13

“It could be a trap, Major,” he called out to me in the dream, just as he had called out those same words on that bitterly cold night near Kandahar.

“It probably is a trap, Sergeant,” I told him as we waited in the darkness of the bombed-out village.

The S-2 in our battalion’s intelligence shop had convinced the colonel that one of the border chieftains in our sector was willing to bring two important Taliban leaders over to our side.

My special operations team was ordered to secure the ground for an Afghan army escort that would meet them in a small village near Lashkar Gah and then take them on to Kandahar.

We infiltrated the village shortly after night fell and found it deserted. I assigned three of my men to wait inside the only building still standing for the arrival of the Taliban leaders. The rest of us took up positions behind the stone walls that surrounded the village. I made sure we had a full field of fire for our M249 Squad Automatic Weapons in case it was a trap.

A few minutes after the scheduled rendezvous time, a small caravan of vehicles rolled into the village. Through my infrared scope, I saw that they were driving Afghan army trucks.

The men who emerged from the vehicles were dressed in American camouflage uniforms. There were ten of them, and they were equipped with American-supplied M-4 carbines and MP-5 submachine guns, just like us.

Half of them went inside the building. I radioed my unit commander to tell him that the Taliban group still hadn’t gotten there but that the escort had just arrived. He said that was impossible because the Afghan army escort had been delayed by a car bombing in Kandahar. That’s when I knew we had been betrayed. They were Taliban fighters, and we were their target.

I ordered my team to open fire. A few moments later, the Taliban who had entered the building burst out through the door. They were cut down before they reached their vehicles. The Taliban fighters who had been deployed outside disappeared into the darkness.

We found the three men in my combat team inside the building. They had paid with their lives for my mistake. Each one of them had been horribly mutilated before he died.

In my dream, the three of them stood before me again, their knife-punctured eyes pleading for me to save them. I was wrenched out of the nightmare by the jarring ring of the telephone.

My jaw felt as if someone was boring into it with a dull bit. The muscles in my shoulders and back were aching. Lying across the bed, Bug was giving me a vicious glare that suggested enough was enough with these late-night disturbances.

I remembered leaving the message for Jordan to call me back as soon as possible. Swinging my knees over the edge of the bed, I stood up. Once on my feet, the forward motion took my legs into the kitchen, where I picked up the phone. Whoever was calling hung up just as I got there. I heard only a dial tone.

“Shit,” I said.

Looking at the wall clock, I saw that it was three thirty. The storm had risen in intensity since I had gone to sleep.

I went into the bathroom. Searching under the sink, I found a dust-covered bottle of Listerine. After rinsing out my mouth, I tried to move the loosened tooth again. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed a little tighter. I was taking some satisfaction in that when the phone began ringing again.

“Officer Cantrell?” asked the voice almost timidly.

“Yes, Carlene,” I replied.

“You’re needed here right away,” she said.

“Maybe you don’t know it, Carlene, but I’m officially suspended from duty,” I said. “I’m only a liaison.”

“I know that,” she came right back, “but Captain Morgo asked me to call you to please come right away.”

I wasn’t about to have any part of it.

“Sorry, but I’m waiting for an important call.”

There was another short pause before she blurted, “We have another deceased individual on campus. The caller said the dead man is hanging from the suspension footbridge.”

For a moment I wondered if I might be traveling through a time warp.

“Didn’t we have this conversation last night?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But . . . this is a new one . . . Captain Morgo is on her way there now. She asked me to find you as soon as possible. She told me to tell you—”

Her voice was cut off midsentence. I heard a gurgle in the phone line and it went dead. I wasn’t surprised. My telephone line ran along the forest road, and it took just one falling limb to wipe out service for everyone farther down the lake.

Putting down the phone, I stepped out onto the front porch. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees, and the wind was probably gusting at forty miles an hour. I turned on the floodlight that was mounted on the end of the cabin roof. In its glare, I could see that the rain was being driven almost horizontally by the wind.

A hundred feet out, the surface of the lake looked like the North Atlantic. White-capped waves were slamming into the shoreline, sweeping right over the dock pilings and up the grassy rise toward the cabin. The base of the apple tree next to the dock was already underwater. My old heavy bag was swinging back and forth as if stuffed with feathers.

I heard a ripping sound followed by a loud resounding crack. As I watched, an eighty-foot-high spruce tree came roaring down, smashing straight through the roof of the neighbor’s art studio in the next compound.

I bolted the porch door behind me and headed back into the bedroom. After putting on a denim work shirt, boxer shorts, and white athletic socks, I went to the hiding place next to the chimney and strapped on my leather shoulder harness, socketing the .45 automatic into its holster.

