Without Mercy

by Lisa Jackson

  “Along with the rest of us.”

  “The storm will let up soon,” the sheriff said, though they both knew the weather service predicted more snow.

  “How’s the Prescott kid doing?” Trent asked, dropping his towel and using it to wipe up the puddle that had formed around his feet.

  “Still critical. The docs were real positive when he came to, had that burst of consciousness, talking with everyone, but it seems he’s lapsed back into a coma again.”

  Trent hated to hear it. “Too bad.”

  “Yeah. The hospital is supposed to call the minute he wakes up again, but he’s still in the ICU. They’re talking about brain and spine injury.” After a brief pause, during which Trent hoped to God for a miracle, the sheriff wrapped things up. “I gotta roll. If you have any more questions, talk to Meeker, or call Baines or Jalinsky.” O’Donnell hung up, giving Trent the green light to investigate what had happened in the stable.

  About time. He kicked his towel into a corner and added the sheriff’s number along with those for Jalinsky and Baines into his phone, then got dressed in heavy layers and headed to the stable. He had a couple of hours before he was expected in the gym for the group of kids who played pickup basketball or worked out on the equipment on the weekends, and he wanted to see the crime scene again.

  Most of the stable had been off-limits while the sheriff’s department worked the scene. Since the crime scene investigators and the detectives were finished, Trent ignored the yellow crime scene tape that was already broken and flapping in the breeze and let himself into the stable.

  He found Flannagan leading Omen, a black gelding, through the back door and into his stall. Omen was pulling on his lead, prancing and tossing his head, his black coat gleaming under the lights. The other horses had already returned to their boxes.

  Trent reached into a stall to pat Arizona’s gray muzzle, and the gelding in the next stall snorted impatiently.

  “Take it easy, Scout,” he said, scratching the paint behind his ears. He turned to Flannagan. “Need help?”

  Dressed in camouflage pants and a Blue Rock down jacket, Flannagan shook his head. “Nah. This is the last one. Besides, I got extra hands today, the three from yesterday’s tussle. The new girl, Stillman, Lucy Yang, and Eric Rolfe. They’ve been assigned to muck out the stalls this weekend—that is, when they’re not shoveling snow.” His lips twisted in a smile that was more menacing than amused. “Guess that’s the start of their punishment for their little spat yesterday.”

  “Start?”

  “Hmm.” He locked Omen in his stall, then unclipped the lead from the gelding’s halter. “Usually the two involved would be left out in the wilderness for a day or two, separately, of course, just to give each of ‘em time to think about what they’ve done, how they disrespected the school and all that.” Slipping through the door to the stall, he walked to the area where the feed was kept. While the horses nickered and whinnied impatiently, Flannagan twisted off the top of a barrel of oats. “Because of the blizzard, Reverend Lynch is raining down a little mercy on the sinners’ dark souls.”

  “So they’re sinners?” Trent asked.

  “Isn’t everybody?” Flannagan snorted a laugh as he slipped through the gate. Trent’s eyes were drawn to the man’s hunting knife sheathed but at his side. An odd accessory for a man who worked with juvenile delinquents, but it was part of Flannagan’s persona and was definitely a necessity working with farm animals.

  As Flannagan climbed up the ladder to the loft, Trent stared down at the floor, at the spot where Andrew Prescott had lain, crumpled and unconscious. Although someone had washed the area, the old, porous floorboards had soaked up the blood so that the stain remained, a patch of rusty brown. Farther away was the smaller stain, the one that had looked like another patch of blood, one the detectives had photographed, discussed, and taken samples from to ensure that it was either Nona Vickers’s or Drew Prescott’s.

  “Stand clear,” Flannagan called as he dropped a couple of hay bales through the chute. Swinging down from the opening, he landed on the floor and deftly, one knee placed on the bale, used his knife to slice through the string holding the pressed hay together.

  In his mind’s eye, Trent envisioned Prescott on the floor and Flannagan standing over him, wielding that wicked hunting knife.

  Except Andrew hadn’t been stabbed.

