Trespasser (21 page)

Sarah picked up immediately. “Mike? Where the hell are you?”

“I got sidetracked. I’m sorry about missing Amy’s party.”

“She canceled it on account of the storm. I’ve been worried about you. The roads are horrible!”

“I’m going to be a while longer,” I said through clenched teeth. “That guy I was looking for—Hank Varnum’s ATV vandal—crashed his machine. I’m following the ambulance to the hospital. A boy who was riding with him was injured.”

“A boy? What’s his name?”

“Travis Barter.”

“Oh my God! I have the Barter twins in my class—Jud and Julie. What happened to Travis? Is he going to be all right?”

“I don’t know.”

She took a long time to respond. “Your voice sounds strange.”

“The ambulance is leaving and I need to get going.”

“Call me from the hospital. And please drive safely. It’s such a dangerous night. I’ve had this feeling of foreboding all afternoon.”

“I’ll be home soon.”

I checked my voice mail. There was a message from Kathy Frost, asking for an update. I’d call her later. Maybe by then I’d have an excuse for demolishing her ATV.

There was also voice mail from Charley. “I picked up some info on the q.t.,” he said. “The state police found a print on that telephone outside Smitty’s Garage. It belongs to Mark Folsom, the owner of the Harpoon Bar. That’s an interesting wrinkle, don’t you think? Give me a call when you can, young feller.”

The defroster was having no effect whatsoever on the rimed windshield. I got out and started scraping the glass until, at long last, my truck emerged from its frozen chrysalis.

I could barely process Charley’s message. Was the anonymous caller who reported Ashley Kim’s accident Nikki Donnatelli’s former boss? At the moment, I was in no condition to chase that particular rabbit down the trail.

I drove myself one-handed to the hospital. Sarah and Skip were right: The road was treacherous. At intervals, I felt as if I were driving on sheer glass. Falling rain glittered like diamonds in my headlights. There was an eerie beauty to this night. Every tree branch and hanging wire seemed coated with a pastry glaze.

On my way off the peninsula, I passed several cars off the road and slowed down for each one, but the drivers had disappeared as utterly as Ashley Kim. For their sake, I hoped they had met real Samaritans on the road instead of the monster I knew to be lurking somewhere in the darkness.

At the hospital, I parked in a surprisingly crowded lot and dragged myself through the automatic doors of the emergency room.

The white-haired woman behind the admissions desk looked up from her computer screen with a tentative smile, as if she recognized my face but couldn’t quite place where we’d met. “Can I help you?”

“An ambulance brought in a boy just now. The name’s Barter. He was in an ATV accident. I need to know how he’s doing.”

She pursed her cracked lips. “I’m not supposed to disclose the status of any patients—even to law-enforcement officers.”

“Can I speak to the nurse supervisor or a security guard?”

With a sweep of her hand, she motioned me to a row of chairs. “Please have a seat, and someone will be with you shortly.”

The ER waiting room was peopled with the usual motley crew of injured, ill, and intoxicated persons. Some were casualties of the storm—people who had fallen on the ice or careened their vehicles into snowbanks. But others were just poor folk for whom the emergency room was the only means of getting medical care. A single television set provided the official entertainment, but the remote control was in the hands of a chunky girl with a pierced nose and attention deficit disorder. She would linger on a channel for five seconds and then move on, unsatisfied, to the next.

The security guard arrived first. He emerged through the sliding doors with an expression of alarm. He was a heavyset guy, but he looked strong in the way that some fat men are, impressively muscled beneath the blubber.

“What’s the problem, Warden?”

With my functioning hand, I pointed to an unpeopled corner of the room, beyond the Coke machine. “Can we talk over there?”

When we were out of earshot of the other patients, I explained. “An ambulance just brought in a boy named Travis Barter, who was injured in an ATV crash down in Seal Cove. He’s here with his father, a guy named Calvin Barter. I need to arrest the old man on a bunch of charges, but the boy is in bad shape, and I don’t want to drag his father from his bedside. On the other hand, this Barter guy is potentially dangerous, so I need you to call the Rockport police and get an officer over here. I want to wait for the mother to show up before we bust the father.”

