Thomas Prescott Superpack (55 page)

Chapter 52

The Professor whipped the rifle around, pointing it somewhere between Erica and me.

Neither of us moved.

He had his white mask pulled up on his forehead. Even with the red curse, it was as if all color had drained from his face. He looked awkward with the gun, holding it with both hands against his stomach. 

I waited for him to pull the trigger.

Then the gun fell from the Professor’s grasp and he started trudging towards Ethan’s lifeless body.
He passed it without a glance and fell to the ground near one of the fallen wolves. He cradled the wolf’s head in his hands and began whimpering.

Erica and I watched with a mixture of awe and fright.
A father would act no differently holding one of his fallen sons. The Professor made his way to each wolf, holding each one, caressing their thick coats. The only sound in all of the mountains was the sobbing of the broken man.

I took a step in the direction of Ethan and Erica grabbed my elbow.
I gave her a look as if to say, “It’s okay.”

She relented and I took the ten trudges to Ethan’s body.
He lay face down, arms at his side. Blood had begun to ooze from the large crater in the right center of his back. There was a good chance the bullet severed his spinal cord and Ethan died before his brain registered a single thought.

I pried the gun from Ethan’s fingertips with my left hand and shoved it in my waistband.
Then I lifted his left pant leg. He had a Smith and Wesson .38 in an ankle holster. I know it’s bad juju to speak badly of the dead, but under my breath I whispered, “Shithead.”

I stood and made my way back to Erica.
I handed her the .38. She took it, checked the chamber, and then gave me a quick nod.

I asked, “What do you want to do?”

“We have to take him in.”

I knew
she
had to take him in. I didn’t know what
I
had to do. One, the guy was off his fucking rocker, which didn’t make what he did to Ellen and Riley okay, but it gave him a little leeway. These wolves were his family and whatever he did, he did it so his family could survive. Be together. His conscience had been replaced by animal instinct. Two, the guy had a miserable life. Probably one of the worst in existence. Had he suffered enough? I thought of Riley. Yes, she didn’t deserve to die, but what if she’d been killed by a wolf. What kind of grudge could I hold towards an animal? Had her death at the hands of this deranged man been so much different? I was starting to think not.

As for the wolves, I didn’t hold anything against them.
I couldn’t. It wasn’t logical. They had only been doing the job God had bestowed on them. Having said that, I was ready to get my ass as far away from them as possible. Not to mention getting out of the snow, getting some of these wounds stitched shut so they’d stop leaking all that blood, and curling up with Erica by the fire. And maybe having a bowl of Frosted Flakes.

On a side note here, I’m not sure if it was on account of the loss of blood, but I was starting to second guess my instincts.
It’d been the look on the Professor’s face when he’d shot Ethan. Something hadn’t been right. Something was off.

I said, “I vote we just leave him.”

Erica gave me a sideways glance.
Of course, she had an entirely different outlook; her job was in jeopardy, and by bringing in the Professor she would be on the fast track to lead detective.

Erica was deep in thought, weighing the pros and cons of taking in the Professor or leaving him.
I think we both knew that if we did leave him, he would never be heard from again.

And then you had Ethan.
Don’t think it hadn’t occurred to me that the only person who had the resources to put me behind bars was right this second bartering with God for a spot in the rafters.

Erica snapped me from my reverie.
She asked, “What do you think?”

I ignored her question.
I was more preoccupied with the fact that the adrenaline from my little wolf attack was wearing off and the true severity of my injuries was starting to come to a head. The pain had turned into a dull throb, but I was more concerned with the light-headedness and dizziness. These were both indications I was losing blood. And lots of it. My knees were starting to shake and my vision was beginning to blur.

I licked my increasingly dry lips and said, “Not to alarm you or anything, but I’m not feeling too hot here.”

At last she looked at me and said, “You don’t look very good.”

“Thank you for corroborating that.”
 

