Winter at the Door (35 page)

Dylan’s eyebrows went up skeptically. “Pretty good trick, Lizzie. Gun went off when he fell? You really think—”

“No. Personally I think he got fed up, decided on impulse to get it over with. But I didn’t have to show that it was certain, only that it was
more
likely than him doing it on purpose.”

Rascal sniffed Dylan judiciously, decided he was okay, and lay down with a sigh.

“And Chevrier’s testimony about Bogart’s plan for an actual suicide,” she went on, “combined with the MD’s sworn statement on Bogart’s blood pressure …”

She took a breath. “When you looked at the whole picture, it was clear that it could’ve been accidental.”

It hadn’t hurt, either, that the medical examiner had known and liked Carl Bogart. Dylan laughed.

“Okay, okay. So you got over on an insurance company instead of the other way around for once. Nice going. But what about—”

“Yeah, funny thing about Sirois,” she cut in. “He had all those medications and vaporizers, little oxygen tanks and so on. And,” she added, “one tank that
wasn’t
oxygen.”

Dylan tipped his head questioningly. “Because it was …?”

“Helium. There was one tank that was different in there, not green like the oxygen tanks. Brown. It bugged me, so I looked it up, and it turns out there’s a color code for those tanks.”

“Brown is helium?”

“Right. Simple, painless … and deadly, actually.”

“Really. So it’s not just for party balloons?”

“Um, no. There’s a little more to it than just breathing it through a mask, but not much. And it’s not, you know, violent. A big plus, lots of people would say.”

He nodded in agreement. “But instead the guy got into the bathtub with a long gun, made an awful mess for people to find.”

“Correct. So you tell me,” she added, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

He looked convinced. “Yeah, you wouldn’t shoot yourself if—so you think someone staged his death? Made it look like suicide, but they didn’t know he had a better method than …”

“Uh-huh. They made him shoot himself. By threatening his kids, maybe? I don’t know yet. It’s an open case. But my point isn’t how, it’s that if someone forces you to, it isn’t suicide anymore, is it?”

“And that someone was …?”

She shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know yet. I didn’t have to solve the case, though, just get the ME to reopen it. It was probably Daniel—he’d have known Sirois would be a big help in finding a remote campsite in the woods—but we’ll have to see.”

She looked down the street toward Saint George’s, the church where the funeral was scheduled. No cars had begun gathering yet.

“Anyway,” she went on, “what I do know is that if Sirois threatened Daniel’s operation in any way, Daniel wouldn’t have hesitated to get rid of him, just the way he did the other two, Fontine and Arbogast.”

Rascal came and sat beside her. “Meanwhile, Brantwell has started talking. Feds’ve got him on account of he crossed state lines. From what I hear, he’s trying to get a deal, blaming it all on Daniel. But he’ll still be going away.”

She sighed, imagining it. “Too bad for Missy.”

“Yeah, huh?” he said, and frowned. “Listen, I’m really sorry it wasn’t Nicki out there.”

“Me, too. Not your fault, though,” Lizzie added. “Thinking it was her, I mean. Her mom had disguised her so her ex-husband wouldn’t recognize the kid if he came looking.”

She reached down to smooth Rascal’s glossy fur. “Well, he’d have known if he saw her close up, of course,” she amended. “But the mother was doing the best she could.”

Like all of us
, Lizzie thought clearly.
But sometimes things don’t work out anyway
.

“It’s no wonder you thought the hair was natural,” she went on. “Woman’s a professional hair colorist, back in her old life. And he’s a
real prize, the ex-husband she ran away from in the first place. He’s got a sheet a mile long.”

Of criminal offenses, she meant. Dylan shook his head tiredly. “So this woman, she gets away from one abusive guy and then she runs into—”

“Uh-huh. The weirdo in the woods. Bad luck, huh?”

Lizzie sighed, remembering her interview with the woman; for a while there, no one else had been able to get near her.

“I guess our pal Daniel was a real charmer at first. Missy says that’s his way. But the first time this new woman tried to leave him, he cut her face,” said Lizzie.

The second time, he’d threatened to use the knife on the little girl; yeah, he was charming as all hell.

