Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

Henry nodded. “Want to follow me over?”

“I’ll find my way, no problem,” the detective said.

“How about I go with the chief instead?” Ray Richardson said.

Henry shook his head. “He’s got the nicer ride,” he said.

Henry caught a last glimpse of Ray Richardson, sitting in the back of the Suburban. His eyes were darting around, a panicked expression on his face. For the first time he looked scared.

After the Suburban pulled away, Henry stood there for a moment, staring at the crazytown walls of the motel with an increasing sense of disquiet.

Then it hit him.

Abruptly, he hustled out to his cruiser. The Suburban had turned left on Route 6, he’d noticed, not right. Wrong way.

The Suburban was far off in the distance, the taillights disappearing. Heading away from Westbury. Heading off-Cape.

Two miles down Route 6, the cruiser slid and slithered and the wheels locked and it spun out onto the shoulder. He sat there with the engine ticking and his heart racing.

It was no use. Route 6 was a sheet of ice. No way he was going to chase down the Suburban. That beast of a sport-utility vehicle with its V8 engine and four-wheel drive was probably halfway to the Sagamore Bridge by now.

He heard faint voices and static crackle on the two-way. Melissa from county dispatch. “County to Westbury C-One,” she said.

“I’m here, County, go.”

“Update from the State Police, chief. They’re on their way, but they said to give ’em another twenty minutes or so before they get to you. The roads are really bad.”

He nodded, rubbed the hard plastic of the microphone against his forehead. “County, tell them to turn around and go home. There’s nothing here.”

“You mean, false report?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

He sat in the cruiser for another minute or so, enjoying the blast of hot air from the heater. A couple of other beefy black Suburbans barreled past, headed off-Cape.

It took him a good ten minutes to maneuver the cruiser off the shoulder and back onto the treacherous highway, where he made a U-turn.

He smiled to himself, but it was an ugly smile.

When he got back to the Westbury Motel, he found the door to unit 9 slightly ajar.

Henry pushed it open with his shoulder and switched on the overhead light.

He wasn’t surprised. Not really.

The place had been thoroughly cleaned out. Not a photo or a newspaper clipping remained. No suitcase. No trace of a man named Ray Richardson.

The room smelled faintly of bleach.

It was almost sunrise.

When he got back to the Westbury police station, he found Officer Jeff Crane sitting at a typewriter, punching the keys so hard it looked like he might break the damned thing. Open on his desk at his elbow was an old black briefcase lined with jars of fingerprint powders and brushes and transfer tape and other tools.

“The Staties took the body away, Chief,” Jeff said. “Even arranged for a tow truck to haul the shooter’s car. Plus lots of boxes of evidence.”

“So what’re you up to?” Henry asked.

“Writing up the police report,” Jeff said. “I got some good latents right here. I’ll drive them over to Yarmouth first thing in the morning.” He glanced at his Timex. “Actually, it’s almost six o’clock, isn’t it? Good morning.”

Henry looked at the earnest young officer, at the resolve in his face, his sharp jaw. Then he reached over, grabbed the envelope of latent prints and tossed them into the steel trash basket.

“Chief, what—what—?”

Henry pulled the set of triplicate carbon-paper forms from the platen of the typewriter. He tore it in half, then in quarters, and then dropped the scraps into the trash.

“Let’s head over to the diner and grab a cup of coffee,” Henry said.

Little Al set down plates of pancakes and bacon. “Top off your coffee, gentlemen?” he asked.

Henry smiled and nodded and held out his mug. Jeff shook his head. “I’m good,” he said.

“So you’re just gonna let it drop?” Jeff said. “I don’t get it.”

“How much did you know about my wife Carol?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “I know you guys met in the Air Force. I know she was pretty sick with cancer for a long time, right?”

“Carol was what they call a Radiological Safety Officer. Went places and did things I couldn’t even know about… except for one thing. A number of years ago there was this incident down in Arkansas. A Titan II nuclear missile silo caught fire and exploded. The warhead separated. Flew out of the silo. And Carol was part of the recovery team. They went in there and saved the day. Got everything cleaned up. Official story was, no problem, warhead wasn’t damaged, nothing to look at here, everything’s hunky dory. Real story was, she and the others sacrificed themselves so the nearby towns didn’t get nuked into a sheet of flat glass.”

Jeff was quiet. Henry went on. “Papers were signed, oaths were given. No one ever heard any more about it. Carol’s medical file at the V.A. hospital said she’d contracted lung cancer from smoking. I called up the Pentagon and got through to someone senior and said Carol never touched a cigarette in her life. I just wanted them to acknowledge what happened.”

“Yeah?”

“The lieutenant colonel I talked to said I had a choice. I could keep making noise and lose Carol’s medical coverage and the rest of Carol’s life would be a living hell. The medical bills would bankrupt us. Or else I could keep my mouth shut and she’d get the best care available. So I thought about it. Carol didn’t have much time left.” Henry’s eyes were moist. His eyes were probably just irritated from being up all night. “I knew I was going to lose her. I just didn’t feel like doing something that would make me lose her that much quicker.”

Jeff toyed with his fork for a moment. “So who really took Polowski’s body? And Ray Richardson? And who was Detective Peyton really?”

Henry shrugged. “O.G.A.”

“Huh?”

“Other Government Agency. Take your pick. There’s about a half-dozen three-letter agencies could have pulled something like this off. We’ll never know.”

“What do you think’s going to happen to Ray?”

“Oh, they have a thousand ways of making you disappear. Maybe there’ll be a week of secret interrogation. Then a corpse will turn up on a back road somewhere. Single-vehicle accident. The coroner will say the guy’s blood alcohol level was sky high. He’d been going through a rough patch after his wife left him. It’ll all be in the police report.”

“But… why?”

Henry shrugged. “Couple of weeks back, a civilian airliner was shot out of the sky by a Soviet aircraft. Now the Russians are on the front page, day after day, being portrayed as heartless monsters. But suppose this little story from Cape Cod got out—that a Soviet air defense general who defected had been secretly living here all these years? A general who gave an order to shoot down an American plane in 1958. An order that sounds kinda like another order another Soviet general just gave two weeks ago. Only we protected one general because we wanted to know his secrets. Wouldn’t look so good, would it? Especially with all our shouting about the Evil Empire. See, the thing is, Jeff—no government likes to be embarrassed.”

“Holy crap,” Jeff whispered. He blotted maple syrup on his fingers with a paper napkin. Little ribbons of white napkin stuck to his palm like feathers. “So what do we do about it?”

Henry lifted his cup of coffee and took a long swig. He shook his head. “Stay out of the crossfire.”

They didn’t call it Asperger’s Syndrome in those days, but my younger brother Julian probably had it.