The Lesson of Her Death (56 page)

He drops like a meteorite into the dark rage of water. He feels a scraping pain against his ear as the side of his head smacks the tree on his way down, then a cold colder than he’s ever felt envelopes his body, squeezing every last bit of breath from his lungs.

Jamie Corde looks up, he sees water, he sees blood and he sees in the tunnel of blackness above him a single star, which he knows is the eye of a Guardian, agreeing to lift him away, safely into a new dimension.

A second thermos of coffee appeared. Neale ran his fingers along his buzz-cut hair and told them of the time one of his snipers picked off a perp at eight hundred yards. “God held his breath for that one,” Neale said reverently.

On a panel like the dashboard of a 747 a lonely red light began flashing and an electronic beep pulsed. A sergeant picked up a receiver. “MCP One. This is an unsecured landline. Go ahead.” He listened for a moment. “Detective Corde, for you.”

“Me?” He took the receiver. “Corde here.”

“Bill.” The hollowness of Diane’s whisper cried a hundred different messages to him.

He said, “Honey, what is it? Why are you—”

“Bill.”

Corde could hear she’d already cried volumes. He
heard noises behind her. Other voices. He hated that sound. They were hospital sounds. He asked, “Sarah?”

“Jamie.”

“What happened?”

“He’s in a coma. He … Oh, Bill, he tried to kill himself. A fisherman found him but—”

“Oh, my Lord.”

He remembered, and the thought was like a wallop in the stomach. “The wrestling match? I missed it.”

She didn’t speak for a moment. “Come home, Bill. I want you here.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“They don’t know. He almost drowned. He hit his head when he went in. Come home now.”

When they hung up Corde said, “Wynton, Jamie’s hurt. I’ve got to go.”

“Oh, no, Bill. Was it him?” He nodded toward the hotel.

“No. Something else. Pretty serious. I’ve got to go. You’re in charge here.”

Wynton Kresge had the love for seven children in his voice when he said, “I’ll be thinking of you.” Corde couldn’t speak but just rested his hand on the deputy’s huge back. In that brief gesture, Kresge felt a huge weight shift and remain on him even after Corde stepped out the door. Kresge said, “We’ll get him, Bill. We’ll get him.”

“I
did this one bad, didn’t I?” Corde said.

They sat in the intensive care unit of Community Hospital in a small waiting room separated from their son by a thick blond wood door. The doctors were in with him now. Occasionally the large silver handle of a doorknob would flick and a nurse or doctor would exit silently. This was the purest of punishments.

They held hands but there was minimal returning pressure from Diane’s. Corde figured he wasn’t entitled to expect otherwise. Other than to tell him that Jamie was in critical condition and still unconscious, Diane hadn’t said more than five words since he’d arrived after a perilous drive from Fitzberg through the vast Midwest night. This was her worst anger, a peaceful-eyed, camouflaged fury that seemed almost curiosity.

For the first time in his marriage Corde wondered if he’d lost his wife.

“The case ran off with me.”

He was thinking mostly of the impact on Jamie but he remembered too that he’d turned down the job of sheriff because of Jennie Gebben’s death. He supposed Diane also was thinking of this. “I wish you’d say something.”

“Oh, Bill, how can you figure it all out? Here we spent all our time with Sarah. We just assumed Jamie didn’t need us the way she did. And it turns out he was the one that did, and she’s doing better without us.”

“This was mostly me,” Corde said. “I knew about the match. I was even looking forward to it. Then I heard about Gilchrist and I got like a dog, sniffing rabbit.”

She stood up and walked down the hall to a pay phone. Whoever she was calling was not home. She grimaced, hung up, retrieved her coin and sat down in silence.

Their vigil continued. Corde took a quarter from his pocket and started rolling it over his fingers. The coin fell and rang as it spun to a stop. He picked it up and put it back into his pocket. Then the door opened and three doctors walked out. Both husband and wife locked onto their faces and began panning for clues but goddamn they were stone-eyed. One, the chief neurologist, sat in a chair beside Diane. He began to speak.

