Shadow Dancers (35 page)

While it hovered there at the edge of the road, somewhat impeded by the bank of plowed snow, Warren pulled out a Zippo lighter from his pocket, cupped a hand over it, and flicked it. Standing back beside the open door, he held it in contact for a moment with the fuel-drenched upholstery of the back seat.

There was a sudden audible
whoosh
, as of air sucked inward, violently imploded. A large flash followed closely on its tail. In the next moment, the interior of the car was ablaze. He went around the back again, and putting his shoulder to the trunk, he pushed, even as the front tires, slipping and sliding, began to creep laboriously upward over the banked snow.

A wall of heat rushed outward from the open door with almost palpable force. Arms raised before him, Warren fell back from the car, fearing that the gas tank might explode at any moment. He watched with fascination and a terrible sadness the awful death struggle of the torched car as it slipped and climbed the snowy embankment like an injured insect. Torn between a desire to extinguish the flames and save the car and an urgent, almost panicky need to flee, he chose the latter. But even then he gazed sadly at the stricken car, full of a sense of his own treachery, his lack of gratitude, watching the flames behind the cracking glass glow almost festively. The front tires by then had breached the top of the bank and straddled it, hanging free in space while its rear wheels spun and whined, pushing puffs of powder out behind them.

It seemed to him he could hear the noble thing groan, as if suffering its awful death throes. Without considering his own safety, he darted to the rear of the car, his bare hands splayed across the blistering paint of the trunk, his feet slipping and kicking behind him on the icy road, and with a superhuman effort, heaved.

Nothing seemed to happen, but in the next moment, the car appeared to sigh and shudder forward. His weight bearing down on the trunk had given the spinning rear wheels just enough traction for the blazing vehicle to renew its ascent.

Watching it creep forward, its nose dizzily elevated, he fell back from it, gasping and winded, watching open-mouthed as the hood of the car with its proud three-pointed star symbol rose into starry space, then dipped. The rear end followed.

There was an enormous explosion, followed almost instantly by a ball of flame swirling up above it. Warren dashed back to the edge of the road, standing atop the shattered bank, with the black skid marks of the tire treads imprinted clearly in the snow.

From where he stood, he was able to stoop and peer down into the gorge, watching the ball of flame bounce and spin and turn head-over-tail in its fiery descent into the ravine.

He hovered there atop the bank for some time after, peering down into the gorge. Having followed the progress of that giddy slide, he watched it subside and gradually rumble to a halt several thousand feet below, the car buried nose first in a tomb of snow. Standing poised like a sentinel above the gorge, he could see the flames lick and crack and consume themselves. There was the acrid smell of fuel and burned rubber carried upward on the frozen air, and the sharp crack of sparks shooting skyward. A number of small brush fires broke out in the vicinity of the wreck, burned briefly like flambeaux, then sputtered and went out.

It occurred to him that people in homes nearby might have seen the flames and heard the explosion and that he’d best be off before the police came round to investigate. Buttoning his coat, he hauled his collar up about his ears, grabbed his suitcase, and, with the keen agility of an animal, vanished instantly into the fringe of forest bordering the road.

For some time, he moved along the roadside, but well within the covering of the forest paralleling it. He was terrified of losing his way in the woods. Moreover, the snow there was deep and his feet had begun to sting from the cold. Icy blasts moaned through the trees, sending clots of fresh-fallen powder down into the collar of his coat. His ears had begun to burn and he swiped irritably at his tearing eyes. He didn’t even know that he was crying.

IT HAD STARTED TO RAIN ON MASS. STATE 113
at a point just south of the New Hampshire border. Slightly past five
A.M.
, it was still dark, but a darkness just beginning to yield to the first tentative gray patches of dawn. A combination of rain and sleet pelted down obliquely on the hushed frozen countryside, making a faint hissing sound.

Spotting the car drawn up on the inclined shoulder of the road, the Massachusetts State trooper pulled off the road and nosed his car carefully up the icy grade behind the late model Chevrolet.

