Tuesday Morning
Baileyville, ME
Jim had managed to find a room in the Danforth area, fifty miles north of Baileyville. Not cheap, but clean and good food. He’d gotten in around nine p.m., gone straight to bed, and slept ten hours. With a hot shower, clean clothes, and a lumberjack breakfast under his belt, he felt better. He also felt encouraged.
The TV in the breakfast area had included a segment from the local Game Warden, explaining the dangers of interacting with the Maine wildlife. To illustrate, he had shown a video clip of tourists on Hwy 9 trying to drive around a black bear that was in possession of the road. Jim watched, fascinated, as the bear charged the vehicle, cameras recording the whole thing. The driver of the hatchback was a redhead.
The clip was too short to be sure, but Jim was convinced the driver was Ginny, the passenger was Charlie, and the hatchback was the one they had borrowed from the Albany Homestead. He drove back to Baileyville, parked in the public lot, got out of the SUV, and looked around.
At first he thought he was hallucinating. With each leg cast he spotted, he jumped. None were Charlie, though. He counted them. More than thirty in the immediate vicinity and more arriving each minute. He made his way to the nearest vendor and ordered coffee.
“What’s with all the broken legs?”
The vendor told him.
Jim took his coffee back to the car and climbed behind the wheel. One-legged skiing and sharp shooting. Talk about tough! But what a break! If he knew Ginny, she would be figuring out how to use this to her advantage. She was here, and so was Charlie. Now to find them.
* * *
Tuesday Morning
Dallas, TX
Five days and she was only just now hearing of it. Five days! If Detective Tran had been a swearing woman, she would have indulged in language that could have blistered the sun.
She read the transcript again. It was the testimony of an escaped felon, eight pages of it. He described a white van with Texas plates, two men and a woman, one of the men confessing to a murder and disposing of the body in a boat that had been set on fire.
There was no protocol in place for sharing the ravings of a bitter and apparently lunatic convict with other law enforcement agencies, but someone had eventually routed a copy of this to the Texas clearinghouse. The boat had triggered a match alert and the file had been forwarded to her. Not the actual file, of course, a summary, but there could be no mistake. It had to be Monroe.
Which put him in Roanoke, Virginia five days ago.
The other man and the woman could be anybody, but it was most likely they were Miss Forbes and Dr. Mackenzie. The physical descriptions matched.
Detective Tran’s eyes narrowed. She had spoken to Dr. Mackenzie on Sunday and he had earnestly told her he had not seen Monroe since they left Dallas.
Her entire case against Charles Monroe was based on circumstantial evidence, and not much of that. What’s more, he had a solid alibi for the time of death. She might be convinced he was the killer, but the D.A.’s office would need more.
Well, the first thing to do was pick him up for questioning. If he was on the run, and if Dr. Mackenzie was helping him, she had grounds for warrants.
She pulled up the forms on her computer, a U.S. detain and extradition and a similar process on the Canadian side. It took her the better part of three hours to get all the paperwork done. Now she had to wait. In the meantime, she needed to update her files. She walked over to the whiteboard, pulled out the green marker and got to work.
* * *
Tuesday Afternoon
Baileyville, ME
Ginny watched the final leg of the relay on a screen set up on a picnic table. She was surrounded by the Wildes family and a dozen more Team Steven supporters, all cheering hysterically as the third man approached the handoff point. Vincent was alternating between sitting beside her, his arm around her waist, and leaping to his feet, roaring. The weather was cooperating, with golden sunshine and temperatures hovering just above the freezing mark.
The official start of the race had been at the headquarters of the Moosehorn Wildlife Refuge. The first leg looped through the woods to a safe zone where each contestant fired from both standing and prone positions.
The second leg started from there and moved toward Old Hwy 1, south of Baring. The firing range this time faced south, away from town. The third leg headed southwest, toward Bearce Lake, the most rugged of the four sections. The last leg circled back and ended here, at the junction, but required the skiers to stay south of the intersection, to avoid collisions with motor traffic.
The teams were being shuttled to and from these points by support crews, all dressed in distinctive colors and all celebrating as hard as they could. They, too, were sporting fake casts (or leg immobilizers for the less committed), making the number of men in casts in the area today something in the neighborhood of three hundred.
The times were hardly Olympian. In a standard biathlon, the skiers averaged two minutes per mile on groomed tracks and with two good legs. The contestants in this race were lucky to finish a mile in half an hour. There had been a lot of falling down and getting back up again and a few disqualifications as competitors shrugged off the temporary disability and went at the race full tilt.
