Black Night Falling (14 page)

I made it to Olive Street on foot, skirting the edge of the hospital until I found a path leading from the rear of the building across the grounds. I looked back as I hit the sidewalk, but the cop wasn’t behind me.

My luck turned, a cab coming down the street before I’d even made it thirty paces. I flagged it and prayed the driver wouldn’t recognise my face, not knowing how intensive the search for me was.

In the event, the man never bothered to look back once. I asked him to take me to a car rental joint, and he said the airport was the closest. The route took us along State Line Avenue a few blocks, and I sat low in the seat, my hat pulled down, my mind in tumult at what I’d learned. The connection between Kolkhorst and the dead women in Hot Springs eluded me. So did the significance of the last set of initials –
N.G.
Not compliant with
Ginny Kolkhorst
, even though I now knew her to be the woman in the picture. The possibilities got on top of me – I’d assumed Robinson’s inscription on the photograph meant Kolkhorst was murdered, but what if that had been wrong from the start? If that was the case, who was the third victim? Was Kolkhorst’s death related at all? It was like viewing a painting from too close – the image becoming more obscure the nearer I got to it.

My thoughts turned on me then, Hansen’s words prompting a realisation. I’d sent Jimmy to Callaway’s house that morning to pick up my story, and maybe he was dead because of it.

I closed my eyes and tried to shut it all down. When I opened them again, I noticed a police black-and-white overtaking us in the next lane, headed in the direction of the headquarters building downtown. I went to avert my face, but as I did, I noticed the markings on it: Hot Springs PD.

The clerk didn’t look at my licence too close – the dollar tip I slipped him across the counter at the same time distraction enough. He handed my paperwork back to me and I stashed it fast.

I waited outside while the clerk went to fetch my rental, thinking about the cops that were on my tail. I couldn’t make sense of how they caught up with me so fast. Even if the Texarkana police had known to radio Hot Springs PD to dispatch a car, it couldn’t have got here that quick. So it had to be they were already here.

That opened up its own slew of questions. It was conceivable someone got a look at Robinson’s licence plate since I’d been driving his car and was therefore able to connect me to it. Cole Barrett sprang to mind then. Maybe an outside chance that some other party had noted it down while it was parked outside Tucker’s cabin.

What I couldn’t figure is how the cops from either place knew to look for me in Texarkana.

I found a single listing in the name of Kolkhorst in the city directory and decided I wouldn’t risk a telephone call in advance.

The address was on the Arkansas side of town, the street dotted with young pines and sycamores, the houses a rag-tag mix of low-rise fieldstone bungalows and newer clapboard dwellings – a working class neighbourhood.

I stopped at a light just before the Kolkhorsts’ block, their house in view now – a corner plot, neat yard out front, cleared of leaves, freshly painted white walls and a tiled roof adorned with a little brick chimney.

I looked up at the stoplight on its wire above me, still red, then back at the street. I realised I was drumming my fingers on the wheel. Something felt off. I looked along the road and checked my mirrors, but there was no other traffic around me. I looked ahead again and cottoned to what was bugging me: a little way down, a midnight blue coupe was parked on the other side of the street, facing the Kolkhorst place. A man was sitting up front, but I couldn’t make him out. My eyes flicked from him to the stoplight and back, my nerves jangling now.

The light changed and I drove on. Instinct told me not to stop, so I cruised by the house and on past the coupe, stealing a look at the man inside as I went by. He watched me go, his head swivelling as he followed my progress. I didn’t know him, got the feeling I didn’t want to know him. I carried on driving, checking the rearview. When I was thirty yards past him, he peeled away from the kerb and pulled a U-turn, falling into step a few car lengths behind me.

I carried on to the end of the block, straining against the urge to stamp on the accelerator, and made a right. I drove on, making turns at random, the coupe staying with me. Then the street I was on ran out where Highway 67 cut across it, the raised bed of the railroad tracks visible beyond that. I reached the junction and saw a chance.

I pulled out onto the highway. There was a steady flow of vehicles coming in the opposite direction. I picked up speed slowly, biding my time, the coupe matching me.

