Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (33 page)

He passed a stack of color prints over to me. I sifted through them one at a time. Some of the pictures were taken on board the ship. Others showed views taken through the windows of the White Pass and Yukon train. The next-to-last shot was a crooked one that showed the rough rock surfaces of a tunnel along with an out-of-focus view of the steep tree-and-rock-covered terrain just outside the tunnel's entrance. But it was the last picture in the stack that was the real stunner.

In it a stark white face stared into the camera's lens. Red-eye effect gave the face an unearthly appearance, like that of a monster dreamed up in the crazed mind of a horror-movie director and then crafted by a special-effects whiz. I was so astonished by what I saw there that I blurted out the words before I could stifle them.

“Why, it's Lucy!” I exclaimed. “Lucy Conyers. What the hell was she doing out there?” But then, of course, I came face-to-face with the answer to my own question—the only answer possible. Under the cover of darkness, Lucy Conyers had stepped out onto the platform for no other reason than to shove her husband off the train.

Without a word, Lars Jenssen reached out a hand and lifted the picture from my fingers. He held it up to his eyes and studied it wordlessly for the better part of a minute. Then, nodding, he handed it back to me.

“Ya, sure,” he said. “I knew it.” And then he looked away.

“Wait a minute. You knew it?” I demanded. “Are you telling me you saw Lucy at the time it happened? You saw her out there on the balcony?”

He nodded.

“But if you saw that—if you knew she was the one who did it—why didn't you say something?”

“You haven't been there, Beau,” Lars answered quietly. “You don't know what it's like. I've been through the same t'ing myself, with Aggie—through times when I wanted to put her out of her misery. When I wanted to put us both out of our misery. I know exactly what Lucy was up against—what she was going through. I understand why she did what she did. Once you've been there—really been there—you realize nobody has the right to tell her she was wrong.”

“Murder is wrong,” I insisted. “But I can understand why you didn't want to be the one to turn her in.”

“It's like I told you,” Lars said quietly. “I don't like having the power of life and death over someone—never did. It's too big a responsibility.”

That's when I realized that earlier, when Lars had been talking about having the power of life and death, he hadn't been thinking about losing his grip on Mike Conyers and letting the man fall to his death. No, he had been agonizing over what he knew Lucy Conyers had done and whether or not he should turn her in because of it. For him it was more complicated than a simple matter of right or wrong.

I didn't doubt for a minute that Lars Jenssen had lived through exactly the same kinds of temptation with Aggie. The difference between him and Lucy Conyers was that Lars had resisted them. But he must have come close at times—close enough to realize that he, too, might have found himself sitting in a jail cell and under investigation for murder. No wonder he hadn't been himself. No wonder Lars Jenssen had been acting “old.” If I had been in his shoes, I would have felt sick and old, too. This wasn't a situation that came with easy, one-size-fits-all answers.

Marc Alley had listened to this whole exchange in dead silence. “Does this mean I wasn't the target after all?”

His question made my face flush with shame before I even managed to reply. After all, I was the one who had gone around proclaiming Lucy Conyers' innocence to anyone who cared to listen. It burned me up to think that I had been so wrong about her while Sonny Liebowitz had been dead-on right. Sonny was someone I didn't care to see ever again. I didn't want him close enough to me for the creep to rub my nose in my error, which, being the kind of guy Sonny was, he would be hell-bent to do if he ever had the chance.

I'd had more than my fill of people like that. Detective Liebowitz was a near clone of my old nemesis back at Seattle PD—the supreme jerk of the universe, Detective Paul Kramer. It had been Kramer's promotion to Captain Larry Powell's place in homicide that had been the straw that broke this camel's back. When Kramer moved his smirking face into Larry's fish-bowl office and planted his wide butt in Larry's leather-backed chair, it was only a matter of time before Detective J. P. Beaumont was on his way out. Permanently.

