Absolute Rage (22 page)

“Everything okay? The felons all in good order?”

“Yeah, they don't mess with Cruella. How's your lonely grandeur?”

“Hm. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I'm on the horns of a dilemma.”

He explained briefly what Saul Sterner wanted him to do, adding, “So the good part of the deal, besides its inherent virtue, is that I'd get to be with Mom for however long, the summer at least, until we saw how things lay, sort of a vacation in the mountains.”

“Meaning you could keep an eye on her.”

“That, too,” said Karp, glad once again that another person in the world shared his view of his wife. “On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable with both of us being out of town and you stuck here in charge.”

“We could all come down there,” said Lucy brightly.

“What about the farm?”

“Oh, we'd bring Magog. Billy can handle the place after the puppies are sold, and if not, he can hire a teenager from town.”

“I don't think so. That's all we need is to have to worry about you all. Apparently it's a pretty violent part of the country.”

“Violence! Heavens to Betsy! What a sharp contrast that would be to my entire childhood! Well, you've succeeded in terrifying me out of that idea.”

“I was actually thinking of the boys,” said Karp, a little more sharply than he had intended.

“Oh, right—sorry,” she said, and actually was, because she had not thought for a second about her brothers. What had immediately occupied the center of her thoughts when her father had proposed going to West Virginia was the prospect of seeing Dan Heeney again. “Okay, if you decide to go, I can hold the fort here. Don't worry.”

“Are you sure? I mean, they can get someone else.”

“But you're dying to go, right?”

Karp hesitated before replying to this. “I'm not sure . . . the main thing is I'm concerned about you. You have all that scientific stuff to do up in Boston. It doesn't seem fair to tie up your summer with baby-sitting.”

“It's starting to sound like you're using us as an excuse. You're the responsible parent and Mom is the cuckoo.”

“Not really . . .”

“Really. Look, the way it sounds is that they want you and you can do it better than anyone. And it's important—getting the rats who killed them. It's just your kind of thing. As far as the Boston guys are concerned, I already blew them off. It's not like they can find another me by placing an ad in the
Globe
. It's a seller's market in the prodigy biz.”

“You actually are irreplaceable,” said Karp fervently. “And I don't just mean all the Swahili.”

“And you likewise. Since you're all guilted up, this would be a good time to ask you if I can get the Toyota fixed. It would be great to have.”

“Is it fixable?” asked Karp, who knew little about vehicles.

“Russell says yes, and apparently he's a car maven as well as a dog agitator, kind of a Renaissance man. I'll pay for the fixing if you'll handle all the plates and insurance crap.”

“A done deal. Are you absolutely sure . . . ?”

“Of course. Go. Don't worry about us. And keep in touch, okay?”

After hanging up, Karp sat back in his chair. He had a peculiar feeling, hauntingly familiar, but it took him some little time to identify it. The last day of school? Winning a big case? Oh, right, he thought: happiness. He kicked off and spun his chair around half a dozen times. Swiveling around to the desk again, he dialed Saul Sterner's number.

*  *  *

Marlene was swinging in a hammock strung in the Heeneys' backyard, using a finger against the skull of her dog to push herself in a gentle rocking motion, and at the same time scratching him in the place he liked behind his ear. The dog was happy with this arrangement; Marlene less so. She did not like being stymied. She finished her beer and tossed it in a graceful arc, which did not quite reach the lip of the rubber trash can. Dan Heeney stirred himself from the lounge chair where he was drinking, reached out an arm, and flipped the can in. It was hot under a milk-glass sky. Only vagrant zephyrs stirred the dusty leaves of the maples. She was officially thinking about their next move, but productive thoughts were slow in coming. Had this been a real case, she would have been working with a private detective, doing the investigation that the cops had fluffed, maybe establishing an alibi for the defendant, maybe collecting new evidence. In this particular abortion, however, this was not going to do much good, because the cops and the criminal justice system would take anything she discovered and lose it, or phony up something that undermined it.

