Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  “Did you?” she screamed.

  She was kneeling, trying to conceal her body behind the tree. And she was rocking back and forth, her long hair swaying, jerking, her hands covering her face, then sliding over her head like she expected incoming fire.

  I crouched in front of her, touched her shoulder gently. “I’m—”

  She threw her head up, bucked, struggled. “No!” she screamed again. Her eyes were wild, her face contorted.

  I pulled her toward me, held her against my chest until she stopped struggling, until she stopped thrashing, stopped pounding her fists into my shoulders, my face, my neck. And then I held her until she stopped crying, held her tight like when she was a baby. I put my jacket on her and zipped it up. Still holding her with one arm, I rummaged in my pack with the other. On my county-issued sat phone, I dialed a number I knew by heart.

  “Darren,” I barked when he answered.

  “Camille,” he said urgently. “What the hell is going on? I’ve been calling you all day.”

  “I’m out on the Sinlahekin Road, number one-five-one-three-four. The drive may be blocked; you’ll need to come by helicopter.”

  “What?” he said, panicked. “What the fuck are you doing there? Get out now! You don’t—”

  “No,” I said fiercely. “Everything is here: the helicopter, the Suburban, that truck, the new lab. And everything from that house, everything they used to torture Patrick. And they’re here: Kingman and Victor and—”

  “Stop! You can’t just go in there!” Darren shouted.

  “You don’t understand. I saw it, Darren. I saw them.” In the dark, I touched the pocket where my county cell phone was secured. “I have video of them talking about a job. Spraying the helicopter down with bleach. Hard evidence. It’s everything you need to put them down.”

  “No!” Darren commanded, his voice cold and hard as steel. “You don’t understand how much is at stake!”

  I paused. The wind had picked up, was cutting through the trees. Sophie was sniffling, her head still on my shoulder, her forehead nestled into the curve of my neck. But in the background, faintly now, was the thumping music and the laughing and the shouting and the squealing of dozens of people who had stood by, who had partied on while my daughter was—

  My chest tightened. I understood exactly how much was at stake.

  “Camille!” Darren shouted, his voice distorted, scratchy over the tenuous connection. “Camille!”

  A fragment fell into place.

  The file on Darren’s coffee table. The FBI and the informant and the carefully assembled case notes. The years of criminal records. The patterns. The dead. And I realized what I had done, the ball I had pushed off the cliff. What would happen when they realized Sophie was gone. What would happen when they found Ibensen. And how small, how insignificant Patrick Beale was to Darren’s mission. How much of his mission I had compromised.

  But Sophie was my mission. I clenched my jaw and held her tighter.

  “It’s too late,” I growled. “It’s too late for that.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Camille. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  “Just get out here,” I said, my voice sounding distant and dead calm in my ears. Sounding like someone else’s, someone who was in control. “And bring the feds.”

  23:41 PDT.

  We were nearly back to the Bronco when I heard the helicopters, four of them, I’d guess. Then the megaphones, booming and indistinct, echoing off the hills. Then the screams—whispering faintly in the wind—as the party people scattered. Gunshots. Single fire. Small arms. Repeated. King. Victor. Dougie. Followed by multiple rounds, the staccato crack of an AR-15. The patrols.

  I stopped, turned back. Saw the spotlights strafing the trees, then swoop wide as the helicopters maneuvered out of range. Saw the flash of the rifles responding from the air. The screams grew louder.

  Sophie, shivering in my jacket and my socks, her legs torn by the underbrush, started to say something. I shook my head and for once, she let it go.

  24

  When I opened the door to Sophie’s room the next morning, the first rays of sun were creeping across the floor. I pulled the white curtains shut, turned and watched her sleep, waiting for her to stir, to wake. But she was in deep, her blue T-shirt gently rising and falling, her hair knotted, still damp on the pillow.

  I’d made her shower when we got back. I knew I shouldn’t have. I knew I should have taken her to the hospital, had an exam done, made sure she was all right. But the doctors would ask questions I didn’t want to answer, questions I didn’t want Sophie to answer. Not now. Not ever. And then the cops would come, and I couldn’t allow that. They couldn’t know she had been there, couldn’t know what she had been doing. No one could know. And Ibensen … no one could know anything about him either.

