THE NEXT TO DIE (34 page)

With the cat cradled in her arms, Dayle retreated to the foyer. Every creaking floorboard seemed like a loud groan. She checked the front door’s peephole. She couldn’t see the guard, but her view was limited. Quietly, she unlocked the door and opened it. To her immediate right, the guard sat in a folding chair with a Coke, a box of Archway cookies, and a walkie-talkie on the floor beside him. A husky kid in his late twenties, he had curly brown hair and a baby face. His tie was loosened. He’d been reading
The Fountainhead
. Dropping the book, he jumped up from the chair. “Ms. Sutton? Um, is everything okay?”

She smiled and shifted Fred in her arms. “Oh, hi. Yes, everything’s fine.” Down by the elevator, she noticed a second guard muttering something into his walkie-talkie.

“I really don’t think you should be out here,” the husky kid said.

“Oh, I thought I’d go for a walk before bed. I’m kind of keyed up. Maybe it’ll help me sleep. I just need some fresh air. In fact, I figured I’d go up to the roof. It’s perfectly safe up there….”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll have to clear that with Ted first.”

“Oh, now don’t be silly—”

“He’s right, Dayle.”

She spun around.

Ted stood in the foyer with her. He’d thrown on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and his shoulder holster. He had a walkie-talkie in his hand. “We’ve taken all these precautions for your safety,” he said. “If you want to step out of the apartment, you need to see me about it.”

Dayle frowned at him. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“I wouldn’t like it either if I were you, but it is necessary.” He smiled at her, then set the walkie-talkie on the hallway table. “It’s late, Dayle. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

Sighing, Dayle retreated back into the apartment. Ted stepped inside after her. She heard him close and lock the door.

Sean’s tape recorder picked up everything Larry Chadwick had to say. It wasn’t so much a confession as it was an hour’s worth of steady gloating. Despite the stranger with a gun in the backseat of his car, Larry seemed to think he had the upper hand. He was still at the wheel, still in control.

Yes, he knew who she was. His friends were quite aware that Avery Cooper’s lawyer was in town, and they had a full description of her. They also had Avery Cooper in custody: “Last I heard, he was being held just outside Lewiston, two hours from here. He might still be alive. I’m not sure. My friends were trying to determine his exact whereabouts when you lured me away with that phony phone call.”

He explained about his friends, the Soldiers for An American Moral Order, who were going to bring back family values and godliness to the people of this country. He defended the torture and mutilation deaths of Tony Katz and his friend: “Faggots aren’t human beings. And right now, those two deviates are burning in hell.”

Larry freely admitted to having participated in the murder of Leigh Simone. They had made it look like a drug overdose: “Leigh Simone got what she deserved. She advocated homosexuality, abortion, and the restriction of our constitutional right to bear arms.”

They didn’t set out to kill people. They merely wanted to silence those celebrities who posed a threat to moral order and traditional family values. Often, all it took was a little research into their pasts or intimidation. A good scandal could always discredit a loudmouth liberal celebrity’s cause.

“And if you can’t dig up dirt on someone, you manufacture it,” Sean said. “Did SAAMO arrange the murder of Libby Stoddard?”

“Yes.” Larry studied the dark, winding highway.

In the last hour, they’d encountered only six cars on this road. The most recent was a minivan, which had been keeping a steady, respectable distance behind them for several miles now. They were driving through a forest preserve. The unlit two-lane snaked around clusters of trees.

Sean adjusted the volume on her recorder again. “You had a nurse named Laurie Anne Schneider steal Avery Cooper’s sperm samples from the fertility clinic. One of those samples was planted in Libby Stoddard. Is that correct? Yes or no?”

“Yes,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “And we still have some of those samples, Ms. Olson.”

“You framed Avery Cooper for murder, because he’s a threat to your fundamentalist agenda. Is that correct?”

“He’s no threat anymore,” Larry replied.

“Dayle Sutton, she’s the next to die, isn’t she?”

Larry didn’t hesitate to answer. “Yes. But I’m not in on that one. The wheels are already in motion. We have people in L.A. handling it. She’ll get hers on the set of her movie. It’s slated to happen in the next day or two.”

