by Mason Cross
I thought back to our conversation the other night. “You said you knew him back then, but not well, right?”
“Everybody around here knows everybody to some extent, sure. If I saw him walking along the street I knew his name and whose brother he was and where he lived. But no, I didn’t know him know him.”
“You never talked to him?”
She shrugged. “I met him at a couple of parties, I guess. Before Adeline went missing. Maybe a couple of conversations.” She thought back. “I don’t want to sound conceited or anything, but I think he might have liked me.”
“But that wasn’t exactly unusual back in high school. Boys liking you.”
She glanced at me, a suspicious look like she was wondering if that was a line. It wasn’t, just the truth. “Small town. You look halfway presentable and you’ll get some attention.”
I said nothing, because what I wanted to say was that she would have gotten attention in a town of three thousand or a town of three million, and that really would have sounded like a line. The fact it was true didn’t change that.
“So you had a couple of conversations.”
She nodded. “This would have been the summer before Adeline disappeared. After that, he was the one getting the attention. Though a different kind of attention. The brother of that poor girl, you know? He was all alone, I think a lot of people wanted to mother him at first. I got that too, of course, because my dad …” She closed her eyes and started again. “I played along though, went to the counseling sessions, thanked people when they stopped by to check Mom and I were okay. David didn’t play the game. He pushed them away. Started getting into trouble. Fights, drunkenness.”
“Understandable.”
“Completely understandable,” she agreed. “But you know what places like this are like. Or maybe you don’t. People want to help, but if you turn that down, you’re the bad guy. And then it got worse.”
“The cops started looking at him for the killings.”
“He didn’t help himself. Truth was he stuck out before it all happened. Long hair, stoner, listens to metal. This was 2003 by the calendar, but we have a time difference in Bethany. In some ways it’s 1953, you know what I mean?”
I did. A familiar story. High-profile case, no good leads, the authorities under pressure to nail somebody. You start to look at the misfits, the oddballs. David Connor fit the bill, and even more so because he was a relation to one of the victims.
“But he was ruled out,” I said. “No way it was him, right?”
“No way.” She sounded certain. The same way she sounded when she said the 2003 killer was dead.
“What happened to his folks?” I asked. I knew they were both gone by the time Adeline had disappeared, but not the circumstances.
“Their mom died years before. I don’t know exactly when, but I guess when Adeline was a baby. Their dad had kind of a reputation as a drunk and a bully. People were surprised when he disappeared too, but only because he had stuck around that long. I don’t think he was what you would call a positive role model.”
“When did he leave?”
“Maybe six months before what happened to Adeline. David was eighteen, so I guess as far as the authorities were concerned, they were all growed-up and somebody else’s problem.”
We were approaching the turnoff into the woods. I told Green to slow down. I wondered about Connor’s motivations in skipping surveillance. There could be any number of reasons he would want to do that.
“You don’t think he killed the people back in 2003,” I asked. “What about now?”
Before she could answer, Green’s phone rang. She pulled over to the side of the road. She checked the screen, raised an eyebrow and answered.
“Feldman?”
A pause, and then a sharp intake of breath.
“Where?”
She listened, her mouth half-open in shock.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
She hung up and looked at me. “They just found Roland Roussel dead. And David Connor’s pickup was spotted driving away from the scene.”
50
Isabella Green
They forgot about the turnoff to the Marion house. Isabella made the return trip into town at twice the speed. She filled Blake in on what Feldman had told her during the phone call on the way.
Roussel had been found shot to death behind the wheel of his car about two miles outside of town, on the north road. A member of the public had called it in, but had either been too distraught to give his name, or hadn’t wanted to. The caller said he saw an orange pickup truck driving fast and so erratically it nearly hit him. About a mile farther along the road, he had come upon a beat-up blue Volkswagen pickup parked at the side of the road with blood all over the windshield.
“Caller was anonymous?” Blake asked.
“Let’s focus on the shooting,” Isabella said. “How many bright orange pickups do you think there are around here?”
Blake didn’t answer. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. She knew what he was thinking. It was all a little too neat.
The most direct route to the scene was through town, but Isabella knew the lights on Main Street would slow them down this time of day. She took a right onto the old track that ran parallel with the main road. It was barely a single lane, and turned into dirt and mud for a mile-long section, but it would bring them back out on the other side.
They made it there in five minutes.
Isabella saw Dentz first. He was manning the barricade: three sawhorses across the road with a sign marking the long diversion to 19 via the south road. Roussel’s pickup was parked at the side of the road. There wasn’t a lot of room, so the rear bumper was sticking out into the road a little.
Two of the other deputies were standing by the car, both with drawn faces.
“Four in two days,” Isabella said, mostly to herself. McGregor couldn’t hold out without calling in the feds much longer, surely. It would be out of his hands. “Stay in the car,” she told Blake.
