Gus listens as his body is dragged along the hardscrabble. Every inch is a bruise to a bone. He can’t tell how far he’s combed the surface of the earth (it feels like the beginning of forever), but he’s guessing thirty feet, maybe less. And then, inch by inch, the light recedes, as they disappear into a black hole.
The cave offers a stingy entrance, tight walls of rock, a slash in the monolith. Gus blinks repeatedly, trying to adjust to the light, but only a sliver of day creeps into the cave. “You’ll feel better in a sec,” the man says, leaving Gus on the ground.
Gus lets out a deep breath. As he does this, Chase spins around and unleashes a bottle of water into his face. Gus spits and wipes his eyes. Chase throws him a towel. “Told you,” the psychopath says. “Refreshing, huh?”
“What are we doing here, Teddy?”
The man lowers himself to his knees and smiles. His squat is rugged. His stare explosive. “You and I could be the best of friends, Gus Parker. And only the best of friends get to see how I work. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t, Teddy. This is fine,” Gus tells him.
“I mean, I hope you don’t mind this,” Chase says, reaching into another pocket. He pulls out a three-foot section of rope and yanks it taut as if to make a point. “I’m sorry, Gus Parker. But I want you to sit still. I can’t have you leaving until I’m done.”
Timothy Chase coils the rope around Gus’s wrists and tightens it.
39
Alex Mills is afraid that if he grips the steering wheel any tighter he’ll pull it loose from the column. He’s plowing down the highway, probably averaging ninety. Priscilla Smith is quiet, nearly catatonic in the back seat. Next to her is Bridget Mulroney, eyes closed, but awake, groaning now and then as if the truth is hitting her like contractions.
“You ran out of that house for a reason,” he says to her.
She opens her eyes and nods slowly. “Yeah.”
“You and Chase?”
“Now and then. . . .” She tries to clear her throat. “I knew it was him as soon as you told me about those carvings on his body. But I was hoping against hope.”
“Did you ever ask him where they came from?”
“All he said is they were relics. And personal. In other words, none of my business. I was okay with the mystery.”
Mills nods and says no more about it.
He had called everybody before they left Prescott. And then again, after talking to Gus, using Kelly’s phone so he could keep his own line open to monitor the man’s whereabouts. And then once more, frantically, after Gus located himself at the Spirit Rock Trail. The department is mobilized. A team is waiting at the North Angel Gem Road address. Others are racing toward the Superstitions. His sergeant notified Pinal County and the feds to let them know what was going down. Mills also got a call from Ken Preston who confirmed that Chase had been living in a downtown condo all along, corresponding to the address on file with the department, leaving the house on Angel Gem vacant or in the hands of renters. He has two addresses, two cars, but the two identities have rarely intersected. That poor woman, Mills thinks to himself, eyeing Priscilla Smith in the rearview mirror. Or maybe, he wonders, she might just be happy to have this whole thing over.
He heard a scuffle, he thinks, between Chase and Gus. He’s tried calling twice, but Gus hasn’t answered. But he dials again. Still nothing.
Kelly reaches for his hand. “Hon, stop,” she says. “You’ve done all you can do from here.”
Logically, he knows that. Gus’s phone is dead.
Kelly’s hand is resting on his leg now, radiating warmth. “Hon, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Done all I can do from here.” And then he adds, “But if he’s such a fucking psychic, why did he get in the car with him in the first place?”
Kelly gives him an ironic laugh. “I don’t think it works that way, but you can ask him when you see him.”
“Ask him when I see him?” Somewhere a fat lady sings, a camel collapses, a pot boils over; it’s obviously too late to choose the right metaphor when his thoughts are already roiling in doom. “Don’t you get it, Kelly? Gus Parker is in serious fucking danger. If that lunatic has his way we’ll never see Gus Parker again. How come nobody in this car fucking gets that?”
Kelly recoils. “Jesus, Alex,” she whispers.
“He’s as good as dead,” Mills shouts. At her. At Bridget. At everybody. At the world. “Chase didn’t take him on a joy ride. He didn’t take him for a picnic. They did not go bowling. I haven’t been a detective all these years not to know what the plan is.”
