Deathscape

by Dana Marton

  Jack pulled both of them to standing, anger pumping through him. Every breath stung; the cold bit into his skin. "And where are your friends now?"

  "They were right behind me. I think they took off when they saw you coming. I didn't do nothing wrong."

  He gritted his teeth. “You were trespassing.” But he let the boy go. Stupidity wasn’t a crime.

  He watched as the kid scampered toward the road without looking back. “And don’t come here again! This is private property,” he called after him.

  The adrenaline had worn off, and his whole body ached, reminding him that he was far from fully recovered. He swore, hating the weakness. He couldn’t afford aches and pains. When he caught up with Blackwell, he needed to be ready.

  He hadn’t been ready tonight. He’d seen the shadowy figure, rage had taken over, and he’d acted without thinking. What the hell was wrong with him, tackling that kid? But he could have sworn…

  He took a slow breath, let his lungs fill with cold air.

  Bing would warn him about becoming so obsessed that he was starting to see what he wanted to see. Good thing the captain hadn’t been here to witness this.

  He rubbed his hand over his face, then climbed out of the ditch and slogged back through the snow. Her front steps were covered in snow and ice, he registered again, and reached for the shovel leaning against the stairs before he realized the handle was broken. He kicked the snow off the steps the best he could, then walked inside, stepped out of his snowy boots, and padded up the stairs.

  Ashley stood at her easel, arms wrapped tightly around her body, staring at the painting in the semidarkness.

  He came to a stop behind her, trying to see what she saw when she looked at the macabre image. “There were some teenagers out back.”

  “What?” She turned, her eyes disoriented. She blinked a few times. “Sometimes I hear snowmobiles in the night. Just kids having fun.”

  He looked back at the canvas because he suddenly couldn’t stand the broken look in her eyes. In the dark, the painting looked muted, almost black and gray, precious few light areas with way too many shadows, the old man in the lower right quadrant lifeless and crumpled.

  "It would be best if you told the truth," he said but didn’t have it in him to really get up into her face again. The run and tackle out in the cold had taken the bluster out of him, as did her palpable misery.

  He wanted the whole vision thing to turn out to be fake. Like he’d wanted the kid out there to be Blackwell. But if he wasn’t strong enough to accept reality, he wouldn’t be strong enough to catch the bastard. And reality was that she’d painted the image out of nothing. Reality was his cop instincts said she wasn’t faking her emotions. His most basic instincts said she was real in every way.

  And as much as he resisted it with all the willpower he had, something inside him responded to her.

  She is going to be a complication.

  He didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like that someplace deep inside, he was softening toward her. He’d come for something completely different.

  Her chin came up and she held his gaze, some of her fire coming back as she said, “You want the truth? The truth is, I’m going crazy.”

  Okay, not what he’d expected, but he considered the words for a second. He’d certainly seen his share of the mentally unbalanced in his years of working for various police forces. “People who are crazy usually insist that they’re completely sane.”

  She didn’t seem relieved. “Are you going to take this painting too?”

  He didn’t need it; he had the photos on his phone. He nodded anyway. “It’s evidence.” Although of what, he couldn’t say.

  And he wasn’t sure whether he was taking the damned thing because part of him wanted to give her a break and he didn’t like that so he felt the need to make sure he wouldn’t give an inch. Or because it looked like the painting was hurting her and he felt some weird need to stop it.

  He didn’t do emotions.

  He sure as hell didn’t do mixed emotions.

