Dead Creek (22 page)

“Brad hasn’t told you?” Julie looked strained, as if to convey that if he hadn’t brought it up then perhaps she shouldn’t be saying anything.

“Oh, he did!” said Peggy quickly. “He just didn’t tell me you were coming
today.
That’s all.”

Julie let herself look relieved. “Good. Then, as you know, the initial bequest was for twenty million, but we found more paperwork last week. It seems Mrs. Bowers had two safe-deposit boxes in yet another bank, and the trust officers there were late informing us of the contents. Most of the assets are in real estate, and then there’s five million in cash that should be put in an interest-bearing investment or account somewhere. I brought the paperwork with me so we can execute a wire transfer in the morning.”

“Ah,” said Peggy. “I imagine he’ll do exactly what he did with the other.”

“Oh?” Julie sounded surprised. “I’ll strongly advise against that! He has two million dollars in cash already, I can’t imagine he wants to lose interest on this money.”

Something happened to Peggy’s face with that remark from Julie. Her eyes darted down and up again and the jaw slackened. Then her features tightened and she stood up, “Let me get the coffee. Does everyone take cream and sugar?” Osborne thought she hurried out of the room.

They sat perfectly silent, listening. Osborne expected a rattle of cups, maybe even a murmur of a voice on the telephone. They heard nothing. Ray pointed a finger at Osborne, and Osborne rose to walk toward the kitchen. He pushed open the swinging door. Peggy stood still at a kitchen window, her back to him, her arms wrapped tightly around her body as if she was holding herself together.

Osborne walked up and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Peggy? Is anything wrong?”

The face she turned to him was the real Peggy. Her mouth and jaw were twisted with hate. Her eyes were black and cold.

“The little shit,” she spat. “The little shit. He took every dime Joe and I had and made me mortgage this house up to the hilt last year. When Joe was so sick, we gave him power of attorney. Joe was always so conservative, we just had savings accounts, so I asked Brad to invest it for me, but he put it all in his name. He said it would save on taxes.

“Before I knew it, he had all our assets in his name. Even this house! And he hasn’t talked to me in six months. He said I depress him. He said I make him sick to his stomach. He lives here, Paul. He lives right upstairs but I’m not allowed to go up there. Do you know—all he gives me is two hundred and twenty-two dollars a month. I barely eat on that.”

“How did this happen, Peggy?” Osborne asked her softly. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“He’s mean, Paul. He’s bone mean. When he was a baby, he would bite until you bled. When he was in high school, he would say the nastiest things about people—the things he said about you and Mary Lee. It was disgusting.” She dropped her face into her hands.

“Oh my God, it’s all my fault. I never could figure out what he needed.”

“Peggy …” Osborne actually felt some sympathy for the woman. Why, he didn’t really know.

“He … urn …” her voice was shaking as she raised her head. Osborne sensed she was on the verge of hysteria. “Just last week he told me I could leave if I didn’t like it … but he controls my whole life. Oh, Paul, this is all so humiliating. And now I find out that he’s got all this money? Oh, I’m going to kill myself.”

“Hold off on that action,” said a woman’s voice suddenly. Julie had entered the kitchen with Ray right behind her. “Brad has a few questions to answer before any funds are signed over. Peggy, I think it’s time we tell you the truth. Yes, he’s an heir to a massive fortune, but only because I believe he murdered his brother.”

As the expression on Peggy’s face turned into bewilderment, Osborne let her down gently into a kitchen chair. “Peggy,” he said, “we’d like to take a look at Brad’s room. Would that be all right with you?”

“We don’t have a search warrant,” said Ray. “You don’t have to let us do this, but Dr. Osborne and myself—we’re working on the investigation as deputies for Chief Ferris.”

“You can do anything you want up there if you can get in,” said Peggy. “He’s kept the place locked up tight for months. I don’t know—I’m afraid of what you’ll find up there.

“Here, over here, is the back stairway. See the lock on that door?”

