White Mountain (16 page)

Her expression twisted angrily.
 
Was this something every woman had to go through when cast into the world on her own?
 
She wouldn’t know.
 
Before her father’s death, she’d taken her security for granted, but after today, she wasn’t sure.
 
Dejected, she slumped forward and covered her face with her hands.

“Oh, Daddy, why did you have to dir?
 
I wasn’t ready to let you go.”

The words were little more than a whisper, but spoken just the same.
 
Isabella shoved the keyboard aside and stood abruptly, her eyes filling with tears.
 
She strode to the windows overlooking the front grounds and pulled the curtain aside.
 
A couple of unfamiliar vehicles were in the parking lot.
 
Probably more clients for her father’s clinic.
 
Only it wasn’t her father’s clinic anymore.

Loneliness swamped her as she let the curtain fall into place.
 
Granted, those couples yearned for a child of their own, and she wasn’t denying their right or the intensity of their desire to make it happen.
 
But she wondered if they knew how truly blessed they were?
 
At least they had each other.
 
She had no one.
 
She knew it was foolish, but her heart ached for something she’d never known.

Brighton Beach P.C.—The Same Day

Detective Mike Butoli’s broken toe was getting better, but his attitude wasn’t.
 
Even though the John Doe who’d been found murdered in the alley behind Ivana’s Bar and Grill now had a name, Butoli still didn’t have a clue as to who had done it.
 
One of his snitches had claimed the rumor on the street was that it had to do with the Russian Mafia and the dead man’s past.
 
He knew it was a possibility, especially after the dead man’s prints had come back from Interpol.
 
Granted, it had become quite a puzzle after they’d proved conclusively that the dead man’s prints belonged to a Russian doctor who had supposedly died back in the seventies.
 
And there was another odd but pertinent fact.
 
The autopsy had confirmed that while the old man had died from the stabbing, his days had already been numbered.
 
He was suffering from an advanced case of stomach cancer.
 
Traces of a chemical compound called EAP had been in his system, a drug that was now being used in such cases.

At that point the Feds had gotten involved and Lieutenant Flanagan had told him to back off, but Butoli wasn’t buying it.
 
The man had died on their beat, and he wanted the man who’d killed him, which was why he was still following up lease.
 
And after the phone call he’d just finished, he had discovered some very unusual facts.

Fact number one:

Walton/Waller was definitely dead.
 
He’d died on a Saturday night right before the storm front that had blown through and topple the old lifeguard tower out on the beach.

Fact number two:

Butoli had been in the moregue, watching as the coroner sliced the old man open from stem to stern.

And give that set of facts, then the question still remained as to fact number three:

How had Frank Walton been on an American Airlines passenger list the next day, with a destination of Braden, Montana?

Butoli got up from his chair and circled the desk heading for Flanagan’s office.

“Hey, Lieutenant.
 
Got a minute?”

Barney Flanagan waved him in.
 
“Barely,” he said.
 
“What’s up?”

“You know that dead defector we found?”

Flanagan frowned.
 
“Damn it, Butoli, I thought I told you to—“

Butoli held up his hands.
 
“I know, I know.
 
But just hear me out.”

Flanagan’s face was as red as his hair, but he held his tongue, waiting for the detective to speak.

“Okay,” Butoli said.
 
“It’s like this.
 
The investigation was already rolling when the Feds stepped in, right?”

Flanagan crossed his arms over his belly without giving Butoli the satisfaction of a nod.

Butoli ignored the pissed-off expression on his lieutenant’s face and kept talking.

“So what was I to do?
 
I mean…you can’t just cancel something that fast once it’s in motion.
 
So… I had already put in a call to LaGuardia, as well as the bus terminals and the train stations.
 
You know…checking to see when the old man had come in.
 
The way I figured it, the Georgian Hotel might not have the first place he stayed, and to know for sure, I had to know how long he’d been in the city, right/

Flanagan shrugged.
 
Butolie was a good detective, thorough, and as honest as his mother’s priest.
 
So what he was saying did make some sense.

“Yeah, so?”

Butoli grinned.
 
“So I just got a call from LaGuardia.
 
According to their manifest, a man named Frank Walton had flown into LaGuardia about two weeks before the day he was killed.”

“That doesn’t tell us anything new,” Flanagan said.

“No, but this does.
 
Either Frank Walton’s nasty little habit of resurrecting himself after death is still ongoing, or we’ve got a rat in the woodpile.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Flanagan muttered.

“The day after his body was discovered in that
 
alley, someone name Frank
 
Walton boarded an American Airlines plane on a return ticket to Braden, Montana.:

Flanagan came out of the chair, his eyes wide with disbelief.

“You’re sure?”

“Dead sure…and pardon the pun.”

“Holy shit!
 
There’s a good chance that this is something the Feds don’t know.
 
It’s my understanding that they’ve sent a man to Braden.
 
He needs to know that the killer might be there, too.”

Butoli sighed.
 
“I figured you were going to say that.”

Flanagan picked up his phone and started to dial.

“Sit,” he ordered.
 
