Divisible man three nine.., p.14
DIVISIBLE MAN--THREE NINES FINE, page 14
Andy and Donaldson skirted the firetruck and hiked up the hill shielding their faces from the heat.
“C’mon!” I took Gwen by the hand and weaved through the spectators. I called out as we emerged into the open. “Andy!”
I waved. Andy tapped Donaldson on the shoulder and broke into a run. He limped after her.
“Thank God you’re okay!” Andy cried. She threw her arms around the girl. I stood back as they embraced.
“No problem,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Gwen sobbed and buried her face in my wife’s shoulder. Andy stroked her hair. When the girl came up for air, she asked, “Is it true?”
Andy whispered something to the girl.
It must have been the truth because it made matters worse. Gwen shuddered and wept.
Donaldson hobbled to join us. He studied the crowd, the location and our options. He gestured at me and tapped Andy on the shoulder.
“This way,” he said. The spectators parted for us. Some of them, neighbors perhaps, knew the girl. A woman pressed a hand on her shoulder as we passed. A man patted her back. Many fought tears of their own.
Donaldson led us to where the road turned and entered the woods. I wasn’t sure what he had in mind other than to escape listening ears. Andy held Gwen against her shoulder. The girl cried. We walked down a road lined with trees. Firelight shadows trembled all around us. No one spoke until we stopped far from the crowd at the overlook.
“Kiddo,” Donaldson touched Gwen’s shoulder. “What happened?”
Gwen tried to sniffle and wipe her face. Andy reflexively reached for a tissue from her missing shoulder bag.
“I got this,” I told Gwen. I explained what she’d told me.
Donaldson pulled out his phone and swiped the screen until the keypad for dialing appeared. “Here. Call your folks and let them know you’re okay. This will be on the news or on social media really fast—if it isn’t already. But—listen to me—this is important—say nothing about us, okay? I’ll explain later.”
“What about Papa? What do I tell them?”
“Might be best not to say anything…yet.”
“Lee! She’s family!”
Donaldson ignored Andy. “Gwen, we don’t know anything for certain. I understand it’s a lot to ask. It’s just—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Andy argued. “This is going to get out.”
“She won’t be able to explain how she knows,” he protested. To Gwen, he said, “At this point, no one knows.”
The girl shot glances from Donaldson to Andy.
Donaldson said, “Gwen, if you can you give us a little time it might help us find out who did this.”
Andy frowned at the lie.
Gwen took the phone and nodded. She tapped out a number and stepped away from us. Against the roar and crackle of a fire several hundred feet away, we heard the connection ring, then a woman’s voice answer.
“Mom?” Gwen spoke, her voice high and tight. “It’s me. Um…something happened. I’m okay.” She looked away from Donaldson. “No. He—he—”
Andy gestured for Donaldson and me to stroll away from the girl as she broke down crying anew. We put twenty paces between us and her.
“That was unnecessary,” Andy scolded Donaldson.
“Really? At this moment she’s telling her mother that her grandfather is dead. How did she come by that information? You’re not thinking ahead, Detective.”
I interrupted. “What the hell just happened?”
“A hit,” Donaldson said firmly. “They hit the Director and McCauley in the harbor. Then they torched the Director’s house.”
“They were looking for something,” I said. “In his office.”
“That girl is lucky they didn’t know she was in the house.”
“Or they knew and tried to burn her alive.”
“What were they after?” Andy asked.
“Something from his office,” I said. I described the drawers strewn across the floor.
Donaldson’s face gained hard angles of light and darkness in the firelight.
“What if this is about us being here?” Andy asked. “About Will?”
Donaldson shook his head. “I don’t think so. In fact, I don’t think whoever did this expected or knew that you were here. Or if they did, they saw all of us as incidental. Somebody didn’t like McCauley asking for a meeting with Lindsay. They also thought the Director had something in the house.”
“What?”
“That folder? Something he didn’t show us? Take your pick. Maybe they found it. If not, maybe they torched the place to make sure it was destroyed.”
“They’re still on the island,” Andy said. “They have to be.”
“Possible. Or they could have a boat waiting. Or they came in by airplane like you two. Or they have a time share rented out for the week and they’re sitting on a deck sipping cold beer. How the fuck should I know?”
“There was a guy with a kid—on the dock.”
“I know. I saw them.”
“They might have been a part of this,” I suggested.
“The dad and kid? More likely they provided accidental cover for whoever launched that toy boat full of explosives. Dad and the kid see the guy launching it and strike up a conversation. He lets the kid take a turn, making it all look innocent. He’s not going to say, ‘Buzz off, I got a ship to blow up.’ He’s going to play along for a few minutes.”
Andy said, “So we find them, and they help ID the guy.”
“Needle in a tourist haystack. But we have two bigger and more immediate concerns.”
He looked at both of us, then looked pointedly at Gwen, still caught up in an emotional exchange with her mother.
“A top FBI official was murdered tonight in what will play as a full-blown terrorist attack. This island is about to sink under the weight of the law enforcement agencies descending on it. And you two can’t be here.”
