by Sarah Graves
“Hsst.” She aimed the sound at him on her way by, as if shooing away an animal. Chip felt wounded at this, then realized:
This was his life now. Like an animal’s, yes; one who had already torn someone apart. Osbourne gripped his elbow.
“The people are all gathered in front of the rear courtroom where they think you’ll be,” Osbourne repeated. They paused by a barred, electronically locked door. You needed a card to put into the card slot to get outside the building.
Osbourne peered through the small square of wire-reinforced glass in the door. “We’re going to wait for a couple deputies,” he informed Chip. “Otherwise we’d have to go the rest of the way up this stairwell, and right out into the crowd.”
He glanced at his watch. “Any minute now,” he told Chip, as if they were waiting for a taxi to go somewhere pleasant.
Somewhere without handcuffs. “We’re going to fool the folks up there,” said Osbourne, seeming pleased at the cleverness of the subterfuge the authorities had come up with.
“Take you in through the front door, zip you right into a different courtroom from the one where they’re expecting to see you. Soon as the deputy gets here.”
Osbourne glanced at his watch again, a big round Timex with a brushed-aluminum body and leather band.
“But to do that,” he added, “we’ll have to bend the routine a little.” He looked up at Chip, his dark brown face now devoid of any personal feeling whatsoever.
“Because to go around and get in through the front door of the building,” he finished grimly, “we’ll need to take you outside.”
• • •
He could have made it all better eventually, Hank thought again. He could have gotten his daughter’s love back, made them a real home. Somehow, someday …
Which particular day it would’ve been didn’t even matter now. Because instead, the man they were holding in the courthouse for Karen’s murder had taken them all.
Hank didn’t know why. But he knew the phrase “an eye for an eye,” all right. And he meant to put that phrase into practice.
Soon. As soon as they brought him out, Hank meant to get off his shot. Or ideally, two: one in the head, one in the chest.
After that, he’d be arrested, possibly even shot to death by the police, depending on how trigger-happy those state boys turned out to be. Either way, though, it was a cinch he wouldn’t be driving the car home tonight. So he ran the engine, burning up gas, kept the heat on while he sat there, watching and waiting.
His butt was sore, and his legs felt cramped. But the ache in his chest was the worst part. Hank wondered if, after he blew the head off of the son of a bitch who’d slit his little girl’s throat as if she were a meat animal, the ache would go away.
Or if maybe it never would. But that didn’t matter, either. What mattered was that Hank had a clear view of the courthouse steps, and of the sidewalk leading up to them, and that sooner or later they would have to bring the son of a bitch out.
Transport him to prison, where he would get three hots and a cot, plenty of free TV, any medical care he needed. A tight grin stretched Hank’s lips, which were beginning to bleed from the constant, nervous way he kept licking at them.
Yeah, he thought, life of Riley for the girl-murderer, huh?
Not.
12
“You had snapshots of her in your apartment, remember? Back when we were still seeing each other. Sissy had sent you pictures of her and the baby.”
Dylan spoke in a monotone. The pain of his broken collarbone was getting to him, it seemed, his hair damp with perspiration and his face pale.
But what must’ve been even worse, Lizzie thought, was feeling all his plans crashing down all around him; plans that had included her whether she agreed to them or not, or even knew about them.
“After you told me your sister’s little girl had gone missing, that you’d tried once to find her and couldn’t, I took a couple of those pictures off your desk. You had a bunch, I figured you might not miss them.”
This had been long after Sissy died, she realized, and she hadn’t missed the photographs. Back when she was alive, Sissy had sent dozens, many of them near-duplicates. One or two gone hadn’t even been noticeable.
They sat in her car in the parking lot of the Motel East. A huge wall of clouds from the south advanced slowly across the sky while he went on talking.
“I wanted to find the kid for you,” Dylan said. “Produce her for you, grant your wish. You know? Be a hero.” He made a face at himself.