After snugging the chest strap, I put on my army-issue waterproofs along with rubber wading boots. Loading two spare magazines with ammunition, I secured them in the side pocket of my jacket. The last thing I did before leaving the cabin was make sure Bug had plenty of water in her bowl. There wasn’t time to make her breakfast.

I could see she wasn’t thrilled about being left inside the cabin with no access to the porch or the lawn, but I didn’t have time to explain it to her before locking the door behind me.

The pickup was rocking in the wind when I started it up and began heading toward Groton. The road surface was already littered with downed branches and wind-driven debris. I kept my speed down to thirty so I had time to swerve around the bigger obstacles.

About a mile from town, several deer ran wildly across the road past my headlights. Although I braked right away, it was impossible to avoid hitting the last one with a glancing fender blow.

A hefty buck, he skidded across the gravel road for ten yards, rolled over, and came up on his feet. As I watched, he shook himself and trotted off after the others.

“You and me both, brother,” I called out to him as I drove on.

Heading up the steep grade along the gorge, I saw that the lower windows of the Fall Creek Tavern were lit up like an ocean liner. As I passed by, people were standing three deep at the bar, confirming the old axiom that storms bring people together. Of course, for the regulars, any reason to drink was a good reason.

I pulled into the overlook parking lot next to the suspension footbridge. Captain Morgo’s police cruiser was already there, its lights out. There was no indication that I was approaching a crime scene.

Taking my flashlight and work gloves, I headed down the path toward the bridge. Through the driving rain, I could see a dark figure standing under the trees. Ken Macready emerged out of the downpour, his uniform covered by a wildly flapping green poncho. He trained his flashlight on my face as I came toward him.

“What the . . . ?” he began.

“I ran into some barbed wire,” I said. “So what happened here?”

“We’ve got another dead guy,” he said, coming to attention. “He’s right in the same place as the one yesterday.”

“Where’s Captain Morgo?” I asked loudly.

He pointed toward the bridge. “She’s already out there.”

“What about the sheriff?”

“They’ve already had three storm-related deaths . . . He radioed the captain a few minutes ago that he would get here as soon as he could.”

“Any word on when the storm is going to peak?”

“According to the weather service, we won’t see the worst of it until later this morning. Right now it’s gusting about forty-five.”

A purple-white flash of lightning lit up the dark sky, followed by a crash of thunder.

“What’s the hurricane’s name again?” I asked with a reassuring grin.

“Ilse.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just a little pussy cat . . . nothing to worry about.”

His young freckled face grinned back at me.

“Let’s get to work,” I said.

Together we continued down the path toward the bridge.

Remembering Carlene’s words about there being another caller, I stopped at the blue-light emergency phone. I opened the door of the metal housing with the tip of my finger and shined my flashlight in. There was only bare wire again. The new phone was gone like the last one.

“Just like last time,” said Ken.

Under the college’s service contract, our electronic security provider was responsible for repairing the emergency phones within an hour of a reported outage. Assuming they had done so, the killer was for some reason following the same pattern. It could only be because he wanted us to know it was him.

“What did you do with that camcorder footage you took of everyone who was here yesterday?”

“Captain Morgo gave the camera back to the guy. But I’ve got the recorded material in my desk at the office.”

“Good man,” I said. “We’ll watch it later.”

I pulled up the hood of my waterproof jacket to keep the rain out of my eyes and to hide the damage to my face from Captain Morgo. She would probably find it another docking offense.

“Don’t let anyone out there except the sheriff’s men,” I said, leaving him at the entrance.

On the suspension bridge, the gusting blasts of wind drowned out the cataract of wild water racing down the gorge two hundred feet below me. The reinforced concrete path of the bridge was swaying under my feet as I approached the shadowy outline of Captain Morgo. She was standing halfway across the span and gripping the bridge railing with both hands.

Her skin was the color of a ripe avocado. The force of the wind gusts was inflating her cheeks, puffing them up like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter. Uneasily taking one hand off the railing to face me, she looked up and shouted, “I . . . need your help.”

As she raised her head, the wind flipped her uniform hat off her head, and it went sailing over the rail behind her. I could see the open terror in her eyes. Even with the Glock 17 on her hip, she looked like nothing so much as a bedraggled grandmother in a gaudy police uniform, vulnerable and defenseless. When another gust shook the bridge, she grabbed the railing again with both hands.

“These are designed to take a lot worse than this,” I shouted to her.

Taking a guarded step toward me, she took my left hand in hers and grasped it hard. Putting her mouth closer to my ear, she shouted, “I was wrong about all this, Jake.”

Looking down at her, my past anger just melted away.

I nodded once and squeezed her hand in return.

“Do you know who it is yet?” I shouted over the wind.

She shook her head and yelled, “The call came in less than twenty minutes ago. I just got here.”

