As for the other issue, the more important one, Brynn now put her arm around Michelle's shoulders. "There's one thing you have to understand. Whether you asked them here or not made no difference. Whoever killed Emma and Steve was a professional, hired to murder her. If it wasn't tonight it would've been next week. You had nothing to do with that."
"You think?"
"I do, yes."
The girl wasn't completely convinced. Brynn knew that guilt has a complex DNA; it doesn't need to be purebred to be virulent. But Michelle seemed to take some comfort in Brynn's words. "I just wish I could turn back the clock."
Isn't that a prayer for every day? Brynn thought.
Michelle sighed. "I'm sorry I lost it. I shouldn't've screamed."
"I don't think we have to worry. They're miles away, in the bottom of the ravine. They couldn't hear a thing."
GRAHAM BOYD WAS
pulled from his stew of thoughts about his wife when he heard the distinctive sound of the engine in his F150 start up. "Somebody's stealing the truck." He stared at his mother-in-law and instinctively slapped his pants pocket, felt his set of keys.
How? he wondered. In the shows Anna watched, Matlock and Magnum, P.I., everybody was hot-wiring cars. He didn't think you could anymore.
But when he saw the deadbolt on the kitchen door open and that the spare keys he kept on the hook were gone, he knew. "Jesus, not this. Not now."
"I'll call the sheriff," Anna said.
"No," Graham shouted. "It's okay."
He ran outside.
The truck was backing up against the gardening shed to turn around so the driver could head out, hood first, down the narrow driveway. It tapped into the corrugated metal with a loud bang. Not much damage, none to the truck. The driver slammed the transmission into drive.
Waving his hands like a traffic cop, Graham walked to the passenger window, which was open. Joey looked straight at him with a fierce expression.
Graham said, "Shut off the engine. Get out of the truck."
"No."
"Joey. Do it now. This minute."
"You can't make me. I'm going to look for Mom."
"Out of the car. Now."
"No."
"There are people doing that. Tom Dahl, some deputies. She'll be fine."
"You keep saying that!" he shouted. "But how do you know?"
True, Graham thought.
He saw the boy's edgy eyes, his firm grip on the wheel. He wasn't short--his father was well over six feet--but he was skinny and looked tiny in the big seat.
"I'm going." He still couldn't make the turn down the driveway so he eased forward, tapped a trash can and backed up again, this time judging correctly; he stopped before he hit the shed. He straightened the wheels toward the road and put the truck in forward once more.
"Joey. No. We don't even know where she is." Saying this seemed like a retreat. He shouldn't be arguing from logic. He was commander-in-chief.
Instinct, remember.
"Lake Mondac."
"Shut the engine off. Get out of the truck." Should he reach in for the keys? What if the boy's foot slipped off the brake? One of Graham's workers had been badly injured reaching into a moving truck, just like this, trying to grab the shifter when the driver forgot to engage it. Our bodies are no match for two tons of steel and detonating gasoline.
He glanced at the seat. Jesus. The boy had a pellet gun--Graham recognized the powerful break-action model. At close range it was as accurate as a .22, and as deadly to squirrels and river rats. Brynn had forbidden him to have weapons. Where had he gotten it? Stolen, Graham wondered.
"Joey! Now!" Graham snapped. "You can't do anything. Your mother'll be home soon. And she'd be furious if you weren't here."
Another retreat in the be-the-parent-in-control game.
"No, she won't. Something's wrong. I know something's wrong." The boy let up on the brake and the vehicle began to roll forward.
And, not even thinking, Graham ran in front of the vehicle and stood there, hands on the hood.
"Graham!" Anna called from the porch. "No. Don't make a war out of it."
And he thought, no, it's time somebody did make it a war.
"Get out of that truck!"
"I'm going to find Mom!"
The only thing keeping him alive was a twelve-year-old's untied running shoe on the pedal of brakes that had needed servicing for a year. "No, you're not. Shut the engine off, Joey. I'm not going to tell you again." When Graham was a child, that was all his father had needed to say to get him to comply, though the offenses back then were things like failure to take out the trash or neglecting his homework.
