by Paula Munier
She had a flashlight in her pack. If she could only rouse herself enough to get it out.
The temptation to give in to sleep—or was it unconsciousness?—was overwhelming. She needed to stay awake. She did what she used to do when she needed to breathe through boredom and pain on a long march at boot camp in Fort Leonard Wood: she quoted Shakespeare. Her favorite soliloquies, the ones she knew by heart, rotating among her favorites. Hamlet’s To be or not to be. Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. Portia’s quality of mercy speech. Othello’s It is the cause.
But here, in the dark, as she hunkered down against the tree trunk, her skull drummed to the beat of Richard II:
… And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed …
She mouthed the words over and over again, for what seemed like hours and hours. And tell sad stories of the death of kings. And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
The time passed slowly, quickly, stood absolutely still, then rushed by again. She didn’t move. Finally, she felt well enough to open her pack and retrieve the flashlight. She turned it on, and the bright blaze of light blinded her. Her head blazed, too. She shut her eyes again, and waited until the throbbing subsided. Then opened them slowly, shading her brow against the light, pleased to see that she could now discern objects in the gloom. She waved the flashlight at the darkness, and images appeared. Trees and tarps and abandoned tent cabins.
No vehicles. No people. No Elvis.
She hoped that meant that he had gotten away and gone home to Patience. That’s what she’d told him to do. But she had no confidence that he’d listened to her.
When his sergeant was dying, Elvis had tried to protect him against all comers, covering his body with his own and snarling and snapping those powerful jaws at anyone who came close, his fellow soldiers included. Mercy, too. Martinez knew they might hurt Elvis if he attacked them as they tried to help him, so he whispered, “Home. Mercy.” And the dog backed off, going to Mercy, as he was told to do.
She and Elvis stayed with him until the medics arrived. They watched as the medics worked on him. Loaded him up and flew him away to the field hospital, where he died on the operating table. Far away from Mercy. Far away from Elvis. She doubted the dog had ever forgiven her. Certainly she had not forgiven herself.
A rustling at her feet. A flapping over her head. A cawing in her ears. Slowly, deliberately, painfully, she rotated her head toward the commotion and shined the light on its source. As her battered brain cleared and her focus sharpened, she spotted the body.
A man, she thought. A dead man. Prone. With a Buck hunting knife in his chest, buried right up to the hilt. The same type of blade she’d seen piercing Donald Jonas Walker’s chest.
This was getting to be a bad habit, Mercy thought. Still unsure that she could stand upright, she crept over to the corpse, waving her arms at the critters feeding on what was the newly deceased form of the bird-watcher Rufus Flanigan.
He hadn’t been there long, at least his corpse hadn’t been, or the scavengers—beetles, squirrels, crows—would have gotten to more of him. Fortunately, the same barbwire fence that had partially protected her had kept the larger carrion feeders—bears, moose, coyotes—at bay.
He was definitely dead. Stabbed through the heart with precision.
Just like Walker.
And just like Walker, there was nothing she could do for him now, except try to keep the worst of the night eaters from converging on his corpse. By daylight all of the carrion feeders would be out in force.
She struggled to her feet, lurched toward a slim birch, and held on tight while she steadied herself. She felt faint, and it wasn’t due to the dead body. She was used to dead bodies. This light-headedness was the concussion working on her. She inhaled and exhaled six times, and six times she silently chanted, And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
The bird-watcher was no king, but it was a sad story anyway. She covered his mottled face with his safari hat, and his torso with her hoodie, in a mostly ineffective effort to keep away the scavengers. She drew her pack up on her shoulders and trudged over to the tent cabins, lighting her way with the flashlight. They were standard campground structures, simply framed with canvas walls and roofs and wooden floors and flimsy doors no one had bothered to lock. The first two were empty. Nothing but discarded water bottles and piles of old newspapers and stacks of fliers urging the people of Northshire to save the trees on one side and join the town’s Fourth of July festivities on the other. Tree huggers should have taken better care of their own environment, she thought. But then maybe saving trees was not what these people were really about. Either way, they’d left in a hurry, and they’d left a mess.
She stuffed one of the fliers in a back pocket; maybe she could find out who printed them and that would lead to something. Or not.
In the third cabin, the one where Flanigan claimed she could find Amy and the baby, she found a baby bottle among the plastic litter left behind. So she and Helena had been here. But where were they now?
There was no sign of the man loading the truck or the professor or Adam Wolfe. The place was deserted. No sign of Elvis, either, which came as a relief.
The only secured dwelling appeared to be the Quonset hut, which was locked up tight, a brand-new padlock in its wide roll-up door. She pulled out her knife, grateful that whoever tried to crush her skull did not pocket it, and found its thinnest tool. Holding the flashlight between her thighs so she could see what she was doing, she slipped the tool into the lock mechanism. Another trick Martinez had taught her during the long hours of downtime between missions. He loved puzzles and riddles and locks of all kinds, the way she loved Shakespeare’s scripts and sonnets and soliloquies.
