A Fountain Filled With Blood

He took his feet off the pack and bent forward. This was the reason his subconscious mind had ragged at him to keep the thing with them, from the ravine, to their wild ride, to their headlong flight through the forest.

“Why would his backpack be in the ravine with him? If you’re extorting someone or fighting, would you be carrying your backpack?”

There was a pause. Her ice cubes clinked in her glass, another off-kilter piece of normality. “No,” she said finally.

“It wasn’t on him. It wasn’t even near him.” He unbuckled the flap and flipped it open. Inside, atop dirty T-shirts, plastic jars filled with algae-speckled water, and a dog-eared copy of Topographical Maps of New York State, was a plastic bag the size of a woman’s clutch. It was full of white powder. He heard Clare breath in sharply.

The backpack, thrown into the ravine. Evidence to be found with the body. Except he and Clare had stumbled on the scene too soon.

“What was it you overheard Malcolm saying to his mystery visitor about Peggy?”

“He told him to stay away from his aunt.”

One good hard shove into the gorge. Just enough evidence to link Waxman to Dessaint. He was tempted to give the powder a taste and verify that it was horse or coke, but he’d bet good money it was already cut with the same stuff that had killed the other man.

Stay away from his aunt. No kidding.

And they had met her coming down the trail. And offered to help her. And she had helped them. He remembered seeing her backing out of the cockpit door while he was pulling his headset on. He fished into his pants pocket, and sure enough, it was still there, the broken piece of plastic that had rendered the radio useless. All she would have needed was a screwdriver to jam into it. Easy to swipe one from the office and stick into that big bag of hers. Right there under the bottles of cold water. Evidently, Peggy Landry could think on her feet.

And she had been alone and unwatched with the chopper for what—ten minutes? While he and Clare were breaking into the shed.

“What do you think caused the crash?”

She kept staring at the white powder in the bag, then at the black plastic in his palm. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Something with the fuel lines?” She looked at him for the first time. “I thought I must have rushed my preflight check. I thought I’d missed something.”

He shook his head. “No. You did just right.” He reached for her hand and pressed the splintered radio control into it. “Peggy Landry,” he said.

“It can’t be.” She looked at the knob. “Helos are complicated creatures. And that ship flew. For what—twenty minutes after we had left her? That sort of delayed…”

“Sabotage,” he said, supplying the word.

“That would take a great deal of knowledge about the helo’s systems. You’d need to be a mechanic. And you’d have to open the ship up, get into the engine or something. She couldn’t have—” She stopped, frowning. She slid her fingers absently up and down her sweating glass. “Unless…All those water bottles.” She turned to him. “She could have squirted water into one of the tanks. We were low on fuel, and I switched from the first tank to the second after we made our ascent to spot the Hudson.” Her face, dirty and sweat-streaked, shone with revelation. “It would have been pretty much dumb luck, getting the second tank. If she’d put it in the first, we wouldn’t have made it to the ravine.”

“But you don’t need to know much about any machine to know putting water into the gas tank is going to screw it up.”

They looked at each other. He thought about Ingraham’s bloody death and Dessaint’s bloated corpse. He thought about Todd MacPherson and Emil Dvorak. People treated like disposable lighters. He thought about what might have happened if they had been a shade less lucky, if Clare had been slightly less skilled as a pilot, if the sparks had caught fire a few minutes earlier.

He stood up so abruptly, his wicker chair skidded back half a foot.

“What?”

He turned to the inn’s door. “I’m getting out an APB on Landry and her nephew. And telling Kevin to get here now.” She had tried to kill Clare. And had almost succeeded. “I don’t want anyone else to make this collar. I want to be the one to strap that woman to the gurney.”

Chapter Thirty-One