Corde heard the words. “Brainstem … Minimal … Serious concussion … No life support …” He talked for five minutes and told them all the things they could do for Jamie. They seemed to be good words or at least not bad words but when Corde said, “When will our boy wake up?” the doctor said, “I don’t have an answer for you.”

“But what do we do?”

“Wait.”

Corde nodded. Diane was crying. The doctor asked if they’d like sedatives. They answered, “No,” simultaneously.

“It wouldn’t hurt to get some sleep,” the doctor answered.
“I really don’t think he’ll take a turn for the worse.”

Corde said, “Why don’t you run home, honey, get some rest.”

“I’m staying with my boy.”

“I’m staying too.”

When the doctor left she curled up in an orange fiberglass chair and it seemed that she was instantly asleep. Corde rose and walked into the room to sit beside his son.

“Okay, Deputy, home base is clear.”

Wynton Kresge opened his eyes. Franklin Neale stood above him, shaking him awake.

“What time is it?”

“Six-thirty. In the
A.M.
The hookers’re gone and home base is clear.”

“Beg pardon?” Kresge asked.

The magic thermos appeared again and coffee was poured. Kresge added three packets of sugar and sipped from the red plastic cup.

Neale said, “You want to go in after him now or wait till he comes out?”

Kresge was asking Bill Corde silent questions and not a one of them got answered. He looked at Neale, fresh as a recruit on parade. He was clean-shaved. “What do you think?”

Neale shrugged. “Well, tactically, it’s your classic situation. If we go into his hidey-hole there’s a better chance of return fire. If we get him on the street we could lose him or get some civvies casualtied in a firefight.”

Hearing this, the military lingo, made Kresge feel better. He decided he wasn’t so much out of his element after all. “I’d like to go in and get him.”

“Fair enough, Deputy. We’ve got our SWAT team on standby. You want them to do it?”

Wynton Kresge said, “I’ll go in. I want them as backup.”

And the crew-cut rosy-skin detective was nodding, solemn and eye-righteous, one grunt to another. “That’s the way I’d do it.” Then he looked over Kresge’s large frame and said, “Okay, let’s suit you up in body armor. I think we’ve got something that might fit.”

As he applied the Velcro straps to the Type II vest with the Supershok plate over the heart, Wynton Kresge thought suddenly of an aspect of being a policeman that he had never considered. If the point of being a cop was ultimately to save lives then the flip side was true also—he might have to take a life.

All the while sitting in his Auden U office chair, feeling the rub of the Taurus automatic pistol on his belt, he had never really considered using the gun. Oh, there’d been his theatrical little fantasies about winging terrorists. But now Kresge felt dread. Not at the real possibility that in five minutes he’d be dodging slugs but at the opposite—that he would have to send bullets hissing through the body of another man. The thought terrified him.

“… Deputy?”

Kresge realized the detective was speaking to him.

“Yes?”

Neale opened a diagram of the hotel. “Look here.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“Our SWAT team has layouts of all the hotels in town. Bus and train stations and most of the office buildings too.”

This seemed like a good idea. Maybe he’d suggest it to Corde.

“Okay, he’s in here. Room 258. There’s no connecting door. But there’s this thing here. What is it?”

One of the other officers said, “They have a microwave and a little refrigerator there. Pipes. Stainless steel sink. It’s probably enough to stop the hollowpoints but we can’t use jacketed because of the street on the other side.”

“Deputy?”

Kresge said, “I don’t think we should give him any warning. No gas or grenades. Take the door down and move in fast before he has a chance to set up a fire zone.” He’d seen this in a Mel Gibson movie. He added, “If that’s in accordance with procedures?”

Neale said, “Sounds good to me, Deputy. Let’s get—”

“Sergeant,” the young patrolman at the radio console said, “he’s rabbitting! Left the room and is moving toward Eastwood.” He listened into his headset for a moment then announced to Neale and Kresge, “TacSurv advising SWAT. They’re three blocks away. They’ll proceed to deployment.”

