The Drowned Man (32 page)

Inside, all the connecting doors stood wide open, like a painter's study in perspective, creating a long inner corridor. Not hesitating, she walked through the passageway as far as 404 and locked the connector to the Judy Jones room. Room 402 was now a hollow, locked box, the only detritus linked to Alida Nahvi a bar of used soap in the shower and two stale donuts on the desk.

She waved goodbye to Jeffie as she locked the door to room 404 behind her.

In 406, she stripped off her skirt and discarded her shoes. Within two minutes she was outfitted in the maid's uniform.

Alida then made an impulsive decision that paid off nicely.
I
want them wasting their time in
402
, while I'm doing my thing at the other end of the hall,
she decided. Someone had betrayed her and she suspected Lembridge. Certainly Jeff hadn't been the turncoat. He had compliantly reserved all of the fourth-floor rooms on both sides in fictitious names, doing nothing to alert management. She had fulfilled his sexual fantasies, that was for sure; horniness had made the boy keep the faith.

Evidently the police hadn't figured out which room she occupied on the fourth. If the cops were waiting, she reasoned, and if they had their act together, they would have obtained a universal key of their own.
So why haven't they used it to enter
402
?
Because they didn't have one.

Hurrying out of the room and into the corridor, she went to the door of 402, unlocked it, and jammed a wad of paper from a bedside notepad into the lock mechanism.

Detective Jangler, hunched down in the stairwell, wondered what the hell was going on. He was sufficiently seasoned not to take literally her promise to return in seven minutes, but he was willing to grant no more than three extra minutes before breaking down the door of 402, his gun drawn. He moved down to the fourth level and prepared himself. He heard nothing from beyond the windowless fire door.

He was still pondering the puzzle when he came from the stairway out into the empty corridor. In fact, he had just missed Alida in her maid's outfit. No sound came from any of the rooms up ahead but he was sure that the game was up; she was somewhere on this level. Kicking in the door to 402 would be difficult, and so he stepped to the door panel and leaned in to listen, wondering what to do next. As he nudged the door it swung open slackly.

As he entered, Jangler knew the room would be empty.

He took about a minute to confirm the self-evident. The bathroom had been used but it told him little. Had he been looking for evidence of sex the bed sheets would have provided it, but he ignored them on his first pass. He also failed to twig to the lump of paper on the carpet. He checked the connecting door, opening his side, but found the other firmly secured.

While Jangler was rummaging through 402, Alida was composing herself in 412, adjacent to the freight elevator. Satisfied, she picked up the plastic bucket of cleaning supplies and hoisted the blue gym bag over her other shoulder. Quietly opening the door to the hallway, she wheeled to the right and stabbed at the button of the freight lift, praying it hadn't moved. The heavy doors opened right away. At the other end of the corridor, Dave Jangler sensed something, perhaps a mild shift in air pressure in the corridor, and darted into the hall. Alida's luck held as Jangler caught a flash of the blue skirt of a chambermaid who appeared to be carrying a bucket — sufficient to confirm that she was staff but not enough to make him suspicious of her coincidental presence on the fourth.

Alida took the freight elevator to the main floor rather than the basement. She had earlier considered going to the laundry room but inevitably she would have to ascend to the ground floor and risk one of the exits. Carrying the blue bag in one hand, she hit the panic bar on the exit that opened onto the west delivery bay. Stepping into the bright morning sunlight, she scanned the paved areas for police and quickly determined to keep to her original escape route. She turned away from the Gorman. The immediate goal was to reach the Pharos two blocks away; she would have to pass through two office buildings and a few hundred yards of open streets to reach the taxi stand in front of the boutique hotel.

Peter had chosen to remain across the alley by the Gorman's main entrance, and thus missed Alida's exit. Murdock had decided to monitor the back of the hotel, but Peter had received no calls from him, heard no shouting or gunfire. All was quiet where Peter stood in the shadows. There had been no foot traffic whatsoever through the lobby. He had lost sight of the special agent who was working the front of the Gorman. Mostly from boredom, he edged another few feet to his right to give himself an angle on the east face of the hotel and one small corner of the back parking lot. Perhaps it was instinct, but he magnetically moved a few more feet to improve his view. Only a few seconds later, he caught sight of a chambermaid partway across the delivery bay behind the building.

Peter recognized the woman at once but was so astonished that the sight momentarily fixed him in place. He estimated that the fastest route to her lay around the long way, to the east, avoiding the chain-link barrier to the parking lot. He began to work his way to the rear of the hotel, and for a minute he lost sight of her. Rounding the last corner, he approached the receiving bay and the single rear door. She was now three hundred yards away.

