Heaven's Fury

by Stephen Frey

  Campbell looks around helplessly at the crowd that’s staring at him. Like Prescott before him, he knows he can’t deny what I’m saying. I’ve got him dead to rights, too.

  “Throw on top of that the fact that you out-and-out hate Lew Prescott, and have for years, because of what happened with him and your wife, and you see this as a chance to bury him like he’s never been buried and we’re at case closed. Aren’t we, Bill?”

  “What’s your damn point?”

  I rub my eyes for a few moments. I’m very tired. “A man from Brower County named Caleb Jenkins tried to kill me this afternoon out at Ike and Sara’s place.” Gasps of shock and amazement race around the church. Evidently a lot of people know who Caleb Jenkins is. It’s a small world up here in the north-country when you’re a true local. “He could tell us who ordered the murders of Cindy Prescott and Darrow Clements, because he’s in the cult. But he won’t talk. Not yet anyway. He’s at the hospital in Superior with a bullet in his shoulder because I shot him. He was trying to kill Sara but I got to him first. He was trying to get information out of her before he killed her because she was in the cult, too, but I got there in time.” My eyes flash around the big room. “She believes she’d be tortured if she told me what was going on, so she ran away this afternoon, and I’m sure I’ll never find her.” I’m standing in front of the double doors leading to the outside. “There’s one more person who I’m sure can tell us who the leader of the cult is. Who can tell us who’s carrying out these horrible murders and for whom all of this is ultimately being done. That’s an important thing I just said, if you didn’t hear me. She can tell us for whom this is all being done.” I hesitate as I stare intently at that individual for whom all of this is being done for several seconds. Then I glance at the individual who I’m almost positive is carrying it out. “There’s one more person I’m sure can tell us everything.” My eyes narrow. “And I’m going to go save her right now.”

  With that I’m out the church door and sprinting through the blizzard for my Cherokee. I may not care anymore if I live or die, but I care that she does.

  30

  I’M HALFWAY HOME, racing down 681 through the gale and the whipping snow, when headlights appear in my rearview mirror. It’s him, I know it is.

  He’s coming after me because he understood exactly what I meant before I dashed from the church. He knows which person could tell me everything about the cult, which person could pull back the black curtain for all to see it, which person could be my star witness. It’s Vivian. That’s why he’s tearing down 681 after me as I race for home. He needs to do away with both of us if he’s to have a chance of surviving. There’s no death penalty in Wisconsin, only life without parole, which for him would be even worse. If he kills both of us, maybe he can make it look as if it’s a cult killing, as he’s made the other murders appear.

  According to Sara, Vivian’s been in the cult for several months. Sara told me that the other night when she came by the precinct clutching her pop bottle full of rotgut moonshine. She told me a lot of things that night. She told me that Vivian was forced to bring the knives from our kitchen drawer for the sacrifice of Mel Hopkins’s goat and for Cindy’s murder—which was the knife I found at the cabin after Sara took me out there. Using knives from our drawer and planting that Bruner Washette ticket at the scene of Cindy’s murder were meant to keep Vivian in line, to keep her from telling me or anyone else anything about the cult. If she did, if she broke ranks with the cult, she knew she’d be implicated in the murder. Or, worse, she’d be executed before she could tell anyone what was going on. According to Sara, Vivian was told all that over and over by the man who’s running the cult, by the man who’s chasing me now.

  Vivian joined the cult because it fascinated her, and because it gave her a sense of belonging as well as the companionship she’s been wanting so desperately. Companionship I haven’t been giving her, but I will now—if we survive. Apparently, when she understood the murderous path the cult was headed down, she tried to quit—but she couldn’t. Once you join this cult you join it for good—or you die.

  Sara told me how Vivian cried while Cindy was being murdered and wasn’t actually present when Darrow Clements was killed at the Friendly Mattress. Vivian could still face prosecution for witnessing Cindy’s murder and not going to law enforcement immediately to tell us what she knew. But if I can prove she was in danger of being murdered herself if she told anyone, she might not be prosecuted.

  I still can’t believe Sara killed Cindy. I guess she is crazy, just like everyone always said she was. You’d have to be insane to kill someone the way she killed Cindy—inch by inch across the throat with a knife. That was one thing she didn’t tell me the other night. I had to find that out this afternoon.

  I glance in the rearview mirror. The headlights are closing in on me even though I’m pushing the Cherokee as hard as I can. The road’s already slick with fresh snow and I’m constantly fishtailing along the pavement. I can’t go any faster.

