by Linda Howard
“What if we could turn back time?” Ruth asked softly, bringing his attention back to her. “What if, knowing what would happen, I could go back to the day before it happened and insist she go to the hospital?”
“I don’t believe in ‘what if,’ ” he said, though he kept his tone gentle. “You deal with what is, and go on.”
“You don’t wish things were different?”
“A thousand times, and in a thousand ways. But they aren’t different. This is reality, and sometimes reality sucks.”
“This one certainly does,” she said, stroking her hand over her daughter’s tombstone.
“Do you still come here often?”
“Not the way I used to. I haven’t been in a couple of months, and I wanted to bring fresh flowers. I haven’t been bringing them the way I did at first, and it makes me mad that I don’t remember all the time now.”
“Like I said, you go on.” He put his arm around her waist again and turned her, urging her away from the grave.
“I don’t want to forget her.”
“I remember more about when she was alive, than when she died.”
“Do you remember her voice? Most of the time I can’t; then all of a sudden it’s as if I hear an echo of it and for a second I remember exactly; then it’s gone again. Her face is always clear, but it’s so hard to remember her voice.” She stared hard at the trees, fighting tears and, for the moment, winning. “All of those years, all of those memories. Baby, toddler, little girl, teenager, woman. I can see her at every stage, like snapshots, and I wish I had paid more attention, tried to remember every little thing. But you never think about your child dying; you always think you’ll go first.”
“There’s a school of thought that we come back to learn things, experience things that we haven’t had in our previous lives.” He didn’t believe it himself, but he could see how the idea would bring some comfort.
“Then I must have had great lives before,” she said. She gave a delicate snort. “And great husbands.”
The comment caught Knox by surprise and he chuckled. Looking down at her, he saw her biting her lip to control a smile. “You’re tough,” he said. “You’ll make it.”
“So, what are you up to?” Ruth asked as they reached her car. She hadn’t cried, and she might see that as a victory even though grief still lay like a veil over her fine-boned features. She asked the question to completely pull herself out of the past, not because she was really interested in the answer.
“I’m heading out to Jesse Bingham’s. Somebody slashed the tires on his tractor and killed some of his chickens.”
“Why on earth would anyone hurt those poor birds?” she asked, frowning. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, I’m getting a lot of concern about the chickens.”
“But none about Jesse or his tractor tires, huh?” The frown eased from her forehead and she laughed as he hugged her.
He opened the car door for her and out of habit watched to make certain she buckled her seat belt. “Take care,” he said as he closed the door, and she gave him a little wave as she started the car and drove off.
Knox returned to his own car, wishing he hadn’t seen her. She made him feel guilty, as if he should still be mourning as deeply as she did. He couldn’t. He didn’t want to. He wanted to find someone else to love and laugh with, have sex with, someday get married and have kids with, though damn if he had much chance of that, considering the rut he’d dug for himself.
He pulled his mind back to the job and drove out to the Bingham farm to see what he could make of the vandalism. Sometimes people had a good idea of who had done it, or the neighbors had seen something, but in Jesse’s case just about everyone who knew him disliked him, and he had no nearby neighbors. He was one of those people who blamed everything that happened to him on someone else; if he had trouble with the engine in his truck, he immediately thought someone had poured sugar in his gas tank. If he lost something, he thought it had been stolen and filed a report. But they couldn’t just blow him off; they had to investigate every time he filed a report, because all it took was for him to be right one time and they’d catch hell if they hadn’t done their jobs.
Slashed tractor tires and dead chickens weren’t produced by Jesse’s sense of persecution, though. Either the tires were slashed or they weren’t, and the chickens were either dead or running around pecking at bugs. At least there was something concrete Knox could see.