“What did the guy do?”

“Endangering a minor, failure to stop for an officer, driving to endanger, felony vandalism—it’s a long list. Tell the responding officer to meet me in the waiting room. You might want to hang out in the ER in the meantime. Take my word for it. Barter’s trouble.”

The guard had been listening attentively to me the whole time, and I had the impression that he was good at his job. “Ten-four,” he said.

I returned to my place between the ADD girl with the remote control and a drunk-looking guy pressing a bloody ice pack to the side of his head. The television stations flashed by overhead—infomercial, black-and-white movie, basketball game. The drunk guy stared at the screen, spellbound by the kaleidoscopic effect.

Frayed magazines and yellowed newspapers were fanned out across the table in front of me. I glanced absently at the covers, trying to keep my mind off the pulsing sensation in my hand. A headline from the
Boston Globe
brought me up short:

BAY STATE WOMAN FOUND MURDERED IN MAINE

The picture of Ashley Kim that accompanied the article showed a face I barely recognized, a cute young woman with intelligent eyes and a wry smile—as if the photographer had captured her enjoying a private joke.

The story said that Ashley Kim was twenty-three years old, a native of San Jose, California, now a resident of Cambridge, and a graduate student at the Harvard Business School. She had told friends that she was going cross-country skiing in Maine, which was unusual, since no one knew she skied.

The article reported, accurately, that she had called the rental company about hitting a deer shortly before she vanished. It named Trooper Curtis Hutchins as the responding officer and questioned why he hadn’t gone to greater lengths to search for her. In response, there was a quote from the spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, who said that it was Trooper Hutchins’s understanding that Ashley was uninjured and that she had left the scene of the accident willingly. The spokesman also noted that an internal investigation would review the actions the trooper had taken or failed to take. The choice of those particular words doesn’t bode well for Hutchins, I thought.

The article said that Kim’s body had been found at the summer home of one of her Harvard Business School professors, Hans Westergaard, of Cambridge. According to investigators, Westergaard was “a person of interest,” and the public was asked to report any information they might have about his whereabouts. His wife, Jill, hadn’t responded to phone calls.

“You wanted to see me?”

I looked up from the paper at a strong-looking woman in blue-green scrubs standing over me. She had wiry black hair, thin lips, and dark circles under her eyes.

“You’re the head nurse?” I asked.

“I’m the ER supervisor, and I’m extremely busy. We’ve got a packed house tonight. What can I do for you, Warden?”

Both the ADD girl and Mr. Ice Pack were gawking at us. I hobbled over to my familiar corner behind the Coke machine. “You admitted a boy a while ago named Travis Barter,” I said. “He was seriously injured in an ATV crash. How’s he doing?”

“You know that’s privileged information.”

“Look, I was chasing him at the time. The ATV he and his father were riding was struck by a snowplow because they were trying to get away from me.”

The taut line of her mouth relaxed and the small muscles around her eyes softened. “The kid was thrown pretty hard,” she said. “That’s really all I can say.”

“I understand.” I removed my right hand from the inside of my warden’s parka. The knobby fingers had started turning black. “I think I hurt my hand.”

“Jesus Christ!” she said.

“It’s bad, then?”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “When an ER nurse says ‘Jesus Christ,’ it usually means it’s bad. We need to get a doctor to look at you. Have you filled out an admissions form?”

“No.”

“You need to do that first.”

I hobbled back to the admissions desk and my girlfriend behind the counter.

“I told you you’d have to wait your turn,” she said triumphantly.

*   *   *

After I had been formally processed at the admissions desk, I returned to my perch beside the guy with the ice pack. The ADD girl had vanished. By coincidence, she had left the TV tuned to a show about real-life cops. On the screen, a documentary crew was riding in a squad car through the mean streets of Denver. The shaky camera followed two officers as they arrested a series of belligerent, moronic, and inebriated lowlifes who resembled, in many ways, the people seated around me.

I was entranced with the show by the time the outside doors slid open and Wanda Barter and her red-haired clan blew in on a cold and damp gust of air. There were six of them, from the freckled teenager with the freckled baby down to the little girl who had greeted me the first day I visited their farm. I recognized the twins, the boy and girl Sarah had mentioned were students in her class. Despite the storm, not a single one of the children was wearing a winter coat.