Then there was a break in the oncoming traffic. I slammed the brakes and spun the wheel to make a sharp U-turn, my back end fishtailing out onto the verge. An oncoming truck had to swerve to avoid me, the sound of his horn blaring in my ears.

Now I slammed the accelerator, sped away as fast as I could, the coupe trapped travelling in the other direction by the stream of oncoming cars. I watched in the rearview until the other car disappeared from sight, my heart pounding, trying to get as much distance between us as possible.

I raced down the blacktop, trying to marshal my thoughts. Someone was one step ahead of me at every turn: finding Clay Tucker dead, the Hot Springs cops showing up in Texarkana, and now a man watching the Kolkhorst place. Waiting for me. It made me scared and it made me mad. But it also told me it was all related – that Robinson had stumbled into something that ran further and deeper than either of us could have imagined.

A telephone call wasn’t ideal, but it was the only choice left to me.

I found a gas station with a kiosk. A man answered, softly spoken and with accented English – traces of the old country.

‘Am I speaking with Mr Kolkhorst?’

‘Yes, who is this?’

‘My name’s Yates, I’m calling with regard to Ginny Kolkhorst. May I ask if she was family to you, sir?’

‘The name we gave her was Geneve. My daughter.’ He coughed, a heavy smoker’s hack. ‘What of it?’

‘I apologise for calling you on the telephone; I wanted to visit with you in person, but there are matters that won’t permit me to do that.’

‘What do you want?’

‘It’s not an easy subject, but I wanted to ask you about the circumstances of your daughter’s death.’

‘What is
circumstances
? You are an American, Mr Yates?’

I hesitated, the question unexpected. ‘I am, sir.’

‘Well then, it is correct to say it was your countrymen who killed her. They killed her because her papa is a Kraut, and they broke her mother’s heart for ever in so doing. This is your
circumstances.
’

He said it with such quiet anger that I thought he was about to hang up. But the connection stayed open. ‘You believe she was killed? I was led to understand she had ended her own life.’

‘Yes, of course, this is what they tell us, the police. The doctors say to us it was guilt – the girl she was caring for at the hospital who ran off and stepped in front of a train. Geneve felt responsible for it in some way, maybe.’

Alice Anderson – snatched and murdered but made to look like suicide; lies dogging her even in death. Then a leap, my blood curdling as I realised the parallels: Kolkhorst saw the cop that snatched Alice from Pine Street Hospital; days later, Alice was dead, a faked suicide. What if they’d done the same with Kolkhorst? It all happened in such close proximity of time and location, it was hard to dismiss the similarities. ‘But you believe otherwise.’

‘What I believe does not matter. What does it matter? She is gone and this is what they tell us.’

‘It matters, sir. To me. Do you know who would’ve had reason to harm your daughter?’

He scoffed. ‘All of you. Geneve was born in this country, she was
Ami
– the same as you. And still you call her
Kraut
and
Nazi
and tell her to go back to Germany. We say to her, tell them, “
This
is your home.” But of course it makes no difference. In the end. Only hate and ignorance.’

I closed my eyes, his words heartbreaking; but at the same time, disappointment was settling in my stomach – my hopes that he had solid evidence dashed when in fact he was just a father wracked with anger and sadness. ‘When did she die, Mr Kolkhorst?’

‘April.’

‘Do you recall the date?’

‘They cannot tell me for sure. The 8th is the day she disappeared. She was not found until the 10th.’

The 8th – the date Robinson inscribed on her photograph. ‘Where was she found?’

‘Lake Hamilton. “
A nice place to do it at least
.” Can you believe one of the officers says this to me at the time?’

‘I don’t know it. I’m sorry.’ The word sounded incongruous to the conversation, not something I’d meant to say, but somehow necessary. An apology for intruding in his life and trampling all over his suffering.

‘It is in Hot Springs. The back country, you would say. Why does she think to travel all this distance, Mr Yates?’

My spine went rigid. ‘Hot Springs? Why there?’

‘My question precisely.’

‘Would she have cause to go there?’

‘No. She spent time there, for her training, but that was many months ago, a year or more.’

