And she was their next target.
Maura rose to a crouch to peer over the boulders. A lone man was moving down the mountain toward them. He carried a rifle.
Bear gave a threatening bark, but before he could lunge from the cover of the boulders, Maura grabbed his collar and commanded: “Stay. Stay.”
Rat’s lips had darkened to blue. With every breath he took, the punctured lung was leaking air into the chest cavity, where it was trapped, unable to escape. The pressure was building, squeezing that lung, shifting all the organs in his chest. If I don’t act now, she thought, he will die.
She yanked open Rat’s backpack and scrabbled through the contents for his knife. Sliding open the blade, she found it streaked with rust and dirt. To hell with sterility; he had only minutes left to live.
Bear barked again, a sound so frantic that she swung around to look at what had alarmed him. Now he was facing down the hill, where a dozen men were climbing toward them. A man with a rifle above us. More armed men approaching from below us. We are trapped between them.
She looked down at the gun, which had fallen in the snow beside Rat. The deputy’s weapon. When this was over, when she and Rat were both dead, they would point to this gun as proof that they were cop-killers. No one would ever know the truth.
“Mommy.” The word was barely a whisper. A child’s plea from a young man’s dying lips. “Mommy.”
She bent close to the boy and touched his cheek. Though he was looking straight at her, he seemed to be seeing someone else. Someone who made his lips slowly curve into a weak smile.
“I’m here, darling.” She blinked as tears slid down her cheeks and chilled on her skin. “Your mommy will always be here.”
The snap of a breaking branch made her stiffen. She raised her head to peer over the boulder and saw the lone rifleman just as he saw her.
He fired.
The bullet kicked snow into her eyes and she dropped back to the ground beside the dying boy.
No negotiations. No mercy.
I refuse to be slaughtered like an animal. She picked up the deputy’s gun. Raising the barrel, she fired high into the air. A warning shot, to slow him down. To make him think.
Lower on the slope, dogs barked and men shouted. She saw the approaching posse scrambling up the mountain toward her. She had no cover against their gunfire. Crouching here beside Rat, she was exposed to the firing squad moving toward her.
“My name is Maura Isles!” she shouted. “I want to surrender! Please, let me surrender! My friend is hurt and he needs …” Her voice died as a shadow loomed above her. She looked up, into the barrel of a rifle.
The man holding it said, quietly: “Give me the gun.”
“I want to give up,” Maura pleaded. “My name is Maura Isles, and—”
“Just hand me that gun.” He was an older man, with implacable eyes and authority in his voice. Though the words were spoken quietly, there was no compromise in that command. “Give it to me. Slowly.”
Only as she started to obey him did she suddenly realize this move was wrong, all wrong. The gun in her grasp. Her arm lifting to hand it over. The men watching from below would not see a woman about to surrender; they would see a woman preparing to fire. Instantly she released her grip, letting the gun tumble from her fingers. But the man standing above her had already lifted his rifle to fire. His decision to kill her had been preordained.
The blast made her flinch. She fell to her knees, cowering in the snow beside Rat. Wondering why she felt no pain, saw no blood. Why am I still alive?
The man on the boulder above her gave a grunt of surprise as the rifle dropped from his hands. “Who’s shooting at me?” he yelled.
“Back away from her, Loftus!” a voice commanded.
“She was gonna shoot me! I had to defend myself!”
“I said back away.”
I know that voice. It’s Gabriel Dean.
Slowly Maura raised her head and saw not one, but two familiar figures moving toward her. Gabriel kept his weapon aimed squarely at the man on the boulder, as Anthony Sansone ran to her side.
“Are you all right, Maura?” Sansone asked.
She had no time to waste on questions, no time to marvel over the miraculous appearance of these two men. “He’s dying,” she sobbed. “Help me save him.”
Sansone dropped to his knees beside the boy. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
“I’m going to decompress the chest. I need a chest tube. Anything hollow will work—even a ballpoint pen!”
