Death at King Arthur's Court (20 page)

Wood splintered inside the motel room. ‘Freeze, you son-of-a-bitch! Police!'

A woman screamed.

‘Damn it!' Rocco yelled. ‘Get away from her! I'm warning you, get away!'

As Lyon reached for the door knob to go to Rocco's aid, the picture window behind him shattered. A man entangled in the window drape smashed though the glass and rolled across the walk. Lyon spun around and raised the shotgun to a firing position.

The man rolled out of the drape and sprang to his feet holding an Uzi in both hands. The assault weapon's barrel swept toward Lyon.

Lyon's finger tightened against the trigger as he pointed the shotgun at the man's head.

‘I'll shoot you,' the man with the Uzi said, ‘and I'll cut you in half.'

Lyon's instant of supremacy passed. That single golden moment when his weapon dominated the situation disappeared. Each man held a weapon aimed at the other. Each was capable of killing the other. It was probable that involuntary muscle contractions could cause either of them, although shot dead, to fire and kill the other.

‘Drop it,' the other man said.

The shotgun clattered to the cement walkway. The man pressed the assault weapon's short barrel against Lyon's neck.

Inside the unit, Rocco ripped the latch chain from the door and threw it open.

‘Make funny moves and your partner dies,' said the man.

‘Put your hands behind your head and lie face down on the concrete,' Rocco said as he assumed a shooting stance.

‘You do not understand,' the man replied. ‘Make another move and I will fire. At this range your friend's head will explode.'

Rocco shook his head. ‘You're the one who needs to understand. I don't give a damn about him. I need you and it doesn't matter if you are alive or dead. In fact, it's neater if you're dead. I am going to kill you in three seconds.'

Lyon was surprised at the conviction in his friend's voice. ‘I believe him,' he said.

‘I believe him too,' the man with the Uzi said as his weapon clattered to the walk.

A woman appeared in the doorway behind Rocco. Lyon recognized her as Lorretta Bing, who worked at the motel as a chambermaid and who also supplied some of the male customers with more than just linen. ‘Does this mean the party's over, Winston?' she asked petulantly.

Thirteen

Winston Crawford was sullen as he sat on the cracked leather couch in Rocco's office. His arms were handcuffed in front of him and the cuffs were manacled to a metal waistband. He glared at Rocco. ‘This arrest might add to your glory, Herbert, but I'm getting screwed to the wall.'

‘When I'm through with your list of charges,' Rocco said, ‘you'll be part of the wall.'

‘I've seen you somewhere before,' Lyon said. ‘Weren't you a graduate student at Middleburg University?'

‘An adjunct teacher without a future,' Winston replied. ‘Thanks to the way Professor Morgan sabotaged my application for a full-time position. His well-chosen words gave the death sentence to my academic future.'

‘And you'd really kill to avenge a bad college reference?'

‘It's about time these so-called intellectuals took the disenfranchised seriously. We mean to make the world pay attention to the abuse of power.' Lyon realized that the man's thwarted intellect had honed him into an instrument of hatred.

Patrolman Jamie Martin grunted as he carried in a large cardboard box that clanked when he lowered it to the desk in front of Rocco. ‘This is heavy stuff, Chief,' he said. ‘And there's more to come.'

Rocco nodded an acknowledgment as he began to carefully remove objects from the box and neatly align them across the desk. ‘We confiscated this little collection from Crawford's motel room and van,' he said to Lyon. ‘Look at this crap. Hand grenades.' He held one up. ‘You have your choice: percussion, smoke, or phosphorus.' He shook his head. ‘Six automatic pistols, including a Glock, army .45 and Magnum .44. There's enough ammunition for a small war of indeterminate length and knives in assorted sizes. God only knows what else that we haven't inventoried yet.'

‘How about this baby, Chief?' Jamie Martin said as he re-entered the room carrying an M60 machine gun in both arms. Belts of ammunition crisscrossed his chest like a Mexican bandit. ‘Found it stowed under a blanket in the van.' He stood the machine gun in the corner and draped bands of ammunition over a file cabinet.

‘Jesus, Winston,' Rocco said. ‘Did you intend to line us up on the green and annihilate the town?'

