Carter & Lovecraft (15 page)
“Such a thrilling life you lead.”
Lovecraft was packaging books while Carter told her about the day.
“I don’t see what this Colt kid has to do with anything,” she continued as she neatly sliced squares of Bubble Wrap with a pair of open scissors. “He’s an asshole. So what?”
“He’s the only one I could find with anything like a motive,” said Carter. “‘So what?’ is a good question. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Go back to New York. Haven’t you got any cases there?”
“Not now. I closed an investigation just this week and that’s all I had. I can’t leave this one. Somebody wanted me involved. Well, I’m involved. I want to know why I was dragged into the Belasco death.”
Lovecraft finished cocooning a first color edition of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, and began sealing it with tabs of tape already cut and arranged in a row along the edge of the counter. “Yeah, that was weird. I can see why that bothers you. So, what did you find out in archaeology?”
“What?”
“You said he had caused trouble in the archaeology department. What was that about?” She regarded his blank expression, and grinned. “You forgot to ask.”
“It’s on my list.”
“You have a list? Wow. Mr. Organized.”
“Colt’s been missing for a few days. His car’s gone, too. The timing’s suspicious.”
“A few days? So he wasn’t here when Belasco died?”
“He hadn’t been seen. Told someone he’d had a breakthrough in number theory and was going to break the bank at some casino.” Carter checked his notes. “He won a lot of money on the lottery, too. Or at least he said he did.”
“Gambling problem?”
“Only the kind where you wonder what to spend all the winnings on. The lottery thing seems to be true. Maybe he really does have a system?”
Lovecraft snorted with derision. “Get real. A lottery is just random numbers. Every one of those things is scoured by statisticians to spot patterns. Maybe the balls aren’t perfectly uniform in some way. Maybe one of the machines is a little eccentric. Waste of time. The whole point of a lottery is that it’s a lottery. You can’t come up with a system that gives you a magic set of numbers. Only time I’ve ever heard of a lottery being scammed statistically was in Ireland, I think. It was possible to buy enough tickets to give a better than fifty-fifty chance they’d win the jackpot, and that week’s jackpot was big enough to pay off the investment. They had to buy hundreds of thousands of tickets, though, and there was always a gamble it wouldn’t work. Plus, they had to hire a small army of shills to buy the tickets without arousing suspicion that the probabilities were being gamed.”
“Did it work?”
“Yeah, but it’ll never work again. The lottery people detected irregularities in the betting patterns and are wise to it now. Plus, it was
still
a gamble; they could have lost everything but for smaller prizes.
Plus
, it cost a fortune in seed money. I don’t think your lone postgrad has that sort of backing or organization.”
“He just got lucky.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s lucky now. Going to break the bank at Monte Carlo.”
“Don’t think the freeway goes to Monte Carlo. Maybe Atlantic City’s more his speed.”
“Does anyone still go to Atlantic City? I’ll stick with imagining him playing baccarat against Le Chiffre like James Bond.”
“I saw that movie. It was Texas Hold’em.”
“Philistine. Saying such things in a house of books. Shame on you.”
Carter’s phone buzzed. It was Jason Xu.
“Hey, you said I should call if I remembered anything? Well, I haven’t, but I thought you’d like to know—Colt’s back on campus.”
* * *
Carter was back at Clave College within the hour. He already had the details of Colt’s car, and prowled the college parking lots first, but didn’t see it. Debating the possibility that Colt had already been and gone, Carter parked in the same lot as the Belasco death site and went looking for Xu.
The route took him past the mathematics building and, as he walked by the side entrance, he saw a man who looked a lot like a young David Byrne walk out carrying a black duffel bag slung across his shoulders.
Carter walked on without hesitation, got to the corner, and checked his phone as if he’d just received a text. He wasn’t sure why he was being so circumspect; there was no good reason why he shouldn’t have just approached Colt, confirmed his identification, and then asked him a few questions. He could only put it down to a hunch, although the more he analyzed his feelings, the more he realized that he had already marked Colt down as—if not Belasco’s murderer—certainly involved. There was too much circumstantial detritus floating around the man. Colt
felt
guilty, although Carter could not be sure of exactly what.
