraged that their lover left grab the nearest gun and blow the person away. They don’t hire a bunch of guys and arrange incidents to cover their tracks. Besides, McKinley said the guy who was bankrolling them felt like they did about queers. Wanted to teach ’em a lesson. Wintour’s gay. He’s not going to beat up on his own kind.”

“It’s not a club with a secret handshake and vows of fraternal loyalty, Russ. Besides, from everything I’ve heard about Malcolm, the only person he feels loyalty to is himself. And maybe his aunt.” She twisted in her seat again. “And that’s another reason he may have done it. He’s living with Peggy Landry, relying on her for his housing and his support.”