Legally Dead Read online

  The man never moved as Venturi came up behind him. He turned him over in the water, wrapped one arm around his neck and under the armpit, then saw blood on his arm, swirling in the water, everywhere. The man’s throat was cut.

  Gators roamed the lake. Venturi knew the creatures normally fed at night but were hungry now. The drought had shrunk their hunting habitat during mating season, forcing them to forage farther and hunt longer for food and sex. He had seen them here before. He saw one now.

  An alligator at least twelve feet long had been sunning itself on the muddy shore just a moment ago. Now it slid swiftly into the water about a hundred feet away.

  Scout was also in the lake, gamely dog-paddling behind him. Venturi tightened his grip on the man and shouted at Scout to get out of the water: “Go! Go! Go!” He swam as hard as he could, using a sidestroke, hip pressed against the man’s back to keep him above the surface so he could breathe, if he had any breath left in him.

  Behind him, a muffled splash signaled the entrance of a second, slightly smaller gator that came from nowhere, gliding smoothly toward them at a thirty-degree angle.

  “Go!” he shouted, desperation in his voice. The dog, a few feet away, was swimming toward him. Suddenly obedient, Scout turned, and began paddling back toward shore with Venturi right behind him.

  As his feet touched the mucky shallows he caught the stranger under the arms to drag him toward solid ground. Scout was already ashore, at the water’s edge, barking fiercely at the gators.

  Making it out of the lake didn’t mean they were safe. Surprisingly fast on dry land, gators often attack, then drag their prey into the water. They kill pets, wildlife, and people who venture too close to lakes and canal banks.

  He knew he couldn’t outrun them. Struggling to gain purchase on dry land, he slipped in the mud. The man, a dead weight, nearly fell from his arms. The gators were just a few feet behind. Venturi saw their flat reptilian eyes and their upper teeth. The stranger might be dead already. Should he save him, or the dog? If the man was still alive, he had made his own choice, put himself in this position. At least Scout was alive. So far. A barking thirty-five-pound mutt would have no chance at all against a hungry four-hundred-and-fifty-pound alligator.

  He rolled the man up and out of the water, then ran for his gun, tucked into one of his boots twenty-five feet away. Then he saw something better. A heavy piece of wood, a four-foot-long branch from an Australian pine. Venturi disliked shooting an animal. He hated to kill these prehistoric-looking reptiles unless he had no choice—humans were the intruders here after all. And gunshots might attract a forest ranger or a deputy on patrol. He did not feel comfortable identifying himself to law enforcement at the moment.

  The first, bigger gator splashed out of the water and paused for a millisecond, as though deciding whether to go for the motionless body on the ground or the furiously barking dog, an annoying moving target. He went for the dog.

  Venturi advanced, swung with all his might, smashed the clublike weapon across the gator’s snout, and let it go. The startled creature hissed, then splintered the thick branch between his teeth with a loud crunch.

  The second gator paused, giving Venturi time to drag the stranger to his boat. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he called to the still-barking dog. Scout scrambled into the boat with them, shaking water off his coat, panting, and glancing indignantly over his shoulder.

  If the dog didn’t realize it before, he knew it now—he wasn’t in New Hampshire anymore.

  The man sprawled in the bottom of the boat coughed, then snorted. He was bleeding but still alive. Venturi checked his airway, found it clear, then turned his head to one side. A surprising amount of water gushed from his nose and mouth.

  He appeared to be in his forties, medium height, and slender, at about 145 pounds. His hands, though bruised and scratched, were soft and pale, not those of a laborer. He looked like someone who worked indoors at a sedentary job.

  Venturi had no doubt that he had interrupted a suicide attempt. The man’s wrists were slashed, as well. The cuts were not hesitation marks, but he had done it wrong and the wounds were superficial. He had also stabbed himself in the chest, but his breastbone had apparently deflected the knife thrust. The throat wound was bloody, but if the blade had penetrated his carotid artery he’d already be dead. The head wound bled freely, as head wounds do, but the bullet had only grazed his scalp. Venturi decided this was the most inept suicide attempt he’d ever seen. Yet it was no cry for help or bid for attention. The man was serious. Dead serious. He never intended to be found.

