keen to what lay ahead; my own concentration was given to what lurked behind.
We walked for forty minutes in total silence, the only sound being the muffled shuffling of the snowshoes and the occasional squawk from the radios. Even so equipped, it was slow going. Unless you do it regularly, snowshoeing is exhausting work, and in groups speed is reduced to the slowest member. Still, it is easier and swifter than plunging along without them, and I had to admire our prey for his stamina.
But stamina has its limits, especially if your hip is grinding away at the socket, reducing the bone to dust. We found our man eventually, peacefully sitting in the snow, staring at his lap.
McNaughton stepped up to him, the muzzle of his shotgun three feet from his head. “Are you Steven Cioffi?”
Cioffi looked up and smiled slightly. He had the appearance of a man in mid-daydream.
“Answer.”
“Yes.” His voice had a feminine softness to it.
“I have a warrant for your arrest.”
As the New Hampshire men lifted Cioffi to his feet and searched him, finding nothing unusual, McNaughton read him his rights. When he was through, there was a curious lull, a palpable disappointment that the hunt had ended with such a murmur.
McNaughton radioed in to find out if the backup troops were anywhere near. They were not. The weather had bogged everything down, and they were waiting for additional Sno-Cats.
“Well, I guess we slog home.”
I looked around. “Is that wise?”
McNaughton gave me an exasperated glare. “Wise? What the fuck is wise? Our tracks are half-covered already. If we sit it out here, we won’t be able to find our to findway back, and the backup won’t be able to find us. We might protect this clown, but we’ll all freeze to death in th e process. We got to get back. We can hole up in the Cat if you want.”
I rubbed my eyes. Once again it made sense. I felt like I was attending a wake for which the corpse hadn’t quite arrived. I looked over my four companions. “Does anyone have a vest?”
One of the troopers opened his coat to reveal the bulletproof vest underneath. I cocked an eyebrow at McNaughton.
“Give it to him.” McNaughton pointed at Cioffi.
The transfer took place. Then McNaughton clustered us around the prisoner as tightly as our snowshoes would allow. “All right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Cioffi raised his hand like a boy in a schoolroom. The New Hampshire cop glared at him. “I can no longer walk.”
“The hip?” I asked. He smiled faintly and nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve done it some real damage.”
We rigged a small litter from a couple of shotguns and an extra pair of snowshoes someone had brought along for Cioffi. It was too short to lie on, and sitting astride proved too painful, so Cioffi sat as on a park bench, with both feet dangling off one side. It was a precarious rig, by nature unbalanced, but it was the best we could think of. I walked along one side, holding Cioffi’s hand to keep him from toppling off like a rag doll. Katz was on the other side and McNaughton and one trooper held the point ahead of the stretcher bearers. It was the best we could do to shield Cioffi from any line of fire.
31
Some five minutes into our silent return trip, Cioffi gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “I feel a little silly, holding hands.”
“You’d feel even sillier lying on your back with your legs in the air.”
He let out a small chuckle and nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”
He sighed and tilted his face up, letting the snowflakes collect on his eyelids, as we all used to do as children. It was a gentle gesture, and grotesquely out of kilter with the image we had formed of him. But then, he’d done nothing but debunk that image from the moment we had found him.
In itself, that didn’t surprise me. Violent criminals often reflect startlingly peaceful exteriors. But this man had been made part of a larger and bloodier whole over the past month. The road leading to him had been veiled in pain and deceit and littered with the bodies of friends and strangers alike. Had Helen of Troy been revealed as a fat and pimply teenager with an addiction for chocolate eclairs, the irony would have been no greater.
Perhaps it was because of this absurdity-that the pursuit had utterly overshadowed the prize-that I couldn’t suppress a shared wistfulness with this man, made all the more real by the intertwining of our hands. Somehow, sitting there like a child at the park, he had become less the cause of all this mayhem and more its ultimate victim. The toss by him of the very first stone was ending in an avalanche that would sweep the mountain from beneath him.
“Did you kill her?”
He opened his eyes and blinked at me. The question obviously startled him, as if the correct answer might somehow get him off the hook even now. But then he looked around and let out a little sigh. “Is that man really after me? To kill me?”
“You murdered his daughter.”
He nodded dreamily. “I guess I saw it as self-defense,” he said softly.
I noticed McNaughton turn to say something-no doubt some tough cop wisecrack that would make Cioffi clam up-but he didn’t, and after a moment’s hesitation he turned back to watch where he was going.
Cioffi shook his head and smiled gently. “It was such a long time ago.”
I waited for more, the self-cleansing confession, but he lapsed into silence and studied our joined hands, bobbing chest-high before him. I noticed his false beard was beginning to peel away at the temple. I let a few minutes elapse, but nothing happened. Normally, I might have left it at that-a tentative beginning on which later conversation could be based. But the self-defense line was irresistible. Of all the possibilities that occurred to me while I had stared at the photos of Pam Stark’s bound and strangled body, that one had never even flickered.
“How was it self-defense?”
“To keep Teicher in line.” There was a small pop from behind me, as from a champagne cork sprung from far, far away. Simultaneously, a red dot appeared in the middle of Cioffi’s forehead. He raised his free, mittened hand to it in astonishment and silently toppled backward off his stretcher, landing at Katz’s feet.
“Down,” McNaughton shouted. “Everybody down.”
Both stretcher-bearers dropped like stones, grappling for their sidearms. McNaughton let off two booming rounds from his shotgun. Only Katz and I remained standing, staring at each other as if frozen in time. His left arm and leg were splattered with red and there was a small pink lump of something stuck to his cheek. He looked down the length of his body to his boot, where most of Cioffi’s head rested sleepily. The face, aside from the hole, looked normal enough, but from a point behind his ear, the skull’s contour lost its definition. It looked soft, deflated, and it pumped blood onto Katz’s snowy boot with a rapidly decreasing rhythm.
“I said get down, you stupid bastards.”
I looked at McNaughton, spread-eagled and half-buried, and then I glanced over my shoulder. The mesmerizing, shimmering wall of falling white snow was as impenetrable as ever. I took a couple of steps into it and sensed, more than saw, a small white rectangle detach itself from its surroundings. It was a sheet, propped up by two stakes, looking like one half of a dissected pup tent. I looked over its top at the trampled snow behind it.
“He’s gone.”
I heard some swearing behind me as McNaughton and his two troopers regained their footing and composure. I also heard Katz throwing up.
McNaughton shuffled up next to me, his face red with fury.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a blind.”
“I know what the fuck it is. Oh, Jesus. What a fucking mess. How the hell?”
