by Paula Munier
The compound itself was a glorified squatters colony of three ten-foot-by-ten-foot tent cabins on raised logs and a long, thirty-foot-by-fifteen-foot Quonset hut, all cuddled together in a clearing shaped like a baseball diamond. A large commercial-grade truck about the size of a rental moving van was parked in front, its back door rolled up to accommodate a ramp. Mercy couldn’t see what was inside, apart from a vague sense of folded boxes and tarps.
She watched as a tall man in dark running pants and a dark T-shirt approached the SUV and talked to Dr. Winters across the fence. She couldn’t hear them very well—they were too far away and the rush of a nearby stream made it even harder to discern what they were saying—but from the looks of his face and her gesticulations, he was not happy to see her. She thought she heard the professor call him Max as her voice raised in protest over something he said. Eventually he shook his shaved head, stomping over to open the gate and letting Dr. Winters drive inside. He guided her over to park by the side of the tent cabin nearest the gate, providing a clean entry and exit in and out, presumably for the truck. Mercy couldn’t see any other vehicles, at least not from this vantage point.
The man offered the professor a hand to help her out of the SUV, but she shook him off, jumping down to the ground as gracefully as a lynx. She strode off to the tent cabin in the middle without a second glance at the guy she’d called Max.
Mercy wanted to get a closer look. She held a finger to her lips, signaling silence to Elvis, and quietly made her way with the dog around the colony, following the barbedwire fence. The woods were very dense and layered here. The forest floor was thick with branches and brambles and slick with pine needles and moss. Elvis stepped through the chaos carefully, and she followed in his wake. He alerted, whether to the tall man or to Dr. Winters or to whatever was in that truck, Mercy wasn’t sure. The shepherd’s black triangular ears perked up and he pushed as close to the barbwire as he could get. So close that she worried he’d nick his nose. But he sank into his classic Sphinx pose, his snout still intact.
She turned her attention back to the tall man. There was something familiar about the way the he held his shoulders but she couldn’t say for sure whether he was the masked man she’d seen running from her house or not. As she studied him, he raised his head and looked their way. She didn’t think he saw them, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
“Come on,” she whispered to Elvis. Together they melted back into the forest, and proceeded around the perimeter of the clearing from the safe perspective of at least twenty feet deep under the leafy cover of maples and beeches and birches.
If the entrance to the compound was home plate, then the tent cabin where Dr. Winters had gone was about second base. They were somewhere between first and second base when they came upon an art installation. The work was so cleverly woven into the natural landscape that Mercy nearly missed it.
Elvis found it first. About thirty feet away from the barbwire perimeter, secreted among the logs of a small blowdown area, was a stone structure seemingly suspended between two granite outcroppings. The arch was made of river rock, smooth granite stones chiseled into rough bricks and seemingly held into place by gravity alone.
She stepped up to the sculpture to take a closer look. She was afraid to touch it, for fear that it might fall down. But she knew that it most likely would not; the stones were packed tightly and meticulously, and the structure appeared sturdy enough. The artfully shaped crescent seemed to grow right out of the boulders that served as its abutments. Along its archivolt, the length of smaller stones that ran underneath the main arch, there were faint, fairly shallow markings that looked like Greek letters. Her Greek was terrible, and her Latin only marginally better. She snapped cell photos of the arch, including close-ups of the lettering.
A dry riverbed of rocks ran underneath the arch. When Mercy squatted down to examine the stone current, she realized that this, too, was part of the sculpture. The spirals of stone were too perfect to be natural. Fractal patterns of swirls echoed the curve of the arch overhead and the Greek lettering on the granite blocks themselves.
More photos. She wasn’t sure of the significance of this art installation, if any, but better safe than sorry. The materials and settings of the two art pieces she had seen today—the bronze sculpture in Dr. Winters’s parlor and this natural sculpture here in the woods—were very different, but she could see the hand of the same artist at work in each piece. The feminine curves and hollows and whorls of the bronze were echoed here in this piece, enhanced and expanded and enlightened in the wilderness.
