Heart of Stone (44 page)

“Right,” I said. “The state police are going to have to speak to those witnesses. There's something fishy about their story. You have their address and telephone number, I assume.”

“Sure,” he said, the truck still idling in park on the side of the road. “But how do you know Merkleson's sunburn matches the outline on the rocks? Is your memory that good?”

I held up the envelope I'd found on the floor of his truck. “Right here. Tiny, you were supposed to give these to the state police.” He assumed a suitably sheepish expression, and I smiled. “Good thing you didn't, though.”

“I guess I forgot,” he said.

“Just like you forgot to check on Gayle Morton's airline ticket.”

That last rebuke appeared to sting him, and I thought I may have taken my ribbing too far.

“At any rate,” I continued, “we'll have to get those witnesses back up here to talk with the state police. Their story threw us off the trail for a week.”

“Let me see those photographs of yours,” he said.

I handed him the black-and-white prints of the bodies, along with the loupe; the contact sheet images were small. He studied them carefully, then asked for the slides and began scanning the images one by one.

“Sorry, which pictures show the sun on the outlines?” he asked, offering the sleeve back to me.

I took it and the loupe and held them up to my eye to find the relevant slides.

“If only there had been a witness at eight a.m.,” I mused. “Someone on land, not water like that father and son, who mucked up everything. Jerry Kaufman's girlfriend heard a car on the road, remember. Squealing tires.”

“Must have been those drag racers I've been looking for,” said Tiny.

“Probably. I wonder if that car did hit something,” I said, still looking at the slides, searching for the best one to illustrate my point about the sun. “Karl Merkleson, perhaps. That would explain the glass fragments the coroner found in his skin.” I sighed. “But there were no reported accidents, you said. Nothing all week. No one hit anyth—”

I stopped mid-word. My skin went cold. I tried to act as if nothing had happened. I pretended to examine the slides while my mind searched frantically for an out. I knew in that moment that I was sitting next to a murderer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

As I stared at the photographs through the loupe, I felt something hard against my arm, followed by a smart, metallic click. I dropped the slides and turned to see the hard steel, quality carbon steel, on my wrist. Terwilliger had just handcuffed me.

Before I could react, the beast snapped the other cuff onto his right hand then threw the truck into gear.

“What are you doing?” I gasped as the speed of our acceleration pushed me back in the seat.

He shook his head slowly with what looked like genuine regret on his face. “You just wouldn't let it go,” he said softly. “A simple accident turned into a double murder.”

“That's not my fault,” I stammered. “It wasn't an accident.”

“Yeah, but it was an accident until you stuck your nose into it. I was just hoping you'd go home, forget all about Baxter's Rock, and all this would've been over. Why did you have to meddle, Ellie?”

I had no answer. I just ordered him to unlock the cuffs and let me out. He didn't say anything but made a sharp turn instead. I looked through the windshield, into the pouring rain, and saw that we were on a narrow lane, heading up a slow incline. He was driving fast, bouncing and careening from side to side over the rough, wet road. Then we made another turn, onto an unpaved path that grew steeper and muddier as we went.

“You didn't hit a deer,” I said. “You ran over Karl Merkleson on Route Fifteen, didn't you? It was automobile glass in his skin. From your broken headlamp.”

“It was an accident,” he said, wiping the fogged-up windshield with his right hand, dragging my cuffed left along for the ride. “He was walking along the road just south of Grover Road at about seven in the morning. Just about a quarter mile from here. God knows why. Probably heading back to the Sans Souci after a night in that hunters' shelter with Miriam or Mimi or whatever her name is. But I didn't know that then. I seen a car parked near Grover Road when I passed it, and I figured that was his.”

“My cousin Max's station wagon,” I prompted.

“That's what I found out later. But at that time, I thought it was his. The guy I ran over.”

“So you put him in the car and drove to a spot you knew to dispose of him. Baxter's Rock.”

He didn't answer. Just steered, looking straight into the thrashing rain.

