Entombed (44 page)

"What do you mean?"

"Mercer said Gino
Guidi's on his way over here. You amateurs must have pissed him off
this morning. He's all fired up-without his lawyer this time-no holds
barred."

"Remind me, Mike. Is
there anyone I haven't annoyed lately?"

"I'll be right there,
kid. Just relax."

I replaced the
receiver on the wall hook. I didn't want to rub up against anything in
the house with my bloody ski jacket, so I took it off and put it on the
back of a kitchen chair.

After three or four
minutes of dead silence, I pushed open the swinging door and entered
the living room. It looked like Phelps had been called away suddenly.
There was a tall floor lamp that was on, next to a worn leather chair,
and resting on a table between them was a book, turned upside down with
its spine splayed. A half-filled coffee cup rested on a coaster.

I walked over and
picked up the book. It was an academic treatise on the London plane
tree. I flipped through the pages and as I did, a small stack of green
bills fluttered onto the carpet. I bent over to pick them up-they were
all hundred-dollar denominations- and stuck them back between two
pages, replacing the book on the tabletop.

I was too restless to
sit.

The room was rather
impersonal. There were very few signs of homeyness for someone who had
been in residence here for so long.

I walked to the mantel
over the fireplace to look at the photographs displayed there. All of
them were studies of gardens and trees, presumably favorites of
Sinclair Phelps.

I was pacing now,
walking from the front window, where I looked in vain for signs of the
groundskeeper or Mike and Mercer, back to the bookcases on the far wall.

I returned to the
window, parting the thin lace curtains again to search for headlights,
then crossed the room again.

There were more
photographs on one of the shelves. A rugged-looking young Phelps on
skis, and another of a child in a young woman's arms-his mother's,
perhaps. I smiled at her outfit, which so clearly dated the picture to
the sixties-bell-bottom jeans, a peasant-style blouse, long stringy
hair parted in the middle, and a peace symbol patched onto the arm of
the child's jacket.

A car door slammed in
front of the house, but before I could get to the entrance, Phelps had
opened it and found me in the middle of his living room.

"Miss Cooper? Is there
something wrong?"

"I apologize, Mr.
Phelps. I-uh, we had a problem over at the conservatory-"

"Yes, I've just come
from there. Everything's going to be fine. What are you doing here?" he
asked, his eyes scanning the room to see if anything had been disturbed.

"Well, I was trying to
tell you that one of the detectives got sort of stuck outside-"

"Chapman? He's on his
way in. Zeldin wants you all to meet over at the office in the snuff
mill and-"

"But Zeldin's gone," I
said.

"I just saw him, Miss
Cooper," Phelps said. His tone seemed to get more stern as we talked.
"He's asked me to bring the detectives to meet with him. You might as
well join them there."

I started to back up
toward the kitchen door as he made a move toward me.

The sudden knocking on
the front door startled both of us.

"I'll just step out a
minute to take care of this. One of the staff must have a problem."
Phelps walked toward the door, but before reaching it he turned back to
the table and chair. He picked up the open book, stopped to make sure
the money was still in place, and continued on his way to the door. I
noticed his large hands, covered with calluses, dried and cracked from
years of physical labor.

I was frozen in
place-uncertain about what to do-one hand on the bookshelf and the
other poised against the kitchen entrance.

I glanced beside me at
the floor-to-ceiling array of books. The bottom shelves were all to do
with plants and landscape gardening. The ones above my head were a
neatly lined-up collection of volumes of poetry.

I tried to listen to
the voices outside as I read the familiar names: Yeats, Eliot, Spender,
Auden, Owen, Roethke, Thomas, Heaney. Edgar Allan Poe.

The man Gino Guidi
knew as Monty-Aurora Tait's killer- was never without a book of poetry
in his back pocket. Even in his teens and twenties, the jobs he had
taken to support himself had imprinted their physical hardship on his
hands.

