Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle (91 page)

Victoria was trapped; the best she could do was to postpone—to get Johnny alone where the issue would be simpler to defuse and the man would be easier to handle. “I'll deal with it,” she said. “But if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you to leave first. This topic is very personal—I'm sure you understand.”

“I need to ask you something first,” Nick said.

Braden cut in. “We'll be more than happy to answer any—”

“Your wife,” Nick said bluntly. “I need to ask her.”

“Dr. Polchak, I assure you that anything you can learn from my wife you can also—”

“John,” Victoria said firmly. “Go ahead, Dr. Polchak. Ask your question.”

“A woman disappeared tonight—I'm trying to find her, and I think you might be able to help.”

“Who is this woman?”

“Her name is Alena Savard. She lives alone in the mountains above Endor. She's the one people call ‘the witch.'”

Braden leaned forward in his chair. “The Witch of Endor? Danny told us about this woman—the one who found all the graves at the Patriot Center. Is she in some way connected to—”

“John.
Please
.” Victoria kept her eyes on Nick, but she could feel Chris tensing like a coiled spring beside her. “I've heard about this woman, but mostly through rumors—I doubt that much of what I've heard is true. I've never met her personally.”

“She was kidnapped a couple of hours ago—taken from her trailer by force.”

“How terrible. How can I help?”

Nick paused. “I thought you might have some idea where she is.”

“Me? How would I possibly know that?”

Nick glanced down at the scrapbook in her lap.

She nodded with her eyes. “Do you think this woman's disappearance is related to the deaths of those other people?”

“I think Alena Savard was kidnapped for the same reason the others were killed—to keep something secret.”

“But you said the old librarian was responsible for all those deaths.”

“That's right—and that's what I can't figure out. There was a fourth body discovered at the Patriot Center, remember? Only Agnes wasn't responsible for that one—that body was two hundred years old. Something else is going on here, Mrs. Braden, and I was hoping you could help me understand what it is. Someone else besides Agnes has a secret to keep—a very old one. I need to know what—”

Nick suddenly stopped; he turned and looked down at the floor beside him, then quickly looked around the room.

“Is something wrong, Dr. Polchak?”

“My dog—where's my dog?”

“Right here,” Chris said. The dog was stretched out on the carpet beside him; Chris slumped down low in his chair, allowing one arm to dangle down over the side, casually stroking the dog's back.

Nick stared at the dog, then at Chris.

“Riddick!” the senator shouted. “Don't you know any better than to touch a seeing-eye dog? You're distracting the animal from its duties!”

Chris shoved at Trygg with his toe, but the dog refused to move. “I can't help it—the old mutt just came over and flopped down beside me.”

“It's okay,” Nick said. “She's just friendly, that's all.” He pulled off his glasses and began to rub at the bridge of his nose.

Victoria watched him. Something was wrong, but she had no idea what. Polchak suddenly seemed flustered, as if something unexpected had just taken place. He was covering his eyes, taking time to think; something was going on in that mind of his that he didn't want to reveal.

A few seconds later he slid his glasses back onto his nose and looked up. “Mrs. Braden, do you have any information at all about the whereabouts of Alena Savard?”

“I'm sorry,” Victoria said. “I sincerely hope you find her.”

Polchak stood up and started for the door—then stopped and looked back at the dog. “Trygg—come!”

The dog looked up at him but didn't obey. Nick walked over to the dog, hooked a finger under her collar, and pulled; only then did the dog rise to its feet and follow.

“Not a very obedient animal,” Victoria said.

“She's a female—they can be unpredictable. Sorry to bother you all. I'll be going now.”

“Wait,” the senator called after him. “The Patriot Center—the investigation— what happens now?”

“Ask your wife,” Nick said. “The two of you will have to work that out together.”

Nick let himself out.

They watched until the door shut behind him.

“What a nutcase,” Chris said. “If you ask me, he's—”

“Get out,” Braden commanded.

Chris got up and left without any further word, leaving the senator and his wife staring at one another across the empty room.

38

The minute the truck was out of sight of the house, Nick pulled off the road and turned off his headlights. He slumped forward and rested his head on the steering wheel. His mind scrambled, trying to formulate his next logical move—but a terrible realization kept creeping in, crowding out his other thoughts:
The dog was lying down.

Alena was already dead.

Adrenaline flooded his system; his entire body trembled and he felt like vomiting.

Trygg was lying at Riddick's feet—that was her alert. She detected the odor of death on Riddick's hands or shoes or clothing. Riddick admitted that he was out earlier this evening; he said he had an errand to run, an errand that the Bradens seemed to know nothing about. But wait a minute: Only the senator asked about Riddick's absence, not Victoria—did she know where he went? Apparently the senator knows nothing about the scrapbook and his wife's true identity; maybe she thought she could keep it that way. Maybe it's not just Mommy's little secret anymore—maybe it's her daughter's too now, and maybe Riddick is helping her keep it. But would Victoria be willing to go as far as her mother did?

Nick twisted around and looked back through the rear window into the camper shell; he saw Trygg balancing on three legs in the center of the truck bed, staring back at him. He looked at the dog, and for the first time Nick thought he could read the meaning in the animal's doleful eyes. It was as if she was saying, “Where are we going? That was the guy back there.”

“I know,” Nick said aloud, “and we'll go back for him—I promise.”

