Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  Kevin looked at Hadley. Now what? She gave him a how-the-hell-do-I-know look.

  “You agree to our terms or we walk.” She glanced up at Patten. “You can see if you can find a judge still at work to issue an arrest warrant. It may take a few days, though. I understand they’re closing the courts down due to the weather.”

  Kevin picked up the papers and the pen. Three copies of the terms. “Are you sure?” Hadley asked.

  He clicked the pen open. “Mikayla Johnson doesn’t have a few days.” He signed each copy and passed the papers to Detective Patten, who signed and returned them to the lawyer. She glanced at them, then nodded.

  “Okay, Mr. Davies.” Kevin sat down. “Let’s talk.”

  5.

  Russ twisted to catch one more glimpse of Clare’s face, pinched with pain and stiff with determination, as they marched him out of the storage room and through the kitchen. Oh, love.

  He wasn’t under any illusions. When Hector DeJean started talking about a “good” hostage, Russ knew it sure as hell wasn’t him. These guys didn’t think much of women, and a scared, pregnant female probably seemed like a present wrapped up in a bow to them. They underestimated Clare—lots of men did—and she would use that. No matter what happened to him, she would find a way to save herself and the baby. He held to that thought like the last remaining ember in a dying fire.

  “You sure you don’t want me to come along?” Travis said.

  “I don’t want Mikayla left alone.” DeJean steered Russ toward the door. He shrugged on his own parka but left Russ’s hanging off the back of a chair. Why bother putting a coat on a man who’s going to be dead soon? DeJean nodded toward Travis. “If I’m not back in an hour, kill the woman.” He looked at Russ. “I don’t want any trouble from you. You understand?”

  Russ nodded, dry-mouthed.

  Outside, the freezing rain continued. His captor gestured toward the snow-and-ice-covered slope. The stairs were completely impassable now, and would stay that way until the next thaw. Russ broke the trail, the ice so thick he had to stomp each time he put his boot down. It didn’t help that his arms were stretched behind his back. He clasped his hands together to keep DeJean from noticing the holes Clare had stabbed into the duct tape, grateful that the hard slog up the hill and the constant freezing spatter provided distraction. Of course, keeping his bonds hidden wasn’t going to matter if he couldn’t break free before DeJean decided to cap him. The sixty-minute deadline yawned beneath him like a chasm.

  The garage door was still standing open, as Russ had left it, its broken lock hanging. Inside, the hood and windshield of the SUV were coated with an inch or more of ice. Noticing this, his captor frowned. “You were busy last night.” He opened the back door and gestured at Russ with the .44. “Get in. Climb into the far back and lie down. If I so much as see your head over the seat, we’re gonna stop until an hour has passed. Got it?”

  Russ obediently climbed into the SUV. The wells below the middle seat were packed with plastic containers for gas or kerosene. The accelerants for the MacAllen house fire. He braced his feet and heaved himself over the seat into the storage area, rolling against two twenty-pound bags of sand and a compact shovel. As soon as DeJean fired up the engine and turned the blowers on high, Russ got to work on his restraints, flexing, tugging, stretching, twisting.

  The SUV bumped over the edge of the garage door and they were outside. Instantly, Russ could hear the tattoo of rain on the roof and the hood. At least there would be plenty of noise to cover him. He felt one of the holes catch and widen. He strained his arms apart, gritting his teeth to keep from grunting in his effort.

  DeJean turned on the radio and began scanning up the dial. Twenty-second blasts of music and talking sliced through the vehicle: hip-hop, sports, an ad for a local auto dealership, a song that had been popular when Russ was in high school. The SUV crept into the turn onto the crossroad. Russ felt another part of the duct tape give way. Despite the chill in the far back he was sweating freely.

  “—breaks all records, Stacy,” a voice from the radio said. DeJean locked in the station. “The combination of high and low systems locked into place is giving us the third straight day of icy rain, with no end immediately in sight.”

  The tape was fraying in earnest now. Russ twisted his torso. If he could wedge something between his arms, give himself a little leverage … he thumped and jounced against the hard plastic well liner.

  The radio snapped off. “Hey!” DeJean’s voice was hard. “Settle down back there.”

