Stalking Death (38 page)

Maybe it was sleuth's intuition or maybe the fact that people on this campus came out of the dark and knocked others on the head, but I decided to be careful. Instead of jumping out, slamming the door, and bounding into the building, I sat and studied the area around the building for movement. All was still. I shut off the Jeep's interior lights and slipped quietly out, not quite closing the door.

The Security office was to my right, but the nearest entrance seemed to be about twenty feet to the left. Set into the wall between huge overhead doors was a regular door, looking like Baby Bear's door next to the others. Through its small window, I could see into the cavernous interior of the garage, lit enough for security if not for good visibility. There were variously-sized green trucks and vans with the St. Matthews seal in gold letters. At the far end of the building were campus security cars with light bars on their roofs and beyond them, a door in the end wall marked SECURITY.

The garage was empty. I tried the knob, expecting it to be locked, but it turned in my hand. Why should I be surprised? Security around here was, depending on your point of view, notoriously—or reliably—lax. I entered, expecting any moment that someone would materialize from behind one of the hulking trucks demanding to know why I was there.

My footsteps sounded unnaturally loud on the cement floor as I headed toward Security. A sudden, resounding clang from the other end of the building sent me darting behind the fender of a large truck. The clang was followed by a mechanical roar as one of the doors rose slowly on its tracks and a van drove in. A man hummed to himself as he spent several minutes opening and slamming the van's doors. Then his humming was drowned out by the descent of the garage door. I heard him leave the building and the big room fell silent again.

My pounding heart was as loud in my ears as the door had been. I straightened up, turned, and ran smack into a small car completely covered with a blue plastic tarp, which had been hidden from my view by the truck. Carefully, I raised the tarp. Even in dim light, I could see the badly damaged right front and smears of telltale red paint. It was the same small gray car that had run into me earlier. I dropped the tarp, crept quietly to the back, and copied down the license number. Now what was I supposed to do?

Obviously, it no longer made sense to try and see Frank Woodson. He knew the police were looking for this car and how it had been damaged. Hiding a car used in a deliberate assault wasn't minor. If the car was here, he was part of what was going on. He and Chambers and the Neo-Skulls.

Finding the car here, and its implications, suddenly let me see the picture in the jigsaw puzzle I'd been working on. Most of the picture, anyway. If I put together what Jen and Lindsay had said, the note on my windshield, Lindsay's comments tonight and her housemother's peculiar behavior, Chambers' 'refusal to get it' finally made sense. He got it just fine.

He was indifferent to Shondra's situation, and to the possibility of a crisis involving female students on his campus, because he'd been letting them be victimized all along. He had managed to keep the lid on thus far, and he was arrogant enough to believe that if he calmed the parents with that letter and silenced Shondra, things could go on that way. Keeping Alasdair and his friends out of trouble was worth millions.

That explained the way he'd handled the stalking part of it, and another question that had troubled me—why they wanted Suzanne instead of me. Not because she would be more accommodating but because, if they fed her a carefully vetted segment, she was less likely to connect with students, as I had, who would tell her the truth.

Was I being unfair to Suzanne? I didn't think so. She would have kept her temper and stayed polite. She also wouldn't have pushed them as hard toward the truth as I had, or gone forth as forcefully to check their stories, and so she wouldn't have learned what I had. Because she dealt with schools on day-today issues and I came in when there was trouble. Which is why she didn't get knocked on the head and charged by small gray cars. Would she have questioned their investigation? Believed Shondra? That I didn't know.

It was a peculiar truth to be facing in the chilly dimness of a cavernous garage, but insight comes when it comes. Now another hard question loomed. Why had Chambers regained his arrogant equilibrium so fast after Alasdair's death? He'd gone off to the hospital in a shaken state and returned remarkably restored. What had happened while he was gone?

One possible explanation was that MacGregor still promised the money if they named the building after Alasdair. That would have freed him up to concentrate on his crisis, yet he'd still been too distracted to deal with the issues. So what was it? Was I giving him too much credit by assuming that, undistracted, he would have handled things competently?

Down at the far end of the garage, the van's cooling engine gave a sharp, metallic ping, bringing me back to the tarp-covered car. In my heedless youth, I might have tried to sort this out for myself. Now I had no problem interposing the professionals between myself and the bad guys. The car that had been used to attack me and Shondra was being stored in a campus facility. Under these circumstances, I was not constrained by any duty to my client. The police needed to know it was here, no matter what questions might ensue. And cops meant Bushnell.

Much more carefully now, I walked to the door, eager to skedaddle back to the relative safety of The Swan, dump the whole mess, including Shondra, in Bushnell's lap, gather up Suzanne and get out of town. I had my hand on the knob when I heard voices outside. I ducked down below the window and pressed my ear against the door.

One of the speakers had his back to me, his words an indistinct mumble. The other, facing me, was Woodson. "I don't know whose car it is. It doesn't belong to any of my people. Could be a student with an illegal car, looking for someplace to leave it overnight. They do that all the time."

The other speaker must have turned, because suddenly I heard his voice, quite distinctly, saying, "It was just an incredibly stupid idea to use that car instead of dumping it somewhere immediately. Now we've got to find a way to get rid of it. Permanently. And without anyone noticing." Todd Chambers. "What on earth were you boys thinking?"

"You told us to get Shondra."

"Not you, for God's sakes. Not in a public place, using
that
car."

"Fuck, man. Frank said follow her and keep our eyes open for chances. That big broad hadn't been so fast, we'd have done it, too. One less nigger to foul up the landscape."

"Minority, Alasdair," Woodson corrected. "Minority."

Until that moment, I'd never understood the phrase 'makes my blood run cold,' in a literal sense. Now, the full enormity of what I was overhearing hit and iciness jangled through me. If Chambers and Woodson were talking to Alasdair MacGregor, if, as Jen had said, he was alive, then someone else had been beaten to death and dumped into that fire. And they all knew it.