She picked up Rat’s knife and stared at the thin chest, at the ribs that stood out so starkly beneath the pale skin. Even on that frigid mountainside, her palm was sweating against the grip as she gathered the nerve to do what had to be done.
She found her landmark, pressed the blade against his skin, and sliced into the boy’s chest.
“He would have killed me,” said Maura. “If Gabriel and Sansone hadn’t stopped him, that man would have shot me in cold blood, the way he shot Rat. No questions asked.”
Jane glanced at her husband, who stood by the window, looking out over the medical center parking lot. Gabriel neither contradicted nor confirmed what Maura had said, but remained strangely uncommunicative, letting Maura tell the story. Except for the murmur of the TV, its volume turned low, the ICU visitors’ lounge was quiet.
“There’s something all wrong about what happened up there,” Maura said. “Something that doesn’t make any sense. Why was he so determined to kill us?” She looked up, and Jane scarcely recognized her friend in that gaunt and bruised face. Maura’s usually flawless skin was marred by scratches that were now scabbing over. The new sweater she wore hung far too loose on her frame, and her collarbones stood out on the pitifully thin chest. Without her stylish clothes, her makeup, Maura looked as vulnerable as any other woman, and that unsettled Jane. If even cool, confident Maura Isles could be reduced to this battered creature, then so could anyone. Even me.
“A deputy was killed,” said Jane. “You know how things turn out whenever a cop goes down. Justice gets a little rough.” Again she glanced at her husband, waiting for him to comment, but Gabriel just stared in silence at the glitteringly clear morning. Although he’d shaved and showered after his return from the mountain, he still looked exhausted and wind-burned, tired eyes squinting against the sunlight.
“No, he showed up there intending to kill us,” said Maura. “Just like that deputy did, on Doyle Mountain. I think this is all about Kingdom Come. And what I wasn’t supposed to see there.”
“Well, we now know what that was,” said Jane.
The day before, the last of forty-one bodies had been recovered from the burial pit. Twelve men, nineteen women, and ten children—most of them girls. The majority showed no signs of trauma, but Maura had seen enough in Kingdom Come to know the victims had surely been force-marched to their graves. The blood on the stairs, the abandoned meals, the pets left behind to starve—all pointed to mass murder.
“They couldn’t let any of you live,” said Jane. “Not after what you saw in that village.”
“The day I hiked out, I heard a snowplow coming up the mountain,” said Maura. “I thought they were finally there to rescue us. If I’d been there, with the others …”
“You would have ended up like them,” said Jane. “With your skull fractured and your body burned up in the Suburban. All they had to do was roll it into the ravine, set it on fire, and that was the end of it. Just a group of unlucky tourists, dead in an accident, no questions asked.” Jane paused. “I’m afraid I complicated things for you.”
“How?”
“By insisting that you were still missing. I brought your clothes for the tracking dogs. I gave them everything they needed to hunt you down.”
“I’d be dead now,” said Maura softly. “If it weren’t for the boy.”
“Seems to me, you returned the favor.” Jane reached out to take Maura’s hand. It felt strange to do so, because Maura was not
a woman who invited touches or hugs. But she did not flinch at Jane’s touch; she seemed too weary to react at all.
“The case will all come together,” said Jane. “It may take time, but I’m confident they’ll find enough to tie it to The Gathering.”
“And Jeremiah Goode.”
Jane nodded. “It couldn’t have happened unless he ordered it. But even if those people voluntarily drank poison, it’s still mass murder. Because you’re talking about children, who had no choice at all.”
“Then the boy’s mother. His sister …”
Jane shook her head. “If they were living in Kingdom Come, they’re probably among the dead. None of them have been identified yet. The first autopsy will be done today. Potassium cyanide is everyone’s guess.”
“Like Jonestown,” said Maura softly.
Jane nodded. “Fast, effective, and available.”
Maura looked up. “But they were his followers. The chosen ones. Why would he suddenly want them dead?”
“That’s a question only Jeremiah can answer. And right now, no one knows where he is.”
