Airtight Case (51 page)

“So do we,” snarled Mike. “We just follow the trail back.”

“Which one? The woods are full of animal trails. You’ve made too many mistakes for me to believe you kept track of where you are, and you’re bleeding. Go ahead, Barrel, tell him what that means.”

Barrel looked at her, hair falling in his face. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t listen to her, Barrel, she’ll say anything to stay alive. Shoot her, dammit.” He grabbed for the gun, but Barrel pulled it away.

“Marina was right about the wild animals,” Lindsay said. “You do know there are bears in the woods?”

“Everybody knows that. The rangers keep them away from people. Drive them back into the mountains. That’s what Marina said.”

“Do you see any rangers here? This is where they drive them to. Do you see any tourists?”

“You know, she has a point, Mike.”

“You’re bleeding and they’ve probably already smelled your blood. That’s why they have those long pointed noses. They’re as good as bloodhounds.”

Lindsay didn’t tell him that in the park’s history, no one had ever been killed by a bear. Mauled when they’d provoked one, but never killed.

“However, the bears are not the worst. The wild boars are the worst. Did Marina tell you about the wild hogs?”

“What about them?”

Mike was getting tired and scared. That meant he was getting either more dangerous or less. She wasn’t sure which.

“Lots of people have disappeared in the Smokies and have never been found again—not a trace, not a piece of clothing, nothing whatsoever is ever found of them. Do you know what the park rangers think happened to them?”

“What?” asked Barrel.

As Lindsay spoke, she was forming a plan. If she could surprise them, it might work.

“Wild hogs. Some of them weigh five or six hundred pounds and run like a horse. They eat everything that has blood on it, bones, clothes, even a stick with blood on it. If you don’t get out of the woods and get help, you’re going to be sniffed out, run down, and eaten by a wild boar and the only thing that will be left of you is pig shit—but perhaps I’m being redundant.”

Lindsay watched Mike get angry and Barrel start to laugh. She made her move. She shot her arm out hard and shoved two fingers in Barrel’s eyes. He yelled and she grabbed his gun. He held on. Mike lunged at her and she grabbed at his hurt hand and hit his nose with the heel of her hand as hard as she could. He fell to the ground, stunned. Barrel was still rubbing his eyes and yelling. She picked up a rock and hit his gun hand. He still held on and squeezed the trigger. It missed her by a fraction.

She ran as fast as she could in the direction of the site, leaving them yelling after her. Gunfire behind her kept her running faster. She hadn’t been in this part of the woods, but she did know which direction she needed to be running. The important thing was to leave the two maniacs behind her, especially now that they were very angry.

Lindsay was in better shape than the two of them, and she was wearing sneakers. She stopped to catch her breath, gulping down lungfuls of air. Her sense of the sun was that she was heading away from it, though it was climbing rapidly overhead. She wasn’t really sure where she was or which direction to go without stopping to think about it, and she had no time to stop and figure it out.

The way sloped down abruptly, terminating at a rock overhang and a creek. Growing near the creek was something she could use as a weapon. She fished her Swiss army knife out of her pocket. It would take forever to cut a devil’s walking stick with this. “Damn,” Lindsay said as she scanned the ground near the edges of the grove. There—a pile of them felled, perhaps by winter ice. If she lay flat, she could reach one lying just inside the grove. She didn’t hesitate, even when the thorns tore the skin of her arm.

They’re called devil’s walking sticks because of their shape. They would make good walking sticks were it not for the sharp, prickly thorns covering them from end to end. She took her knife and shaved the thorns off the parts she wanted to hold and slipped her knife back in her pocket. She took the stick and followed the creek, which went more or less west.

Lindsay walked thirty minutes before she came out on Highway 129. She knew where she was. She wasn’t that far from the dirt road leading to the site. She walked along the Little Tennessee River side of the road toward the turnoff. Just ahead of her, Mike and Barrel stumbled out of the woods.

They saw her just as she saw them. Lindsay looked down the embankment to see if there was any safe haven. Nothing but sharp rocks. This was a major highway. Surely, they wouldn’t shoot her here. She was wrong. Mike had the gun now. He raised it and fired. A car came by, and she tried to flag it down. They didn’t stop or even slow down. Instead, they gunned the engine.

