Cold Fire, page 2
‘I’m overreacting,’ she admitted. ‘Ignore me.’
‘Kinda difficult to do that when you screw up your face and wretch.’
‘Yeah, it’s definitely an overreaction. Hopefully you don’t react as dramatically after I tell you who Ratcliffe’s sister is.’
Po eyed her steadily.
‘All right, so you’re not known for losing your sense of proportion,’ she teased, ‘but you might want to steel yourself.’
‘Is she someone famous?’
‘Infamous. You’ve seen the news lately, right?’
‘Sure I have.’
‘What do you make of the nanny who supposedly killed their mother and the children in her care?’
‘You say supposedly, but the evidence is stacked against her. You tellin’ me that Ratcliffe’s sister is this Angel of Death character?’
‘Yes.’
Po’s right eyebrow rose and fell.
‘I guess I kinda blew the surprise, huh?’ said Tess.
‘Nothin’ people do to each other surprises me any more,’ he said. ‘But I must admit, those that hurt children are the worst of the worst in my estimation.’
‘So you don’t think you want to help her?’
‘We’re helpin’ her? I thought Ratcliffe asked you to help bring in a fugitive.’
‘Detective Ratcliffe isn’t fully convinced of her sister’s guilt. Can’t say I am either, not after giving it some more thought. It’s too convenient that the missing nanny was assumed guilty of the murders, right?’
‘There was that case years ago where the British au pair was accused of shakin’ a baby and killin’ it. She was found guilty.’
‘She was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter; Joanne Mason’s been accused of multiple cold-blooded murders.’
‘I can put aside my personal feelings till we find out if she’s a monster or not’ – Po nodded at where the table hid her marginally swollen belly – ‘but are you sure you can … considering?’
‘There were difficult cases where I had to remain neutral when I was a cop, I compartmentalized my feelings, and I’ll do it again: being pregnant shouldn’t affect my judgment. Besides, what if she is innocent?’
Po didn’t answer.
Tess said, ‘More importantly, are you going to eat those pickles?’
THREE
She forced the door closed and immediately snapped the security chain in its holder. Placing her back to the door she stood a moment, trying to regain her composure after dashing the final few yards in panic. She had heard voices, the scuff of shoes on asphalt and had feared that she was about to be pounced upon. She’d almost dropped the old-fashioned key on its oversized fob before she got the door unlocked and lurched inside her motel room. Outside, the footsteps continued, along with the low murmur of conversation. They dwindled. Apparently she was not the object of a trap, or if she were then she’d derailed it for a minute or two more. She listened a while longer, then crept to the single window and peeked between the vertical blinds. She could still hear distant voices, but there was nobody in sight.
Joanne Mason darted across her room to the bathroom: the only place where somebody could lurk out of sight. Nobody was there. She checked her room, trying to spot if anyone had snuck inside while she was out and if the place had been surreptitiously searched. She feared also that tiny cameras and listening devices could have been hidden inside sprinkler heads, smoke alarms or even the light switches on the walls. If a team had fitted any covert surveillance equipment in her room they were damn good at their craft, as they had managed to conceal the tech without disturbing the ratty, disheveled room. The light switch for the bathroom still hung partly off the wall, a screw missing, as it had when she first rented the hovel. Dust clung to the spiderwebs on the lampshade at the centre of the ceiling. The webs themselves, thickened and balled up in spots, caused shadows to be cast about, patterns missing from the uninspired cream paint on the walls. On second study, the walls weren’t painted cream, maybe once they’d been nearer white, but the thousands of cigarettes smoked inside over the years had soured the paintwork. Joanne thought that the most recent tenant had probably smoked a thousand cigarettes judging by the smell that clung to everything. The dated wooden furniture felt tacky.
Next she opened the single closet and saw her meager belongings were untouched. She sorted through them nonetheless, ensuring no tracking devices had been slipped into her bag. She was being overly paranoid: anyone pursuing her wouldn’t waste time with elaborate surveillance, they’d strike the instant they had eyes on her and she would be arrested or killed, depending on who found her first. She sat on the bed, the coverlet feeling as imbued with cigarette tar as everything else, and placed her face in her hands. It would have been easy to weep, to fall into despair, but she couldn’t allow even a minute of weakness. Instead of crying, she cursed vehemently into her cupped hands. Her situation was crappy and it could only get worse.
She needed help, but it was a rare commodity.
Besides, whom could she turn to when even the person closest to her in the entire world couldn’t help? Worse, her big sister might not want to help. Karen was in the untenable position of being a homicide detective and reaching out to her would engender a response that was impossible for Joanne to follow. Karen would do one of two things: she’d arrest her or she’d order her to give herself up and allow justice to follow its course. Whichever way she looked at her problem, Joanne couldn’t see how the murderer of a young mother and her three babies would ever get a fair trial. Supposedly a jury was meant to be unbiased, but where would they find a dozen folk that wouldn’t despise her the second they laid eyes on her? They would deem her no less guilty than if they’d witnessed her washing the victims’ blood from her hands.
