Why the Rock Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  No time to wait for Markov. Lacey crashed through the half-open door.

  Earl flung the jacket down and charged at her. She sidestepped. His fist caught her shoulder. Bending with the blow, she grabbed his wrist and pulled. Momentum carried him into the wall. He hit with such force that dust fell from the rafters. As he rebounded, she swung her branch hard against his back. It broke with a further explosion of dust. Coughing, she backed away. Earl straightened up and tackled her again.

  Ducking his clutching arms, she punched him square in the gut. As he gasped, she veered aside and twisted his arm up his back. He spun out of it. She saw his fist coming barely in time to duck away. His hand smacked the window frame. The pane shivered and fell outside. If it broke on landing, the sound was lost amid the rain on the roof.

  Earl came at her again, arms flailing. She snatched his wrist again, pivoting. He went sprawling over the rickety wooden table, sending empty cans flying. The table tipped, spilling him sideways. He rolled and sprang up. She grabbed the room’s only stool and used it as a battering ram until he wrenched it from her hands. As he swung it wildly at her, she jumped backward. His discarded jacket caught her heel. She staggered, half falling against the bunk support. Earl kicked her feet out from under her and fell on top of her, grappling for her throat.

  Shades of Dan! Fighting the panic, she gouged at his eyes with one hand. Her other hand groped toward the stove. Splinters dug into her palm as she tugged a branch from the pile. Once, twice, she smashed at Earl. At last, as her vision was blacking around the edges, he loosed one hand to grab the log. As his weight shifted, she rolled with it, dumping him to the floor.

  Grunting, he reached for her, but not fast enough. She rammed a knee into his back. He rolled away, groaning. Gasping, she flipped him over and sat on him, yanking his forearm up between his shoulder blades. She pinned his trailing arm with her knee. He cursed, his words slurred against the rough wooden floor. When he bucked, trying to throw her off, her knee ground his wrist into the dusty planks. He screamed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  As she caught her breath, Lacey twisted Earl’s arm a little higher up his back. Now what? No handcuffs, no backup, and all that long, lovely rope was tied to a tree at the cliff-top. Earl was limp for the moment but no doubt analyzing his chances of escape. Of course, he didn’t know Markov was on his way. All Lacey had to do was keep him subdued until the constable arrived. With her free hand, she fumbled through the gear Ben had clipped to her belt. One piece was a loop of strapping sewn at intervals into pockets. She unclipped it and slipped one loop over Earl’s wrist. Then, before he could react to that, she yanked his other arm up beside it and scooped that into a different loop. She wound the rest of the strap around and between those two loops and secured the whole thing to his belt with a carabiner. It was the best she could do for now.

  Breathing heavily, she got to her feet and approached the bunk. Orrin Caine lay on his side, covered to the neck by a torn blue tarp. His face was purple with fading bruises, and blood matted the filthy white hair. Now that she had time to notice it, he reeked of blood, sweat, and urine. Sniffing hard to acclimatize her nose to the stench, she felt for a pulse at his neck. His lips moved, but no sound came. Still, he was alive. All else could be dealt with.

  “You’ll be okay, Mr. Caine,” she said as she’d said so often at accident scenes during her RCMP years, whether the victim could hear her or not. “Help is coming.”

  She checked Earl’s bonds, added a chain of carabiners around his ankles and hooked them to one foot of the heavy little stove and then retraced her steps to Ben.

  He lay where she had left him, cradling his damaged arm. “Earl?”

  “Tied up at the cabin.” She helped him to sit up. “Your dad’s alive, barely.” Folding her windbreaker into a rude sling across his chest, she got him to his feet and slung his good arm over her shoulder. They were limping across the gravel to the cabin when an RCMP vehicle roared into the clearing. Bart and Markov jumped out. Surrendering Ben to his brother, she told Markov, “Orrin’s inside. Alive but will need Medevac.”

  As Markov entered the cabin, Earl lifted his head. “Officer! Arrest that woman. She assaulted me and tied me up.”

  Lacey gaped. “You were about to smother your father with that jacket.”

  Earl said, “I was putting it under his head to make him more comfortable. Officer, I was trying to save my father from Ben.”

