ADX Praxis (The Red Lake Series Book 3) Page 16

  Chapter 47

  Harry felt sick. His head ached as if it were a used soccer ball. When he opened his eyes the ceiling spun overhead. He gave up keeping them open and passed out again.

  Sunshine spilled through the windows. He squinted in the light. Somewhere outside police sirens faintly wailed. Harry struggled to sit up. His clothes were off. Scratches covered his chest. The blood was dried and dark.

  The brunette lay on the cowhide sofa. Her head hung at an awkward angle. She wasn’t beautiful anymore; her face was a bloodied pulp. Harry held up his hands. His knuckles were scuffed and bruised. Beyond his office windows the sirens grew louder.

  Harry crawled over to the woman. Her mouth gaped. Her tongue was thickened, stiff and dark, sticking out of her mouth. Purple bruises ringed her neck. There was no point in checking for a pulse. It must have been the booze, he thought. He looked for the bottle. It lay empty on the floor.

  Heavy steps echoed on the stairs, they pounded down the hall. Harry’s office door exploded open. Four deputies stormed in with their guns drawn. Moments later Harry was slammed face down on the floor, his hands cuffed behind his back.

  “I always knew you were a twisted fuck,” one deputy said to Grim.

  Harry never liked Gonzales. He suffered from a small man complex.

  Mitch Conners looked at the girl. “Better call for the coroner’s meat wagon. This one won’t need an ambulance.”

  Harry was less than gently dragged to his feet. A blanket was draped over his shoulders. Then firmly grasped by two deputies he was walked out of the office, down the stairs, and thrust into the rear seat of a squad car.

  Deputy Hughes was driving. During the summer Jimmy ran the police boat on the lake. Harry became acquainted with him knocking around in the marina..

  “I didn’t do it, Jimmy.”

  “It doesn’t look good Harry.”

  Harry shrugged. Downtown Red Lake slipped by.

  “How is it that you guys turned up, you seemed to know what you were looking for.”

  “We had a call. An anonymous citizen reported the sounds of a fight and a woman screaming. They gave your office address.”

  “My office or just the Edison Building?”

  “They were specific about your office.”

  “Convenient. How many people did you find in the building?”

  “I can’t say anymore Harry. You’re in custody. I got my job to think of you know.”

  Harry saw Jimmy’s eyes in the rear view mirror. They were the eyes of a man determined to hold on to what he had in life. He stopped asking questions.

  Chapter 48

  Harry had not turned up at the boat. As Barton cooked his breakfast he worried about that. Halfway through frying a rasher of bacon he turned off the gas and went out for a run. Leaving Cody’s Marina he turned toward the downtown. He picked up the pace and moved easily along the edge of the road. A half mile west he turned up Boyden Street.

  Several marked and unmarked squad cars blocked the street by Harry’s office. Yellow crime scene flagging wrapped the Edison Building. Barton slowed and stepped into a store’s recessed entry. A scattering of people gawked at the scene. He resisted an urge to ask. That might bring attention to himself.

  The coroner’s wagon pulled up. Two men carried a gurney into the building. A short time later they came out. A body lay under a sheet. Small bloodstains seeped through the white cloth. As the men shifted the stretcher to load the body into the van, an arm slipped free from the shroud, the hand was small, gems glittered on two fingers. It least it wasn’t Harry.

  Barton walked up the street to a nearby restaurant. He ensconced himself near the window with a cup of black coffee. The coroner’s wagon left. So did the squad cars. Harry was either gone or had already been taken in. The cars that remained belonged to detectives.

  When Barton left the restaurant he went back to the boat, grabbed his gear and put it into his car. He did not feel like being questioned. The police were sure to turn up at the boat with a search warrant. And if the way Gaines eyeballed him were an indication, they would want to talk to him, too.

  He pulled out of the Marina parking lot and turned west toward the airfield. The Sleepy Shore Motel seemed more shady than sleepy; they were unlikely to be interested in a black man staying there.

