Текст книги "Murder on the Run"

Автор книги: Medora Sale

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

He was running down a long dark path that was arched with overgrown bushes. Each one that he passed turned into a running man, and then dissolved into a shadow behind another bush. As he grabbed out, an irritating voice penetrated his dream. “Excuse me, sir, but—” He shook himself awake again. “Sir? I think we may have something here.”

McNeil was standing over him, clutching a sheet of paper in his hand, waiting patiently for Sanders to wake up. “Yes? What is it? Don’t just stand there.”

“A woman called in about noon, apparently. Her baby’s been sick and she only just looked at the paper. She said she thought the picture looked a little like her neighbour. She’s not sure about the van, though. She said they had a blue Chevy but he sometimes drove a van. She thinks maybe he borrows the van sometimes.” Sanders looked up at him with weary lack of interest. “But when I checked out the reports on light brown vans there is one registered to a Glenn Morrison on the same street.”

“What did the report say?” asked Sanders irritably. “I thought all those local registrations had been checked out.”

“No one home,” said McNeil. “And nothing suspicious-looking about the van.” He put the report down in front of Sanders. “Morrison’s brother-in-law was home and let him in, showed him the van. Do you want me to check it out?”

“Yes, I do. Of course, you’d better check it out. Send someone back there. And put out that license number just in case.” Sanders yawned and reached over to pick up the little green notebook still sitting where he had left it on his desk.

The first page had been ruled off to accommodate a week and was covered with familiar neat handwriting; it was headed “January 1984,” and there was a date sitting precisely in the upper left-hand corner of each segment. It had all been done by hand. Sunday the first had one entry; “20 degrees, cloudy, 4-1/2 miles.” January 2, in addition to weather and mileage, had a note: “Paul, 4:30.” Each page followed that pattern. Some appointments were identified merely by initials; many were with Paul, although those became less frequent as February progressed into March. Once or twice a week there would be a “J.” and a time. In the back of the book were pages of names and addresses, two letters of the alphabet per page. “It looks like Conway’s missing address book,” said Sanders. “Why would Wilcox be hanging on to it?”

“So we wouldn’t, I suppose,” said Dubinsky sleepily.

“And when did he get it? And how?” As he talked, Sanders pulled a folded note from a pocket in the back cover. A small silver key dropped out with a clatter on the desk. “What does that look like to you, Ed?” he said, staring down at it.

Dubinsky yawned. “A safety deposit box key. Can’t do much about it until tomorrow morning when the banks open, though. Unless you want to start dragging bankers out of bed.” There was a slightly plaintive note in his last remark. “What’s on the paper?”

“It’s from Betty, thanking her for the lovely towels.”

A harsh jangle interrupted them. Dubinsky leaned over and plucked the ringing phone off its cradle. He made a few indecipherable noises into the receiver and turned to Sanders with the ghost of a smile on his face. “They got Wilcox at the airport with a suitcase full of cash. They’re bringing him right down. Does this mean we can get some sleep tonight?”

Constables Joe Williams and Andy Pelletier were sitting morosely in their car, guarding the approach to Highway 401. They were parked in Hogg’s Hollow, just to the south of York Mills Road, within smelling distance of a cheerful roadhouse. Pelletier sneezed for the fifth time and blew his streaming nose pathetically. “Christ, but I’ll be glad,” he was saying, when news suddenly came through that the search was over.

“Great,” said Williams. “I could use some coffee right now.” He started the engine and pulled out onto Yonge Street, heading north.

“Hey,” said Pelletier. “Whereya’ going? Let’s go down to the Northern.” Andy was currently in pursuit of a girl who was temporarily employed at that place. Williams patiently turned right onto York Mills in order to turn around.

“It’s okay with me,” he said, “but I hope she’s working tonight. Their coffee is lousy and the doughnuts are stale.”

Pelletier was raising his head gratefully from his handkerchief to answer when he noticed it. “Whaddya know?” he said. “Another brown van. I’ve been seeing those goddamn things in my sleep.” He looked more closely. Even dulled by a cold, Pelletier’s eyesight and memory were enviable. “Wait a second,” he breathed to Williams. “That’s the license number that just came through.” The van was parked halfway up the hill, facing the main street, between the subway exit and the first large houses, beside a park. Its engine was running, its parking lights were on, and it looked quite unremarkable. The police car was a couple of hundred yards away, about to make a U-turn. Pelletier nodded at Williams, and began to report their find as he accelerated into a sweep up the hill and in front of the van. The ensuing events were a trifle confused. As Williams started to brake, the van slipped into gear and surged forward. They met on an angle, demonstrating an interesting problem in physics for those who enjoy such things. The accelerating van spun the police car around and sent it limping up on the sidewalk facing the way it came, but the effort required flipped the van over on its side, where it lay, wheels spinning helplessly. Pelletier and Williams were out and running before their car came to a halt. The distant wail of sirens mingled with the sound of the van’s blaring horn.