“You’re going to tell them exactly what you just told me, you hear?
 
And then you’re going to file that case away and get to work on something you can fix.
 
Understand me?”

Butoli hesitated, then shrugged.
 
“Yeah, Lieutenant, I understand.”

And he did.
 
There was every chance that the man who’d gotten on the plane as Frank Walton was the man who’d killed him, and if he was, he had more of an itinerary than they had believed.

Flanagan handed him the phone.
 
He took a deep breath, introduced himself to the Federal agent on the other end of the line and started to talk.

Jack stepped out of the barber shop, rubbing the back of his neck and feeling the short strands of his hair.
 
It was a good thing he’d told them to just
 
take off a little.
 
Any more and the old barber would have given him a buzz cut.

He glanced across the street, remembering how the last time he’d been in Braden, he’d watched Isabella come out of that store.
 
His gut knotted as he imagined her coming toward him with that long lanky stride.
 
HE dark hair swaying with the rhythm of her body as she moved closer to where he was standing.
 
Her eyes lighting up in recognition, her mouth widening in a smile.
 
Her arms sliding around his neck as she leaned…

A horn sounded on the street beside him, and he jumped as if he’d been shot, then turned and glared at the teenager behind the wheel.

Damn kid…the least he could have done was waited until my fantasy was over.

Disgusted with himself, he turned and began walking up the street.
 
The more people he visited with, the more information he was gleaning about the permanent residents of Abbott House.
 
He now
 
knew that all seven men had arrived in Braden together, which he found very odd.
 
And that Samuel Abbott had been the only one who was married.
 
A few of the older people remembered his wife, Isabella, commenting on the tragedy of her death as she’d given birth to their only child.

He thought of Isabella, growing up without knowing a mother’s love, then remembered the adoration with which the old men treated her and decided they had more than made up for her loss.

As he turned the corner, a tall, angular man with a mop of long black hair stepped out of an alley and started walking toward him.
 
His appearance was strange, his behavior even stranger.
 
When they drew abreast of each other, the young man started to talk, moving his hands in short, jerky motions as his hair swung across his face.

“I’m gonna get me a guitar and go to Memphis,” he said.

Jack’s heart went out to the man.
 
Despite his obvious problems, he still seemed to have a dream.

“That’s good,” Jack said, and started to walk on by.
 
To his dismay, the man turned and followed.

“I can sing,” he said.
 
“I can sing real good.
 
I always sing for my momma.”

Then he grabbed a handful of his hair and suddenly pulled.
 
Jack knew it must hurt.
 
The action was hard and brutal.

“Hey, buddy,” Jack said.
 
“Take it easy there.”

The man sighed.
 
“I can’t find my momma.
 
Is this Memphis?
 
I gotta find momma.”

“No, buddy, this isn’t Memphis.
 
You’re in Montana.
 
Real pretty country here, don’t you think?”

The man raised his head, but even then, Jack could not get a clear view of his face for the hair in his eyes.
 
He might as well have been wearing a veil.

“See that store over there?” the man said.
 
“They sell guitars.
 
I’m gonna get me a guitar and go to Memphis.”

Knowing that any further conversation was going to be a repeat of the last, Jack tried to walk away.

“Okay.
 
Good luck,” he said.

The man was still talking as Jack started across the street.

“I can sin!
 
I can sing real good.
 
I sing for my momma.
 
She likes to hear me sing.”

The bell jangled over the drugstore door as Jack walked inside.
 
The woman behind the counter looked at him closely, as had nearly everyone else that he’d met.
 
They weren’t unfriendly, just cautious, as was the way in so many small towns.

“Afternoon,” the woman said.
 
“I see you met John.

Jack looked back across the street, watching the black-haired man as he shuffled off into an alley.

Is that his name?
 
I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, John Running Horse.”

“He’s Indian?” Jack said.
 
“I didn’t realize.”

“The Blackfeet Reservation isn’t far from here, but he wanders off all the time.”

“He said he was looking for his mother.”

The woman shook her head.
 
“His mother is dead.
 
Has been for more than ten years, I guess.”

“What about his father?” Jack asked.

“Killed in a car wreck about a year ago.
 
John’s been sort of lost ever since.’

“Isn’t there anyone to look after him?”

“Oh, he’s got family all right, but they’re all kind of scared of him, I thin.”

Jack turned, staring at the woman in disbelief.

“Scared?
 
Because of his mind?”

“No…because they say he’s not one of them.
 
They say he’s a spirit that doesn’t belong.”

Jack frowned as the woman continued.

“Who’s to say?” she muttered.
 
“He’s lost in his head, whatever else is wrong.”

“He kept talking about a guitar.”

She nodded.

“That’s all he talks about…that and going to find his mother.
 
Isn’t that crazy?
 
He’s never been out of Montana in his whole life, and he thinks his mother is in Memphis.
 
Poor thing.”

The lost sound of the man’s voice was haunting him.
 
Suddenly he didn’t want to talk about John Running Horse any longer and made his purchases without bothering to linger.