“You were drunk,” I said to accuse. “You smelled of beer that day, I remember. You always smell of beer. You're even drunk now. You ran straight through that pothole and blew a tire because you'd had two gins and who knows how many beers before that for supper.”

“I drive just fine when I've had a few. It's only beer.”

“You ran him over,” I said again in disbelief.

“Yeah, he was dead on the spot. Or maybe just a few minutes later. I felt real bad about it.”

I put the events together in my mind. Jerry Kaufman and Emily Grierson had just parted company at seven. She heard the squealing tires on the road as a drunken Terwilliger tried, too late, to brake and avoid Karl. He hit him hard. Hard enough to cause the fatal internal injuries reported in the autopsy. Terwilliger remembered having passed Max's car just a few dozen yards before he'd crushed Karl Merkleson to death with his smelly truck. Thinking Max's car belonged to the dead man, he put the body into the way-back and drove him to the top of Baxter's Rock, intending to make his death look like an accident. Karl must have lain in the car for some time; that would account for the lividity on his left side. I still didn't know how Jerry Kaufman fit into the picture.

The wipers slapped back and forth, sloshing the water off the glass in sheets, as the truck barreled up the hill.

“The screeching tires Emily Grierson heard were yours,” I said.

“Yeah, I'm gonna have to do something about that little girl,” said Terwilliger.

My chest tightened. He couldn't be serious. “Are you mad?” I said. “She didn't see anything. She didn't even think there'd been an accident.”

“Can't take that chance.” He shrugged.

Oh, God. Why had I told him her name? Time was short. I had to slip the cuffs and get away, not only to save my own skin but Emily Grierson's as well.

“What are you planning to do with me?” I asked just as Terwilliger steered into a large branch that whacked the windshield directly in front of me. I ducked, but the glass held. When I lifted my head again, a crack, looking like a bolt of lightning, had spread across the windshield, reaching nearly halfway across the driver's side.

“I've really grown to like you, Ellie,” he said, struggling to control the mushy steering in the mud.

Maybe he'll crash into a tree and knock himself cold, I thought. He was a lousy driver, after all. Especially when drunk, as he was now. Not a speech-slurring intoxication, but he was impaired.

“You've got a funny way of showing your affection,” I said. “Please let me go and stop this madness.”

He said nothing. Just stepped a little harder on the gas.

My best hope was for him to drive off the road, even if it killed us both. At least Emily would be safe. I wondered if I had the courage to grab the wheel and steer us into a tree. Or perhaps I could wrestle his gun away from him. But I'd need to displace his belly first then manage to extract the gun from the waistband of his trousers. I had a better chance of pulling Excalibur from the stone.

“If Karl's death was an accident, why did you kill poor Jerry Kaufman?” I asked, trying to distract him.

“I didn't want to do it,” he said. “But the kid showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He came out of the woods just as I was rolling the guy over the edge.”

“And you chased him down?”

Terwilliger shook his head. “No. I just called out to him, told him I was the chief of police, and he came over. He sure was a well-behaved young man. Respected the law.”

“How could you just push him over the edge?” I asked. “At least Karl was already dead, but that poor kid. How could you do it?”

“I didn't enjoy it,” he said as a matter of fact. “But I had to. He saw what I did.”

I shook in horror at the thought of Jerry Kaufman dutifully obeying his heartless killer when he should have run for his life.

“Why did you dispose of Karl's shirt?” I asked with a bitter taste on my tongue. I had to keep him talking. “Was there blood?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Blood. And the shirt was all ripped and torn from the accident. I had to get rid of it. I couldn't fold it up nicely on the seat of your cousin's car like I did with the rest of his clothes. That wouldn't have looked right.”

“When did you throw that wash-and-wear shirt in the water?”

“I had no intention of doing that until you started asking where his shirt was. So I went to the Sears in Elizabethtown and bought a shirt. I thought that might put the question to rest.”

A flash of lightning lit the sky, and a great bang of thunder sounded directly overhead. Terwilliger flinched and nearly lost control of the truck. But he steered through the mud, his tires soon found the ruts again, and we were back on course.

