Superior Storm (Lake Superior Mysteries) (26 page)

I finished my coffee, and stepped back to the wheel. “Another cup?” I asked, handing her my empty one. She smiled and went below. I thought for a moment about Angela and her issues with men.

A few minutes later
,
the companionway opened and Angela
herself
came out. She handed me another cup of coffee. “I don’t know if you and your girlfriend are up to anything, but you’d better not be.”

I sipped some coffee.
“We like being together,” I said. “And we’re just trying to stay alive.”
The boat jumped and rolled and the waves thundered around us. The only thing I could think to do was to try and dig around and unsettle her somehow.

“How is your struggle with guilt coming along, Angela?”

She laughed, short and harsh. “That was all a put-on, to sucker you into all this.”

“But how did you know I would have a counseling cruise? I’ve never done that before.”

Angela was silent. “I’m going below,” she said abruptly. “Stay on course if you like your girl so much.”

I considered my unanswered question. She had clammed up, like she was talking too much.
Right before that
,
s
he
had
said this was all a
put-on, a set
-
up to sucker me into this situation
. That meant that from the beginning, she and Phil had planned to go on a sailing cruise
– before
I even had the idea for it. And
my
idea for it came from Red Hollis.
Hollis was in on it
, he had to be
.

There were five bank robbers in Washington. My dad had killed one,
Charles Holland. That left four. Apparently I had killed another, Phil’s brother. That left Angela, Phil and – it must be – Red Hollis.
Maybe Hollis was really Holl
and
, and he was
the other brother that Jensen had mentioned in his text.
But where was Hollis
/Holland
now?

I had goaded them earlier with the fact that both my dad and I had shot members of their gang. But, surely, that was too bizarre to be coincidence. They must have known who I was all along. Perhaps they came to Minnesota seeking vengeance for their dead comrade. My dad had died of
a
heart-attack, cheating them out of revenge in Washington. Maybe they robbed the First National Bank of Grand Lake d
eliberately when I was in there, trying to kill me.
I shook my head. Silly. There’s no way they could have known I was going to be there at that time, that day. So, at least at that point, they hadn’t known I was related to the man who had killed one of their own.

Jasmine must have come into it later. I doubted she was one of the robbers. Maybe she’d caught them at some point, and they’d bribed her. Or maybe she went to them with some kind of knowledge she had, in exchange for a cut of the money.

I sipped some more coffee, and then put the mug back into one of the cup holders built in to the steering pedestal.
Angela and Phil hadn’t killed me yet, and that made revenge seem unlikely. And the whole boating set-up seemed a little bit elaborate for simple revenge.
But maybe it was revenge, plus something else.

It wasn’t really the time or place for quiet reflection. The wind screamed, pushing at the half-sail up front, plowing us through the mountainous waves, trying from time to time to shove us starboard-side into the lake itself. The wheel jumped and fought me like a rodeo calf. But our lives might depend on my figuring this out.

That thought arrested me for a moment.
It
had
always
been
the smallest mem
ber of the gang who shot people, and Jasmine almost certainly had not participated in any robberies personally.
That meant that Angela was the trigger happy one, the killer.
Another thought crashed into me like one of the giant waves around me. The brief news report I had heard while I was trying to get the radio to work told of a man who was shot to death in Duluth. He was a university professor at University of Minnesota, Duluth. His name was Ethan, a professor in women’s studies and counseling.

Just like the lover that Angela told me had been all made up.
Another murder.

I thought about Jasmine’s words. “
As far as they’ll ever know, I am about to die in the line of duty, along with Tony here. They’ll probably give me a posthumous medal.
”

I knew Angela was a murderer. She
must
have
realize
d
that
I
would figure it out.

I chewed on it some more, beating my brain to work. I wished I had some Bach to listen to, to make me smarter. I began running
Toccata
and Fugue for organ in D minor through my head. Just before I got
to
the more pedestrian part in the middle, I had it.

Red Holland was the key.
As far as
anyone else
knew, we took off into the middle of the world’s largest freshwater lake. Accidents happen. We were going to disappear. Even if the authorities suspected Phil and Angela, as obviously they did, they would believe that we all died out here. Gordon Lightfoot with his famous song,
T
he Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
, had coined the phrase, “Superior it is said, never gives up her dead.” It wasn’t just rhyme. It was true. Normally, when people drown, bacteria
make
the bodies decompose. The gasses released from that process cause the bodies to float. But Superior is so cold that the bacteria which normally feed on drowning victims can’t survive. It was actual fact that drowning victims never floated in
L
ake Superior.
So
,
no one would expect to recover our bodies in five hundred or more feet of water,
miles from any land.
Angela and Company would be assumed dead, along with the rest of us.

But what about Red Holland? He must be bringing a boat from Canada or someplace. So Angela and her gang would play dead, and escape to Canada. Meanwhile, there was no way she would let us
live
to tell others that she was still alive. We really were going to die out here.

