The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  He lifted the Remington to cover the shape on the ground and took cautious steps toward it, watching for the slightest movement. Nothing. But something was wrong. The body on the ground looked too large around the middle to be Decker.

  He slowed to a halt and found himself looking down at Taylor’s corpse, at the ligature marks and bruising around the neck. Wiley little thing. Should’ve cuffed her behind her back again. But there’d been no time and Taylor should’ve been able to handle himself against one lone prisoner.

  Now Keller had Taylor’s Mossberg. But even so, she was no real threat. The shotgun would be almost impossible to handle with her hands cuffed. He looked down at Taylor’s wide, staring eyes, the mouth agape and filling with rain. His ineptitude was emblematic of this whole enterprise.

  Amateurs.

  A noise, behind him, from the barn.

  He turned in time to see the main door fly open with a gunshot crack.

  Horses came galloping through the open entrance, running pell-mell out into the rain, whinnying and scattering across the field in all directions. Ressler dodged away from a black stallion that cut close to him but then shied away at the last second.

  He laughed. Was this Keller and Decker working together? It was a pathetic idea. Did they think they could distract him this easily?

  He looked toward the rear of the barn and almost immediately saw a subtle change in the spill of light against the wet grass and nearby trees. A door opening.

  A tall roan mare cantered by him, snuffling and snorting in the rain, shaking its head as if puzzled by this odd nocturnal jaunt but enjoying it all the same. Ressler dodged to one side of the animal, keeping his gaze centred on the back of the barn. Two figures were staggering away from the structure, making for the trees, both crouched and one supporting the other.

  The Remington tight in his hands, Ressler ran until he was in the dim light of the stable’s eaves, the damp scent of the wood mixing with the animal smell of horses. Shielded from Decker and Keller’s view, he followed the wall to the north end, grateful for the noise of the horses and the rain over top of that. He would catch the two in the open, and two blasts from the shotgun would bring this whole mess to a close.

  Amateurs.

  Eighty-Four

  Sanders stood hard on the brake and her car slewed to a stop across the road. In her headlights, three other vehicles were visible on the rain-washed gravel road, thirty metres ahead.

  Closest was Decker’s car. She could see that it was still running, vapour rising from the exhaust pipes and drifting upward in the rain. The driver’s door was wide open. No sign of Decker himself.

  Further down the road she saw what she thought might be Keller’s car and beyond that a third she did not recognize. A cop car, though—a red beacon flashing on the dashboard.

  It all felt wrong and she grabbed for the radio mic, ready to update Calgary Police dispatch and the RCMP as well, but a strange static was coming through the speaker. She tried twice to raise both police dispatches and got nothing, then realized she could no longer hear even regular radio traffic—cops attending collisions, bar fights, car crashes. Nothing.

  She took out her cellphone and tried to dial into CPS dispatch.

  Call Failed.

  “Well isn’t this fucking familiar.” Exiting the vehicle into the familiar icy mix of wind and rain, she plucked her Glock out of its holster.

  There was thrashing in the brush at the property’s perimeter off to her left, and Sanders spun toward it, bringing her pistol up.

  A horse galloped out of the trees.

  The tall Appaloosa, eyes gleaming black as midnight, skidded to a halt at the edge of the ditch lining the road and shook its head, perhaps perplexed or irritated by the car headlights. Eventually it centred its gaze on Sanders and snorted as if in inquiry.

  Sanders let go the breath she’d been holding. “Looks like we’re both having strange nights, huh?”

  The shotgun blast that shattered the air a second later got the horse moving again, splashing through the ditch and across the road, hooves churning mud and gravel up in desperate spray. It galloped by Sanders and off into the darkness of the adjacent field.

  By then Sanders was running, too, but toward the blast.

  Eighty-Five

  Ressler gripped the Remington tightly, wiping one hand, then the other against his jacket again and again to shed the endless slickness of the rain running over the shotgun. He was nearing the rear of the stable, the rain a roar in his ears and the whinnies and snorts of the horses at his back.

