Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (121 page)

“Madoc?” Jeb began. “Didn’t Norm used to have—”

“Forget it!” Sandy snapped, heading for his truck. “Scottie, let’s get going. We’ve got to be there for Kyle when they find him.” Sandy revved his truck to life.

“I’m going with you!” Edna pushed Scott aside and jumped into the passenger seat.

“But Mom—”

“No argument! Poor Kyle will be terrified. Drive!”

“What about me?” Jeb sputtered.

Scott was already climbing into his own truck. “Come on with me, Jeb.”

Jeb eyed the massive dump truck with dismay, but Scott leaned over to push open the passenger door. “We’ll pick up my Blazer on the way.”

Both trucks began to reverse in the yard to turn around. Sullivan stepped forward to block the path of Sandy’s truck.

“Get out of my way!” Sandy yelled.

Sullivan folded his arms. His voice, surprisingly calm, boomed over the revving of the engines. “Sir, this man is desperate. For your brother’s safety as well as your own, you must stay out of it.”

Sandy leaned out the cab window to stare him down. He was quivering with rage, but after a few rigid seconds, he sucked in a deep breath to calm himself. “We will. But Mom’s right. Kyle will need to see us when you find him. We’ll just go to the Madoc station to wait.”

When Sullivan didn’t budge, Sandy leaned back with his hands open in surrender. “Listen, I’ve sold a few properties around there, so I know that country. I might even have a tip or two the police can use.”

Edna stuck her head out the passenger window. Desperation was written all over her face. “I’ve tried all my life to protect that boy like he was my own, and he’s not going to know what the dickens hit him. Please let me be there.”

Sullivan stared at her for a moment, then flicked his gaze towards Green with a questioning look. My call, thought Green. He studied the pair carefully. Sandy sat quietly, but his hands were locked on the steering wheel, and his eyes stared over Sullivan’s shoulder at the lane ahead. Edna, however, was ashen; her eyes were huge and dark with fear. Green gave a slight nod for Sullivan to step aside.

Edna mouthed a silent thank you, but Sandy said nothing as he gunned the engine. Together the detectives watched the two trucks roar up the lane, the pick-up skidding as it accelerated and the dump truck slowly grinding through its gears. When they turned south onto the highway, Sullivan swore and kicked at a rock they had churned up onto the road.

“Can’t say I blame them for wanting to be close to the search,” Green said. “I’d do the same in their place.”

Sullivan looked at him grimly. “They’re going off halfcocked, Green. They’re going to be a menace.”

“We’ll alert the
OPP
highway patrols to keep them in sight. And when they check in with the Madoc detachment—“

“They aren’t going to check in!” Sullivan snapped. “These are country men. Hunters. They know the meaning of every sound, every plant, every mark on the ground. They’re going home to get their shotguns, and then they’re going after Tom.”

Sullivan’s face was grim and his gaze far away, as if he were back in the landscape of his youth.

“Well, then,” said Green, trying to sound matter-of-fact, “we’d better get our asses on up there.”

Twenty

 S
ullivan stopped to retrieve a road map from his own car, then gestured to one of the brand new squad cars sitting in the grass. “We’ll take one of these fully loaded beauties. You drive, I’ll navigate.”

After a quick exchange with his friend Belowsky, Sullivan ran to a squad car and jumped into the passenger seat. Green did a rapid U-turn and peeled off up the lane while Sullivan unfolded the map and pored over it, cursing the small print.

“Turn left on the highway,” he said before flipping on the radio speaker to try to raise Peters. He grabbed the door strap as Green accelerated onto the highway, then wrestled the map back into position. When Peters came on the radio, he asked her to put him through to the
OPP
incident commander. After some shouting and scuffling, a clipped voice came through.

“Inspector Riordan here. Nothing to report as yet, but we’re getting our teams mobilized.”

Sullivan gave him a terse account of the latest complication. “They’ll likely be travelling south on two, then west on 43 over to Highway 7. It’s a bright red Dodge Ram, registered to—” Sullivan glanced at Green questioningly.

“Sandy—maybe Alexander—Fitzpatrick.”

“Sorry to do this to you guys when you’ve got enough on your plate,” Sullivan added. “He’s not dangerous, just a loose cannon, but check the firearms he has registered anyway.”