He also wondered if there was some fear there. Belasco had died in a way that seemed to have baffled scientific theory. Maybe he had just had a fit, or maybe the fit was induced, and maybe the fit was induced by Colt. Carter had no desire to join Belasco as a footnote in a forensic journal. He would observe William Colt, and see if the bad feeling he had about Colt had any reality to it. Maybe he was just what everyone thought he was, an egotistical cocksucker of a genius. Just that and no more, as if that wasn’t enough.
A sideways glance showed the playacting with his phone had been unnecessary; Colt was walking away from him. Carter quickly consulted his mental map of the area and decided to risk losing Colt in favor of getting his own car. He started at a brisk walk until Colt was hidden behind the mathematics building, and then broke into a run.
He reached his car and drove out onto the street, turning left to see if he could spot Colt. He had barely started looking when a red Mazda3 went by with Colt at the wheel. He must have parked on the street rather than using a college parking lot. The car looked new; maybe he hadn’t wanted anyone to see it.
Carter drove down an access road to the rear of the chemical engineering building, made a three-point turn, and headed back out in pursuit of the red Mazda3.
* * *
Colt was easy to follow. His car was distinctive even at a distance, and he was in no hurry. Carter was able to hang back far enough to let a couple of cars between him and his quarry, and to avoid ever being directly on Colt’s rear fender.
Carter had carried out enough mobile surveillance to keep much of his attention not on Colt, but on the traffic ahead of the Mazda. Seeing changing traffic conditions ahead allowed him plenty of time to make decisions as to how he should proceed. The only even slightly problematical moment was when a slow driver pulled out in front of Carter and proceeded at a determined five miles per hour below the limit. It was a rookie mistake to hope the slow driver would get out of the way or suddenly discover the gas pedal, so Carter carried out a resolute overtaking maneuver the first chance he got. It brought him a little closer to Colt than he would have liked, but he tucked in behind a twenty-year-old Lincoln and hid there for the next few minutes before progressing back to his former tailing position.
Colt was heading roughly southeast, taking him away from his apartment, which was only a couple of blocks south of the campus. From Carter’s inquiries, little was known about Colt’s extracurricular activities. Wherever he was heading might very well turn out to be interesting, or at least illuminating.
They were now deep into suburbia. There were very few nonresidential buildings to be seen, and soon there were none, only streets of white houses weatherproofed to bear the rigors of the neighboring Atlantic. Carter checked his GPS and discovered that if Colt didn’t reach his destination soon, he’d be in the bay.
Then Colt swung south, and headed down a road leading onto a small peninsula. The road onto the isthmus was narrow, and Colt’s car was the only one going down it. While heavily treed, it would only take a glimpse for him to realize he was being followed. Carter fell back still farther, giving Colt plenty of lead. According to the GPS display, the peninsula was something around three hundred yards long with two rows of houses backing upon one another served by parallel roads that split from the access route as soon as it cleared the confining isthmus.
Carter considered his options. He could drive over there, but the chances of being spotted were good. If he walked over, however, that would seem suspicious in itself. He decided he would risk taking the car in, playing the role of a lost stranger who had made a wrong turn.
He took his car in slowly in case of meeting oncoming traffic. As the houses of the prim Providence street behind him vanished beyond the looming English and red oaks that lined the peninsula road, Carter felt a cold sense of isolation settle upon him. “Road” was an overstatement; his car shuddered its way along a rutted and ill-kept track. It had been surfaced once, but was now pitted, and Carter had to watch for potholes.
Any relief he felt at breaking out of the oppressive green tunnel was instantly quashed by the sight of what was, according to the map, Waite Road.
