by Jen Blood
The former sheriff lay on a ratty pullout sofa, eyes closed, a bottle of whiskey spilled beside him. His mouth was open. The cabin was cluttered, but clean. No sign of Erin or Diggs or any bizarre torture devices on the wall. Just a pair of snowshoes, a mounted rabbit with deer antlers on its head, and Red Grivois.
Snoring loudly, and very drunk.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Once he’d gotten Diggs and me under control again, Rainier re-tied our wrists. If I ever got out of this, I was thinking bondage had officially lost its appeal. He put a pillowcase over my head, but he didn’t use one for Diggs—presumably because wherever we were going, it didn’t matter whether he saw the path we took or not. He wouldn’t be leaving.
No one spoke. It was cold out now—not just cool, but cold enough that a jacket and a good wood fire wouldn’t be a bad idea. Rainier kept one hand on me at all times. He’d traded in his knife for a gun that he dug into the small of my back through the whole journey. Sometime along that way, my fear had given way to anger; I’d gone from sick and hurt and tired and terrified to sick, hurt, and just plain pissed off. If they were going to kill us, I just wished someone would get on with it already.
When we reached our destination, wherever the hell that was, Rainier grabbed my bound hands and pulled me to a stop. The wrist I’d broken the day before had been jerked and snapped and pushed and pulled too many times now: when I’d caught myself as I had fallen into the river earlier, I felt the bone shift under my skin. Since then, I’d lost feeling in my fingers… If I didn’t already, it was only a matter of time before I had permanent nerve damage.
I couldn’t smell anything but my own warm, sour breath inside the hood. Couldn’t see, obviously. There had been no temperature change, so I knew we were still outside. That was really all I knew, though. Rainier pushed me to my knees. Rage like I’d never felt before welled in my chest, with nowhere to go but in. I willed myself to keep quiet. Diggs shouted something that I couldn’t make out, either because the hood kept things too muffled or simply because he’d run out of words.
We both had.
Rainier looped something over my head—I felt it brush my forehead, and then my nose and chin before it settled around my throat. Diggs screamed at them again. He sounded farther away now. Somewhere in the distance, I heard whistling.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
I thought of the night and that first day we’d been in the woods running: the whistling we’d heard periodically behind us. That song, in the walls of the cave while Diggs and I were trying to get out. And again today, all afternoon long. I started to shake.
Rainier tightened the belt around my neck.
The whistling got louder. And louder. Eventually, it was just a few feet from me.
Rainier pulled the hood off my head.
It was dark outside, but not so dark I couldn’t see. The moon was still full. The stars still shone overhead. We were in a perfectly circular clearing, surrounded by thick woods. Diggs sat across from me, maybe ten yards away. He was close enough for me to see the hate and the terror in his eyes; far enough away that we couldn’t touch. His hands were tied behind him, around the base of a pole about five feet high.
Rainier cinched the belt tighter, until it bit into my neck. The whistling stopped. A man stepped in front of me, close enough that I had to crane my neck to see who it was.
J.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Juarez
Red Grivois had no idea what anyone was talking about when Juarez questioned him about Will Rainier. He was too drunk to answer much of anything, and Juarez wasn’t interested in wasting more time when he realized they’d been pursuing the wrong man for the past six hours. He stood outside the cabin for a few minutes, taking stock. Trying to get his bearings. Jamie came over and leaned against the cabin next to him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He leaned his head back against the cabin, staring at the night sky. His eyes burned with fatigue. His body ached. “I’m not great,” he said.
She laughed. “Well, that’s the first honest thing you’ve said to me since we met. Where are we now? It’s late, but Bear’s been resting our second team for a while now. I can bring them out, retire Casper and Phantom for the night.”
“I don’t know where we are.”
“You must have some leads though, right?” she insisted. “Don’t get frustrated… Just think.” She said it like it should be the easiest thing in the world.