  “Don’t leave town,” he said, to make sure the both of them knew it.

  ~~~***~~~

  Chapter Six

  After a night that started pretty roughly, then continued with her tossing and turning, worrying about what Jack Sullivan would do with her paintings, Saturday morning came too early. Ashley lay in bed, the bedroom dim in the gray winter morning light.

  She looked at her cell phone on the nightstand, dread and disappointment filling her little by little. She had to call her father and Maddie, let them know she couldn’t come today.

  Detective Sullivan had ordered her to stick around. On any other day, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But today was the day she was supposed to show her father that she was making progress.

  She wanted to get into her car and try, even if her throat would close up when she reached I-95. Even if she would be gasping for air and swimming in cold sweat. Even if she had to pull over. Even if it took her all morning to make the two-hour drive.

  She needed to face her fears. She couldn’t give up, or she’d never have Maddie back.

  She sat up in bed. She would not give up. She felt stronger now than last night. She would call Jack Sullivan and demand her freedom back. She hadn’t committed any crimes, hadn’t been charged with anything. He had no right to put her under house arrest or whatever he was doing.

  She reached for her cell phone just as the sounds of a rumbling motor reached her from outside. A snowmobile. She hesitated. Maybe she should go and talk to those kids and warn them about the creek. Her property in the back was really becoming a mess. Come spring, she would have to hire Eddie to clean it up a little. If one of those kids got hurt on her land…

  She pushed to her feet and hurried to the closet, shrugged into the first set of clothes she put her hands on, jeans and a thick sweater. She shoved her phone into her pocket and hurried downstairs, combing her hair with her fingers as she ran. She wanted to catch those kids before they rode away.

  She jumped into her boots and grabbed her coat, and could still hear the motor, coming closer, when she rounded the house. But as she reached the back, it was Eddie driving a snowmobile from the woods, pulling a log on a chain. And then she saw his beat-up pickup parked to the side.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked with an apologetic smile as he stopped and turned off the engine. He wore his usual quilted flannel jacket and wool cap, lumberjack boots, and work gloves—he looked like someone out of a maple-syrup commercial.

  “I needed to wake up. When did you get here?”

  “About an hour ago. I’ve been looking around out back. Plenty of fallen branches. A couple of trees too. Water washed out the roots of a pretty big oak at the far end of the creek, probably when all that snow melted after Christmas.”

  “Take as much as you need.” He was doing her a favor, really. He used most of the wood in his woodstove and the big stumps for chain-saw art he made and sold, proving her point that deep inside, everybody was an artist.

  He opened his mouth to say something but then looked toward the road, and his eyes narrowed.

  She followed his gaze. A black SUV slowed at her driveway and pulled in. The car rolled all the way up to her front door, and three men wearing dark suits spilled out. Her stomach sank as she recognized them: FBI.

  “I better see what that’s about.” She stomped up front.

  Were they ever going to leave her alone?

  The tallest of the men—early thirties, crew-cut blond hair, cold eyes—reached into his pocket and pulled out his ID as she reached them. “Agent Hunter, FBI. We met a few weeks ago.”

  “What is this about?”

  “We need you to come with us, ma’am.”

  Her heart rate picked up. Why now? They’d been out here and had looked over her land, had found nothing and left. Had something new come up? Suddenly, with a sinking heart, she realized what that might be.

  Jack Sullivan had handed over her paintings. />
  She had no idea how she was going to talk her way out of this. Her throat tightened. “I need to lock up.”

  “Of course.”

  The agents followed her in when she went inside to get her keys.

  “Do you think I could have five minutes? I ran outside this morning without getting ready for the day.”

  “No problem.”

  But Agent Hunter went upstairs with her, checked out her bathroom before she went in. At least he let her close the door behind her. She took care of her morning needs, too nervous to do more than the bare minimum.

  What would they make of her paintings? She brushed her teeth with jerky, frenetic movements. Did she need a lawyer?

