Jericho's Fall (28 page)

Rebecca saw his slight smile, remembered Audrey, felt her blood boiling.

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No.”

“You think I’m exaggerating.”

“No.” He toyed with his root beer. “I wish you were crazy, Beck. Seriously. But what you’re telling me—well, it jibes with a few other things I’ve observed.” A hard glance. “Not that there aren’t any problems with your story. There are. Those lights in the garage, for instance. Even if somebody had a device in there that called up your cell phone, why should some red light flash every time? It’s too convenient. No, Beck. What you saw sounds a lot more like an electric eye. You probably tripped a silent alarm, maybe more than one.”

“What about the footsteps?”

Pete took a bite of his sandwich. He shook his head. “Look. Mr. Ainsley was in bed. His daughters were in the house. I think your mind played a trick or two.”

“Maybe.” She watched the street for a bit. Nighttime traffic was light. She did not see how an intruder could have gotten in. Pete was right. She had simply been spooked. “Okay. Let’s say you’re right. I was alone in the garage, and I tripped an alarm. That means Jericho knows I was in the garage.”

“Somebody presumably does.”

Beck did not like this at all. She did not want to worry about a
somebody
out there. But Phil Agadakos and Lewiston Clark, in their different ways, had already warned her that somebody was. “Whatever’s in those crates,” she finally said, “it must be pretty important.”

“Seems that way.” His soft drink was nearly gone. He took off the plastic top, drained what was left. “Beck, look. The only reason you got into the garage in the first place is that Mr. Ainsley gave you the combination.
He’s not a man who makes mistakes. He wanted you to see whatever’s in there.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.” Drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “Look. Let me tell you my side of the story, and maybe we can put them together.”

“Please.”

Behind the glasses, his eyes were no longer boyish. They were no longer amused. They were serious, but also—frightened. “About six months ago—say, October—some men came to see the sheriff. Dangerous men. Not dangerous in themselves, but men who could order other men to be dangerous. It’s just a quality some men have. You can sense it. Their presence implies legions of hard men, at their beck and call. So, anyway, three of them took the sheriff to a very long lunch. Not here—over in Vail. When the sheriff got back, he was—I don’t know—excited, I guess is the word. Like he was moving up in the world. He called in his top deputies and he said we had big work ahead of us. His number two used to be a woman named Lofton. Very by the book. Lofton asked if it was official, and when we would get the paperwork. And the sheriff, well, he got annoyed. He said he wasn’t answering any questions, he just wanted our cooperation.”

“Cooperation in what?”

Again the deputy hesitated, and Beck had the sense that she had run up against not so much a desire to keep a secret as the reluctance to break a confidence. He was a loyal man, about to be disloyal. “The sheriff told us there would be a whole lot of strangers coming through town the next few weeks. They would be going for drives, taking pictures, wandering the mountains. He wanted us to give them a wide berth. That was what he said, Beck. ‘A wide berth.’ A couple of us asked exactly what he meant by that. The sheriff said he meant what he said. No hassling, no harassment. That’s what he said. And Lofton, well, she asked how we could tell which strangers we were allowed to harass and which ones we weren’t. The sheriff got hot. I guess he hadn’t thought of that. Then she asked when we were allowed to go back to doing our
jobs and protecting our town. The sheriff said we would be doing our jobs, we’d just be doing them with a certain measured deliberation. That was what he said, Beck. ‘Measured deliberation.’ Couldn’t possibly be his own phrase: Garvey doesn’t talk like that. Probably got it out of some memo his visitors held under his nose.”

“Memo?”

“They had government written all over them, Beck.” Again his hesitation. “That’s why I was so evasive when you asked before about if there was anything federal going on in town. After our briefing, the sheriff and Lofton got together, and then she read us the riot act in two languages. Told us not to discuss our orders with a soul, on pain of losing our jobs, and maybe worse.” He took another bite, chewed. “Lofton quit a month later. Got a better offer from another town, she said. Moved to Leadville. But I looked her up. She’s not working in law enforcement. She doesn’t even work for the town. She sells gimcracks in a little tourist shop. She’s making maybe one-third what she was making here. Whatever’s happening, she knew more than we did, and she didn’t want any part of it.”

“And that’s not all, is it?”

