by Sarah Graves
But they hadn’t. She stuck her phone away again. “Gemerle’s got no priors. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t active. I’m guessing these women on his list are ones who never reported what he did to them, because he threatened them. Peg, too, probably.”
Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “And maybe some of them are crossed off because they aren’t alive anymore?”
“Right. I want to know what’s in that backyard of his. If it’s not already dug up then it needs to be.”
Chevrier eyed the corpse again. “So if you think he moved her, where do you think Tara Wylie is now?”
“Who knows? And he can’t tell us. Damn.” She turned away in frustration. It was just midafternoon but already the low sun was sinking toward the mountaintops to the west.
“Meanwhile there’s a woman in the area using the name of one of his victims’ close associates, Jane Crimmins,” she said. “We know it’s not her, we’ve got lab evidence saying so. But again, we don’t know why.”
Chevrier drew an Altoids tin from his shirt pocket and popped one into his mouth. “Sounds like a mess. Hudson, you got all this okay?”
Dylan caught the sheriff’s drift on the first bounce.
“I could sure use Deputy Snow’s help,” he answered smoothly. “She’s got homicide experience and we’ve worked together before.”
He glanced at Lizzie. “Also, she’s up-to-date on all aspects of this case. The local aspects, especially.”
Chevrier popped another mint and chewed it vigorously.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Snow, you can work with all of ’em as needed, right? Feds, state guys…”
“Yeah, boss.” She shot a look of gratitude at Dylan.
Not that this all couldn’t still turn into a huge pain in the butt. As if to emphasize the fact, Chevrier aimed a warning look at her as he strode back to his vehicle:
Don’t screw this up.
—
It was almost midnight, and there’d been no sounds for a while from Cam. But I felt frozen until the door buzzer made me jump.
“Miss Crimmins, do you remember me?”
It was the reporter from the alt-weekly who’d been downstairs earlier.
“Go away,” I shouted.
A business card slipped under the door. “Okay, I understand you might want to think about talking to me. But I want your story and you know from before you can trust me. I’ll write it all just like you say.”
I said nothing but in the bedroom Cam chose that moment to make a loud gurgling sound.
“Miss Crimmins, are you all right?”
“Go away or I’ll never talk to you!” I told him. This late at night one of the other tenants would get fed up with this guy in the hall and then they’d call the police. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow!”
When I peeked out a little later I half expected to see him down on the sidewalk, but he wasn’t there so when I’d finished packing a bag, my laptop, and a big manila envelope full of Cam’s pills, I hurried out of there. I paused only to take two of Cam’s stimulant pills and grab a barbecue skewer from the kitchen drawer.
Cam was still breathing, but shallowly and not often; I thought she didn’t have much longer to live. They’d know that she’d been murdered, surely.
But no one would know where I was. They could pound on the door tomorrow, I thought as I rushed down the stairs and out the service door to the alley. They could pound all they wanted but no one would answer. Eventually they’d get in, and Cam would be here, of course; cold, silent.
But I’d be long gone.
—
It was late Thursday afternoon when Dylan summoned the crime-scene techs from the motel where they’d been finishing up and spent a few minutes with them. The pretty one wasn’t among them, Lizzie noticed, annoyed with herself for caring. Then he and Lizzie went back down the gravel road in the Crown Vic.
“So,” he said as they bumped onto the paved highway, “you think Peg might finally come clean now?” He turned toward town, leaving the ashy zone of fire devastation behind.
“Beats me,” Lizzie said. “Now that Gemerle’s dead he can’t hurt her—or Tara, either—but…”
But there was more to it than that, she was sure of it. And the girl was still missing. A dagger of renewed anxiety for Tara Wylie pierced Lizzie as Dylan aimed the big sedan toward Bearkill and hit the gas.
“If Tara was coming home just around the time Gemerle got to Bearkill, the timing’s right,” he mused. “But how’d he find her?”
Lizzie turned from the depressingly dry rural landscape going by. “Easy. He cruised her neighborhood. If she was headed home by then, which based on her past behavior we think she probably was, he’d have come across her sooner or later.”
Back in the city among so many people the idea would’ve been far-fetched, but not here. “Probably he even knew what she looked like, since he was apparently keeping tabs on her mother for all those years,” Lizzie said.
Surveillance from a distance was easy. Even the pictures on Tara Wylie’s official MISSING posters had been downloaded from the Internet. Identifying her would’ve been a snap.