  A detective’s car passed going the opposite direction. A Crown Victoria, white with black-wall tires. Barton kept his eye on the rear view mirror. The sedan turned into the marina’s lot.

  Ten minutes later he was stretched out on the motel bed. He felt no need to pace or tap his fingers, but merely lay on his back with his eyes closed and waited for Harry to call. If he used his one call to phone a lawyer, the lawyer would contact Dirk.

  Chapter 49

  NTSB phoned Sheriff Gaines. They would send an investigator out to examine the Red Lake plane crash. The coroner’s preliminary report lay on his desk, two dead. The pilot was thrown clear in the crash. His torso had a bullet hole through it. The passenger’s charred remains were still strapped in the rear. The seat was removed with the body; it would be inspected at the morgue.

  His phone rang. “The M.E. is on the phone.”

  “Gaines here, what do you have Richard?”

  “The man in the rear had his esophagus crushed.”

  “Could it of happened in the crash?”

  “I’m not in crash forensics but I’d say no. There was nothing it could have struck. I’ll probably know more in a couple hours, the pathologist is in there now, but I’d say the guy died before the crash.”

  Gaines hung up. Detective Egan sat down in the Sheriff’s office.

  “What do you have Pat?” The Sheriff asked as he laid the Coroner’s file on his desk.

  “Got a witness that says there was a boat out by the plane. The boat left and the plane took off.”

  “Get a description?”

  “No, it was too dark. The best the guy could offer was that he thought it sounded like a big inboard, said it had the throaty rumbled of the old V-8’s. Couldn’t tell me who, what, or how many were in the boat.”

  “Not a lot there.”

  “No, but he said the boat took off without running lights, heading toward town. The plane took off heading north, using its landing lights.”

  Gaines made a wry face. “Don’t know that I’d want to take off on the water in the dark. Easy for something to go wrong.”

  “Well something did, but it won’t be mechanical failure. We found a bullet, flattened in the altimeter.”

  “Why would a man sitting in the back of an airplane shoot his pilot in the back?”

  “Maybe it was an accident? Playing with the gun and it went off?”

  “The medical examiner says his throat was crushed before the crash. How does that happen?”

  “I don’t know? The pilot swings at him, crushes the throat, he shoots the pilot for payback?”

  “I don’t like it.” Gaines stroked his mustache with the words.

  “Neither do I, but there sure wasn’t anyone else on the plane when it crashed. My witness says it never rose above a few hundred feet before it made a half-spiral straight down and exploded on impact. Hell, the blast was so hard we found a severed arm fifty feet away!”

  “You run the prints?”

  “Not yet. The coroner was going to get to them after he finished up with the body.”

  “What did the guys in the plane look like?”

  “Hard to say. Basically, they looked like charcoal briquettes. But one was tall the other average.

  As Egan spoke the Sheriff’s phone rang.

  “Yeah? Okay put him on.”

  Gaines mouthed the word ‘medical examiner” to Egan.

  “What do you have for me doc?”

  Egan couldn’t hear what was said but when Gaines hung up he tersely said, “Let’s go to the morgue.”

  The morgue was an adjunct to the county jail. Egan and Gaines drove west on Route 12, until it turned north on the edge o
f town. From there the highway meandered north toward Mason Forks, passing the landing strip and running parallel to the Lazarus Mountains.

  A quarter mile after the highway swung north they turned onto Aspen Way. The road led into what was to be a light commercial development. The builder went bust in one of the economic downturns so the lots on either side of the road were empty, save blowing trash and the occasional abandoned couch or refrigerator. Items left by people too lazy or too cheap to drive out to the dump.

  The Canaan County Jail complex occupied the end of the street. Beyond the building's gray walls and cyclone fencing the foot of the Lazarus Range rose.