“Talk about a cold-blooded bastard,” Nick whispered from the backseat. “Lare, you must piss ice water.”

Unfazed, Larry scratched his chin, then glanced at the tape recorder in Sean’s hand. He seemed so blasé. It was almost as if he somehow knew that all the information he was revealing would never make it outside of this car.

Sean looked over her shoulder at the minivan, still trailing several car lengths behind them. Nick caught it too. Frowning, he turned forward and tapped Larry’s shoulder with the gun. “Both hands on the wheel, Lare. This is the fourth and last time I’m telling you. See the little trail up ahead? That’s where we’re going.”

With a sigh, Larry pulled off the highway onto a gravel road that dipped into the woods.

“Are they still following us?” Nick asked Sean.

“I can’t see,” she said, twisting around in the passenger seat to check the rear window. “They might have moved on, I’m not sure.”

Engulfed in darkness, they steadied themselves as the car bounced over the rocky trail. Eventually, the gravelly road gave way to a smoother, narrow dirt path.

Sean wondered if perhaps the minivan had switched off its headlights and was now following them. She couldn’t see a thing back there. Larry and his hunting buddies probably knew every inch of this forest. No doubt, he and his friends could maneuver these trails blindfolded. Meanwhile, she and Nick were totally out of their element here. The deeper they moved into the bowels of these woods, the more doomed she felt.

Ahead, she could only see as far as their headlights pierced the blackness. The path grew more narrow and hazardous with tree roots and rocks. An occasional branch from above scraped against the roof of the car. Twigs snapped under the tires.

She turned to Nick. “As soon as we can,” she whispered. “Let’s swing around and head back to the main road.”

He nodded distractedly. “In a minute.” He tapped Larry’s shoulder with his gun. “Someone in Dayle’s camp has been providing you guys with information. It’s how you know I was here. Who’s the stoolie?”

Larry studied a curve in the path ahead. “It’s a guy who works for her, his name’s Dennis Walsh.”

“Well, well, that fat piece of shit….”

Sean watched Larry casually slide his left hand off the wheel, down to his lap. She wondered why he kept doing that. Nick had already warned him about it four times.

They hit another bump, and she dropped the recorder. It landed between her seat and the car door. She went to reach for it.

“Slow down,” Nick barked.

Sean heard Larry laugh a bit. “Sorry.” He sounded so damn confident. What did he know that they didn’t? Or was he just so self-righteous that he figured no one could hurt him? Why wasn’t he scared? It had become so dark in the car, she couldn’t quite see his expression. But somehow she knew Larry was smiling.

Sean pried the recorder from under her seat, and an image suddenly hit her. She remembered the first time she’d set eyes on Larry Chadwick—in the parking lot of the My-T-Comfort Inn. He’d pulled up in his car, opened the door, then reached under his car seat, and taken out a gun.

“Nick?” she said. She sat up and stared at Larry. For a moment, her heart stopped. He had only one hand on the wheel, and in the other he held a semiautomatic, pointed at her.

“Oh, God, no,” she whispered.

A loud shot rang out. Sean felt as if someone hurled a punch in her shoulder. The force of it took her breath away and sent her slamming against the passenger door. The back of her head hit the window.

Another shot resonated, and the car lurched forward. Sparks exploded from the dashboard. A third blast immediately followed, and Larry let out a howl as the gun flew from his hand. Sean felt a spray of blood hit her in the face. Dazed, she watched Nick club Larry over the head with the butt of his gun. Larry flopped against the driver’s door. A pungent smoke from the singed fuse box began to fill the car as it rolled to a stop.

Sean slouched against the door, not wanting to move. It was as if someone had stuck a hot steel rod into her upper chest—beside her right shoulder. Larry was still half conscious as Nick climbed out and opened the driver’s door. He yanked him out of the car. Larry vaguely grumbled in protest, then fell to the ground.

Nick snatched his gun off the car floor, then stared at Sean. “Where are you hit?” he asked, trying to catch his breath.

“My upper chest,” she murmured. “By the shoulder…can’t feel my arm.”

“Shit, you’re bleeding bad. We have to get you to a hospital, doll.”

“Don’t call me doll,” Sean replied in a shaky voice. “We—we can’t go anywhere. The car’s dead. The fuse box is shot….”