Dylan looked puzzled. “So why’d she have a gun, then? Seems to me he’d have taken away any—”

Lizzie nodded. “He did. We were wrong about that, he didn’t leave her with it. But the little girl saw where he’d put it.” The child’s name was Ashley. “So before Spud arrived, while Daniel was busy stashing meth in his van so he could get away—”

It was the only part of the story that had made the woman smile. Dylan, too: “She scampered out and found it?”

“Yup. Daniel was smart, and he was good at his backwoods survival thing, but not infallible. He could make mistakes.”

Dylan made a face. “Fortunately, huh?”

“Yeah. And speaking of luck …”

Lizzie gestured at the papers on her desk. Atop the nearest stack was a notice of Spud Wilson’s first court appearance.

The woman’s second shot had missed him entirely; he’d simply fainted, apparently in fear. “He’ll be in court this morning.”

“Yeah, I know. My case, remember?” The three dead girls in Bangor, he meant. “I’m the one who’s driving him back to jail afterwards,” Dylan said, not sounding eager.

Or more accurately to prison; the hearing wasn’t for any material reason, only to transfer the young man to state custody.

The bartender from Area 51 stuck his head in the door.

“Lizzie, can you come over when you get a chance? They’re gonna
serve papers on poor Henry, his wife’s gonna try an’ divorce him again, and it’ll go better if you’re there, you know?”

Henry was the guy who’d had Missy Brantwell trapped in a stranglehold Lizzie’s first night here. She sighed again.

“Gimme a minute, I’ll run over.” It was a bit of a chore, but if it made things easier for everyone, why not?

“So anyway,” said Dylan, “I just came by to—”

She faced him. “Why did you come to my place that night? The night Missy’s baby went missing, you were hurt and you could have just gone to your motel room. It was closer. But instead you drove all the way back up here.”

She’d been wondering about it ever since. He could’ve shared the motel room with the woman DEA cop. So why hadn’t he?

He shrugged. “Yeah, well, you said it. I felt like hell, I didn’t want to be with some stranger.”

Then he looked straight at her. “I wanted to be with you, Lizzie. That’s all. Just … anyway, that’s the reason.”

Silence while she absorbed this. Then: “I see. I’m sorry I misjudged you.”

There, she’d said it. “I never should’ve been checking on you in the first place. And when I did, I should have known—”

“No,” he interrupted flatly. “No way should you have thought anything but what you did.”

He studied the floor. “It’s not so easy getting over a thing like I put you through, Lizzie. Maybe you never will.”

Looking up, he added, “But what I came to say right now is that I’m on the team getting the case against Spud together.”

“Oh.” She let the news sink in. “So you won’t just be driving to Bangor but staying? And you’ll be busy, I suppose.”

He nodded, a lock of dark hair curling down over his pale forehead. “Right. But Bangor’s not so far, Lizzie … If you ever wanted to we could still …”

Right, they could. It would be easy.

Too easy. “Yeah,” she said. “You know what, though? I think I’m going to just focus on the job here for a while.”

From across the street, an angry yell from Area 51’s general vicinity
said Henry’s divorce papers had arrived, courtesy of some hapless process server who hadn’t known what he was in for.

Also, Lizzie was scheduled to take that long-delayed physical this afternoon: sit-ups, pull-ups, et cetera.

But there was one last thing she needed to know. “Dylan, the photographs. Of Nicki. You didn’t—”

“Make the whole thing up just to get you here to Maine?” He frowned at his shoes. “I deserve that, don’t I? But no.”

He met her gaze. “I don’t know where they came from. But I didn’t fake them. And I still think she’s out there.”

She thought about it a moment. “Okay.” Then she moved toward the door. He caught her as she went by, folding her into his arms and holding her close.

“Take care of yourself,” he said.

“You, too.” She bit her lip hard. Finally:

“Don’t let Rascal out when you leave,” she told him, backing away, then turned to find the burly veterinarian Trey Washburn standing just outside the front window, looking in.

Not at Lizzie, but past her; glancing from Trey to Dylan and back again she saw the two men’s eyes lock briefly, neither man betraying any expression; they didn’t need to. Then as Trey’s gaze met Lizzie’s he smiled, tossing her a little wave like a salute before turning and striding away. From the few faint birdcall notes that filled the air, she thought he might be whistling.

