Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  She had a moment to wonder where he’d stashed the baby, or worse, if he’d—

  “Psst.” A tiny sound from right behind her. Slowly she put her head up out of the snowdrift.

  It was the woman, standing in plain sight with the little blond girl peeping fearfully out from behind her, the moonlight slanting almost straight down through the tall trees picking them both out like targets in a shooting gallery.

  Jesus. “Get down,” Lizzie whispered, her words as loud as a shout in the forest silence.

  But the woman only smiled enigmatically and shooed the child away from her toward the trees, and what was that all about?

  Then Lizzie realized: She’s making herself a target. So the little girl could get away …

  Hurling herself at them, she grabbed the girl’s thin arm in one hand, the woman’s in the other. “Run, dammit!”

  The child obeyed, but the woman struggled free just as a shot whizzed past Lizzie’s ear. Distantly, men’s voices called to one another … too distantly. The guy’s smooth face popped up, staring over the fallen tree at them in grim triumph: Gotcha!

  But then his expression changed, first to a puzzled frown and then to a grimace. Lizzie glanced back. The woman still stood where she had before, but now she gripped the gun.

  I never took it from her, in all the commotion I never …

  And though her face was frightened, the woman’s hand was steady, as if she braced it on some old inner strength that he hadn’t quite managed to scare or brutalize out of her.

  His face relaxed into a look of contempt. “You won’t shoot me,” he said softly. “You know you won’t—”

  The woman fired, the thwack of the hammer smacking down a bright sharp sound in the wintry darkness. But nothing happened.

  The gun was empty. The guy grinned mockingly.

  Focused on his victim, he didn’t notice Lizzie gathering herself. One lunge, she told herself. Hit the body midsection, carry him down and put a fist to his ear …

  But halfway over the fallen tree, her bad foot gave out and the remaining one hit the tree’s coating of ice. She fell hard, the impact knocking her breathless, and in the next instant he stood over her, his weapon aimed straight at her face.

  I’ll be darned, she thought wonderingly, this is it. The time at the very end that we all wonder about, this is—

  A clap of thunder split the night. Clad in his skins and furs, the guy staggered uncertainly and fell backward into the snow, a dark stain spreading around his head.

  Lizzie scrambled over and yanked his rifle away, as from behind the fallen tree Missy Brantwell appeared, gripping the handgun she’d shot him with and looking half-dead herself, her lips a bloodless-looking blue in her white face.

  Behind Missy, three men in winter gear burst out of the woods. Lizzie struggled up and grabbed the arm somebody held out.

  “Chevrier’s over there,” Missy managed, pointing, then paused to gaze down at the man she’d just shot.

  The father of her child … Then she turned away decisively, leading Lizzie and the others to where the sheriff lay on his belly, one arm flung out as if trying to haul himself along.

  In his hand was a chunk of firewood just the right size to use for a club. Because he never gave up trying to stop the guy, Lizzie thought sorrowfully. He never quit.

  He’s a cop, and that’s his job. Or it was …

  But then she saw that he was alive, his chest moving up and down stubbornly. A pair of cops gathered him up, hoisting him into a hurried chair-carry between them. Missy was leaving, too, with the woman and little girl, more cops shepherding them out along the trampled path they’d made through the deep snow, still others moving toward the campsite where they would find Spud. So I don’t have to decide whether or not to tell them he’s there, Lizzie thought. Fortunately for him. Finally only she still stood watching the little girl’s small blond head vanish among the trees, something similar vanishing in her heart, as well.

  It was never her. Nicki was never here at all.

  It was all a … what? A lie? A misunderstanding?

  Or more likely just a mistake. It happened; leads panned out or they didn’t, and you had to accept that.

  That was part of the job, too. “What about Dylan Hudson?” she called after one of the departing cops. “And … did they find the baby?”

  “Yeah. Baby’s okay, they found him in the guy’s van out near the road. He was all loaded up and ready to go. I don’t know what he even came back in here for.”

  But Lizzie did. To kill us. So he’d have a head start, and so that if he did get caught, they couldn’t testify against him.