Adam Wolfe, thought Mercy. She wondered who might be the model for this work—the ebullient Amy Walker as Madonna or the sexy professor Dr. Winters as nerd goddess or maybe simply Mother Nature herself.
Elvis did not alert to the sculpture, after finding it. He backed up a couple of yards and kept looking toward the compound, inching toward the barbwire fence, his eyes on the truck and the tall man loading it.
She snapped her fingers softly and he trotted over to the art installation. He showed little interest in the formation.
Sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture, thought Mercy. She tried to use her phone to text Troy, but of course she got no signal. On the other side of the installation Elvis sniffed at a hiking trail that led through the woods. Mercy figured that the trail must lead back through the northwestern corner of the forest. She thought they’d stumbled upon it on one of their hikes last fall, but she wasn’t sure. Elvis would know. He never forgot a trail.
Wherever it led she was glad to see it; if the way back around the compound and out to the Jeep was blocked and they needed to escape quickly, they’d need an alternate route. And here it was.
“Good job,” she whispered to Elvis.
She heard a snap behind her. The shepherd growled, a guttural utterance from deep within his chest guaranteed to frighten most anyone, whether they liked dogs or not.
She spun around. A man of medium height and weight stepped forward. A bird-watcher, if the birding binoculars around his neck and the field bag slung over his shoulder and the vented safari hat on his head were any indication. He wore a gray and blue plaid flannel shirt and khaki trousers and scuffed-up hiking boots. He was about thirty-five years old, with tired hazel eyes and short brown hair.
“It’s a little late in the day for birding, isn’t it?” Mercy noted that as far as she could tell he had no night-vision gear with him, so if he said anything about nocturnal viewing she’d figure he was lying.
“I was hoping for a close-up glimpse of a bouquet of black-throated warblers,” said the bird-watcher. “They come here to breed in the summertime.” He cocked his hatted head. “If you listen carefully, you can hear their zoo-zee, zoo-zee song.”
She listened, and followed the lazy, buzzy birdsong to a sapling, where she spotted an open nest woven of bark strips and lined with pine needles. A little gray bird perched inside, while its brighter blue mate darted among the leaves, looking for dinner.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“They’re making a comeback, at least for now. If they don’t cut down all their wintering grounds in the Caribbean, we’ll see them here every summer.”
Elvis growled again.
Enough about birds, thought Mercy.
“What do you know about that compound?” Her voice held a command in it, and the bird-watcher looked startled.
“Rufus Flanigan,” he said, putting out his hand with caution, one anxious eye on the dog.
“Mercy Carr,” she said and shook his hand.
“Are you a police officer? You act like a police officer.”
She didn’t say anything. Just let him ramble on as Elvis snarled at him.
“I was on my way home. Then I saw the girl and her baby again. You know, the one in the AMBER Alert. I reported seeing them yesterday.”
She nodded. “Were they all right?”
“They were in the company of a man who look
ed, I don’t know, sketchy. The girl seemed unhappy about it.”
“Where are they now?”
“I think they’re in one of the tent cabins, the one over on the far side of the compound. I was going to hike out and call for help, and then I saw you. And your dog.”
“I don’t think she’s here because she wants to be.”
“Me, either. I see the mother with her baby on my hikes. I’ve never approached them, I like to mind my own business in the hope that other people will mind theirs.” He smiled slightly. “But when the AMBER Alert went out, I thought I should come forward. I never believed that she’d ever hurt her baby. They always looked so happy together. I was just worried that they might be in trouble. And then I see them with this creepy guy.” He waved his hands, big rough mitts that attracted Elvis’s attention. Noting the dog’s interest, he quickly stuck them in his pockets, out of sight if not out of range.
