Hour Game (43 page)

“S
O WHO KILLED
B
OBBY
B
ATTLE AND
K
YLE
M
ONTGOMERY?”
asked Michelle.

They were sitting on King’s dock catching some sun after returning from a morning ride on their Sea-Doos.

“Nothing’s clicked yet. Maybe I used up all my little gray cells catching Eddie.”

“Well, Dorothea had the best motive to kill Kyle.”

“And she had the opportunity to kill Bobby as well. And maybe the motivation. If he didn’t live up to his part of the bargain and give her a bigger piece of the estate.”

Michelle looked troubled. “I know you concocted all that stuff about Remmy and Harry, but you don’t really think—”

“Harry has an alibi, an ironclad one. At the time of Battle’s death he was giving a speech to the Virginia State Bar in Charlottesville.”

Michelle looked relieved. “And Remmy?”

Now King looked troubled. “I don’t know, Michelle, I just don’t know. She certainly had good reason to want to kill him.”

“Or maybe someone who wanted to be the next lord of the manor did it.”

He looked at her strangely and was about to respond when his cell phone rang.

He answered, listened, and his face turned ashen. He clicked off.

“This is really, really bad, isn’t it?” she said fearfully.

“Eddie’s escaped.”

All the Battles were given round-the-clock security at their home. Harry Carrick, King and Michelle joined them there, since their lives were conceivably in danger too. A massive three-state manhunt jointly conducted by the FBI and area police was begun, but two days later there was no sign of Eddie.

King and Michelle were in the dining room having coffee with Sylvia, Bailey and Williams and talking about the case.

“Eddie’s a very experienced outdoorsman. And he knows this country better than most,” pointed out Bailey. “He’s hunted over it and explored it for most of his life. He can live on next to nothing for weeks.”

“Thanks, Chip, that’s very encouraging,” Williams said sourly. “We’ll find the son of a bitch, but I can’t promise to bring him in alive.”

“I don’t think Eddie will let that happen again,” King said.

“Wouldn’t he have fled the area as fast as possible?” asked Michelle.

King shook his head. “Too many roadblocks and police at all the bus and train stations and the airport. The police car he stole was found abandoned on a back road. I think he took to the hills.”

Williams nodded at this. “His best chance is to lay low around here, change his appearance as much as he can, and when things quiet down a bit, he makes his run.”

King didn’t look convinced.

Williams noted this and said, “You disagree?”

“I think he’s hanging around but not for the purpose you think.”

“What, then?”

“Someone killed his father.”

“So?”

“So I think Eddie wanted that all to himself. I think Bobby was supposed to be the final victim in all this, if the stroke didn’t kill him first.” King glanced at Michelle. “He came to see us,
claiming his mother was upset about people thinking she had Junior and her husband killed. He knew she hadn’t done it. He wanted us to find out who had. And you remember when we were having drinks with him at the Sage Gentleman. He said his father just had to live.”

“So he could kill him,” said Michelle.

“So what the hell is he going to do, go after the person who killed Bobby?” said Williams. “We don’t even know who that is, Sean.”

“But if we run that person down, we have a good shot at nailing Eddie.”

“I’d appreciate it if you would not plot the capture and execution of my only remaining son in my house.”

They all turned to see Remmy standing there. She’d rarely come into the mansion’s public spaces. When she did, she spoke to no one, not even Harry. Her meals were delivered to her bedroom.

King rose from his chair. “I’m sorry, Remmy, we didn’t see you standing there.”

“Why should I be? This is only my house and my dining room, and those cups you’re drinking out of are mine too, in case you’d forgotten.”

King glanced at Williams. “I know this arrangement is awkward—”

“To put it mildly,” she interrupted.

Williams said, “It’s just a lot easier having all of you in the same place, Remmy.”

“Oh, I’m glad it’s easier for some people; it’s certainly not for me.”

“We can go to a hotel,” suggested Michelle, but Remmy dismissed this remark with a decisive wave of her hand.

“Never let it be said I shirked my civic duty, even if it does mean losing my son.” She stalked out of the room.

They all looked at each other nervously.

“This really is an impossible situation for her,” said Sylvia.

“Do you think any of us like it?” rebutted Michelle. “Eddie is a mass murderer. She has to learn to accept that.”

King took on a thoughtful look as he stirred more sugar into his coffee. “Speaking of which, I hope all of you realize that the case against Eddie isn’t ironclad.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” protested Williams. “He showed up at Harry’s house with a zodiac mask on, ready to kill all of you. And now he’s escaped and killed a deputy in the process.”