  “And there’s another victim,” he went on, “couple of the other guys are carrying him out, but I don’t know who.”

  Dylan. Fatigue hit her, heavy as a boulder. But unless she wanted to stay here, she had no choice but to go on, didn’t she?

  The cop waited, gesturing for her to come along. Probably he was eager to leave, to go home to his wife and family.

  Or whoever he had. She would be, if she did. Straightening, she followed his lead through the snow out of the silent woods.

  A week later Lizzie pulled the Blazer to the curb outside her office in the northern Maine town of Bearkill.

  She’d brought along a snow shovel, but to her surprise, the sidewalk was already cleared. With Rascal shifting impatiently by her side, she put her key in the lock.

  “Hey, stranger.” She turned.

  “Hey, yourself.” It was Dylan. “I didn’t know you’d been let out of the hospital.”

  The other victim that night in the woods had been a passerby who’d stopped to help Spud when he’d first arrived and gotten bowshot for his trouble. His truck hadn’t been found for days, but during the next thaw his blood leaked down onto the road from a melting snowdrift.

  His funeral was today. She meant to be there.

  “Or,” Lizzie added, struck by a new suspicion, “did they let you out?” The gunshot wound had nearly killed him. But he’d rallied, as he so often did.

  “Yeah, well,” he allowed. “Only so long a guy can take that foolishness.”

  Being in a hospital bed, he meant, from which she gathered he’d signed himself out against medical advice yet again. Now his shoulders looked thinner than she recalled under his topcoat, and his face was even leaner and sharper featured than usual.

  But the glint in his eye and his wry, crooked grin were the same old Dylan. “Congratulations on those ex-cop deaths,” he went on. “Sharp, the way you figured that one.”

  Lizzie shrugged. “Not really. It was just the way we said, that maybe two or three of the deaths were related, but not all of them.”

  So she’d looked at what the smaller number had in common, and bingo, there it was: border crossings. “Daniel wanted to move more product, but to do that he had to expand his supply territory and start bringing the drugs in from Canada.”

  And to do that, he’d needed a cooperative border guard or two. “The trouble was,” she went on, “once he tried recruiting you, if you turned him down he’d have to …”

  Dylan laughed without humor, following her inside, where it still smelled faintly of paint and new carpet. “Yeah, it really was an offer a person couldn’t refuse, huh?”

  Because if you did … well, Clifford Arbogast from Caribou and Michael Fontine from Van Buren had refused Daniel’s corrupt job opportunity.

  And had suffered the consequences. Dylan made an unhappy face. “And the rest of Chevrier’s pals did kill themselves?”

  She shook her head. “Dillard Sprague, the guy whose wife found him dead at the bottom of his porch steps? He really was an accident, I’m pretty sure. As for Bogart and Sirois—”

  “The two who shot themselves, supposedly.”

  “Right,” she said. “Officially, they were suicides. But I was able to get the medical examiner to reopen their cases and start getting them reclassified.”

  Dylan looked impressed. “And how
did you do that?”

  “One”—she held up a finger—“when I dug into his history a little, I found out Carl Bogart had super-high blood pressure in addition to his other problems. Perfect candidate for a stroke. Which if he’d suffered one while he was carrying that pistol of his and fell with it—”

  Dylan’s eyebrows went up skeptically. “Pretty good trick, Lizzie. Gun went off when he fell? You really think—”

  “No. Personally I think he got fed up, decided on impulse to get it over with. But I didn’t have to show that it was certain, only that it was more likely than him doing it on purpose.”

  Rascal sniffed Dylan judiciously, decided he was okay, and lay down with a sigh.

  “And Chevrier’s testimony about Bogart’s plan for an actual suicide,” she went on, “combined with the MD’s sworn statement on Bogart’s blood pressure …”

  She took a breath. “When you looked at the whole picture, it was clear that it could’ve been accidental.”

  It hadn’t hurt, either, that the medical examiner had known and liked Carl Bogart. Dylan laughed.

