“Ezekiel Masterson,” Anderson said. “We’ll find him.”
“Lieutenant Desoto in Orlando might be able to help,” Carver suggested. “He’s the one who ID’d Masterson for us from a photo I sent him. Reverend Freel might know something, too, but he probably won’t talk.”
“He will if we don’t ask him nice,” Anderson said.
“That might have been you nailed to that fence,” Beth said.
Anderson’s jaw muscles flexed. “Any one of us.”
Carver remembered Beth thinking there might have been someone in the bushes outside Adelle Grimm’s house earlier that evening when Al barked. He told Anderson about it, and about his conversation with Jefferson Brama at the Surfside Hotel.
Anderson listened closely, staring at the ground. The red-and-blue glow from the emergency vehicles bathed his face with a shifting, harsh illumination that took away highlight and shadow and made his features a flat, tragic mask. The pulsating glare lent the scene even more of a sense of urgency, setting it to a wild rhythm and making the landscape surreal. Somehow a nightmare had found its way into Wicker’s time awake.
“We’ll get more from Wicker when he’s patched up and has some medication for the pain,” Anderson said when Carver was finished talking.
But they both knew there was little more to get. Ezekiel Masterson had acted out his fanaticism again, then disappeared, and no one who knew anything would talk. Nothing much had changed except that Wicker had been brutally beaten, then crucified with sixteen-penny construction nails.
“You wanted us to see this to make an impression on us, didn’t you?” Beth said. “That’s why you called.”
“Partly,” Anderson admitted. “I feel an obligation to be sure you know what kind of people we’re dealing with. And I thought if I got you out here, you might be more likely to tell me anything pertinent.”
“Did we?” Carver asked.
“No way to know yet.”
Anderson told them good night and turned to walk back to where the paramedics were removing his supervisor and fellow agent from the fence. The strobelike effect of the flashing lights made his movements seem abrupt and intermittent.
He paused and turned. “Stay available, you two. And stay safe.”
“You’d better notify Delores Bravo about this,” Beth said, “but not yet.”
“Do it right,” Carver added.
“If only you could tell me how,” Anderson said, leaving them in the somber dance of the flashing lights.
39
Carver was quiet for a long time during the drive back to the cottage. Anderson’s strategy of calling them to the scene of Wicker’s agony had worked. Not that Carver and Beth had had any doubts about Masterson’s viciousness after what he’d done to Linda Lapella. But that was a simple, brutal beating that resulted in murder. What had been done to Wicker was different; it was torture in the name of God and as ancient as man, and behind its mask, it was worse than indifferent to the pain it inflicted.
As they were rocketing along the highway, the wind pounding again in the car’s interior, Beth said, “I still think Adelle is behind the bombing, and I think she might have hired Ezekiel Masterson. He might have been the man I saw driving away with her from her house earlier tonight.”
“Or the man lurking outside her house who might have done to you what was done to Wicker.”
She smiled. “You afraid, Fred?”
“Oh, I am most of the time on some level. For me and for you.”
“And you still believe Norton acted on Freel’s orders.”
“Or was set up to take the fall for the bombing. Freel had to know Norton was a nut case who was working away on assembling bombs in his home workshop. What better dupe could he find to take the high-minded blame for what really was a squalid murder for the two most frequent motives in the world-love and money?”
“It sounds good when you say it fast,” Beth admitted, “but Adelle’s still my choice.”
Carver watched the dark road. “Freel will be doubly on guard now that he knows his affair with Adelle is known.”
“Still, they’ll meet again.”
“Lovers always find a way,” Carver agreed, trying not to sound like a song title. “Someone else needs to be there when they do. It makes the most sense to put a watch on Adelle and wait for her to go to Freel.”
“We’ll alternate watching her.”
“No,” Carver said. “Are you forgetting what we just saw back there nailed to the fence?” He hadn’t forgotten and never would. The terrible vision of Wicker’s crucifixion, only minutes behind them, remained in his mind with clarity and horror. He knew it would be vivid in his dreams. “I’ll shadow Adelle,” he said. “You stay at the cottage with the gun and with Al.”
“I think not, Fred.”
Lord, this woman was stubborn!
“And I think we should buy another gun.”
Carver shook his head no. He had never liked guns, and he liked them even less after being shot in the leg. One gun floating around in his life was more than enough.
“You’re being stubborn about the gun, Fred.”
He seethed.
Finally they agreed that he would be the one to watch Adelle in the evening if she could work the day shift. With the gun and with Al in the car. She would use her car, with a cellular phone which she could use to check in with Carver or to call for help.
Carver didn’t like the idea, but he knew he had no choice but to agree. He did so tersely, letting her know he didn’t approve. She smiled in the wind.
The next day, they began their loose watch on Adelle Grimm.
She behaved normally, probably aware that someone might be observing her. That evening, she went out for dinner alone at a neighborhood restaurant in a strip mall, then rented a movie from Mr. Video and returned home.
It went that way day after day, but Carver or Beth stayed close to her. Wicker, hands bandaged in what looked like thick white mittens, was back on the job as agent in charge. The FBI had intensified its search for Ezekiel Masterson, which comforted Carver as it made it more likely that Masterson had gone underground and wouldn’t make an appearance for a while. But while the search for Masterson was still going strong, the investigatory phase of the Women’s Light bombing had slacked off. The authorities seemed content to let Norton play the martyr. It made everything fit neatly into bureaucratic cubbyholes real and mental, and it made a neat, uncomplicated moral tale for the media. Norton had been arraigned and would stand trial for murder.
It wasn’t until the third week, when Carver was convinced that Adelle was asleep inside her darkened house and was about to drive to the cottage and get some sleep himself, that her overhead garage door went up at one in the morning.
Carver, in a weary state of alertness, sat up straight as he heard the faint hum of the opener and noticed the visible corner of the garage door moving. What interested him was that for the first time since he’d been watching the house, the light inside the garage didn’t automatically come on when the door rose. Maybe it was burned out. Or maybe Adelle had removed it.
The deep blue Olds backed down the driveway to the street, its headlights dark, and the garage door lowered. Still without lights, the big Olds stopped, straightened out, and began to recede down Phosphorus Lane, its fleeting form blending with the black shadows between streetlights.
Carver left the headlights of his own car off as he followed Adelle through the dark, nearly deserted side streets.
It wasn’t until they were near Shell Boulevard, where there was still sparse traffic despite the desolate hour, that she switched on her car’s lights so that she wouldn’t draw possible police attention. He did the same.
She made several turns, as if trying to make sure she wasn’t being followed, then drove west, away from the ocean and toward the less affluent side of town.
Carver stayed well back and used every technique he knew in order not to be seen by her. But such caution might not have been necessary. She had no idea how to shake a persistent tail and wasn’t really as careful or elusive as she assumed.