by John Saul
Ruston’s blood chilled as he read the article.
“And take a look at this,” Derek Anders said. “It was on the same nail.”
KILLER REMANDED TO CENTRAL STATE HOSPITAL
MADISON—Riley Logan was found unfit to stand trial in the strangling murder of Melissa Hartwell, a UW sophomore. Judge Thomas P. Sewell, after reviewing testimony from three different doctors including Hector Darby, who was hired by the state for the purpose of evaluating Logan, has committed Logan to Central State Hospital, where he will be held indefi
The rest of the story had been torn away, leaving only a ragged edge at the bottom of the clipping. “Hector Darby,” Ruston breathed as his mind began to whirl with memories of the Hanover girl who had been murdered years ago, just before Darby’s disappearance. “What the hell is going on around here?” he said, more to himself than to Derek Anders. He scanned the shack again, the litter of boxes suddenly seeming a lot more foreboding than they had a few moments earlier. “I think maybe we better find out what’s in all these.”
Anders picked up one of the boxes and put it on the only table in the cabin. “Looks like medical files,” he said after pulling open its top and lifting out a yellowed folder.
“Medical files?” Ruston echoed. “Whose medical files? What are they doing here?”
Some of the boxes were so old they were mildewed and rotten, and even the best of them looked as though they could collapse at any moment.
“Oh, Jesus,” Anders breathed. “Take a look at this.”
Ruston joined him and peered at the folder the deputy had just opened. More newspaper clippings were on the top, all about the Hartwell girl. Under those was a fat file folder with the Central State Wisconsin Psychiatric Hospital seal on the front and RILEY LOGAN printed on the tab.
“It’s like he kept a scrapbook on what he’d done,” Ruston said. “And no one ever told us who he was—not even Darby.” He shook his head. “Let’s take that box with us and get out of here,” he went on.
Anders picked up the box, and a moment later Ruston followed him outside. He scanned the hillside, already calculating just how many square miles of wilderness Logan had disappeared into. And he hadn’t taken the dog with him, which could have meant one of two things—either he was coming back, or the dog would have slowed him down.
In all the years he’d watched Logan, Ruston had never before known him not to have the dog with him.
Which meant he wasn’t coming back.
“We’re not going to find him today,” he told Anders as they started back to their boat. “In fact, right now I’d bet we don’t find him at all.”
Anders’s brow furrowed. “Where’s he gonna go?”
“Anywhere,” Ruston replied. “But if he knew we were coming—which I’m damn sure he did—he’ll know better than to come back. And he knows the wilderness a lot better than anyone else, which means if he doesn’t want to be found, we won’t find him.”
“So what about tomorrow?” Anders asked, glancing worriedly back at the cabin, which was now all but invisible again. “It’s the Fourth of July picnic. What if he shows up?”
Ruston fell silent for a moment as he thought about his options, and decided he didn’t like any of them. If he started a manhunt now, he’d need an explanation, and any explanation he might come up with—and the rumors that would inevitably boil in the wake of that explanation—would put an instant end not only to the holiday tomorrow, but to the rest of the summer as well.
And his gut was telling him that no matter how many men he put on the search, Logan wasn’t going to be found.
“We’ll add some extra deputies for tomorrow, and tell them to keep a special lookout for Logan. I don’t think he’s going to show up, but if he does, we’ll deal with him.”
As they got back into the boat a few minutes later and started across the lake, Ruston silently prayed that his gut would be as reliable today as it had always been before.
RUSTY RUSTON MOVED through the parade staging area in the Phantom Lake High School parking lot, keeping his eyes and ears open for anything that might be amiss.
An hour earlier he had deputized ten members of the volunteer fire department, briefed them not only on what had been found in Carol Langstrom’s shop yesterday, but on everything he knew about Riley Logan as well. “The main thing is to keep a low profile,” he’d told them as he handed each one a walkie-talkie. “The last thing we want is to panic anybody. So what I want you to do is stay alert and report anything you see that isn’t right. Anything.”
He’d placed Derek Anders at the parade destination, and assigned the rest to various points along the route. Once the parade was over, they’d move on to the park, where most of the town would gather for the rest of the day, staying right through until the fireworks went off an hour after sunset. The whole celebration needed to go off without a hitch, and Ruston fully intended to see that it did. It was going to be a long day, and the best he could hope for was that Logan had spotted him coming yesterday afternoon, been rational enough to know exactly what was up, and had taken off into the woods with every intention to keep on going. If that was the case—and Ruston’s gut was telling him it was—then he, Derek Anders, and the rest of the deputies would have nothing more serious to deal with than a couple of sunburns and maybe a few fingers scorched on sparklers by the time the fireworks display was over.
Up ahead, Misty Kennedy, who had coordinated the parade every year for the last three decades, was waving her arms at the high school band director, telling him to keep his musicians in line and shouting orders at the float drivers, demanding that they check their order one more time. And everyone was ignoring her, just as they had every year for the past three decades.
Ruston checked his watch: 9:55.
Five minutes to showtime.