Mercy smiled back at him as a counterpunch to the shepherd’s fierce muzzle. “Look, I’m retired law enforcement. We sometimes assist…” She trailed off and let him make whatever assumptions might prove valuable to her. “Hike out of here and get help. Call this number.” She fished Troy’s card out of her back pocket and handed it to the guy, who managed to look impressed and intimidated at the same time. Probably thanks to Elvis, who still appeared ready to pounce on him at any moment. “Tell Warden Warner what you told me. He’ll know what to do.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’ll see.”
He glanced toward the compound. “Be careful.”
“I’ve got Elvis.”
“Okay.” He backed up. “I’ll take this trail. It leads back around through the Lye Brook Wilderness and hooks up with the Long Trail. I’ll call as soon as I can get a signal.”
He turned to go. She wasn’t sure what she thought of him, and it was clear Elvis didn’t much like him. But there was no one else around to help them.
“He’s all we got,” she told the dog as they watched him hike away down the path. She hoped she could trust him.
The woods swallowed up the bird-watcher and the trail completely within fifty yards. All that was left of him was the call of the black-throated warblers.
He was long gone by the time Mercy realized he’d never said anything about the art installation. He must have seen it before. If this was Wolfe’s art colony—or whatever—he may have followed Amy and Helena back here. Maybe he was a stalker. Or maybe he was as scared of Elvis as he appeared to be, and art was the last thing on his mind.
Together she and the shepherd continued to circle the compound. She was looking for a break in the fence. She needed to get through that barbwire, one way or another, so she could find Amy and the baby. Or at least a spot far enough away from the tent cabins and the Quonset hut and out of the line of sight that she could snip the razor-sharp wire and wiggle through unharmed.
She patted the cargo pocket on her right hip, reassuring herself that her trusty knife was still there as always. The Swiss Champ version that her grandmother preferred boasted a whopping thirty-three functions, including a wire cutter.
She found no breach in the fence, which was to be expected. No one bothers to put up a barbwire barrier in the forest unless they are serious about keeping people in and critters out. Bear, moose, deer, even the occasional bobcat roamed these woods, along with the smaller but equally tough mammals like pine martens and mink.
They stayed hidden in the forest about a dozen feet within the perimeter of the compound. They didn’t see anyone, other than the man who accompanied Dr. Winters to the tent cabin in the middle. He was back loading the truck with cardboard boxes. Elvis still didn’t like the guy, but he kept quiet. Whoever else was in the clearing—the professor, Amy and Helena, the elusive Adam Wolfe—was apparently in a tent cabin.
Mercy and Elvis were directly behind the middle cabin now. The one into which the professor had disappeared and from which she had yet to emerge. The shepherd shadowed her as instructed, although all his prancing and dancing indicated that he was as itching to get into that colony as she was.
It was slow going. The forest floor was cluttered with vegetation and downed branches and loose stones, and the trees towered so closely together over them that moving silently was especially tricky. Dusk was falling now and soon the forest would be cloaked in darkness. They wouldn’t have too much time left in the light for exploration. She had a flashlight but using it would announce their presence like a beacon.
Fifteen minutes later, they came around to the back of the last of the tent cabins, round about third base of the baseball diamond–shaped compound. They were still about a dozen feet away from the barbwire fence. She sneaked up toward the barrier. Elvis dropped to his haunches, scooting beside her, alerting and crawling at the same time.
She didn’t see anyone; even the man loading the truck was gone. Or at least out of sight. The truck was still there, its cargo now secured behind the closed roll-up door.
She could sense the shepherd’s agitation and he could sense hers. She could feel their respective anxieties fueling each other, and that was no good. She stopped to breathe, slowly inhaling and exhaling, and stroking Elvis’s fine head and neck the way she did on the mat. Calming them both down.
“Good boy,” she whispered. “Stay.” She didn’t know what was waiting on the other side of that fence. So he needed to stay put.
Mercy opened her knife and pulled out the wire-cutting tool. Carefully she snipped through the wire, avoiding the slashing points. She was about halfway through the triple rolls of metal, when Elvis perked up and started pawing at the ground, ready to dig his way under the fence if she couldn’t slice through it fast enough.
