Blacke and Blue

by Fiona Blackthorne

  He looked at Ian, who wore a poker face though his eyes shone with emotion, and said, “I’ll let you know when I find him.”

  “Be careful,” Ian replied.

  Trisha’s anger drained from her as dread took its place. She watched Ger walk away quickly, breaking a path through the growing snow cover. At the end of the driveway, he turned right and the snow and trees hid him away.

  “What just happened?” she muttered.

  Ian’s arms came around her from behind, and he kissed the top of her head. Then, he landed a stinging smack on her ass.

  “Pull it together, Blacke,” he teased, even though his grin didn’t reach his eyes. “This shit is for rookies.”

  Ian’s words were exactly what she needed. They cut through the emotional haze that had clouded her almost since the moment she had arrived in Blue Moon. She looked at him for a long moment, glaring and trying to hold back a laugh.

  “Fuck off, McDade,” she said finally, laughing.

  “Let’s get back inside,” he said, pulling her toward the door of the shack. “I don’t want your nuts to freeze out here.”

  “Yeah,” she replied smugly. “There is that.”

  It was hard to pace in the cramped shack, especially with an overturned table and three men all trying not to disturb evidence. Somehow, though, Trisha managed it. She needed to pace. She needed a cigarette, too, but that wasn’t going to happen in a snowstorm or in a crime scene.

  She listened absently to Ian radio out the alerts for Perk’s car and give instructions to the deputies for the crime scene analysis team. In her head, she kept trying to wedge herself into Perk’s brain, trying to slip into the place where he was in this moment.

  Driving in the snow, frantic, angry…hungry. He would be aroused, maybe sweating a little bit. His mind would shut down all thoughts of consequences. He wouldn’t even be able to conceptualize of the next day. All that mattered was the now and the next now. Find the victim. Kill the victim. Perform the ritual.

  So what was the ritual? Hadn’t the coroner’s reports said there was some real expertise in the “butchering” of the body? That would mean space and time. A place where he was comfortable. Somewhere private. But still…he could use another location if he was in a rush. No, he couldn’t. This shack would have been the other location, and it was compromised for him now.

  What if…

  She stopped pacing.

  Bingo.

  “Where does Perk live?” she asked Ian.

  “Seal Rock Island,” he replied, looking up from his cell phone.

  “Is that a real island?”

  “Yup. Need a boat to get out to it. Whoa, wait. Hold on there, Blacke. He can’t get back there tonight. No way he can do it with the storm and the water.”

  “He is going to try for it,” she said, utterly sure of herself for what felt like the first time in this whole investigation. “His home is where he does the postmortem work on the bodies. More importantly, his home is symbolic to him. That location is part of the ritual, part of what satisfies him. He can’t do it anywhere but there.”

  “Does he have a good relationship with his mother?” she asked, zipping up her parka again and heading for the door.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Ian was right behind her. “His mother is pretty old, and I think she’s pretty sick. She hasn’t been off the island in probably about two years.”

  “Then there’s your reason!” She had to yell to make herself heard above the howling wind as she struggled to the SUV. “What better way to say ‘Fuck you, Mommy Dearest’ than by mutilating women in his mother’s house?”

  “You have a sick mind, Blacke!” he yelled back. “It’s probably why I love you!”

  Finally inside the truck, they both paused, breathing heavily from fighting the storm. Ian turned the ignition and began to pull around toward the driveway. Trisha clenched and unclenched her hands into fists, trying to ignore the fact that Ian had just told her that he loved her and yet storing it away as a moment to be savored later…preferably after they had caught the Butcher of Bangor.

  “I’m taking us to the boatyard where Perk keeps his boat when he comes over,” Ian said. “It’s our best chance of intercepting him, especially since nobody is going out on the water tonight.”

  “He’ll head for the island, no matter what,” Trisha said.

  “He won’t make it.”

  “He might. We have to be ready for that.”

  “Then you better pray you don’t get seasick, Blacke.”

