Dark Specter (43 page)

It was a man running up the trail toward us. It occurred to me for the first time that my sudden appearance, covered in blood and holding an automatic rifle, might be misconstrued. I tossed the rifle aside and picked up David. The running man reached us. He wasn’t in a uniform and I had never seen him before.

“Stay close to me,” he said. “They won’t fire as long as we’re together.”

I decided that he was crazy but friendly. We marched down the trail, David in my arms, Andrea at my side. As we approached the cleared space where the hall had been, a stout man wearing a khaki uniform and a Nelson Eddy hat advanced. He raised a bull horn.

“Put your hands on your heads!”

I looked at Andrea and smiled. It was all so ridiculous. But we did what he said, as one humors a child.

“Move away from the woman and the kid”
said the fat guy in khaki.

I realized that he was talking to me. I started to explain who we were and what we were doing. Then I noticed that every officer present had a gun that was aimed in my direction. Everyone seemed very tense.

“Just do what he says!” shouted the man who had run up the trail to meet us.

I obediently took several paces sideways.

“Lie
down on the ground,”
continued the man with the megaphone.
“Real easy now. No sudden movements. Just keep calm and nobody’s going to get hurt.”

Again I obeyed, sensing as I did so that I had already surrendered some considerable part of my constitutional rights. My arms were dragged behind my back and handcuffed securely together.

“Better Miranda him,” said a voice above me. “This one’s going to be huge. Watch some slick lawyer try and make a career by springing the son of a bitch on a technicality.”

Strong hands hauled me to my feet and patted every inch of my body while I was told I was under arrest and my rights were recited. I was not really paying attention, but I remember that the charges included assaulting a police officer. For the first time it occurred to me that this was not just a silly mistake which would all be cleared up in a few moments.

“This is ridiculous!” I said. “We’re innocent victims. They would have killed us if they could.”

The character in the hat cut me off.

“You can do all the talking you want back at the courthouse, son. No need to rush things. We’re operating on island time here.”

He turned to another man, also in a khaki uniform.

“Take him across, Lorne. Pete, you go along too. Keep him cuffed the whole time, and don’t take your eyes off of him.”

Other policemen surrounded Andrea and David as I was led away. I protested loudly that David was my son and begged them not to separate us, but no one paid any attention. It was as though I hadn’t spoken, as though I weren’t there. The man called Lorne gripped my arm and pushed me along. I noticed that there were dead bodies everywhere. I recognized Melissa, the blond woman who had kidnapped David. Her face and hands were badly burned and she had a terrible gaping wound in her back. As I surveyed the other corpses, strewn across the ground all around the burned-out shell of the hall, the full scale of what had occurred became apparent to me, and the gravity of my presumed involvement in it.

The two policemen steered me down the trail to the pier, holding me in a tight, impersonal grip. They kept up a bantering dialogue about the number of reporters and television people who would shortly descend on the islands, but neither spoke to me. I felt that I had been reduced to the status of an object to be moved from place to place, some large piece of furniture which no one wanted.

“Shit, it’ll be worse than a long weekend in August,” said the one called Lorne. “They’ll be crawling all over Friday. Show your ass on the street, someone’ll shove a microphone up it.”

“And the ferries? Forget it. Still, I guess it’s a two-way street. I was supposed to visit my sister tomorrow, over in La Conner, but now …”

“Looks like you got lucky, Pete. You might get over there with the car OK, but westbound? No fucking way.”

The scene at the landing was transformed out of all recognition. There were boats everywhere, some by the pier, others anchored offshore, maybe ten in all. Most had their engines running and their searchlights on, illuminating the scene in a weird pattern of intersecting beams. Two men in overalls and another wearing shorts and a polo shirt were bending over Andy’s body. The civilian nodded to the two deputies.

“What the hell happened here?” he asked in a shocked tone.

The one called Pete gestured up the trail.

“You think this is bad, wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you up there. This thing’s a regular massacre.”

“Guess I can forget about that cookout, then.”

