Death Climbs a Tree (30 page)

The quiet settled on her again, but without the peace she'd felt before. Even so, her breathing gradually slowed, and her heart stopped the loud pounding she felt anyone could hear. She no longer was sure of her directions, though the clearing was visible through the tree trunks. The bulldozer seemed to have turned, but of course it hadn't. Using it as a landmark, she reoriented herself. She could hear the wind in the trees and occasional rustling in the leaves. Raccoons, maybe? Or Walcher, moving around.

Suddenly a strong arm grabbed her around her chest, pinning her arms and jerking her to her feet. Strong fingers digging into her face kept her from opening her mouth to scream.

“Don't move, and don't make a sound,” an urgent whisper said into her ear. He was squeezing so hard she could barely breathe.

She shook her head and tried to twist around to see him, but the man's hands stopped her. Instead, he pulled her ski cap off her face and hair. “You!” he said.

This time, enough of his voice came through the whisper that she knew him. In pulling off her cap, he'd released her face enough to let her suck in a little air.

“Can't … breathe,” she managed to get out. The pressure on her chest eased, but only a little. “Thanks,” she got out, trying to sound humble.

“You won't scream?”

She shook her head, but she was encouraged. He knew they weren't alone, or he wouldn't be worried about being heard.

When her cell phone sounded softly in her pocket, the arm tightened around her. Knowing it was impossible, she made no attempt to reach it. Let it be Andrew, she prayed. He knows I'm down here. Not answering is almost as good as screaming. And he can tell Ketcham.

Now what? Whatever else he had in mind, he couldn't shoot at anyone while his arms were holding on to her. And he wasn't harming her. If she didn't call him by name, he might think she didn't recognize him and would be safe to release.

“Can I go now?” she asked softly, as if this sort of thing happened to her all the time.

The pressure increased again. Mistake.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

Rather than answer in words, he began dragging her deeper into the woods. Giving him very little help, she stumbled along in his wake.

Was he going to take her all the way to his cabin? Even though Andrew had been able to see that far through the woods, it would be a long way to drag someone, especially up and down the hills she had seen in the daylight. She couldn't let him carry her off in silence. She'd have to risk angering him by screaming if it came to that.

Not yet, though. Now they were circling the clearing, faster than she would have thought possible. When she could, she kept her eyes on the bulldozer, her one clear landmark. She wondered where Walcher had gone. No sign of that unlikely ally. Couldn't he hear them?

They had to be almost opposite Andrew. Now that the arm across her chest was reaching under her left arm to drag her, she could move her right arm a little. Could she do it without being noticed? She inched her bare right hand over to the pocket and slid it in. He didn't react. Inside the pocket, her fingers found the cell phone. She couldn't look, but it was already turned on. Andrew was first in the alphabetical list of numbers in her phone's memory. She felt for the flat screen and touched the button underneath it to select Andrew and then the one beside it to place the call. After giving him time to pick up, she dragged her toe until she felt something it could catch on.

“Oh!” she cried, and fell to the ground as convincingly as she could. She hoped Andrew could hear her through the fabric of her pants.

Jim Chandler jerked her to her feet. “I said shut up!” In the heat of the moment, it was almost his natural voice.

“I'm sorry. I can't go so fast.” She said it as loudly as she dared. Come on, Andrew, she thought. We're down here, and moving. You might be able to see us, even if it is dark. Tell them!

She couldn't hear his response, if there was one, in her pocket. Good. Neither could Jim. But Andrew couldn't call the police unless she broke the connection, or could he with cell phones? In case he couldn't, she touched the button to break it and hoped he'd know what to do.

Now she let her whole body sag. Let Jim haul her deadweight. He'd find out she wasn't as skinny as he thought.

“Shut up and move it!” he whispered.

Staying as limp as she dared, she worked to snag dry twigs with her feet, make noise any way she could that wouldn't tempt him to stop her breathing permanently. Here we are! she cried out silently.

He managed her without apparent strain until they came to a steep hill. That slowed him down, and he began breathing harder.