“What?” Andy squared herself to him.
Donaldson shook his head. “You can’t be here. As it is, someone’s likely to step forward and tell the authorities they saw a woman firing a gun at the yacht seconds before it blew up.”
“I wasn’t firing at the—”
“Are you suggesting we run for it?” I asked.
“No,” Andy declared. “No. I was a witness. I was practically on top of the thing. I know what happened and how. I can’t walk away from this.”
“I was there, too. I saw everything you saw,” Donaldson said. “Look, I can explain why I was here. But trying to explain why you were here is a bad idea.”
“Leaving the scene of a crime is a bad idea!”
“Andrea, he was the fucking Deputy Director! This will be top of the hour on every cable news outlet in the country. The Director himself will probably take charge. How exactly do you explain why you’re here? Why he’s here.” He jabbed an accusing finger at me. “We went to Lindsay for discretion. That’s out the goddamned window now. Cameras and spotlights from here on out. You two can’t be here. Period.”
“This is not right, Lee! I’m a police officer!”
“Who can’t answer hard questions!” he snapped. “And you know it.” He turned to me. “Can you take off at night?”
“That’s going to look ridiculously suspicious.”
“It might. But it’s going to look a lot worse when law enforcement gets the full handle on what happened here and shuts down the airport, which I expect to happen as soon as they can muster the manpower.”
Andy shook her head and planted her feet. I saw the war flag—a lock of hair—fall to her eyebrow. I held my breath for a barrage of argument.
Donaldson faced her.
The argument didn’t come. At least not with Donaldson. She stood and stared at him for a long moment. She had the argument with herself. And lost.
“Dammit.” She said. She looked at Gwen. “What about her?”
“I’ll take care of her,” Donaldson said.
“You’ll have to deal with something else, then.” I said. I explained how Gwen had survived the fire. Donaldson rolled his eyes.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Wait!” Andy said. “We can’t leave. Will, your flight bag. It’s in the fire. We don’t have keys to the airplane!”
I unzipped a pocket in my cargo pants.
“Oh, hell no. On me at all times.” I dangled a set of keys between us. They glittered in the firelight.
“Go,” Donaldson said. “I’ll reach out as soon as I can.”
Andy didn’t move.
“Go.”
Andy exchanged a parting embrace with the girl and spoke to her softly, sharing understanding, trading secrets, offering emotional strength. Her words staunched the flow of tears. They hugged and held it. When they separated, Gwen stood in stunned silence, staring at the flames.
Andy closed a grip on my arm. I took her hand and we vanished. I kicked us straight up to clear the trees, then used the BLASTER to navigate to the dark and deserted airport at the center of the island. We stopped briefly in the small empty office, then hurried to the plane. I untied the airplane. Andy kept watch for anyone in a hurry to stop us.
No one appeared.
We boarded. I started the Baron’s engines and taxied without lights. At the cottage, against the dominating firelight, the night sky had gone black, but once we got away from the flames and out of the woods, faint twilight lingered in the sky—enough to illuminate the taxiway and runway. Flaunting regulations, I operated without lights. We took off to the west. I lifted the nose against the city glow of St. Ignace.
With the gear up and power set for climb, I banked left and flew a circuit around the island. Andy leaned forward in her seat to watch.
Emergency lights flashed on the bluff road where Lindsay Cottage burned between its neighboring cottages like an ancient coastal signal fire.
More emergency lights winked along the waterfront. For an island without motor vehicles, the emergency had quickly produced a small fleet of firetrucks and ambulances. Boats moved slowly around the harbor, circling wreckage where the yacht had been. Clusters of debris burned in the harbor. As I flew two thousand feet overhead, I smelled smoke.
Neither Andy nor I spoke. I completed a circuit around the scene, then set a course for Essex County Airport.
Part III
29
“Turn on your TV.”
“Hello to you, too,” I said to Donaldson.
“Turn on your goddamned TV, Will. MSNBC.”
“Hang on,” I said. “I’m at the hangar. Arun has a TV in the office.”
“Arun?”
“Arun Dewar. Works for the foundation, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. The Brit.”
“Where are you?” I hurried across the empty hangar floor.
“Still on the island along with every other FBI agent in North America. Hurry up, it’ll be on in a minute.”
I jogged into Arun’s office. A wall-mounted flatscreen broadcast endless financial news without sound. I grabbed the remote from his desk.
“What channel is MSNBC?” I asked him.
“Forty-six.”
I thumbed the two digits. The channel flashed to video of McCauley’s yacht, broken and burning. The footage, shot with a phone in vertical format, jiggled accordingly.
“I already saw this,” I told Donaldson. The scene cut to another angle; someone was smart enough to shoot the chaos in widescreen. “I saw it this morning with Andy.”
“Not all of it. Wait for it.”
I waited. The image changed to a talking-head split screen. The morning anchor occupied the box on the left.
A familiar face appeared in the box on the right.
“What the—?”
“Uh-huh.” Donaldson answered. “It’s him.”