  “The shovel was poking me,” Russ said.

  “Just remember what I said. Your wife’s life is in your hands, not mine.”

  What was DeJean’s plan? Would he haul him out of the SUV and shoot him in the road? Truss him up and leave him to die of hypothermia? Was DeJean going to do him before he checked out the cabin? Or after? Russ pictured Bob Mongue lying there, alone, in pain and feverish. Clare at least knew what was coming. Bob didn’t have a clue. But Russ was gambling that he could escape and stop Roy before DeJean found the wounded trooper.

  When the duct tape finally gave way, it was with an audible tear. Russ froze, holding his breath, but the beat of the windshield wipers and the roar of the heater covered the sound.

  He almost cried out when he spread his arms. It felt like he was being tased. His muscles burned and his joints sizzled with electric shocks. He tried to lift his hand off the floor, but all it did was twitch. He clenched his teeth together and forced himself to relax. He needed time. His abused shoulders and biceps would work again. He just needed a little more time …

  The SUV came to a stop.

  He heard the jingle of keys being pocketed. “Okay, Van Alstyne. I’m gonna check your place out. If it’s all good, I’ll come and get you.”

  I just bet you will.

  The door thudded shut. Russ counted to three, then sat up. Through the windows, he could see the back of DeJean’s head as he descended from the road to the cabin. Avoiding the iced-over stairs here, just like they had at the other lake house.

  He needed to get those keys. He needed to stop DeJean, to put him down for good, and to get back to Clare. And he needed to do it in the next forty minutes. DeJean’s head disappeared from view. Getting close to the cabin now. In a minute or two, he’d be walking in on the unsuspecting and unprepared Mongue. Under normal circumstances, Russ had no doubt the statie could more than hold his own against one bad guy with a .44. But flat on his back with a busted leg? Mongue was dead meat unless Russ did something.

  He rolled into the middle seat and carefully opened the door. The wrenching pain in his shoulders brought tears to his eyes. He staggered to the rear of the vehicle and cupped his hands around his mouth. He sucked in enough air to make himself heard across the lake.

  “Bob Mongue!” he roared. “One man, armed, approaching kitchen door!”

  He heard DeJean’s scream of rage from downslope. He was going to shout another warning when a gun went off, its bullet biting into a pine branch above Russ’s head. Warning enough. He took off up the road, running hard, head down, his boots crunching and catching where the tires had roughed up the ice. He counted on the steep slope and the difficulty of moving fast through the crusted snow to give him an extra few seconds before DeJean had a clear line of fire.

  Another shot. Russ hurled himself over the mounded snow banking the edge of the road. He hit with an ice-cracking thud and let himself roll, arms and legs flung out, like a kid playing on a grassy hillside. He hit a tree, slid sideways, ricocheted off another. Shouting and swearing above him. No gunfire yet. DeJean would wait until he had Russ in his sights. He tucked his hands over his head and somersaulted down the slope, thudding into tree trunks, whipped by saplings, torn by bramble.

  He slowed as the slope evened out. He uncurled and came to his feet, scrambling toward the lake’s edge. The trees and brush he had pinballed through screened him utterly from the road. If DeJean wanted him, he’d have to come down the same
way Russ had.

  Two shots, one, two bullets tearing away ice-encased branches, the echos falling away fast in the rain-thick air. “Van Alstyne!” It was DeJean. “You come up here right now and I won’t take it out on your wife! You make me come after you, we’ll peel her skin and carve that kid right outta her.”

  Russ squeezed his eyes shut against his visceral reaction to DeJean’s threat. The best chance for Clare—the best chance for all of them—was his freedom. He gritted his teeth against his rising gorge and leaned into the hemlock sheltering him.

  “I know you can hear me, Van Alstyne! I’ll give her to Travis first!” There was another long pause. “You ain’t gonna make it anyways! You got no gun and no truck and no place to go!”

  Another shot, then another, and another, closely grouped, professional. Mongue. He wasn’t out for the count yet. Thank God.

