Dead Level (16 page)

She knew me and my sometimes convoluted thought processes too well. When I didn’t answer, she tipped her head skeptically, hands on hips. “You know, I think I’ll just stick with the he-fell-and-hit-his-head theory, okay?”

Right again. And the thing was, she
was
absolutely right: it was a ridiculous notion. For one thing, it was a pretty dumb way to try killing somebody (even if you did have a motive, which as far as I knew no one had one of those vis-à-vis us). You’d have to make sure your victim was here by the pond when it flooded and couldn’t just run away, and—oh, all sorts of sensible reasons.

Also, it’s not as if I were a nature expert, able to identify beaver claw marks at ten paces. Probably the industrious little animals had filled the culvert again, and the straight cut-marks were made by the edges of their strong, flat tails, or something; they were well known to be fast builders.

Besides, Ellie was halfway to killing me herself; all she had to do was work me a little harder. Speaking of which:

“So, while we wait for the road crew, how about we hit that gravel pit? I tossed two shovels in back,” she added helpfully.

Great, so I couldn’t have the position I so dearly aspired to, that of nonworking supervisor. Five minutes later we were bouncing downhill in the pickup, following a dirt track into a huge, roughly circular depression in the earth, about three hundred yards wide and twenty or so feet deep. Its floor was of sand, rocks the size of my fist, and pea gravel: lots and lots of gorgeous, multihued natural pea gravel.

Which is, of course, pea-sized. Eons ago glaciers ground it down; then the glaciers melted to streams, depositing the gravel where water flowed. Where the dirt road ended, we stopped, jumped out, and got the shovels out of the truck bed.

I’d put a half-dozen big plastic buckets in the truck, for transporting the pea gravel, and some of the large black plastic basins that I used for mixing concrete, as well; there’s no such thing as too much gravel, and if I had any left I could spread it around the clearing or on the path down to the dock. Lowering the truck’s tailgate, we got to work digging shovelfuls from the wall of the pit, then hefting them up into the buckets and basins.

It was about ten-thirty by now, and the sun still peeping between the gathering storm clouds was as high overhead as it got this time of year; even though it was autumn-cool back up on the road, we began sweating almost at once.

“Oof,” said Ellie, stepping back quickly as her shovel set off a mini-landslide in the pit’s high wall. Above hung the half-exposed root ball of an enormous dead pine tree, its trunk rotted out so I could look up and see the sky through it.

“Be careful.” Another loose bunch of stones and soil rattled down. “I don’t want to have to dig
you
out,” I cautioned.

But she wasn’t listening, her eyes widening in alarm as she dropped her shovel and dove at me, hitting me waist-high. As her momentum knocked me backwards I had just enough time to see that
pine tree’s root ball barreling downhill at me, carrying with it an enormous avalanche of boulders and gravel.

My head hit the truck’s rear tire. My shovel went flying, an edge of its sharp blade just barely not taking my ear off. The roar was amazing, like a jet plane revving its engines a few feet away, and so
fast;
ten seconds later, it was over.

“Ugh.” I was on my back, Ellie half on top of me. Pushing up on my elbows, I saw she was unhurt; checking my extremities and noticing that they moved, I figured so was I.

And then I saw the wall of the gravel pit. Or rather, where it had been. Now a house-sized mound of sand, gravel, and stones was heaped atop the fallen tree where the wall had come down.

A dead, crooked branch stuck up out of the heap like a giant skeletal finger; my stomach lurched at the thought of how close we’d come to being impaled by it.
Buried
and impaled …

Ellie got up, brushing sand from her clothes. “Whew,” she said, which I thought was an understatement.

“Um, yeah,” I agreed, not wanting to sound like a wimp.

But when I clambered to my feet, my legs felt as if my bones were dissolving, wobbly and loose. Around us, the gravel pit was as silent as the tomb it had so nearly become.

There’d been no warning. We must’ve loosened the gravel with our digging until at some point the weight above exceeded support from below. It was a known hazard in gravel pits, but until now I had never realized just
how
hazardous.

“How’d you know that was coming?” I managed, crossing the stony expanse of the pit floor for the shovel, which my outflung arm had hurled twenty feet.