“Sure do,” said Ray, pulling a Swiss Army knife from his back pocket. “Where’s your screwdriver?”

“Joe’s workbench in the basement,” said Peggy.

The lock was expertly jimmied in less than five minutes. “Another notch in the belt for the exit expert,” said Ray with a slight grin, pulling the door open.

Just then the phone rang. Osborne picked up the nearby kitchen wall phone.

It was Mark. “I called Lucy. No sign of Lew yet. I’ve tried every one of Erin’s friends. No one has seen her!” Mark sounded like he was going to cry.

“Mark, hold on,” said Osborne. “Let me call you back in five minutes. Just hold on, okay?” He set the phone down and raced up the stairs behind Ray and Julie.

They found three bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper level. In one room, the furniture had all been pushed to the side as if to make room for storage.

“Looks to me like he had boxes in here,” said Ray, pointing to dust patterns on the floor. He smeared his finger through a footprint. “They were recently moved, within the last few days.”

The next room had served as an office. A desk in the corner held envelopes and papers littered across it. Julie ran over and shuffled through a few. “Nothing here. Some college staff memos and stuff. Old, a couple years old.”

The third room had definitely been used as a bedroom. Dirty sheets and an old quilt lay loosely across the double bed. Otherwise, Brad appeared to have packed up and left. Two dingy white towels lay on the floor in the closet. A small dresser was empty.

At the end of the hall, the last door, the bathroom door, was closed. They paused before pushing it open. More towels on the floor, trash overflowed out of a wastebasket just inside the door, and a discarded travel kit lay on its side beside the toilet.

“Get a load of the mirror.” Ray pointed and they crowded around. Across the top of the oak-framed mirror Brad had tacked a series of photos. From left to right, three shots, taken from the waist up, showed Brad Miller in different stages of weight loss.

In the first shot, his face was pudgy, eyes bulbous and staring at the camera, mouth grim, head bald. The next shot was of a slightly thinner Brad, while the third was of a startlingly slim man. It was still Brad, but this shot showed him standing alongside another person: Robert Bowers.

“My God, look at the resemblance,” whispered Osborne. He was right. Having lost weight, the facial structures were uncannily similar, although Robert’s neatly trimmed beard provided a sharp contrast to Brad’s smooth-shaven face. Both were bald and the shapes of their skulls identical.

Tacked to the right of the three photos, grainy as if it had been enlarged from a much smaller picture, was a head shot of Judith Benjamin. Her face was much thinner than the two men, even though the basic bone structure was similar. On her, the flat, fishlike eyes were tempered with makeup. The blond hair that was so neatly pulled back into a French twist now looked quite obviously like a wig. Osborne was surprised. It had never occurred to him that she might be bald. He knew, of course, why the line of her jaw was so different.

“Check out the five o’clock shadow around Judith’s mouth,” said Ray. “She shaves.”

Osborne looked back at the shot of Robert Bowers. The face looked robust and healthy above the crisply tailored beard. His eyes, under his gleaming bald head, were alert and smiling, with natural crinkles of humor at his temples and at the edges of his gentle grin that made him look happy and attractive, in sharp contrast to Brad’s hostile stare. And yet, in all three, the noses, the eyes, and the mouths were almost identical.

“My God, it is amazing how much they look alike, yet the differences in expressions and their body weight makes the similarities tough to catch,” said Julie softly. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t notice how much they looked alike when I met Brad.” She studied the photo closely. “Like I said earlier, I thought he was wearing a piece. The man I knew in Kansas City was not bald.

“And the police drawings of the silver thief—they show a man with hair and a beard—but pudgy. I remember thinking it was odd that Brad and Robert shared some mannerisms, in their speech patterns especially, but I didn’t really think they looked that much alike. Brad was such a prissy guy, always wearing his pants pulled up to his nipples. Robert was an athlete and very trim. He always….” Her voice caught suddenly and trailed off. Osborne put his arm around her to give her a hug.