"I'm going!"
The truck lurched forward a foot.
Graham gasped but didn't move.
If you move, he told himself, you lose.
Though his mind was also running through the places he could leap if the boy floored the accelerator. He didn't think he'd make it in time.
"You're not going!" the boy raged. "Are you?"
He was inclined to say, It's not our job to go. Let the police do their thing. They're the experts. But instead he said calmly, "Get out of the truck."
Aware that his instincts might be about to kill him.
"Are you going to go find her?" He muttered something else. Graham thought one word was "coward."
"Joey."
"Get out of the way!" the boy screamed. His eyes were wild.
For a moment--an eternal moment--Graham believed the boy was going to hit the gas.
Then Joey grimaced, looked down at the shifter and shoved it into park. He climbed out, reaching for the gun.
"No. Leave it."
Graham walked up to the boy and put his arm around his shoulders. "Come on, Joey," he said kindly. "Let's get some--" The boy, who seemed furious at this defeat, shrugged the gesture off and stormed into the house, past his grandmother. Saying not a word.
AFTER A COMPASS
reading, the women continued through a portion of the park less entangled with shrubbery and ground cover than the area they'd left behind, around Lake Mondac. There were patches of clearing--grass and meadow. And, increasingly, imposing rock formations pushed up by glaciers millions of years ago. They walked in silence now.
A quarter mile from the last compass check Brynn was about to ask Michelle how her ankle was feeling. Instead, she said, "My husband is too."
Shocking herself.
Did I really say that? she wondered. My God, did I really?
Michelle glanced at her, frowning. "Your husband?"
"Just like yours." Brynn inhaled the cold, fragrant air. "Graham's having an affair."
"Oh, God. I'm sorry. Are you separated? Getting a divorce?"
After a pause she said, "No. He doesn't know I found out."
Then she regretted speaking. This was absurd, Brynn thought. Just shut up and keep walking. But she wanted to tell the story. Desperately wanted to. Which was curious because she hadn't shared it with anyone else. Not her mother, not her best friend Katie from the Fire Department or Kim from the parent-teacher organization.
In fact, she supposed it was significant that only here, in these extreme circumstances, with a complete stranger, could she talk about what had been tormenting her for months. Part of her hoped Michelle would respond with a few words of sympathy, that the subject would dwindle and they could get back to completing their trek. But the young woman responded with genuine interest: "Tell me. Please. What's the story?"
Brynn arranged her thoughts. Finally she said, "I was married to a state trooper. Keith Marshall." She glanced at Michelle to see if the name had registered.
It didn't seem to. Brynn continued, "We met at a State Police training seminar in Madison." She remembered seeing the tall, broad-shouldered man standing in front of the table that served as their desk.
Keith had glanced her way with a lingering gaze that confessed he certainly liked her looks; but she hadn't really caught his interest until her turn to ru
n a mock hostage negotiation, which the psychologist running the exercise said was perfect. What really got his attention, though, seemed to be the Glock field-stripping and reassembly test. She had her slide mounted and clip loaded while the runner-up was still struggling to get the locking block pin back into the frame.
"That's pretty romantic," Michelle offered.
What Brynn had thought too.
After the seminar they'd had coffee and discussed small-town policing, and small-town dating. He'd winced once and she'd asked if he was all right. Then he explained that he'd just gotten back from a medical; he'd been shot in a real hostage rescue, which nonetheless ended happily--for everybody but the hostage takers.
"The HT's didn't quite make it."
Oh, that incident? she'd thought, recalling the bank robbery gone bad, two armed tweakers--meth heads--inside a branch of Piny Grove Savings with customers and employees. The windows were too thick for a safe sniper shot, so Keith had walked around the barricade and through the front door, holding his weapon at his side. Not even crouching to present a smaller target, he'd shot one in the head, took a round in the side and in the vest from the other one, then killed him too, through the kiosk he tried to hide behind.
