The red canteen hung from a post by the front of the next tent along. Right by the entrance stood a small folding seat and right there on the seat Alice saw it: the journal one of the girls had been sketching on in the afternoon. The journal and a pen. Alice looked up. The man could not see her.
Alice stared at the journal.
Inside the tent somebody shifted and someone else whispered words she could not hear.
The journal.
John James Walker was not a patient man, and this little project was testing his limits. Why wasn’t the kid back already? He wasn’t going to be so stupid as to go for a walk in the middle of the night, was he? Maybe he was more foolish than he seemed.
The man peered at the campsite. The fire was all but extinguished and he couldn’t even see if the red canteen was still there.
He heard the soft steps from yards away and something inside him lifted.
Alice dropped the canteen at the man’s feet. She was shaking. Even in the darkness she could see that he was smiling and it was more frightening than what she had just done.
“Tomorrow,” she said, and she checked her voice, kept it steady, kept it low. “Tomorrow, sir, please take me back.”
The man mulled it over for a moment. Alice’s hands were tight fists and she was struggling not to cry. She was relieved to have made it back; she was terrified to have made it back.
The Hunter reached into his backpack and brought something out, snapped off a piece, and offered it to her. It was chocolate. “Take it, you earned it.”
Alice hesitated.
The man leaned forward. “You’re not done learning, child. When you are, I’ll take you back. You did good tonight but that was lesson number one. Lesson number two is how to hit the target right in the eye.”
Alice knew then, if she had not known it before, that whatever this man had done in his life before they had met, he had killed people, real people. Maybe it had been in a war, maybe not, she couldn’t tell. The world was spinning around and her insides felt ice cold in the August night.
She didn’t take the chocolate, and the man ate it in a single bite.
“We’ll see how you feel about things in the morning, boyo,” he said.
Later, much later on, Alice heard his breathing deepen and slow down, and she stirred in the sleeping bag that she had left unzipped. She could make it look like she was moving in her sleep, but she was ready to make a run for it, ready to grab her pack and go.
In the darkness the man sat with his back against the trunk of a mossy tree, holding the rifle across his knees—his eyes wide open.
It had been two days since Alice and the man had first spotted the hikers, and they had never let them out of their sight for more than a few hours. The Hunter had tracked them, anticipated their route, left them for a while, and then picked them up again—as if they were a plaything he used for his own grim amusement. And all the while he had been trailed by a twelve-year-old girl who he was watching even more closely than his targets.
The Hunter had trapped rabbits and squirrels and had taught his reluctant, taciturn apprentice how to skin them, gut them, and portion them. Alice watched him—she was so far beyond fear that she felt mostly numb, with sudden moments of despair—and she waited in dread of the next lesson, the next task. The man—it seemed—never slept and his eyes never strayed too far from her. The one good thing was that he still hadn’t realized that she was a girl.
“I can see something in you, boy,” he said to her once. “You don’t whine, you do your part. That’s more than a lot of grown men do.”
The dawn of the third day was pink and yellow on the jagged edge of the mountain, and Alice idly wondered whether they were still on Mount Baker. The man had been silent for a while and Alice tried to gauge his thoughts the way her father had taught her a thousand years earlier. There was the sense of a plan coming together, of potential scenarios being considered and eliminated. The Hunter glanced at the hikers’ camp—half a mile away and quiet in the early morning—and he glanced at Alice.
Today is the day, she thought. She was too far out of herself to be either surprised or scared. Today is the day he’s going to tell me that I have to kill one of them.
Chapter 42
Alice Madison woke up and wished that she was in her home in Seattle, where she would go into her kitchen in the bunny slippers that Rachel had given her for Christmas and she would make herself warm milk. She hitched herself up on her bed in the attic room: it wasn’t about the darn milk, she thought, it was about being in a place where everything reminded her of the darkest time in her life and what she’d had to do to survive it.
The wind rattled the pane and the chill drove Madison back under the covers. Brave Samuel, she thought, who had gone against his father. Would twelve-year-old Alice have been as brave? Courage is an oddly shaped thing: razor-sharp on one side and blunt on the other. You push forward because you have to, and you do what you must.
After a while, in spite of the wind rattling the old house, Madison fell asleep.
No one came for her in her dreams, and she lay motionless under the blankets until dawn.
The snowplows started early on Monday morning and worked Main Street and the thoroughfare that linked Ludlow to the highway. Emergency vehicles could just about get through, if needed, but travel was discouraged: if the snow melted even a little and then froze again when the temperatures dropped, the road would become deadly.
The radio news confirmed that the schools would not open and gave a telephone number for parents to call. It was the third time it had happened that winter.
The roads off Main Street were still difficult to negotiate, and Brown, Madison, and Sorensen made their way through the snowdrift to the police station under a watery sky. The deputies had already left the office, busy trying to reach a couple of elderly residents who lived alone—to make sure they were all right.
