We heard the sirens as they approached the highway gate. Thurman went with Calvin to the monitoring room and showed him how
to unlock it, but he didn’t know how to turn off the sensors. Calvin enjoyed an impressive audiovisual display as one after
another was tripped by the ascending motorcade.
Back downstairs, I watched as the young men from the rescue squad worked quickly and efficiently to transfer Kyle to their
ambulance. No way was Clete not riding along on the trip to Albany; he made that loudly clear as they were getting ready to
leave. The paramedics looked less than pleased, but didn’t argue. They insisted that Baxter and Calvin, too, needed hospital
attention, even if the ambulance would be crowded. Baxter managed to argue it down to having one of the cops drive them south
to Riverton Memorial. Frank made sure that happened promptly.
The party was over, I supposed, but both my dates had left and it was a long walk home. I looked around for Matt, to bum a
ride; he’d slipped away. So I broke down and asked Frank what he’d like me to do. He was almost cheerful about rounding up
a driver.
Thus, at what turned out to be not even midnight, I was deposited safe and sound inside my kitchen door, hugging Roxy as she
lunged up to greet me. I took a long, very hot shower, got into my own sweats, and experimentally lay down on the bed. Various
parts of me ached, and my arms and legs felt like they weighed an extra ten pounds apiece. But physical fatigue or no, my
eyes were not ready to close.
I took a beer from the refrigerator and wandered around with it for a while, trying to work into the spirit of knowing my
life was back to its normal expectations, trying to focus on what those had been.
One hand on the cordless phone, I sat at the dining table. Should I try to reach Willem, let him know that some portion of
the sky was about to fall on his head? He’d find out soon enough, and our loyalties were not going to be very similar. Donna
had filled my answering-machine tape with alarums about the faxes I’d sent. I dialed her home number and told her “Speculations”
and its addendums could be destroyed. And why, concisely. She sounded less than mollified but too confused to fire off her
usual caliber questions. Then I called Pete and Janey and fed them the whole story. With Pete’s interruptions, it took half
an hour. That helped. All those years as cottage parents had honed their skills at deriving the components of unlikely situations
and reassembling them in recognizable order. They judged my adventure to have ended and partway convinced me they were right.
When it got to be time I called Vicky, just home from her Friday shift, and brought her up to speed. Her understanding of
personnel and sequences never entirely clarified, but she got the bottom line right: “So next week can play just like we set
it up. Sissy, that’s wonderful!”
Wonderful? I supposed it would be. Possible to anticipate? Not yet. Tomorrow (make that later today), I would … what? For
sure, there’d be police business, and reassurances to be made in daylight hours. Assignments for a clear head. I really ought
to get some sleep.
Bed still had no appeal. I compromised with the sofa, another beer, and the classically oriented “Music for a Late Night”
on the radio. In a move that I would probably come to regret, I invited a puzzled but overjoyed Roxy up to sprawl alongside
me.
I guess I did doze off a little; at any rate the tapping on the kitchen door and Roxy’s reflexive barking startled the hell
out of me. Making for the door I discovered my limbs had taken on yet another ten pounds each.
Baxter stood there, still clad in gray country club sweats, his arm in a neat blue sling. “I figured if my adrenaline rush
hadn’t worn off yet …”
That rush hadn’t restored much color to his face, whichwas slightly on the healthy side of chalky. Nor did his smile do much
to dispel how very, very tired he looked. “Come on in. Are you up for a hard-earned beer?”
“That’s the best offer I’ve had in hours.”
I got him one; most of my second was still left. “How are you feeling?” I asked as he followed me to the sofa.
“A couple of years older than yesterday. And somebody must have injected lead into my legs. Otherwise not bad.”
“Your shoulder?”
“It turned out to be a clean wound, like I thought. They numbed and bandaged it, gave me some pain pills for tomorrow.”
“Calvin?”
“Concussed. He seems to be shaking it off, but they’re keeping him overnight, at least.”
“How about Kyle?”
“The last word was he’s on hold until they can build him up enough for surgery.”
“What did they find?”
