Tag Man (13 page)

He considered his options. He was on the second floor of a house whose magisterial dimensions dictated a drop of fifteen feet or more to the ground below. Dan was light and athletic, but such a distance, onto invisible terrain possibly strewn with lethal debris, was too daunting.

That eliminated the easiest course of just leaping out the window.

But he had his ropes, and the leather gloves he’d used earlier. It would be a simple matter to rig a knot and rappel to safety, before Hauser had time to react.

Dan scuttled across to the nearest window, not taking his eyes off the door. He reached up and pushed against the lower half of the window. It was locked. He straightened and felt for the lock. It was nailed in place.

“Damn,” he murmured, and as quickly as he could, twisted around, shielded his eyes with his hands, and peered through the glass. As he’d expected by now, the shutters were closed.

He didn’t need to establish that they’d probably been screwed down as tightly as bulkhead doors.

He returned to the barricade of the large bed.

Dan was essentially a cat burglar, predisposed to stealth, silence, and deliberation. His opponent would think of him thus, and prepare himself accordingly. He’d shown that much by his construction of this trap—he’d known that Dan would initially check on Gloria’s whereabouts.

Salvation, therefore, possibly lay in violating that presumption—Dan might increase his chance of survival by turning on every light he could locate, and running like a maniac for the front door, leaving his nemesis flatfooted in surprise.

But did he dare? It was a long stretch to that door, and one of the few things he rarely cataloged in his memory was the location of light switches. Did he really want to base his entire strategy on correctly guessing which switch lay where? And what if Hauser had already seen to that, and killed most of those lights? He’d certainly been sharp enough to plant a dummy of Gloria in this bed and to seal the windows. He’d had to have anticipated moves that Dan might make if he returned for a second visit.

This man, as twisted as he seemed, clearly could think things through.

So what had he not foreseen?

Dan racked his brain, sensitive to the passing seconds, convinced that Hauser lay in wait, ready to execute the plan that would convince authorities that the now dead Tag Man had been caught and killed in defense of home and hearth. Wherever Gloria really was—and Dan was confident she’d been sent on some bogus journey in order to empty the house—she’d probably return and have only praise for the protector of her worldly goods.

Up, Dan suddenly thought. That would be something Hauser wouldn’t have considered—that Dan would head upstairs, even to the roof. In fact, the roof might be preferable. He tried to remember that topmost aspect of the house from his prior visit here. However, along with the location of light switches, it wasn’t something to which he gave much attention. Still, there had to have been something …

The top floor had the usual collection of small rooms, once reserved for the servants—garrets with dormer windows, and a shared bathroom at the end of the hall. Dan steered his memory back to an outside view of the house—and its flat-topped mansard roof.

He left his spot by the bed and moved quickly to the edge of the door frame, pausing to chart his route.

To his right was the main staircase leading down to the foyer, the living room, and the other formal spaces. Given what Hauser seemed to be planning, that was the direction where the danger would be greatest. Fortunately for Dan, to the left, directly above the kitchen, was a second, narrower staircase to the cramped and largely ignored third floor.

He took a deep breath. This was far from his operating norm, even when he was situated in a setting of his choosing. The irony would have been comical if he hadn’t been so scared.

Fighting his previous urge to run at full tilt, Dan slipped out into the hallway, his shoulder blades against the wall, and strained to pick up on Hauser’s presence. Of course, that worked all too well—the menace of the man enveloped him like a fog.

Hoping to quell his rising panic, Dan slid down the hall, toward the back of the house, convinced that at every step, his stalker would suddenly appear from behind some door or passageway. The trade-off of his having chosen a moonless night to break in was that he’d rarely been in such blacked-out surroundings.

Paul Hauser could have been standing right behind him, and he would have been none the wiser.

On the other hand, he rationalized, unless Hauser had the same night-piercing goggles Dan had been wishing for earlier, he was at the same disadvantage as Dan.

