Desert Run (34 page)

Bull's eye! He let fly a few more curses, then subsided to groans, the better to lull me into sympathy.

“Hey, Mark. I'll bet that shoulder hurts. Why don't you throw the gun down the slope and let me out of here so I can call Air-Evac for you? I wouldn't want to see you get an infection. Or get dizzy and fall off the trail. You could bang yourself up pretty bad on that slope.”

Recognizing that his pity-ploy had failed, he began cursing again. The man was nothing if not consistent.

The longer I talked, the more blood he would lose, so I soldiered on. “After Gilbert finishes tying up Joyce Bollinger and her children, he runs out to the car and gets the tire iron. Then he comes back to the kitchen and…Well, we both know what he did.” I paused and took a deep breath to steady myself. “Afterwards, he's so upset he forgets to be careful, so he leaves his bloody footprints all over the kitchen, footprints so small that they eventually clear those big German POWs of the murder.

“But there
is
a German in at the death, isn't there? Kapitan Erik Ernst is hiding outside in the bushes and he gets a good look at your dad, probably when your dad opens the kitchen door and the light shines across his face. I'll come back to Ernst in a minute, because he's what started this whole thing up again. That night, after killing the Bollingers, your dad realizes he's in a world of trouble. In a panic, he drives off. He doesn't go straight home but drives around and around until he can clear his mind. Somebody sees him, but it's so dark out that they just take it for granted that it's Chess joyriding in his father's car again. Eventually, Gilbert decides to go home and tell his father what he's done. Is that the way it worked, Mark?”

“You tell me, Miss Know It All.”

At least he'd cleaned up his language. “I don't know how strong the relationship was between Gilbert and his own father, but from what happened afterwards it's clear that your grandfather did everything necessary to cover your father's tracks. He burned your dad's bloody clothing, didn't he?”

Mark was so quiet I could hear a hawk call in the sky outside, hear the wind rushing through the valley. Wherever Josef Braun now was, could he hear it too?

Before I continued, I touched Josef's boot again. I hoped he had sailed on the wind, all the way across the Atlantic to Germany and that little Bavarian farm where he'd left his pregnant wife. I hoped he'd seen his baby before drifting away to that place where we all eventually end up.

I shifted my position to make myself more comfortable. How much longer would this take? Just as I began to resettle myself, Mark used the slight rustlings I made to fire off another round, but he came no closer than before. At this rate, he would empty his clip before he fainted from loss of blood.

Cheered by this thought, I continued. “Your grandfather did more than just burn your dad's clothing, didn't he? He talked one of his Navajo farm hands into driving the Olds along back roads all the way up to the Navajo Reservation. Later, when Chess was fingered for the murders, I'll bet your family breathed a sigh of relief. It never crossed their minds to tell the truth just to keep an innocent kid out of prison.”

Mark finally spoke. “You're so smart.” From his tone, it wasn't a compliment.

“Smarter than you, since I'm not the one out there bleeding in the hot sun. Attract any bees, yet? I hear the Africanized variety has been spotted out here in the Wilderness.”

I let that scary image hang in the air for a moment, then continued. “Anyway, I promised I'd get back to Erik Ernst and his role in the Schank family saga. Sixty years have passed, your father has made a bundle from selling classic cars, and you're not doing badly, either. Your life is about to get even better, because your father is in failing health, and you're about to inherit everything. Ah, life is good. But then Warren Quinn decides to make a documentary about the German escape from Camp Papago, and guess who he decides to use as his chief talking head? Eric Ernst, the one man alive who can place your father at the scene of the Bollinger killings. That sure came as a nasty shock to your dad, didn't it, Mark?”

“What the fuck do you think?” His bitterness told me my solution to both the Bollinger and Ernst murders was right on the money.

“You're not really interested in film, are you? You only pretended to be a film buff so you'd have another excuse to keep turning up on Warren's set to keep an eye on things. The Golden Hawk just gave you another excuse, an even better one, because it enabled you to talk to Warren on a regular basis.”

“The sonofabitch doesn't know shit about cars. He just thinks he does.”

Maybe. But Warren knew a hell of a lot about people. Which brought me to my next question. “How long have you known about your father's crimes?”

Silence.

“Then I'll guess. When I saw you and your father together at your office, I noticed the strong resemblance between the two of you. Give or take forty years, you two could be twins. I'm betting that the first day of shooting, you didn't know a thing about the Bollinger killings, that you just ambled over to the set thinking you could sell something nice to the rich Hollywood director. That's when Ernst saw you, saw the stunning resemblance between you and the blood-spattered boy he'd seen sneaking away from the Bollinger farmhouse sixty years earlier. He'd probably seen you two together on your commercials, but since you were always filmed head-on, he couldn't see your profiles. And you were both always mounted on horses…”

“I was on that damned jackass!” Mark howled.