Nick tried and tried to restart Larry’s Honda Accord. The engine made a grinding noise, but refused to turn over. Meanwhile, Larry had managed to sit up on the dirt path. He held on to his bleeding left hand. A trail of blood slid down from the gash on his forehead. Yet he was laughing like a crazy man. “You screwed yourselves!” he called, staggering to his feet. “You’re trapped! You’re not going anywhere….”

He kept laughing and taunting them, until finally Nick jumped out of the car. Half delirious, Larry didn’t even see him coming. Nick coldcocked him. He might as well have been swatting a pesky fly. One expedient, forceful hit, and Larry Chadwick went down.

The last thing Sean heard him say was: “She’ll bleed to death. That cunt’s going to die out here.”

Earlier, when they’d driven up the dirt path, Sean hadn’t noticed all the other forest trails merging into this one. Those few minutes in the car had covered several miles.

They’d been trudging through the woods for close to an hour now—lost, swallowed up in the darkness. Cursing, Nick stumbled over rocks and tree roots while she staggered behind him. With her good hand, Sean clung to his belt at the back of his jeans and faltered along with him.

She tried to ignore the pain in her shoulder. Her arm was in a sling—crudely fashioned by Nick from Larry’s khaki trousers. Her arm and her right side down to the hip were sopping wet with blood that had turned cold. Sean could see her breath in the chilly night air, yet she was burning up inside. Drops of sweat trickled from her forehead. She had a fever—an infection from the bullet, or maybe from all the blood she’d lost. Still, she pressed on.

In addition to relieving Larry of his trousers, Nick had also stripped him of his shirt and undershirt. He tore up the shirt and tied Larry’s hands in back of him with the shreds. After shooting a couple of breathing holes in the Accord’s trunk lid, Nick had dumped the unconscious, underwear-clad Larry inside. Sean weaker protested that he’d freeze to death. Nick said he didn’t give “a frog’s fat ass.” He shut the trunk, then pocketed Larry’s keys.

He found a bottle of water in the glove compartment. With that and Larry’s T-shirt, he tried to clean the bullet wound by Sean’s shoulder. Then he made a sling out of Larry’s pants. As they started down the path, Larry must have regained consciousness. They heard him pounding on the trunk lid, the muffled yelling and cursing.

That had been nearly an hour ago. Now, Sean blindly held on to Nick. For all she knew, they could be heading deeper into the forest, away from the highway. She felt herself growing weaker and dizzier with every step. Suddenly, the ground seemed to drop out from under her. She tripped over a tiny rivulet, almost pulling Nick down too. The fall knocked the wind out of her.

“You okay?” Nick asked, hovering over her. “From what I can see, you don’t look so hot.”

“Flatterer,” Sean murmured. She didn’t think she could stand up again. “How can you even see
anything?
” For the last hour, she’d been praying for some point of light that might lead them to the highway—some wonderful, bright, artificial light. But there was only darkness.

“Let’s rest here for a sec, okay?” Nick said.

Sean nodded again. Shivering and sweating, she listened for the sound of a car, a radio, maybe some people talking at a nearby campsite. Nothing. Yet she and Nick weren’t alone. She could hear creatures moving in the shrubs all around, twigs snapping beneath feet—or claws.

“God, listen to that,” Nick whispered. “I’m a city boy. Gentle Ben or Bambi, either way, I don’t like this shit….”

Sean laughed, but she felt herself slipping away. She didn’t think the darkness could become any blacker, yet it was happening. She couldn’t move. Nick was still talking to her, but through a fog.

Sean thought of Danny and Phoebe. She remembered them playing on the beach with their aunt a couple of nights ago. And she felt her body shutting down.

Tom glanced in his rearview mirror at the white Taurus—his escort to the studio. He wore his blue seersucker—along with his disguise: glasses and a fake mustache. Beside him in the front seat, Hal was reviewing details for Dayle Sutton’s execution one last time. When he started to explain about the “getaway” afterward, Tom told himself not to believe a word.

