Stranded (7 page)

He nodded and she was shocked he didn’t pursue it. Pleased, but shocked. “Okay,” she continued. “Let’s move from looming disaster to more mundane things. How about helping me change the batteries in all the smoke alarms today? You weren’t here on the first day of spring when we usually do it and I didn’t want to ask Billy.”

“Sure. But now that you’ve brought up Billy, I was just thinking that he never came around our house before I crashed the Cessna.”

“I know. I hadn’t seen him since high school, but like I told you, two or three days after the crash, he showed up and asked if I needed help shoveling snow. Once I gave in and agreed, I tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take any money. How he rode from his place to our house in the snow on that old red bike is a mystery, but he did.”

They left the café holding hands. The wind had come up and cut through the fog, made the parking lot a cold, damp, nasty place. Once they got to the car, he turned her to face him. “Do you need to go anywhere else before we head home?”

“Nope.” She noticed that he scanned the parking lot every few moments, looking for bad guys, she supposed. She looked around, too. What people were visible through the mist seemed in a hurry to get out of the weather. No one seemed to have a good tan like the man in the photograph.

“Let’s just go home and do chores like normal people,” he said at last as he turned his gaze to her. His hazel eyes seemed to glow and she realized that each day he was back seemed to erase a week of the time he’d been gone. He was growing familiar again, closer, like before the Labor Day mall shooting and even way before that.

He kissed her forehead and she smiled. “Watch what you say,” she warned him, touching his forehead where a pink welt was all that remained of the cut she knew he’d received when the plane landed and he was hit by broken glass. “I happen to have accumulated a long list.”

“Great,” he said. “Just make sure there’s time in there for us to take a nap in the hammock if it ever warms up, okay?”

“And to talk to Billy when he comes by,” she added.

“If he comes by.”

* * *

F
OR
THE
SECOND
morning in a row, Alex awoke to the sound of a ringing phone. He answered it quickly, noting as he did that the fog was gone, replaced by heavy, thunderous-looking clouds. May in Blunt Falls was always a mix of weather.

“Yes,” he said.

“The chief just called,” Dylan said. “We have a dead body out on Evergreen. I’ll be by to pick you up in fifteen minutes.”

“I can come get you,” Alex said. “It would be faster.”

“No, I’ve moved out beyond your house. Just be ready.”

Alex got out of bed as quietly as he could, took a quick shower and pulled on his clothes. It would have been nice to start back to work with something a little less gruesome, but you took what you got.

He leaned over the bed and kissed Jessica awake, knowing the alarm clock would ring within minutes anyway. He’d talked to her last night about making sure the house alarm was set and driving a different route to the school, encouraging her to park near others and not wander around by herself. She’d tolerated his instructions better than he’d thought she would and then reminded him that no one had tried to kill her, so maybe he should take his own advice.

“I have to leave,” he told her. “We have a dead body.”

“Do you know who it is? Is it Billy?”

“I seriously doubt it. Evergreen is a long way from Blue Point. I’ll call you later and let you know my plans.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t forget—”

“To set the alarm when I leave. Yes, dear.”

He smiled at her and kissed her forehead.

Dylan pulled up right as Alex walked down the driveway. He got into Dylan’s dark gray car and they took off as Alex opened a Vita-Drink and took a swig.

“You still drinking that stuff?”

“It’s good for you,” Alex said. “I’d think you’d appreciate that. Where’d you move to?”

“Eagle Nest.”

Alex whistled. “That’s the high-rent district.”

“I got a deal. They like having a cop around and I like the on-site gym.”

Alex looked at the scratched dashboard and added, “I thought someone said you got a new ride.”

“I did,” he said.

“This doesn’t look real new.”

Dylan nodded. “It’s not. I drove my car to Billings yesterday for a date.”

“That’s a long ways to go for a date,” Alex said.

“You haven’t seen the girl. Man, she’s barely out of high school.”

“Did you check her age?” Alex said.

