Death Benefits (14 page)

He put the magazine back on top of the other one, and handed Ellen’s to Walker. “Let’s get out of here. You leave through this room, and I’ll leave through hers so we can latch both sides of these connecting doors. I’ll meet you in the car.”

Walker waited until Stillman had screwed the latch back in and closed the door. Walker latched his side, went to the door, and listened. He heard no sound, so he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. The elevator opened and a middle-aged couple stepped out. He turned away from them and walked ahead in the same direction they were going. He made a turn, then another, and another, until he reached a dead end where the hallway stopped. He took the emergency stairway down to the next floor and found his way to the elevator.

He arrived at the basement level and stepped out to find Stillman sitting in the car. When he was inside, Stillman started the engine and drove toward the exit. “Look for a phone,” he said.

As soon as they were out on the street, Walker saw a pay telephone beside a restaurant. “There.” Stillman pulled to the curb, got out, and made a call. After a few minutes, he came back and drove off.

“I just called American Airlines,” he said. “I checked on her flight from New York to Zurich to see if it fit what she wrote down.”

“Does it?”

“Of course it does,” said Stillman. “While I had them on the line, I thought I’d ask whether there was a direct flight to Zurich from here tonight. There is. One a day, in fact. And there are still seats available. Odd, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” said Walker.

“The only reason I can think of to fly to Zurich is if you want to get to Zurich,” Stillman said. “Am I getting through to you?”

“Yeah. We lost them,” said Walker. “Can you call somebody in Zurich to meet their plane or something?”

“I would if I were a cop,” said Stillman. “If I were a cop, I’d do a lot of things like that, because I could afford to stumble all over myself until the truth came out. In the morning, the hotel maids will open the room to clean, see she’s gone, and the manager will call the cops. They’ll find what we found. They’ll see the watch and say, ‘Aha! This isn’t Mrs. Bourgosian.’ They’ll figure out E.S.S. is Ellen Sue Snyder. They’ll find that somebody used the telephone book as a scratch pad, and they’ll call Zurich. In a day or so, they’ll admit they lost her. She slipped out of their cunning clutches. They’ll assure the nearest reporter that they’re turning Europe upside down to extradite her and bring her to justice.”

“You mean they’ll be lying?”

Stillman shrugged. “They may try to do it. If people start thinking they can escape a crime just by going to Europe, it’ll be impossible to get a seat on a trans-Atlantic flight. They’ll all be booked until doomsday by fleeing felons.”

“I take it what you’re saying is that Ellen didn’t go to Zurich.”

“Somebody using her name made a reservation from a hotel room in Chicago to take a flight out of New York. But I didn’t see any note about a reservation on a flight to New York. Did you?”

“Maybe she didn’t write it down. Besides, there must be a flight from O’Hare to Kennedy about twice an hour. She could show up and get one.”

“True. Is that the way you would do it?”

“Probably not,” admitted Walker. “Maybe she drove to New York.”

“She would have to drive about a hundred and twenty to get there in time.” He sighed. “Here’s the way it looks to me. You have this young woman who pulls a very odd little crime that requires lots of elaborate moves: washing her cut of the money, using fake names and IDs and so on. Then she’s in a hotel in Chicago. She’s alert enough to know that we haven’t lost her. She leaves without checking out of the hotel so anybody following her will think she’s still there. This is not hard for a woman to do, because the clerks and cashiers always assume she’s with some man who just paid, or will be along in a minute. Fine so far?”

“Fine,” said Walker.

“She leaves in such a hurry that she forgets her watch, which is exactly what a person in a hurry would miss first. When you’re trying to catch a plane, you look at your watch every minute or two. As it happens, this watch is not ordinary. It has her initials and a date engraved on it. The date is October second, which is Ellen Snyder’s birthday.”

“You know that for sure?”

“I haven’t had time to check, but it will be.”

“It is,” Walker admitted. “But it could have been the anniversary of something: maybe the day she got her braces taken off, or the day her grandmother swam the Hellespont.”

Stillman nodded. “Maybe. But look at it backwards. Suppose you wanted not only to be sure somebody knew you were in a particular place at a particular time, but to be sure that they didn’t make a mistake and think you were somebody else. How would you do it?”

“I’d leave a signed note.”