Ellie stood by the truck, looking up past the dead pine tree that the avalanche of gravel had brought down and nearly covered. “I didn’t. I heard something and when I looked”—She made a downward-sweeping motion with her arms—“it was already on its way.” Picking up her own shovel, she turned to the fresh gravel, now conveniently near the bed of the pickup truck.

“At least now we don’t have to carry it so far to get it into the buckets,” she said, and began digging again.

Right, and if it had buried us both completely, I thought, at least no one would have to dig our graves. But it hadn’t, and half an hour later we’d loaded enough.

As we drove back to the cottage, the wilderness was full of sounds: crickets chirping, woodpeckers rat-a-tatting, the rush of a rising breeze chattering in the dry leaves and clicking brittle branches together. Glancing back at the culvert, I noticed that in the little time since we’d seen it last, the pond had already risen back nearly to the level that it was before the flood.

“You’re
sure
?” Wade Sorenson put both big hands flat on Bob Arnold’s old gray metal office desk and leaned over it intently.

Not for the first time, Bob felt glad that Wade was one of the good guys. “Well, let’s see, now,” he replied. “Guy goes into the woods with no more idea what he’s doing than I would have if I stepped out onto the moon.”

Wade looked skeptical, but he kept listening. “Wrong gear, wrong clothes, wrong time of year,” Bob went on. “No cellphone on him, either, no way to call help if he gets in trouble. Next thing you know, he turns up deceased. That surprise you a whole lot, does it?” he asked.

Reluctantly, Wade shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “City people don’t realize how it is, way back in there. Dead when he hit the water, the M.E. says?”

For the past twenty hours, Wade had been out on a tugboat helping bring in a freighter. So he’d just learned about the body Jake and Ellie had found, and of course he didn’t like it.

To put it mildly. “Yup,” Bob said, glad he could answer with certainty. Because they didn’t know where the death site was, an autopsy had been done right away, just to make sure an accident really was all they were dealing with.

“Victim had a heart attack, it turns out. Must’ve been by the water
when it hit him, he fell forward onto a rock, smashed his face up, and
splash
—so sayeth the autopsy report, anyway, and I think I’ll just go ahead and believe it, if that’s okay.”

That, at least, seemed to pacify Wade, whose problem Bob understood. If Wade rushed on up to the cottage to check on his wife, Jake, she might feel that he was patronizing her, as if he thought she couldn’t take care of herself.

But if he didn’t go, he’d keep on feeling that he should’ve. “Give her a call, you want to know for sure everything’s okay,” Bob advised just as his own phone rang.

“Yeah,” he answered it, recognizing the caller ID number. As he listened, he looked out through the big glass front door of the old Frontier Bank, on Water Street in downtown Eastport.

“So you got stiffed, huh? Yeah, I can come in and take a report.” In a few days the police station would be moving to its new quarters, two blocks away in the refurbished A&P building. There he would have clean white walls, tiled floors, upgraded lights and heating, and an honest-to-God holding cell.

He supposed he ought to be happy about it. “But why don’t I take a walk around town, first,” he said into the phone, “and make sure your pair of deadbeats aren’t still around? Maybe they haven’t quite gotten out of town yet.”

He listened briefly. “Good, then, I’ll be by in about half an hour.” But his caller wasn’t done.

“Huh,” Bob said again when the last bit of information the Rusty Rudder’s owner had to say to him had been communicated.

The last, least-welcome bit. “Uh, listen,” he said when he had heard it. “Wade’s here, you want me to put you on speaker?”

He hated the speakerphone. Talking, it was like shouting into a cave, and listening was worse. But it had its uses, and now was one of them; at least he wasn’t having to give the bad news.

“Wade?” said the restaurant owner, his voice thinly echoey, then went on apologetically. “Listen, you know I’m not one to say much about my customers.”

“Right,” Wade and Bob replied together. The Rusty Rudder owner never said word one about what his customers did, said, or consumed while they were in his establishment.

Or about them any other time, either, for that matter, and everyone knew it. “But Sam asked me to,” he continued. “Couple years ago now, Sam came in and
asked
me. He made me promise him this, you understand?”

“Promise what, pal?” Wade asked patiently. Even on the tinny speakerphone, he and Bob could both hear the tension in the pub owner’s voice.