Juarez nodded. He forced his mind back into gear. There was a quiet place in there, where answers just came… He’d been there many times before. A place where he could simply run through things without the fear of what would happen if he was wrong; if he didn’t get there in time. Lucia’s face flashed through his mind again, but for once he pushed her away.
Not now.
It all came back to Mister E. Every lead they had, everything they’d found, came back to him. The picture he had of Eliot from the Lansing asylum didn’t come up in any facial recognition systems, and no one he had spoken with in Black Falls had seen the boy since he’d summered there with Jeff Lincoln in 1970.
Bonnie Saucier had known J. She had known Mister E. She dated Jeff Lincoln—the real one. And she was dead now… What had Rosie said? Bonnie and Will had passed the test. They were the only ones. Will was missing. But maybe if Juarez could find the connection with Bonnie…
They were close enough to Eagle Lake, and therefore civilization, that Juarez’s cell phone worked again—as long as he wandered around the area chasing bars as he talked. He called the Black Falls police station.
“I need to speak with Hank Gendreau,” he said.
Gendreau was in transit. It took half an hour before anyone was able to track down the officers transporting him and get the prisoner on the phone. By that time, Juarez had driven back into town, where the reception was better. Jamie was resting her dogs. The other searchers had gathered in the parking lot of the now-closed general store, looking weary and discouraged. Juarez sat on the tailgate of one of the warden’s pickup trucks, finally connected with Gendreau again.
“Did Bonnie ever talk to you about the night on Eagle Lake when Will attacked Erin Lincoln?”
“No,” Hank said after a moment. “She was different after that night, though. Dropped out of school and moved to Portland not long after. She took some classes. Then she met up with Max.”
“Max Richards?” Juarez asked.
“Right,” Hank confirmed. “He was finishing up law school, doing a few other things on the side—he worked in a lab for a while, that kind of thing. He’s richer than God, so he always paid Bonnie to help him out with whatever crazy project he had going.”
Juarez’s pulse kicked up a notch. “And when was this?”
“Late ‘70s, maybe. She got married to Luke and Sarah’s brother in ’79, so she stopped working for Max for a while then.”
Juarez checked his notes. “And her husband died?”
“Ran off,” Gendreau said. “It was a big surprise, too; we all thought he was crazy about her. She wasn’t the same after that. She just hid out. Worked for Max—by then he had his own firm. He has a place up north, so Bonnie went up there whenever she could. But she was never the same, really. Then when Ashley died…” He trailed off.
Juarez barely noticed, suddenly revived. “Do you know where Max Richards is from?” he asked.
“Midwest somewhere, I think. He doesn’t really talk about himself much.”
“And he’s been your lawyer from the start… Ever since Ashley was killed?”
“It didn’t make sense to go with anybody else,” Gendreau said. “Bonnie knew him, so he gave us a good deal. I couldn’t have afforded half the appeals and motions he’s done if it was anybody else.”
Juarez got off the phone with Gendreau and called D.C. He interrupted a date Mandy was trying to have with a man twenty years her junior; someone he knew she’d been flirting with for months.
“I�
�ll make it up to you,” he promised.
“You haven’t made up for the last six times you said that. What is it?”
“I need you to look into someone named Max Richards, and I need you to do it quickly. Lightning speed. He’s a lawyer who practices in midcoast Maine.”
Half an hour later, Mandy called from her D.C. apartment.
“He’s an interesting one, this guy,” she began.
“What did you find?”
“As far as I can tell, he doesn’t actually practice much law. It looks like Hank Gendreau’s his only client, and most of the time he’s just going back and forth to Augusta filing motions or sitting in on panels or meeting with civic groups up there.”
Suspect, but hardly incriminating in and of itself.
“What about fingerprints?” Juarez asked. “Aren’t lawyers supposed to be fingerprinted?”
“That they are,” she agreed. “Somehow, though, he’s managed to get around that. I haven’t been able to find any fingerprints on file for him, and almost no information about him. The guy’s a ghost, Jack.”
“Does it say where he’s from?”
