Death Benefits (32 page)

Stillman was already shading his eyes with both hands and staring into the distance to the west. “Damn. You can’t see the old covered bridge from here, because the woods are in the way. Probably too far anyway. If they had only gone down there and blocked it off when I told them to, this would already be over.”

“Why do you suppose they didn’t?” asked Walker.

“Inconvenience. That’s what it always is.”

“It doesn’t look that hard.”

“Not to do it,” Stillman said. “To take the heat for having done it. People who want to drive to the next town to rent a movie have to wait an extra minute while a cop stares into their back seat.”

Walker watched him for a moment as he stepped from that panel to the next, always looking down. “Is that what made you quit the police force—local politics?”

“What makes anybody not quit?” said Stillman. “The job stinks. Low pay, long hours, and now and then you get to have a wrestling match with a mean drunk.”

“Did something happen?”

Stillman glanced at him. “Yeah, a lot happened. What did you have in mind?”

“The captain in Miami seemed to think maybe there was something you did that didn’t get made public.”

Stillman shook his head. “No, there wasn’t anything like that. It was wrong for my temperament, so I made a career change.”

“Not much of one.”

Stillman shrugged. “I was thirty years old. What I had learned was how to fire a sidearm, come out of a street fight better off than the other guy, and drive a car fast. What was I going to be—secretary of state? I had a little practical experience in tickling the law-enforcement establishment to get them to do what I wanted, and had made a few acquaintances who had other useful skills.”

“What’s the difference? Is it just money?”

Stillman shook his head. “No. The difference is, if the phone rings and somebody wants me to do something, I can say no and hang up.” He stared at Walker for a moment. “And if somebody asks a question I don’t want to answer, I don’t.” He turned away again and looked out between the slats.

Walker moved away from him to the northwest corner. He shaded his eyes and squinted to the west along Main Street, past the river and across the open fields to the woods that hid the covered bridge, and to the row of hills beyond. The sun was low now and had a blinding glare, like a fire that burned brightest yellow just as it was consuming the last of its fuel. That was the direction where the two men had almost certainly gone, and was probably the direction from which they would return. But after a time, the low angle of the sun made it too painful to look to the west, and he turned to the north.

He stared down at the quiet residential streets on the other side of Main. He picked out Birch Street, where James Scully had lived, then the block, and, finally, from his memory of the morning when he had searched for it, the very house. The old trees threw long shadows and made the green of the lawns deep and soothing to his eyes, so he devoted himself to Birch Street, staring closely into each of the yards, trying to detect the policemen who had been assigned to watch Scully’s house. He moved on, but kept returning to that block during the next hours. He did not see any uniformed men crouching there, or any movement or change that would have signaled their presence. He looked at the plain rectangular box of New Mill Systems, and tried to pick out each car in the lot on the unlikely chance that the two men had parked their rental car among the herd and gone to wait in the woods.

Stillman had lapsed into a long silence, still moving from panel to panel according to an unpredictable schedule. He would spend fifteen minutes at one, then just a minute at another. When he spoke, his voice was calm and quiet. “What do you see?”

“Not a whole lot,” Walker answered. “There doesn’t seem to be much going on anymore. How about you?”

“They did a pretty good sweep for an hour or so after we got up here. Since then, it’s been a lot more subtle. They’ve got three patrol cars on the road instead of the usual two, but there seem to be a few cops walking around in plain clothes trying to look inconspicuous.” He pointed at the louvered panel in front of him. “See? There’s one.”

Walker moved to the panel and looked down, standing tall to achieve the proper angle. There was a man in a sport coat walking along Main. He turned into the drugstore. “He’s a cop?”

Stillman said, “Either he’s checking in with a radio or he’s making calls on a cell phone every five minutes that last three seconds each.”

They kept watching as the sun sank below the three hills and the steady breeze began to turn cool. The foot traffic on Main Street thinned, and Walker saw some of the shop proprietors come out, close their doors and lock them, then walk up Main and turn onto the residential streets on both sides.