She flopped back on the bed. It creaked beneath her. Her heart beat a wild rhythm, felt within her throat and ears. The ceiling was no less tarnished than the walls. Joanne closed her eyes and allowed her anxiety to escape in a low wail that wouldn’t travel beyond her room. To her, the moan sounded far too loud and might draw her hunters there. She sat up, clutching handfuls of the grimy bedding. She stared at the door, expecting somebody to burst inside. Even the footsteps and voices from before had diminished, but her pursuers might be approaching with stealth. She pushed up to her feet and returned to the window, again peeking out through chinks in the blinds. On edge, about to explode, anyone would think she deserved the turmoil and fear, because it would be slight compared to what her victims had endured as they were struck time and again with the claw end of a hammer.
Nobody was in sight. Voices were indistinct murmurs. Even the traffic noise sounded muted. And within her room, the walls closed in around her, squeezing the breath from her lungs. Joanne croaked in dismay. She couldn’t stay in the room another minute. Thankfully she was disguised and her belongings were few. She grabbed her bag from the closet and returned to the door. She drew it open, took a brief check outside, then dashed for where she had parked her car, out of sight of the motel office and from traffic passing on the highway. The car had gotten her this far from Massachusetts. She had first planned on abandoning it in the motel lot and to use public transportation to move on somewhere far away, but paranoia had clutched her in its stranglehold, and her only hope of shaking it off was to put distance between her and the horrible motel room as quickly as possible.
The car wasn’t hers. She’d found it unattended, with its keys in the ignition and had taken it. It was nothing special, not something she’d write home about. It was fourteen years old, an old gas-guzzler, but had proven to be a sturdy old workhorse and had never failed to start when turning the ignition key. Even as strung out as her nerves were, her fingers refused to shake as she turned the key and the engine sputtered to life. She had to manually turn on the lights and the old car came with a stick shift. She had her hands full as she maneuvered out of the motel lot and sat waiting at the side of the highway to find a gap in which to enter the fast-moving traffic.
Anxiously, she expected the manager to come running out of his office, to chase after her for failing to return the room key and its ridiculous fob, but how could he suspect she was fleeing when she’d paid for a week’s accommodation up front? After winding down the window, she delved in her pockets, found the stupid key and dropped it on the road. If some homeless dude found it and gained access to the room and stayed there free of charge, so be it. If the key was quickly returned to the manager he could assume she’d dropped it accidentally; he wouldn’t know she had fled until after she failed to return that evening, maybe not even before morning. She’d no fear of him growing suspicious about her sudden disappearance, not enough for him to put two and two together and realize she was a fugitive from justice; should he guess she’d ran away, he’d probably pocket the cash she’d paid for the worst room she’d ever rented and sell it again to another desperate resident.
She caught a break and pulled out, following in the slipstream of a truck headed for the turnpike that would take her across the state border from New Hampshire into Maine. It was several days since she had fled West Roxbury, an upmarket district of Boston, and made it almost to Portsmouth. Ordinarily a journey of that distance, even in her old car, should’ve taken no longer than an hour and a half. Sticking to the slow rate she’d set, it would take her another week to reach Portland, Maine, and a month beyond before reaching the Canadian border at Houlton. A treaty of extradition existed between Canada and the USA, but Joanne hoped that she could lose herself north of the border. The manhunt currently underway for her was hottest around Boston. She hoped that up in New Brunswick or Quebec territories, wherever her flight stalled, her assumed identity would hold for longer, at least until she could think and plan for a more permanent move.
She had waited, thinking that to dash for the border would be expected of her, but that was under the misapprehension that the manhunt would cool down as news of fresh atrocities overtook the murders of the young family. Now she realized that by stalling, all she had done was encourage her pursuers to sniff out her trail and to grab her before she’d completed even half of her journey. She put her foot down, urging the car to speed up. Not too fast, though. She stuck to just below the speed limit, tucked in behind the truck as it rolled northeast, in an attempt at attracting as little notice as possible. It was cold, the skies were clear, but further up in Maine the same cold front that had already dumped feet of snow on western Massachusetts and Vermont was moving in. Before reaching the border, she’d probably be driving through a blizzard. The thought pleased her, the blizzard would help hide her, and the Canadian Border Services agent would probably wave her through without leaving the warmth of their cubicle.
She by-passed Portland, and continued towards Bangor before the urge to visit a bathroom overtook her. She held on to the discomfort in her bladder. A good distance after Bangor she got off the highway on to a country road and pulled in at the next gas station. The air was frigid as she left the warm confines of her car, so she felt justified in pulling down her woolen hat and tightening a scarf around her features from the bridge of her nose down. She also turned up her collar. It would take the most sophisticated of facial recognition technology to identify her from what little of her face showed and she doubted the CCTV camera drooping off the wall of the gas station was up to scratch. Fooling an observant human being could prove more difficult. Fortunately, the country was coming out the back end of a pandemic, where it was still the norm for some fearful people to conceal their faces under surgical masks or knitted scarves like hers, so she wouldn’t raise too much suspicion by keeping her face covered.
