Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery (Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (36 page)

Kevin nodded. “The most efficient thing for us to do would be to drop a net on the meth house. We can either find Roy or squeeze whatever lowlife we do catch.” He looked at the FBI agents. “How would that affect your investigation?”

“We can live with that,” Tom O’Day said. “In fact…” He examined the ceiling as if he might find a message in the soundproofed tiles. “Maybe this is the time to make the move.”

“During the ice storm of the century?” Boileau laughed. “Trust me when I say we don’t want any agents running around out there. They’ll only end up flat on their asses.”

Hadley smirked.

Marie O’Day glanced at her husband. “We’ll talk about it later.” She walked over to the door and opened it. “Officers, I’m sure you’re eager to get started home. With the weather and all.”

“We are. Thank you so very much for all your consideration.” Hadley used the same fake-polite voice the federal agent had. The two women stood opposite one another, smiling in what Kevin assumed was the female version of “show me yours.”

Tom O’Day caught his eye. The man gave him a half-rueful, half-proud look that said,
Women. What are you going to do?
Kevin realized O’Day assumed he and Hadley were also a couple. Kevin opened his mouth to set the man straight, then changed his mind. “Thank you both,” he said. “Detective Patten?”

He drove back to South Station going twenty miles an hour the whole way. “What do you think of the O’Days? Will they come through for us?”

Hadley made a rude noise. “I wouldn’t count on it. I’m sure they have a nice plum promotion waiting for them if they can bring down LaMar. Mikayla will just be an unfortunate loss. Too bad. Better luck next time.”

“I disagree.” Patten leaned forward from the backseat. “Tom and Marie have been in the same office, at the same level, for a lot of years now. The only thing waiting for them is a federal pension check.” He snorted. “And maybe a job as a greeter in Walmart, if the Feds are as stingy as the state is.”

Kevin pulled into the station’s parking lot, wobbling across the ice. “Are you sure you two won’t stay the night?” Patten asked. “When Lyle called me, he said to keep you here if the weather got too bad. It’s gonna be a skating rink once you get off the Northway.”

“Thanks,” Hadley said, “but I’ve got children at home.”

“You sure? We got lots of room at my house now the kids are gone. Plus Vince’s famous sausage patties for breakfast.”

“We’ll be fine. I trust Flynn’s driving.”

“All right, then.” The Albany detective sounded doubtful. “At least let me set you up with a couple travel mugs of coffee and a visit to the restroom. ’Course, you two are young. Maybe you can make it all the way back to Washington County, even in this weather. Me, I gotta stop twice between here and Saratoga to drain the snake. It’s hell gettin’ old, lemme tell you.”

Kevin and Hadley managed to make it inside without too many more of Patten’s pithy tales. They accepted the coffee, turned down the stale Danishes, and were headed out the door again when one of the civilian employees jogged down the hallway to stop them. The headset still tucked over her ears identified her job.

“Officer Knox?” She held out a folded piece of paper to Hadley. “We got a squawk from your dispatcher while you and Detective Patten were out. She said they tried to call you, but your cell phone’s not working.” The woman looked harried. “First the landlines, then the cell network breaks down from too many calls and too few towers. Keep your fingers crossed we don’t overload the emergency system, too.” She waved and jogged back to the communications room.

Hadley unfolded the paper. “What is it?” Kevin asked. “Has the chief finally shown up?”

She looked up at him, her face white. She held the message out for him to read.
Call from Glenn Hadley via MKPD. Officer Knox’s ex-husband has her children. Please advise.

12.

As camps went, a half-burned cabin with a working woodstove wasn’t the worst Russ had ever slept in. He was a hell of a lot warmer and drier than he had ever been, say, sleeping in mud in ’Nam. On the other hand, as a honeymoon, the whole experience was sucking hard.

When Clare had reached him on the lake, pink-cheeked and out of breath and gloriously alive, he had felt as if joy alone could levitate him out of the trap he had gotten stuck in. Then she had propped her hands on her hips. “How on
earth
did you fall into your own ice-fishing hole?” She didn’t sound overpleased to see him.

“It was an accident! I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“Five square miles of ice and you manage to step into one eighteen-inch-diameter hole.” She squatted, stripping off her gloves. “I’ll lift you.”