Fifteen minutes later, the partners stood in meditative silence and watched the ambulance driver and his mate carefully deposit the unconscious Glenn Morrison into the back of their vehicle and speed off. “So that’s that,” said Williams. “I wonder if he’s the right guy?” Pelletier shrugged. Right now he didn’t care. “Did someone call for the tow truck for this thing?”

“Yeah,” said Pelletier, and sneezed. “One of the guys over there.” He pointed at a patrol car that was preparing to leave.

“We’d better have a look inside, you know,” said Williams, who had been visited by an unpleasant thought. “There could be something—or somebody—in there.”

Pelletier scowled, walked over to the toppled van, leaned over the roof, reached in with a martyred sigh and took the keys out of the ignition. “Come on,” he said. “The truck’ll be here in a minute.” He walked around, tried one key in the back door, then another. The second one turned smoothly. “Come on, Joe,” he complained. “Give me a hand to hold this door up.” Williams lifted up the top door as Pelletier reached down and freed the latch on the bottom one, then shone his flashlight inside.

“Jesus,” said Williams. “Look at that! The whole goddamn thing is lined with broadloom, even the ceiling. Gold, with brown patterns.” Then he looked again.

“That’s not a pattern,” said Pelletier, turning even paler. The floor and sides of the insulated, padded, carpeted interior were soaked in dark splashes of dried blood.

Sanders’ head had scarcely hit his pillow when something jerked him back to consciousness again. He groaned as the light of real morning stabbed his tentatively opened eyes. To hell with it. He wasn’t getting up yet. But his tired muscles twitched and quivered as he tried to compose them for sleep again. It was hopeless. Until he took care of whatever was keeping him awake, he could kiss sleep goodbye. It was the good old Puritan mentality he had inherited from a long line of conscientious forebears. What in hell was bothering him? He dragged himself out of bed and into the shower, hoping for inspiration from the pounding of water on his head.

At 7:15 he was opening the door to Grant Keswick’s apartment. He had already been into the file and stared at Cassidy and Rheaume’s neat list, but couldn’t decide whether it was comprehensive or merely contained items they had considered interesting. More likely the latter, since it would have taken them days and reams of paper to do an inventory of the possessions of a well-heeled cocky bastard like that. There was everything in the living room that he would have expected—flashy audio equipment, white and beige furniture and rugs, plants, paintings and wall hangings lending splashes of discreet and irritatingly trendy colour. The kitchen was the same. Plants, blond wood, copper and red enamel pots. It had a static and unused quality; if anyone had done more than fry an egg in here he’d be very surprised. The bedroom had almost as much closet space as floor space—king-sized bed, everything else modular or built-in, a cosy chocolate rug with a vaguely South-East Asian pattern. He went carefully through the drawers, the closets, the bathroom cabinets, the contents of the clothes hamper. Somehow the pattern of Grant Keswick as anything but a small-time operator didn’t add up to anything he was happy with.

He brooded over his coffee and raisin roll at the small French café on the edges of Rosedale while he waited until it would be a reasonable hour to ring the expensive doorbell at Wilcox’s solidly impressive house. Nothing trendy there—just old money, well spent. At least now he knew what he was looking for. He glanced impatiently at his watch for the fifth time, put the morning paper back on the rack unread, and tried to inject a note of cordiality into his goodbye to the girl behind the cash.

Adrienne Wilcox had been dragged reluctantly from her bed by her daughter, and if she was surprised by Sanders’ desire to inspect her husband’s clothes, she concealed the emotion expertly. Sanders concluded that it was more likely that her apathy came with the hour. This was probably the earliest she had been out of bed in years. She left him alone to plow through closets, drawers, and laundry hampers once again. This time he emerged with his eyes glittering in satisfaction. Mrs. Wilcox had disappeared, no doubt back to her bed, apparently unperturbed by her husband’s predicament. He said his farewells to the maid who was vacuuming the front hall, the only sign of life in the dark, cold house.

