Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery (20 page)

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Authors: Steve Hamilton

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adult

BOOK: Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery
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When we were in the air, the pilot called in the basics. A constable dead on the scene, another man, the owner of the plane, dead on the shore. Five men in a shallow grave north of the cabin site. At least according to me. Boxer Face sat in the passenger’s seat, looking back at me every few minutes. It was hard to read his expression. He was probably thinking twenty different things at once. I was sure one of those things was just how good it would feel to open the door and toss us right out of the plane.
They didn’t ask me to tell the rest of my story, as I had promised. They were saving that for the ground.
We flew for an hour and a half. The drone of the engines eventually got to me, and I drifted in and out of a trance as we bounced and buzzed our way all the way to a small airport. It was a true amphibian plane, one that could land on pavement as well as water. When we got out, three OPP cars and an ambulance were waiting for us.
They put Vinnie in the back of the ambulance and me in the back of one of the cars. About a half hour later, I was sitting in a bed in the clinic with an IV in one arm and the other arm handcuffed to the bed rail. A doctor was cutting the laces off my boots with scissors while the two constables stood by watching.
“How long were you out there?” he asked.
“Most of two days.”
“Immersion foot,” he said. “Let’s see how bad.”
“What about Vinnie? How’s he doing?”
The doctor looked up at the officers. “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone else is working on him.”
When he finally slipped the boot and sock off, the foot was purple. It looked and felt like some alien thing. “Not good,” he said.
“What do you have to do now?”
“We have to let them warm up slowly,” he said. “And then it’s just a matter of keeping them dry and elevated.” He went to work on the other boot.
“Can one of you guys go see how Vinnie is doing?” I said.
Neither of them moved. They both stood there and looked at me with their hands folded across their chests.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
Another man, vaguely familiar to me, came in while the doctor was getting my other boot off. That foot looked just as bad. “Nice case of trench foot,” he said. “You’re gonna be hurting for a long time.”
“Can you tell me about my friend?” I said.
“They’re cleaning out his wound right now. That duct tape probably saved his life. Was that your idea?”
“It’s all we had to work with.”
“That spear that killed Mr. Gannon, was that yours, too?”
“Yes.”
“Who actually killed him?”
“We both did. We had to.”
“Mr. McKnight, who physically ran the spear through Mr. Gannon’s body?”
“Vinnie did.”
He let out a long breath, closed his eyes, and pinched
the bridge of his nose. I realized where I had seen him before. He was the staff sergeant we had seen at the station. This was obviously supposed to be his day off, because he wasn’t wearing his uniform.
“Your name is Moreland,” I said. “You’re the detachment commander.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got to understand something. We didn’t kill Constable DeMers.”
“He was three months away from retirement. Did you know that?”
“He mentioned it, yes.”
He opened his case and took out a tape recorder. “So start at the beginning.”
That’s what I did. I told him everything, from the first time we came up to the lodge, to meeting Guy and his grandfather, flying up to the lake, finding the dead bodies, and then the other plane landing. I told him the whole thing from start to finish, and then I told it to him again, this time with some other men standing around listening to me. The doctor took out the IV and gave me some water. He asked me what I thought I could eat. I said anything they had. While I was waiting for the food, some men from the Royal Mounted Canadian Police came in and I had to tell the whole story one more time.
The food came right in the middle of my story. It was turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. I asked the men to forgive my bad manners as I dug into my own little early Thanksgiving.
When they were all gone, a new constable I’d never seen before stayed to watch me. He looked like he had just started shaving, and he sat in a chair and never took his eyes off me once, like he was expecting me to hop up at any second and try to escape. I lay there, still cuffed
to the bed, with my legs propped up with pillows, my feet in the air.
I must have passed out for a while. When I woke up, the constable had been replaced by Boxer Face. The room was in shadows. I asked the man about Vinnie, but he had nothing to say to me.
“You’ve got to uncuff me,” I said. “I need to use the bathroom.”
Nothing. He didn’t even blink.
“Look, if I was told to sit in a chair and watch somebody who I thought might have killed one of my fellow officers, I’d be acting the same way. Hell, I’d be tempted to do a lot more than just give him the silent treatment.”
He stared at me.
“But you need to know something,” I said. “I didn’t kill him. Okay?”
“If you need to take a piss,” he finally said, “then use the bottle.”
“You’re a real pal,” I said. Then I proceeded to attempt the impossible—urinating into a urinal bottle with one hand cuffed to the rail.
“I don’t suppose you’d feel like taking this away,” I said.
“What do you think?”
I rang the nurse for some help, then I settled back and tried to sleep a little bit. It didn’t work. I couldn’t stop thinking about Vinnie, wondering where the hell he was and how he was doing.
And more than anything, I couldn’t stop wondering what had really happened up there. And why. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Hours later, when it was dark in the room and the constable had been replaced by yet another, I finally drifted off into a hazy half sleep. In my head I saw pine trees,
and a plane turning slowly in the middle of a lake, and the wide-open eyes of a dead man.
And bears.
 