“Of course I did. She’s legal. Unfortunately, she’s also a terrible driver. Got rear-ended, so I had to borrow her car while mine gets fixed. Eight hundred and six miles on the odometer and she puts it in the shop.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, always amazed at Dylan’s desire to bed any female he met. For Alex there was one girl, one woman, and that was Jess. “Time to get to work,” he said. “What do we know about our victim?”

Dylan cast him a swift look. “A guy with a metal detector was working the lot at the old drive-in theater when he came across a dead man.”

“It’s kind of early in the morning for a metal detector isn’t it? Was it even light when he was out there?”

“Just barely. It takes all kinds, though. I’ve run kids out of there plenty of times.”

“Maybe they hit someone they didn’t know was there,” Alex said.

“Maybe. But these kids also do drugs so maybe one of them OD’d and the rest ran off. I’m thinking about the Cummings twins.”

The Cummings twins. Was that what Lynda Summers had meant when she said “look-alike” kids? They drove in silence for a moment and then Dylan started talking again. “What did you and Jess do over the weekend?” he asked as he turned onto Evergreen.

“Things around the house.”

“I can’t believe you’re back from near death for two days and Jessica has you doing chores.”

“I didn’t mind. I just like being with her.” He paused a second, thinking back to the day before. “Chief Smyth had me handle an off-the-record complaint from Lynda Summers. She said she heard a noise in her yard.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No. Someone might have been trying to break into the shed—I doubt it, though.”

“He’s had me run out there a handful of times in the past few weeks, too,” Dylan said. “What a pigsty.”

Alex cast him a long look. “Same kind of thing?”

“Yeah. Almost always it’s nothing I can do much about. Last time it was because she was mad at a neighbor who told her they were going to turn her in if she didn’t fix up her yard. She wanted me to go read them the riot act. I walked over and calmed down the neighbor. Face it, the Summers house belongs on one of those reality TV shows.”

“How did the chief ever get on the receiving end of her calls?

“Believe it or not, his mother is responsible. He told me this one night after a couple of beers. His mother was Lynda’s godmother. The old lady—on her deathbed, mind you—made Frank promise to take over as Lynda’s unofficial guardian angel. By then Lynda was getting a little goofy. He did as good as he could when he was a detective like you and me, but it was impossible to protect her from everything. Now he’s acting chief and he seems hell-bent on making sure her antics fly under the radar.”

“I’m not sure he’s doing Lynda a favor by helping her avoid reality,” Alex mused. “It’s a wonder something hasn’t fallen on her head and crushed her to death.”

“Yeah,” Dylan said, “but since Smyth is obviously aware of her predicament, I’ve decided to mind my own business.”

They finally glimpsed vehicles and lights up ahead all pulled into the giant parking lot of the old drive-in theater. Dylan drove slowly through the open gates.

Kit Anderson was one of the uniforms who had responded to the panicked metal detector’s call. He had on rain gear which he might very well need within the hour. “We’ve got guys combing the area for any evidence,” he said by way of greeting.

“Get them into a grid,” Alex said. “Try to cover the whole lot before the weather breaks.”

“Where’s the guy with the metal detector?” Dylan asked.

“In the back of my car. He was pretty shook up. His name is Henry Fields and he admits he comes here once or twice a year to see if he can find anything interesting. He says he always wiggles through some loose boards in the back so he didn’t notice the chain on the front entrance had been cut.”

“Why in the world did he come out here so early?” Alex asked.

“I asked him that. He says there’s never anyone around out here when it rains, so as soon as he got up and heard the weather report, he took off. His truck is parked out behind the lot where he left it.”

“We’ll go talk to him,” Alex said.

Kit shook his head. “There’s no need,” he said. “He already told me everything he knows.” Kit was a tall, wiry man who had been a track-and-field star back in high school. He gestured with a long arm. “If I were you, I’d go talk to the M.E.,” he suggested, his voice on the raw edge of condescending. “He’s been here for quite a while.”

“But you aren’t me,” Alex said softly. “Please join the search and set up a grid, okay?”