  When Sophie left the bathroom that night, so late it was almost morning, waves of steam trailed after her. She slammed her bedroom door and didn’t say a word to me, not to scream, not to rail, not to blame or hate. She was in shock. Maybe. Shock because she had nearly been raped or because her mother had come out of nowhere, swooped in, did damage. Claimed her. Or maybe she was just rigid with anger.

  I stood in the kitchen, my fingertips grazing the counter, my thighs tensed to run. I didn’t say anything. But I stayed awake, on watch. Cleaned the Beretta, bleached every inch of it, then reloaded. Burned our clothes and my supplies slowly, carefully, in my old Weber and scattered the hot ashes in the gravel behind the mart. Sprayed down the Bronco’s fake leather seats and rusting doors. Prowled the dark windows, listened for tires on the cracked tarmac. But there was no truck, no sheriff’s cruiser, no boots on gravel, no helicopter. No crack of gunshots. No whistling of incoming rockets. No roar of incendiaries. Just the wind rattling the window screens and, in the distance, the flash and bang of dry lightning arcing from the clouds, striking the hills of the Okanogan.

  25

  Rhonda Faye walked into the mart just before seven. She told me I looked like hell. She told me to go back to bed. I nodded, said, “Maybe tomorrow.”

  She did her thing: quarterly Sunday inventory and a deep clean. I told her it was pointless. She insisted, every time. I retreated to the office, booted up my new laptop, and stared mindlessly at the home screen. The background was water, churning white and crashing into the ocean, a thousand little falls. And above the water, rocks, craggy and orange, untouched by the spray.

  Stiffly, I rested my elbows on the desk and sank my head into my hands. In the field, after a mission, you return to your home base. If you’re lucky, you go to a green zone, someplace safe where other soldiers are on watch. Someplace you can relax and let your guard down. Recover. Without that, you get more and more exhausted, closer to the water, closer to its icy embrace and pounding waves. Until, eventually, you jump from the rocks into the churn.

  I wanted to climb back to the top, to stand in the sun and look out at the ocean, to see into forever. But I needed a toehold, some way to scale the rocks, to make myself whole.

  Slowly, I opened my eyes, fumbled for the mouse, and opened Facebook. In the few days since I had logged in, Mike Havers had sent five messages, asking more questions, asking for an update. Telling me that his momma had hope, that I had given her hope on her sickbed. I smiled a little, even while I cringed. I was no one’s savior, no one’s giver of hope. But maybe I could return to them some kind of peace. So I told Mike Havers what I thought was true: that James Kingman had been arrested, that he would face justice for someone’s death, if not Paul Havers’s. When I was done, I deleted the account. I had nothing else to say to him.

  What next? I needed to talk to the Beales, to tell Christine it was over, that she could stop crying, at least for Patrick. But my bones were heavy, my brain fogged. I needed sleep, needed to check on Sophie, to make sure she was still there. Unsteadily, I stood, but before I reached the door, there was a sharp knock.

  Rhonda’s voice, muffled by the solid wood d
oor: “Boss.” Just outside, she stood tensely, her eyes narrowed, her lips tight. “Someone here to see you.”

  In front of the ice cream cooler was a woman, a stranger with a blue suit and black skin and a tight knot of braids on the crown of her head.

  “Camille Waresch,” she drawled, her accent straight out of New York. “Darlene Oyinwe, FBI. You got a few minutes for me this morning?”

  Standing in the doorway to the office, I swallowed, nodded. Without breaking eye contact, I said to Rhonda, “Sophie’s not feeling well; she’s asleep upstairs. Take care of her.”

  * * *

  At the Sheriff’s Office in Okanogan, the deputy driving the cruiser let us off in the back of the building, then pulled away before Agent Oyinwe had even entered the code on the keypad next to the heavy steel door. She held the door, then took the lead down the hallway and on through a set of double doors with another keypad. Down that hallway were four rooms with four numbers mounted at the top. Between them, two doors marked “Observation.” At the end, a blank wall.