The voice of the man
that Phelps was talking to was raised a pitch. They were arguing about
something. The visitor cursed, and the words were spoken in Spanish.
The visitor stepped back away from the door, and through the gauzelike
curtains I could make out a dark-hooded sweatshirt covering his head.

Packs of marauding
teenagers. Aaron Kittredge had encountered a similar group outside the
back gate a decade ago when he tried to visit Zeldin to talk to him.
Others had attacked me at Poe Cottage while the rest of their gang
caused a distraction at the bandshell. Today, a threesome assaulted
Ellen when Zeldin ordered them to go and get Sinclair Phelps. Maybe
Phelps was running them the way a spymaster would send his agents out
on missions. Maybe the money stashed inside the book was a payoff for a
job well done at the conservatory today. Maybe.

I made a sudden
decision. I pushed against the kitchen door, padded across the linoleum
flooring as quietly as I could, and let myself out into the cold, dark
February night.

43

I turned the key to
start the golf cart. Without flipping the switch for the headlights, I
jammed the pedal and swung the small machine around in a tight circle.
Instead of driving out as I had come in, I followed the stone wall
behind the house in the opposite direction-certain that I could avoid
Phelps and the hoodie and just as sure that I could connect around to
one of the main paths.

The strong afternoon
breeze seemed to have died down with the sunset. I was grateful for the
cart's overhead cover and windshield, which sheltered me somewhat from
the winter chill. I hadn't stopped to retrieve my jacket from the
kitchen chair, but I was glad for the silk camisole I had put on
beneath my cashmere sweater and slacks when I had dressed so many hours
ago.

The road looped around
a fenced-in area of several acres in which bushes were covered with a
large tarp to ward off the frost. I was racing through an urban
oasis-the most natural of settings in the most unnatural
neighborhood-hoping to find homicide detectives from whom I was
separated by fields of rose gardens, lilac bushes, and a conifer
arboretum.

Had I identified the
murderer, who was indeed hiding in plain sight, whose bold imitation of
Poe's fictional brick crypt had been revealed accidentally by the
destruction of the old building in which the grand master of crime
stories had lived for a brief time? And had the tragic circumstances of
his own childhood led him to live out the fictional tortures of the
literary master of revenge?

I took no chances with
lights, and slowed down only to look at the path markings at the first
intersection. From the direction of the carriage house I heard
shouting-perhaps Phelps and the young man still arguing or-maybe
worse-commands being given to the thugs to hunt me down.

In the distance I
could hear the gurgling sounds of the river, and I followed the
pavement toward the noise, as it intensified into a pounding of water
against rock.

There was a sign to
the snuff mill, and I veered off in that direction before the small
overpass, hoping to see familiar NYPD Crown Vics parked nearby.

I paused above the
driveway entrance to the three-story building. It was completely dark
with no cars in sight. Of course Phelps had lied to me about Mike and
Mercer wanting to meet me there.

I juiced the machine
and was about to retrace my route when I saw headlights coming from the
direction of Phelps's carriage house. I didn't want to take the chance
of crossing his path, so I drove away from the mill instead. Anxious to
get back to the conservatory and a populated area of the gardens, I
turned left at the first possible break in the road. It was a larger
stone structure-the sign said Hester Bridge-and as I ramped up and over
it I could hear the rushing noise of the waterfall at the foot of the
Bronx River Gorge where Dr. Ichiko had met his death.

There were only two
choices as I rolled down the incline. A left would lead me to the
farther bridge, toward which I had seen Phelps or his cohort heading
just minutes ago. According to the arrow on the signpost, the
straightaway would take me back to the conservatory and administration
building-after a drive through New York City's only native forest-fifty
acres of undisturbed stands of hemlock, birch, and beech.

I was pushing the cart
as fast as it could go, and it bounced me around on the seat as it
rattled over branches and rocks that winter storms had thrown down in
its path.

The birds and animals
that populated the dense trees and exotic park in warmer months had
either flown south or hibernated, and there was a dreadful silence that
hung over the dark woods-a quiet appropriate to a greenhouse, but not
one that I had ever known before on a city street.