“So I had a bunch of copies made of the pictures,” he went on, “sent them around to people I knew. Organizations for missing children, cops in other states, figuring maybe a lead would turn up.”
But none ever did. And—“That doesn’t explain where these came from.” She tapped the photographs of a smiling nine-year-old with an impatient index finger.
“Age-advanced,” he explained. “Digitalized to show how a little kid like your sister’s toddler would appear as an older child.”
So the pictures of the older girl weren’t even really Nicki, just a computer’s idea of her. Lizzie shook her head, watching a line of rain squalls march up the bay like a heavy gray curtain.
“So you just wanted to get me here. Is that it? Nothing had changed, no new evidence about Nicki. It was all just about what you wanted.”
He half-turned toward her in appeal. She twitched the gun she held. “If you touch me, I swear to God I will kill you. You lured me here, you faked all this to—”
He drew back, his face bluish-gray in the fading daylight. “That’s how it began. But Lizzie … the photographs are real. I mean, I used Nicki’s real toddler snapshots to get them made. A guy at the missing-kids organization owed me a favor, so …”
Yeah, and God forbid Dylan should leave a debt uncollected. “Why, you got lonesome? So instead of finding a new woman, one you’d have to spend time and money getting to know, you figured you’d just yank the string on the one you already knew was a sucker for your nonsense?”
“You still don’t get it. I know that I screwed up, okay? And I’m sorry, it was stupid, I shouldn’t have done it. But the pictures are good, they’re what Nicki would actually look like at that age. I’ve sent them all over the state multiple times. I kept at it. To make it up to you, or try.”
He paused. “And the reason I had to get you here one way or another now,” he added, “is that I finally got a nibble.”
She stared while a heavy rumble of thunder shook the car and he kept talking. “Town up in Aroostook County, way up in the northern part of the state. Allagash, the town is called.”
She lowered the gun, put the safety on. “Someone thinks they’ve seen her,” he said. But then his shoulders sagged. “Probably not, you know, though. It’s probably some other kid.”
“Why here, then? Why Eastport, and why didn’t you just call me? Let me decide whether or not to—”
But she knew the answer to that last one, at least. Even if he had called, she’d have hung up on him, deleted his email without reading it, or in the unlikely event she had heard him out, she’d have thought it was a trick.
An empty lure he was dangling, to get her where he could work on her. The most he could’ve hoped for was that she’d take his flimsy lead on where Nicki might be, and follow it herself.
But this way—a supposedly accidental meeting, an imaginary plot by some shadowy third person, targeting them both—this way he had a chance of getting close to Lizzie again.
Or so he’d thought. He turned toward her once more. “This was more believable, Eastport. The last place Sissy lived … I figured you could go on from here, I’d get you up to Allagash somehow once you were in Maine.”
His face turned rueful. “But I’m sorry,” he repeated. “You were doing just fine without me. I should’ve had somebody else get in touch with you, tell you what I’d found. I should’ve left you alone.”
Doing just fine … She had been, actually
. Sort of: work, the gym, the Friday night fish dinner with Liam’s family, with the series of nice Catholic guys they kept inviting to sit next to her in the dining room where Liam’s medals and commendations were still ranged out on the mantel like a saint’s relics.
Just fine, the life she’d given up for Dylan’s lie. But she didn’t miss it, she realized suddenly. Since arriving here in Eastport, she hadn’t missed it at all, not even the apartment she had been so very proud of. Hardly thought of it, even.
He glanced over at the gun she still held. “So, are you going to shoot me with that thing or what?”
She shrugged. “No.” She put it into the nylon holster under her jacket. “So … tell me something. After we … after it ended. You never called. Was it because you didn’t want to, or …?”
He closed his eyes, leaned back against the headrest. “I’d promised her I wouldn’t. Sherry, that is. And for once I thought I ought to keep a promise, you know?”