  “What?” Flannagan asked, grabbing a nearby pitchfork. “This bother you?” He pointed the tines at the bloodstain visible beneath the loose hay.

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “I tried to wash it down, but the damn stain is stubborn. Blood is hard to remove, you know,” Flannagan said, as if he’d had experience with trying to clean up like stains. He shook forkfuls of hay into the mangers, and the horses shuffled and snorted as they shoved their noses into the loose, dried grass.

  “I guess it seems disrespectful to just pretend it isn’t there.” Trent measured rations of grain.

  “Life goes on,” Flannagan said, flashing his razor-sharp grin. “Don’t get me wrong, I hope the boy survives. I hope Sheriff O’Donnell tracks down the killer and all. But I got stock to feed, barns to keep clean, kids to teach. I can’t worry about a little spilled blood. Seen enough in my lifetime, let me tell you. Nothing we can do to change what happened; we can only hope to make sure it never happens again.”

  Finally, they agreed on something, Trent thought, as Flannagan returned the pitchfork to its hook on the wall, then walked out of the stable on his way to the barn.

  Once the door shut behind Flannagan, Trent scowled at the faded bloodstain and climbed up the ladder to the hayloft. A familiar spidery feeling slipped up his back, an eerie sensation that had hit him in the gut the night Nona Vickers died. He stared up at the rafters, remembered her swinging, nude corpse. If only these walls could talk …

  He climbed up to the spot where there had once been sleeping bags and a pile of clothes. The wall of bales had been dismantled, and there was a small stack of bales and loose hay in disarray from the investigation. It was cold up here, the small round window still open a few inches. He thought about closing it, then remembered the owl who nested in the rafters and left well enough alone.

  Standing there, in the place where terror had reigned in the deep cold, he took out his cell and called the detectives he’d met yesterday. The line clicked through to Ned Jalinsky’s voice mail, so he tried Tori Baines.

  “This is Baines.” Her voice was low and had a bite to it, as if she were too busy to talk.

  “Cooper Trent, at Blue Rock. We met at the crime scene yesterday, and I spoke to O’Donnell this morning. He deputized me.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” She didn’t sound happy about it. “You’ve been a deputy for all of ten minutes, right? Not wasting any time, are you?”

  “I want to get this guy before he gets someone else. Sheriff O’Donnell told me to refer questions to you. Is this a bad time?”

  She sighed. “Fair enough. I guess this is as good a time as any, since I’m sitting at a roadblock. You wouldn’t believe how many drivers think they’ve got the skill to beat snow and ice just because they have four-wheel drive.”

  “I believe it. I used to do police work.” Trent looked up at the rafters and caught another memory flash of Nona swinging there. “I’m wondering if you’ve gotten any forensics back on Nona Vickers. Did they do an autopsy yet?”

  “The coroner fit the autopsy in before end of day yesterday,” she said. “I’ve got the report on my BlackBerry here, and no matter how it was staged, this was not a suicide.”

  “That would confirm what Drew Prescott said.” Cell phone in one hand, Trent turned away from the loft and climbed back down to the stables.

  “But you suspected as much, right? You pointed out the signs of petechial hemorrhaging. Looks like the hanging was just for show. The victim died from asphyxiation.”

  “Someone strangled her,” Trent said.

  “Bruises on the neck consistent wit
h fingertips,” she said. “Also, a few broken ribs. You put it all together, and it looks like a strangling. Someone got on top of her and squeezed her neck until she died.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Trent said, wanting a cigarette now more than ever. “Son of a goddamned bitch.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Jules stood at her window drying her hair with a thick towel while she watched opaque clouds roll over the mountains. Though the night had been as quiet as death, this morning the storm was back with a vengeance. Those mountains would be impassable. For today, at least, they would be trapped here without the support from law enforcement.

  Trapped with a killer on the loose.

  The howl of the wind, as forbidding as Satan’s laugh, shrieked through the canyon before licking the icy edges of Lake Superstition and roiling the center of the lake, which was too deep to freeze through. Steely clouds collided overhead, and snow fell in tiny, hard flakes of ice that clicked frantically as they hit the window.