“Sure,” Kit said, and walked off with a scowl.

“You got yourself an enemy,” Dylan said as they moved toward the squad car.

“I guess. I don’t want him pissed at me all the time, but there’s not a lot I can do because I didn’t wind up moldering away in the mountains.”

“Are you thinking Kit had something to do with that crash?”

“Hell, no. I didn’t say that.”

“Because I can’t imagine he’d go to such lengths.”

“Nor can I.” Alex stopped abruptly. “You know, though, in this case he may be right. We both don’t need to question our metal detector. I’ll go get started on the crime scene before the weather deteriorates.”

“Sounds good,” Dylan said, and ambled toward the squad car.

Alex approached the crowd of people gathered under an open tent. He’d come to this theater a few times when he was a kid but it had closed decades ago. There was no longer a standing screen or a concession/projector building, just gently rolling ground. In the old days, cars would pull their front ends up on the berms, giving them a clear line of sight to the big outdoor screen over the tops of the cars in front of them. Remnants of metal posts that used to hold the speakers stuck up out of the weeds.

Patrolmen had erected a tent over the body in deference to the deteriorating weather. The victim was facedown in one of the lower spots between the humps. Thanks to the team working the scene, he couldn’t see the dead man, just a pile of what appeared to be mangled dark clothing amid a sea of flashbulbs.

“Someone ran over him,” the M.E. said as he approached Alex. “More than once, I might add.” He turned to the ambulance crew and called, “I’m finished for now. You can get the Vic ready for transport.”

“Do we have an ID?” Alex asked.

“Not yet. We’ve taken his prints, but right now all I can tell you is we have a Caucasian male in his early twenties. There’s no sign he struggled, which leads me to believe he was unconscious when he was run over.”

“Any signs of drugs?”

“No, but I’ll run a toxicology.”

“How about a time of death?”

He shook his graying head which was covered with a jaunty plaid beret. “At least twenty-four hours. He’s been here awhile.”

So he’d died sometime early Sunday morning. Alex thought for a moment before speculating. “I wonder if he walked out here, overdosed on something and fell into a deep sleep or hit his head.” Like Dylan said, teens sometimes cut through the chain and came in here at night to race over the rolling lot, seeing just how fast they could go and most of the time, they did it late enough there were few people to see their headlights. If there’d been a sleeping or drugged person in a dark spot, it was conceivable someone ran over him accidentally. However, you’d think they would have noticed a bump and quit after the first hit.

“I’ll know more after the autopsy,” the M.E. said.

Alex nodded as he looked around. The ground was covered with a layer of weeds that would make getting tire impressions tricky even if it hadn’t been raining most of the night.

Alex pulled up his collar as more rain started now. He began the trek down to the body but before he got far, Kit Anderson yelled from the back of the lot near where the screen used to be. Alex changed direction and jogged through the rain. He stopped short as he got close enough to see what had been found near a pile of discarded lumber: a mangled red bicycle.

“I don’t think it’s been here long,” Kit said as Officer Herrera planted an evidence flag near the bike and the photographer began snapping pictures. “There’s no rust to speak of.”

“Get something over it as quick as you can,” Alex said, then turned and retraced his steps. They were loading the body into the ambulance as he gently pulled the blanket away from the victim’s face.

Somewhere in his gut he’d known.

“Oh, Billy,” he whispered. “What in the hell did you get yourself into?”

Chapter Five

“Take me by the school,” Alex told Dylan.

“Jessica’s school? Why?”

“Because I don’t want her to hear about Billy from someone else.”

“Then call her,” Dylan said with his typical lack of understanding about sensitive issues. No wonder he went through women like water through a sieve.

“Billy Summers was important to Jessica, especially in the last few months. The kid brought some color into her life and I owe it to both of them to make sure she hears what happened to him from me.”

“Use the damn phone,” Dylan said impatiently.

“Stop at the school. It’ll take ten minutes.”

