Dark Tiger (26 page)

 

 

 

 

Calhoun guided the Vandercamp men again on Tuesday. They fished both Big and Little Hairy lakes and caught a good number of salmon, though none as large as the one Franklin Redbird's sport had caught and killed the previous day.

That night after dark he again staked out the dock where the Twin Otter was parked, but nobody came to the float plane while Calhoun was watching.

He spent the next three days guiding a retired couple from Michigan. In the evenings he sat with his back against the same pine tree overlooking the dock. On Wednesday he watched a porcupine saunter up the moonlit path toward the lodge. Thursday evening a deer brushed close to him. He guessed it was the same one he'd seen his first night on stakeout, a small doe. He'd apparently set up his stakeout right next to a game trail.

Calhoun enjoyed his encounters with the wildlife, but he was getting frustrated. Nobody went near the Twin Otter while he was watching.

He couldn't come up with another way to shake the bushes and kick the grass, so he was back again on Friday, and around
midnight, just as he'd begun to think about heading back to his cabin, his eye caught a movement on the path. Someone was coming down the slope from the lodge. By the shape of him and the way he moved, it appeared to be a man. He was hugging close to the shadowy edge of the pathway, moving slowly, and his body language said that he was trying not to be seen. He was wearing dark loose-fitting clothing and a cap with the visor pulled low. Calhoun couldn't see his face or the shape of his body. He couldn't tell how old the man was. He was just a dark amorphous shape easing through the night shadows.

Calhoun could see that the man was feeling alert and furtive, that he didn't want to be detected, that he was on a mission he didn't want anybody to know about.

The man had nearly reached the dock when he suddenly stopped on the path an easy cast with a fly rod from where Calhoun was hiding. The man swiveled his head around slowly, as if he were trying to locate somebody who he knew was watching him.

Calhoun held his breath and sat as still as a stump.

The man's eyes seemed to bore through the darkness and the shrubbery. His gaze hesitated, then passed over the spot where Calhoun was hiding. All the while, his face remained a black shadow under the visor of his cap.

After a long minute, the man turned and went out onto the dock. He moved directly to the Twin Otter. He flicked on a small flashlight with a narrow beam and used it to light his way as he climbed out onto a pontoon. Then he stepped up, opened the plane's door, slipped into the cockpit, and shut the door behind him. The light flickered through the side windows and then became dimmer, and Calhoun figured the man was moving into the bowels of the plane.

He realized he'd been digging his fingernails into his palms.
His heart was thudding in his chest. This was it. Finally. This was the reason he'd come to Loon Lake. This was why he'd been spending the past several evenings hiding in the woods. This, he figured, was what McNulty had seen. This man in the float plane.

It was, he guessed, what got McNulty killed. It was why Mr. Brescia had sent Calhoun here.

He forced himself to take a few slow, even breaths. He felt his adrenaline kicking in.

A few minutes later, the light inside the plane went out.

Then, as Calhoun watched, the figure seemed to materialize from the shadows. He was on the dock, heading back to the pathway, and he was carrying something by a handle down by his side. It looked like an attaché case.

When he got to the end of the dock, instead of following the path back toward the lodge, the figure turned the other way and headed in the direction of the boathouse.

Calhoun waited for a couple of minutes, then pushed himself to his feet. He slipped through the bushes to the path and followed along a safe distance behind the man with the attaché case.

When he got to the boathouse, the man stopped and looked around. Calhoun froze where he was standing in the shadows on the edge of the path. After a minute, the man turned to the building, flicked on his flashlight, shone its narrow beam on the door, opened it, and went inside.

Calhoun, moving soundlessly on the pine needles that blanketed the path, eased up to the window beside the boathouse door. The window was head high on the building's wall, and by bracing himself on the sill and going up on his tiptoes, Calhoun was able to see inside.