Stan Hawes might be interested. She didn't think he was really dirty yet, but it would take an extremely pure-minded state's attorney to actively cooperate in wrecking the biggest case he was likely to see in a decade. She needed something new and major then, the murder weapon maybe, or a signed confession from the real guys, one about as likely to turn up as the other. There was no crime-scene forensic evidence that did her any good. There were prints in the house from dozens of people, but distinguishing among these, separating the killers' from those of the Heeneys' many guests, was a job beyond her resources. If she had been there from the beginning, in charge of the investigation, or even on defense from the get-go . . . no, useless thoughts: if your grandma had wheels, she'd be a garbage truck. Still, if the cops had done a half-assed job, there might be areas still worth investigating. Where, though? She rolled out of the hammock, went to the cooler, and cracked another Iron City, feeling Dan's eyes on her as she did so. He was waiting for her to pull out rabbits, but she was all out of rabbits today.

She walked across the lawn, the grass cool on the soles of her feet, the can icy when she pressed it against the back of her neck. Go back into the house, look at her notes, maybe something would pop up. She closed her eyes, her mind blank. When she opened them, she was staring at a mountain. This was not unusual, as there were mountains everywhere one stared around here. This one, she recalled, was known as Belo Knob. There was a flash of light from the mountainside and then another. She heard, above the buzzing of the insect life, the distant grind of a truck in low gear, climbing. She looked up at the mountain again. The truck had disappeared. A road on a hillside: Why was that of interest? She didn't know yet, but it was, something about the night of the crime. She wandered back to the hammock and sat on its edge.

“Dan, the night of the murders,” she said tentatively, “there were people at the house—Emmett said . . . ?”

“Yeah, there was a dissident-faction meeting, maybe about twenty guys. It lasted until ten, maybe ten-thirty.”

“Right, and then the killers came. But, what I'm wondering is, how did they know the house was empty except for your family?”

Dan twitched his shoulders. “I don't know. They were watching the house?”

“Uh-huh. But from where? Where was their car while they were watching? It couldn't have been in your driveway or on 119 or on that little access road. Someone would've spotted them. A bunch of dissidents, all paranoid as hell, probably armed . . . the killers wouldn't have wanted to take that chance. Come here a minute.”

They walked around the house. Marlene pointed to Belo Knob. “There's a road across that mountain.”

“Uh-huh. Belo Road. It hooks up Route 10 on the east side of the knob to 130 on the west, and it picks up a bunch of no-name dirt roads that go to where folks live up there. What about it?”

“I was just thinking that if someone parked their car on that road, they'd have a pretty good view of your yard. They could see when the last guest left. Have you got a large-scale map of the county?”

“Sure. It's on the computer.”

A few minutes later, Marlene was looking over Dan's shoulder at a bird's-eye view of the house they were standing in. He punched a key twice and the view expanded to take in the south flank of Belo Knob. “We have fifty-meter resolution on this. The whole county, and we have the subsurface, too, down to three thousand meters.”

“Where did you get this?” she asked. “It's fantastic.”

“My mom. There's a state law that says the coal companies have to map all their abandoned shafts, mines, and impoundments and share the information with the community. The state makes them do the mapping, and they also do their own mapping and subsurface exploration, to plan where they're going to cut next. They use sonar to find what the rock's like under the mountains. My mom's little enviro group sued Majestic to release this data.”

“And won?”

“Amazingly, yes. It was a federal court decision. That's how we knew that Gillis Holler was going to happen before it did.” He saw her puzzlement. “A local disaster.” He hit some other keys. The view on the monitor changed to what looked like a cutaway of a layer cake prepared by a drunken pastry cook.

“This is Hampden, to our east. The coal-bearing strata show up in gray, and those red lines are old shafts and adits. Where the coal strata are exposed, that's Majestic Number Two, the main surface mine in the county. They're taking the whole top off Hampden.” His finger tapped the screen. “This blue blob is an impoundment, or was, Impoundment Fifty-three A. They set off a charge at Number Two and the shock waves whipped along this boundary layer, under the limestone stratum, see? And focused right here. It cracked open the rock between the bottom of the impoundment and an old shaft. Half a million cubic feet of water came out of that shaft like a steel rod and blasted half a dozen houses and trailers into toothpicks.”