“Yeah, that must have been humiliating. Anyway, since you were both always on some sort of equine, he couldn't see your heights. Or lack thereof. But after Ernst saw you in the flesh, three-dimensional, as it were, he put two and two together and came up with blackmail. That would have been, what, six or seven weeks ago?” When Ernst realized he had to do something about his financial situation or wind up in a state-run nursing home. “Say, Mark, when Ernst showed up that first time at Schank's Classic Cars, how did your father take it?”

He controlled his pain and rage long enough to answer. “Better than you'd think. He just told Ernst to get out of his office, that he had nothing to lose anymore, that he'd probably be dead from emphysema in a few months anyway.”

I started to nod, then remembered he couldn't see me, hidden as I was behind my sheltering rock wall. “But you had plenty to lose, didn't you?”

“Damn straight! Ernst said he'd go to the cops if Dad didn't pay up, and that meant a pack of high-priced attorneys bleeding us dry while they angled for continuance after continuance. By the time the system was through with Dad, there'd be nothing left for me to inherit. I've worked too damn hard to let that happen!”

And co-starred in too many bad commercials. “Tragic, all that lovely money, going, going, gone. Um, before you killed Ernst, did you at least try to reason with him?”

“I never meant to kill him. I went over to his house late that night when I knew his caretaker would be gone, and tried to make him see things our way. I even offered him some money, although not as much as he wanted. I talked myself blue in the face, but the old sonofabitch refused to listen.”

Just as I thought. But there was something else I'd never been able to figure out about that night's scenario. “You're relatively young and strong, so why did you duct tape Ernst to his wheelchair? Or did you think that would make him more
reasonable
?”

“Give me a break. I only did it because the mean bastard kept ramming me with it! He even bloodied my shins! So, yeah, I found some duct tape in one of the kitchen drawers and taped him down so he couldn't do me any more damage. But once I got him all taped up, he just went crazy on me. You wouldn't believe the mouth on that old Nazi.”

Oh, yes I would. Everyone who'd known Ernst remarked on it. Still, for a moment I felt a brief twinge of compassion for Das Kapitan. Old, sick, broke and alone, dying the same kind of death he'd dealt to Joyce Bollinger so many years back. Then, remembering her dying agony, my compassion faded. “So you bashed his brains in like your father did the Bollingers. And like Gilbert, you let someone else take the blame. Only this time, the patsy wasn't a delinquent teenage boy, but a hard-working Ethiopian immigrant.”

“I didn't
plan
to kill Ernst!”

Sure, it was just one of those unfortunate accidents. “What'd you kill him with? The cops never found the murder weapon.”

A mumble.

“I can't hear you.”

“A hammer, that's what. It was in the same drawer as the duct tape.”

“Where is it now?”

“In the Cross Cut Canal.”

I'd probably floated right past the murder weapon when Lindsey shoved me in. “Okay, I'll concede that you didn't plan to kill Ernst. But you
did
plan the killings of Fay. And Harry.”

“You can probably guess why.” Every moment he sounded more and more like a sulky child.

“Sure I can, but I'd rather hear you tell it.” And I'd rather keep him bleeding in the hot sun. Once he fainted, this mess would be over. I could crawl out of the cave, phone for help, and start the wheels of justice turning. I would also do something for Josef, whose presence had given me so much comfort. I reached out and touched his boot again. “It won't be long, Josef,” I said quietly. “Soon we'll both be out of here.”

Mark's voice drifted into the cave. “That damned reporter was going to include a chapter on the Bollinger killings in that book of hers, the one Warren's using as the basis for his stupid documentary. I guess she fancied herself some sort of detective, because she came up with a plat map that showed who was living where back then. And there were the Schanks, less than a mile from the Bollinger farm. Hell, Dad even rode the same school bus as that worthless Chess! Anyway, she found all this out and showed up at the dealership when Dad was there, demanding to talk to him. He took her into the office, she told him she was writing a book on the escape and was going to include a chapter on the Bollingers, and that she knew he…” He stopped for a moment to catch his breath. Good. He was weakening. Or pretending again.

“Any minute now, Josef,” I whispered.

A gust of wind came up, almost carrying away Mark's next words. “Dad told the reporter that if she attempted to tie him to the Bollinger murders, he'd sue her and her publisher until they were all piss-poor penniless. It didn't scare her, but it sure as hell scared her editor, and he made her drop that chapter from the book. At the time, I knew nothing about any of it. I didn't find out until Ernst showed up at the dealership. Then, after Ernst, uh, died, the reporter started nosing around again, so I protected my father.”

