The Reckoning (22 page)

When the news got out, everybody met at the Walker house. Reed Walker arrived in his pursuit car just as Mavis and Nick were leaning on the Suburban and smoking cigarettes in the street outside Kate's house. Yes, they were smoking again, but only when they were stressed, which lately was always, so yes, they were smoking again.

They waited while Reed shut the engine down, popped the door, and came over. He was still in his Highway Patrol uniform, charcoal gray, crisp and military, with a gold six-pointed star on his Kevlar that glittered in the lamplight.

“Where is he?”

“Inside,” said Nick.

“And he's
okay
?”

“He's shaken up, but he's fine,” said Mavis.

“No shock?”

“Nope. Not even that. He's one hard-core young guy. ER docs did the whole nine yards. Axel said there was no way he was going to stay in a hospital, so in the end they decided to bring him home. He's in there now and Beth is holding him so tight I think his eyes are gonna pop out.”

Reed, a hard-faced muscular cop with his black hair in a Marine cut, managed to look almost sunny as he took this in. Almost. “Jeez. I can't believe it.”

“Believe it,” said Nick.

“Anybody figure out how he fell in?”

Mavis and Nick looked at each other.

“We've got a theory,” said Mavis.

Reed went back and forth between them and got it in one. “Shit. They're buddies. Why would Rainey push his buddy in the river?”

“Rainey has a history of shoving people into the Tulip,” said Mavis, who was no longer in the Rainey Teague Fan Club.

“Alice Bayer. That was never laid on him,” said Reed.

“Tig and the ADA figured they'd never make the case,” said Nick. “Psychological issues. A minor. His personal history. The abduction. Any decent defense counsel could kick the case to splinters.”

“What does Axel say?”

“He says Rainey told him to rinse their picnic stuff in the river. Next thing Axel knew, he was going in. When he got back to the surface, Rainey was nowhere around.”

“And he's still gone,” said Mavis. “We've had squads out looking for him. Not a sign.”

“No way a fourteen-year-old kid can stay gone that long. We've taken the town apart. Kid's gone to ground. Only possibility.”

Mavis shook her head. “Gone to ground
how
? He's a kid. Who's gonna help him? Who's gonna hide him from the police?”

Nick had no answer.

“Or he's in the river himself,” said Reed.

Nick shook his head. “Not
that
kid. People saw him running away on his bicycle. He was going south. Rainey's no suicide, Reed. He's fourteen going on forty.”

A matte-black Ford F-150 came around the corner, engine burbling. It came to a stop behind Reed's pursuit car.

“That's Lemon,” said Nick.

Lemon Featherlight stepped out of the truck, and a pale and beautiful blond woman got out of the passenger side. In the amber half-light of the evening she looked like she was made out of spun gold.

“That's Helga Sigrid, the forensic chick,” said Reed in a reverent whisper.

He had made a heated run on her a few weeks back. They'd had one spectacular evening, after which she'd kissed him and told him that
while she would love to have play sex with him anytime, she was thinking maybe she was wanting to have the sex also with Lemon Featherlight.

“I hear she been doing a number on those bone baskets, according to Lemon,” said Nick, cutting into Reed's thoughts.

“Oh, my. Oh, my. She's so fine,” said Mavis in an appreciative whisper as Lemon and Helga Sigrid came up. Mavis, whose sexual inclinations were flexible, was struck by how different they looked, Helga pale and Nordic, Lemon as dark as mahogany, with long shiny black hair. After some reintroductions, Mavis couldn't help saying “You two have eyes exactly the same color.”

“We do,” said Helga with a wide smile. “The green eyes come from Alexander the Great's soldiers. Maybe Lemon and I, we are related.”

Lemon was looking at all the cars parked every which way. “Something's going on here?”

“Oh yeah,” said Nick.

“Can I hear about it?”

So they told him. When they were finished, Mavis and Nick taking turns with it, Reed and Lemon and Helga Sigrid were silent for a few moments, and then Helga said, “He floated on a
dead body
?”

“Yes,” said Mavis. “A headless dead body. We ID'd him from his tats—”

“What are these tats, sorry to ask?”

