Swallow The Hook Part 4

"When you got down here to the parking area, did you see a car other than your own and that old green Volvo?"

"No." Then Milton caught on. "Oh, is that his car? It wasn't here when I hiked in yesterday."

"The victim is one Nathan Golding, resident of Brooklyn, New York, according to his license," Meyerson said. "And that car is registered to him."

"The Nathan Golding?" Milton asked.

"You know him?"

"Know of him. He's the head of Green Tomorrow, the environmental group. The one that blows stuff up."

Frank's eyes met Meyerson's and he knew they were thinking the same thing. What was Golding up to in the Adirondack Park? Frank could probably provide Meyerson with a quick answer by telling him about the conversation he'd overheard in Malone's, but why should he? If Meyerson knew so d.a.m.n much about running a murder investigation, let him work it out for himself.

A tiny muscle near Frank's left eye began to twitch. He no longer heard what Milton was saying to Meyerson. What would he do with the information if he didn't pa.s.s it on to Lew? Investigate himself?

Well, why not just look into it? He didn't like the idea of bringing the state police down on Beth's head. Besides, if she knew anything, she'd be more likely to tell him than some a.s.s-kicking trooper.

Christ, what was he thinking? He couldn't withhold information from the officer in charge of the case. Where was Meyerson?

The lieutenant was handing the hiker his business card and telling him to call if he remembered anything else. He glanced up and noticed Frank watching. "You're free to go, Bennett," he said dismissively.

The muscle near Frank's eye pounded.

"Thanks, Lew. Don't work too hard."

As soon as Frank stepped through the door to his office, Earl and Doris were on him like two puppies on an old shoe. "Who got shot on Giant?" "How did it happen?" "Was it hunters?" "Did you arrest anyone?"

"Jesus H. Christ! Why don't you two consider doing a little work for a change? You obviously spent the whole morning listening to the radio."

Doris and Earl slunk off while Frank sank into his chair and ma.s.saged his throbbing temples. Ten after one, and all he'd had to eat today was a lousy doughnut and coffee in Albany-no wonder his head hurt. Too bad he'd snapped at Earl like that. He could hardly ask him to go to the Store for a sandwich now.

As he was about to get up and go himself, Doris's mousy brown bouffant appeared around the edge of the door. "Joe Sheehan is here," she whispered. Doris always spoke softly in the presence of tragedy, to keep it from turning its attentions to her. "Should I send him in?"

Frank nodded and sat back down as Joe entered, shutting the door behind him.

"Well, what did you find out?" Joe asked.

When the fingerprint match had come through, Frank had told Joe he'd be going to Albany to see the Finns. But with all that had happened since he left Trout Run yesterday, he hardly had given a thought to what he would tell Mary Pat's parents about the visit.

Frank began straightening a paper clip, keeping his eyes fixed on his task. "Well, the Finns are the people who wrote that letter I found in Mary Pat's room. Unfortunately, they don't have the baby." Frank explained the entire Sheltering Arms story, ending with the money the Finns had paid for the baby they never got.

Instantly Joe's hackles went up. "Now, wait a minute! First you accused my girl of killing her baby, now you're saying she sold it for money! Mary Pat didn't have but three hundred dollars to her name when she died. I'll show you her bank statement."

"I didn't say Mary Pat sold her baby; I said Sheltering Arms did. The Finns found out about this so-called agency through the Internet. Did Mary Pat have a friend with a computer? Or did she go to the Lake Placid library a lot?"

Joe shook his head. "Nah, Mary Pat didn't have no interest in computers. She had trouble just typing a letter on the one in the church office."

"Does that computer have Internet access?" Frank asked.

Joe shrugged, then s.h.i.+fted his body in his chair to pull a large blue handkerchief from his pocket. He dabbed at his eyes. "This is just getting worse and worse. I thought you'd come back and tell me that this nice couple adopted the baby fair and square. And then I could tell Ann that everything was settled."

"Well, I'm sorry I couldn't oblige you," Frank said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. He'd just told the man his granddaughter was being sold like a steer at a cattle auction, and all he cared about was being able to tell his wife their messy problem was cleared up.

But the remark apparently sailed over Joe's head. "That's all right," he said. "What's next?"

"The Finns said Sheltering Arms told them the baby had been born on September seventeenth. If we knew where Mary Pat was that day, we might discover someone who helped her. And that person might know how Mary Pat hooked up with Sheltering Arms."

"The seventeenth-what day of the week was that?"

"Wednesday."

