Beneath Bone Lake

by Colleen Thompson

  She resumed working on the tape at Ruby’s wrist, her gaze straying to the limned door and the muttering of voices on the radio.

  Nodding, Ruby whispered, “The thing Best wanted, the thing he took off of me. It’s not what he expected. Not what he’s been demanding. So I have to—we have to get out of here before he figures out—”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. What is it? Why did he come looking for you? I was already in too deep, letting Dylan stay with us at the house—your house—to try and get his act together. But the stupid shit invited Coffin and those other creeps to hang out, said they were his friends. But everybody was Dylan’s friend when he was using.

  “It didn’t take me long to lose control completely,” Misty added, shaking her head. “And when those bastards started cooking drugs, they wouldn’t let me take Zoe and leave.”

  “I had something,” Ruby told her, “something I brought back with me that could damage the company I worked for. Someone was murdered for it, but she passed it off to me first. That’s what they’re after, Misty. Sorry I got you wound up in this. If I’d had any idea they knew, I never would have—”

  “The man in the other room—he showed up at the house and talked to Coffin last week. I got the idea they knew each other from prison. Still, I tried to talk this new guy into helping me and Zoe. Instead, he offered a pile of money,” Misty explained, “to buy us and hire Coffin to do him a couple of favors. I had no idea what he wanted. I thought it was some sleazy sex thing, so I panicked and grabbed Zoe to make a run for it. When Coffin tried to stop me, Dylan went for his throat.”

  “Because you were carrying his child,” Ruby guessed.

  Misty looked up at her sharply. “I might’ve been stressed out, even moody lately, but no matter what you’ve heard, I’m not—Dylan and I never—he was my friend. My—” Choking up, she moved on. “Screwed up or not, he would’ve killed Coffin except the moneyman—I guess it’s the guy you call Best—shot him. Shot him right through the throat.”

  “He killed Dylan?”

  Misty nodded, moisture glimmering on her face. “God, it was so horrible—the gurgling, the kicking. But then Best shot him again, chest this time, and he and Coffin wrapped the body and put it in the canoe. I think Best took it out somewhere and dumped it in the lake.”

  Ruby thought about the chunks of human flesh recovered, thought about her grief when she’d believed the corpse was Misty’s. “Your car was dumped not far off. Your driver’s license, too. When they found it, I thought…everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  “I am—we all are—if we can’t get away from him. Because he’ll kill every one of us with less thought than you’d give to swatting flies.”

  Ruby heard, as well as felt, the tape rip loose from her wrist. At the same moment she heard heavy footsteps before a radio switched off behind the door.

  Footsteps next, a big man striding toward them.

  For one heart-freezing moment, Ruby’s gaze met Misty’s. With nothing to be done to disguise the torn tape, both of them feigned unconsciousness, prayed for invisibility, exactly as newborn fawns will when confronted by the wolf.

  THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE

  Zoe tried to sleep, but all she could think of was her mom coming to get her. Her mom was very brave—Misty and Mrs. Lambert always said so—so maybe she would stop the bad men and then take her and Aunt Misty far away. Or maybe her mom would bring a whole lot of police and they would put the men in jail. On the way home, she would buy everybody pizza.

  Zoe rolled over, feeling gritty and sticky and too hot in her blanket. And then she started thinking of the Bad Man making her get off his phone almost as soon as she had started talking. It made her stomach hurt because she’d had a whole lot of things to tell her mother, things she couldn’t wait to say until tomorrow.

  So as quietly as she could, Zoe crept from her nest to the closet and pulled it open. Slipped inside the blacker darkness and hoped the spiders were asleep in their beds.

  Once there, she found Aunt Misty’s telephone and started pushing at the keypad, pretending she was dialing her mother’s number.

  Except this time, something happened. She didn’t know what different thing she’d done, but the phone lit up and made a funny whooshing noise that it had never made before, not even after her aunt whispered instructions on how to turn it on. Maybe she’d done it wrong before because Aunt Misty had said the battery must be dead and though Zoe couldn’t see her, she had heard her crying for a long time after that talk.