  “I’ll take your statement in a moment,” said Markov. Orrin groaned. Markov went to check him out. Then, leaving Earl tied up, he returned to his truck and radioed his dispatcher.

  Lacey followed. “You’re not buying Earl’s story, are you?”

  Markov frowned. “I can’t arrest him for attempted murder on your word alone. The Crown would chuck the charges before the ink was dry.”

  Frustrated, Lacey glared around the clearing. After misdirecting the searchers for most of a week, hoping his father would die what appeared to be a natural death, Earl had raced up here to finish the job. It should be obvious.

  “Then arrest him for assaulting me last Tuesday evening in his father’s security office. If you check his legs, you’ll find older bruises and at least one healing scrape from my office chair.”

  “Still your word alone. He could claim he got those anywhere. Did you file a report about that assault?”

  “Not yet.” She should have, if she was going to use it now. “I did, however, report it to Wayne right away. You can still see the older bruise on my cheek from where he mashed it into the desk. He was wearing a balaclava that night, very like the one he wore when he chucked rocks down a cliff at us a few minutes ago. Ben might want to press charges against him for that, too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  After sixty hours of nausea, brain fog, and alternating sweats and chills, Jan sat in the shower, revelling as warm water streamed down her limbs. Nothing hurt much, just a residual ache from the last lactic acid clearing out of the muscles. Eventually, she huddled into her terrycloth bathrobe and stretched out on her bed to recuperate. A text from Lacey waited on her phone: Are you up for company? She immediately texted back: You bet. Dying to hear how it all went down.

  When she walked to the front door, Jan marvelled at the strength her legs had already regained. What that woman from the online support group had told her was bang on. Once you’ve burned your mitochondrial reserves, she’d typed, you’re stuck on trickle charge. Small exertion = two days. Big exertion = five days. Simple. The formula was easy to remember and gave her hope when the bad days seemed endless. She let Lacey in along with a fug of sultry air. No storms like yesterday, but the sky remained grey and brooding. She hugged until Lacey squeaked.

  “Sorry. I forgot you might be hurting. Is it bad?”

  “Scrapes and bruises.”

  “You could’ve been bare-knuckle boxing. I was so terrified when Terry said you’d gone off into the wild after a possible killer. Come in, tell me all about it. Do you want tea?”

  “No, thanks.” Lacey followed her to the living room and settled on the floor. Jan crawled back on the couch and pulled her afghan over her legs.

  “So all I know is that you and Ben climbed up a cliff in a storm, and he was hurt, so you tackled Earl on your own.”

  Lacey rested her arms on her bent knees. “Basically, that’s the whole story. The bastard threw rocks down on us, trying to knock us off the cliff. One broke Ben’s collarbone. He climbed the last stretch one handed. Earl tackled him at the top, wearing a balaclava at first like when he attacked me in the security office. Ben ripped it off him during the struggle.” She shifted position, grimacing. “Markov found it eventually and decided it showed premeditation. If Earl really hoped to save his father from his evil twin brothers, he wouldn’t cover his face. But I guess it was the best story he could think of while he was lying there tied up. The arrogance of the rich white male. He was totally pissed that Markov didn’t automatically believe him and untie him.”
r />   “What gall.” Jan could too easily picture it. To a man raised to believe he was untouchable by anyone except his tycoon father, it was unthinkable that a lawman wouldn’t take his word over that of a mere woman. “And then the helicopter came, and more Mounties?”

  Lacey shook her head. “The thunderstorm crashed over us before the helicopter could get there. It was really ferocious up on that bluff. The trees were bending so far, I thought they’d come through the roof. That old hut would have been smashed to splinters, and us with it.” She shuddered. “So picture this: Earl handcuffed and Orrin unconscious, Ben with a useless shoulder, and me oozing blood from various scrapes because we’d used up all the Band-Aids in Markov’s first aid kit. Rain blasting in the broken window. And did I mention there was only one stool? Nobody wanted to sit in the bunks near Orrin, because he frankly stank to high heaven. So we all sat on the floor. Bart made us tea he found in a tin box, and we split up Andy’s food. Then we just waited until the storm rolled on to beat up the next hilltop.