He walked through the high school musicians as they finally began falling into what passed as a formation, adjusting their uniforms, chattering excitedly, and tuning their instruments to the best of their admittedly small ability.
Still, everyone loved the band, especially the parents of its members. The baton twirlers were warming up—only one flying out of control as Ruston watched—and the banner announcing the Phantom Lake High School Band was moving into place.
Then he began catching snatches of the kids’ conversations.
“…satanic ritual murder…”
“…picked up hitchhiking by some pervert…”
“…I miss him…”
“…he was a jerk, but still…”
“Do you think…?
“Did you hear…?”
“My mom said…”
So it wasn’t the parade the kids were talking about at all, and Ruston sighed as he realized he should have expected it. The kids—the whole town—was nowhere near over the shock of Ellis Langstrom’s death. Still, he’d hoped that today, at least, they’d be able to put their worry and grief aside long enough to enjoy the holiday for which Phantom Lake had been famous for almost a century. And judging from the size of the crowd, the rumors about what might have happened to Ellis Langstrom hadn’t spread too far, for it looked to Ruston as if half the people in the neighboring counties had come to join in the fun.
He pressed his thumb on the transmit button of his walkie-talkie. “Five minutes,” he said.
Each of the deputies responded with “all clears,” and Ruston began to relax.
Then he caught a glimpse of a ragged-looking guy with a shaggy head of hair on the other side of the Birthday Club float, and felt a shot of adrenaline squirt into his bloodstream. An instant later he was running, trying to keep the man in sight, dodging students, tubas, clowns, and bicycles.
He made an end run around the back of the drugstore’s float, which appeared to be intending to bribe the judges with hot dogs this year, but by the time he got to the Birthday Club, the man was nowhere to be seen.
Slowing his pace close enough to a walk that it wouldn’t unnecessarily alarm anyone,
Ruston moved along the only route the man could have taken while keeping the float between himself and the sheriff.
There!
He had him now. He sped his gait just enough to close in on the man without panicking anybody else, but just as he was about to lay his heavily practiced, if rarely used, “law enforcement” hand on the man’s shoulder, followed by a spin that would end with the man pinned against the wall of the bank, the man turned around.
Fred Rawlins.
The manager of the very bank Ruston had been about to slam him up against.
Rawlins was wearing a shaggy wig and rags for some float—probably designed by his over-the-hill hippie wife—the point of which Ruston was certain would be lost on nearly everyone except Mrs. Fred, who had changed her name to Sunbeam Moonrise twenty years earlier, and had steadfastly refused to allow people to shorten it to “Sunny,” thus relegating herself to being known as “Mrs. Fred” ever since.
Fred himself now smiled and held out his hand. “Hell of an event again this year, Rusty,” he said, waving exactly the kind of small American flag his wife hated. “See you at the barbecue?”
Rusty Ruston shook the proffered hand, nodded, then stepped back as Fred climbed aboard his wife’s float, which seemed to be trying to draw attention to the plight of the homeless. Sunbeam Moonrise had struck again, and Ruston wondered what Rawlins’s superiors in Madison would say when they heard their bank had sponsored a float honoring the people they wouldn’t be caught dead loaning money to.
Not my problem, Ruston decided. His problem was to figure out some way to relax a little; he’d nearly spun the bank manager around and slammed him up against a wall, and he couldn’t stay that edgy all day or he’d wind up hurting someone.
He had to calm down.
He had to trust his deputies to be his eyes and his ears.
He checked his watch.
Ten o’clock on the dot.
The band was lined up, and the drum major held his baton high. He gave a short blow on his whistle, and the band began to march out of the parking lot, the drum major strutting smartly. As the band turned the corner onto Main Street, they broke into an enthusiastic rendition of “Strike Up the Band” that was only slightly out of pitch.
The parade was officially under way, and, as always, the crowd began cheering with far more enthusiasm than Ruston thought the parade truly merited.
But that, of course, wasn’t the point.
The point was for everyone to have a good time, and Ruston decided that the best way he, too, could have a good time would be to go back and stand next to Misty Kennedy while she stood at the curb with her clipboard and stopwatch, trying to control the pace of the floats. The drivers were getting themselves under way either when they felt like it or when they got their engines running, whichever came last.
Following the band was Summer Fun’s “Land of the Free” float, with Merrill Brewster’s daughter Marci as the Statue of Liberty, wearing a costume that was far better than any ten-year-old Miss Liberty had worn in years and standing proudly in the center of what was apparently supposed to be some kind of immigrant ship.
With any luck at all, Ruston decided, the rest of the day would turn out just as beautifully as Marci Brewster’s costume.
Finally, as “Land of the Free” cruised slowly by him with only a slight list to starboard, Rusty Ruston began to relax.
LOGAN MOVED THE brush away from the cave entrance and peered out, his rheumy eyes squinting against the sun that had risen high in the sky while he slept. He listened while he waited for his eyes to adjust to the glare, holding so still that even his breathing was silent. Only when both his eyes and his ears told him there was no danger lurking nearby did he finally wriggle out of the cave’s narrow entrance to stretch his cramped muscles in the great expanse of the morning.
