The Way You Look Tonight (20 page)

She chewed her bottom lip for a few moments before reaching a decision.

‘Lee.
Lee
. . .’ She stroked his shoulder. ‘Lee, wake up. You have to go back to your room.’

‘Huh? What? Stella?’ He gulped and surfaced, noisily. ‘What’s up?’

‘You – or you should be.’

‘Why?’

She slipped out of bed and went over to the dressing table where she picked up the newspaper and held it up to him.

‘This. Now you’ve named a suspect the story will go up to another level. They’d
love
to report that the President’s protégée and the FBI’s
finest are . . . well . . . how would they put it?’

‘Screwing?’

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh God, surely not! They wouldn’t be so crude as to—’

He gave a sleepy laugh.

‘No, of course not. I’m teasing you, honey. But you’re right. It
would
make a good story, even if they just ran it as innuendo. I’ll get my things – but
I’m not going anywhere before we have a cop car parked outside this cabin, OK?’

He dressed while Stella, unselfconsciously naked and cross-legged on the bed, watched him.

‘That was incredible,’ she told him. ‘Just now, I mean.’

He smiled at her and crossed the room, sitting beside her on the bed and taking her face gently in both hands.

‘It was for me too, Stella. And I’m only leaving now because . . . well, because . . .’ He gestured towards the crumpled newspaper.

‘I know. Anyway, it was my suggestion you should leave.’

‘Sure.’ He kissed her forehead, and moved his hands down to take both of hers in his.

‘Look, Stella. I realise we’ve barely got to know each other, despite, well, just now . . . and that you’re going to have to go back to Massachusetts before long and I’ll
be sent
God
knows where next, but . . . I really, really like you. And I’d really, really like to go on seeing you. Even if that means getting on a plane and crossing three time
zones to do it. Do you feel the same?’

She nodded. ‘I do. I think you’re lovely, Lee, and admirable, and I—’

She was cut off by the portable radio.

‘Headquarters to Agent Foster.’

He looked at her triumphantly. ‘This could be it.’

He grabbed the radio’s microphone and squeezed the transmitter.

‘Foster here. Who’s that? Over.’

‘Sergeant Thompson, sir. Sorry to wake you. There’s no sign of Woods. He’s done a complete vanishing act. As you know, he got to his house before we did, but I took it on
myself to order a second search of the property and we just found a wall safe hidden behind a locker in the den. The safe’s open and empty, so we can reasonably assume he took some cash and
maybe other valuables before he cleared out.

‘Also, sir, there’s no sign of his Dart anywhere on the Key. He’s not approached either roadblock and as per your instructions, we’ve trawled every street on the island.
Nix. Maybe he’s pushed it off a jetty into one of the deeper docks, or even the ocean, but if he has, how’s he planning to get off the island? Over.’

Lee rubbed his stubbly chin. ‘You’ve got men covering public transport? Over.’

‘Of course.’ The sergeant sounded aggrieved. ‘We’ve got this place sealed off tighter’n a duck’s ass, sir. Over.’

‘And you’re liaising with the Coastguard, as per my orders, in case he tried to leave by boat?’

‘That’s a bit trickier, sir, at such short notice. They’ve sent a coupla cutters down from Miami but with so many private boats coming in and out of all the marinas and
harbours down here, they need some kinda steer on what to look out for. I’ve said that if we get a report of a stolen vessel, we’ll pass it on to them.’

‘Hmm . . . OK, sergeant, I’m coming in. We need to figure this out. Meantime I’d be obliged if you send a patrolman over to Largo Lodge to park his sedan outside Miss
Arnold’s cabin. I’ll explain when I get there. Over and out.’

He dropped the mic, and saw that Stella was wearing a strangely abstracted look.

‘What? What is it, Stella?’

Stella climbed slowly off the bed, and reached for the bathrobe that was hanging on the back of the bathroom door.

‘Well,’ she said, turning to him as she tied off the robe’s belt and pushed her hair back from her forehead with both hands, ‘I’m grateful for the police
protection, really I am, but listening to that little exchange I honestly don’t think a patrolman is going to be necessary here. I’m awfully sorry, Lee, but I think our Mr Woods is long
gone from this island. He probably got away sometime soon after sunset.’

