Like all of his pals, Rachel accepted the drastic change without complaint, and said that it seemed reasonable to her. She didn’t even mind when Shelly gave him a kissy-face bon voyage.
When the big bird took off, Bill Bradfield seemed to relax. He bought a round of drinks, and he and Chris toasted each other. Due to their fine work, Jay Smith had been unable to murder anyone.
As Chris put it, “We were very pleased. The bad guy was behind bars.”
The Host Inn near Harrisburg is about a two-hour drive from the home of Susan Reinert in Ardmore. The Three Mile Island nuclear power station is near the hotel, and two men from South Carolina who had business at Three Mile Island happened to be driving into the hotel parking lot at 7:00 P.M. Sunday evening.
The two men spotted an orange Plymouth Horizon in the parking lot with its hatchback partially open. One of the men could see something white inside that he thought was a laundry bag. They entered the hotel but forgot to notify the desk that someone had left the hatchback open.
At 2:00 A.M. Monday morning, a Swatara Township policeman was on routine patrol in the Host Inn parking lot. He too spotted the Plymouth Horizon with the hatchback open. He didn’t get out of his patrol car, but he did make a radio check and found the car to be registered to Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore. He went into the hotel and found that there was no registered guest with that name. He then got a radio call to handle a fatal traffic accident and took off.
At 5:20 A.M., the Dauphin County police and fire radio dispatcher received a call from a man who identified himself as “Larry Brown.” The caller said there was a sick woman in a car at the Host Inn parking lot.
The same Swatara Township cop got the assignment and this time he did open the hatchback of the Plymouth Horizon.
She was so slight that her pale naked body could nearly be contained by the luggage well. The man from Three Mile Island had obviously seen her right hip. Susan Reinert had left the world the way she’d entered, in the fetal position.
15
“Look at them little bastards,” he said with a grin that was always lopsided.
Joe VanNort referred to a litter of strawberries huddling against the shale at his weekend retreat near Scranton. He was proud of his new strawberries, and proud of all he’d accomplished in two years. Almost single-handed, he’d cleared a road and built a log house in his twenty-nine acres of wilderness.
His labor was truly amazing in that many years earlier he’d broken his back during an African safari. A Land Rover had overturned leaving him writhing in the bush for four days. He’d refused surgery and body casts and traction and demanded to be sent home after promising incredulous doctors that he’d heal the “natural way.” And he did. His only concession to the fractured vertebrae was sitting in straight-backed chairs whenever possible.
The interior walls of the log house were covered with skins and heads from that safari: lion, gazelle, and a mammoth Cape buffalo that had charged him. The ebony horns measured fifty-eight and a half inches from tip to tip, close to the world record at the time. His only regret was that he’d never gotten his leopard, and when he looked in the mirror at his fifty-five-year-old gray-white head he knew it was too late.
One thing that could really aggravate Joe VanNort when he was weekending in the mountains was the sound of whining engines down in the valley-the swarm of mud bikers. The summer brought them like the gypsy moths that ate his trees.
A biker engine made his spiky black eyebrows arch and he’d need his twentieth Marlboro of the day, or his sixtieth if it was late afternoon. Mud bikers in summer, snowmobiles in winter, horsemen all the time. Goddamn neighbors. Goddamn people.
“Them sons a bitches!” he liked to yell at all the worlds trespassers.
“Which ones, Joe?” his wife would retort from inside the log house.
Betty VanNort was an administrative assistant to the director of the Pennsylvania State Police. She’d been with the “staties” for twenty years, and felt like a cop herself. Joe VanNort, a lifelong bachelor, had proposed to her four years earlier after a courtship that had lasted a decade. She was a domestic dynamo who could clean and cook while chatting with any state trooper who came from the police barracks in Harrisburg to haul logs or clear land or just to see what had been accomplished on the mountain by those two compulsive workers.
Betty always said that Joe shouldn’t let people get to him because folks were naturally curious about the middle-aged weekenders on top of the mountain in the log house. Her voice was deep and foggy and disappeared into a rasp when she laughed at Joe.
“Wait’ll the lookie-loos come next Christmas,” Joe VanNort told her. “I’ll throw the assholes in jail, is what!”
He was complaining about the rubberneckers who came all winter long to look at the Santa Claus and reindeer and lighted owls he’d attached to the pitched roof of his log house. To keep people out he’d chained the rut-pocked, spine-jarring path leading down to the country lane in the lowlands. And he’d also dropped a few trees across the path that led up to his neighbor in the north.
One “trespasser” almost wrecked the furniture. Joe VanNort and a chipmunk practically demolished the interior, one trying to escape with his life, the other trying to let him do it. In the end Joe accidentally coldcocked the chipmunk and couldn’t revive it.
That wouldn’t happen anymore because of a remarkable cat. It had been a wounded mangy bag of bones that he’d found limping three-legged in the snow. The amazing thing about the cat was that it loved bread.
Joe VanNort would step out behind his cabin and say, “Here, Snooker. Come Snookie, baby,” and throw bread or cookies or a doughnut to the half-wild creature and it would crouch and pounce and devour that meal like a state trooper at a truck stop.
He had one project left before he’d be satisfied with the house he’d built. He wanted a Madonna, with a pool of water at her feet. He had the spot picked but he couldn’t decide what the pool around her should look like. He didn’t want it round or oval or kidney-shaped like some goddamn Hollywood swimming pool. It had to look natural, and had to be fed by a little waterfall. He was going to light her with a spotlight so she could be seen at night. He was a devout Catholic and this project was so important to him he was uncertain how to begin.
Despite the strawberry patch and a Madonna and the cat named Snookie, Joe VanNort was not a sentimental man, certainly not as far as people were concerned. Nearly thirty years of policing people was right there in the lopsided cynical grin that passed for a smile.
It was a three-hour drive from the state police barracks in Harrisburg. Sergeant Joe VanNort hoped someday to get a transfer to Dunmore Barracks so he could live in his log house all the time. Instead, the telephone call about a lonely little corpse at the Host Inn took him away from the log house and even away from Betty.
The aftermath of that phone call would age and consume Sergeant Joe VanNort. He often felt that his next hunt would never end, that it would last the rest of his life.
The partner of Joe VanNort was a thirty-two-year-old trooper named John J. Holtz who had joined the Pennsylvania State Police in 1968 and who had been working for VanNort as a criminal investigator out of Troop H in Harrisburg since 1975. Joe VanNort had always said that Jack Holtz had the makings of a top-notch “crime man.” Jack Holtz enjoyed working “crime,” but many investigations were time consuming and the hours were bad.
A lot of the older troopers said that Jack Holtz reminded them of Joe VanNort when Joe was young. Although he never admitted it, VanNort probably agreed, and maybe that’s why he picked Holtz to be his partner and protégé.