Kelly doesn’t look at him but says, “Gus is a smart guy. Psychic or not, he can handle himself.”
Yeah right, Mills thinks, intelligence is really going to save his life.
40
Intuitively, Gus knows the rope around his wrists is from the same coil of rope that killed Andrea Willis. To confirm he closes his eyes, and the vision comes to him immediately: she, struggling in the hallway, knocking pictures out of place, kicking at the man’s shins; he, dragging her by the waist, lumbering toward the bedroom; they, rolling on the floor, cracking a closet mirror.
She’s clutching the carpet, holding on for dear life.
He’s clutching her neck, beginning to wind the rope.
When Gus opens his eyes the cave is aglow. On the floor of the cave, a small army of flickering candles. And there on the wall is a portrait. The beginning of a portrait. A carving in progress. Gus’s orientation comes together. He’s inside an arched monolith; it’s like an ancient tomb excavated from the earth beneath Jerusalem. Or maybe his imagination is hyped up on adrenaline. He knows this: Chase has been here before, has set his stage, and has thought through this whole piece of theater. There are provisions on the floor against another wall. Tools. A few jugs, contents unknown. A blanket. Gus takes this all in as if he’s a visitor to another world.
“Snap out of it, Parker,” Chase tells him. He hands Gus a bottle of water. “Stay hydrated. You’ll be here a while.”
Gus begins to sip. The killer removes his jacket and then reaches for the tools.
“Going to do some art today, Teddy?”
“It’s excellent to have an audience.”
“So you made the women watch you first? You made them see their own murders?”
Chase spins around and thrusts the chisel into the rock. “Some of them. It’s only fair. Don’t you think?”
“You’ve been camping out here?”
“Sort of.”
His back is to Gus, and he begins to carve. Gus strains to see but can’t see the man’s progress. The sound of metal hitting rock continues, gashing, chipping, ringing in a way that, like the days when you actually love your mother and she’s banging pots and pans in the kitchen, is surprisingly soothing, settling to Gus; in fact, he’s feeling calmed, sleepy. He doesn’t understand, but he feels himself drifting to the insane lullaby of the artist’s work. The sounds are getting distant, first like echoes, then like receding surf, then an empty hallway. He’s about to take another sip from the bottle when he startles himself with a discovery, one that sort of leaps from his chest.
“Did you drug all the others?” he asks Chase.
Chase doesn’t answer.
“I said did you drug all the others?”
The man turns. “No. Just you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re bigger and stronger. Because it was easier just to gag them.”
“What’s in here?” Gus asks, struggling to hold the bottle in front of him.
“Don’t worry. It’s very mild. I’ll wake you when I’m ready.”
“Don’t you want me to watch?”
“Close your eyes, Gus Parker. You can surely conjure a vision of your own demise.”
Gus’s head, heavy like a bowling ball, collapses against his chest. He’s a marionette, a rag doll, a charm on his mother’s bracelet. But he won’t let this happen. He won’t surrend
er to the potion. He’s fighting back, kicking at the ground beneath him; he’s riding a recumbent bike, and it’s getting him nowhere, but it’s keeping him awake.
“Finish the water, Gus Parker,” Chase insists. “Finish it now.”
Gus clumsily empties the bottle on the dirt. “Sorry,” he says.
“There’s more.” Then the man comes over and whacks him across the face.
“A knife is missing from your garage,” Gus says.
“Of course it is. It’s here with me.”
Gus sees his body parts scattered across the floor of the cave; the vision is too dreamy to be frightening or to be real. There’s his arm. A severed hand, and its dripping tendrils. There’s his leg, more muscular than he’s given himself credit for. Oh, Jesus, there’s his head. His smiling face. Oceans of thrilling waves in his eyes. Holy shit! Jesus Christ, make this stop. Jesus, Jesus, make this stop. Our Father who art in heaven, Hail Mary, and all the other shit I forgot to pray about, stop!