He shook his head obstinately. ‘Not possible. He
must
be here still, lying low. Otherwise we would have picked him up, either in one of the patrol sweeps or at a
roadblock.’

She sighed. ‘Oh Lee . . . I told you that he’s as slippery as an eel. It’s obvious. He’s wriggled into the water, hasn’t he? He’s already left by
sea.’

Fall had definitely come to Massachusetts. Although the days remained gloriously sunny and defiantly clutched the tattered skirts of summer about them, nights were chilly now
and their darkness lasted longer than the diminishing daylight hours. From Stella’s bedroom window in the house on Bancroft Road, she could see that the leaves on the American Elms planted
down both sides of the street were already turning from green to gold.

‘You’ve come home at my favourite time of the year,’ Dorothy told her as she hugged Stella at Logan Airport. She’d had to collect Stella by herself; Jeb was giving his
first lecture of the new term and Sylvia was back in class. ‘October’s a wonderful month here. Oh, it’s
so
good to see you again, darling Stella! And look at you! All
brown and glowing and sparkly-eyed! My
goodness
,’ she said suddenly, ‘you haven’t gone and fallen in love with someone, have you?’

Stella had blushed and stammered and ended up in a coughing fit. Dorothy laughed: ‘Well, well! You must tell me all about him during the drive home. And then I want to know everything else
that’s been going on. Oh, Stella, you can’t imagine our astonishment when we saw you in the papers and realised where you were and what you were up to! And then just a day or so later
the police named their prime suspect! That was of course
your
doing, wasn’t it?’

Stella nodded. ‘Well yes, some of it. Much good it’s done them, though. They can’t find him. Frankly, I’m not sure they ever will.’

John Henry Woods had indeed vanished into thin air. But in the hours and days after his disappearance a steady stream of details about his background had emerged thanks to a squad of
investigative reporters, America’s finest, and were published in the fullest detail by newspapers across America.

Agent Foster and his colleagues had found themselves temporarily eclipsed by the Press.

‘I got bawled out by Hoover himself today,’ Lee told Stella gloomily over dinner at their hotel three nights after Woods’s disappearance. ‘He phoned me direct from
Washington first thing this morning and told me he was considering giving my job to the chief reporter of the
New York Times
. Christ
.’

It was quickly established that Woods’s father walked out on his wife when she was pregnant with their only child. As his son would do thirty years later, Woods
père
had
dropped comprehensively off the radar. When last heard of, he was working in a packing factory in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. That was fifteen years earlier and there were rumours he was
now somewhere in Venezuela. Some said it was Bolivia.

Woods’s mother had died of stomach cancer when her son was twenty. She had worked as a hotel cleaner all her life and to everyone’s surprise, it turned out she had managed to
squirrel away a considerable sum in her savings account. She left it all to her son and as soon as he could he moved out of their rented apartment and put down a deposit on the cottage he’d
lived in since then.

Military records showed that around the time his mother died, Woods had been overseas with the US Army in Korea.

This was where the story took its first sinister turn.

Reporters tracked down some of Woods’s former army buddies, and while these veterans took great care not to incriminate themselves, a few of them spoke guardedly about persistent rumours
of an atrocity involving civilians in the spring of 1951, when Woods was a 21-year-old G.I. attached to special forces on the Asian peninsular.

For years there had been word-of-mouth reports of civilian massacres in Korea, barbarities committed by both sides, but no one was admitting to anything. However, under pressure from hard-nosed
reporters – and with envelopes stuffed with twenty-dollar bills quietly changing hands – some of the men in Woods’s outfit began to open up a little.

‘I ain’t saying I know this for sure,’ one former member of his platoon told an NBC News Tonight film crew, ’cos I was on furlough down in Seoul at the time, and I
weren’t up there on the line. But I heard some of our planes shot up some refugees in a village called No Gun Ri – by mistake, of course, lousy intelligence, the usual screw-up –
and Woods was part of a detachment of specials sent in on the ground afterwards to see how bad it was. What I heard was that some of those Ko-reans were still alive, but in a pretty bad way.
Dyin’, I means. The detachment didn’t have chopper back-up or medical supplies worth a good goddamn so they did the kindest thing and put those poor heathen souls out of their misery.
Shot ’em in the backa the head.’