Dan reached the end of the hall and was confronted by a closet before him and a door to either side, one leading to the kitchen below, the other upstairs. He groped for and took hold of a small side table decorated with a flower arrangement he remembered from before, and gently dragged it across the rug to where it blocked the entrance to downstairs. It wouldn’t prohibit that door from being opened, but it would create a hell of a noise were that to happen.

He then cautiously opened the door opposite.

Just then a faint noise rose up behind him like a chill—the muted brushing of a foot against the carpet.

He dropped to one knee and swung around, staring wide-eyed into the gloom with his hands out before him. His fingertips grazed a man’s pant leg just as he felt the breeze of something heavy barely miss the top of his head.

Without thought, he launched himself forward like a linebacker, using his legs for explosive propulsion, and caught his opponent by the waist. There was a thudding outburst of air, a strong smell of human being in Dan’s nostrils, followed by a tangle of arms and legs and fists as they both went sprawling to the floor.

Instantly, Dan knew he was up against a far bigger man than he, so he pursued his momentary advantage by pummeling the face beneath him, leaping to his feet, and reaching back to the small, vase-equipped table to bring the whole of it crashing down on the body still struggling before him.

Without pause or thought, he followed that by bolting for his original escape route. He yanked the door wide and half stepped, half fell onto the rough wooden stairs heading up, reaching out to steady himself and catching his hand on what seemed to be an interior dead bolt. Seizing this opportunity, he slammed the door behind him, and just as he heard the scrabbling of hands on the other side, he snapped the dead bolt closed.

He quickly explored both sides of the door frame, found a switch, and flooded the tight passageway with light.

He bounded up the stairs, pursued by the repeated pounding of fists against the door.

At the top of the stairs was a long, unadorned corridor with doors on both sides, each leading, as he knew, to an assortment of small bedrooms, storage areas, and a bathroom at the end. Every other room had a garret window overlooking the lawn far below, but Dan recalled their all being small and placed high on the wall—enough to supply air and light, but hardly ideal as a means of escape.

Hitting another light switch on the way, he continued jogging down the hall until he reached a trapdoor mounted in the ceiling.

As in a countdown to a launching, he heard Hauser battering the downstairs door with something far more solid and destructive than his fists or shoulder. It wouldn’t be much longer now.

Dan checked the nearest room, found a half-broken chair parked against the wall, and pulled it under the trapdoor. He clambered up, wobbling atop its frail, spindly legs, and studied the overhead opening from close-up. It was larger and heavier than he’d expected, equipped with rugged hinges and a latch.

Fumbling nervously, aware of wood splintering below, Dan undid the latch and pushed with all his might against the square panel.

At the precise moment that the trapdoor yielded to his efforts, the chair collapsed beneath him, accompanied by a resounding crash at the foot of the stairs.

Hauser was heading his way.

Dan caught hold of the opening’s edge, chin-lifted himself to where he could push the unhooked door with his head, and with some effort scrambled up and over the lip of the opening, surprised to find himself not in an attic but on the roof of the house itself. Just as he slammed the door back down, he saw his pursuer coming into view.

Unslinging his backpack and opening it as he ran, Dan crossed the flat roof to where it met the mansard slope downward and peered over the edge. Hopelessly far below, he saw the crown of a tree and only blackness beneath.

Dan glanced about for an anchor, found a nearby chimney, knotted a quick loop in one of his ropes, secured a carabiner to the harness around his waist, and—just as the roof-access panel flew back on its hinges and revealed a vertical shaft of light—Dan twisted around, took two steps backward, and dropped off the edge of the roof into the void.

Hauser was faster than he’d hoped. As Dan reached the gutter marking the boundary between the mansard slope and the sheer drop beneath it, he placed both his feet against the wall and pushed out, in order to effect a rapid descent by letting the rope fly almost unimpeded through his “beener.”

Instead, the rope simply vanished, sliced through at its anchor point.

For a split second, Dan felt suspended in midair, before the tree’s uppermost branches began tearing at his body in freefall.