  Take advantage of confusion, Clare had said, and he did so, slogging down the rest of the way to the lake and stepping onto the frozen surface. He half ran, half shuffled along the shore, moving fast without trees and brush and deep snow to trip him up. Then he was past the heavy wood beside the cabin. He dropped to the ice and elbow-crawled along the embankment until he could see up the clear slope to the glassed-in porch and the windows where Clare had sat and read and looked at the lake about a million years ago.

  There was no sign of DeJean. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t flat on his stomach in the brush at the edge of the clearing, ready to blow Russ’s head off the minute he came into view.

  He forced himself to breathe, to slow his racing heart and mind. What did DeJean know? What did he want? And what was he going to do to get it? He knew there was at least one armed man in the cabin. He didn’t know Bob was injured, his mobility severely impaired. He didn’t know the sum total of their weaponry was limited to one service piece and whatever clips Bob had had in his duty belt. So right now, the cabin must look like a hard and potentially dangerous nut to crack.

  DeJean wanted the cabin, though. Or at least a safe, warm place for his daughter. Russ stopped at that thought. Why was DeJean still here? He and Roy had snatched the girl in the wee hours of Friday, well before the ice storm had begun. He could be in Texas by now, headed over the border to Mexico or Honduras, leaving Roy to take the fall for the MacAllens’ murder.

  He shook his head. The why was irrelevant. He wasn’t investigating here, he was trying to save Clare’s life. And Mongue’s. And Mikayla Johnson’s.

  The rain, freezing, then melting at the heat of his skin, had plastered his hair against his scalp until his forehead and ears ached with cold. His unprotected hands were raw, stiffening with every minute he stayed out in the open. Think. Think. It would only get harder as he got colder. He had to get the SUV away from DeJean or stop the man permanently. Either way, he needed to be back at Travis Roy’s house—he checked his watch—in twenty minutes. His heart sank. It had taken DeJean that long to drive around the end of the lake to get here.

  Get into the cabin. Get Mongue’s weapon. Find DeJean. Simple. He hadn’t heard anything from either DeJean or Mongue in several minutes. He’d like to think it was because Mongue had nailed the bastard, but it was more likely DeJean had retreated to a better position to avoid the state trooper’s line of fire. Which would mean taking the high ground up at the road, facing the side of the house with only one tiny window. From there, he could cut off any attempt to escape out the kitchen door or through the French doors in the bedroom.

  But he wouldn’t be able to spot a man headed straight up the middle. Russ looked at the twenty yards of open ground between the lake’s edge and the cabin’s back door. Not so much as a sapling to shelter behind. He had a sudden, head-jerking vision of himself at nineteen, charging a nameless hill in Lao Du, avoiding the bullets that were chewing up half his platoon by sheer random luck. He took a deep breath. Then another. He had lost a lot of speed in the intervening thirty-four years. He hoped he hadn’t lost the luck.

  He launched himself uphill before he could reconsider. He pumped and flailed and stomped and swung, horrified at the noise he was making but helpless to stop it. He ran toward the cabin the way his younger self had raced to the top of that hill, putting every last fast-twitch muscle in play, leaving nothing behind.

  He slammed against the porch, chest heaving, thighs burning. Instantly, a shot rang out, spiderwebbing the window next to Russ. He raised his hands, waving frantically, praying Bob wouldn’t drop him where he stood.

  Nothing happened. Hands still raised, he climbed the stairs and cracked the porch door. Crossed the porch and opened the interior door. Bob Mongue was straddling a chair, ammo pouch between his legs, his service piece pointed straight at Russ’s chest. “It’s me,” Russ said, his voice hoarse.

  Mongue lifted his gun away. “I see. What the hell’s going on?” His voice was strained with pain and fatigue.

  “A shitstorm of epic proportions.” Russ surveyed the cabin. Mongue had taken up position at the edge of the kitchen, where he had a line of sight through both sides and the porch. One of the windowpanes in the bedroom was shattered, as was the glass set in the kitchen door. “Did you hit him?”

  Mongue shook his head. “No. I scared him off, though.”

  “Did you hear his SUV leaving?”

  “Hell, I didn’t hear it arriving. First warning I got was you screaming at me.”

