Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

POLICE REPORT BY JOSEPH FINDER

The incident in the small Cape Cod town of Westbury began on an evening of dismal weather. A freakishly early snow mixed with sleet had closed most of the roads off Route 6, the Cape’s main artery, and knocked out power and telephone service throughout much of Barnstable County. By some stroke of luck, though, Westbury was spared.

So at 2:50 in the morning the phone rang in the bedroom of the house belonging to Westbury’s police chief, Henry Silva.

He rolled over and reached out in the darkness without looking and grabbed the touch-tone’s handset. “Silva,” he said.

“Chief, Melissa here at county dispatch.”

He coughed, rubbed his eyes, switched on the lamp. On the nightstand were a pad of paper and a Bic pen. He uncapped the end of the pen with his teeth. “Go, what do we got?”

“A fatal shooting. Vladimir Polowski of 14 Old King’s Highway.”

“The old guy? Christ. Where’s Jeff Crane?”

“His cruiser’s stuck in a drainage ditch off Long Pond Road. Says he should be freed up just as soon as Tucker Towing gets him out.”

“Oh, jeez,” Henry said. Jeff Crane was Silva’s only officer. “All right, who called it in?”

“Ray Richardson.”

“Don’t know him. Is he a neighbor of Polowski’s?”

“No. He’s not from around here. Says he’s been living up at the Westbury Motel for the past couple weeks or so.”

Henry scribbled a note. “Where is this Ray Richardson now?”

“Says he’s in the victim’s kitchen.”

“Huh. He say what he’s doing in there?”

A pause. “Yeah. He says he’s the one that killed him.”

That jolted Henry wide awake. “Say again?”

“When he called it in, he identified himself, gave the address, and said he shot Vladimir Polowski. He also said he’d be sitting in the kitchen with his hands up whenever the cops arrived. I asked him why he did it, but he wouldn’t say. He said he’d only tell the chief of police.”

Henry fell silent for a long moment.

“Chief?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Okay. Tell Jeff Crane to haul ass over to Vladimir Polowski’s house soon’s they get him out of the ditch. Then call the county district attorney’s office, get a hold of the assistant D.A. on duty, and alert the State Police. Medical Examiner’s too, while you’re at it.”

“Got it, Chief.”

“All right, I’m getting dressed and heading out there.”

“Okay,” Melissa said. “And Chief…?”

“Yeah,” he answered, dreading what she was about to say.

“Sorry about your wife. Carol was good people.”

“She sure was,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Fifteen minutes later he was sitting in his police cruiser, waiting for the engine and the interior to warm up. The 1978 Ford LTD was sheeted with ice. He turned the windshield defroster all the way up. While he waited for the car to thaw out, he listened to the AM radio, catching WBZ out of Boston, with its strong signal.

It was one of those all-night talk shows. He sat listening with folded arms and a scowl. They were arguing about a tragedy that had happened a few weeks ago and a half-world away. The Russians had shot down a Korean Air passenger jet over Sakhalin Island in the North Pacific. The two hundred and sixty-nine people on board had all been killed. Unbelievable. The plane had been en route from New York to Seoul, South Korea, carrying sixty Americans, a U.S. congressman and — most terrible of all — twenty-two children.

Henry remembered arguing about it with his officer and the owner of Al’s diner, Al Perry, over coffee at the counter not long ago.

“You need any more proof those bastards are the evil empire?” said Al, a giant, ruddy-faced, potbellied guy whose father, Big Al, had opened the diner right after the war. Al — Little Al, as he was sometimes still called — was hand-wiping a stack of dishes hot from the dishwasher’s station. “A civilian airliner happens to stray a little bit over into Soviet airspace and they shoot it down in cold blood. I mean, for the love of God.”

“Not how I heard it,” said Jeff Crane, by far the youngest of the three men. Jeff was lanky and sharp-jawed and had a buzz cut so close you could see the pink of his scalp. “I heard it was a spy plane.”

“Horse crap it was,” Al spat back. “All those civilians on board?”

“Yeah,” Jeff persisted. He seemed to like tweaking Little Al. “The Pentagon puts, like, spy equipment, radar or whatever, on passenger planes all the time to spy on the Russians. I think that was in the Globe.”

Henry took a swig of coffee.

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” Al said. His face had turned crimson. “Hank, you were in the Air Force, tell this kid he’s full of it.”