“According to what few records he does have on file, he’s originally from NYC. I think that’s bogus, though. I started looking in Lynn again, using the name you suggested: Max Richard Eliot. Still nothing. But I started looking at area hospital records for births around that time… That’s when I hit paydirt.”
It was ten o’clock at night, and he was still in the parking lot of Eagle Lake Grocery. The rest of the search party huddled in their cars, trying to get a few minutes’ rest while they waited for Jack’s instructions.
Juarez rubbed his head. “Mandy…”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sending a picture of Max Richards to you now. I found a Max Richard Eliot Billings, born September 10, 1954. Your guy legally dropped Eliot Billings from his name in 1975, and changed to Max Richards.”
Juarez took out the photo of Jeff Lincoln from the Lansing asylum, comparing it with the one of Max Richards that Mandy sent through his phone. He could understand how Gendreau and others in the town might not have recognized Max Richards as their mysterious Eliot, just ten years later. As a teenager, Max Eliot had been a small, wiry, bookish-looking boy with glasses and bad acne. Somewhere along the lines, that had changed—he had clearly gone to great lengths to tone his body, clean up his complexion, and possibly even surgically alter his appearance. All to ensure that people’s perceptions of Max Richards was of a harmless, slightly eccentric and not terribly competent attorney. Meanwhile, he could live off his family’s money and use his position as a lawyer to find his next victims.
They’d found Mr. E.
Now, they just needed to find Erin and Diggs.
Chapter Thirty
“I feel like we’ve come full circle tonight,” Max Richards said to me. He clasped his hands behind his back. Instead of the suit I’d seen him in back in Rockport, tonight he wore khakis and a button-up shirt beneath a lightweight jacket. I’d been expecting a flowing robe or some kind of demonic mask… Instead, the lawyer nobody saw stood above me, gazing down with a beatific grin.
The robe and mask would have been less unnerving.
“You have questions, I expect?” Max asked.
I had a thousand of them, as a matter of fact. Instead of asking them, I kept my eyes straight ahead and my mouth clamped shut. Max chuckled.
“She is a stubborn one, eh Will? It all started when I met your father, you know…”
I lasted half a second before curiosity got the better of me. Story of my life. “Where was that?”
“Lynn,” he answered promptly. “Our fathers were in business together, you could say. And then his family moved away… I had a falling out with my parents that spring, so I came up to Maine to stay with my old friend. I met Will here…” Will grunted behind me. My body was shaking from the effort of keeping still, still kneeling with Rainier’s belt looped around my neck.
“Dear old J. was up to his old shenanigans with the girls of Black Falls,” Max continued. “He was a real lady killer, that boy.” He winked at me. “From there, it was just that cosmic perfect storm… I’d been dreaming of something like this—”
“Something like what, exactly?” Diggs asked.
Max turned so he could include him in the conversation. He waved his hand around the circle. “This, Mr. Diggins. My own anthropological Petri dish. One of the most fascinating aspects for me has been discovering the point at which empathy is cast aside in favor of self-preservation. How much it takes to drive people to kill. For Bonnie? It was a combination of things: post-hypnotic suggestion, for one. And surprisingly enough, she responded more when her animals were in danger than when she faced physical pain herself. Or when other people did, for that matter. It was fascinating, watching the way this experiment changed her over the years: from a beautiful, gregarious, bright young thing, to the eccentric shut-in you met in Rockport.
“For Will, on the other hand, it’s been a series of rewards over the years… And the simple pleasure of the act itself,” Max continued. “Some of our subjects have been stronger than others, of course. And you two…” He looked from Diggs to me and back again. “I wonder how much it would take—how many hours, how many days, at Will’s mercy, before you agree you’ll do anything for freedom.”
“Anything meaning what?” I asked. “You want us to kill each other? That’s your objective?” I looked past him to Diggs. “What would it take for you to put me in the ground about now, Diggsy?”
