In Shadows

by Chandler McGrew

  “And the sheriff fit in, how?”

  Jake shrugged. “Virgil came around pretty often after . . . after my mom was killed. I think he felt sorry for me as much as Albert did. He got to taking me on patrol with him sometimes when it was slow. I hung around the jail in Arcos, and I learned a lot from him, like how to keep quiet.”

  “Dat one I don’ know,” said Cramer.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Stop me anytime. How was your mother killed?”

  Jake started toward the car, but Cramer paced him easily with his longer stride. Jake jerked open the door of the rented Camry, glaring at Cramer as the big man walked slowly around to take the driver’s seat.

  “She was beaten,” said Jake at last. “But the ME said cause of death was heart failure.”

  “Your father ever attack her before that?”

  “He never touched her.”

  Cramer shook his head. “So what set him off?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Jake, closing the subject.

  By the time they got off the mountain, Jake was certain Cramer was going to get them killed. Instead of watching the dirt lane that was little more than two tire ruts, he kept peering out through the trees, more than once edging perilously close to a ravine or gully. When Jake finally spotted the valley road ahead he breathed a sigh of relief, and Cramer gave him a funny look.

  “Son, I could have driven for Nascar if I’d wanted the fame and fortune,” said Cramer.

  “You couldn’t have done it anywhere with trees.”

  “It’s true I’m not your frontier type. Want to start investigating now?”

  “We’re not supposed to interfere.”

  Cramer waited.

  “If Virgil catches us at it, he’ll be really pissed,” said Jake.

  “What else are we doing here? You didn’t fly two thousand miles to stand over a grave. And you don’t seem to be any good at family reunions.”

  Jake was still trying to figure that out himself. He had climbed on the plane almost by instinct. But since returning to the valley his subsconscious had been ominously silent. He stared at the gravel intersection realizing that only one direction might lead to answers. But were they answers he was prepared to face?

  “Take a right and then the first driveway,” he said quietly.

  “I’m guessing your uncle’s place?”

  Jake nodded. When they reached the driveway he pointed to the side of the road. “Stop at the mailbox.”

  He slipped his fingers underneath the box, removing a key with a magnet attached.

  Cramer wound the car up the drive and parked in between Albert’s weathered old trailer and a large, tin-sided shed. Yellow police tape formed an X across the trailer’s front door. Jake peeled it away. Cramer looked at him but only shrugged and followed him inside.

  The place still had the familiar salty, urine odor of death, and the carpet and walls were streaked with brown bloodstains. But to Jake the air reeked of Albert’s sweat and the Old Spice he used to cover it up, of the garlic and Tabasco with which he saturated his food, and lastly the pipe smoke that followed the old man everywhere. Jake’s throat tightened as he stared at the worn sofa where he had often sat playing checkers or just jawing with the old man. An easy chair lay on its back in the corner, and several ripped-up magazines rested on the floor along with scattered newspapers.

  Over the years Jake had placed everyone in the valley inside a time warp where they never aged or changed. Discovering that one of the people closest to him had been murdered was stunning. That Albert had been savagely beaten to death was totally unnerving. Staring at the bloodstains, he could picture the carnage that had taken place. Albert was small and old, but he was feisty. He would have tried to put up a fight.

  “Probably not much to learn here,” said Cramer. “The scene is old, Jake. The local cops and medical examiner have been all over it.”

  “I know . . . but this just doesn’t make sense.”

  “No,” agreed Cramer. “Crazed killers out for blood and cheap thrills leave clues.”

  “Right.”

  The outline of a lower leg lay permanently dyed into the worn green carpet beside the overturned recliner. Blood spattered the low plasticized ceiling, and brown scabs trickled down the window. From the trail, the violence appeared to have started near the sofa. Jake surmised that Albert had been sitting there when he realized what was about to happen.

  Cramer walked past Jake into the small kitchen, opening and closing drawers and cupboard doors. There had to be something Virgil had missed.