Then she heard it, too. The faint cry of an infant. Helena.
“Stay,” she ordered the dog in her deepest alpha voice and hurried to cut through the remainder of the wires. Once it was cut, she pulled the fence apart cautiously. As soon as she’d managed a foot-wide opening, Elvis slipped past her and into the compound proper, bounding toward the sound of the crying baby.
“Come,” she commanded. But the shepherd ignored her. He’d never have disobeyed his sergeant this way, she thought, cursing as she scrambled in through the barbwire after him. She stood up, ready to follow the dog. The snap of a twig behind her stopped her cold. She heard Elvis snarl just as she sensed someone behind her and the blow to come. She couldn’t let anything happen to him again. “No, Elvis!” She needed him to be safe. “Go home. Home to Patience!”
The last sounds that registered in her brain were those of a dog barking and a baby crying and a shot firing. Or was it a truck backfiring? She didn’t know. Her brain wouldn’t work. She stood there, somehow suspended in time, while the inside of her head exploded.
“Patience,” she said again, but her voice was just a squeak, and she went down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
TROY AND SUSIE BEAR STOPPED BY THE OFFICE on Main Street in Northshire on the way back out on patrol. Thrasher was there, with reports from the Major Crime Unit on the murder of Donald Jonas Walker. He was perfectly turned out as always, his uniform pressed and boots shined, despite the long days on the job this time of year. His boss hadn’t had any more sleep than he’d had, but where Troy knew he’d need a shower and a shave and a change of clothes to look presentable, Thrasher looked every inch the prepared and alert professional.
They stood in the back of the warden service office by the whiteboard, which bore a map of the area marked with the locations of the victims and sightings of Amy and the baby, as well as photos and facts pertaining to the case. They went over what they knew so far about the Walker murder and the Bones case, as they were calling it unofficially.
“Two dead men, three years apart, both found with representations of the Vermont coat of arms.”
“Adaptations of the coat of arms,” corrected Troy, who regretted the correction as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“Adaptat
ions of the coat of arms,” repeated Thrasher good-naturedly. He was petting the shaggy dog’s floppy ears, his blue-green eyes on Troy. “A belt buckle and some ink. Pretty thin.”
“Don’t forget the pendant.”
The captain raised an eyebrow. “Hidden by a cat.”
“A cat with a clue.”
Thrasher rolled his eyes. “They found twenty thousand dollars in cash hidden in the recliner where Walker was sitting when he died. Now that’s a motive.”
Troy whistled. “That’s a lot of money for a guy living in a crap house full of cats.”
“His wife claims he won it playing bingo.” The captain smiled as Susie Bear rolled over, exposing her belly for a sweet rub. He squatted down to humor her with a good tummy scratching. Her big black tail thumped away on the wide oak-planked floor as he dragged his fingers through the long black fur that graced her rumbling stomach. “I think she’s hungry. Let’s go get pizza.”
“Bingo?” Troy laughed. “Definitely time for pizza.”
Pizza was one of the Newfie mutt’s favorite words, along with lunch, supper, treat, play, walk, and search. She shuffled to her feet, and led the way out of the office and down the street to Pizza Bob’s Wood Fired Pie Company. Pizza Bob’s was the best place in town for pizza, and not only because it was the only one with outside seating that accommodated the dog. It wasn’t much to look at, outside or inside, but the massive one-of-a-kind pizza oven decoratively painted with graffiti art made up for it. Susie Bear’s favorite kind of pie was the Howl: hand-tossed with pepperoni, sausage, bacon, meatballs, and ham. With a large bowl of water on the side.
Troy and Thrasher shared an extra-large with the dog and passed on the water in favor of the fresh root beer on tap.
“So who wins twenty grand at bingo?”
“According to Karen Walker, her husband went to the American Legion in Middlebury every Wednesday,” said Thrasher. “Says they have a three-thousand-dollar pot at their bingo.”