  A brisk breeze tugged at them as they crossed the parking lot. The lobby was sterile and utilitarian. They took the elevator down. The odor of antiseptics met them as the doors opened. Gaines recalled Milton’s words from his high school English class, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ It was cool on the basement level. They walked down the hall. Gaines looked through the window in a door to the lab and knocked. Vince Tartelli the forensic pathologist waived them in.

  “Gavin, Pat.” He nodded to each.

  “So what did you want to show me Vince?”

  The pathologist walked over to a stainless steel table. On it a severed arm lie. The palm was up, the rigid fingers spread.

  “The arm still has some rigor mortise but it’s passing. Take a look at this.”

  Tartelli grasped the first finger and with a pair of tweezers prodded the tip. It looked waxy. The edge of the tweezers slipped under the tissue. He closed the tips and pulled, the fingertip tissue seemed to peel back, yet the finger on the arm was undamaged.

  “I pulled one already. It’s in that petri dish.”

  “What is it?” queried Egan.

  “Fingerprints, made from latex or plastic. Whatever they are, they’re not the same prints as the ones on the body.”

  “Pull all of them.” Gaines ordered. “Take a set of the victims and the fakes. As soon as you finish, upload them into the IAFIS.”

  *

  Egan drove. Gaines again stroked his mustache as he thought.

  “I doubt we’ll get a fingerprint match.”

  “Why not?”

  “My guess is this ties into our body across the lake, Harry Grim’s house exploding and Eddie Ames’s fatal car crash. How the hell those events tie together I don’t know, but it has something to do with national security.”

  “What do we have here that could tie in to that?”

  “The only thing we’ve got is Praxis. It’s a federal lockup. Some of their prisoners were high profile spies. But you would expect the FBI, BOP, or DOJ to be investigating. This feels more like spy versus spy rather than usual channels.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Check the prints. My guess is they will not be in the system or they will be fakes. Nobody is going to tell us anything, so we wait and let Harry keep digging.”

  “Kind of dangerous for Harry?”

  “Yep. That why the private dicks make the big bucks.”

  Chapter 50

  Claus was at his wits end. Was everyone incompetent? How hard was it to kill a man? Obviously, it was much more difficult than he assumed. The report on the plane irked him. Two men were on board. He knew there should have been three. In that Speers had not called in, it was reasonable to assume somehow Barton escaped.

  As if that were not enough to irritate his ulcer, the Red Lake police had run a fingerprint check on three sets of prints. One came up as the pilot, one set for Louis Speers, and another set that matched the dead soldier from Iraq.

  So, the police had found the false fingerprints. That was sure to raise their suspicions. Claus wanted fewer questions being asked, not more.

  He took a couple anti-acid tablets and washed them down with coffee.

  “Christina, get me Kurt Clemson.”

  A few moments later she buzzed to say he was on the line.

  “Report.”

  “We took Barton last night. But the plane went down. I assume he is dead. This morning the Red Lake police took Harry Grim into custody on suspicion of murder.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Samantha. I’m sorry sir, I know you were fond of her.”

  Claus said nothing for a full minute. Finally, Kurt ventured a reluctant, “Sir?”

  “You know what you do when you assume Kurt? You make an ass of u and me! Barton wasn’t on the plane.”

  “He had to be! I was there when he got aboard.”

  “Well they only have two bodies! Which ones do you think they are?”

  Clemson swallowed hard. “I don’t know sir.”

  “Well I do. Obviously, Barton is alive. Now how the hell did Sam die?”

  “She picked Grim up as planned in the bar last night. We thought he’d take her to his boat, but they went to his office. Fortunately we placed a GPS bug on his car but we lost time getting to her. I guess Grim likes it rough because he beat her to death before we arrived.

  “You’re an incompetent fool, Clemson. We’re running out of people here, or hadn’t you noticed? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “She was supposed to spike the drinks. Then we were to beat her up. When they woke up she would cry assault. Grim would be discredited as a woman beater. When he disappeared people would have assumed he was just skipping out on the trial.”

  “Couldn’t you just put a bullet in his head?” shouted Claus.

