Smugglers Notch Page 4

  “You’ll pay for this.”

  “Don’t count on it,” St. Germain said. Then he loaded the carton into the trunk and backed away.

  “Jesus, Lieutenant,” Jeffcoat said, still trying to fasten the belt. “I don’t believe you did that.”

  “Tell you something.” St. Germain looked both ways before turning the Ford onto a desolate country road.

  “What’s that?”

  “Neither do I.”

  Marlow was out of the office when they returned to headquarters. St. Germain found him downstairs in the communications room, tinkering with the antique radio that held the county together while the dispatcher looked on over his shoulder.

  “I can’t understand why you won’t junk that thing and replace it with something modern,” St. Germain said, “say, since the time of Marconi.”

  “And how’s the county supposed to meet your salary while we try and pay it off?” Marlow pulled his head out of the radio. “Hand me that tube over there, will you? And, Ed, what about putting up a pot of coffee?”

  The dispatcher went out and St. Germain poked through a collection of silvered tubes and handed one to his boss. “This what you’re looking for?”

  “Uh-huh. Did Ray Beausoleil bite your head off when you told him what his daughter’s been up to?”

  “Didn’t get the chance,” St. Germain said to Marlow’s back, which stiffened at the words.

  “Why’s that?”

  “We still don’t know where Becky went. She’s not at her boyfriend’s. She was there yesterday, all right, but he insists she left. He’s a queer duck, growing sensimilla in a big greenhouse right in the open. … Was, anyway.”

  “What do you mean was?”

  “It’s not important, John. What is, though, is that he’s every bit the class act Beausoleil said he was. I wouldn’t want to be any girl who stepped on his toes. And Lederer admits he and Becky were fighting all the time.”

  “So what does that prove?”

  St. Germain let the excitement out of his voice. “Nothing, I guess,” he said, chagrined. “It’s just something to keep in mind. What do we do about Ray Beausoleil now?”

  “Don’t you think you’ve got your priorities out of order? Shouldn’t it be Becky we’re worrying about?”

  “The girl’s a tramp, everybody knows it. Lederer says she’s probably shacked up with someone else.”

  “I don’t know it,” Marlow said, a steely edge undercutting the fatherly tone he reserved for St. Germain. “And until you can tell me where she is and what’s happened to her, neither do you. Why not give her the benefit of the doubt and try running her down?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “I am,” Marlow said. “But only for the next thirteen months, or till it finally sinks into that handsome blond head that you can’t take anything for granted, not when an eighteen-year-old girl’s well-being is at stake. Then, with any kind of luck, the sheriff’s office becomes your headache. So how about you figuring out what we do.”

  St. Germain buried his hands in his pockets. “I’ll call the Free Press and the Herald and the Times-Argus. TV and radio, too.”

  Marlow laughed humorlessly, the sound rattling in the guts of the old radio.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You are,” the sheriff said. “You’re what … thirty years younger than me …and it’s like we’re light years apart. The way I’d go about it, first I’d send her description to Chittenden and Lamoille and Caledonia counties and the state police, then notify the hospitals and morgue. And I’d be thinking of rounding up some of her friends, girls if she’s got any like that, and asking if they have a notion where she could have gone.”

  “I was getting to it.”

  “In the meantime, you’re concerned more about making a name for yourself than you are about the girl.”

  “Becky’s made her reputation.” St. Germain moved into the corridor, nearly bumping into the dispatcher, who was juggling three containers of coffee. “I’m still working on mine.”

  “Come back here.”

  “I’m going upstairs,” St. Germain said. “I have calls to make.”

  “Larry—”

  When St. Germain brought his bulk inside the doorway, Marlow was standing with his back to the radio. “A reputation’s not worth shit if it isn’t backed up by something substantial.”

  St. Germain dropped two sugars in black coffee and inhaled the steam. “I don’t see the harm in having my picture in the news before election year.”