  She’d had one after the accident on the reservoir. She could call him again. She hesitated. Not yet. Lawyering up right now would just make her look guilty. Not to mention she didn’t have the money. But she would definitely call if things got any worse.

  On the way out to the car, she looked to the backyard, wanting to tell Eddie that she was leaving, but Eddie had gone back into the woods already. He wasn’t the type to sit around; when he worked, he gave one hundred percent. One of the many reasons why the town kept him even with the budget cuts last fall.

  Whatever maintenance personnel they had left now answered to him. The town trusted him with all kinds of things, even sent him to tradeshows out of state to check out new road-maintenance equipment they needed. He’d been proud of that.

  “Are you getting some work done on the property?” Agent Hunter asked as he opened the back door of the SUV for her, looking at Eddie’s pickup.

  “Just giving away some firewood.”

  The agent watched her through narrowed eyes, a cold expression on his face, not looking like he believed her. Which didn’t bode well for the upcoming questioning. She was innocent, had nothing to do with Brady Blackwell or Jack Sullivan’s troubles. How did she end up getting pulled deeper and deeper into all this mess?

  At the end of her driveway, the car turned onto the road toward Broslin. Cold sweat gathered on her forehead as she clasped her hands on her knees. And her phobias were the least of her problems.

  She hated, absolutely hated Jack Sullivan for forcing her secret out, then doing this to her.

  * * *

  The fans on the ceiling whirled in a futile effort to evenly distribute the heat through the Broslin Police Station. The phones rang off the hook; the department’s ancient copy machine grated on, giving everyone within ten feet an instant headache,

  Nobody sat behind the front desk. Leila didn’t work weekends. She kept office hours Monday through Friday. The rest of the time, the nearest person answered the phone. Whoever was unlucky to be on duty had to fend for himself.

  “No, ma’am. We can’t arrest your neighbor’s dog for getting yours with puppies. I’m sorry, ma’am.” Jack listened. “You’d have to go to court for, ah, puppy support; we don’t do that either.” He let the old woman rage at him for another minute before politely saying good-bye and hanging up.

  And, miraculously, there wasn’t another call immediately.

  He sat at his desk and watched the closed door of the interrogation room. The news that the FBI had brought in Ashley Price was the first thing he’d heard when he’d come in for his exercise this morning. Okay, when he’d come in to talk Bing into letting him back on at least partial duty.

  Then he caught sight of her through the half-closed blinds, and he chose to sit at his desk instead, from where he could keep an eye on her while surreptitiously signing into the database on his computer. Not that the data could hold his attention. Twice he’d come to his feet to barge in. Twice he’d sat himself back down. Bing was in his office, talking on the phone but keeping an eye on him.

  Joe and Chase were off duty. Mike was out on some call. Harper, Broslin’s black sheep turned cop, was the only other person in the office.

  “Want some coffee?” he asked Jack as he put down his phone and headed for the coffee machine.

  “Had too much already. Hey,” Jack called after him. “Any missing persons since I’ve been out?”

  Harper poured his coffee, then strode back to him, tall and lean, a ladies’ man, if the gossip was to be believed. To his credit, he didn’t parade his women around the office like Joe. Harper liked to keep his private life private.

  “No one’s gone missing. A single murder all week, early this morning, not ours, over in West Grove. Looks like nephew kept his old-man uncle locked up in a closet, starved him to death while he spent the vic’s social security checks.”

  “People are idiots.” Jack reached for the mouse and brought up the crime-scene photos of the West Grove murder in the central database, dozens of shots of the old guy’s closet, with and without the body.

  The short hairs stood straight up at the back of his neck as he took in the spookily familiar images on his screen—an old man folded on the floor, stacks of boxes at his feet, clothes hanging above him. Exactly as in Ashley’s painting.

  “Remind me not to get old.” Harper scanned the images. “Neighbor called it in. They hadn’t seen the old guy in a while. Hell of a thing is, if they’d called a day earlier, the poor geezer could have been saved.”

