Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (26 page)

I
N THE NEXT MOMENT, WADE’S ARMS WERE AROUND HER
. Jake pressed her face into the rough fabric of his heavy blaze-orange hunting jacket and felt his embrace tighten.

“Hey,” he said into her ear. Not until then did she realize how much she’d needed his presence, that doing this all alone was, of course, possible …

But it was dreadful. “Hey, yourself.” He smelled like soap, lime shaving cream, and the sharply herbal scent of the bag balm he used on his hands to keep them from cracking in cold weather.

“Is there any news about Sam?” Because in the hour since she had talked to Bob Arnold, anything could have happened.

But Wade only shook his head. “I got home just as Bob was hanging up the phone from talking to you. So I heard him out, and then I turned right around and started up here.”

Half an hour later, the U.S. Customs and Immigration people accepted the copied documents Wade had brought with him. Wade had been on the phone again with Bob meanwhile.

“He sent a boat over to where you said you saw Randy,” Wade reported as they left the customs building.

“And?” she said, steeling herself.

Because if the news had been good, he would already have told her about it. Bella sneezed again and wrapped the wool blanket Wade had brought along more tightly around herself.

“He said they found the fishing boat, but Dodd was gone. No Sam or anyone else on it, either.”

They drove through the market town of Calais between tire shops and convenience stores. As they pulled out of town, Wade reached over and turned the heat up even higher, then let his arm fall around Jake’s shoulders.

Along the road old maples and cedar trees screened barns and farmhouses from traffic noise. A little snow dusted the north sides of the tree trunks. As well as she could through a haze of fatigue and fear, Jake brought Wade up to date on the events of the night, until at last he steered the truck through the final pair of downhill S-turns before the turnoff to Eastport.

In the distance, the leafless white maples on the hillsides looked like stands of soft paintbrushes. “Randy was hunting us, back there on the beach. If something more important hadn’t come up, I think he might’ve found us and …”

Beaten us to death. Or shot us
. “He’s got some plan in his head,” she said. “But I don’t know what. And if he’s not where Bella and I saw him …”

He’d already proven he could hide, that he knew the coves and inlets as well or better than anyone around here. So by now he could be anywhere.

Then she saw in Wade’s face that there was something more. Something worse. “Sam’s old friend,” he answered her unspoken question. “Chip Hahn is his name?”

She nodded.

“When they found the fishing boat, they found a life jacket floating nearby. Bob Arnold’s pretty sure it’s one from the dory Chip stole out of the boat basin yesterday. Guy it got stolen from, he says he’d left two jackets on that dory.”

Wade went on. “But the dory’s gone. Bob thinks maybe Chip’s with them now. That maybe he’s on the missing dory with Sam and the girl.”

And Randy Dodd
, Jake thought, chilled. Her ankle felt huge, and as sore as a boil. “But how would Chip have—”

“Found ’em?” Wade slowed for the speed trap just inside the Passamaquoddy Indian reservation.

“Drifted there, maybe. There was a slick on the water by the fishing boat, a gasoline leak. So maybe a fuel line came loose, Chip lost power? And that’s right where you would end up, if you just let the current take you.”

Just before the causeway sat the Indian police squad car, waiting for drivers who didn’t know or had forgotten that the speed limit sign meant business. Wade lifted an index finger from the wheel as he went by, and the cop returned the salute.

“None of this is in any way your fault,” he added evenly. “If Randy Dodd hadn’t seen you, he’d still have seen the copter and hightailed it.”

“Yeah,” Jake said glumly, hoping her dad felt that way about it, too. Keeping Bella out all night, putting her in danger, and soaking her to the skin … oh, he was not going to be happy about this.

“We’ll just get home, get that ankle looked at and everybody
present and accounted for again, and then see what happens,” Wade said comfortingly.

But the expression on his face wasn’t comforting. It said things were bad, and that they might be about to get worse.

“Bob’s sending a car up to Saint Stephen,” he added. “To check your vehicle.”

In case of evidence, he meant. In case Randy Dodd had made it that far inland before returning to his boat.

“It’s a big ocean,” Wade added quietly.

As if he was thinking it, too: that all Randy wanted was to get away with the money. That his simplest, best move was to kill all three of his captives.

And that he could dispose of their bodies most easily just by throwing them overboard.

“I CAN MAKE YOU FAMOUS,” CAROLYN RATHBONE SAID
quietly to Randy Dodd. She sat near the stern of the small boat Chip Hahn had come in. The dory, he’d called it.

Up front, Sam Tiptree lay crumpled and motionless; Randy had gotten Sam from the larger boat into the small one by the simple method of dumping his limp body over the transom.

Chip sat near Sam, sullenly silent. A huge purple bruise was swelling on his cheekbone where Randy had hit him.

Randy himself looked straight ahead, one hand on the tiller of the engine he’d gotten started simply by tinkering with it and one on the little gun he’d gotten from somewhere. It was daylight now; as he piloted the boat, he kept scanning the shore.

But nothing moved there. They’d heard engines for a while, and voices; Randy had tucked the dory into a cove between high boulders and a deadfall, dark as a cave, and from outside just as invisible. When the voices went away and the engine sound faded, they’d emerged.

And now here they were. Rocks, trees, cliffs … once she saw an eagle swoop, seize a fish out of the shallows in its talons, then sail away with its silvery prey still wiggling and gleaming.

And once, only a dozen or so yards distant, a whale breeched, its vast, dark, gleaming shape like something in a science-fiction movie. But since then, nothing.

“I mean it,” she said, keeping her voice low. The sound of the engine probably covered it, she thought, but there was no sense letting Chip hear.