  “You worry so much about your image, pretty soon that’s all there’ll be.”

  “Come on, John, who’s being cheated if I like playing the hero every now and then? Are you saying the taxpayers aren’t getting full value out of me?”

  “You are,” Marlow said, and went back to the radio.

  Plows had come by while he was away, walling the long drive with boulders of packed snow. He left the cruiser at the side of the road and mounted the barricade, high-stepping toward a cabin of burnished logs.

  The woman in the garden was tall and thin, with sloping cheekbones providing an angular framework for pale skin livid with the cold. She was wearing waffle-soled boots and a maroon skirt, a man’s overcoat with a knit scarf under the collar. With a chewed-up broom she was batting clumps of snow from barren hedges bent nearly double against themselves. For long minutes St. Germain stood beside a sugar maple riddled with tapholes, watching her plump the bushes lovingly with bare hands. In the four years he had known her, he never tired of just looking at Annie. Now that he had her to himself again, he knew he’d better get his fill.

  When she went inside, he followed. The smell of supper on the stove relaxed him in the same way that a few beers with the boys had served the same purpose during the months when they were living apart. He hung his gun belt on a coat tree and put his cap over it. The fleece-lined parka that was supposed to look like part of his uniform he wore into the bedroom, where he found her darning his socks.

  Without looking up from her sewing, she said, “You’re home early.”

  “You could pretend you were happy about it.”

  “Must we start right away? You haven’t even taken off your coat yet.”

  “I was ragging you, Annie.”

  She put down the sock and leaned across the bed to kiss him, letting him cup her breast in his hand as he always did no matter how polite her call for affection. “So was I.” Lingering on his lips. “How was skiing?”

  “Huh?”

  “You remember, Mr. Lieutenant. When you left this nice warm bed, it wasn’t six o’clock in the morning. Because, you said, you had to try out your new skis.”

  “It was okay, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Tell you the truth, I’d about forgotten I’d been to Stowe today. We had some trouble, and it’s still on my mind.”

  “You didn’t do anything to make John mad …”

  “No, not like that. A girl went missing last night. I’m trying to find her.”

  She rethreaded the needle and jabbed it into frayed Argyle. “It seems like you’re always trying to find a girl.”

  “For crying out loud—”

  “Ease off, Larry. It was a joke.”

  “I’m not in the mood for comedy,” he said. “We looked in every bed you’d expect her to turn up in. Nothing. Her dad’s the new state’s attorney, and if we don’t bring her to him soon, there’ll be all kinds of hell to pay.”

  “Only if you grab the check.”

  “You don’t understand. This is a real son of a bitch on our back. It’d be his pleasure to make life miserable for the department.”

  “That’s my point,” she said. “You have no business in the sheriff’s office.” The tall woman bent lower as she propelled the needle with a thimble that was a silver blur on her finger. “Instead of camping out in the woods, wasting your life with the Keystone Kops, you could be making something of yourself.”

  “I though
t you like the country.”

  “I do,” she said. “But one day I hope to have a child—yours, if you can get up the courage—and I’d hate for him to become the next log cabin President.”

  In spite of himself, St. Germain began to smile, then thought better of it. “If it was good enough for Abe Lincoln—”

  “It’s not good enough for my child.”

  “Maybe it won’t have to be. John’s making some more noises about me taking over when he retires.”

  “So we trade the cabin for a shack in town and you can grow old early like he did playing cops and robbers? Take off the white hat, cowboy.” She made two quick stitches, knotted the thread and snipped the end between her teeth. “You promised me things would be different this time around.”

  St. Germain dropped beside her and put an arm over her shoulder. “You should have known better than to believe me. I’d have said anything to have you back.”

  “Damn you.” She squirmed away and twisted around to face him. “You’re only twenty-nine, not too old to finish your degree. In a couple of years you could be working regular hours, bringing home decent money—”

  “Doing what?” He shuddered. “Teaching?”