“Yeah, right,” Riordan replied with heavy sarcasm. Both officers knew there was a good chance the weapons weren’t registered yet, and even if they were, the new firearms registry was in such a bungle, nobody would be able to find the file anyway.

Sullivan signed off then perched his reading glasses on his nose to peer at the map. “Might be slow going for them, what with all these little towns. If we go fast enough, we should be able to catch them ourselves.”

As they crested the hill, the village of Ashford Landing came into view, dotted with cars and pedestrians ambling about their business. Green hit the emergency lights, and they sailed through the town at twice the posted speed limit. Green flashed Sullivan a quick grin. “Haven’t done that in a long time!”

Sullivan hung on to the strap as they slewed around a curve. “Yeah, just remember you haven’t driven high speed in a long time either, so don’t get us killed. The
OPP
’s been notified, and they’ll have everything under control up there.”

But Green could feel the adrenaline coursing through his blood. The urge to join the chase and get the fugitives in his own sights, to take Tom down and deliver everyone to safety, was irresistible. In a crunch, on a high, he could never believe other people wouldn’t screw up, miss a crucial clue or misread the bad guy’s intent. It was a character flaw he’d learned to keep under wraps so as to appear to believe in teamwork, but Sullivan knew him too well.

To calm himself and regain some distance, Green slowed his speed marginally and began to fill Sullivan in on his discoveries of the day. As they talked, the countryside flew by, mostly fields dotted with farm fields and clumps of proud old trees. Straight ahead, the sun slowly sank towards the west, casting long shadows down the road.

“Gay?” Sullivan remarked as Green told him about Derek. “Not an easy label out here, I can tell you. This is pretty conservative country; anti-gun control, anti-government, antigays, anti-abortion.”

“Surely not everyone.”

“Enough. Especially twenty years ago. United Empire Loyalists hammered a life out of this bush, and it’s still God, the Queen and their own bare hands.” Sullivan ruffled his bristly hair. “Puts a different spin on the romantic triangle, that’s for sure. Wonder who the lover was?”

Green gave a Cheshire cat smile. “I know exactly who the lover was. Our buddy in the bright red truck.”

“Fitzpatrick?” Sullivan’s eyebrows shot up, and Green could almost see him replaying the scene at the Boisvert farm moments earlier. Reinterpreting the burning rage in Sandy’s eyes. Not a distraught man out to protect his brother but a much deadlier man out for revenge.

“He’d have been awfully young,” Sullivan observed dubiously.

“About seventeen. But sometimes, the first love is the strongest.”

Sullivan watched the passing scenery thoughtfully. Occasionally, through the barren trees, they could catch glimpses of the river blazing in the late afternoon sun. “You think this construction guy Scott is his current partner?”

“Looks that way. I suspect they keep a pretty low profile, although Scott’s tattoos are a bit over-the-top.”

A large town came into view ahead, spreading its industrial tentacles into the surrounding farms. Green hit the emergency lights again.

“Better put the siren on,” Sullivan said. “Smith Falls has some of the craziest traffic for its size, and we have to go right through the main drag.”

Green hit the siren with glee and watched the vehicles inch resentfully towards the curbs to let him pass. Sullivan talked him through the complex sequence of turns that led through the town and once they were safely back on the open road, he pulled the visor down against the setting sun and picked up the thread of their conversation.

“But you’d think if Sandy was the lover Derek was supposed to meet,” Sullivan said, “wouldn’t he have known something about the murder? Or at least raised the alarm about Derek’s disappearance? I mean, if he was going to meet him that afternoon, he might have witnessed the whole thing, for God’s sake. Would he have kept quiet all these years just ’cause he was scared to reveal he was gay?”

Green searched his memory for the fragments of information Sandy had dropped about Derek. It was possible that as a seventeen-year-old he’d been too frightened to admit the whole story and expose himself to the public censure and scrutiny that would follow. As the years passed, any confidence he might have gained in his sexual orientation would have been overshadowed by his fear that his own innocence would be suspect because he had kept quiet for so long. By the time Green had come asking questions about Derek, Sandy’d had twenty years to rehearse his story, until his reaction of shock and bewilderment became second nature.

