Fasca sat at his desk and began rummaging through its drawers. “Which brings us back to nowhere.”
I gently fingered the bruise on my temple. “Maybe not. It could be my showing up with Duncan was what pushed him over the edge. Lenny plays both ends against the middle. Talking to you is one thing-predictable, safe, mutually beneficial, as is working with Bouch on the other side. But bringing me in implied the cat had been let out of the bag, just like you feared. He had to have heard we’d discovered Jasper’s body-and assumed that Bouch had killed him. Seeing me was proof it was time to jump ship. He didn’t want to be grabbed by us as some sort of co-conspirator, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be whacked by Norm Bouch.”
“Which means he’s probably running around now tying up loose ends, if he hasn’t already left town,” Jonathon said.
Fasca was poring over the contents of one of his files. “Duncan,” I asked him, “if Jon’s right, Lenny’s meeting with people. Not at his apartment or the local bar or wherever else you and he used to meet-he’d figure all those are covered-but someplace where he feels in control. You got any suggestions?”
Fasca began flipping through pages as I spoke, searching for something in particular. A minute later, he looked up, a small smile on his face. “It sounds a little nuts, but I think we ought to stake out the ferry. He and I never met there, but he mentioned it once a couple of years ago as the best place to meet if you’re in a jam. You can check out everybody on board, it’s hard to be bugged or photographed, and you got all the time in the world to conduct business.”
A dead silence settled between us. “I like it,” Jonathon finally said. Sharing no small amount of dread, we rose to our feet and filed back into Tim Giordi’s office.
“What’s he doing now?” I asked.
Audrey’s voice came over the earpiece in a whisper, making her hard to hear over the throaty rumbling below decks. “They’re both at the bow, looking at the water, still talking.”
“You there, Jon?” I asked.
There was a brief pause, I imagined so Jonathon could casually turn his back and speak into the mike hidden under his jacket. “I’m here. They’re not looking too happy with each other.”
“All set down there, Duncan?”
“All set,” Fasca replied, the huge diesels bellowing behind him.
I put the radio back on the pilothouse map table and stared out at the horizon, as I imagined the two below were doing on the car ramp. Between the low clouds and the vast gray expanse of the lake before us, I might as well have been looking at a huge pool of cement. The Adirondack Mountains of New York, usually Lake Champlain’s most dominant feature, were barely a smudge beyond the murkiness.
We were on board The Champlain, a double-ended, 148-foot-long, 725-ton ferry, built the same year as the Flynn Theatre-1930. This I’d learned from the captain, who now stood glumly beside me, having run out of conversation in the face of my distracted silence.
I was dressed in khakis and a work shirt, wearing a watch cap of vaguely nautical appearance. Jonathon was part of the deck crew, openly walking around the boat, tending lines and looking innocuous. Audrey, with bandaged head, was wrapped in a blanket, confined to a rented wheelchair near the stern ramp, accompanied by the oldest police officer Giordi could supply, big-bellied, white-haired, and avuncular, who was making a great show of being the doting nurse. Duncan and three others were confined to the engine room, since one glimpse of him would tip Lenny to our presence.
Lenny Markham, in the meantime, having appeared as we’d hoped at the ferry that same afternoon, was keeping company with the nervous boy who’d escorted Duncan and me to the grid at the Flynn. Neither one had showed up in a vehicle, but Lenny-significantly, I thought-was carrying a heavy-looking duffel bag.
I leaned forward and tried unsuccessfully to see the leading edge of the bow ramp beyond the upper-deck railing-as I had ten times before. I was in Duncan’s predicament in a sense, having met Lenny face-to-face, but we’d all agreed the lighting had been too poor to make it count, and that standing in the pilothouse I’d be virtually invisible-a member of the crew people noticed but did not see.
Frustrated, I switched my gaze to the starboard window and looked back toward the Vermont shore, now barely visible. A mere dot in the distance, the Burlington PD’s boat ran a parallel course, waiting to be called in if needed.
“They’re on the move,” Audrey reported at last. “Coming toward me through the central parking area. I can’t see them too well with all the cars in between.”
“Jon. Got ’em?” I asked.
“Getting there,” he answered. “I’m opposite the stairwell to the engine room. I don’t have them in sight yet.”
“Don’t rush,” I cautioned, instinctively moving to the side I knew Lenny and the boy were on, one level below.
“I just caught a glimpse of them,” Audrey came back on. “They’re moving toward one of the openings on the side of the boat, where all the smaller cars are parked.”
I left the confining pilothouse, crossed the deck, and looked over the rail. Flush with the ferry’s exterior steel hull were the large oval holes supplying fresh air and a view to those below. Skirting the length of the boat, just under these windows, was a continuous, foot-wide fender of steel pipe, attached to the hull by angle irons. For an instant, I considered lowering myself to it, just above the rushing water, so I could crouch beneath the opening and eavesdrop on Lenny’s conversation.
“Okay, I see them now,” Jonathon reported. “They’re between two cars, still talking.”
“Anyone in the cars?” I asked, stepping back from the rail.
“As far as I can see, they’re empty. And there’s nobody nearby. Oh, oh… ” There was a pause. “Sorry. Had to duck. Lenny was looking around.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Keep a close-”
But I was cut off. Jonathon suddenly started shouting, “Go, go, go. Man overboard. Lenny just knifed the other guy.”
The radio exploded with voices, each drowning the other. As I turned back to the pilothouse, I heard shouts of, “Freeze. Police,” echoing out over the water. I tore open the door and shouted to the captain, “Man overboard, this side.”
My ear still ringing with disembodied chaos, I ran to the stern and began scanning the water, searching for anything bobbing on the surface. What with the gray, choppy surface and the ferry’s own wake, I couldn’t see a thing. All too slowly, I felt the boat shifting underfoot and saw the previously straight line of froth behind us begin to twist into a curve. I changed channels on my radio and called on the Burlington PD boat to swing in behind our original course and see if they could find the young boy’s body.
By that time, I was heading toward the stairs to confront Lenny in cuffs. I was stopped by Audrey’s voice. “Joe?”
“On my way.”
“You might not want to do that. Lenny’s grabbed a hostage. Some old lady was asleep in one of the cars he was near. Jon didn’t see her.”
I froze in place. “What’s the layout?”
“Lenny’s where he was, near one of those window-type things. We’re fanned out in a semicircle behind all the cars. He’s got a knife to her throat.”
“No gun?”
“None visible. What’s your location?”
“Still up top. Keep him talking. I might be able to flank him.”
I looked over the railing again at the narrow steel fender fifteen feet below. I checked the bulkhead nearby and found a traditional orange life ring on a hook with a coil of rope attached.
Unraveling the rope, I quickly tied it to the railing, threw the rest overboard so it trailed in our wake, and returned to the pilothouse. “Got a pair of gloves?”
The captain, still in the midst of making his circle, merely pointed to a pair by the window. I grabbed them and ran back to my rope, putting them on while I swung one leg over the side.
My toes parked on the outer edge of the deck, I looped the rope across my shoulders and brought my gloved hands together in front of me. Slowly, I paid out line until my body was parallel with the blur of water. Ignoring the pain that leapt back to life in my damaged right arm, I began stepping backwards down the hull.