I clenched my teeth against the shakes and listened. "You aren't even supposed to be around anymore, Alasdair," Chambers said. "That was the deal we made. We've really gone out on a limb for you here, and you're screwing everything up. Suppose someone sees you?"

"They'll think they're seeing a ghost. Everyone knows I'm dead. Besides, Toddy, I'm having way too much fun with this."

"Well, we're not," Woodson snapped. "You were supposed to leave this morning. Your grandfather hires a car and driver and you don't show. Someone's going to see you, or hear your voice, and it'll blow this wide open. If that happens, Alasdair, you're not walking away from this anymore than the rest of us. You understand that, don't you?"

"Oh, please, Woody, spare me your tale of drama and sacrifice. It's not like you both aren't getting what you want out of this. You get me, your chief trouble-maker, off your hands. Once I'm gone, Todd and Charles "Mister God" Argenti can go back to realizing their dream of taking this place back to the dark ages. You get rid of Shondra Jones, and you get Grandfather's money for your arts center. With
my
name on it."

Alasdair gave a derisive snort of laughter. "Toddy, here, loses the principle thorn in his side and can go back to humoring his crazy wife. The fact that Shondra has pictures of Woody screwing a student conveniently disappears along with Shondra, and his job is secure. So don't whine to me about the risks you're taking. Life's full of risks."

"Not at this level, it isn't," Chambers said. "To you, everything is a big joke, but we've got a lot at stake. We still haven't found that camera or those pictures or Shondra."

"She's got the pictures of Woody boning that little piglet? His wrinkled old ass pumping? She got that?" Another manic hoot of laughter. Alasdair must be on high something. Shondra had mentioned drugs. "It's almost funny, isn't it, that while I'm targeting her, having my fun, she's targeting you. And you thought what?" His voice rose, "That you could... how did Toddy put it? Contain her by making everyone think she was crazy?"

"Watch yourself, son." There was a warning in Woodson's voice.

"What have I got to worry about, Woody? I've got immunity. You do anything to me, you both hurt yourselves. I'm only good to you alive. That's what grandfather said, and that's what grandfather meant."

There was a loud crash, like someone had kicked something big into the side of the building, and Alasdair gave his crazy laugh again.

"Stop that, you idiot." Rage boiled in Chambers' voice. "There are security guys in there. You want them to come out to see what's going on and find you?"

I wished I had my tape recorder to capture this conversation. I also wished I possessed the ability to become invisible. Sooner or later, they were going to come in here and do something about that gray car. They couldn't leave it here. Someone would notice. Maybe Woodson could control his own people, but there were so many other people in and out during the day, and people are naturally curious, especially about damaged civilian cars parked in a business facility. About anything under a tarp.

I backed away from the door, looking for a place to hide. Inside a vehicle or under it were obvious places. But if they were obvious to me, they'd also be obvious to anyone looking for me. Woodson was smart. Pretty soon he'd connect me to that Jeep. Too bad I wasn't tiny like Suzanne. There were a hundred places she could have hidden. Finally I found it. A curved snowplow blade pushed up against a back wall. Where it curved away from the wall there was a space just my size. Quick as a wink, I wiggled into it.

It was dusty and airless, with cold metal on one side and cold cinderblock on the other. Still, it felt relatively secure. Who knew how long I might have to be in here? One thing was sure.

I hadn't found it a minute too soon. I'd just gotten settled when the door opened and their voices were in the room. I muffled my breath with a sleeve and listened.

Their voices rose and fell, hollow and indistinct through the metal, as they decided what they'd do about the car. The passage of time felt physical, each minute stroking me slowly, teasingly, from head to toe as the chilly metal sucked heat from my body. I became nervously aware of two things. First, that where I'd parked might be blocking them from moving the gray car out of the building. Second, that my phone was unreachable in a lower pocket, and when I wasn't at The Swan, Suzanne would call.

"So where the hell we gonna dump it?" Woodson said. "You got any clever ideas?"

"Just out there in the woods somewhere," Chambers said.

"Out there in the woods somewhere? You think we're what? Up in Alaska or something? You have any idea how many people are through there every day? Not just our kids, out for a run or looking for someplace to screw? Half the damned town uses these woods. You've been here two years and you haven't noticed?"

"Douse it with gasoline and burn it?"

"And get every fire department from six towns?" Woodson sneered. "And that would be if we hadn't already had a suspicious fire. Another fire on this campus and we'll probably have the governor and the National Guard called out."

"Somewhere else then," Chambers said. "What about those... what are they called? Quarries? Aren't there some of those around? Someplace nice and deep. Dump it off the edge and that little car is never seen again."

"That would be fine," Woodson said, "if you know of any quarries around here. I've been here most of my life and I don't."

"Justin Palmer's family's got a summer place pretty close by, it's on a lake that's really deep," Alasdair suggested. "They own, like, all the land around the lake, so nobody's going to be around."

"You know how to find it?" Woodson asked.

"Sorta."

"You've got to do better than sorta. We can't go driving this thing all over hell and gone, trying to find the place. The cops are looking for this car. Assuming we can figure out how to get there, you know for sure that no one's gonna be around, no one is living there?"

"He said it was empty. Before the thing with that girl... before all this shit... bunch of us were going up there this weekend... have a party. We do that lots."

The thing with the girl? Bingo. The puzzle was complete. The shudder that ran through me wasn't from cold metal but from their cold hearts. The abduction and assault on a 12-year old girl had been all over the news. This was what had made Alasdair's departure necessary. Something more serious than harassment of female students and date rape. Chambers had taken that in stride. This was gang rape of a child.