He reached out with both hands in desperation, caught several violent blows in his back and across his forearms, before finally grabbing hold of a branch thick enough to break his fall. Not slowly enough, being whipped across the face and body as he went, Dan tumbled from level to level within the tree’s embrace before finally cascading out the bottom and landing in a heap on the cool grass.

Momentarily, he lay stunned on his back, wondering what might appear out of the night sky above him like a truck and crush him flat.

Then he gathered himself together, sat up without finding anything broken, and staggered to his feet.

He headed off, limping slightly, resigned that while he’d fended off Hauser here and now, he was going to have to make virtual ghosts of himself and Sally.

Starting immediately.

CHAPTER TEN

“Time rewards those who wait,” Ron announced from the open doorway.

“I hate shit like that,” Willy answered him, not looking up from the gun magazine he was reading.

“Nevertheless,” Ron persisted, stepping into the VBI office and raising a hand in greeting to Lester Spinney, who was on the phone. “Parking Enforcement just let us know that they booted a car with Mass plates in the Elliot Street garage. Looks like it might be our dead guy’s.”

Willy opened his mouth to protest before Ron cut him off, laughing. “I know, I know.
Your
dead guy’s. Wouldn’t want to step on your FBI wingtips.”

“Fuck you.” Willy tossed the magazine onto his desk and got up.

“You ever figure out why he had Bariloche’s name in his pocket?” Ron asked.

Lester had hung up by then and answered, since Willy clearly wasn’t going to. “Nope. The owner only gave us about five names of who might’ve been there that night—regulars or people he just happened to remember—I think he was mostly playing dumb, being protective of his high rollers.”

Willy was already halfway down the hallway.

*   *   *

The municipal parking garage had been baptized the Transportation Center, in early hopes that commercial bus lines would use it as a depot, which—after the merest glance at downtown traffic patterns—they never had. It was a huge, hulking, oddly designed, multilevel structure whose otherwise acceptable redbrick veneer had been clumsily accented with small clusters of white brick, making the whole building look like it had succumbed to a case of acne.

But the building fulfilled its purpose, and had, by and large, addressed the parking concerns of the time.

They found the car facing the Elliot Street exit, a bright orange clamp affixed to its front wheel. Its lack of personality, even from a distance, said “rental.”

The three men split up as they approached it, studying it from all angles, finally peering through the windows without touching anything, to see what might stand out.

“Anything on your side?” Ron asked.

Willy ignored him, but Lester responded, “Nope. You?”

“Nothing.”

“You run this by anybody?” Willy asked at last.

“The rental firm,” Ron told him, speaking over the roof. “The ID used in Boston was for Nate Sullivan. We plugged that into the system and of course got nothing. Did you want to call in the crime lab to process it?”

Willy was using his pocket flashlight to better see the interior. “Is Tyler around?” he asked.

J. P. Tyler was the police department’s veteran forensic expert—small, self-effacing, and the man to see about prints, tool-mark impressions, serology collection, and the rest. The advent of DNA and a few other high-end scientific developments had eclipsed some of his talents, calling for more expertise or money than he or the PD could afford, but for most of the day-in, day-out basics, he remained a hard man to rival, and a credit to his chief, Tony Brandt. Most other departments had thrown in the towel by now, choosing to rely instead on an evermore hard-pressed state forensic mobile unit to do their evidence collection for them.

“Yeah,” Ron answered, a little surprised. “You want him to do it?”

Willy straightened to stare at him. “No. I just wanted to make sure you were watering him regularly. Yeah, I want him to do it.”

“For a homicide?” Ron persisted.

Once more, Willy didn’t react as expected, choosing to explain instead, “I doubt we’ll find much anyhow. The guy was stripped of ID, used a bogus name. What d’you wanna bet he didn’t leave his diary under the seat?”

Ron was reaching for his cell phone.

*   *   *

Willy had called it correctly, of course. An hour later, J. P. Tyler, clad in a white Tyvek jumpsuit, backed out of the open car and unzipped the front of his costume to cool off.

“Anything?” Lester asked him. Willy had already wandered off somewhere.