  Jake lifted Albert’s tattered chair back to its feet beneath a dusty, freestanding reading lamp. Gray light filtered in through the windows, but it was so weak that it seemed to soak away into the carpet, and the humidity intensified the musty smell of old blood. Jake ran his fingers along the walls. The killer must have battered Albert like a madman to create the carnage the bloodstains revealed. And the sight of it was far too familiar.

  “One thing bothers me,” mused Cramer, after he and Jake had inspected the rest of the trailer.

  Jake stared at him.

  “Where’s his guns? Did the killer take them? The report claimed nothing was missing.”

  Jake shook his head. “Albert didn’t like guns. He wasn’t a hunter.”

  “A logger in a backwoods hole-in-the-wall like this who was an antigun nut?”

  “He wasn’t a nut. He just didn’t like them. His father killed himself. Albert would never talk about it.”

  “His father would be your grandfather?”

  “On my mother’s side. Albert was my mother and Aunt Claire’s brother.”

  Cramer closed the front door behind them. Jake tried replacing the tape, but it wouldn’t stick, and finally he just let it fall.

  As he started down the rickety stairs he glanced toward the empty shed where Albert usually kept his bulldozer. His eye was drawn to a frazzled sheet of newspaper clinging to the wall of the tin building, quivering in the breeze above the stacked firewood. It was almost certainly just a bit of trash pasted there by the wind. Virgil or one of his men would have been over the shed already. But the familiar tingling of one of Jake’s hunches drew him toward the scrap. He slipped across the gravel drive to the side of the shed and stood on a couple of fallen logs to reach the paper. But before he could pull it from the splinter it was snagged on, Cramer caught his wrist.

  “Don’t,” said Cramer, staring at the paper and shaking his head.

  “You don’t think . . .” said Jake, eyes glued to the scrap.

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Cramer.

  On one corner of the torn page, the toe of a shoe sole was clearly visible in a brown stain that looked like blood. In the center of the sole was an equally legible eight-pointed star.

  There had been bloody shoe prints on the trailer’s carpet, of course. But they were all so smudged that it would have been impossible for the cops to tell what size they were, let alone what kind of shoe.

  Jake shook his head, unwilling to believe they’d found something so easily that Virgil had missed. Cramer read his mind.

  “Look at it,” said Cramer, nodding toward the sheet flapping in the breeze. “If it was windy the day Albert was killed it could have been blown anywhere.”

  “And then it just floated up here and got caught?” said Jake, frowning in disbelief.

  Cramer shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. Sometimes the Iwas are watching out for you.”

  “Try telling that to a judge.”

  “First we have to find out who did the killing. Then we can worry about a judge.”

  Cramer gently wedged a piece of firewood against the paper to hold it in place.

  “Call your buddy the sheriff.”

  IRGIL WASN’T PARTICULARLY HAPPY that Jake and Cramer had found evidence he had missed, or that they had been messing around a sealed crime scene. And since Jake had a familial connection to the case they all knew that anyt
hing he discovered could be construed as tainted by a good defense attorney, anyway.

  “I didn’t have anything to go on until you found that print,” Virgil finally admitted, as the three of them sat in his cruiser. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you shouldn’t have crossed that tape, and both of you know that. I also got a report about you from Houston. You aren’t planning on dragging your problem with these Torrios here, are you?”

  Jake frowned. “Cramer and I can help.”

  Virgil eyed Jake as though weighing the idea again.

  “No,” he said at last. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want any part of local law enforcement a long time ago.”

  Jake reddened. “So? What are you gonna do now?”

  Virgil sighed, resting both hands on the steering wheel and staring out into the drizzle that had just started. “I have no suspects other than the usual town reprobates. But they all have alibis, and even if they didn’t, Albert’s killing was out of their league. Hell, that kind of brutality should be out of anybody’s league. My boys have been to every house in the valley and along the highway. We had dogs all over Albert’s land. They didn’t find anything to track. How they missed that newspaper, I’ll never know. There were no fibers in the carpet or on any of the furniture, and all the blood in the house was Albert’s. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. The paper will go to the crime labs in Augusta. If they can’t find anything for us it will be sent to the FBI. Now, you stay out of it.”

