Cutter's Run (30 page)

Paris looked at me. Then he shook his head. “Neither,” he said. He reached down, took the shotgun from my hands, turned, and shot Leon in the right foot.

Leon screamed and grabbed at his foot. His boot was half gone, and it was a shapeless lump of oozing blood and raw flesh and splintered white bone.

Paris tossed the shotgun aside and came over to me. “You gotta do this,” he said. “I only got one arm. Come on. Stand up.”

He put his good arm around my back and helped me stagger to my feet. I leaned heavily on him while the woods swirled around me. I swallowed hard and took deep breaths, then managed to whisper, “I’m okay.”

Paris half dragged me to the van and helped me into the passenger seat. Then he went around and climbed in behind the wheel.

I slumped there in the front seat of Leon’s van, breathing rapidly. Suddenly, bile rose in my throat and spilled onto my lap. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say. “It was the water. I waded in it. Cutter’s Run…”

Then I felt myself tipping and spiraling, and blackness closed in around me.

T
HE IMAGE APPEARED
through gray swirling mists, blurry and distant but vaguely familiar, and as I looked at it, the fog gradually dissolved, and the image came into focus.

It was Jesus, up there on his cross.

No, I thought. Couldn’t be. I’d never believed in any of that.

Sometime later I heard a soft voice calling me.

I felt a hand on my arm. I turned my head and blinked.

Alex’s face hovered above me. I tried to smile.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey yourself,” I grunted. My head hurt with the effort to speak.

“How do you feel?”

“I thought I was dead. I saw Jesus.”

She bent and kissed my cheek. “You’re not dead,” she said.

“He was up there on his cross. I figured that was it. I’d passed over.”

“You’ve been sleeping for quite a while,” she said. “It was a dream.”

When I looked past her, I saw that Jesus was still there. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want Alex to be dead, too.

The next time I dared to look, it was dark and shadowy and both Jesus and Alex were gone.

A large man with a bald head and a close-cropped gray beard was bending close to me shining a light into my eyes. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Coyne?” he said.

“Disoriented,” I said. “Fuzz-brained.”

“Understandable,” he said. “You’ve been asleep for nearly thirty-six hours.”

“I saw Jesus.”

He flicked out his light. “Huh?”

“I saw Jesus on the cross. I figured I’d died and had gone to judgment. Thing is, I’m not a believer.”

He chuckled. It rambled from deep in his chest. “You’re in Mercy Hospital in Portland, Mr. Coyne. Look.”

He straightened up and pointed. On the white-painted wall at the foot of my bed hung a crucifix.

“This is a Catholic hospital?”

“Right.” He smiled. “I’m Dr. Epstein. So either way, you’re in good shape. A Catholic hospital and a Jewish doctor. The best of both worlds, huh?”

“What happened to me?”

“They brought you in early Thursday morning. Your system was in toxic shock. Liver and kidneys on the verge of shutdown. You were semicomatose, dangerously dehydrated, vomiting uncontrollably. Fortunately the young man with you helped us identify the problem and we were able to treat it.”

“What was the problem?”

“You were poisoned,” he said.

“I don’t remember drinking anything…”

“You didn’t,” said Dr. Epstein. “This was something different. This you absorbed through your skin.” He straightened up. “You’re out of danger now. Looks like you’ll be none the worse for wear. In the future, be careful where you go swimming, huh?”

He gave my shoulder a squeeze and disappeared. A moment later Alex came in. Behind her glasses, her eyes looked red and smudged.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Thirsty.”

She put an arm around my neck to prop me up and held a glass for me. I sucked in some room-temperature ginger ale through a straw. It tingled pleasantly on me way down, but it gave my stomach a little jolt when it arrived. I realized that I had an IV sticking into the back of my left hand, and beside my bed a machine was ticking and blinking.

“I saw that Jesus hanging there,” I told Alex, “and I thought I’d died.”

“You came close,” she said. “Paris LeClair saved your life. He drove you here and told them what was wrong.”

“I need another drink,” I said. “Help me sit up, will you?”

Alex cranked up my bed and bunched a pillow behind me. Then she handed me the glass. I held it and sipped tentatively through the straw. My stomach made a fist. I handed her the glass.

“I still don’t feel so hot,” I said.

“You were awfully sick.”

“What time is it? I mean, what day is it?”

