He braced his left hand high on the windshield pillar and stretched for the gear lever with his right, yanking it back into Drive even as he pushed hard with his left hand, twisting his body away and back out of the door. The wheelspin held the car in place just long enough, the long, heavy door rebounding against its hinges and just missing him as he rolled away and hit the ground. He covered his eyes against the spray of rocks and sand as the tires bit and the car lurched ahead, yawing to one side but going straight enough to power itself over the ledge.
He lay there for a moment and then got up slowly, finally going to the edge and looking over. The damn thing hadn’t gone far, landing nose down maybe ten or fifteen feet away from the rocks on the shore, but at least it hadn’t gotten hung up on anything. Water was already rushing in through the open windows, and he stood there and watched in spite of the urge to get the hell out of there. He stayed until the water burbled over the rear end and he told himself he couldn’t see it any more. He thought of staying longer to be sure, wait for the dirt already coming up from the bottom to clear, but he knew there was nothing more he could do, just get himself away from there and start the long walk back. He realized he was shivering, and it wasn’t even cold.
It took over two hours to slog back to the cottage. All he could do was hope that no one had shown up there, casual visitor or otherwise. He reminded himself that he had to tighten things up, big time. Too many people knew where the key was, just like Jimmy had.
Talk about locking the door after the horse has gone.
23
There were two secondary roads that went out from the center of town to the northwest—the one Frank lived on and the one he was on now, the one where Emily’s assailants lived. The roads started out within two blocks of each other, near City Hall, and ran nearly parallel for three blocks before they began to diverge until they were finally separated by several square miles of scrub brush and woodland, some of which was still being harvested for firewood.
The road he was driving on led to what years before had once been an isolated community, independent of the town, but one that now stubbornly persisted at its outer edges. It had always had a bad reputation among the townies, going back to when Frank was a kid and probably even before that. It still showed a lot of poverty and a lot of the violence that often follows it. Nobody went there at night unless they lived there or they wanted something, something they couldn’t or wouldn’t get closer to home.
For some reason Frank couldn’t define he didn’t really think the two mouth-breathers who’d cornered Emily before had much to do with her disappearance, but they had to be checked out. He could do that on his own—he’d already been in touch with Brent, told him to get the notifications out, check the hospital, make sure the usual bases were covered.
Whole other world, he reflected as he passed clusters of small frame houses, most of them dilapidated, a few with some evidence of halfhearted repair or renovation, and all with some kind of disabled, rusting vehicle sitting in the driveway or yard. Everything from old cars and trucks to snowmobiles and ATVs.
Once in a while he’d see a nondescript figure walking along the side of the road. One even waved, but for the most part they’d just stare at him as he passed. He’d been around long enough to have heard the leering theory that most of these people were products of prolonged inbreeding, and from what he saw in some of the faces he passed he couldn’t dispute it.
The churches were everywhere, all of them small but better cared for than any other buildings on the road. One obscure, fundamentalist denomination after the other, to the point where, based on population, the average congregation for each couldn’t number more than two or three dozen. From what he’d heard the weekly sermons were looked at as a spiritual get out of jail free card—do your time in church once a week, and the rest of the time you’d be able to do whatever you wanted. To whoever you wanted.
It all reminded Frank of how far out of his element he really was. Twenty years of big city police work, mostly in homicide, was an advantage most of the time—but not here.
The Dunning and Watts houses were separated by only a few hundred yards. He didn’t see any vehicles—at least any that were operable—in their respective driveways. He decided it would be faster to keep going to the small sawmill they contracted with, get directions there. They didn’t work at the sawmill itself, but they wouldn’t be far, and someone at the mill would probably know where.
The mill manager wasn’t surprised to see him and even less surprised when he told him who he was looking for.
The directions were simple. He only had to drive for another five minutes past the mill before he saw the break in the trees and slowed down, turning onto the freshly cut fire road. It was narrow, just wide enough for a vehicle, and he hoped that somewhere along its length he’d be able to find a place to turn around. It was muddy back here, already rutted, and he doggedly kept going until he found two old pickup trucks parked nose to tail on one side of the track. One of them was the same one from the incident at the Simmonds house. He could hear the rasp of a chainsaw even through his closed windows.
He stopped his own truck and got out, suddenly aware that once again he’d put himself in a vulnerable position. No backup, with Brent only vaguely aware of his location and two subjects with a demonstrated lack of impulse control. If he’d found out one of his officers was doing things this way he would have torn a strip off him big enough to use for wallpaper.
At least the racket made by the chainsaws made them easy to find. He tried to register his surroundings as he walked toward the noise. He still had to find his way back to the truck, and getting lost in the woods only a mile from a road would make him the butt of station ridicule for years to come.
