Because he was so brilliant and so thorough, he would throw the authorities well off his trail and exit the States with the ease of a casual tourist. Lipton delicately placed his computer in the smaller of his two bags and then deposited them both on the back porch.
Down in the cellar was a large horizontal meat freezer. In it was the frozen body of Walt Tanner, the love-stricken traveling salesman who matched Lipton's body type exactly. The body was a useful prop in the drama over which Lipton was master. Lipton undid the padlock and lifted the lid. Tanner's knees were crunched up to his chest and his eyelashes were frosty white like powdered sugar. Slip knots Lipton had tied more than a year ago secured a frozen clothesline around his neck and knees. Hoisting the slack end of the line over his shoulder, Lipton heaved the body up and out of the freezer and dragged it into the middle of the damp concrete floor. That would be the epicenter of the heat, ensuring the survival of nothing more than bones. He reached into the freezer again and extracted the gun used to kill Tanner. He laid that next to the body and mounted the stairs.
Lipton knew all the angles by which the police could positively identify the bones, and he had done everything possible to thwart that investigation. It began by securing and destroying every X ray ever taken of his own teeth and bones and ended with a thorough cleaning of his home, purging it of hair from the obvious places. Because they had no DNA from Marcia Sales's apartment, the DA had never taken DNA samples for the trial. That would have been counterproductive. So now, the only way it could be conclusively proved that he wasn't the man with an apparently self-inflicted bullet hole in his head would be to exhume Lipton's mother and do a comparison sample. Even if they went to that trouble, it would take the police weeks if not months to work through the red tape, and by then Lipton would be so far gone it wouldn't matter. If nothing else, the bones would buy him time.
On the porch, Lipton hoisted a duffel bag over each shoulder and made his way around to the side of the house. He froze, only for a second, but it was long enough to distinctly hear the crunching of gravel beneath the tires of a car moving slowly up his drive toward the house. It was too soon to be a response to his call and this puzzled him. It really didn't matter, though. He sneered in the direction of the approaching car. Carefully, he placed the bottom of his foot against the side of the burning barrel. With a swift shove, he pushed its burning contents over and into the brush pile. In seconds, the flames began to lick up through the sticks, spreading to the clapboard siding of the house. Lipton did a quick calculation and decided that even if the police in the approaching car did get inside the house, their search would never get as far as the cellar before the whole place was an enormous funeral pyre.
He strode rapidly down the back path toward the boathouse. Inside was a small skiff. In case one broke down, Lipton had attached two small outboard motors to the transom. On the other side of the reservoir, his dead aunt's Buick Riviera sat waiting at the end of a dusty lane. It was the perfect escape, the perfect execution of a perfect plan. Before going into the boathouse and closing the door behind himself, Lipton glanced up at the sky and chortled quietly to himself. It even looked like the rain would hold off long enough for him to cross the water and disappear for good.
CHAPTER 38
Bolinger drove slowly down the gravel path looking and listening carefully for any sign of the professor. He didn't want to come clattering up the drive and give Lipton any advance warning. Nor did he want to rush into some kind of ambush. The car windows were open, and they all smelled the smoke. Unger sat beside him in the front seat fidgeting like a kid in a barber's chair. He hadn't found the nerve to start making his media calls, partly because of Bolinger and partly because he wasn't certain of success. In the back was Casey, silent but intensely alert.
"Smoke," she said quietly.
Bolinger nodded his head.
"He's here!" Unger burst out excitedly at the sight of the van beside the house.
"I don't see my car anywhere," Casey commented.
Bolinger said flatly, "Sales lost him."
"You want me to go in the front and you go in the back?" Unger said, pulling the gun from his jacket.
Bolinger gave him a somber look before saying, "No, we'll go in the front together and cover each other."
"Sounds good," Unger said. His only experience in this sort of thing had been a two-week seminar nearly fifteen years ago and a hefty dose of NYPD Blue on television.
Bolinger brought the car to a stop just shy of the now dusty white van. Cautiously they got out.
Bolinger turned around in his seat and spoke forcefully. "Stay right here," he told Casey. "I mean it, don't move from this car."
Bolinger and Unger got out of the cruiser without closing the doors. Quietly, they approached the front steps. The surrounding trees and the coming night hid the smoke billowing from the back side of the house. The sounds from the snapping fire were cloaked in the windblown pines. Upwind from the blaze as they were, the difference between the smell of a campfire and a nascent inferno was negligible.
Just as the two detectives disappeared into the tall gray house, Casey spotted the form of Donald Sales emerging from the woods near the far corner of the house. But instead of moving her way or toward the house, she watched him quickly set off at a right angle, jogging in the direction of the water. It was obvious that he'd seen something the police hadn't.
Casey got out of the car and headed after him. She kept a good distance from the house, avoiding it as if it were something alive lying in wait for her. When she rounded the far corner, not far at all from where Sales had emerged from the trees, she was confronted with the shocking sight of the back half of the house awash in crackling flames. Part of her wanted to cry out to the police inside, but making herself known to Lipton if he was lurking in the vicinity was unthinkable, so she remained silent, crossing the back lawn in cautious pursuit of Sales.
Sales knew before he broke through the smoke-filled trees that everything was amiss. He could see the orange flames and the police cruiser with its doors wide open parked behind the van. But when he broke into the open, he saw the chance he thought had probably gone up in flames with the house. Out of the corner of his trained eye, he just made out a tall shape fading into the trees that climbed halfway up the bank of the reservoir toward the house.
Most people would have stopped to think about what they might or might not have seen, so fleeting was the image. But trained his whole life in the ways of the woods, where small signs were conclusive proof, Sales didn't miss a step but took off across the back lawn. Instinct took over and he crouched warily as he entered the gloomy stand of pines.
Soft needles muffled his footsteps as he hurried along through the trees. Near the end of the path, he could begin to make out the shiny black surface of the water and the dull gray sides of the boathouse, an architectural sister to the main house above. There was no one in sight, but Sales could hear low noises coming from inside the boathouse. A set of mossy wooden steps took him down the bank and onto the dock. The dock itself wrapped around the boathouse, part of it extending well out into the water. There was a door in the nearest corner but it was shut tight.
With the memory of the Tech-9 fresh in his mind, Sales had no intention of barging through a door and drawing its fire. Determined not to give Lipton any warning of his approach, he circled the house to look for an opening through which he could get an idea of what was going on inside and maybe even have the chance at a clean shot. Circling the boathouse, he stepped carefully on the dock to ensure silence. When he reached the far side of the building, he could see that there was a large mullioned window in the center of the wall. He could also see that instead of extending out onto the water, the dock on this side actually wrapped itself around toward the front of the boathouse.