At eight the street lamps flickered once or twice, then came on steadily. By then, the windows of the businesses that sold food or drinks were the only ones that had not gone dark. The belfry was high above any source of artificial light, and it had fallen into deeper darkness than the rest of the town. After some time, Stillman held his wrist close to his face, leaned toward the louvered panel, and stared at his watch. “Time to go. Watch your step on the way down. It’s hard to see.”

They climbed down the ladder to the second level, where there was no opening and the darkness seemed nearly total. Walker had to feel around the floor to find the hatch cover. When he had, he lifted it up carefully and listened for a few seconds before he whispered to Stillman, “You first.”

Walker heard rustling sounds while Stillman was going down through the opening, then the soft shuffle of his feet on the rungs. When Walker heard Stillman’s shoes creaking the floorboards of the cloak room, he started down after him. The moment his head had cleared the opening he began to feel a bit better. The air was cooler, and there was a dim glow through the open doorway of the cloak room, the faint filtered light from the sanctuary windows reflected off the white walls. He carefully replaced the hatch cover and descended to Stillman’s side.

They did not speak again until they were outside the building, moving in the shadow of the wall toward Constitution Avenue. Stillman said, “If those guys go to Scully’s first, we’re out of luck. The cops will get them. We have to hope they go to the other house first. We’ll wait down by the river, near the entrance to town, where we can see them coming and follow on foot.”

They turned at Constitution Avenue and walked purposefully toward the river. They would slow down as they came to each intersection, then turn so they could cross the street in the middle of the block, where the street lamps could not reveal them. When they reached Franklin Street they could see the bright lights in the windows of the Old Mill Restaurant reflected on the black surface of the river.

When they were on Washington, nearly to the spot where Main Street narrowed to cross the short bridge, Stillman tapped Walker’s arm and they scrambled down the steep bank to the edge of the water, where they were in deep shadow again. Walker found a broad, flat rock on the dry riverbed. When he sat down, Stillman came to sit beside him, facing the town. Walker said, “Why are you sitting like that?”

“Because I have full confidence that you’re capable of seeing a car coming toward you with its headlights on. This way I can see what’s coming up behind us.”

While they waited, Walker watched each car that came into town. He would see the glow of headlights appear beyond the fields, bright dots that flickered now and then as they passed behind the trunks of trees. He would stare behind the lights, trying to discern the shape of the vehicle in profile before it reached the bend in the road and the headlights turned to aim at him as it crossed the unused farmland. When it came closer, he would duck down so the light skin of his face would not make him visible, and he would listen to the deepening pitch of the engine noise until he heard a bump. That was the front tires hitting the slight seam where the road met the bridge. From then on, the car’s headlights were aimed above him and to his right, and for two seconds he could see the car and its occupants clearly illuminated by the street lamps of Main Street.

In the first hour, he estimated that he had seen a dozen cars arriving. Some of the cars had women and children, some solitary men, but each face had presented itself to him as the cars crossed the bridge. It was nearly ten-thirty now, and the numbers had tapered off. He began to sense that the road would soon be deserted until the two men arrived to commit their burglaries.

Then he saw a car that seemed different. It had come out of the woods that hid the covered bridge like the others, then made the turn toward town. It was going across the fields past the two barns when he put his head down to protect his invisibility. He identified the difference by sound. This one was not traveling at the usual constant speed. It would accelerate briefly, then coast until it had slowed considerably, not quite stopping, then accelerate again.

He nudged Stillman without raising his head. “This car is different. It keeps slowing down.”

Stillman turned and watched the headlights, then ducked down too. “He’s looking for something. Get ready.”

They both turned their bodies away from the bridge. The car grew louder and the headlights brighter. Walker heard the bump, looked over his shoulder to stare through the car’s windshield, and stood up quickly. The driver was Mary Catherine Casey.

