Knife River, page 26
“Where did you drift off to just now, Tyler?”
“Just thinking.”
“This isn’t the time to be secretive,” she said.
Jesse had no way of knowing in that moment that her choice of words had cut to the quick of my psyche, an unwitting surgical strike. I had just spent the better part of the past two hours constructing a scheme based on little more than decades-old secrets and rumors, suppositions, whispered confidences and vague recollections, the entirety of which was dependent upon the reputation I had earned as the sheriff of this county. That, and the trust being placed in my personal judgment. I had not lied to anyone, but innocent people now found themselves in positions of potential personal compromise that would and should land squarely on me if I proved to be wrong. The burden was solely mine to carry, but I owed my wife a measure of truth.
“I went to see Ruth Brawley yesterday,” I said.
“Oh really? What about?”
“About an old case that I couldn’t recall. From back in the sixties.”
“I hope you didn’t upset her,” she said as she sipped her wine and studied the firelight reflected in the facets of her glass.
“No, turns out Ruth’s a pretty tough cookie. But it’s a goddamned unpleasant story. Do you remember the young girl they found at the old McEvoy farm, back in the day? The story at the time was that she committed suicide, hung herself.”
“At the McEvoy farm?”
“At the time, the place was owned by a family named Swanson.”
“Vaguely rings a bell. What about it?”
I took a deep draft of Jim Beam and rattled the ice in my glass, then recounted the story I’d heard from Ruth Brawley: the antipathy that existed between the Lomax and Swanson families, the budding teenage romance between Paul Swanson and Heather Lomax, and the inexcusable combination of apathy and ineptitude that had tainted the investigation in the aftermath of Heather Lomax’s death.
The longer I spoke, the more Jesse receded into herself, and I felt guilty about having brought up the subject at all, reconsidering whether I had unintentionally shifted my millstone to her. The whiskey in my tumbler had turned mostly to water. I stopped speaking, drank off the dregs of my drink, and crossed the room to the bar cart, where I made myself a fresh one and brought Jesse’s wine bottle with me back to the fireplace.
She was staring into the firebox when I returned, shoulders hunched, hands clasped, leaning into the heat from the flames. I resettled myself, and I saw my wife startle when a log slipped from the andiron and sent a shower of sparks up the flue.
“Tell me the rest of it,” Jesse said.
“That’s it,” I answered. “That’s all of it.”
“I can tell that there’s more to the story. I’m not made of porcelain, Tyler.”
I refilled her wineglass and set the bottle on the mantel beside me; I looked into the face of the best woman I know.
“Apparently, there was some evidence the girl had been abused before she died,” I said.
“She was raped?”
I nodded.
“Ruth Brawley believes Heather Lomax might have been pregnant at the time of her death.”
“Poor thing. That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“She wouldn’t be the first girl to think she was out of options,” Jesse said.
“I said the same thing, but Ruth seemed to think she was okay, that she had a plan of some kind.”
“The girl must have been terrified. Who was the father?”
“Miss Ruth didn’t know. But she was reasonably sure it wasn’t the girl’s boyfriend. Seems the Swanson boy drove Heather to Doc’s office that day, very concerned about her, and not in the way that you’d expect.”
“If he wasn’t the father, then who was it?”
“Lloyd Skadden’s investigation never got that far. And Doc Brawley never got the chance to follow up. But Heather Lomax lived alone with her father, by all accounts a bitter man and an angry, volatile drunk. Caleb told me he knew the man.”
Jesse shivered.
“Good god,” she said. “People can be such animals.”
“Once Skadden had it marked down as a suicide, both families skipped town in a hurry. Seemed the whisper mill here was throwing around a lot of unpleasant speculation, and both the men thought there’d be repercussions of some kind.”
“They were probably right. Anybody know where they went?”
“Gavin Lomax disappeared off the map. Had family in Tennessee according to Miss Ruth. Nobody around here ever saw or heard from him again.”