Erica nodded.
I could see she was still trying to reason her way through the situation. She’d glance at me, then the Professor, then Ethan, then the snowmobile. She continued this for a good twenty seconds. How was she going to transport the wackjob Professor, the quickly deteriorating Thomas Prescott, and Ethan’s remains? It was sort of like that cannibals and canoe riddle, save for the cannibals. And the canoe.

She looked at me and said, “Can you drive the snowmobile?”

For the record, I was having trouble standing at this point. “I can try.”

“That’s a no.”

I felt two shadows behind me and said quietly, “Don’t move.”

Two wolves had circled around the large rock and were now directly behind us.
I slowly turned and looked over my shoulder. I hadn’t seen these wolves before. Neither wore collars. These were
wild
wolves.

In another instant there were three wolves pacing just ten feet behind us.
My vision was starting to double, and the wolves were overlapped by three white ghosts. One of them locked eyes with me and snarled, revealing his twenty ivory daggers. His ghost did the same.

I took the gun out of my waistband and held it in my left hand.
It didn’t feel quite right, but I was still confident I could hit a charging wolf.

Keeping my eyes on the wolves, or sets of wolves, I whispered to Erica, “Go for the snowmobile.
I’ll cover you.”

She nodded and slowly began walking towards the snowmobile.
Had the wolves made even a muscle twitch in her direction, I would have blown them to pieces. But I didn’t know how many bullets were left in the magazine and I’d already met my quota of wolf kills for the month. 

I gave a quick glance in Erica’s direction.
She’d made it to the snowmobile. The engine roared to life and ten seconds later, Erica had pulled alongside me. I gingerly hopped on behind her, my left leg screaming, while keeping my gun leveled at the now five wolves. 

I wrapped my good arm around Erica’s waist.
She drove until we were a safe distance away and ground to a halt. We both turned. The wolves had advanced towards their fallen brothers and sisters and methodically began sniffing, licking, and prodding the dead.

The Professor watched the wolves, then launched into a similar system of sniffing, licking, and prodding.

One of the white wolves leaned back on his haunches and let loose a deafening howl.
His counterpart added his voice and their duet rolled down the mountain. Riley had said howling was a sign of fellowship, but this howl wasn’t. It was a sign of mourning.

We heard another loud noise, more barking than anything else, and it took us a moment to register the sound was coming from the Professor.
He was on his hands and knees, head back.

Erica whispered, “Is he howling?”

“I think so.”

“He’s crazy.”

“Yep.”

Then I saw them out of the corner of my eye.
In the trees. Three more of them. The howling hadn’t been a sign of mourning after all. It’d been a battle cry.

I nudged Erica and pointed.
She followed my outstretched arm and nodded.

They darted from the trees like three bullets and converged on the Professor simultaneously.
This wasn’t something I wanted to see. It felt like a world where humans shouldn’t pry, a world where humans didn’t belong. The Professor could vouch for that. 

Erica started the snowmobile and we raced away.
The Professor’s screams could still be heard a half mile later.

Chapter 53

It’s a bad sign when they’re stitching you up and they have to send out for more thread. One hundred and thirty-seven stitches in all. I felt like a football.

By far, the worst of my injuries was my right shoulder.
Cujo had torn nearly every ligament and every tendon in my right deltoid. And these, apparently, do not mend themselves. I underwent three surgeries in the first week, with promises of more in the months to come.

I’d asked the doctor if I would ever throw a baseball professionally again.
He said I would not. In fact, he said that I should probably get used to eating with my left hand. 

The new
Time
magazine came out the day after my third surgery. The cover was a picture of four dead wolves surrounding the remains of a devoured Professor Koble. The headline read, “
To Catch A Predator.”

The story detailed Ellen Gray’s disappearance all the way up to the Professor’s untimely demise.

Two days after the magazine came out, I was discharged from the hospital.

I was dressed in the clothes Erica had brought for me, my trusty gray hooded sweatshirt and matching bottoms.
My right arm was in a sling beneath the sweatshirt and as I lowered myself into the wheelchair, I could feel something brush against my hand. There was something in the front pouch of my sweatshirt.