Henry set down his mug. “You’re both wrong,” he said. “I was just talking to a buddy of mine who’s pretty high up in the Pentagon. We went through Skyraider training together in Florida, back in the day. He said don’t listen to the news, it’s all propaganda, both sides.”

“What, it’s propaganda that two hundred and sixty-nine innocent souls were killed?” Al said.

Henry traced a pattern on his place-mat with the tines of a fork. “Oh, no. They got killed by the Russians, all right.”

“Exactly!” said Al.

“So what’re you saying, boss, the plane wasn’t really in Soviet airspace?” said Jeff.

“Oh, no,” said Henry evenly. “It strayed into Soviet airspace, all right. By accident, I’m sure. I’ll bet the pilot programmed the nav system wrong. It happens. You’d be surprised.”

“So what the hell did the Soviets shoot it down for?” Al demanded.

“My buddy says the Russians thought this Boeing 747 was a big old Boeing RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft. An intruder.”

“Oh, come on,” said Al. “I bet they don’t look anything alike.”

“You’re saying the Russians screwed up?” said Jeff.

“Big time,” said Henry.

“So how come they don’t just say so?”

“And admit their Air Force is so incompetent it couldn’t tell a Boeing 747 from an RC-135? Yeah, right. It’s the Cold War, man. Us versus Them. Can’t let the facts get in the way.”

Now, listening to the argument on the radio, Henry shook his head in disgust, got out of the cruiser and reached into the back for a snow scraper. He broke up a big ice sheet on the windshield. Meanwhile the freezing rain kept on splattering against the glass, big fat slushy drops.

He cast a longing glance back at the house. Usually on nights like this, no matter how late, Carol would be up as well, swathed in her baby-blue bathrobe, pouring freshly brewed coffee in a travel mug for him. She’d always hand him the mug with a sweet kiss and the same whispered words: “Stay safe out there, honey.”

But the house was dark now, and quiet. He opened the car door, tossed in the ice scraper, got into the cruiser, and backed slowly down the driveway. At the first stop sign, the cruiser fishtailed and slid straight through the intersection. He cursed aloud, pumped the brakes to bring the car careening to a stop. The windshield wipers thumped rhythmically.

It was a dangerous night to be out and about, and as he carefully crossed Route 6 toward Old County Road, he wondered what might make a guy go out on a night like this and murder an old man.

Old County Road was a narrow winding country lane with no guardrails, lane markings, or streetlights. He slowed down and switched on the side spotlight, and as he maneuvered the steering wheel with one hand, he shone the spotlight with the other, illuminating the mailboxes on the side of the road, one by one.

There it was. Number fourteen. On the left.

He turned and advanced slowly down the dirt drive. Up ahead, surrounded by sand and a spiky sea-grass lawn, was a white single-story double-wide, no doubt planted right on top of a concrete slab. On one side of the modest house was a pickup, blanketed with snow and ice. It looked like it hadn’t been used in days. Next to it was a Subaru all-wheel-drive sedan with Ohio plates. It looked like it had been there no more than a few hours. He edged in the cruiser and parked behind the two vehicles. Grabbing the handset to the Motorola police radio, he said, “Dispatch, this is Westbury C-One, off at the scene.”

“Ten-four, Westbury,” Melissa said. “FYI, your P-One is still stuck.”

“Got it,” he said. Poor Jeff.

He switched off the engine, got out, and took his handheld radio. The freezing rain was coming even harder now. He pulled out his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and kept it at his side as he slowly climbed the short stoop.

The front door was open. He could see through the storm door right into the house. He saw a tidy living room. A tired-looking couch and matching chairs and a television. A color TV set in a console with rabbit ears. Beyond the living room was a well-lit kitchen.

Seated on a stool in the kitchen was a scruffy middle-aged man in jeans and sneakers and a gray sweatshirt.

The man saw him and slowly raised both hands.

With his free hand, Henry pushed open the storm door. He strode in, raising the revolver in a two-handed grip. “Don’t move,” he called out. “Keep your hands up.”

“Absolutely, officer,” the man said calmly. He smiled. “Good evening.” On second glance he looked younger than middle-aged. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He had shaggy blond hair and several days’ growth of beard.

When Henry reached the kitchen threshold, he saw the body.

Lying on the linoleum floor was an elderly white-haired man in gray pajamas and bedroom slippers. In the center of his chest were two sizable entry wounds. Dark crimson blood stained a large oval area around the wounds and pooled on the floor.

