The Murder Channel (22 page)

I hesitated, then shook my head.

“Tell me what you think happened,” she said, and eventually I did.

Now, the truck slowed. “Exit eight,” Baylor said. “I’ll drop you at a store down there. I gotta fill my thermos.”

“Which way is Claremont?”

“East,” he said. “It’s a long walk. This time of night there isn’t much traffic, and it’s a hell of lot colder than where we came from.”

“Is there a motel near here?”

“The City Line. When you cross the bridge, it’s on your right.”

I thanked Baylor, flipped up my coat collar, shoved my hands into my pockets, and headed east.

A pink neon sign with most of its letters illuminated announced the City Line Motel. A hand-painted board nailed to a picket fence advertised cable TV and hot showers. Two other makeshift signs read Vacancies and No Pets.

My room was the last in a row of a dozen in a low, wood-frame building. I sprawled on the bed, unwrapped a sandwich I’d bought from the night clerk, and grabbed the TV remote. Suddenly I had no interest in what they were saying about me. I dropped the remote and bit into my Italian cold cuts on a bulkie roll.

When Fremont’s tears had cascaded across the back of my hand, I flashed on the rivulets of condensation inside my refrigerator, and on an image of myself sitting on the kitchen floor feeling the cool air and watching the water flow across well-worn plastic paths. I listened for the sound of the water
,
but I heard only the whisper of Wendy Pouldice’s TV voice.

I could not call her then. She was on the air, alive in my TV. When I was ready—when I was clear in my mind about what I would do—then I would tell her.

Wendy,
I would say, imagining her in a nightgown standing on her bed watching Mary Martin, then soaring into the air, flitting around the room, and flying through her window into the night.
Wendy, I’m ready to show you what I saw. I’m going to start by cutting my way through the darkness. Bring your camera. Then I will put an end to the tears and silence and sighs, and my sister can sleep.

Wendy Pouldice would arrive with her camera crew and microphones. “This is ‘Local Scene’ with Wendy Pouldice, live from Ravenwood, where …”

Dermott Fremont had required considerably less persuasion to tell me his Wendy Pouldice story than to talk about my sister. Waiting for Ms. Local Scene to return from New Hampshire at her leisure was out of the question. She would return with me.

I bit into my sandwich and stared at the blank TV screen.

“THREE MORE DEAD IN THE BATHROOM AT
Riddle’s,” Bolton said as crime scene technicians worked in the hall outside my door. “All Vigil members. Zrbny broke their necks.”

“He waited for them.”

“That’s what it looks like. He stacked them like sacks of grain.”

“He wanted J-Cubed. If Zrbny had to kill a dozen to get this one, he would have.”

“Why do you get the head?”

“Both ears and the tail,” I muttered, thinking that Zrbny was more than a step ahead of me. “He’s watching us on TV. He knows who I am, why I’m here, the information I’m working with. He has the same information, but he obtained most of his firsthand. I think he saw Fremont kill his sister. Or maybe he saw her after Fremont was finished with her. He spent fifteen years putting it together. At the end, Pouldice was the catalyst.”

“The plate on the car in the courthouse alley came back to BTT. The station had a crew of two
on the front steps. They had their own van. Braverman had the car.”

“He left the airport as soon as I got there,” I said. “He had plenty of time. Everyone was on schedule except Zrbny. He spoiled the party.”

I wondered if Zrbny knew the plans for his escape from the courthouse, then wondered if he had made the connection between Vigil and BTT.

I grabbed my coat. “I have to talk to Pouldice,” I said.

“Her office says she’s in seclusion. I sent two units to the Towers to bring in Braverman. He’s disappeared. Pouldice has an estate on the Connecticut River in New Hampshire. That’s where she is.”

“Braverman with her?”

“The office manager, Hannah Stanley, didn’t think so. She said Pouldice has always gone there alone.”

“You got a home phone for Hannah?”

Bolton flipped through his notebook and gave me the number.

“If I find Braverman, I’ll bring him back,” I said.

“Preferably alive, Lucas. Right now we have questions. That’s it.”

“I assure you that I will do my best to preserve his anatomical integrity.”

BOLTON KNEW ONLY THAT POULDICE’S
second home was near Claremont. I stopped in the
hotel lobby, grimaced at the phone, then called Hannah, the BTT office manager.

“Sorry to drag you from sleep at this hour,” I said.

“I remember you,” Hannah mumbled.

“Wendy has been overwhelmed by the last two days,” I said. “I have to leave in the morning, and I want to FedEx something to her in New Hampshire, but I need the street address.”

“I’m not supposed to give that out, Dr. Frank, and I can’t reach her to ask her. Her cell phone is switched off, and the land lines are down from the storm. I tried all evening to call her.”

“I’m sure this one exception would please her, Hannah. Wendy and I go back a lot of years. You know that. When we had dinner two nights ago, I promised that I would not leave the city before I gave her this small package. We had no way to foresee events.”