The door opened, and an ICU nurse stepped in. “Dr. Isles? The police have left, and the boy’s asking for you again.”
“They should leave the poor kid alone,” said Maura as she pushed herself out of the armchair. “I’ve already told them everything.” For a moment she looked dangerously weak and wobbly, but she managed to regain her balance and followed the nurse out of the room.
Jane waited until the door swung shut again, then she looked at her husband. “Okay. Tell me what’s bothering you.”
He sighed. “Everything.”
“Care to be more specific?”
He turned and faced her. “Maura’s absolutely right. Montgomery Loftus fully intended to kill her and the boy. He didn’t come with our search party. He was canny enough to predict the boy would head for Absolem’s cabin, and he hired a chopper to drop him off there. That’s where he waited to ambush them. If we hadn’t stopped him, he would have killed them both.”
“What’s his motive?”
“He claims he just wanted justice to be done. And no one around here is questioning that. After all, these are his friends and neighbors.”
And we’re just the meddlesome outsiders, thought Jane. She looked out the window at the parking lot, where Sansone was walking Bear. They made an odd couple, the wild-looking dog and the man in the cashmere coat. But Bear seemed to trust him, and willingly jumped into the car when Sansone opened the door for the drive back to the hotel.
“Martineau and Loftus,” Jane said softly. “Is there a connection between them?”
“Maybe there’s a money trail to follow. If Martineau got paid off by the Dahlia Group …”
She looked at Gabriel. “I’ve heard that Montgomery Loftus is having money trouble. He’s barely hanging on to the Double L Ranch. He’s ripe to be bought off, too.”
“To kill Maura and a sixteen-year-old kid?” Gabriel shook his head. “He doesn’t seem like a man you could buy off with money alone.”
“Maybe it was a lot of money. If so, that’s going to be hard to hide.”
Gabriel glanced at his watch. “I think it’s time I head to Denver.”
“The Bureau field office?”
“We’ve got a mysterious shell company in Maryland. And large amounts of money being thrown around. This is starting to feel really big, Jane.”
“Forty-one dead bodies isn’t big enough?”
He gave a somber shake of the head. “That may be just the tip of the iceberg.”
Maura paused in the ICU cubicle doorway, unnerved by the sight of all the tubes and catheters and wires snaking around Rat’s body, an invasion that no sixteen-year-old boy should ever have to endure. But the rhythm on the cardiac monitor was reassuringly steady, and he was now breathing on his own.
Sensing her presence, he opened his eyes and smiled. “Hey there, ma’am.”
“Oh, Rat.” She sighed. “Are you ever going to stop calling me that?”
“What should I call you?”
You called me Mommy once. She blinked away tears at the memory. The boy’s real mother was almost certainly among the dead, but she did not have the heart to break the news to him. Instead she managed to return the boy’s smile. “I give you permission to call me whatever you want. But my name is Maura.”
She sat down in the chair beside his bed and reached for his hand. Noticed how calloused and scabbed it was, the fingernails still stubbornly stained with dirt. She, who did not easily reach out to touch anyone, took that battered hand in hers, and took it without hesitation. It felt natural and right.
“How’s Bear?” he asked.
She laughed. “You’ll be changing his name to Pig when you see how much he’s been eating.”
“So he’s okay?”
“My friends have been spoiling him rotten. And your foster family promised they’d look after him until you get home.”
“Oh. Them.” Rat’s gaze drifted away from hers, and he looked up listlessly at the ceiling. “I guess I’ll be going back there.”
A place he clearly did not want to go. But what alternative could Maura offer him? A home with a divorced woman who knew nothing about raising children? A woman who was carrying on a furtive love affair with a man she could never acknowledge as her partner? She was a poor role model for a teenage boy, and her life was already troubled enough. Yet the offer trembled on her lips, an offer to take him in, to make him happy, to fix his life. To be his mother. Oh, how easy that offer was to make, and once made, how impossible to retract. Be sensible, Maura, she thought. You can’t even keep a cat, much less raise a teenager on your own. No responsible authority would grant her custody. This boy had already known too much rejection, too many disappointments; it would be cruel to make promises she couldn’t keep.