“How about renting a hotel room, which narrows the time down to twenty-four hours? Then leave something there that’s yours. A watch with initials and a birthday isn’t a bad choice. The only thing missing is her social security number. That watch is better than a birth certificate. A gold watch is too valuable to look like you left it on purpose, and this one looks like it has sentimental value. And, unlike a birth certificate, it doesn’t even have to be genuine to fool an expert. You could go into a jewelry store and buy a watch and have anything you want engraved on it.”

Walker said, “So you think it’s another trick. Ellen is trying to throw us all off and make us think she’s in Europe.”

“I think somebody is,” said Stillman. “The watch was left on purpose, and nobody who’s running uses a phone book as a scratch pad to write down her next flight.” He paused. “She wouldn’t have had to do any of that herself.”

He drove along the lake, then turned west, staring ahead at the dark road, then at the map he held on the steering wheel. Then he turned north onto a smaller road and set the map aside. From time to time he would slow markedly and look out the window at landmarks in the dim landscape: a construction site, a stand of trees that had at first looked like a woods but turned out to be only the narrow green windbreak beside a large condominium complex. He seemed to be evaluating places and rejecting them.

“What are you doing?” asked Walker.

“This is the road that was marked on the map they took with them.”

“I thought you said everything we found was faked.”

“I don’t think leaving an impression on the page beneath the map was something they did to mislead us,” said Stillman. “If it was, they would have left it in her room. Nobody was supposed to know the people in the next room had anything to do with Ellen Snyder. And it wouldn’t be contradictory. You don’t leave false trails leading in two different directions. You pick one and leave signs to it. I think they picked Zurich. So I’m trying to drive this route and look at the things I see from a different point of view.” He sighed. “Now I’ve got to ask you to be quiet for a while and let me think.”

Walker sat in silence while Stillman continued northward. Now and then he would slow the car down, look at a particular configuration of buildings or fields, then seem to reject it and speed up again.

After another fifteen minutes, he pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road beside a large field that had once been a farm but had no buildings left except a single bare-board barn with a caved-in roof. Through the empty front doorway, Walker could see stripes where the moonlight streamed in through gaps in the back wall.

Stillman flipped on his bright headlights and Walker could see the green reflective surface of a road sign at the edge of a narrow perpendicular line of pavement. It said
LOCKSLEY RD
. Stillman turned the lights off and cut the engine. Walker realized with growing uneasiness that this was the first place they had come to that was completely quiet and deserted, the first place where he could see no electric lights in any direction.

When Walker turned his head to look at Stillman, he could see the sober expression and the sad, watchful eyes. “I’m not asking you to do it,” Stillman said. “If you want to wait here, you can.”

Walker shook his head, not so much to deny the thought as to dispel the cold, prickly sensation that had settled on the back of his neck. “It doesn’t have to be. It could be nothing. Somebody else could have marked that map and ripped it out of the magazine two weeks ago.”

Stillman turned and stared out the window into the dark field. “It’ll go faster with the two of us.”

14

Stillman opened his suitcase and took out a small Maglite, then handed an identical one to Walker. “Save your batteries until we get out there.” They closed the trunk of the car and stepped to the edge of the field. Stillman said, “We’ve got maybe six hours before farmers and commuters start coming up that road in force. You start down on that end, and I’ll start up here. Walk the field in rows, as if you were plowing it.”

Walker asked, “What will it look like?”

“I think if they were here at all, it was probably sometime today. The weeds will have been trampled down, and they won’t have had time to stand back up.”

Walker made his way up into the edge of the field, thinking about Ellen Snyder. Whenever he approached a spot that looked like a gap in the weeds, his breathing became shallow and his arms began to feel weak. He was expecting to see the white face appear in an open-eyed stare between two clumps of alfalfa. But as he walked to the end of the field and came back beside his own tracks, his thoughts became calmer.

Two years ago, if she could have imagined this night, what would she have felt? The one searching for you should be some close relative, not an old boyfriend you had left, expecting never to see him again. There was something intrusive about this. He turned again and came up the next row.

As he walked, he began to believe that what he was doing was spending the night tromping around in an empty field, getting burrs and seeds stuck to a pair of pants that had cost about two days’ pay, and scuffing a pair of shoes that cost more. Stillman had paid for them, he thought. He can decide how they get wrecked. Walker glanced to his right to watch Stillman’s light sweeping back and forth ahead of him as he trudged on.

There was a quiet rhythm to the night sounds. Walker could hear unseen crickets chirping, the distant call of some invisible night bird, the swish of dry plants against his legs. He set his pace by the sound of his own footsteps, methodically marching the distance out and marching back.

