When they call me out for my hearing, I fight to keep my head above the tide of utter despair that threatens to engulf me, the impulse to panic and fight and run. I think I’m succeeding at that too.
Until I’m not. Because the small courtroom is packed to the gills with reporters. I should have realized that would happen; no doubt they were given the heads-up, and ever since Melvin’s trial my name is instant news catnip. I’m dealing with that, or at least I think I am, until the sight of J. B. Hall’s friendly middle-aged face takes my knees out from under me. Relief hits so hard it feels abusive. I sway, and the deputy puts a hand on my shoulder to steady me. She’s a big woman, and she gives me a concerned look. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I tell her, though it’s true only in the broadest sense. She takes me through the wooden gate to the defendant’s table, where my lawyer is standing up studying a file folder. He’s a round African American man with triple chins and an old suit, and he greets me professionally and seems damn competent. I’ll get through this. I’ve been through this before, charged as Melvin’s accomplice. Charged, and acquitted. I survived that, with a packed courtroom full of shouting, angry people beaming real hate at me. I can certainly do this.
The fact that I want to curl up in a ball and scream uncontrollably that I have to go through this again is beside the point. I put on my game face and nod to my lawyer like I’m a pro, and he shakes my hand. I sit. He does, too, a little abruptly. “This should go fast,” he says. “They’re arraigning you for felony assault. I assume you’re pleading . . .”
“Not guilty.”
“Okay, that keeps it simple. Anything you need to tell me?”
“It’s total bullshit.”
“Good enough.”
I turn to look at J. B. Hall, who’s claimed the seat right behind me. She looks as sharp as I remember: an older pale woman, dressed in an effortlessly intimidating pantsuit. No makeup, a blunt haircut, and everything about her radiates competence and power.
She leans forward. There are journalists on either side of her, but she cheerfully ignores them.
“Hey,” she says. “So. I was hoping this would get dismissed before we got to this point, but the DA is a prick and he wants to coast on your notoriety while he can. You all right?”
I’m not, but I nod. “Thanks for coming,” I say.
“No problem. Soon as this is done, I’ll get you out of here.” We’re talking in low tones; even though the two reporters are leaning in and trying to get a listen—discreetly, of course—the hubbub of the room works in our favor.
“What about Carol? Do they have her in custody?”
“I’m afraid not. They got her statement, and as soon as their backs were turned, she ghosted. The address she gave them is a liquor store, by the way. They know they’ve been had on this one. And forensics is casting serious shade on her entire story.”
“And they’re still doing it?”
She shrugs. “Our fearless DA here is eager to get some press attention before the upcoming election cycle. He’d like to be known as tough on crime, and it helps that your connection with a serial killer always gets attention. It’s just politics. My information is that they’ll drop the charges in twenty-four hours. Quietly. It’ll be buried on the back pages.”
I’d like to reply with what I think of that, but it’s too late. The judge enters, we all rise, and the dry proceedings . . . proceed. My lawyer at least tries to argue the merits for dismissal, but it’s over fast. He knows it’s a political stunt, and in ten minutes we’re done. Bail is set at $50,000; J. B. is already headed for the clerk to pay it when I’m led away again.
It takes another hour to bust me loose into her custody, and once we’re outside and I’m breathing free air again, the shakes set in hard. I have to sit down on the closest bench. J. B. waits calmly next to me. “Hey,” she finally says. “You did good work, Gwen. It’s not your fault that you got taken by an expert. All indications are this Carol is one hell of a con artist.”
I swallow back my tide of anxiety. “Do you think there was any truth to the cult thing? That she’s on the run from them?”
“Do you?”
I don’t know why she’d fake that Bible, or wear the clothes she does, if it wasn’t on some level authentic. And how Carol, the brash con woman, seemed completely helpless at the sight of that circling RV. That’s conditioning. And terror. “Yeah, I do. It feels like she might have some thread of truth in all this. The story she told me was of a cult that operated some mobile preaching/recruitment mission out of RVs. You ever heard of anything like that? Maybe something run by a guy named Father Tom?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell, but I’ll ask around. Unfortunately, religious cults are always in style.” She slides me a sideways look. “You got anything else for me to go on?”
