by Tami Hoag
She rubbed her mitten at the sore spot above her right eye. The headache lingered, threatening, then retreating in an exhausting fencing match with her tattered stamina. She should have stayed in bed, but she didn't want to be there alone. She had been driving around since dawn, her brain chewing on the mess she had made of her life. Should have taken that FBI post, O'Malley. She could have been in Memphis now, a thousand miles away from the cold and snow, a thousand miles away from a broken heart.
That heart still wished things could have worked out. Her head knew better. What could she offer Mitch? She wasn't wife material, didn't know anything about raising a five-year-old girl. All she really knew was being a cop. Thanks to her own reckless temper, that would be taken from her, too. Panic tightened in her chest.
Thinking she was asleep, Mitch had slipped out early. He had a manhunt to oversee. According to the snatches of information Megan was picking up on the police radio, there had still been no solid sign of Albert Fletcher. Citizens had been calling in sightings, but none had turned into anything. Deer Lake was crawling with police cruisers and county cruisers and state patrol cruisers. The choppers circled overhead like buzzards.
Megan shook her head in amazement. She had pegged Fletcher as weird right off, but she hadn't envisioned anything like what Mitch had finally described to her last night. No doubt about it, the deacon was a few beads short of a rosary. Crazy enough to kidnap Josh to be his own private altar boy? Yes, but he had to have had help. He'd been lecturing on sin and damnation at St. E's that night. She tried to picture him and Olie as compadres, but couldn't manage it. Fletcher was a loner. He never would have been able to hide his ghoulish secrets otherwise.
She drove slowly through the campus of Harris College, keeping her eyes open for the deacon. She wondered if Mitch had sent any men there. With classes resuming Monday, the buildings had probably been opened but would still be largely unoccupied. Fletcher could have found himself a nice hiding spot out of the elements.
Harris was the kind of college they didn't build anymore. Many of the classroom and administrative buildings were of native limestone and looked as if they dated back to the origin of the school in the late 1800s. Handsome and substantial, they sat back from the winding drive, the grounds around them studded with ancient oak and maple and pine.
The road wound past dormitories, their parking lots a third full, students tracking back and forth to the buildings to carry in the laundry they had done over the break and the books they had probably neglected. Goalposts sticking up out of the snow marked an athletic field that backed onto a vacant pasture, and suddenly Megan found herself in the farm country that ran on and on to the west.
She turned onto Old Cedar Road and headed south. If she remembered correctly, this eventually ran past Ryan's Bay and served as a back way into Dinkytown. She pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park, letting the engine rumble on as she stared out the window at the bleak landscape. The naked hardwood trees like blackened matchsticks in the distance; the snow robbing the contours from the land, making everything look flat and one-dimensional; the sky hanging low above it all like slabs of slate. In a field beside the road, a pair of shaggy paint horses pawed listlessly at the dirty blond stubble of cornstalks. Up ahead, at a bend in the road, a rooster pheasant cautiously made his way out from under the low branches of a spruce tree to peck for gravel on the verge. A brown house sat back from the road on a rise, shades pulled, garage closed, looking vacant. The name on the mailbox at the end of the drive was Lexvold.
Lexvold. It rang a dim bell. Maybe she had seen it on a report. The paperwork on the Kirkwood case would put any blizzard to shame. They had interviewed dozens of people, taken countless statements of non-clues from citizens who wanted to be helpful or at least involved. Like ripples in a pond, the crime had touched them all.
Megan put the car in drive and eased back onto the road. The temperature might have climbed to twenty-two degrees, but the Lumina's heater was good to only about twenty-five, if it was any good at all. She needed something hot to drink, which would delay her even more in leaving for St. Paul. Then, if she drank enough, she would have to stop to go to the bathroom, stalling a little longer.
She was thinking of hot chocolate at The Leaf and Bean, when her gaze caught on the angry black skid marks that crisscrossed on the road ahead. Checking the rearview mirror, she pulled off on the shoulder again and sat with her foot on the brake.