“When we were in her home,” Brown said to Chief Sangster as he was pouring himself coffee, “Mrs. Edwards said something about the town not being what it used to be. That’s what she’d said the first day, when she was talking to you here about her dog. I remembered it last night. At the time I thought nothing of it, but she repeated it after the shooting. She meant something by it, didn’t she?”
It took Sangster a second to register what Brown had asked him.
“It’s nothing,” he said after a beat.
“What’s nothing?”
“A few months ago there was a run of break-ins and a couple of burglaries. A few cameras were stolen, some small jewelry, a couple of laptops. That’s all.”
“Go on.”
“They were linked to three ex-cons who were trying to get to Canada. They spent a few days in town and then moved on. They were arrested in Christina Lake, across the border.”
“Did they find the stolen property on them?”
“No.”
“Why did you think it was them?”
“Too much of a coincidence: you’ve got three felons passing through with robbery convictions involving violence—parole violators on their way back to jail, if you ask me—and suddenly I get calls that people’s homes have been trashed and their valuables are gone.”
“Robbery is very different from a break-in or a burglary.”
“These guys were in a hurry. They snatched what they could and made for the mountains.”
“Was any business hit? Any store?”
“No, that would have been too dangerous. They were just trying to get some easy money. If they’d hit a business they’d have had the state police and a dozen choppers on their asses in three minutes flat.”
“How many?”
“What?”
“How many break-ins and burglaries?”
Sangster sighed. “Four break-ins, three burglaries.”
“Seven incidents in all.”
“That’s right.”
Brown sat back in his chair.
“I’d like to see the list
of the residences who were hit,” Brown said.
“Wait a minute . . . ,” Sangster replied, and then something passed across his face and the man paused.
Brown did not need to ask—but he did so, anyway. “Were the Edwardses hit?”
Sangster pressed his fingers on the bridge of his nose. The whole notion that the break-ins and the shootings could be connected was ridiculous.
“Was the residence of Lee and Ty Edwards one of the ones broken into?” Brown repeated.
“Yes, it was,” the chief admitted. “And let me go on the record that I don’t think it had anything to do with a nutter shooting Ty Edwards dead.”
“It’s on the record,” Brown said. “And now, Chief, if I may, I really need to see that list.”
The chief looked like he’d had a bad night. The telephone had been ringing every couple of minutes since they got in, and Polly was trying to field the calls from the locals and the media in the best way she could. The online news reports alluded to the task force in charge of the case; Madison wondered how many people you needed to be called a task force. As of that morning they had four full-time officers, two part-timers, and one civilian—if she counted Polly, the chief’s assistant, who seemed to be doing better than they were.
Sangster was on the fifth day of his first double-homicide investigation, and he didn’t look good on it. He worked at his desk for a few minutes and then produced a file. Brown and Madison read it at the table—the task force table.
When they were done, they looked at each other: Sangster’s day was going from bad to worse.
“Chief,” Brown said, “we think there’s a pattern here.”
“What do you mean?”
“See, look at the addresses . . . the perpetrators didn’t stick to one area of the town. They moved around and chose mostly houses, but also one apartment. Nothing too valuable or awkward to carry was ever stolen. And, chronologically, we have the break-ins first and the burglaries later.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“All the people whose homes were hit were above sixty and married, and the Edwardses were the last ones. What are the chances that the one common factor between all the victims is that they were couples of the same age?”
“He was looking for Edwards,” Madison said.
“Guys—” The chief’s patience would only stretch so far. “Are we really saying that the killer has been in town since last summer?”
“No,” Madison said. “He must have arrived much earlier than that, looked around for a while, found which of Ludlow’s residents fit the bill, and then begun to eliminate them from his short list until he found the person he was looking for.”
“You do know this sounds like guesswork wrapped in baloney with a dash of bullshit, don’t you?” Sangster said.
“Yes,” Brown replied. “We get that a lot.”
Sorensen had been studying a section of one of the recovered fibers in her microscope. In spite of Madison’s crack she had actually considered whether the man-made fiber could possibly have come from a wig, but she had quickly crossed out that possibility. Sorensen’s gut told her car carpet. The dog must have been transported in some kind of vehicle—and presumably the killer would have wanted him unseen during transit.
Looks like Tucker might have been put in the trunk.
There were a huge amount of variables but FACID—the Forensic Automotive Carpet Fiber Identification Database—was a useful tool. Sorensen had sliced the fiber into two sections: one half for analysis via infrared spectroscopy, the other for observation under a polarized microscope. Hopefully, it would minimize fiber distortion and give her better results.
In order to search the database Sorensen still had to ascertain color, cross-sectional type, polymer class, and presence/absence of delustrant and heavy striation—and even once she had managed to fulfill all the requirements, it might turn out to be a pointless exercise.
She stood, paced around the senior center’s main room, and then returned to her desk. At least in Seattle she had her team to irk and nag for her own amusement, to keep things lively.