  “After that, we — me and Bart and Markov — had to go out and move the vehicles around, shine the headlights on the gravel space, because it was getting dark by then and the chopper still had to drop the rescue tech and basket. Did I mention the road down was blocked by the windstorm? They were working on getting it clear, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be stuck up there all night with Earl tied up and Orrin maybe dying on us. Another quarter hour and it would have been too dangerous for the helicopter to hover near those treetops, so there we were.”

  Jan clutched her afghan closer. “I’d never have survived it. But at least Earl’s under arrest, right?”

  “Not for attempted murder. He stuck to the claim that he was protecting his father. If Markov hadn’t stopped to check out Orrin’s wrecked Rover farther down the hill, he’d have arrived while Earl was trying to kill us. But he didn’t.”

  Jan scrunched sideways. “How is it possible that he got away with it? He knew exactly where to find his father, and he didn’t go there for five days, lied to the search manager about phone numbers and claimed he didn’t know where the hut was. When he did finally go there, he beat up the people who were coming to rescue Orrin.”

  “Well, he’s not totally in the clear. They’ve got him on assault charges for the first attack on me and reckless endangerment for the rock-throwing, which might yet get upgraded to aggravated assault or even attempted murder. He had to go to the RCMP post for processing, have his old and new bruises photographed and measured, get his fingerprints taken. He’ll hold a grudge for that humiliation, you can bet. His lawyer talked a good game, though, and they let him go on his own recognizance.”

  “Not even a night in jail? That’s ludicrous.”

  “It’s far from over.” Lacey looked at her battered hands. “I spent this morning with the RCMP, giving them a statement about all the ways he obstructed the search. And I met the search manager as I was leaving. She gave a statement about him suppressing two of the three phone numbers, never saying that his father owned that land off 579 or that Orrin had a hunting hut up there. Of course they should’ve checked who owned it and gotten permission to search, but when you’re looking for a vehicle and you come to a locked gate, you’re more likely to assume the vehicle didn’t go that way than that the person you’re searching for is the owner and has a key.”

  “I don’t understand how he knew which hut as soon as you asked him.”

  “He hasn’t admitted it, but Susan Norris figures that’s where Orrin dumped him all those years ago. There’s a way down into the ravine behind the cabin, a lot easier than the route we went up. Orrin probably sent him down that way. At the mouth of the ravine there are cutlines that intersect, and he got tangled up following them to where Susan found him. Same route Ty took, most likely.”

  “So he’s going to get off with a slap on the wrist?”

  “I doubt it. Now that he’s on the RCMP’s radar, they’ll go into his phone records and finances, discover every place and person he’s recently been near.”

  Jan stared at the ceiling. “But he didn’t tamper with the vehicle.”

  Lacey sighed. “Nope. He had an accomplice. We have to figure out the identity on that garage video. Are you up for it today?”

  “I will be, as soon as I get some food into me. Stay for lunch?”

  “Sure. Maybe now that you’ve brightened up the video, I’ll spot something useful simply because I know the ground and the people.”

  Over a light lunch of salad greens with cold salmon, Jan reported in more detail on her meeting with Kitrin’s mother. “I really hope Mylo gets over his snit and that she doesn’t try to take Michael away again. That poor kid needs some stability. I’ve neglected him while I was recovering. I glanced through Jake’s staff’s pictures this morning, but none of them twigged. Maybe when I see their back views. I’ll get Chad down later and make him look, too.”

  “Are you a hundred percent sure Chad didn’t do it himself? I mean, he was running around up there with the cameras off during that half hour.”

  Jan shook her head. “I didn’t know it until yesterday, but he had cleared up a few things with Kitrin over the years. She’d even told him about Rob. And he seems genuinely concerned about Michael. Speaking of him, any news on Tyrone today? I know he’s not in the same hospital as his father. Is Sloane going back and forth between the two?”

  “Nope. Orrin is so sedated, he’ll never know if she’s there or not. Once he’s awake, they’ll have private nurses at his bedside twenty-four-seven. Cheryl said Ty will be released later today. Tough kid. Although I understand he was in the hut with Orrin and a bit of food for all but one of the nights. So not as bad off as he could have been.”

