by John Hart
The line went dead.
Hunt poured another scotch.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Freemantle stared at the gun. It shook in Johnny’s hands. Johnny’s voice shook, too. “Where is she?”
Jack pushed closer, alarmed. “Johnny, what are you doing?”
“Where’s my sister?”
“I don’t know your sister.” An ember popped in the stove. “I don’t know you.”
Johnny stooped for the scrap of cloth with Alyssa’s name on it. He held it out. “This is my sister. Her name is Alyssa Merrimon. This is her name.” Freemantle kept his eyes on Johnny’s face. “Look at it,” Johnny said.
Freemantle shrugged and looked. “I can’t read.”
“She was taken a year ago. That’s her name.”
“I don’t think he knows,” Jack said.
“He has to.”
“I would tell you if I knew.”
“He doesn’t know,” Jack said.
“Where did you get this?” Johnny shoved the bloodstained cloth at Freemantle. “Where? When?”
Giant shoulders rolled, muscles tight under the skin. “I got that from broken man. Right after you bit me.”
“Who?”
“Broken man.” He said it like it was a name. “Broken man was by the bridge. I got that from broken man’s hand. He was holding it.”
The gun dipped. “After you picked me up?”
“God told me to see what you was running from, so I did.”
“David Wilson,” Johnny said. “Was he alive when you found him?”
Freemantle’s head tilted, and he closed his eyes, thinking. “Put the gun down,” Jack whispered. Johnny hesitated. “You really think this man has Alyssa? You’re going to get somebody killed.”
Johnny let the muzzle settle until it pointed at the dusty floor. “Was broken man alive?”
Freemantle’s eyes stayed shut. “There was voices in the river. Whispers. Dandelion words.” He made a floating motion with his fingers. “I was so tired …”
“Voices?” Johnny keyed on the word. “Did the broken man say something? Anything?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You have to.”
The big hands turned palm up. “The crows was coming. I was scared.” They were a foot apart, the boy, the man. “I’d tell you if I could.” Freemantle lay down on the warm stone. “Maybe I’ll know in the morning. That happens sometimes.” He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry about your sister. I’m done now.”
Johnny stared at Freemantle. He stared until his legs went numb. He felt despair, like hunger, and when he finally turned, Freemantle was snoring.
Johnny put the gun on a shelf. He looked at beams and posts and bits of sharp-edged metal. He turned his face to the roof as a dark pit opened in his chest. He was torn, and then he was empty. The pit was a vacuum.
It was Jack who broke the silence. “Why is he scared of crows?”
“I think he hears the devil when the crows get close.”
“The devil?”
“He hears one voice. Why not the other?”
“What if it’s true?” Jack put his arms around his knees. He rocked on the trunk and couldn’t meet Johnny’s eyes. “What if he really hears God’s voice? What if he really hears … You know.”
“He doesn’t.”
“But what if?”
“Nobody does.”
Jack pulled his knees tighter. Dirt rimed his face. “I don’t like crows, either. Been scared of them since I was little. What if that’s why?”
“Come on, Jack.”
“You know what they call a group of crows?” His voice was small and strained.
Johnny knew the answer. “A murder,” he said. “A murder of crows.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for that.” Jack looked at Freemantle. “What if God sent him here for a reason, too?”
“Look, Jack. This guy killed two people because they let his daughter die in a hot car. If thinking God told him to do it makes living with that fact any easier, then I guess that’s what he had to do. The crows, the other voice … that’s just guilty conscience catching up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” They both stared. “But he knows something.”
“I’m scared, Johnny.”
Johnny’s eyes glittered. He watched Freemantle by the fire, nodded as the night grew thin.
“He knows something.”