Suddenly he yelped and dropped her. This time her fall wasn't faked.

“Run, Mom, run!”

Andrew? Down here? She scrambled to her feet and ran, stumbling down the hill in the dark, toward his voice.

Behind her, Jim was swearing and crashing through the underbrush. She'd never outrun him, she knew. But then she heard shouts.

“Stop, or I'll shoot!”

“James Chandler, you're under arrest!”

She turned. Powerful flashlights lit the scene. Men with
OPD
on the backs of their jackets were forcing a squirming figure facedown on the ground. Tom Walcher stood off to one side, watching.

And, from opposite directions, Fred and Andrew were running toward her.

31

Fred sent her home while he supervised Jim Chandler's transportation and booking. “I'll deal with you later,” he said. He sounded tough, but the strength and warmth of his embrace left no doubt about his intentions.

While she drove the now-familiar road, Andrew told her that he had indeed heard her cry out when she faked a fall and that he'd heard Chandler shutting her up. “That really worked, Mom.”

“But how did you get down so fast?”

“I slid down the rope.” He inspected his hands. “Couple of rope burns, looks like, but they're not bad.”

“How did you know he dropped me?”

“I made him do it. I had my Wrist-Rocket up in the tree. And I took along a few smooth rocks in case I ever needed to defend myself. When I knew you were in trouble, I slid down and shot one of my rocks at him.”

“How could you aim in the dark?”

“Moonlight. I've been out there awhile, Mom. You get used to seeing with a lot less light than at home.”

It was true. She'd seen much more than she'd expected.

“And I was close to him by the time I let fly. Hit him pretty hard. That's why he dropped you. I was ready to shoot again, but I didn't need to. Fred and the rest of them reached him before he could get you.”

“You knew they were coming?”

“Sure. Ketcham made sure someone gave Fred a fresh battery, so he and I were talking. But I already knew they were coming through the woods from Chandler's cabin.”

“I wish you'd told me. I kept expecting them to come this way.” She gestured out the window.

“Fred didn't want him to escape into the woods. And he didn't want to spook him. They had this road blocked, just in case, and they found his car parked halfway down his own road. So they followed him in.”

When they arrived home and Andrew shed his clothes for a hot shower, Joan had time alone to think. Jim Chandler wouldn't have expected to find her in the woods. In fact, when he peeled the ski cap off her face, he sounded surprised to find her under it. He wasn't interested in her body; she already knew that. She'd only been a nuisance to get out of his way.

So why had he been over there to begin with, much less at night?

He was shooting at Andrew, not me, she thought. I told him I went out there to visit my son, and he figured it out. He knew if Sylvia could see his house, Andrew could, too. I would have been next. He wasn't worried about Birdie—he was sure he could control her. But if he could terrorize Andrew into giving up, he could do what he wanted out there. Maybe that's all he was trying to do with Sylvia. Only he killed her, instead.

And Vint could have been the same kind of freaky accident. Vint got in his way while he was out there shooting animals. Or saw too much—probably the slingshot. So he shot at him, too. It was Vint's dumb luck to hit that tree when he tried to leave.

No, Jim had to know Sylvia would fall, standing on the edge of the platform the way she was. And he had to know Vint would crash. By then, the mayor had told the world they thought she'd been murdered, and Jim had to know that meant they had some idea how. He couldn't let anybody tell about seeing him use the Wrist-Rocket. He would have gone back after Andrew.

And he would have come after me if he hadn't found me in the woods. As it was, he would have squeezed the breath out of me and left me for dead near Andrew's tree, not his cabin, before he melted back home.

Shivering through the warm black sweater, she remembered how his eyes had frightened her, how shaken she'd felt even after he'd rejected her and pushed her away. She hadn't been wrong to feel that way, she knew now. From one moment to another, the man switched from charming, to nasty, to dangerous, if he felt crossed in any way. He'd sneered at Birdie before turning his nastiness on the violas. And he'd made Birdie believe he thought Sylvia was a joke—when he really felt threatened enough to knock her out of a tree.