Ahead of me, between
bare brown tree trunks and filtered through the evergreen branches, I
could make out the headlights of another cart. They were coming my way.

I turned the wheel
sharply and tried to make a U-turn on the path, hoping to find a foot
trail on which to drive. The little machine lurched and threw me
forward against the dashboard, stalled in place. I played with the
ignition but there was not even a flicker of life. The cart had run off
its charge. It was dead.

The blunt nose had
bumped against the curb on the left-hand side of the road. I jumped out
and looked around to get my bearings, and decided to run for cover in
the opposite direction from which I had come.

The ground was firm
when I stepped onto it. I was glad the snow had melted from its edges
so that no tracks would be obvious to anyone heading along this way. I
looked for a clear path between the trees, and set off racing when I
found a narrow hiking trail. A small sign identified a grove of
Himalayan white pine, and their flexible branches covered with long
green needles gave as much protection as I could have hoped for. I
ducked and took myself as far off the roadway as I could navigate
without much visibility.

The pair of lights got
closer to me now and came to a stop in what I assumed was the vicinity
of my abandoned cart.

Certainly, Mike and
Mercer would be searching for me. There was no point in my trying to
peer out of the foliage and see who had approached. If he were friend
and not foe, he would have been calling my name.

The headlights cut
off. My pursuer had decided to look for me on foot. I didn't hear him
getting closer-maybe he had been fooled briefly by the direction in
which the empty cart had been facing and started his search on the far
side of the paved road. But I took the moment to climb deeper and
higher into the woods, certain I would find an egress on the far side
of the trail I had entered.

Seconds later, the
intense beam of a high-powered flashlight made a 360-degree arc from
the roadway where the man-probably Phelps-was standing. I crouched
behind one of the fat pines. My clothes were navy blue and black. There
was nothing shiny or bright to catch the attention of a flashlight, so
I tried to stay calm and motionless.

When the glare no
longer looked like it was focused on me, I found the trail again and
kept walking, up a hilly slope and into a denser plot of trees. I
patted my pants for my cell phone, but realized it was back in Phelps's
kitchen, in the pocket of my blood-soaked jacket.

As I climbed higher I
thought of Mercer and Mike. They knew I was inside the gates of the
Botanical Gardens and they would know I would not have left here
without them. Mike had sworn to me at the hospital after my spell
beneath the floorboards at Poe Cottage that he would never again leave
me behind without a thorough search. I expected to hear sirens any
minute, and I knew they could call in choppers with infrared lights
that were capable of finding my warm body in the darkest forest if it
came to that.

I stopped for a few
minutes, still spooked by the total silence of the woods around me. A
groundskeeper who had lived on this property for more than twenty years
would know every inch of the terrain, while I was feeling my way around
like a blind person. I could walk myself in and around trails that
Phelps would be able to trace from memory until I dropped from
exhaustion, or I could shelter myself in the warmest place possible and
let the NYPD come to me.

The long green fingers
of the pine needles seemed as likely a cushion as anything I would find
in this wilderness. I pulled at a few of the low-hanging branches,
knowing I'd infuriate the garden's high-rolling contributors for
destroying their plants and counting on their forgiveness if I survived
the chase.

I covered the surface
of the ground with several fronds and then seated myself atop them,
pulling others over me as further camouflage. But the frozen turf
beneath them was filled with the residual dampness of the winter's
earlier storms, and fifteen minutes of sitting still chilled me more
than I could bear.

On my feet again, I
traipsed down the far side of the hill, hoping to find some way back to
civilization. Now I could make out two sets of headlights, tearing
across the roadway like a pair of bumper cars at an amusement park.
What if Phelps had called on his army of teenage bandits to ferret me
out?

Time to get off a
comfortable path, I told myself. I bent beneath the boughs of several
trees and started traversing the hillside. I wanted to be in a place
where I couldn't see lights, and nothing short of night-vision goggles
could spot me.