by Rachel Lee
Gus slipped away, and soon she heard him murmuring to the gathered campers.
Not knowing if she would ever get the boy’s name, she said quietly, “Wanna come outside? I’m sort of like police, you know. You probably saw me working when you were on your way up here.”
No response.
Then Gus’s voice in her ear. “Jimmy. He’s Jimmy.”
“Okay.” She lowered the zipper more. When Gus squatted, she let him continue pulling it down so she didn’t have to take eyes off the frightened and confused little boy. “Jimmy? Would you like to go home to Mommy? We can get Mommy to come for you.”
His eyes flickered a bit. He’d heard her.
“My friend Gus here has a horse, too. You want to ride a horse? His name is Scrappy and he’s neat. All different colors.”
She had his attention now and stepped carefully through the flap, totally avoiding the father. She wondered how much evidence she was destroying but didn’t much care. The priority was getting that child out of there.
The floor of the tent was small and not easy to cross. A small sleeping bag lay bunched up, a trap for the unwary foot. Toys were scattered about, too, plastic horses, some metal and plastic cars and a huge metal tractor. She bet Jimmy had had fun making roads in the pine needles and duff outside.
As soon as she got near, she squatted. His gaze was focusing on her more and more, coming out of the shock and into the moment. “I think we need to go find your mommy, don’t you?”
“Daddy?”
“We’ll take care of Daddy for you, okay? Mommy is going to need you, Jimmy. She probably misses you so bad right now. Let’s go and I’ll put you on my ATV. You like ATVs?”
“Zoom.” The smallest of smiles cracked his frozen face.
“Well, this is a big one, and it definitely zooms. It’s also a little like riding a roller coaster. Come on, let’s go check it out.”
At last Jimmy uncoiled and stood. But there was no way Blaire was going to let him see any more of his father. She scooped him up in her arms and turned so that he’d have to look through her.
“Gus?”
“Yo.”
“Could you hold the flap open, please?”
Who knew a skinny four-year-old could feel at once so heavy and light? The flashlight she carried wasn’t helping, either. She wished she had a third arm.
“Are you cold, Jimmy?” she asked as she moved toward the opening and bent a little to ease them through.
“A little bit,” he admitted.
“Well, I’ve got a nice warm blanket on my ATV. You can curl up with it while I call your mommy, okay?” Lying. How was she going to call this kid’s mother? Not immediately, for sure. She couldn’t touch the corpse or look for ID until after the crime techs were done.
“Gus? The sheriff?”
“I radioed. There’s a lot more than two cars on the way. Crime scene people, too.”
“We’ve got to get this cordoned off.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Curious to help me. He’ll love it. The kid?”
“Jimmy is going to get my favorite blanket and a place to curl up in the back of the ATV, right, Jimmy?”
Jimmy gave a small nod. His fingers dug into her, crumpling cloth and maybe even bruising a bit. She didn’t care.
Walking carefully and slowly with the boy, almost unconsciously she began to hum a tune from her early childhood, “All Through the Night.”
To her surprise, Jimmy knew the words and began to sing them with her. His voice was thin, frail from the shock, but he was clinging desperately to something familiar. After a moment, she began to sing softly with him. Before she reached the ATV, Jimmy’s head was resting against her shoulder.
When the song ended, he said, “Mommy sings that.” Then he started to sing it again.
And Blaire blinked hard, fighting back the first tears she’d felt in years.
* * *
GUS WATCHED BLAIRE carry the small child to the ATV. He’d already recovered the crime scene tape and there were plenty of trees to wind it around, but he hesitated for a moment, watching woman and child. He could imagine how hard this was for her, dealing with a freshly fatherless child. War did that too often. Now here, in a peaceful forest. Or one that should have been peaceful.
His radio crackled, and he answered it. “Maddox.”
“We’re about a mile out from the parking area,” came the familiar voice of the sheriff, Gage Dalton. “Anything else we need to know?”
“I’m about to rope the scene right now. The vic has a small child. We’re going to need some help with that and with finding a way to get in touch with family as soon as possible.”
“We’ll do what we can as fast as we can. The witnesses?”
“Some are trying to pack up. I’m going to stop that.”
He was as good as his word, too. When he clicked off the radio, he turned toward the people who had dispersed from the remaining knot and started to fold up tents.
“You all can stop right there. The sheriff will be here soon and you might be material witnesses. None of you can leave the scene until he tells you.”
Some grumbles answered him, but poles and other items clattered to the ground. One woman, with her arms wrapped around herself, said, “I feel like a sitting duck.”
“If you were,” Gus said, “you’d already know it.” That at least took some of the tension out of the small crowd. Then he signaled to the guy who’d tried to follow them to the tent and said, “You get to help me rope off the area.”
The guy nodded. “I can do that. Sorry I got too close. Instinct.”
“Instinct?”
“Yeah. Iraq. Know all the parameters of the situation.”