  “I’m glad one of them is recovering.” Jan pushed her plate away. “Are you ready to tackle these videos?”

  Two hours of playing videos on Terry’s big monitors got them no further. They looked at dozens of samples of Jake’s staff walking past security cameras, and each person was too tall, or too broad, or too hairy down the neck, or something else disqualifying. Although Lacey, like Jan, was teased by a faint sense of familiarity about the staffer at the pool gate, the context didn’t fit anything in her recent memory. Eventually, they viewed the enhanced video from the ranch garage, but that too was a dead end. There were plenty of details visible now, but the person in the balaclava was too narrow-shouldered to be Earl, and Lacey still swore it was none of the women she’d seen around the ranch.

  Midway through the afternoon, as they were shifting to the living room so Jan could lie down, Lacey got a text from Wayne. It read: Earl was with his mother all Saturday morning. She frowned. “I don’t understand. Earl would want Kitrin out of the way fast, before Orrin could change his will to include her or Michael. He clearly didn’t know Orrin had already ordered Wayne to investigate.”

  Jan shook her head. “More arrogance of the rich white male. He won’t ask questions and doesn’t listen, so he misses out on vital information.”

  “Cynical much?”

  “If that ape got my friend killed just to inherit the whole pile of bananas,” said Jan, “I want him put in prison with a lot of big, mean bikers to show him his place in their jungle. But how would he know there wouldn’t be more sons, anyway? Sloane’s young enough, and Orrin wouldn’t have revealed his infertility. Virility is key to his alpha-male status.”

  “I wondered about that, too,” Lacey admitted. “I only found out about it from Cheryl, and probably only because she was so exhausted and stressed, her filters were down. When I checked the dossier again, I realized Earl was VP of Human Resources and oversaw the company benefits plan for many years. He could have kept tabs on his father’s health all along.” She frowned. “The other thing that worries me is what Earl will do now. Orrin’s still alive. He might cut Earl off like he did Ben, and he could still make Michael one of his heirs.”

  “Are you suggesting Michael might be in danger?”

  “Not
from Earl. The RCMP will keep him on a short leash until they’ve figured out what other charges to file.”

  “Then we have to find out who sabotaged the Rover for him. He could send them after Michael.”

  “And after Ty,” Lacey added. “With both of them gone, and neither twin interested in the company, he’d rule it all.”

  “God, you’re really scaring me now.” Jan stretched the knots out of her neck. “If only we could put those boys under guard, somewhere Earl can’t easily reach them.”

  “That eliminates any place Orrin owns.” Lacey sighed. “I can try to convince the RCMP that the boys are in danger, but they won’t believe me without evidence. It’s exactly that situation that led to the disaster at Capilano Gorge and me leaving the Force. Sometimes your gut just knows, but as a cop you can’t act on it in the absence of evidence.”

  Jan closed her eyes, trying to visualize a safe place, but all that came to mind was Jake’s swimming machine, where Kitrin had nearly drowned on her first full day in Bragg Creek. “Hey, wait. Jake’s place. He’s got security to the eyebrows now, right?”

  “Sure. I can tell them all to take special care of Michael. But Ty’s still exposed.”

  “Maybe not. Watch and learn.” Jan snagged her phone off the coffee table and called Jake’s cell. “Hi,” she said. “How’s it going up there today? How’s Michael? … Yeah, I’d be bored in his shoes, too. Listen, did you know Tyrone Caine is getting out of the hospital today? What do you think about inviting him to recover at your place? The boys can distract each other better than any adults would. Of course you’d have to have Sloane, too. She won’t want to let Ty out of her sight so soon.”

  After a few more exchanges, she hung up. “There. If Sloane distrusts Earl as much as you say, she’ll leap at the offer. Jake will invite some of his pet hockey players up, too, for ball hockey if Ty’s fit enough, and video games if he’s not. He wants me to do art activities with them, and he invited Michael’s granny to stay. He thinks Mylo’s being unreasonable to keep them apart right now.”