Pushed Too Far

by Ann Voss Peterson

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  “I called a friend of mine,” Val explained to her niece. “She invited us to stay with her a few days.”

  Grace greeted the news with a frown.

  She’d been frowning since Val got home, had frowned all through dinner, and Val had to admit, she couldn’t blame her. It had been a hell of an upsetting day, not just for her, but for Grace, too. And even though she felt as if she’d been run through a wringer and come out still soaking wet, she needed to hold it together. One of them had to, and it wasn’t fair to expect it of a sixteen year old.

  The tea pot screamed from the stove. Val tore open two packets of instant hot chocolate, dumped them into cups, and poured in the steaming water. She hadn’t finished outlining the plans she made, and had yet to break the news about her suspension. She’d hoped chocolate would make everything go down a little more easily.

  She carried the fragrant mugs into the adjoining living room and set them on the coffee table. “My friend is really great. You’ll like her. And there’s a lot of fun stuff to do in Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” The sixteen year old flopped herself on the couch the way only a hormonal girl facing a life upheaval could. “What about the horses?”

  Val took a sip of the cocoa, burning her tongue. Giving up, she set the cup down and eyed her niece. “Oneida found a man who has horses of his own. He’s agreed to feed and muck stalls while we’re gone.”

  “What if he doesn’t know what he’s doing? What if Max colics again? What if he forgets to check Banshee’s blanket and she gets too hot? Or too cold?”

  “I think he can manage.”

  “How about water? If the power goes out, the heater in the water tank won’t work.”

  “If that happens, he’ll carry buckets from the house.”

  “The water pump in the house won’t work either.”

  “So we’ll tell him to get some jugs of water from Wal-Mart.”

  “Do you know how much water horses drink?”

  “Did you miss the part about him having his own horses?” Val shot back.

  Grace shook her head, blond hair flying. “A lot of people have horses, and they’re really stupid about taking care of them.”

  Val forced a deep breath into her lungs. She’d hardly slept in days, and even though some feeling seemed to be returning to her hand—she hoped—the problem with her neck and head was getting worse. On the drive home from the station, she’d been hit with a fatigue so deep, she’d been barely able to make it.

  Jeff Schneider had been right. She needed to get out of here, to get Grace out of here. Even if it was only a few days, she needed to make sure they were both safe so she could rest.

  She could do that in Chicago.

  “Listen Grace, no one cares for those horses like you do. But that doesn’t mean this guy can’t handle feeding and cleaning for a few days.” She prayed it wouldn’t be longer than that, although if her suspension turned into losing her job completely, they wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of the horses. They’d have to sell them.

  No point in mentioning that to Grace just now.

  She stared at the empty fireplace for what seemed like forever, then wiping her eyes with the back of one hand, she pulled herself into a sitting position on the couch and folded her arms. “I want to talk to him.”

  Definite progress. “He’ll be here for feeding time tomorrow morning. You can show him around, give him instructions.”

  Arms still crossed over her chest, Grace lightened up on the pout. At least a little.

  “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  “I’m not a kid. I know this isn’t just for fun. It’s because of what happened in school today, isn’t it?”

  Val couldn’t deny it.

  “Heidi saw he had a gun. She did. She wouldn’t lie about that.”

  “He was messing with her, Grace. He was messing with the teachers. He was messing with all of us.”

  “And now you’re in trouble?”

  “I was suspended, with pay. Which just means I have to take a little vacation.”

  “They’re making you. That’s not a vacation.”

  “It’ll be fine. Jeff will take care of everything. And we’ll get out of here, away from Hess and this whole mess.”

  “What if he follows us?”

  “He won’t.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  She didn’t. But there was a reason she chose Chicago, and it wasn’t all about free lodging. “My friend? The one we’re staying with? She’s put away people nastier than Dixon Hess. We’ll be safe there. The only thing you have to worry about is whether you want to go shopping or visit museums first.”

  Grace still didn’t look convinced. Pointedly ignoring the steaming cup of cocoa, she grabbed the remote off the coffee table and started flipping channels.

  “Still refusing to climb aboard the fun train?”

  Not a smile, not even a hint.

  To tell the truth, Val couldn’t blame her. At the moment, it was tough to find anything to smile about. “It’s going to work out, Grace. Really.”

  The same words Jeff Schneider had said to her.

  She hadn’t believed them either.

  Lund was running before his boots hit the ground.

  The car had skidded off the road and over a small embankment. There it had rolled, crushing through snow and into rock.

  The rock didn’t give. The steel did.

  Having settled back on its tires, the Volvo had come to a stop against the tree trunk now embedded a foot into the hood on the driver’s side. Pebbles of glass blanketed the snow, sparkling in the headlights of Unit One. The side windows were completely pulverized. The windshield remained intact, so many cracks marring the expanse, it appeared opaque.

  Lund had seen a number of wrecks, and while this wasn’t the worst, the driver would have to be lucky to survive. He meant to improve that luck.

  Drawing close, he could make out the airbag, now deflated, and the shadow of a human form. The scent of gasoline tinged the cold air, along with the sweet hint of antifreeze. There was something else, too. The odor of burned hair.