“The shot shattered one of the middle vertebra, and severed the spinal cord there. That isn’t repairable. The surgery will
be to clean up some lesser damage.”
“It would be a lot simpler if that shot had killed him.”
“A lot cheaper, too. It still might kill him—his condition sounds somewhere near the lower end of critical. On balance, I’d
rather it all worked out through the system.”
Would I? Assuming typical operation, the system figured to make a pretty good hash of things. “You’re just getting back from
Riverton?” I asked.
“God, no. I’ve been at the office, trying to set the framework up right before the meddlers descend. I recorded my account;
I’ll want yours in the morning, and Calvin’s, if he’s up to it. Maggie Byrnes, the senior ADA, is taking over for the district
attorney’s office.”
“How did you bring that off?”
“With his financial interest in Hudson Heights, Phil obviously has to recuse himself. As soon as he responds to Maggie’s message
on his answering machine she’ll point that out. She’s authorized me to send a couple of the guys to fetch our two backpacks
as soon as it gets light. We’ll see how the samples read out in lab tests. And we’ll go for a court order to have more taken—legally,
this time.”
“Stipulate that the sampling should be deeper, and make sure they cover the quarry pond area. Won’t Thurman’s acknowledgment
be enough, for starters?”
“It wants beefing up. There are a few areas we can corroborate independently, I think. He’s saying everything’s finished:
he falsified the Hudson Heights EIS, he was involved in murdering two people, he sees no need for a lawyer and doesn’t want
one. He insisted on dictating and signing a statement.”
“That doesn’t tie it?”
“An impulsive confession made during a time of trauma, without benefit of legal representation? We processed him rigorously,
by the book, but even a mediocre lawyer can mount a respectable challenge. Maybe get it thrown out altogether, at least minimize
the implications for other people. Provided Thurman agrees to pipe down. His daughter has special needs—I expect he’s pretty
vulnerable moneywise.”
“You think he did all that for money?”
“I think he did it for a mix of reasons, Val, one of which had to do with money. I also think he’s a man of some conscience.”
“Maybe too much for his own good.”
“I’d have said not quite enough.”
“Not nearly enough, the way you’re thinking. What I meant was he felt too guilty about the toxic dump under the plateau, about
concealing it, to realize what a good job he’d done. He kept expecting Skip or me to notice something.”
“Yet he probably had little, if any, feeling for the danger a man like Ryan Jessup posed. Nor does he seem to find it especially
wrong to have murdered him. And you know, if they’d low-profiled the whole thing instead of trying to get cute and put you
out of the picture, too, there’s a good chance it would’ve worked. No one was going to care much when Ryan turned up missing—hell,
nobody cared much when he turned up dead. I’d have had a serious shortage of things to look at.” He patted my knee. “And no
knowledgeable person to help me look.”
“Without the Garden Center blowup and our Monday night retrospective, Mariah wouldn’t have found Ryan’s murder worth more
than three minutes of speculation,” I said glumly. “I wonder whose idea it was to tie me in. Kyle’s, probably.”
“So Thurman claims. He says he wanted you off the scene badly enough he convinced himself you couldn’t actually be convicted
of a murder you hadn’t committed. As I said, not quite enough conscience. Or would it be a weakness for the expedient?”
“At least he doesn’t warp that into a virtue. Mariah had never been anything but good to Kyle and his son. He had no goddamn
call to dismiss her as patronizing.”
“I was afraid you were going to charge him at that point. Look, I’m not about to defend Kyle’s good character. You’ve got
to credit the man with tenacity, though. He was in this thing for as long a ride as there’d be. Our only hope out there was
to play on whatever conscience Thurman might possess and help him decide to end it. You seemed to pick up on that.”
I did a quick mental review. Baxter had kept hammering away at the futility of their tough-it-out posture, the unworthiness
of their mission. As much as I’d had a tactic, it was to make Thurman feel guilty, as I damn well thought he should. His companion
I figured to be a lost cause in that department. “We were trying to get him to shoot Kyle?” I asked, frowning.
“No, Val, we were trying to persuade him not to shoot one of us. Sitting there, I’d grabbed hold of a decent-sized rock I
hoped to do some damage with if Kyle’s attention got diverted. I didn’t peg Thurman to be that decisive.”
