The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  She took the turnoff and watched the lights of the highway recede in her rear view mirror as she sped east. Every few minutes, she flicked the car’s touchscreen, brought up Recents on her phone, tapped at Keller’s number, and waited.

  Eight kilometres off the highway she got a busy signal instead of a failed-call message.

  That was new. She’d been trying to connect with Ash Keller since she’d left. Now Keller might be talking to someone. Maybe. Electronic informants were as unreliable as human ones at times.

  She cruised on. Two kilometres before Highway 9, her phone trilled—not the burner, her phone—the opening bars from the old Miami Vice TV show. She’d made the mistake of letting it ring through the whole squad a year prior and decided never living the moment down was all the more reason to hang on to the ringtone.

  Decker came up on the screen and she toggled Answer. “Missing me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “About fifteen minutes from Keller’s place. What’s up?”

  “It’s a crime scene. Maybe an active one…” Sanders felt a sudden chill, as if she’d stepped out into the snowstorm, but Decker was still talking. “Keller may have shot somebody. I have RCMP on the way. You may want to hang back.”

  “Tell me the rest.”

  “I got through to her phone. She’s on the road, headed to a place she called ‘the palace,’ looking for her missing friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Robin Wolf Child, I think.”

  “And she shot someone?”

  “She says she shot someone. Says the guy was trying to kill her. But she also said she was high. Claimed he’d given her pills.”

  Jesus, Keller.

  “She gave me a name—Gavril Sechev. I’m running it now.”

  Sanders slowed as she approached the Highway 9 turnoff. The snow was thicker, wetter now, and it reminded her of the scuba dives she’d done years ago in Upper Kananaskis Lake when trying to locate a murder weapon, the silt so thick you couldn’t see more than two feet in front of you. She peered into the waves of white, saw no other traffic, and turned north. The navigation system beeped happily.

  “And waking the boss?”

  “Better fucking believe it.”

  “I’ll carry on,” she said, her heart racing now. She floored the accelerator, felt the car wobble and then settle into the snow.

  “You sure?”

  “What’s the ETA on the RCs?”

  She could almost feel Decker’s shrug over the static on the line. “They’re dealing with a half-dozen MVAs north of you on the highway, but they got a guy heading there right now.”

  “Then yes, I’m sure. What’s this shit about a palace?”

  “Her phone cut off. I’m trying to figure out what she meant…” Sanders heard the snap of his fingers against the keyboard as he interrogated Google. “Holy… There’s a place called the Palomino Palace about five klicks south of Bottrel. You know where Bottrel is?”

  She winced. “In Alberta somewhere? No.”

  “Twenty klicks north of Cochrane on the 22.”

  “That’s where Keller’s headed?”

  “It’s a guess… Only place called ‘palace’ I could find between here and Red Deer.”

  “Who says it’s rural—shit!” A gust of wind conspiring with a patch of icy road nearly drove her into the ditch. She eased back on the accelerator a hair.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. What if it’s in the city?”

  “Didn’t sound like she was headed to Calgary.”

  It made sense. Calgary probably had a hundred places with palace in the name—restaurants, doggy daycares, kids play-places—but most of those eliminated themselves if Keller was looking for a place a pedophile chose to stash his victims.

  Decker echoed her thoughts. “Feels rural, doesn’t it?”

  “Like Oakes’s farm. Yeah.” She glanced down at her console. “I’m five minutes out from Keller’s place.”

  “All right. Guess I’m going to Bottrel.”

  She heard the familiar squeak of Decker’s chair as he pushed back from his desk. She shook her head, despite the fact she knew Decker couldn’t see her. “No. Send the RCs.”

  Decker hissed dismissive impatience. “I don’t want to send too many people on wild goose chases in this shit. I can be there in less than an hour.”

  “Bullshit. I’ll head there now.”

  “Better not. You’re going into a crime scene with a shooter. What if there’re people there need help? Wait for backup and check it out.”