He saw only one of them—looked like John Watts, the bigger of the two, and paused for a moment. He listened. Watts was trimming a fallen tree, his head down and unaware of his presence. Frank could hear another chainsaw at work but couldn’t judge its whereabouts, just that it was farther away. It shut off suddenly while he was still trying to locate the sound.
Watts lopped off another branch from the deadfall and shifted his position to move farther along the trunk, raising the blade slightly. That brought his head up and he saw Frank. His face stayed impassive as he shut off the saw and straightened up, still staring at him. There was an abrupt, menacing silence.
“You’re a long way from town, Chief.”
The implication was clear.
Frank held eye contact with him, very aware that he still had no idea where Dunning was.
“Sorry to interrupt your work. Just came out to ask you a couple of questions.”
Watts’s eyes were flat.
“I thought we were all done with that.”
“We are. And I gave you both a break.”
Watts dismissed that with a smirk. Frank saw his eyes move quickly to one side of him, and he swung around, his hand going automatically to the butt of his gun. Dunning hadn’t made a sound, coming out of the woods from one side and behind, way out of Frank’s eye line. He was around twenty or thirty yards away, and Dunning kept walking until Frank was between them. They were too far apart for Frank to watch both of them at the same time. He heard Watts chuckle.
“So what are you doing way out here, Chief? You change your mind—gonna put us in jail after all?”
Frank forced a casual slowness into his movements, taking a few steps back so he could get both of them into his peripheral vision. It looked like he was retreating. Watts grinned. Dunning didn’t move at all.
“You keep acting like a couple of assholes that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Frank glanced over at Dunning and jerked his head in the direction of Watts, “Get over that way.”
Dunning allowed himself a small smile. He didn’t move for a moment, his eyes flicking over at Watts, then slowly walked over to stand beside his bigger partner. Frank kept his hand on the gun butt. They were separated from him now by about twenty feet.
Not a lot of space meant not a lot of time.
“Now—all I want to know is whether you’ve seen that Simmonds girl in the last day or two.”
Watts grinned.
“Wouldn’t mind seeing her.”
“Don’t fuck with me, John. She’s missing and I don’t have time for it. Answer the question.”
Watts glared at him resentfully.
“We haven’t seen anybody. We’ve been out here. Working.”
“What about last night?”
“What about it?”
“Where were you?”
“I was home fuckin’ the wife,” Watts told him, “You can ask her if you want. Hell, you can stop off on the way home and throw a fuck into her yourself.”
Frank kept his expression neutral and looked over at Dunning.
“What about you?”
“John doesn’t let me fuck his wife,” he looked over at Watts and then back at Frank, “you must be special.”
Frank’s voice was flat.
“I need to know where you were.”
“I was home. A couple of guys stopped over after work—they stayed ‘til about ten, then I went to bed. I was too fucking tired to go anywhere.”
Frank got the names of their buddies—pretty much a useless exercise since they’d back up the story whether they’d been there or not. It didn’t matter, now that he’d come out and seen them. He was pretty sure if they’d had anything to do with the girl’s disappearance he wouldn’t have found them working in the woods the next day. He’d check the alibis anyway, but he knew he’d lost time. He got back in the truck and left.
24
Langdon wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing at all. He didn’t think of himself as somebody who panicked, but on the way back to the cottage he had time to second guess what he’d done. Maybe he would’ve been better off if he had called 911. The trouble with that was there wouldn’t be any way of telling which cops would arrive on the scene. He had a perverse degree of faith in the older ones, the veterans—but not the new guys, the ones who’d come on in the last few years. Langdon had been attracting the attention of cops since his early teens, long enough to have seen a clear dividing line between the old school generation and the new one. The new ones all looked and acted like they’d watched too many cop shows when they were kids. Langdon had watched the same shows but he always wanted the bad guys to win, to get away with whatever they’d done.
Looking back on it Langdon figured if he’d gone direct, called Frank Stallings or Brent, maybe he could’ve finessed his way out. They’d never been on the same side, but at least they knew who he was and presumably where he drew the line...no, he’d done the right thing after all, the only thing he could’ve done. That kind of reasoning was too much to expect, especially for cops, too cut and dried and everything pointing to him. Didn’t matter now anyway—it was done and he had to follow through on what he’d already started. He was almost staggering with fatigue and reaction by the time he got back.
He was still shaking and he knew he probably looked like shit. There was a gas station/convenience store down the road and he figured if he went there, suddenly bought a lot of cleaning supplies, he’d just end up attracting attention. If somebody showed up at the cottage while he was gone...he wanted to just lock the place up and leave, but that was a non -starter too. He knew he was a badass, knew he’d done a lot of things wrong in his life—but he’d also taken heat for a lot of things he hadn’t done, just because of who he was and because it was convenient for the town to have one all-purpose bad guy to blame its perversions on. Sooner or later somebody would come around asking about Jimmy, and if it looked like he’d gone missing himself there’d be questions and suspicion. Cops didn’t like coincidence, and they’d be only too happy to use it against him.
