I called Kojak’s name and sighed with relief when he sauntered out of the bedroom. I splashed cold water on my face for the second time that night, put ice in a dish towel and held it tenderly against my head where it helped numb the pain.
I went out on the deck. The box was where I left it, behind the chair. The bird container was still inside.
Dudley said his boss knew where to find the Crowell decoy. I stood on the deck and recalled my conversation with Murphy, and the startled look on his face when I told him his gift to the museum had been moved to the barn.
I remembered, too, the way he had stared at the Crowell barn photo when I found him with his teeth smashed in. It was a deliberate gesture that must have caused him some pain but he did it anyhow.
Sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees.
You can get so involved in the details, you can’t see the whole picture.
Whether he intended to or not, Mike’s wry comment told me he had found a safe place for the original Crowell. Right in the open, where no one would suspect it to be.
It was a short drive from my house to Brooks Academy. The black Cadillac was parked on a side road in the shadow of some trees.
I dug a filleting knife out of its case, snuck over to the car and stuck the blade into all four tires. The car slowly slumped onto its rims. About then, I heard the sound of an alarm from the workshop. Dudley was making his move. I got back in my truck and drove to the police station around a half mile away. I went in the front door and hurried up to the dispatcher’s desk.
“I just went by Brooks Academy and heard an alarm going off,” I said. “There’s a car parked nearby. Looked kinda suspicious.”
The dispatcher thanked me, and while she got on the phone I slipped out of the police station. I sat in my truck and saw a cruiser drive away from the station toward the museum. A minute later another patrol car raced past, going in the same direction.
I waited ten minutes, then drove by the museum. Four cruisers with roof lights flashing were parked near the museum. Some police officers were talking to a tall man. He had his back to me so I couldn’t see his face, but his hair looked even more silvery in the harsh beam of headlights.
On the way home I stopped by the bank ATM and deposited the check from Ruskin. The transaction went through, thanks to the warning from Dudley.
I was still thinking about Dudley when I stepped into the boathouse. He’d probably say he got drunk and broke into the workshop by mistake. Ruskin would spring him from jail before the arresting officers got off their shifts.
A guy like Dudley doesn’t make his way through life without leaving tracks. I called the best tracker I knew. If John Flagg was surprised to hear from me at three o’clock in the morning, he didn’t show it. He simply said, “Hello, Soc. Been a while. What’s up?”
Flagg seems to function without sleep. Which may have something to do with his job as a troubleshooter for an ultra-secret government unit. We’d met in Vietnam and bonded over our New England heritage. He was a Wampanoag Indian from Martha’s Vineyard whose ancestors had been around for thousands of years. My parents came to Massachusetts from the ancient land of Greece.
“Ever heard of a guy named Merriwhether Ruskin the 3rd?”
“Sure. He runs one of the biggest mercenary ops in the world. Bigger than the armies of lots of countries. Why do you ask?”
“He hired me for a job.”
“Never figured you for a soldier of fortune, Soc.”
“Me neither. That’s why I’m no longer on his payroll. Ruskin has another guy working for him. First name is Dudley. Maybe Australian. I know that isn’t much.”
“Give me a minute. I’ll look in the bad guy database.” He hung up. I could imagine him tapping into the vast intelligence network he had at his fingertips. He called back after three minutes. “He’s an Aussie named Dudley Wormsley, AKA ‘The Worm.’ Interpol has a pile of warrants out for him.”
“I thought as much. Wonder if there is any way to let the FBI know that ‘The Worm’ is sitting in the Harwich, Massachusetts police station, under arrest for breaking and entering.”
“I’ll take care of it. When we going fishing?”
“Charter boat’s coming out of the water, but there’s my dinghy. As you know, I don’t bait my hooks.”
“Suits me,” Flagg said.
I hung up and thought about Mike. He said he’d been attacked by goats. Dudley had referred to the hazmat suit as a spook suit. Spooks equal ghosts. Which meant plural. Which meant he wasn’t alone. Which meant the second ghost was Ruskin.
With Dudley out of the way, Ruskin was an open target, if I could get to him, although that was unlikely given the air-tight fortress he lived in. When I got home I retrieved the box from the deck and brought it inside. I took out the plastic case protecting the merganser, put it on the kitchen table and stared at it, taking in the graceful lines of the bird’s body and neck.
“Talk to me,” I said.
Early the next morning I got up, poured some coffee into a travel mug, and called Ruskin’s number. The butler answered the phone and said his boss was busy. I said that was all right. I merely wanted to drop off Mr. Ruskin’s decoy. He said to leave it at the gatehouse.
After hanging up, I got a small leather case out of a duffle bag I keep in my bedroom closet. Inside the case was a full range of lock picks. After a few tries, I popped the padlock and lifted the box lid back on its hinges. I remembered how Ruskin had reached into the box for the carving and lifted it above his head.
Then I took the decoy out of the box, put it in the sink and got a jar of peanut butter out of the refrigerator. I spooned some butter out of the jar onto the bird carving and smeared it all over the wooden feathers with my hands. Then I nestled the glistening fake bird back into its fake nest. I padlocked the box again and carried it out to the truck.
As I drove away from the gatehouse after dropping the box off for Mr. Ruskin, I thought what I’d done was rather sneaky and not very nice. Maybe Ruskin was allergic to peanuts. Maybe not. But I didn’t like being played for a patsy, especially when innocent people are hurt. It happened at a village in Vietnam, and with Murphy. It wasn’t going to happen again.
I stopped by the hospital on the way home. Mike was out of the ICU and sleeping. The nurse in charge said he was doing fine.
Bridget called me that night to say that she had been trying to reach Ruskin, but his butler said he wasn’t available. She said she would keep me posted. I didn’t know what Ruskin was allergic to when I returned his decoy. Maybe I just got lucky.
Mike got out of the hospital a few days later. I drove him home and checked in on him while he healed and popped painkillers. When I asked why he had called me instead of 911, he said it was because Marines stick together.
Once he was able to talk at length we discussed what to do about the Crowell decoy.
He confessed that he’d taken it from the Orloff mansion for payment of back wages. When he found out the bird was worth maybe a million dollars, he knew he couldn’t sell it. He read about Chinese reproductions somewhere and went into the fake decoy business for himself. He had the original scanned in New York and made in China. He sold out the first batch except for the one he kept. But he started to get nervous about attracting attention to himself and wanted the Crowell bird out of the house. He hid it in plain sight at the historical society museum, never figuring they’d put it in the Crowell barn.
“Legally speaking, the bird belongs to Ruskin,” I said. “He told me that he paid Orloff for the merganser, but I have only his word for that. It’s quite possible no money exchanged hands, which means that the sale never went through. In that case, Orloff was still the owner. Did he have any heirs?”