  Who is he? Venturi wondered. Few suicides travel deep into the wilds to dispose of their own bodies, which was exactly what this man had done. Bleeding from self-inflicted injuries, he had plunged into an alligator-infested lake. He clearly intended to disappear without a trace and would have succeeded, had Venturi not stumbled upon the scene.

  Keeping an eye on the gators just offshore, Venturi checked the campsite. There had been a small fire at the center. Papers had been burned, and the fire stirred until all had been incinerated and reduced to ash. Even the FBI lab would find it impossible to resurrect evidence from it.

  The clues were few. He was a Marlboro man. He’d left a Bic lighter and two of the brand’s flip-top boxes, one empty, the other half full. He was neat. The empty pack held a small pen knife and a pair of fingernail clippers.

  It appeared as though he had been there for hours, maybe days, trying to find the strength to complete his plan.

  He had left two untouched sandwiches, both American cheese on white bread wrapped in plastic, and a half pint of blended whiskey. The bottle was empty, the final toast consumed.

  It must have been to bolster his courage. It was not enough to anesthetize him.

  Venturi found the man’s shoes, a bent steak knife, and the gun, a small-caliber two-shot Derringer in the shallows at the lake’s edge. The gun was empty. No trace of anyone else.

  He went back to the boat.

  The moaning stranger struggled to sit up, making his wounds bleed more. His hair was dark brown, his eyes light brown. He looked oddly familiar.

  Venturi opened his first-aid kit and began to check the man’s injuries. The first shot was probably a test to see if the gun worked. When he fired the second, his hand must have been shaking.

  Venturi wrapped a Curlex compression dressing around the man’s left wrist, tight enough to stop the bleeding but not enough to cut off circulation. The patient tried to jerk his arm away.

  “No! Don’t do that. Let me die,” he pleaded in English.

  “You’ll be all right,” Venturi assured him. “I’ll take you to the hospital. They’ll fix you up, then you can talk to a shrink.”

  “No way!” Tears mingled with the water glistening on his face and dripping from his hair.

  “Way,” Venturi said firmly. “What’s your problem?”

  “I’m having a bad day.”

  “Better than no day at all. You just came damn close to being gator food. Not a good way to go, man. Life can always get better. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary situation.”

  The man seemed about to laugh but winced instead, as Venturi cleaned his scalp wound with a Betadine-soaked swab. “My life is over,” he blurted, “dead in the water. The way I should be. No hospital. I can’t go there. Word will get out. The vultures will be all over me.”

  Venturi gazed at him curiously. “You mean the press?”

  The man nodded, gasping. “Please,” he said, despair in his voice, “just go away. Leave me here.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  He struggled feebly to hurl himself out of the boat. Venturi easily restrained him, held him down with one hand, and warned him to stop or he’d be handcuffed.

  “You’re a cop?”

  “Nope. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have handcuffs.”

  The man maintained a defeated silence nearly all the way back to Venturi’s place. He sat hunched over acro
ss from Scout, who watched him, his expression grave.

  “I had a dog like that once,” the man mumbled, his voice breaking.

  Venturi nodded. “You were lucky.”

  “He’s all wet. Did he pull me out of the water?”

  “No. He’s not Lassie.” Venturi smiled at the private joke. “He was too busy barking at the gators that were about to drag you under.”

  “You should have let ’em.” His voice sounded hollow. “My life is broken and can’t be fixed.”

  “Anything can be fixed,” Venturi lied, acutely aware of so many things that never can be fixed, like the lost girls in New Hampshire. “You wanted by the law?”

