The Letter Of The Law

CHAPTER 37

There was a large black barrel on the side of the tall Victorian house. A sizable fire had been laid inside it with dry twigs and split logs soaked in starter fluid. Beside the barrel, stacked ten feet high against the side of the old wooden house, was an enormous confusion of sticks and branches. Lipton stuffed a wad of inside-out clothes, the blood-soaked outer layer he'd removed outside Patti's apartment, into the barrel. In the bottom of the barrel a wick of newspaper protruded from a quarter-size hole in the rusty metal. Lipton bent down, struck a match, and ignited the blaze. He watched without emotion as fiery orange sheets of flame engulfed the clothes. Soon it became so hot that Lipton had to step back.

A warm breeze from across the water escorted the black smoke away from the house and into the towering trees. Lipton looked critically at the sky. The sun was down and directly above, a tilted half moon was shot through with the horn of a ragged cloud that portended a dark rain from the north. Everything was a factor, and Lipton considered his prearranged plan of escape as he shifted the Tech- 9 in the waist of his pants and mounted the porch steps. For the moment he would leave the snapping blaze to its own designs.

Inside the house, Lipton went directly to the phone. It was an old dusty thing, faded black. He dialed 911.

"Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?"

"Just listen," Lipton said, adding a touch of hysteria to his voice to make the whole thing believable. "This is Professor Eric Lipton. I'm going to kill myself. I can't take it anymore. The police have persecuted me long enough. They've ruined my life! Do you hear me? They've ruined everything! They won't leave me alone! I'm going into my basement and I'm going to end it. My blood is on their hands! I'm an innocent man, but I'm going to kill myself because of them! You tell them that!"

"Sir-"

Lipton slammed down the phone. He knew 911 automatically registered the address of every call. He knew they would send the police and that his voice would be preserved on tape for the media. It was much better than a note. He wasted no time gathering his things. There was no evidence of panic in his movements, just a hasty efficiency. Devising plans for every eventuality was something Lipton delighted in. Although he had never intended to leave his safe house in a rush, he had made provisions in the event something unforeseeable happened. And how could he have foreseen Sales's arrival at Patti's apartment the moment he had cut her open?

While he stuffed the last few items into his backpack, he went back over the day. His only error was in failing to make certain the girl was dead. Had he done that, he wouldn't have to run. But in the confusion of his escape, he'd forgotten all about Patti Dunleavy. She very well might die from the wound he had inflicted, but in hindsight, he should have put a bullet in her head on his way out the back. Without her testimony against him, he could laugh in the face of the police. Sales, the only other person who'd seen him, didn't count, and once again, every shred of physical evidence was in his burning barrel. But the possibility of the girl's survival made it imperative that he not only leave the area, but probably the country as well. A few years in South America with a new identity might be in order. He had several from which to choose.

Because he was so brilliant and so thorough, he would throw the authorities well off his trail and exit the States with the ease of a casual tourist. Lipton delicately placed his computer in the smaller of his two bags and then deposited them both on the back porch.

Down in the cellar was a large horizontal meat freezer. In it was the frozen body of Walt Tanner, the love-stricken traveling salesman who matched Lipton's body type exactly. The body was a useful prop in the drama over which Lipton was master. Lipton undid the padlock and lifted the lid. Tanner's knees were crunched up to his chest and his eyelashes were frosty white like powdered sugar. Slip knots Lipton had tied more than a year ago secured a frozen clothesline around his neck and knees. Hoisting the slack end of the line over his shoulder, Lipton heaved the body up and out of the freezer and dragged it into the middle of the damp concrete floor. That would be the epicenter of the heat, ensuring the survival of nothing more than bones. He reached into the freezer again and extracted the gun used to kill Tanner. He laid that next to the body and mounted the stairs.

Lipton knew all the angles by which the police could positively identify the bones, and he had done everything possible to thwart that investigation. It began by securing and destroying every X ray ever taken of his own teeth and bones and ended with a thorough cleaning of his home, purging it of hair from the obvious places. Because they had no DNA from Marcia Sales's apartment, the DA had never taken DNA samples for the trial. That would have been counterproductive. So now, the only way it could be conclusively proved that he wasn't the man with an apparently self-inflicted bullet hole in his head would be to exhume Lipton's mother and do a comparison sample. Even if they went to that trouble, it would take the police weeks if not months to work through the red tape, and by then Lipton would be so far gone it wouldn't matter. If nothing else, the bones would buy him time.

On the porch, Lipton hoisted a duffel bag over each shoulder and made his way around to the side of the house. He froze, only for a second, but it was long enough to distinctly hear the crunching of gravel beneath the tires of a car moving slowly up his drive toward the house. It was too soon to be a response to his call and this puzzled him. It really didn't matter, though. He sneered in the direction of the approaching car. Carefully, he placed the bottom of his foot against the side of the burning barrel. With a swift shove, he pushed its burning contents over and into the brush pile. In seconds, the flames began to lick up through the sticks, spreading to the clapboard siding of the house. Lipton did a quick calculation and decided that even if the police in the approaching car did get inside the house, their search would never get as far as the cellar before the whole place was an enormous funeral pyre.

He strode rapidly down the back path toward the boathouse. Inside was a small skiff. In case one broke down, Lipton had attached two small outboard motors to the transom. On the other side of the reservoir, his dead aunt's Buick Riviera sat waiting at the end of a dusty lane. It was the perfect escape, the perfect execution of a perfect plan. Before going into the boathouse and closing the door behind himself, Lipton glanced up at the sky and chortled quietly to himself. It even looked like the rain would hold off long enough for him to cross the water and disappear for good.