 
The doctor looked at my feet again in the morning. He told me the color was a lot better, and asked me how they felt.
“Like hell,” I said. “They itch like crazy.”
“That’s to be expected,” he said.
“Any chance I could get some socks? I feel like Frankenstein’s monster lying here.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I hope you like white cotton socks, because that’s all you’ll be wearing for the next few weeks.”
“Fine, whatever. Now can you tell me how my friend is doing?”
“Not too bad, considering. He did lose part of his right ear.”
“I figured that. Can I see him?”
The doctor looked at the constable who was lucky enough to draw chair duty that morning. “That’s not up to me,” the doctor said. “There are a couple of men in with him right now, asking more questions.”
“I’m sure I’m next,” I said.
I was right. About an hour later, two men came in the room. They were wearing dark gray suits and expensive hair, and I wasn’t surprised when they told me they were from the FBI. It made sense they were there, with five dead men out of seven being Americans. They asked me all the same questions. I gave them the same story. They promised me they’d be speaking to me again if and when I got back to America. If and when, they said.
I ate some more. I lay there in the bed, quietly going insane.
Then Constable Reynaud walked in the room. She looked like hell. She looked like she was having almost as bad a week as I was. She told the constable on duty that he could leave, and then she unlocked my handcuffs.
“We found the bodies,” she said. “Right where you said they’d be.”
“And Gannon, I assume.” I rubbed my wrist, where the cuff had been.
“Yes, of course. I could see the body from the plane. I waited there for a couple of hours until they came and got me.”
“I’m sorry about your partner.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“I talked to him while I was waiting. I promised him I’d find out what really happened out there.”
“I want to know just as badly as you do,” I said. “Have they figured out when Albright and those other men were killed? Tom, I mean.”
“They think about ten days ago. Long before you ever got there.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.”
“One of the men at the crime scene must have seen your truck go by. Apparently, he mentioned this to Claude, so Claude went up there and saw your truck parked outside the Berards’ house.”
“And he must have figured—”
“That you didn’t go home like we told you. That you got Guy and his grandfather to fly you up to the lake. The Berards told me what happened, McKnight. They said Claude was so mad at you guys, he wanted to fly out there and bring you back, and then kick your asses all the way back to Michigan. He could’ve called it in, had one of the OPP planes fly up there to pick you up. But he didn’t. You wanna know why?”
I had a sick feeling I already knew the answer. “Why?”
“He told them that if he called it in and they had to get a plane up there, then both of you would definitely be charged with felony obstruction, and that the Berards might even be charged, too. As mad as he was at you guys, he still didn’t want to see you in serious trouble. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Yes. I do.”
“He wasn’t about to fly out there in Mr. Berard’s plane, though. Did you know that plane is supposed to be out of service?”
“No.”
“He stopped doing fly-in hunts three years ago. He was supposed to get it inspected and recertified before taking it up again. So Claude took Mr. Berard’s keys and told them both to sit tight. He said he’d give Hank Gannon a call over at the lodge. His plane was faster, anyway.”
“You didn’t know anything about this?”
“I was back at the station. He knew I wouldn’t have let him go out there. That’s the kind of thing he’d do all the time, McKnight. He used to drive me crazy.”
She shook her head, almost smiling.
“I don’t know if I would have made him call it in or not,” she said, “but at least I would have made him take me with him.”
“If you had gone,” I said, “you’d probably be dead now.”
“He wouldn’t have gotten both of us.”
“If you weren’t expecting it,” I said, “and if he had gotten both of you in front of him—”
“You guys would have been his out,” she said. “Gannon would have made it look like it was all on you.”
“It really was just him? Nobody else from the lodge was involved?”
“It doesn’t look like it. It turns out Helen and the
Trembleys weren’t even around last Saturday. That’s the day those men supposedly flew back.”
“I knew about Helen not being there. Trembley, that’s Ron and Millie, right?”
“Yeah. They were all in Timmins that day, buying storage containers, so they could pack everything up and move.”
“So you talked to them,” I said. “I mean, since yesterday—”
“Three months, McKnight. He was three months away from retirement. This was like the last thing he could do for somebody. Flying out there like a cowboy, getting you and your friend out of there, saving you from going to jail. That was the last big stupid thing he was gonna do before he retired.”
I closed my eyes.
“The Berards waited around all day yesterday. By this morning, when they still hadn’t heard anything, they finally decided they had to call us. I went up there, got the whole story from them, drove over to the lodge. The plane wasn’t there. Everybody was gone. The whole place was closed up. We tried reaching him on the radio—”
She stopped. She looked out the window.
“The Northeast regional commander himself called me and asked me how I could not know where my own partner was for a day and a half. Then he told me to get over to the airport, because I was going out to help look for him.”
She rattled the cuffs around, and then pulled them tight.
“Gannon killed him. He flew him up there and killed him. He shot him right in the back. While I stayed behind, not doing a damned thing.”
I let the silence hang there for a moment, not sure if I should say anything. “Do you have any idea what this is all about?” I finally said. “I mean, once it was done, he
was afraid of what your partner would find up there. That almost makes sense. But to kill those other men like that in the first place—”
“We don’t know, McKnight.”
“Those men were all from Detroit. You’ve got no idea how they figured into this?”
“Not right now.”

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