Skid marks. Lexvold. Old Cedar Road. Car accident.
The scene blurred as her mind tried to shake loose what she needed.
The college kid. A patch of ice. A patch of ice the officer at the scene had felt was manufactured.
She slammed the transmission into park and climbed out of the car. She trudged back up to the curve and stood there with her hands tucked into the pockets of her parka, her shoulders hunched against the wind. To the north and east lay the Harris campus. To the south, farmland gave way to the sloughs of Ryan's Bay. Old Cedar Road intersected with Mill Road. To the east on Mill the spires of St. E's punctuated the sky above the treetops. She turned and looked up the hill at the brown house and attached garage.
She remembered Dietz in his Moe Howard wig sitting at the end of their booth in Grandma's Attic. . . . looks to me like someone snaked a garden hose down the driveway . . .
“So where's the hose?” Megan murmured.
That kind of prank was usually borne of opportunity. If the Lexvolds didn't have a hose out, there was no opportunity. If there was no opportunity, that meant someone brought a hose to the party, which meant premeditation. Premeditation meant motive. What motive?
She turned back toward the road, an empty ribbon of asphalt. The only sounds were the wind and the hoarse cluck of the rooster pheasant, hiding now beneath the spruce trees, annoyed with Megan for interrupting his snack. Up at the drive into Harris, a red Dodge Shadow pulled onto the road and roared toward her, whizzing past with a pair of young men with wispy grunge-look goatees. Students taking the back way off campus. Like that kid the night of the accident.
The accident that had kept Hannah Garrison late at the hospital.
Megan pictured the time line taped to the wall of the war room. Everything started with Josh's disappearance. But what if the thing they had missed, the thing that had been there all along that they hadn't been able to see, had happened earlier? What if the accident hadn't been an accident at all?
Adrenaline surged through her as the possibilities clicked fast-forward through her brain. Students used the back road to the college. Anyone living around there would know that. Albert Fletcher, whose house was no more than a mile away. Olie Swain, who had audited courses at Harris. Christopher Priest, who had sent his student on an errand that night.
Priest. Megan tried to shake off the idea. The funny little professor with the bad fashion sense and limp-fish handshake? He was as unlikely a suspect as Elvis. He had no motive. He openly admired Hannah, had gone out of his way to help with the case. . . . Had installed himself in a position where he would be privy to all incoming news of the case, maybe even have access to confidential police information. He had known Olie Swain, had taught him. He was probably at this very moment communing with Olie's computers down at the station, ostensibly searching for clues. And she had put him there. ignorance is not innocence but SIN.
Sin. Religion. Priest. Christopher Priest.
“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered.
In her mind's eye she could see him bending over the glowing screen of a terminal in the room where Olie's equipment had been set up. She couldn't have put a possible suspect in a position to tamper with evidence. Her stomach rolled and twisted at the thought. She had wanted so badly to crack this case. It was the one that could make or break her career, but the stakes were so much higher than that and she knew it. She would have sold her soul for a nickel to nail the bastard who had taken Josh. If Christopher Priest was dirty and she had put him in that office with those machines . . .
>
The sound of a car rolling up snapped her back to the moment. A gunmetal-blue Saab had come to a halt in front of her. The passenger's window buzzed down. As the driver hunched down to see her, the fur collar of his navy wool topcoat crept up around his ears.
“Agent O'Malley! Are you having car trouble?” Garrett Wright asked.
“Uh—no. No, I'm fine.”
“Kind of a cold day to be standing out in the wind. Are you sure you don't need some help? I've got a cellular phone—”
“No, thanks.” Megan forced a polite smile as she leaned down into the window of the car. “I'm just checking something out. Thanks for stopping, though.”
“Still looking for Albert Fletcher?” He shook his head, frowning. “Who would have guessed . . .”
“No one.”
In the beat of silence his dark eyes went bright with the kind of embarrassed curiosity that fueled the fires of coffee-shop gossip everywhere. “So . . . is Paige Price really sleeping with the sheriff?”