He shook his head. “That investigator. Pesky. I visited him in the clinic after Mr. Ainsley attacked him. A very informative conversation. Pesky wanted to know if we were going to charge Mr. Ainsley. I told him it wasn’t up to me, it was up to the State’s Attorney. And Pesky, well, he said in that case a lot of people were going to be calling the State’s Attorney in the next few days. They wouldn’t want Mr. Ainsley charged. They wouldn’t want him locked up. They’d want him to stay right where he was, at Stone Heights. I assumed he meant Mr. Ainsley’s political connections would be trying to protect him. Now I’m not so sure.” He tried to sip his root beer, momentarily forgetting that it was empty. “And then—before I left?—Pesky offered me money. Not a bribe. Not exactly. Not for any dereliction of duty. He just said, if I should happen to find out what Mr. Ainsley was hiding, and where he was hiding it, my family and I would never have to worry about money again. I told him where to stuff his money” He nodded his head,
glumly. “Anyway, that’s why I believe your story. Because now everything makes sense.”

Even in the darkness, the street seemed to brighten. Her breath came easier. The music from the radio was suddenly catchy and smooth. Not to be insane was a marvelous thing.

“So—what are we going to do about it?” she asked.

The faint smile returned. “
We?”

“About this, Pete. About what’s going on.” She covered his hand with hers. “Not…the other.”

“A guy can dream.”

“Not about this.”

The deputy nodded, and took his hand back. “You have to understand, Beck. There’s only so much I can do.” He looked away. “I have a good job in Bethel, and, well, the sheriff—”

“I understand.”

“But I have an idea.”

“Okay.”

“First, let’s figure something out. Your CIA friend told you that Mr. Ainsley’s working with somebody in town, right? It’s not you, and, believe me, it’s not me. So who’s left?”

Beck had been giving this a lot of thought. “Not Corinda. It’s too obvious. Not Miss Kelly. She kind of stands out. It has to be somebody he can see all the time without anybody noticing.”

He frowned. “That’s a short list, Beck. Brian Navarro. Jimmy Lobb. That’s it.”

“I don’t think it’s Navarro. He was too free with Jericho’s business.”

“He bailed out Pesky. At Jericho’s request.”

“Too obvious. Too open.”

“So it has to be Jimmy Lobb.” He grimaced. “Or it was.” He hunched forward. “His tox screen was negative. Did the sheriff happen to mention that? Mr. Lobb was not drunk. He was not on drugs. He ran off the road. I don’t know, Beck. This is getting a little dangerous.”

“I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I think that’s good. Fifteen minutes ago, I was ready to try to get
you to stick around a little longer. But now—well, look at it this way. Say Mr. Lobb was helping Mr. Ainsley Mr. Lobb’s dead. So who takes his place? You seem to be the only one he trusts, Beck.”

“I told him no.”

“Maybe not everybody got the news.” Seeing her stricken look, the deputy gestured her closer. “Beck, look. I’m worried about you. This goes a little bit against my interest, but I won’t be sure you’re safe until you’re on that plane tomorrow.” He hesitated. “That is, if you’re sure you’re going.”

“I have a whole other life, Pete.”

“It’s possible to raise good kids in Bethel”—he stopped, offered that boyish grin. “Sorry. Sorry. Look. Just promise me one thing. If you run into any trouble tonight—even the hint of trouble—you’ll call me. Okay?”

She smiled. “Sure. But town’s forty-five minutes away. If there’s trouble—”

“I’ll be at Stone Heights in half an hour.”

Outside the car, they hugged for a while.

“You be careful,” he said.

“You’re doing the hard part.”

Pete held her by the shoulders, watched her face. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said.

This time it was Beck who drove off first, too distracted to think about romance. She was thinking, instead, of the East Coast number that occurred most frequently in the sheriff’s phone records for the past month. A number that appeared in the list of recent calls on Rebecca’s own cell phone.

The sheriff had been talking to Margaret Ainsley.

CHAPTER 26
The Hireling

(i)

Beck cruised along Main Street all the way to the elementary school, swept past the clinic, turned for the return trip. Twice, three times, she circled the town.

Aunt Maggie.