“Yeah.” I take a deep breath. “Got a pen?” She does. I reel off the five extra names Sam gave me last night.
“Okay, what am I looking for?”
“It might all be connected,” I tell her. J. B. looks up, frowning. “These young men also disappeared. I don’t think Remy’s the only one.”
“Lord Almighty, are you telling me that they’ve all joined this cult?”
“If they have, it might not have been under their own power,” I say. “And from what Carol said—if we can believe anything she said—they might not have survived.”
J. B. looks shaken. I feel it too. It’s like cracking open an egg and getting a flood of spiders. “I’ll look into it,” she says. “If it’s true, this may be bigger than we can handle.”
“Did you check into the nonprofit who hired us?”
“Yeah. It’s a religious group called All Saints International. It traces back to what is essentially a business park that runs an administrative service for small organizations, some of which look pretty shady to me. I don’t know they would have . . .”
Her voice fades away in my ears, because I feel a sudden snap of realization and a hot burn of anxiety. All Saints International. All those marked passages about saints. The quote in the front of the Bible. Carol saying that Remy’s with the saints.
That cannot be a coincidence. But why the hell would they hire us to investigate Remy if they’d actually taken him?
Because they know we’re not going to find him. They want to find Carol. Holy shit. We’ve been played. Carol knew someone would come looking. It wasn’t a coincidence that they’d found her at the bus station; I’d found her for them. She ran because she knew that.
Carol knows things they can’t afford to have revealed.
“Gwen?” J. B. asks, and I snap back to focus on her again. I explain my theory, and I see the grimness set into her expression when she thinks it through. “Those bastards. They used us.”
“I can’t look for Carol anymore,” I tell her. “But maybe someone else can. I can keep them focused on me. You can locate Carol and get her to safety.”
“How? She’s not about to trust me any more than you. Or anyone, as far as I can tell.”
J. B. has a point. And I don’t have an answer. It’s frustrating, and I desperately want to find out what happened to Remy, but I need to back away from Carol. At least for now.
I sigh. “Just try, okay? By the way, sorry about the bail. I appreciate it.”
“This? This is nothing. I’ve had to rescue my people from way worse situations than this. But stay out of trouble for a while, okay? This case will go away; a news cycle of coverage is all the DA’s going to need, and then he’ll quietly dismiss. I’ll dig into All Saints International a little deeper, particularly the corporate officers. Might be something there. I’ll follow up on these other cases too. But you need to get home.”
“My rental car’s still at the hotel.”
“I’ll drive you back to Stillhouse Lake, and have one of my local guys take the rental back. Deal?”
The idea of going home to my family sounds like heaven. “Deal,” I agree. “Thank you.”
> Once we’re at J. B.’s spacious sedan, she stops and opens the trunk. There’s a solid lockbox inside, and she takes it out and hands it to me, along with a set of small keys. “It’s a loaner,” she says. “Since they’re not releasing your gun back to you until the case is dismissed, and I don’t want you running around without anything. Lose it and you’re dead to me.”
She’s not kidding, and I nod. I get into the passenger seat and open the lockbox. Inside is a pretty fine Browning 9 mm, and ammunition to go with it. There’s even a belt clip holster. I prefer a shoulder holster, but I’m grateful for anything. I put it on my right side, and the weight makes tension unspool inside me.
Really need to work on that, I think. I want guns to be tools of my job, not security blankets. But with my history that’s a long, tough therapeutic road.
It’s an hour and a half to Stillhouse Lake, and we arrive after dark. I can feel weariness pulling me apart, fraying my edges, and I yawn as J. B. pulls up in the drive of the house. The lights are on, and the warmth of it makes me feel a wave of relief. Everybody’s okay. The SUV’s parked in front, so they made it back safely.