“Well, well,” said Ray softly, “we may have something here.” He had reached behind him to open a linen closet. Towels were neatly stacked on the two shelves. The third and fourth shelves, the shelves at eye level, held a complete studio’s worth of stage makeup.

On the floor was a large black case. Ray pulled it forward and opened it. Trays slid out on hinges, a fully stocked makeup artist’s case. He lifted a plastic box from the bottom section of the case and tipped the lid open. Inside was a soft chamois pouch. He shook it and out fell a beard. A neatly trimmed, straight, grayish blond beard.

“Robert’s beard,” whispered Julie.

“He must have big plans if he doesn’t need this stuff anymore,” said Ray,
“big
plans.”

Just then, Peggy called up to them from downstairs. “I just talked to his secretary from the college at home,” she said. “I thought it might be worth the chance she would know where he was going. Brad has always loved ordering other people to do his work for him. I was right. She ordered his tickets. He’s booked on a flight to Japan early tomorrow morning, first class out of Vancouver.”

“That means he’s gone already,” said Julie, turning around anxiously.

“He only had tickets from Vancouver,” said Peggy. “He wouldn’t tell Linda how he was going to get to Vancouver.”

“Lemme call Mark,” said Osborne, scrambling down the stairs. He picked up the phone and punched in Erin’s number.

“Mark, any news?”

The answer was negative.

“Now, don’t worry. We think we know where they are. I need you to call the police station and tell them to tell Lew where we’re going. If she isn’t there yet, give these directions to Lucy. Tell her we need backup as soon as possible.

“This is tricky, but Lew knows the way: Take k toward Shepard Lake. Take the right at the sign for Marjorie’s Bed and Breakfast off Old Highway C onto a gravel road, go back a good five or six miles. At the old Cantrell warehouse, drive right back behind it, drive around a landfill and a berm, just keep going. The road dips down to a new log house set way back. That’s the place.

“Got it? Good, we’re on our way.” He hung up before Mark could answer.

“Paul,” Peggy stood before him, “I want you to know something I’ve never told anyone in Loon Lake. Brad got kicked out of Princeton after his first semester. He never worked at Yale. He’s been lying to everyone. He falsified documents about his graduate schools and teaching career and made me swear to secrecy. I want you to know in case it helps.”

“It sure does, Peggy. Thanks.” Osborne gave her a quick pat on the shoulder. “I’ll call you when we know more.”

“Thanks so much for your help,” called Julie as the three of them walked rapidly through the house and out the front door.

Osborne’s car was rolling down Pelham Street before Ray and Julie had shut their doors.

“Back to Erin’s,” said Ray. “We’ll take my truck. I’ve got a goddam arsenal in the back. We may need it.”

“This is one time he’s not kidding,” said Osborne in response to Julie’s raised eyebrows.

“Do you always drive around with loaded guns?” she asked.

“No,” said Ray, “but I just had all my rifles and my shotguns cleaned and oiled by a gunsmith up in Eagle River last week. I picked them up Thursday and then I got bonked on the head before I had a chance to put ‘em back in the gun racks. They aren’t loaded—yet.”

Ray
cut the engine and the lights as he turned off the gravel road. He let the truck roll down the grassy ruts toward the old Cantrell warehouse. A cloud bank cut off any light from the moon, but once their eyes adjusted to the dark, they could make out the familiar shape of a car parked in front and to the right of the brick building.

“Lew’s cruiser! That’s a good sign,” said Osborne. His confidence level shot up a hundred percent. His entire body unclenched ever so slightly as, for the first time in hours he began to think that Erin and the baby might be okay. He realized he’d spent the entire drive out from Loon Lake hunched forward in his seat. He sat back and tried to relax his shoulders as he moved his hand to grip the door handle, ready for a signal from Ray.

“I hope you’re right,” said Ray under his breath as he sat motionless behind the wheel. He gave no sign for anyone to move. Instead, he scrutinized what landscape was visible in the deepening blackness around them: the sky faint behind the tree line, the forest hiding anything that might be lurking along the outside walls of the brick structure.