By the time he got downtown again, the working day had begun in earnest. Dubinsky had surfaced, looking repellently undisturbed by lack of sleep. “I located the safety deposit box,” he said. “It’s in the Bank of Nova Scotia on Adelaide. The manager said he’d open up as soon as we got there. Where in hell have you been? No point in coming in until the banks opened, eh?”

Sanders glowered. “I’ve been working. Since 6:30 this morning. So cut the crap and drive us to the bank.”

Opening up a safety deposit box obviously caused the bank manager something akin to physical pain. Their possession of the key, their identification, and a hastily acquired court order were not enough to stem the flow of muttering. “Most unusual—we don’t do this sort of thing you know—absolute privacy—our customers don’t like to think—” He was clearly intent on getting rid of them as quickly as possible before anyone figured out that the police could get into someone’s box. Sanders wrote out and signed the receipt as slowly as he could, enjoying the man’s agonized dance of despair. He was damned if he was going to slink about because some bank manager didn’t like the look of him. Still, eventually they did depart, carrying a plastic bag which contained a small bundle of letters. Extravagant girl—hiring a safety deposit box to hold such a modest cache.

Less than an hour later Sanders walked into the room where he had spent so much time the night before getting so little out of a stony-faced Paul Wilcox. The intervening time had not served to wipe the stubborn glare from his eyes or the taut control from his jaw. Sanders smiled pleasantly at him and sat down. “I’m not going to bore you any more about that little matter of the tenders, Mr. Wilcox. We’ll leave our people in Fraud to deal with that. It’s not in my line of competence anyway. But I do have something here that I’d like to discuss with you.” And from his pocket he withdrew a small bundle of letters and spread them on the table in front of him. “They’re not all here, of course. I thought we could just go over some of the more interesting ones.” Wilcox stared incredulously at the paper laid out in front of him. His face whitened and then turned gray with shock; the smooth tight muscles under his cheeks and jaw spread and sagged, making his stern profile puffy and aged.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “She told me she’d burned them—all of them. She promised.” His face fell forward into his hands and he began to cry, with deep racking sobs of exhaustion and despair.

“Paul McInnes Wilcox,” said Sanders, his voice almost lost in the tumultuous hysterical weeping of the man he addressed, “I charge you with the murder of Jane Annette Conway.”

Eleanor walked into the Indonesian restaurant and looked around. There he was, sitting over by the wall, his back to her, reading a paperback. “Hi,” she said nervously, and sat down. “How do you like it?” She gave her head a funny little shake. “He said it was the best he could do without shaving my head. I don’t think he believed my story.” She grinned. “He seemed to think I had a very kinky boyfriend.”

Sanders looked at her critically. Her inch-long hair curled tightly all over her head. “I like it,” he said. “It looks good on you. Which is a damned good thing, because I’d be in real trouble if it didn’t.”

“You said you talked to the guys who did it?”

“Oh no. The guys who did it are back in Detroit or Montreal or wherever by now, I imagine. They were probably here to look after something else, and came in useful picking you up. I got a message from the guy who ordered it done.”

“Who is he?”

“How should I know?” Sanders laughed. “If I knew who he was, I’d be a hell of a lot more famous, or at least richer, than I am.” He stopped to order two bottles of German beer. “No. His communications are anonymous.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much. Just that he was getting out of my life again—actually, our life. He’s lost interest in Wilcox and friends. That’s one more thing we don’t have to worry about right now.”

“Oh, sure,” complained Eleanor. “You weren’t lying on that cold hard floor for hours. And you don’t look like a French collaborator after the war right now, either.”

“Come on,” said Sanders. “Where’s your adventurous spirit? Besides, it’s cute and fluffy-looking. And anyway, when I saw that envelope full of hair, I was expecting much worse.”

“Where is my hair, anyway?”

“Tucked away safely. It’s evidence.”

“Sure. A trophy, you mean.”

“That too. Let’s order. Can you work your way through a Rijstaffel?”

Eleanor finally put down her knife and fork with a contented sigh, and then looked at the scraps remaining on the dishes arranged on the hot plate in front of them. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t eat another green bean right now. Although I could choke down another beer if one were put in front of me.” She pushed her plate to one side and leaned comfortably on the table. “You know, I find it hard to believe that Grant Keswick would kill a woman in cold blood like that. People really surprise you sometimes.”

“He didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Kill Jane Conway in cold blood—or even in hot blood, as far as that goes. His vices don’t seem to run to murder.”

“Then why do you have him locked up for it?” Eleanor shook her head impatiently. “And if he didn’t do it, then who did?”