When they drove back into Bearkill the downtown streets were nearly empty, people either staying close to home or leaving town altogether on account of the fires. Dylan pulled to the curb.
“So does your new girlfriend know the kind of hours you work?” Lizzie asked suddenly. “And what you’re doing while you work them?”
He glanced at her. “Why, you think she needs warning?”
But then his face went rueful. “I don’t know. Maybe she does. Just…but look, probably we shouldn’t talk about it.”
“Yeah. Probably we shouldn’t.” It was none of her business.
“Anyway, I’ve got to go,” she said. “I sent down a separate request to the New Haven PD earlier, asked them to get in touch with the real Jane Crimmins. And with the other girl, the Gemerle victim that Jane Crimmins took in. She’s in the hospital.”
“So we’ll see what they have to say. They’re working on tracking down the stolen van, too. As far as whatever vehicle Gemerle was using, there’s plenty of them in the fire zone. Volunteers’ cars, work-crew trucks, people bringing food and water…”
One more wouldn’t be noticed. She got out, bent to the open car window. “Listen, you might as well know something now. When this is over I’m out of here. I’m going back to Boston. I’ll tell Chevrier once things settle down.”
He stared for a moment. Then: “But what about Nicki?”
She forced herself to answer calmly. “Dylan, I can’t search the state of Maine inch by inch. I need some kind of a lead, and there aren’t any. Like it or not, she’s a cold case.”
When he didn’t reply, she went on. “And there’s nothing else for me here. If something substantial about Nicki needs looking into, you can call me about it.”
A muscle jumped tautly in his jaw. “Didn’t take you long to give up.”
She couldn’t believe it. She kept her voice even. “Oh, that’s what you think I’m doing? Really?”
Luckily just then Missy Brantwell came outside and spotted Dylan’s car. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, hurrying over. “The NHPD sergeant called you again,” she told Lizzie. “About someone you wanted checked. Jane Crimmins? He said no one was home at her place but the uniforms got the super to open it.”
Missy took a deep breath. “And it looks like somebody got killed in there, he said.”
—
Outside our building in New Haven I called the reporter who’d showed up earlier, reading the number off the card he’d slipped under the apartment door. It was past midnight and he sounded half asleep, but he perked up when I told him I would talk with him after all.
Only it had to be now, I said. I’d meet him in East Rock Park; if he brought anyone else, though, it would be all off, and Cam was refusing to talk to him at all.
He could get the whole story, every lurid detail, I told him: Cam’s victimizatio
n at the hands of Henry Gemerle, her rescue, and our lives together afterward.
But he’d have to get it from me. The reporter agreed, the same terrier tenacity I’d heard in his voice earlier drawing him now, and ten minutes later I was waiting by the playground where the swings and jungle gym stood half lit by a single streetlamp.
He showed up on foot and came over to my car, a skinny young guy in a tan knitted hat and black hoodie over a T-shirt, a wispy reddish beard and thick horn-rims completing his hipster look.
I gestured for him to get in, and he did. “Hey,” he said, taking the horn-rims off to wipe them.
“Hey, yourself.” I felt bad about it, but he’d heard Cam’s labored breathing and he seemed smart. He might get to thinking about it, later; he might even call the police.
He could do it soon, and I needed a head start. And I’d come this far, hadn’t I? Isolating Cam, lying to her and drugging her—or trying—then attacking her and leaving her to die…it wasn’t as if I didn’t know what I’d already done, and what I’d become.
What, like it or not, I was. So I turned quickly while the reporter was still busy polishing his glasses, and gripping the metal shaft of the barbecue skewer I’d taken from the apartment, I drove the tip of it into his left ear canal as hard as I could.
He stiffened, his arms jerking up and his clenched fists slamming his chest. He’d already begun convulsing as I grabbed his phone out of his pocket, leaned across him to yank the door handle, and pushed him out. When I pulled out of the park his body was visible in the rearview mirror, still moving.
So that was done, his foolishness ended for good. But I still couldn’t leave town; not yet. Instead I drove to the medical center, walked through the dim, silent parking garage to the hospital’s main entrance, and crossed the echoingly empty lobby.
There was no one at the security desk. The cafeteria was closed, and in the gift shop the Mylar balloons floated eerily, pressing shiny faces against the windows as if trying to escape.
I took the elevator upstairs, entered my office, and logged onto the medical database system as ADMINISTRATOR. Locating Cam’s file, I changed her status from DISCHARGED to ADMITTED and listed her condition as CRITICAL.