So she did not make any. She merely held his hand and stayed at his bedside as he drifted back to sleep. The nurse came in to change the IV bottle and whisked out again. But Maura remained, pondering the boy’s future, and what part she could realistically hope to play in it. I know this much: I won’t abandon you. You’ll always know that someone cares.
A knock on the window made her turn, and she saw Jane beckoning to her.
Reluctantly Maura left the bedside and stepped out of the cubicle.
“They’re about to start the first autopsy,” Jane said.
“The Kingdom Come victims?”
Jane nodded. “The forensic pathologist just arrived from Colorado. He said he knows you, and he’s wondering if you’d care to observe. He’s doing it downstairs, in the hospital morgue.”
Maura glanced through the window at Rat, and saw that he was peacefully sleeping. The lost boy, still waiting to be claimed. I’ll be back. I promise.
She nodded to Jane, and they left the ICU.
When they arrived in the morgue, they found the anteroom crowded with observers, Sheriff Fahey and Detective Pasternak among them. The sheer number of victims had made this a high-profile case, and nearly a dozen law enforcement and state and county officials had gathered to witness the autopsy.
The pathologist saw Maura walk into the room and raised a beefy hand in greeting. Two summers ago, she’d met Dr. Fred Gruber at a forensic pathology conference in Maine, and he seemed pleased to spot a familiar face.
“Dr. Isles,” he called out in his booming voice. “I could use another set of expert eyes. You want to gown up and join me in there?”
“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said Sheriff Fahey.
“Dr. Isles is a forensic pathologist.”
“She doesn’t work for the state of Wyoming. This case is going to be watched closely, and questions could be raised.”
“Why would there be any questions?”
“Because she was in that valley. She’s a witness, and there could be charges of tampering. Contamination.”
Maura said, “I’m only here to observe, and I can do that perfectly wel
l from this side of the window, with the rest of you. I assume we can watch it on that monitor?” She pointed to the TV screen mounted in the anteroom.
“I’ll turn on the camera, so you’ll all have a good view,” said Dr. Gruber. “And I’m going to ask all the observers to remain in this room anyway, with the door shut. Since there’s a possibility we’re dealing with cyanide poisoning.”
“I thought you had to swallow the stuff to get sick,” one of the officials said.
“There’s the chance of outgassing. The biggest danger is when I cut into the stomach, because that’s when cyanide gas might be released. My assistant and I will be wearing respirators, and I’ll dissect the stomach under the fume hood cabinet. We’ve also brought a GasBadge sensor, which will immediately alert us if it detects hydrogen cyanide. If it’s negative, I may be able to let some of you into the room. But you’ll have to wear gowns and masks.”
Gruber donned dissection garb, including a respirator hood, and pushed through the door into the autopsy lab. His assistant was already waiting, similarly garbed. They turned on the camera, and on the TV monitor, Maura could see the empty autopsy table awaiting its subject. Gruber and his assistant wheeled the plastic-shrouded body out of cold storage and slid it onto the table.
Gruber unzipped the shroud.
On the video monitor, Maura could see that the body was a young girl, only about twelve or thirteen. Since the exhumation from the frozen ground, her flesh had been allowed to thaw. Her face was ghostly pale, her blond hair a crown of damp ringlets. Gruber and his assistant were quietly respectful as they removed the garments. Off came a long cotton dress, a knee-length slip, and modest white briefs. The corpse, now nude, was slender as a dancer’s, and despite days of burial, she was still eerily beautiful, her flesh preserved by the valley’s subfreezing temperatures.
The officials pressed in closer around the monitor. As Gruber collected blood, urine, and vitreous specimens for toxicology, the men’s eyes took in what should never have been revealed to them. It was a violation of a young girl’s modesty.
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