For a few more seconds he did not move, even though Alida saw him and stared back, making eye contact. Peter understood where he had seen her before: not just her passport, but her picture somewhere else. It occurred to him, irrationally, that this phantom could disappear into the air at will. She was beautiful even at this distance. Her smooth face showed anger and sadness in equal parts — and fascination with him, he fantasized.

Peter could now see the full expanse of asphalt and parked cars, all seemingly fixed in place by the glaring sun. His trance shattered as Price Murdock came out of the hotel, huffing and straining as he burst from the delivery door. Price immediately saw Alida in the distance.

Peter moved towards Price and almost collided with the special agent as she came out the back door, gun out. While all three understood that the woman in the chambermaid uniform was their target, no one shouted at her retreating figure, or said anything. They merely stared. Murdock, wheezing heavily, took out his Glock and slowly raised it at Alida, likely trying to intimidate her, Peter judged. Price would not risk injuring bystanders. The other special agent raised her Glock 17 in a parallel line and waited for the boss's shot.

Price Murdock delayed to see what the girl would do and that extra few seconds gave Dunning Malloway time to come out the back of the hotel. His gun was already in his right hand. He saw Alida and fell into position next to the other two shooters and Peter. The four mocked Wellington's thin red line, or a ragged firing squad, Peter thought. Murdock threw Malloway a questioning frown and stared at the gun in his hand.

Malloway stiffened and sighted along the pistol.

“No,” Murdock said, and he and his fellow agent pulled their weapons back.

Peter understood that Malloway would disobey; he wanted the woman dead. Instinctively, Peter reached out his hand and forced Malloway's arm upward. It was a fast and simple gesture. The gun went off and the bullet disappeared into the sky.

Alida looked back at Malloway and then at Peter. Peter could not make out her expression, but he knew that she somehow had taken in every detail, even at that distance.

A few seconds later she was gone.

This did not end the confrontation. Murdock, anger turning his face deep red, glared at Malloway, adding a sidelong glance at Peter. “Where the hell'd you get that weapon?”

Before Malloway could respond, Murdock sat down on the pavement and fell onto his back. His faced puffed up and he turned a darker red as he fought for breath and clenched his arms against his side in an effort to quiet his heart.

Murdock's people, working with Jangler, later figured out that Alida scooted from the parking lot through two buildings, crossed the street to the Pharos and jumped into the first cab at the stand. She was out of the zone in three minutes. The driver took her to the Portage Road Transit Center, where, appearing to know precise schedules, she hopped a series of buses that eventually deposited her in Rochester, New York.

At the scene, recrimination against the Scotland Yard detectives was delayed as the special agent beside Price Murdock used her cell to call for an ambulance. Peter knew that he himself was of no use in these circumstances. FBI agents are superbly trained to deal with emergencies such as heart attacks and he backed off and watched until he heard the ambulance siren grow loud. He noticed that Malloway had vanished. With Price attended to, Peter walked around to the front of the Gorman and over to the next intersection, seeking a line of sight up and down the urban streets. Peter was standing exposed in the intersection when Jangler ran up, out of breath. He explained that a search of room 402 had come up short on the Booth letters, leaving as evidence “only a pile of useless fingerprints.”

Peter joined Dave Jangler, the two
FBI
agents and a squad of uniformed police officers in searching the streets and buildings around the Gorman. Noting that Malloway was gone, Peter guessed that he had taken off after the suspect and was unlikely to return. If and when he did, Peter was determined to let him tough it out with the
FBI
. While he might be able to explain away possession of the weapon, his firing the gun in a public area was unacceptable, and could lead both Henry Pastern and the Buffalo Police to register a formal complaint with London. The abruptness of Malloway's vanishing act told Peter other things: Dunning must have fled before hearing confirmation that the letters weren't to be found within the hotel; his immediate pursuit of Alida Nahvi reinforced Peter's suspicion that it was the woman and not the documents he was after. Malloway must have known that the chances of finding the woman on his own were slim, yet he was making the attempt.

After an hour of searching, Jangler took Peter aside. “You noticed, Chief Inspector, that I wasn't at the planning session yesterday.”

Peter, who was as tired and frustrated as any of the special agents and police officers scouring the area, said, “I wish you had been.”

“You bet. But the reason I was absent was that my team and I were busy checking with cab drivers, restaurants, and shops in the city to see if anyone had encountered the woman. I can tell you, if we had found her that way, I would have arrested her on the spot. In retrospect, I wish we had. Water under the Niagara Bridge, as we say. But someone at the downtown tourist office, presented with Nahvi's description, identified her and said she asked how to get to Grand Island.” Jangler described the island and its location. “I sent an officer out there yesterday to look around. He happened to check the Holiday Inn and he found a reservation in the name of Alice Nixon for one night, tonight.”

