Two Graves

He watched morosely as the hotel detective disappeared into the room, alerted by the husband’s shouts. Almost immediately the killer stepped out again and headed for the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button, waited a minute, and then—as if changing his mind—walked the rest of the way down the hall, exiting through the stairwell door.

Moments later, the elevator doors opened and three men in suits stepped out.

“Stop,” D’Agosta said. “Let’s see the feed from the thirteenth floor. Begin at the same time index.”

“Sure thing, Loo,” said Hong.

They had already reviewed the tapes of the fourteenth floor—at that particular moment there had been several cleaning ladies at work, their carts blocking the corridor. Now D’Agosta watched as the killer emerged from the stairwell onto the thirteenth floor. He strode over to the elevator bank, pressed the DOWN button again, and waited. He let one elevator go by, then pressed the button again. This time, when the doors opened, he stepped inside.

“Stop,” D’Agosta said.

He had been through this again and again. Where was the accomplice? In several instances, there was nobody around to observe, and in other situations, where there were people who might be spotting, he could find no physical matches between them. Nobody could turn himself from an old, stooped gentleman of eighty into a fat Dominican cleaning lady in fifteen seconds. Unless the killer had half a dozen accomplices.

This was seriously, seriously weird.

“Lobby camera,” D’Agosta muttered. “Same time index.”

The image on the monitor jittered, then came into focus again, showing a bird’s-eye view of the hotel’s discreet and elegant lobby. The elevator doors opened, and the killer emerged—alone. He began to walk toward the main exit, then seemed to reconsider, turned, and sat down in a chair, hiding his face behind a newspaper. Seven seconds later a uniformed man—hotel security—went ru

D’Agosta watched as the form was obscured by the closing door. Other cameras had shown him going out an exit in the hotel’s loading zone. Repeated viewings of the lobby and other video feeds again showed no sign of a possible partner in the murders.

Hong stopped the video of his own accord. “Anything else you’d like to see?”

“Yeah. Got any Three Stooges reruns?” And D’Agosta pushed himself wearily to his feet, feeling even older than when he’d first come in.

But as he was leaving, he was suddenly struck by an idea. The accomplice didn’t need to be in all those places. If he had access to the live video feeds, he would have seen everything D’Agosta had. And could have warned the killer accordingly. So he was either someone in the security department itself, or someone who had hacked into the CCTV system and was diverting a private feed for himself, in real time—perhaps, if those cameras were networked, even over the Internet. In that case, the accomplice might not even be in New York City.

With this brilliant stroke in mind, D’Agosta immediately began thinking about how to exploit it.

24

THE CABIN DIDN’T BELONG TO HER FATHER AND NEVER had. Jack Swanson wasn’t really the kind of person who actually owned things. He talked his way into borrowing them, took them over, and then over time acted as if they were his own. As was typical of Jack, he had somehow stumbled across the run-down tar-paper shack years ago, in timberland owned by Royal Paper on the New Jersey side of the Delaware Water Gap. The story Corrie heard was that he’d made friends with some Royal Paper executive he’d met on a fishing trip, who apparently agreed that if Jack wanted to fix the place up he could stay there whenever he wanted as long as he kept a low profile and didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Corrie was sure the transaction involved many beers and fishing stories, and a big dose of her father’s apparent charm. The cabin had no heat, water, or electricity; the windows were broken and the roof full of holes; and nobody seemed to mind that Jack went up there, slapdashed the shack into something barely habitable, installed himself as its proprietor, and used it as a base for occasional fishing trips to nearby Long Pine Lake.

Corrie had never seen the place, of course, but she knew it existed, because her mother complained bitterly when she discovered that his “fishing cabin on the lake in New Jersey” did not actually belong to him when it came time to divide up their (nonexistent) assets in the divorce.

The cabin, Corrie felt sure, was where her father had holed up. He didn’t own it, so officialdom couldn’t trace him there. And she was pretty sure news of his seamy little bank robbery would not likely have traveled very far from Allentown, certainly not up into the little hamlets about the Worthington State Forest of New Jersey.

How many Long Pine Lakes could there be in that area? According to Google Maps there was only one, and Corrie sure as hell hoped it was the right one as she got out of the horribly expensive cab she’d hired from the bus stop in East Stroudsburg, which had taken her to a country store known as Frank’s Place in Old Foundry, New Jersey, the closest commercial establishment she could find to Long Pine Lake.

Counting out a hundred and twenty bucks, she paid off the cabdriver, then sauntered into the store. It was just as she’d hoped, one of those cramped places selling fishing lures, bait, cheap rods, coolers, boating supplies, bundles of firewood, Coleman fuel, and—of course—beer. An entire wall of beer.

Just her father’s kind of joint.

As she walked up to the counter, a silence fell among the beer-guts hanging out around the cash register. No doubt it was her purple hair. She was tired, she was irritated, and she was not happy to have spent a hundred and twenty dollars on a cab ride. She really hoped these good old boys weren’t going to give her a hard time.

“I’m looking for Jack Swanson,” she said.

More silence. “Is that right?” came the eventual response from the apparent self-appointed clown of the group. “What… Jack knock you up or something?” The man guffawed and looked to his friends, left and right, for approval.

“I’m his daughter, you mentally defective asswipe,” she said in a very loud voice that reached to the farthest corners of the store and brought a sudden hush to the place.

Now the laugh came from the friends. Beer-Gut colored deeply, but there wasn’t much he could do. “She got you that time, Merv,” said one, a little less simian than the others, nudging his pal.

She waited, arms crossed, for an answer.

“So you’re the kid he’s always talking about,” the less simian one said, in a friendly tone.

This business about her father always talking about her surprised Corrie, but she didn’t show it. She didn’t even look at Merv, who was clearly hugely embarrassed. “So—you all know my father?”

“He’s probably up at his cabin,” the nicer one said.

Bingo, thought Corrie. She’d been right. She felt a huge relief this hadn’t been a wasted effort.

“Where’s that?”

The man gave her directions. It was about a mile up the road. “I’d be happy to give you a ride,” he said.

“No thanks.” She hefted the knapsack and turned to leave.

“Really, I’d be happy to. I’m a friend of your dad’s.”

She had to stop herself from asking him what he was like. That wouldn’t be the way to go about it—she had to find out for herself. She hesitated, gave the man a once-over. He looked sincere, it was freezing outside, and her knapsack weighed a ton. “All right. As long as Perv, I mean Merv, here doesn’t tag along.” She gestured at Beer-Gut Number One.