Ginny had been astonished to see how many men were competing. Each team had four members and there were three levels of competition: “Just Kidding”, “Mine’s Bigger Than Yours”, and “Don’t Even THINK About It.” Team Steven fell into the last category. The beginner class (Just Kidding) had twelve teams; the intermediate, ten; and the advanced, fifteen; for a total of one hundred forty-eight contestants. The officials had been starting the teams in volleys all day long. The premiere event, however, was this one, the last of the day.
Team Steven was in the lead and Charlie had the anchor spot. They had taken him out early this morning to let him get used to the borrowed rifle and his accuracy had convinced them to put him in last.
Ginny knew he could shoot. She’d even heard him say he could ski. What she didn’t know was whether he was physically up to this level of exertion.
There were spotters along the route, watching to make sure no one fell hard enough to need rescuing, and each of these, apparently, had a phone with a video feed. There was no lack of coverage, just discipline. The images bounced and slewed around, making it hard to recognize what she was looking at. Every now and then, though, she could identify the acid green jersey Team Steven had adopted flashing through the trees.
The handoff had happened and all eyes were on Charlie. For a full twenty seconds she had a clear view of him, moving his body from side to side, using the poles as if they were an extension of his skeleton, poised and balanced and tremendously strong.
“Look at that!” someone said.
“He’s a natural.” There were murmurs of agreement, then the image was lost and the party resumed.
Ginny was biting her nails before the final sprint. Charlie had performed the miracle, ten clean hits, and was headed for the finish line, in front of all the other competitors, but he no longer looked like it was easy.
“Come on! You can do it!” They were cheering for him, for him personally, as well as for the team. He was approaching the finish line. He was over it. He was down.
Ginny felt her heart stop, but it was just the excitement of the team, they had jumped on him, knocked him down. They were picking him up again, pounding him on the back, lifting him above their heads and carrying him to the truck, then heading for the reviewing stand.
Ginny watched the ceremonies with a dry mouth. Here was something else she hadn’t counted on, photographic evidence of Laredo Pete Harmon winning the Busted Bum Biathlon for Team Steven. When they finally let him come to her, he moved as if he had nothing left.
“Pete?”
He pushed the cheap plastic trophy at her. “I won, Bonnie.” He was grinning like an idiot. “Makes up for that last bull.”
She shook her head at him. “You are one tough hombre,” she said. “Now what?”
“Now,” Vincent said, “we eat and we drink and we celebrate into the night!”
Ginny shook her head. “He needs rest. Look at him.”
Vincent turned and studied Charlie, then nodded. “I keep forgetting his leg is really broken.”
They loaded Charlie into the truck and took him back to the Wildes house. Ginny settled Charlie on the couch, then waited on him, making sure he ate and got lots of water. The rest of the team had followed and the party surged around them. Ginny found herself pulled into the celebration.
“Bonnie Jean, darlin’,” Charlie called, “you behave yourself.”
Ginny waved from the arms of the man who was swinging her around the living room. It was time to see if she could put her plan into motion. She maneuvered her way into Vincent’s arms, smiling up at him. He was happily inebriated and bursting with pride.
“I’m the one who found him! You should be thanking me!”
Ginny smiled up at him then reached up and took both of his ears in her hands and pulled his face down so he would see her.
“Remember our bet?”
“Yeah!” he grinned. “I remember. He wins, I give him a ride on the dogsled tomorrow. He loses I get to take you to bed tonight.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “I don’t supposed you’d let me do that anyway?”
“Tell you what, if you’re still on your feet when this party ends, I’ll let you kiss me goodnight.”
“All right!”
Ginny kept a weather eye on Charlie while the party raged on, then spilled out into the night, taking Vincent with it.
“I’ll be back for my kiss!”
Past midnight Ginny found herself pulled off the sofa and into Vincent’s arms. It turned out he was a good kisser and still both drunk enough and happy enough with the win to let her push him into his own room and return to the couch with only a moderate amount of wrangling. She found Charlie watching her.
“Bonnie Jean Bowie!”
“Yes, Pete?”
“What did you promise that boy?”
Ginny came over, sat down on the edge of the sofa beside Charlie, and lowered her voice.
“I made arrangements for you to ride his dogsled across the river tomorrow. Not the whole race, just a short bit of it. I’ll meet you on the other side.”
“And what did you promise him in payment?”
“It was a wager.” She explained the bet.
Charlie’s eyes grew large. “I’m really glad I didn’t know about that when I was out there today. It would have taken all the fun out of it.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“I seem to be in your debt again.”
She shook her head, smiling. “Not this time. You won. So I don’t have to pay up. Vincent does.”
Charlie looked at her, the corner of his mouth curving up as he shook his head. “You’re a braw lass, Bonnie Jean. I just hope Jim knows how lucky he is.”
* * *