By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel (26 page)

He had scored a bull’s-eye, but Tess didn’t see any reason to concede his point.

“I’m not
playing
anything. I’m legitimately stranded between two religions.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“That’s awfully personal.”

Rubin laughed. It was the first time Tess had heard
his
laugh, and it was full-bodied, extremely appealing, the kind of laugh that made her want to keep saying funny things.

“Tess, you’ve asked me about my marriage, my sex life, my wife’s convict father, and my finances. I think I’m entitled to ask whether you believe in God.”

“Okay, okay. I…do.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I could explain it.”

“Maybe there’s
your
yarmulke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Think about it.”

Tess might have said something more, but as they crossed the next summit, the horizon turned gray-green and the air changed perceptibly. A sudden drenching rainstorm began moments later, a downpour so complete that visibility was reduced to virtually nothing. The scenario happened to match one of Tess’s recurring nightmares, one in which she was driving but could not see — because of weather or simply because her eyes refused to open.

“Pull over,” she urged Rubin in a tight, dry voice.

“It’s safer to keep going, as long as I can see the taillights of the car ahead.”

“Yeah, assuming
he’s
still on the road. You could follow him right off the side of the mountain, too.”

Rubin did not bother to reply, just drove in grim silence. The freak storm lasted no more than a minute or two, but Tess spent every endless second awaiting a plunge over the side of the highway or the sudden jolt of a runaway truck on the Jaguar’s bumper. She would have felt so much better if she were behind the wheel.

The rain ended as abruptly as it began, stopping completely instead of tapering off. Over the next few miles, Tess and Mark passed dozens of cars on the shoulder — cars with crumpled fronts or crushed backs, surrounded by dazed-looking people. At least no one appeared to have been badly injured.

“See?” Mark said.

“See what?”

“They pulled over and ended up having accidents.”

“You don’t know that. They could have pulled over after the collisions.”

“Do you always insist on having the last word?”

Tess opened her mouth, saw the trap he had set for her, and shut it, shaking her head emphatically instead. Rubin’s laugh boomed out again, but she could not quite recapture the pleasant mood. The rain had seemed prophetic, a reminder that they had crossed some unseen boundary and all natural laws were now suspended.

Amos Greif lived outside Grantsville on a large farm, a place of several hundred acres judging by the long expanse of barbed-wire fence that fronted the roadway.
NO TRESPASSING
signs were posted every few feet, and when the Jaguar turned into the long, dirt drive-way, two mutts raced it for much of the way, dropping out only because the distance was so great, almost two miles by the odometer.

Tess hummed a few lines from the old
Deliverance
banjo duet.

“Are you sure this guy is Jewish?” she asked Rubin.

“In his own way, yes.”

“How did a car thief ever make a living in Grantsville? It’s pretty small.”

“Amos ran a chop shop out here, dismantling cars stolen from Baltimore and Pittsburgh — and who knows what else. I think he took care of the paperwork, too.”

“One-stop shopping. How convenient.”

Amos was standing on his porch by the time they reached the top of the hill, probably alerted by the dogs and the Jaguar’s noisy approach. He was the biggest man Tess had ever seen — maybe six foot eight and at least three hundred pounds, massive but not fat. He was perhaps the one person who really could attribute his weight to being big-boned. He also looked like he never quite came clean, although not for lack of trying. Perhaps there was just too much of him to wash, and too many places he couldn’t see.

Tess and Mark got out of the car but lingered behind the Jaguar’s open doors, unsure of their welcome.

“So,” Amos said, “the mountain comes to Muhammad.”

Tess looked across the roof of the car at Rubin, who seemed equally mystified by the greeting. They had literally come to the mountains, and the man on the porch was far more mountainlike than either of them.

“It’s been a long time, Amos. You look well.”

This generous description didn’t lure Amos forward or even convince him to unfold his huge, muscled arms. “Why are you here?”

“Miss Monaghan is helping me look for my wife and children, who have been missing since before Labor Day. During her investigation she discovered that Natalie had a friend, Lana Wishnia. Tess tells me you were once married to Lana, and that you may have been a confidante of my father-in-law as well. You remember him, Boris Petrovich? I couldn’t help thinking — well, hoping — that you knew something, anything, about Natalie’s whereabouts. If either one of them told you anything…”

Amos just kept staring, assessing them.

“There’s money for you,” Tess said, “if you know something.”

Rubin nodded. “Absolutely. I’d pay dearly for any information that led me to my family.”

“Wait here,” Amos said, in a tone that made it unthinkable to do anything else. He turned his back on them and disappeared inside the little farmhouse with a slam of the screen door. He hadn’t done much to prettify it, but the wood-frame building was well tended.

Tess and Mark were left where they stood, car still idling, its open doors like wings on a green metallic bug. Tess would not be surprised if the Jaguar proved to have magical powers, à la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, capable of taking them through the sky or across the water. There was no trace in the air of the strange weather they had passed through. The sky was a cloudless blue again, clear enough to see miles in all directions.

“You can see three states from here,” Rubin said, “if you know where to look.”

Tess didn’t even try to make conversation. She was too busy worrying that Amos, not exactly a garrulous sort, wasn’t going to let her off the hook. How would she ever tell Rubin what Larry Kirsch had said about Natalie? Perhaps it wasn’t even true. She should get at least one more source to verify the information.

“My property’s posted,” Amos announced, coming back on the porch. “Which means I’m entitled to do this.”