  He slid on ice, nearly fell, then righted himself before he reached the vehicle.

  A woman was inside. Skull thrown back against the headrest. Her face was half covered by copper-blond hair, but he could still see the glisten of blood. There was also blood on her bare shoulder, a lot of it, and he could hear a disturbing gurgle with each breath she took.

  He tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. “We’re here to help. We’re going to get you out. Understand?”

  Another gurgle.

  “I want you to stay calm.” He had no idea if his words would help her, or if she was even able to process them, but he kept talking anyway.

  A siren screamed from the direction of the highway, the EMTs arriving, their flashing reds adding to the police red and blue pulsing off trees and snow.

  It took only seconds for him to size up the damage. The hit from the front had forced the fender and front wheel back into the passenger compartment, making the door useless. Normally they would remove the roof, peel it back and lay it out on the hood. It would provide clear access to the victim, but the process was time consuming, and he didn’t need to be an EMT to know time wasn’t something this woman had.

  The hydraulic pump growled to life.

  Dempsey, Johnson and a young guy named Blaski tromped down the bank and scrambled over rock, their arms weighed down with tools. Johnson set up lights illuminating the scene as best they could.

  Dempsey’s breath fogged the air. “How’s it look?”

  “We’re going to have to take off the door,” Lund said.

  Dempsey nodded and brandished his weapon of choice, a hydraulic cutting tool with curved blades that resembled the bill of a parrot, if your average parrot could bite through the toughest steel. The tool was heavy, but other than that, it took little strength to operate, thanks
to hydraulics. The challenge to using it was knowing where to place the blade. The wrong spot and a rescuer could easily hit belt pretensioners, gas shocks or set off one of the side airbags.

  A mechanic by trade, Dempsey knew his cars. He opened the steel jaws and punched one blade through the windshield, then cut through the point connecting the car’s roof to its body. Another cut to the rear of the driver’s window frame, and the pressure from the roof was no longer a factor.

  Lund took the spreader from Blaski. Larger and heavier, this tool did exactly as the name suggested, splaying steel as easily as if it was Playdoh. He fitted the device between the front fender and the driver’s door and got to work. The arms moved outward, slow but steady. Soon he could see the hinges. The first one popped under the pressure. The second, Dempsey had to cut. They lifted off the door.

  She was even worse than he’d expected.

  The dashboard had folded inward. Her legs seemed to bend backwards, not just at the knee, but like a comma from mid-thigh to ankle. Completely naked, her body was marred by more burns and cuts than Lund could count. In places, she was raw and oozy red, shiny in the lights, the first few layers of skin gone. Nylon cord fastened her wrists, and when he tilted her head back to check for a pulse, he saw her lips.

  At first they appeared to be bloody and clustered with wiry flies. Then he realized her mouth was sewn shut.

  “Holy shit,” Dempsey said.

  Lund’s reaction exactly.

  He pulled his focus from the woman and directed it to the car’s structure, trying not to think too much about damage done to flesh and bone. Trying to concentrate on how best to roll the dashboard forward to take pressure off her legs. But even though he’d become a master at compartmentalizing over the years, he could still feel a tremor run along every nerve, shaking him to the core.

  Holy shit was right.

  He moved the spreader’s arms together until he could fit them between the car’s floor and the dash. Despite the cold air, sweat trickled down his back under the insulated turnout gear. Holding the heavy device in place, he let the hydraulics do their thing. The steel frame shifted, tilting the dash back, the wheel up to face the crushed roof.

  The progress was slow, too slow.

  His face shield fogged with his breath, and he flipped it up. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see movement coming down the hill, the techs and their equipment, silhouettes against the flashing, glaring lights.

  Her pulse had been hard to find, the beat light and erratic.

  He prayed she was still alive by the time he pried her free.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  Val might not be acting police chief, but she still had her radio.

  When she heard the call go out about a car off the road in the bluffs on the east side of town, she hadn’t thought much about it. But when a steady and experienced Lake Loyal officer named Christopher Edgar had called in a breathless request for the shift sergeant and Chief Schneider to meet him at the scene, Val woke Grace, and the two of them piled into the Focus.

  Since the Crown Vic she usually drove belonged to the police department, she’d had to leave that behind along with her service pistol. She didn’t mind driving the Focus, but the pistol she felt naked without. She’d have to go gun shopping, and soon.

  They wound along back roads until they reached Sunrise Ridge Lane, only two miles or so as the crow flies. It wasn’t hard to find the spot of the crash. Red and blue light throbbed off trees and low lying clouds like a spotlight announcing Black Friday’s midnight sale.

  Val pulled to the shoulder. Leaving the key in the ignition and engine running, she turned to Grace. “I need you to stay in the car. Okay?”

  “I can help.”

  If there was one phrase that summed up Grace’s philosophy of life, that was it.

  “There are a lot of trained people helping here, honey. I’m afraid the big trick for both of us is going to be staying out of their way.”

  She crossed arms over chest and slunk low in the seat.