I stopped talking when I noticed our daughter padding down the hallway. She was barefooted, wearing a flannel nightgown with an unbuttoned wool sweater wrapped around her shoulders. Her hair was still damp, disheveled and unevenly parted; the overall effect of her appearance put me in mind of the sole survivor from a ravaged pioneer wagon train.
“You don’t need to stop talking just because I walked in the room,” Cricket said.
“Have a seat by the fire and warm up,” I said as I stood and offered her my seat on the hearth.
Wyatt the dog heard Cricket’s voice and wandered in from the mudroom and planted himself on the floor beside her bare feet. She leaned down and scratched him behind his ears and she smiled at him as he squeezed his eyes shut in canine bliss. Our daughter looked up at me, and then at her mother, stitched her lips tightly together, and gazed out the window into the deepening color outdoors.
“I’m not naive,” she said softly, her focus lingering outside somewhere in the woods. “I knew Ian wasn’t going to make it. I saw the whole thing, watched it happen right in front of me. Nobody could live through something like that.”
Jesse started to speak, but Cricket continued as though she was thinking aloud, or perhaps solely to hear her own voice. She stopped scratching Wyatt and he curled into a ball as she settled herself closer to the flames.
“It’s just that you never think that the day will ever come,” Cricket said. “The day when it actually happens, and he’s just … gone.”
“I’m sorry, Cricket,” I said. “Very sorry.”
“Ian liked you,” she said, and a wistful smile touched the corners of her mouth. “He thought you were cool.”
“I don’t believe I’ve heard that word applied to me very often,” I said and watched my daughter turn inward again. “He was a decent young man, Cricket. He didn’t have it easy, did he?”
“No, he didn’t,” she said. “How do you know that?”
“People talk. Did he say much to you about his life?”
“A little,” she said. She turned toward her mother and held out a hand for Jesse’s wineglass. “May I have a sip?”
“You can finish it off,” Jesse said. “Might help you sleep.”
“Ian moved somewhere outside of Chicago when he was a teenager,” Cricket said. “At the time, it was just Ian and his brother and their dad.”
“Moved from where?” I baited and noticed the look Jesse shot at me.
Cricket shrugged and tipped the wineglass to her lips.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He said they lived in an apartment above an old lady’s garage. Ian’s dad did chores and handyman work for the lady in exchange for rent. Then Ian’s dad died in a car crash not long after they moved there. Ian said he and his brother started using new names after the insurance got paid out. He was terrified that Child Services would find them and take his brother away from him. Anyway, the authorities found his dad’s car in a lake, but they never found his dad’s body. Creepy. Really did a number on Ian.”
“He was only a boy himself at the time,” I said.
“That’s terrible,” Jesse agreed.
“It pretty much messed up Ian,” Cricket said. “He wasn’t even sixteen yet and he had to take care of his brother—his brother’s handicapped, you know. They had a little money from their dad’s life insurance, but it wasn’t much. Ian quit school and bussed tables at a diner. He learned to play guitar and busked in the street for money. That’s where the record people found him. Playing guitar on the sidewalk for loose change.”
“Ian never mentioned that to me,” I said.
“He didn’t talk too much about it,” she said and looked into my face. Her expression had grown brighter as she spoke of Ian’s life. “I guess they had some big reveal planned during the Saturday concert. Some big thing for the film.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. Ian never said. It all seemed very hush-hush.”
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and the blood in my veins rushed cold.
“Did Kaanan ever say anything about that to you, Jesse?” I asked.
She shook her head and eyed me with that special look she held in reserve for when she wanted me to know that we’d be talking about this whole thing later on.
“First time I’m hearing about it,” Jesse admitted. “But Len is the director. There’s no reason he’d feel compelled to tell me everything. Why?”
“Just curious,” I said, but Jesse knew I was prevaricating, and one more cog clicked into place in my head.
