Whisper Death (13 page)

“Jesus,” McGuire muttered.

“I beg your pardon?” Goggles said quietly.

“What happened, somebody miss their cue? Shouldn't I have heard ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic' behind that speech?”

“Get him out of here,” Goggles hissed, turning his back on McGuire.

Baldy held up a hand in caution to the other man, but he directed his words to McGuire. “Lafaro, Littleton and Crawford were performing special duties as part of their military assignment,” Baldy continued. “On one of these assignments, they were located within an army defence area when Lafaro seized his two companions, disarmed them, secured them so they could neither follow nor alert others, and fled the area in a military vehicle.”

McGuire looked from one man to the other. The pain in his neck had softened to dull discomfort. “He went AWOL.”

“That's right. In a spectacular fashion.”

“He took something with him,” Goggles said from his armchair. “A piece of top-secret material. A few weeks later, he and a companion offered to return the equipment to the US government for three million dollars in cash.”

There was a pause. Neither man seemed prepared to continue.

“And?” McGuire finally prodded.

Both began speaking at once, but Goggles deferred to Baldy and folded his arms, avoiding the eyes of the other men.

“The ransom was paid.” Baldy carried his empty glass to a sink above the concealed refrigerator.

“And you got the equipment, or whatever it was, back,” McGuire offered when neither man volunteered more information.

Goggles looked uncomfortable. Baldy studied McGuire solemnly from the wall-unit before replying. “No,” he said. “It was not returned.”

“You mean some two-bit sergeant picked Uncle Sam's pockets for three million dollars and disappeared?” McGuire grinned. “For twenty years? And took a piece of military junk with him?”

Again both men began to speak, and again Goggles, his face flushed, demurred to his companion.

“You may think this is a laughing matter, McGuire. Or just an embarrassment to the government. Well, it's much more than that. Two, perhaps more people, have died because of what happened back then. And many more could follow.”

“Tell me about Amos.” McGuire settled back in his chair again. “How does he fit in?”

Goggles continued to avoid McGuire's eyes.

“Colonel Amos was in charge of transferring the ransom money and retrieving the equipment,” Baldy explained.

“And he blew it,” McGuire offered.

“He was unable to obtain the material, that's correct.” Baldy stood with his arms folded. “He then asked for and was granted the duties of leading a special task force assigned to track Sergeant Lafaro down and retrieve the missing equipment.”

“He spent twenty years at this?” McGuire asked.

“He devoted the balance of his military career to it. His life, in actual fact.”

“And what was he doing in Boston last month on Bunker Crawford's doorstep?” McGuire's eyes flew between Goggles and Baldy, willing them to answer.

This time, Goggles took the initiative, speaking quickly as though to soften the effect of his words. “Colonel Amos reached the conclusion that Lafaro hadn't acted alone. He determined that, in spite of their stories, Littleton and Crawford had been part of the conspiracy all the time.”

“It was an early theory,” Baldy said. “But there was no solid proof. You saw Crawford's file. If he participated in the ransom, there was no evidence that he benefited from it. He was under surveillance during the transfer of the ransom and has been almost continuously since.”

“Last year, the colonel began a new tactic,” Goggles added. “You don't have to know the details, but it was a matter of selective, uh . . .”

“Harassment,” Baldy finished. “Let's not become lost in semantics. There were cryptic messages sent to Crawford and Littleton, the usual things to flush out suspects.”

“And then, one day, Amos appears on Crawford's doorstep,” McGuire interrupted. “And Crawford shoots him.”

“That's what we believe happened.” Baldy was watching McGuire for his reaction.

“Where's the other guy, Littleton?” McGuire asked.

“He lives near here,” Baldy replied. “Still under surveillance.”

“You've heard enough, McGuire,” Goggles said, pushing himself out of his chair. “We've told you this much because, in spite of your spotty career record, you have a reputation for being trustworthy with important information. Now that you know what you're dealing with, you can either set your curiosity aside and back away from where you're not wanted. Returning to Boston would be an excellent start. Or, if you continue to remain in this area, we expect you have an obligation to report to us.”

“Report what?”

“Anything at all. Especially any information you may have on Rocco Lafaro. You don't take any action. You don't probe any deeper. You simply act as a conduit of information to us like any good citizen would.”

“Like Bonnar, the Palm Springs cop?” McGuire asked. “Is he your model citizen?”