All will be well.
I thank J. B. again, and she heads back for her home in Knoxville—or the office, maybe; J. B. has a boundless amount of energy. I don’t right now. The emotional demand of enduring jail and court again sapped me dry.
When Sam opens the door, I sink into his arms and drag in a deep, shuddering breath. “Hey,” he whispers against my hair. “Hey, it’s okay. Come inside.”
I need to get it together, and I do because Lanny and Connor are there, anxiously waiting too. I hug them both. I have to swallow tears, and it tastes like blood; my throat is so raw and tight it hurts. But I smile through that and kiss them on their foreheads and tell them I love them, and I mean it with every cell in my body.
That’s when the stories start to tumble out.
“Mom, Vee ran off, and there was a man out there with a gun in the trees,” Lanny says, “and Sam went after him, and—”
It’s the casual drop of Vee that makes me hold up a hand. “Hang on,” I say. “Vee? Vera Crockett?”
“Uh . . . yeah.” Lanny’s taken aback, and I realize that Sam already knows this part. Lanny just forgot that I didn’t. I look to him, and he takes up the story.
“Turns out Vera’s been coming around and talking to Lanny,” he says. “She skated on her foster family.”
I don’t know whether to be more alarmed by Vee’s appearance here or Lanny not telling me about it. Neither one is a good sign. “Vee’s supposed to be with her aunt.”
“Well, she’s not,” Lanny says. She folds her arms and sits back, chin thrust forward. Aggressive and defensive at the same time. “Her aunt didn’t take her. And she got put in foster care, and that was awful. So she came here because—because she just wanted to be close to people she knows.” Not the real story, I know that. But I don’t have time to mine for information. I look at Sam.
“She wanted someone she trusted to front some information to the FBI,” he says. “For the reward money. I said no.”
Lanny’s mouth drops open, and her head swivels around toward him. She looks like someone just sucker-punched her—shock, pain, and betrayal. Her crossed arms drop. She didn’t know this. Vee never told her.
Vee probably told her that she’d just come for her. And that makes me want to shake that girl hard for hurting my daughter like that.
“What information?” I ask him.
“She claims that she knows where Vernon Carr is hiding.” He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s being honest.”
Vernon Carr. I remember him vividly: a bitter, lean old man who wasn’t above kidnapping, abusing, and murdering women. He’d had his own little cult out there. Creepy.
Then Sam says, “She thinks he’s gotten shelter with a bigger offshoot of the same cult he was running out of Wolfhunter. She says it’s called the Assembly of Saints.”
He says more, but I don’t hear it; there’s a high-pitched buzzing in my ears, and I feel my heartbeat accelerate hard. Saints. We were hired to find Remy Landry by All Saints International. And Carol, with her marked-up Bible, all those passages marked with stars that referred to saints. I hear her voice whisper, Remy’s with the saints.
I lick my lips and focus back on Sam. “How does she know?”
He frowns at me and cocks his head. “You mean how does Vee know where Carr is?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think she does; she talked around it, but didn’t tell me a place. She said Father Tom started the cult in Wolfhunter, then took most of his followers and formed his own, bigger compound. So maybe she just assumed that’s where Carr would go. If I had to bet, I’d say she doesn’t know exactly where it is. But she’s not lying about this Father Tom.”
Father Tom. F.T.
“I think someone in Wolfhunter told her where Carr is,” I say, and stand up. “Sam. Somebody told her. And they knew she’d come to us. Maybe they even suggested it.”
“Whoa, whoa, Gwen, calm down. What are you talking about?”
“Something is very wrong about all this. We have to go,” I say. “Right now. Now. Lanny, Connor: get your bugout bags.” I fall back on old terminology; from the time I got reunited with my children to when we landed at Stillhouse Lake, I’d insisted they pack emergency bags with everything they’d need to take in the event we had to evacuate quickly. Bugout bags. We’d even decorated Lanny’s with painted ladybugs. Connor had decorated his with rhinoceros beetles, which he thought were really cool.