Ray cranked his window down and motioned to Osborne to do the same. He listened. Osborne and Julie sat perfectly still, listening and waiting.

Not a hint of light came from inside the old warehouse. The clouds did not move to unveil the moon. The woods were silent. Finally, in the distance, a great horned owl hooted.

“Do you think anyone’s in the building?” asked Julie softly.

“Nah. I’d be very surprised,” said Ray, his voice low, “but we better take a look.”

The three of them climbed out of the truck on the driver’s side. Ray left the door slightly ajar to avoid making a loud noise. As he walked to the back of his truck, Osborne noticed that the easy, casual lope had disappeared, replaced with the quick step and the deft movements of a man with every muscle on alert.

Ray leaned over the truck bed to unlock the padlock on the beat-up old metal chest he kept in the back of his truck. He opened the lid and reached inside for a black Maglite flashlight, which he handed back to Julie. Then he pulled out his deer rifle, checked the action and the sight, and handed it back to Osborne. “Hold this for me, Doc.” Osborne heard the clink of bullets as he stuffed them into his jacket pockets.

“I don’t know how to use a gun,” said Julie lamely, as if apologizing.

“We’ll certainly have to change that, won’t we,” said Ray briskly, glancing at her with a quick smile. Seeing the anxious look on her face, he amended his words. “Not tonight. Don’t worry. If one gun isn’t enough, then even a dozen guns won’t do it.

“What do you think, Doc? You want the twenty-gauge?”

“No, Ray. My eyesight in the dark—God help us if I made a mistake.”

“Not a problem. We know Lew is armed.”

Ray reached through the driver’s seat window for his trout hat. He set it carefully onto his head, tipping it slightly to one side. “Mandatory for good luck.” He winked as he reached for the rifle.

“Ready?” Ray sprinted toward Lew’s cruiser.

“Oh, boy,” he said softly. The front door of the car was ajar, the keys in the ignition. “No interior light may mean the battery is dead, and that means she didn’t expect to be gone long,” whispered Ray. He swung the door wider. No light went on. He checked the keys. “She left the ignition running, too. Out of gas. Looks like she got out to check on the place and never came back. Not a good sign.”

He turned and moved toward the front of the old building. Julie followed right behind, waving the flashlight so the beam bounced through the front windows. Osborne peered over her shoulder. The boxes that had been piled high earlier were gone.

“Aim for the corner to the right,” said Ray. The light picked up a haphazard pile of silver candlesticks, bowls, and other odd-shaped items that glinted under the beam.

“Looks like they dumped the small stuff,” said Julie.

“Or didn’t have time to smelt it,” said Osborne. “Ray, remember the smoke I remarked on yesterday? They’ve definitely been smelting something with a high silver content.”

“We’ll check the house, but I want us to stay back in the trees as we come around that boulder and the berm,” Ray cautioned as the three of them started toward the corner of the building. He shifted his gun to his left hand and reached for the flashlight.

“I’ll go first. Doc, you behind me. Julie, you follow last. Try to stay on grass so we’re not heard. With the cloud cover and no moon, we should be able to get pretty darn close. But keep low and stay behind me.”

Ray adjusted the flash to a low beam, aiming it right at his feet. He started forward slowly. They moved across the ground behind the warehouse and toward the fake boulder that hid the road to the house. As they came around the berm to the point where the road dipped, Osborne was surprised to see that the house was clearly visible and brightly lit, top to bottom. He glimpsed a flash of color and movement on the main floor.

“Looks like a party,” whispered Julie.

“You two stay here,” said Ray. He handed Osborne the flashlight. “I’ll go around to the front, check it out, then come back. Don’t move from here. I’ll be just a few minutes.” His lanky form vanished into the night blackness without a sound.