The off-camera reporter’s voice cut in. ‘And John Woods was part of this alleged incident?’

The man hesitated. ‘I ain’t sayin’ he was and I aint sayin’ he wasn’t. But that’s what I heard, anyways. Someone tol’ me he was the guy that suggested
the whole mercy-killin’ thing, to be honest, almost as soon as they reached the village.’ He looked down at his hands, and added, so quietly that the sound man was forced to quickly
push up the recording level: ‘I heard he enjoyed it. Enjoyed it a
lot
. And that some of those people he shot probably woulda made it, you know?’

Woods had taken a sniper’s bullet to the shoulder later that same year and been shipped home to the States with a Purple Heart and a pension. Back in Key Largo, he’d worked as a car
mechanic for six or seven years before joining Pelican Cabs in 1958. He’d been with them ever since. They described him as a model employee with a blameless record. He’d never been in
any kind of trouble with the police, either, not even a speeding ticket.

A search of his cottage revealed remarkably little apart from a Polaroid camera, 900 series, which police believed Woods had used to take the photograph he had delivered to the
Courier
offices
.
But no other photos were found, and no knives. It was thought that these and other compelling evidence, such as the chloroform he used on his victims and the rope he bound them
with, had either been disposed of or were in the trunk of his Dodge, which was still missing.

To no one’s surprise, the fingerprints taken at the house matched those on the knives used to kill the girls. Woods moved up from prime suspect to Most Wanted.

Stella felt increasingly surplus to requirements as the days dragged on. There was nothing more she could usefully offer the inquiry and Lee was away at headquarters for much of the time,
co-ordinating the hunt for Woods. When he did manage to re-join her at Largo Lodge, it was invariably late in the evening and he was exhausted and preoccupied. They had slept together once more but
it had lacked the spark and romance of the first occasion. He had apologised to her afterwards.

‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t much good there . . . I’m just so damned tired, honey. And I can’t stop thinking about the case. Where the fuck
is
the
bastard?’

She understood, but a week after Woods vanished, and after a solitary lunch on the beach – solitary apart from the uniformed cop that was never loitering far from her side during the day
– Stella made up her mind.

Lee phoned her that afternoon from headquarters. ‘We’ve cut our first real break,’ he told her jubilantly. ‘The Coastguard have found an abandoned motor yacht adrift
about twenty miles south of Key West, over toward the Dry Tortugas. The rudder was locked off and the boat had run out of fuel. They’ve traced the owner. He’s a snowbird
and—’

‘Sorry, Lee,’ Stella interrupted. ‘What’s a snowbird?’

‘Oh, it’s what the locals call visitors from the north who winter here in the Keys . . . anyway, the last this guy knew, his vessel was safely moored right here in Key Largo. But
here’s the solid gold part, Stella – the guy says Woods had the contract to keep an eye on it while he was up north. So
that’s
how the son of a bitch got away.’

‘This is tremendous news, Lee,’ she told him. ‘But why didn’t the owner call the police when the TV and newspapers carried Woods’s photo and all the rest of
it?’

‘Been in Europe on a business trip. Woods’s luck strikes again, huh? We tracked the guy down to West Berlin this morning. I spoke to him at his hotel there.’

‘I see . . . so, what, then – you think Woods is in Key West?’

‘Probably, or hiding out thereabouts. The boat’s little inflatable’s missing so he must have set the launch’s controls to automatic, then abandoned ship and rowed ashore
in the dinghy. The bastard tried to open the main seacocks so the launch would eventually sink but he made a half-assed job of it and they got jammed with seagrass and all the junk that comes up
with the Gulf Stream. Even so, it was settling in the water when the Coastguard boys showed up. Much longer and it would have gone down without a trace. We’re dusting it for fingerprints
right now but that’s a formality.’

He sighed.

‘As usual, Stella, you were one hundred per cent right. The bastard got out by sea.’

She smiled into the receiver. ‘Well, you sound happier than you have for days, Lee. I’m pleased for you. But look . . . I’ve got something to tell you too.’

There was a pause at the other end. ‘You’re going back to Massachusetts, aren’t you?’ he said quietly.