Dylan did as asked, immediately taking out his cell and making phone calls as Alex jogged inside. Probably because of the rain, but maybe because of the run across the drive-in lot, his leg hurt today but he ignored the pain.

He found Jessica alone in her classroom as it was late lunch period by now. She was eating a sandwich at her desk while reading a book.

She looked happy to see him, which warmed his heart to no end, and rose to greet him. He hugged her and held her for a moment, breathing in the fragrance of her hair and the feel of her body next to his, simple pleasures he would never take for granted again.

“Why are you here?” she finally asked, and he requested she sit down.

Five minutes later, tears in her eyes, she blew her nose on a tissue Alex fetched for her. “How did Lynda Summers take it?” she asked. Her voice was raw with grief.

“Chief Smyth said she took it hard,” he said.

“Do you have any idea who would do this to him?”

“The drive-in gets weekend action from teens driving too fast and doing drugs. Maybe Billy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, I just wanted you to know I’ll be late tonight and I didn’t want you hearing this from someone else.”

“Has he been missing since he left our house?” she asked.

“I’m not sure, but it looks like it. Far as I can tell he was wearing the same clothes. I’ll talk to his mother later and find out for sure. Are you okay? I’ve got a ton to do and Dylan is outside chomping at the bit.”

“Go do your job,” she said. “And be careful.”

“That’s what I was going to tell you,” he said, and kissed her on the lips. Hers were salty, but sweet, and he hugged her once more.

He didn’t tell her about the drug angle Dylan had brought up because he knew she wouldn’t believe it, and until verified, it was just a rumor. Dylan had told him he heard that the Cummings twins used Billy like an enforcer of sorts and speculated someone got back at him by giving him some of the drugs and then killing him. Alex just wanted to make sure of the cause of death before they started making up stories.

Within twenty minutes, they were bypassing the air terminal to drive around to the back of the airport. Alex’s gaze was drawn to the three rows of privately owned planes and specifically to the spot on the tarmac he’d rented for his Cessna. There was another plane there now.

They parked by the maintenance building and went inside where they found Tony Machi working on the engine of a small aqua-colored single-engine plane Alex knew was owned by a local lawyer. Tony looked up from his work as he apparently heard their footsteps. He immediately broke into a grin and started wiping his hands on a grease rag hanging from an overall pocket.

“Good to see you back,” he said to Alex, stepping forward, arm outstretched. “I’ve been dying to know what happened to the Cessna,” he added, his brow creasing. He was a middle-aged guy with a big family, as competent as he was kind and a hell of a mechanic. “I’d just worked on it a couple of days before you took off, remember? And don’t think the FAA and every other agency in the country wasn’t all over here, looking at my records and books.”

Alex introduced Dylan before he explained. “I wasn’t feeling very good that day and my memory is shady,” Alex admitted. “I recall a sudden drop in the oil pressure, a fire, the engine seizing and the crash. A lot of people are talking sabotage but I don’t see how that could be, do you?”

“Did you hear an explosion or something?”

Alex searched his mind. As fuzzy as some things were, he was positive he hadn’t. “No.”

“Well, I talked to your friend Nate Matthews on the phone. The FBI mentioned him, too, and then there was a lot of talk about that militia group and the way they were staging these horrible shootings on national holidays. You and your buddies were a threat to them, I guess.”

“I guess,” Alex said.

Tony shook his head. “Memorial Day is coming up—I’m keeping all the kids home. They’re throwing a fit because they want to go to the parade with their friends, but I just can’t let them do it. We’ll go tend my parents’ graves like we do every year, but then it’s home for movies on the television.”

Alex knew Jessica would also go to the cemetery and put flowers on graves of former soldiers and that of her own grandfather, a World War II veteran. It was a tradition in her family, one they had shared over the years. But he hated to hear Tony talk about being afraid for his kids to attend a parade.

“Probably a good idea to stay close to home,” Dylan said.

“Yeah,” Tony said with a shake of his head. “But kind of sad, too. It’s getting so regular folks like me feel they need to carry a gun around.”

