Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

“I shot him.”

“I can see that. Care to tell me why?”

Now an expression came over the man’s face, a twist of contempt. “That son-of-a-bitch killed my dad.”

Henry looked back at the dead dairy farmer. “I find that hard to believe. When do you say he killed your father?”

“In 1958.”

“That’s, what, twenty-five years ago.”

Ray Richardson nodded once.

“You want to explain?”

He shook his head. “Not here.”

“Huh?”

“I can’t tell you here. Take me back to my motel room, I’ll explain everything.”

Henry waited with the suspect in silence for another forty-five minutes. Then a flare of headlights spread across the living room wall.

The rest of the Westbury Police Department had arrived.

Henry opened the door for Jeff Crane, who was dripping wet and profusely apologetic. Henry held up his hand. “You can tell me about it later.”

“Okay, Chief,” Jeff said, removing his police hat, shaking water on the living room carpet. “Holy shit, that’s really Polowski over there, huh?”

Henry suspected Jeff Crane had never actually seen a dead body before. He’d been on the force for less than a year, and was the son of George Crane, owner of Crane’s Hardware and chairman of the board of selectmen. From talking to other small-town chiefs on the Cape, Henry knew what a minefield it could be to hire local. But Jeff had been a pleasant surprise. Once he’d even given his own mother a speeding ticket, and he hadn’t told Henry about it until the story appeared in the Cape Cod Times .

“Jeff, the Staties and the D.A. should be coming up here in a bit. You secure the scene. Don’t let anybody in, and I mean anybody, until they show up. That body’s leaving the kitchen only when the medical examiner says so. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“I’m going to take our suspect here back to the station, print and process him. You need me, gimme a holler. Otherwise, hang tight here and wait.”

Jeff wiped his hand over his face. “Yeah, about that, Chief, I got a message from county dispatch just before I got here. Seems like Route 6 is flooded around Cahoon Hollow. The Staties and the county attorney are going to be delayed some.”

Henry shrugged. “No matter. Your job’s still the same. Keep the place secure. Questions?”

“Nope.” He hesitated a moment. “Oh, hey, Chief, I wanted to let you know my Aunt Clarisse, in Falmouth, she sent a big donation to the American Cancer Society. You know, in honor of Carol.”

“So no questions?”

“I’m good.”

“Then Mr. Richardson and I will be off.”

The Westbury Motel was right on Route 6, a one-story structure with a modest office building at one end, and a series of connected motel rooms extending off to the left. Out front was a small swimming pool, covered with a vinyl tarp for the winter. Underneath the Westbury Motel sign, a VACANCY light flickered.

He parked the cruiser in front of the office underneath an overhang. Leaving the confessed killer in the back seat, secured and cuffed, he got out and pressed the buzzer. Eventually Tommy Snow answered the door, yawning, scratching at his bald head, clutching his tattered brown bathrobe with his other hand.

“Shit, Chief, what’s up?”

“I need you to open up a room for me. Rented by a guy named Ray Richardson.”

“Something happen to him?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, he’s an odd duck, I’ll tell you that. Been here about two, three weeks, and you know what? He won’t let anybody clean his room. Even pays me an extra fifty a week to keep out of it. I leave him fresh towels and sheets outside the door. He’s a strange one.”

Tommy ducked back into his office and came out with a key. “Hey, Chief, sorry about your wife.”

“Thanks for the key,” Henry said.

He drove the cruiser around to unit 9. The rain seemed to be slowing. He left the engine running to keep the headlights on. Henry got out of the cruiser and opened the rear door for Ray Richardson. Then he unlocked the motel room door and switched on the light.

A shabby room with a double bed against one wall. A cheap veneer nightstand with an ugly lamp. An open suitcase rested on a folding luggage stand.

And the walls…

They were covered with newspapers and magazine clippings and photocopies, many of them yellowed and marked up. Strung here and there in jagged lines, weaving this way and that, was red yarn, connecting one photo with another, connecting maps with clippings…

He’d seen such scenes on TV and in movies. The serial killer’s wall of death. The paranoid obsessive’s charting of some loony conspiracy theory. An intricate web of madness.

He felt a wash of acid at the back of his throat.

A roomful of crazy.

The tortured work of a lunatic.

Ray Richardson stood handcuffed in the doorway.

“All right,” Henry said. “Talk.”

“The whole story’s up here, left to right. I’ll talk you through it if you’d like.”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “I’d like.”

Richardson stepped into the room. Henry looked closer at the bizarre collage. On one side of the room were photos of an Air Force aircraft, circa 1950s, with four propellers and a shiny fuselage, some parked on an airstrip, some airborne. There were photos of uniformed airmen gathered in front of the parked aircraft for a group shot like they’d just graduated from high school. Headshots of one particular Air Force officer. Ray Richardson’s father, Henry guessed. He could see the resemblance. A large map of Turkey and Central Asia. Blurry photocopies of newspaper articles.

Ray stood gesturing with his chin like a demented museum guide. “That’s my dad, on the left. Back in 1956, ’57, when he was in the Air Force. Lieutenant Andrew Richardson.”

A yellowed clipping from the Cleveland Plain Dealer with a photo of the same man, with a headline: AIR FORCE PILOT LOST OVER RUSSIA—LOCAL MAN WAS 36.

“You know what the government told my mom after my dad was shot down? That it was a routine weather reporting flight. So my poor mom… when she’d had one too many martinis in the afternoon, she’d say my dad had been killed to measure winds and clouds. What a waste, she said. And when I got older, I decided to find out the truth.”

Richardson nodded in the direction of the wall. “That’s more than ten years of research up there. I even interviewed a couple of guys from my dad’s unit. That’s when I found out what they were really doing. I knew my dad flew in the Korean War. What I found was, he later volunteered to fly special intelligence missions for the Air Force, for the National Security Agency. He was based at Adana, Turkey.”

Henry peered closely at one of the photos. “That’s a C-130…”

“You know your aircraft, huh?”

“I was a flyboy too.”

“Well, then, you know those things were jammed full of electronic surveillance equipment. To intercept radio transmissions, radar frequencies, other electronic signatures. They’d fly right up to the border of the Soviet Union, trigger their antiaircraft radar, then measure the frequencies. That way they could let the bombers down the road know how to spoof the radar. Let ’em slip through to hit Moscow or Minsk or Pinsk.”

“Who the hell are you? A researcher? Military historian?”

He shook his head. “John Deere salesman from Ohio.”

“So you want to explain what this is all about, all this… this…”

“It’s my attempt to cut through the lies, the bullshit, everything that was slopped our way the past couple of decades.”

“I see.”

“Once I found out who my dad really was, and his mission, I wanted to find out who had ordered his plane shot down.” Another nod to the wall. “And that’s the guy.”