“In the ambulance,” Hal said, consulting a notepad, “you’ll be furnished with a new passport and all the necessary papers. By the way, your passport photo is just an old picture of you that we doctored up. Your new name is Robert Allen Bryant. You’ll receive ten thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in the van—”

“Ten thousand?” Tom interrupted. “But you told me—”

“You have reservations tonight at The Best Western Golden Park in Rio,” Hal went on. “Under the name Robert Allen Bryant. It’s not the Hilton, but it’s affordable until you find your retirement villa. Three days from now, you’ll receive an another eighty thousand in traveler’s checks. It’ll be sent to the hotel. After that, additional payments will arrive every month. You’ll end up with a quarter of a million—as promised, Tom.” Hal grinned and patted his shoulder. “Or should I say ‘Robert’?”

Gazing at the traffic ahead, Tom bit his lower lip. Suddenly, the whole Rio dream didn’t seem like such a lie. He thought about last night. He could still see that drag queen dropping his self-incriminating letter to the
Los Angeles Times
in the mail. Had he screwed up his chances for a clean break?

“Um, where will you find a body of someone who looks like me?” he asked, stopping at a traffic light. “You’ll need a body….”

“I know.” Hal glanced out the passenger window. “It’s a nasty detail we’ve already taken care of, Tom. The less you know about it, the better.” His cellular phone rang. He took it out of the zippered pocket of his designer sweatshirt and answered, “Hal speaking.”

The light changed, and Tom pressed on. They weren’t far from the studio. Soon he’d be on his own.

“Well, where’s Larry?” Hal said into the phone. “Hasn’t anyone heard from him?”

Tom kept hoping against hope that the call was about canceling Dayle Sutton’s assassination. He’d done a prison movie years back, in which a last-minute call from the governor had saved him from the electric chair. Was it too much to ask that this last-minute call be his salvation?

“I want them tracked down,” Hal continued. “Have Larry call me right away…. Well, then keep paging him. Over and out.” He pressed a button, and quickly folded up the phone. “Damn it,” he grumbled.

“We’re still—doing this?” Tom asked, feeling his stomach lurch.

“All systems are go,” Hal said. “Pull over. I’m switching cars.”

Swallowing hard, Tom followed Hal’s orders. In the rearview mirror, he saw the Taurus veer over to the curb and stop behind them.

“Don’t forget,” Hal said, opening the car door. “At the studio gate, your name’s Gordon Swann, and you’re an old friend of Dennis Walsh.”

Dennis was in a good mood this morning. He’d had a particularly amorous evening with Laura last night, then slept over to help her move today. They’d had another go at it about a half hour ago. Now she was in the shower, and he was dressed, fixing them breakfast.

Someone knocked on her door. “Just a sec!” Dennis called. Threading around storage boxes, he checked the peephole. He didn’t recognize the guy; then again, he didn’t know Laura’s neighbors. “Can I help you?” he called.

“Um, I live upstairs,” the man called back from the other side of the door. “Some of Laura’s mail was put in my box by mistake.”

Dennis opened the door. The neighbor was a small guy, about twenty-five, with athletic good looks, and straight blond hair. He handed Dennis an envelope from Pacific Bell. “Sorry. I wasn’t looking when I opened it up. I thought it was mine—until I saw all those calls to Idaho.”

Dennis stared at the man, then at the envelope.

“I don’t know anybody in Opal, Idaho,” the neighbor explained.

Dennis studied the phone bill. One call to Opal after another, and always the same number: 208-555-4266. She’d phoned every day—at all sorts of hours.

Dennis managed to smile at the neighbor, and nodded vaguely. “Um, thank you.” Closing the door, he glanced down the hall toward the bathroom. He could hear the shower’s torrent. In a stupor, he wandered back into the kitchen, picked up the telephone, then dialed the Opal number.

It rang twice before a man picked up. “Hey, there, Laurie Anne,” he said. “How are things with you and fatso?”

Dennis quickly hung up. It took him a moment to realize that the party in Opal had Caller I-D. But who was Laurie Anne?

The phone rang. They were calling her back. Dennis let it ring. Her answering machine came on, and they hung up.

Eyeing the bathroom door, Dennis tried the machine for old messages.

Beep
. “Hi, honey—” It was him. He skipped to the next message.