‘Who found your daughter, sir?’

‘The local sheriffs.’

‘Garland County?’

‘Yes.’

‘A man named Cole Barrett?’

‘No. I don’t remember the name, but not that.’

Barrett’s turf, Barrett’s men. Maybe naïve of me to think he’d involve himself in person. ‘Did they investigate? How did they conclude she took her own life?’

‘They say they had a witness who saw her throw herself from a bridge, and that the coroner finds she is heavily intoxicated at the time. They take only two days to tell me this is the explanation. “
There is nothing to indicate foul play
.”
This is what they tell me.’

Ginny Kolkhorst died in Hot Springs. Suicide on the record, murdered according to Robinson. The other two victims were garrotted in their own homes. It fit and it didn’t – but the proximity meant the likelihood of a connection between Kolkhorst, Runnels and Prescott was suddenly greater.

‘Why are you asking me these questions?’ he said. ‘Still you have not stated your purpose. You are working with the other journalist?’

‘The other?’

‘Yes. Mr Robinson. He approaches me too, asking questions like you. He says to me they were friends – “
Nurse Ginny
” he calls her and says she was helping him with important matters. He believes me, that she was murdered. He tells me this.’

The nickname clicked immediately. Nurse Ginny –
N.G.
So simple, and yet I wasn’t sure I’d ever have seen it. ‘Robinson and I were colleagues. I have to tell you that he died several days ago. He asked me to help him with his investigation, but he passed away before I could get to him, so if there is anything you can tell me about what he said—’

‘He is dead? My god, how?’

I told him about the fire, calling it an accident so as not to cloud matters any further. ‘Please, if there is anything you can remember about your conversations . . .’

‘He came only two times after she died, I remember all of it. He was like you, he never tells me his purpose, but he asks so many things about her. What schools did she attend, the names of her friends, all about her life. He was most particularly interested in her training – because of Hot Springs, I suppose.’

‘Do you remember what you told him?’

‘What could I tell? I say to him she completed her training in Hot Springs, and he asked me all manner of questions about this, but this was when our daughter was becoming a woman, and she stops telling her papa everything. He says it is helpful to know nonetheless.’

‘Where did she train, sir?’

‘There is a veterans’ hospital there – for the very worst cases, you understand?’ I thought of the giant building looming over the bottom of Bathhouse Row, the wounded servicemen I’d seen in passing. ‘This is what makes me the most angry – not only was Geneve
Ami
, but she wanted only to help others – the victims of that mad fool Hitler. And still they killed her. The wrong kind of
Ami
, yes?’

I raced away from the gas station with a renewed sense of purpose. Kolkhorst may have been mistaken about what caused his daughter’s death, but his pain was all too obvious. At the very least, he deserved to know that there was more to it than the lies he’d been fed. The responsibility for finding him that peace of mind was mine; if Ginny Kolkhorst’s death was linked somehow to Alice Anderson’s, then the blame was at my doorstep, for failing to finish the job when I had the chance.

I took the rental car back to the airport, intending to switch it for a different model – guessing that the watcher at the Kolkhorsts’ place would have my plate now. But as I pulled up outside, I realised I’d gained an advantage, and that doing so would be to squander it. It was just a question of eluding them long enough to cash in.

I cruised by the rental offices and saw there was a different clerk behind the desk – the break I needed – so I drove back into town and parked around the block from a cab stand, then I ran back to it and paid for a ride back out to the airport. I made it to the hire car office just before closing time.

The clerk was rushing to shut up shop, so he took no care over the paperwork. I paid him with the money I’d stashed for my airfare home, half-gone now, hoping like hell that Acheson was good to his word and had sent more cash. For my part of the bargain, whatever story I could cobble together for the
Journal
would have to wait.

When we were done, the clerk handed over the keys and hustled me out the door. I climbed into the new rental, dropped the satchel Hansen had given me on the seat, and set off, taking the highway north-east, into the coming dusk.

Whoever was watching for me knew I was in Texarkana now. And if they found the old rental, parked two blocks from State Line, they’d take it as a sign I was still in town. A little diversion; let them think they were still closing the net on me.