The Bingham farm was set on a pretty piece of property, with wooded hills and neat fields. Jesse’s one good quality was that he took care of the place. The fences were always mended, the grass cut, the house painted, the barn and sheds in good repair. Jesse didn’t have any help on the place, either; he did it all himself even though he was in his late sixties. He’d been married once, but Mrs. Bingham had showed the good sense to leave him flat more than thirty years before, and go live with her sister in Ohio. Word was they’d never gotten a divorce, which to Knox’s way of thinking was a smart way to save money. Jesse sure as hell wasn’t going to find anyone else to marry him, and Mrs. Bingham was so put off marriage by her experience with him that she wasn’t interested in giving it another whirl.
Knox parked his car beside Jesse’s truck and got out. The house’s door opened as he started up the front steps. “Took your time getting here,” Jesse said sourly through the screen door. “I’ve got chores that I need to be doing, instead of sitting on my butt waiting for you to decide to show up.”
“Good morning to you, too,” Knox said drily. Seeing Jesse always surprised him. If there was ever a man whose appearance didn’t match his personality, it was Jesse Bingham. He was short, a little pudgy, with a round cherubic face and bright blue eyes; when he opened his mouth, though, nothing pleasant came out. The effect was that of a rabid Santa Claus.
“Are you gonna do your job, or stand there making sarcastic remarks?” Jesse snapped.
Knox took a firm hold on his patience. “Why don’t you show me the tractor and chickens?”
Jesse stomped his way toward the barn, and Knox followed. The tractor was parked in the shelter of a lean-to attached to the barn, and even from a distance Knox could see that the wheels were sitting flat on the ground. “There,” Jesse said, pointing. “Little bastards got all six of them.”
“You think it was kids?” Knox asked, wondering if a gang of kids had been extra busy last night.
“How the hell would I know? That’s your job, finding out. For all I know, it was Matt Reston at the tractor place, so he could sell me some new tires.”
“You said ‘little bastards.’ ”
“Figure of speech. Don’t you know what that is?”
“Sure,” Knox said easily. “Like ‘asshole.’ Figure of speech.”
Jesse gave him a suspicious look. In his experience, most people either took off in the face of his nastiness, or wanted to fight him. Knox Davis always kept his temper, but one way or another he made it plain he’d take only so much.
Knox carefully examined the ground; unfortunately, the prints in the dirt all seemed to be Jesse’s, which he could tell because they were small for a man. “You walked around out here?”
“How else would I look at all six tires?”
“If there were any prints in the dirt, you ruined them.”
“Like you could look at a footprint and tell who made it. I don’t believe that crap. Millions of people wear the same size shoe.”
Knox knew exactly where he’d like to plant a size eleven athletic shoe. He examined the tires, looked for fingerprints on the metal parts, but from what he could tell each tire had one slash in it: stab in a knife, pull downward. If the tractor had been touched at all except for that, he couldn’t tell it. Maybe he could get a fingerprint that wasn’t Jesse’s off it, though—if Jesse hadn’t wiped the tractor down this morning, and destroyed all the other evidence. Knox wouldn’t put anything past him, though he guessed the old fart wouldn’t slash his own tires, because that mea
nt he had to spend the money to replace them. Unless—“You got insurance for things like this, Jesse?”
“Course I do. Only a damn fool doesn’t have coverage these days, with people running around pretending to fall down on your property so they can sue you.”
“What’s your deductible?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“Just asking.”
Jesse’s face began to get red. “You think I did this? You think I’d slash my own tires?”
“If your insurance would buy new tires, and you have a low deductible, that would be a way to save money. You could get new tractor tires for, what, a hundred dollars?”
“I’ll call the sheriff!” Jesse bellowed. “Get your ass off my land! I want someone else—”
“It’s me or no one,” Knox interrupted. “As for who cut your tires, I can’t say. My job is to cover all the bases. You’re a base.” He walked around to the back of the barn, taking care to stay out of the soft dirt around the wall where Jesse kept the grass killed. There. The dirt was scuffed. He looked closer, and could make out what looked like one footprint on top of another one, as if someone had walked the same way, leaving as they had arrived. Bigger than Jesse’s foot, too.