36

Walker was up out of the riverbed and dashing across Washington Street before he had acknowledged the need to make a decision. He sprinted to the corner of Main, trying to reach it in time to see where the car was going. He forced his legs to slow his pace to a fast walk as soon as he was in the pool of light cast by the street lamp at the corner. He stared up Main, and saw the pair of red taillights moving away. Mary was going at a tantalizingly slow speed, but she was pulling farther and farther away every second.

He was almost sure he knew where Mary was going to stop. She would come to the spot on Main where Stillman had parked the Explorer, and recognize it. She would park there and then begin to search for Walker and Stillman. He turned up Constitution, where there was less chance he would be seen, and ran after her. As he ran, he wondered what she was doing here. He had expected her to be in Concord for at least a couple of days. She must have returned to Keene, not seen the Explorer in the hotel lot, and come looking.

He turned up Grant Street, then turned again onto Main and saw her. She was wearing jeans, a red short-sleeved top, and sneakers. At first she seemed not to recognize him. Her body turned to the side with the knees slightly bent and her weight on her toes, as though she was deciding whether to run back to her car. Then she visibly relaxed. He saw her take a deep breath and blow it out, then step off and trot toward him.

When they came together, he put his arms around her, but she pushed him away impatiently. “Where’s Stillman?”

“Back there by the bridge. Why?”

She glanced toward the Explorer. “Please tell me you’ve got the keys to this thing.”

“I don’t. Stillman drove.”

“Then come on.” She took a step toward the driver’s side of her car, then stopped and held out the keys. “Drive to where he is.”

Walker took the keys, started the car, and headed up the street to the next corner and turned right. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m not sure it’s anything serious, now that I’ve found you,” she said. “But there’s potential.”

“Why? What happened?”

“When I got back from Concord, I went to my hotel, changed, and called you. You didn’t answer, so I walked over to your hotel and sneaked into your room, just like before.” She looked at him, and her eyes were wide. “Somebody else has been in your room.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s a mess. The bed is all torn up, the suitcase dumped on the floor, and all the pockets of your clothes turned out. I went to Stillman’s room, and his is worse. Somebody knows you’re here, and they know where you’re staying.”

“Is there any chance that they saw you?”

“It’s possible, but if they did, they don’t know I’ve got anything to do with you. I went in through the restaurant. On the way out, I was spooked, so I made some very strange detours. I even took a quick stroll through the Colony Mill Mall to be sure nobody could follow me.”

He looked at her, concerned. “Would you be able to tell?”

“Of course I would,” she said. “I was a southern California mall rat. What do you think teenaged girls are doing in those places? They’re trying to get somebody to follow them.”

Walker drove down Washington and parked in a spot far from the street lamps.

Mary jerked her head one way, then the other, her eyes impatient and troubled. “Where is he?”

“He’s down there in the riverbed. We were waiting for those two guys to show up when you came along.”

“What two—” She stopped herself. “No. Don’t answer now. Let’s just go get him.” She slipped out of the seat and hurried around the back of the car. As she stepped into the street, he was surprised to feel her small, thin fingers around his. She tugged his hand and hurried him across the pavement and down the rocky bank until they were on the dry, pebbly ground beside the water. Then her fingers slipped from his and she surged ahead, nearly lost to sight in the shadowy darkness beside the high bank, where the lights of the town did not reach her.

Walker followed, planting his feet carefully while he watched the distant spot beyond the fields where the headlights always appeared first. Every few seconds he would turn his eyes away from it to the right, to check the end of Washington Street and the short slice of Main Street that he could see from here.

In a moment, Mary had found Stillman. They were crouched low beside the big rock where Walker had been sitting, and Mary was whispering with animated gestures. Walker came close and knelt on the pebbles beside Mary.

Stillman turned his head toward Walker. “Did you hear those guys found our hotel?”

“Yes,” said Walker. “I don’t know how they did it.”

“It’s the biggest hotel in the biggest town around here,” said Stillman. “It’s where I’d look first. It’s a good thing we didn’t move before Serena left for Concord. This gives us a little edge we didn’t have before.”

