He frowns. “Tonight?”
“Yes, I saw her leaving your…” I trail off as I take in his expression. “When did she speak to you?”
“Yesterday afternoon. She has not been here since.”
I mentally run through the residents who live nearby and compare it to that short list of new residents she’d been interested in.
“Holy shit,” I whisper.
“The detective has solved the case?” he asks as I stand and head for the hall.
“No, she’s solved a mystery she never realized was a mystery at all. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Tease!” he calls after me as I hurry out the door.
* * *
There isn’t a guard posted outside the clinic. That throws me, until I remember that we have no need of one. How often in the past has our overnight patient been a suspect or a victim? Far too often. But not tonight. Such a relief.
As I hurry inside, a figure rises from an examination table, and my gun flies up. I hit the light … and see my sister blinking and squinting at me.
“Casey?” she says.
I lower the gun. “What are you doing here?”
“Monitoring the patient, of course.” It only takes a second for brisk efficiency to return to her voice, and she runs one hand through her hair, returning it to perfection. “I would request, though, that you please do not mention it to Kenneth. I told him that I ought to monitor the patient, and he made it quite clear I should not do so at night, for my own safety. I pointed out that Jay is currently comatose, but he still worried.”
She rolls her eyes, but there’s a glitter of pleasure there, too, that Kenny was concerned for her safety. Then she snaps back to herself and says, “Whatever are you doing here? At…” She checks her watch. “Two in the morning.”
“I popped in to check on the patient. But since you’re up, can I run something by you? I need your brain.”
“A medical question, I presume?”
“There’s a medical question included, but mostly, I just want to bounce my theory off someone smarter than me, someone who might see the holes that I’m missing.”
She frowns. “Detective work is your forte, Casey, and I’m quite certain you’re the expert in that regard. As for requiring someone smarter to vet your reasoning, any difference in our IQ is minimal enough, on the overall scale, that I hardly think you need my help.”
She peers at me and steps closer. “Are you all right? Your eyes appear to be watery. You didn’t encounter any potentially toxic substances in your search for Felicity, did you?”
I laugh, say, “Thank you,” and hug her, a brief hug that she endures, even patting my back awkwardly.
“I do believe you’re overtired, or else I am still half asleep, because I fail to see what I said that requires gratitude or shows of affection.”
“If you’d like to rest, April, that’s fine, but if you’re up…”
“I am.”
“Then I would love to bounce this theory off you. Get your take on it. Is that all right?”
That look sparks in her eyes, the dart of pleasure I’d seen when she talked about Kenny’s fretting.
“Of course,” she says. “Tell me everything.”
I do.
THIRTY-THREE
As I’m talking, Dalton comes in, having tracked me down. He slides into a chair and listens as I tell my sister the whole story behind the creation of the hostiles.
When I finish, April says, “That is…”
I brace for the next word. “Ridiculous”? “Preposterous”?
“… completely the wrong way to conduct scientific research,” she says. “Highly irregular and unethical.”
I laugh. “So it’s impossible, then?”
“Nothing is impossible, particularly when it comes to drug research. People have this misguided image of scientists in a lab, chatting amicably and sharing their knowledge for the betterment of humankind. It is like any other big business. Competition is both fierce and cutthroat. This firm could certainly afford to send a few researchers into the wild, particularly for the possibility of a drug with military applications.”
“My logic is sound, then?”
“With the independent corroboration of Émilie, yes, I believe you have solved your mystery, Casey. Well done.” If the smile she offers holds traces of a patronizing pat on the head, I know her well enough now to take no offense.
“So our Danish tourists weren’t actually tourists,” I say. “We started having problems with the hostiles and that—combined with my reports about their narcotic brews—prompted the Danish pharmaceutical firm’s council contact to inform them. Then they sent a team in to evaluate the situation.”
April frowns. “I am uncomfortable with the nationality of the transgressors. I have always found the Danes to be a peaceful people.”
“It’s a private corporation working for foreign powers. Where there’s money to be made, there are unethical people ready to make it, no matter what their nationality.”
“True. Sophie wasn’t an innocent tourist, then. That will alleviate Will’s guilt.”
It isn’t that easy, but I only say, “It explains her sudden burst of both power and skill. I chalked it up to adrenaline, but that was her training. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
“I would not go quite that far, Casey. She was obviously mentally confused at the time. She would need to be, to attack Jay.”
I open my mouth and then pause. Not yet. Instead I say, “So the four Danes were sent in to evaluate, and they must have triggered the hostiles in some way and were attacked. Or they weren’t attacked by hostiles at all, but by someone pretending to be hostiles, ironically killing the very people sent to help the situation.”
“Are we sure the Danes were sent to help?” Dalton says. “Or sent to clean up the mess? Which doesn’t tell us what happened to that settler family.” He rubs his chin. “Unless it does. A case of mistaken identity.”
“Hmm?”
“This Danish firm wouldn’t send their people into the wilderness unarmed,” he says. “We didn’t find guns, but they sure as hell had them. What kind do you think they’d have? Hunting rifles?”