As the aching of the night began to ease, he crouched low, once again listening.
Nothing to be heard but a pair of jays, quarreling over some morsel of food they’d found.
Rising, he began making his way quietly down the slope toward his cabin, moving slowly, constantly casting his eyes and ears in every direction, searching the woods for any sign of men waiting to take him away.
Nearly an hour later he finally reached his goal.
The one-winged crow was perched on a stump outside the cabin door, and the moment it caught sight of him, it began bobbing madly up and down, cawing and flapping its wing.
“Shhh,” Logan hissed, but the bird paid no attention, its scolding far from over. As the man headed for the door, the bird hopped off the stump and scuttled to the cabin, pushing through the door as soon as Logan cracked it open. As it disappeared into the cabin, the bird fell silent, and Logan felt a grim foreboding.
He pushed the door wider, and the sunlight flooded in.
His dog lay dead in a pool of black, sticky blood, his chest blasted open.
For more than a full minute Logan stood silently in the doorway, his eyes fixed on the corpse of what only yesterday had been his best friend.
A trick, he told himself. Has to be some kinda trick. Who’d want to shoot a harmless old dog?
But even as he formed the words in his mind, he knew they weren’t true. “No,” Logan whispered, finally moving into the cabin and dropping to his knees. He lifted the cold, limp corpse and held it to his chest, cradling and rocking the remains of the animal as gently as if it were a baby. “Why’d they do that?” he murmured. “What’d they think you could do to them?” He buried his face in the dog’s fur and breathed in the pungent smell of the only real friend he’d known in years. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
Tears began to stream down Logan’s face, and his gentle rocking turned violent. A moment later, still clutching the bloody corpse of the dog to his breast, his balance failed and he was rolling on the floor, his grief for the loss of his one true friend igniting the worries and fears and terrors that had been building up inside him ever since he’d discovered that Dr. Darby’s demons had once more been set loose.
And now they’d killed his dog.
His poor, harmless, deaf and crippled old dog.
For a long time—he had no idea how long—Logan lay on the floor, sobbing. But slowly the emotional storm faded, and at last he sat up and wiped his sleeve across his face.
Everything, he knew, had changed.
Everything was wrong.
His most precious secrets were strewn across the cabin floor, and he knew he could never live here again.
His eyes fixed on the crow, who was pecking at the last of the bread crumbs Logan had left for it on the floor yesterday.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, only partly to the crow. Now images were flitting through his mind. Images of the girl he’d killed so long ago, the girl he’d wanted only to love.
And Dr. Darby, who had tried to help him.
And the girl that Dr. Darby had killed. Logan reached deep into the dim recesses of his memory and found her name.
Hanover.
That was it. She’d looked like the other girl—the girl he’d loved—and he had been afraid she might die, too. But Dr. Darby had told him she wouldn’t.
Dr. Darby had told him he was all right.
But then Dr. Darby had killed the girl and told him to make sure the demons stayed locked up.
Logan had watched Dr. Darby drown that night. He’d been out in his boat, fishing in the moonlight. He’d even tried to save Dr. Darby, but the water was too deep, and he hadn’t been able to get to him.
He’d failed.
And now he’d failed again.
The demons were loose, and now even his dog was dead.
And soon the men would be back, and they’d take him away.
But maybe it wasn’t too late! Maybe there was still something he could do—something that would make up for all his failures.
Struggling back to his feet, Logan picked up the ruined body of his dog. “Come on, dog,” he muttered. “Maybe we’re not through q
uite yet.”
Leaving his cabin for what he knew would be the last time, Logan carried the body of the dog down to the lake, never once looking back.
The crow, as if somehow knowing it would never see Logan again, uttered one final caw and then fell silent.
Logan settled the dog down on its bed of rags in the bow of the boat, just the way he had a thousand times before. The old dog looked as if he might simply be taking a moment’s nap.
Logan stepped into the boat and pushed off, heaving the bow loose from the mud.
He rowed quickly but silently, hugging the shoreline, as he made his way toward Pinecrest.
The lake was almost unnaturally quiet; deserted of even a single other boat this morning.
When he came to his goal thirty minutes later, Logan slid the bow of the boat into the weedy cover twenty yards from the Pinecrest lawn and tied the painter to the branch he’d used so many times before.
“Shhh,” he said to the dog. “Wait here.”
Quietly, Logan moved through the woods that bordered Pinecrest until he was as close to the carriage house as he could get without leaving his cover. Already the voices were whispering to him, but this time he knew he could not fail.
He had one last thing to do, and this time the voices would not deter him.
He moved quickly from the safety of the woods to the carriage house door, but hesitated before he touched the doorknob.
What if he failed again?
Perhaps he should turn back now, go back to his boat, and follow where Dr. Darby had led.
But that was failure.
And this time, he was not going to fail.
This time he would do exactly as Dr. Darby had wanted him to do.
He gripped the doorknob, and as the voices grew louder he felt a new energy flowing into him from deep inside the building.
It was going to be all right!