  “No.” The man reacted with umbrage at the suggestion. “I’ve never been arrested. I wish it was that simple. Then I could surrender, do time, and it would end.”

  “What’s your name?” Venturi couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he’d seen this man before.

  “When this gets out…” The thin voice trailed off. “A lot of people would be happy to hear I was dead,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction.”

  Venturi had planned to drop the man off at a hospital emergency room without becoming involved. But if he did, what would stop the guy from boarding an elevator to the roof and jumping?

  He couldn’t let that happen after all the trouble he’d gone to to keep him alive. And he was curious.

  The man seemed lucid and was in no danger of dying, but they were both in sticky, dirty, unpleasantly wet clothes. He docked the boat, helped the man up the bank, and took him into the house instead.

  The man’s shirt and jeans were way too big, not even close to his correct size. His shoes were also too big by several sizes. Yet he did not appear to be homeless. He sounded educated, had good teeth, and seemed to be healthy.

  The man showered. He had no tattoos or old scars that Venturi could see, but scores of mosquito, spider, and red ant bites had increased his torment. Venturi gave him some of his clean clothes that were also too long and too large on the smaller man.

  Venturi checked the pockets of the man’s oversized garments, found nothing, and tossed them into the washing machine. He’d gone into the Glades to think, hoping to sort out his future. Quiet time close to nature had always comforted him. Instead, he’d encountered gunshots, blood in the water, and jeopardy.

  What the hell is this? Venturi wondered. The man could be a serial killer who couldn’t live with himself and decided to disappear, leaving his fate an unsolved mystery. Half a dozen possible scenarios crossed his mind. He wanted the real story.

  He poured the man a shot of bourbon and heated some of the bright yellow homemade chicken soup from a quart bottle Luz had sent home with him the night before. Danny swore the rich broth cured colds and hangovers faster than aspirin or Advil.

  They sat across from each other at the rough-hewn wooden table.

  “Okay,” Venturi said calmly, as the man scratched his multiple mosquito bites between sips of soup. “What’s up?”

  “I used to work for NASA,” he said, resigned. He paused as though expecting a response. When none came, he continued. “When I was four years old I told everybody I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up. By high school I knew it was impossible. I could never pass the physical—a heart murmur, allergies, and so on—so I focused on the next best thing. I studied computer sciences and electrical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineering and actually wound up working for NASA. The next best thing to that childhood dream was to support the astronauts and their missions.”

  In a sudden flash of revelation, Venturi knew exactly who the man was and where he had seen him: on television, and in newspapers and magazines.

  The man caught his look of recognition.

  “That’s right.” He nodded. “It was me. I’m the one who killed the astronauts. That’s what they say. The whole world believes it. Even my wife believed it. My kids, too. I lost my job, my reputation, my family and friends.

  “The press convicted me in the court of public opinion and will never stop hounding me. Ever.”

  Venturi remembered the two veteran astronauts killed in a freak accident and the man blamed and accused of trying to cover up his mistake, or worse. The two, part of the crew on a mission to the space station, died during a routine repair procedure.

  A 125-foot mechanical arm, attached to the shuttle and stored along the hinge line of the payload bay doors, malfunctioned and swung wildly, severing the tether of the astronaut working on it. Then it slammed into the second spacewalker, knocking off his helmet, splitting his space suit, killing him instantly.

  The first man floated free in space, his radio still operational. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he blurted. The shuttle crew, Houston, and the entire world heard his last words: “Damn it, Lyle!”

  He never uttered another word, although he apparently remained alive and conscious for some time. A rescue attempt failed. Plans for a recovery mission were still under way.

  Lyle was the engineer who designed a virtual-reality simulation used to train astronauts in such repairs. He had taken them through the procedures in a wind tunnel, in space suits, over and over.

  Now that man, Lyle Gates, a lifelong NASA employee, sat in Venturi’s kitchen and explained how he had become a scapegoat, damned by a hero’s last words, and blamed by coworkers and superiors for a freak accident that was not his fault.