It was all about manual dexterity and misdirection, he said. The secrets of magicians and thieves. He told her a story once about a young monk who decided to leave the monastery and go out into the world on a pilgrimage. He came to a roaring river too wide and wild to cross. Across the choppy currents he spotted a wise old priest. “How do I get to the other side?” he asked, shouting to be heard over the rushing water. “You are on the other side,” the old priest yelled back.
I’m on the other side of the river now, she thought. Mercy wiggled the tool to trip the lock. The concentration required set her head to throbbing again, and she shut her eyes briefly against the pain. Then she steeled herself, opened her eyes, and pulled the shackle out of the body of the lock. She snapped the tool back into the knife and returned it to her pocket, along with the padlock. She rolled up the door far enough so that she could step inside.
The large space was mostly empty, at least at the first wave of the flashlight. The lack of windows gave the place a murkiness that retreated only briefly even in the glare of the beam. The gloom eased the strain on her eyes, and she was grateful for that. She shuffled around the edge of the hut, looking for something, anything, that might indicate what had been here.
At the back of the long steel building, a line of steel trunks hugged the wall, so similar in color to the wall itself that they nearly blended right in. As if they were meant to go unnoticed.
These trunks were secured with padlocks much like the one on the roll-up door. The same silver-metal mechanisms, just as easy to open. Nothing here but a lot of packing material—foam sheeting, bubble wrap, rolling tubes, brown paper, folded cardboard boxes—and a few scraps of metal and a couple of granite pebbles and a short length of what looked like clothesline. Barely an inch long, but she knew det cord when she saw it. Maybe that was all the explosives they’d ever find. But it was enough to prove Elvis right.
She thought about slipping it into her pocket, too, but t
echnically this was a crime scene so she decided against it. She could already be in enough trouble for tampering with evidence. She could always blame it on the concussion.
She replaced all the padlocks on the trunks as well as the one on the Quonset door. Time to think about getting out of here. The question was, which way would be the safer route? She wasn’t up for any sort of confrontation, with man or beast.
The fastest route would be the way she came. The tire tracks of both the SUV and the truck led out of the compound and down the same old logging road that the professor had used to get here and that Mercy had used to follow her. She hoped her Jeep was still there so she could drive it back to her cabin. Assuming she could make it to the Jeep without passing out again. Her head was still throbbing and the dizziness persisted. But if she didn’t rush it she thought she might be able to do it.
First she needed to check a couple of things, starting with Elvis. She walked back to where she’d been attacked, and where the bird-watcher was still dead. Her jacket had not much deterred the scavengers, and their nibbling was more than she could bear. She stomped her feet at the rodents and snapped her hoodie like a locker-room towel to shoo away the birds. The beasties scattered—even the beetles—at least for the moment.
The effort exhausted her, and she stumbled, falling hard on her butt, which hurt her head so meanly she bit her lip and tasted blood. She pulled some water from her pack and took a long drink. Something she should have done earlier to fight dehydration. The concussion was confusing her thinking. Confusion was the enemy.
She went through her pack, and found a granola bar and a bag of yogurt-covered raisins. She ate it all and washed it down with more water. Feeling better, she dragged herself to her feet and went in search of signs of Elvis, canvassing the area where she’d snipped open the barbwire fence. It was clear that the dog had gone back that way, but someone had pulled the fence back together. She was relieved that she could find no traces of fur or blood on the razor-sharp points, which meant he’d made it out of the compound before whoever had come along and righted the barrier.
Mercy reopened the fence, and tracked Elvis back through the bushes and past the art installation to the trail the bird-watcher had told her about. The one she hoped Elvis would remember from their autumn hike. The trail had been used by humans and animals alike, and she struggled to distinguish traces of Elvis in the jumble of old and new footprints and paw prints. But it was still too dark to see much, even with the flashlight, and just looking at the ground made her head swim with pain.
She caught her breath and made her way back through the barbwire, pulling it closed behind her, to the corpse in the compound. She squatted down so she could examine him again, more thoroughly this time. He was wearing the same khaki trousers and gray and blue plaid flannel shirt he’d been wearing when she’d met him. His birding binoculars still hung around his lifeless neck. Nothing unusual, apart from the knife in his chest.
Using a long stick she found on the ground, she removed her hoodie from his body. As she pulled it away, the victim’s shirttails parted, revealing his belt. He was wearing a brown leather belt with a pewter belt buckle. She leaned in for a closer look. It was the same belt buckle with the same gun-toting adaptation of the Vermont coat of arms that was found with Walker’s bones. Not your average bird-watcher, after all.
So who was this guy, really? Mercy searched his pockets and found his wallet, thirty bucks in cash, a burner phone, a Canadian passport in the name of Rufus Flanigan, and a flier like the one she’d found in the tent cabin.
Mercy sighed. According to Troy, the Feds and the staties agreed that Adam Wolfe had gone to Canada to work with secessionists in Quebec. And here was this bird-watching, Vermont First belt buckle–wearing corpse from across the northern border. Surely not a coincidence. She thought about what that might mean, but her skull was drumming again. She’d love to just lie down and go to sleep, but she knew that was a bad idea. She needed to get home.