“And there never were any witnesses,” I said. “No one found the shirt in the lake. You did. And there was no father and son in a boat either.”

“Nope. That's why I'm doing this, Ellie. You're insisting on telling the state police about the witnesses. It would've come out that I was lying. I sure wish you hadn't done that.”

Me too, I thought. Or, at the very least, I wished I'd kept it to myself.

In all the time since he'd handcuffed me and turned off the main road, I hadn't given any thought to where he was taking me. I was concentrating on distracting him with questions while I tried to figure out a way to get him to run off the road. But suddenly as we spun up the slippery hill, I realized he was heading for Baxter's Rock. One-trick pony. Oh, God. My insides tightened, and I steadied myself by clutching the door handle as if it were trying to run. I knew what was coming next. He was going to throw me off the cliff.

And just as I came to that terrifying realization, with no more time to wrench the steering wheel from his hands or make a grab for his gun, we reached the crest of the hill. Even in the dark, I recognized the clearing where we'd discovered Max's car one week before. Terwilliger skidded to a slippery stop in the wet grass on his bald tires.

“We'll wait a bit till the rain eases up,” he said, and I struggled to catch my breath. “I'm real sorry, Ellie. Real sorry. That's why I kept you so close this past week. Once you started asking about loose ends, I had to know what you were onto. And then I grew to like you.”

“You don't have to do this,” I said. “And Emily Grierson poses no threat to you. She didn't see anything. You're safe.”

He switched off the engine.

We waited. It felt like an eternity. My guts churning, my mind ablaze, thoughts and schemes ricocheting off the walls of my skull, I rooted desperately for an idea, an out. I was finding no traction at all, though, as my captor just sat there, waiting for the rain to stop so he wouldn't get his hair wet. Then I caught myself, grappling to gain control of my careering emotions. Panic wasn't working. I had no chance if I didn't concentrate. Calm. I needed to think rationally. God knows Terwilliger was calm, and he seemed to know exactly what he was going to do to accomplish his goals. I had to do the same.

I drew a breath and held it, as if trying to suffocate an insistent case of the hiccoughs. Then I exhaled and drew another breath. I considered the situation. I was handcuffed to the man who was planning to throw me over the cliff. That meant he had to release me, unlock the handcuffs, before sending me to my doom. That was the moment I had to make my move. I had to win one battle in that last fleeting moment of freedom. My options were few, I thought, as Terwilliger watched the rain sullenly. I could try to overpower him, but that was unlikely. He outweighed me by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. He was a strong man, if not fit. And I was as physically unimposing a specimen as you could hope to find. But I was fairly fleet of foot, and it was dark. I was sure I could outrun the ape in the open field.

I weighed my other advantages. He was drunk. I wasn't sure exactly how much of an edge that might prove to be, since he was also cagey and I was chained to him. And he had a gun, the half-strangled pistol he'd ruined for resale by stuffing down his pants. I put that thought to one side and continued my inventory of options.

He clearly liked me, even if he was determined to shove me off a cliff. That was a plus in my column. Could I use my charms to distract or delay him? I didn't see how, short of stripping out of my clothes. And I had no intention of doing that. If I had to die, I was going to die with my dignity intact. What did I have in my purse? Anything that might incapacitate a killer? No guns, knives, or weapons of any kind. I struggled to remember if there was a small vial of perfume. If so, I might, if my aim was true, squirt a healthy dose into his eyes and make good my escape. I knew for sure that my Leica was inside my purse. Maybe I could bash him on the head with it. But how would I accomplish that? Ask him to pose for one last photograph?

None of these ideas was viable, I realized. My only hope was to run when he unlocked the handcuffs.

“I think the rain's letting up,” he said, bringing me back to the present. “That's the way it is with these storms. They come in quick, dump a lot of rain, and move on soon enough.”

“How right you are. Thanks for giving me something so banal to ponder in the last moments of my life.”