He scrounged around in the cottage and the shed, eventually putting together a bucket and a devil’s brew of leftover detergent and cleaning fluid. Then he chopped up a couple of bars of soap and mixed the whole thing in with some hot water. A lot of hot water.
At least, he thought while he started pulling it up, the rug was pretty thick—while a lot of the blood had soaked through and was already drying on the wood floor, it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. He grimaced, making sure the stray brain matter stayed with the rug and didn’t spill on the floor. He got some towels from the bathroom and started scrubbing, swearing to himself all the time he was doing it. His arms and shoulders hurt like hell but he didn’t allow himself to take a break until he figured he’d gotten most of it. He leaned back and looked at the huge wet splotch on the bare floor. He told himself a lot of it was simply the dampness from the water and the cleaning solution. Best he could do now was wait and see how it looked when it dried.
He rolled up the rug and dragged it outside to the back. There was a fire pit near the back of the cottage and he laid the rug beside it. He stripped off his clothes and grabbed some kindling from the woodpile, then remembered the towels. They were so soaked with blood and water they probably wouldn’t burn right away, but better to get them out of the house.
It had turned warm and he was sweating. The air was soft and heavy, the sky overcast. If it started to rain he was fucked. He hurried inside for the towels and took them back out, then went into the shed and looked for something to cut the rug up with. He figured smaller pieces would burn more easily than the whole thing. All he could find were a rusted pair of old garden shears that he didn’t even know he had. He wasn’t sure they’d work but they were better than nothing. He felt an amazing amount of don’t give a fuck creeping over him, a desire to just lie down somewhere and close his eyes. He fought it off—he had to keep going, destroy all this crap and do it fast. The only answer for that was gas—as long as he didn’t incinerate the entire yard.
It took nearly half an hour, but eventually the whole mess started to burn—smoky as hell, but at least it was working. He took a chance on leaving the fire unattended long enough to go back inside and take another look at the floor. It was still wet, still dark and discolored, but he went up to his bedroom and pulled an old area rug out of one of the bedrooms and carried it downstairs, spreading it out to cover the wet patch.
He knew the best thing to do, and soon, would be to pull up some floorboards and replace them. Then he went back outside to keep the fire going.
He’d just reached the fire pit when he heard the car pull in behind him and he froze, then snapped out of it enough to turn around, his hand going to the .45 tucked in his jeans at the small of his back. It was Sherry, and she looked pissed. Pissed didn’t even describe it.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
He was breathing hard and it was an effort just to keep his voice steady. He brought his empty hand back out from behind his back. She didn’t answer him, just walked up and slapped him hard in the face.
“That’s what I should’ve done last night.”
She turned around and started back to her car. He thought of the fire behind him and the mess in the living room and thought of letting her go. But he needed her here. He caught up to her, grabbed her by the arm. She was quick, swinging around with another wild punch, but he blocked it with his forearm and resisted the urge to slap the shit out of her.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I saw you in here. Last night.”
“I wasn’t here last night.”
“The hell you weren’t. I went right up to the porch and saw you through the window. You were banging the shit out of some girl—right up against the wall.”
Unbelievable. He pushed her away.
“Yeah? Did you get a good look or do you just think you did? Did you actually see my face?”
“Your car was in the driveway.”
“I said did you actually see my face?”
“I saw your car.”
“You saw Jimmy’s car. You saw Jimmy. I wasn’t here.”
She looked at him, her certainty starting to fade. He kne
w she’d want to believe him anyway.
“Yeah? So if you weren’t here then where were you?”
He looked at her.
“I was with you.”
Everything was different now. Emily whimpered, sobbing into his shoulder as he thrust himself into her. She’d fought him only for a few moments, and then had suddenly subsided into terrified sobs as he’d stripped away her jeans, marveling at how beautiful she was. She’d panicked when he entered her, pounding at his shoulders, but then he’d held the knife to her throat and told her if she tried to stop him or get away he’d just kill her. He lied to her, told her if she did what he wanted and if he liked it he’d let her go.
Most of the others had stopped fighting at that point and she was no different. This was the part he liked best, other than the kill itself. This was the part where he could imagine they were not his victims but willing participants, that they wanted to do this as much as he did. That’s what it felt like now, and he allowed himself to raise up on his elbows and look down at her. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut but his shift in position caused her to open them. She was crying, crying so hard that she was having trouble breathing, like a small child. He reached for her forehead with his free hand, stroking her hair, but still carefully using the weight of his lower body to keep her down. He saw a glimmer of calculation start to come into her eyes. He’d been expecting it. He pulled back and then pushed into her as slowly and as deeply as he could. He could feel everything and it was delicious. He’d broken another rule—no condom, nothing between her body and his, DNA everywhere, and even though it was a huge risk the way it felt was worth any risk at all.
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