Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

He did not have to climb far. Fifteen feet up, he got his first look at the house. He could see LaMoia pacing impatiently at the top of the trail steps near the guest house. He climbed up higher and discovered a large, heavy branch that ran nearly level and probably offered a fairly comfortable perch. The flashlight revealed that here the dark tree bark was excessively shredded yellow. Someone had spent some time here. He did not climb up onto the branch, for he wanted to leave it for ID, who were waiting for a call while parked only a few blocks away. But there seemed to him little question as to the quality of the unobstructed view this offered of Adler’s home office.

He aimed the light back down to the ground, with a little voice calling to him never to look down, and experienced a brief sensation of vertigo. But it was as he was planning his descent through the branches that his eye caught the flash of something bright. Suddenly his planned route meant nothing to him. He descended out of the tree as effortlessly as would a chimpanzee.

From above they had looked like yellow pine needles, and yet unnatural and misplaced. Boldt counted three of them-not pine needles at all. Each chewed to a pulp on both ends-discarded as the Tin Man had sat patiently up in this tree biding his time, waiting to place his call. Toothpicks. Three of them. Freshly chewed-damp to the touch at one end, dry on the other.

The radio spit static and the urgent voice of Bobbie Gaynes said, “Sergeant, I need you down here. I’m about thirty yards lower than where we split up. I’m waving my light.”

Boldt covered his own flashlight and saw the beam from hers reflected in limbs of the trees. “I’ve got you.” He took note of his surroundings so he could find this same spot again. He contacted Bernie Lofgrin’s ID crew and told them to come onto the property and to wait with LaMoia at the top of the trail. LaMoia copied.

Boldt contacted Daphne and asked her to relay to prosecuting attorney Michael Striker that they needed an immediate access to the calling logs of all the area cellular phone companies. If it had been Caulfield in that tree, and if he had made the phone call from up there, then it had to be from a cellular phone. If Caulfield had a cell phone, then he had an account; if he had an account, he had a mailing address. Striker was to contact Boldt the moment he located a record of any such call.

The park trail was rough going at a run. Boldt punched through a railroad tie, crashed, and recovered himself, but not without winning some bruises to show for it.

Gaynes was fifteen yards off the trail into the woods, in an area that seemed to Boldt nearly directly beneath the observation tree. As Boldt approached, she asked, “Did you have dinner?”

“No.”

“Well, you’re lucky. I just left mine in a bush over there.”

Boldt did not think of Gaynes as having a tender stomach. He reached her. He could smell the metallic bite of fresh blood in the air well before he saw the body. She lowered her light onto Mackensie’s corpse. The branch that had been used to cave in his face was lying a few yards from the twisted wreck of a body, and Boldt thought that the man might have survived that blow had his hands not been cleaved from his arms at the wrist with something incredibly sharp. But there they lay-at the ends of his arms looking like a pair of deerskin gloves. Mac Mackensie, knocked unconscious by that branch, had bled to death, his face now the color of a bedsheet.

A few minutes later when LaMoia arrived, he said to Gaynes, “Come on, help me. I think we should give him a hand.”

At three in the morning, Boldt drove Daphne down to where she had parked her car in the picnic area.

“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

Daphne nodded.

“You’re just tired,” he tried. “It’s late.”

“I’m wide awake,” she answered. She could not think how to explain what she felt to another person; she barely understood it herself. As a psychologist, she wanted to be strong and able to quickly overcome such pain-to adapt. But as a woman, a human being, she ached not for Mac Mackensie, but selfishly, for herself. Then she thought that Lou Boldt, of all people, would understand. “Five minutes either way,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice giving her away.

Boldt pulled the car next to her Honda and left it running. “And it would have been you,” he said.

She nodded, and she felt the choking sensation in her throat, she felt the tears, and she hated herself for this reaction. She leaned forward and Boldt put his big hand on her back and rubbed her there, and it comforted her. “That was too damn close for me,” she said, sobbing now. “And it’s me I care about, not Mac Mackensie-can you believe that? And you know how he went out? He went out being a jerk. A real goddamn prick. And that’s the last thing he ever was-a jerk. A real jerk. Listen to me!”

He continued to rub her back, and when his hand reached her neck, she felt the tension spill out of her and she found her self-control again. “Sorry,” she said.

“Whenever a cop-someone I know-goes down, my first sensation is gratitude. Glad it wasn’t me. My turn. I always felt guilty about that-until now. I’ve never talked about it with anyone, never shared that part of me. Not even with Liz. My second thought is for the deceased-it’s not that I don’t care; but my first reaction is a huge sense of relief. I dodged another one-something along those lines.”

“I was there,” she said softly. “I heard someone in the woods. First to my left, then below me, then later to my right. I heard two people, not one. He was there. For all I know he was coming for me when Mackensie caught up to me. For all I know he was right there .” She looked over at him then with surprise in her eyes. “For all I know it’s been him following me all along.”

“Or Mackensie for that matter,” Boldt suggested.

“No,” she said, “Mackensie was just doing a job. After he left me, he didn’t make it far.”

“He probably heard something. Wandered into the woods. Caulfield jumps up and hits a home run into the side of his face. The hands were an afterthought, I think. Maybe Mackensie tried for his piece. Maybe he grabbed for a radio or something. I think Harry used the hands to buy himself time-no time to tie him up, so he cuts them off. Something that simple. The question I have to ask is what the hell kind of knife is he carrying around?”

“You’re trying to say there was nothing I could have done. You’re trying to make it right.”

“It wasn’t you who disobeyed the signs.” Boldt pointed through the windshield to where the headlights caught the parks department sign. It read: FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL.

Daphne parked her car down the street and across from the houseboats in a space for which she paid seventy-five dollars a month. It was a well-lighted lot, which lately made her appreciate it all the more. She turned off the car, locked it, and made the trip to the houseboat at a brisk pace. It was after three-thirty in the morning and all of her neighbors were locked up and dark.

She reached the door, unlocked and opened it, and headed directly to the home security box that she found flashing its violation, indicating her entry. She rekeyed the device, locked the front door, and turned on more lights than necessary, keeping her purse at her side while she made a full trip around every room, checking coat closets, even under the bed, and confirming to herself that she now qualified fully as a paranoid.

She convinced herself that at this hour any sane person would head straight to bed, but on this night it was not for her. She considered a bath, but not tonight. Sleep would not come for another hour or so, and to try to force it would only delay it more.