Converged, actually, right up to the door of the big shed, a barn-red, paint-blistering wooden slab that stood ajar.
Genuinely suspicious now, he sent the flashlight beam on ahead, followed by the revolver in his fist. He approached slowly and, a few yards from that red door, called out, “Police! Step outside, now!”
Which, if he were talking to a racoon or a stray dog, he knew was a wasted effort and risked him making a fool of himself.
With no response, he pushed the door open and, from the doorway, he dispatched the beam of his flash to take a look around inside. Initially all he saw were such yardwork and general home maintenance items as a rider mower, a spreader, rakes, shovels, hoes, coils of garden hose, and an aluminum extension ladder, but finally — stacked carelessly on the floor like those two bags of seed he’d imagined — officers Dickson and Rawley, belly down and dead as hell.
The shovel that swung into him broke his right knee and dropped him to his left and his mouth came open to scream but didn’t get the job done as the next swing of the shovel flattened his features in a bone-crunching, tooth-shattering smunch, knocking him back outside, onto his back, the face looking up at the moon barely a face at all.
Then two powerful hands took one ankle each and dragged the dead cop inside with the others.
Their Medal of Honor-winning suspect had been out of state during two of the murders — those of Doctors Carter and Petersen — and Davis and his wife had been entertaining some old service buddies at the time that Molotov cocktail had come crashing through the window at the Ryan place. That he had no alibi for the Petersen killing seemed moot.
They released him before midnight, but as he was going out, Davis — ever belligerent — said, “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in hell you people have found my car.”
They were in the small lobby area on the other side of the civilian counter. Davis and his pretty, petite wife — who’d married him before he went into the service and who had stuck by him after — were just about to go out, their attorney acting as a high-priced doorman, possibly on Uncle Sam’s dime. The loving wife, vaguely embarrassed by her husband’s behavior, had fetched his artificial legs, which he now wore, putting him nose-to-nose with the chief — uncomfortably so.
“What do you mean, Mr. Davis?” Cutter said, working to be polite. This guy was a verified hero but also a certified pain in the ass. “You were driving your car.”
Davis held up two fingers and it wasn’t a peace sign. “I have two cars. Imagine that? One of them was stolen over a month ago and I reported it. Don’t you cops keep track of such things?”
“We’ve been rather focused elsewhere,” Cutter said, “and I would assume you reported it to the Suwanee PD.”
“That’s right. That’s where I live! Where else would I report it?”
“Sir, there are dozens of suburbs around Atlanta, and as many departments. And, really, locating a stolen car is more the province of the Georgia State Patrol.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be so damn hard to find! How many ‘67 Chevy sedans like that are out there, anyway?”
“Like what?”
“Rigged up like mine! With hand controls.” Davis threw his hands in the air, to make his point. “You people are unbelievable.”
Then the little group was gone, though their former suspect’s grumbling could be heard trailing off.
Cutter turned to Janet Hodges at his side. “Huh. His car was stolen. Do you think Dennis Lee might be driving it?”
“Who would have taught him to drive?”
“Good question. Maybe nobody. Maybe in the middle of the night he managed to get that buggy as far as a parking lot till he familiarized himself with those hand controls. Makes him mobile.”
Jackson came up from the mostly empty bullpen with a slip of paper. “Chief, a call came in for you while you were in the interview room. From Chief Sturgis in Timber Lake. Wants to talk to you yet tonight, if possible.”
“Wonder what rates that,” Cutter said.
He brought Janet along to his office and made the call, which he put on speaker, then settled behind his desk. “Am I getting back to you too late, Wynn?”
“Not at all, son,” the familiar folksy voice said. “I just called half an hour ago, and it’s a good chance we’ll be here at the scene a while yet. Maybe all night.”
Cutter exchanged glances with Janet, then asked, “You’re at a crime scene?”
“Not sure what you’d call it. We got a call from the owner of a cottage ‘long the Chattahoochee. Lights were on in a neighboring place that’s been boarded up since last year. Seemed like suspicious activity to this neighbor. Guy was surprised the electricity was still on, which actually it wasn’t — but a generator was. But here’s the prize in the CrackerJax — cottage belonged to the late Efram Lee.”
“And you just learned Lee had a cottage now?”
“Afraid so. It wasn’t listed in his estate. A kind of off-the-books deal. I’m guessing it was a love nest — maybe for him and that little gal who took a fall down the stairs ten years ago or so.”
“You’re at the cottage now?”
“Outside of it, at the moment. You’re patched through to my radio in my cruiser. What makes this worth bothering you with, this time of night, is... well, I can’t be sure if this bears upon your situation, but... somebody’s been living in this boarded-up cottage. Somebody who knew about it from before, I’d say. Somebody smart enough to get the generator going and get himself some electricity.”
Cutter frowned. “These are signs of recent activity?”
“Food in the refrigerator is fresh enough. Bed slept in. Soap and toilet paper stocked. We had two convenience stores get robbed in middle of the night. Looks like somebody goes shopping when the larder gets thin.”
Janet spoke up. “Detective Hodges here, Chief Sturgis. My husband’s convenience store was robbed last week, which is an embarrassment to his policewoman wife.”
“You may get the chance to do somethin’ about that,” Sturgis’s voice said. “Because I think your hubby’s thief and ours may both be named Dennis Lee... What do you think, Chief Cutter?”
“I think,” Cutter said, on his feet, “I told some people they’re safe and they really, really aren’t.”
Officer Ben Raymond, another of Cutter’s NYPD early retirement pals, was the last officer standing at the Ryan compound, though he wasn’t aware of that. Sixty-two, bald as a grape, paunchy but still tough and alert, he knew finding that ladder leaned up under the attic window meant trouble. This was the opposite side of the house from where the previous assaults had been, but that just meant their attacker was smart enough to mix things up.
It also meant the suspect at the Peachtree Heights station was almost certainly not their man, as that ladder hadn’t been positioned there on his last circuit of the house.
Service revolver in his right hand, he got on his walkie and tried to raise any one of the other three cops patrolling the grounds, but got no response. He clipped the walkie back on his belt and got out his flash and worked it around the area, starting of course with the ladder. Their mean little man might already be up there, though the window was closed. So what? Dennis the Menace — as all the cops working the Ryan place had taken to calling their man — might well have closed it behind him.
Was that little bastard perched somewhere along top of that fieldstone wall, waiting to pounce? Raymond swept the beam slowly along its upper edge particularly, and — while no sign of the menace presented him/itself — the cut phone line dangling did. Had the thing shimmied up the pole like a damn lineman and clipped it? Holy Hell, what were they up against?