  Clemson was wise enough to say nothing.

  “Pull jurisdiction on this hick sheriff and get Grim into our custody. Then get your ass out of the country.”

  Chapter 51

  Sheriff Gaines considered murder to be a rare occurrence in Canaan County. Of course there were exceptions, a couple years back Robert Goodman killed five, wounded one and threatened to blow up a hundred at the New Life Church. He was executed for it. But in a normal year he saw none or one homicide.

  As a consequence when the call came in for a homicide at the Edison building, that morning, rather than going as he did when they failed to find a body by the lake house, he let Detective Pat Egan take charge. Egan had done well in the Goodman case. Gaines felt it was time to start letting go of the reins, he knew he held too tight.

  Later, when he learned the alleged killer was Harry Grim, he regretted his decision. He read Egan’s report on Harry’s arrest. Egan was thorough and the case against Grim was tight. After forty years in police work, he knew anyone might kill but not necessarily kill in any manner and he thought he knew Grim, beating a woman to death with his fists was beyond the odds of probabilities.

  To his irritation Gaines saw Clemson was back. He was not particularly pleased as the man beyond his office glass browbeat the desk officer. Gesturing with one hand toward Gaines and waving a badge with the other Clemson leaned in toward the deputy’s face.

  How was it Clemson was here so soon? Perhaps it was a coincidence? Anyway he would have to see him and he might learn something. He walked over to the glass and rapped on it with his knuckles, waving Clemson in.

  He was barely seated at his desk when Clemson began his demands.

  “You have a man in custody that we want for national security reasons.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Harry Grim!”

  “No, I mean who wants him? First you were FBI then you were wanted on a Federal writ. Just who do you represent?”

  “Don’t mess with me Sheriff. I can make your life hell.”

  Gaines pulled a forty-five from his desk. He pointed the barrel into Clemson’s face and pulled the hammer back. “And I might blow your brains all over my office wall. After all I have proof you impersonated an FBI agent. It won’t be hard to convince the Grand Jury you assaulted me.”

  The veins in Clemson’s temples pulsed.

  “Don’t threaten me in my town. If you want Grim, then bring me some paper. Until then get out of my office!”

  Clemson bristled but backed out. Gaines
held the gun up until he was gone.

  “I’m going over to the jail, Carter. If that guy comes back with a court order, stall. Tell him I’m in Mason Forks checking out a bar killing.”

  Carter gave a two-finger salute and he returned to his paperwork.

  *

  At the Canaan County jail, Sheriff Gaines ordered Harry brought to an interview room. When he arrived, Grim had a black eye and swollen cheek.

  “What happened to you, Harry?”

  “A couple of your boys don’t like men who beat woman.”

  “Are you a woman beater, Harry?”

  “No but they think so.”

  “Give me their badge numbers. I’ll have them up on charges.”

  “Naw, I agree with their sentiments though I object to their conclusions. I despise wife beaters. And I got to admit, I look guilty as hell.”

  “That you do. What happened?”

  “I was a little drunk. This brunette lady was looking hot, but nobody could get anywhere with her. Suddenly she was coming on to me.”

  “That’s because you so ruggedly handsome I suppose.”

  “Could be, Sheriff. But I figured it had something to do with Praxis and whoever wanted to kill me by blowing up my house.”

  “Fools rush in…”

  “I suspected something might happen in the parking lot. Nothing. And nobody followed me to the office.”

  “We both know electronics are an easy way around a hard tail.”

  “At the office she asked for a drink. I got a bottle out of my desk. She must have spiked the glasses, because she went down. The last thing I remember is trying to move her when my lights went out.”

  “We have the bottle and glasses. It’s too early to get toxicology back, but we took blood samples from the body and you signed a consent for yours.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Fingerprints make her out to be Samantha Quilling, a government secretary from D.C.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Perhaps so but you’re wrapped up pretty tight on a murder charge by this. How’d you bruise your knuckles?”