And it does stop. All he has to do is ask. All he really has to do is seize the moment in all of its brilliant and microscopic brevity and consider it done. “The knife,” he says. “You’re not going to use it on me, are you?” He hears a slow laziness in his own voice.
“I brought it just in case,” Chase says. “You could have put up a fight. But you didn’t. I have other plans for you. You’re a good boy. Your daddy loves you.”
“He loved you too, Teddy Junior. He did.”
Again, a whack to the face. “Don’t you say a word about him, Gus Parker. Now, open up and drink.”
With one hand holding Gus’s jaw, the man forces a bottle into Gus’s mouth. “Told you I had plenty of fluids. Fluids are so important.”
Gus can’t speak. He’s trying to reject the malevolent cocktail in violent spits and coughs, but he’s choking and gulping and choking again, and most of it goes down his throat, the rest down his windpipe, and he thinks this must be what it’s like to drown.
“Sure, I added something to it when you weren’t looking,” Chase says.
Gus watches the cave spin in circles, or maybe that’s his head rolling, or maybe he’s at the bottom of the ocean, flailing for life. His mouth is open, but he can’t say a word. All he can do is listen—to a rumbling, to words creeping up from the bottom of a stairwell, to words of a man escalating as they surround him. I love my daddy. I. Love. My. Daddy. Gus feels himself falling asleep, not to a gentle melody but to the thunderous cries of a grown man.
By the time they get to the North Angel Gem Road house, the place is crawling with cops. Priscilla Smith shields her eyes as if she is shielding them from a blinding sun. Kelly helps her from the car. Bridget follows. She’s shivering and begging Mills not to leave her. “I can’t be alone,” she cries. “I’m freaking out, totally freaking out.”
He nods to Kelly, and Kelly understands. “I’ll take her, Alex.”
Woods approaches. “You and I will have a long talk later,” the sergeant tells Mills. “A good talk. But right now I need you and Myers to hustle out to the Superstitions. Like yesterday. I got a crew over at Chase’s condo. Preston and I will handle stuff here. We’ll need Mrs. Smith to stay with us.”
Mills nods. His pulse is banging in his ears. He pulls his wife close and whispers, “Thank you,” then, “I love you.” Then he’s off. The road, the sky, the residue of the sun, everything is in front of him as he hurtles down the highway. Myers, who’s monitoring the chatter, says there are six cruisers ahead by twenty-five minutes or so. A chopper is up. Myers’s voice is calm. Extra calm, the way cops sometimes talk to a hostage taker. Got to give the guy some credit. He’s good, Myers, way smarter than he looks, the way he senses the silent howl climbing up from Mills’s diaphragm, the way he overcompensates so maybe the windows won’t bust out of the car with a sonic boom.
He’s going ninety, but he can’t get there fast enough.
Eighteen miles to the exit.
“Everything is going on at once, and I know that Chase knows he’s fucked,” Mills says breathlessly. “People who know they’re fucked are dangerous.”
Myers won’t really indulge him. He says, “The rangers have cleared all the trails, and they’re searching all of them in case Chase detours.”
“Good.”
They ride in silence for a few moments, and then Myers says, “I guess I’m off the hook.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it was obviously Chase who made that call to lure Bobby Willis out to White Tanks,” Myers replies. “Not me.”
“I never really thought it was you.”
Twelve miles to the exit. Twelve fucking miles.
Timothy Chase is going to kill Gus Parker. Mills knows it. He feels it in his gut, and he sees it all go down: the torture, the blood, the garden of death.
That wall of rock is taunting him. It looks much closer than it is.
Seven miles.
The chatter has ceased.
“Get someone on the radio, Myers. Now!”
An officer responds and tells them patrols have already hit the trails. “No contact yet. What’s your ETA?”
“Five minutes,” Myers says.
Three minutes later, Mills’s car screeches to a stop in the parking lot. It shudders, and he flies out. Myers follows, trudging behind. Mills sees the first piece of evidence and points. “Chase is here. That fucking Jeep is his.”
A ranger greets them. “You’ve got guys out on the trail already,” the man says. “I put some of my men on some surrounding trails just in case your suspect didn’t stick to the Spirit Rock.”