“Mike Conyers was an Alzheimer's patient,” I explained to Marc. “Taking care of him must have been too hard on Lucy, his wife. From looking at this, I'd say she reached the end of her rope somewhere along the track as we wound our way up the mountain to White Pass.”

“I do remember seeing her,” Marc said, nodding. “I remember her crying in the car after it all happened. She seemed very upset. But she also seemed old to me—too old and not that strong.”

“Desperation makes you strong,” Lars replied. “Sometimes, you yust don't know your own strength.”

I felt as though Lars and I owed Marc Alley the courtesy of a more detailed answer. “You see,” I explained. “Lars' first wife had Alzheimer's, too. It was after Aggie's death that he married my grandmother.”

Marc nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Alzheimer's is a terrible disease for everyone concerned, but I still don't know what I should do with this picture.”

“You'll have to turn it over to the proper authorities,” I said.

“Why?” Lars asked.

“Because this is a murder investigation,” I explained. “It's against the law to withhold evidence or information, and you have to admit, this is pretty compelling evidence. The picture puts Lucy Conyers out on the platform right at the time Mike went over the rail. Look on the back of the photo. It's even timed and dated. The picture doesn't actually show Lucy giving Mike a push, but any first-year prosecutor will be able to make that case and have it stick.”

“But what about Lucy's lawyer?” Lars asked. “Can't she do something?”

“At this point, I'd say the best Carol Ehlers could go for would be a negotiated plea agreement. Now that you mention it, the sooner, the better. Once this picture falls into Sonny Liebowitz's hands, things will only get worse.”

Lars started to get up, then dropped back into his chair.

“What about Beverly?” he asked hollowly. “What about Claire and Florence? What's going to happen to them when they find out about what Lucy did? They all think of her as a friend. They're not going to want to believe this.”

“They may not want to believe, but they will,” I assured him. “They're all big girls. They'll be able to take it. And remember, Lars, my grandfather, Jonas Piedmont, may have died of a stroke rather than Alzheimer's, but he was sick for a long time. He was in a wheelchair, unable to take care of himself, and totally dependent on Beverly for years before he died. Beverly may never have said anything to you about it, but I'm sure she's lived though the same kind of hell you and Aggie did, and Mike and Lucy Conyers, too, for that matter. I'd be surprised if she hadn't been subject to the same kinds of temptation.”

Lars looked at me. “You t'ink so?”

“I know so.”

He nodded. “All right, then,” he said. “I'll go find Beverly and tell her what's happened. You call that lady lawyer.”

I nodded. Meanwhile, Marc Alley had been gathering up his scattered pictures. “Mind if I tag along?” he asked.

“By all means,” I told him. “After all, they're your pictures.”

We went back down to the Capri Deck. When I opened the door to my stateroom, I was a little concerned about whether or not Naomi would be at home. Not that she shouldn't have been. Not that we were doing anything wrong. It was just that the situation would have been awkward, and I was happy not to have to deal with it.

Again I cursed myself for not having brought along my cell phone. Once again it seemed to take forever to put through a ship-to-shore phone call. Once the call went through, however, Carol answered on the second ring.

“Carol Ehlers here,” she said.

“This is Beau,” I said. “J. P. Beaumont.”

“Good to hear from you. Don't worry. Things are fine.”

“Things aren't fine,” I told her. “In fact, I'd say they're anything but fine.” For the next several minutes I explained the damning details of the photo.

“The picture really is time-dated?” Carol asked when I finished.

“I'm afraid so.”

“And it's clearly Lucy Conyers in the photo—Lucy and nobody else?”

“No mistaking her,” I said. “It's Lucy, all right.”

“It's a good thing I'm still here in Skagway,” Carol said. “I'll go talk to Lucy right away. I was visiting with the prosecutor a little earlier, and he was hinting around about a plea bargain. Charging sweet little old ladies with murder doesn't win popularity contests. I'll try to convince Lucy that we should take the deal before things get any worse—because you're absolutely right. As soon as that picture ends up in Sonny's hands, things will get worse. If we can put a plea agreement in place soon enough, there's no reason it should ever have to.”