  Agent Oyinwe held the door of room two open, then offered me a cup of coffee. I refused.

  “Take a seat,” she said, then sat down in one of the metal chairs herself.

  I stood there for a moment, taking it all in: the one-way mirror on one wall, the cameras mounted in two corners of the ceiling, the fluorescent tube lighting. The paint, brown and beige, like a white man in Darren’s uniform.

  I retrieved my phone from my pocket, sat down, and slid it across the steel table.

  “What’s this?” Oyinwe said and glanced at the phone like it was an amusing toy.

  “It’s all on there,” I said. “The evidence you want.”

  “Is it?” she said. “And what’s that, then?”

  “The photos. The video.”

  Oyinwe was still smiling faintly.

  “I told Darren about them last night,” I said. “Isn’t that what you brought me down here for?”

  “Well, thank you, Ms. Waresch,” she said, her voice lazy and calm. “I’ll just see if one of my colleagues can take a look at this while we’re talking.”

  She stood, scooped up the phone, then passed it to someone just outside the door.

  “How long will it take?” I asked.

  “Not long,” she said.

  The second hand swept over the face of the clock mounted over the mirror. I was exhausted, running on vapor. Paranoid without my weapon, taken “for everyone’s safety” before I’d even walked into the building. Anxious about my kid who was alone, still vulnerable.

  “Is that all?” I snapped.

  Oyinwe frowned. “Oh, I’m sorry about the delay. My colleague will be here very soon.”

  And then, on cue, the door handle turned, the door opened into the room, and from behind it stepped a man with sun-browned skin and flaming orange hair, wearing a swanky gray suit.

  “Lucky Phillips?”

  “Camille,” he said and bent toward me, his hand outstretched, his white teeth dazzling behind a wide smile. “Special Agent Phil Paulsen. My friends call me Lucky.” He tilted his head. “Are you my friend?”

  * * *

  Hours later, I had lost my cool.

  “This is a waste of time!” I shouted from the corner of the interview room. My shoulders were braced against the wall, my heels dug into the brown linoleum floor.

  At the table, Lucky and Oyinwe had removed their jackets, pushed their open laptops to the edges of the table.

  “These people weren’t there,” I said, pointing at the stacks of photographs—grainy surveillance, crystal-clear mugshots, distorted photocopies—in front of the agents. “I don’t have any clue who they are. They’re not the ones you want!”

  Oyinwe leaned forward, her hands folded on the table. “Who do we want, Ms. Waresch?”

  “Kingman!” I groaned. “Victor. They killed that kid. They killed Patrick Beale. And his brother—that little shit Todd. He told them Patrick was an informant. He tattled.”

  “No, Camille.” Lucky sighed.

  “He did! He told …”

  Me, I started to say. But he hadn’t. That morning in the cemetery replayed in my head. Todd in his gray shirt, on the green grass, blood seeping out of his face where I had hit him on the way down. There was a look in his eye, an evil, knowing look. But he didn’t confirm what I had accused him of. No, Todd was too smart for that.

  Lucky shook his head. “Todd doesn’t matter. And even if he told them, that’s not a crime. He’s not law enforcement. He’s just a kid.”

  “Fine. Todd doesn’t matter, but the rest of it is true. It’s all on the video I gave you!” I scraped my fingernails through my hair. “It’s all in the photographs!”

  Lucky shook his head. “They’re not enough.”

  “Then what is enough? What do you people want?”

  “We want them all,” Oyinwe said.

  Then Lucky, his eyes hard as flint: “And we would have had them.”

  Fury burned through my shredded nerves. Words I could never say rose in my throat: “My d—” I clamped my mouth shut.

  “Your what?” Oyinwe snapped.

  “Fuck this,” I spat. “Why don’t you fucking ask them? Ask Kingman. Interrogate him. Fucking torture him if you have to. Turn him. Isn’t that what the feds do?”

  Oyinwe and Lucky exchanged glances. He raised his eyebrows. She opened her mouth.

