“What do I say if he is?”
“Just wish him sweet dreams. Let him know you’re there.”
“10-4.”
I got back out of the car and dialed Megan Goss’s number, suddenly stimulated by what she’d said earlier. “Besides sitting put,” I asked her after she’d picked up, “what might Gail’s attacker do under pressure? Sammie’s been pushing these guys pretty hard. And she’s getting reactions, except from one of them. He just politely lost his sense of humor and steered her out the door. Never showed a spark.”
Goss considered that for a moment. When she answered, it was with an element of anxiety. “The rape dealt more with power than with sex or violence. That’s why I suspected the rapist wouldn’t act again until he felt a renewed need to dominate. If properly stimulated, though, he could snap. His repressed violent instincts could overwhelm his cunning, and turn him into a killer with no thought of consequence.”
That might’ve been nice to hear a little earlier, I thought. I hung up the phone angrily, thinking of Gail in a remote house with no police protection. Could Duncan know where she was? I remembered the inconsequential sound I’d heard on the darkened Wardsboro Road, looking for oil stains… And another, similarly furtive noise from the far end of the municipal parking lot as Katz and I ended our conversation last night.
I ran for my car, realizing with a cold fear that our man had taken his precautions, following me, following Gail. If Goss was right, and Duncan did snap, wouldn’t his target be the very person whose attack had put him in jeopardy?
Driving the slick expanse of Main Street as fast as I could with one hand, I reached for the portable radio next to me. “Ron. Is he there or not?”
What traffic existed was bunching up at the primary intersection of High and Main, cowed by the unexpected conditions. I decided to cut right onto Grove Street and use the residential back streets.
“Joe?” Ron’s voice sounded tentative.
“Did you find him?”
I pulled hard on the wheel and felt the back of the car swing wide on summer tires, sliding into the opposite lane, into the path of an oncoming minivan. I grabbed the wheel with both hands, dropping the radio onto the floor, and managed to fishtail away from a collision, accompanied by the plaintive howl of an offended horn.
Ron’s voice eddied up from between my feet. “I tried the door. There’s no answer. We’re circling the building now, looking for tracks.”
I groped around for the radio between my feet and finally brought it back up to my mouth. As I did so, I noticed its antenna was bent at an extreme angle, the stem connecting it to the frame cracked like a half-broken pencil. “I think he’s headed for number 20 Lamson Street. If he’s gone, meet me there. He could be after Gail again.”
I put the radio down more carefully and swung onto Oak, gunning the engine to pull out of another skid.
“We found some fresh tracks, Joe, leading from a side window. I guess he flew the coop. Should we do a forceful entry?” I swore and tried fumbling with the antenna. It came off in my hand.
I took the next corner haphazardly, this time sideswiping another car waiting at the four-way stop. Spinning away from the sound of crumpled metal and fractured plastic, I sped up the hill to where High becomes Western, and where Union takes a precipitous left-hand plunge into the narrow Whetstone Brook ravine.
I gave the radio one last try. “Ron, goddamn it, get your ass to Lamson Street.”
“Joe? You there?”
I threw the radio aside in disgust, cursing a department budget that required personal vehicles for undercover work and couldn’t equip them with dash-mounted mobile radios.
Whetstone Brook cuts through Brattleboro from west to east in a thin, ragged laceration, along an ancient riverbed, the depth and breadth of which are reminders of a far more aggressive ancestor. The ravine walls that line the brook are at points almost sixty feet high and several hundred feet apart, making the town utterly dependent on a few key bridges for easy cross-access. There are enough of these crossings, however, to make the Whetstone as a barrier all but unnoticed by most of the population. I was hoping Philip Duncan, whom I assumed was on foot, had discovered just the opposite.
Union Street is precipitously steep, literally plunging downhill, and with a couple of challenging curves thrown in for good measure. It offers rooftop views of the houses tucked below, presenting a very real threat of some car hurtling through the old wooden guardrail, and crowning one of the hapless homes like a hellish version of Santa’s sleigh. The town’s sand trucks usually make Union Street their first stop in a snowstorm.
Except that this one had hit so early those trucks hadn’t even been mounted with plows yet, much less loaded with sand.
As I nosed over the edge off of Western Avenue, I felt the car balancing between the pull of gravity and the resistance of the road. I knew from painful experience how slight this margin was-how one small mishap could cause a momentum to build that only a large, heavy, possibly lethal object could stop. The car’s heater began to feel like a sauna as I strained at the wheel, my eyes glued to the swirling funnel of falling snowflakes that swept past the windshield, as if the wind itself were trying to push me back.
Of all the questions assaulting me now, the primary one concerned the size of Duncan’s head start. Whetstone Brook was but one of Brattleboro’s geographical obstacles; the other was Interstate 91, running on a north-south axis. Between the two of them, they cut the town into quadrants. They’d also turned some neighborhoods into cul-de-sacs, especially near the center where they intersected. Lawson Street was wedged into the southeast corner, far below I-91’s embankment, and teetering high above the Whetstone’s fast-flowing waters. Thinking only to shield Gail from the public’s prying eye, I’d left her alone instead, in a corner pocket with only one easy way out.
Halfway down Union the car slowly sloughed off to the side, coming up against the guardrail. I took advantage of the movement to accelerate rather than brake, and rode along the barrier, tearing at the side of the car, until the rear wheels regained their grip.
I fought to swallow the bitter irony that I might have stimulated Gail’s tormentor to show himself, only to incite him to greater violence. That possibility, coupled with the fact that he’d been given a healthy lead, blinded what caution remained in me. Impatient with the snow and the fear it instilled, I finally just gunned the car and sent it hurtling down the rest of the hill, sliding sideways into the five-way intersection at the bottom, rear wheels spinning frantically. I shot across the narrow bridge spanning the river, and used the car’s own dead weight to sling myself halfway up the hill on the opposite side, realizing only vaguely how lucky I’d been that no other car had been in my way.
The thick snowflakes were no longer fighting gravity like feathers in an updraft. They formed instead a pale, tattered blanket, and I drove through it like a child running among his mother’s windblown laundry, the white sheets wet and clinging, blocking my sight with suffocating efficiency.
The houses to either side of me vanished from my peripheral vision, and the twisting, slippery, snow-clogged streets became a series of interconnected tunnels, as glittering as the headlights they reflected. Staring at the mesmerizing, swirling vortex so hard it hurt my eyes, I began to feel I was falling through the storm, and that the wheel I clenched in my hands was no more functional than the restraining bar on a roller-coaster. Ron’s voice, and those of others he was talking to, trying to locate me, faded away into the background.
I circled ever closer to Gail, across the water to the south bank, up Estey Street and around to Chestnut, almost to where it dead-ended against the interstate, and to the right again down Lawson-short, narrow, and pointing like a finger at a precipitous, sixty-foot plunge into the foaming Whetstone, newly thrashed into white water by a brief, stony falls a half mile upstream.