Blind Sight

by Terri Persons

  Back to the baby. The first killer is still struggling, trying to feed the infant. The nursemaid sets the bottle down on the kitchen table and stands up with the child. Readjusts the bundle. Why is this person so clumsy? It suddenly occurs to Bernadette.

  The couple on the couch again. The senator rises from the couch. A glint of something silver comes into view. It is aimed directly at Magnus Dunton. Large hands extend the weapon. Bernadette thinks she recognizes something on the killer’s left wrist but can’t be completely sure. Dunton keeps coming. What is he doing? He reaches for the gun.

  A bright light.

  Bernadette gasped and opened her fist, dropping the knotted thread onto her lap. “Hurry!”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Garcia. “What did you see?”

  Bernadette blinked twice, but all she saw was blackness. Not now! she thought. She raised her hands to her eyes and rubbed hard. Closed her lids tight and opened them again slowly. Nothing. Still blind.

  “Cat,” said Garcia. “Talk to me.”

  Struggling to keep a calm voice, she told Garcia, “The Duntons are in trouble.”

  “What’s going on?”

  She closed her eyes and hoped. Prayed. Turned her head toward the passenger window and continued talking as if nothing was wrong. “The senator’s been shot.”

  “You sure?”

  “Someone is holding him and his wife at gunpoint. He went for the gun. I saw a flash.”

  “Where?”

  “His buddy’s place.”

  “Call an ambulance. Tell the troops.”

  She took her phone out of her pocket and opened it. Felt around for the right keys. Dropped the cell on the floor. “Fuck,” she breathed, and bent down. Fumbled around the floor.

  “Christ!” said Garcia. “You’re blind again!”

  She sat up straight and stifled a groan. Her head was throbbing. “You’d better call.”

  After several seconds, she heard him on his cell. She and Garcia would be the first to arrive at the cabin on Walker Bay—and she was blind. Useless.

  She closed her eyes tight and dropped her face in her hand. Offered a silent prayer: “Lord, help me see. Please.” Then an angry addendum: “What do you want from me?”

  Bernadette lifted her face out of her hand and opened her eyes. She saw a wall of wrought-iron bars in front of her and hollered, “The gate!”

  “Fuck it,” said Garcia, flooring it and smashing through the metal barrier. As the truck barreled through, he looked over at her with relief. “You can see now, I take it.”

  “I can see.”

  “Good,” he said shortly.

  As they pulled up in front of the house, she glanced down at the knotted string in her lap, the object that had taken her to the two killers. As she dropped the yarn back into the plastic bag, she suddenly realized what purpose the bracelet could have served. Who would have worn it, and why. It was the equivalent of a string tied around a finger. A rubber band slipped over a wrist.

  “Let me get you a catalog. Where did I put it? I can’t remember anything, I swear. I have the worst memory.”

  Garcia popped open his door. “Are you okay?”

  She opened the passenger door. “I’m good. Let’s do this.”

  With guns and flashlights in hand, they went around to the back. The drapes on all the patio doors were closed, but they could see that one of the windows was lit. It was the trophy room.

  “There,” she whispered, motioning with a tip of her head.

  “I see,” he said.

  They went under the deck. The basement door had been kicked in, but no alarm was sounding. The Duntons either didn’t know how to use the home’s security system or they hadn’t bothered to activate it.

  The two agents went inside and shined their lights around. No one in the basement. They ran up the basement stairs. The main level was dark, except for a light shining down a hallway. The hallway that led to the trophy room.

  That’s where they found the Duntons. His T-shirt more red than white, the senator had been hit square in the chest at close range. He was on the floor, crumpled at his wife’s bare feet. Michelle Dunton was sitting on the sofa, tipped to one side as if she’d fallen asleep while watching television. She’d taken a bullet to the gut.

  Garcia put his fingers to her neck. “She’s alive.”

  “Stay with her while I go through the rest of the house,” Bernadette said.

  “Watch yourself,” he said after her.