Joe rattled off the litany of Mary Pat's well-regulated life-shopping on Monday, her day off, volunteering at the church on Tuesdays, at the clothing bank on Fridays, helping her mother with housework and her father with yardwork.

"And did she come straight home after work every night? Were you awake when she got home?"

"Of course she came straight home-she knew her mother could never sleep until she was in," Joe explained. Then added, "Except for Wednesday, now that you mention it."

"What happened then?" Frank prompted.

"She spent the night at Debbie's," Joe said, his mouth pursed in disapproval.

"Debbie...?"

"Flint, who she worked with at the store. You know she's got those two little kids and her husband run off and left her, so whenever her regular baby-sitter would stand her up or she wanted to go gallivanting with some man, she'd want Mary Pat to come over after her s.h.i.+ft and watch the kids, and Mary Pat would never say no."

"I take it you disapproved." Frank wondered what poor Debbie, who had always struck him as a decent, hardworking woman, would think of this take on her social life.

"Well, Mary Pat's just too good-natured. We thought Debbie took advantage, is all."

"And Mary Pat would spend the night when she baby-sat?" Frank asked.

"Yeah, Debbie would stay out till all hours, and then Mary Pat would be too sleepy to drive home, so she just slept over on the sofa and came home early in the morning."

"And that's what happened Wednesday the seventeenth? What time did she get home on Thursday morning?"

"Well, she didn't come home that morning. She called around seven and said Debbie was taking her and the kids to that new pancake restaurant that opened on the way into Lake Placid, and she thought she might just do a little shopping over there afterward. See, I had to take Ann to Plattsburgh for a doctor's appointment later that morning."

"So you didn't see Mary Pat from the time she left for work at two-thirty on Wednesday, till she got home from work at eleven-thirty on Thursday night," Frank clarified.

"Yeah, that's right, "Joe agreed. "So you think she had the baby while she was over at Debbie's? I knew that girl was no good. Why would she let Mary Pat do such a thing and not call a doctor?"

"Hold on, we don't know that Mary Pat had the baby there-she could have been anywhere that night. We'll have to talk to Debbie." Frank thought back to the afternoon in the Stop'N'Buy when Mary Pat hadn't shown up for work. If Debbie had known about the birth, she would have suspected the reason for Mary Pat's absence-but she had seemed truly puzzled. And he didn't think she was that good an actress.

Joe looked at Frank in confusion. "You think Mary Pat lied? That she just told us she was at Debbie's, and she wasn't really?" This seemed to shock Joe almost as much as the pregnancy.

"Did this baby-sitting thing come up suddenly?" Frank asked.

"Yeah, as a matter of fact, it did. She just told us about it an hour or so before she left for work. That's what got Ann so riled up. She said Debbie just had Mary Pat at her beck and call. But Mary Pat would never hear a bad word spoken about anyone. She said Debbie had a rough life and deserved a little fun, and she didn't mind helping her out."

"Maybe she felt some contractions and figured the baby was coming, so she'd better make a plan. Although how she managed to get through her s.h.i.+ft at work, if she was in labor-" Frank shook his head. "Do you know who she would have been visiting on Harkness Road?"

Joe shrugged. "I don't know. I can't really think of anyone she knew over there."

Frank hit the intercom b.u.t.ton and told Doris to bring in the property tax record book. She responded with unusual alacrity, then dragged her feet on the way back out, clearly hoping to gather a tidbit of information. Frank remained silent until she was back at her desk.

"Here, Joe-look over the list of property owners and see if that jogs your memory."

After studying the book, Joe shook his head. "I recognize most of the names. Mary Pat probably knew most of them by sight, too. But I don't think any of them were special friends. She never mentioned visiting them."

Frank stood up abruptly. "I'm going to talk to Debbie Flint about Wednesday. And I'll have to go out to Harkness Road and talk to everyone there. I don't think this can stay secret much longer, Joe. You better do what you can to prepare Ann." His voice sounded harsh even to his own ears, but he didn't care.

Joe nodded silently and slowly headed toward the door. With his hand on the doork.n.o.b, he turned back to face Frank. "I lost everything here, Frank. My daughter. My granddaughter. The life we used to live. Ann is all I got left. Don't blame me for wanting to keep her safe."

Frank stared at the door that had closed behind Joe. He hadn't thought he could have felt any worse than he had when the man had opened it, but he did.

8.

IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE to talk to Debbie while she was working at the Stop'N'Buy, so Frank decided to head over to Harkness Road first, then talk to Debbie after her s.h.i.+ft.