He almost told her not to bother, but he hadn’t been able to leverage himself yet, and his right leg had gone completely numb. He took her hands and she stood, grunting. He slid from the fishing hole. Clare dragged him free, then dropped him on the ice like an oversized arctic char. Water dribbled out of his boot. He groaned.

She frowned at the sight of his sopping clothing. “We need to get those pants off and your leg warmed up, or you’re going to get frostbite.” She held out her hands again, and he let her help him up without protest. She looked toward the cabin. From this angle, they couldn’t see the fire, only the heavy smoke trying to rise against the rain. “It should be plenty warm up there. Where’s Lieutenant Mongue?”

“In the boathouse. I stuck him in a canoe with blankets and a bunch of hand warmers. He should be okay for a while.”

She picked up the shotgun and handed it to him. “You should have stayed with him. I was coming to find you.”

He slung an arm across her shoulder. They started across the ice, Clare balancing, Russ limping. “I didn’t know that, did I? I thought I was racing to save you from a fate worse than death.”

“I can take care of myself. You ought to know that by now.”

“You weren’t doing such a good job of it the other night, when they had you hogtied on the front porch.” He had no idea how he had gone from ecstatic to annoyed in less than fifteen minutes. “Never mind. How did you get away? And where’s the little girl?”

As they walked to the shore, she gave him a rundown of her morning that sounded like the sort of heavily edited report he used to give to officious superiors. Before he could press her to tell him the real meat of the matter, she asked, “What do you think he meant by ‘the factory’?”

“Factory implies they’re making something, as opposed to storing drugs for transport. Unless they’re repackaging smuggled cigarettes, it’s probably a meth house. I’m guessing Roy and DeJean didn’t drive along the Shore Road. They probably went past the turnoff, into the hills. Nothing up that way but a few old farms. Lots and lots of space, no neighbors. Remember, I told you, perfect country for cooking meth.” They reached land. Stepping into the snow, his right foot twinged. “I think I’m getting feeling back.”

“Good. Let’s get you as close to the fire as we can.”

“You know, a burning house isn’t the safest place to hang about getting toasty.”

“If you have a better suggestion, I’m all ears.” Clare set her mouth in a line and continued upslope. In fact, the fire looked to be dying down. Russ could still feel the heat yards away, but the flames no longer roared and reared into the sky. As they drew closer, he could see why. The entire wall facing the road had burned away, and the loft, unbalanced and unsupported, had cracked and fallen at an angle. Fire was trying to chew its way farther down the side of the house, but without DeJean’s accelerant, the logs were proving a tough match. Clare led him to the woodshed, which was, ironically, untouched. Roofed and enclosed on three sides, it had trapped heat from the cabin fire. He pulled off his dripping poncho and began untying his boots.

“There you go. Take off those pants and have a seat.”

“Here?” It was warm and protected from the rain, but being so close to the cabin fire made him antsy. “What if something explodes and the whole place goes up?”

“There isn’t anything in there to explode, except maybe what was in the composting toilet, and that’s already gone.” She took a few steps toward the remains of the cabin, scooped up a handful of snow, and tossed it against a strip of fire eating its way across a log. The flames sizzled and wavered. “Maybe we can put it out.”

“Don’t get too close,” he warned, working his jeans off. Painful prickles replaced the numbness in his leg. He was warm, and his wife was safe, and he just wanted to rest for one goddamn minute.

When he opened his eyes again, he had a wool blanket thrown over him and the pale gray sky had dimmed into twilight. He rose, stretching and snapping his spine, which screamed at him for falling asleep on a pile of timber. His parka fell, which was when he realized his jeans, boxers, socks, and boots were gone. Clare had left him a pair of thick wool socks last seen in the duffel he had left with Bob. He tugged them on, flexing and testing his leg as he did so. Apparently, his ice-water plunge hadn’t done him any harm. He wrapped the blanket around his waist and went around to the back of the cabin.

The canoe, empty and overturned, was set in front of the porch door. He angled past it and walked inside, part of him amazed that the structure was untouched. The rest of him was amazed to see his wife and Mongue, draped in blankets and sprawled in front of the woodstove, talking. Clare had turned over the sofa and chairs and dragged them into a rough curve, capturing the stove’s heat and blocking the draft from the blackened ruins of the kitchen and bedroom.