The HTs didn't quite make it.
Keith had recovered quickly from his minor injuries. He was reprimanded--it had to be done--for the Bruce Willis/ Clint Eastwood procedure. But nobody had treated his disobedience very seriously and, of course, the media had lapped it up like a kitten gorging on milk.
Brynn made him tell her the story in depth. She was fascinated. Too fascinated, she'd decided later, utterly won over by the tough, quiet man.
Their first date involved a horror movie, Mexican food and lengthy discussions of calibers, body armor and high-speed chases.
They were married eleven months after that.
"So you married a cowboy?"
Brynn nodded.
Michelle added with a grimace, "I married my father, my therapist says.... Anyway, what happened?"
Ah, what happened? Brynn managed to refrain from stroking her deformed jaw but couldn't stop a compulsive memory: Keith, his face flipping instantly from rage to shock, stumbling back under the impact of the bullet, gripping his chest, as their brightly lit kitchen filled with the pungent smell of gun smoke from her service Glock.
"Brynn?" Michelle persisted softly. "What happened?"
Finally she whispered, "Things just didn't work out.... So, there I was, single again. I had Joey and my job--my mother was living with us then, so there was a built-in babysitter. I loved work. Had no plans to get married again. But a couple years ago I met Graham. Bought some plants from his landscaping company. They didn't work out too well and I came back for more. He told me what I was doing wrong and then asked me out. I said yes. He was funny, he was nice. He wanted children but his first wife hadn't. We went out for a while. And I found it was really comfortable. He proposed. I accepted."
"Comfortable's nice."
"Oh, real nice. No fights. Home every night."
"But...?"
Now she was touching her jaw. She lowered her hand.
Brynn grimaced. "A little time goes by and suddenly I'm working more assignments, longer hours, tougher jobs. Lot of domestics. And when I wasn't doing that I'd spend time with Joey.... He'd had some problems at school. That's an issue, I don't know if you heard? Children of law enforcers?"
Michelle shook her head.
"Statistically more behavior problems, psychological issues. Joey keeps getting into scrapes at school. And he can be a little reckless--he skateboards like a speed-demon. So I was focusing on my job and on Joey, and next thing I know Graham's started going out to regular poker games."
"But they weren't really poker games."
"Sometimes they were. But sometimes he wouldn't go for the whole game. Sometimes he didn't show up at all."
One thing she didn't share with Michelle was that when Tom Dahl asked her to drive to Lake Mondac earlier her first thought was: If I go, Graham can't leave tonight. Can't see her.
Thinking too: He didn't answer his phone when she'd called from the car; had he gone anyway?
"You're sure?" Michelle asked.
"Oh, there was an eyewitness. Saw them together."
"Do you trust 'im?"
"Pretty much. It was me." Brynn could picture the scene now. Outside of Humboldt. Driving in a detective's car to a briefing on a meth lab situation. She'd seen Graham standing next to a blonde, tall, outside the Albemarle Motel. She was nodding, smiling. Brynn remembered it seemed like a nice smile. He was talking to her, head down, outside the motel, when he'd told Brynn that he was going to be twenty miles away on a job in Lancaster. At dinner that night he'd looked her in the eye and told her about the drive up to that idyllic vacation town, how the job had gone--offering a liar's saturation bombing of too many details. Brynn knew all about that; she'd run plenty of traffic stops.
Seeing them at the motel, she'd wondered: Was it after or before they'd been to the room?
"What'd you say to him?"
"Nothing."
"No?"
"I don't know why exactly. Didn't want to rock the boat for Joey. Splitting with Keith. Then another divorce. Couldn't do that to him. And he's such a good person, Graham is."
"Aside from cheating," Michelle said darkly.
Brynn smiled wanly. And echoed her earlier comment. "It's not all his fault. Really.... I'm pretty good at being a deputy. I'm not so good at this family stuff."
"I think people ought to take more than a blood test when they get married. There ought to be a two-day exam. Like the bar."