He had a shotgun in his arms, and he leveled it at Rubin, taking aim. Even then Tess did not quite believe he meant to shoot them. It was a warning, an order to leave, nothing more. A little over the top, but country people were touchy about property rights.

“A job done is a job done,” Amos said, more to himself than them, his finger on the trigger.

Did Rubin scream for Tess to duck? If so, she never heard the warning, falling instinctively to the ground behind the open door before Amos fired and scrambling for her gun, worn on her belt today. She had spent a lot of time working on her marksmanship over the summer, and those hours of practice paid off. She positioned herself and pulled her gun out as automatically as she might hit the snooze button on her alarm clock, albeit with more alertness.

Yet as quickly as she had moved, Rubin had moved faster still, diving into the car from his side, banging open the glove compartment and grabbing a gun. Holding the weapon in his left hand, he reached through the passenger door and pushed Tess’s head down with his right, using so much force she almost ate a mouthful of gravel. He then shot his onetime acolyte square in the chest, catching him just as he fired, sending the shotgun blast into the porch roof.

Amos dropped his shotgun, but he continued to stand for several long, agonizing seconds, swaying slightly, as if it took a while for his massive body to transfer the news of his injury to his nervous system. Finally, with a confused yet almost respectful look for Mark Rubin, he fell to the floor of his porch.

Tess and Rubin remained huddled together, listening to each other breathe. After a few seconds, he pulled himself away from her and began brushing dirt and dust from his suit. He approached the porch, his weapon drawn, walking around Amos’s huge body, then kneeling down to take his pulse at the neck. Mark’s lips moved, and Tess assumed he was reciting a prayer, perhaps a kaddish. Even so, Tess approached the porch with great caution, her own gun in hand.

A thousand questions occurred to her, but she settled for perhaps the least important. “Why in hell do you have that gun?”

“I always carry a gun when I go to the storage facility or transport furs. One of my father’s ways of saving money.”

“But I mean…it’s not just any gun.” She recognized the pistol from her own recent gun-shopping days, when she had decided to upgrade to the Beretta. “It’s a SIG Sauer. A German gun.”

“Swiss-German, actually.”

“Still, for a man who wouldn’t even consider owning a BMW…”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “They do some things very well.”

T
he Garrett County authorities were polite, almost pains-takingly so, to “that girl and that Jew who killed Amos,” as Tess overheard one deputy say to another. The tone was innocuous, the meaning clear: They were outsiders who had killed a local. Just their luck, Amos Greif was well liked in his hometown, if only because he kept to himself and paid his property taxes. And if he had come out of prison less than rehabilitated, as a cursory examination of his house seemed to indicate, at least Grantsville was only a staging area for his auto-theft network. Amos Greif was a good neighbor. He left the local cars alone.

Luckily, Tyner knew a Cumberland lawyer willing to safeguard their rights on short notice. Tess had learned through sorry experience that there was no percentage in talking to authorities without a lawyer present,
especially
when she was innocent. The lawyer arrived quickly, and by the time the sun went down over West Virginia, the sheriff had decided to let Tess and Mark Rubin leave, although he reminded them that they would be expected to return for grand jury proceedings. But Tyner’s friend said she knew the state’s attorney and he was likely to recommend no indictment under the circumstances. Tess and Mark were licensed gun owners on legitimate business, and their stories meshed with the physical evidence at the scene.

“It would have been better,” said the lawyer, Gloria Hess, “if you hadn’t gone inside his house after you shot him. But I still think you’ll both be okay.”

She was a tall, striking brunette, gorgeous enough so that even Mark seemed to register the fact, shaking her hand with a faintly dazed look. It occurred to Tess that Tyner’s legal contacts all tended to be lookers.

“I had to call 911, and it’s hard to get service on my cell out here,” Tess told Gloria. “You have to admit, Greif’s behavior made more sense after the deputies saw what was in his house. Clearly it wasn’t trespassing he was worried about.”

The deputies had opened a closed door off the central hallway and discovered a state-of-the-art forger’s shop, with a gleaming photocopier and templates for all sorts of documents — temporary tags, titles, driver’s licenses. There also were meticulous files, kept in restored oak filing cabinets, showing price lists for certain parts and in-demand vehicles, broken down by region. Another folder yielded voluminous correspondence about firearms, but this appeared to be legal — up to a point. Greif was the registered owner of hundreds of handguns, but the only weapon the deputies turned up was the shotgun he had died holding.

The deputies were impressed by their find, so Tess had pretended to be, too, despite having seen it all, and more. She wished she had thought to shut down Greif’s computer — with the flick of a finger, the deputies could have traced her frantic path through it in the minutes before they arrived. She had searched documents for references to Natalie and the children, started and quit all the recent applications. The last thing she did was click on Greif’s America Online account.

“What’s the use?” Rubin hissed from the door, where he was keeping watch. “You can’t get into his e-mail without his password.”

“But I can get into his address book.” She opened it up and was grateful to discover that Greif had stored only five addresses.

The first four, all Hotmail accounts, meant nothing to her. Tess jotted them down, knowing that a computer-savvy type could discern a lot from mere addresses.

The last address was for Wishnia, Lana, with an AOL user name of SlavicBeautee. And the comment box included the P.O. Box at the Reisterstown mail store where Tess had followed her that first day.

Tess quit the program, scooting out of the room and into the front hallway just moments before the deputies climbed the porch steps and began walking around the considerable corpse left there. Contemplating the lifeless form, Tess had felt nothing, or close to it. Her only regret about Greif’s death was that he had taken whatever he knew with him.