The Lesson of Her Death (51 page)

In the living room the scents were of mildew, moist paper, dust and a sour scent as if a pet had grown old and ill in the room. The light, dimmed by drawn curtains, barely illuminated the space, which seemed uninhabited. The bookcases were filled but the jackets of the volumes all were matte paper imprinted with dull inks, old-style typography. The wooden chairs were coated with dust, the upholstered ones weren’t indented. A dust sphere leisurely followed Corde into the living room.

The men danced past each other, stepping into rooms and covering each other—a choreography that Kresge learned quickly. Corde could see he was unnerved and trying to look three directions at once. They secured all the rooms except the kitchen.

They paused outside the closed French doors.

Kresge had his index finger curled around the ribbed trigger of the scattergun. Corde lifted the sizable finger out and straightened it along the guard. He then nodded toward the door and together they pushed inside.

Empty.

Kresge picked up a cup coated with a moldy layer of dry evaporated coffee. He set it down. Stacked on the table were literary magazines, books, dense articles. “Delmore Schwartz: The Poetry of Obsession.” “Special Problems in Translating the
Cantos.”
“The Rebirth of the Poet Warrior”.…

The feeling first came to Corde as he stood flipping through the blank notepad beside the yellow telephone, which was decorated with a sticker in the shape of a daisy. He paused as the crinkling chill began at the knob of his neck and swept down his spine. His scrotum contracted. One by one he lifted his fingers off his pistol and he felt the pads of his fingers cool from evaporation. He looked around him at the still, pale doorways, out the window at a black gnarled willow trunk.

He’s nearby. I can feel it
.

Kresge dropped the journal back down on the table. Corde walked to the stove and touched the top. It burnt his hand. The tea kettle too was hot but then he tapped the metal again cautiously and found that the pilot light was heating the empty pot. He left the kitchen and returned to the second bedroom, which served as Gilchrist’s study. He searched the desk. Papers, letters, drafts of articles. Doodles. There were no photos. Nothing gave a clue as to what Leon Gilchrist looked like or where he might be.

A chill again shuddered through Corde’s back. Corde had to share this. “He’s nearby.”

“What?”

“I feel him. He’s around here someplace.”

Kresge pointed to a coating of dust on the wood floors and the linoleum. Only their footprints showed. “He hasn’t been here for a long time.”

Corde said, “We’ll get the Crime Scene boys to go through it, take some paper samples and fingerprints. Let’s get out of here.”

Slocum was walking out from behind the apartment building. He met Corde and Kresge in the parking lot. “I heard something behind there. I went to check but I didn’t see anything. If he had a car it’s gone.”

“We should call in a county APB,” Corde said. He walked toward his car. “DMV license and any tag numbers. Let’s get back to the office and fax an ID to the state and the FBI. Get a picture of him from the university.”

“Yessiree, let’s move,” Slocum said.

They found though that they had to make a detour.

Which was to drive Randy Sayles to the emergency room at Harrison County Community Hospital. Corde drove, hitting speeds of close to a hundred on the straightaway of 302, while Kresge crouched in the back, applying fierce pressure to the slashes in the man’s carotid arteries. Because Sayles’s hands were cuffed to the armrest in the backseat of the car, Gilchrist had been free to cut deep and with fearful precision.

At the hospital, while Kresge cleaned up as best he could, Corde sat in a blue plastic chair in the lounge. He sat forward, his chin in his hands. The doctor walked out of the ER and after surveying the three cops chose Corde, to whom he said simply, “I’m sorry.”

Corde nodded and stood up. On the way out of the door he glanced at the sky and believed he saw for a moment a silver crescent of waxing moon before it was obliterated by an oncoming storm.

T
he way Sarah thought of it was that her world suddenly turned joyous.

For one thing, she woke up without the pitchforks in her stomach, the way she always felt on school days and still felt sometimes when she awakened from a dream about class or about taking a test. This morning, sitting up in her bed, she felt perfectly free, floating and safe. It was like she had all the good parts of running away from home but still had her family and her room and her magic circle in the forest behind the house.