“Captain Bonnar is aware of some of these facts, yes.” It was Baldy, looking impatient. “He has agreed to assist us in a confidential manner. We expect you to do the same.” Baldy tossed a business card on the arm of McGuire's chair. On it was the telephone number McGuire had dialled in the telephone booth. Beneath it, printed in stylish script, he read: “24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

Baldy glanced at his watch. “If you are contacted again by the man who referred to Lafaro, whoever he is, call that number. Immediately.”

“What if I choose not to get involved?” McGuire asked. “And just leave you spooks to chase each other around the desert for another twenty years?”

“That's your choice, isn't it?” Goggles answered. “In a free and democratic society, each citizen makes his own choice.”

“Just don't make your choice a dumb one,” Baldy warned.

“This guy who called me. Who is he?” McGuire asked.

“We think it's Lafaro.” It was Goggles, gathering the cuffs and canvas sack from the side table.

“And who are you guys?” McGuire asked.

“Don't be silly,” Goggles scoffed, and he lowered the canvas hood over McGuire's face again.

They returned him to the Flamingo parking lot, the driver choosing an obviously circuitous route to disorient McGuire. At the lot, the side door opened and in smooth fashion the plastic cuffs and canvas bag were removed. McGuire was left on the sidewalk, the door closing even as the van drove away.

McGuire memorized the licence plate but he expected it would lead nowhere. There would be a block or a dead end, perhaps a duplicate plate issued to a legitimate citizen or some other device to shunt inquiries aside.

He walked back thoughtfully to his car, drove slowly from the parking lot, and began the return journey to Palm Springs.

All of McGuire's assumptions had been confirmed by the two Secret Service men. Bunker Crawford hadn't shot Ross Amos as a spontaneous act of insanity but because he'd feared for his life. Then he'd fled to Las Vegas . . . why? To meet Lafaro? McGuire frowned. Baldy and Goggles and maybe an earlier generation of agents had been looking for Lafaro for twenty years. How could he have eluded them for so long? And why had Amos devoted his entire career to finding him?

He crossed the state line into California. The traffic around him had thinned long ago and he was coasting west out of the mountains into a wide, shallow valley. Only the lights of oncoming traffic defined the road ahead of him. Once again he was overwhelmed by the vastness of the desert landscape. He couldn't imagine living in such an open expanse, so much empty space above and around you, so much darkness and solitude when the sun faded.

Why was Crawford in Palm Springs?

And why at Glynnis Vargas's house?

Which brought it all back to the beginning again: who killed Crawford and shot Ralph Innes from behind the shrubbery?

The man who called him, who directed him to Las Vegas, had been in the casino tonight. Was he Lafaro? Not likely. He talked about Lafaro as somebody else. Said he had to feed Lafaro. But insane people often speak of themselves in the third-person. And living out here, alone for twenty years, pursued by a fanatic like Amos and bloodless spooks like Baldy and Goggles, would be enough to drive anyone over the edge.

Except for the small portion of the road immediately ahead of McGuire's car, which appeared to move in the glare of his headlights, McGuire was immersed in blackness. He felt isolated and threatened. Only the glow from the car's instrument panel seemed soothing and friendly.

Twenty years. Three million dollars.

Clever people.

And what had they stolen?

He arrived at the Palm Springs motel after midnight. His room was undisturbed, but he checked the closet and bathroom carefully before locking the door, sliding a heavy sofa in front of it and drawing the blinds.

There would be little sleep tonight, he told himself as he slid into bed. Too many thoughts to shake out. Too many ways he could find himself in the same condition as Bunker Crawford if he wasn't careful.

“It's all yours, McGuire.”

Art Lumsden emerged from the ground-floor motel room carrying a cardboard box. In the early morning heat of the day, his pastel-blue suit was already stained with sweat. “This detail is giving up its bivouac and marching back to base.”

McGuire stood watching from the shade of a palm. “You didn't learn anything.”

Lumsden dropped the box heavily onto the open tailgate of a station-wagon. “We didn't learn anything,” he echoed. Two uniformed officers followed with the portable computers and printer. “Just cleaning our nails and scratching our asses. Besides, there's more work. Found some guy out in a nature preserve last night. Buck naked, middle of nowhere, and a couple of rounds pumped into the back of his head. Damned place is getting to be like Chicago.” He hoisted a foot onto the station-wagon's rear bumper and looked at McGuire as though he had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. “Where were you yesterday? Didn't see you around here at all.”

“I went up to Las Vegas to catch a show,” McGuire answered.