  After the nightmare, Jules had slept poorly, her mind filled with images of death. The dream with her father lying in a pool of blood had been followed by a nightmare in which the naked body of a young woman swung from a noose in a dark stable. Poor Nona.

  As for her fears that someone had been in her room or lingered in the hallway, she saw no evidence of anything out of place. Apparently her vivid, macabre imagination had been working overtime again. “Paranoid,” she whispered under her breath as she walked into the bathroom. “That’s what you are.” She plugged in the dryer and finished with her hair, then added lipstick to her pale face. She made herself a cup of orange pekoe and dialed Mrs. Dixon, an early riser who answered on the first ring, saying, “You’ll never get him back.”

  “What?”

  “I saw it was you on the caller ID, and I’m just warning you, I’m in love with this cat. You’ll have to pry him out of my arms!”

  “You’ve had him what, two days? Let’s see how much you love him in a week or so, after he’s brought you headless mice as trophies, then clawed your drapes and hissed at any friends you have over.”

  “Sweet little Diablo?” the older woman said with a laugh.

  “He has that name for a reason, you know. He earned it.”

  Mrs. Dixon chuckled, and they chatted for a few minutes while Jules sipped her tea and Agnes Dixon regaled her with cute stories of the cat. When she hung up, Jules felt a little more grounded. The hot tea had warmed her from the inside out, and any concerns she had about her pet had been quieted by her neighbor in Seattle. Diablo, that little traitor, appeared to be doing just fine without her.

  After she bundled up against the cold, she set out to explore the campus on her own, trusting that she was safe navigating on her own in the light of day. She tried to memorize the location of buildings and the way paths connected them. A walking trail that cut through the campus led past the barns and into the wooded slopes in one direction and followed the shoreline of the lake in the other. This, she decided, would become her jogging path when the weather broke. If she was here that long.

  Right now it was impossible to run due to the icy conditions, but she figured she could work out in the gym, where, according to all the literature she’d read, there was plenty of exercise equipment.

  Even if it meant dealing with Cooper Trent.

  She had to start thinking of him as an ally rather than an adversary. The heartbreak between them was long over; they both had to deal with the here and now.

  No more tripping down memory lane to that summer when she’d first met him. He’d smelled of dust, tobacco, and horses, a three-days growth of beard had shaded his strong jaw, and an irreverent smile that touched his eyes had slowly crept across the lower half of his face. She’d been caught up in the mystique and pure, sexy maleness of him.

  “Fool,” she said under her breath, but even so, her stupid heart was racing at the memory.

  Forgetting about their time together was easier said than done, Jules decided, and found out she was right a few hours later.

  She caught her first glimpse of Trent that day at breakfast when he took a seat at the table with his pod. A glum Shaylee sat next to him, picking at her muffin. Each time Jules glanced Trent’s way, she saw him dealing with his students. She never caught him looking in her direction, which was just as well. Still, that didn’t improve the taste of her oatmeal, fruit, and coffee.

  On the other hand, Shaylee nearly stared a hole right through Jules, which wasn’t smart. Jules tried and failed to ignore the plea in her sister’s eyes. It wasn’t that Jules didn’t want to talk to her sister; she simply couldn’t risk it. Not with the faculty and student population of Blue Rock Academy looking on.

  Before the meal, Reverend Lynch had given his prerequisite prayer about trusting God for their safety. “Psalms twenty-seven five tells us, ‘For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling, he will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock.’”

  High upon a rock? Jules mulled that one over, wondering if he’d chosen the Bible quote because the academy was called Blue Rock.

  The meal itself was strained, with students and staff still reeling from the attacks on campus, still worried that the killer had not been found.

  As students began clearing their plates, Lynch went to the podium again and moved on to housekeeping, breaking down chores by pod. Then, to Jules’s surprise, he called up Shaylee, Lucy Yang, and Eric Rolfe. He asked them to hold hands and “break through the wall of misunderstanding” that had put them at odds.

  Jules tried to ignore the snickers that punctuated the room as Lynch placed a hand on each of their heads and led a prayer asking the Lord’s forgiveness for their sins. At the last “Amen,” he insisted everyone in the dining hall link hands and say a kind word to each of the people they were touching.