Henry looked quickly around. “Is anybody else in the house?”

“No, sir,” he said. “Just me and the deceased.”

“Where is your weapon?”

“On the counter.” He gestured with his chin. Next to the toaster oven on the white speckled Formica counter was a steel-framed Colt .45 1911 with wood grips, plain and powerful.

Henry advanced a few steps farther. “Who are you?”

“Ray Richardson.”

“All right, now, Ray, I’m going to ask you to slowly — and I mean slowly — stand up and rotate, with your arms still up in the air. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” The man obediently got off the stool, hands up, and turned around. Henry stepped up, slid his left foot between Richardson’s legs, and smoothly handcuffed the man. Only then did he holster his revolver. He frisked the man and was satisfied. Then, grabbing the stranger’s left elbow, he guided him into the living room and sat him down on the couch.

“Sit, and don’t even think about moving,” he said.

“I understand,” Ray Richardson said quietly, even pleasantly. Henry backed into the kitchen, keeping his eyes on the living room, then peered more closely at the body on the floor. Vladimir Polowski, all right. Retired dairy farmer from Vermont, still spoke with a thick accent from his native Gdansk. He’d moved to Westbury a decade or more ago because he missed seeing the ocean. He liked to hang out at Crane’s Hardware and the Westbury Diner. He’d come here after selling his cows in Vermont because he was weary of getting up early every day for the milking.

Yes, those were some serious entry wounds. The Colt .45 packed a serious punch. One bullet would have done the job. The old Pole’s face had grayed out, nearly matching his white hair and handlebar mustache. Only a birthmark on his cheek stood out, an angry-looking purplish scimitar. His eyes were open, staring.

Henry looked back at the living room. Richardson sat quietly on the couch.

“All right, now, what happened here?”

“I shot him.”

“I can see that. Care to tell me why?”

Now an expression came over the man’s face, a twist of contempt. “That son-of-a-bitch killed my dad.”

Henry looked back at the dead dairy farmer. “I find that hard to believe. When do you say he killed your father?”

“In 1958.”

“That’s, what, twenty-five years ago.”

Ray Richardson nodded once.

“You want to explain?”

He shook his head. “Not here.”

“Huh?”

“I can’t tell you here. Take me back to my motel room, I’ll explain everything.”

Henry waited with the suspect in silence for another forty-five minutes. Then a flare of headlights spread across the living room wall.

The rest of the Westbury Police Department had arrived.

Henry opened the door for Jeff Crane, who was dripping wet and profusely apologetic. Henry held up his hand. “You can tell me about it later.”

“Okay, Chief,” Jeff said, removing his police hat, shaking water on the living room carpet. “Holy shit, that’s really Polowski over there, huh?”

Henry suspected Jeff Crane had never actually seen a dead body before. He’d been on the force for less than a year, and was the son of George Crane, owner of Crane’s Hardware and chairman of the board of selectmen. From talking to other small-town chiefs on the Cape, Henry knew what a minefield it could be to hire local. But Jeff had been a pleasant surprise. Once he’d even given his own mother a speeding ticket, and he hadn’t told Henry about it until the story appeared in the Cape Cod Times.

“Jeff, the Staties and the D.A. should be coming up here in a bit. You secure the scene. Don’t let anybody in, and I mean anybody, until they show up. That body’s leaving the kitchen only when the medical examiner says so. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“I’m going to take our suspect here back to the station, print and process him. You need me, gimme a holler. Otherwise, hang tight here and wait.”

Jeff wiped his hand over his face. “Yeah, about that, Chief, I got a message from county dispatch just before I got here. Seems like Route 6 is flooded around Cahoon Hollow. The Staties and the county attorney are going to be delayed some.”

Henry shrugged. “No matter. Your job’s still the same. Keep the place secure. Questions?”

“Nope.” He hesitated a moment. “Oh, hey, Chief, I wanted to let you know my Aunt Clarisse, in Falmouth, she sent a big donation to the American Cancer Society. You know, in honor of Carol.”

“So no questions?”

“I’m good.”

“Then Mr. Richardson and I will be off.”

The Westbury Motel was right on Route 6, a one-story structure with a modest office building at one end, and a series of connected motel rooms extending off to the left. Out front was a small swimming pool, covered with a vinyl tarp for the winter. Underneath the Westbury Motel sign, a VACANCY light flickered.