“Handguns.” I pause. “Like the ones used to kill the settlers? You said mistaken … Oh, shit. The Danes are the ones who mistook the settler family for hostiles. The Danes came looking for wild people of the forest. They seemed to find three and carried out execution orders, only to realize they made a mistake. So they staged the scene to look like a hostile attack. That hides their crime and plants further proof that the hostiles are a dangerous element. Then they come across actual hostiles who turn the tables and slaughter them.”
Dalton shakes his head. “Will definitely doesn’t need to feel so bad about shooting Sophie now.”
“You think it’s plausible?” I ask. “The firm ordered them to kill all the hostiles?”
“We already suspect they staged the car accident that killed Hendricks, the original researcher,” he says. “Do I think those four Danes planned to slaughter a couple dozen hostiles? No. I think they underestimated the numbers. That’s been the pattern all along, right? Clearly, we’re exaggerating.”
He makes a face. “Maybe I’ve read too many spy novels. Maybe they didn’t intend to kill them, but things got out of hand. Either way…”
“They were unprepared,” April murmurs. “That much seems evident. They mistook the settlers for hostiles, and the actual hostiles then killed them.” She looks my way. “Is that the medical question you had? Whether your theory fit … No, that was Eric’s theory, newly formed. What was your question, then?”
“Is there any chance Jay is faking his coma?”
“What?” Her brows shoot up to her hairline.
“Yes, it’s probably a silly question.”
“His vital signs confirm he is, indeed, comatose and likely to stay that way for a while.”
“That may be for the best. Otherwise, Kenny’s concerns mig
ht have been valid.” I look at Dalton. “Émilie did talk to Mathias. She’d asked about recent arrivals and whether any seemed suspicious. That conversation, though, took place yesterday afternoon. When I saw her creeping about, I believe she was coming from an apartment near Mathias’s house. Searching a residence she knew would be empty.”
“Jay’s,” Dalton says. “Fuck.”
“Yep, convenient that he knew Danish, right?”
April frowns. “But he arrived before Sophie.”
“I don’t think Jay came here because of Sophie. I think he was just a second prong of the Danish mission. Send four agents into the woods to investigate the hostiles. Send Jay here to monitor us. He speaks Danish because he is Danish. It was pure luck for them that he was already here when Sophie arrived.”
“He offered his help so he could mistranslate. Redirect your investigation if necessary.”
I nod. “Then her mind cleared enough for her to realize he was mistranslating. That’s why she flipped out. It’s also why she targeted him. She might have still been confused, recognizing him as a fellow employee but not necessarily an ally. Or she was thinking just fine and blamed the firm for her colleagues’ deaths.”
“Either way, she knew he wasn’t an innocent guy caught in the cross fire.”
“No one was innocent here.” April’s gaze turns toward the other room, where we’re storing the evidence. “Except those poor settlers.”
“Yes,” I say, “but unfortunately, while their killers are dead, this has snowballed into new problems with other innocent victims: Felicity, Edwin, and the pilot who came for the Danes.”
As I rise from my chair, I look toward that room April had glanced at. The repository for our evidence. We’d need to decide what to do with Sophie and the items we’d brought from the dead settlers. Also the foot of Sophie’s lover.
Or maybe Victor hadn’t been her lover. Jay could have embellished their relationship to support the tourist theory and add an extra layer of pathos to the story. Victor had been something to her, though. She’d snapped when April brought in his boot.
Wait. Had she actually snapped? We’d interpreted her reaction as grief. Knowing she wasn’t an innocent tourist, I replay that scene and see strategy. We bring in the boot, and she feigns a fit of grief, which throws us off guard and allows her to strangle Jay.
I tell Dalton my theory that Sophie used the boot to distract us.
“Yeah,” he says. “Makes sense.”
“But the whole reason we presumed that foot belonged to the fourth tourist—her lover—was her reaction. That clinched it. Without that…”
“Fuck.”
I pause, seeing him thinking and piecing it together. Then he mutters another “Fuck.”
“April?” I say. “The guy we found, the pilot. He was blind.”
She blinks at me. “While I know there have been immense strides taken to improve accessibility—”
“Not when he flew. Afterward. He was blinded by the attack. No apparent damage to his eyes, but he’d been struck on the head.”
“All right…”
“Can that cause blindness?”
“Total blindness? In both eyes?”
The incredulity in her voice answers the question. “That’d be a no, then.”
“It’s not impossible, but without damage to the eyes, the most likely cause of total binocular blindness would be a clot, unrelated to the attack.”
Colin isn’t blind, and Petra didn’t take him anywhere.
He took her hostage.
Colin Berger is Victor, the fourth Dane.
* * *
It’ll be dawn in an hour, and there’s no time to waste, but we need to make one stop first. Dalton goes to fetch Storm and gather supplies while I stop in to see Maryanne. Despite the hour, she’s gracious, inviting me in.
I give her the briefest rundown on our hostile encounter. As soon as I mention the young man, she shakes her head.
“That isn’t my group,” she says. “There was no one nearly that young. I’d have mentioned it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I describe the dead hostile, and there’s a flicker of potential recognition, but when I describe the woman I shot, her eyes round.
“That’s the shaman,” she says.