Mills raises his radio and calls to his search party.
“We found footprints going both ways,” someone tells him. “No real caves to speak of. No blood. We’re heading back.”
“Go meet them up there,” the ranger suggests, pointing to a rocky bluff where the trail descends.
They climb in that direction, shuffling through stones, pounding the earth, boots on the ground, like a drill. As they reach the bluff Mills sees a head popping up over a ledge, then another. The officers, three men and a woman, dusted up and sweating, climb toward him. He recognizes the young patrolman, Hall, and Jan Powell, the officer who worked the Squaw Peak detail. The other two have faces he knows, but the names are unfamiliar.
“Sorry, Alex,” Powell says. “I think we lost him.”
“We didn’t lose him,” Mills tells the officers. “He’s out there.”
The ranger steps into the circle of Phoenix cops and says, “Detective, why don’t I take you up the trail so you can have a look for yourself? The rest of you can go off to the east. There are plenty of caves out there, a few random petroglyphs.”
“Let’s do it,” Mills says. He climbs down the ledge, followed by the ranger.
Myers hesitates, then dumps himself over.
They zip up the Spirit Rock Trail, pushing ahead as if they have to diffuse a ticking bomb. Yes, the trail yields plenty of petroglyphs but few openings in the rock.
Mills stops by a pool of water and turns to the ranger. “No caves out here?”
“Lots,” he replies. “But they’re mostly off-trail.”
“I don’t think Chase goes far off-trail. He’s efficient.”
“But if he’s looking for a cave, most likely he’s left the trail. And not necessarily far.”
Mills nods. “Fine. Lead the way.”
They march onward into an open canyon, which, itself, yields nothing but sky. The ranger points out a petroglyph bearing a half moon and a collection of stars on a slate towering above them, and as they approach Mills narrows his eyes and makes out a series of holes at the base of the rock, mini caves that look like a neighborhood.
There are no footprints. No signs of residents. No evidence of visitors. But the ground is more stone than dirt, so it’s plausible people come and go without leaving a trace.
He tells Myers and the ranger to scatter, one to each side of the monolith.
&n
bsp; “Check out every one,” he orders. “Meet me in the middle.”
In aggressive strides, Mills makes a straight line to the center caves, draws his gun, and slides quietly into each. They turn out to be more dents than caves, and each one of them is empty. He hears Myers coming closer, the ranger, too, shouting out in intervals of two minutes, maybe shorter, “Clear.”
Fuck clear.
Fuck this. Fuck the fucking symbols.
Mills, with the other two in his wake, heads back to the trail. He gets on the radio, asks for Powell and Hall to meet him on the bluff, and then in silence, he retraces every step back down the Spirit Rock in case he’s missed something. Of course he’s missed something. He’s missed everything. How did he not see that the man he worked with so closely was homicidal? He doesn’t even want to wrestle with that right now because he knows there’s no good answer.
“He has to be here,” he shouts once they’ve all climbed the ledge. “Chase planned this. And he found the perfect killing ground. Think about his MO.”
“Good profile of the profiler,” Myers tells him.
Several cops, hearing Mills’s booming voice at the bluff, have gathered. Among them are Powell, Hall, and a few deputies from Pinal County.
“Nothing out there,” Powell reports. “I’ve been on the radio, and we’ve got nothing coming in.”
“We’re going back up the trail,” Mills insists. “Chase is here. His car is here. He can only get so far with a victim in tow.”
They approach the ledge again. The uniforms go down, several of them. Mills follows. Myers is next, this time a bit like Humpty Dumpty—but, hell, the man is as dedicated as anyone else, and he won’t be deterred, proving himself clumsy but loyal. Clearly overexerted and drenched in sweat, Myers loses his footing and rolls to the ground. With him comes a shower of pebbles. They land at Mills’s feet, and Mills immediately sees the stark contrast between clay and blood. He kneels to the ground and, indeed, sees traces of blood, fresh blood, on the shreds of rock. He looks to Myers; the man is not bleeding.
Desert Remains Page 38
