Open Season (39 page)

McNaughton radioed in to find out if the backup troops were anywhere near. They were not. The weather had bogged everything down, and they were waiting for additional Sno-Cats.

“Well, I guess we slog home.”

I looked around. “Is that wise?”

McNaughton gave me an exasperated glare. “Wise? What the fuck is wise? Our tracks are half-covered already. If we sit it out here, we won’t be able to find our way back, and the backup won’t be able to find us. We might protect this clown, but we’ll all freeze to death in the process. We got to get back. We can hole up in the Cat if you want.”

I rubbed my eyes. Once again it made sense. I felt like I was attending a wake for which the corpse hadn’t quite arrived. I looked over my four companions. “Does anyone have a vest?”

One of the troopers opened his coat to reveal the bulletproof vest underneath. I cocked an eyebrow at McNaughton.

“Give it to him.” McNaughton pointed at Cioffi.

The transfer took place. Then McNaughton clustered us around the prisoner as tightly as our snowshoes would allow. “All right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Cioffi raised his hand like a boy in a schoolroom. The New Hampshire cop glared at him. “I can no longer walk.”

“The hip?” I asked. He smiled faintly and nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve done it some real damage.”

We rigged a small litter from a couple of shotguns and an extra pair of snowshoes someone had brought along for Cioffi. It was too short to lie on, and sitting astride proved too painful, so Cioffi sat as on a park bench, with both feet dangling off one side. It was a precarious rig, by nature unbalanced, but it was the best we could think of. I walked along one side, holding Cioffi’s hand to keep him from toppling off like a rag doll. Katz was on the other side and McNaughton and one trooper held the point ahead of the stretcher bearers. It was the best we could do to shield Cioffi from any line of fire.

SOME FIVE MINUTES
into our silent return trip, Cioffi gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “I feel a little silly, holding hands.”

“You’d feel even sillier lying on your back with your legs in the air.”

He let out a small chuckle and nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”

He sighed and tilted his face up, letting the snowflakes collect on his eyelids, as we all used to do as children. It was a gentle gesture, and grotesquely out of kilter with the image we had formed of him. But then, he’d done nothing but debunk that image from the moment we had found him.

In itself, that didn’t surprise me. Violent criminals often reflect startlingly peaceful exteriors. But this man had been made part of a larger and bloodier whole over the past month. The road leading to him had been veiled in pain and deceit and littered with the bodies of friends and strangers alike. Had Helen of Troy been revealed as a fat and pimply teenager with an addiction for chocolate éclairs, the irony would have been no greater.

Perhaps it was because of this absurdity—that the pursuit had utterly overshadowed the prize—that I couldn’t suppress a shared wistfulness with this man, made all the more real by the intertwining of our hands. Somehow, sitting there like a child at the park, he had become less the cause of all this mayhem and more its ultimate victim. The toss by him of the very first stone was ending in an avalanche that would sweep the mountain from beneath him.

“Did you kill her?”

He opened his eyes and blinked at me. The question obviously startled him, as if the correct answer might somehow get him off the hook even now. But then he looked around and let out a little sigh. “Is that man really after me? To kill me?”

“You murdered his daughter.”

He nodded dreamily. “I guess I saw it as self-defense,” he said softly.

I noticed McNaughton turn to say something—no doubt some tough cop wisecrack that would make Cioffi clam up—but he didn’t, and after a moment’s hesitation he turned back to watch where he was going.

Cioffi shook his head and smiled gently. “It was such a long time ago.”

I waited for more, the self-cleansing confession, but he lapsed into silence and studied our joined hands, bobbing chest-high before him. I noticed his false beard was beginning to peel away at the temple. I let a few minutes elapse, but nothing happened. Normally, I might have left it at that—a tentative beginning on which later conversation could be based. But the self-defense line was irresistible. Of all the possibilities that occurred to me while I had stared at the photos of Pam Stark’s bound and strangled body, that one had never even flickered.

“How was it self-defense?”

“To keep Teicher in line.” There was a small pop from behind me, as from a champagne cork sprung from far, far away. Simultaneously, a red dot appeared in the middle of Cioffi’s forehead. He raised his free, mittened hand to it in astonishment and silently toppled backward off his stretcher, landing at Katz’s feet.