Gus was familiar with that. He decided the guy wasn’t a ghoul after all. He also proved to be very useful. In less than ten minutes, they had a large area around the victim’s tent cordoned off. Part of him was disturbed that a gunshot had been heard but no one had approached the tent of the one person who hadn’t joined them, not even the veteran. The tent in which a child had apparently been crying.
But it was the middle of the night, people had probably been wakened from a sound sleep and were experiencing some difficulty in putting the pieces together in any useful way. Camping was supposed to be a peaceful experience unless you ran into a bear. And, of course, the sound of the child crying might have persuaded them everything was okay in that tent. After all, it looked untouched from the outside.
Scared as some of these people were that there might be additional gunfire, they all might reasonably have assumed that Jasper and his son were staying cautiously out of sight.
Once he and Wes, the veteran, had roped off the area, there wasn’t another thing they could do before the cops arrived. Preserve the scene, then stand back. And keep witnesses from leaving before they were dismissed by proper authority. He could understand, though, why some of them just wanted to get the hell out of here.
The fact remained, any one of that group of twelve to fourteen people could be the shooter. He wondered if any one of them had even considered that possibility.
Blaire settled Jimmy in the back of the ATV after moving a few items to the side. She had a thick wool blanket she carried in case she got stranded outside overnight without warning, and she did her best to turn it into a nest.
Then she pulled out a shiny survival blanket and Jimmy’s world seemed to settle once again. “Space blanket!” The excitement was clear in his voice.
“You bet,” she said, summoning a smile. “Now just stay here while we try to get your mommy. If you do that for me, you can keep the space blanket.”
That seemed to make him utterly happy. He snuggled into the gray wool blanket and hugged the silvery Mylar to his chin. “I’ll sleep,” he announced.
“Great idea,” she said. She couldn’t resist brushing
his hair gently back from his forehead. “Pleasant dreams, Jimmy.”
He was already falling asleep, though. Exhausted from his fear and his crying, the tyke was nodding off. “Mommy says that, too,” he murmured. And then his thumb found its way into his mouth and his eyes stayed closed.
Blaire waited for a minute, hoping the child could sleep for a while but imagining the sheriff’s arrival with all the people and the work they needed to do would probably wake him. She could hope not.
* * *
HE HADN’T KNOWN the kid was there. God in heaven, he hadn’t known. Jeff scrambled as quietly as he could over rough ground, putting as much distance between him and the vic as he could.
He’d been shocked by the sight of the kid. He almost couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he hadn’t, though, he’d be the next one The Hunt Club would take out. They’d warned him.
His damn fault for getting too curious. Now he was on the hook with them for a murder he didn’t want to commit, and he was never going to forget that little boy. Those eyes, those cries, would haunt him forever.
Cussing viciously under his breath, he grabbed rocks and slipped on scree. He couldn’t even turn on his flashlight yet, he was still too close. But the moon had nose-dived behind the mountain and he didn’t even have its thin, watery light to help him in his escape.
His heart was hammering and not just because of his efforts at climbing. He’d just killed a man and probably traumatized a kid for life. That kid wasn’t supposed to be there. He’d been watching the guy for the last two weeks and he’d been camping solo. What had he done? Brought his son up for the weekend? Must have.
Giving Jeff the shock of his life. He should have backed off, should have told the others he couldn’t do it because the target wasn’t alone. Off-season. No tag. Whatever. Surely he could have come up with an excuse so they’d have given him another chance.
Maybe. Now that he knew what the others had been up to, he couldn’t even rely on their friendship anymore. Look what they’d put him up to, even when he’d sworn he’d never rat them out.
And he wouldn’t have. Man alive, he was in it up to his neck even if he hadn’t known they were acting out some of the plans they’d made. An accomplice. He’d aided them. The noose would have tightened around his throat, too.
God, why hadn’t he been able to make them see that? He wasn’t an innocent who could just walk into a police station and say, “You know what my friends have been doing the last few years?”
Yeah. Right.
He swore again as a sharp rock bit right through his jeans and made him want to cry out from the unexpected pain. He shouldn’t be struggling up the side of a mountain in the dark. He shouldn’t be doing this at all.
He had believed it was all a game. A fun thing to talk about when they gathered at the lodge in the fall for their usual hunting trip. Planning early summer get-togethers to eyeball various campgrounds, looking for the places a shooter could escape without being seen.
The victim didn’t much matter. Whoever was convenient and easy. The important thing was not to leave anything behind. To know the habits of the prey the same way they would know the habits of a deer.
Did the vic go hiking? If so, along what trails and how often and for how long? Was he or she alone very often or at all? Then Will had gotten the idea that they should get them in their tents. When there were other people in the campground, making it so much more challenging. Yeah.
He had believed it was just talk. He’d accompanied the others on the scouting expeditions, enjoying being in the woods while there were still patches of snow under the trees. He liked scoping out the campgrounds as the first hardy outdoorsy types began to arrive. And that, he had believed, was where it ended.
Planning. Scouting. A game.
But he’d been so wrong he could hardly believe his own delusion. He’d known these guys all his life. How was it possible he’d never noticed the psychopathy in either of them? Because that’s what he now believed it was. They didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything except their own pleasure.