“I don't suppose she's shown up,” Peter said.

“Nope,” Jangler said. “I just called. But I could use some help checking it out. I can have a constable with a cruiser drive you.”

Once there, it took Peter only a few minutes to ascertain that Alida had never arrived to claim her reservation at the Holiday Inn. He told his police chauffeur that he would stick around to watch for the fugitive. As soon as the cruiser departed, Peter flagged a cab at the front of the hotel, handed him a fifty dollar bill, and asked him to drive to the best spot for viewing the western arm of the Niagara River.

Peter stared across the water to the Canadian shoreline. The current created an effective barrier to anyone thinking of swimming or paddling across the international line. He erased that scenario from his list. But would Alida find another way to sneak into Canada? He clung to the belief that she had unfinished business in Montreal. She was truly on the run now and Peter knew most of the reasons. Not only was she implicated in the Carpenter murder and the savage death of the Anacostia hooker, he now knew that the beautiful creature he had seen behind the Gorman Hotel was the girl in the photograph in the
News of the World
. He seldom read the
News
but that afternoon on the flight to England he had scanned its exposé of the cricket scandal, with its candid shots that included a party scene in a luxury hotel, booze spilling from raised glasses (even though the players were all Muslims), drunken faces in the camera lens, and party girls in the background.

He hadn't made the connection before, but that was Alida Nahvi in that London hotel.

And now she was being hunted. Malloway was hunting her.

His mobile vibrated. It was Jangler, who reported that Murdock had been taken to a hospital and was now stable. The woman had evaporated. Recalling that the old night clerk had been forced to extend his shift through the morning, Jangler had his men call on the day shift clerk, but it wasn't until they thought to check every room on the fourth floor that he was discovered. Young Jeff could not yet be awakened because of an elephant-crippling amount of drugs in his bloodstream. Jangler wasn't happy about anything.

The river was mesmerizing and Peter gazed at two boats tossing in the channel, while the taxi driver smoked a cigarette back by the car. Peter worked to figure out what Alida Nahvi wanted. The beautiful young woman was searching for safety far from London hotel rooms and Pakistani cricket pitches. She retained no fealty to Motihari, hometown of George Orwell, or to Orwell's British childhood home in Henley; Alida loved her mother but she must know that her old life was irretrievable. On her jagged path to her El Dorado, wherever it might be, she had killed, probably twice, possibly more, and had spoiled all her chances. Peter would not, could not cut her any slack. He saw no equivocation in her decisions to murder. John Carpenter's death had occurred within a few days of arriving in Canada; she must have swiftly improvised and carried out the plan to steal the letters. Then Alida had murdered the hooker, a blameless victim of her panic to get away. Alida Nahvi remained erratic and dangerous to the general public.

Peter continued to stare at the channel. His phone's ringtone made him jump. It was Maddy. He was sure she could hear the river and the bridge traffic in the background as he answered, but she refrained from asking where he was.

“Dad, you said you'd call.” There was both apprehension and relief in her voice.

Peter summed up the fiasco at the Gorman, knowing it was a scattered, unsatisfying narrative. He mentioned the guns levelled at Alida in the street and the way she looked back at him with . . . disappointment?

Maddy replied blithely, “I don't know. How would I like looking at three coppers pointing their guns at me?”

The question made him realize that he owed his daughter-in-law a better report. For the next thirty minutes the saga poured out of him, a mix of facts and educated judgements, lacking an ending. She let him tell it without interruption. He stood close to the current as he related the story, while the cabbie smoked another three cigarettes and let the meter run.

“At least she didn't kill the desk clerk,” Maddy finally said.

“My battery is running out, dear,” he replied.

She rushed to tell him why she had called. “Three bridges cross to Canada from where you are. The Peace Bridge goes from Buffalo to Fort Erie in Ontario. The Rainbow runs from Niagara Falls, New York, to the equivalent town in Canada, and you can walk across that one. The Whirlpool Bridge is a smaller crossing but you need a special pass to use it. There's also the Lewiston Bridge along the river from the Falls.”

“Thank you, dear,” he replied. “That's very useful. Could you do some more computer research for me?”

She remained silent while he told her about the cricket scandal and its disturbing connections, and the kind of information he needed now.

“I'll get right on it.” She sounded more cheerful and enthusiastic. Peter worried about her pregnancy but he could think of nothing to say that wouldn't patronize her.

There was a further pause. “You're looking at the bridges now, aren't you?” she said.

“Yes.” He was more certain than ever that Alida would head north. He promised to call Maddy within a day.

Peter watched the river for a few more minutes. He could see two of the bridge spans from where he stood but he no longer cared which one Alida might have taken.