“It’s Friday, a little after noontime. Paris brought you in here Wednesday night—well, Thursday morning, about three o’clock. It was Sheriff Dickman who told me what happened. He’s anxious to talk to you.”

“I think I can tell him what he wants to know,” I said.

“He says you were a hero. He says you saved Paris’s life and solved two murders and prevented a disaster from happening downstream from the tannery.”

“Paris saved my life, too.”

She nodded.

“Wait,” I said. “Dickman called me a hero?”

Alex smiled. “No. That’s my word. He actually called you a loose cannon. But I think he meant it in the nicest possible way.”

Alex stayed with me for an hour or so, and then she said she was going home to change and clean up. She kissed my forehead and said she’d be back.

The nurse took my temperature, listened to my heart and lungs, made notes on a clipboard, asked if I felt like voiding—which I didn’t—then helped me into a chair. I made it with just a touch of dizziness. She put fresh sheets on my bed and fussed around the room, and when she was done she asked if I wanted to get back into bed or stay in the chair. I chose the chair.

A few minutes after she left, Sheriff Dickman came in. He was wearing a plaid shirt and chino pants. No sidearm, no badge. It was the first time I’d seen him out of uniform.

“You look like roadkill,” he said.

“That’s about how I feel,” I said. “I bet you want to know what happened.”

He pulled up a wooden chair and sat in front of me. “I got a couple versions of it. I’d like to hear yours, if you’re up to it.”

“The doctor said I was poisoned,” I said. “I got it from wading through Cutter’s Run below the beaver dam. I didn’t drink any of it. It gets you through the skin. The other day after I tried to catch a trout from the pond I felt a little sick. All I did then was dip my hand into the water to see how cold it was. I bet Charlotte Gillespie’s dog took a swim in that pond. That’s what killed him.”

Dickman was nodding. “You’re right about the pond. See, here’s what—”

“Wait,” I said quickly. “Let me see if I got it. That company—SynGen—was dumping some kind of toxic shit into those old cisterns at the tannery. When the beavers dammed up the stream, the water backed up into the tanks and the stuff leached out into the pond. The dog got into it and died, and Charlotte must’ve figured it out. Her note. She said she wanted to talk to me. That’s what she wanted to tell me, I bet. About the poison in the pond. But I was in Boston, and by the time I came back to Garrison, it was too late. They’d killed her.” I looked up at Dickman. “How’m I doing so far?”

“Good,” he said. “They found the poor woman’s body in that cistern by the tannery. She’d apparently been strangled. The dog’s body was there, too, and several housecats. They’d dumped lime on them.”

“Lime,” I said. “Like in an outhouse.”

The sheriff smiled. “To keep the smell down.”

“After the dog died,” I said, “someone retrieved it from the vet. To make sure nobody ran tests on it, probably. I know who, too.”

“So do I,” said the sheriff.

“Paul Forten,” I said. “He killed Noah Hollingsworth, too, right? He strangled them both. Noah must’ve been out pissing off the back of his deck one night and seen the headlights from the truck going in there to dump their stuff. The day before he died, he took out his horse. Bet he went down to the tannery and figured it out. Probably let it slip to Paul Forten. Paul hung out there with Susannah all the time. He knew how Noah got up in the middle of the night. Waited for him and strangled him.” I paused. “What happened to him? And Leon? Paris shot them both.”

Dickman shrugged. “That he did,” he said. “Forten had a big hunk of his leg blown away, not to mention a busted finger, and Leon Staples has got a mangled foot, and young Paris LeClair has a busted arm and a nasty gash on his face. They took Forten and Staples over to Maine Medical.” He arched his eyebrows. “Forten’s gone.”

“Gone?” I said. “What do you mean?”

The sheriff shrugged. “He’s gone. He’s not here anymore.”

“You let him get away? You didn’t arrest him? He’s a fucking murderer.”

“The feds claimed jurisdiction. They took him.”

“The feds,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

“We talked to a guy named Arthur Tate at an outfit called SynGen,” he said. “Mr. Tate was eager to be helpful. Turns out Forten’s the liaison for some federal agency that had a contract with SynGen to run tests on some new chemical they were evidently developing as a weapon. This stuff is a highly concentrated synthetic that works through the skin. In crystal form it’s inert. Mix it with water and it’s deadly. A piece the size of a grain of salt in a bathtub of water will kill anyone who lies down in it. Dump a scoop into a river and everything downstream that contacts it will die—or at least get damn sick. Supposed to be completely untraceable. SynGen was testing it on animals.”