He heard a sharp, shrill whistle, and turned his head. Stillman’s light had stopped moving. It shone straight down into the weeds. Walker heard the whistle again. “No,” he whispered. He began to walk through the weeds toward the light. “Let it be the money,” he thought. “Let it be nothing at all.”

He came near Stillman and looked down cautiously, letting his light slowly move toward Stillman’s feet. He could see nothing. “What is it?”

Stillman moved his foot and a clump of weeds fell over. “That,” he said. “Somebody did some digging here, and then replaced some of the plants. In a few days, they probably would have taken hold again.”

Walker was silent, waiting.

Stillman sighed. “We’re not going to do any digging, so you can forget about that. We’re going to have to concoct a very convincing bullshit story and then locate the nearest cop so we can tell it to him.”

It took a few minutes to reach the next town. As soon as they passed the sign that said
WALLERTON, POP. 953
, time seemed to stop. There were lights on in the tiny police station, but when they went inside they discovered that the man on duty at the desk was not the watch commander. He was just there to answer the telephone and then walk across the station to the radio desk and ask the woman who served as night dispatcher to put aside the book she was reading and summarize the call to the three patrol cars that were out on the major highways waiting for speeders.

It took Stillman only a couple of minutes to convince the desk officer to make the walk across the room, but it took nearly fifteen minutes for the patrol car to pull up outside.

The two patrol officers climbed the steps into the station, arranging their nightsticks and hitching their belts. The shorter one opened the glass door and went straight to Stillman and Walker. It took Walker a second to see that she was a woman. She had short, dark hair tied back tightly, and the body armor under her shirt gave her torso a square, plump look. The other cop was a tall, rangy man in his forties who had a weathered, sunburned face and crow’s-foot wrinkles beside his eyes, as though he spent his days on a tractor. Walker read their name tags.

The female, whose tag said
ORMOND
, asked, “Are you the gentlemen who found something in a field?”

“That’s right,” said Stillman.

Walker waited for the next round of questions, but it didn’t come. She said, “Why don’t you show us where it is?” then turned and walked toward the door.

Walker didn’t like getting into the back seat of the patrol car. There were no door handles, and there was a metal cage that separated the back from the front. But Stillman slid in and Walker joined him.

Stillman said, “It’s the field on the corner of Locksley and Waterman Road.”

“The old Buckland place,” muttered the male policeman.

Walker closed his eyes. Things were dreamlike—not quick or startling enough to be a nightmare, just a dream with a slow, growing sense of familiarity as things got worse and worse. It would have to be called something like “the old Buckland place.”

“How did you happen to be out there this time of night?” asked the woman.

“We’re insurance investigators from McClaren Life and Casualty in San Francisco. We’ve been following a suspect in a fraud investigation,” said Stillman. “We had a lead that she was in the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, but when we got there she had just left. We looked at the routes she might have taken to get out, and this one seemed most promising.”

“It did?” The surprise in her voice was what Walker felt. “Why is that?”

“A lot of reasons,” Stillman said. “For one thing, in a couple of miles you’re in Wisconsin. It’s a new state, where she hasn’t been seen before, with lots of rural roads all the way north to Duluth, Minnesota.”

“You think she’s going to Duluth?”

“No, I think she may be planning to keep going all the way to Canada,” said Stillman. “Now, you and I know that going to Canada is one of the worst ways to stay hidden. Americans don’t look any different from the locals, but the locals know the difference, and anybody looking for you has about a tenth of the faces to look at. But this is an inexperienced, first-offense white-collar suspect. If this turns out to be nothing, we’ll probably take a plane and wait for her at International Falls.”

The policewoman didn’t assent or deny it. She just said, “What kind of vehicle description?”

“Blue Pontiac Grand Am was the last one she rented, but that was in Denver, and just because it hasn’t been returned yet doesn’t mean she’s still got it. We thought maybe what she’s been doing is avoiding the interstates and taking back roads.”

“This used to be a main road,” said the male cop. Walker thought he detected a little resentment. It was all part of the dream, and this place stood for all of the small towns that had been bypassed by the interstate highways and had slowly withered, leaving ruined barns and a few embittered loyalists.

Stillman seemed to Walker to have said too much already. He seemed to be giving them a thousand chances to catch him in a lie. Walker held his breath, hoping the policeman would fill in the time, tell Stillman all about the way the town once was, and the betrayal that the federal government and the politicians in Springfield and the Chicago business interests had pulled forty years ago.