  But now that it worked—really worked—Zoe pushed three buttons, the three buttons from the song her aunt sang with her. The three buttons she had promised would always bring help.

  C HAPTER T HIRTY-ONE

  “The consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor.”

  —Sir Walter Scott,

  From “The Heart of Midlothian,” The Waverly Dramas

  When karma came back to bite a person’s ass in Preston County, Justine Wofford decided it did so with a vengeance. While holding her howling, shrieking wildcat of a son through the ordeal of stitches, she missed a slew of phone calls. She’d neglected to put her cell on vibrate, and the repeated intrusion—an annoyingly insistent jingle she’d let Noah choose—only added to the exam room mayhem.

  “No touch, no touch,” he cried, a phrase that had become his favorite since he’d finally started speaking three years earlier, at the age of six.

  “Listen, listen, Noah,” Justine said in the calmest voice she could manage. “Listen to the sound you picked. Listen to the pretty ring tone.”

  He quieted—making her wish she’d tried that particular distraction ten minutes earlier—and tilted his head toward the sound. The doctor’s shoulders heaved and his lips moved through what looked like a prayer of gratitude as he worked. Meanwhile, a graying nurse sporting multiple chins stood nearby, rubbing at the elbow Noah had kicked and treating Justine to an especially hateful variant of the hairy eyeball.

  Exhausted, stressed, and with her ears ringing from the noise, Justine forced herself to grind out, “I’m sorry you were kicked, Ms. Del Monte. Autistic kids don’t intentionally set out to hurt others. Noah’s just reacting to his own fear and discomfort.”

  “Reacting to being spoiled, if you ask me,” the woman grumbled.

  During the years she’d spent in law enforcement, Justine had been shoved by addicts, hit by a belligerent wife beater, and on one especially memorable occasion, pissed on by a drunk. Yet somehow, she had never wanted to shoot anyone more than she now did—Justine glared over at the name tag affixed above a drooping bosom—Marguerite Del Monte, LVN.

  Before she could say anything regrettable, Noah did it for her, echoing the nurse’s words, down to their snotty intonation: “Spoiled, if you ask me.”

  Caught off guard by Noah’s pitch-perfect imitation, Justine laughed at the shocking outrage blooming in the woman’s eyes. Which, quite predictably, infuriated her even more.

  “Why, of all the disrespectful—”

  “That’s enough, Marguerite,” said the doctor, a Nordic giant who looked better suited to the college gridiron than a small-town ER. “Why don’t you take a break now? Go and put some ice on that elbow.”

  “Gladly.” She huffed out of the room.

  Noah, completely unmoved, watched fascinated as the doctor knotted the last stitch. “Flash-flash,” he sang.

  Justine smiled, pleased to comprehend. “He means the needle,” she translated. “He’s into the way it gleams when you move it. Careful he doesn’t find a way to pocket it when you’re not looking.”

  The doctor, who had earlier introduced himself as Ross Bollinger, glanced up at her. “I’m sorry for what she said to you. I could have her written up or, worse yet, counseled on dealing with our special needs patients.”

  Justine smiled. “Would it do any good?”

  “For that one?” Humor gl
inted in a pair of gray eyes that crinkled at the corners. “Want the truth, or what the hospital’d expect me to tell you?”

  Before she could answer, or decide whether he was flirting, her phone interrupted.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, with a glance at the caller ID window. “Work’s a bitch some days.”

  “Bitch some days,” Noah echoed, leaving her to hope it wouldn’t be one of those phrases he would take a shine to and repeat for months on end. Including at the latest Sunday school, where he was already close to wearing out his welcome.

  “Go ahead and take it,” Dr. Bollinger invited. “Noah and I are doing just fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely, if you’re not too long.”

  The knot in Justine’s stomach loosened slightly. Nodding, she reassured him—and herself—by saying, “I’ll be right outside.”