The day too was perfection itself. The sun was like the round face of a sky tiger and the wind blew through the new leaves so crisp and fast you could hear the voices of the trees calling to each other.

Sarah strolled outside and played a game Dr. Breck had taught her. She looked at the lawn and she said out loud, “G-R-A-S-S.” Then came T-R-E-E and
C-L-O-U-D. And she got the giggles when she pointed to Mrs. Clemington next door and spelled, “T-R-O-L-L.”

She pointed to a cow, ten feet away, separated by the post-and-rail fence. The animal gazed at her eagerly as if it was milking time.

She lay down in her circle of stones and took her tape recorder out of her backpack.

Another good thing about today: she was going to finish the last chapter of her book. This one was her favorite story. She’d been working on it for days and hadn’t told anyone about it. It filled almost half a cassette and she hadn’t even gotten to the climax of the story yet. She’d give the tape to Dr. Parker, and her secretary would type out the words and Sarah would get the story back in a few days. Then she would copy it into the notebook and show it to Dr. Breck. She wanted desperately to impress him and had worked particularly hard on this story.

Sarah rewound the tape to the start of the chapter to see what she had written so far. She hit the Play button.

Chapter fifteen. The Sunshine Man
…
Once upon a time, deep in the forest, there lived a wizard
.…

The deputies got a kick out of Wynton Kresge—a man who owned more law enforcement books than they knew existed and who could outshoot any of them, either-handed, on the small arms range at Higgins. As far as they could remember there’d never been a black deputy in New Lebanon and it made the office seem like a set on a Hollywood buddy movie.

They were sitting around this evening, debating where Gilchrist might have gone. Prosecutor Dwayne Lovell had gotten a bench warrant issued and faxed to Boston and San Francisco, both cities having been Gilchrist’s home at one time, then Corde added Gilchrist’s name to the Criminal Warrants Outstanding Bulletin
and Database for state and major city law enforcement agencies.

“What will they do?” Kresge asked Corde.

“Boston and San Francisco’ll prioritize it. The others? Nothing. But if they happen to pick him up for something else and find his name in the computer they’ll give us a call. It’s not for sure but we can sleep a little better knowing we’ve done it.”

“Looking for a tick on a dog,” Kresge muttered as he dialed Boston PD. After a brief conversation, he learned that Gilchrist had no criminal record in Massachusetts.

Earlier that day Corde had granted Kresge’s fervent request that he be allowed to interview Dean Larraby about Gilchrist. It was a long interview and she hadn’t been much help though Kresge clearly had enjoyed himself. In searching Gilchrist’s office and the other departments at Auden, the men had found that the professor had stolen most of the files containing personal information about himself. The Personnel Department, the Credentials Department, the English and Psych Departments—they had all been raided. Computer files erased. Cabinets emptied.

Kresge and Corde interviewed other professors. None of them knew much about Gilchrist or had snapshots that included him. They could not recall any school functions he had attended.

Brian Okun, Corde learned in a second antagonistic interview, said he knew the professor as well as anyone and could offer no clues as to where Gilchrist might have gone. “He’s resourceful,” Okun said then added with eerie sincerity, “It’s troubling you don’t know where he is. The evil we can’t see is so much worse than that which we can, don’t you think, Detective?”

Corde didn’t know about that but one thing he did know: Gilchrist
was
Jennie Gebben’s killer. Sayles had been correct; Gilchrist’s fingerprints were on the tie-down rope cut from the Ford truck. The rope also contained two of Jennie’s partials from trying to fight off the
strangulation and one of her hairs. Another strand of her hair was found on a shirt in Gilchrist’s closet. He also had several red marking pens whose ink matched those on the newspaper clipping he had left for Corde the morning after Jennie’s murder and on the back of the threatening Polaroids. Gilchrist’s prints were also found on the back door, window and armrest of Jim Slocum’s cruiser. It wasn’t necessary to dust for those prints; they had been made with Randy Sayles’s blood.