“Where’s my baby?” Wanda wailed at the admissions clerk. “Where’s Travis?”

I considered approaching Mrs. Barter to convey my sadness about the tragic turn of events but then thought better of becoming the outlet for her considerable anger. After a few minutes of Wanda’s shouting and wailing, a nurse appeared from the trauma center to take the Barter family into the ICU to see the injured boy.

Instead of the Rockport cop I was expecting, I was surprised to see Kathy Frost appear at the hospital door. She stepped in out of the rain and pushed back her wet hair from her streaming face. She spotted me within seconds and came striding across the room, boots squeaking, with the scowl of an irate mother. “Where’s my ATV?”

“I crashed it.”

“You what?”

“I crashed it while pursuing Calvin Barter. It’s in the woods near Hank Varnum’s house. How did you know to look for me here?”

“I called Sarah, and she told me about Barter’s boy. How is he?”

“They won’t say.”

Water was dripping down her forehead into her eyes, causing her to blink. “Goddamn it, Mike. How could you crash my ATV?”

“I rolled it on an icy hill.” I held up my mangled paw. “I think I broke my hand.”

Her lips pulled away from her teeth. “Yeah, I’d say you did. Jesus, that’s disgusting. But it doesn’t get you off the hook.”

What happened next was so abrupt, it caught me entirely off guard. One of the Barter kids must have noticed me sitting in the waiting room, because suddenly Calvin Barter came rushing out of the trauma center, shouting obscenities. Kathy scarcely had time to dodge to one side before the bearded ogre threw himself at me.

“Fuck you! Motherfucker!”

I put up my good hand to defend my face from the punches he was hurling at my head, but I ended up falling backward onto my injured wrist. A burst of pain from my hand turned my vision bloodred. Then a punch connected with my temple, knocking me against the seat back.

I kicked hard at Barter’s knee while Kathy sprung on him from behind, wrapping her forearm around his windpipe. The fat security guard was suddenly there, too, pulling at one of my assailant’s forearms. All three of them went down with a crash, breaking the legs of the magazine table.

By the time my vision had cleared, I saw Kathy cuffing Barter’s hands behind his back while the overweight guard sat on his head.

*   *   *

An hour or so later, I was sitting on a high table waiting for a doctor to examine me. My hand had swollen to the size of a catcher’s mitt.

At last, the ER doctor popped around the curtain. He was the same little blond guy who’d stitched up my arm a few nights earlier.

“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked.

23

The X-rays revealed that I had broken two bones in my right hand—the first metacarpal and the radius—in addition to whatever insults I had committed against the ligaments. Because of the intense swelling, the doctor fitted me with the largest splint available, size extra-extra-large. He said that we’d have to wait for the hand to shrink back to near-normal size before they could outfit me with a standard plaster cast. I was told I would have my choice of colors.

“Even green to match your uniform,” the doctor said with a pearlescent smile.

I found my sergeant waiting for me outside the trauma center, arms crossed, snapping her gum.

“What happened to Barter?” I asked.

“I handed him off to the Rockport cops. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I can drive myself.”

She gave me a doubtful sort of smirk. “I’m not sure that’s such a smart idea, Grasshopper. The doc didn’t give you any drugs, did he?”

My parka was draped over my left shoulder, since my right arm was now in a sling. “He wrote me a prescription for Vicodin.”

“That’s heavy-duty stuff.”

It was after midnight now and the waiting room had grown relatively quiet except for the mindless chatter of late-night television.

“How’s the boy?”

“Too soon to tell. I guess the docs want to evacuate him to Boston, but the weather has all the Life Flight choppers grounded. I don’t know if they’ll chance driving him in an ambulance.”

My coat began to slide off my shoulder. Kathy caught it.

“So it looks like I’ll be taking a few sick days,” I said at last.

She studied the bruised fingertips sticking out from my splint. “I’d say that’s a safe bet. You won’t be able to go on patrol as long as you’re wearing a splint or a cast. Maybe we can put you behind a desk in Augusta after you get back from disability leave.”