Stranded (13 page)

This was the first time Alex had seen Dylan’s new car and it was a beauty. Built low to the ground, power seemed to ooze from under the hood. In many ways, the car was a perfect fit for the well-toned man who drove it.

“How did you get the car back from Billings?” Alex asked.

“I figured you can get a pizza delivered, you can get a car delivered,” he said.

They finally reached the house and knocked at the front door. No response until a woman’s voice called from the back. The two of them walked around the well-kept cabin to emerge in a beautifully tended garden that boasted lush vegetable beds as well as walls of climbing flowers. As the growing season started late and ended early in parts of Montana, there wasn’t actually a lot of produce on the plants yet but even to Alex’s untrained eye, the vegetation looked lavish and healthy.

The owner of the voice rose from where she’d been sitting on the side of a raised flower bed. It had turned into a warm day and she wore a skimpy T-shirt with a flowing cotton skirt and sandals. She’d piled her blondish hair atop her head where it tumbled over her eyes. Her voice was whiskey soaked and her expression was saucy. She was probably in her late forties and holding her own.

“Can I help you?” she asked, the spade in front of her.

“Excuse us,” Alex said with a swift glance at Dylan who was giving the woman his customary once-over that seemed to take a week. After introducing themselves, he explained, “We’re investigating the death of a man who lived up the street, Billy Summers. We’re hoping you might have seen or heard something late Saturday night, early Sunday morning.”

“Heard something?” she asked, settling her hip against a potting bench. “Like what?”

“Like a car passing or screech of metal or maybe you saw Billy on his bike?”

“Oh,” she said. “No, I didn’t. I wish I could help. I know who Billy was. Sometimes he stopped by to see my garden. Not this year, not yet, anyway, and now I hear he’s dead, that someone ran over him. That’s too bad, he was a sweet guy.”

“Thanks for your time,” Dylan said as he handed her a card. “If you think of anything, please give us a call.”

Her assurances followed them back to the front yard.

“She was holding up pretty good for an old broad,” Dylan commented.

“Damn, man, keep your voice down.” Alex lightened his tone and added, “What in the world would a real woman see in a clown like you, anyway?”

“Sticks and stones,” Dylan crooned.

Once they hit the road, Alex pointed toward the Summers house. “Go that way,” he said. “Lynda Summers had closer neighbors we can interview.”

“We already talked to them,” Dylan said.

“They were questioned about
her
death. I want to ask them if they heard anything the night Billy disappeared. But, frankly, I want another look around the Summers place, too.”

“You’re becoming obsessed,” Dylan said, but then he shook his head. “Sorry. After what you told me you found on the Cessna, of course you’re obsessed.” He poked Alex in the ribs. “I knew you weren’t sitting home sick because I drove by your place and no one was there.”

“Why did you do that?”

Dylan shrugged. “I just doubted you were sick and thought you might need help of some kind. Why didn’t you tell me you were going to dive on the plane? You told that Miter guy.”

“I just borrowed a plane from John,” Alex said. “If he knows anything else it’s because he always seems to know exactly what’s going on.”

“I know. That’s what creeps me out about him.”

“Anyway, it all came up kind of fast.”

“I can read between the lines,” Dylan said. “You didn’t want the chief to blab it to his reporter pal.”

“Something like that,” Alex said.

“I still can’t believe Billy had anything to do with your crash,” Dylan said. “Frankly, the kid didn’t seem clever enough.”

“If he did, he must have had help,” Alex said.

“Yeah. Maybe Tad and Ted Cummings put him up to it.”

Alex was about to protest but stopped himself. How did he know what Tad and Ted were capable of?

“Maybe Billy’s death didn’t have much to do with drugs,” Dylan mused aloud. “If the Cummings boys were in on the conspiracy to keep you from going to Shatterhorn, maybe they decided to cut their weakest link—Billy—out of the picture.”

Alex glanced over. “What?”

Dylan shifted position which seemed to cause the car to sway. Sitting next to the guy in the low-slung car was like sitting next to a bulging muscle. “Think about it,” he said. “Didn’t that B-Strong organization in Shatterhorn use young males about Ted and Tad’s age to do their dirty work?”

“They trained them as gunmen who then terrorized malls and picnics and parades,” Alex said. “We’d better check them out for any kind of club involvement.”