  A few hundred yards from my driveway he reaches my bumper and nudges me with his. For several fleeting seconds I’m able to hold the road, I’m able to stay in control. But then the front wheels go hard left and I’m hurtling toward the pine trees lining the side of the road. Then I’m able to wrench the wheels back to the right. But the change in direction is too sudden and the Cherokee flips. The truck rolls over and over down the narrow strip of grass between the road and the forest before it finally comes to rest upside down against several trees. Thanks to the seatbelt and dumb luck, I’m alive. I’m banged up and bruised, but as far I can tell, nothing’s broken.

  Somehow I’m able to unbuckle the seatbelt, drop down to the roof, and shove the door open. As I crawl out of the Cherokee, I see that he flipped over, too. He’s just pulling himself from his vehicle, so I take off for the house, limping. Something’s wrong with my left knee. It feels like ligaments.

  “Vivian!” I shout as I burst through the back porch door. “Viv!”

  I don’t have to look far. She’s standing in the kitchen by the stove and there are literally hundreds of candles lighted everywhere.

  She smiles at me sweetly. “I love you, Paul.”

  I race to where she’s standing. “Vivian, we’ve got to—”

  But I’m too late. I whip around as the back porch door flies open and the man chasing me bursts into the kitchen with his gun drawn.

  Billy Brock stands in front of Vivian and me, chest heaving, blood dripping down his face from a gash over his eye.

  “Why’d you do it, Professor?” he mutters. “Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone?”

  I move beside Vivian and take her hand in mine. “Because I’m the sheriff, Bear.” It’s the first time I’ve called him that in a long time and I think it’s because he isn’t Billy to me anymore. “It’s as simple as that.” He’s someone I don’t know now. “You turned into a killer for hire and you used the cult as a way to do it. You had Sara kill Cindy and you killed Darrow Clements yourself and you took money for the murders from Bill Campbell. The money for that new TV in your house didn’t come from some insurance scam. I talked to that agent of yours down in Madison tonight, right before I went into the church, and he denied everything.”

  “Of course he did, he—”

  “He said he’d let anyone I wanted come to his office and look at anything they want to!” I shout, “and I got your bank records, Bear, for that account of yours over in Superior.” His eyes open wide. “I looked at them right before I came into the meeting tonight. You’ve been putting cash into that account for the last few months, lots of it. You’ve turned into Bill Campbell’s hired gun. He hates Lew Prescott from a long time ago, and he hates the thought of his backyard turning into a taconite dynamite range, so he hired you to stop it by scaring people away from buying the land. He hired you to set the cult up and make it seem like you were killing animals and people because you were devil worshipers when all you really worship is money.
Maybe the rest of the people in it, people like Caleb Jenkins, maybe they think it’s real. Or maybe some of them are in on the money, too. I don’t know, we’ll have to find out. But my bet is that your next target was going to be a senior executive of whatever company showed interest in buying the land. Or maybe it was going to be Henry Steinbach.” I can tell I’ve struck a nerve by the way Bear’s looking at me. Like he thinks I must have planted a listening device on him somehow. Apparently, I couldn’t be more right about what I’m saying. “I bet Bill Campbell had no idea before tonight how bad the situation is for Lew Prescott at the family company. Campbell was going to luck into that one, wasn’t he, Bear? By getting in the way of the taconite deal he was going to put Prescott into bankruptcy and probably ruin Jack Harrison’s political career. But he didn’t know that when he first talked to you, did he?”

  Bear shakes his head. “You can’t prove anything, Professor. You can’t—”

  “Have you told anybody else in the cult that you’re taking money for the murders? Have you told anyone else what’s really going on?”

  “They don’t need to know—”

  “Is that why Karen left you? Because she found out what was going on? But you couldn’t bring yourself to kill her, could you, Bear? Despite all the fights and the yelling, you couldn’t kill her, could you? So you paid her off.” I shake my head. “And she took it.” A strange smile plays across Bear’s face and a horrible thought flashes through my mind. “Oh, no. You didn’t, did you? You didn’t kill Karen.”

  He nods. “After we met at the house the other morning. I couldn’t risk it any longer.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “You’ll never find her body. No one—”

  In one smooth motion I pull the Glock from my holster and fire—but not before Bear gets off a shot that grazes my left shoulder. Vivian screams as Bear clutches his gut and keels over. I hit him right in the stomach, exactly where I was aiming. I grab Vivian’s wrist and hobble quickly through the house to the front door, pulling her along. Then we’re down the steps, onto the front lawn, and into the storm.

