“You want to knock, or make like a lizard?”
I thought how I might respond if I were camped out on top. “Knock,” I said, stepping back and cupping my hands around my mouth.
“Hello on the platform. Is there anyone there?”
A long silence elapsed during which we heard only the slight creak of the trees in the breeze high above.
“Who wants to know?” The voice was clear, neutral, belonging to a man.
“It’s the police, Mr. Toussaint. We’d like to talk to you. Could you come down, please?”
“You come up. There’s no danger.”
Sammie made a face. “Wish he hadn’t said that.”
“No history of violence,” I tried soothing us both.
She wasn’t interested. “That we know of.”
I grasped one of the ladder rungs. “I’ll go first. You cover. Just make sure you don’t shoot my ass off from below.”
We headed up slowly, discovering the platform to be much higher than it appeared. The ladder was actually made in multiple parts, ingeniously connected across several large trees, and hinged here and there to compensate for any movement caused by the wind. The more we climbed, the brighter it got, and the more prevalent the snow that the lower branches had stopped from reaching the gloomy forest floor. I was reminded of an article I’d read in National Geographic in which researchers had lived for months in the top of the jungle canopy, studying Christ knows what. Only here, the ladder was cold and increasingly slippery and was beginning to sway much more than I found comfortable.
We paused some distance below the closed trapdoor of a solid wood platform that blacked out about a fifteen-foot square of sky.
Sammie’s voice was barely audible below me. “Okay-all set.”
She linked one leg through the rungs and braced both her hands around her gun, taking a bead on the door just over my shoulder.
Unhappy with the William Tell positioning and unable to come up with a better suggestion, I finished my climb, leaned out to one side, and rapped on the wood overhead.
The trapdoor opened almost instantly to reveal a clean-shaven, thin man with a wrinkle-free face and what looked to be prematurely white hair.
“Come up,” he said simply, and vanished from view.
I motioned to Sammie to follow and climbed into a small, warm, glassed-in tree house the size of a very large, square closet. It was flooded with the blinding light we’d been missing for over an hour by now and overlooked the view I’d been hoping for from the log cabin-miles and miles of tree-choked hills and valleys, with a horizon of snow-covered mountains in the distance. It was exactly like one of the fire warden towers of old, including a narrow cot, a small wood-fired stove, and a pair of binoculars balanced on a window sill.
I could appreciate all this because our host was standing at one of the windows, his back to us, his hands in clear sight, spread out and leaning against an overhead beam-as if he was consciously trying to appear non-threatening.
It worked. Sammie holstered her weapon.
“Mr. Toussaint?” I asked.
He turned then and nodded wordlessly.
I made our introductions as I had to his wife earlier, repeating, “We’d like to ask you some questions.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
He crossed over to the one chair in the small room-a rocker-and sat carefully, leaving us to stand over him. I noticed the whole cabin was swaying slightly from side to side, which made me wonder what it was like to be up here during a storm.
“I’m not,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of what I’ve been doing at Tucker Peak.”
“What’ve you done, exactly, Mr. Toussaint?” Sammie asked, sitting on the cot near him.
He smiled sadly. “This where I confess my sins and ask for mercy?”
I pulled a small recorder from my pocket and turned it on. “You’re not under arrest here, but if you want to confess to something, we’re willing to listen.” Given what little we had against this man, I was silently praying all this meant what it seemed to.
“I did it for my son,” he admitted after a pause.
“We heard about that,” I said. “How’s he doing?”
“Not well. He’s alive, but too damaged to appreciate it. It’s one of the great ironies of my life that after decades of fighting for a cleaner, healthier environment, I’ve fathered a doomed and crippled son.”
“He still might make it,” Sammie commented. “Especially nowadays.”
He looked at her with scorn. “You sound like his mother. You people are fools. You don’t get the joke.”
I decided to return to something more tangible. “What did you do on the mountain, Norman?”
“I rigged the chairlift-almost killed that woman and her child. Christ, what a piece of work that would’ve been.”
I wondered how long he’d been up here, herding his thoughts into ever tightening circles, perhaps hoping that eventually he’d turn into himself entirely and drift out among the treetops like a ghostly black hole.
“What else?” I asked.
“I blew the water main to flood the ski slope.”
“And the pumphouse fire?”
He’d been staring at his hands resting in his lap, but now looked up at me quizzically, “No. I don’t know who did that. After the water main, I came here. I couldn’t handle the guilt.”
“What about putting the dye into the storage pond?” Sammie asked.
He let out a small, mirthless laugh. “That was classic-environmental guerrilla tactics, one-oh-one, just like nailing that shed door shut and chaining the snowmobiles together.” He then shook his head. “No, I left that stuff to the firebrands. I had more serious work to do. Private work. Feats of redemption.” He returned to studying his hands.
I crouched down before him to better look into his eyes. “Norman, you were making money doing these things, right? To pay for your son’s treatments.”
“To do that; to buy back a lost love; to betray the beliefs of a lifetime. I can’t believe I almost killed another human being.”
His tone was that of a man in a near suicidal depression. I was glad we’d located him when we did.
“When you blew the water main, the power went out, too-a two-man job. Who paid you? Was he also the other man?”
Toussaint finally locked onto my gaze and shook his head. “Oh, no. You can have me. You can’t have him.”
“Norman. The bottom line is you didn’t kill anyone, and you do have a wife and child. Things are tough, but they can get better. What you’re doing now will ruin everything. We’ll bust you, take your life apart, seize your assets, interrupt the cash flow to your son’s treatment. You can prevent that. Give us the name of the man paying you off. That’ll make you a witness for the prosecution, cut you some slack, buy your family time to heal, and take the son of a bitch who’s exploited your tragedy off the street.”
But he was stuck in his own reality. “That’s just what you think you can do. The way I’ve set things up is the only hope we have.”
I stood up, convinced of his determination. “You know we’ll find him anyway. You’re throwing away your only chance of salvation.”
“You have to say that. You don’t have a choice.”
I sighed and looked out at the breathtaking view, pondering how such beauty could be host to such misery. “Okay, Norm, then I guess you better come with us.”
Chapter 21
Lester Spinney found me in the basement of the Municipal Building, where I was putting the finishing touches on paperwork relegating Norman Toussaint to the police department’s temporary holding tank.
“Conan Gorenstein just resigned as CFO of Tucker Peak, effective immediately. Linda Bettina thought you’d like to know.”
I signed my name to the bottom of the form and leaned back in my chair. “Why?”
“Officially, because he got a better offer elsewhere.”