She waved away more bugs and birds and rodents. She was facing a catch-22: either she messed with the crime scene or the critters did. She’d have to leave the body, and she’d have to leave it where and as it was, to the delight of the forest creatures, until law enforcement could secure the crime scene.
Her phone was gone, not that she’d get a signal up here anyway. More important, her gun was gone. Most important, Amy and the baby were gone. She couldn’t help but think they were in trouble, given they were most likely keeping company with a murderer, whether they knew it or not. She had to find them. But first she needed to get out of here, before whoever killed this guy and knocked her out came back to finish the job.
Securing the crime scene was a joke, given the scavengers all about, but she retrieved the duct tape from her pack and roped off the area anyway—hoping to keep out people if not creatures. She started the long hike back to her Jeep, going through the gate at the front of the compound, which they hadn’t bothered to lock in their hurry to leave. An odd oversight, given the fact that they’d remembered to lock up the empty Quonset hut and the mostly empty trunks it housed.
She worried over what that meant, but it hurt her head too much. So she focused on moving down the trail, staying close to the tree line. She thought about Elvis. As long as he wasn’t hurt—and there was no sign at the scene that he was—he could have made it back to Patience all right. If any dog could make it back, he could.
But he was stronger than she was. She was not so sure she could even make it back to the Jeep without passing out. She proceeded slowly, and every hundred yards or so she paused, leaning against a tree to beat back the dizziness. Whispering the sad stories of kings. Waiting for the fog to clear.
She’d gone about a quarter mile when she heard sounds of movement up ahead. She ducked behind some pines along the road and switched off the flashlight. The quick action rattled her brain, and she closed her eyes, sinking down to the ground on her knees. She felt the darkness spinning in on her again.
Her own sad story.
CHAPTER THIRTY
IN HER DREAM—OR WAS IT DELIRIUM?—she was rolling, rolling, rolling on the forest floor, a dead soldier unfurled from a Stars and Stripes shroud. She came to a stop on her back, face-up, blind to the light. The darkness was a living, breathing, pulsating thing, and it enveloped her. Shuttered her brain. Swallowed her whole. Sucked the soul right out of her. And left the remains to the feeders.
* * *
A SLAP OF cold and wet hit her chin. She opened her eyes to a blur of tawny fur and a sweet dark muzzle nuzzling her face. Elvis.
She threw her arms around him and hugged him hard. He seemed as happy to see her as she was to see him, licking her nose and cheeks and ears thoroughly.
Troy was right behind him, a headlamp bathing her in red light.
“How did you find me?”
“Patience sent us.” He held a flashlight with one hand and held back Susie Bear with the other. The Newfie mutt strained at her lead, looking like she’d like to get in a lick or two of her own. He told her to sit, and she did so reluctantly, scooting close to Mercy until her shaggy butt was right up to hers. Elvis sat, too, and they both regarded her as if to say, Do something useful.
“Is Elvis okay?”
“He’s fine, your grandmother says so. But what about you?” Troy squatted down to get a good look at her. His flashlight hurt her eyes, and she blinked. “Sorry.”
“I’m good. Just don’t like the light.”
Troy touched the bill of her baseball cap softly. “What happened to your head?”
“Someone hit me from behind. Knocked me out. But I’m good now.” Which was at least mostly true. She was feeling much better now that the canine cavalry had arrived.
“I’m taking a look,” he said in a heavy voice that told her there was no point arguing with him. He slowly removed the Red Sox cap, careful not to hurt her. Still, that gentle movement brought tears to her eyes. She shut them, quick.
“Sorry.�
�� He brushed away her hair gently with his fingers and examined her skull. “Some bump you got there.”
Mercy remembered to breathe. “I’m fine.”
“No blood that I can see.” He pulled an ice pack out of his first aid pack. “Here. That should help. At least until we can get you home and shave your head.”
“Don’t even think about it.” She opened her eyes and smiled at him. The cold felt so good against her sore skull she almost cried with relief. Her nausea subsided and she was able to think more clearly.
“Did you see who hit you?”
“No. They came up behind me. I didn’t hear them until right before the blow. Too late.” She told Troy about the baby wailing and Elvis running toward the cries.
He frowned. “You should have waited for backup.”
“They’re all gone now,” she said. “But there’s something I need to show you.”
“Of course there is.”
She started to rise, and fell against him.
“Whoa.” Troy caught her and helped her up, his strong forearms supporting her as she wobbled to her feet, one hand still clutching the ice pack to her head.
“I’m good.”
“Take it easy.”
“You really have to see this.” She led him and the dogs back down the old logging road to the compound. Both Elvis and Susie Bear danced around, tails flying, eager to search, but as instructed they accompanied Mercy and Troy as they walked over to where the dead body lay.
The game warden shook his head. “What is it with you and the woods?”
She chose to ignore that remark. “Rufus Flanigan. Stabbed just like Don Walker.”
“The bird-watcher who called in on the AMBER Alert?” He seemed surprised.
“If that’s what he really is.” She pointed her flashlight at the belt buckle. “Same as the one we found buried with the bones.”
“And the tattoo.”
“Yes.”
“I’d better get this called in.” Troy looked around. “It’ll be a while until the techs can get here. Will you be okay while I secure the scene?”
