THE NEXT TO DIE (35 page)

“Dayle, thank God,” he said in a rush. “Listen, I just found out, they set me up. Laura, she’s one of them. They’ve been getting to you through me and my big mouth. I didn’t know, I swear—”

“Hold on,” Dayle said. “I don’t understand.”

“Ted Kovak is with that hate group. Laura arranged for me to ‘bump into’ Ted at this party. She’s been making calls to Opal, Idaho, for a couple of weeks now. And that old man I told you about, the one visiting the set today, Laura asked me to arrange it and keep her name out of it. I don’t know the guy, Dayle. It’s some old fart, but he’s a good shot, and he’s been hired to kill you. He’s probably there already.”

“Is he wearing a seersucker suit?” Dayle asked. “Glasses?” She glanced down at the phone. Her other line was blinking.

“I’m not sure what he looks like, but Ted’s supposed to waste the guy once you’re hit. Listen, Dayle, stay in your trailer, lock the door. I’ll call security at the studio and the cops. We’ll have a net over these guys within three minutes.”

Someone was knocking on her trailer door. “I’m sorry, Ms. Sutton,” the studio secretary called. “There’s another urgent call for you on line three.”

“
What?
Who is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s collect, from Opal, Idaho.”

“Thank you!” She got back on the line: “Dennis? Okay, contact the police. I’ll stay put. I have Sean on hold here. I’ve gotta go. Bye.” She clicked off and pressed line three. “Hello, Sean?”

“Yo, don’t keel over or anything. You probably figure I’m toes up.”

“Nick?” she muttered, stunned.

“Yeah. Are you okay? Has anyone taken a potshot at you today?”

“I can’t believe you’re actually alive,” she murmured. Dayle sank down on the sofa. “What happened?”

“Tell you later. Here’s what’s important. Either today or tomorrow, they plan to whack you on your movie set—”

“I know,” Dayle cut in. “The police are on their way. Listen, did you ever meet up with my lawyer friend out there? Sean Olson?”

“Yeah, she got a full confession from one of them on tape.”

“Is she there with you?”

He said nothing for a moment.

“Nick? Where are you anyway?”

“I’m at a police station in Opal. I was arrested. You’re my one call.”

“I’ll have somebody get you out of there. Is Sean with you?”

“Um, no,” he said soberly. “I don’t think she’s going to make it, Dayle.”

“What do you mean?”

“The guy whose confession we taped, he was hiding a gun. He shot her. It was hours before the cops picked us up. They took Sean to the hospital just a while ago. She lost a lot of blood. The paramedic said she didn’t have much of a chance.” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Dayle.”

“Oh, God, no….” Tears came to her eyes, and she started to tremble. Dayle took a couple of breaths. “Okay. Find out what you can about Sean and—and let me know. I—I’ll have someone get you out of there, Nick.”

Dayle hung up the phone, and wiped her tears. As if in a trance, she moved to the vanity, pulled off her wig and hair net, then shed the jacket. She went to the trailer door. She was supposed to lock it, stay inside until the police showed up. Instead, she opened the door and came down the trailer steps. The police and studio security hadn’t arrived yet.

Ted Kovak stood beyond the sound equipment—near where Beverly had assembled the visitors. Dayle started toward him. He was scowling at the old man in the seersucker suit. Ted didn’t see Dayle until she was right on him.

“You son of a bitch!” She slapped him hard across the face.

Everyone on the set stopped to gape at them. Ted reeled back, startled. “What the hell—”

She slapped him again. “Murderer…”

He took another step back and put up his hands to defend himself. But she swatted at his arm, then connected again across his face with another forceful slap. “Goddamn you and your hypocrite friends! How many good people have you killed? Tony Katz and Leigh, Maggie, my friend, Sean…”

Ted grew more furious with her every slap. He glared at Tom, who retreated back with the other stunned bystanders on the set. Ted seemed ready to shoot Dayle himself. She clawed at his face, drawing scratch marks above his left eye and down his cheek. Finally, he pushed her away. “You crazy bitch!” he snarled.

“It wasn’t enough for you to kill these people,” she hissed. “You had to shit on their memory too. You made Leigh look like a drug addict, and you dug up those stag films Maggie McGuire did back when she was struggling. Think about their families….”

She lunged at him again, swinging her fist. But Ted dodged her and reached for his gun. He glared at Tom. “Kill her, goddamn it!” he growled. Only a few people might have heard him over the noise and chaos.