She made a note in her pad and her thoughts turned to powdered titanium dioxide, a common delustrant. Just then, her gaze fell on the evidence bags that contained the bullets: the killer had used two different firearms and in all likelihood had already gotten rid of both. He had also used fire to destroy the evidence at the first crime scene. He was about fire and gunmetal, about total destruction and execution.
Sorensen appraised the meager resources of her back-room lab and hoped to God that they would be enough, because there was a time line: Robert Dennen had been killed in the early hours of Thursday morning and Ty Edwards had been shot on Saturday around lunchtime. If the shooter was following a day-on/day-off schedule then Monday, Sorensen thought, as she adjusted the specimen under the lens, was a kill day.
Lee Edwards’s home felt as if it was not quite hers any longer. In the rush to help and support her in her time of need—her daughter was flying in as soon as possible—friends and neighbors had almost forgotten that the widow was perfectly capable of cooking her own meals and seeing to her own needs.
It was nice to have company, and Lee appreciated everybody’s efforts; however, from time to time, she just needed to go into her bedroom for a bit of solitude and a quiet weep, and possibly a nap too. When she returned to the living room, she was sure to find a couple of friends chatting away and eager to be there for her.
What had happened two days earlier had thrust her many years into the past, and it had all poured out: how she had met Ty and her early days in Ludlow, the uncomplicated ease of their life together, and the joys of living in such a remote place.
Talking, napping, and weeping seemed to be all that she was good for these days.
Somewhere in Ludlow, in a house not so different from any other on the same street—a street that had been cleared by the snowplows—a man sat on the bargain-basement sofa in his living room and stared into space. Life, he knew, was a cruel joker. And just when you thought it couldn’t dump any more of the brown stuff all over you, there it was, a fresh new truckload of it coming around the corner just for you.
He had planned, he had executed, and still—still—it had not been enough. The man reached for one of the sofa cushions. He placed it flat on the dining table and then opened the cutlery drawer in his kitchenette. Once he found what he was looking for he returned to the table. It was a poor substitute for the actual target of his rage—but all things in good time. He clasped the knife tight and ripped through the fabric, over and over and over, until there was nothing but shreds. He did it without a word and, when it was done, he cleaned up and sat back on the sofa.
In front of him, on a coffee table he had bought at the Jacobsens’ yard sale, lay a steel trap. Its bright metal jaws were clamped shut, but shards from a piece of kindling were visible where he had tested the mechanism a few months earlier. It was an antique—clear proof that they didn’t make things how they used to, he thought.
The man had had other plans for the hunting trap. But life, in its sick and twisted way, had taught him to improvise, and he had learned his lesson well.
Chapter 43
His da had been a fisherman, and the blindfolded man had been brought up to love, respect, and fear the sea. It had taken the lives of some of his da’s friends and provided the food on his table. It was somehow fitting that he would be brought there that day, for the savage sea to be his witness.
“Do you believe in God?” the man said.
“Yes,” the blindfolded man replied. He did not believe, though, and had never believed, not really, not with faith and fervor and hope, as his parents had. He had shed his religion like a bad suit, as soon as he was old enough and his mother couldn’t physically carry him to Mass. Was that why this was happening to him? “I believe in God,” he said.
“Good. But he’s not here right now, and I am.”
The blindfolded man did not reply. He was
exhausted, he was confused. He sat bound to a chair with heavy ropes that stank of algae, and he felt the floor of the boat under him roll with the swell. There were seagulls too—he could hear them—clamoring high above them, not understanding that this boat, these men, were not out there on the open sea to fish. There might very well be some killing, and some dying, but nothing that should concern the shoals of fish around them.
The man had woken up on the chair a while earlier and since then he had heard nothing outside the cabin but the shrieking of the gulls and the splashing of the waves against the hull. Wherever they were, they were far from the harbor, far from anybody who might perhaps hear them and come asking questions. The air was salty and sharp and it could have been a great day out. It probably was—for someone else, somewhere else.
The man found it difficult to concentrate: fear had strapped a ton of lead to the middle of his chest and it was hard to breathe, let alone think. In his fatigue he caught a draft of sea breeze, and for an instant he was on a pier with his da when he was eight, after a day at the Cape.
A squawk from a bird brought him back and he shivered, a deep shiver that had little to do with the cold: he had tried in vain to leave his wretched body on this boat and escape into the memory of a perfect day, but the ropes biting into his arms told him that he’d stay right where he was, because his da was dead and buried in St. Augustine and no one on this boat was going to buy him cotton candy.
“Tell me about it,” the man said.
“I don’t know anything.”
“I’m going to give you a minute to gather your thoughts. Consider whether we would really go to the trouble of taking you all the way out into the blue forever if we didn’t know you knew. If we didn’t know for sure that you knew.”
The man was not angry. His voice—pure south Boston—sounded amused, almost pleased.
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