But, as Corde knew and as Wynton Kresge was learning with great disillusionment, finding a criminal’s identity is not the same as finding the criminal.

Gilchrist had vanished.

Corde got a deputy to call car rental agencies. No one named Gilchrist had rented a car, the deputy announced, and Corde and Kresge looked at each other, both concluding simultaneously and silently that he wasn’t going to be using his real name.

Corde, tapping the butt of his gun with a forefinger, began to say, “When we got Sayles to the ER—”

Kresge finished the question, “Did they find his wallet?”

“I don’t know,” the deputy said.

Corde continued, “Find out and if not call back the car companies and ask if someone named Sayles rented a car.”

Kresge didn’t wait to find out about the wallet. He got on the horn and called Hertz. A supervisor told him that a Randolph Sayles had rented a car the day before at Lambert Field in St. Louis. He’d rented it for two weeks and was paying a drop-off charge to leave the car in Dallas. Kresge got the description and plate number of the car and told them it had been illegally rented. “Have them notify us as soon as he returns it. Is that right, I mean, the right procedure?”

Corde realized Kresge had looked up from the phone and was speaking to him. Corde, who had never before had a car-renting felon, said, “Sounds good to

“Okay, it’s a green Hertz Pontiac,” Kresge announced, and sang out the license number. Corde had him send that information out over the wire to the county and state.

They checked the Midwest Air commuter flights. No one matching Gilchrist’s description had flown from Harrison County Airport to Lambert Field in the past two days and there had been no private charter flights.

State DMV showed a car registered to Gilchrist, a gray Toyota, but no record of a state driver’s license. After two hours on the phone, Miller found out that Gilchrist had a Massachusetts license. They’d fax a picture within three days.

“That’s the best they can do?”

“And I had to beat them up to get that.”

Kresge said, “So he drove his car to St. Louis, dumped it, rented another one and is going south.”

“Maybe. Maybe he’s trying to throw us off. Fax Dallas in any case.” Corde pondered. “You know, maybe he’s flying someplace and just rented the car to cover his tracks. Left it in the airport. Call the airlines, everything that flies out of St. Louis. Let’s hope he used Sayles’ credit card again. And check the airport long-term parking for his own car or the rental.”

Kresge said, “That’s pretty good. How’d you know this stuff?”

“You pick it up as you go along,” Corde said.

“I’ve got a lot to learn,” Kresge said.

“He’s gone over state lines,” Corde said, then added reluctantly, “We could get the FBI in if we wanted to.”

“How’s that?”

“Feddies aren’t interested in state crime unless there’s interstate flight or you’ve got a kidnapping, drugs or bank robbery.”

“Why don’t we want them in?”

Corde decided it was too early in Kresge’s career for this kind of law enforcement education. “Because,” he answered.

Slocum strolled up. “Bill, one thing I was thinking.”

“Yup?”

“I’m not so sure this is just a fleeing felon thing.”

Corde wondered what trashy paperbacks he’d been reading.

Slocum continued, “I was trying to psych him out. I mean, look what he did to Sayles.” When Corde kept staring blankly he added, “Well, it could’ve been a revenge situation.”

“Sayles was a witness,” Corde said. “Gilchrist had to kill him.”

Kresge said, “But, Bill, we didn’t need Sayles to convict him, did we? We had enough other evidence. And Gilchrist would’ve known that.”

Corde considered and said that was true. “Go ahead, Jim, what’s your thought?”

“His life’s over with. He’s never going to teach again, never have a professional job. The best he can do is make it to Canada or Mexico and the first time he runs a red light, zippo, his butt’s extradited. I think he’s around the bend and wants to get even. He’s just killed again. My bet is he rented that car to send us off to Texas but he’s staying around here somewhere. He’s got some scores to settle.”