I FINISHED my Jim Beam on the gallery, the ridgeline now reduced to a shadow against a sky of deepening blue, a final gasp of golden glow showing along the rim. I heard Drambuie nickering inside the barn not far away, saw the incandescent light come to life behind the cupola as Taj Caldwell and Paul Tucker fed and watered the horses before they retired to the bunkhouse. I leaned a shoulder on the porch stanchion and passed my eyes across the dense tangle of forest. The musky smell of equine sweat, leather, and trampled sweetgrass lingered in the air as Jesse stepped outside to join me.
“Want to tell me what that was about in there?” she asked.
“It’s probably nothing, but if I turn out to be correct, I’ll be sure to let you know,” I said and winked at her.
I was about to head back indoors when something in the tree line captured my attention. I cupped my free hand to my face and squinted into the woods.
“What is it?” Jesse asked.
I thought I’d seen a flash of light in the shadows of the trees, like a twinkling on metal, or perhaps the reflective surface of binocular lenses. I stood on the gallery and stared into the vegetation until my eyes watered, wondering whether my fatigue and imagination were playing tricks on me.
“I thought I saw something out there,” I said.
I dipped into my shirt pocket and showed Jesse the Polaroid photograph of the stagehand from Half Mountain.
“Who’s this?” she asked.
“I was hoping you’d know.”
“Looks like one of the riggers out at the studio. What’s going on, Ty? Why are you carrying that man’s picture in your pocket?”
“He’s just somebody I’m trying to find,” I said. “But if this guy ever shows his face on this ranch and I’m not around, shoot him.”
Jesse cut her eyes to the rifle case in the living room and the row of lever-action rifles lined up behind the display glass. She took another look at the photograph, passed it back to me, and nodded.
“I’d shoot that guy whether you’re here or not,” she said and returned to the kitchen.
CHAPTER THIRTY
BIG JIM BELNIK called me at home before I’d finished my second cup of coffee. I had stayed at home that morning to cook breakfast for Cricket and Jesse, an attempt to return a little normalcy into our lives. The aroma of frying bacon and drop biscuits filled the kitchen, and I’d already set the table for the three of us when the phone started to ring.
“I saw Len Kaanan’s statement on the TV news this morning,” Belnik said without preamble when I picked up. “Looks like I’m coming along with you, Dawson. You said you’d think on it. Just say the word. Tell me when and where.”
I had seen the newscast, too. Len Kaanan had come through, had done exactly what I’d asked of him, and made a statement to the media that Ian Swann’s miraculous recovery would see him released from the hospital no later than tomorrow morning. I could tell that it had taken all that Kaanan had in him to stand before the cameras and lie outright, and I recognized that I had now used up every last chip of credibility I possesssed to garner the cooperation of these men, and that of Nurse Fields. I knew I had to allow Big Jim to be with me today. My hunch would either prove right or wrong, and the outcome was about to fall squarely on me.
“Saddle up, Jim. We had a deal,” I said, and gave him the details as to where to meet me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I WAITED UNTIL the evening shift change at the hospital, intending my clandestine activities to get lost in the transitional commotion. The sign fixed to the wall outside Ian Swann’s room still had his name printed on it, but the room’s door was closed, and inside, my deputy Jordan Powell was being costumed in a hospital gown, taped with counterfeit IV tubes and wires, and wrapped with gauze from head to foot like Ian Swann had been. I watched him climb into the bed, his service weapon tucked between his knees, one eye exposed beneath the bandages, thin blankets tucked under his chin. I could see that Powell was grinning as we turned out the lights inside the room, the only window in the room exposing the closing moments of dusk outside as the hospital shifted into the quieter modality of evening.