Aaron McCauley filled a frame with Mackinac harbor in the background. I stared for a moment before I realized he was talking. I found the volume control.
“…am so grateful to be alive—it’s devastating, just devastating...”
McCauley explained to the announcer that he’d been interviewed extensively by the FBI. He explained that he told the authorities how he met Director Lindsay by chance on the island—how he planned to dine with the FBI Deputy Director because the Director had served in the Army with McCauley’s father, who had been killed when McCauley was a boy—how he looked forward to learning more about a father he barely knew—how a mix-up in timing sent the Director to McCauley’s boat while McCauley was still ashore.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s going on?” Arun asked. I held up a finger signaling for him to hold his question. I muted the TV and wandered back into the empty hangar.
“Did you tell them this is all BS?”
“Yeah…as much as I could. Technically, I’m still on medical leave.”
“What are you talking about? You just worked the DeSantorini case.”
“Paperwork. My formal reinstatement hasn’t come through.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s not all bad. I used it to explain why I was here. I told the acting SAC that I jumped chain of command to speak to Lindsay directly—that I came here to plead my case.”
“You lied to the FBI.”
“Everybody lies to the FBI. I couldn’t tell them the truth—about you and Andy.”
“This is insane. Did you at least fill ‘em in on what Lindsay was doing?”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“He told us! He had that dossier!”
“Relax, Will. I covered it. I told the SAC that Lindsay mentioned McCauley, a meeting, and a dossier he had his people put together. I told them McCauley is a lyin’ sack of shit.”
“And?”
“They don’t believe McCauley any more than I do. But the sonofabitch is sticking to his story. He also has some juice in D.C. My guess is it’s the ex-partner at DOJ because the shit is rolling downhill.”
“Are you back in? Reinstated?”
“Oh, hell no. It’s worse than before. Now I’m a witness. If I hear the word ‘pending’ one more time. Screw it. Doesn’t matter. Oh, hey—they found the dad and the kid—from the boat dock.”
“How?”
“I told you. Every FBI agent in North America is here. You were right—the boy and his father were on the dock when they saw a man launch the model boat. A nice man, they said. He invited the kid to have a turn.”
“I don’t suppose they could provide a description.”
“Yeah. White male tourist. Wore a Mercury Marine hat. Sunglasses. Looked like every third guy on this island.”
“How’s Gwen?”
“She’s a tough kid. I had a long talk with her. Got her story straight. She’s saying she made it down the back stairs before it went up in flames. She said to say thanks—for herself and for your help with the horses. She’ll be fine. She won’t say anything about people staying at the cottage or about you doing you-know-what.”
“Great. Now she’s lying to the FBI.”
“Everything she said is true—up to the point where you Tinkerbelled her out the window. They’re going easy on her. She’s family. Gwen’s mother is Lindsay’s daughter. Her parents arrive this afternoon with the Director himself.”
“Did they find Lindsay?”
“Yeah.” Donaldson’s tone said he didn’t plan to elaborate.
“You think McCauley invited Lindsay out to his boat, then blew him up?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, that makes McCauley a pretty obvious suspect.”
“The arrogant prick doesn’t care that we’re looking at him. He thinks his D.C. connections make him bulletproof—and he may be right. Which makes him more dangerous. Keep in mind that McCauley had inside information that Lindsay would be on the island.”
“You think there’s a leak in the Bureau?”
“Yeah. The numbnuts kind. Everybody knew about his place on the island. Lots of people knew he was coming here. There’s another problem.”
“Of course, there is.”
“My colleagues are sharp, Will. They’re all over that airport. It’ll take them no time to track down the plane you flew in, and the fact you were the pilot.”
“Not necessarily. The office was unattended when we departed last night.” I explained the honor system for registering and paying the state park landing fee. “On the way out, my envelope was still sitting in the slot. I took it with me. There’s no record that we were ever there.”
“But what about a flight plan? We look up that shit all the time.”
“Yesterday was severe clear. We launched out of Essex without filing. I thought I might air file, but I ended up calling for flight following instead.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means no flight plan. It means a random airplane talked to Chicago Center while flying over Lake Michigan, but they have no record of the destination or the landing.”
“What about the tower on the island?”
“There is no tower. I didn’t talk to anybody.”
“What about last night? Can’t they track you on radar?”
“Not the way you think. On the return trip, I flew as far as Escanaba at low altitude with the transponder off. Radar coverage over Upper Michigan is spotty. Trust me.”
“Okay. But we’re not out of the woods yet. The Bureau will pull Lindsay’s phone records.”
“So?”
“So, one of the last calls he made was to your phone, remember? At the house? Just before we left.”
“Wrong number. I killed the call and he didn’t leave a message.” I said. “Oh, crap.”
“What?”
“I called him back. I tried to reach him when we were on the dock, just before the explosion.”
“That’s not good.”
“I can just say I got curious, called the unidentified number back, but no one answered on his end, which is true.”
“Except both calls would have pinged towers in the area. And there’s more. I had to tell them the part about a woman shooting from the dock.”
