Butchers Hill (35 page)

"Are you sure?" Pearson
asked. "Are you absolutely sure? Well, how long has it been
since anyone has seen him? What happened to the body guard? How inept
can you possibly be?" The last question must have been
rhetorical, for he hung up the phone without waiting for an answer.

"He's missing. Along
with one of the groundkeeper's trucks. Apparently he ducked
into the lavatory about thirty minutes ago and never came out. They
found his school uniform in a stall, so he must have planned this,
changing into a worker's clothes. He even left a note,
telling them not to worry, that he had to leave in order to be safe,
that he would travel faster if he went alone."

"Jesus."

"I bet I know where he's
gone." Pearson looked up excitedly.
"There's a place, a place he always goes back to
when he's troubled or unhappy—"

"Tell me."

He narrowed his eyes. "No.
I'll go find him on my own."

"You mean you want to get to him
first, get your stories straight, convince him to keep lying, as he has
all these years." Tess allowed the flap of her knapsack to
fall open, so Pearson could see the gun inside.
"Where's Sal?"

"He'll run from you, if
you go there alone. He doesn't trust anyone but me."

"Fine. Then we'll go
together." Pearson started to object, and Tess flipped her
knapsack again, showing her gun one more time. "I'd
just follow you anyway, so you might as well take me along."

T
hey
took Pearson's car, the sleek little 911 Porsche of which Sal
had spoken so longingly. Tess had planned to take the wheel anyway, but
seeing the Porsche cinched the deal. Was it bought with kickbacks from
the foster child trade? She could ask Pearson later.

"So you going to tell me where
we're going?"

"Not yet. Not until
we're a little closer."

She drove on. The Porsche was a dream to
drive. Eighty felt like fifty-five, and the usual twenty-five minutes
from Annapolis to the Baltimore Beltway sped by in fifteen.

"Now?" she said, turning
on to Interstate 95.

"Not yet." She wondered
what Pearson was trying to pull, if he still thought he might get to
Sal first. If so, he was underestimating her. "It's
in the old neighborhood, I'll tell you that much."

"Good." She zipped past
the exits for downtown.

"Why are you taking the McHenry
Tunnel?" Pearson asked suspiciously.

"I think we can make better time
going in Eastern Avenue," she lied, as they dipped into the
belly of the tunnel. Suddenly, she took her foot off the accelerator
and let the car drift forward of its own momentum, its speed
plummeting. Horns sounded behind them, echoing harshly off the tile
walls.

"You'll get us
killed," Pearson yelled, grabbing for the steering wheel, so
the car slithered to the left, and then back into the right lane.

"Possibly. I'm more
likely to cause a horrible traffic jam, and we won't get out
of here for hours, and by then it will be too late to find Sal. Now
tell me where I'm going. Exactly."

"Only if you start driving
again."

Tess tapped the accelerator. The car was up
to thirty now, still a little slow for the tunnel, but fast enough to
avoid being rear-ended.

"The Kipling is the
key," Pearson said.

"Kipling?"

"Sal made an allusion to one of
his poems in his note. He travels fastest who travels alone. It
reminded me of another poem he liked, one he taught the other
children."

"So?"

"‘By the old Moulmein
Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea / There's a
Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
/ For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say: /
Come back, you British soldier, come back to
Mandalay.'"

"Very nice. But what does it have
to do with Sal?"

"The pagoda. He'll be at
the Patterson Park pagoda."

There's a
Burma girl a-settin'
. Hadn't
Treasure said Destiny had gone to Burma? The pagoda must be the safe
place of which Sal had spoken. Not so safe for Destiny, though, she had
died at its feet. The porsche began the slow gradual climb out of the
tunnel. Good, the toll lines weren't too long. Tess picked
the one on the far right, and flicked a switch to lower the power
window.

What if someone was
going to kill Sal? What if he had been summoned to the pagoda just as
Destiny was, to meet a murderer?

"Hand me my phone," she
said to Pearson. "It's in the side pocket of my
knapsack."

"Why do you need a
phone?"