I had to admire it.
It was perfect, except for the part about us dying.

In a way
,
I felt relief in knowing what the stakes were. It was life or death, us or them.
I still struggled to understand their plan. It would make sense if they were headed to Canada. Northwest Ontario, directly north of us, is probably the wildest, least populated area along the Canadian-U
.
S
.
border. You could drive for hours on the trans-Canada highway up there and see more moose than people.
But sailing was about the slowest way to get there I could imagine. Unless they were being followed by the FBI or someone, the simplest thing would be to drive across the border. Grand Lake wasn’t all that far from Canada, and I had been hiking up in the little mountains outside Thunder Bay several times. Usually
,
I was just asked a few questions, and then waved across the border when I got there. No one had ever searched my car for stolen loot.

I shook my head
and allowed a blast of spray to strike me full on the face. Of course, they
were
being watched by the FBI.
Obviously, Jasmine must have told them that. That would have kept them from
just driving
to Canada.

The companion
way door opened, and Jasmine stepped out, swathed in rain gea
r and a life vest
. She pulled the door shut and came over to the wheel.

“Two hours, my turn.”

“Why did you do it, Jasmine?”

Not used
to
the spray and cold yet, she winced as we were showered with icy water. She wipe
d her eyes and shrugged. She glanced at the companionway door. She looked like she was about to speak.
Then she shrugged again and said, “You’d better get below.”

I stayed. “I figured
out
this was the gang doing the bank robberies around the North Shore.
I think they also operated in Northern Washington, where my dad was a state cop.”

“That’s true,” admitted Jasmine.

“But you weren’t with them during the robberies.”

Jasmine was silent.

“
And why did
the FBI
get
involved
here
? They robbed the customers, not the banks. Robbery is a local crime, not a federal one. I thought the FBI would stay out of it.”

“If they hadn’t got greedy and violent, we might have. But
the Bureau
had local police forces all over the area clamoring for our help. Finally, because they hit so many banks and were shooting people,
we
found a judge who gave
the FBI
a wink and nod to get involved. I think the technical argument was that this gang, though not actually robbing FDIC
-
insured institutions, was significantly harming banking and commerce.”

“And then you decided crime pays better than law enforcement.”

Jasmine peered into the darkness ahead of
us
, blinking in the continuous spray. “Don’t make this harder than it is, Borden. Get below before Angela comes out here.”

“You
and Stone
aren’t married, are you?” I asked. Finally, their relationship was making sense.

“Your profile said you were brilliant,” said Jasmine in mockery.

“
I have an FBI profile?”

She
shrugged.
“
I
nitially, you were part of the investigation. You had the Washington-North Shore connection like the rest of the gang. You met with
Richard
Holland in Duluth. So
,
we faked a marriage
,
and marriage problems
,
to get in with you and try to get close to Angela as well.”

So Red Hollis
was
actually R
ichard
Holland
–
the brother of
the dead memb
er of the gang, Charles Holland, and Angela’s brother as well.
That was my final confirmation.

“You didn’t fake
it very well,” I said.
“
Yours was like no marriage I had ever seen.”

She laughed.
“And I got in close with Angela anyway.”

“Too close,” I said bitterly.
“Just out of curiosity, when did
the FBI
kn
ow I was in the clear?”

“
The FBI
stopped considering you a serious suspect after that night at the bar – that dance.” In the wild darkness I thought I saw her face darken like she was blushing. “
We
figured no one but a real pastor
would react to me like you did.
”

She
glanced at the companionway door again.
“
Get below now
.
I mean it.
”

I went.

Angela stood at the bottom of the companionway, with one foot on the first step. I turned and pulled the
hatch
closed
behind me.

“Thought I’d jumped her?”

Angela shrugged. “I’m just careful, that’s all.
”

The cabin was blissfully warm after the wild frigid wet of the cockpit. I saw that there was coffee in the pot in the galley. “May I?” I asked. Angela nodded.

Tony Stone was lying on the port s
ettee, which was now stained with blood. He was propped up so that his chest was higher than his lower body
, and someone had rigged a kind of canvas that kept him from falling out of the berth.
He opened his eyes slowly and looked at me, and then closed them again. Phil was sitting on the starboard settee at the top outside of the U, with his back to the bulkhead wall of the bow cabin, facing the rear of the boat. Leyla sat across from him, looking forward. Her hands were secured together by plastic cuffs that looked like giant zip-ties.

“Give me your hands,” said Angela. “Remember, Phil can shoot
you
before you can disable me and get to him too.”

I remembered. Angela put a plastic figure eight around my wrists,
but kept my hands in front of my body,
leavi
ng me free to drink coffee
. We must take comfort wherever we can in hard times.
She pushed me down next to Leyla, and then slipped into the galley.
“Keep your hands on the table where we can see them.”