  “James Kingman is dead.”

  I blinked. “You shot him.”

  Oyinwe shook her head. “No.”

  “I heard you open fire.”

  “Our colleagues returned fire, Ms. Waresch.”

  “Whatever.” I shrugged. “You shot him.”

  Lucky leaned forward. “He was dead when they got to the compound, Camille. Executed.”

  “What?”

  “Taken out. Taken down.” Lucky gripped an imaginary pistol and pulled the trigger. “Boom. Single shot to the head.”

  “What, like in the movies? Kneeling and begging for his life?”

  “No. He was standing, probably walking away.”

  “But close range?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A handgun,” I murmured.

  Lucky nodded. “Probably. Initial ballistics are iffy, but it was probably a Glock.”

  I shook my head. “When? Where?”

  “Afternoon, probably. Maybe early evening,” Oyinwe said. “In the building you identified as a lab.”

  “That’s impossible. I was there. I would have heard the shot.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “The shooter may have used a suppressor—”

  “Yes, I would,” I said, but then I paused. Remembered. “There were fans, several of them venting the lab. They were really loud.”

  “Yeah, and they were running last night, weren’t they?” Lucky said, like he was speaking to a child. “They were manufacturing around the clock.”

  “Yeah,” I said sarcastically. Then a memory slotted into place. “Kingman didn’t leave the building,” I said slowly. “No, I didn’t see him leave the building.”

  I pressed the palms of my hands into my eyes. What else had I missed? My memory flashed, another fragment fell into place.

  “But the other man went in with him.” I opened my eyes. “And he came out.”

  “Tell us more,” Lucky said quickly.

  “The other guy, he was a buyer … or something. You can hear him on my video. He was going to buy thirteen kilos of meth, but Kingman only had ten. He, the second man … he wanted the tarp and Patrick Beale’s shirt.” I shivered. “He wanted the pliers they used to torture him.”

  Hastily, Oyinwe began laying out the photographs again.

  “I didn’t see him in those,” I said, waving my hand.

  “Look at them again,” Oyinwe insisted, her fingers flashing as she flipped through the photos.

  Glaring at the top of her bent head, I slowly stood, walked back to the table, and looked. I shook my head while sitting down
.

  “Can you describe him?” Lucky asked.

  “Shorter than Kingman … two, three inches shorter maybe. He was wearing a ball cap and his hair was a little long.”

  “Black, white, Latino, Asian?” Lucky prompted.

  “White,” I said quickly. “His hair was dark, though. And he was thin, I guess. Or just not fat.” In my mind’s eye, the man faded, blurred. I pressed my fingers into my eyes, stretched the lids to the corners. Stars burst, blood pounded in my temples. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But his voice …”

  “You recognized his voice,” Lucky said eagerly.

  “Maybe.” Slowly, I shook my head, opened my eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “If we played a recording, could you identify him?” Lucky asked.

  “I … I don’t know.”

  Oyinwe raised an eyebrow at Lucky.

  He swallowed. “Yeah,” he said.

  Next to him, Oyinwe pulled her laptop closer. For a moment, her fingers flew over the keyboard, then audio began. Fabric rustled. Wind blew. White noise—a fan, maybe—droned. And distantly, a man spoke.

  “… about thirty feet left.”

  “That’s Kingman,” I said swiftly.

  A pause on the recording was filled with the steady in, out, in, out of breathing. My breathing.

  “… floor.”

  Another pause. Longer.

  “The fuck you do that for? … orders.”

  “That’s him,” I said. “The second man.”

  Oyinwe nodded. Lucky was leaning back in his chair, his arms folded, his eyes closed.

  Another pause, then the second man’s voice, but his words were unclear, only “… shirt …” drifting to the microphone.

  Kingman responded, “… pliers and the battery leads.”

  A few moments later: “The hell does he want with this stuff anyway? The kid’s dead.”

  Then, the second man, his voice angry, taunting: “You fucked up, Jimmy …”

  A gust of wind swept across the microphone.

  “—the fuck, man?” Kingman again. “You know me. You know I’m gonna do it right.”