My kids just sit there. They exchange looks, and Connor says, “Uh . . . we don’t have any? I mean, we’ve been here awhile, and we didn’t . . . we didn’t think we needed those anymore?”
Oh God dammit. I jam the heels of my hands against my burning eyes and take a deep breath. I can’t freak out right now. I need to stay calm. But we are exposed. “Okay,” I say, and I can hear the false normality in my voice. “We’re going to get packed and leave. Now. Tonight.”
“Mom—” Lanny says. “What’s wrong? Why? We just got home!”
I shout, “What did I just say?” I never yell at my kids, never, and I see both of them flinch and it makes me heartsick, but they move.
Sam’s standing up now, too, and he says, “Gwen, what the hell?”
“They’re going to come for us,” I tell him. “They used me to get to Carol. Maybe they already have her. But they aimed Vee right at us. They want us to chase a lead right back to the Assembly of Saints, and we’re not doing that. We need to get out of here.”
“Hey. You’re not making a lot of sense here. Maybe we just need to sit down and think this—”
Now I’m shouting at him. “We are not safe!” I’m acting irrationally, in his eyes. And maybe he’s even right. Maybe I’ve gone a little crazy. But I remember how Remy slipped off into the night without a ripple to mark his disappearance. And those other young men. I remember the oppressive horrors I saw in Wolfhunter, and I don’t want to be here.
Sam steps into it. Into my chaos and rage and fear. He puts his hands on my face, and the touch stills me a little. Centers me. I catch a breath, and he stares into my eyes. “Gwen,” he says. “If you want to go, we’ll go. No more questions.”
I am so grateful for that I nearly choke on the swell of relief. I sag into his embrace for a warm, precious second, and I feel safe there. I know it’s an illusion, but it helps.
When I push back, I say, “Thank you for trusting me.”
“Always,” he replies, low in his throat. And I realize that it’s true. He does trust me. And I haven’t given him that same respect, not consistently. He’s not demanding for me to explain. He’s just trusting my instincts. “Come on. Let’s get packed and go.”
I stop to open up the gun safe under the couch, and take out the weapon I keep there. I grab extra ammo from the supply I keep behind books on the bookcase. All of it goes into a backpack. When it comes to clothes
, I just grab a couple of changes and shove them in on top. Doesn’t matter if it looks good. Shirts, pants, underwear. Good enough. Sam’s shoving toiletries into a bag and tossing it to me to throw in as he heads for his side of the closet.
Five minutes.
Lanny and Connor are done ahead of us, which is flat-out amazing; I’m zipping the backpack when Sam freezes for a second and says, “Shit. I forgot to tell you. There’s a police cruiser out on the road, they want to take us to the station. Lanny needs to give a statement about what happened at Killing Rock.”
“We’re not going,” I tell him. “They’re not going to arrest her, Sam. Not tonight anyway. And we can make amends on that tomorrow.” I’m afraid right now. Deeply, viscerally afraid that everything, everything is going to go completely wrong. If the Assembly of Saints thinks I know where Carol is, they’ll come for us. Or they’ll just come for revenge. Or to find out what we know. Or . . . any of a thousand reasons, and I know, because ice-cold Carol is afraid of these people, that I cannot risk my family here. I want to hunt them. I don’t want them to hunt me. Stillhouse Lake no longer feels safe to me. It feels like a trap.
“Okay,” he says. Another gift of trust. He takes the backpack.
I hear the doorbell ring, and absolute terror bolts through me. I move the borrowed Browning in the holster until it’s snug against the small of my back. I draw the gun and ease ahead of Sam. “Lanny,” I say, as she turns toward me, eyes wide. “Open the safe room.”
She drops the backpack she’s holding and runs to push the chairs and dining room table another foot back. Our safe room—original to this house when we bought it—isn’t fancy, but it’s secure, and she clicks open the hidden door in the wall and starts keying in the code. I leave her to that and look out the peephole.
Bitter Falls Page 18
