The Old Man(87)
Her mother scrubbed the floors and walls, working with cleaners that smelled like bleach and then going over and over the same areas.
She had asked her mother if her father was hiding the bodies, and her mother said, “You shot one in the back, and the other in the side of the head when he wasn’t looking. What else can we do?”
Her father returned a few hours later and began the interior painting he had planned to get to over the next few weeks. He got the hallway and the girls’ bedroom done the first day, and when he came home from the base the next morning he put on another coat of paint, and then completed the hallway so everything matched.
About two weeks later, her parents waited until the small children were asleep, and then had a talk with her alone. Her mother told her that her father had taken the men out and buried them. He had wiped the fingerprints off the shotgun and thrown it into the grave with them. He had thought that was the end of the horrible incident. But about a week ago, a couple had been running their dogs in the field where he had dug the grave, and the dogs had smelled the bodies. The state police had dug up the bodies and the shotgun. They had declared the cause of death a double murder.
The shotgun had belonged to his grandfather originally, and so there was not much chance of connecting it with the family after all these years. But the police had checked the serial number, found the gun had been sold in the 1930s at a Sears store in Wichita, where his grandfather had lived, and the store had looked up the name of the purchaser after all these years. The surname matched the new man on the base.
Today her father had been summoned to his commanding officer’s office, where two state police investigators were waiting. They wanted to know about his shotgun. They said that while the gun had been cleaned of fingerprints, there had been very clear prints on the shotgun shells still in the magazine. They had already compared the prints with his and his wife’s, but there was no match.
Her father had told them that he’d had the shotgun in the U-Haul truck he’d driven from Tennessee, but he’d just arrived a few days ago and hadn’t unpacked everything. He hadn’t noticed it was gone.
He said to her, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think to check if it still had any shells in it.”
Her mother said, “I know this is really bad news. But there’s a good thing too—a way out. They told your father they’d checked the records of all the people whose fingerprints they have and not found any matches. It occurred to us that this is our chance to save you. Nobody anywhere has your fingerprints. They can run them for matches until the end of time and not have any luck.”
“Okay,” she said. But she wondered why they looked so sad.
“But you’re going to have to leave us,” her father said. “This isn’t the end of it. They’ll come here in a day or two, and they’ll take the fingerprints of anybody old enough to lift a shotgun.”
“We can’t let them see you,” her mother said. “You would go to prison for the rest of your life. We’ve put together all the money we can spare so you’ll get a start. And your father has signed over the car to you. We’ll get by with just the pickup until we can buy another one. We’ll have to tell them that the kids they can see are the only ones. If they learn that you exist, we’ll tell them you ran away a couple of years ago in Tennessee.”
Her father said, “We just got here, and you’re not registered for school yet. Nobody knows you, so they won’t be asking where you are.”
She studied her parents, and said, “This can’t be real.” But the tears running down their cheeks were real.
She left that night. She drove the family car to Denver, got a job as a waitress, and found a cheap apartment to share with another waitress.
Just over a year later, when she met Darryl, there was no question she had been too eager. She had married him, hoping that her infatuation with him would grow and grow. It hadn’t, but being his wife had kept her safe for nineteen years. She had never dared to have her fingerprints taken. She had never tried to teach music in a school, or apply for a license to do anything else, because that meant fingerprints and background investigations. She would have been charged with two murders.
Last fall, when the two Libyan assassins had broken into the apartment and Peter Caldwell needed to run away, she had not wanted to go with him. He was a killer. But once he had kidnapped her from the house and she had time to think, she realized that she had to leave that night too, and she could never go back. If there was a police investigation of the two Libyans’ deaths, how could the police not find her fingerprints? They were on every surface, every object in the apartment. The long-unsolved shotgun murders of two men outside Rapid City, South Dakota, would be solved. So she had gone with Peter, hoping that when he said the intelligence people would clean the apartment completely, he was right.
She’d had sympathy for Peter, and gained even more as she ran with him and he became Hank, and then Alan. It had never occurred to him that he wasn’t the only one who was being hunted for murder. She had often been tempted to tell him, but that wouldn’t have helped him. It might even have made him think being with her threatened his life. It was just as well that she had not taken on the task of explaining it all to him. She had loved being with him, but now he was gone and he was going to die.
32
It was 2:00 a.m. when the charter flight touched down on the runway in Tripoli. The pilot had come in slow, giving it just enough speed to keep from being swept sideways by any sudden wind, and then he hit the brakes hard. Tripoli’s runway had been part of a major battlefield at least twice in the past couple of years, and Alan Spencer didn’t blame the pilot for his caution. Mortar and tank rounds had undoubtedly hit the pavement, and there was no way to predict how well the holes had been patched.