The Skeleton's Knee (38 page)

On the drive back into town, I took advantage of the peace and quiet to mull over how the pieces were beginning to slip together. What Gary Schenk had told me amounted to the last sighting of a ship before it drifted off into the fog forever—bearing a mismatched trio with blood in their past and death in their future. My concern now was how to intervene before the fate of two of them extended to the third.

· · ·

I closed the door to my office when I got back and dialed Gail’s number. “How’re you holding up?”

She let out a small laugh. “Fine, I guess. I keep thinking about this story I read as a girl, where some hunters staked a fawn in a clearing and then waited in the underbrush for the tiger to appear.”

“How did it end?”

“You don’t want to know. You having any luck?”

“It’s early yet—we’re making progress. You comfortable with the setup there?”

Her voice was cheerful, artificially so, I thought. “Oh yes—Marshall Smith is keeping me company in the house, looking like a one-man army; the others are somewhere outside. I can’t see any of them, which I suppose is good.”

“We can pull the plug on this, Gail.”

Harriet Fritter poked her head into my office and whispered, “Line two. Norm Runnion.”

I nodded silently. Gail’s voice on the other end had resumed its firm footing. “I’m fine, Joe. You do your end; I’ll do mine.”

I let out a small sigh. “See you tonight?”

“There may not be room.” She chuckled. “Give me a call.”

I said good-bye and punched the blinking button at the base of the phone.

“You get your ass in a crack back home?” Norm’s voice was comforting at the other end.

“I told you what Vermonters think of the big city. They welcomed me back with open arms. You been fired yet?”

“Not hardly. They didn’t pin a medal on me, though. I dug around a little on the University of Illinois angle for you. Pendergast shows up, all right, but the one you call Fuller doesn’t show up anywhere. I looked at the yearbooks, then I went to the admissions records to check on students who dropped or flunked out. There was nothing that fits, Joe.”

I pondered that for a few seconds.

“Maybe the old lady in Marquette got it wrong,” he suggested.

“Could be.”

“Want me to chase down anything else?”

“No, Norm—you’ve stuck your neck out enough. Thanks.”

“No sweat. Tell me how it turns out.”

I put the phone down and looked up, to see Willy Kunkle, wearing a satisfied expression as he leaned against my doorjamb, his withered arm stuffed in his pocket like some odd piece of cloth the tailor had forgotten to remove from his jacket. “You look pleased with yourself.”

“Shattuck’s in town.”

My heart skipped a beat, and I sat back in my chair, feigning casualness. “Do tell.”

“One of my snitches was approached at the Sky View trailer park by some guy wanting information on you. Apparently, he’s been making the rounds with a lot of questions and a lot of money. It’s a definite match with Shattuck’s picture, all the way down to the ponytail. From what I was told, he’s not being real friendly.”

“Is it worth it to check out the Sky View?”

Kunkle shook his head. “He’s long gone.” He hesitated, a rare flicker of compassion crossing his face. “The guy’ll screw up sooner or later. Someone’ll tell us where he’s hanging out.”

I glanced at the wall clock, frustration and urgency mingling deep inside me. I thought back to Gail’s cheerful farewell on the phone and realized only then how much I’d been hoping that for some reason Shattuck wouldn’t appear. “Thanks, Willy. Keep me updated.”

· · ·

Fifteen minutes before our scheduled afternoon meeting, Tony Brandt walked into my office and placed a single fax sheet on my desk. “As promised. I asked my contact to get me every birth within twelve hours on either side of the time on the chart, just to be on the safe side. I’m afraid there’re quite a few.”

I glanced quickly at the list, running my finger along it to see if any of the entries jumped out at me. Halfway down, I stopped at the one name that instantly made complete sense of much that had been baffling us—including why no one had been able to connect Abraham Fuller to David Pendergast. “Did you look these over?”

Tony shook his head. “You find something?”

I twisted the list around so he could read it from where he stood by the side of my desk. I pointed out the name with my fingertip. “I’d been focusing almost exclusively on David. He’d been the natural leader of the three—the one best remembered, the only one with a record, the only link to Bob Shattuck. It was even his metal knee that got the ball rolling for us. I should’ve known to look more carefully into his background.”