“No comment,” Megan replied, forcing a wan smile, straightening away from the Saab. “You'd better move it along, Dr. Wright. We wouldn't want you to cause an accident.”
“No, we wouldn't want that. Good luck finding Fletcher.”
He gave her a salute as the window hissed upward, and the Saab rolled on. The purr of the motor faded into the distance, leaving her standing there listening to the wind in the pines, staring at the only visible evidence of the accident that had claimed two lives outright and possibly altered the lives of an entire community.
ignorance is not innocence but SIN.
10:28 A.M. 22° WINDCHILL FACTOR: 10°
Where's Mitch?”
Megan burst into Natalie's office. Mitch's assistant stood behind her desk, the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. She gave Megan a scowl and picked up a copy of the StarTribune from her desk, holding it up to display Henry Forster's headline—O'Malley Strikes Out: BCA's First Female Field Agent Told to Hit the Road.
“I'm sorry, Mr. DePalma,” she said pointedly into the receiver. “I've got to put you on hold.”
She punched the hold button and arched a thinly plucked brow. “Well, if it isn't the elusive Agent O'Malley. People in high places are looking for you, girl.”
“Screw 'em,” Megan snapped. “I've got more important things to do.”
Natalie gave her a long, measuring look, pursing her lips. “He's in the war room.”
“Thanks.” Megan pointed to the blinking red light on the telephone console. “I'm not here.”
“I never heard of you,” Natalie said, shaking her head.
Megan blew out a breath and turned for the door. “Natalie, you're the best.”
“Damn straight.”
He has to be somewhere.” Marty Wilhelm stated the obvious. He strolled up and down the time line with his hands in the pockets of his teal blue Dockers. “He hasn't been outside all this time. I'm guessing he's holed up wherever he has Josh stashed. We should check at the courthouse and see if he owns any other property in the area—a cabin or something.”
Mitch gave the agent an irritated look. “Been there. Done that. He doesn't.”
Puppy Boy went on, undaunted. “They haven't found anything useful in Olie Swain's computers—no mention of Josh or Fletcher. We should get Fletcher's phone records—”
“At the command post,” Mitch snapped. “Stevens and Gedney are going over them.”
He'd been on the manhunt himself since the crack of dawn, had come in to the station only at Wilhelm's request for a brainstorming session. So far the storm had been more of a light drizzle.
“Look, Marty, I've got to tell you, having you jump in here midstream is a real pain in the ass.”
Marty grinned that innocent-boy grin Mitch was growing to hate. “I'm doing all I can to get up to speed, Chief. By rights, this case should have been mine from the start. It isn't my fault that didn't happen. I guess I just don't look as fetching in a short skirt.”
The veneer of tolerance peeled away like dead skin. A dangerous look tightening his features, Mitch rose from his chair and advanced on Marty Wilhelm one slow step at a time until they were close enough to dance. Wilhelm's bright eyes widened.
“Agent O'Malley is a damn good cop,” Mitch said softly. “Now, Marty, for all I know, you can't find your dick in a dark room. But I'll find it for you if I hear you make another remark like that one. Are we clear on that, Marty?”
His face pale, he held his hands up in surrender as he backed away. The trademark grin quivered and twisted. “Hey, Chief, I'm sorry. I didn't know this was a serious thing with you and Megan. I thought it was just—”
The words strangled in his throat at Mitch's glare. This thing between him and Megan was nobody's damned business, whatever it was. God knew, he'd bent his brain into a knot thinking about it in the predawn while she lay beside him. It seemed so much simpler in the night, when she wasn't afraid to need him and he couldn't think beyond the next caress. Then morning came, and the world and their lives were just as screwed up as ever.
A knock at the door brought Mitch back to the moment. Megan made her entrance, parka hanging off one shoulder, dark hair escaping her ponytail. The bright color along her cheekbones might have come from the great outdoors, but he suspected it had more to do with the energy radiating around her. He could sense her tension across the room and knew the source of it. He had felt that same rush himself more than once when he'd been onto something.