  Jack looked at TOD. Time of death was approximately eight p.m. last night. Just when Ashley had begun painting.

  An unpleasant shiver ran down his spine as Harper saluted him with his coffee mug, then sauntered away.

  If Ashley did have visions, if she wasn’t pretending…

  Whatever was happening to her was taking a damn heavy toll, he had seen that. Hell, he was a tough-ass cop, and he wasn’t sure he could live with something like that.

  Bing got off his phone at last and headed for him. “You’re only supposed to come in to use the gym for your physical therapy.”

  “Reporting back to duty, sir.” Jack winced when his side brushed against an open drawer.

  “Like hell.”

  “I’m all healed.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Healed enough.”

  Bing’s gaze turned to steel. “I’m the captain. Keeping my men safe is my top priority. Go home.”

  “I could be useful on this case,” he said reasonably.

  “Like a screen door on a submarine. You were one of Brady’s victims. Your sister was one of Brady’s victims. Can you say conflict of interest?”

  Frustration tightened his jaw. “You can’t keep me on sick leave forever.”

  “I can try. I sure as hell am not gonna lose you again.”

  A few moments of charged silence passed between them.

  Jack broke it first. “What happened to me wasn’t your fault.”

  “One of my men went missing, and I couldn’t find him.” Bing dropped into Joe’s empty chair at the next desk, the fight going out of him. “You still look like death chewed on you before spitting you out.”

  Which was exactly what had happened, come to think of it. And yet… “I can’t sit at home. How about desk duty? Partial duty?”

  The man gave an irritated huff. “You looked right into my goddamn eyes and lied. You hadn’t come to Broslin for a job. You came to hunt Blackwell. And you didn’t say a damn word about it. I thought we were friends.”

  The words made him feel like dirt. Technically, he hadn’t lied. He just hadn’t told Bing everything. But he was in the wrong, and he knew it, so he wasn’t about to defend himself. “I want Blackwell,” he said simply.

  “You stay away from that bastard if you want your badge.”

  Tense silence stretched between them.

  “She was my sister,” Jack said after a while. “I can’t let this go. Could you? If you had Stacy’s killer within reach?”

  Bing’s wife had been killed two years before, during a home invasion, the killer never apprehended, zero leads.

  His mouth narrowed into a thin line. “Don’t you dare throw that into my face. I had let it go. You know why? Because I swore an oath to the citizens of thi
s town to protect them. Not to pursue my own vengeance, dammit.”

  “You’re a better man than I am,” Jack said, and meant it. He had carried the darkness around inside him for too long. It had changed him, he knew that. He didn’t care. He was so close now, he just wanted to see this to the end, wanted to see Blackwell finished.

  “I can’t sit around at home and do nothing. All I do is think about Shannon and that bastard. It drives me crazy,” he admitted. “Let me come back.”

  Bing watched him.

  The phone rang again. Harper answered it.

  Bing shook his head after a couple of seconds. “Hell, maybe work would keep you busy, keep you out of trouble. Desk duty only.” He scowled as he thought for another second. “On three conditions. You pass the physical, you talk to the shrink, and you stay away from the Blackwell case.”

  He leaned forward, into the I-mean-business pose they all used in the interrogation room. “I catch you as much as looking at that bastard’s file from across the room, and you’re going back on leave. Is that clear?”

  Jack scratched the back of his head and let the captain interpret it whatever way he wanted.

  Bing leaned back in the chair, his shoulders relaxing a little. “I don’t suppose you remembered anything new?”

  Jack shook his head. He’d been in and out for those three days he’d been missing, the details sketchy. The fact that he’d been blindfolded complicated things. And so far he hadn’t remembered anything that could have given them a clue on where Blackwell had taken him after tasing him at that abandoned farmhouse. “I was in some kind of a workshop, that’s all I remember. He had plenty of tools handy. Somewhere in a basement, I think, cement floor, a woodstove and fan, a metal chair he chained me to.”

  Bing winced. “It’ll come back. You need to give yourself a chance to recover.”

  “Feds said anything about why they brought Ashley Price in?” he asked after a few seconds, reaching for his coffee cup, gesturing toward the interrogation room with it. “She has nothing to do with anything.”

  A bushy eyebrow rose. “Now you’re defending her?”