by Nora Roberts
EYES BRIGHT, SYLVIA leaned on the counter of her pretty little shop while Fiona debated earrings. “He did not say that.”
“He absolutely said that.” Fiona held long pearl drops to one ear, funky, colored glass balls to the other. “I’m not elegant enough for his overrated cabinet. I can be elegant.” She turned. “See? Pearls.”
“Very pretty. But the fused glass ones are really you.”
“Yeah, but I could wear the pearls, if I wanted.” After setting them back in the display, Fiona wandered over to a tall raku vase.
There was always something new to see in Sylvia’s place. A painting, a scarf, a table, a treasure trove of jewelry. She stopped by a bench with high, curved sides and skimmed her fingers over the wood.
“This is beautiful.”
“It’s one of Simon’s.”
She resisted giving it a flick with her formerly admiring fingers. “Figures. Then he said I wasn’t his type. As if I’d asked. You are.”
“I am?”
“He even used you as an example. Arty and female and built.”
“Really?”
“Sure, go ahead and look smug.”
Deliberately, obviously, Sylvia fluffed at her hair. “It’s hard not to.”
“Well, feel free to follow up,” Fiona added with a dismissive wave.
“It might be interesting, but I think I’ll just stay smug. I’m sure he didn’t mean to insult you.”
“Oh yes he did.”
“Tell you what. I’m closing in ten minutes. We’ll go have dinner and trash him. Better, men in general.”
“That sounds like fun, but I need to get back. I really just came in to bitch. Jesus, Syl, it’s been a crappy couple of days.”
Sylvia skirted the counter to give Fiona a bolstering hug. “Why don’t I come over and fix you some pasta while you take a nice long bath?”
“Honestly, I think I’m going to open a can of soup, then go to bed. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“I worry about you, Fee.” She gave Fiona’s tail of hair a little tug. “Why don’t you come stay with me until they catch this maniac?”
“You know I’m fine. Me and the boys. Besides, the maniac’s not interested in me.”
“But—” She broke off when the door opened.
“Hi, Sylvia. Hi, Fiona.”
“Jackie, how are you?” Sylvia smiled at the pretty blonde who ran a local B&B.
“I’m just fine. I meant to get in earlier. I know you close in a few minutes.”
“Don’t worry about that. How’s Harry?”
“Tucked up in bed with a cold—which is one of the reasons I ran out. I swear you’d think he had the plague instead of the sniffles. He’s driving me crazy. I’ve been doing a little early spring cleaning between waiting on him hand and foot and listening to him moan. I decided I need to spruce the place up a little, do some redecorating. Mind if I look around, get some ideas?”
“You go right ahead.”
“I’d better get going. Nice to see you, Jackie.”
“You, too. Oh, Fiona, my boy and his wife just got a puppy. Practice, they say, before they start working on making me a grandmother.” She rolled her eyes.
“That’s nice. What kind did they get?”
“I don’t know. They went to a shelter.” She smiled then. “Brad said they’d save a life, then start thinking about starting one.”
“That’s really nice.”
“They named her Sheba—as in Queen of. He said if I ran into you I should tell you they’re going to sign up for your puppy classes.”
“I’ll look forward to it. I’d better go.”
“I’ll come by tomorrow, give you a hand with your classes,” Sylvia told her. “Oreo could use a little refresher course.”
“I’ll see you then. Bye, Jackie.”
As she walked out she heard Jackie exclaim over the bench, “Oh, Sylvia, this is a wonderful piece.”
“Isn’t it? It’s by the new artist I told you about. Simon Doyle.”
Fiona grumbled all the way to the truck.
IN HIS CELL in Washington State Penitentiary, George Allen Perry read his Bible. While his crimes had earned him a maximum-security cage for the rest of his life, he was considered a model prisoner.
He joined no gangs, made no complaints. He did the work assigned to him, ate the food served him. He kept himself clean, spoke respectfully to guards. He exercised regularly. He did not smoke or swear or use drugs, and spent most of the endless days reading. Every Sunday he attended services.
Visitors came rarely. He had no wife, no child, no staunch friends outside, or inside, the walls.
His father had long ago deserted him, and his mother, who the psychiatrists agreed was the root of his pathology, feared him.
His sister wrote him once a month, and made the long trek from Emmett, Idaho, once a year, considering it her Christian duty.
She’d given him the Bible.