  Gun and flashlight still in hand, she went from room to room, checking out the main level and then the second floor. The rest of the place was dark and empty. By the time she got back to the main level, Wharten and Cahill were running up from the basement with guns drawn, a small army behind them. “The killer got away,” she told them as she holstered her gun.

  “Who’re we looking for?” asked Wharten.

  She spotted the medical crew bringing up the rear and pointed them to the room. “In there. Garcia’s with them.”

  As he rushed past her in the hall, the lead ambulance guy asked, “What are we looking at?”

  “They were shot,” Bernadette told him. “Dunton’s dead, but his wife is still breathing.”

  “Who?” asked Cahill. “Who did it?”

  Instead of answering B.K., Bernadette ran out the back and went down to the lake to check out a hunch.

  Shining her light around, she spotted a set of fresh tracks.

  A line of squads followed Bernadette and Garcia to a different house on Walker Bay. After finding snowmobile tracks behind the massive log home where the Duntons had been staying, Bernadette deduced that the shooter had gotten to the couple by avoiding the front gate and entering through the back. Wharten confirmed that one of her suspects lived on the bay.

  “He said she inherited it from her grandparents. Went there summers. I’ll bet that’s how she met Dunton. I have no idea what she had on him, but it goes back to that body found in the woods in Brule.”

  “And you think she’s the one you saw because of the way she held the baby?”

  “Lydia must have told her boyfriend that she felt like The Fugitive, not a fugitive.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “The Fugitive. That old show. He was always looking for the one-armed guy.”

  “You said there were two of them.”

  “I spotted a rubber band on the second killer’s wrist.” She pulled the packaged string out of her pocket and held it up. “This was the same thing. A reminder tool. Something tied around a wrist to remember something.”

  Garcia shook his head. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I am,” she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Alerted by the roar of the snowmobiles as she hopped out of the truck, Bernadette started running down the hill toward the lake. The only illumination was coming from the snowmobiles’ headlights and the full moon overhead, but it was enough for Bernadette to identify the two accomplices. “FBI! Sonia Graham! Stop!”

  Garcia followed, yelling the other woman’s name. “Rachel White! This is the FBI! Get off now!”

  The midwife extracted something from her jacket.

  “Gun!” Bernadette hollered, and she and Garcia fell on their bellies. Two shots rang out, slamming into the incline behind them. Both agents were dusted with the snow that scattered upon impact. Bernadette raised her head and saw White pull on her helmet and speed away. Graham’s sled had killed, and she remained behind.

  Garcia crawled down the hill next to Bernadette and rasped, “Take cover.”

  They scrambled to their feet and dove behind a pair of old evergreens, the lower quarter of the trunks bare of branches. She and Garcia were across from each other, hunkered about fifteen yards apart. Bernadette looked down toward the shoreline, but she couldn’t discern if Graham had the weapon in hand while she was fiddling with the snowmobile. The machine was sputtering and killing. The woman had probably flooded it. Bernadette and Garcia pulled out thei
r Glocks and flashlights and trained both at the large figure.

  Bernadette yelled, “Sonia Graham! Drop your gun and get off the sled! Now!”

  A shot punched the ground between the pines, releasing another cloud of snow into the night air, and the agents ducked behind the trees.

  Bernadette waited ten seconds and peeked out from around the trunk. Graham was again preoccupied with her sled. Bernadette looked at her boss and motioned with a tip of her head. Both moved forward, and closer to each other. The agents were behind pines planted less than five yards apart, and less than ten yards from the shoreline. They took aim at Graham with their guns and flashlights. “Sonia!” hollered Bernadette. “She ditched you! It’s not worth it! Drop it and get off! Hands up in the air!”

  Graham turned, the big gun between both her hands. Two cracks sounded, and one of them found its mark. The midwife flew off the seat of the snowmobile.

  Bernadette ran over to the sled.

  “Shit,” muttered Garcia, holstering his gun.