Brynn felt like she was in a movie, a comedy in which two sisters separated young are reunited: one who'd gone to live the high life in the city, one off to the country. And then they find themselves going on some trip together and learning that at heart they're virtually the same.
Michelle paused. Then pointed ahead and to the left. "Careful. There's a steep drop-off that way."
They steered the safer route. Brynn realized that for the first time that night Michelle was walking in the lead...and she was content to let her.
"THERE THEY ARE."
Compton Lewis touched Hart's good arm and pointed through a gap in the trees. Two, three hundred yards away they could just make out in the moonlight the backs of two figures dressed in dark clothes. One limping along, using what looked like a pool cue for a walking stick.
Hart nodded. His heart tapped faster, seeing their quarry in clear view at last, not quite in range but close. And completely unsuspecting.
The men began to move toward their targets.
The Trickster had been at work again.
As they'd stood at the top of the cliff, the bloody ledge below, Hart had been debating fiercely with himself: Had the women really tried to climb down the rock face and make for the ranger station?
Or had they continued along the Joliet Trail?
Finally he'd decided that Brynn was faking. If either one of them had actually fallen and been hurt she would've done whatever she could to hide the bloodstain with dirt or mud. Leaving it exposed was an attempt to fool them, get them to head to the station.
Hart had turned the trick against them, though. He wanted Brynn to think she'd been successful, lull them into slowing down and growing careless. He didn't know for sure if they'd have any view of the cliff face, but in case they did, he'd decided to sacrifice one of the flashlights. He'd tied it to a rope made out of Lewis's cut-up undershirt and dangled it from a branch. The wind eased it back and forth close to the ledge, giving the impression they were searching for a way to climb down to the forest floor and pursue the women to the station.
The craftsman had surveyed his handiwork and he was pleased.
Then he and Lewis had continued fast over the trail.
But as to where the women had actually gone--that was up for speculation. It was likely they'd continued on the trail, which according to the GPS kept north
east for a ways--through nearly fifteen miles of woods. They wouldn't have gone that way. Somewhere north of here they'd have to make a decision: they could go left off the trail, west, bypass the ranger station and find the road that led eventually to the county highway. Or they might go north, aiming for the Snake River, which would lead them either west to the interstate or east to the town of Point of Rocks.
But thanks to the scream--the wailing voice a few minutes before--he knew that they were making for the river. The earlier shout--from the intersection by the shelter--had been faked, of course, like the screams when the men were shooting at the canoe. But the second howling was real, Hart knew, since the women believed the men had climbed down the cliff and were miles away.
Hart and Lewis had left the trail too and moved in the general direction of the sound, picking their way slowly to avoid noisy leaves and branches, as well as the knife-sharp thorns and the steep drop-offs.
As for where the women actually were in this mess of woods north of the trail, they couldn't say--until they found a clue. Lewis stopped, pointing to something white, lying on the ground. Small but very bright in the sea of blacks.
They approached it very slowly. Hart didn't think it was a trap--couldn't imagine what it would be--but he didn't trust anything about Brynn now.
The Trickster...
"Cover me. I'll check it out. Don't shoot unless I'm about to get shot or stuck. I don't want to give us away."
A nod.
Hart, crouching, moved in close until he was about three feet away from the object. It was a white tube about eighteen inches long and three inches wide. One end bulged out. He prodded the object with a branch. When nothing happened he looked around. Lewis was scanning the nearby scenery. He gave a thumbs-up to Hart.
The man bent down and picked it up. Lewis joined him.
"A sock with a billiard ball inside."
"That was theirs?"
"Has to be. It's clean and dry."
"Shit. One of 'em was going to use that to clobber us. Man, that'd break some bone."
Brynn, Hart thought.
"What's that?" Lewis asked.
Hart looked at him, eyebrow raised.
"What'd you say? I missed it."
"Nothing. Didn't say a thing." Had he said her name aloud?
They'd continued straight, going almost due north, just now their prey had come into view.