The first year had been a misery that he’d borne with downcast eyes and a quiet manner that had disguised a raging fear. In the second year he’d lost fear in depression, and by the third he’d accepted that he would never be free.
He would never again be free to choose what to eat, and when to eat it, to rise or repose at his own whim. He would never again walk through a forest or glade or drive a car along a dark road with a secret in the trunk.
He would never again feel the power and the peace of a kill.
But there were other freedoms, and he earned them carefully. Meticulously. He expressed regret for his crimes to his lawyer, to the psychiatrist.
He’d wept, and considered the tears humiliation well spent.
He told his sister he’d been born again. He was allowed private consultation with a minister.
By his fourth year, he was assigned to the prison library, where he worked with quiet efficiency and expressed gratitude for the access to books.
And began his search for a student.
He applied for and was granted permission to take courses, both by visiting instructors and by video feed. It gave him an opportunity to interact with and study his fellow inmates in a new setting.
He found most too crude, too brutal, too lacking in intellect. Or simply too old, too young, too deeply entrenched in the system. He continued to further his education—he found it interesting—and he held to the thinning hope that fate would offer him the spiritual freedom he sought.
In his fifth year in Walla Walla, fate smiled on him. Not in the guise of a fellow inmate, but an instructor.
He knew instantly, just as he’d known the woman he would kill the moment he saw her.
This was his gift.
He began slowly, assessing, evaluating, testing. Patient, always, as he outlined and refined the methods by which he would create his proxy, the one who would walk outside the walls for him, hunt for him and kill for him.
Who would, in time, in good time, correct his single mistake. One that haunted him every night in the dark cage where silence and comfort were strangers.
Who would, in time, kill Fiona Bristow.
That time, Perry thought as he read Revelation, was nearly here.
He glanced up as the guard came to the cell. “Got a visitor.”
Perry blinked, carefully marking his place before setting aside the worn Bible. “My sister? I didn’t expect her for another six weeks.”
“Not your sister. FBI.”
“Oh, my goodness.” A big man with thinning hair and prison pallor, Perry stood meekly as the door clanged and slid open.
Two guards flanked him, and he knew others would search his cell while he was gone. No matter, none at all. They’d find nothing but his books, some religious tracts, the dry, God-fearing letters from his sister.
He kept his head down, repressed the smile that strained to spread over his face. The FBI would tell him what he already knew. His student had passed the next test.
Yes, Perry thought, there were many kinds o
f freedom. And at the thought of gaming with the FBI again, he took wing and soared.
SIX
Grateful for the bright, brisk morning and work that demanded her full attention, Fiona studied her advanced special-skills students. Today was a very big day for dogs and handlers. They’d attempt their first blind search.
“Okay, the victim’s in place.” She thought of Sylvia, three-quarters of a mile away, sitting cozily under a forked-trunk cedar with a book, a thermos of herbal tea and her radio. “I want you to work as a unit. We’re going to use the sector system. You can see I’ve set up the base.” She gestured to a table she’d placed under a pole tarp and the equipment on it. “For today, I’ll handle base and stand as operational leader, but by next week I want you to elect your officers.”
She gestured to the whiteboard under the tarp. “Okay. The local authorities have notified the operations officer—me, in this case—and asked for assistance in the search and rescue of an adult female hiker who’s been lost approximately twenty-four hours. You see on the board temperatures last night dropped to forty-three degrees. She has only a day pack, and little experience. The victim is Sylvia Bristow.”
That brought out some grins as the class knew Sylvia as Fiona’s sometime assistant. “She’s age-deleted for my own well-being, Caucasian, brown hair, brown eyes, five feet, five inches, and about a hundred and thirty pounds. When last seen she was wearing a red jacket, jeans, a blue baseball-style cap. Now, what do you need to know before being given your sectors?”
She answered with details from the scenario she’d devised. The subject was in good health, had a cell phone but often neglected to charge it, had been expected to hike two to four hours, was not local and had only recently taken up hiking.
She called the unit to the map and the log she’d already begun. Once she’d assigned sectors, she ordered everyone to load on their packs.
“I have items worn recently by the subject. Take a bag, give your dogs the scent. Remember to use the subject’s name. Refresh the scent whenever you think your dog may be confused, or if he or she becomes distracted or disinterested. Remember the boundaries of your sector. Use your compass, check in by radio. Trust your dogs. Good luck.”