  Just the kind of thing Jules abhorred.

  “I’m glad you’re a part of the staff,” Rhonda Hammersley said to her. “We need a few more women.”

  Jules, forcing the lie over her lips, responded in kind, that she was happy to be at Blue Rock.

  On her other side, Wade Taggert, with his ever-worried expression, told her she was a welcome addition to the school and that he was looking forward to working with her. The whole scene seemed surreal, even scripted. Hoping she sounded a hell of a lot more sincere that she felt, Jules repeated what she’d said to Hammersley. As soon as Taggert dropped her hand, he rubbed nervously at his goatee.

  She couldn’t hear what Shaylee, Lucy, and Eric said to each other, but the set of Shay’s jaw didn’t bode well in the forgiveness department, but Jules couldn’t worry about it. Not now.

  Even though it was technically the weekend, Jules was busy. First up, she had to complete employment forms for her personnel file. As soon as breakfast ended, Jules headed over to the office in the admin building and located Charla King, Lynch’s secretary, who looked a little like a former beauty queen—very faded and slightly unhappy. With manicured fingernails, Charla pointed out where Jules was to sign on insurance, retirement, and tax forms. The process was tedious, but Jules scanned the documents as she signed them.

  “Almost done,” Charla promised, as if reading Jules’s mind. She slid the final form across her desk. “This is about privacy for the school. It ensures that you won’t disclose anything about Blue Rock Academy during your tenure or after you leave us. As you know, we value the privacy of our staff and students.”

  Jules’s toes wiggled in her boots as she looked down at the form. This one would be a problem, but what the hell?

  Charla smiled as Jules read the short document quickly, then scribbled her name in the appropriate box.

  “Perfect.” Charla scooped up all the pages, tapped them on the top of her desk to straighten them, then carefully placed them in a file and locked the slim folder inside one of a bank of file cabinets.

  “Okay, then.” Charla dropped the key in her purse, then reached for her wool coat and scarf
. “Let me take you on a quick introductory tour, though the campus is going to be quiet today. All this snow, and our students will be kept inside for the most part. Everyone’s still worried about what happened to those two kids.”

  Somehow, Charla’s tone minimized the severity of the situation. Jules shrugged her coat on, grabbed her hat, and followed the woman out into the cold wind.

  Animated, the tip of her nose and cheeks turning red, Charla pointed out buildings, paths, and shortcuts, most of which Jules had seen on the map in her room.

  “Reverend Lynch runs a tight ship and helps hundreds of troubled kids every year,” Charla said, her breath fogging in the air, as if powered by her faith in the man who was, in her mind, the backbone of Blue Rock Academy.

  Jules followed her on the shoveled path, which was quickly being covered by new snow. With more force than had been predicted, the arctic storm was ripping down from Canada, tearing through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and even parts of Northern California. News reports indicated that parts of I-5, the lifeline of the western states, were closed. Jules was glad to have made it here yesterday before the blizzard set in.

  Jules stared at the edges of the frozen Lake Superstition, where the seaplane was tethered in ice. In this weather, there really was no way in or out of here.

  Charla followed her gaze. “I’ve never seen that much ice on Lake Superstition, though we get our fair share of snow. This area of the Siskiyou Mountains is always inundated.”

  “You don’t mind the isolation?” Jules asked, feeling the spit of tiny crystals of ice against her face.

  “I can honestly say it’s cozy in the winter. Blue Rock Academy might be geographically challenged, but we’re prepared for anything. We could probably even survive a nuclear attack.”

  Prepared for anything except missing students and murder, Jules wanted to say. The woman seemed ridiculously smug about Blue Rock’s resilience.

  “I even think at one point there was a fallout shelter on campus, though I’ve never seen it.” Charla laughed and explained that the campus was self-contained, with stores of food, two generators, extensive tanks of propane, and gasoline. There was a radio/communications station as well as a clinic. Though there was no doctor on staff, Jordan Ayres was soon to become a nurse practitioner, and Kirk Spurrier, the pilot, had once been an EMT.