  An ember of love warmed and glowed in her heart at his words. Whatever secrets he still kept, at least he respected her enough to spare her the fake chivalry and argument of no-you’re-not-going-on-the-boat-yes-I-am. In this moment, at least, they were a real team. Blacke and McDade.

  “What are you smiling for?” Ian asked, smiling a little himself.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” she quipped. “Can’t you go any faster?”

  “He has a one-hour head start. Do you really think he has a chance of being that far ahead of us?”

  She fidgeted in her seat, biting her lip and again regretting doing it as the burning chapping on her lips flared up.

  “I just have a bad feeling about this,” she said. “Maybe he’s stuck in the snow like all of us. He’s a cornered psychopath, though. I wouldn’t be surprised at anything he does.”

  “I hate it when you have instincts,” Ian muttered, working a fishtail on an ice patch.

  Trisha stayed silent until he had control of the vehicle again. The clock on the dashboard didn’t seem to make any sense. Time was passing, but all she saw were blinding lines of snow, the occasional fuzzy glare of a streetlight, and banks of black trees against the black night.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “At this rate? Forty minutes, maybe more.”

  She bit her tongue, not wanting to distract Ian as he drove, but wanting to demand impatiently how anybody could possibly live somewhere like this where it took so damn long to get anywhere. A moment later, she was glad she didn’t voice her feelings. She remembered she had grown up in Montana where it was a hundred miles from Billings to anywhere with a gas station, and it was only because she had been in Washington, D.C., and Virginia for so long that she had lost her sense of distance and time.

  Montana…that reminded her that she had mentioned something to Ian about knowing wolves because she was from Montana. She knew what she had seen the night at his parents’ house. She knew what she had heard outside her motel room. Those were wolves. There were wolves in Blue Moon and Elkville. But so what? Why would Ian be so intent on denying it? What was the point?

  “Does Perk have a dog?” she asked suddenly.

  “A dog?” Ian’s tone was completely surprised.

  “A big dog. A power breed, maybe a German Shepherd, Pit Bull, or Rottweiler? Even a big Lab.”

  “No.”

  She was taken aback by Ian’s flat monosyllabic answer.

  “Does anybody on Seal Rock Island have a dog?”

  “No.”

  “Huh.”

  “Why are you asking, Blacke?”

  “Well, I was just thinking,” she replied, deliberately letting her voice trail off, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the mystery…or frustration.

  “Thinking what?”

  “That it would explain the teeth marks on the bones,” she tossed out casually, sliding him a side-eyed look of amusement that had more flirtation and less rancor than ever before.

  He snorted and gave a hard laugh.

  “You know, Blacke,” he said. “You are something else. One-track mind. There are all kinds of animals in the woods around here—”

  “Like wolves?” she interjected.

  “Like foxes, bears, and the occasional coyote,” he corrected her firmly. “Not to mention owls, hawks, and other things that would scavenge.”

  “Too bad they don’t leave canine teeth imprints,” she threw back. “Large canine teeth.
Like wolves.”

  “Or coyotes.”

  “Or wolves.”

  Ian’s cell phone rang loudly from the cubby in the dash where he had stashed it. Trisha sat on her hands to keep from reaching for it.

  “McDade,” he said into the phone, then paused, listening.

  Trisha leaned in as close as she could to try and hear something, anything. But between the sound of the engine, the tires crunching snow, and the vibrating swooshing of the windshield wipers, she could only hear a low rumble of a man’s voice on the other end of the line.

  “Shit!” Ian exclaimed. “How long ago do you think…okay…fuck. Really? Fuck. Okay. We should be there before you, but if we’re not, don’t wait, just go. Okay. Hey, be careful. Yeah, she’s fine. I will. Right.”

  “What?” Trisha demanded as he hung up.

  Ian sighed and gunned the accelerator as much as he could. The vehicle lurched forward, and the sense of going precariously faster on a slippery track made everything and everyone shake with the effort.

  “I hate it when you’re right,” Ian said finally.