Mike shot again. This time, Lindsay had another plan. She fell onto the grass and slipped down the embankment as if she’d been shot. She grabbed a piece of driftwood, threw it in the water with a splash, hunkered down among the jagged rocks and a fallen tree, and waited.

“I got her. I got her, didn’t I? Did you see?”

“No, man, I can’t see a damn thing. Look at my eyes. Did she poke them out?”

“No, stupid. You saw well enough to get out of the woods and cross the road, didn’t you? You want pain and misery, you should have my hand and nose. I’m going to need plastic surgery on my nose. I can’t breathe through it. I tell you, the money Marina’s offering isn’t worth this.”

Lindsay waited until she saw the gun and then Mike’s head, as he leaned to look for her in the water. Without hesitation, she struck his hand with the thorned walking stick. The gun went flying into the rocks, along with a spray of blood from his wrist. She briefly took note of where the gun landed, stood, and struck him again across the kneecaps. Mike yelled, cursed, and fell into the water.

“What is it, Mike? What’s happening?”

“Help, she’s killing me. Find the gun.” Mike clung to the rocks, his legs dangling in the river. “Help me, Barrel. I’m going to drown.”

“I’m getting out of here.”

Lindsay heard tires squeal and braced herself for a thump. It didn’t come. Instead, she heard Sheriff Ramsey telling Barrel to put his hands behind his back.

* * *

The sheriff took Barrel and Mike to the farmstead to pick up Marina. The three of them were in the dining room sitting at the table. Marina was cuffed to Mike. Barrel, squinting around him with deep bloodshot eyes, had his hands cuffed behind him. Lindsay sat across from them. Mr. and Mrs. Laurens stood by the kitchen door, behind Lindsay, looking very cross at Marina. The crew were in the living room gathered around the door.

“You can’t prove anything,” said Marina.

“This is the same caliber gun that killed the woman hiker,” said the sheriff. “What’re you willing to bet the bullet that killed her matches this gun?”

“Damn you, Marina,” said Barrel.

“Don’t say anything. That’s what the Miranda warning is about. What you say can be used against you. Just pretend you have lockjaw. They have to have proof beyond reasonable doubt, or they can’t even go to court.”

“Little lady, you’re dreaming if you think I don’t have enough to take you to court. Miss Tidwell didn’t die of natural causes, for starters.”

“You can’t connect me with that.” Marina looked defiantly at the sheriff.

“We can connect you with Dr. Chamberlain’s attack, for another thing.”

“How?”

“The photograph of you and Mike, the one you changed to put Dr. Chamberlain’s face on your body to fool her into leaving the hospital with Mike.”

Lindsay could see the faces of the crew wide-eyed with disbelief.

“You just have her word that there was such a picture, and I understand she has no memory of the time she had amnesia.”

“You’re wrong there, missy,” said the sheriff. “We have Mary Carp’s testimony. The sheriff in Mac’s Crossing convinced her to tell the truth. Besides that, every FBI agent on Dr. Chamberlain’s mailing list has a copy of the pictures, along with the UGA faculty, I understand.”

Marina opened her mouth and shut it. “You’re lying,” she whispered.

“She told me in the woods she emailed it. I didn’t believe her. You should have destroyed the thing,” said Mike. “Sheriff, I’m really hurting. I need to go to the hospital.”

“Mike, will you and Barrel please keep your mouths shut? Anybody could have doctored those pictures.”

“Which leads us to you,” said the sheriff. “Let’s leave off for the moment that we have Lindsay’s testimony against all of you.” The sheriff placed the bagged contents from Mike’s jacket pocket on the table. He picked up the baggie containing the coin. “This is Miss Tidwell’s.”

“You can’t prove it.”

“Is that some kind of—what you call it—a mantra?” said the sheriff. “You can’t prove it? You think saying it over and over’ll make it true? I damn well can prove it.” He put a piece of paper on the table. “This here’s a rubbing Mrs. Laurens did of Miss Tidwell’s coin in 1952 or thereabouts. I believe it’s the same coin.”

“I don’t believe you . . . Is that proof?”

“Damn near it.” The sheriff picked up the bagged tooth and handed it to Lindsay. “Why don’t you tell him about this?”