“What about my chickens? You think I killed my chickens, too? Just take a look at them!” Jesse had followed him, still bellowing, and practically jumping up and down he was so mad.
Knox held up a hand. “Don’t mess up these prints, too. Just stay back, will you?”
“Changing your mind now, huh? Coming onto a man’s property and accusing him of—”
“Jesse.” Knox said it quietly, but the look in his eye when he turned his head to pin Jesse with his gaze said that he’d had enough.
Jesse stopped in mid-tirade, and contented himself with looking sullen.
“Show me the chickens.”
“This way,” he muttered, and led the way, back past the tractor, to a small chicken coop tucked up next to a trimmed hedge at the back of his house. “Look at that,” he said, pointing. “Six of them.”
Six hens lay scattered about the coop. There wasn’t any blood, so Knox guessed someone had wrung their necks. The sheer meanness of some people never failed to surprise and disgust him.
“Did you hear anything last night?”
“Nothing, but I was tired and had trouble getting to sleep, so I may have been sleeping too hard. Weird night. All those lightning flashes kept me awake, but I never did hear no thunder. Finally stopped around midnight, and I went to sleep. I guess all this happened after that.”
“Lightning flashes?” Knox asked, frowning. He didn’t remember any lightning, and he’d been out and around.
“Kind of low to the ground, too. Like I said: weird. Not like normal lightning. Just these white flashes, like big flashbulbs going off.”
White flashes, Knox thought. Wasn’t that a coincidence. What in hell was going on around here?
3
“The flashes might be related,” Knox said. “There was another vandalism last night where there was a white flash. Where were they, about?”
“Don’t see how in hell any flashes could have something to do with killing my chickens,” Jesse grumbled, but he turned and pointed toward the stretch of woods across the road. “Over there. My bedroom window faces that direction.”
“You said they were low.” Knox turned and surveyed the land: hilly and heavily wooded, like most of eastern Kentucky. “How low? Tree level, or higher than that?”
“Just above the treetops, I guess.”
“Got any guess as to the distance?”
Jesse was a farmer, and farmers knew distances. He could probably pace off almost an exact acre. That it had been night would hamper him some, but he had the advantage of knowing every hill and curve of his land. He narrowed his eyes as he squinted at the hill, too interested to bitch. “About a hundred yards in, I’d say. Can’t be much farther, or you crest the hill and go down the other side.”
Made sense to Knox. “I’m going to take a look over there,” he said. “Want to come along?”
“Let me put on my boots.”
While Jesse fetched his boots, Knox opened the trunk of his car and took out his own pair of field boots, which reached almost to his knees. The heavy leather protected against snake-bites. He was lucky in that he wasn’t allergic to either poison oak or poison ivy, but so far as he knew no one was immune to snake venom. He sat down on the porch step to put on the boots.
Jesse came out wearing a pair of green Wellingtons, and together they tromped across the road and into the woods. Knox thought this had to set a world record for length of time for Jesse not griping about something; it had been—what—five whole minutes? He checked his watch so he could keep track of how long the peace lasted.
The temperature was cooler under the thick umbrella of the trees. He wasn’t much of a woodsman, but he recognized the red and white varieties of oak, the maple trees, the hemlock. Wild azaleas dotted the undergrowth with delicate color. The rich, earthy smell teased his nostrils, prompting him to take deep, appreciative breaths.
“Smells good, don’t it?” Jesse observed, and for once his tone was quiet instead of strident. Knox made a mental note that the woods seemed to affect Jesse’s personality; maybe they should build a pen out here and keep him locked in it.
The land began to rise, the slope becoming steep. They pushed through bushes, tugged their clothing free of briars that grabbed at them, climbed over some rocks and went around bigger ones. Jesse kept looking around, mentally measuring the distance, since the foliage was too thick for him to see his house. They were near the crest of the hill when he stopped. “Right about here, I guess.”