  “I’ll find out what’s going on and let you know. Keep the doors locked, all right? And only open them for people you know.”

  Her big eyes widened with the last warning.

  Val hoped she was just being paranoid, but with Hess around, she wasn’t about to take a chance, even if that meant frightening her niece. “Okay?”

  Grace nodded.

  With that, Val stepped out into the night air. It was warmer than it had been recent nights, part of a trend the forecasters said, but it still carried a damp chill that wormed its way into Val’s bones.

  She passed the black-and-white, its light bar whirling, and moved on to where the fire department’s Unit One idled. A young firefighter pointing the way, she peered down the rough slope that plunged into the forest preserve.

  The reflective bands crossing the sleeves, legs and torsos of the firefighters’ turnout gear glowed in the emergency lights. Behind them, she could make out the crumpled bluish gleam of a car.

  Tamara Wade’s steel blue Volvo.

  For a moment, the air seemed to condense in her lungs. Just as she feared when she heard the second call, this was no ordinary accident. It was the first move in Hess’s game.

  “I thought I told you to get some rest.”

  She knew Schneider was on his way, but the gruff tone in his voice gave her a start anyway. She turned to face him. “It was Hess, Jeff.”

  Bushy brows lowered over skeptical eyes. “How do you know that from up here?”

  “The car. It belongs to Tamara Wade.”

  “His attorney?”

  “He wasn’t happy with her.”

  “Hmm. You’d think firing her would suffice.”

  Val nodded. The joke wasn’t meant to be funny, just to lighten the intensity a little, gallows humor.

  It didn’t work.

  The group around the car broke up and a few men started trudging back up the slope. Val recognized the tall, wiry figure and his broad shouldered partner as Baker and Caruthers from EMS. They carried their stretcher up the hill.

  Empty.

  And they would only do that if they’d pronounced the victim dead at the scene.

  “I’ll call the State Crime Lab. Looks like they’re about to turn the scene over to us.” She turned to walk back to the road.

  “Better let me do that, Val.”

  She pulled up short. “Right. Sorry.”

  “Not necessary. You know that.” He plopped a big mitt on her shoulder and gave it a pat. “You, my dear, had better start thinking about getting out of town.”

  Val had to agree, but she didn’t follow Schneider’s suggestion right away. Being on suspension, she couldn’t very well sneak down to the car and take a look. All that would do was add another set of footprints to an already trampled crime scene and give her and Schneider an extra dose of explaining to do.

  But that didn’t mean leaving immediately was her only option. After checking on Grace, she returned to Unit One and waited for the firefighters to haul their equipment back up the ridge. To her relief, Lund was among them.

  Skin pale and sweat beaded on his forehead, he looked worse than she’d ever seen him, including both times his wife had died. He stowed the large hydraulic spreading tool in the truck, then followed her to a more isolated spot behind Grace’s car.

  She didn’t ask, just waited for him to offer up what he’d observed.

  “Her mouth was sewn shut.”

  “Sewn?”

  “Needle and thread. Yeah, that bad. Also most of her body was burned, a few cuts thrown in for good measure.” He looked like he might throw up, but managed to keep it in check. “Go look for yourself.”

  “You didn’t watch the ten o’clock news, did you?” She filled him in on her suspension. “I’m getting Grace out of town tomorrow. Visiting a friend in Chicago. You should get out of town, too.”

  She was just being a good police chief, trying to keep the citizens in her jur
isdiction safe, but somehow the suggestion felt intimate, as if she was asking him to come with her, and she found herself looking away.

  “I have the feeling I’m going to be needed here. But since you’re going to Chicago, I have an idea of some side trips you might want to take.”

  She frowned. She was obviously missing something. “Side trips?”

  “Couple cemeteries down there. Northwest of the city. Might be fun to visit.”

  She smiled as his meaning dawned. Jeff had said he’d do it, but now that he was acting chief, the plan had changed. “You know, that is a great suggestion.”

  Maybe this trip would be more than a forced vacation after all.

  Dale Kasdorf saw the police car through the trees along the highway before it turned into his drive.

  He knew they’d be coming.

  The calls from police had begun days ago, cautious words about keeping safe, warnings of dangers to come. Little did they know, the bad things had already started. The woman at the lake. Strange movements at the dairy farm next door. The car crash tonight on Sunrise Ridge. They knew bits and pieces. But only he saw all of it happening and could put the pieces together.

  Or at least enough of them to be certain he didn’t want any part.

  He ducked back into his house and locked the door, sliding the bolts home in three places. Immediately he made for the stairs. The wood gave a hollow thunk under his boots as he descended into the cellar. The place was cold and dank. Not a place anyone sane would stay by choice. Not a place anyone would look.

  And that was the point.

  He crossed to one water-stained rock wall lined with shelves of canning jars. The corn relish and tomatoes and icicle pickles had been put up by his mother, and most were still good. Every once in awhile, he’d open one as a treat. To remember her sweet face and brave smile.

  The rest of his childhood, he was willing to forget.

  He grabbed the right side of the wood shelves and swung them into the room and out of the way, revealing the door hidden behind.