Dunston Falls (14 page)

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“He has forty seven square miles to hide out in,” Peck said.

“And?”

“He likes it here.”

Reese spooned some eggs into his mouth and washed it down with coffee. He looked directly at Peck. “Then we better do our job and catch him.”

SIX

Late in the day, Peck returned to Linda’s hospital room and found her still asleep. He pulled a chair against the wall and sat down. He looked at her in the bed as if seeing her for the first time and realized just how tiny a woman she was. Maybe a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. He was grateful that she was alive and not just because she did nothing to provoke such a horrible death. She may well turn out to be the key that unlocked the clues that solved the mystery for them. Exhaustion suddenly washed over him and he closed his eyes and was asleep in a matter of minutes.

He woke up an hour later when Linda’s voice penetrated his semi consciousness.

“Sheriff, are you okay?” he heard her say, softly.

From his light sleep, Peck heard her voice and he opened his eyes and looked at her in the bed. “Yes.” Slightly disoriented, he looked at his watch. “I must have dozed off.”

“Where’s the other guy, the mean looking one?”

“Lieutenant Reese?” he said, more awake now.

“I guess so.”

Peck stood up to stretch his back. “He’s at your house with his team of men.”

Linda sat up in bed with her back against the stiff, hospital headboard. “Going through my stuff,” she said with mild annoyance.

“It’s how you find clues and evidence.”

“I suppose,” Linda shrugged. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

Peck removed his pack, lit two and gave her one. “It’s difficult, but I need you to help me now. I need you to talk me through what happened right up to the end.”

Linda blew a smoke ring as she thought. “I never did thank you for being so nice to me, did I?”

“It isn’t necessary,” Peck said as he retook his seat. “It’s my job. So?”

Linda nodded, then said, “I was expecting Harvey around midnight.”

“As a client?”

“Yes. Anyway, I started the generator so I could take a bath. When a man is paying you he has the right for you to smell good, and even if he isn’t paying you.”

“What time was that?”

“Around eleven, eleven thirty. Right in there somewhere.” Linda paused to puff on the cigarette and made eye contact with Peck. “I thought it was Harvey when I heard footsteps. It wasn’t.”

“What happened then?”

Linda took a deep breath. “It happened so fast. All of a sudden, he was there. He……I think it was a log from my woodpile. He hit me with it. In the head. When I woke up, I was tied to the bed. My mouth and eyes were covered in tape. After a little while, he ripped the tape from my eyes, I guess so I could see him.”

Peck thought for a moment, and then said, “Did he say anything to you?”

Linda shook her head. “No, nothing.”

“Not even one word, nothing?”

“He never made a sound. Never said one word.” Linda shook her head again. “He just……. watched me. Like he was studying me or something. His eyes through the ski mask, they looked yellow.”

“Yellow?”

“I know that sounds crazy,” Linda said. “I think it was the flame on the candle what made them look that way.”

“What happened next?”

Linda took a puff on the cigarette as she looked at Peck. “He……….I tried to fight, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even scream. He had a bread knife from the kitchen. Then………. he pulled down his pants. He had an erection. The sick bastard is holding a foot long knife on one hand and his dick in the other. I started to pray he would kill me first.”

Linda took another puff on the cigarette and closed her eyes. “Funny the stuff you think when you feel you’re going to die. I remember thinking I could stand the pain of the knife, but not of being raped.” Linda opened her eyes and puffed on the cigarette.

After a moment of silence, Peck said, “After that what happened.”

“Harvey showed up. I heard his truck and I tried to warn him, but the tape on my mouth… I couldn’t scream.” Linda paused to close her eyes again and take a breath. She opened her eyes and took a sip of water from a glass on the bedside table.

“Take your time,” Peck said.

Linda replaced the glass on the table. “Harvey walked in and he was hiding in the shadows behind the door. It happened so fast, I wasn’t sure I even saw it. He shoved the knife into Harvey’s stomach and Harvey dropped the bottle of scotch he brought for me. He seemed to stand there for a second as if he was admiring what he did, then he was gone and Harvey was on his knees with the knife in his stomach.”