—
Jack fell into a fitful sleep as wind sighed through the cracks, a small voice that, twice, gusted into something terrible. The fire burned low. Johnny moved from anger to grief to unwanted sleep that took him down hard. He dreamed of stinking wood and sharp, yellow eyes, of a hard fall through shattered limbs and of his sister’s hopeful smile. She squatted in the dirt of a low cellar: filthy skin, tatters for clothes. A single candle burned, and she looked up, startled. Is that you? she said, and Johnny bolted up with a scream trapped behind his teeth.
For that instant, he did not know where he was or what had happened, but he knew that something was wrong. He felt it in the close, hot air.
Something was wrong.
Levi Freemantle sat in the dirt, cross-legged, not three feet away. He was sheeted with the same sweat, shadows gray on his black skin. His hands were cupped in his lap, the pistol in his hands. He was staring at it, tilting it toward the stove. His finger found the trigger.
“It’s loaded,” Johnny said.
When Freemantle looked up, Johnny had the sense that his sickness had spread, that little awareness remained behind the vacant eyes. He turned the gun and gazed into the muzzle. The moment drew out. Johnny held out his hand. “May I have that?”
Freemantle ignored him. His hand swallowed the grip. “I got shot once.” Johnny could barely hear him. Freemantle touched the bullet scar on his stomach. “Little boys shouldn’t have guns.”
“Who shot you?”
“My wife.”
“Why?”
He looked at the gun. “Just ’cause.”
“May I have that?” Johnny leaned closer and Freemantle handed him the gun. It could have been an apple. Or a cup of water. Johnny took it, pointed it at Freemantle’s face. He was scared. The dream still had him. “Where’s my sister?”
The muzzle was eighteen inches from Freemantle’s eyes.
“Where is she?” Louder. Twelve inches. Ten. The gun, this time, was deathly still, but Freemantle was as unconcerned as an ox facing a bolt gun.
“When she shot me.” His voice was low. “She said it’s ’cause I was stupid.”
Six inches. One hand cupping the other, finger tight on the trigger.
“You shouldn’t call people stupid,” Freemantle said. “Calling people names is mean.”
Johnny hesitated, and Freemantle lay down. The gun still pointed at the empty place his eyes had been, his yellow-stained, bloodshot, slaughterhouse eyes.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Hunt woke at five, restless, still tired. He showered and shaved, moved through the small house, paused at the door to his son’s room and listened to the sounds of his deep and steady breathing. It was a bad day coming. He felt it in every fiber, every bone. For this day to end well, he thought, it would take a miracle.
Downstairs, the kitchen was overly warm and smelling of scotch. Hunt rarely drank. He was hungover and disappointed in himself.
Screw Yoakum.
Screw that phone call.
But that was not fair. As much as he’d hated to hear it, the man was right. Hunt put events in motion the second he stepped out of the elevator and into Holloway’s office. Meechum’s death was his fault. He might as well have pulled the trigger.
Hunt flicked the curtain and looked out. No stars shone, but there was no call for rain, either. The medical examiners would be back in the woods in a matter of hours. They’d get the last bodies out today. Maybe one was Alyssa. Maybe not. Maybe Johnny would turn up. Then again …
Where are you, Johnny?
His son still slept when he left.
Pale mist gathered in the black trees.
The Chief had set the meeting for nine o’clock—late in cop terms—but Hunt could not wait that long. The sun still hung below the courthouse as he drove down Main Street, then turned left and rolled past the police station. Already the curb was lined with news trucks. Cameramen stamped their feet. Reporters checked makeup. They knew the cops would move soon. They would make the long, slow roll to the black woods at the edge of town, where the last bodies would be culled from the damp, grasping soil.
The story would grow.
The day was ripe with opportunity.
Hunt drove around the block to the small parking lot at the rear. It was not yet seven, but Yoakum was there, waiting. He sat on the edge of a concrete barrier at the south end of the lot. His back pressed against a chain-link fence and bowed it out. Behind him, weathered-looking men in hard hats drank coffee and ate fast-food biscuits while dozers and cranes idled, damp and dull in a gray light so weak it made the turned earth look frozen. A bank would rise, Hunt thought. Maybe an office building. Holloway’s probably. And the wheels of commerce would turn.