Yet his story had an odd ring of truth. The pallor and dilated pupils he’d exhibited in the yard earlier were signs of genuine shock that were difficult to fake. When questioned about the shed a few days ago, he had nonchalantly remarked that he’d seen the fire through the trees from his house. From his house! Not while en route to a clandestine rendezvous nor while fleeing from the discovery of his lover’s bludgeoned body.

Perhaps most compelling of all, when Green had first asked him about the Pettigrew sons, Sandy had not missed a beat over Derek. He hadn’t painted him as the saint others had but rather churlishly implied that Derek considered himself above the common country folk he’d grown up with. If anything, Green thought with a twinge of excitement, he had sounded a little bitter. Like a lover left behind?

He voiced his thoughts aloud. “Perhaps he never got the note, and that’s why he never showed up at the meeting. Remember the note was in Lawrence’s treasure can. Maybe Lawrence intercepted it before Sandy even saw it. So Sandy didn’t know he’d been invited, therefore he assumed Derek had left him behind. All these years he’d assumed, just as the town did, that Derek was living the high life down south. That would explain his meltdown today when he discovered Derek never got off the farm.”

Sullivan peered at his map with his reading glasses perched on his nose, then squinted over them at the empty road ahead. He adjusted the visor against the sun’s blinding glare. “Funny we haven’t caught up with him, unless he’s driving like a bat out of hell.” He flicked on the radio to call Peters, who reported that the
OPP
had had no sightings of the red truck at any of their surveillance points along Highways 43 or 7. Sullivan frowned at the map. Once the truck got past the town of Perth, Highway 7 was virtually the only route west toward Madoc through the rolling bush country riddled with lakes.

“He’s trying to avoid being seen,” Green said once Sullivan had signed off and turned the radio down low, so that the routine chatter washed over them unheard. “He wants to get to Tom without having to answer to the police. What about back country roads?”

Sullivan traced his finger across the map and shook his head. “Nothing direct, and those roads twist and turn, impossible to make good time. I think he went down to the 401.”

Green cast him a startled glance. “It’s way south, and he’d have to go all the way north again when he got off.”

“But he can make much better time. More than fifty clicks an hour faster than back country. He knows we wouldn’t be looking for him there, and even if we tried, it’s much easier to slip through our nets in that huge volume of traffic.” Sullivan turned the radio back up to tell Peters to get the
OPP
to look for Sandy on the throughway. He glanced at his watch. “He’d be nearing Kingston by now. Put a cruiser at the exit just past Belleville. I’m betting he takes that road back up north again.”

The incident commander himself came on the radio to brusquely inform them that the
OPP
traffic patrol would do its best, no thanks to the Ottawa Police, but that most of their available units in that area were needed for the manhunt. Green glanced at the sun, which now sliced the horizon with its dying rays, and stomped harder on the gas pedal.

“They’re going to run out of daylight to conduct a proper search,” he said once Sullivan signed off. “Do you think Sandy can get there ahead of us?”

Sullivan braced himself as they hit a curve. “Not at this rate. But it looks like it’s going to be a long night.”

Green’s cell phone rang, startling them both. He fumbled to find it on his belt, jerking the wheel as the car drifted off track. Scowling at him, Sullivan snatched the phone. Lou Paquette’s gravel voice came through loud enough for even Green to heard.

“Where the fuck are you boys? You sound a hundred miles away.”

“Good guess,” Sullivan said.

“What’s up?”

“Green wanted some answers on this mystery print he’s got. Tell him it’s still a mystery. The old man’s a no match, and damn near had another stroke when I showed up to print him.”

“We owe ya, Lou. Any other news back there?”

“The place is humming. Biggest excitement we’ve had all year. The brass is crawling all over the case. Our bigwigs talking to the
OPP
bigwigs. Tell Green he’s going to have to check in before his new boss puts his balls in her sights.”

Sullivan chuckled. “I’d like to be around for that one. Any news from the dig?”

“Yeah, Cunningham called, so excited he forgot to be pissed. The bone guy says it’s definitely a human skull, probably a large male. Looks like it was cracked open, maybe with that axe. They’re going to try to test the axe for blood, which would be the icing on the cake.”