Fatal Judgment. Andrew Welsh-Huggins
maybe that was an act of self-preservation forced on her by someone. I thought again about calling Pinney back, and again decided against it. I was as sure as I’ve been of anything that Laura was in trouble, and that the mysteriously telegraphed messages leading to the words Mendon Woods on a scrap of paper in a legal definition book were prime evidence of the fact. But it was also true that Laura’s involvement in the case was hardly a secret, and it was semi-plausible that that scrap of paper with those words could have been a handy bookmark.
The cat appeared, jumping on my lap. I pushed it aside, stood up, pocketed the paper, and made my third big decision of the day. According to the clue—if indeed it was such a thing—answers about Laura’s troubles led from here to a swamp on the north side of town. That would be my next stop. But first I needed to know more about Rumford Realty and the case before Laura. I instructed Siri to call Bonnie Deckard. She answered after one ring.
“Hey, Andy.”
“Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“Just on the way to the gym. What’s up?”
“You must be feeling better.”
“I’m not barfing as much, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not exactly how I would have put it. But that’s good to hear. How’s your schedule looking? I need a little research.”
“Am I breaking any laws this time?”
“Not that I’m aware of—for the time being, anyway.”
“Probably for the best, given everything, you know?”
Bonnie was a freelance Web designer and IT consultant. She also took on occasional jobs for me, either when a technological puzzle surpassed my abilities—meaning most of the time—or when I was in a hurry like now. Bonnie possessed three things I’d come to prize in a case consultant: efficiency, speed, and powerful enough encryption software that she could occasionally cross certain lines safely and clandestinely. When she wasn’t inhabiting the world of ones and zeroes, she was a blocker on Columbus’s Roller Derby team, the Arch City Roller Girls. Not long ago, that would have explained her midday jaunt to the gym. But she’d recently learned she was expecting, with twins at that, and so was spending less time on burpees, leg presses, and the elliptical machine and more on yoga and swimming. And not crossing certain lines, apparently.
I explained what I needed her to do with Rumford Realty and the case before Laura.
“I’ll poke around when I get back. By the way, any chance you could take Troy out for a beer this week?”
“I’m always up for beer. Why?”
“He’s still struggling a bit with the whole baby thing. Babies, I mean. I figured talking to another dad might help.”
“You mean any other dad but me?”
“He looks up to you, Andy. You know that.”
Bonnie’s boyfriend and I had a complicated history, but I was happy to do a favor for Bonnie given how much she helped me out, and told her so.
Disconnecting, I left Laura’s bedroom and walked down the hall. I was about to exit the apartment when the cat appeared and brushed against my legs. I recalled the empty food bowl. It wouldn’t be like Laura to leave the cat alone without making arrangements. Was this another indication the judge was incapacitated?
Either way, I knew I couldn’t leave the cat there. By taking it, the worst that could happen was Laura would reappear later that day and demand to know where her pet was. Leaving it, the worst that could happen didn’t bear thinking about. I just hoped Hopalong was up for the company.
With the cat watching me from the counter, I shuttled its food dishes and litter box out to my van. Back inside, I borrowed a towel from Laura’s bathroom, snared the protesting cat, wrapped the towel around it and walked outside. I went back in for a final look around. By the door to the garage I spied an extra set of Laura’s keys hanging on a hook. House and Lexus, including a spare fob. What the heck, I thought. In for an inch. I pocketed the keys, locked up the condo and headed home. Once again I pushed the speed limit. I couldn’t get over the feeling that time was running out.
9
I PUT THE CAT’S food bowl and water dish on my kitchen counter, out of reach of Hopalong’s vacuum-like appetite. The cat’s back went up immediately when it spied the dog, whereas the Lab spent all of twenty seconds staring at it curiously before retreating to the couch. So hopefully there would be something left of my house when I returned.
Thirty minutes later I was pulling into a gravel parking lot framed by weathered split-rail logs half a mile off Sawmill Road on the northwest side. Even with a stand of maples lining the entrance behind me it was still possible to see the orange corner of a Home Depot a few hundred yards away. The rush of traffic on Sawmill was distinct, like an incessant breeze, and a smell of cooked meat wafted in from a nearby McDonald’s. A wilderness this was not. This was a petunia in an onion patch operated by an agribusiness. Just standing there glancing at the trees ahead of me, I could understand both sides’ arguments. For a developer, this acreage was a lost cause whose fate was being sealed by the growth around it one load of hot, steaming asphalt at a time. Why not call it a day, especially since the world would get an even bigger swamp in return? For an environmentalist, these fields and forest were a last stand whose fate would determine how society dealt with nature on the brink. Why not save it, since no one could plausibly argue the world needed one more strip plaza anchored by a Starbucks on one end and a Verizon store on the other? I didn’t envy Laura her decision.
I followed a packed dirt trail through the woods, noticing how the sounds of the outside world diminished the farther I walked, traffic noise dimming just a little and the smell of frying meat gone altogether, replaced by a mossy, wet odor that took me back to patches of forest on my uncle’s farm that my sister and I explored for hours as kids. After ten minutes of steady hiking I stepped onto an elevated boardwalk at a break in the woods. I read a marker that explained the biological diversity present in the swamp ahead of me. Herons, cranes, and hawks hunted there. Numerous songbirds called it home, including the coastal tanager, a Brazilian native that migrated north and summered in the few remaining swamplands that it favored. I looked up, hoping to glimpse the bird, but detected only a flutter of wings that could have been anything from a sparrow to a mourning dove.
I walked along the boardwalk toward the swamp. Just as I fostered the fantasy of seeing Laura in her home office when I entered her condo that morning, I imagined seeing the judge round the corner ahead of me, a smile on her face as she congratulated herself on luring me to a romantic rendezvous with a clever collection of verbal and handwritten clues. But no one was there. I walked another hundred yards until the walkway ended at an expanded platform overlooking a small pond at the heart of the park.
I put my hands on the rail running around the platform and gazed over the water, which was dark and brackish, its edges coated with algae like brushstrokes of undulating green batter. At my approach sunning frogs catapulted themselves into the water with a pitter-patter of splashes. Below me a mud-brown water snake glided into the depths in pursuit of lunch. On the far side of the pond a small stand of reeds was encroaching into the water. Something in the middle caught my eye. What I’d first mistaken for another pair of reeds were the legs of a heron. The bird stood motionless at the edge of the plants, head slightly lowered. I looked closer and saw just a few feet away another frog, this one sitting atop a lily pad, facing the opposite way, oblivious to the danger directly behind it. The heron extended its neck almost imperceptibly, raised a stick-like leg, and advanced noiselessly a few inches in the water. The frog didn’t move. I was torn between clapping my hands and giving the little guy a chance and doing nothing and watching the circle of life unfold in all its cruel efficiency. I chose the latter, for better or worse. The heron took another step, and then a sound behind me interrupted it, the creak of a loose board on the observation deck, and the frog disappeared with a splash and I turned and reflexively stepped back as the knife in the hand of a man crouching behind me bit into air instead of my rib cage.
10
HE