Tom was one of those few. Yet the words still echoing in his head had been spoken a moment ago by Dayle Sutton:
You dug up those stag films Maggie McGuire did back when she was struggling
. Tom wondered how he could have blinded himself to that fact. The group he was working for had—as Dayle put it—
shit on the memory
of Maggie McGuire.

“What are you going to do, Ted?” Dayle said, gasping for breath. She clinched her fist. “Are you going to shoot me in front of all these people?”

His face bleeding and nearly purple, Ted glared at his employer. He aimed the gun at her heart. Someone screamed.

Dayle Sutton spit in his face. “Go ahead and shoot, you lowlife, sorry son of a—”

She did not get the last word out. The loud gunshot silenced her.

Tom Lance had raised his semiautomatic, aimed carefully, and squeezed the trigger. He put a bullet through Ted Kovak’s right eye.

The police and studio security had a lot of questions for the old man who had wandered onto Soundstage 8 with a concealed gun. But after saving Dayle Sutton’s life, Tom had some leverage. He was a hero, and people wanted to believe him. His story didn’t stray far from the truth. He was recruited against his will to assassinate Dayle Sutton by an extremist group. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t cooperate. He gave a not entirely accurate description of Hal Buckman, hoping his SAAMO contact could elude authorities for a while. As long as Hal was on the run, Tom figured his story was safe. In his telling, Tom had never intended to kill Dayle; he’d shown up on that movie set to protect her. When asked why this group had singled him out as their assassin, Tom explained: “I was very close to Maggie McGuire once. These people were going to pin her murder on me.”

No fake ambulance ever arrived. Tom knew he’d done the right thing. His picture would be on the front page of the evening edition—sans the glasses and fake mustache. Blinding camera flashes went off inside the soundstage while Dayle Sutton thanked him. She didn’t seem to recognize Tom from the failed audition. She shook his hand, and hugged him. The photographers would use that shot for the news story, he knew.

Leaving the soundstage with a police escort, Tom watched members of the press shoving one another to get closer to him. “Tom, over this way, please! Tom, just one picture! Over here, Tom!” He smiled as the shutters clicked. At last they wanted him.

Dennis Walsh arrived at Soundstage 8 in time to see two attendants carrying out the draped corpse of Ted Kovak. He also caught a glimpse of the hero of the hour, Tom Lance, as they escorted him to a police car.

Back in his fraternity days, Dennis had learned how to trap a frat brother in his room by squeezing a penny between his door and the hinge near the latch. The pressure against the latch made it impossible to pull the door open. He employed the same trick on Laurie Anne, incarcerating her in the bathroom—only he raised the ante by tossing out her clothes, the towels, and that ugly pink shower curtain. She was trapped in there, wet and naked. Dennis phoned the police about her involvement in a conspiracy to commit murder, then left the apartment unlocked for them.

Laurie Anne was violent, hysterical, and still quite naked by the time the police were reading her her rights and offering her a robe.

At that same moment, Dennis struggled through the crowd outside Dayle’s trailer. Dayle stood on the steps by her door with reporters firing questions at her. Dennis had only one question for his boss. He wanted to know if he still had a job.

Though still dressed in her “old lady” tweed suit, Dayle must have had someone perform a quick touch-up on her face and hair, because she looked every bit the movie star, standing by her trailer. She saw Dennis in the crowd and waved at him. “Dennis, please, I need you!” she called.

He worked his way up to the steps. She grabbed his arm, then pulled him into her trailer. “Thank God you’re here,” she sighed. “You have to get rid of these reporters for me. I’ll talk to the police, but that’s it.”

Dennis gave her a wary look. “So I’m not fired?”

“God, no.” Dayle said, her voice quivering. “I’m not dumping you just because you made a mistake. You’re my friend, Dennis.” She gave him a quick hug. “Listen, more than anything, we have to track down Sean Olson. She’s in a hospital somewhere around Opal. I need to know if she’s still alive.”

After making his one call, Nick Brock was cuffed to a desk in the Opal police station. He was covered with scratches, dried sweat, and dirt.

He and Sean had been lost in those dark woods for nearly three hours. Her strength and determination amazed him. In the second hour, Nick held her up. The only peep out of her was when she mumbled incoherently to someone named Dan. Limp as a rag doll, she pressed on. But she began falling so many times, he had to carry her the last couple miles.

They stumbled upon the highway at around three-thirty in the morning. Nick covered her with his jacket, then sat by the road and waited for a car. In two hours, he counted only six cars—each one speeding by. He tried flagging them down. But who would be dumb enough to stop at this hour—in the middle of nowhere—for a crazy man covered in blood? It became light out. Sean’s face had a blue tinge, and her every gasp for air was a death rattle.