  “All right,” she said, but there was no way she was going to wait what could be hours for backup. Decker was on point. What if someone needed help? “I saw Croutier and his crew kicking around the squad earlier. How ’bout you rope him or some of his guys into this?”

  “Naw. They’re all set to arrest that music teacher.”

  Sanders knew the case well. A high school teacher and serial sexual offender, he’d been arrested by the Sex Crimes unit, then charged and released on bail, only to immediately reoffend. A guy who needed to be yanked off the street, now, and hopefully for good this time.

  “I’ll go up and look around,” Decker continued, “and sound the alarm if I see anything crazy.”

  “Okay, we’ll do it your way. Shit, Harry, your asshole friend Keller is going to make me late for dinner. Lobster, coquilles St. Jacques with Gruyère, and Chardonnay to wash it down. King scallops, Harry. Melt in your goddamn mouth.”

  “Dinner? In the middle of the night?”

  “I have a very understanding girlfriend,” Sanders said. “Till now, I should say… Now, I won’t be home till noon tomorrow and it’ll be cornflakes and a cold fucking shoulder.”

  Homicide: Missed dinners, missed parent-teacher meetings, missed baptisms. Missing life because of someone else’s death.

  “Call me when you’ve checked Keller’s place.” Decker’s voice was softer now. He’d guessed she wasn’t going to wait for backup. “Be careful. She said the bad guy was dead, but…”

  “You be careful too,” Sanders said. “I swear to god, if she’s just high and hallucinating or some such shit…”

  But it didn’t feel like that and they both knew it.

  “I’ll buy you guys dinner,” Decker said. “Cocktails St. Jacques and everything.”

  “Coquilles.” Sanders ended the call, allowing herself a brief smile while driving onward through the snow.

  Seventy-Four

  0220 hrs

  Keller glanced down at her phone.

  25%.

  Great, her phone was alive. But who would she call?

  Technically she had already called the police. Or they’d called her. Either way. So… done. She’d call 9-1-1 when she arrived at the Palace so that the more generic form of the police could trace her exact location.

  Family?

  Mom and Dad were gone, grandparents long ago. All her cousins were distant. The “Hey how you doing? on Facebook every three months” kind of family. So… friends. Well, friend.

  Except Lang was intubated. Atchison was not technically a friend. After that, what did she have? A big circle of acquaintances from the job, most of them distant since she’d outed herself as an addict-killer, though in truth she’d never been sure if it was the addict part or the killer part that pushed people away the most.

  No. Be honest. You were the one who distanced yourself from everything and everyone, and it was the fentanyl that started it. No point in blaming anyone else.

  Google Maps chirped. “Your destination is one hundred metres ahead, on your right.”

  The Palace, according to Sechev’s navigation system. The snow was wetter, more like rain now, coming at her in thick waves that cascaded over the car in arrhythmic hurricane squalls. She peered through the windshield and saw lights ahead and nothing else except a rural road awash with rain and blotchy snow, bordered by vague outlines of fences on either side.

  She felt herself ge
tting fuzzy again, edging into Cool Smooth. It was hard not to just let it happen. A Cool Smooth level of consciousness had shepherded her through a great deal of her life quite nicely over the last couple years.

  It just wasn’t going to do now.

  She pulled over and killed the headlights. No sense advertising her presence any sooner than she had to. Grabbing for the used syringe on the passenger seat, she fished one of the remaining multidose vials of naloxone out of her other pocket, spiking the needle through the rubber lid and siphoning the vial dry. Then did it again, with a second vial.

  More than she ought to need, but there was no margin for error. She was going into the lion’s den. She felt fear, and once another dose of Narcan was on board she’d feel that more keenly, but there was something else, too—some muddle of excitement in her hindbrain. Philby was right. All this time, it wasn’t just the fentanyl that had been dragging her below the water.

