He shook his head. “Oh, hell! So they already know I lost him?”
The lieutenant grabbed Schoen by the hair and lifted his head. “I’m going to ask you one last time, turkey, and then I’m going to get angry. What’s your name!”
“All right. All right. I’m Special Agent Don Duprey, FBI, assigned to the Cincinnati office.”
“Sure you are!”
“If you’ll check beneath my right pants leg, you’ll find a pouch with my credentials, my passport, and even my shot record. What did you mean, I got KO’d by an FBI agent? I am an FBI agent.””
The police lieutenant looked at his men and motioned to one of them to perform the search. The ID wallet and passport were precisely where indicated.
“If…” Schoen breathed hard. “If you’ll take a moment to call the Cincinnati office, or even call Washington back, you’ll find I’m legit.”
Unsure and off balance now, the officers helped Schoen to his feet as one of them radioed in the request. The dispatcher came back within five minutes with confirmation and a description, which was relayed to the lieutenant. The officers stepped away from the prisoner to talk while keeping a cold eye on him.
“So now what do we do?” one of the officers asked under his breath.
The lieutenant frowned and glanced at the prisoner. “We have a valid ID with a matching picture and FBI confirmation. Did anyone see this female agent Washington was talking about?”
There were blank looks among the uniforms.
“What was that name?” one of them asked.
“Special Agent Katherine Bronsky,” the lieutenant replied. “That’s the agent Washington said cuffed this guy.” He surveyed his men. “Jim? Bill? You two were first here. Did you see anyone?”
“Just civilians,” Jim replied as his partner nodded. “A girl and a guy were at the foot of the stairs.”
“Could the girl have been Agent Bronsky?”
“Hardly. She was a real piece. They don’t make FBI agents like that.”
“Wait a minute,” the other one said. “That name. Wasn’t it a Bronsky they had on the news last night? The FBI agent who’s kidnapped a little boy?”
“Yeah,” the other one answered, “that’s the same name, and I saw her picture, but the gal at the foot of the stairs bore no resemblance to that fed.”
The police lieutenant sighed and shook his head. “Call FBI headquarters, get a description of this Bronsky, and see if it fits the woman you saw. If it doesn’t, we’re releasing this guy. I don’t want any hassles with the FBI, and I’ve got nothing to hold him on.”
The answer came back within five minutes. The two officers who had arrived on the scene first listened carefully, then shook their heads simultaneously.
“That definitely wasn’t her.”
After being released with an apology and melting rapidly into the crowd, Arlin Schoen found a phone and punched in the direct 800-number to his command post.
“I thought you were on the way back here, Arlin.”
“I was waiting for the Vegas flight when I spotted MacCabe.” He snapped off a quick description of what had occurred.
“Was Bronsky with him?”
“I don’t know, but I suspect she was the one who clubbed me from behind. Someone did.” He rubbed his head. “I haven’t a clue where they’re headed.”
“I do” was the response.
CHAPTER 43
The sound of his own breathing was a comforting counterpoint to the “schuss” of his skis as Warren Pierce settled into a comfortable pace. The snowfall the night before had been minimal, but the snowpack through the fields on either side of the main road was substantial and satisfying. It was crystal days like this, he thought, that made cross-country skiing so invigorating — crisp air in his lungs and the blur of evergreens on each side making the valley his own special world.
Another of the summer cabins passed by to his left, a familiar sight to any Stehekin resident. That one is the Caldwells’ place, he thought, absently letting his eyes wander from the snow-covered roof to the contrail of a distant airliner tracing a feathery exclamation point in the sky above Lake Chelan.
He rounded another bend and crossed the road, trending toward the river. The substantial old log house ahead had been there all his life, and it loomed into view on schedule, the usual wisp of steam curling from the heater vent on the roof.
Warren stopped, unsure why, but something about the cabin was wrong.
Why is the door open?
Warren moved closer, keeping himself within the tree line to the north side as he took in a shuttered window to the left of the open door. There was no sign of life.
A breeze moaned through the evergreens overhead, and the front door swung open even farther with a mournful creaking that startled him. He could see an overturned chair inside, but there were no lights visible within.
A cold feeling of apprehension began to move up his spine, an unreasoned desire to turn and go, but he tried to overrule the feeling and will himself to look more closely. Don Donohue was the caretaker. He checked it every day. How could the front door be swinging open?
Warren forced himself to ski in to the front yard, his eyes taking in shards of broken glass and footprints in the muddy snow by the porch — as well as something by the door that looked red, like blood.
Warren turned and skied toward the road as fast as he could, turning toward the ranger station and the dock, propelled by a mindless fear. Someone needed to investigate, and that someone was not going to be him.
Kat had watched the south side of Portland International Airport flash past and drop away as the DeHavilland Dash 8 lifted into an overcast sky from Runway 10 Right. Like the instinctive act of a blue heron lifting off a lake and pulling its long legs up behind it, the spindly landing gear of the Dash 8 retracted backward and tucked itself into the underside of the wing-mounted turboprop engines, leaving Kat with a spectacular view. High-wing aircraft were well suited to daydreaming passengers, she thought. Especially smaller ones flying at lower altitudes over the lush Pacific Northwest landscape of manicured golf courses and a carpet of forest.
The verdant hills to the east of Portland were moving sedately past as the Dash 8 climbed through the bottom of an overcast, turning the world outside into an endless field of milky white. Her view diminished to the right engine pod and the faithfully churning jet-driven propeller.
In the forward cabin the lone flight attendant was preparing her tiny rolling bar for the drink service, when the sound of a ringing cellular phone reached her ears. Her attention snapped to the flashy blond in a midcabin window seat. She left the galley immediately and moved swiftly to row eight, reaching out just in time to catch the ringing phone before the excessively blond passenger could raise it to her ear.
“You’ll have to turn that off, Miss.” she commanded, happy with the authoritative tone in her voice. The surrounding passengers were turning out of curiosity, but that was fine. The woman deserved some communal condemnation.
But the passenger fairly yanked the phone from the flight attendant’s hand, placing it to her ear as she fished for something in her handbag.
“I said, TURN THAT THING OFF!” the flight attendant commanded.
The blond’s left hand whipped out a leather wallet and flipped open a badge and an ID that the flight attendant recognized as the emblem of the FBI. She nodded and backed up the aisle in confusion, pulled out a key, and entered the cockpit.