  “What’s wrong with that? You’re good with kids.”

  “There’s a kid who needs me now.”

  “Oh, shit,” Annie said.

  “What if I’ve been wrong about her? What if she’s lying by the side of a road somewhere, hurt bad?”

  “I need you,” Annie said. “You don’t have to teach. Stowe’s starting to hire again, and they’re paying management trainees thirty thousand to start. You could be outdoors as much as you like.”

  “For all I know, the girl’s been snatched.” St. Germain went on as if she hadn’t said anything. “Annie, this could be the one I’ve been waiting for, the case to hang a career on.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “If Becky has been kidnapped …” He got up from the bed and began tracing a circle in the floor around a yellow scatter rug. “And the more I think about it, the less unlikely it sounds … there could be a ransom demand coming.”

  “Now you’re fantasizing.”

  “I’m going to ask Beausoleil if we can put a tap on his phone. I’ll also contact the state police about getting a tracking dog over to Lederer’s place.”

  “Whose?”

  “Becky’s fellow … And see if he can pick up a spoor.”

  “The whole thing stinks, if you ask me.”

  “If I can get that poor kid back from whoever grabbed her, the election’ll be just a formality.”

  “I thought you said the poor kid is a slut.”

  “It’s not my job to judge ’em, Annie. Only to find ’em.”

  “What about our weekend? We were going to Montreal …”

  St. Germain stopped pacing. “And if there’s no call for ransom, I’ll get a helicopter in the air, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll ask for volunteers to check every vacant building in the county, have the governor’s office authorize a reward.”

  “I said, ‘What about …?’”

  “Sorry, Ann.” He leaned over to kiss her, and his hand slid automatically to her breast. “Maybe if we get lucky quick …”

  Annie didn’t answer. She reached inside a small cloth bag and pulled out another sock.

  3

  HUNTERS FOUND THE BODY.

  They were down to three by then, two men and a boy, diehards from a party of six that had spent most of the night in the tavern of a Hogback Mountain lodge, losing two of their number to hangovers before the day got started and another on the forced march through two feet of fresh snow to a bivouac in the woods. Now, in the early dusk, they trekked back, lugging a trussed 170-pound buck—a fine trophy, the boy had been told, although he wondered if his wisecracking uncles would mount the eight-point rack or the white-tailed hindquarters, like he’d seen over the men’s room at the lodge. The boy, who was twelve and small for his age, urged his frozen feet not to quit. Two hours before, excited by the kill, he had worn himself out in the struggle with the carcass. Exhausted now and shivering in the chill downpour that had taken them by surprise, he lagged behind, scarcely able to shoulder his unfired Winchester.

  In an opening in the trees the boy dropped back farther to rest on a stump. Staring blankly through clouds of his breath, his interest was drawn to a swatch of blue in the field of white. With the first strength that he could spare he pushed himself across the drag marks to investigate. The blueness seemed to be expanding at his feet as the rain washed the forest floor. He kicked away some of the snow and then peeled off his mittens and scraped more with his hands, uncovering cloth that was stiff and unyielding, anchored to the ground by a cumbersome form around which it was loosely molded. He tugged at a corner and looked inside, and, feeling colder than he could ever remember, he fell to his knees to dig like a dog for a trophy of his own.

  The lips were the bluest, as blue as the bedspread shrouding the rest of her. When he had cleared away the snow, he pushed back the cloth and filled his eyes with her body. She was the first woman he had seen without clothes, but the first dead person as well, and he didn’t know whether to smirk or to scream. The choice was made by a voice sounding a little like his own, pleading with his uncles to forget about the deer and come back for him, no matter how far they had gotten.

  Trying without success to avoid peeking at her again, he knelt beside the woman and pulled the cloth over her. The wind blew it away and he went in search of a heavy rock to weigh it down. Another voice was calling to him then, floating above the storm. “Hello, Tim, you all right?”