“You get through here, Dick, you won’t want to eat charbroiled meat for a long, long time, I promise you that.”

We walked down the pier and boarded a launch marked SHERIFF. My handcuffs were fastened with another set to a guardrail support. The launch was lying between the pier and a red fire boat, and it took a few minutes to re-rig the mooring lines and back the launch out. Then we did a high-speed turn and scudded off over the dark waters.

Despite my humiliating and painful position, I felt an enormous sense of relief just to be off that island at long last. Whatever happened from here on in, the worst was over. It looked as though Mark and his two allies had torched the hall, maybe using gasoline from the generator shed. If one of them had approached the south end of the hall, where there were no windows, he would have had all the time he wanted to start a serious blaze. And since there was no source of water inside the hall, once the timbers caught there would be no way to put the fire out. If the people inside stayed put, they would be overcome by the smoke and flames. If they tried to leave, they would be shot down. Mark, Rick and Lenny would have had no compunction about this. Every killing validated their contention that they alone were fully human, empowered to mete out life and death.

We rounded a headland and turned into a sheltered bay with the lights of a town at the far end. As we drew closer, I saw that it was a sizable pleasure port, with a large marina and a loading dock where a car ferry was tied up. The police launch cut up the channel to the landward end of the marina. One of the two deputies unfastened the handcuffs securing me to the rail. We disembarked, walked up a gangplank to the street and drove off in a police car.

After my enforced exile, I greedily took in every detail of the scene. There was a main street back of the harbor and a few smaller ones off those. We went about three blocks, pulling up in a parking lot before the courthouse annex, a long one-story building from the fifties with an overhanging flat roof. There were lots of pretty trees, shrubs and flowers planted in front. The sheriff shared the office space with the county’s Building and Planning Department, as well as the Public Health and Community Services.

Inside the front door was a cardboard box with a slit and a handwritten sign reading
COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS
, a large plastic recycling bin, and a set of gray metal lockers marked
WEAPON DEPOSIT BOX
. In my heightened and febrile state, they seemed to symbolize the essential trinity of American life: democracy, idealism, violence. We entered a warren of cramped offices where I was formally placed under arrest. My name and other details were recorded and my fingerprints taken. I was allowed one phone call, which I used to contact my parents. It was the middle of the night on the East Coast, but they were very sympathetic. My father told me that he couldn’t fly out immediately because my mother was too sick to be left alone, but that he would get in touch with people he knew in Boston and hire the best defense lawyer in the Northwest. They both said they loved me and that everything would be all right. I wanted to tell them about David, but it didn’t seem the right moment.

The deputy called Lorne had meanwhile broken out a first aid kit which he used to clean and dress the cut on my forehead. Then I was taken to a holding cell at the end of the block, a small bare space with a bunk bed and a window of opaque glass bricks. My handcuffs were finally removed and I was locked in. I paced up and down, thinking about David and Andrea. I wanted so much to see both again. Although it sounds absurd, I had come to think of us as a family. The intensity of the experiences we had been through together seemed to constitute a lived history at least as substantial as the one I had shared with Rachael. But time dragged by and no one appeared. Eventually I lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

I was awakened by the arrival of two different policemen. One pushed a breakfast tray into the room while the other covered his partner from the doorway with a revolver. Then they backed out of the cell and relocked the door. I got out of bed and retrieved the tray I was starving, and it was a good breakfast, biscuits and gravy and scrambled egg with a big mug of fresh coffee. After that, nothing happened for several hours. Then the door was unlocked again and the sheriff stepped inside, accompanied by the deputy named Pete.

“How’re you doin’?” the sheriff asked.

I shrugged.

“Best breakfast I’ve had in a long time.”

The sheriff nodded.

“Molly’ll never be the cook her mom was, but she does an OK job. We have to send out. Don’t have cooking facilities here. These cells are hardly ever used, except some drunk needs to dry out overnight.”

I’d had enough of this bantering.

“Where’s my son?” I demanded.