I reached my left hand into the pouch and extracted the folded white pages.
It was the bank statements I’d taken from Adam Gray’s house. I shook my head. It seemed so long ago. Ages. 

I unfolded the pages and the small picture fell out, fluttering to the ground.

The wheelchair stopped.

Erica knelt down and picked up the picture.
She gazed at me with the intensity of someone who’s newly in love, and said, “What’s that?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to confide in Erica about the breaking and entering.
At least not until we consummated the relationship. Which, according to the doctor, I shouldn’t partake in until the stitches were removed. I think it had something to do with the thrusting.

I went with, “Just a photograph.”

She stared at the picture intently, then said with a smile, “A friendly reminder of your friends that nearly devoured you?”

She handed the picture back to me.
I didn’t know what she was talking about for a good minute. My eyes were drawn to the beautiful fall foliage and the snowcapped mountain on the far horizon. Not to them.

In the top right corner of the picture, nestled behind a tree, were two wolves.

Chapter 54

It’d been two weeks since I’d been discharged.

Sunny was once again listening to her iPod.
She was biting on the eraser of a pencil, her eyes focused straight downward on another Sudoku puzzle.

Initially, I’d suspected Adam had been having an affair with her.
She was beautiful in an
I bought my face
sort of way, and she was none too qualified to be the receptionist of the most sought-after defense attorney on the planet. I’d assumed Adam had been bopping her on the side and had given her the position when the spot had opened up.

But in actuality, Adam had been having an affair with her predecessor.

I’d taken a second look at the transactions on the seldom-used
Bank of Victoria
account. I had written off the twenty-something thousand dollar payment to his Alma mater, Seattle Pacific University, as a donation.

After a couple phone conversations in which I called myself Adam Gray, I found out the money was in actuality for fifteen credit hours of law school classes.
After a bit of cajoling, I got a name. Julia Zadiez.

I remembered back to the first time I’d visited Adam Gray.
The nameplate sitting on the desk. Julia. 

I was able to wiggle an address out of the lady on the phone.
I made a quick stop at her apartment complex and had a chat with her landlord. He’d last seen her in mid-November. Then she’d left.

I recalled that according to Sunny, Julia had flown to be with her mother who had fallen ill and would be gone indefinitely.
The landlord said a week after Julia left, a man came by and paid for the duration of her lease, then moved all her stuff into storage.

I inquired about the man.
He had been large, with thin salt-and-pepper hair and a white goatee.

Sound familiar?

The man had told the landlord that Julia’s mother had fallen terminally ill and that she had moved home on a whim to be with her until the end. The landlord said he found this curious because he’d had a conversation with Julia once, while fixing her showerhead, and she’d mentioned her mother died when she was very young. The landlord had then inquired as to her father. Julia had said that she hadn’t spoken with her father in many years. He was back in Louisiana.

The father wasn’t hard to find.
There were only three Zadiezes in Louisiana, and I hit pay dirt on my first call. According to Greg Zadiez, he hadn’t spoken to his daughter in more than three years. Last he heard, she’d moved to Seattle and was working for some hotshot attorney.

. . .

Five minutes later, the door to Adam’s office opened and he emerged. He was wearing another of his designer suits. This one, black with thin pinstripes and a green and black striped tie. He smiled, his goatee wrinkling around the edges of his mouth, and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

I stood up gingerly, my thigh still quite tender, and took a couple steps forward.
My right arm was still in a sling, and I was forced to shake hands with my left.

Adam said, “You look like shit.”

I laughed. Ethan had said the very same words. Then he’d died twenty seconds later. Would history repeat itself? I instinctively felt the pressure of the cold steel digging into my hip. It was my father’s Smith and Wesson. It was loaded this time. One bullet in the chamber.

I followed Adam into his office.
He offered me a drink and I told him that I was craving a five-dollar water. He said they were six bucks and went over to the bar to retrieve me one.