He parked the cruiser in front of the office underneath an overhang. Leaving the confessed killer in the back seat, secured and cuffed, he got out and pressed the buzzer. Eventually Tommy Snow answered the door, yawning, scratching at his bald head, clutching his tattered brown bathrobe with his other hand.

“Shit, Chief, what’s up?”

“I need you to open up a room for me. Rented by a guy named Ray Richardson.”

“Something happen to him?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, he’s an odd duck, I’ll tell you that. Been here about two, three weeks, and you know what? He won’t let anybody clean his room. Even pays me an extra fifty a week to keep out of it. I leave him fresh towels and sheets outside the door. He’s a strange one.”

Tommy ducked back into his office and came out with a key. “Hey, Chief, sorry about your wife.”

“Thanks for the key,” Henry said.

He drove the cruiser around to unit 9. The rain seemed to be slowing. He left the engine running to keep the headlights on. Henry got out of the cruiser and opened the rear door for Ray Richardson. Then he unlocked the motel room door and switched on the light.

A shabby room with a double bed against one wall. A cheap veneer nightstand with an ugly lamp. An open suitcase rested on a folding luggage stand.

And the walls…

They were covered with newspapers and magazine clippings and photocopies, many of them yellowed and marked up. Strung here and there in jagged lines, weaving this way and that, was red yarn, connecting one photo with another, connecting maps with clippings…

He’d seen such scenes on TV and in movies. The serial killer’s wall of death. The paranoid obsessive’s charting of some loony conspiracy theory. An intricate web of madness.

He felt a wash of acid at the back of his throat.

A roomful of crazy.

The tortured work of a lunatic.

Ray Richardson stood handcuffed in the doorway.

“All right,” Henry said. “Talk.”

“The whole story’s up here, left to right. I’ll talk you through it if you’d like.”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “I’d like.”

Richardson stepped into the room. Henry looked closer at the bizarre collage. On one side of the room were photos of an Air Force aircraft, circa 1950s, with four propellers and a shiny fuselage, some parked on an airstrip, some airborne. There were photos of uniformed airmen gathered in front of the parked aircraft for a group shot like they’d just graduated from high school. Headshots of one particular Air Force officer. Ray Richardson’s father, Henry guessed. He could see the resemblance. A large map of Turkey and Central Asia. Blurry photocopies of newspaper articles.

Ray stood gesturing with his chin like a demented museum guide. “That’s my dad, on the left. Back in 1956, ’57, when he was in the Air Force. Lieutenant Andrew Richardson.”

A yellowed clipping from the Cleveland Plain Dealer with a photo of the same man, with a headline: AIR FORCE PILOT LOST OVER RUSSIA — LOCAL MAN WAS 36.

“You know what the government told my mom after my dad was shot down? That it was a routine weather reporting flight. So my poor mom… when she’d had one too many martinis in the afternoon, she’d say my dad had been killed to measure winds and clouds. What a waste, she said. And when I got older, I decided to find out the truth.”

Richardson nodded in the direction of the wall. “That’s more than ten years of research up there. I even interviewed a couple of guys from my dad’s unit. That’s when I found out what they were really doing. I knew my dad flew in the Korean War. What I found was, he later volunteered to fly special intelligence missions for the Air Force, for the National Security Agency. He was based at Adana, Turkey.”

Henry peered closely at one of the photos. “That’s a C-130…”

“You know your aircraft, huh?”

“I was a flyboy too.”

“Well, then, you know those things were jammed full of electronic surveillance equipment. To intercept radio transmissions, radar frequencies, other electronic signatures. They’d fly right up to the border of the Soviet Union, trigger their antiaircraft radar, then measure the frequencies. That way they could let the bombers down the road know how to spoof the radar. Let ’em slip through to hit Moscow or Minsk or Pinsk.”

“Who the hell are you? A researcher? Military historian?”

He shook his head. “John Deere salesman from Ohio.”

“So you want to explain what this is all about, all this… this…”

“It’s my attempt to cut through the lies, the bullshit, everything that was slopped our way the past couple of decades.”

“I see.”

“Once I found out who my dad really was, and his mission, I wanted to find out who had ordered his plane shot down.” Another nod to the wall. “And that’s the guy.”

There were fewer photos and newspaper clippings on the other half of the wall. Most of them were in Russian. A few headshots of a Soviet military officer. The photos looked like they’d been photocopied from library books.

“And this is…?” he asked.

