Dead Level (33 page)

Shivering, Bob turned uphill to where his car was parked. In his absence, a wrecker had come out and hauled the vehicle out of the deep mud it was mired in, and put a wheel on to replace the one he had ruined. Then the wrecker guys had driven the car up here and left it for him, the road in to the crime scene by that time being clogged with squad cars, state vehicles, and a fire crew from Calais.

So now here it sat, mud-spattered but drivable; meanwhile, throughout the day, the Calais cops had brought him dry clothes, set up emergency heaters, and furnished him with gallons of hot coffee in an effort to get him warm after his icy dunking. But he still felt like somebody had shoved an icicle up his …

Well. Cold was how he felt, and it had nothing to do with the lake. Or the weather, chilling down again with the onset of afternoon, the sky a deep, purplish blue more like February than October and the air smelling ominously of snow.

I killed a guy
. Bah-
dum
-pum-pum, the rhythm of the words a repeating drumbeat, not so much in his head as in his heart.

To distract himself, he ticked items off his mental to-do list, even though he was not strictly speaking in charge of the crime scene, or the rescue scene, or even on the teams that were in fact responsible for them. The Calais cops and state guys had jurisdiction, Calais because of where the scene was located and the state because the perpetrator was an escaped prison inmate.

Had been an inmate. Bob returned his mind to his list:

Jake Tiptree and Wade Sorenson were both still alive as best Bob knew, both airlifted to the hospital in Calais, then Life-Flighted to Bangor, check.

Halfway up the path, Bob turned back to gaze across the lake at the cottage wreckage, staties still swarming over the clearing and the woods around it. He knew from the way they’d treated him that he wasn’t going to have any trouble about the shooting, that even before he’d given a statement—which he would no doubt be doing all the rest of this afternoon and well into the evening—they’d known it was a justifiable use of his weapon.

That he’d been right to shoot Dewey Hooper in the head …

In the head. Bah-da
-bump
. He shook his own head to clear it, went on trudging up the steep path between the big old trees. A vivid picture of his wife, smiling prettily at him, floated into his mind; next time he touched her, it would be with hands that had killed another human being.

Meanwhile, Ellie White had been sent first to the hospital in Calais for treatment, then back to Eastport, where she’d be asked to give the only full account that was presently available of all that had transpired over the past two days.

Check, Bob thought. Ellie’s husband, George, had argued protectively that Ellie ought to give her statement later, when she’d had a chance to get her thoughts together; tomorrow, maybe, or even sometime next week.

But that of course was just what the investigators didn’t want, her memories tamed and civilized into something more coherent but perhaps less accurate, and so not as useful for the official record. Either way, though, Bob thought she already had herself together just fine.

That she’d be fine. Which left only the unidentified, nearly naked man who had stumbled out of the woods at Sam Tiptree hours earlier, and then saved Wade Sorenson’s life. When Bob got out to where Wade lay unconscious and bleeding, the unidentified guy was there putting pressure on the gunshot wound to the thigh Wade had recently suffered, and once he got warm enough to talk again, Sam had backed up the guy’s story, that he hadn’t been the shooter.

But that part of Wade’s savior’s tale had been complicated; Bob figured it would all come out in the wash later, once the man had been treated for his own injuries and was able to give more of his own story.

If
Wade had been saved, Bob reminded himself unhappily; that part wasn’t for sure yet. He flattened his hands on the fender of the old Crown Vic. “To Serve and Protect,” the vehicle’s decal proclaimed in black letters that were beginning to flake off in patches, exposing the white paint beneath.

Leaning over the hood, Bob felt the forest all around him slowly expanding and contracting, as if it were breathing. Above him a woodpecker’s rat-a-tat-tat echoed hollowly; a fish jumped, landing in the lake with a flat slap.

Turning, he let all the coffee he’d drunk come up. They’d taken his service weapon; a formality, they’d assured him. But Bob hoped it would all go as smoothly as they said, and thinking this reminded him once more of Dewey Hooper.

Only this time, not of the act of shooting him. Instead Bob recalled a night a long time ago, when he’d driven a rowdy, uncooperative
Hooper to the county lockup after grabbing the man up on yet another drunk-and-disorderly.

Dragging the back of his hand over his mouth, he remembered what he’d told Hooper that night:

That Hooper should slow down, think things through before going off half-cocked. That things would work out better if he did. Bob wondered now if Hooper had even heard this, much less remembered it.

Probably not. Straightening, Bob got into the car, and once he’d settled behind the wheel he felt better. Sam Tiptree had been driven to the hospital by one of the Calais cops, to be assessed in the emergency room, and shortly after that word had come back that he’d been released, shaken but otherwise okay.

So, check. Bob put his hands on the wheel. The unidentified man had been taken away, too, wrapped in blankets for his own trip to the ER. What would happen to him after that depended on what the rest of his story turned out to be.

Some big-time head trauma, there. Gash the size of Idaho in the guy’s forehead. But he’d been walking and talking, so there couldn’t have been too much wrong beyond the obvious beating he’d taken, the flesh wound to his shoulder, and the effects of being practically bare-assed out here overnight in the freezing woods.

Bob pulled the car out onto the dirt road. He would go home, take a hot shower, change clothes, and then go give his statement to the state boys, and after that maybe have a beer.

God knew he could use one. For now, there was a half-f bottle of water in the cup holder; he spat the first mouthful of the stale, warmish stuff out the car window, then drank.