“Harvey, he crawled to you and cut you loose,” Peck said.

Linda nodded. “He…. pulled the knife from his stomach first. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt. He saved my life. He said, run to his truck and call for help on the radio.”

“Up to that point, you didn’t know Harvey was a cop, a state trooper?”

Linda shook her head. “Not until that Lieutenant Reese told me.”

Peck thought a moment and said, “There’s something I’m not seeing.”

Linda smiled for the first time in their conversation. “For twenty bucks you can see a whole lot more.”

Peck stood up to toss his cigarette into the toilet. “That reminds me. When this is over, you’re under arrest for solicitation, young lady.”

Linda wrapped the covers over her shoulders. “It’s freezing in here.”

Peck reached for the extra blanket in the closet and placed it around her shoulders. “They turn the heat on every two hours. It will warm up.”

Linda tucked her arms under the second blanket. “Thank you.”

“About Harvey, how did you meet?”

“Like they all do,” Linda admitted. “He called me for a date.”

“When was that, yesterday?”

Linda shook her head. “No, at least three days ago. He said he got my number from a friend at the paper company. He would not say who because the guy is married. Like that would have mattered. All these married guys and their big secrets.” Linda held her cigarette to Peck and he took it and tossed it into the toilet.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Peck said, returning to the chair.

“What, that the guy is married?”

Peck shook his head. “Harvey called you before the first murder was even discovered,” Peck said. “He was supposedly on duty in Augusta. Why would he do that?”

“Maybe he was horny?” Linda joked.

“Enough to drive two hundred miles and risk his life during a statewide crisis? I haven’t been there, but there has to be some women in Augusta who practice your …vocation.”

“Was Harvey married? He said he was, but he also said he worked for the paper company. A married man will do all kinds of things to keep his wife from finding out,” Linda said. “Like the wives care. As long as the man brings the paycheck home and doesn’t give her any diseases, most women don’t care at all who their husbands are sticking it to. I’ve heard of some wives joining in for a threesome.”

Peck shook that off. “I don’t know if Harvey was married but I’ll find out from Reese.” Peck slumped back in the chair and gently massaged the spot between his eyes just above the nose.

“Do you have a headache?” Linda said, softly.

“I’m working on it,” Peck said. “A doozey.”

Linda sat up straight in the bed. “I’ve had those, too.” She got out of bed, stood over Peck, and looked at him.

“It starts here,” Linda said. She touched the spot between Peck’s eyes with one finger. It felt warm and comforting to the touch.

“Then it spreads out.” She ran her fingers across his forehead. “Slowly at first.”

Peck looked at her as she reached out and touched his face. Her fingers felt warm and sensual against his rough skin and stubble of beard. Peck felt almost embarrassed at the sensation.

“Then, bang,” Linda said, suddenly.

Linda placed both hands on the top of Peck’s head.

“It’s like an explosion went off inside your head.”

Peck made eye contact with her and there was an awkward moment of silence. Slowly, Linda lowered her hands. “I can see him,” She whispered. “Those yellow eyes looking at me.”

Peck stood up and took hold of her hand. It was suddenly freezing. Her arms were covered with goose bumps. “Maybe we better get back to bed.” He guided her to the bed and she slipped between the covers.

“If it’s we, leave a twenty on the way out,” Linda joked. “I have to pay this hospital bill somehow.”

Peck returned to the chair and sat.

“It’s funny, but I can still taste the glue from the tape in my mouth,” Linda said. “I’ve brushed my teeth a dozen times, but I can still taste it. Maybe it’s just my imagination, like a man missing an arm can still feel his fingers.”

Peck looked at her and nodded.

“Is there any chance at getting something to eat around here?” Linda said. “Besides medicine and toothpaste?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Peck said.

Peck found Doctor McCoy in the small emergency room where he was patching a kid who fell on the ice and bruised his knee.

“The cafeteria open?” Peck said.

“It was. You hungry?”

Peck shook his head. “For Linda Boyce.”

“She’s awake? Good. I’ll check on her.”