He paused to catch his breath and looked back over his shoulder. Far away, glimpsed through the thick forest, he caught sight of flashing red, blue and white lights. The police were there.
He’d known it wouldn’t be long. That was part of the plan. Once he fired his gun, he had to clear out before the other campers emerged, and not long after them the cops.
Well, he’d accomplished that part of his task. He was well away by the time the campers dared to start coming out. But the little kid’s wails had followed him into the night.
Damn it!
So he’d managed to back out of the place without scuffing up the ground in a way that would mark his trail. No one would be able to follow him. But now he was mostly on rocky terrain and that gave him added invisibility.
The damn duff down there had been hard to clear without leaving a visible trail. It had helped that so many campers had been messing it around this summer, but still, if he’d dragged his foot or... Well, it didn’t matter. He hadn’t.
But then there had been the farther distances. Like where he had kept watch. His movements. Too far out for anyone to notice, of course. He’d made sure of that.
So he’d done everything right. They’d never catch him and the guys would leave him alone. That’s all he wanted.
But he hated himself, too, and wished he’d been made of sterner stuff, the kind that would have gone to the cops rather than knuckle under to threats and the fear that he would be counted an accomplice to acts he hadn’t committed.
Now there was no hope of escape for him or his soul. He’d done it. He’d killed a man. He was one of them, owned by them completely. Sold to the devil because of a threat to his life.
He feared, too, that if they were identified they would succeed in convincing the police that he was the killer in the other cases, that they were just his friends and he was pointing the finger at them to save his own hide.
Yeah, he had no trouble imagining them doing that, and doing it successfully. They’d plotted and planned so well that there was nothing to link them to the murders except him.
At last he made it over the ridge that would hide him from anyone below, not that the campground wasn’t now concealed from view by thick woods.
But even if they decided to look around, they’d never find him now. All he had to do was crawl into the small cave below and await daylight. Then he would have a clear run to his car to get out of the forest.
All carefully planned. He’d be gone before any searcher could get up here.
Damn, he wanted a cigarette. But that had been part of their planning, too. No smoking. The tobacco smell would be distinctive, so they avoided it unless campfires were burning.
Who had come up with that idea?
He couldn’t remember. He was past caring. He slid into the dark embrace of the cave at last, with only a short time before dawn.
Past caring. That was a good place to be. He envied the others. Instead he kept company with the remembered cries of a young boy.
* * *
BLAIRE WISHED SHE could do more. She was the kind of person who always wanted to take action, to be useful, but right now the police were in charge, using skills she didn’t have to look for evidence, so she kept an eye on the little boy in the bed of her ATV and on the scene where some officers were busy questioning other campers and the rest were busy photographing the scene and hunting for evidence. Pacing back and forth between the two locations, she imagined she was creating a rut.
At least Jimmy slept. She hoped he slept right through when they removed his father in a body bag. She hated the thought that such a scene might be stamped in his mind forever.
She knew all about indelible images. She wished sometimes for a version of brain bleach. Just rinse your head in it and the dark, ugly stuff would be wash
ed away.
Nice wish. She was old enough, however, to realize how unrealistic such a wish was. Life was the accumulation of experiences, and you could only hope that you’d learn from all of them, good or bad.
Gus stayed close to the line, attentive as the officers questioned the witnesses. Dropping by from time to time, she heard the same story repeated by everyone. They’d been asleep. Awakened suddenly by the loud, sharp clap. At first they hadn’t even been sure they’d heard it.
Some had sat up, waiting to see if it came again. Others considered rolling over and going back to sleep.
Then came the sound of Jimmy’s crying. Yes, he sounded scared but that might be a reaction to the sudden, loud noise. He was with his father, so he’d be okay.
Only slowly had some come to the realization that perhaps they’d better look outside to see what had happened. By then there was nothing to see, and the night had been silent except for the little boy’s sobbing.
Which again they ignored because he was with his father. Except for Wes.
“I was in Iraq. I’ll never mistake a gunshot for anything else. When the boy kept crying, I knew. I just knew someone had been shot. Maybe suicide, I thought. I was the first one out of my tent. The others took another couple of minutes. Regardless, I’m the one who ran to the emergency phone and called the ranger. No, I didn’t touch a thing.”
Wes paused, looking down, saying quietly, “It was hell listening to that kid and not acting. But his dad might have been okay. My appearance might have just scared the boy more.” His mouth twisted. “They don’t make rules of engagement for this.”
“I hear you,” Gus said. Several deputies who were also vets murmured agreement.
The sheriff spoke. “You did the best thing.”
Except, thought Blaire, she’d moved in, opened the tent, stepped inside and took the boy out. She’d interfered with the scene. Next would be her turn to be grilled.
By the time they came to her, however, they were allowing the others to pack up as long as they were willing to leave contact information with the deputies. The early morning sun cast enough light on the world that details had emerged from the night, giving everything more depth. Making the trees look aged and old and maybe even weary. But that might be her own state of mind. Usually the forest gave her a sense of peace, and the trees offered her a stately temple.