He took a deep breath, grimaced at the pain, and let it out. “Just for once. And then she was gone. For a while I was sort of stunned, too paralyzed to do anything, and after that so much time had gone by that I figured you would be too pissed off.”
“You were right. I was.” And yet she was glad he’d managed to keep his promise. One tiny bright spot in his character … it was something, anyway. It gave her hope for him.
She glanced up from the age-progressed photograph of Nicki. A pretty little girl with cornflower-blue eyes, flaxen hair … she looked just like Sissy had at that age.
Just like her. “But now here we are, anyway.”
Outside it was getting dark, though it was barely three in the afternoon. Raindrops skittered warningly across the puddles on the paved parking lot.
“Just one thing, Dylan.” She started the car.
He was already nodding. “Yeah. I figured you’d have to ask. I was at a bachelor party in Augusta when I got the call. Guy in my old squad’s getting married.”
The call about a dead girl in an Eastport church, he meant. “Don’t worry, I’ve got alibi witnesses,” he added lightly.
Witnesses to say, that is, that he hadn’t been here killing a kid just so he’d have an excuse to be in Eastport when Lizzie arrived. Terrible thought, but she was a cop, so she’d had it.
She shrugged. That kind of coincidence was … well. It could have happened.
Stranger things had. “How were you planning to get together with me? I mean, before the girl got killed and brought you here as part of your job, how did you think we’d run into each other?”
“Um,” he said. “I hadn’t quite figured that part out yet. But … just take a ride, end up here, make it my business to run into you on the street or something. Since I knew you wouldn’t meet with me on purpose.”
Which actually reassured her more than anything else he could have said; a pat answer was her least favorite kind, in the believability department.
“Where are you staying?” He must’ve hoped to be staying with her by now. But then, we all hope for a lot of things, don’t we?
And we don’t get them. “Ah, there’s a cot at the cop shop; I’ll bunk there again if Bob Arnold lets me,” he replied.
She turned that direction, out of the motel parking lot. On the street the other cars had their headlights on, their wipers slapping at the rain gusting crosswise in bursts. A few pedestrians hustled along leaning sideways, holding on to hats or gripping plastic shopping bags to their chests.
At the corner she slowed for an eighteen-wheeler headed for the breakwater. A massive freighter with open cargo bays was tied up to the outer berth; near it, men in reflective vests directed the truck traffic under swaying dock lights.
Then, just as she was about to turn into the police station’s asphalt parking area, a familiar car—where had she seen it?—approached from the opposite direction. Before she could glimpse its plate, it pulled a U-turn and raced away.
Instinctively she hit the gas, only then recalling where she had noticed the fleeing vehicle before. Oh, for a dashboard beacon, a radio, anything … because she wasn’t a cop here and didn’t play one on TV, either. But she was about to behave like one.
Oh, was she ever. A dead girl with her throat slit, and then a dead boy with his throat cut, too … now there was a coincidence worth pursuing.
At the corner she swung the wheel hard to the left and hit the gas, accelerating into a narrow, tree-lined lane. Dylan glanced at her questioningly.
“Detour,” she told him flatly. The car ahead made another sharp left, fast, as if the driver knew she was following and had a guilty conscience.
She peeked at Dylan again; he looked … interested. Then she noticed something else about him.
“Dylan, buckle your damned seatbelt.”
The car ahead shot up over the top of the hill. Lizzie hit the gas again, gripping the wheel with one hand, reaching inside her jacket with the other. Dylan went after his own weapon, came up empty, and uttered an oath, then stuck his hand out for hers.
“Give it here. Come on, I know you’re a hardass at heart, okay? But on paper …”
She’d have argued, but he was right. A civilian did not get to fire from a moving vehicle at another moving vehicle, not for any reason. Not unless she wanted a lot of trouble.
No matter what she’d been empowered to do two days ago in another state. “Here.”