  “Good luck,” said Jake as he climbed out of the cruiser. “Nice seeing you again.”

  Virgil shook his head.

  Cramer nudged Jake as they walked back to their car. “He’s just mad because you’re back one day and you find evidence he couldn’t.”

  Jake shook his head. “It’s a lot more than that.”

  Cramer nodded. “Baggage,” he muttered.

  They watched as Virgil’s cruiser disappeared down the drive, and for a while longer they sat there in silence, both lost in thought.

  S CRAMER PULLED OUT OF ALBERT’S DRIVEWAY a bright red sports car nearly took off their bumper. Jake caught a glimpse of a youthful face—barely high enough to see through the steering wheel—before the car banked away around the corner in a squeal of rubber and a roar of exhaust.

  “At last,” said Cramer, gunning the car out onto the valley road. “Some excitement!”

  “We’re not traffic cops,” said Jake, tightening his seat belt and pressing the soles of his feet down into the carpet as though he had the brakes.

  “Yeehaa!” shouted Cramer as the Camry lifted up on two wheels in the turn.

  “I rented this car,” Jake reminded him.

  Cramer showed him a wicked, toothy grin before turning his eyes back to the winding road. “Sucks to be you, mon ami.”

  They almost caught the little guy when he slowed at the valley’s mouth to make the turn onto the highway. But then the Mustang shifted gears, and it was all Cramer could to do keep it in sight. The driver of the car must have spotted the state trooper ahead even before Jake did, because he whipped off the highway and onto another farm road, and when Cramer and Jake made the turn Jake hung out the window, flagging his shield at the cop, who nodded and flipped on his lights.

  “This is a bad road to speed on,” muttered Jake.

  Cramer glanced at him, then back to the road. “Something I should know?”

  “Something I hope he knows,” said Jake, nodding toward the disappearing car ahead. “There’s all kinds of drop-offs around here, and not many of them have guardrails.”

  As Jake spoke Cramer burst over a low hill just in time to see the sports car fail to negotiate the next curve. That one did have a rail, but it didn’t slow the Mustang much, and Jake knew the road well enough to be certain the kid wasn’t going to survive the crash.

  On the rim of the overlook Cramer ground the Camry to a halt, and Jake ran to the torn guardrail. He could hear the roar of raging water before he got there. Still shaken from the chase, he watched what was left of the car sink beneath the white water in the stream below. The boy’s body lay draped over a granite outcrop, forty feet down. Sirens heralded the approach of more than one police cruiser, and Jake noticed that the second car belonged to Virgil. Tires slashed gravel, car doors slammed, but they were faraway sounds that couldn’t touch Jake. When Cramer slapped him on the back he barely felt it.

  “Nice vacation,” said Cramer, glancing up into the thin drizzle.

  Jake waved toward the ravine. “A boy’s dead down there.”

  “Car booster. I keep telling you, Caucasians are all criminals. You people just got no values.”

  A deputy started looping a rope around the rail, preparing to rappel down over the lip of the road. Jake watched, feigning interest.

  The deputy’s partner checked out both their IDs, nodding to Virgil as he approached the scene.

  “Tourists?” the cop asked Jake.

  “Family reunion,” said Cramer.

  The cop stared at him and Jake glared. The black population in Maine was only slightly higher than the number of carrier pigeons.

  “What happened?” asked Virgil, trotting up to them.

  “The kid blasted by us on the valley road at about a hundred miles an hour,” said Jake. “We couldn’t catch him.”

  The deputy glanced over his shoulder at the taut rope where the other cop had disappeared. Virgil nodded for him to go help, and he passed his clipboard to the sheriff.

  “Anything else?” asked Virgil, turning back to Jake.

  “Not much,” said Jake. “The boy was so small I couldn’t see the top of his head through the rear window.”