  The ringing stopped, and she took advantage of the lull to check her voice mail, frowning through the news of the disaster found at Dylan Hammett’s house—including the presence of a pickup registered to Sam Mc-Coy, who couldn’t be located. When she heard about the fresh blood on Hammett’s back patio and the hole drilled through the bottom of the truck’s fuel tank, she wondered whether McCoy was a murder victim or the perpetrator.

  In a subsequent message, she heard the concern in her deputy’s voice at the news that Holly Hammett, Dylan’s wife, could not be found. The deputy—a competent eight-year veteran named Caruthers—reported that he was going to see Hammett’s parents in an attempt to find out what they knew about the situation….

  “Oh, shit,” she breathed. Caruthers couldn’t get to Hammett’s on the Lake before she did, couldn’t be the one to break the news to Paulie that his son’s body—or parts of it—had been pulled from the lake. Glancing down at her watch, she checked it against the time the voice mail had been sent.

  Too late, she realized. I’m too damned late already. As if that weren’t disaster enough, the next voice mail brought her a report that a witness had seen Ruby Monroe abducted, thrown into the trunk of a dark Mustang. Parked nearby, another car—the white Corolla she’d been driving—had held a tattooed body, one matching the description of Balderach’s suspected killer.

  But with the body count increasing by the hour now, Justine couldn’t glean a moment’s satisfaction that her deputy had gotten justice. She was too busy wondering what other disasters karmic payback would heap atop her tainted term of office…a term whose final price she could not yet begin to guess.

  One part of Ruby warned she shouldn’t look at his face, that if she did, this man would have to kill her.

  The other knew that in the end, it wouldn’t matter, that her fate and the fates of her family had far less to do with her actions than with this murderer’s whims…or more likely with the orders some higher-up at DeserTek—maybe even a U.S. official or a senator—had given.

  So she looked up at the bastard who had bought her sister and her daughter from a drug dealer as leverage. The bastard who had slaughtered Elysse Steele simply to send Ruby herself a message—her stomach spasmed with the thought—and killed Sam McCoy to keep him from helping her.

  Defiantly, she glared, taking in the murderer’s short hair and dark eyes, the hard muscles of a weight lifter’s physique. With her loathing and her fury and her terror for her family all crowding to the forefront, it took her a full minute to register the dangerous wrath in the man’s expression.

  It took her even longer—seeing him in this shocking context—to understand who this man was, to realize she knew Hobson Best’s real identity.

  Which, she understood with sickening horror, dropped her odds of survival even further.

  “You—you killed—he was your—” she started.

  “You thought I was so careless”—her captor stalked toward her, his gaze as cold as any hunter’s—“so fucking incompetent that I wouldn’t even check the flash drive?”

  Eyes wide, she cried out when he caught her by the throat.

  “You thought I was nothing but a shadow, a man who’d accept a contract with no thought”—he raised his free hand, revealing the coiled, orange extension cord he carried, its metal pronged end drooping toward her, threatening as a serpent’s head—“absolutely no intention of keeping my word.”

  He released her neck and grabbed the cord, about three feet down from its plug. Without asking her a question, or even allowing her more than a split second to fill her lungs, he lashed her, raining his fury in the form of blows that split flesh at her chest, her elbow, thigh, and face. Screaming, sobbing, she lost track of the places that the cord struck, lost track of everything except the terror that she would die here, without a prayer of saving her child.

  Misty, too, shrieked, begging him to stop. Yelling that Ruby couldn’t answer questions, couldn’t be of any use if she died. His red-faced frenzy didn’t slow a moment until Misty cried, “How will you keep your word now? How will you keep from turning into a shadow if you can’t stop?”

  The killer froze, his fist raised, the snakelike cord dangling limp beneath it, dripping with Ruby’s blood.

  It was only then that the pain hit her, pain that obliterated all other awareness, from the sounds of her own daughter’s frightened wails behind the closed door to her desperate need to think of something—any lie or promise—that would save them.