"I think Sal's in
danger. Destiny died at the pagoda, Treasure wasn't far from
it. Maybe the police can get there faster than we can."

Or what if Sal had been
the one to summon Destiny? What if Sal was the killer? Then who was he
planning to kill this time?

Pearson pulled out her phone, lowered his
window, then flung it backward in the path of a car that had just
emerged from the tunnel.

"You son of a bitch."

"No police," Pearson
said calmly. "That was our deal."

Tess wanted to argue, but it was her turn to
roll up to the toll booth. She looked over at the far right lane, where
a transit cop was parked, surveying the traffic.

"That'll be one dollar,
ma'am," the attendant said.

Tess gave her an ear-splitting scream
instead. "He's car-jacking me! Oh my God, call the
police, he's carjacking me, he's going to kill
me!" She rammed the gate, which was slightly harder to break
than she had anticipated. Well, Pearson probably had insurance. Not
that you could ever really fix body damage. But it was only fair. An
eye for an eye, a Porsche for a portable phone.

"What the hell are you
doing?"

"Getting us a police escort.
There's a killer in Patterson Park, and it's either
Sal or the person he's gone to meet. I'm afraid
your political future has to take a back seat to such
considerations."

"You're an
idiot," Pearson shouted back at her, holding onto the handle
above the door. "Sal will never tell you what you want to
know, I'll see to that."

Technically, Baltimore police had a policy
forbidding high-speed pursuits in the city, so the flashing lights Tess
saw in the rearview mirror hung back, slowing at intersections. Luckily
for her, the lights on Eastern Avenue, maddening under normal
circumstances, proved to be perfectly synched when a driver was going
ninety mph. She reached the southeast corner of the park in less than
five minutes, but the pagoda was in the northwest corner. She zipped
along its southern border, then turned north, running up on the
sidewalk and scattering a few dog walkers as the car came to rest fifty
yards from the pagoda.

She could still see the police in her
rearview mirror. Of course, they thought she was a victim, the
terrified hostage of a crazed carjacker. Sal was straight ahead,
waiting, a windbreaker pulled close to his body, as if the day were
cool. His gaze was fixed on a tall, muscular young man in baggy jeans
and a tank top, approaching from the east. The man looked vaguely
familiar, but she couldn't place him. She threw the car into
park, stripping the gears, grabbed her gun from her knapsack and fell
out of the car, screaming all the while.

"He tried to kill me, he tried to
kill me," she screamed, running toward the pagoda.
"Please someone help me, he's trying to kill
me."

As she had hoped, her screams distracted Sal
and the approaching man. She ran between them, firing once into the
air, just to show them she knew how to use a weapon. But
wasn't that how Luther Beale had started, firing one shot up
into the sky?

"Whatever you have, drop
it," she said. She hoped she sounded more confident than she
felt. "Both of you."

Sal looked stunned, while the muscular young
man smiled. She finally placed him. It was the monitor from the
Nelson's school, very much out of uniform. The one who had
lectured her on survival.

"What makes you think I have a
weapon?" he asked, his round face innocent and guileless.
"He's the killer, aren't you Sal? He was
probably fixing to kill me when he asked me to come here today. After
all, I'm the only one left who knows what he did. Once
I'm dead, he's home free."

Sal cried, a child's wail.
"That's not fair, Eldon. We promised to never tell,
not ever. All for one, and one for all. Besides, you're the
one who asked me here."

"All for one and one for all.
Right. I didn't see you helping the rest of us get fancy
scholarships. From the day they split us up, it was every man for
himself."

"But I didn't know where
to find you. Ask her, she'll tell you. I even broke into her
office just to get your address."

So this was little chubby Eldon, all grown
up. He wasn't really listening. He was reaching behind
himself, Tess saw. To scratch his back, or to pull out a weapon? It was
a hell of a split-minute decision to have to make.

The cops made it for her.

"Freeze," one yelled, as
six police officers came running across the lawn. "And throw
your weapons down, now.
Everybody
.
That includes you, miss."