The cop said no more. The car stopped, and Walker saw the sagging skeleton of the barn to his right. The female cop suddenly backed up and swerved to the side in reverse, then turned off the engine. The male cop took the microphone off the dash and said, “Unit One-two-eight. Show us Code Six at the junction of Locksley and Waterman, out.”

Then Stillman was leading them back into the field with his flashlight, following the trampled weeds.

Suddenly Ormond’s flashlight came on. It was a four-battery model that he had earlier mistaken for a club, and its beam was incredibly wide and bright. It flashed ahead for a moment, then swept across the field toward the area Walker had searched, and lingered there. “What were you doing over there?”

“That was me,” said Walker.

She turned to study him as though she had not seen him before. “What were you doing?”

“We split the field up and started on both ends.”

“What did you expect to find?”

Walker shrugged nervously. “Best case—maybe she buried the money out here. Worst case—” He realized he had probably made a mistake, so he changed his sentence. “I guess I don’t know what that is.”

She stared at him for a moment. “You don’t, huh?” Her eyes bored into him long enough to determine that he had no answer, then she turned away and followed Stillman.

“I see it,” called the male cop. “Somebody’s been digging, all right.”

Walker followed the others at a distance. He stayed on the periphery of the bright area cast by their flashlights. The beam of Officer Ormond’s flashlight suddenly transfixed his chest. He knew its purpose was to illuminate his face without making him squint and turn away. She asked, “How much money was it?”

Walker answered, “Twelve million dollars, roughly. We think she was carrying about a million of it.”

The light didn’t move. “I’m still not clear on why you think she would pick the old Buckland place to bury it on.”

Stillman intervened. “It was my hunch. We drove out of Chicago, and this was the first place we saw where you could be fairly sure of getting it done and not get noticed.”

“You agree with that?” she asked Walker.

“Yes,” he said.

“What made you think she’d bury it at all?”

Walker hesitated. “We . . . I think she knew we were close behind her. She wouldn’t want to have it on her.”

The two police officers looked at each other for a moment. It was the male who spoke. “It’ll be first light in an hour or so.”

Ormond squatted and touched the ground, then fiddled with the stem of a plant that wasn’t rooted. “We’ll have to get some people out here.”

They drove back to the station in silence. Walker and Stillman sat on a long wooden bench, drank stale, acidic coffee, and watched the police officers make six or seven telephone calls from the desks on the far side of the counter. The sky outside the glass doors of the station achieved a pale, gray glow, and others began to arrive. There were two men in a pickup truck who wore blue jeans and baseball caps, then a couple of other cops, who went behind the counter to talk to Ormond and her partner with their backs to Stillman and Walker, then left again.

After Walker had finished his third cup of coffee, Ormond came around the counter and said, “They’re already getting started out there. I imagine you’d like to be there.” Walker could barely imagine anything he would like less, but she had set off for her car again, so he and Stillman followed and climbed into the back seat.

When they arrived, there was another police car pulled up at the side of the road. There was yellow
POLICE LINE
tape strung on fresh wooden stakes in a ring around the spot Stillman had found. A cop was taking Polaroid photographs of the ground while the two men in baseball caps leaned on shovels outside the ring. When he finished, they stepped over the tape and began to dig. Stillman, Walker, and the two police officers stood along the road and watched.

The policeman with the camera came out of the field and leaned on the door of Ormond’s patrol car. Walker decided he must be at the beginning of his shift, because his uniform looked newly pressed, with the creases all sharp and clear. The cop said philosophically, “You never know on these things. Last year we got called out because a lady tipped us her neighbor had dug a big hole in his back yard. We went over, and sure enough—fresh dirt. We were in a real grim mood digging it up until somebody’s shovel hit an antler.”

He slapped his thigh and laughed. “He’d hit a buck on the highway, and figured the meat shouldn’t go to waste. But then he got scared and figured, it being out of season and all, he better do something.”

A half hour later, the sun was above the horizon beyond the field, and the low angle seemed to make it impossible for Walker to keep it out of his eyes. Ormond walked out of the field, opened her car door, and sat behind the wheel. She picked up the microphone and closed the door. As she spoke into the microphone, Walker could not see her lips, but her eyes never moved from his. After a minute she stepped out of the car.

“Have you got a picture of the suspect with you?”

“It’s back in town in our car,” said Stillman.

“Then one of you will have to come take a look.”