He told her about what had happened after that, the wildcat strike, the election. He spoke with regret mixed with cynicism, a young man's approach to corruption and horror. She'd heard some of this from Rose, but she let him talk until he was through and then steered him back to the matter at hand. The south flank of Belo appeared once again. His fingers on the mouse made the vegetation details vanish, leaving only landforms, roads, and structures.

“Can we go there?” she asked.

“Sure. You mean now?”

“I almost always do.” She ran off to gather some items.

Belo Road was rutted and ran narrowly through hemlocks and laurels, two lanes of thin blacktop chopped into the mountainside. Marlene drove, flicking her gaze between the road ahead and the steep slope to her left, a wall of vegetation. Which vanished briefly and then reappeared. Marlene hit the brakes and threw the truck into reverse. There was a wide place in the road, a sandy area just big enough for one vehicle, under a big slate outcrop, dripping with seepage. She jumped out and crossed the road. Dan came up beside her.

“This has to be the place,” she said. “You can see everything from here—the house, the yard. Christ, what a waste! If they'd brought a crime-scene unit up here the morning after the crime, they would've got tire tracks and footprints and God knows what else. Well, let's look around anyway.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. A matchbook with the name of a nightclub on it. The murderer's diary . . .”

“A lot of broken beer bottles,” said Dan, standing at the base of the slate outcrop. Marlene looked and saw the remains of at least two dozen brown beer bottles and two white-glass Jim Beam pints lying in the shallow declivity below the rock wall. Marks on the wall showed that they had been thrown against it. Marlene returned to her truck and brought out a sheaf of plastic supermarket bags. She stuck her hand in one of them and selected several of the more intact bottles.

“What're you doing that for?”

“You never can tell. These might be from our guys. In fact, unless this place is a famous parking spot, I'd say it's likely. Look, they drive up here after dark, say about nine-thirty. They have to wait an hour or so until all the cars leave and they sit around and drink and smoke. See all the butts?” She knelt and bagged a collection of these. “I figure three guys. One smoked Winstons, one smoked Camels, and one smoked those cheap, thin cigars. The amount of drinking's right for three guys, too. Now the cars are gone from your yard, so they're ready. Do they drive down? Where does this road go?”

“West of here it hooks into 130 west on the other side of Belo, or 11 north a little farther along. East of here was the way we just came, off 119 about a quarter mile from our drive.”

“Wait a second—130? Does that go over some kind of bridge? A green bridge?”

“Yeah, it does. Over the Guyandotte. Why?”

“Because that's where Mose said he found the bloody boots. They stayed here, drove down to your place, did the murders, and what . . . ? Came back the same way, past here, and out to 130, across the bridge, where they tossed the shoes off the bridge, but not too carefully, because they landed on dry land instead of in the water.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Dan agreed, “because otherwise they would've had to go through the middle of town on 119 and someone might have seen them. There's not much traffic in McCullensburg after 1
A.M
. But what does that do for us?”

Marlene was leaning against a pine and looking down the slope of the hill. A scrim of young pine and ash bordered the road, below which rolled a curiously even, glossy green carpet. “I don't know,” she said. “Maybe it gives us their getaway route. On the other hand, they might not have bothered to move the car at all. They might've walked down this slope. It's not more than a couple of thousand yards and the slope isn't that steep. And that would've been better for them, assuming they knew about the driveway alarm and the lights.”

“Maybe, but you can't walk that slope. It's a laurel hell.”

“A what?”

“They don't have those in New York?” said Dan in mock surprise. “A laurel hell is an extremely dense growth of mountain laurel or sometimes rhododendron, mixed with greenbrier and other creepers. Rabbits can go through it but nothing else. Sometimes they roll on for miles. This one is pretty small. I guess they could've gone around it, though, on the other side of that deadfall.” He pointed to where a good-sized tulip tree had come down.