Tony read the name aloud. “Susan Pendergast?”

I was moving toward the door, seized by the importance of this discovery—and by the urgency to act on it quickly. “His sister, who ran away from home and was never heard from again. She was the only family he had left after his parents died. I should’ve wondered about that.”

I pulled open the door and shouted into the squad room. “Sammie?”

She popped up from behind one of the soundproof room dividers. I gestured for her to join us, then closed the door behind her.

“You checked out Abraham Fuller earlier, right?”

She nodded, looking uneasy.

I showed her Brandt’s list of names. “Susan Pendergast is David Pendergast’s sister. She’s got to be the connection between Fuller and her brother. She must have linked up with Fuller in Alaska, which would explain why he never cropped up when we were checking into David’s activities in Chicago.”

“What about the picture of them together in Marquette?” Brandt asked.

“My guess is Susan brought Fuller with her to Chicago shortly before 1969, where they hooked up with David. And David must’ve brought Fuller up to Marquette for a visit, maybe treating him kind of like a brother-in-law.” I turned to Sammie. “Did you find anything at all relating to Fuller in your digging—documents, bank records, credit companies, anything at all?”

Sammie shook her head. “I checked everything six ways toward the middle. The only Abraham Fuller I came up that fitted the approximate date of birth was a kid I found in the town clerk’s records.”

I stared at her for a moment. “What kid?”

Sammie tugged at a strand of her hair. “I was looking through the birth certificates. For a second, I thought I’d hit the jackpot, but it turned out that Abraham Fuller had only lived a few days.”

“You think that’s our boy?” Brandt asked softly.

I began pacing the small room excitedly, using the two of them as a sounding board to the revelation that was burning brighter and brighter in my mind. “It’s one of the ways you can establish a new identity, especially in rural areas, where few people bother checking into details.

“You find the grave or death certificate of an infant, assume his name, and put in a request at the town clerk’s or wherever for a new birth certificate, claiming you lost yours. The clerk looks up the birth certificate on her rolls, which are kept separate from death records, issues a duplicate, and bingo—you’re on your way to establishing a new identity.”

“But I checked everywhere else,” Sammie protested, “Abraham Fuller never did establish an identity. Besides, what’s all that got to do with Susan Pendergast?”

I bolted for the door, Sammie’s exasperated question ringing like a confirmation in my ears. “Because,” I said on the threshold, “if Fuller took on a false identity using that method, then Susan Pendergast probably did, too.”

I strode out into the squad room and toward the exit, Brandt and Sammie hard on my heels, both of them now sharing my impatience to explore this new avenue.

As we moved rapidly down the hall toward the town clerk’s office, I addressed the other part of Sammie’s question. “I don’t know why Fuller never went beyond just taking on a false name, but assuming he was wounded just after coming to this area, I’d guess he became so traumatized, he completely withdrew from life, which made a new identity irrelevant.”

The young woman behind the town clerk’s counter stared open-mouthed as we marched by her to where the record books were kept in a back room. I handed out several of the large, heavy volumes to both of them.

Sammie was still perplexed. “What do we look for?”

“Those are death records from the 1940s. Eventually, we should compare them to something like the Department of Motor Vehicle records, see if we can locate a living, licensed driver who should have died fifty years ago. But right now, let’s just look for anything that might ring a bell.”

We moved quickly, spurred on by our hopes that we’d finally cracked the enigma—and that a single name might provide us with the answers we’d been seeking.

It finally did, but with none of the joy I’d been anticipating. For the second time in fifteen minutes, a name leapt out at me with the power of pure revelation. But this time, instead of the excitement of having my efforts rewarded, I felt only the frustration and anger at having been duped, almost from the start of this investigation. The name neatly penned on the page before me resounded with its owner’s self-confidence and daring. Susan Pendergast had used Gail as a way to meet me, then had used my own prejudices to buy herself time.

I slammed the book down on the table in disgust, causing Tony Brandt to come over and glance down at the page. “I’ll be damned.” Sammie looked up from her own scrutiny. “What did you find?”

“Wilhelmina Lucas—Billie for short.”

I SAT ALONE
in the office on the top floor of the Whipple Street house that Susan Pendergast, as Billie Lucas, had lived in and worked out of for the past twenty-odd years, conducting pottery classes, doing charts, and generally playing the expected role of the socially conscious, liberated woman she’d painted herself to be.

