That one had been worth the price of admission!
Now the game grew tiresome, though. It was time he got away, created a new and better life, a whole new identity. He had no difficulty believing he’d get away once he was airborne. Denise would be released only after he had completed his disappearance.
And who was she, really? A little nobody.
But he knew they would allow him to escape — all in order to protect a woman who didn’t know how to put a proper English sentence together. They would never want to be accused of causing her death. That’s what he loved most about their rules. They had to play by them.
Their rules were what kept them from succeeding against crime in the spectacular way he had succeeded. If he were in Tom Cassidy’s position, he would order the snipers to take him out immediately. To hell with anyone killed on the ground as a result.
There was some sort of commotion, and he realized that he had a new guest at his little bon voyage party. Frank Harriman.
When Frank met Vince outside the hangar, he handed him a brown bag. “This is all you need,” he said.
“For what?”
“To catch Haycroft. I’m starting to get to know this son of a bitch.” He told him his strategy.
“Cassidy will never go for it,” Vince said.
“He will. It’s all in the presentation. You ready to put on a show?”
Vince smiled. “Not much of a part, but yeah, sure.”
“Frank Harriman,” Cassidy drawled. “You amaze me. You have a couple of crazy-ass days — fifteen minutes of which would have been enough to get most of us served up on a marble slab — and instead you walk up to me looking ornery.”
“Have a favor to ask, Tom.”
“Yeah?”
“Let him go.”
Cassidy laughed. He ran a hand over his short hair, which — although he was not much older than Frank — was mostly gray. “Oh, brother. You were out in the sun way too long today.”
“Let Haycroft take off with the woman. Just let me say something to him as he taxis to the runway. I think he’ll come back with her.”
“‘Think’ is not good enough. But tell me what you have in mind.”
“You’re about to let him go anyway, aren’t you, Tom?”
“We’ll be following him.”
Frank rolled his eyes.
“He says he’s got more bombs planted around town,” Cassidy said.
“Do you believe him?”
“To be honest, no, I don’t.”
“Your instincts are still good then, Tom, because it doesn’t fit with his obsession with Kerr. And that’s what this guy is all about — that, and protecting his own ass.”
Cassidy calmly studied him for a moment. “So what’s your idea?”
Haycroft watched as the discussion between Cassidy and Harriman became more and more acrimonious. In the end, Cassidy looked utterly defeated.
“Mr. Haycroft?”
God, how he hated that damned drawl!
“Detective Harriman has just informed me that you may have your wish. He claims the district attorney refuses to file against you — I guess the D.A. is saying our department has no real physical evidence against you. Can that possibly be true?”
Haycroft hesitated. This could only mean they hadn’t found anything at the house and had not discovered the problem with the computer program in the property room. Managing a hostage meant that he had not had time to check on his diaries, and with all of the department watching him now, he was not about to reveal where he had hidden them on the plane.
Did they know about the diaries?
No, if they did, he was convinced, Cassidy would have gloated about it, as he had about the survival of Harriman and Kerr.
“If what he says is true,” Haycroft said slowly, “why were you waiting for me here? What led Detective Harriman to me in the first place?”
“Well, Detective Harriman claims it started with you telling him some fib about your son’s photograph, which made him suspicious, and he ultimately realized you had a darned good reason to dislike Judge Kerr. But even though he may be convinced you’re guilty as sin, the irony is this — if the D.A. doesn’t have more to go on than that, some dumb judge like Kerr will toss the case out on its rear end. Isn’t that right?”
“Why, yes, it’s true. But you see, there is this little problem of my having taken a hostage now.”
“Well, this is awfully embarrassing to the department, of course. I’m sure Denise there would be happy to say it was all a joke that she went along with just in order to help you out. You release her, and all is fair and square.”
He looked at Denise, who was nodding furiously.
“I think not. I feel safer with her here, you might say. And I am concerned that Vince Adams must have had a little look-see through my plane while he waited for me, so I don’t really believe I can rely on your story. I will be leaving now.”
He began to taxi out of the hangar. “Haycroft!” a new voice said.
“Detective Harriman, forgive me, but I must be on my way.”
“That’s fine with me, but I just wondered if you really believe your papers are the only thing Vince and I might have messed with on that Cessna today.”
He stopped taxiing, then smiled to himself. “Nice try. It’s running perfectly well.”
“To tell you the truth, I hope you think so.”
“You wouldn’t be trying to tell me that you in some way disabled a plane carrying a hostage?”
“How was I to know there would be one? Besides, sometimes lambs must be sacrificed.”
“But you, dear Frank, are no killer of lambs.”
“Things happen to change a man. You weren’t either, before Kit.”
Haycroft was silent. He allowed the plane to move a little farther forward.
“You should know better than anyone, Haycroft, that, sometimes, the legal ways are not the effective ways. I’ve learned that from you. I applied it to your case, too. You just couldn’t be caught by normal means. So I had to come up with something special.”
“You don’t know the first thing about airplanes,” Haycroft sneered. The plane nosed out of the hangar.
“Vince has a pilot’s license. And I don’t need to tell you that a person can learn a lot when he’s investigating a homicide. For example, the NTSB showed me how little it might take to sabotage a plane.”
“I still don’t believe you.”
“Okay, my conscience is clear. Have a sweet plane ride, just like Lefebvre did all those years ago. And don’t forget to wave to Vince on your way out. He’s just to your left.”
As Haycroft passed, Vince smiled and waved. He was holding an opened five-pound bag of sugar.
“This is nonsense,” Haycroft said, as much to himself as to Frank.
But he thought of Lefebvre’s fall from the sky.
He taxied to the runaway that had been assigned to him that morning.
“Nice try, Frank,” Cassidy whispered to Frank.
“I’ll bet you’ve wondered what it was like for Lefebvre, that last flight,” Frank said, not giving up.
Haycroft was silent.
“I’ll bet you’ve asked yourself, ‘Was he calm when he heard the engine cough and then go silent? Did he panic and scream?’ Now you can find out what you’ll do in that situation. Personally, I’ve got you pegged as a screamer.”
Haycroft let the plane drift a few feet forward.
“Maybe you think you’re such a hot pilot, you’ll be able to land it without power.”
Haycroft increased power so that the engine droned louder.
“But then your emergency locator transmitter won’t work any better than his did.”
The plane did not move farther.
“And you never know what you’ll be flying over when you start to hear that first little sputter. Water, trees, rocky ground. I guess it won’t matter. It will all feel like a brick wall once you actually hit it.”