He nodded, looking ahead at the Volkswagen. Isabella got out and approached, ignoring Dentz’s greeting. There was a bullet hole in the driver’s side of the windshield, difficult to see with all the blood sprayed all over the inside. A male victim, head on the steering wheel. Gray hair, dark blue raincoat. She hunched down to confirm what she already knew: it was Roussel. As she circled the car she saw there was a lot of blood on the side window too, even though it was rolled halfway down.
This time she didn’t need to close her eyes to see the movie start to unfold. Roussel’s eyes, narrowed in suspicion, then widening in fear. The recoil of the gun. The bullet finding glass and then flesh and bone.
She was grateful when Sheriff McGregor’s voice snapped her out of it. “You made it here fast.”
“You get ahold of the caller yet?”
McGregor shook his head. “We’ll find him. Priority right now is snagging Connor before he kills somebody else. If he knows he was ID’d at the scene, there’s no telling what he’ll do. I have Feldman back in town in case he decides to go postal. Jerry and Carl are still watching the exits onto 19 – full roadblock now. I have an APB out for Connor’s vehicle with state.”
“The caller ID’d him?” Isabella repeated, surprised. “He described Connor?” If things had gone down the way the caller described, that would be very unlikely. At the point he saw the truck driving erratically, he had no reason to suppose the driver was fleeing the scene of a murder. You see a car driving toward you, you get out of the way, you don’t waste time looking at the driver.
McGregor shook his head and confirmed her suspicion. “Carl took the call. He didn’t get time to ask him about the driver before he hung up. You know a lot of other orange pickup trucks in this town?”
Isabella grimaced as her own words were thrown back at her. But it didn
’t mean they weren’t right.
“What’s he doing here?” McGregor said, eyeing Carter Blake. For the first time, there was something in his voice that said he wanted something. Something other than to see the back of Blake.
“As a matter of fact,” Isabella said, “he was going to help me look for his client.”
McGregor paused, seemed to be weighing something up in his mind.
“Let me ask you a question.”
“The answer’s yes, Sheriff. He can help us.”
He bit his bottom lip as though he was surveying a tricky repair job and turned his head to look at Blake. Isabella glanced back at the car. Blake was watching as the two of them talked, his face completely impassive, as though he were stuck in traffic and daydreaming. She didn’t doubt he knew exactly what they were discussing.
“That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”
“It wasn’t?”
“It wasn’t the only thing I was going to ask. The other part was, do you think we can trust him?”
She flinched inwardly, thinking about what Blake had said earlier. About how they needed to be careful about who they talked to. She was starting to question a lot of people now. Blake wasn’t one of them.
“Yeah. Yes, I do.”
“Then let’s stop wasting time.”
51
Carter Blake
Before Sheriff MacGregor even looked at me, I knew that the parameters of my job had changed from a couple of days before. I had come to town to see David Connor as a client, and now he had turned into my quarry.
That wasn’t to say I was ready to believe he was guilty yet, but I had to admit the evidence was piling up. The timing of the new killings, for one. The fact he had been one of only a handful of people who would have known Wheeler had been in Atlanta, and why. And a witness seeing an orange pickup truck driving away from the scene? That was one of two things: damning, or a little too convenient.
There was another thing, too. If I was right about where Connor had gone, it was mostly down to a lucky break on my part. McGregor’s people might not need luck. They knew the area better than me, and the old house was likely on their radar. Maybe it was one of the boltholes on Feldman’s list to check. With one of their own lying on a slab, tempers were frayed. If the Bethany sheriff’s department found Connor before I did, his life expectancy might drop significantly.
McGregor signaled to me to get out of the car. I obliged and approached the Volkswagen, where he and Green were standing. I took the opportunity to take a closer look at the bloody windshield and the body slumped over the wheel before I met McGregor’s stare. Why had Roussel been targeted? I couldn’t shake the feeling that it had something to do with our visit.
“What you said the other day,” McGregor said. “You’re good at finding people who don’t want to be found.”
“It’s a living.”
“You might have noticed we have …” he paused and glanced at the body behind the glass, “… a situation here. There’ll be time for working out the rights and wrongs later, but right now I need to do one thing.”
“Keep people safe,” I said.
“Exactly. I don’t know what your usual fee is, but—”
“We can talk about that later.”
“You’ll help us, then?” He practically issued the question through clenched teeth.
“Yes. I don’t know if David Connor had anything to do with this, but I think we’ll make progress either way by talking to him.”
“Okay,” McGregor said, seeming satisfied with that. He looked back at Green, who gave him a nod. “So what do you need? Obviously we’re covering the bases. APB out for Connor’s jeep with state. I have a request in for a location on his phone. Feldman is in town, and I have another couple of men at Connor’s house.”
“What about the driver who spotted him?”
“We’ll find him.”
“All right,” I said. McGregor’s delivery was prickly, his gray eyes watching me carefully, like he was waiting for me to point out what he had missed. He hadn’t missed anything. He was doing a good job. “I assume you’ll want to search Connor’s place once the warrant comes through.”