BUSINESS PROCEEDED as usual for the authentic members of the medical staff, serving the needs of real patients suffering real afflictions, while Jim Belnik, dressed in surgical scrubs, pretended to be working, reading articles he’d clipped out of the Portland newspaper and taped onto a clipboard, his brow etched with a scowl. I, too, was incognito, a doctor’s white lab coat obscuring the revolver I carried underneath, a stethoscope draped across my shoulders and a plastic badge with a name I didn’t recognize pinned to a pocket bulging with ballpoint pens.
Minutes stretched into hours, the hours into increasingly muted spans of unmarked time that overtook the building and commenced to mock me when the hall lights began to dim and the snores of slumbering patients drifted down the empty corridors as the clock passed midnight and crossed into the wee hours. Belnik shot a look at me, his confidence in my scheme visibly diminishing as we sat side by side in the nurses’ station, sharing that emotional no-man’s-land that is known so well by soldiers and the condemned, that crimson-gray borderline that marks the space between the haze of boredom and the sudden terror of incoming fire; a grenade of razor wire concealed inside the velvet temptation of slumber, the fright that wakes you from your torpor like a blast of Willy Pete and turns your bodily fluids to ice and forever after fills your skull with spiders and disinherits you of any expectation of peace.
I could sense that Belnik had all but given up on me when I looked up and noticed the man I’d been waiting for all night prowling furtively along the corridor. He was attired simply in blue jeans, white T-shirt, and khaki jacket; he carried no weapon that I could detect, which meant little to me under the circumstances. If this man was here with the intentions I suspected, his errand could be accomplished with a simple pillow pressed over an unsuspecting and slumbering face, or a swift and decisive wrench to the head, a broken neck and a severed spinal cord. His shoe soles made little sound as he moved along the deserted passage, his attention focused and unblinking. I averted my eyes from his direction and pretended a flagging concentration on reading from a stack of medical journals at my elbow.
He trailed an odor of stale tobacco, sweat, and creosote, the telltale scents of his personal pursuits, so pungent it was as if they’d been infused into his skin. He shot a quick glance left and right, saw nothing to discourage his objective this time, and, confirming that Ian Swann’s name still appeared on the placard, slipped inside the darkened hospital room he’d come so close to entering once before.
I tapped Jim Belnik’s foot and woke him, held a finger to my lips to make sure Big Jim remained silent while I unbuttoned my white lab coat and tucked the open flap behind the handle of my Colt. I held an open palm between Belnik and me, gestured for him to stay right where he was as I crept my way along the wall toward Swann’s room, one hand tracing the wainscot and the other ready on the grip of my Peacemaker.
I could hear no sound at all emanating from within as I approached the door, risking exposure as I peered through the narrow opening between the doorjamb and the door. The dim glow of the medical devices inside lit the intruder’s plain features, and I watched him withdraw a small clamshell box from his jacket pocket and snap it open. I recognized the shape of a syringe as he extracted it from the box, one he’d likely copped from among his junkie FTRA brothers and was now about to employ to commit murder on a man who appeared to be slumbering helpless in his bed.
I noticed the bedsheets stir slightly as the trespasser drew back the plunger, his eyes compacted to slits of concentration as he charged the cartridge with deadly air. All at once, the prostrate body in the bed sat upright, head bandaged like a mummy, a Navy Colt 1911 clutched in a fist and aimed only inches from the bridge of the would-be killer’s nose. The intruder spun toward the door, but I now stood in his way. He gripped the syringe firmly in his palm and made a move to stab me in the eye with it, but I juked sideways and felt the breeze of a near miss.
He, too, feinted from one side to the other, then tried to shoulder past me through the doorframe, but there were two of us for him to deal with now, Jordan Powell now standing behind him in a Weaver stance. Powell thumbed the Colt’s hammer with the distinctive mechanical click that anyone with a familiarity with firearms recognizes as the last sound you’ll hear on this earth if you choose not to yield.
The would-be killer halted in his tracks and I shipped my Peacemaker and drew a bead on the man’s forehead.
“Go ahead and hook this man up, Jordan,” I said.