I’d had two separate phone conversations with Adam since I was nearly eaten alive, the first from the hospital.
We’d chatted for a good half hour. It was a conversation mostly comprised of euphemisms, the likes of
I can’t believe it
. . .
But it’s all over now
. . .
You never would have thought
. . .
Really makes you think
. . and
We have the rest of our lives to ponder this one
.

Then I’d spoken to him again a week later to thank him for the get well present he’d bought me.
Inside the card stuffed deep within the massive fruit basket he’d sent me had been tickets for a ten day African cruise. He said it was all the rave right now. I told him it was just what I needed. And it was.

He returned with my water.
He had taken the liberty of pouring himself a couple fingers of scotch. I took the water from him, took a swig and asked, “Keeping busy?”

He nodded. “We start jury selection in the Albert Jones case next Monday.”

Apparently, Albert Jones was an old Seattle Seahawk, kicked off the team for drug charges a couple years back. He’d been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. He killed a family in his Range Rover. They’d found a crack pipe and two rocks on the passenger seat. 

I said, “Sounds innocent.”

“Aren’t they all.”

No.
No, they aren’t. And today would be a proclamation to that very principle. I stared at him, but said nothing. I couldn’t help but notice Adam appeared tired. Worn out. He didn’t have that energy, that sparkle that he usually exuded.

I made my way over to the aquarium.
I wanted to check up on my favorite weeny fish. I spotted him hiding behind the fake scuba diver. Maybe he’d seen me come through the door. I tapped the glass with the Perrier. Several fish darted around their man-made ocean. From behind I could hear Adam squirm. I tapped the glass a second time. The fish frenzied, then settled. I couldn’t spot my purple friend anywhere. I think he’d made for the cave.

I waited for Adam to say something.
He did not. I took a deep breath and said, “You weren’t on your yacht that day.”

I turned around.

Adam was leaning against his desk.
Shaking the ice in his scotch glass just below his lips. He didn’t respond. Just continued shaking his scotch, staring off into the distance.

I wasn’t sure he knew exactly what I was saying, so I simplified things for him. “You said the day your wife disappeared you were on your yacht with your client.”
I added, “You were not.”

Gray swiveled his eyes so he was staring directly at me.
It was almost the same stare as when he’d noticed my presence at his trial. He rattled the ice, knocked back the last of the scotch, then set the glass on the desk. But here’s the scary part: he didn’t use a coaster, nor did he appear to care that he didn’t use a coaster.

He smiled and said, “No, I was not.”

Something had always been missing.
The more I thought about the Professor, the less I was convinced he killed Ellen or Riley. It was the look on his face when he shot Ethan. He hadn’t wanted to do it. Ethan had forced his hand. He had only killed him to save his wolves. Save his family. Was he a killer? Certainly. I’d witnessed it firsthand. But, I couldn’t see the guy murdering in cold blood. I couldn’t see the Professor putting a gun to Ellen’s forehead and pulling the trigger, or using a knife to kill Riley for that matter. And so I went back to the drawing board. It had always been about the North Cascades. That had always been the connection. But there was one thing missing. Adam. How was Adam connected to the North Cascades? And then it hit me. The photo.

 
The photograph had started me thinking, and I did some investigating. I checked the ferry records for the day Ellen Gray went missing. I had to grease a couple palms, but four hundred dollars later, I was holding a list of the make, model, and license plate number of all the cars on the ferry that day. Turns out that on the 8:00
A.M.
ferry—the same ferry Ellen took before she went hiking—there was a black Jaguar with vanity plates.

NTGLTY.

I took a step forward, “In fact, you were in the North Cascades.
Same as your wife.”

“Yes, I was.”

. . .

Neither of us spoke for a solid minute. I took another couple steps toward Adam. His whole demeanor had changed in the last few seconds. He was like a punctured beach ball. And for the first time, I knew I was looking at Adam Gray. Not the lawyer, but the man.

He said, “How much do you know?”

“Most of it.”