  Bernadette leaned over the sled and shined her flashlight on the body that had landed on the other side of the uncooperative machine. Graham was on her back, the revolver on the ground at her right and her helmet at her left. Her eyes were wide-open, and her hands were thrown up over her head in a kind of postmortem surrender. “Stupid,” Bernadette said, holstering her Glock.

  “The others just pulled down the driveway,” said Garcia, coming up next to her while closing his cell. “I told them we’d go for the nurse while they look for the baby.”

  “I hope the bitches didn’t kill her.”

  Garcia trained his light over the entry wound, a wet hole in the middle of Graham’s parka. “Which one of us—”

  “I don’t know or care,” said Bernadette.

  Graham’s left foot was still propped against the side of the sled. Bernadette kicked the big foot off and hopped on the seat. She hadn’t ridden in a while, but she remembered the basics. Mounted on the right handlebar was the throttle, and all she had to do to put the sled in idle was take her thumb off the spring-loaded lever. The brakes were mounted on the left handlebar. She put her thumb over the throttle and slowly pressed down. As she pulled away from shore, she hardly noticed that Garcia had hopped on behind her. The big woman drove a big sled.

  “White was headed north!” Bernadette yelled.

  “Going for Leech!” Garcia hollered, referring to the massive main lake. “We’ll never catch her!”

  The headlights of their snowmobile shined two hundred feet in front of the sled, allowing them to follow White’s tracks at night. Garcia was right. The nurse was heading for Leech. Bernadette wondered if White had an escape plan beyond fleeing across the lake. She suspected that the women had simply panicked after the shooting and decided to get the hell out of town in the quickest and stealthiest way possible.

  Bernadette steered the sled north through the bay and hung a right onto the frozen narrows that led to the massive white expanse. At first, the tracks of the nurse’s sled indicated that White was hugging the south shore. Then the tracks went between two clusters of fish houses, one group close to shore and the other farther out in the lake. Suddenly the trail was lost in a tangle of crisscrossing lines.

  “Shit!” Bernadette said, and stopped the snowmobile.

  Each took out a flashlight and shined it around the snow-covered ice. Two sleds had exited the fish-house neighborhood recently. One hooked left, toward the middle of the lake, and the other hung a right, going up onshore between two rustic log cabins.

  “I think she stayed on the lake,” Garcia said, training his beam over the tracks leading to the middle. “She’d get bogged down in the woods.”

  “But she’d be too easy to pick off in the open,” said Bernadette.

  “Your call.”

  They pocketed their lights, and Bernadette steered the sled to the right. They bounced over a snowbank and onto shore, and cut between the cabins. Behind the log homes was a road and then a farmer’s field. Bernadette crossed the road and stopped short of entering the field.

  “What’s wrong?” Garcia asked.

  She took out her flashlight again and shined it around. “You don’t want to drive into that,” she said, her beam landing on a strand of barbed wire that was stretched in front of them.

  Garcia took out his flashlight and shined it to their left, along the farmer’s fence line. “Did we lose her?”

  Bernadette worked her light to their right and spotted a gap in the fence twenty yards down. A set of tracks went through and then stopped. There were footprints, and then the tracks continued. “Bike’s giving her trouble. I’ll bet she had to get off and pull-start it,” said Bernadette, referring to a cord that resembled that of a lawn mower.

  She pocketed her light and steered the sled toward the right, taking the same path to enter the field. Bernadette was going more slowly. She knew that farmers’ fields could be filled with land mines: Pieces of machinery. Wads of barbed wire. Piles of boulders and tree limbs. Cow and horse carcasses. In the winter, they would look like harmless humps covered by snow.

  Bernadette and Garcia went up over a rise, and when they peaked they saw the lights of a sled ahead of them. It wasn’t moving. It had to be White; no one else would be stalled in the middle of a farmer’s field in the middle of the night. Bernadette wondered why the woman hadn’t killed or smashed her lights to avoid being seen. Maybe she figured no one had followed her.

  Bernadette gunned it, and the two agents went flying down the hill.