Hannah considered her options. “She did seem eager to see you.”

She gave me the address.

I glanced at the wall clock behind the desk. Allowing extra time for bad roads, I could reasonably expect to be in Claremont by six
A.M.
I found my way out of the city and drove north.

Road conditions improved outside Boston. When I reached Concord, New Hampshire, and picked up I-89, steep snowbanks lined the highway, but the pavement was clear. Northern New
England is prepared to deal with heavy snowfall. Days would pass before the Boston area approached anything resembling normal, whatever that was.

I left the interstate at the Lake Sunapee exit and drove west. Near Bradford, five deer descended an embankment on my right, crossed the road, and disappeared into the woods on the left. I felt homesick for Lake Albert.

The dashboard clock read 6:35 when I pulled into downtown Claremont. The lights were on at Daddy Pops Humble Inn, a diner tucked between a row of stores and a dozen dead factories. I had heard of the diner on an earlier trip north. What it lacked in exterior appearance—it looked like a retired city bus—Daddy Pops more than made up for with excellent food at reasonable prices.

Music played softly from a wooden radio with a cloth-covered speaker—nothing but tunes from the fifties and sixties, and no advertising. I sipped coffee and waited for my eggs and home fries. The front page of a local newspaper was thumbtacked to the wall behind the counter. The headline,
INCINERATOR
WOES
, hyped the hot topic of the day, a controversial trash-burning facility. I doubted that the six-page paper contained a word about the “Bloodbath in Boston.”

When the cook delivered my breakfast and a coffee refill, I asked him about Pouldice’s rural route address.

“That’s west,” he said. “Go like you’re going to Vermont. Just before the bridge, take your right. The way the letters and numbers work, this should be a dirt road on your left maybe a mile north.”

Twenty minutes later I was back on the road following his directions. At first, route 12A swung away from the river; at a half mile, it veered back to the west. There were two dirt roads. I chose the one with the Private Property No Trespassing sign.

The mailbox displayed the correct rural route address. The private road wound through a snow-laden evergreen forest that opened on a clearing dominated by an expansive white house. I parked in front of the open garage and walked slowly to the porch, glancing in windows as I went.

Pouldice’s condo in the Towers was stark, post-modern—a collage of white hemp, black leather, and natural wood slapped together from an interior designer’s nightmares. This house had evolved, accepting additions through nearly two hundred years.

When no one responded to my knock on the front door, I tried the handle. It was locked. I retreated to the garage and found its interior door open. I stepped inside and moved slowly from a mudroom into the main hall.

The house was silent. I walked slowly through the hall, peering into rooms as I went. Pouldice’s study was a large, bright room on the east side of the house. Four windows offered views of a
peaceful, snow-covered field, a scene in sharp contrast with the study’s condition. The place had been ransacked.

I continued through the hall until I reached the oversized entryway.

I saw the gun first, a magnum, resting on a black and crimson Persian carpet. Two feet beyond the gun was an inert Donald Braverman, a single black hole in his forehead.

THE DREAM WAS REAL, FILLED WITH THE TEX
tures, odors, and images of my world when I was fourteen years old.

My T-shirt was soaked with sweat as I stepped from the August heat into the cool, dark, damp dungeon. A muffled scream echoed somewhere deep inside the concrete corridors. I walked into the blackness that I knew so well. I avoided the deep pools of stagnant water, fingered my way along the wall, listened, and moved forward, staring into endless night.

I stood enveloped by darkness and listened to a long, deep sigh. The slow erosion of the walls by moisture, the dripping of water into accumulations of itself, grew faint. A new trickling thundered from the black recesses ahead of me. I was certain that I heard the sound of my sister’s tears, but when I reached her side, I knew.

I had heard Levant’s last breath, and the blood drain from her body.

I opened my eyes, surveyed the drab motel room, and felt a curious calmness. I was near the end of
my brief odyssey in a world that had no use for me, nor I for it.

Morning sunlight reflected on the snow and created the illusion of warmth. Everything is a matter of sensation and perception.

I showered, then tried the phone number listed for Wendy Pouldice. A recording told me that phone lines in the area were down.

I asked the morning clerk about large riverfront homes.

“Pouldice,” he said. “North. About a mile up you take your first left after the curve. It’s a big white house on the river.”

I bought coffee and walked along the side of the road, watching snow buntings flutter into the air as I approached, then settle again in the field behind me. The birds sought last year’s corn stubble, and they were successful despite the new inches of snow. I wished that I had been born to this world of farms and forests and few people.

The dirt drive had been plowed. Pine and spruce trees that lined both sides of the road leaned with the weight of snow, creating a quarter-mile tunnel that remained stunningly bright despite the lack of direct sunlight. At the end of the natural corridor, an open field stretched another quarter mile to the white, three-story, New England house.

One car was parked in the circular drive. There were no cars in the garage.