“Is there a B-Strong around here?”

“From what Nate said, there’s no longer any B-Strong clubs anywhere. They were disbanded after what they were doing came to light.”

Dylan parked in the yard. The old double-wide already had a sagging look of abandonment about it, like the weight of its interior was pulling the roof down and in. There was a sign on the door telling people the property was condemned and to keep out.

“Things move fast,” Alex said.

“They sure do,” Dylan said as he rubbed a tiny scratch on his hood with a finger and swore under his breath. “Okay. I’ll take the two houses down there, you get the three up the street.”

They went their separate ways. The first house Alex came to was owned by a small, ancient-looking woman. She tried to think back to Saturday night or early Sunday morning, but Alex could see it was a lost cause.

“I don’t go outside after dark,” she finished. “There’s that woman next door and her odd son. Have you seen what a mess she keeps that place? It’s disgraceful. I have half a mind to call the mayor.”

There was no one home at the house next to hers, and at the house farthest away, he found several people sitting around the yard drinking beer. Figuring out which person actually owned the place took a while and produced no results. Alex walked back to the Summers place. Unless Dylan had better luck, this line of inquiry was going nowhere fast.

He waited in the yard for Dylan to return for five long minutes and in that time, he had the strangest feeling that someone was watching him. He walked completely around the house and saw nothing, didn’t even hear anything but some birds chattering up in the treetops.

Eventually, he decided to take another look at the shed while he waited. It was once again locked, and Alex played around with breaking it open to look at the model airplanes and the room one more time. Instead he walked around to the back where he saw evidence the lab crew had tried to lift footprints from under the window. Stepping carefully to avoid the last of the yellow crime-scene tape, he moved the ivy and peered into the room.

His gaze was immediately drawn to the stack of index cards beside the lamp. He was almost positive there had been more there the first time he saw it, though he couldn’t say why that thought persisted. He closed his eyes and tried to picture it the way it had looked the first time he’d seen the room. The striped lamp, the cards by the base, all the way up to the bottom of the first yellow line.

He opened his eyes. That was it. The cards topped out down low on a black stripe. The stack was shorter than it had been before Billy died.

“What are you doing?” Dylan asked.

Caught by surprise, Alex jumped a few inches. Then he told Dylan about the index cards.

“Are you sure?” Dylan asked.

“Well, I guess I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but I’m pretty sure.”

“Maybe Lynda took some of them when she came to unlock the shed,” Dylan offered.

“And that doesn’t make sense, either. If she was so grief-stricken she was on sedatives, why would she have walked out here by herself to unlock the shed and then come inside to investigate? Why would she do that?”

“From everything you and Frank Smyth have said, I get the impression she wasn’t aware of what Billy had done to the inside of the place. Maybe it caught her off guard. Where did we come up with the scenario that she came outside to unlock it?”

Alex thought for a second. “Chief Smyth surmised it. We don’t know for sure.” What caused him to pause was the fact that he’d found Smyth inside the shed when he came looking for him the day Lynda died. Was it possible he’d slipped some of the index cards into a pocket? He’d actually been standing next to the lamp and table.

But why do it with everyone there when he’d apparently enjoyed free access to this place? And wouldn’t taking those cards amount to a cover-up, either for himself or someone else? Was Alex really thinking that the chief of their small police department was involved in all this?

He tried to recall the man’s politics as he moved aside for Dylan who had been straining to see into the room over Alex’s shoulder. But he didn’t know Frank that well. He’d never been to his house or said more than a greeting to his wife or met his daughter. Still, could a man be part of something so sinister and not reveal it in his everyday life?

If he was clever enough.

This was impossible.

Again Alex thought back to the day before yesterday. He’d commented on the scratches on the back of Frank’s hand. He could visualize the chief subsequently shoving that hand in a pocket. He’d been wearing the kind of jacket someone wears when they ride a bike, close fitting, not bulky at all. Wouldn’t Alex have seen the general shape of a half a dozen or more cards if they’d been in one of those pockets?

Dylan walked away from the window and Alex took his place for one last glimpse. This time he noticed a small vertical seam on the rounded side of the table. He’d taken it for a defect, but now he wondered if it indicated an inset drawer. Why hadn’t he paid more attention to it when he had the chance?