The figure was shining his light around in the back corner
beside the big freezer where Franklin Redbird had stowed his client's prize salmon for the taxidermist. As Calhoun watched, the man slid the big carton that held the foam fish crates away from the wall. He aimed his flashlight at the place on the floor where the carton had been. Then he knelt down, and Calhoun saw him lift and slide away a large square of plywood. It looked like a trapdoor in the boathouse floor. The man leaned over the hole in the floor and slid his attaché case into the opening under the floorboards. Then he wrestled the trapdoor back in place and pushed the big carton on top of it. He stood there with his flashlight pointed aimlessly at the floor and looked slowly all around.

Suddenly, his head stopped moving. The man seemed to be staring hard at Calhoun's window. To Calhoun it felt as if the man's eyes were drilling into his. He wondered if his head was silhouetted against the glass. He ducked quickly away, moved into the woods alongside the boathouse, and slid behind the trunk of a big pine tree.

A moment later the boathouse door opened, and the man stepped out. He panned his flashlight all around. When its beam approached the tree where Calhoun was hiding, he pulled his head back and flattened himself against the trunk.

The light seemed to stop moving when it came to Calhoun's tree, and he half expected to feel the beam of the man's flashlight center on his face, or to hear the man order him to step out where he could see him, or to see a gun materialize in his hand. Instead, after a long pause, the flashlight's beam resumed moving.

After what seemed like several minutes, the light went out. Calhoun peeked around the side of the tree trunk. He saw that the man had turned off his flashlight and had begun walking back along the pathway toward the lodge.

Calhoun still hadn't gotten a look at the man's face. The visor of his cap had kept it in shadow, and he'd never allowed his flashlight to illuminate his features. Judging by the general shape of his body and the way he moved in the darkness, Calhoun believed he could eliminate Ben, the tall, gangly young guide who was now the lodge's pilot pro tem, and Mush, who was short and rotund. Otherwise, this man could've been any of the guides or other employees—and most of the male guests—of the lodge. Calhoun was pretty sure it was a man, although, come to think of it, Kim, the female guide, moved and was shaped like a man.

He waited there behind the tree next to the boathouse until he guessed that the man had made it back to the lodge. Then he went to the door, pulled it open, slipped inside, and flicked on his flashlight.

Wood planking formed a U-shaped interior, with the open end of the U facing out to the lake. The boathouse was about the size of a six-car garage. There were three log walls with two windows and a door in each wall and a shallow-peaked roof. A rack against one wall held eight or ten Grand Lake canoes. About a dozen outboard motors hung from another rack. Paddles and life jackets and boat cushions hung on pegs. There was a long workbench with several big toolboxes, and in the corner stood the double-wide freezer and the carton of foam fish crates.

Calhoun moved quickly to the corner. He slid the carton away from the wall and shone his light on the floor. A two-foot square of plywood with a finger-sized hole drilled into it fit tightly into a cutout place in the plank floor. Calhoun used his forefinger to lift and slide the piece of plywood away, then shone his light down into the hole.

The hole was lined with fine-mesh wire, and water from the
lake came to within two feet of the floor planks. Calhoun guessed it had been built to serve as a live well for bait. He leaned in and shone his light around, and he saw that there was a wide wooden shelf built into the floor joists above the waterline. He reached into the shelf and felt around, and his fingers touched something hard and metallic. He slid it out and lifted it onto the floor.

The attaché case was made of brushed aluminum. Calhoun undid the two snaps, opened it up, and shone his light inside.

The interior of the case was padded with foam rubber. Twenty-four compartments were cut into the rubber, four rows of six, and each compartment held a glass vial the size of a small test tube with a rubber stopper. Calhoun took out one of the vials and shone his flashlight on it. It contained a yellowish powdery substance. When he shook it, he saw that the powder was as fine as talcum.

He had no idea what the stuff was. Some kind of drug, he supposed. Cocaine? Raw heroin?

Botulinum? He had no idea what the botulinum toxin looked like, or even if it was a powder.

He'd let Mr. Brescia figure it out.

He slipped the vial into his jacket pocket and zipped it shut. Then he closed the aluminum case, shoved it back into its compartment under the floor joists, returned the plywood trapdoor to its place, and slid the big carton back on top of it.

He guessed he'd been inside the boathouse for four or five minutes. Anybody looking at the building would've seen the flash of his light in the windows. He patted his pockets. He had no weapon, not even his filleting knife.