Tess threw down her .38 happily. Eldon
dropped a semi-automatic, a cruel-looking gun. Sal pulled a serrated
butcher knife from his jacket, and let it fall to the grass. What a
flimsy little thing it was, next to Eldon's gun, how
inadequate. It would be hard, of course, trying to find a weapon at
Penfield on such short notice.

"Eldon said he needed
me," Sal said, almost sobbing now. "He said some
shit was coming down, and he needed my help. You probably told Destiny
and Treasure the same thing, you son of a bitch. Why'd you
kill them? What'd they ever do to you?"

"Fuck you, man," Eldon
said, his hands on his head as the cops patted him down. "You
started it all. If it weren't for you, none of this shit
would have happened."

Tess, who was also being patted down, looked
at the two of them. She might as well get her questions in now.
"There was a car, wasn't there, the night Donnie
died. A car, and two more shots fired, just as Luther Beale
maintained."

"I don't remember a
car—" Sal began.

Eldon shrugged, a small, cramped gesture
given that his hands were on his head. "A car? There may have
been. It doesn't matter."

"It matters to Luther
Beale."

"You really don't get
it, do you?" Eldon looked disgusted. "Stupid bitch,
stirring everything up, and never really getting it. None of that shit
matters because Sal killed Donnie Moore. Didn't you, Sal? Oh,
you were such a big man, carrying your gun around, trying to protect us
all. Well, you protected Donnie right into the grave."

At the police station, as the cops tried to
untangle the various felonies of the day, Tess almost felt sorry for
the
Beacon-Light
police
reporter, a young man she knew only by reputation. Herman Peters, aka
the Hermanator, a man who was rumored to never, ever, be without his
beeper. Rosy-cheeked, with dark curly hair, he looked like the kind of
smiling boy who should grace a box of instant cocoa. But he was a
tenacious, tough reporter, intent on fact and nuance, not as easily
satisfied with the little scraps spoon-fed to the television reporters.

"I still don't
understand," she heard him saying insistently to Tull, who
was handling media while his fellow homicide detectives interviewed
Eldon, Sal, and Pearson. Because of the public nature of the crime, the
reporters had descended on the police station within minutes of the
showdown in Patterson Park. "You say Donnie Moore was killed
by his friend Sal Hawkings, but you're going to charge Eldon
Kane with the murder of Keisha Moore and her boyfriend, and
he's also a suspect in the deaths of the Teeter
twins?"

"It's our supposition
that Eldon was a hit man, working for the Nelsons. He killed anyone who
threatened to expose their operation in D.C. Cops down there just
executed a search warrant at the Benjamin Banneker Academy, found a
basement full of stolen goods and an attic full of guns. They had
expanded the scope of their operation since they moved to
Washington."

"Back up a minute," the
Hermanator pleaded. "I'm not getting all of
this."

"Okay," Tull said with a
grin. "It all begins with a couple who figure they can get
cheap labor through the city's foster care system. The
original mom-and-pop operation, if you will."

Sal should have been reading Dickens instead
of Kipling, Tess thought as she half-listened to Tull unspool the dark
yarn. The Nelsons had taken in foster children as workers in their
fencing operation, at first a small-time operation. The original
mom-and-pop burglary ring. The children had stolen car radios and
anything else that wasn't nailed down, but the real money was
in weapons. Sal had even helped himself to a gun from the
Nelsons' cache. So when Luther Beale had opened fire that
night, Sal had shot back. Problem was, he wasn't a very good
shot, and he had ended up hitting Donnie instead. Or so he thought.

The children had sworn an oath never to tell
what had really happened, not to mention guns, or stolen goods. They
had assumed lies would keep their little family intact, but
Donnie's death had started the inexorable process by which
they would be torn apart.

Two years later, Sal had tracked down
Pearson and wrangled his scholarship, threatening to expose him.
"I was smarter than the others," he had bragged to
Tess. "They were dumb motherfuckers." Yet Eldon had
done the same thing, convincing the Nelsons to hide him after he jumped
bail. They had been glad to do it for a few small favors here and
there. And Destiny had been smart enough to try and shake the Nelsons
down for money. Or dumb enough, given the outcome.