I trained my flashlight on the walkway beside her. It looked almost exactly like the scene I had encountered the previous night. The end of the brightly colored rope was lashed around the railing with the same stopper hitch. Sitting in the lee of the wind at the foot of the railing was a green plastic drinking cup.

The intricately braided cord looked identical to the other one, with the end knot shaped like a golden acorn. The cord even appeared to be lashed in exactly the same place on the bridge. I leaned out over the railing and trained the flashlight down at the swaying corpse.

“Be careful,” cried Captain Morgo as she grabbed the bottom edge of my waterproof jacket in her powerful hands.

There was an important difference between this death scene and the last. Unlike the first one, this body was stark naked. Aside from the reddish-gray hair on his head and genitals, the man was fish-belly white. I recognized him as soon as I coned the beam of the flashlight on his face.

“Do you know him?” yelled Captain Morgo.

I nodded.

“He was Dennis Wheatley’s best friend. They were roommates here at St. Andrews twenty years ago. His name is Robin Massey.”

I saw another difference after leaning farther over the railing to get a better look at his neck.

“He didn’t use the concertina wire this time,” I called out.

“Who didn’t?” yelled Captain Morgo, who was holding on for dear life.

“The man who murdered them,” I said after regaining my balance on the walkway. “Maybe he didn’t have any more of it.”

I wondered what had happened to Robin Massey’s clothes. Aside from his white clerical collar, which was wedged into the wire mesh beneath the railing, the only things left were his shoes. It was possible the wind had blown the rest away, or the killer might have thrown them over. Nestled at the base of one of the vertical stanchions, I saw one of the green plastic reunion cups. Picking it up with my gloves, I smelled the same aroma of whiskey that had been in Wheatley’s cup.

“The coroner will find that he probably has as much liquor in him as Wheatley did,” I shouted over the wind.

“Do you know why?” she shouted back.

“I think they were both forced to drink against their will before he made them walk the railing.”

It occurred to me that there was now only one roommate left from the original three, and that was Hoyt Palmer. I had last seen him on his way to the Groton Medical Center in an ambulance. I told Captain Morgo who he was.

“His life could be in danger too,” I shouted. “You should contact the Groton police and have a guard put on his room at the medical center. If he’s been released, they should take him into protective custody as soon as they locate him.”

While she was calling the police dispatcher on her radio, I cradled the flashlight in my armpit and trained it on the acorn-shaped ball at the end of the braided rope. Gazing at it, I felt another twinge of recognition.

Grasping the ball in the fingers of my work glove, I turned it over several times in my hand, examining the braided gold stitching that covered it like tiny cornrows. I suddenly remembered the presentation sword that the army had given me after I had won the Silver Star. The sword now rested next to the hearth of my fireplace, where I used it to poke logs.

The acorn-shaped ball looked like a big sword knot. The use of them came from a time long ago when men actually fought with swords. They would loop a sword knot along with the strap through the handguard so that they wouldn’t lose their sword when the blade connected with steel or bone.

But nobody fought with swords anymore. They were used at military weddings and promotion ceremonies. The last time Americans had fought with swords was during the Civil War, and I doubted if our murderer was 175 years old. The concertina wire suggested a military background too. But Wheatley and Massey didn’t have any connection to the military.

“What do you think?” yelled Captain Morgo as I continued to study the acorn-shaped ball.

“Do you know what happened to the braided rope that was used in the Wheatley killing?”

“The sheriff’s people have it.”

I knew that the chances of getting it back anytime soon were slim.

“I know this doesn’t follow strict crime scene procedure, but I’d like to cut off this knot and take it with me,” I shouted. “There’s someone I know who might recognize it.”

The old Captain Morgo would have rejected the idea immediately.

“Do it,” she came right back.

Using my pocket knife, I sawed through the braided cord and put the ball in my pocket. Standing up, I saw another dark figure coming across the bridge toward us from the direction of the overlook parking lot. I wondered why Ken Macready had let the person past until I saw it was Big Jim Dickey. Indifferent to the swaying bridge, he came strutting up to us like Moses parting the Red Sea.

“This baby is going to be one shit kicker for the record books. I already got three dead over in Enfield,” he shouted to us as if thrilled at the growing body count.

Looking down, he saw the clerical collar wedged into the wire mesh. With a steady stream of rain pouring off the brim of his Smokey the Bear hat, he said, “I hear we maybe got us another suicide over here.”

Removing her hands from the railing, Captain Morgo turned to face him.

“He was murdered, Sheriff . . . just like the last one,” she shouted back almost defiantly. “And I need your criminal investigation team here right away.”

Turning to me, she said, “Are you going to the medical center now to interview Mr. Palmer?”

I nodded.

“Take Ken’s radio with you. Call me if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” I said as Big Jim stared at us in obvious confusion.

“And be careful,” she admonished me as if I were her prodigal son and had just gotten my first driver’s license.