Knox took his time, studying every detail around him. Just to the right, the foliage thinned out somewhat, but was still too dense to be called a clearing. The trees grew thick and tall here, with flowering dogwoods tucked up under the shelter of the bigger trees. As far as he could tell, none of the leaves looked singed or in any way disturbed, so whatever the flash was, either it hadn’t been close enough to do any damage or there was no accompanying heat.
The ground, though . . . something had disturbed it, in a vague way. He couldn’t find any prints, but clumps of decaying vegetation had been disturbed, with the darker, wetter side turned up. “Someone’s been here,” he said to Jesse, pointing to the forest floor.
“I see.”
“Wiped out their prints, though. Wonder what they were doing up here.” Knox did a full turn, looking for a break in the foliage that allowed a view of . . . something. “Nothing’s visible from here. I guess some sort of flare could have been set off, but for what reason?” He sniffed the air again, but smelled only that same rich, loamy scent. No one had burned anything recently, or the smell of smoke would have lingered in the air.
“An animal could have done this,” Jesse said, indicating the disturbed vegetation. “Two bucks mighta locked horns, or a fox could have caught a rabbit. Don’t see no blood, though. And I don’t see no point to this, other than wasting time.”
Knox checked his watch: thirteen minutes, a new world rec-ord for Jesse Bingham. “You’re right,” he said, turning around and reversing his path downhill. “I was just curious about those flashes.”
“I told you, it was heat lightning.”
“Not if you didn’t hear any thunder, it wasn’t. This was right on top of you.” Any type of lightning caused thunder. Moreover, the flash that had blinded the security cameras in town hadn’t been produced by lightning.
“Then maybe there was thunder and I just don’t remember it.”
“That isn’t what you said. You said you couldn’t hear any thunder.”
“I’m getting old. I don’t hear so good anymore.”
His patience shredded, Knox turned around and jabbed a finger into Jesse’s chest. “Stop messing with me. Now.”
Jesse glared at him, but before he could decide whether or not to risk pushing just a little
further, the radio on Knox’s belt crackled to life.
“Code 27,” said the dispatcher’s voice. “Code 27; 2490 West Brockton; 10-76.”
Knox was already heading downhill at a run. Code 27 meant “homicide/deceased person,” and 10-76 meant an investigator was needed. He fished the radio off his belt and keyed it to give the dispatcher his 10-4 and ETA.
“Hey!” Jesse yelled behind him, but Knox didn’t slow or in any way acknowledge him.
He was intimately familiar with all the roads in Peke County, even the back trails. West Brockton began life in Pekesville as simply “Brockton,” but once it crossed over the main highway it became West Brockton. The road was almost exclusively residential, upper-middle-class, though the farther you traveled from town the farther apart houses were. To the best of his recollection, 2490 was about a mile outside the city limits.
He got back to his car much faster than he’d gone up the hill. Grabbing the blue light from the seat, he slapped it on top of the car and turned it on, then jammed his foot down on the accelerator and left rubber as he rocketed onto the road.
He recognized the house as soon as he saw it, and not just because of the tangle of county cars and emergency vehicles parked on the far shoulder of the road. He knew the people who lived here—or at least he had. Right now he had no idea how many bodies he’d find inside.
No one had parked in the driveway or yard, at least not yet. He’d taught them well: let an investigator and Boyd Ray, their forensic guy, have a shot at finding some evidence before it was driven over, trampled, or otherwise obliterated—not that they had a big forensic department with all the newest equipment, but, hell, at least give Boyd a chance.
As Knox got out of his car one of the deputies, Carly Holcomb, came toward him. The expression on her freckled face was as serious as he’d ever seen it.
“This is Taylor Allen’s house,” Knox said. Taylor was a lawyer, and Knox thought, judging from his dealings with him, a pretty decent one, as lawyers went. He was fiftyish, divorced a couple of years back, and had quickly acquired himself a twenty-nine-year-old trophy wife.