“Tattoos. The body had tattoos all over both arms. We were able to ID him from those tats.”

“Who was he?” asked Lemon.

“Guy named Ollie Kupferberg,” said Mavis. “A local thug. Looks like he was killed some time Friday night.”

“How he was killed?” asked Helga, who had a professional interest in such things.

“Shotgun blast, from medium range. Took his head clean off. Body might have gone into the river from the Armory Bridge.”

Reed was ahead of the game. “Where it gets caught up on rebar or something on the bridge footings—”

“And stays there decomposing and generating gases,” said Nick. “Until Axel comes along and bumps him free—”

Mavis just had to finish it. “And Ollie Kupferberg turns into a raft and he floats Axel all the way down to the Tin Town Flats, where he comes ashore in the weeds and gets spotted by one of our Tin Town units.”

Helga and Lemon shook their heads.

“Man,” said Lemon. “That's just so freaking…”

“Niceville,” said Nick.

In spite of the grim times that had come upon them, the fact that Axel had survived the Tulip River—few creatures that went into that river ever came out alive—made a kind of impromptu party out of Saturday evening.

Eufaula stayed to say hello to Lemon and met Helga, told Lemon she approved of her in a whispered aside, suggested he keep an eye on Reed in that connection, and then left for the long night's drive up to VMI to see her cadet.

They all had a barbecue out in the backyard and a lot of wine and beer was taken on, and after Axel and Hannah got put to bed in the Carriage House, the rest of them—Nick and Kate and Beth, Mavis and Reed and Lemon and Helga—sat around on lawn chairs and talked in soft voices about all manner of things.

Out of regard for the civilians, nobody asked too many specific questions about what had happened to those two cops who had gone into the house on Sable Basilisk. They were in the ICU at Sorrows, physically unharmed, completely out of it, dazed and sedated, the neurologists clustering around.

There was still no word on Rainey, or for that matter, on Maris Yarvik, who was now the subject of an ever-expanding search, since the guys on the scene had figured out that Yarvik was actually inside the Sable Basilisk townhouse when Nick and Mavis had gone to check it.

A search of the Garrison Hills area had offered up nothing useful, and seven hours later the search perimeter had been expanded to include just about all of Niceville west of the Tulip River.

Combined NPD and County patrol crews were going house to house, everybody in town had been asked to check on neighbors and relatives to see if they were being held hostage, and an Air Unit chopper from State equipped with infrared and thermal sensors had flown over every playground, park, and green space in the entire city, including four random sweeps over the Confederate Graveyard.

Results so far: dick all, other than a couple of thousand freaked-out raccoons and possums and an elderly couple in the midst of a complicated carnal encounter in their own backyard who had gotten themselves lit up by the Air Unit hovering at a hundred feet above them.

The subsequent sincere apology offered to the couple by the chopper pilot was not entirely helpful, since it was delivered through a bullhorn and was loud enough to rattle windows and raise eyebrows in all the neighboring houses

Yarvik's wife Glynda was offering a reward of $10,000 for
any
information, but so far nothing. Crime scene specialist Dakota Riley's report from the Morrison killings had come through, and its basic message was that Maris Yarvik's DNA was everywhere it had no reason to be.

Around eleven Frank Barbetta showed up with a supersized cat carrier containing Mildred Pierce, the Maine Coon cat who was the only survivor of the Morrison killings. The cat had been cleaned up and medicated by some guys from the Canine Unit, and Frank Barbetta had decided to adopt her. He was her third owner.

The first was Delia Cotton, now either missing or dead or living like a recluse in Temple Hill, her mansion up in The Chase. The second was Doug Morrison, who had adopted her when Delia Cotton went missing. With Morrison now dead, along with the rest of his family, Frank Barbetta had taken her on.

It did not occur to him that Mildred Pierce was not a harbinger of good fortune.

Barbetta stayed for a couple of beers and they told him the Ollie Kupferberg story and Barbetta sat there with the Chopin nocturnes turned down low and took it all in with a quiet smile, thinking his own thoughts.

