“His boobytraps, all three of them, must be tied to the penal code.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The statute we convicted him on — the boobytrap statute, Chapter Three point Two of the California Penal Code. One of the section subdivisions reads… let me think… it says ‘Boobytraps may include but are not limited to explosive devices attached to tripwires or other triggering mechanisms, sharpened stakes, and lines or wire with hooks attached.’ Hooks. You see it?”
I saw it, all right, the way Latimer had twisted the statute to suit his own perverted brand of revenge. My hand was slick on the receiver as I got to my feet. “Fishhooks,” I said.
“Has to be. Something to do with fishhooks.”
And in my mind, then, I was reliving a few minutes of yesterday. Seeing Chuck emerge from the storeroom under the deck, carrying his father’s heavy tackle box. Hearing him say Dad’s got a lot more junk in here than I remember. Feeling the weight of the box as I lugged it up into the cabin, set it on the floor. Not hard enough to jar it, but I could have, and if I had…
“Pat,” I said, “how fast can you get a bomb squad up here?”
“…You have an idea where he put it?”
“I think so. Yeah.”
“Where, for God’s sake?”
“Your tackle box, the one you keep in the storeroom.” That’s why the padlock was off the storeroom door, I was thinking. The second one, from the boathouse, was to confuse the issue. “How fast on the bomb squad?”
“Nearest one’d be Sacramento. They’d have to assemble and fly in by helicopter… couple of hours, soonest.”
“Okay. One thing, Pat. I’m not leaving here with your family until I’m sure Latimer has been neutralized.”
“That’s not your problem. The county sheriff—”
“It’ll take him and deputies a while to get here from Quincy.” My problem, all right, and for more reasons than that one. “You’ll have to call them, let them know. No time for me to do it, and you’ve got the authority.”
“First thing. Where’ll they find Latimer?”
I told Dixon which cottage he’d rented. “He may be there, he may not. I’ll try to pinpoint him. Have the sheriff look for me at Judson’s.”
“You make sure Marian and Chuck are safe before you do anything else.”
“I will. Have you talked to Marian?”
“This morning? No.”
“Well, I doubt they’re together. Chuck’s gone fishing at Chuck’s Hole. I’ll have to go get him.” Dixon said something but I kept talking through it. “You do the explaining to Marian — I’ll have her call you from Judson’s. Don’t tell her anything about Strayhorn being Latimer or about the boobytrap. She doesn’t need to know any of that yet.”
“All right. Move, will you?”
“Moving,” I said.
I banged the phone down and went out of there on the run.
13
Marian was the first hurdle, the easy one. I hammered on the cabin door, different hopes colliding against one another in my mind: that the joint fishing trip had been canceled and the boy was home or had gone to Chuck’s Hole alone, that there hadn’t been anything sly or sinister in Latimer’s invitation yesterday, that Marian was here for me to talk to, that she wasn’t here because then I could get after Chuck, Latimer, both of them that much sooner…
She was there. She opened up after a few seconds, started to smile when she saw me, turned it upside down when she got a good look at my face. “What is it?” she said, alarmed. “What’s the matter?”
Not answering, I eased in past her and kept going into the front room. The tackle box was where I’d set it yesterday, against a side wall. Small, cold relief that it hadn’t been moved again and made even more dangerous. Latimer’s boobytrap bomb wasn’t the main worry right now.
Marian had come up behind me. I turned to face her, tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked, “Chuck go fishing with Jacob Strayhorn this morning?”
“Yes.”
“To Chuck’s Hole?”
“As far as I know. What in heaven’s name—”
“Listen to me, Marian,” I said. “I’m going to ask you to trust me and do what I tell you, without question or argument. I just got off the phone with Pat. This is what he wants, too.”
She opened her mouth, shut it again, and nodded once.
“Take my car and drive to Judson’s.” I had the keys in my hand; I pushed them into hers, closed her fingers around them. “Call Pat from there — he’s home. He’ll explain what this is all about. Then stay there and wait for me. Okay?”
Another nod. “Chuck?” she said.
“I’m going to Chuck’s Hole right now. I’ll bring him to Judson’s as soon as I can.”
Her eyes burned into mine, searching. Five, six, seven beats; neither of us blinked or looked away. Then, wordlessly, she caught up her purse from where it was looped over the back of a chair and headed for the door.
I went to the side wall, avoiding the tackle box, and grabbed one of Pat’s sacked fishing poles to use for protective coloration. Marian didn’t say anything when I came outside with it, nor did she question me when I told her to lock up. Together we went over the rise and onto the Zaleski property, moving fast but not running. She gave me one last look before we parted, her for the car and me for the dock and Zaleski’s skiff; it told me what she was thinking and made me grit my teeth, the sweat run on my upper body.
He’s in your hands. Don’t let anything happen to him.
I won’t, I vowed. My fault if he’s harmed in any way and how could I ever forgive myself for that?
I threw the sacked pole into the skiff, clambered in after it. The outboard was cold and cranky; it took three or four minutes and a string of cusswords to get it working. What if it quit on me before I got over there? No, the hell with that kind of thinking. If it quit, I’d fix it; the screwdriver Nils Ostergaard had given me was still wedged under the seat.
Out on the lake, with the throttle wide open, I beat myself up a little more by wondering if I should have made the connection last night between what had been happening up here and the bombing threat against Pat Dixon. The missing padlocks, Ostergaard’s suspicions and his sudden death, the news that Strayhorn wasn’t Strayhorn… was there enough in that to intimate a plot against Dixon, a link with the San Francisco bombings? Maybe not. Probably not. Quantum leap from one to the other without so much as a hint that Dixon was number three on the bomber’s hit list. I’m not psychic and I’m not Sherlock Holmes. Still… I’d taken long speculative leaps before, made connections that at the time had seemed farfetched. Slipping. Losing the intuitive edge I’d once had. At the least I should’ve smelled enough wrong to keep the kid away from Strayhorn this morning…
Get off that, too. What’s done is done, what’s coming is all that matters. No mistakes when you get to Chuck’s Hole, when you drop the fisherman’s pose and the gun comes out.
The outboard sputtered and rattled a couple of times as I neared the far shore, but it didn’t conk out on me. No time lost on that account. Five minutes lost on another, though: I thought I was pointed straight for the inlet that led to Chuck’s Hole, but it had been pre-dawn when the boy took me into it, and coming out I had not had a good look at landmarks, so I missed it now by a couple of hundred yards. I had to swing back and forth twice before I spotted the right opening in the dense forest growth.
Sweat soaked my shirt as I eased in there, turned clammy once I was out of the sun and into the dank, murky woods. I cut the engine, hauled up one of the oars and poled upstream the way
Chuck had, through a hundred yards of twists and turns. I could hear the snowmelt bubbling down the terraced rise before I saw the series of steps themselves. The mud beach where we’d left the Dixon boat was hidden for another few seconds, then it slid into view—