“Already came through. I spoke to Judge Chalmers on my way out here.”
“Fast work,” I said.
“So?”
“So you’re doing everything right,” I said. “Ordinarily, you wouldn’t need me.”
“Ordinarily?”
“There are a limited number of roads he can take, which you’ve got eyes on. Only one road in, one out. You’ve got somebody watching the town in case he comes back, you’ve got people at his house. It’s a waiting game. Only problem is, if he’s running from you, he probably knows all of that already. And he won’t stay on the roads.”
McGregor sighed. “And as you’ve probably noticed, we have a shitload of off-road around these parts.”
“There’s an old ruined house on the shore of the lake,” I said. “There’s a road branching off the south road that takes you down there. You know it?”
“The Marion house?” McGregor asked, glancing at Green. She kept her face straight, not letting on that this wasn’t new information to her.
“I haven’t thought about that place in years,” he continued. “It used to be a hangout for teenagers until the curfew. A flash flood took the bridge down in ’04. After that, it seemed to drop off the party circuit. Jimmy’s and the old cabins were easier options.”
“I went to a couple of parties there, before the curfew,” Green said. “I never liked it. It was a creepy place. Everybody said it was haunted.”
McGregor looked doubtful. “You have a reason to believe that’s where he’s gone?”
“I followed him down there on Saturday,” I said. “He didn’t know I was there. You said the bridge was out?”
“Yes, washed away. Probably lasted fifty years past its natural life by then, too.”
“Not anymore. There’s a new bridge.”
McGregor sucked his teeth. “I’d need to pull Feldman from his post to go down there. Half-hour round trip, even if the bridge is back up.”
I shook my head and looked at Green. “The two of us will go. It’ll help if I’m there to talk to him.”
Green opened her mouth to protest. I pre-empted her.
“I don’t mind hanging back. But if I’m right, I want to be there. How else can you use me?”
McGregor touched Green on the arm. They turned away from me and walked a few steps, going into a brief huddle. When they turned around, McGregor beckoned me over.
“Okay Blake, it’s worth a shot. Thanks. But let Deputy Green approach first, clear? If Connor turns up there, he may not be pleased to see either of you.”
52
Isabella Green
As Isabella drove, an on-the-hour news bulletin told her and Blake – and everyone else in the world – that another person had been found shot to death in Lake Bethany, and the authorities were on the lookout for a suspect named David Connor. They gave his description and last-known whereabouts, and warned he was not to be approached.
Blake sighed. “There goes the element of surprise, if we had it to begin with.”
Isabella bristled a little. “It was the right thing to do. Like you said, the priority is to keep people safe.”
They were approaching the turnoff for the old road down to the Marion house when they saw another vehicle up ahead of them. It was Feldman, moving fast. How the hell had he gotten out here so fast? Out of the corner of her eye, Isabella saw Blake glance over at her. She said nothing.
They followed Feldman’s car onto the old road. It was rutted and overgrown. Isabella hadn’t been down this way since the old bridge came down, and that had been way before she had gotten her license. Even the sign warning of a dead end looked like an artefact from centurie
s past. She slowed as they approached the gully and she saw that Blake was right: there was a bridge. A twenty-foot-long metal temporary bridge had been erected to join the road. Isabella could still see some of the remains of the old bridge supports beneath. She expected Feldman to stop and inspect it, but he just drove straight ahead, barely slowing. She held her breath, but Feldman’s SUV glided over it with no trouble. They followed.
The Marion house appeared out of the woods like a specter, its gray walls and irregular lines blending it in with the woods. It was so familiar, and yet so strange seeing it in the present. Like a fragment of a dream that had somehow come to life.
It was just as Isabella remembered it. The broken windows, the old barn at the side, the strange, asymmetrical tower on the east side. Feldman hadn’t beaten them by much; he was getting out of the car, his gun drawn. There was no sign of Connor’s orange pickup.
Feldman stayed put, waiting for Isabella to catch up. She brought the car around in a circle, so they were facing back the way they had come. Blake popped his seatbelt as they rolled to a stop, reaching for the door handle.
Isabella put a hand on his arm. “Remember what McGregor said. You’re an observer.”
Reluctantly, he settled back into the seat. “All right. Be careful.”
“I can handle David Connor.”
“I was more worried about Deputy Feldman.”
She didn’t respond to that. She reached for the keys, and it was Blake’s turn to put a hand on her arm. She turned to look at him. Stupidly aware, given the situation, that they seemed to be touching each other a lot. She opened her mouth to tell him to forget it, if he was thinking about insisting on coming.
“Leave the radio on? Just in case anything else comes up.”
A fair enough compromise. Isabella left the keys in the ignition and got out. Feldman waited for her to approach, keeping his eyes on the windows and his gun ready.
“What’s he doing here?” he hissed under his breath, not looking away from the house.
“If we find Connor here, it’s because he gave us a helping hand. How did you get here so fast?”