‘I'm a collector,' the manacled man said.

‘Obviously, and you're having a going-out-of-business sale.'

‘Why do you anarchists always seem to get baby carriages in the line of fire?' Lyon asked.

‘Because they don't give a damn who gets in the way,' Rocco said.

‘You think your badge gives you indemnity for hypocrisy. An hour ago you were perfectly willing to let me blow your friend's head off in order to capture me for your own glory.' He grimaced at Lyon. ‘How do you like being cannon fodder?'

‘I suppose it's possible to consider the situation Rocco faced as a problem in game theory,' Lyon said. ‘I'm sure he evaluated the alternatives. If you shot me, he shot you. If he didn't shoot you, you might kill both of us. If he hadn't done what he did, the question was, would you have fired? The situation dictated that you would. Rocco took the only course of action available that might save everyone's life.'

‘If any man had sacrificed me like that, I would never rest until he died.'

‘If there are any sacrificial lambs in this room, you're the only one bleating,' Rocco said. ‘Suppose we get a stenographer in here to take down your confession? I'd like to hear all the lowdown on this Armageddon crap.'

‘Not much to kick around, Chief. I wrote a few letters and then basked in the bloody limelight. I couldn't have asked for better circumstances, starting with a death by sword.'

‘You could look at it that way,' Rocco said with good humor. ‘Let's see, you knocked off Morgan, the dancer Bambi, and now Skee. You did do Skee, didn't you?'

‘Ski who?'

‘The bodybuilder. The musclebound friend of Rina's?'

‘If he's connected to Morgan, I did him. I'll get a letter off as soon as I learn the details. I'll do that first thing in the morning, if you'd like.'

‘A simple confession should be enough.'

Winston shrugged. ‘I hope you liked my letters. I tried to work in the proper attitude.'

‘They had a rather bloodthirsty ring to them,' Rocco said.

‘I was really quite lucky to arrive here and find Morgan already dead. Of course I took the credit. When the woman died, it was bonus time. They seem to be dropping like flies around here.'

Rocco's chair rocked forward as his benign smile faded. ‘What in the hell are you talking about?'

‘I really fell into a good thing here. I came to do Morgan and I turned up roses.'

‘You didn't kill Morgan?' Lyon asked.

‘What do you mean, he didn't murder Morgan?' Rocco yelled.

‘I'm going to confess, of course,' Winston said. ‘And you've got all these weapons. I assume you'll plant the ballistics evidence on me, and maybe I could help you phony the fingerprints? It will do nothing but put the spotlight on Middleburg University's abuse of power.'

‘Are you trying to create an insanity defense here, Crawford? Doing in a professor who blighted your college job application? I'm asking you once more,' Rocco said. ‘Did you kill those people?'

‘Of course not. I merely took the credit. It was rather convenient to get all the glory without having to do the bloody work. The beauty of it all was that the real killer didn't seem to mind.'

‘I do not believe this is the man who attacked me with the sword,' Lyon said. ‘An attempt was made to frame me and implicate him. Someone else killed those people.'

Rocco catapulted to his feet with a velocity that slammed the desk chair back against the wall. ‘We've been had! While we've been fooling around with this clown, the perp is getting away.'

Winston took a quick step across the room and bent forward so that his manacled hands could snatch a fragmentation hand grenade from the desk. He retreated clutching the weapon. ‘I might be a number of things, Chief, but I am not a clown! Get on the floor before we're all blown to hell.' He pulled the grenade's pin but continued to clamp the lever against its body so that it did not pop off and complete the arming. ‘Back off!'

‘Give me that damn thing!' Rocco said as he reached for Winston's hands.

The defrocked intellectual released his grip on the lever, which immediately spun off the grenade and allowed the striker to hit the cap and activate the four-second fuse.

‘For anarchy!' he screamed as he gripped the live grenade.

‘For Lyon!' Rocco answered as he snatched the grenade from the man's fingers and flipped it over his shoulder.