  “Okay, okay. So you got over on an insurance company instead of the other way around for once. Nice going. But what about—”

  “Yeah, funny thing about Sirois,” she cut in. “He had all those medications and vaporizers, little oxygen tanks and so on. And,” she added, “one tank that wasn’t oxygen.”

  Dylan tipped his head questioningly. “Because it was …?”

  “Helium. There was one tank that was different in there, not green like the oxygen tanks. Brown. It bugged me, so I looked it up, and it turns out there’s a color code for those tanks.”

  “Brown is helium?”

  “Right. Simple, painless … and deadly, actually.”

  “Really. So it’s not just for party balloons?”

  “Um, no. There’s a little more to it than just breathing it through a mask, but not much. And it’s not, you know, violent. A big plus, lots of people would say.”

  He nodded in agreement. “But instead the guy got into the bathtub with a long gun, made an awful mess for people to find.”

  “Correct. So you tell me,” she added, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

  He looked convinced. “Yeah, you wouldn’t shoot yourself if—so you think someone staged his death? Made it look like suicide, but they didn’t know he had a better method than …”

  “Uh-huh. They made him shoot himself. By threatening his kids, maybe? I don’t know yet. It’s an open case. But my point isn’t how, it’s that if someone forces you to, it isn’t suicide anymore, is it?”

  “And that someone was …?”

  She shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know yet. I didn’t have to solve the case, though, just get the ME to reopen it. It was probably Daniel—he’d have known Sirois would be a big help in finding a remote campsite in the woods—but we’ll have to see.”

  She looked down the street toward Saint George’s, the church where the funeral was scheduled. No cars had begun gathering yet.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “what I do know is that if Sirois threatened Daniel’s operation in any way, Daniel wouldn’t have hesitated to get rid of him, just the way he did the other two, Fontine and Arbogast.”

  Rascal came and sat beside her. “Meanwhile, Brantwell has started talking. Feds’ve got him on account of he crossed state lines. From what I hear, he’s trying to get a deal, blaming it all on Daniel. But he’ll still be going away.”

  She sighed, imagining it. “Too bad for Missy.”

  “Yeah, huh?” he said, and frowned. “Listen, I’m really sorry it wasn’t Nicki out there.”

  “Me, too. Not your fault, though,” Lizzie added. “Thinking it was her, I mean. Her mom had disguised her so her ex-husband wouldn’t recognize the kid if he came looking.”

  She reached down to smooth Rascal’s glossy fur. “Well, he’d have known if he saw her close up, of course,” she amended. “But the mother was doing the best she could.”

  Like all of us, Lizzie thought clearly. But sometimes things don’t work out anyway.

  “It’s no wonder you thought the hair was natural,” she went on. “Woman’s a professional hair colorist, back in her old life. And he’s a real prize, the ex-husband she ran away from in the first place. He’s got a sheet a mile long.”

  Of criminal offenses, she meant. Dylan shook his head tiredly. “So this woman, she gets away from one abusive guy and then she runs into—”

  “Uh-huh. The weirdo in the woods. Bad luck, huh?”

  Lizzie sighed, remembering her interview with the woman; for a while there, no one else had been able to get near her.

  “I guess our pal Daniel was a real charmer at first. Missy says that’s his way. But the first time this new woman tried to leave him, he cut her face,” said Lizzie.

  The second time, he’d threatened to use the knife on the little girl; yeah, he was charming as all hell.

  Dylan looked puzzled. “So why’d she have a gun, then? Seems to me he’d have taken away any—”

  Lizzie nodded. “He did. We were wrong about that, he didn’t leave her with it. But the little girl saw where he’d put it.” The child’s name was Ashley. “So before Spud arrived, while Daniel was busy stashing meth in his van so he could get away—”

  It was the only part of the story that had made the woman smile. Dylan, too: “She scampered out and found it?”

  “Yup. Daniel was smart, and he was good at his backwoods survival thing, but not infallible. He could make mistakes.”

  Dylan made a face. “Fortunately, huh?”

  “Yeah. And speaking of luck …”

  Lizzie gestured at the papers on her desk. Atop the nearest stack was a notice of Spud Wilson’s first court appearance.