She passed the weapon to him without looking. As it crested the hilltop, the CRV caught air, slammed down onto its tires, and shot forward again after the fugitive car, which blew through the stop sign at the approaching corner and swung around it. Lizzie floored the Honda, flew around the same corner, and raced down a curving slope through what turned out to be a sprawling cemetery spread out on both sides of the road, entered by way of iron gates set into granite-block posts.
The gates were open. In the thickening gloom of approaching evening, the marble gravestones gleamed wetly under rain-haloed streetlights. Ahead, the fleeing car showed under them, too, as it entered the cemetery. It was a small red sports car with a black cloth top.
A Miata, Lizzie thought. More power, less weight … the Honda was great for off-duty, the little four-banger under the hood as economical as hell. But right now she’d have killed for a V-8 and to hell with better gas mileage.
Inside the graveyard with the Honda trailing, the Miata cut between two large stone angels onto a grassy track, paralleled the graveyard’s cast-iron fence for a hundred yards, then found the cemetery’s open iron gates once more and shot back out onto the road. The fleeing car’s brake lights flashed briefly at another corner, then rounded it faster than she’d have thought possible. The driver was nuts—
Or guilty of something, and Lizzie was betting hard on the latter. But why run from her? No one here even knew her, and they certainly didn’t know she was a … but then she realized:
Dylan. They could’ve glimpsed him through the windshield, and he’d been at the church right after the murder. He’d been there in an official capacity, inside the crime-scene tape with all the other …
“Cops,” she said. “They know we’re …”
In the dim glow of the dashboard lights, his face was tight with pain, but his grip on the gun looked solid. “Yeah. I betcha you’re right.”
The next turn put the Honda on two wheels momentarily, but it set down solidly again when instead of panicking, she floored it and let the car’s engineering do what it was designed to: not roll them. They raced down a dark, twisty road between big pine trees whose branches thrashed heavily in the rising wind.
“Hey. One other thing.” Dylan spoke calmly, just as if they weren’t exceeding the posted limit by triple or so.
“Yeah?” Taillights still glowed intermittently ahead each time she raced around another sharp curve, tires squealing. But unless she had her directions mixed up, they were approaching a larger thoroughfare where there could be more local traffic.
Storm or not, it was getting to be the
hour when working people would be on the road going home. And whoever this jerk up ahead was, he wasn’t worth the collateral damage she could cause by chasing him much farther right now.
“When this thing here is over, you’re going to let me help you,” Dylan said.
“Hah.” The mirthless laugh got punched out of her by a bump in the pavement. “Are you kidding?”
Then she concentrated again on catching up with the small red car. It had disappeared around a curve ahead, but if memory served, the main road was still a little ways distant.
So she might still catch up. “Yeah, they’re still up there,” Dylan said as she pressed the gas pedal harder. “And if whoever’s running from you is doing it ’cause they saw me in your car …”
Then maybe it was because they’d seen him at the church, she completed the thought silently. Because they’d done the crime.
“Or if it’s you they recognized …,” Dylan added.
Right; she’d been at the scene, too. Not only that, but she’d been in this very car not twenty-four hours ago, watching four punks until they twigged to her and split.
Four punks who could’ve known the dead girl; it was why she had been watching them in the first place.
Punks who could be in that car right now; as soon as she thought it, she knew it was true.
“I owe you, Lizzie. I got you here, it’s my fault. So if Nicki really is still alive and in Maine, maybe in Allagash—”
“Yeah. But listen, we’ll talk about it later, all right?”
Because for now it was all she could do just to hurtle down this wet, barely familiar road. Gripping the wheel, pushing the CRV as fast as she dared—faster, even—she frowned into the thickening drizzle. But no taillights showed ahead now, just the swaying evergreens lining both sides of the dark road.
Until suddenly she did see … “Dylan.”
She touched the brakes. The road, slick and wet in what was rapidly becoming another downpour, felt like ice under the tires. She braked to a stop by the side of the road and put the flashers on. Beyond a row of pine trees, a low, dark shape sent up plumes of steam.