He laughed. It sounded strained and borderline hysterical, but it was still a laugh. “After this week? Not much. Maybe another night in that swank Sanctuary, and I’m there.”
I looked at Max. He wasn’t amused.
“And I’m on pretty much the same page here, so there you have it,” I said. “Get this fucking belt off my neck, and I’ll put a cap in his ass now.”
Anger flashed in Max’s eyes. He waved his hand toward Rainier, a kind of ‘Have at it’ gesture that effectively drained any laissez faire I’d been feeling to that point. Rainier knelt behind me, his body pressed to mine, while he cinched the belt still tighter, his mouth at my ear. The air left my lungs and the world around me blurred. Diggs shouted. Everything but Rainier’s breathing in my ear, the cruel words he whispered, fell away. The world was underwater, and I was floating above it.
“That’s enough,” I heard Max say. Rainier loosened the belt. I gasped for air.
“There are a number of ways we’ve pushed our subjects to kill,” Max continued. I could barely hear him above the rushing in my ears and my own hacking cough. He paused until I’d finished. “Occasionally, it’s simple empathy. My subjects see how much these friends they’ve come to love are suffering… And they intervene.”
He waved his hand again. Rainier tightened the belt around my neck. Diggs turned his head away. He was straining at the ropes, but I knew he wouldn’t get free. No one would come. It felt like my lungs would explode, the belt cinching tighter around my neck, Rainier’s warm breath in my ear. Spots floated in front of my eyes, getting brighter with each passing second.
And then, the angel of death appeared.
He didn’t wear the cloak I remembered him in on the island at ten years old. Now, he wore jeans and a windbreaker; he might have just come from walking the dog or picking up groceries. He had a receding hairline and a thin, sharp nose, and he carried a gun. While Max and Rainier were so focused on my torture, he walked right up to them. My body screamed for air. The hooded man raised his gun. He aimed it at Rainier first, still standing right behind me. Instead of the deafening gunshot I expected, there was a muffled snick before the belt loosened. Rainier let go of the belt and fell backward.
Max screamed, his face red with rage. The man pointed the gun at the center of his forehead.
“You’ve become a liability, Max. We warned you about this when you left the fold…” He had a surprisingly gentile voice.
&nbs
p; “My family—” Max argued.
“Your family has had enough,” the hooded man said. Another muffled shot sounded in the night. Max just stood there for a second as though suspended, a hole in the center of his forehead, before he fell to his knees. He pitched forward.
The hooded man knelt beside me and untied my hands. He pulled the leather belt from around my neck, and helped me stand.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Are you all right?”
I nodded, mute.
“Good.”
Then, he walked very deliberately across the clearing toward Diggs. His gun was up again. He stopped and looked around at the bodies bleeding into the forest floor around us, then fixed his gaze on me.
“You know what I’m capable of?” he asked me.
I thought of the fire in the church; the bodies on the island last spring. My father’s disappearance. Jane Bellows’ murder.
“I do,” I said quietly.
“Good.” He released the safety on his gun and pressed the barrel into Diggs’ temple, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Stop looking. If you don’t, I will come back. And I will kill him. You understand?”
I nodded rapidly.
“That’s good. I won’t tell you again.”
He removed the backpack he’d been carrying, put the safety on his gun, and backed away.
“There’s water in there, and a compass. There’s a search party looking for you due east of here.”
“Okay,” I said. I could hardly hear my voice over the thundering of my own heart.
As he was walking away, the man turned back and looked at me. He smiled. “It’s always nice seeing you again, Ms. Solomon. I hope for your sake that we won’t meet again for some time, though.”
He holstered his gun and disappeared into the woods.
Chapter Thirty-One
Juarez
“She’s unexpected,” Juarez came up with finally, while he and Jamie were out searching late that night. Mandy had found an address on Three Brook Mountain where Max Richards had chartered a seaplane two years before. And now… Here they were. Searching another stretch of deserted woods in the hope that they might find something besides deer and bear and rogue vacationers.