“Down,” McNaughton shouted. “Everybody down.”

Both stretcher-bearers dropped like stones, grappling for their sidearms. McNaughton let off two booming rounds from his shotgun. Only Katz and I remained standing, staring at each other as if frozen in time. His left arm and leg were splattered with red and there was a small pink lump of something stuck to his cheek. He looked down the length of his body to his boot, where most of Cioffi’s head rested sleepily. The face, aside from the hole, looked normal enough, but from a point behind his ear, the skull’s contour lost its definition. It looked soft, deflated, and it pumped blood onto Katz’s snowy boot with a rapidly decreasing rhythm.

“I said get down, you stupid bastards.”

I looked at McNaughton, spread-eagled and half-buried, and then I glanced over my shoulder. The mesmerizing, shimmering wall of falling white snow was as impenetrable as ever. I took a couple of steps into it and sensed, more than saw, a small white rectangle detach itself from its surroundings. It was a sheet, propped up by two stakes, looking like one half of a dissected pup tent. I looked over its top at the trampled snow behind it.

“He’s gone.”

I heard some swearing behind me as McNaughton and his two troopers regained their footing and composure. I also heard Katz throwing up.

McNaughton shuffled up next to me, his face red with fury.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s a blind.”

“I know what the fuck it is. Oh, Jesus. What a fucking mess. How the hell?”

I pointed at two thin parallel tracks in the snow. “Cross-country skis. He used them to follow our footprints and then waited. Chances were pretty good we’d retrace our steps.”

I left him to curse some more and to radio in the results of our little hike. Katz was kneeling in the snow beyond the body, retching. He’d pulled his foot out of his boot and had left both boot and snowshoe where Cioffi had pinned them. I slipped them from under the head and tried to wipe them off a little with my mittened hand, mostly just smearing them with pink snow. I crouched by Katz’s leg, separated the boot from the snowshoe, and began to put it on him.

He pulled away. “Don’t.”

“Your foot’ll freeze.”

I reached out and straightened his leg, loosened the laces, and put the boot back on. Katz was as submissive as a child.

“What happened?”

“We were ambushed. He stalked us on skis, set up shop behind a white sheet, and blew our friend away with something like a twenty-two, I’d guess.”

“Come on. A twenty-two?”

I finished lacing the boot and stood up. “Explosive shell.” I leaned over him, and flicked the small lump of brain from his cheek. He stared at it and gagged again. Then he rubbed his face with snow.

In the distance, I could hear the low growl of a Sno-Cat engine. McNaughton was standing over Cioffi’s body. “The troops?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Too little, too late.”

“Join the club.”

GAIL FOUND ME FAST ASLEEP
on a hallway bench outside Kunkle’s hospital room. I dreamed of her before I saw her, interspersing her face with dim snow-shrouded images of shouting policemen, Eskimos with crossbows, and peaceful half-heads haloed in pink blood.

She brought me back with a few gentle strokes across my forehead. “You want to go to bed?” She smiled.

“Aren’t we in bed?” I blinked hard several times and rubbed my eyes. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on my knees, and looked at the floor. It was speckled linoleum, with bright stripes running down the middle.

Gail rubbed my back; the sensation was muted by my coat.

“What time is it?”

“Almost midnight. How’s Kunkle?”

“Depressed—that’s normal for him. I’ll give him good cause this time, though. Doctor says he might lose the arm. He’ll sure as hell never play basketball again.”

“What happened out there, anyway?”

I rubbed my eyes again. “The roof fell in. It all came apart. Pretty fitting end to this whole stupid mess.”

She stood up and pulled me to my feet. “Come on home.”

It had stopped snowing sometime that afternoon, the storm dissipating with the suddenness of its arrival. The sun had glared from low on the horizon on a snow-thickened landscape of gentle curves and dips. The Sno-Cats had crawled in various directions across this smooth and sparkling world, inanely following Stark’s dim ski tracks, carrying Cioffi and the dead trooper back to the highway or just wandering back and forth across Mount Washington’s broad foot, their growls rendered tinny and ineffectual by the unimpressed white mountains staring down at them.