“All we have are questions and more questions,” he muttered to himself. He glanced at Dylan. “You were gone quite a while. Did you find out anything?”

“Nobody was home anywhere,” Dylan said. “I swear, this neck of the woods empties out during the day. I’ll catch them tomorrow night.” He popped a knuckle or two.

“Why not tonight?”

“I have plans.”

“Are you driving all the way back to Billings to see your new girlfriend?”

“How’d you guess?”

“And you have the nerve to call me obsessed.”

“Get in and relax,” Dylan said with a laugh.

Alex slid into the luxurious car, but the relaxing part wasn’t as easy to accomplish. On the way back into town, he found himself checking his side mirror, trying to see if they were being followed.

He never saw a thing but he was almost certain someone was there.

Chapter Eleven

Jessica was as restless that night as Alex was. Neither of them could stand staying inside the house. Since their own yard still held too many upsetting memories they tried a walk. Even that didn’t settle their nerves.

They finally decided to drive to the store and order the flowers for Memorial Day. That process ate up a whole forty-five minutes. They were waiting in a long line to buy a sandwich for dinner when Alex’s cell phone rang.

“It’s John Miter,” Alex said as he scanned the screen.

What followed was a short conversation where Alex hardly said anything but listened intently until he muttered, “No rush, we’re not at home. Thanks.”

“Was that about the Vita-Drink?” Jessica asked as he pocketed his phone. She’d unconsciously lowered her voice as though the people in line behind them had the slightest idea what they were talking about. It was just sometimes hard to remember that not everyone was caught up in the same confusing drama they were.

“John’s friends at the lab just got back to him. Nate is right, the drink was drugged.” His voice was toned way down, too. “He’ll email the results to our home computer sometime tonight.”

“What drugs?”

“A whole laundry list of pharmaceuticals. Something to relax muscles, something else to make you sleepy—it was probably the combination of them that made me queasy as well as tired that morning. It’s a wonder I didn’t pass out.”

“Who could have done this?” she asked.

“I picked up the water at the store the night before the flight. It was locked in my truck in our garage until I got to the airport the next morning. Someone either doctored the bottles there or switched them with previously altered bottles that morning, and the only time I can think either of those things could have been done was when Kit called me at the airport and I went inside to take his call.”

“Why didn’t he call on your cell?”

“He said he was at home and he didn’t have that number. Let’s see, I remember him complaining that he hadn’t been able to reach Dylan. Anyway, it was a miserable morning weatherwise, cold and nasty and the only other person I saw on the field was Billy Summers.”

“But you said he was cleaning a windshield or something like that.”

“Deicing, I think, but I didn’t see him working, I just saw him carrying a bunch of stuff.”

“Coming or going?”

“He was coming toward me while I was walking to the Cessna.”

“So you think he could have been carrying your original water bottles?” she whispered.

“They could have been in the toolbox,” he agreed as he dug out his keys. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“Blue Point Road. You game?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

* * *

A
LEX
STOPPED
AT
the first of the three houses Dylan had struck out with that afternoon and was relieved when someone was home. Jessica sat in the car as he conducted the brief interview, which didn’t turn out to help a whole lot because the guy admitted he fell asleep to a blaring television every night.

The second place appeared to be abandoned but the man who answered Alex’s knock at the last house was a different story. He claimed he’d heard screeching brakes late Saturday night.

“What time?” Alex asked.

The guy was in his late forties, tall, wearing a bib apron printed with the slogan Will Cook for Sex. He explained he had to flip a steak on his indoor grill in exactly four minutes. The aroma of sizzling beef wafting from the kitchen started Alex’s stomach rumbling.

“After midnight. The clock in the bedroom is broken but I’d gone to bed at twelve and I heard the brakes before I actually fell asleep.”

“Did you see anything?”

“I looked out the window. I think I saw a couple of lights like headlamps a little bit south of here, but it was really foggy and I’m not sure. That road is treacherous on a bad night.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s time to turn the T-bone. You need anything else?”

Alex handed him a card. He got back in the truck, and together he and Jessica drove south, stopping often to look at the road. About four hundred feet along, Alex found what he was looking for and got out to check the pavement.