  As they came up on White, she was just getting back on her sled. She looked over her shoulder at the agents and gave her snowmobile the gas. The sled jackrabbited forward, and the nurse shot up another rise. Bernadette and Garcia were close behind, the nurse’s sled trapped in the far edges of their snowmobile’s headlights.

  White’s sled became airborne at the top of the hill and dropped down on the other side, disappearing from sight. Bernadette’s snowmobile got some air at the top, and both agents grunted upon landing but managed to stay on the sled.

  As they hit a flat stretch of open field, White remained in their crosshairs, her snowmobile still caught in the headlights of their sled. Though one-handed, she was navigating the flying sled without a problem. Both machines were going better than sixty miles an hour, a dangerous speed at night. By the time they spotted an obstacle in the headlights, it would be too late to stop. Bernadette’s face was frozen and her gloved hands were growing numb. Though her body served as a windbreak for Garcia, she suspected that he was getting dangerously cold as well.

  Bernadette saw a dark silhouette in the distance and recognized the shape. It was an old barn, leaning to one side. As the two speeding sleds neared the building, White opened her throttle further. Bernadette hung back. Where there was a decrepit barn, there was farm trash.

  “What’s wrong?” Garcia hollered.

  Both agents suddenly saw in White’s headlights what the nurse spotted too late: a stretch of old fencing poking up through the snow, at neck height.

  Bernadette stopped her sled and screamed, more a reaction than a warning. It was far too late to warn.

  Bernadette remembered reading somewhere that after a guillotine comes down the executed individual remains conscious for thirteen seconds, long enough to blink once for yes and twice for no. The agents didn’t make it to White’s head soon enough to ask it any questions.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  A search team on snowmobiles discovered the body of Benjamin Rathers a week later.

  Inside the ski jacket worn by Rathers was a map and directions—in Dunton’s handwriting—leading to White’s home. Found in the nurse’s garage—apparently dropped there while the body was being loaded into a vehicle—was an envelope addressed to White, also in Dunton’s handwriting. Next to that was a balled-up slip of paper with a message: Don’t come tonight. Don’t call. FBI watching and listening. Funds are forthcoming Also found on White’s property was a set of s
nowshoes and poles, as well as Rathers’ boots and gloves.

  Found inside the White house was Lydia’s shoulder bag. While she’d turned her backpack over to the tatt-shop owner, she’d managed to keep the purse. Inside were more letters from White and Graham to the Duntons. They contained enough detail to lead the girl to Brule, the beginning of her quest to learn about her birth mother.

  Of particular interest to Bernadette was White’s living room. It was exactly as she’d seen it in her dream, down to the pile of broken Peanuts Christmas statues. Bernadette guessed that the two women had been fighting, and one had taken her anger out on the other’s cherished statue collection.

  Sitting unharmed on an end table was the little wizard statue stolen from Ashe’s barn.

  Michelle Dunton—who’d been airlifted to the Twin Cities—kept her lawyer by her hospital bed. She grudgingly answered some questions and the rest of the details were filled in by a paper trail.

  The senator’s home and offices were raided, as was the cabin where he and his entourage had stayed in Walker. Michelle Dunton’s personal journal was seized, as were records showing cash withdrawals over the years. The bank transactions weren’t large enough individually to attract attention. When they were added together, they came to a handsome sum and, with the other documents, painted an ugly story.

  Dunton and White had met in the lobby of a real-estate office in Walker about seventeen years earlier. Dunton was in the early stages of a land deal that would eventually become the gated community on Walker Bay, and White was there to investigate putting her late grandparents’ lake home up for sale. The two ambitious professionals hit it off, and Dunton persuaded White to hold off meeting with an agent until he could get a look at the cabin.

  As the pair walked around the White property, the nurse confided that she hated selling the place but needed money to help her partner—a woman she’d met in Vermont—relocate her midwife practice to the Midwest. She also had to pay off a pile of loans. White had spent years in medical school and had her dreams dashed by an accident: she’d lost her left hand while using a chain saw at the cabin.