A smile flashed briefly on Lumsden's face. “A show,” he repeated. “Your partner's got his spleen shot out and you drive three hundred miles to look at tits and ass. McGuire, you're really something, you know that?” He lowered his foot and walked to the station-wagon door, shaking his head.

“Remember I told you about somebody named Lafaro?” McGuire called after Lumsden.

“Yeah,” Lumsden laughed, sliding behind the wheel. “We checked him out, McGuire. He's not registered here.”

“Well, check him out when you get back to headquarters,” McGuire said. “Put him on the computer. See what comes up.”

Lumsden looked at McGuire thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said, starting the engine and slipping the car into gear. “I might do that.”

“Two o'clock,” the doctor told him. “That's when he's scheduled to be moved out.” He looked uncomfortable with the idea.

“Is he conscious?” McGuire asked.

The doctor held up two fingers. “Two minutes, that's all,” he said. McGuire nodded, showed his ID to the uniformed cop guarding Ralph's room and entered.

“I hear you're going home,” McGuire said when he'd settled in a chair next to Ralph's bed. “Chartered jet and Fat Eddie to hold your hand all the way.”

Ralph forced a smile. “I'll take it,” he said.

“Janet too. She's coming along. She insists on it.”

“I know.”

McGuire looked at the electronic paraphernalia installed over Ralph's bed, then down at the floor and around the rest of the room. “We might be getting somewhere.”

Ralph questioned McGuire with his eyes.

“Crawford might have been part of some kind of military scam years ago,” McGuire said. “Along with somebody named Lafaro, who's been AWOL since then. This guy, Lafaro, if he's alive maybe he did it. At least he had a motive.”

Ralph rolled his head away.

“I'm staying down here,” McGuire said, standing with his hands in his pockets. “Until something pops.” He headed for the door. “Just thought I'd let you know,” he added.

Ralph called his name. “You be there?” he asked.

“Where?” McGuire's hand was on the doorknob.

“At the airport. When I go.”

“You want me to be?”

A shadowy smile. “Yeah. We're a team, aren't we?”

“Sure,” McGuire replied. “I'll be there.”

He ate lunch at an open-air restaurant on Palm Canyon Drive, watching beautiful women of every age arrive and depart in open cars: ivory Mercedes, white BMWs and sand Rolls-Royce Corniche convertibles.

McGuire marvelled at the power of money. The women, and the men who drove darker-coloured versions of the same vehicles, measured their identity and self-worth entirely against the wealth they acquired. Money was not an extension of the power they wielded; money
was
the power and the identity.

Why can't it be merely freedom? McGuire wondered.

He paid the bill to the overly friendly waitress and drove to the airport.

The chartered air ambulance, a converted executive jet, was parked in a shaded area just beyond the terminal when McGuire arrived. A fuel truck drove away as McGuire showed his ID to the uniformed Palm Springs cop guarding the steps to the aircraft.

“You from down here?” A tall, slim man in his thirties with tight, curly brown hair and a plastic smile was standing at the top of the steps. McGuire guessed he was the pilot.

“Boston,” McGuire replied.

“Yeah?” The pilot pulled a package of breath mints from his pocket, shook two into his hand and popped them in his mouth. “Hey, you the guy who was with this cop when he was shot? I read about it in the
Globe
.”

“Who's on board?” McGuire asked.

“Nobody. Some dude came to pick up the two cops and the reporters who rode down with the medics. One of the cops is a woman. Some honey. Jesus, I'd spend a year in solitary if she'd join me for one night.”

“When are they coming back?” McGuire asked.

The pilot looked at his watch. “Should be any minute,” he said. “We're set to be gone by fourteen-twenty. Listen, do you know this cop, this Parsons broad? What's she like? Couldn't get her to say much on the way down. Invited her up to the cockpit and everything.” He shrugged. “Maybe she doesn't have a thing for pilots. Most of them do, but . . .” He shrugged again, then looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Looks like our passenger's here.”

McGuire turned to watch two marked patrol cars escort an ambulance and black limousine through the chain-link fence and across the concrete apron in front of the terminal building. Uniformed officers emerged from the patrol cars and surrounded the ambulance as Eddie Vance, Bonnar and two casually dressed men stepped out of the limousine. Vance's eyes caught McGuire's immediately.

“I want to talk to you, McGuire,” Vance said. He walked at an angle away from the limousine to a spot behind the wing of the chartered jet. Bonnar and the two other men, one of whom had several cameras suspended from his neck, clustered at the rear door of the ambulance.