In most instances, with cars pulled up in that fashion, off the road at that hour of the morning, the trooper expected to find someone shivering behind the wheel, waiting for a mechanic to arrive; or, more commonly even, someone heavy in drink, three sheets to the wind, and sleeping it off.

Removing his flashlight and ticket book from the glove compartment, he buttoned his rubber poncho and prepared to leave the cozy warmth of his front seat to bear the icy blasts of night air battering the hood of his car. Stepping out into the cold, dripping dark, he approached the Chevrolet, his feet crunching over the thin crust of slushy ice mantling the earth.

A hump of drier snow had mounded up over the roof of the car, suggesting that it had come down from someplace further north where the snowfall had been far heavier than here in northern Massachusetts. Approaching, the trooper noted that, somewhat oddly, the two front doors on either side of the vehicle hung open, swinging slightly in the buffeting wind. The beam from his flashlight, filled with sleet, widening slowly from its source, picked out the license plates on the back. They were New Hampshire plates.

Something about the way the doors hung open, the pale orange of the dome light inside glowing dimly, the general desolation of the place, made the trooper reach down, almost involuntarily, and check the holster under his poncho.

He approached from behind on the driver’s side. Stooping down, he flashed his light inside. The car was unoccupied, yet the radio played softly, dance music from an all-night disc jockey. Glancing over the roof of the car, he peered into the fringe of trees beyond, half-expecting to see someone emerge from there. He glanced down again, shining his light back inside the car. This time his eye caught the vivid splash of red on the floor beneath the front right-hand seat. He moved around to the other side of the car to check that. He almost didn’t have to. He knew it was blood. Sticky and quite fresh. His action had served only to confirm it.

Inside, the car smelled faintly of cigarettes. Otherwise, there were no signs of the occupants. Over on the passenger side where the trooper now stood, marked clearly in the freshly fallen snow, were footprints. Two pairs, the trooper quickly determined when he’d played his beam on them, following it with his eye to where the prints trailed off into the little copse running parallel to the road.

He followed the prints up toward the trees, pausing here and there occasionally to study some aspect of them more closely, as though they were a Morse code that only he could decipher. He followed the prints up to where they disappeared in the tangle of brush. Fumbling beneath the dripping rubber of his poncho, he withdrew the .45-caliber police special from its holster and started into the trees.

It didn’t take him long to find what he was seeking. It was no more than twenty feet or so into the trees, where the bare branches laced with ice rattled and clicked against each other as he brushed against them in passing.

The body — his beam picked it out easily — had scarcely been concealed. It lay on its side, facedown in the slushy snow. Approaching it warily, he wondered if the owner of the second pair of prints was still somewhere about. When he stooped down and put his beam directly on the body, he could see a fanlike shape of pale rose leeching out from just beneath the face, half-buried in the snow.

Before turning the body over, he looked around once again over his shoulder, playing his beam of light out in front of him. It had the effect of transforming the short, stumpy, leafless second-growth trees into crouching, twisted shapes. The noise of the sleet dropping steadily through the trees made a low hissing sound.

With his pistol in one hand, he turned the body over with his foot so as not to have to bend or stoop or become vulnerable for an unguarded moment.

The sight he saw there was one he would not soon forget. The body was that of a man. The throat had been slashed so deep that the head was barely attached to the shoulders and hung from a thin, stringy tendon of muscle in the neck. The cartilage of the throat protruded in the gap. Crystals of ice, like broken glass, adhered to it.

It had been a man, a rather youngish man, the trooper guessed from the build and the smooth, unblemished skin of the bare hands. But he had no way of knowing for certain.

There were no features left where the face had been. They’d been erased by a series of long, unbroken knife .lashes that traveled from just beneath the hairline to below the chin. Each was a thin, perfectly drawn line, executed by a strong, steady hand. Each no more than an inch apart, they looked like the dirt ridges carved out by a tractor in a freshly plowed field. The precision of the markings gave the impression that someone had gone to great pains to produce such a careful design. About it, there was something mysterious and ritualistic, the deliberate scarifying still practiced by some primitive races as initiation into manhood. It was as if each stroke of the blade had been intended to convey some special significance, a kind of wall graffiti, transferred to human skin.