“They were dumping the dead animals at the tannery,” I said. “And those animals had this stuff in their systems.”

He nodded. “Forten arranged that, and he hired Leon Staples to help him. See, their problem was to find a way to dispose of the waste—those dead laboratory animals—so it couldn’t be traced back to SynGen. So they trucked a load up there a couple times a week, dumped it into the tank, and poured lime over it. The chemical’s potency dissipates fairly quickly, apparently, so if those dead animals just lay there for a while, they’d pretty soon lose their toxicity. If the beavers hadn’t come along, nothing would’ve happened.”

“You’re forgetting Charlotte Gillespie,” I said. “She knew something was going on. She found a discrepancy when she did the SynGen quarterly audit. There was something she couldn’t account for. It was those animals. They were buying large numbers of them, but there was nothing in their records to account for what happened to them. When she refused to fudge her numbers, they had her fired.”

“That’s why she moved to Hood’s cabin,” said Dickman. “To check it out.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Ellen Sanderson told me Charlotte had been having an affair with someone. She thought it might be a client. I bet it was one of the guys from SynGen. Tate, maybe, the CFO, the one she would’ve worked closely with. Those SynGen guys used Hoodie’s place for deer hunting. So Tate took Charlotte up there a couple times, maybe let something slip about that stuff they were making and how they disposed of their dead laboratory animals. It was probably Tate who got her fired. Charlotte wasn’t one to shrug and say okay. So she decided to do something about it. She rented Hoodie’s cabin and moved there to get the goods on them. When her dog died, she knew she had it.”

“Yep,” said Dickman. “A woman scorned. Charlotte Gillespie is the real hero here. She refused to knuckle under and change her report. When she got fired for it, she didn’t just fade away. She went to Garrison and figured it out.”

“She tried to tell me about it.” I shook my head. “But I wasn’t there for her. By the time I got back, it was too late.”

Dickman nodded. “Forten got to her first.” He touched my leg. “Not your fault, my friend.”

I shrugged and reached for my ginger ale. I took a tentative sip. This time it settled comfortably in my stomach. “So is everybody under arrest, or what?”

Dickman smiled. “It’s not that simple. Forten’s the main villain here. He masterminded the whole thing, and he’s the one who committed the murders. The feds’ve got him stowed away somewhere. They’ve shut SynGen down pending an investigation, but it’s not clear who has jurisdiction over any criminal prosecution of them, if there ever is one. From what we can get out of Leon, he just trucked those dead animals from Portland to Garrison twice a week and kept his ears open for Forten. He admitted telling Forten about Charlotte’s dog and about how you were getting snoopy, and I guess old Noah must’ve let something slip, too, because Leon was feeling pretty bad about Noah. He swears he didn’t kill anybody.”

“So who took Charlotte’s dog from the hospital and left those messages on Alex’s machine? Forten?”

He nodded. “According to Leon.”

I shook my head. “Why would a man like Leon get involved with someone like Paul Forten?”

Dickman rubbed his fingers and thumb together. “Money, what else? Forten was paying him a helluva lot of money, by Leon’s standards. By the time they were done, Leon would’ve had enough to leave Garrison. He said all his life he’d been dreaming of dumping that store and dumping that wife of his. Said the store was the chain and Pauline was the ball.” Dickman smiled. “You know Pauline. It’s kind of hard to blame Leon for that.”

I nodded. “So what’s going to happen?”

He shook his head. “The feds have taken over. They can’t prosecute SynGen without implicating Forten, and that would mean exposing a government scheme to manufacture a chemical weapon. You know how that works.” Dickman shrugged. “Big can of worms. Even Leon might get off. So far, no one is showing any inclination to indict anybody for anything. Fish and Game dynamited the beaver dam, and then the EPA sent over a team to incinerate everything in that cistern—including Charlotte Gillespie’s body. And that’s that, as far as physical evidence is concerned. On the other hand, before too long you might be able to catch a trout out of Cutter’s Run, at least upstream of where the pond was.”

“What about downstream?”

“That poison has a pretty short life once it’s activated in water.” He smiled. “Trout will be able to live downstream, too. Which is what you were worried about.”