He shook his head; he was talking to a dog. It made no sense—or maybe it did. Trygg reminded Nick of the child prodigies he had read about in studies—the one-year-olds who had memorized the faces of all the U.S. presidents before they had even learned to talk. That was Trygg's problem: The dog knew far more than she was able to communicate. She had detected the scent of death, but was it Alena's scent or someone else's? The dog was trained to detect the telltale odor of tissue and fluid and blood—but which one was it? Alena once told him that a dog's chief ability was to distinguish between scents; where a man smells only beef stew, a dog detects the individual odors of carrots, potatoes, and meat. But which is which? Only the dog knows, and she has no way to tell. Did Trygg detect the odor of Alena's dead body already beginning to putrefy? Or was it only her blood—in which case Alena might be wounded but still alive? The dog had no language to communicate the things that she undoubtedly knew.

But the dog could find Alena. She could at least track the scent she had detected on Riddick's shoes or hands or clothing. She could find the source of that scent, and Nick would just have to hope for the best when they found it—and hope they got there before it was too late.

Trygg had picked up the scent of Alena's blood or decomposing body, but there was no scent at Alena's trailer—that meant Alena was alive and probably unharmed when she was taken. Riddick could have killed her and dumped her body anywhere along the way—or he could have brought her here to Bradenton. It was a definite possibility. A human body is a difficult thing to dispose of, and hastily dumping a body in an unfamiliar area is a sure way to have it discovered quickly; bringing it here would give him time to think. There were hundreds of acres of land at Bradenton—plenty of places to bury a body, and all on private land where no one would ever look.

It's worth a try
, he assured himself—but he knew that anything is worth a try when you have no other options.

He pulled the truck into a grove of river birches until it was out of sight of the road and then killed the engine. He took a handful of knotted bandannas from the seat beside him and switched on the cab light to examine them. He remembered what Alena had told him: The dog was trained to distinguish four different kinds of remains. The first bandanna was red with a polka-dot pattern—the one Trygg wore at the Patriot Center when she searched for skeletonized remains. Nick set it aside—it wasn't the one they would need here. The second bandanna was green with a checkerboard print—the one Trygg wore when she searched the lake for submerged remains. Nick set that one aside too.

That left only two: an elaborate blue plaid and a bright orange print with a series of wavy black lines. He looked at each of them:
putrefying remains
and
distressed body
. One of them told the dog to search for Alena alive and the other to search for her dead—but he had no idea which was which. And how “distressed” did Alena need to be before the dog could find her? The dog would never find her alive and unharmed; she had to be just less than dead.

He made a random guess—the blue plaid—and stuffed the other bandanna in his pocket.

He climbed from the cab and opened up the back of the truck; Trygg stepped onto the tailgate and silently leaped to the ground. Nick squatted down in front of the dog and held the blue bandanna in front of her face.

“I hope I've got this right,” Nick said. “See this? This means we're going to work now. I want you to search for the same scent you just found inside—got it?” He looped the bandanna around the dog's neck and stood up. “We'll circle around behind the house and check the stables and outbuildings first—that's our best bet. He wouldn't have dumped her out in the open and he wouldn't have taken her in the house; he would have hidden her until he figured out what to do next. Come on, let's go.”

Nick walked a few yards away but the dog didn't follow. He turned back and said to her, “Look—I know how smart you are, so there's no use playing dumb. If you can detect the scent of table salt in a dilution of one part in ten million, then you can figure out a simple spoken command. Now we don't have time to mess around, so—”

He snapped his fingers once and said, “Come!”

Trygg immediately rose and followed.

Nick nodded with satisfaction. “Your first word. Momma will be so proud.”

They stayed in the shadow of the trees as they made a wide arc around the house; Nick could see the lights still burning in Braden's office. He wasn't surprised; by introducing that scrapbook he had undoubtedly kicked off a discussion that would last well into the night. He wondered how Braden was taking the news that his made-in-heaven wife was a little more down-to-earth than he thought; he wondered how the senator's spinmeisters would reveal to the public that the future First Lady's mom was a serial killer responsible for multiple murders, including the murder of a federal agent. And these weren't genteel and ladylike murders either—not just a sprinkle of arsenic on the pot roast or a few sleeping pills dissolved in the tea. No—these were bat-bashing, skull-cracking, corpse-dragging murders—the kind that stick in people's minds for a long, long time.

The Braden campaign seemed doomed—it seemed impossible to Nick that anyone could recover from that kind of negative publicity— but if anyone could manage it, the beautiful Bradens could. There was a lot of money on the line in a presidential race and a lot of powerful people were involved. The Bradens had probably already made a few calls, and somewhere in Washington right now an army of strategists was already calculating the best way to distance the Bradens from these unfortunate events.
Politicians are survivors
, Nick thought. In his experience they were harder to kill than a cockroach, probably because they share a common characteristic: When the lights go on, they disappear.

It took fifteen minutes to circle around behind the house and come up behind the first of the outbuildings—a rustic old grain silo that had apparently been preserved to keep Bradenton looking like the working farm it hadn't been in years. If the silo was empty it would be an excellent place to hide a body—but Trygg circled it once and simply looked up at Nick.

Next they came to a large tack shed. Nick pulled up a handful of grass and tossed it into the air to test the direction of the wind; they approached from downwind to allow Trygg to pick up any scent that might be drifting in the breeze, but the dog made no alert. Nick found the door unlocked and they entered; they searched the interior carefully but found nothing there.

They worked their way from building to building, allowing the dog to sniff every crack and crevice for any indication of scent. Nick began to wonder if he was doing something wrong; maybe the dog needed some further instruction—maybe she thought they were just out for a walk. But then he remembered the scene in Braden's office, where Trygg simply picked up the scent, walked over to Riddick, and lay down with no instruction from Nick at all.
She knows what she's doing
, Nick told himself.
This is what she was trained to do. All I need to do is stay out of her way and watch.