Even knowing he was under arrest, Joan checked the doors. Then she shed the clothes that reminded her of him by their very touch on her skin, pulled on her softest, warmest nightgown and a fleecy robe, reheated a cup of the coffee Fred hadn't drunk, and curled up on the sofa to wait.

Andrew wandered through the living room in nothing but a bath towel knotted around his hips. Water sparkled on his dark curls, which smelled of shampoo.

“Okay if I eat some more of that chicken?”

“Sure, if you leave enough for Fred.” They'd probably sent out for something at the station, but she hated for him to come home to an empty kitchen.

Andrew stuck it in the microwave and went upstairs. Life was back to normal, she thought.

By the time Fred rolled in, they were sitting together, Andrew in jeans and shirt, eating chicken out of a bowl on his lap, and Joan drinking the last of the coffee.

“Got any more of that?” He bent and kissed her.

“I'll make it.” Andrew bounded into the kitchen. “You have no idea how good it feels just to get up and walk around.”

They laughed.

“You still like Starry Night?” Andrew stuck his head into the living room and held up a small bag of the coffee beans. “There's more supper, too, if you want it.”

Fred nodded, and Andrew ground the beans and zapped a bowl of teriyaki chicken and rice. While the coffee was brewing, he brought the bowl and chopsticks into the living room. “So tell us all about it.”

Fred untangled himself from Joan and took the food. “There's not a lot to tell.” He lit into the chicken. “Mmm! This is good.”

“Fred!” Joan said.

“We had him red-handed, of course, but he still tried to talk us out of it. Said we had the wrong man. All sweet reason—didn't sound anything like the foulmouthed guy we arrested.”

Uh-huh, Joan thought. He turns it off and on. “Did you find my stick?”

“Sure, and the two stones. He had no idea where they came from, of course, and he'd managed to toss the slingshot away, but one of our men found it, and they all had his prints on them.”

“And?”

“He's our man, without a doubt. His prints match, and they match the ones we already had for Ward Utterback.”

“Huh?” Andrew said.

“When we told him that, he demanded his lawyer, and he hasn't said a word since.”

“Who's this other guy?” Andrew said.

“Good question,” Fred told him between bites. “Chandler was arrested in Michigan years ago under that name.”

“What'd he do?”

“We don't know what he's done in the past fifteen years, though you can bet we'll investigate. Back then he was accused of assaulting a woman. Those charges were dismissed.”

“They better not be this time.”

“This time, thanks to your mom, we're going to nail him for Sylvia's murder.”

“Because Mom went out there tonight?”

“No, that was a damn fool thing to do. I should have sent an officer to the house to keep you safe there.”

“That's how you caught him,” Joan pointed out in her own defense.

“We would have caught him anyhow, once we knew he was out there shooting at Andrew. We had the Tell City police talk to his mother, by the way. She says she hasn't seen him for months, but she wasn't surprised that he'd lie about it. Says he's pulled stunts like that ever since he was a boy, and she'll say so in court if we need her to. I already had a search warrant for his house. We didn't need you to get yourself half-killed.”

“Only Andrew?”

“I was fine, Mom. Lying down in my sleeping bag. There was no way he could hurt me.”

“No? You used your Wrist-Rocket to get up there, didn't you?”

“Sure.”

“He had one, too, and muscles you wouldn't believe.”

“Which you were protecting me from?”

“Well…” She knew better. “I didn't expect him to see me.”

Andrew rolled his eyes at Fred. Just like old times, with the two of them ganging up on her.

“All right for me to tell Birdie?” she asked.

“She knows. Ketcham called off her police protection. But she's going to need all the support you can give her. We'll need her to testify, and that's never easy in a rape case.”

“She has to go through that? Wouldn't it be hard to prove now? Isn't it enough to go after him for murder?”

“Motive.”

“Oh.”

“We'll need your testimony as well.”

“Of course.” She'd redeem herself on the witness stand. But she had a new worry. “That won't be anytime soon, will it?”