“I think taking part in what happened to Mariah bothered him a lot. They genuinely were friends. Maybe not best buddies, but
friends. Did he indicate anybody else besides Kyle was involved?”
“Thurman concedes—well, you heard him—that the cover-up of the toxic dumps was Clete’s directive. He insists both murders
were strictly his and Kyle’s doing. I think he genuinely believes that.”
“Do you?”
“In terms of the actual killings, yeah. And in the case of Mariah, there was so little time between the realization she was
a threat and the reaction, it’s likely they worked totally on their own. But a lot of planning went into Ryan’s murder. My
guess is they had some help there, though it’s very possible Thurman didn’t know about it. Whatever Kyle might know, we should
assume he won’t be telling.”
“So there’s a good chance nobody else will turn out to be guilty of anything?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Clete will be facing some tough questions—let’s see how he answers them. Did he know about the Ryan
problem from the get-go or figure it out after the murder? He definitely figured it out at some point.”
“He must’ve. Look at all the pressure to keep things away from Hudson Heights and get you off the case. The Etlingers could
have generated some of that, probably did, but I’ll bet Clete was directing the action. How much of his dramatics were for
show—like maybe the Red Barn bit? I found it hard to tell, especially with Kyle volunteering to be my chief interpreter.”
“There may turn out to be good enough evidence to link him to the murders in some capacity, I just don’t know yet. We will
have solid grounds to indict him for falsifying that EIS statement, which means jail time is not out of the question. And
we might get Matt on lesser charges, if we want to pursue it. He was certainly aware of the toxic dump cover-up.”
“That hardly qualifies him as a major player.”
“Matt got stuck in a mess he didn’t make. Like most of our cast of characters, probably. And Val, you can’t nail people for
what they merely suspect. Kate’s the most vulnerable of the lot. She’d be my number one choice as a co-conspirator. Yours
too, isn’t she? We can actively go after her. Would you like that?”
I’d been thinking yes, but that’s not what came out of my mouth. “They’ll have enough problems.”
“I imagine so. Family notoriety aside, if the discovery of the dumpsite under the plateau has the effect everybody predicts,
Hudson Heights is dead in the water. Clete will go bust and his investors will take a bath.”
“And the Garden Center hasn’t a prayer of survival without Clete to shore up the financing.”
“Poor Willem?”
“Poor, hell! He’s finally getting sprung to move his tail in the right direction. It’s past time to find out what he can do
with that.”
“If I have my way, there’s one district attorney who’s going to find out what private practice is like. Recusing himself is
just the necessary first step. This man should not be in public office.”
“Go for it.” I sighed. “While we’re on the subject of intentions … I’ve been mulling it over—what Thurman said about the sort
of panic flight that happens when a site gets branded toxic. A place like Hudson Heights, it’s not like it’s possible to put
things back the way they were before the contamination. Maybe Thurman’s right. Maybe whatever problems they’ve got aren’t
ever going to be hazardous to anybody’s health. Or to the environment, as long as everything gets drained down into the quarry
pond, which is nowhere near an aquifer. We ought to find out what’s actually in that cave, get a handle on the current and
projected effects. I may say something to that effect, if anybody with a microphone asks my opinion.”
Baxter shook his head, but he was smiling. “Simplification’s not way up there on your list of life goals, is it? Hell, you’ll
have a forum—use it. Just don’t get too bent out of shape if nobody listens.” Grimacing, he tried a minor position shift.
“Even if the water turns out to be pure enough to drink, I doubt I’ll want to jump into the quarry pond again any time soon.”
“That’s a welcome sign of maturity.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t do it. The expression on your face …”
“All that shooting may have given me a little motivation.”
“I’d have given you a big push. I did mean it, Val, about intending to know you for a long time.” He looked a little tentative.
“At least I’d like to.”
“I guess we can see how things go,” I stumbled, caught off guard. Lord knows what my considered answer would have been.
“Let’s do that,” he said, smiling.
And then, because now I did know who I’d been waiting up for, I leaned over and kissed him.