  At the corner of the building he slowed, jamming the Remington hard into his shoulder as he eased around the edge, ready to fire.

  At nothing…

  Where are they?

  He blinked and lowered the gun to wipe moisture from his face, then brought it up again, sweeping it back and forth, looking for any movement.

  Behind him, the wet rustle of grass. Too quiet for a horse.

  He whirled around, adrenalin lighting him up.

  And there behind him was Keller, Taylor’s Mossberg in her hands and the blank, black bore of the shotgun pointed straight at him.

  “Don’t fucking move.”

  The woman was bruised, battered, and torn. His handcuffs dangled from one of her bloody wrists, mocking him. She was trembling, in a thunderstorm of fear and pain and exhaustion. Like all the little girls were, all the ones he’d taken over the years.

  The fear did them all in. The fear made them hesitate when they should have run, should have fled, should have fought.

  But Keller’s eyes seemed hard, empty. More like the girls after their time with Hunt or his friends, when they were all used up and ready to die.

  Ressler smiled at her. “You don’t want to point a gun at me, Ash. This is a misunderstanding. We can work this all out if you just put the shotgun down.”

  She blinked, dazed-looking, and that was enough. He shifted, easing the shotgun toward her.

  “Don’t—”

  The moment her lips moved, he raised his weapon. Humans couldn’t speak and shoot at the same time. It wasn’t in their nature. In a half second he would be firing lead balls into her, rendering her into shredded ribbons of bleeding flesh. Wiping her off the earth.

  There was a thunderous roar and Ressler was slapped off his feet as if by a gigantic fist. He flew back into an icy pool of mud.

  The suddenness of it all was shocking, disorienting. Now the rain was pounding onto his face and his body was afire, acid volcanoes of pain erupting all over his chest and belly and arm. He tried to roll over, but a hundred searing points of agony held him back, pinning him to the cold, slick ground.

  Keller walked forward to stand over him, the wispy fog of propellant rising from the bore of her shotgun, that same hard emptiness on her face. He heard a boney snap as she racked the Mossberg, sliding another shell into the barrel.

  Eighty-Six

  Impossible. How could this have happened?

  Ressler struggled to breathe, cold shock sleeting through him. He tried again to grab for his shotgun and felt only an empty torment. When he looked, he saw that his right arm was half gone, a bloody mangled mass of shredded tissue and shattered bone.

  Impossible.

  But he saw it clearly now. The horses had been a feint, but so had Keller and Decker’s dash from the stable. They’d doubled back, or she had at least. Right through the stable, probably. Fast. Keller was a runner, he suddenly remembered.

  And now it was as if he, too, were running a race. He coughed and tasted blood. It felt like he was drowning, and he wondered how many of her shotgun pellets had pierced his lungs.

  “Where are they?” Keller was looking down at him with undisguised rancour.

  A new horror spiked inside him as his future flashed before him. If he somehow survived this, he would be in prison for the rest of his life. A maimed prisoner with a life sentence in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell, sequestered twenty-three hours a day to protect him
from the other inmates, who would despise him only a little less than they did the guards. Cop. Child trafficker. Pedophile. Rapist. What was he going to say? “Actually, I only kidnapped children for the pedophiles.”

  His sanity would never withstand a year in prison, never mind a lifetime.

  Keller leaned over him, the shotgun in his face.

  “Where’s Robin?”

  Robin? The girl at Oakes’s farm? Yes.

  The pain in Ressler’s body was all-encompassing, but nothing like life-long confinement would be. And Keller held in her hands the power to take it away, if he could make her use it.

  “I buried her,” he gasped, “in the field.”

  “What?” He saw her hatred dissolve into disbelief and horror.

  It took all Ressler’s strength to drag air into his lungs. “That Indian bitch… I buried her in the field… after I finished screwing her.”

  “No… No. You tell me where she is.”