He stepped into the outer office, where Doris sat chatting animatedly on the phone while making occasional stabs at her keyboard. He might have known she wouldn't be fazed by his earlier sharp words.

Earl was another matter. He sat at the desk shared by the tax collector and the building inspector when they were in, typing with unusual speed. Frank could tell by the uncharacteristic straightness of his a.s.sistant's back and the elaborate attention he paid to the computer screen that Earl was truly p.i.s.sed.

"Earl, I have some interviewing to do out on Harkness Road, and I'm going to need your help," Frank announced.

Earl made a great show of finis.h.i.+ng his typing and shutting down the computer before he looked at Frank. He maintained a dignified silence all the way out to the patrol car.

"Hey, I'm going to pick up a sandwich at the Store before we take off. You want a doughnut? A Kit-Kat?"

"No, thank you," Earl answered.

Frank pressed his lips together; he didn't like having his peace offerings declined. He bought the candy bar anyway and left it on the console between their seats in the car. Steering with one hand, eating with the other, he filled Earl in on the Sheehan case as well as the shooting on the Giant trail.

"Right here!" Earl warned as the car threatened to shoot past the faded sign that marked the beginning of Harkness Road.

Frank succeeded in making the turn, but not without sending up a spray of gravel from under the patrol car's rear wheels. "I told you I needed your help."

Earl grinned and reached for the Kit-Kat.

The houses on Harkness Road, though modest, all sat on large acreages. They had big, wild yards that ran into thick woods at the back of the properties. Frank drove past the first two houses. He'd found Mary Pat's car beyond these two, heading back out to the main road, so she couldn't have been visiting them. The next house after the spot where Mary Pat's car crashed belonged to Vivian Mays, who'd found the body. As he'd already spoken to Viv at length, Frank kept going. They stopped at the fourth house, despite the fact that Earl said the couple who lived there both worked in Plattsburgh and wouldn't be home. He was right, and they continued on.

Frank followed a bend in the road around a tall stand of white pines, and the next stretch of Harkness Road lay before them. Two green-painted Adirondack chairs sat in the middle of a meadow-sized front lawn belonging to a small, log cabinstyle house. A man sat in one of them, enjoying the view of the meadow-sized lawn across the street.

"Ah, this looks promising," Frank said as they pulled into the driveway.

"I don't know," Earl cautioned. "That's Mr. Nyquist-he's about a hundred."

Frank suspected that Earl regarded everyone over sixty as "about a hundred," but as he crossed the lawn he saw that Mr. Nyquist was indeed quite elderly. Still, the old fellow seemed alert enough, straightening up in his chair and waving cheerily at the prospect of company.

"Why, Earl Davis, is that you?" Mr. Nyquist shouted. "I bet you growed another foot since the last time I seen you. How's your sweet grandma?"

"She's just fine, Mr. Nyquist, how are you?"

"Can't complain, can't complain. And if I did, ain't n.o.body to listen." He grinned, revealing a broad expanse of pink gums interrupted sporadically by stumpy brown teeth. "And this must be the new police chief, who replaced Herv," he continued, turning his attention to Frank. "I been hearing some good things about you. You must be here about a year now, huh?"

"Going on two," Frank answered, reaching out to shake Nyquist's hand. The old man's grasp was surprisingly strong.

"Well, you can't be here to arrest me. I don't move fast enough these days to get into any trouble," he said, slapping his bony knee. "So what can I do for you?"

"It's about Mary Pat Sheehan," Frank began.

"Don't think I know her, although the name kinda rings a bell."

"The girl who was found dead in her car out here last week," Earl explained.

"Oh, oh, her. Yup, that was quite a bit of commotion." Mr. Nyquist's eyes glittered with remembered excitement. "Pity-can't imagine what caused her to crash. It's not like she didn't know the road."

Frank and Earl exchanged glances. "You saw her out here a lot?" Frank asked.

"Sure, recently, that is. She drove a beige Escort."

"Who did she come out here to see?"

"Couldn't tell you that. I'd just see her drive by; then about an hour later, sometimes less, she'd drive back."

"So whoever it was, they must live beyond your house," Frank clarified.

"Yessiree."

"And when did you first notice her car out here?"

"It was in May. That's when I start sitting out, when things warm up. In the winter I sit by the window in the house, but I can't really see the road too good from there."

"So she might have come before that?"

Mr. Nyquist nodded.

"What about last fall-did you notice her then?"

"Oh, no, definitely not then."

"Thanks, Mr. Nyquist, you've been very helpful," Frank said.