“You like gold, don’t you, Mike?” she said. “This “is a temporary cap for a molar. It’s gold. Not particularly valuable, but gold nonetheless. I’ll bet when you hit the hiker in the back of the head, you saw it pop out of his mouth and just couldn’t help yourself. He had a temporary cap put on just before he went hiking. Nigel discovered the cap missing and used dental records of some missing persons to identify the body.”

“That’s my cap. You can’t prove it’s not.”

“Mikey, Mikey, Mikey,” said the sheriff. “The woman is a forensic anthropologist. Listen to her.”

“When a dentist makes a temporary cap for a person, he makes it fit the tooth like a glove. This cap will only fit the person for whom the dentist made it, no one else. It’s like a fingerprint. When Nigel puts this cap on the hiker’s tooth, he’s going to know it’s his cap, without a doubt. And the jury’s going to know the sheriff found it in your pocket.”

Mike’s frown looked comical with his swollen nose and black eyes.

“We’re getting close, aren’t we?” The sheriff leaned forward with his hand on the table. “Barrel, we going to be able to match that gun to the bullet in that woman hiker? I’ll have to tell you, son, we already matched the bullet that came out of the hiker with the bullet that came out of Claire Burke.” Barrel put his head down and mumbled something. “That’s okay, boy. We can wait for the results.”

“You don’t have anything on me,” said Marina. “Just because that photograph is of me doesn’t mean I altered it.”

“No, you’re right about that. It doesn’t. However, we have these boys’ testimony. We got them, and they’re going to be looking for a deal. Chances are, they aren’t going to be that loyal to you. Put their testimony with the photograph, and all the little circumstantial evidence that keeps adding up. With Dr. Chamberlain’s testimony to boot, I know the D.A. and he’s going to be as happy with this case as he can be.”

“It’s not proof.”

“Miss,” said the sheriff, “we have enough proof to send you away. You can be as stubborn as you like, but your partners in crime are going to turn on you. Drew and her husband have already taken steps to distance themselves from this whole mess and lay the blame on you. They’ve sent Miss Tidwell’s documents back with a letter saying when they bought them from you, they didn’t know they were stolen, that you told them they had been obtained legally.”

That got Marina’s attention. “Drew, she killed Miss Tidwell, and her husband told her to do it. I heard him. I saw her crush the poison leaves and make the tea and put it in the Thermos to give to her. I’ll testify to that.”

* * *

The sheriff had been gone with his prisoners for about thirty minutes when the phone rang. Lindsay was in the living room, looking at Elaine McBride’s photo album of the cabin. She picked up the phone.

“Lindsay, it’s John. Lewis and I got tied up and are running late. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I’m not worried at all.”

“Everything okay there?”

“Sure. Everything’s fine.”

“We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

“No problem.”

“Stay in the house and don’t do anything dangerous.”

“I won’t. I’ll stay right here on the couch. See you in a while.” She hung up the phone and went back to the album. “Adam,” she called into the dining room. “I have an idea.”

* * *

It took a little bit to get Lewis to do it, especially without telling him why. But Adam had agreed, so Lewis signed off on excavating the well. This was not normal excavation procedure, and she and Adam gave it much discussion, pro and con, before deciding to do it. They excavated down to ten feet, a layer at a time, photographing a profile and sifting the dirt. At the ten-foot level, Lewis was growing uneasy.

“I think that’s as deep as we should go,” he said.

“Give me the rod,” Powell called up from the bottom.

He was handed down a four-foot steel rod with a handle at the top that is used to probe beneath the surface of soil.

“No more than that,” said Lewis, squatting beside the hole.

John had agreed to stay and help with the safety of digging a deep hole. Lindsay actually thought they would have to go deeper. He looked at her quizzically and stroked her bruised face, just as Powell said he had found something.

In less than an hour, Powell uncovered part of a tiny coffin.

“What?” said Lewis. “Another one? How did you know?”

“The loft poems,” said Lindsay. “I looked at the photograph of the floor scratchings again and decided that the one that said, ‘
Not my sin, the hell he’s in’
actually read, ‘
Not my sin, the well he’s in.’
That particular poem was printed, and the capital
W
looks like a capital
H
. I think that Sheldon Warfield was given the impression, just before the baby was to be buried beside his son, that it was not his son’s baby, but the surveyor’s. In his anger, Warfield had it thrown, coffin and all, down the well. Another thing that Faith hadn’t meant to happen and felt guilty about.”