“Maybe I’ll get her something from Deb’s,” Peck said.

He left the hospital, crossed the street, and entered the diner. Of course, the entire town was now aware of the incidents, although sketchy. They looked, but the staff and patrons of the diner were respectful and did not push him. Kranston and Regan had made the rounds; an official announcement would be forthcoming at Sunday services, they said. That seemed to satisfy their curiosity for the moment.

Peck ordered a cheeseburger with French fries and a large soda to go. The order was ready in fifteen minutes and he carried it back to the hospital in a paper bag.

When Peck entered her hospital room, Linda was not alone. Father Regan had joined her.

“Good evening, sheriff,” Regan said, with a smile. “Miss Boyce and I were just having a chat.”

“Hello, Father,” Peck said.

“Is that food I smell in that bag?” Linda said, sniffing.

“From the diner,” Peck said, handing Linda the bag. “It’s the best I could do at this hour.”

Linda looked into the bag and smiled. “It will do.”

“Linda and I were just discussing this Sunday service,” Regan said. “I missed her last week, but she promised to be front row as usual.”

Peck looked his question to Linda.

“I was raised Catholic,” Linda said as she bit into the cheeseburger.

“And she was about to make the act of confession,” Regan said.

Peck, unaware of Regan’s hidden request, did not move until the priest cleared his throat and said, “A moment of privacy, sheriff?”

“Sure, of course,” Peck said. He nodded his goodnight to Linda and left the room. In the hallway, he could hear Linda ask the priest if he could wait until after she finished her cheeseburger.

Alone in his office, Peck made a fire in the woodstove, percolated a pot of coffee on its flat service, then sat behind his desk and read reports. There were dozens of statements given by town residents, none of which shed any light on the two murders.

He read Reese’s report on Doris White, then his own several times in succession.

The report written on Deb Robertson by Reese was three times as thick as the one on Doris White and he read it through several times with the same results. Nothing. Whatever he was searching for was not there. If it was, it failed to register in his mind.

He read his own report on Deb Robertson, trying hard to differentiate his personal feelings from his professional opinion. It was difficult. Prior to his recent budding relationship, Peck never seriously considered marriage. As he had explained to Deb, there never seemed to be the time to develop the kind of relationship with a woman that would lead to a serious commitment.

That changed in the span of a single evening.

Even though he knew next to nothing about Deborah Ann Robertson, the ease in which they fell into each other’s life was a promising start that would be left without a conclusion.

He felt cheated. Then he felt guilty for feeling cheated when Deb was the one laying on a cold slab in the morgue.

As the sheriff in whose jurisdiction her life ended, Peck felt it was his duty to find the man responsible for ending it and to make him pay. As the man who was her final lover, he felt enough internal rage at losing her to rip the sick bastard’s head off and stick it on a pole on Main Street.

Neither emotion helped matters and only served to bog down his mind.

Peck read his report a second and third time. He saw nothing that shed any new light upon the growing list of murders. He realized that his feelings for Deb might be clouding his ability to analyze the evidence from an impartial viewpoint. That was a detective’s biggest mistake, examining evidence with the heart instead of the head. That was the reason most departments had a policy against a detective investigating crimes committed by relatives or against relatives. To a homicide detective, emotion equated to failure. He remembered seeing some episodes of the TV show Dragnet. The two detectives were always deadpan in the way they spoke to suspects or witnesses. Whenever a witness would go off on a tangent, they would always ask for just the facts. It was their way of leaving emotion off the job.

The candles burned low on his desk. His exhausted mind took him nowhere new. He snuffed out the candles, settled in on the cot near the woodstove, and allowed sleep to overcome him.

Peck was sound asleep when something in his subconscious caused him to bolt awake and stare at the black ceiling above his head. He saw something in his sleep that he was missing in his consciousness.

It nagged at him until he stood up, lit a candle and sat behind his desk. Reaching for the bottle of scotch in the drawer, Peck poured an ounce into his empty coffee mug. He lit a cigarette, opened Deb Robertson’s file and read it again.