Stalking Death (43 page)

He came back with a blanket and wrapped it around me. "You should have let them admit you," he said. "You're a mess."

"I just need to rest," I said. "Hospitals never let you do that. They're too busy taking care of you to leave you alone. Trust me. I'm kind of an expert on this subject." The blanket felt nice. I pulled it tighter around me and leaned back, resting my head against the wall. My eyelids slammed down like lead shutters. "How did you..."

"Those two girls," he said. "Shondra and Lindsay called me right after you did. You must have said something to them about going to see Woodson. Or maybe Shondra guessed. At any rate, they went over to Security looking for you. I guess they felt guilty about running away. They looked through the window and overheard enough to know what was going on. One of them had my card, so they called me."

Bushnell handed me the tea. "The last thing you said to me was Justin Palmer's camp, so I asked them about that. They told me who Justin was. About Alasdair and his friends taking girls to the camp. Jen Reilly knew a lot more than she was saying. Can't blame the girl, though. She was terrified of them. We found Justin Palmer and made him give us directions." It didn't sound like they'd asked politely.

"Look, I know that right now you're probably feeling anything but heroic, but you have no idea how much good you've done here. What you've helped put a stop to."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I'll explain. But first... you're probably going to resent this... I called your husband. I told him he had the bravest, smartest and fastest wife this department has ever seen. You know what he said?"

Bushnell shook his head in wonder, as if he couldn't imagine a marriage like ours. "He said 'and the most beautiful. Or she was. How many stitches this time?' I told him ten, they wouldn't show, and that you were going to be fine. He says to tell you that he's got the rest of the body parts."

"That's good news," I said. "He's really not upset?"

"Oh. He's upset all right. What did you expect? He made me promise to see that you got a huge breakfast, a hot bath and went right to bed." I could swear Bushnell actually blushed. "I don't think he meant I was supposed to personally supervise those last two."

Caretaking at a distance. That was my Andre. I couldn't quite imagine telling some sister cop to give him breakfast and a bath and tuck him into bed. I considered those my prerogatives. But if I couldn't be there? Maybe the breakfast part—he was a man who loved to eat—but that was all. Andre was a shower guy, not a bath taker, and given the way we liked to shower, I wasn't delegating that job to anyone. Nor the going to bed part. Maybe I wasn't as easygoing as my spouse.

"You're smiling," he said.

"I told you I was a newly wed."

"Yeah?" His eyebrows rose. "I don't know how he can let you..."

We were getting along okay right now and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn't have the emotional capacity to handle anything negative. There was plenty of that coming down the road as we debriefed this thing. "I don't, either," I agreed. "It's just one of the great things about Andre. He respects who I am."

I changed the subject. "Shondra and Lindsay and Jen," I almost said, 'my girls,' "are they okay?"

"Better than okay, I think. They're pretty proud of themselves for having the initiative to act when all the adults were sitting on their hands. Shondra's happy about her brother, and..." His serious face brightened. "They all want to know how they can be you when they grow up."

"That's hogwash. No one, in or out of their right mind, would want to go through this." I held up my bandaged hands. "Or feel like this."

"I meant being courageous enough to stick to your guns and in the process uncovering a festering mess of abuse and corruption, getting an innocent man out of jail, rehabilitating the reputation of an outstanding female athlete. Instead of folding your tent and going home to write some dull report."

"Right now, going home to write some dull reports looks very attractive."

"I'll bet it does." He scooped his jacket off the back of a chair. "You want to get that breakfast now?"

"What time is it?"

"Coming up on 0600."

"Can I keep the blanket?"

"I'd like to see someone try and take it from you while I'm around."

He held the door for me and I trudged through. Everything, including my feet, was sore and tender. I felt about eighty. And not a spry eighty, either. I was heading toward the lobby when he put an arm lightly around my shoulders and steered me in a different direction. "This way, unless you're in the mood to play Meet the Press."

"Can't say that I am."

His car was parked outside the door, engine running, Gabriel Lavigne behind the wheel. It had actually been Lavigne's chest I'd run into, his hands that had gripped me tight. His name was probably indelibly imprinted on my cheek. I didn't know. I wasn't about to look in any mirrors. I was teetering on the verge of a plunge into deep self-pity. I didn't need anything to accelerate my fall.

Lavigne observed my cheery face and the way my chic beige blanket complimented my nausea green scrubs and turned up the heat. Bushnell leaned in and carefully fastened my seatbelt around me. TLC, cop-style. Then he got in the back.

"We're going out for breakfast, Gabe," he said. "Ida's, I think?"

"Yes, sir," Lavigne said, and we were rolling.

We ate in a booth way at the back, the kind that had high walls for privacy, and following Andre's instructions, Bushnell ordered me the biggest goldarned Lumber Jill breakfast on the menu. Their own selections weren't exactly modest. There's nothing like a good dust-up with the bad guys to whet the appetite. With two bandaged hands, it was like eating with mittens on, but I managed. When food is available and I've got the time, I'm pretty good at finding ways to get food into my mouth.

After a lengthy session of unbroken eating, I unmittened my fork and looked at Bushnell. "Alasdair... is he... did he?" I knew it had taken four or five bullets to stop him, but he'd still been alive when they put him in the ambulance.

"He'll never wipe his ass with his right hand again," Bushnell said bluntly, "which may not matter since he'll probably have to shit in a bag, but he'll be around to stand trial."