“General Dmitri A. Kunayev, head of the PVO Strany district, where my dad was shot down in Soviet Armenia.”

“The PVO who?”

“It’s an acronym,” Richardson explained. “Stands for Protivo-vozdushnaya Oborona Strany, which translates into Anti-Air Defense of the Nation. It took me ten years to find out, but he was the son-of-a-bitch who ordered four MiG-17s to shoot down an unarmed surveillance craft.”

A gust of wind splattered rain against the room’s window. Henry felt colder. He turned to Richardson and said, “You got to be kidding me.”

The handcuffed man shook his head. “Vladimir Polowski. Vermont dairy farmer maybe. But he was really Kunayev. And he murdered my dad.”

“Uh huh. So poor old Vlad Polowski was actually a Soviet general living under an assumed name right here in Westbury, Massachusetts? Do I have that right?”

“Exactly.”

“You do all this… research… on your own?”

“Wasn’t easy,” Richardson said, a tinge of pride in his voice. “Took a hell of a lot of digging. I found a little news clip in the International Herald Tribune, back in 1971. Said a General Kunayev had been killed in a car accident in Tehran while on a military exchange mission. Body burned in the wreckage. I figured, well, at least the old bastard met a fiery death. Until last year, when I went to the Big E.”

“You’re talking about the Big E Agriculture Fair, in West Springfield? That Big E?”

“Yep. I was staffing the John Deere booth. Just doing my job… and then I saw him walk by. The son-of-a-bitch walked right by me… That big ole birthmark — Christ, I nearly jumped him right then and there and strangled him.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because I wanted to make absolutely sure of it, that’s why. I followed him around for a while, followed him right out to the parking lot. And then — then I wimped out. I didn’t have the guts to do it. Not yet, anyway.”

Henry glanced again at the photos. An ugly birthmark on the man’s face, a long dark blotch that looked sort of like a scythe or a scimitar. If you took that general and aged him and slapped a handlebar moustache on the face…

Vladimir Polowski. Yep, that was him, all right.

“So how’d you make sure?”

“Wrote down his license plate number. Made a bunch of calls and eventually turned up his name and address. Kept on digging. His records said he’d been a dairy farmer in Strafford, Vermont, before moving to Cape Cod. So I took some vacation time, and went to Vermont, and you know what I found out?”

“What’s that?”

“Absolutely nothing. Nobody in Strafford remembered him. Nobody remembered any Polish émigré who owned a dairy farm around there. No one.”

“Okay.” His handheld radio at his side crackled to life: “Chief? Chief?”

“So then I got it,” Richardson said. “That alleged car crash in Tehran was a cover story engineered by the U.S. government. Kunayev didn’t die. He defected. The CIA must have debriefed him and resettled him with what they call a ‘legend’—a fake biography and identity. It was a perfect cover. Except for one thing.”

“What?”

“One obsessed John Deere salesman.”

Henry stepped outside. The air had gotten colder. All the slushy crap on the ground would soon be freezing into deadly ice. He picked up his handheld.

“Jeff, go.”

Another burst of static, and he made out “… They’re here.”

“What’s that? Repeat, Jeff.”

“Chief, I said, the State Police are here. Along with the medical examiner.”

“How about the D.A.?”

“He’s about half-hour out still. They’re processing the scene now… but there’s a Detective Peyton from the State Police, wants to see you and the suspect. Are you at the station?”

“No,” Henry said. “I’m at the Westbury Motel. Send him over here, okay?”

“You got it.”

For the next ten minutes he stood quietly in the motel room, with an equally quiet Ray Richardson. His kept on glancing back at the wall, wondering what kind of demons would possess someone to go so far, to do so much. To risk so much. To go happily to prison for the sake of long-delayed vengeance.

Finally he turned to Ray and said, “Let’s say you’re right, and this old dairy farmer really was a Soviet defector living here under deep cover. Let’s just say for the sake of argument you’re right. Don’t you think the guy deserves at least an arrest and a trial?”

Ray shrugged. “You think they’d ever let this go to trial? No way, José. I even called the FBI. Told them about this guy. No one wanted to take my call. They all but hung up on me. Finally I got through to this assistant special agent in charge of something or other. Know what he told me?”

Henry shook his head.

“Guy said, ‘Just live your life.’ But I couldn’t. Thing had got its hooks in me. The idea that the guy who ordered my dad to be killed was just living the good life on Cape Cod. My wife left me six months ago. Thought I was unhinged.”