  The boy hesitated, trying to quell the tremor in his throat. “No,” he hollered. “I need you fast.”

  When they found him, double-timing it into the clearing, flushed and breathless with their rifles in their hands, he was squatting with his back to the dark patch in the snow.

  “What you bagged there, boy?” One of the men grinned. “We didn’t hear no shot.”

  The child didn’t answer. Clinging to his Winchester, he stood up and moved away and the men gazed down at the pale form in the bedspread.

  “Holy shit,” one said. “Tim, did you shoot her?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Ralph,” the other man said. “This girl’s been dead awhile. And even an idiot could see where she ain’t been shot.”

  “Well, what’s her body doing out here in the weather?”

  “Ain’t our business. Far as we’re concerned, we didn’t see nothing. Let’s get going.”

  The men shouldered their rifles, retreating toward the path through the clearing. “Sure was a looker, though,” Ralph said.

  “Ain’t you coming, Timmy?” his other uncle called back to the boy. “There’s lots more girls where this one come from.”

  Tim shook his head. “We can’t just leave her here like this.”

  “Why not? It’s the way we found her, ain’t it?”

  The boy went back to the body and stood over it with the Winchester across his chest, groping for something to say, something they couldn’t twist around to make him sound like a dumb little kid. “It ain’t right,” he tried finally. “That’s why.”

  “Listen, son,” Ralph said. “You know our tickets’ve been filled since opening day. Last thing we need’s two carcasses out of season. We call the authorities on this, they’re going to arrest us for the deer, if not the other. You might consider that.”

  The boy dropped down on his haunches. “But it ain’t right.”

  “Tell you what we’ll do, Tim,” his other uncle said. “Soon’s we get the buck out of the woods we’ll go looking for a phone and you can let the sheriff know what you found, and where, so long as you don’t leave any names. It a deal?”

  Before the boy could answer, he was being prodded out of the clearing, the three of them jogging through the rain, glancing over their shoulders. They went an eighth of a mile before they found the deer where Tim’s uncles had left it u
nder a mossy underhang, and the boy, not so cold anymore, led the way to the truck.

  When the dispatcher reached him with word about the body in the woods, St. Germain was less than a block from the sheriff’s office. He continued into the lot, made a U-turn around the building, and raced out of Tremont Center headed back the other way. At Waterbury he turned toward Stowe, sighting through flailing wipers along a highway cleared of snow. Outside the village of Moscow he crossed the Little River on a road that went to dirt pitted with icy puddles as it climbed alongside Miller Brook toward Lake Mansfield.

  He counted three Cabot County cars parked on the brushy shoulder with their right wheels in the ditch, four if you included the meat wagon from the coroner’s office. He left his cruiser behind the others and used his five-cell flashlight to pick a way into the trees. Up ahead he made out the shape of a man in a hooded parka moving slowly through the snow, and doubling his pace he caught up easily with Wally Jeffcoat. The young deputy broke stride and spun around when St. Germain laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  “Mind if I lead?”

  “Who the … oh, it’s you, Lieutenant.” Jeffcoat grinned with embarrassment. “You scared me out of two years’ growth.”

  “I hope not,” St. Germain said. “I’ve been counting on you fitting into your uniform one day.”

  Jeffcoat grinned some more and then looked guilty about it. “They’re saying it’s the Beausoleil girl they found.”

  St. Germain moved ahead, following the probing beam of his flashlight. Two feet of snow had softened into a carpet of slush that oozed inside his shoes. The rain was starting to mix with large flakes that found the back of his neck, transmitting a chill down into his shoulders.

  At the edge of the clearing he doused his flash. Lit by portable arc fights, four men cast exaggerated shadows against the silver trees. St. Germain recognized Marlow and Deputies Dick Vann and Artemis Gray, along with the Cabot County coroner, Dr. Sajit Singh. “G’evening, Loot,” one of the deputies said, and then both walked away with their eyes on the patchy snow.