No sense in depending on him to save her. “I write crime books. I sell millions of them. You could be in one, and then—”

Then everyone would know how smart you are
, she’d meant to finish. Because they all wanted it, didn’t they? Everyone did. To be famous. To be
special
.

As if being a bloody monster wasn’t special enough. It was all she could do just to talk to this guy at all without throwing up or screaming. The girls, though; the girls in their graves.

You’re one of us
, they seemed to intone yearningly as they gazed at her with hollow eyes.
You’re one of us … almost
.

The girls sounded confident. She wanted them to be wrong. She took another breath of the salt air, let it steady her, and tried again to make what they were saying untrue.

“People would understand how important you are,” she said to Randy. “How … interesting.”

Right. Like a tumor is interesting
, she added silently. She tried keeping those thoughts off her face, though. Because if she was going to get out of this, she had to offer him something.

Something he wanted. And he would have to believe her, that she could deliver. “I’d let you talk to my editor,” she bargained. “You’d stay entirely hidden, though. Completely anonymous. They might,” she added, struck by a burst of inspiration, “even help you get out of the country.”

Not bloody likely. The only thing Siobhan Walters would do if she
heard from this creep would be to hire security guards, and with her next breath she’d demand her own bazooka. Because Siobhan was no fool; she knew she didn’t need the real people that most nonfiction got written about. And especially not the criminal ones; a photograph, maybe, just to show readers he really did exist and wasn’t the product of some fool’s fake memoir.

But nothing more. Most nonfiction subjects were nothing but trouble anyway, with their new prima donna attitudes and their demands to have their pasts fixed up to their satisfaction, their good deeds magnified and the bad ones papered over like so much rough plaster. And it was the same with true-crime books.

Forcing herself to gaze at Randy Dodd’s surgically altered features, she knew for a fact that she could bring his dead body home strapped to the hood of the Volvo, write about him as if he were alive, and barely anyone would even know the difference.

Dead guys didn’t open their big yaps to contradict anything the writer said about them, either. They didn’t give interviews, or sue.

In other words, he’d be perfect, and for Carolyn herself it would be a coup. “You’d be famous,” she said confidently again.

Interviews with a serial killer that the author had escaped from herself … God, it would be beautiful. All just as a way of getting free from him, and saving Chip and Sam, too, of course.

She told herself that once more as the dory pulled between the shore and some more large rocks. “Famous, huh?” he said.

Tonelessly, his eyes still roving back and forth. In the pale morning light, she examined his face, the scars at his temples and in front of his ears where some clumsy surgeon had made a tuck here, loosened a little there.

Reddened ridges revealed where stitches had been.
What a botch job
, thought Carolyn, who had done a teensy bit of preemptive research into cosmetic surgery herself, just to be ready when the time came.

Still, what he’d done had been enough to let him venture into
Eastport, to pass for a stranger as long as it was dark and no one looked too closely.

“Yes
,” she said, forcing herself to sound enthusiastic when what she wanted was to puke on his shoes. His bloody shoes …

She looked away. “You could be,” she went on, keeping her voice even, “a star. Go on TV. They’d probably make a movie about you.”

Randy Dodd laughed humorlessly. “That what you think I want? Lots of people knowing about me?”

He turned his gaze on her. The surgeon had gotten something about the corners of his eyes wrong. His nose, too, trimmed to a hawklike beak, looked like a plastic piece stuck above his lips, which had been plumped out cartoonishly.

“Well,” she amended smoothly, sensing something going wrong but not knowing quite what, “not really about you in detail. Not so anyone could ever—”

Find you
, the girls chorused spookily.
Find you and catch you and—

“Kill you,” he said flatly, his eyes searching the shore for anyone who might be watching from there. “That’s what I want.”

Anyone who might see her and save her. “That’s the plan,” he added. “And there is no other plan.”

He met her gaze, which was when she realized how hopeless it was, talking to him. Arguing, trying to persuade.

Because there was nobody in there. He might have been a real person once, with rational thoughts, feelings, empathy for anyone else.

But not anymore. Now he was just a walking, talking, deadly compulsion. Sick, twisted, and getting more grandiose—convinced he could do anything and get away with it—with each passing minute.

“That’s what I want. That’s what I’m going to do,” he said, his voice calm and hideously matter-of-fact. “I’m just waiting for the time to be right. So do yourself a favor: Don’t get your heart set on anything else.”

CAROLYN PROBABLY THOUGHT CHIP HAHN WOULDN’T BE
able to hear her trying to bargain with Randy Dodd, but he could. Typical, he thought. She would try to get herself out of this first.

Not that it would work. Wherever Randy was going, it would be a place he could hide three bodies and get away.

Out of the country, carrying a million bucks, or so Randy still thought. It wasn’t all in the scrapbook, but Randy had the rest somewhere, and that was all he wanted: freedom and cash.

And the pleasure of doing with Carolyn whatever bad deeds he could devise. Chip thought there were probably plenty.

Beside him on the floor of the boat, Sam Tiptree breathed in and out. His color wasn’t too bad, and from the way the stain on his shirt had stopped spreading, he wasn’t bleeding the way he had been.

But overall he still looked terrible. Lips dry and cracked, his face drawn and creased deeply with pain, the young man who in his childhood had thought Chip was the next best thing to a comic book hero now hovered close to death.

A doctor, preferably a surgeon, was what he needed. And if he didn’t get one soon, Chip thought Randy might as well have dumped Sam into the waves and been done with it.

Sam opened his eyes. “Hey, guy,” Chip said, trying to sound encouraging.

Sam didn’t look fooled. “Check my pockets,” he managed, and when Chip did, he came up with a small leather case containing a fire kit: matches, flint, and steel.

He tucked these into his own pocket. Sam watched, nodding approvingly.