She felt their excitement, and the nerves, as well as a sense of competition. Eventually, if they made it as a unit, the competition would shift into cooperation and trust.
“When you get back, all dogs who didn’t find our victim need a short find, to keep up morale. Remember, it’s not just your dogs being tested. You’re honing your skills, too.”
She watched them spread out, separate, and nodded in approval at the way each gave his or her dog the scent, the command.
Her own dogs whined as the others scented the air, began to roam.
“We’ll play later,” she promised them. “These guys need to do it on their own.”
She sat, noted the time, wrote it in the assignment log.
They were a good group, she thought, and should make a solid unit. She’d started with eight, but over the past ten weeks three had dropped out. Not a bad percentage, she mused, and what was left was tight, was dedicated. If they pushed through the next five weeks, they’d be a good asset to the program.
She picked up her radio, checked the frequency, then contacted Sylvia. “They’re off and running. Over.”
“Well, I hope they don’t find me too soon. I’m enjoying my book. Over.”
“Don’t forget. Sprained ankle, dehydration, mild shock. Over.”
“Got it. But until then, I’m going to eat my apple and read. See you when they haul me back. Over and out.”
To keep her own dogs occupied, and give them some consolation for not being able to play the find game with the others, Fiona ran them through their paces on the agility training equipment.
It may have looked comical to an outsider—cheerful Labs climbing up and down the ladder of a child’s sliding board, or taking that slide on command. But the skill taught and reinforced a search dog’s ability to cope with difficult footing. The fact that they enjoyed it, as well as balancing on the teeter-totter, negotiating along narrow planks, maneuvering through the open drums she’d formed into tunnels, added a bonus.
The demands of the search exercise required her to order sit-and-stays while she took radio calls from the unit, answered questions, logged in positions.
At the end of an hour, the dogs settled down with chew treats, and Fiona at her laptop. When her radio crackled, she continued to keyboard one-handed.
“Base, this is Tracie. I have Sylvia. She’s conscious and lucid. Her right ankle may be sprained and is causing her some discomfort. She appears to be somewhat dehydrated and shaky, but otherwise uninjured. Over.”
“That’s good, Tracie. What’s your location, and do you require assistance transporting Sylvia to base? Over.”
Exercise or not, Fiona logged in the location, the time, the status. She may have smiled when she heard Sylvia playing up her victim role in the background, but she created a professional and complete log.
While they’d debrief as if the search had been real, Fiona felt such moments deserved commemoration. She set trays of brownies on her picnic table, added fruit platters for the more healthy-minded, pitchers of iced tea.
She had dog biscuits and a toy for the dogs—and for Lolo, Tracie’s clever German shepherd, a gold star for her tag collar.
As she carried glasses outside, Simon’s truck drove over her bridge.
It annoyed her to feel annoyed. She was basically a happy person, Fiona thought. A friendly one. She liked Simon well enough, and his dog quite a bit. But irritation pricked nonetheless.
Maybe part of it was because he just looked good—sort of rough and arty at the same time in battered jeans and expensive sunglasses—and somehow approachable (a misconception, in her opinion) with his adorable puppy.
He let the puppy race unleashed to greet her, then bounce like an over-wound spring to the other dogs, back to her before he tore off in circles around the yard in a bid to get her dogs to play.
“Having a picnic?” Simon asked.
“Of sorts.” She mimicked his oh-so-casual tone. “I have an advanced class on their way in from a practice search. Their first with a person. So we’ll have a little celebration.”
“With brownies.”
“I like brownies.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Jaws demonstrated his opinion by trying to climb onto the picnic bench to steal a sample. Fiona simply put his front paws back on the ground. “Off !”
“Yeah, good luck with that. He’s a freaking acrobat. Yesterday he managed to climb up on a stool and eat my sandwich—he likes pickles, apparently—in the five-point-two seconds my back was turned.”
“Consistency.” Fiona repeated the “Off!” command the second and third times Jaws attempted the snatch. “And distraction.”
She walked back a few steps, called him. He ran to her as if they’d just been reunited after a war. He sat when she ordered him to, then preened under her praise and pets. “Positive reinforcement.”
She dug a treat out of her pocket. “Good dog. He’s coming along.”
“Two days ago, he ate my flash drive. Just swallowed it whole like a vitamin pill.”
“Uh-oh.”