  But it was different now. That horrible night of Jonas’s death, of the murder—After all, you did murder him no matter what anyone says—and saving those girls… That night had drawn her back into the air again. Those girls had brought her to the surface, made her fight to take another breath.

  They’d saved each other’s’ lives and Keller was going to fight for those lives again if she had to.

  She lifted the syringe.

  All the usual injection sites were used up. Thighs. Ass. She had shoulders left but her right one was already messed up from her fight with Sechev and her cracked rib would make injecting either shoulder a torment.

  She took a deep breath and plunged the syringe into her left thigh, pushing down hard on the plunger and taking guilty pleasure in the pain and the subsequent rush of clarity.

  Rain was clearly overtaking snow now, washing the white away—a temporary victory. Winter would soon wander into Alberta in earnest and everything would be covered with snow, the plants frozen and dead beneath a white blanket to rise in the spring when sun warmed some secret place within them.

  Where will you be when spring comes? Beneath the ground or above it?

  She gritted her teeth, recapped the syringe, and slid it into her thigh pocket, where the last vial of Narcan waited beside it.

  Her phone was getting a clear signal now and she brought up the website for Palomino Palace.

  With the return of lucidity that Narcan inevitable bestowed, Keller oriented herself as best she could to the complex. It seemed to be a high-end equestrian centre, a riding stable for the rich. It extended over four hundred acres, including some woodland, a small lake, indoor and outdoor training arenas, and a large open field for show jumping. There was one main ranch house, a guest residence, and a large stable, along with two adjacent storage buildings.

  A large area to search on her own.

  Maybe you should try Decker again.

  Tempting, but no. He had sounded by turns doubtful and horrified—but certainly not trusting—during their last conversation. Sanders would no doubt be the same. At best Keller was a fuck-up in their eyes, just something in their way of finding a killer. At worst, she was a killer. A double-murderer now.

  Fuck it.

  She tapped Decker’s number one more time. It rang straight through to his voice mail. Talking to Sanders? No, not if it was a burner. Maybe it was off. He might even have tossed it already, done with her and on to other things.

  Give it up and get going. She turned back to the map of the ranch. Where to start?

  But that was false modesty. Much as she would wish to deny that she could think like a violent criminal, the fact was she’d been exercising her mind doing just that from the time she was fourteen. She examined the map of the facility and focused on the two storage buildings. Maybe one for feed, another for equipment?

  She knew as much about horses as she did about ducked-billed platypuses. But it seemed likely to her that the storage buildings at the rear of the property would be the best place to look for the kind of holding areas the Herzogs and Oakeses of the world might wish to create.

  She peered through the rain and made out lights shining in the main building fronting the property; someone residing on-site, she guessed. Odds were, whoever lived there was an active participant in any ugly goings-on, or perhaps just well paid to overlook them. Starting her illicit prowling farthest from the main house made sense.

  She turned back to the map on her phone and zoomed in on the rear of the property, where a side road wove through it. Would there be a gate back there, a service entrance? There would be deliveries of feed, surely, and maybe the horseshit would be carted out? She was pretty sure rich horse-riding adolescents and their parents would not appreciate seeing any more shit than was absolutely necessary. A back entrance seemed likely.

  Leaving her headlights extinguished, she slipped the car into drive and eased down the road until she came abreast of the property’s rear fenceline and the near invisible widening in the road that was the turnoff.

  Easing the car around, she pulled as far off the road as possible and stepped out. She retrieved the rain jacket she kept in the trunk and pulled it around her as the wind tore at her like a hungry animal.

  Just one more thing to do before she started trespassing and maybe breaking and entering—make sure the cops were here to witness anything she found.

  Dialling 9-1-1 at any time prior to this moment might have resulted in police arriving before she did. The owner or caretaker here would be prepared for such eventualities, would perhaps even offer to show the police around while in reality showing them nothing of real importance. And then all Keller’s accusations would be dismissed as the product of a traumatized addict’s paranoia. She would most definitely not be allowed to lead police on a free-for-all foray through the Palomino Palace on a quest for mythical kidnapping victims. Maybe, there’d be an investigation later, but an hour or two of grace was all the bad guys would need. The people running this place might flee or try bluffing it out while hiding anything incriminating, but the one thing they would not do is leave any kidnapping victims alive. Robin would be long dead and gone by the time anyone from law enforcement took a good hard look at the place.