The junior Senator from Vermont had been in regular touch with Sheriff Garvey, including a call, according to the records, on the night Mr. Pesky was arrested. The game had just changed so dramatically that Beck could no longer follow the state of play. A United States Senator from one state did not call up the sheriff of a tiny county in another state: not unless he was facing a threat with the potential to shake the nation; or at least a political career.

Margaret Ainsley had asked Rebecca to be on the look out for classified documents in Jericho’s possession, and Beck had assumed that the Senator was simply accommodating a request from the Attorney General. But now it seemed that Aunt Maggie was pursuing an agenda of her own. She was reaching into Bethel and commanding a man Jericho considered an ally.

All to get her hands on whatever her cousin was concealing.

At a stoplight, Rebecca heard a horn honk. She jumped, but it was only Corinda, owner of the café, who had pulled up beside her and was rolling down the window of her car. Beck did the same, smiled, and
blew an unenthusiastic kiss and said yes, Jericho was doing fine, and, yes, certainly, she would let him know that Corinda had asked.

“Ask him to call me,” said Corinda, as if the rules prohibited her from initiating contact. Perhaps they did.

The light changed. Corinda gave a saucy wave and sped away.

“Jericho and his women,” Beck muttered, with her own mother’s disapproval.

But, of course, she had been one herself. She remembered the terrible day when Jacqueline made the pilgrimage to Stone Heights, hoping to shame her only child into coming home to New Jersey. She stayed at a boarding house in town—she would not be caught dead sleeping under the roof of a man like Jericho Ainsley, whom she considered the next thing to a statutory rapist. Once Jericho realized that his charm was wasted on Beck’s mother, he made himself scarce, for he never enjoyed the presence of women he could not dominate. Jacqueline begged and cajoled and bribed. She played every trump in her hand, from I’m-getting-old-and-I-need-you to you’re-being-a-slutty-whore to no-man-will-marry-you-after-something-like-this. Nothing worked. Beck was enjoying her newfound freedom too much after the imprisonment of life with her strict parents, even if the freedom was, really, only another sort of prison—

Her cell phone rang.

She pulled over to the side, looked at the screen. An actual number came up—not one she recognized, to be sure, but at this point any port would do.

“Hello?”

“Beck, it’s Lewiston Clark. Don’t hang up.”

(ii)

Another night, Rebecca told herself grimly, another clandestine meeting with a man in the town of Bethel. Tonight, actually, this was her second. They met at McDonald’s, not Arby’s; and yet, sitting across
from Lewiston Clark, she could not repress the sense of being caught in a temporal loop, repeating the same experience over and over.

“You’re wrong about me,” he said, eyes haunted now, the confidence shot. “I didn’t lie. About Jericho, I mean. About working with him.”

“He denied it.”

“But you’re taking his word over mine. Why would you do that? I know you loved him, but he’s spent a lifetime lying. At least hear me out before you decide I’m the one who’s at fault.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have all night, Mr. Clark. Before you tell me your story, maybe you should tell me why you want to.”

He was trying to look in every direction at once. He had shaved his beard. He had ditched the gaudy red Explorer and was driving some sort of rent-a-wreck. She did not understand why he was still in town.

“They’re after me,” he finally said. “I need your help.”

“My help?”

A tight nod, Adam’s apple bobbing. “You can’t be touched, but I can. I’m in serious trouble, Beck. But I think, if you’ll just talk to Jericho, he can call off the dogs.”

“Jericho!”

“He’s the one who hired me in the first place. Now people are trying to kill me.”

Beck opened her mouth to dismiss his words as melodrama, then shut it with a snap: she was in no fit state to accuse someone else of seeing monsters under the bed. And so she listened. The tale was part whine, part complaint, part cri de coeur. And it was quickly told. After he lost the lawsuit over his Kennedy book, Clark had found himself suddenly without a publisher. Nobody would touch him. Then Jericho came along. Not personally. An intermediary. With an offer. He was to dig up all the dirt he could about Scondell Bloom. Every fact, but also every rumor. Beat the bushes. Use whatever tools came to hand. Hire people if he needed them: there was a budget, said Clark, and not a modest one. His fee, too, would be handsome. He had to sign various undertakings not to disclose anything to anyone but the intermediary,
but he had no trouble with that. When his research was done, when it was all turned over to the client, he was free to write his book, subject only to the client’s editing.