  “Which part of ‘I’m right’ are you talking about?” she asked, dreading the answer and praying, for the first time since high school, that she was wrong.

  “Perk’s got another victim,” Ian said grimly. “Ger found a backpack with women’s clothing lying abandoned by the side of the road. Seems from the tire tracks that the car swerved to cut her off, there was a scuffle, and he got her into the car. Ger saw a little blood and heel dragging lines in the snow.”

  “Oh my God,” Trisha whispered. She felt like she was going to throw up. In that moment, she would willingly have given her life for the chance to turn back the clock to this morning, even to a few hours earlier. If they didn’t catch Perk now, she didn’t know how she was going to be able to live with the consequences.

  “Perk has that head start on us, just like you said,” Ian continued. “He’s probably almost at the boatyard by now.”

  “Can we call the boatyard? Have them stop him?”

  “The number’s in my phone. You call. I gotta drive. It’s under Cole Peterson.”

  Trisha was scrolling through the unfamiliar phone list when Ian broke the tense silence between them.

  “You know,” he said. “We have another name for Seal Rock Island, something that only people in Blue Moon call it by.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, not really paying attention as she closed in on the P’s.

  “The Isle of Graves.”

  Chapter 21

  Ger was running blind, only scent to guide him back toward Blue Moon. Sound was muffled by the snow. Even his own paws and breath were nothing more than faint shushes against the falling silence. He could barely keep his eyes open at a squint because of the stinging, water-heavy snow that stung when it slapped against his eyes.

  His paws were beginning to feel the cold ever so slightly, which meant the temperatures were falling. This was good and bad. It meant that soon it would be too cold to snow, but it also meant that everything would begin to freeze over. Even with his fur, it would be hard to be out in the open in the deep cold of the darkest part of the night.

  He would run until he froze, though, if it meant he could help Trisha and Ian capture Perk and hopefully save the small female that monster had with him. He growled as he ran, remembering the battered army rucksack by the side of the road.

  Perk’s tire tracks had started to parallel small, struggling footprints in the snow. Ger had followed the tracks until they abruptly stopped and erupted into chaos. His heart raced with worry as he reconstructed the next few moments.

  The tire tracks swerved to cut off the path of the small footprints. The small footprints turned and began an ungainly run back in the other direction. Large boot prints emerged from the car and followed the smaller footprints, easily gaining on them. There was a mess of smeared snow and mud that splashed out in several places, showing that Perk had taken down the smaller person, probably grabbing the backpack and in the process pulling it off. The pack had fallen to the side, some of the pitiful contents spilling out—a petite grayed-out white T-shirt, a toothbrush, balled up socks, thin cotton underwear, a bottle of acetaminophen, and a hairbrush. Everything smelled sweet, if slightly antiseptic. A woman’s things.

  Ger had put his nose to the area of the scuffle, finding the woman’s scent and following it. She had evidently broken free and run into the woods. She had made it a surprisingly good distance before Perk had caught up with her. There was another disturbed area that showed another takedown, and there was some blood.

  It wasn’t Perk’s blood. Ger knew his scent. It was the woman’s blood. There wasn’t much blood, but it wasn’t hard to kill someone without spilling a lot of blood, either. Perk had somehow subdued the woman. Dead or unconscious? Ger prayed it was the latter as he tracked the heel dragging marks back to the car. Perk had loaded her into his car, and the tire tracks turned and resumed their trajectory toward Blue Moon.

  Ger had braced himself and shifted back to human, crouching low and trying to stay in the shelter of the undergrowth. He had only a couple of minutes before he would begin to freeze as a naked human man. He unbuckled the extra-large “dog collar” that had been modified to hold a cell phone and keys. In his human form, it hung around his collarbones, hidden by a shirt, but he didn’t have a shirt now. Just snow on skin.

  After making the call, he replaced the collar and shifted back, shaking to try and get the collar in place again on his thickly muscled wolf neck. None of the wolves of Blue Moon liked wearing them—it felt far too domesticated—but there was a time and place when the collar was useful.