“Good,” I said. A wave of relief washed over me. The weight of responsibility was out of my hands and into Carol Ehlers' capable ones, and that was fine with me. I suspected it would also be fine with Lars. Still, despite what I had said earlier, I was worried. I suspected that hearing about Lucy Conyers' planned guilty plea wouldn't go over well with Beverly Jenssen, or with her friends Claire or Florence Wakefield, either.

I hung up. “So what do I do with the picture?” Marc asked, holding up the envelope.

“Keep it for right now. We'll give Carol Ehlers time to work things out. When we get into Sitka tomorrow, I'll call her again and see how she fared in the plea-bargaining department. If they've got a deal, then you don't have to do anything with the picture. You can keep it or burn it or do whatever you want. If Lucy decides to plead innocent and go to trial, then it's a whole new ball game. You'll have to send it along to the proper authorities.”

Marc nodded. “Does this mean I don't have to worry anymore—about someone coming after me?”

I shook my head. “It doesn't mean anything of the kind. It turns out what we initially thought was an attempt on your life, wasn't. I think it's safe to say that Lucy Conyers wasn't a member of Leave It To God, but that also doesn't mean that the LITG threat has gone away. On that score, nothing has changed.”

“So I should still be careful?”

“By all means. And that reminds me, Marc. Please don't tell anyone else about what's been going on. The fewer people who know about it, the better.”

He nodded sheepishly. “I realized telling Christine was a mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but there was no way to take them back. By then the damage was done. It's just that I needed someone to talk to right then, some way of getting the load of worry off my chest. Christine happened to be handy and sympathetic.”

“I certainly understand your need to confide in someone,” I said, “but try not to tell anyone else.”

“I won't,” Marc said determinedly. “I've definitely learned my lesson.”

Just then I heard the sound of a key card in the lock. I had thought I'd be able to hustle Marc out soon enough to get away clean, and I almost did. With another minute or so, he would have been out of the cabin and everything would have been fine. But just then Naomi Pepper walked into the room. She stopped in the doorway.

“Am I interrupting something?” she asked, looking questioningly from Marc to me and back again.

“Oh, no,” Marc said quickly, “I was just leaving.” If he was surprised that Naomi had a key to my room, he didn't let on.

“You don't have to leave on account of me,” Naomi told him.

“That's all right,” he said. “I need to be going anyway.”

Marc let himself out of the room. Naomi had obviously been out on deck. She went into the bathroom to hang up rain gear, which was still dripping water, and with her hair wet and windblown. When she came out, her hair was still damp, but it had been combed into a semblance of order.

“Was that about the picture?” she asked.

“How did you know about that?”

“I was out on deck all afternoon with your grandmother and her friends. They were all determined to catch at least one glimpse of a glacier.”

“Did it work?”

“It did, actually. Just a little while ago there was a slight break in the weather. Most of the other passengers had given up and gone inside by then, but not us. Your grandmother is one stubborn woman. We got to see a calving glacier after all, and we were still out on deck when Lars came to tell us.”

“Us? You mean he blabbed it to all of you? He said he was going to tell Beverly.”

Naomi shrugged. “We were all there together, so he told us, too.”

“Great,” I groaned. “So what did Claire and Florence have to say?”

“About the glacier?” she asked.

“No, about the picture.”

Naomi shrugged. “Oh, that. Not much. They were shocked, I suppose, and sad, too, but they all—even your grandmother—seemed to take it in stride. Beverly told me later that Lars was looking ever so much better—like he'd had the weight of the world lifted off his shoulders.”

“I'm sure that's how he felt,” I said.

I slipped off my shoes and lay down flat on the bed, folding my arms under my head. I lay there and wiggled my little toe to see if it still hurt. It did.
Time to take some more Advil
, I counseled myself.

Naomi sat down on the edge of her bed. “I guess I owe you an apology,” she said. Her back was to me, so I couldn't see her face, but I heard what sounded like genuine regret in her voice.