“HOW FAR?”

“‘Bout six miles down. Just south of the New Hampshire border.”

“When was it?”

“‘Bout five
A.M.
yesterday morning.” The chief, a man by the name of Sanderson, at the state police barracks in Concord paused. For a moment Mooney could hear him going over some report that had just been put down before him.

“Lieutenant — you still there?”

“Still here,” Mooney snapped when the chief came back on. “You get any prints off that car?” Mooney asked.

“Millions of ‘em. That’s the trouble.”

“I get your drift,” Mooney replied glumly. “What makes you so sure this is our guy?”

“We get all of your ‘all-points’ up here. Been reading about it in the papers. Seeing it on TV. If you’d seen the body I saw at the morgue …”

“That much damage?”

“Damage is hardly the word.”

“You didn’t happen to find the weapon.”

“No, but our forensic people say it was a knife. Six Inches at least, with a serrated blade.”

“Sounds like our guy, all right.”

“To me too. What’s more, this Murchison chap … I bat’s the victim’s name … turns out he lived right up around that notch where your boy’s car went into the ravine. That was a ‘sixty-eight Mercedes he was s posed to be driving?”

“Right,” Mooney confirmed. “A two twenty. This Murchison: probably picked him up on the road that night. Offered him a ride.”

“Looks that way,” the chief huffed. “Last ride that poor sod’ll offer anyone. I figure your boy’s probably traveling your way right now.”

“What makes you say?”

“The New Hampshire troopers found no trace of a body in or around the Mercedes up in the notch, and there wasn’t a sign of him around the Chevy down here.... Ever see a New Hampshire license plate?”

“Not so’s I can recall details.”

“It’s a white plate with green letters and numbers.” Mooney waited, perplexed. “What about it?”

“The state motto is printed right above the plate number. Know what it is?”

“Don’t have the foggiest.”

“‘Live free or die,’” Sanderson proclaimed, then grew silent as though he’d delivered some earth-shattering revelation.

Mooney’s perplexity deepened. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s not so much the motto,” Sanborn chuckled. “It’s the way we found it on those plates.”

“How?” Mooney asked with mounting exasperation. The chief waited, letting him simmer a bit longer. He suddenly resumed. “On both of them plates, both front and back, all around the motto, someone had drawn a big circle in pink crayon. Now from what I read of your boy, he’s given to crayon drawing. Our people tell us the crayon on the plates was applied in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Okay — I don’t doubt this is our guy. That I.D. plate you took off the car in the gorge …”

“What about it?”

“It’s the same V.I.N. as the one on the registration we located here. It’s him, all right,” Mooney finally conceded.

“No doubt,” the chief remarked laconically. “And he’s all yours. Massachusetts is overjoyed to be rid of him. Merry Christmas to you all down there.”

Mooney’s desk was stacked with bulletins and reports There were nearly a dozen message slips with telephone numbers to call back. The call from Concord had been his first of the morning. From there on, the phone started to ring with a vengeance. The gist of the Concord message was not unexpected. Mooney had more or less projected the same scenario himself: the car commandeered, driven across state lines, the owner murdered, and both abandoned at the side of the road. The trip from there, no doubt, continued via ground transport — a train or, more probably, a bus. Then a discreetly unobtrusive reentry into the city, back to the old hunting grounds. It was precisely the way Mooney would have imagined it to have happened. What he’d not foreseen, however, was the uncommon swiftness, the gathering momentum of events culminating in the Shadow Dancer’s return.

While the thought that the Dancer was probably back prowling his old haunts around the city was disquieting, Mooney felt a curious excitement at the idea of his sudden proximity. There was a sense of things rushing to a head.

Moments after he’d hung up the phone, he was back on with Mulvaney, apprising him of developments, as well as giving him the bad news that their old friend had probably returned and that, if he had, undoubtedly they’d be hearing from him soon.