Страница 51 из 70
TWENTY ONE
A good night’s sleep had cleared A
Blue to indicate death by suffocation or drowning, immersion in the icy waters of Superior; a death, or a burial like De
A
A private phone: A
Normally, no, but it wasn’t a busy morning and the librarian had always wanted to be a park ranger, so yes, this once. She would call back.
Patience emerged from the bath in a cloud of commercial scent. Her slender frame was draped with tasteful elegance in dove-gray linen with shoes to match. “How do you do it?” A
“Perhaps I didn’t marry well,” Patience said with a wink, “but I divorced brilliantly. Carrie A
Looking dull as an ox beside her mother, Carrie trudged up the hall and was taken off to the lodge in maternal custody.
A
It was the librarian from Hopkins. Yes, there had been a number of articles on Theresa Coggins published in the newspaper between 1978 and 1980. Ms. Coggins and her husband, David Coggins, had been on trial for manslaughter. They had been accused of the wrongful death of their daughter, Constantina, aged ten months, twelve days.
“Whoa!” A
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“They were finally acquitted,” the librarian said, sounding mildly disappointed. “That’s everything, except a wedding a
“Do you have a fax machine?” A
“There’s one at the post office.”
A
The newspaper articles beat her to the ranger station on Mott. Seventeen articles in all, covering the death of the child, the trial, the public outcry, the acquittal.
The first paragraph of the first article told the story. “During last Sunday’s cold snap, when temperatures were hovering at thirteen below with a windchill factor in the minus forties, David and Theresa Coggins went cross-country skiing on Winetka Lake near their home in south Hopkins. They took their ten-month-old daughter, Constantina, along in a backpack worn by Mrs. Coggins. Exertion kept David and Theresa from feeling the cold but the baby, confined to the backpack, froze to death.
“ ‘I thought she was sleeping,’ said the nineteen-year-old mother. ‘Then she just wouldn’t wake up.’ ”
A
“Put me on your list of volunteers,” Sandra Fox said, never taking her fingers from the printout she was reading. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re a shit, you know that, A
“I’m just postponing the inevitable. You always find out everything eventually. Think of it as a challenge.”
“I hate that damn fax machine,” Sandra said without rancor. “Messages blatting in and out of my dispatch and I can’t read them.”
A
Scotty was blackmailing Tinker to stop her and her husband from investigating the disappearance of his wife, the alleged lover of the dead man.
Damning as it was, A
“Scotty hasn’t got the balls,” she muttered.
“Begi
A
Was Tattinger continuing those activities at ISRO?
“Sandra, do me a favor?”
“No. No way. Not possible. Tit for tat. Eye for an eye. You scratch my back, et cetera.”
“Find out why Jim Tattinger left the Virgin Islands.”
“Is Jim being investigated in the Castle thing?”
“No,” A
“Island dispatcher to island dispatcher?” Sandra said with a smile. “The centers through which all information flows? You want me to abuse my position of trust to wheedle gossip from an unsuspecting peer?”
“That’s it in a nutshell.”
“Tit for tat,” Sandra replied.
A
“I’ll see what I can do,” she promised.
A
The Belle Isle needed refueling and A
“It’s okay,” A
Damien stopped pacing and looked at her squarely for the first time. “The Windigo is so powerful. People eaten up with fear. They must devour others but they’ll never be sated. I thought I could take care of her,” he added simply. “But all I could do was love her.”
“In the end that will be all she’ll remember ever needing,” A
Damien paced the length of the bench again, his eyes on something farther away than the mountains. “Is it over?” he asked when he’d returned to where A