It was late—past ten o’clock. For the past five hours, we’d been combing the building for signs of where she might have vanished, for vanished she had. According to the friends and colleagues we’d contacted so far, she’d left in the middle of a meeting several days ago, purportedly to use the phone.

It was the completeness of her disappearance that nagged me the most. By now, we had poked into every square inch of the building. We had found bankbooks, business records, tax papers, personal correspondence, even love letters. In her bathroom and bedroom, everything was still in place, from her underwear to her toothbrush. Her car was still parked by the side of the house.

I had detectives and patrol units all over town interviewing people, rousting judges for warrants, going over phone and bank records, and analyzing the papers we’d found here. Photos and descriptions of her had been circulated all over the state, and to police departments, sheriff ’s offices, and state law-enforcement agencies beyond our borders. But somewhere in my gut, I knew it would all be for nothing, because I knew that it wasn’t the police that had kept Susan’s survival instincts sharp over the years—and would drive her now to burrow deep underground—but the threat of Shattuck’s revenge.

Without a single shred of evidence, I was convinced Susan Pendergast was acting out the nightmare she’d kept bottled up inside her for two and a half decades. She was the last of three fugitives. After Abraham Fuller had died and David’s bones were disinterred, she must have known her own anonymity was doomed, and her life become forfeit.

The question was, where was she now? From the time I’d arrived back in Brattleboro, I’d felt like a racehorse striving for the finish, trying to beat out a shadowy, unseen competitor. But now that I knew Susan was scared and running, how could I keep myself at the head of a race that had suddenly changed from a mad sprint to one of careful strategy?

I was sitting at the same desk I’d seen Billie typing at the first time we’d met. The lights were off now, and only the reflected glow from the streetlamps outside revealed the vague details of the room. Downstairs, I could still hear people moving about, checking and rechecking the contents of the house, frustrated that the policeman’s adage that nobody vanishes without a trace was proving to have an exception.

There was a knock at the door, and J. P. Tyler, who was heading up the search of the house, stuck his head in. “Anyone here?”

“Yeah.”

He stepped inside, wisely leaving the lights off. He knew my moods. “We found a hiding place, kind of like Fuller’s. Two M-16s and several boxes of ammunition, all .223 LC 67 stock.”

“That it?”

“There’s a small fortune in cash, too, the stolen chart, and a book.”

“
The Scarlet Letter
?”

“Yeah. I was going to box it up for the Waterbury lab, but I thought you might like to take a look first.”

I switched on the desk lamp and he walked forward, gingerly carrying a paperback hanging from a wire like a small piece of laundry from a clothesline, preserving whatever fingerprints it might have on it.

He laid it carefully on the desk. I saw the title on the spine was roughly circled in a rusty brown—the dried blood from Fuller’s pricked finger, just as it was on the photograph I’d seen.

“The inside cover,” Tyler indicated.

I used my pen to pry back the front of the book. On the inside, also scrawled in brown, was the message: “I burned it—Love.”

“I checked the rest of the hiding place; there’s nothing else—at least nothing obvious.”

I nodded and let the cover fall back. “Does it look like anything was removed recently?”

He picked up the book again. “It’s hard to tell, of course, but I don’t think so.”

“How much money?”

“Something like a half-million, all in hundreds.”

“Okay, J.P.—thanks.”

He retired and I switched the light back off, remembering the fresh ashes and the match we’d found in Fuller’s wood stove.

I burned what?

The intercom on the phone buzzed. I picked it up and gave my name.

One of the search team said, “Ron’s on line one, Lieutenant.”

I hit the blinking button. “What’s up?”

“Couple of things I thought you’d like to know. I’m at the bank right now, going through her records—the manager’s madder than hell, by the way, and said he’d let you know what he thought about us rousting people in the middle of the night—but what we’ve found so far is nothing. I took her IRS files from the house to compare them with these at the bank, and they match perfectly—same basic income and expenses. And we opened her deposit box, too—just some jewelry. I know she probably has other accounts under other names, but so far, it all looks regular as dishwater, so I don’t know where she stashed her share of the money, assuming she has one.”