Somebody in one of those automobiles must have called the cops, because two patrol cars came up the timberland road at seven in the morning. The policemen were from Opal: a gaunt, old sheriff, and his deputy, a tall, big-boned kid who seemed like a pretty dim bulb.

Nick told them his girlfriend had been shot by someone in the woods, and their car had broken down. The sheriff took a look at Sean and radioed paramedics. Nick helped him move Sean into the warm police car. They covered her with a blanket. She didn’t regain consciousness.

It was another forty minutes before the paramedics arrived. Once they’d loaded Sean in back of the ambulance, Nick pulled one of them aside, and asked about her chances. The medic frowned. “She’s in bad shape, and the hospital’s fifty miles away in Lewiston. Doesn’t look good.”

Once the ambulance sped away, the old sheriff asked him for more details about the shooting. Nick reluctantly forfeited his gun, showed him his private detective credentials, and explained that he wasn’t answering any questions without his attorney present. However, he did volunteer to lead them back to where he’d left the car.

They found the original trail and, eventually, Larry’s Honda Accord. The backseat had been kicked through from the trunk, and Larry was gone. The sheriff sent his deputy to look for him.

When he finally hauled Nick into the Opal police station, the sheriff was greeted by a chorus of ringing telephones. Once a line cleared, Nick was allowed his one call to Dayle. The phones kept the old sheriff busy, while Nick remained cuffed to the desk. Over the police radio, the deputy reported that he’d located Larry Chadwick, staggering along a forest trail in his undershorts. With a bullet wound to his left hand and a gash on his forehead, Larry explained that he’d been kidnapped and assaulted.

Two hours later, he marched into the police station as if he owned the place. The dim-witted deputy was on his heels. Cleaned up, and with his wounds bandaged, Larry now wore an aviator jacket, an Izod sport shirt, and pressed blue jeans. “There’s the scumbag!” he declared, stabbing a finger in the air at Nick. “He’s the one! Asshole….”

With his free hand, Nick snuck Sean’s tape recorder from the pocket of his jacket. He let the tape rewind for a moment, while Larry continued his tirade. “You’re gonna get yours, prick….”

The sheriff and his deputy restrained Larry. They gently guided him to the other desk, then sat him down.

Nick pressed play on the recorder, then slowly increased the volume to compete with Larry’s diatribe. “…close-knit group,” Sean was saying. “You and your hunting buddies had a real time of it in those woods outside Portland back in September, didn’t you?”

“Yes, it felt good,” Larry answered on the recording.

Larry stopped yelling as he listened to the sound of his own voice.

“It felt good murdering Tony Katz and his friend? It felt good torturing two fellow human beings?”

“Faggots aren’t human beings. And right now, those two deviates are burning in hell….”

“Turn that off!” Larry barked. “You can’t use that, you son of a bitch. You had a gun to my head the whole time….” Red-faced, he glared at Nick. He didn’t seem to notice that the sheriff was pulling out another set of cuffs. The old man locked one cuff around the desk drawer handle, then slapped the other around Larry’s wrist. “What is this?” Larry let out a stunned laugh. He yanked at the handcuffs, and the heavy desk moved a bit. “Hey, what gives?”

The tired-looking sheriff shook his head. “Sorry, Larry,” he said. “The feds are on their way. Within the hour, they’re gonna have a net over this whole town. You and the guys are finished.”

“Goddamn it!” Larry shouted. “Let me go! You can’t do this! What the hell is happening here anyway? Son of a bitch, LET ME GO!”

Nick Brock shut off the recorder. He sat back and smiled at him. “Hey, Lare. You know, you have the right to remain silent.”

One of the nurses at Lewiston General Hospital showed Avery the bullet they’d extracted from his thigh. Stored in a small glass jar, the tiny, dark-gray projectile couldn’t be kept as a souvenir just yet. It was part of the state’s evidence against Officer Earl Taggert, now charged with two counts of attempted murder and a growing list of misdemeanors.

Avery and Deputy Peter Masqua had shared an ambulance to Lewiston General. Earl Taggert had ridden behind them in a police car. After doctors had treated his broken nose, split lip, and other bruises, the soon-to-be-ex-cop had been escorted to jail. His cohort, an unemployed timber-mill worker named Don Sheckler, had pulled up to the old train depot in his new Cadillac to find three state troopers waiting for him in the station house.