  He tried for a laugh but it came out as a gurgle. “Slit her throat… after I was done. She was a prize... piece of ass...”

  He watched Keller’s forefinger settle on the shotgun trigger. Yes yes yes, do it.

  Then a shout rose from behind her.

  “Police! Drop the gun, Keller!”

  Ressler watched Keller pause, thinking about it. Her eyes locked with his, cold, like the rain on his face.

  “He killed her!”

  Rage in Keller’s voice, a soulless thirst for revenge. Good.

  The voice barked again. “I mean it, Keller! Drop the fucking gun!”

  Keller held his gaze, the cold fire in them pulsing like a heart. Then she threw the shotgun aside and raised her arms.

  Ressler steeled himself. He had only one more chance.

  Eighty-Seven

  Sanders’s heart was pounding in her chest as she held the Glock centred on Keller’s back, a thousand questions ricocheting around her brain, chief among them Where is Decker?, What the hell went on here?, And why the hell does Keller have a pair of handcuffs dangling from her wrist?

  “Step back toward me, Keller. Slowly.”

  The man on the ground was still alive, however long that lasted, gasping and panting despite his horrific wounds. His face looked familiar. A cop?

  “Sanders, do you have a working phone?” Keller’s voice was shaking but oddly flat, the emotion sucked out of it.

  How did Keller know her phone wasn’t working?

  But police procedure was clear. Keller had just shot a man. Before she did anything else, Sanders was going to get her cuffed… again.

  “Shut up, Keller. Step back toward me, now. Do not make any sudden moves.”

  Keller didn’t move an inch. “Sanders, Decker is shot. We need STARS. Do you have a working phone?”

  The man—the cop?—groaned at this and Sanders saw him cough up blood as he twisted onto his side.

  “Sanders, you need to trust me.” Keller turned to her slowly, hands raised, her expression unreadable. She was covered in blood and scrapes and bruises, her wrists raw and lacerated and her clothes coated with mud. She looked like she’d been in a barroom brawl.

  “Decker is shot,” Keller repeated. “We need a phone.”

  Her attention on Keller, Sanders almost missed the glint of metal in Ressler’s left hand as he rolled onto his back again. Pistol.

  “Gun!”

  Keller’s eyes widened as Sanders rushed toward her, left arm arcing out to shove Keller aside as Ressler fired.

  She heard the bullet whistle by her left ear, in the space Keller’s head had occupied only a second before. She centred the Glock on Ressler’s torso and fired, the gun kicking and Ressler’s body jerking each time a bullet punched into his chest.

  She watched the man sputter again—once—blood pouring out of his mouth. Then he seemed to relax into death, his mouth filling with blood and rain making shallow pools in his open, sightless eyes.

  Keller had fallen to the ground and was staring at Ressler’s corpse, her face slack. After a moment, she turned to Sanders. “He…” She seemed to lose her train of thought, shaking her head and getting to her feet, unsteady and wavering.

  “You okay?” Sanders said it out of habit. She felt numb.

  She’d shot a man once before, six years prior. A guy on meth tried to crash through a police barricade and wound up pinning a traffic sergeant against his own car. The addict survived to enjoy prison. Two years after, the sergeant made a toast in Sanders’s honour at his retirement party. She had endured several weeks of nightmares, but eventually they’d faded.

  How many years of bad dreams after killing a cop?

  Keller was jogging toward the stable.

  “Keller! For fuck’s sake, halt!”

  Keller kept going and Sanders had no choice but to give chase, ducking through the door on the north end of the stable after Keller and watching her collapse to her knees beside Decker.

  Sanders’s partner was on his back, unconscious, his skin soaked with rain and sweat and blood. Keller’s fingers were on his neck, checking his pulse.

  Keller looked up at her. “He’s bleeding into his abdomen. There’re vet supplies around here somewhere. I have to find them.”

  Sanders locked eyes with her. The woman was bleeding and trembling and looked about to collapse, but she had killed at least one person tonight and shot a cop. Sanders knew exactly what she should do—secure Keller, render first aid to Decker, then find a phone.