“About drinking,” came the reply. At this, Wade’s blue eyes opened wider in surprise and his square jaw tucked down abruptly, as if he were reflexively rejecting what he’d just heard.

“He asked me, if I ever saw him drinking in here, to go to one of his family members. Right away, he said. So now I am.”

“Well, now,” Wade temporized, a clash of emotions clearly visible on his rough-hewn face. “That’s fine, I mean, I’m glad he said that, and that you kept your promise, too. But are you sure he wasn’t just sitting with people who were …?”

“No. And that’s the other thing,” came the answer. “I just told Bob I had a couple of visitors in here with a stolen credit card last night. I didn’t tell him, but I’m telling you, that’s the pair that Sam was with.”

The restaurant owner took a breath. “Drinks, dinner, the whole shebang, and now I got a guy in here, he says that card is his. Says he thinks he left it at the boatyard yesterday, credit card company called him late last night to say it was used, and was he the one who used it? Which he wasn’t.”

Worse and worse; Bob looked at Wade and shook his head wonderingly as the food-and-drinks man kept talking.

“See, when the card got used, the owner hadn’t realized that it was lost yet, so he hadn’t—”

“Reported it yet,” Bob finished. “Yeah, I get it. But calm down, okay? Everything’s all right, we’ll straighten it out.”

He hung up. It wasn’t all right; in fact, it was pretty goddamned far from anything that was even anywhere near all right.

“Look, Wade, just leaving Sam aside for a moment …”

Wade glanced up. “What?” he snapped, but then his expression softened; he knew none of it was Bob’s fault.

“Look, as far as Jake and Ellie being at the cottage goes, I know what you’re really worried about, okay?” Might as well at least get that off the agenda, Bob thought.

“But Dewey Hooper’s just a lowlife wife abuser who went too far, not some criminal mastermind. Also, turns out he was kind of nuts on the topic of the woman he killed, according to the prison guys the state police investigators are talking to. Obsessed with her, they say, and she’s buried in New Hampshire where her sister lives now.”

Bob took a breath. “They think he might be headed for her grave, down around Nashua. And besides, if he were around here, by now someone would’ve seen him and recognized him.”

He got up, picked the telephone handset back up out of its base, and with the ease of long practice punched in the keystrokes that set it to forward calls to his cellphone. Then out of habit he checked to make sure the wires leading to his computer modem and fax machine were all plugged in securely.

Once he moved to his new office, he could say goodbye to the tangle of wires. In its place he would have high-speed broadband, and a new, much more powerful computer that could send or receive big files—crime-scene photographs, surveillance videos, and so on—without the machine crashing and having to be restarted just as the data transfer had nearly completed.

All of which was fine, he supposed, and he was grateful for the grant that had gotten it all for the city, and thus for him, because that was where the city council had decided to spend it. He’d taken it as a compliment, appreciating what he regarded as a vote of confidence.

But personally, he wasn’t looking forward to the move a bit. He’d gotten used to this place, with the heavy brocade floral curtains at the
high, arched windows, the marble counters, and the old carpet on the floor. Plus the vault came in handy for storing valuables, weapons, and contraband.

“Yeah, I guess Hooper wouldn’t come back here,” Wade said. “What I don’t get, though, is how he avoided the cameras in the prison in the first place. I mean, being as we agree he’s not the genius type.”

Bob looked up from untangling one of the phone wires. “So you knew him?”

Wade shrugged. “Not really. Ran into him once or twice, and that was enough. Unusual type of guy, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“Right,” Bob agreed. “Hell, half our upstanding citizens are unusual.” He put a wry twist on the word. Way the hell out here in what the rest of the world thought was the boondocks,
unusual
was pretty much a requirement.

“He didn’t strike me as a real smart fellow, though,” Wade went on, still frowning over what he’d heard on the phone. “Smart enough to fool people whose jobs’re not to
get
fooled, I mean.”

State prisons ran surveillance cameras 24/7, and there was no way to disable one or otherwise thwart it without the attempt getting noticed by the officers watching the monitors’ display. They glanced away once in a while, sure, human nature being what it was. But you still couldn’t count on them doing it just when
you
were doing whatever it was you didn’t want observed.