“Right. But not knowing what happened between him and the deputy, there might be a claim for self-defense or manslaughter. The cell door was open, and a defense counsel could make the claim that the deputy was trying to hurry along the process of justice and Eddie just fought back. Now, I’m as certain he’s guilty of all those murders as though I’d seen him commit them. But you don’t have to convince me, you have to convince a neutral jury, maybe one from another part of the state or even a different state. So where’s your direct evidence that he committed the murders?”

Williams was still bristling. “All the stuff you said. His motivation, the cipher disk, drugging Dorothea.”

“That’s theorizing and speculation, Todd,” said King firmly. “We need physical evidence tying him to the crimes; do we have it?”

Sylvia spoke up. “If you’d asked me before the murder of Jean Robinson, I’d probably say no. However, I found a hair follicle with root attached to it on the floor next to her bed. I don’t know how it got there, but the color and texture told me it wasn’t hers or her husband’s. I’ve sent it for typing along with a sample of Eddie’s DNA. If it matches, we have him, at least for that murder.”

“And hopefully ballistics will match the slugs shot into our car tires when Junior was killed to the gun taken from Eddie,” pointed out Michelle.

“Just let me get hold of him,” said Williams. “We’ll have a confession in no time.”

“
If
we get hold of him,” said Michelle.

“He can hide for a while, but we’ll eventually catch him,” said the police chief confidently.

“The person he’s after,” said King. “That’s the key. We find him, we find Eddie.”

“You really think that?” said Bailey.

“No,” replied King, “I know it. He’s got one more to go. Just one more. And we have to get there before he does.”

E
DDIE SAT BACK ON THE SMALL COT IN HIS CAVE.
H
E’D
rested, eaten and planned. He had a battery-powered TV/radio/police scanner and had kept abreast of the search developments, which was fairly easy since there were none. However, he was limited in his movements. He could only go out at night, and it was a long hike to the battered old truck he’d hidden away in a patch of woods just for this contingency.

After all these years of bouncing from thing to thing, never really etching an identity anywhere, he’d finally found his niche: fugitive killer. He laughed, rose, stretched, dropped to the ground and did a hundred push-ups and an equal number of sit-ups. He had wedged a steel bar between two jagged outcroppings of rock farther back in the cave. He did twenty-five quick pull-ups and then five with each arm. He dropped to the ground, breathing hard. He wasn’t twenty anymore, but for his age he wasn’t doing too badly. Big cop would no doubt have attested to that.

He slid the pistol out of its holster and chambered body-armor-piercing ammo he’d purchased on the black market with as much ease as clicking a mouse key. Hell, you could buy anything on the Net—guns, ammo, women, children, marriage, divorce, happiness, death—if you just knew where to look. But it was only one gun against a thousand, far worse odds than even at the Alamo.

And yet a man with nothing to live for is a powerful man
indeed. Perhaps unbeatable.
Had he read that somewhere or just made it up? Whatever, it would become his coda from this point forward.

They’d eventually hunt him down and kill him. Of that he was certain. But it didn’t matter so long as he got to his father’s killer first. That’s all that really mattered now. Wow, he’d certainly streamlined his life. He laughed again.

He took the list from his pocket. The names were dwindling, but he wasn’t sure he could manage now to get to them all. However, after much thought he might just have come upon a shortcut. He’d try it out tonight. Two more deaths: his father’s killer and his own. And then Wrightsburg could get back to normal. His family could move forward with fresh lives, finally free of their monster patriarch.

He lay back down on the cot, listened with one ear to the radio and with the other to any noise coming from outside. The cave’s isolated location and well-hidden entrance made it highly unlikely anyone would come near. However, if they had the misfortune to, he’d give them a proper burial. He was not a monster; in his case the apple had fallen far from the tree.

I am not my father’s son. And thank you, Jesus, for that. But I’ll be seeing you soon, Pop. Maybe the devil will bunk us together. For all time. We’ll talk.

He cracked his thick knuckles and dreamed of such an encounter as the afternoon receded into night. The night when he’d be on the move. To his shortcut. To his last target. And then the big curtain would come down on the Eddie Lee Battle Show. There’d be no encore. He was getting tired.
Good-bye, everybody, it was cool while it lasted.

Just one more to go… Or maybe more? Yes, maybe more. What did it matter after all?

T
HE SMALL BUILDING HOUSING THE
W
RIGHTSBURG
G
AZETTE
was dark and empty at this hour of the night. There was no alarm system and no night watchman either, for what was there to steal from the venerable but money-losing
Gazette
other than paper? Cash was tight at the daily publication, and the owner didn’t like to waste it on protecting things he believed didn’t need it.

The back door’s simple lock turned and then opened, and Eddie moved inside, shutting the door behind him. He shot across to the small room at the back of the printing area. He pushed open the door to this windowless section, shone his light around at the flat file cabinets stacked one on top of the other and started reading the labels on the fronts.