Osborne took a deep breath. His entire being had switched on a familiar, intense concentration, a mind-set that he remembered from the many times he’d stalked a deer. Every sense tuned, every muscle tensed, his peripheral vision alert to the tiniest motion.

He wished like hell he had his own rifle with the sight adjusted to his eye and vision, the familiar checkering on the stock that fit his hand like a glove and the trigger through which he could slip his finger without thinking. That gun was like an extension of his arm, and how he wanted it right now.

This was no deer approaching. This was the enemy. These were people who threatened what he loved most in the whole world. For an instant, he felt hot tears press against his eyelids, but he blinked them back. He clenched his jaw and forced the fear and worry over Erin and the baby to pump his adrenaline.

The minutes passed slowly, incredibly slowly. He could hear himself and Julie breathing. Then Julie nudged him and whispered, “I see him!” Ray reappeared, as silently as he had left.

“The boathouse doors are wide open,” he whispered. “The boat is outside, tied to the far side of the dock, and a two-engine seaplane is floating in the boathouse. It’s a pretty spacious little four-seater. Looks like they took out the seats. The doors on both sides are open. I could see several wooden crates. Hard to tell from a distance, but I thought I saw Judith sitting in the pilot’s seat with interior lights on, studying something.”

“No sign of Brad?” asked Osborne.

“No. The lake-side windows on the house have their shutters closed tight, so I couldn’t see a thing. Let’s try this back window to the right.”

They crept forward. The house had been situated against a thick stand of evergreens fronted by arbor vitae, which made it easy to get within five feet of the windows yet remain hidden. If the builder had deliberately tucked the house under the towering pines in order to hide it, the opposite had also been accomplished: a visitor could approach and remain hidden until nose-close to the back windows.

They looked directly into a kitchen. Fully lit and empty. Even as they peered in, Brad entered the room from the left. He was dressed for a business trip in a dark suit with a pale-colored shirt and a tie. His jacket was open, and Osborne could see he wore his pants, as usual, belted primly up and over his potbelly. Slung around his neck was a long red silk scarf. He looked less like a criminal than a pretentious fop.

He walked rapidly straight across the room, crossing in front of them to a closed door opposite the window. He stopped and crooked his head as if to listen. For a long moment, he stood quite still. He must have heard something because he lingered. Then Osborne heard something, too, and grabbed Ray’s arm. He heard the distant, muffled sound of a baby crying. Osborne recognized the cry of his grandson.

“They’re here!” He almost spoke out loud.

“Steady, Doc,” Ray whispered. He laid a reassuring hand on Osborne’s shoulder.

They watched as Brad shrugged and started to walk away from the door. As he started to move, an outdoor air compressor, not far from where they were standing, clicked on with a loud, sharp whir. Julie yelped in surprise. Brad twisted toward the window, his eyes wide and alert.

Osborne backed quickly into the brush with Ray and Julie right beside him. He wasn’t sure if they’d been seen. Brad hurried to the back door. An outside light clicked on, but the pool of light that it threw over the stoop and stairs fell a good ten feet short of where the three of them huddled.

Brad stepped out into the night, peering into the dark around him. Osborne was reminded again of how serpentine the man looked: Brad seemed to hold his head perfectly still with only the flat fish eyes moving in their sockets.

“Jude?” he called into the crisp night air. “Is that you?”

No one answered. He listened for a few seconds. Not even a breeze rustled a branch. Only the faint calls of young peepers down at the water’s edge broke the silence. An owl hooted, soft but piercing. It hooted again, this time a shriek—the aggressive cry of an owl striking prey. Brad jumped back into the doorway.

What he couldn’t see was that the owl was six foot four, wore a stuffed trout on its head, and happened to be standing right beside Osborne. Startled but satisfied, Brad stepped back in the house and closed the door. Ray waited a few beats and hooted again. Then he moved up toward the window. Osborne and Julie followed. The kitchen was empty.

“Where’s Lew?” asked Julie. “This doesn’t look good, Ray.”