Gorham had become a town besieged as state troopers, sheriff ’s men and even the town constable marched about in contrasting uniforms, notebooks in hand, radios squawking. Patrol cars, ambulances, snow plows, a coroner’s station wagon all sported blue, red, and yellow flashing lights with a competitive energy wasted on the local population, none of whom was in the way. In contrast to the chaos that had led up to it, this flurry of post-shooting investigations had all the earmarks of textbook efficiency. McNaughton, I and everyone else had been interviewed again and again by the representatives of those offices who now had to pick up our broken pieces. The veiled skeptical glances and toneless questions had done little to bolster what was left of our pride.

The day had concluded with several hours of isometric exercise on a jump seat in the back of the lurching ambulance carrying Kunkle home to Brattleboro. By the time I slumped onto the front seat of Gail’s car, I had been awake and tense for roughly thirty-four hours.

And yet, now that I was back in the lap of normalcy, heading toward bed with nothing but warm and soothing comfort attending, my mind began to stir from its torpor. I ran it all through, from the discovery of “Kimberly’s” twisted nude body to the snow-dusted corpse of her murderer, and all I could see were unanswered possibilities. The only light left, the only potential oasis in this desert, floated in Cioffi’s last words.

“Does the name Teicher ring any bells?”

“John Teicher?”

“Maybe. Who is he?”

“Head of Leatherton, Inc. I met him a few times when he was coaxing a building permit out of the board for that industrial park—not that it was any great feat. We were pushovers. Why?”

I didn’t answer at first. I was basking in the oasis. This piece of chitchat had handed me the source of Cioffi’s wealth, the probable reason for Pam Stark’s death, and, I thought, the father of her fetus. The sensation that washed over me was not unlike pure bliss. For the first time, I was convinced all the puzzle pieces were on the table—and I had just caught a glimpse of the box top.

“Why, Joe? What’s Teicher got to do with this?”

“I don’t know. His name just came up. Drive me by the office.”

She stared at me in amazement. “Joe, it’s the middle of the night.”

“I need to talk to Tony.”

“You can barely talk to anyone. Can’t it wait?”

“No. Please.”

She shook her head and turned the car around.

· · ·

“You’re not going to be able to get a warrant just because Cioffi mentioned his name. You know that.” Tony was sitting on the edge of a cot he’d set up in his office. He was wearing his pants and an undershirt.

I nodded.

“You also know that if you waltz through his door and piss him off, he’s liable to stir things up a little—like reporting you to Tom Wilson or the board.”

I nodded again.

He stood up and put his shirt on. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks. Can I do it?”

“You’re asking permission?”

“I want backup—lots of it.”

“You really think this is it?”

“Yes.”

Brandt gave me a half smile. “We’re in such hot water now, I don’t see where a little extra can do any harm. I’ve already been given thirty days vacation without pay, so you might do me some good for once.”

“They suspended you?”

“Yes and no. They won’t identify it, but I’m out of here next week for a month. That’ll give ’em time to decide whether to make it permanent or not. If you come up with something, I might be invited back.” He gave me an odd smile, and added, “Of course, that’s a two-edged sword for you. They plan to have you stand in for me while I’m out. That might grow on you.”

“Bullshit.”

He continued smiling. “Thanks. Well, I’m off to the hospital, for what little good it’ll do. Let’s reconvene here at 8:00 A.M. I’ll set everything up.” He put on his jacket and patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about the screwup, Joe. Try to get some sleep.”

“WANT ANY?”
Billy Manierre offered me a cup of coffee.

“No thanks.” I checked my watch. It was 8:15. “How are we set?”

“I’ve got three patrol cars, two men each, one van with a driver, and all the special gear I could find. What are we doing anyway? Taking a fort?”

“I just want to talk to a man—forcefully.” Aside from Brandt, no one knew what I had planned.

“I guess.” We set out in single file toward the Leatherton, Inc. headquarters, driving along the back roads as much as possible. I’d collected seven hours of the deepest sleep I could recall. Now I sat in the passenger seat of Tyler’s unmarked car, squinting against the glare off the early sun-bleached snow, wondering for the first time if I was right. I wondered if my desperation to save at least one piece from the chess board was clouding my judgment, or worse still, whether I was leaving open yet another hole for Stark to gain the advantage.