Yoakum was rough, unshaven; a cigarette hung at the edge of his mouth. He took a drag and flicked it through the fence as Hunt stepped into the warming air and walked the last twenty feet.
“Morning, John.” Hunt was neutral, guarded. Their friendship was an understood thing, and this doubt between them was untouched ground.
“Clyde.” Yoakum fished out another smoke, ran it between his fingers. He did not light it, and had trouble looking Hunt square in the face. He put his eyes on the roofline of the police station, then on the shoes that still showed traces of mud from the field behind Meechum’s house.
Hunt waited.
“About last night,” Yoakum began. “I was drunk. I was wrong.”
Hunt kept his face immobile. “Just like that?”
Yoakum sparked the cigarette. “I was not myself.”
Steel eyes. Doubt. Hunt said nothing, and Yoakum changed the subject. “You see this?” He lifted a stack of folded newspapers from the barrier on which he sat.
“Bad?”
Yoakum shrugged, handed over the papers. Hunt flicked through them. The headlines were sensational. There were photos of the medical examiner’s vehicles framed by the deep and secret woods, photos of thin body bags being loaded through wide double doors. Reporters speculated on body count, hinted at police incompetence. They spoke of a security guard, shot dead by an unnamed cop. They recapped the story of how Tiffany Shore had been found, and they all asked the same question: Where is Johnny Merrimon?
“They know that we have an all-points out on Johnny.” Hunt shook his head.
“Kid’s a damn hero.”
There was something in Yoakum’s voice, and Hunt could not decide if it was bitterness or just another hangover. “The kid’s missing.”
“I didn’t mean anything bad by that.” Yoakum gestured at the papers. “Just that we come off like idiots.”
“Occupational hazard these days.”
“No shit.”
“They’re already stacked up out front. A dozen trucks. You see them?”
“They don’t have my name yet.” He was talking about Meechum, about the shooting. “You couldn’t pay me to go in through the front door.”
Hunt didn’t blame him. The story would grow. Yoakum would be chewed up in the process. “They’ll have it soon enough,” he said.
Yoakum nodded, looked at the back of the station, a concrete wall stained with moisture. “Let’s get this over with.”
They crossed the lot together, but a tension remained between them, an awareness of the late night phone call, of things said and unsaid. At the door, Yoakum stopped. “Last night, Clyde.” He looked embarrassed. “I was in a dark place. You understand?” Hunt started to speak, but Yoakum cut him off, opened the door, and edged a shoulder inside. “You do what you have to do,” he said, then turned away.
Inside, an energy charged the air; Hunt saw it in the brisk movements, the eyes that danced their way. Yoakum was treated like a hero. Handshakes. Back slaps. Cops hated pedophiles, and Meechum’s house had yielded a trove of damning evidence, the most frightening of which was a thick sheaf of photographs taken by the mall’s surveillance cameras. The girls ranged in age from ten to fifteen, fresh-faced and awkward. Pictures showed them sitting in the food court, riding the escalators. Meechum had made bold notations in black marker: Rachel, Jane, Christine. He was uncertain of some of the names. Those had question marks: Carly? Simone? April?
Some photos had addresses noted on the low corners. They lived on quiet streets, family streets. Other photographs had ages scratched in dark marker, beneath the names, the faces: Rachel, 12. Christine, 11. They’d come from the locked bottom drawer of Meechum’s desk, and had made Hunt sick, when he saw them, sick and furious. More than that—the sight had made him murderous. Right or wrong, killing the bastard had been a good thing. There was, in fact, a certain beauty in how the case had unfolded. Burton Jarvis died in the street, half naked and begging for his life, put down by one of his victims. Meechum was gunned down in his own home, shot through the heart by one of the department’s most senior detectives.
Beauty.
Justice.