  During the chaotic press coverage that followed the accident, coworkers pointed fingers, made accusations. The national media anticipated an indictment. But it never happened. Gates was forced off the job, his reputation ruined. Divorced by his wife, shunned by family and friends, the press continued to hound him.

  The goal of every major news organization was to land “the get,” the interview in which Gates finally confessed to acts of carelessness, incompetence, or downright malice against the heroes he saw soar to heights that he could never achieve.

  He explained it all to Venturi.

  While he was training the lost astronaut, he had carefully demonstrated the proper technique and warned repeatedly against overtightening a mechanism, that if stripped, would loosen and cause the arm to swing the other way.

  “He made a mistake,” Gates said. “When he said my name, he remembered our sessions and realized what he’d done wrong. He knew he’d been properly instructed. I don’t believe he intended to damn me with his last words, but that’s how it sounded. He knew he screwed up but didn’t want to admit it to the world. So he never spoke again. That wasn’t the legacy he wanted to leave.”

  Gates said he had urged more training sessions before the mission. But none of his memos were found.

  “My mistake was that I devoted too much time and energy to the job. I neglected my family and pissed off coworkers who were unwilling to make the same sacrifices.

  “But to me it wasn’t a job, it was a mission, it was my identity,” he said softly. “I loved working for the program. The men and women who venture into space were my heroes. I would have died to protect them.”

  His words had the ring of truth.

  “I think the best way to waste your life,” he said, “is to go to work for a government agency.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” Venturi said. “If what you say is true, it’s a damn shame the spacewalker didn’t man up to his mistake. But surely, with your background, there are other lines of work you could pursue outside the space program.”

  “There are. I could design video games, software, virtual-reality tours. I’m interested in biochemistry as well, specifically the field of nutrition. But they won’t let me.”

  Every time he found a new job, word leaked out and the media pack invaded, disrupting business until he was fired.

  “I’m more hated than O. J. Simpson, who is still treated like a hero by some people. The only person I ever hurt was myself.

  “I was investigated by everybody from a grand jury right up to a U.S.
Senate committee. But I was never indicted. There was nothing to indict me for, not a single shred of evidence. But some things you never live down. Life isn’t long enough.” He finished his soup and swallowed a small, tentative sip of the whiskey.

  His expression made it clear that he didn’t even like the taste.

  “What’s with your clothes?” Venturi asked. “Why are they all too big?”

  Gates smiled ruefully. “When I ran out of money I told my landlady I was moving to Chicago. I didn’t want to be reported missing. Then I traded my clothes and shoes with some homeless men who live under the MacArthur Causeway bridge. I remembered reading that police can often identify human remains by the labels and the sizes of their clothes, belts, and shoes. They release the information to the public and hope someone will recognize it. If my remains were found, I wanted the information they released to be all wrong.”

  Damn, Venturi thought again, he seriously wanted to disappear.

  “How did you get way out there? I didn’t see a car.”

  “A small, flat-bottomed boat. I scuttled it in another lake about two miles east, then slogged over to where you found me. It took a couple hours. Didn’t see another soul. I thought it would work,” he said, voice flat.

  “It almost did.”

  “Sorry to be so much trouble.” He gingerly fingered the scalp wound, then studied his bandaged wrists.

  “I won’t apologize for ruining your plans.”

  They talked till dark. Gates, still queasy from his near-death experience, wasn’t hungry but didn’t refuse more soup. Venturi heated it for him and, because he didn’t want to stay up all night to protect the man from himself, dissolved two Ambien in the bubbling broth.

  He showed him to a guest bedroom with an adjoining bath after removing anything Gates could use to hurt himself.

  “I have personal issues of my own to work out,” he said, “and I’ve also had run-ins with the press, so do me a favor, Lyle. Don’t do anything crazy in my house tonight. Get some rest. Things always look better in the morning.”