He nodded.
He didn’t ask how I knew. I don’t think he cared.

He stood up and began pacing around his desk.
I watched him very carefully. He made his way over to his bookcase. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder at me, then he started. “We needed to go over that little shit Proctor’s cross-examination. I do my best thinking on the
Habeus Corpus
and Proctor and I planned on being on the yacht for most of the day. Ellen and I were both up early. It was one of the few times we’d both slept under the same roof in a long time.”

I nearly said, “Because you usually slept in your condo with Julia Zadiez.”
But he was on a roll and I didn’t want to interrupt him.

“Proctor showed up just as Ellen was heading out the door.
Proctor was always really nice to her, overly so, but the guy made her skin crawl. Shit, he made
my
skin crawl. Ellen was wearing khaki shorts, a tank top, and had a backpack on. Proctor asked where she was going. She said she was going hiking. Then she jumped in her car and sped away.

“We were on our way out to the yacht when Proctor says, ‘You really think that bitch is going hiking?’”

“I told him that I didn’t give a shit where she went.”

“He said, ‘I bet that bitch is having an affair.’”

“I told him that if he called my wife a bitch again I was going to break his fucking neck. But it did get me thinking.”

I said, “Because you were having an affair yourself.
You knew how the game was played.”

Gray’s body went stiff.
I watched his hands for any sudden movement. I flexed my left hand, just in case. Gray relaxed, turned, and said, “No, it got me thinking because we were going to get divorced. It was only a matter of time. One of the guys at the office was sleeping with Ellen’s press secretary, and he’d let it slip that Ellen was planning on filing for divorce right after she won reelection.”

Bad Kim.

Gray was just getting started. “This was like the fifth Sunday in a row that she’d said she was going hiking. I almost hoped that she was sneaking off to see some guy. It would give me a lot of leverage come the divorce settlement. Proctor says that we should follow her and that we can go over his testimony in the car. Didn’t seem like too bad of an idea. Proctor tells me I should grab my camera so I have proof.”

He took a breath.
“We were one of the last cars to get on the outgoing ferry. I could see Ellen’s car about three rows ahead of ours. We stayed in the car so we wouldn’t run into her and went over his cross.

“Then we followed her.
Just barely kept her car in sight. Followed her for two hours until she parks at the trailhead inside the national park. I said to Proctor, ‘There. She’s going hiking. Just like she said.’ I remember him shrugging.

“Ellen disappeared up the trail.
It didn’t take long to see why she was up there. It was amazing. Shit, I hadn’t been to the mountains in probably ten years. The fall colors were at their peak and there was this mountain range with white caps. It was perfect.

“I told Proctor to read over his testimony and I grabbed my camera.
I climbed up this little dirt trail for about a mile, took a couple dozen pictures, then hiked back down. Wasn’t gone more than an hour and a half.”

I thought about Adam snapping pictures, nestled up in the brush, trying to get the lighting just right.
He’s got the trees in the frame, reds, oranges, and yellows. The king’s crown of white icing dripping off the top of the mountains. And then just when the picture can’t get any better, two wolves emerge from behind the trees. Adam had taken the one picture that his wife so much desired. He had photographic evidence wolves had returned to the North Cascades.

Adam was still rambling, “Ellen’s car was still parked there when we left.
We got back to my place around four, spent a couple hours on the yacht going over his testimony, then we called it a day.”

He swirled the last remaining cube of ice around in his glass.

He looked up. “I get a call the next morning from some guy on her security detail asking if I’d heard from my wife.
I told him I hadn’t. He said that when he’d last heard from her the day before, she was going hiking, that he hadn’t spoken to her since. I didn’t see it as relevant that I’d been the last one to see her. So I decided to keep my mouth shut.

“Later that day, when the cops started asking questions, I just couldn’t tell them.
It would look like too big of a coincidence. Her disappearing while hiking. Me, following her, then snapping pictures. The husband is always the prime suspect. And when it leaked that our marriage was all but over, I would have been crucified. So, I lied.”