  Calling 9-1-1 and going in herself was her best option, thereby creating an anthill of cops who would follow onto the property an addict who was also a murder suspect intent on doing who knew what. She’d just have to hope she found Robin and whoever might be with her before the cops caught up to her.

  She stepped toward the rear entrance. There was lighting around the stable, and closer, there were dim outlines of a fence running along a side road, as well as what looked like a gate farther ahead.

  You’ve waited long enough.

  She tapped at her phone and brought up 9-1-1, but headlights flashed at her suddenly, and she hesitated. Blue and red lights began blinking from the car’s grill, murky in the freezing rain.

  Cop.

  She swore. She’d wanted to be inside the compound and actively engaged in mischief before the cops arrived. She slid her cellphone into her back pocket and held her arms at her side, trying to look as calm and unthreatening as possible.

  The car halted fifty feet north of hers. The door opened and a man got out. He held a flashlight up in his left hand and she watched as it traced her tracks through the waning snow until they found her, standing staring at him.

  “Ash Keller?” Hint of a Maritime accent. The voice was distantly familiar, and sparked memories of fire and blood. “RCMP. Going to need you to walk toward me. Very slowly and no sudden moves.”

  She watched the figure’s right arm rise and understood it held a gun, aimed at her.

  “Nice and slow,” he repeated, voice rising against the wind and rain. “Come toward me.” A pause as the flashlight played around her, and she knew the figure was looking for accomplices and to assure himself that she wasn’t armed. She’d shot someone earlier, after all. “I know about what happened at your house,” the voice continued as if reading her mind. “I know it wasn’t y
our fault.”

  She hesitated, looking left and right. She could see shapes of structures not far distant—the storage buildings Google Maps had shown her. And there were trees and dense brush only footsteps away, with darkness beyond all that. She could hide, escape, find Robin and the others…

  “We know what you’re trying to do,” the voice said.

  “There are kidnap victims somewhere on this property,” she shouted back at the figure. “Children, being held here.”

  “We know,” the voice said, commanding and reassuring. “There are more police coming. We’re going to lock down this place and find them all and put the people who did this behind bars.”

  She shivered, but the wind driving the rain through her jacket was only part of it. She was running on the waning effects of naloxone and adrenalin. Fatigue poisons and fentanyl metabolites were clogging her brain.

  “Ash, you’ve been through a lot.” The voice was gentle. “Do you remember me? I helped you out at the farm where they… where the girls were.”

  She peered into the flashlight’s beam. Looking for something she recognized.

  “I was there when you saved them.”

  The RCMP guy from GIS. The one from Oakes’s farm.

  “Ressler?”

  “That’s right.” He stepped forward, his pistol still pointed at her, his flashlight running up and down her form until he was certain she wasn’t holding anything remotely like a weapon. “Need you to be calm, Ash.” He stepped closer as he spoke.

  “I am calm.” And it wasn’t exactly a lie. She was pretty damn calm, considering.

  She could hear Philby’s voice in her head. “It’ll all come crashing down. You’ll hit a breaking point and want to curl into the fetal position.”

  Sure. Maybe. But not yet.

  She looked up and down the road for the flashing lights that would herald Ressler’s backup. “How long till your backup gets here?”

  “A few minutes. Bad night, crashes everywhere.” His voice was softer now, friendly even. “Ash, I need to take you into protective custody while we take this place down.” He lifted his head, nodding to his left and right, taking in the ranch around them, the buildings shrouded in the dark rain. “We’ll get it all straightened out, but for your protection, I’m going to have to place you in the back of my car, okay?”