And protected your inheritance at the same time. “How about Harry Caulfield? Why did he have to die?”

“Same…same reason.” This time the wind didn't carry away his words. With a grunt, he leaned his chin on one of the rocks at the cave mouth, and his voice echoed around both rooms like a ghost's. “The Ernst thing got Harry so stirred up that one day he called my dad and asked if his old house had been close to the Bollinger farm.”

Mark rightly took my silence for a sign to continue. “Harry told Dad he was going to get the Bollinger case reopened. Jesus, once a detective, always a detective.”

And this detective's patience was running thin. “Oh, for God's sake, Mark. You make it sound like none of this was your or your dad's fault, that if people had minded their own business, everything would be fine.”

I'd had it with him. I was tired of his self-righteousness, tired of his tenacity. He was like a spider glued to his web. He wasn't going to fall off the trail, not even if he bled out. If anything, he'd probably slump unconscious into the cave opening, and I'd have to kick his body away before I could get out.

I decided to bring the standoff to a close. But not before I gave Mark a piece of my mind, the better to help empty his firearm. “It would never have been fine because you're a conscienceless jackass. And so is your kid-killing father!”

The slur so incensed him that he fired off another few rounds, but not enough to empty his semiautomatic. Regardless, it was time to take the offensive.

No problem there. “Hey, Mark! Bullet coming through.”

I inched my head around the rock and snapped off a round, taking care to aim slightly above his head. He responded exactly as I wished, by panicking. In his haste to back away from the cave's entrance, he dropped his semiautomatic in panic and collapsed onto the narrow trail with a shriek. Before he had time to recover, I dove through the second chamber's opening and exploded out of the cave. I found him on his hands and knees, cringing against the cliff wall.

Now I aimed my revolver at the center of his torso. Chest shot or gut shot, either would suffice, although I hoped it wouldn't come to that. “Clasp your hands behind your head and stand up slowly.” I stepped back to give him room.

He looked at me, his face a mask of hate. “Go fuck yourself.”

With a grunt, he launched himself forward in an attempt to drive me off the trail. It didn't work. Ready for this last-minute effort, I merely pressed myself to the cliff wall and watched as he lost his footing and began the long roll down to the valley floor below.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When I finally reached Mark, I found him crumpled against a spine-studded prickly pear cactus on the valley floor. A white bone poked through a tear in his pants, revealing a compound fracture. Compared to that, the rest of the cuts and scrapes he'd sustained while rolling down the slope were relatively minor. As he lay on the ground moaning, I unclipped my cell phone and called 911. Although my conversation with the dispatcher was interrupted several times by static, I managed to convey my message: hiker down on the Peralta Trail approximately a half-mile southeast of Weaver's Needle.

Send AirEvac.

And cops. The hiker was a suspect in the killing of Erik Ernst, Fay Harris and former Maricopa County Deputy Harry Caulfield.

Help summoned, I left Mark's side to search for the Beretta and found it ten feet up the slope, nestled underneath the magenta blossoms of a barrel cactus. I couldn't leave it for hikers to find, so I hauled it out with a stick, trying my best not to superimpose my fingerprints over Mark's, and clicked the safety on. Prepared for a possible overnight in the Wilderness, I'd carried a large Baggie full of trail mix in my backpack, so I dumped out the mixture for the field mice, turned the Baggie inside out, and slipped the Beretta into the clean side of the Baggie. It wasn't flawless crime scene technology, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. When I returned to Mark, his eyes were still closed, but the tautness of his body hinted that he'd regained consciousness.

I gave him a poke with the same stick I'd used to retrieve the Beretta. “How's it going, guy?”

“Bitch.”

I smiled. “How unoriginal.”

There was no point in letting the man suffer more than necessary, so I gave him a sip of water from my canteen, then slid the sheet of waterproofing from my backpack and erected a rough lean-to over his face to keep off the sun. Good deeds thus accomplished, I sat back a few feet away and waited for help.

I had just begun to hear the whupa-whupa-whupa of helicopter rotors over Weaver's Needle when two young men came around a bend in the trail, headed back down the Peralta Trail from their trip to Weaver's Needle. Loaded with climbing gear, they were dirty-faced but smiling. When they saw Mark, the smiles faded and they rushed over to help.

“
Was geschah hier
?” one said. “Ah, sorry! What happened here?”

Germans, about the same age as Gunter and Josef when they followed Das Kapitan into the Wilderness.

I flicked a look at the cave above us, where another German lay awaiting rescue.

“What happened? Oh, it's a long story. A long, sad story.”