“Huh.”

“Then a couple weeks back I heard about all those poor people on the Korean airliner who got shot down over Japan? Like two hundred some? Know what I’m talking about?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And that kinda flipped a switch in me. Those people — they were innocent. They just got caught in the crossfire. Just like my dad.”

“I see.”

“That’s why I waited for you. Now there has to be a trial.”

Outside, a car door slammed. Henry looked outside. A big black official-looking Chevy Suburban with tinted windows pulled in next to his cruiser.

A short, squat man knocked at the open door, and Henry let him in. The man was wearing a soaked tweed cap and a black cloth raincoat, gray slacks, and black shoes. He held out a leather wallet with his photo and badge from the Massachusetts State Police.

“Warren Peyton, State Police Troop D,” the man said. “You’re Chief Silva?”

“I am,” he said. “You made good time.”

“We’re the state. We get the Suburbans.” He gave a perfunctory smile. “So what do we got?”

Henry spent the next fifteen minutes describing the events of the evening so far, beginning with the phone call from the county dispatch, right up to Ray’s remark about “crossfire.” The state police detective nodded and grunted and took a lot of notes. He had a somber look about him and seemed older than the usual Statie who might have the bad luck of catching a call like this in the middle of the night. “Okay, tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t I drive this gentleman over to your station so you can get him booked and all the paperwork taken care of?”

“Makes no difference to me who takes him over.”

“Since he’s waived his rights, maybe he’ll tell me a story on the way over that makes a little more sense.”

“He’s all yours.” The Staties were going to bigfoot him anyway. They took over most homicide cases in Massachusetts. His job was done. And frankly, Henry was relieved to be just about rid of the man and the whole bizarre story.

“How about I go with the chief instead?” said Ray Richardson.

Peyton shook his head and smiled and took Richardson’s elbow gently. He guided him out to the dimly lit parking lot and into the black Suburban. It had a couple of whip antennas in the back.

Another big black Suburban pulled up the steep drive.

“C triple-S,” the detective said. He meant the state police Crime Scene Services Section.

Henry nodded. “Want to follow me over?”

“I’ll find my way, no problem,” the detective said.

“How about I go with the chief instead?” Ray Richardson said.

Henry shook his head. “He’s got the nicer ride,” he said.

Henry caught a last glimpse of Ray Richardson, sitting in the back of the Suburban. His eyes were darting around, a panicked expression on his face. For the first time he looked scared.

After the Suburban pulled away, Henry stood there for a moment, staring at the crazytown walls of the motel with an increasing sense of disquiet.

Then it hit him.

Abruptly, he hustled out to his cruiser. The Suburban had turned left on Route 6, he’d noticed, not right. Wrong way.

The Suburban was far off in the distance, the taillights disappearing. Heading away from Westbury. Heading off-Cape.

Two miles down Route 6, the cruiser slid and slithered and the wheels locked and it spun out onto the shoulder. He sat there with the engine ticking and his heart racing.

It was no use. Route 6 was a sheet of ice. No way he was going to chase down the Suburban. That beast of a sport-utility vehicle with its V8 engine and four-wheel drive was probably halfway to the Sagamore Bridge by now.

He heard faint voices and static crackle on the two-way. Melissa from county dispatch. “County to Westbury C-One,” she said.

“I’m here, County, go.”

“Update from the State Police, chief. They’re on their way, but they said to give ’em another twenty minutes or so before they get to you. The roads are really bad.”

He nodded, rubbed the hard plastic of the microphone against his forehead. “County, tell them to turn around and go home. There’s nothing here.”

“You mean, false report?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

He sat in the cruiser for another minute or so, enjoying the blast of hot air from the heater. A couple of other beefy black Suburbans barreled past, headed off-Cape.

It took him a good ten minutes to maneuver the cruiser off the shoulder and back onto the treacherous highway, where he made a U-turn.

He smiled to himself, but it was an ugly smile.

When he got back to the Westbury Motel, he found the door to unit 9 slightly ajar.

Henry pushed it open with his shoulder and switched on the overhead light.

He wasn’t surprised. Not really.

The place had been thoroughly cleaned out. Not a photo or a newspaper clipping remained. No suitcase. No trace of a man named Ray Richardson.

The room smelled faintly of bleach.

It was almost sunrise.