When he got back inside after taking a half dozen pictures with his cell phone, Jessica raised her eyebrows. “Well?”

“There are tire tracks like a vehicle makes with a sudden stop, but there’s no way for me to know when they were made or by who. I’ll call downtown and get someone out here tomorrow to process them just to be on the safe side.” He was thinking the adjacent terrain deserved a once-over, as well.

It was still light outside, though the shadows were deepening when they pulled up in front of Billy’s old house. Alex was surprised to find a tractor and a large Dumpster out front.

“What’s with the equipment?” Jessica asked as Alex parked his truck.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wonder who will end up with this place.”

“What would anyone do with it?”

“I can’t imagine. Probably knock it down once it clears probate. The land must be worth something. Come on, let’s make sure no one else is around, and then take another look at that shed, okay?”

They both got out of the truck and Alex took Jessica’s hand. He wasn’t sure exactly how they’d managed to go from lovers and friends to frustrated near enemies, and he also wasn’t sure how they had managed to get back on the right track with each other. Perhaps they owed this second chance to the plane crash which was kind of ironic when you thought about it.

But wonderful, too. It was hard to believe that they would soon be parents at long last.

“Which room are we going to turn into a nursery?” he asked suddenly.

She looked up at him and smiled and he leaned over to kiss the top of her head as his arm slipped around her shoulders. “I thought the one right across the hall from ours,” she said after a moment.

“Do we know if it’s a girl or boy yet?”

“Not yet. The ultrasound that checks bone length and organ development also reveals the baby’s sex. It’s in about a week.”

“Which do you want?” he asked, stopping to pat her stomach area and look into her eyes.

“I couldn’t care less,” she said. “How about you?”

“One of each,” he said lightly as he stepped onto the front porch and knocked, then tried the knob. “It’s locked,” he announced. He looked through the window, too. The place looked different than it had when he’d last been there which was right after Lynda Summers’s death, as if more of the boxes had been shifted here and there. No doubt the paramedics had had to rearrange things to get Lynda’s body out of her house.

“Let’s go around back,” he said.

He called out as they walked around the house, not wanting to surprise anyone, but there wasn’t anybody there.

The shed door was secured just as it had been earlier that afternoon, with a lock threaded through a hasp. “Wait here a second,” he said, and sprinted back to his truck where he took a toolbox out of the covered bed and carried it back to the shed. Setting it on the ground, he dug around in it until he found a screwdriver.

“Alex Foster, what are you doing?” Jessica asked, her eyes wide.

“I’m taking the hasp off the door because I don’t want to break the lock.”

“Is that legal?”

“Not technically.”

“In what way, then?”

He removed the last screw from the old wood and the hasp came free. “I think Billy tried to kill me.”

“I know you do.”

“And I think he must have had help and I don’t know who that person might be. That makes trusting anyone except you a little tricky. Plus there’s a tractor and a rig out front. On the off chance I missed something in this shed, I plan on taking a look before it’s too late. Stay here.”

“Who’s going to watch your back?” she said. “If we’re caught, maybe we can share a cell.”

Alex laughed as he stepped inside the shed, Jessica right behind him. The laughter died immediately. Billy’s bastion of uncluttered order looked as though it had been hit by a tornado. Glass sparkled on the floor in front of the shattered window and the little striped lamp had been smashed to pieces. The round table lay on its side next to the overstuffed chair that spilled its foam rubber guts.

“Someone has been in here,” Alex said unnecessarily. As he righted the table, he noticed something was missing and looked around the room.

“This was Billy’s space?” Jessica said.

“I know it’s hard to believe, but it used to look like a little oasis next to everything else around here,” Alex said.

“Why would anyone destroy it this way?”

“It looks to me like someone was looking for something.”

“I wonder if they found it.”

“If it was part of the red-and-white biplane that used to hang over the table, it appears so. The plane is gone and I don’t see its pieces on the floor.”

“There are other models.”

“This one was different. Much larger, better constructed.”

She stared at the ones that had survived the attack. “He was capable of being very creative,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“When I think of how meticulous he was with the garden—you know, Alex, I’m going to replant it. I can’t let whoever did that to Billy’s work get away with it, especially when they also wrecked this sanctuary. I mean it has to be the work of the same person, don’t you think?”