“Okay, I’m going in,” said Ray softly. “I want you two to wait here. If I have any trouble, I’ll fire the rifle. That means you head for the truck and get help. Doc, here’s the key.”

He moved swiftly to the back door, which opened silently. He disappeared inside.

Osborne took a deep breath and shifted his feet. Julie reached over to give his arm a squeeze. “He knows what he’s doing,” she whispered.

Suddenly, the air compressor kicked off as quickly as it had come on. An instant of silence followed and then a shrill cry that seemed to come from underground. A baby’s cry.

Osborne was through the back door without even thinking. He ran down a short hall, turned sharply to his right, and crossed the kitchen toward the door he had glimpsed through the window. If the sounds had come from below, he figured this must be the door to a basement.

Curiously, instead of a knob, it had large silver handle in the shape of an airborne eagle. The right wing was designed to lock down into a steel hook on the wall, but it wasn’t in place at the moment. Instead, the door stood slightly ajar. He grabbed the wing, the door swung open toward him, and he found himself staring down at rows of wine bottles. He ran down a short stairwell into a fully stocked wine cellar.

Osborne stopped and looked around. He could hear a voice off to his right. He recognized Brad’s. At that moment, the baby wailed again, the sound still muffled but closer—definitely off to his right. But Osborne couldn’t see where the noise was coming from. He looked frantically to his left and to his right, along a wall of bottles. The baby had begun to cry hard. Osborne walked quickly between six-foot-high stacks of bottles in the direction of the noise. Sure enough, at the far right end of the wine cellar, set back so it was nearly hidden by shelving, was another door. This one was steel and it, too, was ajar. Osborne stepped through. Cold, cold air hit him in the face.

At first, all he could see was another short hallway. He crept down the hallway to peer around the corner. At the end of a room about five feet wide and fifteen feet long were three chairs. In the chair farthest to his right, tied hand and foot with cord and with clear packing tape twisted around her head and over her mouth, was Lew.

Beside Lew, her son tied to her chest with a bath towel so his little head and body faced her, was Erin. The baby was banging his head against his mother’s collarbone and screaming. She was also tied hand and foot and gagged with the tape. If Lew and Erin had worn jackets earlier, they didn’t have them on now, and the room was absolutely frigid. Osborne could see his breath in the air.

Beside Erin, tied into a chair, was a third woman, a blond wearing jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt, whose head drooped down against her chest so Osborne couldn’t see her face. The exposed skin of her arms looked dead white. In front of the three, his back to Osborne, stood Brad. He was rocking back and forth on his heels with his arms tightly crossed and chattering at his victims, a condescending tone to his voice.

Lew’s eyes caught Osborne’s, but she looked away quickly, focusing on Brad. Erin didn’t see him. Her face was turned up toward Brad with a pleading look in her eyes. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was making guttural noises in her throat.

“Oh, hush that disgusting child! And wipe that look off your face, you stupid woman.” If Brad Miller had ever attempted to hide his whining, effeminate mannerisms, he certainly didn’t any longer. “I’m sick of that idiot child crying,” Brad shook a threatening finger at her. “I’m doing you a favor, you know. It doesn’t hurt to freeze to death. Just ask dear departed Miss England here. See? No pain on this face.”

From behind, Osborne saw him step forward and reach to yank back the head of the frozen corpse beside Erin. “Oops, sorry—ha, ha, ha,” he laughed his flat, humorless laugh, “I forgot, frozen solid.” Brad blocked his field of vision so Osborne couldn’t see his daughter’s face. Whatever her reaction may have been, she was silent. The baby wailed again.

Brad took a step toward Erin, raising his right arm. Osborne saw he had a little Colt .25 automatic in his hand, holding it so the butt gleamed in the light. “I think I’ll just clock that little sucker and put him to sleep early.” Brad walked forward, the pistol raised. Osborne heard Erin scream from low and inside her chest. Now he could see her frantically wresting her body back and forth as if she thought she could jerk herself and the baby out of Brad’s way.