A polite notice instructed her to request the key to the washroom inside the adjoining convenience store. She’d been out shopping for provisions before paranoia had her fleeing her motel room. Thankfully she had not unloaded her foodstuff from the trunk of the car, so she was stocked up for a few days. However, she required more convenient snacks that she could eat whilst driving. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to gas up either, as the gauge showed that the old car had drank half its fuel already, and she still had a-ways to go before reaching the border. She entered the shop, heard the electronic ding of a bell, and saw the clerk eye her from beyond Plexiglass. She nodded and raised a hand in greeting and immediately turned away to start rummaging at a counter stacked with candy bars and other treats. When she glanced back at him, the clerk showed her no more attention, more concerned as he was with fitting a fresh receipt roll in the cash register. Joanne chose several different sweet snacks and a cold bottle of spring water from a cooler and approached the counter.
‘Do you need gasoline, ma’am?’
The gas station ran on a pay-first pump-second system. ‘Forty dollars’ worth,’ Joanne replied and was surprised by the volume of her own voice: it was the first time she’d spoken directly with anyone since fleeing West Roxbury.
The clerk probably knew the makes and models of cars, so didn’t ask the type of fuel she required. He dabbed at the buttons on the cash register and then craned to see what snacks she held. The Plexiglass screen was a holdover from when people stringently avoided breathing each other’s germs. At its base was a narrow slot through which the clerk shoved a barcode reader, and complying with the unspoken instruction, Joanne held out each of her purchases until she heard corresponding beeps. She paid cash, to the clerk’s slight perturbation, but there was nothing else for it. She had several items that identified her as Jo-Beth Sugden, but when stealing them she hadn’t also taken Sugden’s debit or credit cards. No way could she use her actual cards otherwise the police would be on to her trail within minutes.
‘I also need to use your bathroom,’ Joanne told the clerk.
He passed a key on a large fob through the slot. Immediately he squeezed sanitizer on his fingers and wrung his hands together. Joanne wondered what it was with keys and oversized fobs around these parts. ‘Do you pump the gas or is it self-service?’
‘I can do it for you, ma’am. Not as if I’m rushed off my feet, no how.’
‘Thank you, I’m almost cross-legged. Keys are in the ignition.’ She hurried out, carrying her purchases and the bathroom key, and dumped the former on the passenger seat of her car. As she headed for the bathroom, the clerk hobbled outside on what were obviously prosthetic legs. Joanne stared a second or two longer than was polite, causing him to stare back. While jostling with her purchases her scarf had slipped and he got a good look at her features, and she thought recognition exploded behind his eyes. She averted her face, rushed for the bathroom, terrified to look back at him in case he’d left the gas pump in its holder and gone inside to call the cops.
The bathroom was an addition added to the original convenience store, more or less a wooden box tacked on almost like an afterthought. She could probably throw her meager weight against a wall and the entire thing would collapse. She unlocked the door and pushed inside, immediately slipping the bolt in its retainer. Rather than go to the toilet, she rushed across the small room and laid her ear to the adjoining wall. There was no hint of a telephone conversation from beyond the wall. Then again, the clerk could have been whispering to avoid alerting her. There was a small window high up near the ceiling. Joanne clambered up on the toilet bowl, balancing awkwardly as she craned to peer outside. Her vantage offered little view of the clerk, but the angle of weak sunlight was enough to spot his wavering shadow. From what she could tell from the faint shadow, the clerk was busy filling up her tank. She exhaled and stepped down from the bowl, feeling jittery. Quickly she urinated and washed her hands; there was no automatic hand dryer, and under no circumstances would she ever use the grungy cotton towel hanging limp on a roller. She ran her palms over her thighs, slid open the bolt and stepped outside. She paused to pull up her scarf and settle the brim of her hat lower. Again the cold assailed her and she shivered. The quaking went right down to her bones and chattered her teeth; it had little to do with the temperature, more to do with adrenalin.
The clerk nodded to show he’d done as asked and the car was ready to go. If he’d been insulted by the way she’d stared at his false legs, then he didn’t mention it. Instead, he thumbed at the kiosk, said, ‘I could only fit thirty-five bucks’ worth in your tank. If you’d paid by card I coulda—’
‘Take the five dollars and my thanks for helping me out.’
‘Was no problem,’ he said. ‘Say, d’you have a long journey ahead of you? Reason I ask is there’s some bad weather forecast upstate.’
‘So I heard,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going far.’
‘Say, are you from Lincoln or from nearer abouts? It’s just I thought I recognized you from someplace.’
An icy worm burrowed through her gut. ‘I’m from Concord, over in Vermont. It’s my first time here in Maine, so no, you must be mistaken.’
He nodded at her wisdom. ‘You’re right; I see so many faces passing through they all begin blending into one. If I stand around long enough I’ll probably spot myself limping past.’
While he chattered his inanities, she ducked inside the car and got settled. She was relieved again when the engine turned first time. The clerk tapped on the roof of the car. ‘Be seeing you, ma’am.’
Jo pulled away, and back on to the highway. ‘Not if I see you first,’ she said.
FOUR
Tess pushed away from her computer and stood. She wandered through the house from the converted bedroom office and into the open plan family room. Po had gone out on an errand without turning off the TV; it was tuned to one of the major syndicated news channels.