“Edge?” said Mary. “What edge?”

“If they’ve looked at everything in our rooms, they know we haven’t found a damned thing yet.”

Mary blew out a breath and shook her head. “If that’s your idea of an edge, it’s pitiful.”

“It will have to do,” said Stillman. “The fact that we’ve got nothing will convince them that pulling the break-ins won’t be a waste of time. Whether they knew it at the time or not, searching our rooms means they can’t change their minds. They’ve made it pretty hard for us not to know they’re around. If they’re going to do it, tonight’s the night.”

Mary said, “Is that what you’re sitting in this ditch for? You’re waiting for some men to come here and pull a burglary?”

“Actually,” said Walker quietly, “it’s two.”

“Men or burglaries?”

“Both.”

“How does that help you?”

“The houses they’re going to break into belong to James Scully and the other man who was with him in Florida. When they go there, we’ll know who he was.”

“Terrific,” said Mary. “Then we can get out of here now.”

“You found him?” asked Stillman. “You know who the second man was?”

“Why do you think I came back from Concord?” she said. “I found what I wanted to know. Come on. I’ll tell you about it while we’re driving back to Keene.” She popped up and took a step, but Stillman’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm.

“Wait,” he said. “Tell us now.”

She reached across her chest and plucked his hand from her arm. “Myra Sanderidge helped me make a family tree for James Scully. His father was Thomas Scully, and his mother was Mary Holbrooke. Thomas had two siblings and Mary had eight siblings, but they don’t matter, because the connection has to be two generations back—the grandparents. Like everybody else, James Scully had four of them. His paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather were only children. His maternal grandmother had two brothers. One was killed in an accident without getting married, and the other had two daughters. One died at sixteen, and the other lived eighty-two years without getting married. So it’s his paternal grandfather that’s the connection. He had a sister named Amanda Scully, whose married name was Bowles. She had two daughters, both of whom had girls, and one son, whose name was Philip. And Philip has one son named Gerald.”

Stillman leaned toward Walker. “Did you follow any of that?”

“I’m afraid not,” Walker admitted apologetically. His eyes were on Mary.

She sighed, giving out a quick, angry huff of air. “The only near male relative who is not a first cousin or closer, and who was born thirty-some years ago, was Gerald Bowles.”

Stillman stood and began patting his pockets. “He’s on the list.”

“What list?” asked Mary.

Walker said, “He made a list of adult males in Coulter, and whittled it down to the possibles—not accounted for, not answering their phones, and so on—and—”

Stillman said, “Can’t see in this light,” and climbed along the edge of the riverbed. He stepped quickly across Washington Street and stopped to unfold a sheaf of papers. He stared at one sheet, then moved to the second. He leaned to catch a bit of the light from the street lamp, then folded the papers again. “It’s 302 Maple Street.”

Mary moved toward her car. “Either drive or hand over the keys.”

Walker held out her car keys. “We’ll meet you at your hotel as soon as this is over. I can’t leave him to do this alone.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I was just offering to drive to Maple Street.”

Stillman said to Mary, “Serena, I don’t want you here.”

“You don’t have a way to get rid of me without attracting attention.”

Stillman stared at her intently for a moment, then sighed. “If you’re coming, then come.” As he took his first step, he said, “Leave the car. If things go wrong, we’ll all know where it is.” He set off up Washington Street.

He passed Constitution and kept going until he reached Federal, then turned east on a course parallel with Main. Walker studied the houses along Federal. They were about the same as the ones on Constitution, mostly center-entrance colonials that had been heavily refurbished and remodeled, but a few were nineteenth-century red-brick houses that probably had been replacements for vanished originals. At each step, he looked for heads in windows, lights that illuminated too much of the sidewalk, or pedestrians. But everyone seemed to have gone indoors hours ago, and many of them were probably asleep.