Nick, who'd had a couple of G and Ts, was feeling loose and getting ready to take Frank aside and ask him about Frédéric Chopin when Beth came back out of the Carriage House, where she had gone to check on the kids. She sat down in her chair, looking distracted, picked up her glass.

“Axel just said something odd,” she said.

“I'll alert the media,” said Lemon, who, unless Helga could drive a truck, was definitely going home in a cab. He'd been up since five in the morning and had driven all the way down from Charlottesville. Helga looked over at Reed, who mouthed the words
hammered to the gills
with a wolfish smile and got a sideways look back.
Never say die
, Reed was thinking.

“What'd Axel say?” asked Kate.

“This man you're looking for, the suspect in the Morrison case. Have you released his name yet?”

“Beau put out a press release at five.”

“And what was his name?”

“Maris Yarvik,” said Mavis.

Now everyone was picking up Beth's tone.

“Beth? What is it?” asked Kate.

“And this was at
five
?” asked Beth.

“Yes,” said Nick. “Right around there. It went out to all the stations, the papers, the wire services.”

“But before that, nobody knew it?”

“Nobody outside the investigation,” said Nick. “What's bothering you, Beth?”

“Axel got shoved into the Tulip at three, right?”

“Yes, best guess, according to Bob Mullryne.”

“Okay…I went in to check on Axel and he was awake, so I asked him how he was, and he asked me who Maris Yarvik was.”

“Okay,” said Kate. “He was in the ER around five, and they had a television in the waiting room.”

“No. What he said was that
Rainey
had told him about a Maris Yarvik.”

“Rainey?” said Barbetta. “There's no way he could have known about Maris Yarvik. Not at three.”

“Nobody knew,” said Nick. “Nobody who wasn't a cop. Is Axel sure?”

“He's sure. He repeated the name. He said that Rainey was upset about Kate and me being mad at him—they were right by the river there—and Rainey got a funny look—Axel said it was like Rainey was listening to something—and then he got real happy and smiled at Axel and he said something like Maris Yarvik was some kind of handyman or servant and he did favors for Rainey.”

That sent a ripple through the cops. “
Rainey
said that?” asked Barbetta.

“At
three
?” asked Reed.

“Is this so strange?” asked Helga. “Forgive me for asking this.”

“It is certainly passing strange,” said Lemon, enunciating carefully, fooling no one.

“Too damn strange,” said Nick.

“What does it mean?” asked Beth.

“It means we need to find Rainey,” said Mavis.

The evening, like the fire, was winding down. Barbetta had gotten the impression that Lemon and the Valkyrie had driven all the way down from Charlottesville with something important to talk about with Nick, but given Lemon's current condition, it had been decided that Reed was going to drive them to the Marriott in Lemon's pickup and come back in a cab for his Interceptor.

So, time to say good night, Gracie.

He picked up his cat carrier, said his good-byes to everyone, gave Reed a cautionary look that Reed was delighted to completely ignore, and headed around the house to the driveway.

Nick caught up with him at the gate.

Barbetta heard him coming, figured he knew what Nick wanted to talk about, so he waited, thinking that whatever happened, he wasn't going to lie about any of it. What he had done was done.

“Frank, I wanted to ask you about those earplug things. About Frédéric Chopin.”

That surprised Barbetta. “Not about Ollie Kupferberg?”

Nick looked out at the street, watched some guy ambling along in the dark about two hundred yards up the street, walking a dog, maybe.

Nick let out a sigh, fumbled for his cigarettes, offered one to Barbetta.

They lit up and Barbetta waited.

“To be honest, Frank, I don't want to hear one more fucking thing about Ollie Kupferberg. He's dead and Axel's not. Kupferberg was no earthly use while he was alive, but he was exactly the right guy in exactly the right place when he was dead.”

Barbetta considered that. “Okay. If you and Tig and Mavis are good with that, so am I.”

“Good,” said Nick, smiling at him through the smoke cloud. “So, the Frédéric thing?”

“It's FREE-drick, not Frederick.”

“Right. Freed-rick. I'll try to remember. You've been wearing them how long?”

Barbetta gave him a look. “Well, since we did that tunnel thing with the Dutrow kid.”