It certainly wasn’t much to look at; before him the road ran straight ahead along one row of houses, then arced to the right to form a shape that looked overall like an asymmetric tuning fork or the mirror image of an “h.” The houses were all of the same form, built in the 1930s by the look of them, and all were occupied and maintained. That said, they weren’t maintained with much emphasis on appearance. The roads Carter had navigated to reach there had been lined with houses that were clearly the owners’ pride and joys, or—at least—the product of stringent local laws and possibly residents’ associations.
Waite Road didn’t care, or at least the arm he could see, the row facing eastward toward the river, didn’t. The lawns were not overgrown, but looked more like they were kept in check by the grazing of goats rather than mowers. The paintwork was white, but patches of moss showed here and there under the eaves. About half the houses had cars in their drives, and all of them were pickups, none of them new. None of the houses had any swing sets or outdoor toys visible. None of the houses had any view of the bay, the east side of the road bearing a dense stand of trees. More oaks, Carter saw.
Carter had been in bad neighborhoods before, ones where being an unfamiliar face had gotten people shot in the past, but he had never been in one that felt so
wrong
before. Waite Road was an appendix to Providence, both in the sense of being something added that was not absolutely necessary, and as an organ whose function was obscure. The last thing he had expected in the city was a place that felt like a failed
Deliverance
theme park.
There was a rough track off to the left where a path worn by generations of vehicles turning had been given a patina of permanence with a grudging few sacks of gravel thrown onto the rutted earth. Carter drove by it and then backed down along the track as far as he dared, which at least served to make his car partially hidden by the oaks and not quite so obvious from the road itself. His initial plan had been to stay there until Colt came out again, but he quickly decided he would need to be more proactive if he wanted to find anything out. This second plan ran into problems when he felt a powerful reluctance to open the door and get out.
He wasn’t scared, he told himself, it was just that the place had put him on edge. It was idiotic, he knew. The citizens along Waite Road would just be normal folk, and it was only the strange isolation of the place that was working upon his nerves. Even so, it took a swift check of his Glock before he felt secure enough to step out of his vehicle.
Outside, he felt foolish. There was nothing odd about the place; it was just run-down. Probably some historical quirk of the city’s zoning laws meant this place was overlooked. Still, he thought as he broke out of the tree line on the bay side, it seemed odd that such prime Rhode Island real estate was being underused like that. The view across the water was excellent, though he could understand why the stand of trees was necessary as a windbreak.
He walked southward along the shoreline until he gauged he was about level with the farthermost house, and reentered the trees. He walked cautiously through the leaf mold and frail grass until he could get a good look at the house without being seen in turn. The plan was to make his way northward through the trees, examining each house in turn until he found Colt’s car, although as he hadn’t been able to see it from the neck of the road, he thought it must be down the other arm. This supposition was disproved immediately.
The farthest house on the bay-side arm of Waite Road was half as wide again as its neighbors, but that was the limit of its grandness. It was no mansion; only the same as the other houses around it, but more so. In fact, Carter wasn’t convinced it was a residence at all, or not purely so. There was a sense that it was some sort of communal building, a community center, in as much as one street bearing maybe a dozen houses can be a community.
And there was Colt’s red Mazda3, parked down the far side of the building. Of Colt himself there was no sign. Carter looked quickly around to make sure he was unobserved and, as there didn’t seem to be a soul anywhere around, took a few pictures of the house. The lower windows showed nothing but darkness within, whereas even the shutters were closed on the second floor. Carter guessed that, with some of the winds that blew in off the Atlantic, the shutters weren’t just there for show. Then again, he thought, none of the residents gave the impression they did anything for show, if their homes were any evidence.
He waited for half an hour, then an hour, but saw no activity whatsoever. Deciding he might be in for a long haul, he went back to his car to get some bottled water, an MRE heater, and a pouch of coffee. Maybe a ration pouch, too; he was just beginning to feel the absence of the meal he’d missed by responding to Xu’s phone call. The coffee wouldn’t taste much like coffee, but sometimes you just want something hot, and he’d drunk enough of the coffee pouches to have acquired the taste. With a small frisson of perverse pleasure, he remembered he had a cappuccino pouch in his map pocket.