  Russ pointed to Mongue’s weapon. “How much ammo do you have?”

  Mongue picked up the pouch. “Three clips.”

  Thirty shots. “Okay. I’ll take ’em.”

  “What exactly are you planning to do?” Mongue’s doubtful look changed to something sharper. “Where’s your wife?”

  “Back at Roy’s cabin, with Roy and the missing girl. That’s the girl’s father out there. Hector DeJean. He gave Roy orders about Clare. If he’s not back in an hour…” He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “What can I do?”

  “Keep watch. Yell if you spot him. I’m going to go out there and kill him.” He was surprised at how matter-of-fact he sounded. His entire career as a cop was predicated on the idea of force as the last resort, but he had no intention of capturing DeJean. He was going to put him in the ground, and if he got a clean line of fire on Roy before Clare could object, he was going to kill him, too.

  Mongue didn’t blink at his statement. “Okay. Better get something on over that sweater. And I’ve got shooting gloves in the inside pocket of my coat.”

  Russ retrieved his waterproof anorak from the pile he had left on the floor when he dumped his ice-fishing duffel. He had turned to get Mongue’s parka off its hook when he caught the acrid scent of smoke. “You smell that? Did you throw something into the woodstove?”

  “Nope.” Mongue sniffed. “Smells oily.”

  “Oh, shit.” Russ bolted for the kitchen door. He could tell, by the heat radiating through it, that it was too dangerous to open. Then he spotted the bright orange lick of flame through the tiny kitchen window. The mingled odor of gas and kerosene was heavy in the air. “That sonofabitch is trying to burn us out.”

  6.

  Tracking down meth dealers in the Albany area during what the National Weather Service was calling “the ice storm of the century” was marginally better than a root canal without anesthetic. But it was a slim margin. The third time her feet flew out from beneath her and she landed ass-first on the sidewalk, Hadley began to reconsider her decision to move from California. The third time they came up empty, she began to reconsider her decision to become a cop.

  Davies had given up four names. All active dealers, all potential snitches. All of them lived in parts of Albany that legislators, lobbyists, and school kids on state capital tours would never get to see.

  They couldn’t find the first guy. His entire block, a row of sagging two-story houses that looked like they should have been condemned years ago, had emptied out when the grid went down. A city employee, seeing them huddled by the perp’s door, leaned out of a Bobcat
he was using to scrape out the drainage grates. “Disbursed to shelters,” he yelled. “Without electricity, these dumps are like walk-in freezers.”

  “Should we search shelters?” Hadley asked.

  Patten shook his head. “Not unless we get desperate. He could be in any one of a dozen schools or churches at this point. Better try number two.”

  They found perp number two. Or rather, they found his girlfriend, leading a lights-out party at his row house. She answered the door bundled up in a puffy coverlet, the odor of alcohol rising off her in waves. “He dead,” she told them.

  “Dead?” Flynn peered past her shoulder, where similarly swaddled people were reeling through the room, laughing and waving candles.

  “Yeah, this like a wake.” She turned away from the door and snatched a frame off a table. She showed it to them. Instead of a photograph, it held a neatly clipped obituary. “He dead.” She suddenly burst into tears. “Oh, my poor Levi! My baby! What I gonna do without you?” One of her friends staggered up and slung an arm around her.

  “Okay. Um.” Flynn took off his hat. “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am. Sorry for your loss.”

  “If they don’t set that place on fire from the fumes alone, I’ll be amazed,” Hadley said, as they crept across the ice to where the Aztek was parked.

  “I like a nice wake,” Patten said. “Cry and drink, drink and cry, until you pass out clutching the dearly departed’s mass cards. What more fitting way to see somebody into the afterlife?”

  Lunch was sandwiches, cold, from a local bodega, eaten in Flynn’s Aztek. Hadley tried to raise Granddad on her cell but couldn’t get through. She prayed Flynn’s DVD player was holding up. Or that Granddad was. The kids hadn’t been in school since last Friday, and if tomorrow was a snow day again—as looked likely—she was going to hook up with some other moms and arrange a playdate. God knew when she’d be able to reciprocate, but Hudson and Genny had to get out of the house.