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.” She shivers. “You were lucky. She’s the worst of them. Brutal and smart. I always got the sense she drank less of that narcotic than the others, to keep her wits sharper.”
I tell her about our brief conversation, which was clearer and more lucid than I expected.
She nods. “That is undeniably her, then. That means I do know the man who was killed. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was her new husband, though he’d never have been the leader. Once she seized the reins, she’d hold them tight.”
“Then the young man?” I say. “Either the two groups have joined or he’s new.”
“New…” she murmurs. “I didn’t consider that, but it makes sense. He must have joined after I left. Perhaps recently, which explains why he isn’t as indoctrinated. He could be an ally, but be careful, please. The shaman will not hesitate to use him against you.”
I thank her, and she gives me more advice plus all possible details about the two groups. When I step outside, Dalton is sitting on the front step, sipping steaming coffee as Storm wanders off toward the woods to do her morning business.
I settle in beside him to await the dog’s return, and he fills a tin mug from the thermos. I tell him what Maryanne said.
“That’s what you figured, right?” he says. “That this woman was the shaman?”
“It is. I just wanted independent corroboration. I still don’t know whether these people have Felicity and Edwin. I have no idea who does. So my focus will be on Petra, though by now I’m sure Victor has her on a plane to Whitehorse.”
“Nah.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a set of keys. “Our pilot’s not going anywhere.”
“Nicely done. You suspected his story, then.”
He pauses, mug halfway to his lips.
“You can tell me if you did,” I say. “In the future, I’d rather you shared that right away, but I’ve been guilty of the same thing. We need to share our hunches, even when they seem far-fetched.”
“That’s not it. I hesitated because I’d love to say I suspected the guy. Truth is…” He shrugs. “When I peeked into his pack, I just grabbed these. I figured if I found his plane, there might be first-aid supplies you could use, and with him being blind, it wasn’t like he needed the keys.”
“Huh. Well, good call either way. And may I suggest, when we tell this story to the council, we say that we took the keys because we doubted his story?”
“Works for me.”
“Then Victor is in the woods, trying to figure out his next move. He has Petra and his backpack, with a few days’ supplies. He probably has a gun, too. That’s why I didn’t find one. He’d have hidden it when he heard us coming. He can also summon help. He has a…”
I turn to Dalton.
“Sat phone,” he murmurs. “Victor has a sat phone, and so does Émilie. We may not need to go poking around the forest after all.” He pushes to his feet. “Let’s go see if there’s any way we can broker a deal.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The problem is, of course, that we need Victor’s number. We bring Émilie on board, in hopes she can obtain it. We also bring in Phil. If either of those choices is a mistake, well, right now, we’re on a sinking ship hailing passing vessels. They might help … or they might fire another shot through our bow, and it’ll only speed up the inevitable.
Émilie tells us that she flew to Rockton as soon as she heard about the “Danish tourists.” Finding a newcomer whose application had been rushed through—and who conveniently speaks Danish—she had a good idea what Jay had been up to, but by that time, he was in a coma and Sophie was dead.
She’d resorted to investigating on her o
wn, begging off time with Petra by claiming exhaustion and then talking to Mathias and, last night, searching Jay’s apartment. She’d found a sat phone smuggled into a secret compartment in Jay’s luggage, one that bypassed Dalton’s tech-device checks. In the same place, she found notes in Danish. They were in code, but the fact that he was making notes in Danish means it wasn’t just some language he knew passably well, as he’d claimed.
When we check the sat phone, we find a few preprogrammed numbers. One is to another sat phone. Victor’s? We certainly hope so.
Émilie calls the number, and it goes through, but no one answers. There’s voice mail, though, in Danish, and she leaves a message. We’ll give it an hour, and then we’ll go on foot to find Petra.
We tell Phil everything, and then we eat breakfast. Well, everyone eats except Phil, who’s still processing. Not arguing. Just processing.
He doesn’t confirm or deny any of it. He can’t. As Émilie has warned, the Danish connection operated above his pay grade.
A few older members of the council were aware of the original drug trial and undoubtedly saw the connection to the “narcotic brew” reported by Maryanne, but they had feigned ignorance. Then there’s the element that’s on the Danish firm’s payroll. All other council members have a justifiable claim to ignorance. I’d still say they’re guilty of not taking the problem seriously. But it’s understandable that Phil knew nothing … with one exception: the plans to close down Rockton.
“I had raised concerns,” he says when he returns from a walk. “About the dwindling numbers. It was a matter of budget and long-term planning. If this was a permanent decrease, then we’d need to close buildings, and we should allow higher-contributing members to take larger quarters. I suggested a plan for reconstruction, doubling the size of some apartments. I also noted that if the decrease continued, we’d need to reevaluate our storage requirements and possibly reconfigure jobs. They insisted it was a temporary drop only—we’d had a decrease in applications and tightening of the extension guidelines.”
“Yeah, I remember you mentioning that,” Dalton says. “Wait. Nope. You never said anything about downsizing. Or tightened extension rules. Funny you didn’t mention that last part when you brought Jen to us.”
A Stranger in Town Page 29
