Pity Him Afterwards

They burst into town, across the stunned intersection at Broad Avenue and onto Circle North, and Mike took the dirt turn-off on two wheels. The car shuddered to a stop at the foot of the pier where Dave Rand already had the launch’s engines growling.

It was not a new launch, but Dave kept it painted and shining, the lettering crisp on its cabin. Through local ordinance, it was the only motor-powered craft allowed on this lake. Sondgard and Mike ran out on the pier and jumped onto the launch, and Dave shouted at them from the wheel to loose the lines.

After the mad scramble to get to the launch, the next hour and a half was slow and dragging anticlimax. Dave roared the launch down to the farther end of the lake, where the madman had gone in, and they crossed back and forth, back and forth, searching the shore through binoculars, searching this area of the lake. They didn’t concern themselves with the island; it was too far away for a man to have swum it.

At four o’clock, the first state police cars appeared at their end of the lake, and Sondgard through his binoculars saw Captain Garrett standing at the water’s edge, near the Lounge, waving to him. He turned to Dave. “Go on in to shore.”

They couldn’t get the launch in to the short pier where the theater’s rowboat had stood, but there was a longer pier behind the Lounge itself. Dave eased the launch in next to it, and Sondgard and Mike threw the lines to two uniformed state policemen, who held them while Captain Garrett came aboard.

He was a bluff and hearty man, invariably cheerful of manner, surrounded by an aura of fantastic patience and competence. He shook Sondgard’s hand and said, “You’ve got a rough one this time, eh, Eric?”

“Do you want to hear it now?”

“If it’ll help.”

Sondgard told it quickly, sketching in what the madman had done, and what he had done in retaliation, outlining his own blunders as clearly as possible. But Captain Garrett immediately reassured him, saying, “Don’t go putting on a hair shirt, Eric. You were up against a lunatic. A normal killer now, somebody who kills for a reason, you can almost always track one of those fellows down. But a lunatic now, that’s a horse of a different color. I think you did just fine. You flushed him out in a day, didn’t you? Couldn’t ask for better than that.”

“Two people died who shouldn’t have died.”

“You thinking about that fingerprint? Now, don’t go putting a lot of hope in one lone fingerprint off a cake of soap. Just listen to me, I’m making up poems. But take my word for it, Eric, that little slip with the soap could have happened to anybody. And it probably wasn’t a print worth a damn anyway. Soap’s too soft, it blurs the outlines.”

“Rod McGee is dead,” Sondgard said bitterly.

“That boy would probably of been killed anyway. Him or somebody else. He got killed because you flushed this Forrest fella out. Now, if you hadn’t of flushed him out, how many people would of been killed? Maybe this same Rod McGee, plus a whole lot more. Don’t you go getting mad at yourself, Eric, you did this just fine. I can’t think of anything I’d of done different, and there’s one or two excellent things you did I wouldn’t of even thought of.”

Sondgard remained unconvinced, but he let the conversation lapse because they were wasting time. They agreed that Captain Garrett would take charge of the search on shore, and Sondgard would stay on the launch. Forrest had undoubtedly crawled onto land somewhere by now, but he might just try heading back into the water again if Captain Garrett’s men got too close to him.

They spent a little while setting up a radio connection between the launch and one of the state police cars, through the nearest state police substation and Joyce Ravenfield back at the office. Then Captain Garrett left the launch, and they headed out into the lake again.

Four o’clock. Four-fifteen. Four-thirty.

A flash of color kept itching the corner of Sondgard’s eye. A flash of color, an irritant. He kept trying to concentrate his attention on the shoreline and the near water, and this flash of orange color kept intruding on him, until all at once his mind was full of it.

Orange. A bright orange sail out beyond the madman’s bobbing head, when Mike had been shooting and missing. And now, a bright orange sail...

He turned, squinting, peering for it. Down by the island. Stopped there, down by the island.

It didn’t have to mean a thing. Somebody out for a sail, and taking a break on the island.

But the madman had disappeared. And that orange sail had been down at this end of the lake before.

Sondgard hesitated. But one more blunder now, and he didn’t know what he’d do with himself. He turned to Dave. “Go on over to the island,” he said. “Let’s just take a look at the island.”