Beep
. “This is your mother, Laurie Anne. Pick up. Are you there? Oh, you’re not there. Listen, someone from your old job at the clinic called me last night, asking for a
Lauren
Schneider. Anyway, this Grace somebody says they owe you over a thousand dollars from some kind of social security withholding mix-up. I gave her your number. She’ll be calling. Maybe now you can pay me back some of that loan, Laurie Anne. Call me, okay? God bless.”

“End of Messages,” announced the prerecorded mechanical voice.

“Laurie Anne” must have erased all the calls from her Opal cohorts. Dennis didn’t want to think it was true. Once again, he picked up the phone and dialed the number in Idaho. It rang once. “Yeah?” the man said warily.

Dennis hesitated. “It’s Ted,” he grunted.

“Ted? What are you doing at Laurie Anne’s? It’s execution day, for God’s sake. Why aren’t you at the studio with the bitch? Ted?”

Dennis hung up on him. In a daze, he wandered down the hall—past all the packed boxes—to the bathroom door. He tried the knob. She hadn’t locked it, trusting soul. Quietly, he opened the door. He saw the figure on the other side of the pink-tinted shower curtain. Dennis ripped the curtain aside.

Laurie Anne swiveled around and automatically covered her breasts. Then she saw him and burst out laughing. “You silly—”

Dennis grabbed her and slammed her against the tiled wall. She struggled helplessly. The shower matted down his hair and drenched his clothes as he held on to her. “I just got off the phone with a friend of yours in Opal, Idaho,” he growled. “I know you set me up. I figured out about Ted too. But tell me this,
Laurie Anne
. Who’s this Gordon Swann you wanted me to smuggle onto Dayle’s film set?”

Tom didn’t need to mention this Dennis person at the studio gate. All he said was, “My name’s Gordon Swann,” and the guard gave him a pass—along with directions to the administration building and visitors’ parking.

He felt sickly, and couldn’t stop trembling. Within an hour, he would be dead—or riding to the airport in an ambulance.

The thin, pretty Asian girl at the front desk must have seen it in his face. After calling for his escort, she asked if he was feeling all right. She made him sit down, then fetched him a drink of water.

He felt a bit better by the time the studio’s young page pulled up to the building in a golf cart. He reminded Tom of himself—about fifty years ago, a good-looking kid with black, wavy hair. Driving down alleyways past the vast soundstages, the kid started in about how big the studio was, the different movies and TV shows shot there—the standard tour-guide spiel. His words were just background noise, like the prayers the prison chaplain reads for a man led to his execution.

Tom felt another wave of dread when Soundstage 8 came into view. The page dropped him off at a side door, where Tom showed his visitor’s pass to the security guard. He tried to keep his hand over the bulging pocket of his seersucker jacket. The gun felt heavy and awkward.

The security man led him into the building, down a hallway to a door with a green light above it. The guard opened the door for him. Tom was overwhelmed with a million memories as he stepped onto that movie-making soundstage. The McDonald’s ad two years ago had been filmed at a tiny studio. Nothing major league like this. The cameras and lights were different from his heyday, but the feel of it was the same: they created magic here.

He gazed at the movie set: a town hall meeting room. Extras sat in folding chairs facing a podium on a small stage. Some folks had cigarettes going—for the scene obviously, since
NO SMOKING
signs were plastered on the soundstage walls. Behind the podium stood Dayle Sutton in an unflattering gray wig. She looked bored. No one seemed to pay any attention to her.

Tom touched the gun in his pocket.

“Mr. Swann? Hello, I’m Beverly. Is this your first time on a film set?”

Startled, he managed to smile at the woman with the blond beehive hairdo. She was around sixty, in great shape, carefully made up and decked out in a pink suit. “No, I—I’ve been on a movie set before,” Tom said, carefully taking his hand out of his jacket pocket. “I used to be an actor.”

“Oh, really?”

He shrugged. “Bit parts mostly. That was a long time ago.”

“How interesting,” she said. “Then you must already know, sometimes they’ll ask for ‘quiet on the set…’” Beverly went into a long, elementary explanation of how to behave on a film shoot. The only other visitors on the set were three Japanese businessmen. Beverly paid more attention to them, which was all right by Tom. He didn’t want her watching his every move.