  None of that mattered now as he ran. All that mattered was that he get to the boatyard. There were miles to go, and it was definitely growing colder. But, as a wolf, he could cut across the woods and make a straight line for shore, traveling lighter and faster than cars…or at least he hoped so.

  He dug down deep, found that strength he needed, and kept running.

  * * * *

  “Hey, Ian!” a man’s deep, friendly voice said on the other end of the line.

  “Hi,” Trisha replied.

  “Oh, uh, who is this?”

  “Are you Cole Peterson?”

  “Yes, ma’am, and you are?”

  “Special Agent Trisha Blacke. I’m working with Ian McDade.”

  “Sure, of course. What can I do for you?”

  “Has anybody gotten in a boat since five o’clock?”

  “A boat? In this weather? Nobody would do that.”

  “Mr. Peterson, that’s not my question. I am tracking someone who would have a very good reason to do that. Has anybody come in or out of your boatyard since five o’clock?”

  There was a pause. Trisha ground her teeth, then stopped, reminding herself to be patient.

  “I haven’t seen anyone, but I’ve been up in the office for a while now,” Cole said finally. “Wait a minute, let me go ask Preston. He’s out in the shed. I’ll call you right back. You’re on Ian’s phone, right?”

  “Yes. Please hurry.”

  Cole hung up, and Trisha stared at the phone, as if willing it to ring again immediately.

  “Would it be any use calling Perk’s house?” Ian asked. “If he’s there and picks up, we could let him know he’s going to be caught. Might make him stop?”

  “He won’t pick up,” she replied. “He already knows he is going to be caught. Reminding him of it over the phone when we can’t physically stop him might just push him to go faster with his ritual. If he hasn’t killed the victim yet, then this could make him rush into killing her. Is there anyone else on the island?”

  “Well, there’s the Casa de Pais,” Ian said, taking a sharp corner and using the skid to propel forward.

  “What’s that?”

  Ian chuckled. “It’s a group of five South American political literary dissidents. They’ve all been here since the 1980s. In the summer, all kinds of people come
to visit them. Every few years, they talk about going back and starting the revolution, but somehow they never get around to it. Maria Luisa Donis just published a book of exile poetry last year.”

  “You read poetry?”

  He shouted out a laugh. “I didn’t say that. I said she published the poetry. I don’t really read poetry, especially not critically-acclaimed poetry.”

  For what felt like the first time in days, Trisha laughed.

  The phone rang.

  “Blacke,” she answered.

  “It’s Cole Peterson. The only person that came through here was Perk Hawkins about forty minutes ago.”

  “Shit. Okay, you say he came through there. Did he actually take his boat out on the water back to the island?”

  “That’s right. But, he’s done that run every day for twenty years, even in bad storms. It’s not the smartest thing to do, but sometimes, he doesn’t have a choice. A man’s gotta work.”

  “I’m about to unemploy him,” Trisha muttered.

  “What was that? Sorry, storm might be messing with the signal.”

  “Never mind. Ian, how far are we from the boatyard?”

  “Ten minutes now,” he replied.

  “Mr. Peterson,” she said. “I need you to get us a boat ready in ten minutes. We need to get over to the island.”

  “Agent Blacke, I don’t—”

  “Someone’s life may be at stake. We’re going to the island, one way or another. We can either commandeer a boat, or you can have it ready for us.”

  After a beat, Cole replied, “I’ll have something ready for you.”

  “Be there in ten,” Trisha said and hung up. She looked at Ian. “How are you with boats?”

  “Boats are fine,” Ian said, grimly taking another turn too fast. “It’s water that’s the problem.”

  * * * *

  The only way Trisha could tell they had arrived at the boatyard was that the sound under the tires turned crunchy, as if going over gravel. Ian parked the SUV up at the top of the driveway where other cars and trucks were parked as well.

  “Shit!” Trisha exclaimed as she got out of the vehicle. “It got colder!”