  “Fill this out, then,” said Virgil, handing Jake the clipboard so he could write in his own statement. “Didn’t take long for you two to find more trouble.”

  He shook his head as he walked away to join his deputies.

  “You look tired,” said Cramer, giving Jake the once-over.

  “I’m tired of people dying,” said Jake, shielding the clipboard under his arm.

  “Neat vacation, huh?” said Cramer.

  “Want to go back to Pam’s?”

  “Nah. I’m going to rent another car, drive out to the coast, and kill myself.”

  ANDI HAD REPAIRED THE BROKEN PANE by duct-taping cardboard where the glass had been. Pierce sat quietly beneath it, enjoying the smell of wet grass through the open window and the feel of misting rain on his hands.

  But suddenly he experienced a sensation that didn’t seem to be coming from his nose or his tongue or his skin but actually entering his head somehow, like a vibration that wandered eerily up and down in pitch, somewhere inside his skull. He felt as though he were being sucked right out of his bedroom and blasted somewhere else. He could feel his feet still resting on the floor, but he could also feel the vibration of what he knew instantly was an automobile as it raced through the gears. And there was something else happening, as well. Strange explosions inside his skull like … shapes … only he sensed them as patterns rather than felt them. Weird, undulating, ever-changing … differences … variated things rather than the blank wall of darkness he was accustomed to. Then suddenly the vibration ceased and instead he had an awful feeling of falling. But throughout the entire experience there was fear, as well. A weird and not quite definable terror that had nothing to do with the eeriness of the encounter or the imagined fall. And for the life of him he could not quite grasp whether it was he who was afraid or some other.

  He gasped, clenching every muscle in his body, finally letting out a sigh that seemed to last forever, as though his life were slowly exhaling from between his lips.

  With his arms still resting shakily on the windowsill, he closed his eyes and concentrated, trying desperately to hold onto the horrible sensation, to understand it. Closing his eyes had no physical effect on Pierce. It just always seemed to help him think.

  He kicked off his shoes, and let his socked feet rest on the hardwood floor. />
  Nothing was moving in the house. His mom was at work, and he was alone.

  He ran his wet fingers along his face, tracing the skin up his jawbone to his earlobe. The strange contact had appeared out of nowhere, and then just as abruptly it had been cut off, like flipping the switch on his mother’s electric razor.

  Buzz.

  No buzz.

  But he did understand a little of what had happened, and the possibility filled him with both wonder and dread. His mother had explained the idea to him. Sound. For only a scalpel moment, for just that sharpest of times, Pierce knew that he had heard.

  And just maybe, oh, just maybe … he had seen.

  More than anything else in the world, Pierce had always wanted to see and hear. There was only one other wish he could imagine that he would have traded for either if God had suddenly chosen to come down and say Pierce, you’ve been a great kid. What would you like for me to do for you today? But he had never thought that he was any more likely to gain his sight and hearing than he was a real father. Until this moment.

  But what had he heard? What had he seen?

  And what had he felt?

  The terror had gripped him in monster talons, and he knew that it was a fear so deep-rooted it could only come from the knowledge that death was very, very near. And then it had all stopped just like the razor.

  Someone was dead.

  Wonder, awe, and fear bubbled up so fiercely in his chest he was convinced he could hear them. The last thing in the world he wanted to hear or see was people dying. If that was the only channel he was going to get, he thought he could live without it. Would God do something like that? Was it some kind of test, like he’d given to Job?

  Pierce’s fingers slipped along the soaked windowsill, scratching at the flaking paint.

  I don’t want to know that people are dying, Lord. Especially not if there’s nothing I can do about it. Please don’t ask me to know about that.

  But in his heart he knew that something like that was happening to him, because he still sensed danger. Not immediate. Not a vibration in the house. No evil odor drifting through his bedroom. Something tantalizing but even more hateful and horrifying in its faint faraway feeling. The thing that had come to watch him was out there somewhere. On the move.