He had no excuse, either. What logical reason could he give for going into the boathouse with a flashlight at midnight?

Well, if he had to, he'd come up with something.

He turned off his flashlight, waited for a couple minutes
while his eyes adjusted, then felt his way along the back wall to the door. He hesitated there, and then, imagining a man with a gun waiting outside for him, he decided to use the door on the opposite wall for his exit.

It turned out to be a sensible but unnecessary precaution. When he sneaked around the outside of the boathouse and peeked at the area around the door he'd entered by, nobody was there.

He felt that rush you get when you've gotten away with something illegal or immoral—a combination of triumph and relief.

He walked quickly back to his cabin. Instead of going directly inside, he sat on one of the rocking chairs on the screen porch. He wanted to try to think this through.

The man who'd hidden the aluminum case in the boathouse would see that one of the vials was missing the first time he opened the case, so Calhoun figured he didn't have much time to decide what to do and then to do it.

His best move would be to deliver the vial to Mr. Brescia. It seemed pretty obvious that the contents of the aluminum case, whether it was botulinum toxin or not, was the key to what had gotten McNulty—and Millie Gautier and Elaine Hoffman and Curtis Swenson, too—killed. McNulty, he guessed, had found a vial of this stuff on the airplane. He'd taken it to St. Cecelia, where he'd met up with Millie. He'd intended to continue on to Augusta, but the two of them died from botulism poisoning. Whoever was responsible for the vials found their dead bodies, shot them in the head, and retrieved the vial that McNulty had taken. Calhoun figured that shooting McNulty and Millie was intended to confuse the police, to deflect their attention from who McNulty was and what he was really up to, and to prevent them from figuring out what really killed the two of them.

It could have worked. If the police had taken it at face value, and if the bodies hadn't been autopsied by the medical examiner, the two deaths might well have been chalked up to the murder-suicide of a pair of doomed lovers.

Calhoun guessed that Curtis Swenson had smuggled the cases containing the vials into Loon Lake on the float plane, most likely from some remote river or lake over the border in Quebec, which was only a few miles away. From there, he had flown them to Greenville or Houlton, and from there, they were probably shipped to Boston or New York.

Before he got killed, Curtis Swenson appeared to be the villain, but now he was dead. Calhoun guessed that the shadowy figure who'd taken the case of vials off the float plane tonight was also the person who'd shot McNulty and Elaine Hoffman, and who'd booby-trapped the Cessna and killed Swenson.

Calhoun guessed he'd leave the
who
and the
why
questions to Mr. Brescia to figure out. Calhoun had discovered the
what
, and he had the evidence of it in his pocket. He thought that would be enough.

He pushed himself out of the rocker and went inside. There came a rustling noise from the direction of the bed, then the click of dog claws on the wood floor, and then Ralph was pushing his nose against Calhoun's leg and whining softly. Calhoun scootched down, rubbed the dog's ears, and let him outside.

When Ralph came back in, Calhoun took off his jacket with the glass vial in its zippered pocket and hung it carefully on a hanger. Then he slipped off his shoes and socks and pants and slid into his bed. Ralph curled up on the rug, sighed, and began snoring.

Calhoun lay there on his back with his fingers laced under his neck, staring up into the darkness, too pumped up to think about sleeping quite yet.

He was thinking that if he could just get this done, if he could deliver the vial to Mr. Brescia and tell him what he knew, it would be over, and he could go home. He'd resume his life. He'd patch things up with Kate, and things would be good again.

He lay awake for a long time, fine-tuning his plan, such as it was.

 

 

 

 

On Saturday Calhoun guided a pair of brothers from Cleveland. One was a lawyer, and the other was a sports agent. Both were competent anglers, and Calhoun enjoyed their company, but all day he worried that whoever had hidden the aluminum attaché case under the floor in the boathouse would look into it and see that one of the vials was missing. He wished he could've left first thing in the morning, or even in the middle of the night, but he'd been scheduled for this guide trip today and didn't want to call attention to himself.