She looked up as he opened the inner door. “You’re awake!”

“I am now.” He stared at where the loft floor had become a lean-to. “Clare, what were you thinking?” To his left, the bedroom’s French doors had split and shattered. Cold air sucked through the half-collapsed hole where the outside windows had been. “This place isn’t safe. The whole thing could come down any second.”

Mongue twirled his hand above his head. “’S fine.”

“I tested it before we set up camp,” Clare said. “I jumped and pulled and stomped on things. We’re okay in this corner.”

She had a roaring fire going in the woodstove. He shook his head in disbelief. “What were you going to do if the loft had dropped on you while you were jumping and stomping? Jesus, Clare, if you can’t stop to think of yourself, at least think of the baby.”

“Gotta take care of the baby,” Mongue agreed.

“I’m sorry to have alarmed you.” Clare’s voice sharpened and her Virginia accent increased. Never a good sign. “In your absence, I had to trust in my
girlish
intuition and my pilot’s survival training and the experience I gained from tours of duty in two war zones!”

“You tell ’im, Clare.”

Her frown edged into a half-smile. “Thanks, Bob.”

So it was Clare and Bob now, was it? Russ picked his way between Mongue and the open duffel bag to sit next to his wife. His wet clothing had been hung on one of the rickety porch chairs. “It’s dry,” Clare said, following his gaze.

He peeled off the damp ragg socks and laid them on the hearthstone. “You should have woken me up. We could have crossed the lake, gotten the truck, and be gone by now.”

“Bob and I discussed it. The ice storm’s been going on for two and a half days now. Even supposing we could drive out on the South Shore Drive without running into another fallen tree or downed power line, there’s no telling what condition the highway’s in. We could wind up off the road, trapped, with no help coming and no place to take refuge.”

“We could have called for help!”

“I
tried
that. The radio is dead. No signal. Bob and I decided the safer thing to do was to stay put for the night.”

“In a half-destroyed cabin that could fall in on us at any moment. A pregnant woman and a guy with a broken leg.”

“’M feeling better.”

Russ peered at the trooper. “What the hell, Bob? Are you high?”

“Yep.”

“I grabbed a first aid kit from Travis’s place before I left.” Clare pointed to a white plastic box with a familiar red cross sitting next to Mongue. “It turned out it had a different kind of aid than I was thinking.”

Bob rattled the box. “Oxys.”

Russ stared at Clare. “You took Travis Roy’s OxyContin stash?”

“Well, I didn’t know it contained narcotics. But yes.”

“And gave some to Bob?”

“’S good stuff,” the trooper said.

“It
is
pain medication.”

Russ hesitated, not wanting to sound suspicious. Something in his expression must have given him away, though, because Clare set her hand on his arm. “I didn’t sample any.” She kept her voice low.

He was equally quiet. “I didn’t think—”

She gave him a look. “Russ. I have a problem. I understand if you worry.” She looked around the ruins of their cabin. “Somehow, this didn’t seem like the time to fall off the wagon.”

He snorted. “I have to confess something.”

“You’ve come to the right person, then.”

“I didn’t want to go to a resort for our honeymoon because I thought this would be easier on you.” He gestured toward the darkness through the still-intact porch windows. “No temptations to resist.”

She looked into the fire for a moment before nodding. “I think we’ve managed to go beyond ‘no temptation.’ But that reminds me!” She scooted across the floor and retrieved a box from behind one of the tipped-over chairs. “Animal crackers.” She handed the box to him. “Hungry?”

In response, his stomach growled. Clare shook the box toward the state trooper. “Bob? Are you ready for dinner?”

“No steak and potatoes, huh? Damn.”

Clare laid a scarf on the floor and portioned out the tiny cookies into three piles. “You should have more,” Russ said. “You’re eating for two.”

“You can both split my share,” Mongue said. “’S’not like I’m burning up calories running around.”

“Yeah, but you need to keep your strength up. You know, to fight off infection.”

“Enough.” Clare used her Officer Voice. “We all get an equal share.”

Russ sketched a salute, smiling. “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.”

“Bossy, i’n’t she?” Bob said.