  Now there was going to be one more thing to explain to the deputy chief because there was no fucking way she was going to cuff the only paramedic in a hundred square miles when her partner was dying.

  “Do what you have to do.” She turned and ran toward the house, about to do a little breaking and entering.

  Eighty-Eight

  After the STARS chopper lifted off, Keller allowed Sanders to lead her to one of the arriving ground ambulances. In a few short minutes Decker would be in the same trauma bay that Lang had been in less than twenty-four hours prior, and the docs would be puzzling over the IV Keller had started with a 14-gauge metal needle to infuse two litres of equine Normosol. Not quite what the doctor would have ordered, but close enough to keep Decker breathing, and that was all that counted.

  Sometime in the near past Sanders had draped a thick coat around Keller’s shoulders, which had done nothing really except encapsulate her in her own wet clothes, but at least the wind wasn’t cutting her to the bone anymore.

  “Let’s get you seen to, Ash.”

  Sanders directed her toward the nearest ambulance, walking with her arm around Keller’s shoulders.

  “Not going to arrest me?”

  “It’s somewhere on my list.” Sanders looked her up and down. “First things first.”

  Keller glanced around to see the equestrian centre was growing more crowded by the minute. Four RCMP cruisers, five Calgary Police vehicles, and coroner and crime scene technicians from both services were on their way. A lot could happen in twenty minutes when your conversation with a police dispatcher started with phrases like multiple shooting, child-kidnapping, and most especially police officer down. A neighbouring farmer had even appeared, with his bleary-eyed teenage sons in tow, to help corral the horses.

  “I should…” Keller trailed off. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t die now, but the familiar fuzzy aura of narcosis was drawing around her again. “The girls…”

  Sanders turned toward the shed, where several cops were working to get past a highly secure doorway that looked like it led underground. “You’re not going anywhere near it.”

  “I need…” Keller faltered, dazed, eyes on the shed.

  “Christ, you’re a pain in the ass.” Sanders took Keller’s arm, far more gently than Keller thought she deserved, and led her on to the ambulance.

  A medic named Chandra bandaged Keller’s wrists and—reluctantly, with Keller’s prodding and under Sanders’s baleful gaze—started a saline lock and gave her another two milligrams
of Narcan.

  “You look like you need morphine, not Narcan. You definitely need to go to the hospital,” Chandra said, his eyes sad as he took in the plethora of ugly wounds covering her arms.

  “I’ve been to hospitals. They’re not that much fun.”

  “You—”

  “I’m not fucking going anywhere. Not yet.”

  “Play nice, Keller,” Sanders said.

  Keller did feel bad when she saw the pain in Chandra’s expression. “Not yet, please.” She glanced out into the darkness, at the men and women in uniform striding purposefully back and forth, then up at Sanders. “Not till they find them.”

  “If they’re here,” Sanders said, following her gaze.

  “They’re here,” Keller said, exhaustion crowding some of the certainty out of her voice.

  There was a shout from across the field. More followed. “Get the medics!”

  Keller brushed by Sanders before the cop could stop her and leapt out of the ambulance, running across the field, not caring about the crime scene, not caring about anything.

  She could hear Sanders behind her, swearing as she gave pursuit, but no one else tried to stop her.

  A group of cops was clustered around the entrance. Between the bodies, she saw a dirt floor, strewn with rusty farming tools from another age. Several looked to have been dragged back to reveal a far more modern stainless steel door set in a concrete panel in the ground.

  One of the RCMP constables noticed her and a look of disquiet crossed his face, some mix of pity and duty that said, You shouldn’t be here. It was Hardy, she realized. Hardy, from that long-ago night.

  “Good work, Keller,” he whispered.

  Sanders came up beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder, much firmer than before. “Keller, I swear to god—”

  There was a metallic snap as bolt cutters worked through the padlock securing the door, and the cops began prying back panels.