Officer Peter Masqua was in stable condition. Confined to a wheelchair, Avery kept trying Sean’s cellular. No answer. He called her hotel, but she wasn’t in her room. He knew something had to be wrong.

After all of Taggert’s talk about the impending arrival of the “federal guys,” the real FBI had shown up at the hospital early in the morning. Both Avery and Officer Pete had given them enough information to expose the Opal Chapter of SAAMO. The FBI clamped a tight lid on the hospital to keep the information contained and the press oblivious about what was happening. No more outside calls for Avery. Rumors spread among the Lewiston General staff about a gag quarantine of hospital personnel for the next twenty-four hours.

“You’re the biggest thing to hit this little hospital since the Chichester quadruplets were delivered here in 1987,” said Judy, the nurse who had shown Avery his bullet. A petite redhead, she had freckles and a cute face that belied the fact that she had a son in college. She was pushing Avery in his wheelchair down the corridor after a visit with Pete Masqua.

Avery liked Judy. On her morning break, she’d dashed out and bought him pajamas and a flannel robe. “K-Mart’s best,” she’d joked. But it was a big improvement over his skimpy hospital gown. He made a point of telling Judy how grateful he was.

“Well, as an Idaho native and a Christian, I’m on a mission here,” she said, steering him down the hall. “I want to prove to you that we aren’t all hate-mongers. A tiny fraction of nutcases have given this beautiful state a bad rep. And most
real
Christians are very tolerant, good people.”

“I know that,” Avery assured her.

Judy patted his shoulder. “Okay then, end of sermon. Did you hear? The FBI is now monitoring all calls going in and out of here. Visiting privileges are temporarily suspended. There’s even talk that none of us on staff will be able to leave today.”

“I’ve really screwed things up for everybody, haven’t I?” Avery said.

“Oh, I think it’s kind of exciting,” she said. “But maybe you could use your influence with the warden to release me in time for Thanksgiving.”

Avery managed to smile at her over his shoulder. “I can’t promise anything but an autographed eight-by-ten glossy.”

“Just the same, maybe you can offer me some inside information. I seem to be the only one around here who sees a connection with you and Pete Masqua—and this third gunshot case who came in this morning.”

Avery shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, that’s my point. The paramedics brought in a woman at eight o’clock. She’s upstairs in intensive care, practically in a coma. She has an infection, and her temperature’s a hundred and five. Apparently, she was wandering around with a bullet in her shoulder for seven hours. I heard it was a hunting accident in a forest outside Opal. But snoop that I am, I checked her admission chart and she’s a lawyer from Los Angeles….”

Tom watched
Entertainment Tonight
in his hotel suite. Bracket, McCourt & Associates had put him up for the night at the Beverly Hills Hilton, hoping to sign him with their talent agency. He’d agreed to meet them for breakfast downstairs in the morning.

Tom sat on the bed, wearing one of the hotel’s terrycloth bathrobes, sipping champagne and snacking on some foreign crackers from the honor bar. The night final of the
Los Angeles Times
was at the foot of his bed. The photo of Dayle hugging him had made the front page, with the headline:
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON DAYLE SUTTON FAILS, CONSPIRACY EXPOSED
.

By the time the evening news came on, several arrests had been made, including seven of Opal’s most solid citizens. But Howard Buchanan—a.k.a. Hal Buckman—had eluded authorities, and so far, Tom’s story still had no detractors.

Everyone wanted to quote him, and take his picture. Suddenly Tom Lance
mattered
. Several video companies were now vying for the rights to his old films. At last he’d be in video stores. There were job offers too: playing Tom Hanks’s guardian angel in a comedy-fantasy and as an aging mob boss in a Harrison Ford movie. His dreams were coming true.

“Continuing with our top story,” the handsome, sporty
E.T.
anchorman announced. “The man who saved Dayle Sutton’s life and blew the lid off an extremist conspiracy is a seventy-six-year-old film-acting veteran named Tom Lance. According to Lance, an organized hate group used extortion and intimidation to get his cooperation….” Tom watched the same clip of himself from all the other evening newscasts. It was taped outside the police station. The seersucker suit didn’t photograph well, and he looked a bit tired. Still, he relished seeing himself on TV.

The telephone rang. It was the hotel operator. She’d been screening his calls. He’d taken only a handful since checking into the hotel: a couple of talent agents, someone from
People
magazine, and somebody at
The Today Show
. With the remote, Tom muted the TV, then picked up the phone. “Yes?”

“Hello, Mr. Lance. Do you want to take a call from an Adam Blanchard?”