The sheriff leaned up against the wall.

“The boy and his mother are staying with Lorne and his wife. They’ve got plenty of room now the kids have gone. We got a doctor to attend to the woman’s injury. They’re both OK.”

I was about to point out that Andrea was not David’s mother, then decided to keep this to myself.

“I want to see him!” I said. “You have no right to do this. We’ve just been reunited and now you’ve separated us again!”

The sheriff held up his hand.

“You’re way ahead of me here. I don’t know a thing about you except your name. Assuming it is your name.”

I strode toward him, waving my hands dramatically.

“Call the FBI! David was kidnapped. They’ll tell you—”

“Hold it right there!”

The deputy had drawn his revolver and was pointing it at me. I stopped. There was a moment’s silence.

“OK,” said the sheriff. “How about we all go into my office, where a man can rest his butt, and you tell me the whole story from the beginning?”

My handcuffs were replaced and I was taken out of the cell and down the hall to a small cubicle with a desk decorated with framed family photographs. The sheriff sat opposite me, while Pete perched on a filing cabinet and operated the tape recorder. I told them everything, from the very beginning: how Sam and I had met at college, how I’d run into Vince by accident, how David had been kidnapped and Rachael had killed herself, how I’d sunk into depression and then decided to hit the road. I spoke openly and naturally, making no attempt to hide anything. I wanted them to realize that I had nothing to hide.

I must have talked for almost an hour. Sheriff Griffiths, as the sign on the desk proclaimed him to be, made no attempt to cross-question or interrupt. I finished by describing meeting Rick in Anacortes and the drive to the house.

“I don’t know where it is exactly, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find. It’s situated on a headland, down a dirt road. There are some outbuildings and a pier just like the one on the island.”

“What kind of a car were you driving?” asked Griffiths.

“A big old Chevy,” I replied promptly. “It has Minnesota plates, 469 AUK. It’s kind of an aquamarine color. There’s an antenna and whitewall tires.”

The sheriff glanced at the deputy.

“OK,” he said. “Now tell us what happened when you got to the island.”

I was about to answer, but something about the look the two policemen had exchanged made me think better of it. Filling in the background was one thing. My experiences on the island would form the basis of any case against me, and it might be a mistake to discuss that without legal representation. I could easily end up saying something which looked damaging. It didn’t help that most of the other witnesses were dead.

“I asked my father to get me a lawyer,” I told Griffiths. “I’d prefer not to say any more until he gets here.”

The sheriff nodded lazily.

“Guy phoned already,” he said. “Name of Merlowitz. Supposed to be here this afternoon. He’s chartering a floatplane from Seattle. Sounds like he must come expensive.”

He got to his feet with a sigh.

“I sure hope so, son. Because you’re going to need the best there is.”

“But I haven’t done anything!” I protested angrily. “My only crime was to be in the wrong place!”

The sheriff smiled very slightly.

“Not just you.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Chevy you just described to me? We found it OK. Only we didn’t find it at Fidalgo, like you said. It turned up on a dock in Bellingham, right next to the marina where that blue motorboat was stolen yesterday. The one that was faked up to look like a police launch.”

Back in my cell, I tried to come to terms with this latest development. It didn’t take long. I’d left the key to the Chevy with Lenny when I arrived. Mark and the others must have realized that the painted VW van was too conspicuous for their purposes and taken my car instead. It made no difference. Since I’d never left the island, I couldn’t be implicated in anything that might have happened in Bellingham.

The lawyer recommended by my father’s friends in Boston arrived shortly after three o’clock. He was in his mid-thirties, thin and balding, with a heavy five o’clock shadow and shrewd eyes. He wore a crumpled linen jacket, a white T-shirt with a silkscreened Gary Larson cartoon involving rats and lawyers, black jeans and Banfi loafers. He introduced himself as Paul Merlowitz, shook my hand and looked me in the eye.

“OK, first off, did you do it?”

“Of course not!”

Merlowitz continued to stare at me for a full ten seconds.