“Bonnar says you're not cooperating fully with his investigation,” Vance said. He pulled at his moustache as he talked. “That's not what you led me to understand.”

“Bonnar's lying,” McGuire said coolly. “He and his people are getting nowhere on this. I'm just a fall guy.”

Vance's pie-shaped face was already shiny with perspiration, and he moved further into the shadow cast by the aircraft. “He says if you're down here any longer, you'd better become part of the team.”

“What do you think, Eddie?”

Fat Eddie had never enjoyed being asked for his opinion. Opinions weren't facts or directives. They were subject to errors of judgment. Opinions were for editorial writers, not for decisive leaders. He looked away from McGuire, who was pinning him to the spot with a steady stare.

“We're really short-handed back home,” he said finally. “Maybe you should wrap things up here and be back in Boston on Monday.”

“We've lost a prisoner and damn near lost a first-class detective down here,” McGuire said. “And there's evidence that Crawford's murder may have involved US Secret Service personnel.”

Vance looked even more uncomfortable. He wiped a hand across his shiny forehead. “I'm not familiar with those facts,” he said.

“The hell you're not—”

“It's all conjecture—”

“Bonnar let the prisoner be interrogated for almost an hour—”

“It was within his rights . . .”

“—in total privacy, by two men whose identity he didn't even record!” McGuire exploded.

Bonnar and the reporter were looking in McGuire's direction, their attention attracted by his shouts of anger.

Vance began walking away from McGuire with his hands raised, shaking them to ward off further comment. “You're off-base, McGuire,” he said, heading for the ambulance. “Monday. Don't forget. Monday,” he repeated.

Janet Parsons emerged from the ambulance where she had been riding with Ralph and the medical team. She followed the eyes of the others to meet McGuire's, and gave him a tight smile.

McGuire watched the ambulance team carry Ralph out of the vehicle and lower the wheels of the mobile stretcher. Eddie Vance strode quickly over to speak to Innes. A doctor and grey-haired nurse stepped out next, pausing for the photographer to shoot several photos of Fat Eddie posing next to Ralph's cot, looking at the camera with a sombre expression.

Finally, the procession began moving in McGuire's direction. Two uniformed officers led the way, their eyes scanning the area for suspicious activity. They were followed by the two ambulance attendants wheeling Ralph on the cot, flanked by the doctor and nurse who had accompanied Fat Eddie and Janet from Boston. Vance, Janet, Bonnar and the reporter brought up the rear while the photographer scurried around them, shifting quickly among the three Nikons dangling from his neck.

“Nice of you to make it,” Janet said coolly as she approached McGuire. She offered her hand and a smile. Her hair had been pulled back in a loose ponytail and she wore only a hint of make-up.

“Said I would,” McGuire murmured.

Janet's smile grew wider; she turned to watch the ambulance attendants prepare to lift Ralph's stretcher aboard the aircraft.

“You're looking good.” McGuire smiled down at Ralph who lay with one arm under his head. He had been watching McGuire and Janet as they talked.

“I'm feeling better,” Ralph replied. An IV bottle swung from its hanger like a pendulum as the attendants began to lift him aboard.

“We may be getting somewhere,” McGuire offered. He reached out to touch Ralph's shoulder as he passed. “I'll keep you posted.”

“Sure,” Ralph said as he was carried into the aircraft. The doctor and nurse stepped aboard, followed by Janet Parsons and the reporter. Vance posed while the photographer took several shots with each Nikon. He photographed Vance shaking hands with Bonnar, Vance and the Palm Springs detective smiling at each other, Vance looking grim-faced into the camera, with one foot on the steps of the aircraft. Finally Fat Eddie climbed aboard, followed by the scrambling photographer.

McGuire saw Janet Parsons looking out at him sadly. He raised a hand to her and she returned the gesture as the door swung closed and the jet's engines began their warm up.

It was more than a wave goodbye from Palm Springs, McGuire knew. It was a wave that swept aside all they had been and all they might have been. She was Ralph's now. He needed her more than McGuire did. Janet had made her choice. And McGuire had made his. But he couldn't remember when. Or why. And it was too late now anyway.

McGuire walked back to the terminal. He heard the aircraft begin to move and the roar of its engines fade as it taxied into position for takeoff. Someone called McGuire's name, and he turned to see Bonnar in the front seat of the limousine, the window lowered.