“Which is exactly the fear these people strive to create,” Alex said.

“Yeah. I know, I read that, too.” Tony sighed and squared his shoulders. “Okay, give it to me straight. Where is your beautiful Cessna now?”

“Under at least twenty feet of cold lake water. Nate and I are going to dive on it.”

“Won’t the FAA bring it out of the lake?”

“Yeah, they will. But it’s in a remote spot and it’s going to take a helicopter and a lot of staging. I want to see it myself before they move it.”

“Yeah, I would, too. I’ll make a list of things you should look for or check, okay?” Tony offered.

“That’s great.”

“But that’s not why we’re really here,” Dylan pointed out. He gestured at a few stools pulled up to a workbench. “Let’s sit down. We have bad news.”

Tony froze in place. “Is it Noreen or one of my children—”

“Nothing like that,” Alex rushed to assure him. “It’s about Billy.”

Tony shook his head. “I know you were looking for him yesterday. He still hasn’t shown up? Well, he’s late getting here, too. He has a whole bunch of small jobs to perform and it’s getting late. When he does get here, I have half a mind to tell him to get lost.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Alex said gently. “We found his body a little while ago. He’s been dead since sometime Sunday morning.”

Tony sat abruptly. “Dead? How?”

“I’m not entirely sure. On the surface, he was run over at least twice. But it’s unclear why he would just lie there and let someone do that to him.”

“An accident?” Tony said. “I mean he rode that bike of his everywhere. Did someone run him down beside a road?”

Thinking they wouldn’t really know if Billy actually died at the drive-in until all the evidence was analyzed, Alex kept it vague while Dylan didn’t respond at all. “It’s unclear.”

Dylan added, “Do you know if he used drugs?”

Tony looked aghast. “Drugs? I don’t think so. They test employees but Billy wasn’t really on a formal payroll. I never saw any indications, though.”

“How about friends?” Dylan persisted. “Did people come here to see him?”

“Once in a while, but he had trouble with people, you know. He was impressionable and eager to please most of the time, but then he’d get all sullen and quiet.”

“You ever see a couple of blond boys about eighteen years old visit him? They’re twins so they stand out,” Dylan said.

“Blond, good-looking boys?”

“Yeah, I guess you could call them good-looking.”

Tony nodded. “I’ve seen them. They talk to Billy sometimes. Seemed like odd kids for a guy like Billy to know, but they acted friendly enough.”

“Billy came by our house Saturday night,” Alex said. “I don’t think he was aware there was a party.”

“Why did he go to your house?” Tony asked, obviously surprised.

“He befriended my wife while I was away. She got to be quite fond of him. But Saturday night he said he came to talk to me. Then he got scared off by all the cops hanging around and claimed he couldn’t remember what he wanted. While he was there, I recalled seeing him here on the tarmac the morning I took off. He was deicing a windshield for somebody else, at least that’s the impression I got because of the tools he carried. He didn’t remember seeing me, though.”

“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have remembered one morning out of a hundred, but that morning stands out on account of what happened to you,” Tony said. “No one else took off in a private plane that morning and I don’t remember Billy being here, either, at least not until later in the day. Now, two days before, that was a different matter. The kid got here early and stayed late, hanging over my shoulder all the time, even refusing to break for lunch.”

“Was that unusual behavior for him?” Alex asked.

“Well, sure. It gets a little cold in this hangar in February, you know, so we’re all anxious for a few minutes in what we refer to as the lounge. It’s that room back there with a table and chairs. Oh, and a heater. It’s where we eat our lunch and Billy was as fond of food as the rest of us. But that day, he stayed here, looking at his little cards as though he was trying to remember something.”

“Little cards?” Dylan asked, but Alex was pretty sure he knew what Tony was talking about.

“Yeah, you know, those little white cards my wife puts recipes on, or at least she used to before she got her computer. As long as the directions were real easy, he liked to have them written down.”

Alex cleared his throat. “Directions to what?”