I looked down at my decimated pancakes, the oozing remnants of my eggs, the few lonely potatoes scattering the vast expanse of plate, glad I'd finished eating. I wished I hadn't asked. I wasn't ready to process this. Still way too close to all the sensations of Alasdair chasing me through the night and the awful toll that level of fear took. It was wrong to want another person dead. I knew that. I also knew that that was the only way I, and a lot of other people whose lives he'd messed with, would ever feel completely safe.

"Hey." Gabriel Lavigne, who to my dazed and weary eyes really did look more like an angel than a cop, set his warm hand very gently on my arm. His smile was tender, his expression slightly worried. "You don't want to talk about this right now, you don't have to. You went through a real bad time last night. It's okay to wait until you're ready. Don't push yourself just because you're so responsible."

Okay. So I couldn't talk about Alasdair. Stalker. Rapist, I now realized. And cold-blooded murderer. But I wanted the rest of the story. "That boy... the kid who went missing. He was the body in the fire?" Bushnell nodded. "How did Alasdair find him?"

Bushnell set down his fork and leaned forward to answer, but I held up a hand. "There's another whole piece of this that I'm missing. About the girl. They kept talking about a girl, and something Alasdair had done, as a reason he needed to disappear? That's the 12-year-old over in Keene?"

Bushnell nodded again. "MacGregor is a monster," he said.

While I was being poked and prodded and x-rayed and cleaned up and stitched, they'd been out interviewing. Putting the pieces together. Never mind that it had been the middle of the night. The wheels of justice never stop. Now they took turns explaining it to me. "The body in the fire was a local kid... a townie... used to deliver pizzas and subs to the dorms. Also sell some dope. Alasdair and his buddies were customers. Sometimes the kid hung out with them. He was a nice kid, malleable, kind of a loser. They were boarding students and couldn't have a car. He had a car."

"They wouldn't have killed him just so they could use his car. It doesn't even make sense that they... or even Alasdair, would kill someone just so he could quietly disappear. There's so much money in that family, Alasdair could just have left." I tried to puzzle it out. Kill some poor schmuck of a kid just to get Jamison Jones in trouble? It was consistent with Alasdair's level of malice, but it seemed too risky. "Sorry. I interrupted you. Go on."

"You need to go back to The Swan and get some rest," Bushnell said. He reached for his coat. "You aren't ready for this."

"Finish the story."

Lavigne assessed me with his worried eyes, taking in the whole bruised, bandaged, trembling mess. "You sure? We can do this later."

After last night's callous indifference, it was comforting to have someone act concerned. "If I need you to stop, I'll tell you, but I think I have to have the pieces... to understand." I pushed some potatoes around, remembering things.

"Woodson and Chambers. They knew. They both knew... and they didn't care at all. Last night they... their plan was to let Alasdair kill me with the... uh... well, you know about that. Then they were going to kill him. Incapacitate him somehow, put him in that car, and send it into the lake so it would look like he'd killed me and then accidentally driven into..."

Bushnell handed me his handkerchief. Surprised, I touched my face and found tears. They were right. I couldn't talk about this yet. The fear from last night was crawling like worms under my skin. I closed my eyes. "Guess you're right," I said. "Maybe all this should wait. Just promise me they're both locked up."

"We promise," Bushnell said, grimly. "And with your help, we should be able to convince the judge they're both flight risks and keep them there." He slid out of the booth.

"Just one question," I said. "Why kill the boy?"

"He was with them when they snatched that little girl and assaulted her. He didn't participate in the attack, but he was there. He was driving. Then his conscience got to him. He was going to tell us what they'd done."

"So they killed him, made it look like he was Alasdair, and Alasdair was supposed to take off."

"Might have gotten away with it, too, except that he insisted on hanging around to see what would happen next," Lavigne said. "And your friend Shondra Jones got Jamison to tape the whole plan on the nanny cam."

"She what?" I popped to my feet, staring at both of them. Some detective I was. St. Matthews had been a veritable pit of snakes, and I'd only seen one or two. How had I missed so much?

"We all missed it," Bushnell said, reading my mind. "Might have gone on missing it if you hadn't poked around until you made them so upset they got careless. Oh. She didn't know she'd taped it. It was just an idea of hers. Her brother put the camera in Alasdair's room and just happened to tape their whole plan. Thing is, the nanny cam only gets pictures, not sounds, but a lip reader can make out a lot of what they were saying. They were just using Jamison to cover Alasdair's get away... and to get back at Shondra for taking pictures."

"But the other guys. They're rapists, too. And accessories to murder," I said. "How many are involved? Are they arrested?"

Bushnell shook his head. "We're still sorting it out. But there will be more arrests." He hesitated, then decided to tell me something confidential. "There was only sperm from one guy in the Keene case, although she said there were four guys. So one of them was either too stupid... or too arrogant... to use a condom."

I thought we all knew it was arrogance. "Take a look at which parents have pledged big bucks for the arts center," I suggested. "I think Chambers extorted those pledges in return for condoning their son's activities."

I didn't see how St. Matthews was going to recover from this disaster, but I didn't care. With my stomach stuffed with warm food, exhaustion had socked in like a sudden, dense fog. I could barely stand.

Luckily, I was with two guys who serve and protect for a living. They closed in on either side like an honor guard, marched me out the restaurant, and whisked me off to The Swan, where Lavigne started my bath, Bushnell laid out my jammies, and then they both beat a hasty and discreet retreat.

Chapter 34