At Grant Street, Stillman stopped and whispered, “Here’s how we do it. Serena, you find yourself a spot on Maple Street that’s out of sight a block or so down from 302 on the Main Street side. If you see a car come along with two men in it, or you see two men on foot, you signal Walker with this.” He took a small flashlight from his pocket and placed it in her hand. “Once you signal him, slip away, get back to your car. If we’re not there in ten minutes, head for Keene.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “Is this just a way to get rid of me?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a way to make you useful. The police are looking for strange men prowling around town, and you’re the only one who doesn’t fit the description.”

He turned to Walker. “You find a spot right near the front door where you can see it if she turns on the flashlight. Keep an eye on her hiding place. If you see the light, come get me.”

“What are you going to be doing?” asked Serena.

“I’ll just be taking a look around in the house,” said Stillman. “Let’s go.”

“But that’s . . . ” She let her voice trail off as she followed Stillman up the street.

Stillman didn’t speak again until they reached Maple. He stopped at the corner and stared along the quiet, tree-lined street for several seconds, then turned. “Okay. It’s down there about half a block. No mistakes, and no delays. We know those guys are on their way. Serena, go.”

Walker felt there was something terribly wrong as he watched Mary’s small, thin shape moving off down the sidewalk alone. Stillman seemed to read his thoughts. “She’s going to be safer than you are. She’s not pulling a burglary.”

They set off when Mary was a hundred yards ahead. Walker kept his eyes on her until she seemed to be no more than a small variation in the shadows, and he would lose her occasionally, then find her again just because he knew how much space she would have traversed in that time. Then Walker caught a glimpse of her gliding up the front lawn of a house with dark windows. When she reached a thick, flowering bush, she was gone.

He turned his attention to Stillman, who was walking along beside him, studying each house they passed. When he spotted the right one ahead, Walker saw him slow down and study it as he came closer. Number 302 was a narrow Civil War–era brick rectangle with three stories that stood out a bit from the older ones near it. The house reminded Walker a little of a New York brownstone. He moved cautiously to a place near the front steps where he could see Mary’s hiding place, then crouched lower to lose himself among the shrubs along the front wall. Stillman nodded and moved silently along the side of the building.

Walker had seen Stillman work often enough that he could imagine exactly what he was doing: he would move along the side, stopping to examine each window, then continue to the back of the house, looking for a door lock he could pick or a window he could jimmy.

As time passed and Walker began to feel himself alone on the dark, silent street, his senses seemed to magnify each sight and amplify each sound. His eyes passed across the front door, where there was an old handle that had tarnished and darkened, and a shiny new brass key receptacle for a dead bolt. He wondered if Stillman had seen it and admitted defeat, or had simply not wanted to fiddle with a lock where he was visible from the street. He sighted along the foundation of the building looking for basement windows, but he saw none. He heard a noise. It was sharp and metallic, like the snapping of a latch. It took him a second to realize that it had come from above. He quickly moved around the corner of the house, pressed his belly against the smooth, old-fashioned bricks, leaned to bring one eye back to the corner, and craned his neck to look up.

This time there was a quiet scraping noise. A window was opening. Could Stillman have gotten up there so quickly? There was a long silence. Walker held his breath and stayed motionless. He saw a man’s head slowly emerge from the open window, facing down at the spot by the steps where he had been crouching. It wasn’t Stillman. Walker pulled back, then forced himself to look again. The head came out a bit farther, so the shoulders were visible. There was a movement, and the right arm swung down, holding a long, dark club-shaped object—a flashlight. The bright beam came on, made a few jerky movements on the shrubs by the steps, and Walker pulled his head back from the corner. He saw the beam go past the front of the building to his left, then retreat. Walker looked again in time to see the man withdrawing his torso into the house. As the arm bent to bring the flashlight inside, the hand turned it off, but not before Walker had seen the dark blue shirt and the glint of the badge. The window slid shut.

Walker whirled and hurried along the side of the building as quickly as he could. He stepped around the corner at the back of the house and saw Stillman kneeling at a kitchen door, his face close to the lock. When Walker took his second step, Stillman popped up and faced him.