When he got back to the Westbury police station, he found Officer Jeff Crane sitting at a typewriter, punching the keys so hard it looked like he might break the damned thing. Open on his desk at his elbow was an old black briefcase lined with jars of fingerprint powders and brushes and transfer tape and other tools.

“The Staties took the body away, Chief,” Jeff said. “Even arranged for a tow truck to haul the shooter’s car. Plus lots of boxes of evidence.”

“So what’re you up to?” Henry asked.

“Writing up the police report,” Jeff said. “I got some good latents right here. I’ll drive them over to Yarmouth first thing in the morning.” He glanced at his Timex. “Actually, it’s almost six o’clock, isn’t it? Good morning.”

Henry looked at the earnest young officer, at the resolve in his face, his sharp jaw. Then he reached over, grabbed the envelope of latent prints and tossed them into the steel trash basket.

“Chief, what — what—?”

Henry pulled the set of triplicate carbon-paper forms from the platen of the typewriter. He tore it in half, then in quarters, and then dropped the scraps into the trash.

“Let’s head over to the diner and grab a cup of coffee,” Henry said.

Little Al set down plates of pancakes and bacon. “Top off your coffee, gentlemen?” he asked.

Henry smiled and nodded and held out his mug. Jeff shook his head. “I’m good,” he said.

“So you’re just gonna let it drop?” Jeff said. “I don’t get it.”

“How much did you know about my wife Carol?”

“Not much,” he admitted. “I know you guys met in the Air Force. I know she was pretty sick with cancer for a long time, right?”

“Carol was what they call a Radiological Safety Officer. Went places and did things I couldn’t even know about… except for one thing. A number of years ago there was this incident down in Arkansas. A Titan II nuclear missile silo caught fire and exploded. The warhead separated. Flew out of the silo. And Carol was part of the recovery team. They went in there and saved the day. Got everything cleaned up. Official story was, no problem, warhead wasn’t damaged, nothing to look at here, everything’s hunky dory. Real story was, she and the others sacrificed themselves so the nearby towns didn’t get nuked into a sheet of flat glass.”

Jeff was quiet. Henry went on. “Papers were signed, oaths were given. No one ever heard any more about it. Carol’s medical file at the V.A. hospital said she’d contracted lung cancer from smoking. I called up the Pentagon and got through to someone senior and said Carol never touched a cigarette in her life. I just wanted them to acknowledge what happened.”

“Yeah?”

“The lieutenant colonel I talked to said I had a choice. I could keep making noise and lose Carol’s medical coverage and the rest of Carol’s life would be a living hell. The medical bills would bankrupt us. Or else I could keep my mouth shut and she’d get the best care available. So I thought about it. Carol didn’t have much time left.” Henry’s eyes were moist. His eyes were probably just irritated from being up all night. “I knew I was going to lose her. I just didn’t feel like doing something that would make me lose her that much quicker.”

Jeff toyed with his fork for a moment. “So who really took Polowski’s body? And Ray Richardson? And who was Detective Peyton really?”

Henry shrugged. “O.G.A.”

“Huh?”

“Other Government Agency. Take your pick. There’s about a half-dozen three-letter agencies could have pulled something like this off. We’ll never know.”

“What do you think’s going to happen to Ray?”

“Oh, they have a thousand ways of making you disappear. Maybe there’ll be a week of secret interrogation. Then a corpse will turn up on a back road somewhere. Single-vehicle accident. The coroner will say the guy’s blood alcohol level was sky high. He’d been going through a rough patch after his wife left him. It’ll all be in the police report.”

“But… why?”

Henry shrugged. “Couple of weeks back, a civilian airliner was shot out of the sky by a Soviet aircraft. Now the Russians are on the front page, day after day, being portrayed as heartless monsters. But suppose this little story from Cape Cod got out — that a Soviet air defense general who defected had been secretly living here all these years? A general who gave an order to shoot down an American plane in 1958. An order that sounds kinda like another order another Soviet general just gave two weeks ago. Only we protected one general because we wanted to know his secrets. Wouldn’t look so good, would it? Especially with all our shouting about the Evil Empire. See, the thing is, Jeff — no government likes to be embarrassed.”

“Holy crap,” Jeff whispered. He blotted maple syrup on his fingers with a paper napkin. Little ribbons of white napkin stuck to his palm like feathers. “So what do we do about it?”

Henry lifted his cup of coffee and took a long swig. He shook his head. “Stay out of the crossfire.”