“It sure appears to have the same wanton destruction-for-destruction’s-sake quality about it,” he agreed.

“Yeah. Well, I’m going to make our yard beautiful again, you know, in his memory.”

“That’s a good idea,” Alex said. He looked down at the table and used his fingers to feel for the groove in the table apron that he’d noticed from the window. “I was right, it’s a drawer,” he said, kneeling in order to check it out and watching he didn’t cut himself on broken glass. He turned the table a little and slid out the drawer that seemed to have a spring mechanism instead of a knob or handle. “This seems shallow,” he said.

“Is there anything in it?”

“Not much. I don’t want to leave prints on the contents, though. I should have brought gloves.”

“Wait a second,” she said. “I just saw an open box of latex gloves over in the mess on Billy’s workbench.”

“Don’t touch anything,” he cautioned. “I’ll get them. I was here two days ago so my prints are easy to explain away but yours might be a different matter.”

“That’s why my hands are in my pockets,” she said. “I’m married to a cop, you know. I figure stuff like this out.”

He grabbed a couple of gloves so he wouldn’t destroy any evidence that might be in the drawer, and stopped to kiss her forehead before he once again knelt in front of the drawer.

“Okay. There are a few blank index cards, a couple of pencils...not much else. Frankly there doesn’t seem to be room for much else.”

She knelt beside him, touching her belly as she did so. “For the first time, it feels like there’s a baby between my chest and my knees when I bend over,” she said, and they exchanged excited smiles. She studied the drawer before adding, “Is that a false bottom?”

“Yeah, I think it is,” he said as he withdrew his knife. Wishing the light were better, he inserted the blade at the front edge of the drawer bottom and immediately felt the thin wood wobble. He removed the few things that had been scattered atop the false bottom, then carefully slipped the wood out of place.

They found themselves staring at a hypodermic needle and three small empty medical vials whose labels Alex recognized as the drugs John Miters’s lab had confirmed were injected into the Vita-Drink bottles.

Beside him, Jessica’s sigh sounded like a very soft, sad refrain. “I didn’t want to believe it,” she said.

“Look,” he said as he lifted the needle out of the drawer to reveal an index card covered with simple illustrations and directions. “Here’s how you load a needle with the drugs and then inject the contents into the high shoulder of a plastic bottle. Sound familiar?”

“Of course it does.”

He slid the entire drawer from the table and gestured at the index cards. “Is that Billy’s writing?”

“I don’t think so. What are we going to do with all this?”

After shifting the drawer into position under his arm, he helped Jessica stand. “I’m going to call downtown and get a crew out here,” he said, grabbing his phone from his pocket. “I’ll stay with everything until someone arrives. The place has already been broken into once tonight, we can’t walk away and leave it unguarded.”

“Actually,” she said with a fleeting smile, “it was broken into twice.”

“You and your technicalities,” he said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to drive to Silvia’s house. I want you as far away from all this as you can get.” He pulled out his phone but before he could place a call, her fingers lit on his arm. He looked down at her.

“I’m not leaving you here alone,” she said. “You should know that about me by now.”

He did know it. He just wanted her to be safe and that meant away from this shed.

“Just make the call,” she told him.

He nodded, but before he could tap even one number the window beside them shattered. From the corner of his eye, he saw a missile fly into the room. It hit the chair and immediately burst into flames. “Get out of here!” Alex yelled, pulling on Jessica’s hand. The fire quickly spread to the wooden floor and then to the worktable where it ignited the solvents and paints stored on the shelf.

They reached the safety of the outside right before a small explosion inside the building signaled the beginning of the end. They ran to get as far away as they could.

Alex handed Jessica the drawer and pulled out his gun. She stood with her back against the house, her face pale in the weakening light. She clutched the drawer in one hand while she took her cell phone from her sweater pocket with the other.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“I’ll live. I’ll call the fire department.”

“Stay here,” he added, and took off to the front where he could hear what sounded like a far-off motor. Their attacker was getting away. By the time Alex rounded the corner, the yard was clear and nothing looked one bit different than it had since they entered the shed. The tractor still stood off to the side, the Dumpster beside it, Alex’s truck pulled in close to one of the wrecks that occupied the side yard.