“Oh, you know, things like, go get the broom, sweep up garbage, put garbage in can. I don’t know what he was looking at that day because it wasn’t one of my cards.”

“And how do you know that?” Dylan asked.

“Because mine are all pink. They’re leftovers from the wife. The one he kept fingering was white.”

“What were you working on that day, do you remember?”

Tony shrugged. “Just regular stuff. Engine tune-ups, maintenance checks, you know. It might have been the day I looked at your plane, Alex. Yeah, in fact, I’m sure it was.” He frowned for a second. “Sure as heck can’t figure out why he’d go to your house at night like that.”

“His mother didn’t know what he wanted, either. Are you sure he didn’t say anything to you about my being back?”

“I haven’t seen him since you got back. He didn’t come into work Saturday which was unusual for him. The only times he tended not to show up were when he had a problem of some sort he was working through.”

“What kind of problem?”

“I don’t know, he didn’t exactly tell me. I just knew when he was preoccupied. He’d get quieter than ever and go off by himself.” Tony sighed as he got to his feet. “The boy had big dreams. I think he was kind of desperate to get away from that house. I gave him rides home when the weather was real bad. His mother was always haranguing him. I don’t know how he stood living in that rat’s nest.”

“I don’t, either,” Alex said. For the first time, he started wondering about the noise Lynda Summers claimed to have heard in the wee hours of Sunday morning. He’d written it off, but not any longer. Maybe it warranted another look around.

“If you think of anything, let me know,” Alex said, and handed Tony a card.

“I will. Damn shame. All and all, I’m going to miss the kid.”

* * *

“I
THINK
WE
need to talk to the Cummings twins and to Billy’s mother sooner rather than later,” Alex said.

“Which one first?”

“You go see the twins, I’ll go see Lynda Smyth.”

“No,” Dylan said. “We should stick together.”

“I don’t think so,” Alex said. “Let’s drop by the office and talk to the M.E., and then you swing by my house and let me out. I’ll get my truck.”

“I don’t know,” Dylan protested. “You heard what the FBI guy said and now Tony is talking about Billy hanging around your plane while it was getting fixed. We stick together.”

Alex shook his head. “I’m not budging on this. It’s our job to investigate Billy Summers’s death and I’m not going to jeopardize what needs to be done so you can hold my hand. Let’s stop arguing about it.”

“Three months in the mountains didn’t cure your stubborn streak, did it?” Dylan said.

“Nope.”

By the time Dylan reached Alex’s house, they knew that Billy had drugs in his system at the time of death and that he’d been alive when he was run over. There was still no explanation of how he ended up at the old drive-in except that it seemed unlikely he rode there on his bike as there were no discernible bicycle tracks. And if he hadn’t ridden the bike, then someone had taken him. Why? Hopefully Billy’s mother or the Cummings boys could shed some light on the matter.

“Jessica isn’t home yet,” Alex said to himself as they pulled in the driveway.

“Did you expect her to be?”

“Kind of.”

“Don’t worry. She’ll be cautious.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, not at all sure his partner was right. As Dylan roared off, Alex unlocked the garage and got in his truck. It was the first time he’d turned the key in the ignition since coming home, but Jessica had told him she’d run the engine every few days. The truck started right up and he pulled out of the garage.

As he drove away, he attempted to reason with himself. Jessica was fine, she knew he was going to be late, she probably just stopped by a friend’s house.

The pep talk grated every raw nerve in his body.

* * *

T
HE
LAST
TIME
Jessica felt like she did today, she’d been eighteen years old and a freshman in college. It had been the first time she’d been away from home and she remembered feeling so excited she could hardly sleep. All the new people and ideas and parties and conversations made her anxious for each new day.

And then things began to change. It started with an uneasy feeling of being watched, causing her to turn while walking across a field or down a hall to see if someone was behind her, looking over her shoulder with uneasy glances. There never seemed to be anyone interested in her and after a few days of it, she began to think she was developing some major psychological problem.