“Well, actually, at the moment he’s locked up for trafficking, but he’ll probably be out on bail by tomorrow. And once we got into Jane Conway’s safety deposit box, it wasn’t too difficult to work out. Paul Wilcox had been her lover for some time, and he’s one of those guys who have a compulsion to commit themselves to paper when they’re in love. Surprising how many people are like that. Anyway, we have a small bundle of tender little notes that she carefully kept together. He tells his ‘darling Jane’ several times that his life would be perfect if only they could get married, but that he knows she understands that his career would be ruined if he tried to divorce his wife—who isn’t an understanding sort of woman, apparently. In one he explains to her that she will definitely have to get rid of the baby, and if she doesn’t feel like having it done here, he’ll pay for a fancy clinic somewhere else. Obviously nothing was too good for her.”

“Except marriage.”

“Exactly. But you can tell from her correspondence with her lawyer that she was hell-bent on divorce because she was planning on marrying again. It looks as if she kept those pictures and letters to blackmail Wilcox into marrying her.” He gazed deeply into the newly arrived beer for a moment. “It was obviously a mistake on her part.”

“It’s a damn good thing for Grant that she kept those letters and that you found them. My God, imagine if they still hanged them here!”

“I was never entirely happy about Keswick as anything but a pusher. I just couldn’t come up with a mental picture of him actually doing it. I mean, here’s a girl, in top physical condition—granted that she’s pregnant, of course—who runs miles every week and gets killed in daylight on a public running path, potentially in full view of anyone coming along. How does an actor who boozes and God-knows-what-else catch her?”

“Easy. He waits for her and grabs her. He’s maybe in lousy shape, but he’s very strong.” Eleanor shivered. She remembered that rock-hard arm steering her across the floor at the party.

“Uh uh. How does he know where she runs, when she’s coming along, and that someone else isn’t going to be running by at just the moment she appears? It was sitting at the back of my mind, ever since I decided the rapist didn’t get her, that it had to be someone she went running with. And her husband had one hell of an unshakable alibi. And then Mrs. Wilcox talks about her husband coming in at breakfast time all sweaty from his run—although how she knew is beyond me, since she hasn’t been up before ten in years. When I woke up the next morning it clicked. Keswick’s apartment doesn’t even have a pair of sneakers or sweaty shorts in it—but Wilcox’s laundry smells like a locker room after a soccer game. He admitted it; I don’t know if he’ll keep on admitting it once he discusses it all with his lawyer, but I don’t think he’s the type that stands up well when he feels guilty.”

“What’s going to happen to the others? The ones who kidnapped Amanda?”

“Not all that much—it’s going to be almost impossible to make kidnapping stick under the circumstances, and all her injuries were caused by her falling over the edge of the ravine when she ran away. Gruber’s going on fast and furious about drug dealing to get himself out of the soup, so that’s what the Crown is going for. I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the expression on her face, “but really you don’t want to put Amanda through a court case as well. They’ll get a few years.”

“And what’s going to happen to the guy that killed all those girls? After all those months of being terrified of him, it seems impossible that he’s actually been caught. Where is he?”

“In the hospital. He’s suffering from a concussion and a few broken bones, I guess, but he’s babbling away about his mission, and failed tactics, and that sort of thing. He seems to think he’s in some sort of commando unit. He’ll never even see a courtroom. He’s really out of it.” Sanders picked up his glass. He had been profoundly shaken by those honest blue eyes and his earnest explanations. “They’ll put him away somewhere until he pulls out of it or is just too old to do any more damage.”

“Horrible,” said Eleanor. “Was he married?”

“Yes. And his wife is pregnant.” Sanders shook his head dubiously. “She doesn’t seem very unhappy, though, according to Dubinsky. Once she realized she would never have to see him again, that is. She has a good job, and she’s clever. Ed liked her. He figures maybe she already has someone else in mind—but he has a very suspicious mind. She said when we were through with the van we could give it back to the dealer or drive it off a cliff—as long as she never had to look at it again. She sounds like a gutsy sort of girl. But he said he never wants to look at anything as disgusting as that van again.”

“So all these people get off practically scot-free—with deals and pleas of insanity. I don’t like it.”

“Not really. Morrison will be locked away for years, and who are the others? A two-bit hood, a coked-up actor, and a stupid little cop. We got Wilcox, and I’ve got ten days off coming to me. Life looks pretty good really.” He stood up and pulled out her chair. “Come on, let’s start my vacation right now,” he said, dropping a kiss on her short, tangled curls.