Most of the cops were smiling, but not the Chief. The Chief was bleached out, with bright spots of scarlet in the center of his meaty cheeks. He stood in the door to his office, looking out. Seven fifteen in the morning, and he was already stained with sweat. Behind him, shadows moved. Hunt saw men in the Chief’s office. Strange men in dark suits. Men who looked like cops.
“Five minutes,” the Chief said, then closed the door.
“We’re going early,” Hunt said.
Yoakum rolled his shoulders. “I’m catching a smoke.”
Detective Cross watched Yoakum thread through the crowded room, then rose from his desk and approached Hunt. “Can I talk to you in private?”
Hunt led Cross to his office and closed the door. Cross was ragged, his shirt coffee-stained and wrinkled. He’d failed to shave, and Hunt noticed that most of his whiskers were coming in white. “What’s on your mind?”
“Any word on the Merrimon kid?”
“We’re hopeful.”
“But not yet?”
“Is there a problem?” Hunt asked.
“My son, Jack. I can’t find him.”
“What does that mean, you can’t find him?”
Cross ran thick fingers across the brush of his hair. “We had a fight. He snuck out of the house.”
“When?”
“Last night.” A pause. “Maybe two nights ago.”
“Maybe?”
“I’m not sure about the first night. Maybe he left then, maybe it was the next morning. I was out of the house early and didn’t see him. With everything in the papers, you know, my wife’s worried. More than she might otherwise be. She doesn’t handle worry very well.”
“She’s worried, but you’re not.”
Cross fidgeted, and it was clear to Hunt that he was more than worried. He was genuinely frightened. “Do you know my wife, Detective?”
“I met her some years ago.”
Cross’s head moved. “She’s a changed woman. The last few years …” He paused, struggling. “She’s become very religious. She’s been at the church for most of the past thirty hours, not really eating or sleeping, just praying, mostly for Jack. She’s worried that he may be out with the Merrimon kid. If I could tell her that he’s not—”
“Why is that her worry? Why Johnny?”
Cross cast a concerned gaze across the room
. He lowered his voice. “She claims to see a darkness on Johnny’s soul. A stain.” He cringed as he said it, apologetic. “I know, I know; but there it is. She thinks that Johnny is bad for Jack. She’s more worried about that than anything else. She’s not right, you understand.” He squinted, tilted his head. “She’s struggling.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.” Hunt paused. “Are you worried about Jack?”
“Ah, he’s done this kind of stuff before. Normal teenage junk. But two nights, if it is two nights … That’s unusual.”
“What was the fight about?”
“Jack worships that Merrimon kid. I mean, truly. Like a brother. Like a saint, even. I can’t break him of it.”
“And that’s why you fought?”
“Jack’s a weak kid, more like his mother than his brother. He’s frightened and easily led. My wife’s irrationality aside, Johnny is a bad influence. A rule breaker. Damaged, you know. I told Jack to stay away from him.”
“Johnny’s a good boy, but he’s been pulled apart by all of this.”
“Exactly. He’s fucked up.”
“He’s traumatized.”
“That’s what I said.”
Hunt buried his frustration. Not everyone saw Johnny the way he did. “What can I do for you, Cross? You want Jack’s name added to the all-points?”
“No. God, no. Just let me know if you hear anything. His mother is upset, not thinking straight. She blames me. The sooner I can tell her that he’s okay …”
“I understand.”
“Thanks, Hunt. I owe you.”
Cross left. Hunt stood in the door and saw Yoakum come back inside. His face had lost none of the anger. He was barely into the room when the Chief’s door swung wide. “Hunt. Yoakum.”
The Chief preceded them through the door. He circled his desk but remained standing. Hunt stepped in first. To the right, he saw the two unknown men. Both were north of fifty, tall and square with lined, uncompromising faces. One had silver hair, the other brown. No fat between them. Big hands. Calluses. Badges hung on their belts. Guns. Hunt came farther into the room, got a closer look at the badges. State Bureau of Investigation. From the look of them, they were senior in the Bureau, professional, hard men.
