Obrowski brought out lemonade, a whole pitcher of it, and two blue glasses stacked with ice. He arranged them with a flourish on a round teak table midway between their chairs. “Unbelievable,” he said, pouring their drinks. “Were you really flying the plane that went down, Reverend Fergusson?”
Clare accepted one of the glasses. “Helicopter,” she said. She had a look in her eyes that made Russ think maybe she, too, was uncertain how much of this was real.
“Those bankers of yours are quite something. I’ve never thought much of the paintball crowd that shows up on the weekends around here. I remember once when Bill Ingraham went with his business partner. He told me it was the most pointless exercise he had ever undertaken in his life, and that included his draft-induction physical.” He laughed. Russ took his glass from Obrowski and drained it so fast, all he was aware of was the slide of the cold and tart-tasting liquid over his tongue.
Obrowski looked at Russ, then at Clare, then back at Russ. “I’ll leave you two to catch your breath, then, shall I?”
The screen door banged behind him and they were alone. He poured himself another glass of lemonade and drank it more slowly. Thinking about the whole incident with the helicopter made his stomach ache, and thinking about the whole thing with Clare made the rest of him ache. So he propped his feet on the backpack, looked at the slightly unreal scenery, and thought about Waxman. Waxman taking Peggy to the gorge and hitting her up for money. Threatening her, fighting with her, a lucky push or punch—lucky, because she wasn’t a big woman and Waxman must outweigh her by quite a few pounds—and he goes over the edge.
With his backpack.
Christ.
“Clare,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Waxman’s backpack was down in the ravine with him.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
He took his feet off the pack and bent forward. This was the reason his subconscious mind had ragged at him to keep the thing with them, from the ravine, to their wild ride, to their headlong flight through the forest.
“Why would his backpack be in the ravine with him? If you’re extorting someone or fighting, would you be carrying your backpack?”
There was a pause. Her ice cubes clinked in her glass, another off-kilter piece of normality. “No,” she said finally.
“It wasn’t on him. It wasn’t even near him.” He unbuckled the flap and flipped it open. Inside, atop dirty T-shirts, plastic jars filled with algae-speckled water, and a dog-eared copy of Topographical Maps of New York State, was a plastic bag the size of a woman’s clutch. It was full of white powder. He heard Clare breath in sharply.
The backpack, thrown into the ravine. Evidence to be found with the body. Except he and Clare had stumbled on the scene too soon.
“What was it you overheard Malcolm saying to his mystery visitor about Peggy?”
“He told him to stay away from his aunt.”
One good hard shove into the gorge. Just enough evidence to link Waxman to Dessaint. He was tempted to give the powder a taste and verify that it was horse or coke, but he’d bet good money it was already cut with the same stuff that had killed the other man.
Stay away from his aunt. No kidding.
And they had met her coming down the trail. And offered to help her. And she had helped them. He remembered seeing her backing out of the cockpit door while he was pulling his headset on. He fished into his pants pocket, and sure enough, it was still there, the broken piece of plastic that had rendered the radio useless. All she would have needed was a screwdriver to jam into it. Easy to swipe one from the office and stick into that big bag of hers. Right there under the bottles of cold water. Evidently, Peggy Landry could think on her feet.
And she had been alone and unwatched with the chopper for what—ten minutes? While he and Clare were breaking into the shed.
“What do you think caused the crash?”
She kept staring at the white powder in the bag, then at the black plastic in his palm. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Something with the fuel lines?” She looked at him for the first time. “I thought I must have rushed my preflight check. I thought I’d missed something.”
He shook his head. “No. You did just right.” He reached for her hand and pressed the splintered radio control into it. “Peggy Landry,” he said.
“It can’t be.” She looked at the knob. “Helos are complicated creatures. And that ship flew. For what—twenty minutes after we had left her? That sort of delayed…”
“Sabotage,” he said, supplying the word.
“That would take a great deal of knowledge about the helo’s systems. You’d need to be a mechanic. And you’d have to open the ship up, get into the engine or something. She couldn’t have—” She stopped, frowning. She slid her fingers absently up and down her sweating glass. “Unless…All those water bottles.” She turned to him. “She could have squirted water into one of the tanks. We were low on fuel, and I switched from the first tank to the second after we made our ascent to spot the Hudson.” Her face, dirty and sweat-streaked, shone with revelation. “It would have been pretty much dumb luck, getting the second tank. If she’d put it in the first, we wouldn’t have made it to the ravine.”
“But you don’t need to know much about any machine to know putting water into the gas tank is going to screw it up.”
They looked at each other. He thought about Ingraham’s bloody death and Dessaint’s bloated corpse. He thought about Todd MacPherson and Emil Dvorak. People treated like disposable lighters. He thought about what might have happened if they had been a shade less lucky, if Clare had been slightly less skilled as a pilot, if the sparks had caught fire a few minutes earlier.
He stood up so abruptly, his wicker chair skidded back half a foot.
“What?”
He turned to the inn’s door. “I’m getting out an APB on Landry and her nephew. And telling Kevin to get here now.” She had tried to kill Clare. And had almost succeeded. “I don’t want anyone else to make this collar. I want to be the one to strap that woman to the gurney.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Russ tried to get rid of Clare, of course. First, he wanted her to stay at the inn and accept Ron and Stephen’s offer of a shower and a room to rest in. Then, when Officer Flynn arrived and drove them up to the construction site to reclaim their cars, he ordered her to go home, a direction he emphasized by driving past the rectory on his way to the Landry house and pointing his finger out his window at her driveway. When they got to the imposing modern house—Clare still dogging Russ’s Ford 250—and discovered that Peggy, her laptop, and two suitcases were gone, she could see he was tempted to leave her there, with the nearly hysterical bride-to-be and the poor confused Woods. She crossed her arms and simply ignored everything he said that didn’t involve her sticking around. His heart wasn’t really in it anyway. Maybe there was something about throwing up on another person’s shoes.
“I know why you’re doing this,” he said as he rifled through Peggy Landry’s home office. He, Kevin, Noble Entwhistle, and a friendly cop introduced as Duane were searching the house. “You’re an adrenaline junkie. I’m here to tell you that the only way to get over that is to live a life of quiet contemplation.” He tossed several folders on the floor. “Here, make yourself useful.” She sat on the Oriental rug and began paging through the documents. “Quiet contemplation,” he went on. “Like the priesthood.”