“Roger,” the detective said. “Where’s he headed?”

“Toward the river. On foot. Got his suitcase with him. He’s moving fast.”

Kresge said, “Where’s that from here?”

“A block.”

“Well, let’s go get him.”

Neale pulled on a blue cap that said
POLICE
on the crest.

“TacSurv says he’s vanished. He turned before he got to the bridge—into those old warehouses down by the riverfront. He’s gone north, they guess.”

The door of the van burst open and Kresge squinted against the blinding light. “Which way?”

“Follow me.” Neale began running across the street. Past a scabby field overgrown with weeds and strewn with rusted hunks of metal. Kresge could see block after block of one- and two-story warehouses. Most of them dilapidated. Some burnt out.

A perfect hiding place for someone on the run.

A perfect vantage place for a sniper.

An Econoline van screeched to a stop nearby. Five SWAT officers jumped out. Kresge heard: “Load and lock. Green team, deploy south. Blue, north. Hug the river. Go, go, go!”

Neale pulled up in front of the first building. “Deputy?”

Kresge looked at him and saw he was motioning to Kresge’s pistol, still in its holster.

“Oh.” Kresge unsnapped the thong and drew the gun. He pumped a round into the chamber and slid his right index finger parallel to the barrel. He felt a monumental spurt of energy surge through his chest. Neale pointed to himself then to the right. Kresge nodded and turned the opposite way, toward the river. A minute later Kresge found himself in a long alleyway through which ran rusted narrow-gauge rail lines. It was filled with thousands of black doorways and windows and loading docks.

“Oh, boy,” he sighed, and jumped over a small stone abutment, as he ran into the war zone.

The first five buildings were pure hell. Spinning, ducking, aiming his pistol at shadows and garbage bags and shutters. Then having gotten this far without being shot, Kresge grew bolder. Gilchrist didn’t want to get trapped.
His whole point’s to escape. He’s not going to back himself into a closed warehouse
.

Though it was in a warehouse that Kresge found him.

The deputy stepped into a huge abandoned space, pillars of jagged sun coming through the broken panes of skylight.

And there was the man he sought. Not fifty feet away, hiding beside an old boiler. He held no weapons, just an old suitcase. He looked benign and small next to the huge tank, a slight man, blond, ashen and nervous. It occurred to Kresge that this was the first time anybody involved in the investigation had actually, seen Leon Gilchrist. It wasn’t much of a sighting; the light here was dusty and diffuse.

Kresge shouted, “Freeze.”

The man did, but only in shock and only for a moment. Then very slowly he turned his back to Kresge and
started to walk away as if he were reluctantly leaving a lover.

“Stop! I’ll shoot.”

Step by step he kept going, never looking back.

Kresge aimed. A clear target. Perfect. Better than on the small arms range at Higgins. His finger slipped into the guard and he started putting poundage on the trigger. About halfway to its eleven pounds of pull he lowered the gun and muttered, “Shit.” Then took off at a full gallop.

Ahead of him the silhouette became a shadow and then vanished.

One of the patrolmen temporarily assigned to FelAp, the Fitzberg Felony Apprehension Squad, was Tony LaPorda, a great, round chunk of a man, who wore his service revolver high on his belt and his illegal .380 automatic in a soft holster under his pungent armpit. He was a small-city cop—a breed halfway between the calm, slope-shouldered civil servant urban police of, say, New York and the staunch cowboys of Atlanta or San Antonio.

LaPorda wore a leather jacket with a fur collar and dark slacks and a hat with a patent-leather brim and checkered band around the crown. He was typical of the five patrolmen working North Side GLA, who’d been told to volunteer for a couple hours at time and a half to collar some professor from New Lebanon who’d stuck the big one to a student of his.

For this assignment LaPorda was given a special frequency for his Motorola and a flak jacket but not an M-16 (nobody but SWAT had rifles, this Leon Gilchrist not being a terrorist or anything but a fucking professor). LaPorda was not very excited about the project especially when it turned out that the perp was on the move. LaPorda hated running even more than he hated the riverfront.