“Hmph. Guess you’ll be seeing plenty of him while I’m not around,” said Dylan.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied airily, and was about to add some light, jealousy-provoking taunt; that is, until she saw Dylan’s face.

“Don’t,” she repeated gently, “let Rascal out.” Then she went out herself into a bright, bone-chillingly cold winter day in the little town of Bearkill, Maine.

Across the street, a car in the Food King’s icy lot skidded and banged, horn blaring, into a parked one. A snowmobile shot fast and absolutely illegally uphill on the library lawn. And the fire siren atop the cupola on the potato barn went off, signaling a blaze somewhere.

So much for the funeral; on the street outside Saint George’s the
long, black hearse was just now pulling up. She’d never get there in time, not that anyone would miss her.

Instead she headed for the fender-bender; after that came the snowmobile, a check on the fire siren, which turned out to be for a shed blaze somewhere, and finally a visit to Area 51. There her old pal Henry, after an initial tantrum, had settled down and taken the divorce papers stoically, although with a gleam in his eye that she thought boded ill for later when he’d had more beer.

All of which took half the morning; by the time she finished sorting it out, she had barely enough time for the sixty-mile drive to Houlton and Spud’s court hearing.

But she made it.

As Cody Chevrier crossed the parking lot between his office and the dome-topped, red-brick edifice of the Aroostook County courthouse, he felt his mood darken. Inside, Spud Wilson’s folks would be waiting to hear what came next for their son, still hoping that there had been some kind of mistake, and Cody meant to be there with them when they learned that there hadn’t, that the boy they’d raised was to be tried as a killer.

It was his duty. But he didn’t like it. Inside, he climbed the polished stairs to the courtroom level, read the schedule posted on the wall across from the stairwell, and found the room with its varnished wooden wainscoting, heavily ornate wooden bench flanked by the State of Maine and American flags, and the prosecutor and defense desks of brightly polished wood, sitting at right angles to the witness stand.

All the hearing participants had already arrived: Al Bacon, the county judge; the prosecutor, Marion Brandt Daly; defense attorney Hamilton Bell; and Spud himself, with a white padded bandage covering his injured ear.

His folks were there, too, his father and mother looking stunned in their Sunday clothes, as if being well dressed might somehow be of
help to their boy. His mom wept quietly into her tissues while his father, eyes bleary as if recovering from a hangover, sat with his hands stuffed in his pockets.

Behind them sat Lizzie Snow, waiting like the rest for the proceedings to begin, which shortly they did, and almost as soon as they had begun, they were finished: the complaint was read, Spud was asked how did he plead, and he replied, “Not guilty.”

All of which had been expected. Cody shifted, trying to ease the ache in his wounded shoulder, and wished the heat in here wasn’t always turned up so damned high. But he wouldn’t be here long; there might ordinarily have been a defense argument on why Spud Wilson ought to be let out on bail.

There was no bail for murder charges in Maine, though, so all that remained was for the judge to speak.

“Prisoner is remanded to the custody of the state.” The transfer had already been arranged and agreed to.

But Spud still looked puzzled. “Jail?” he queried shakily. He’d been in a cell downstairs; the county lockup was right here in the building. “Does he mean I’m going back to—”

But his father understood, all right. “No!” he shouted, his face reddening as he yanked his right hand out of his pocket.

A hand with a gun in it. Not for the first time, Cody cursed the absence of metal detectors in the courthouse building; every year he argued for them, and every year there was simply no money for it.

“No, you ain’t takin’ my boy,” the old man yelled, “this ain’t fair, this—”

“Marty!” Spud’s mother cried, but he shoved her roughly away.

“—this ain’t
right
! And it’s your fault! You … you always
coddled
him so, you made him that way!” He grabbed his wife, held the gun to her head, then waved it around.

“Don’t come near!” he threatened as Cody jumped up.

For an instant the courtroom was still, even the deputy who’d run in when the judge hit the panic button under his desk froze in place. Only Lizzie Snow stood slowly, her face a smooth mask of intent, right behind Wilson so he didn’t see her.

Then she was on him, her hand plucking the weapon from his in a quick, deft motion, his arms seized and yanked behind him. Another moment and he was on the floor with her knee in his back.

Spud stared slack-jawed. Cody wondered again if the boy was on some kind of medication, or if he’d suffered a brain injury in the shooting.