‘For the hole!' Lyon yelled as he scooped the grenade from the air. He turned without looking and rammed his hand through the closed window. He released the live hand grenade outside into a cellar window receptacle as they all dropped to the floor. The grenade exploded at the furnace-room window below ground level. Several pieces of shrapnel ricocheted up through the flooring, missed the three prone men, and buried themselves in the ceiling.

Bea Wentworth was extremely angry. She stood in front of Rocco's desk with her fingers curled over two .30-caliber ammunition boxes which she occasionally thumped together to emphasize a point.

Lyon sat on the couch nursing his hand. Crawford had been thrown into a cell.

‘This is a confrontation not a discussion, Rocco,' Bea said as she thumped an ammunition box.

‘The guy was on a mission of revenge and grabbed a hand grenade,' Rocco said with a shrug. ‘You have to expect that sort of behavior when a man gets thrown out of the ivory tower.'

‘Come on!' Bea said. ‘You allowed an unguarded prisoner in the office a few feet away from live weapons. And he almost blew you both up. Suppose someone had been in the yard when Lyon dropped that bomb out the window?'

‘We expect risks in police work,' Rocco said without a great deal of conviction.

‘You both went into that motel room after an armed man without proper back-up.'

‘Damn it all, Bea! The circumstances dictated that.'

‘You would not allow your brother-in-law any credit on the bust,' Bea said.

‘Now that I remember,' Lyon said. ‘Three years ago you fired Jake Manly for going into a convenience store during an armed robbery without calling for back-up.'

‘Lyon is not a sworn police officer,' Bea said. ‘He is not even an auxiliary constable. He is a civilian.'

‘I seem to substitute as the town's bomb-disposal squad,' Lyon said.

Captain Norbert of the state police, flanked by his two-corporal entourage, erupted into the room. His glare encompassed everyone but settled on Lyon with particular distaste. ‘I understand you detonated a bomb within the Murphysville city limits?'

‘In a manner of speaking,' Lyon answered.

‘That's against several laws, Wentworth, or do you effete intellectuals bother about such things?'

‘The hand-grenade perpetrator is in cell two,' Rocco snapped. ‘He claims he didn't kill anyone and only took the credit to highlight the so-called plight of the anarchists.'

‘I believe him,' Lyon added.

‘Of course he didn't do it. That's what they all say. If he didn't kill the bodybuilder, do you expect me to believe that our lady gymnast put a two-hundred-pound weight on the guy's neck?'

‘She had enough strength to take the same weight off his neck when she decided to move the body. There are other suspects who are also capable,' Lyon said.

‘You are a civilian and you are not a law officer, thank God.'

‘I'm afraid the proof will be when the next victim dies,' Lyon said.

Lyon and Bea stood outside the Murphysville police station as Jamie Martin's patrol car slid to a halt behind Bea's parked compact. The young patrolman came toward them and gave Bea a short salute. ‘Good evening, Senator. They fixed your car while you were inside.'

‘There's nothing wrong with my car.'

Jamie shrugged. ‘A guy in coveralls and a baseball cap pulled up in a van and popped the hood on your car. He only worked under there a couple of minutes before he slammed it shut and drove off. So maybe it was a mistake.'

‘Probably,' Bea said as she retrieved car keys from her pocketbook. She slid behind the wheel.

For a brief moment Lyon felt a chill. He had an inchoate sense of dimming of sunlight and the fluttering of an unknown fear. He drove the thought from his mind. The car was parked directly in front of the town police station in full view of the dispatcher's console. It would be impossible for anything to be wrong.

‘It's beginning to rain,' he said as she reached for the ignition.

‘Good for the plants,' Bea replied.

‘It's going to fall on my balloon in the back of the pickup and it's hard for me to manage with this hand. Would you drive?'

‘We certainly wouldn't want our balloon to get wet,' she said as she left her car and went to the pickup in the parking lot.

Dark rain clouds obscured the sky and rain began to fall as they pulled away from the police services building in Lyon's twelve-year-old pickup truck. Bea had to lean slightly forward on the seat to peer through the windshield. The creaking wipers swept an uneven swatch in their losing battle against the heavy rain.

‘How's your hand?' she asked without turning her attention away from the misting road.

‘Not bad.' He worked his fingers back and forth with a slight wince. ‘It'll be all right tomorrow.'