He glanced over at Dayle Sutton, leaning sluggishly against the podium. “Um, Beverly,” he said. “Would it be all right if I moved a bit further down along the wall? I want to get a better look at Dayle Sutton.”

Beverly grinned. “Certainly, Mr. Swann. But she’s Ms. Sutton’s stand-in. Dayle’s in her trailer right now.” Beverly pointed to the mobile unit against the soundstage wall—past of an array of lights and sound equipment.

Beverly started explaining the various duties of a stand-in. Tom didn’t hear a word. He noticed a lean man with thin blond hair standing by the trailer door. He wore a blue suit. Her bodyguard. Was he really with the organization—as Hal had said?

The bodyguard scanned the set. He checked out the group of Japanese businessmen; then those eyes kept moving along the outer wall until his gaze locked onto Tom’s. They stared at each other for a moment. The bodyguard gave a single nod, and smiled ever so subtly.

“Quiet please!” someone called.

A dozen spotlights switched on, illuminating the set. Somebody held a light meter to the stand-in’s face. Amid all this, Dayle Sutton emerged from her trailer. She looked older and careworn in the dowdy tweed suit, and with her trademark auburn hair hidden beneath a brown-gray wig. She started onto the set, studying her script. The director was talking to her.

Tom felt a little short of breath. He checked his target. He wished the director would move out of the way. Accompanying her up to the podium, he kept stepping into the line of fire. He patted her back and whispered to her.

Tom held on to the semiautomatic in his pocket.

“Quiet on the set!” someone yelled again. The director finally moved away. A mike, hanging from a boom, descended closer to Dayle’s head. Both hands on the podium, Dayle took a deep breath. Tom had a clear shot, but then the man with the clapboard stepped in front of her. “Scene eighty-seven. Take four!” He slapped the clapboard together, then stepped aside.

“Roll cameras,” the director barked.

She stood alone up there. He had her in range. No one was looking. Tom took the gun out of his pocket and brought it up to his chest, burying it in the folds of his jacket. He glanced up toward the podium.

Dayle Sutton seemed to be staring right at him. She had tears in her eyes. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Susan…and I—I’m an alcoholic.”

Tom took a step back, bumping into the wall.

The congregation applauded her and called back, “Hello, Susan!”

The smile she gave them was heartbreaking. For a moment, the dowdy woman had the face of an angel. “Thank you,” she replied in a stage whisper.

Mesmerized, Tom forgot that he was holding a gun—until, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Dayle’s bodyguard coming toward him. The tall, blond man glowered at him and angrily muttered something under his breath.

Tom nodded sheepishly. He raised the gun, and aimed it at Dayle Sutton.
Just another Coke bottle on that front porch railing
.

“Cut!” the director bellowed. “Does everyone in the meeting have to smoke? Looks like a goddamn Turkish bath! I can hardly see Dayle….”

While the director complained, a woman stepped up on the stage to dab powder on Dayle Sutton’s chin. She blocked the line of fire. Another woman approached Dayle, pointing to the trailer. Tom couldn’t get a clear hit. He watched Dayle retreat back into her trailer, and then he turned to see the bodyguard scowling at him.

Tom looked away. With a shaky hand, he slipped the gun back into his coat pocket.

It would take a while for the fans to blow away the excess smoke. So Dayle headed back toward her trailer to answer an “urgent” phone call from Dennis. She wasn’t anxious to talk with him. Having pushed Ted Kovak on her, Dennis didn’t sit high on her list of trusted friends right now.

She hadn’t slept last night—what with Ted in the next room. By 5:45 this morning, she’d been dressed and anxious to leave. She and Ted had driven to the studio in her limo together. She’d used studying her script as an excuse for not talking with him.

She would figure out later today what to do about Ted Kovak. For now, she wanted him to think everything was status quo. She felt safe—for the time being. He wasn’t about to try anything on a crowded movie set.

On her way to the trailer, Dayle glanced over toward where Beverly corralled the visitors—a handful of Japanese businessmen and an elderly man in a blue seersucker suit. Ignoring Ted, she ducked into her trailer.

She picked up the phone and pressed the blinking red button. “Yes, Dennis?” she said warily.