He started off down the dirt road, bumping through the ruts slowly so as not to damage the squad car’s muffler. A loon called somewhere out on the lake behind him, the mournful-sounding
ha-ha-ha!
bringing a fresh lump to his throat.

I killed a man
. But he swallowed it down, let the squad’s tires roll
over the humps and gulches they encountered. The trees went by, some leafless, some evergreen, the huckleberry brambles and the cattails, dark brown and velvety looking. The flat, bright surfaces of the streams and beaver ponds where they came up to the edge of the weathered roadway were glassy and silent.

As he drove he thought of all the things he would say if the deadly shot had been fired by someone else; by Sam Tiptree, for instance. In that case Bob would take pains to reassure Sam, to tell him he’d had no choice. That he’d done the correct thing.

That tomorrow was another day, and that everything would be all right. All those things were true, Bob knew. But as the Crown Vic’s wheels kept turning, the tires rolling over and over the bumps in the dirt road, he couldn’t stop thinking:

Bah
-dum
-pum-pum.
I killed a man
. Shot him.

In the head.

CHAPTER
12

“Y
ou mean it can just break like that? A blood vessel, with not even any warning?”

Bella Diamond’s voice sounded outraged, as if this sort of betrayal by a person’s own body should not be allowed, and if I’d been in the mood to talk I’d have agreed.

But I wasn’t; in the mood, that is. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Eyes closed—they all thought I was still asleep—I was sitting halfway upright in a hospital bed with what felt like a cotton wad the size of Manhattan shoved so far up my nose, it was bumping against my tonsils.

Also, I was pretty sure that Ellie and Sam were dead, since the last time I’d seen them a guy with a shotgun had been aiming it menacingly at them, ready to fire.

The cottage was gone, too, and who knew what—or who—else. So I didn’t open my eyes. Why bother? But then came Sam’s voice.

“Ellie was the real hero,” he said. “Can you believe she not only sent an email on a Kindle, she was smart enough to send it twice? Once to George, and a copy to Bob Arnold.”

“Oh, well,” Ellie remarked self-deprecatingly. “What was I supposed to do, send up smoke signals? Although,” she added, “I guess Dewey Hooper did a pretty good job of that.”

A tear leaked down my cheek; they were alive. But I put the brakes on any serious weeping, since I was fairly certain blowing my nose would be catastrophic.

“So, what was the guy’s story, anyway?” my dad asked. “He thought Ellie was his dead wife?”

“Not just thought so.” Sam again, sounding tired but okay. “He was obsessed with her. Bob Arnold says that back at the prison they found a pile of notebooks, seven years’ worth. Full of her name written over and over again, pages and pages.”

“Hmph.” Bella Diamond’s contemptuous snort conveyed what she thought of that. “If he was so crazy about her, he shouldn’t have murdered her. Seems to me some people don’t
deserve
wives.”

Amen
, I thought. The faint scrape of a chair told me she had come over to sit closer to me.

Her work-chapped hand took mine and held it comfortingly. “Poor thing,” she murmured. “What did those surgeons do to her in that operating room, anyway?”

Sam replied eagerly. “Actually, it was kind of great. What she had is called an intranasal arterial hemorrhage. It means a burst artery, not a big one, and really it can happen to anyone, no warning, and it wouldn’t stop because an artery has pressure in it, see? It has your blood pressure in it.”

I smiled inwardly; Sam had always liked listening when his brain-surgeon father explained medical things. He went on:

“So what they do is, they stick an electrocautery wire—a hot electrical wire, basically—way up there where the bleeding is, and then they
zap
it—”

Ouch. No wonder my face felt like a truck had hit it. They’d electrocuted my nosebleed.

“What I still don’t get,” Ellie put in, “is who the guy was, who was wandering around nearly naked in the woods.”

“
That
guy.” Ellie’s husband, George, laughed without humor. “
That
guy was just a late-season tourist who’d wandered in there, thought he was going for a hike. A walk in the woods.”

Another chair-scrape as George pulled up to my bedside, too. “Instead, he ran into Dewey Hooper. And
he’d
just found the body of that hunter who went missing, remember him? Bentley Hodell?”

I did remember, sort of. There’d been a search for him, but an unsuccessful one. Bella tsk-tsked as George went on:

“Guess we’ll never know for sure what he was thinking, but Hooper must’ve wanted Hodell’s clothes. Pretty decent jacket and a pair of lined pants.”

I remembered those, too. “So when the smoke cleared, Hooper had the boots and jacket on,
and
he’d hit the tourist guy on the head with a rock, took
his
clothes, too, and put them on Hodell.”

“But didn’t take his gun?” Bella asked acutely. A stickler for detail, Bella could find a toast crumb on a kitchen counter that was otherwise so clean, Victor could’ve done brain surgery on it. “The tourist’s gun, the one Sam had, there at the end?”

“Right. Hooper didn’t know about it.” It was Bob Arnold’s voice now. “Tourist guy was trying to get it out, he fell on it when Hooper clobbered him, and then it was lying under him, in among the fallen leaves, so Hooper never saw it.”

Footsteps entered the room. “Hooper put the tourist’s ID on Hodell’s body, and the tourist’s clothes, too. Bashed him up so he
wasn’t recognizable otherwise … maybe he figured that there’d be another search if a visitor went missing, but not so much for Hodell since he’d already been searched for.”