He found the one he wanted, opened it, lifted out the spool of old-fashioned microfiche and went to one of the terminals that lined the outside ring of the room. He sat down, inserted the spool into the reader, clicked on the light behind the screen and turned on the machine. He knew the date he was looking for, and he quickly found the story he wanted. Of course, it all fit now, all the things he’d heard over the last few years, the little clues here and there. Another thought struck him as he remembered something Chip Bailey had once told him. It had happened before, not in this country, but in another.

Yes, now it all makes perfect sense.

He removed the spool and replaced it in the file cabinet. He was about to leave but paused, thinking something over, finally
breaking into a smile.
Why not?
He picked up a Sharpie pen from a holder on one of the tables and went over to the wall. He wrote the four letters large on the concrete wall. They couldn’t very well miss it, could they? Not that they’d have any clue what it actually meant. He wanted to get there first after all. They could come and pick up the pieces after it was all over.

He admired his handiwork for a moment and then slipped back out. His truck was parked about a mile off, on a dirt road that he very much doubted the police would be covering. He kept to the wood line as he made his way back.

Chip Bailey sat up in bed, confused for a moment, then realized what the noise was. It was his cell phone ringing. He groped around, found the light in his small motel room and clicked on the phone. It was Chief Williams; his message was terse but drove from him thoughts of sleep.

Someone had just broken into the
Wrightsburg Gazette.
The description of the person fit Eddie Battle. They were locking down the entire area. Bailey was dressed in a minute, put on his belt clip and slipped his gun inside. He ran to his car and jumped in.

The knife hit him in the chest with such force that the hilt smacked into Bailey’s sternum. The dying FBI agent tried to look around, to see who’d just killed him, but the blade had nearly severed his heart in two. He slumped back against the seat, his head tilted to one side.

Eddie rose up from the backseat and let go of the knife. He’d passed by the motel on his way back to his truck. Seeing Bailey’s car in the parking lot, he’d thought it appropriate to pay back his old friend for “saving him” all those years ago. He might not get another chance. He’d dialed Bailey’s cell phone, a number well known to him, from a pay phone. He’d imitated Williams just well enough that the groggy FBI agent would not have picked up on the difference.

Well, that inattention to detail had certainly cost him.

Sorry, Chip, you snooze you lose. And you weren’t that good
of an agent anyway. Pretty damn inept and pompous actually. And you wanted to be my stepfather so badly. Those big bucks are quite the attraction, aren’t they, old Chip? Old buddy. Old pal.

Eddie climbed out of the car. He made it to his truck in half an hour, keeping well out of sight of the roads. It was now time to sleep and prepare. And then to act on the information he’d obtained tonight.

His shortcut to determine the identity of the person who’d killed his father had worked to perfection. He just hoped the “execution” on the other end would be as flawless.

“It was
his
knife,” Williams told King and Michelle at the Battles’ house. “His prints were on it. Eddie’s not trying to hide that he did it. Hell, he’s probably proud of it.”

Chip Bailey’s body had been found the following morning by one of his men. The death of the veteran FBI agent had staggered everyone.

“Pretty damn ballsy for Eddie to come out of hiding to take out Chip like that,” said King.

“I’m not sure that’s the only reason he came out,” replied the police chief. “You two better come with me.”

He drove them to the
Gazette
building and pointed out the word on the wall that Eddie had written there.

King looked at the word and then glanced at Williams. “Teat? What, like a cow’s teat? You’re sure this was Eddie’s doing and not some kid’s prank?”

“No, I’m not sure. It looks like just that, in fact. But the
Gazette
isn’t that far from the motel where Chip was killed.”

King looked around the room. “What would he want from here?”

Michelle pointed to the numerous microfiche files. “Maybe he was looking for something in there.”

“That’s a lot to look at when you don’t know what you’re looking for,” said King. He turned to Williams with a concerned expression. “You better watch your back, Todd.”

“I’m not looking to get a knife in my chest. I’ve got twenty-four/seven protection on me. I wish Chip had done the same.”

“Maybe he thought it could never happen to him,” said Michelle. “Or maybe he was too proud.”

“Or maybe he really believed Eddie was his friend,” commented Williams.

“Some friend,” remarked King. “How’s the search coming?”

“Way too many back roads and woods. And apparently, everybody within a four-state area has called in and said they saw Eddie. He’s ten feet tall with claws and has body parts dangling out of his blood-encrusted mouth. I swear to holy Jesus I don’t know how anybody gets convicted in this country, I really don’t.”

“It only takes one good lead,” Michelle reminded him.

“I might die of old age before that happens,” Williams shot back.

Michelle looked at her partner. “What do you think, Sean?”

He shook his head wearily. “I think after all this, Eddie’s in the driver’s seat and we’re back at square one.”