“What have you got?” he asked, moving toward her.
“I need to talk to you.” She made a beeline toward him, not so much as glancing in the direction of her replacement.
“Agent O'Malley,” Marty Wilhelm said sardonically, “aren't you supposed to be in St. Paul right now?”
Megan cut him a nasty glare and looked back up at Mitch. “I had an idea about that accident out on Old Cedar Road the night Josh disappeared.”
“Bruce DePalma called me looking for you,” Wilhelm went on.
Megan turned her shoulder to him. “What if it wasn't an accident at all? What if it was set to happen as a means of keeping Hannah at the hospital?”
Mitch frowned. “It wouldn't change anything, except to make the crime even more diabolical. We already know it wasn't a random act.”
“I realize that, but think about it—think about the location. It's a mile or so to Fletcher's and St. Elysius.”
Marty perked up at Fletcher's name. “What? How does Fletcher tie in?”
“He could have slipped out of the church, made the icy patch on the road, and gotten back in time for his classes,” Mitch speculated. “Causing the accident that kept Hannah at the hospital and still providing himself with an alibi. It works, but he still had to have an accomplice.”
“It's probably a long shot,” Megan said, “but I was thinking if we could find a witness who saw someone hanging around the Lexvold place that day, we might get a link we don't have now.”
“We?” Wilhelm's voice made her cringe as sure as fingernails on a chalkboard. “Agent O'Malley, might I remind you, you're off this case.”
“I don't need reminding,” Megan said, still refusing to look at him.
He gave an incredulous half-laugh. “I beg to differ.”
He snatched a copy of the StarTribune off the table and displayed it in front of him. “You're on temporary suspension from active duty. That takes you off this case, out of this room, and all the way to St. Paul.”
She tilted her chin up, glaring at him. “I'm taking care of some loose ends.”
“You're off the case,” he repeated, throwing the paper down, then thrusting a forefinger in front of her face like an exclamation point.
Megan wanted to grab his hand and bite him. Instead, she clenched her jaw and her fists. “I don't take orders from you, Wilhelm. Don't try to push me around. Better men than you have tried and regretted it.”
A beeper went off like an alarm, shrill and piercing. They all flinched automati
cally in response, looking down at the little boxes on their waistbands. Wilhelm stepped back and unclipped his from his belt.
“If this is DePalma,” he said, moving toward the door, “I'll tell him you're on your way, Megan, because you are off this case.”
Megan held her tongue until he was out the door and had closed it behind him. “The hell I am, Spaniel Boy.”
“Megan, you're going to get yourself fired,” Mitch said.
“I've already been fired.”
“You've lost the field post, not your career. You jerk DePalma around this way and he'll have your badge.”
Megan stared down at the toes of her boots. She had been over all of this in her mind again and again. She had told herself her career was all she had, that she had to do everything she could to protect it—don't get involved with a case or with a cop. But she was involved and she couldn't walk away from this case for the sake of her career. A little boy's life was at stake.
“I'm not walking away from this until it's done. We're too close and it's too important. Now, you've got to get Christopher Priest away from Olie's computers.”
“Why?”
“Because everything we just said about Albert Fletcher could apply to him, too.”
“Megan, get a grip. He's been nothing but helpful on this case from day one.”
She nodded. “And most arsonists return to the scene of the crime to watch the firemen. Listen to me, Mitch. I know it sounds crazy on the surface, but it could fit. The kid behind the wheel of that car was a student of his,” she reminded him, refusing to back down. “Priest told me he had sent him out to run an errand. He had to know the kid would take Old Cedar Road.”
“What possible motive would Priest have for taking Josh?”
“I don't know,” she admitted, wishing she had more to go on than the uneasy feeling in her gut. “Maybe it's not about motive. We've said all along he's playing games with us. Taking Josh was the opening move. Then came the taunts, the messages, the notebook, his conversation with Ruth Cooper. Maybe it's just about winning, outsmarting everyone.”