  While we were in the house it turned into a raging blizzard out here. Sustained winds must be at least forty miles an hour and the gusts have to be whipping up to fifty, maybe even sixty. The snow’s blowing sideways and the tiny ice crystals feel like missiles blasting my face. I can see Vivian shrieking right next to me but I can barely hear her.

  When we’ve only made it twenty feet onto the lawn I turn to face the door, putting myself between Vivian and the house. I feel her fingers clinging to me as the door opens and Bear staggers onto the porch and stops directly beneath the overhead lamp.

  Bear stands there, one hand on his gut as his jacket whips crazily around him. He gazes at me for a few moments, then slowly raises his gun and aims. Vivian’s screaming at the top of her lungs, begging me to run. But I won’t. I have to see if Bear will take another shot at me, I want to see if he’ll actually try to kill me. I want to give my best friend one more chance.

  A flash of fire spits from the barrel of his gun, but he misses. As I knew he would. But now I have to shoot back because he’s staggering down the porch steps. I can’t let him get off another round, because he’s getting too close. I can’t put Vivian in that kind of danger.

  Everything goes into slow motion as I raise my gun, aim, and squeeze the trigger. Then it all speeds up again when Bear tumbles to the ground. He’s dead, I know it. I hit him right in the heart, right where I was aiming. I had to kill him this time, I didn’t have a choice. If he’d gotten any closer he might have actually hit me. Worse, he might have hit Vivian.

  As I stare at his body lying on the ground, I realize that this is what he wanted. He didn’t want to live anymore; he couldn’t handle the guilt and maybe he’d found out that having a little money wasn’t as great as he thought it would be. Not enough to become a killer. So he came after me because he wanted to die. He didn’t race out of the church to kill me, he raced out of the church so I’d kill him. He knew everything was over and he didn’t want to go to jail.

  For several moments I gaze at the ground, what I’ve done sinking in as I stand here in the raging blizzard. I’ve killed my best friend, the man who saved my life twice. Finally, I turn around to hold Vivian.

  And behind her is Sara. She’s ten feet away pointing a revolver at us. She’s screaming that if she can’t have me, no one will.

  There’s no way I can get my gun up in time and she’s a damn good shot. Better than any of my deputies. Vivian and I are about to die. Sara will put us both down with the first shot, then finish us off with a few more rounds as we lie on the ground helpless.

  Just as Sara squeezes the trigger of her revolver there’s an incredible blast of wind that seems to shake the ground we’re standing on. It rushes down from above with a great roar, knocking a huge limb off a pine tree that crashes onto Sara. I don’t even feel the pain in my knee as I climb over the limb and grab the revolver from Sara’s hand. But as I do, I realize that there was no need to worry about her shooting us.

  Sara’s dead.

  Epilogue

  IT TURNED OUT that somehow Bill Campbell knew Prescott Trading was in trouble. How he found out was never clear to me, but in the end it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that Campbell had, in fact, approached Bear about starting the cult and using it to destroy Lew Prescott. Campbell had never forgotten what Prescott had done after that cocktail party seven years ago—and apparently several other times as well—and he didn’t want to listen to the sounds of dynamite exploding down the ridge from his mansion for the rest of his days. So he hatched a plan.

  I could believe it of Campbell, given all the stories I’d heard about how he’d created his business empire. What I couldn’t believe was that Bear agreed to help him. That Bear gave in to the lure of money in return for killing. You think you know someone—but you never really do. It’s a horrible truth.

  When the trial was over, Vivian and I moved to Montana, to a little cabin on the Bitterroot River. We don’t have much money, but we found our happiness again. I do private security up in Missoula, and Vivian waits tables at a little restaurant not far from our cabin.

  A year ago we got an incredible surprise when Vivian visited her doctor. She was pregnant. Three months ago she had a little boy and we named him Paul, Jr. Someday I’ll build a canoe with him in the barn out back during a long Montana winter—and we’ll name it Intrepid.

  Acknowledgments

  THANKS TO CYNTHIA Manson, Peter Borland, Judith Curr, Louise Burke, Jack Wallace, Barbara Fertig, Andy and Chris Brusman, Kevin Erdman, Jeanette Follo, Steve Watson, Bart Begley, Jim and Anmarie Galowski, Gerry Barton, Pat and Terry Lynch, Nick Simonds, Skip Frey, Tony Reinhardt, Jeff, Jamie and Catherine Faville, Baron Stewart, Mike Pocalyko, Bob Carpenter, Mike Lynch, Matt Malone, and Chris T. and Gordon Eadon.