  The woman’s second shot had missed him entirely; he’d simply fainted, apparently in fear. “He’ll be in court this morning.”

  “Yeah, I know. My case, remember?” The three dead girls in Bangor, he meant. “I’m the one who’s driving him back to jail afterwards,” Dylan said, not sounding eager.

  Or more accurately to prison; the hearing wasn’t for any material reason, only to transfer the young man to state custody.

  The bartender from Area 51 stuck his head in the door.

  “Lizzie, can you come over when you get a chance? They’re gonna serve papers on poor Henry, his wife’s gonna try an’ divorce him again, and it’ll go better if you’re there, you know?”

  Henry was the guy who’d had Missy Brantwell trapped in a stranglehold Lizzie’s first night here. She sighed again.

  “Gimme a minute, I’ll run over.” It was a bit of a chore, but if it made things easier for everyone, why not?

  “So anyway,” said Dylan, “I just came by to—”

  She faced him. “Why did you come to my place that night? The night Missy’s baby went missing, you were hurt and you could have just gone to your motel room. It was closer. But instead you drove all the way back up here.”

  She’d been wondering about it ever since. He could’ve shared the motel room with the woman DEA cop. So why hadn’t he?

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well, you said it. I felt like hell, I didn’t want to be with some stranger.”

  Then he looked straight at her. “I wanted to be with you, Lizzie. That’s all. Just … anyway, that’s the reason.”

  Silence while she absorbed this. Then: “I see. I’m sorry I misjudged you.”

  There, she’d said it. “I never should’ve been checking on you in the first place. And when I did, I should have known—”

  “No,” he interrupted flatly. “No way should you have thought anything but what you did.”

  He studied the floor. “It’s not so easy getting over a thing like I put you through, Lizzie. Maybe you never will.”

  Looking up, he added, “But what I came to say right now is that I’m on the team getting the case against Spud together.”

  “Oh.” She let the news sink in. “
So you won’t just be driving to Bangor but staying? And you’ll be busy, I suppose.”

  He nodded, a lock of dark hair curling down over his pale forehead. “Right. But Bangor’s not so far, Lizzie … If you ever wanted to we could still …”

  Right, they could. It would be easy.

  Too easy. “Yeah,” she said. “You know what, though? I think I’m going to just focus on the job here for a while.”

  From across the street, an angry yell from Area 51’s general vicinity said Henry’s divorce papers had arrived, courtesy of some hapless process server who hadn’t known what he was in for.

  Also, Lizzie was scheduled to take that long-delayed physical this afternoon: sit-ups, pull-ups, et cetera.

  But there was one last thing she needed to know. “Dylan, the photographs. Of Nicki. You didn’t—”

  “Make the whole thing up just to get you here to Maine?” He frowned at his shoes. “I deserve that, don’t I? But no.”

  He met her gaze. “I don’t know where they came from. But I didn’t fake them. And I still think she’s out there.”

  She thought about it a moment. “Okay.” Then she moved toward the door. He caught her as she went by, folding her into his arms and holding her close.

  “Take care of yourself,” he said.

  “You, too.” She bit her lip hard. Finally:

  “Don’t let Rascal out when you leave,” she told him, backing away, then turned to find the burly veterinarian Trey Washburn standing just outside the front window, looking in.

  Not at Lizzie, but past her; glancing from Trey to Dylan and back again she saw the two men’s eyes lock briefly, neither man betraying any expression; they didn’t need to. Then as Trey’s gaze met Lizzie’s he smiled, tossing her a little wave like a salute before turning and striding away. From the few faint birdcall notes that filled the air, she thought he might be whistling.

  “Hmph. Guess you’ll be seeing plenty of him while I’m not around,” said Dylan.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied airily, and was about to add some light, jealousy-provoking taunt; that is, until she saw Dylan’s face.

  “Don’t,” she repeated gently, “let Rascal out.” Then she went out herself into a bright, bone-chillingly cold winter day in the little town of Bearkill, Maine.