  C HAPTER T HIRTY-TWO

  Between the idea

  And the reality

  Between the motion

  And the act

  Falls the Shadow

  —T. S. Eliot,

  from “The Hollow Men”

  Sam’s fingers shook so badly he could barely punch the buttons of the cell phone he’d recovered from the nest box. Dangerous as it had been to venture so far on the lake, he’d risked replacing the phone he’d ruined during his swim. Risked being caught by armed agents on the water.

  In Paulie’s shack now, he shuddered beneath layers of towels and blankets he’d wrapped around himself and wished for Ruby’s warmth. Or Java’s, or even his truck’s heater. All of which lay far beyond his grasp.

  “McCoy? That you?” Paulie slurred, sounding strange, as if he had been drinking heavily. “Do you know already? Do you fucking know—”

  “I—I know they’re looking for me.” Sam had trouble speaking with his teeth chattering so hard. “Know I have to get a car before it’s too late.”

  “That bitch Wofford sent someone to tell me Dylan—they’re saying my son’s dead, Sam.” Paulie sounded as if someone were sawing through his arm with a dull blade.

  “Dylan’s dead?” The news hammered flat Sam’s lingering hope that Dylan might be keeping Misty safe, that the two of them had gone somewhere together. Sam squatted down on his heels and pulled the towels around him tighter, needing warmth to make sense of what his friend was saying.

  “They found his—found someone in the lake, but it can’t really be him, can it? How could he have been out there—supposedly for days? I would have fucking known it. And Anna, she’s his mother. Wouldn’t she have felt it? How can parents not know that their only child’s gone?”

  Sam flashed onto a memory of Paulie clapping Dylan’s shoulder at his wedding and trash-talking about stealing away his son’s bride, both father and son grinning from ear to ear. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, Paulie, sorry for your family.”

  Had Dylan’s body—or parts of it—been the one recovered close to Misty’s car? Or had both of them been murdered—two obstacles in the path of the kidnappers’ ideal hostage, Zoe?

  “What the fuck do you know about sorry?” Paulie demanded. “What do you know about my boy? They sent—sheriff sent a goddamned deputy to tell me—her freaking lackey, after everything I did for that bitch.”

  Sam wondered at the edge of fury in the man’s voice, and at the “after everything I did for that bitch.” He’d known Paulie was dead set against his old enemy Roger Savoy winning the sheriff’s office, suspected that Sa
voy might shine too bright a light on Paulie’s Play Room—a place Sam scrupulously avoided—if he were elected. But Sam had had no idea Paulie had played a major role in helping Justine Wofford defeat the man.

  “They’re telling me they found your goddamned truck at Dylan’s,” Paulie told him. “And there were windows smashed and blood in back. They’re telling me you might have—”

  “You have to believe me,” Sam said. “I had nothing to do with what happened to Dylan. This evening, I went over to find Ruby—”

  “She was going to see him—” Paulie stammered. “Goin’ because that crack whore Jackie said she saw Dylan with Misty. Ruby swallowed those lies, even though I told her my son had nothing to do with all that. He’s a happily married man with a—with a business—and I—I love him, Sam. I love my boy….”

  Hammett broke down completely, causing Sam to close his eyes against the force of the man’s grief. To think that everything Paulie and Anna had been through with Dylan, all the love and all the struggle, had boiled down to this loss. The sadness and waste of it tore the breath from Sam’s lungs.

  And reminded him of Ruby, in the midst of her own fight to save her child.

  “Could Ruby have hurt my son?” Paulie asked Sam. “Could she—people do things when they’re desperate. They get crazy.”

  “You said yourself the deputy told you Dylan had been in the lake for days. Besides, somebody jumped Ruby this evening at your son’s house. Probably the same person who hurt Dylan.”

  “Who, Sam? Fucking who? Because when I find out, I’m going to kill the bastard.”

  “Too late,” Sam told him, thinking of the tattooed body he’d found in the trunk. “I’m pretty sure it’s already taken care of.”

  “What do you mean by that? What do you have to do with this, Sam?”

  Realizing he’d get no help from Paulie, that his grief was quickly turning to suspicion, Sam said, “Nothing. But please tell Anna I’m sorry. I’ll keep both of you in my thoughts.”