That way if anyone went looking for Cam, they’d have an explanation for why no one answered our apartment door. If they looked hard for her, of course, it would be a different story. But this would slow them down. Exiting the database, I left the office and the hospital building as unnoticed as I had arrived.
The drive through the silent city felt surreal, as if the dreams of the sleeping people all around me were in my own head.
At the service area in Branford I saw only the slack-faced servers at the food counters, moving like zombies to the beat of piped-in music under the fluorescent lights. I bought doughnuts and sandwiches, washing another of the Ritalin pills down with a swallow of Big Gulp soda; minutes later the car was gassed up, the tires checked and reservoirs filled, so there was little chance of my becoming disabled by the side of the road.
On the turnpike once more, I glanced a final time in the rearview mirror at the city’s late-night glow, sodium yellow on the charcoal sky. After that I drove north, not stopping until I entered the state of Maine.
—
By Thursday evening, a few hours after Henry Gemerle’s body turned up in the fire zone, a high-pressure system that had been stalled north of Montreal got a reluctant move on, sliding east. Behind it a line of thunderstorms promised relief for parched, fire-plagued Aroostook County.
But ahead of the storms came lightning, long wriggling lines of blue-white light crackling hotly through the night sky around Bearkill. Next came bright, yellow-white flares shooting up from the tinder-dry evergreens on the ridges around town, their pitchy sap so flammable that it might as well have been gasoline.
“It’s happening.” Trey Washburn blew an unhappy breath out. The burly veterinarian stood with Lizzie on the sidewalk in front of her office. From there the sky’s orange glow made it clear that in a supreme case of irony, the weather they’d all been hoping for had touched off the major blaze they’d been fearing.
“Looks like I’m going to have a long night,” Trey continued. Not everyone in the area had moved their livestock yet, and plenty of animals still needed coaxing into trailers.
“Me, too.” Another bright flare sprang up on the horizon as here in town more cars and pickup trucks zipped by, heading for the volunteer fire crews’ staging area.
“You okay?” Missy called, driving up in her yellow Jeep.
In the backseat, Rascal drooled happily, his hound-dog head hanging out the open car window; of course Missy had thought of going over to Lizzie’s for the dog.
“Heading to my gran’s,” she called. Trey’s big red pickup truck had already departed. “Unless you need me?”
“Nope. You go, I’ll hang out here,” Lizzie replied. “Stay safe with your family.”
A whiff of burning creosote stung her nose as Cody Chevrier pulled over, his face grim. “Everything under control?”
She stepped up to his vehicle. “So far. I’ll keep the office open as long as I can. Unless there’s something else you need?”
Chevrier shook his close-clipped, silvery head. “You’re doing it. Give yourself time to get out ahead of any flames, you hear?”
The fire was visible between the rooftops, moving inexorably closer. Chevrier eyed the blaze uneasily while from his dashboard a stream of urgent dispatch transmissions crackled.
“Things get dicey, you hit the road,” he said. “This here’s for an experienced crew, Lizzie.”
On his radio the dispatcher’s tone changed suddenly. “Fire One, choppers report you have flame approaching your position on your west, over.”
Fire One was the on-air name for the all-volunteer Bearkill Fire & Rescue. “Fire One, do you copy?”
Still nothing. “Answer back, Fire One.” Chevrier pulled away abruptly, the Blazer’s cherry beacon swirling.
Experienced, she thought, watching him go. Which she wasn’t, and it made her feel even more out of her element here than usual.
But as she turned back to her office she spotted Peg Wylie leaving Area 51, under the glowing sign of the big-eyed alien with the tilted cocktail glass.
Peg looked as if she’d been tilting a few cocktails herself, wobbling unsteadily toward her old Honda. So instead of going in, Lizzie fired up the Blazer and drove alongside Peg.
“Hop in,” she called, and Peg obeyed; booze fumes filled the passenger compartment.
“Take me out there,” the inebriated woman demanded thickly.
“You lied.” Aiming the Blazer out of town, Lizzie gripped the wheel so hard her fingers ached.
“I was about to commit a crime for you, you know that?” she went on as she swerved hard onto the old Station Road just past the Bearkill town limits sign, bumping on the broken pavement.
“Tara’s not the result of any one-night stand. She’s not your ex-husband’s kid, either. And Gemerle didn’t give her to you.
“She’s yours and Gemerle’s, isn’t she? You didn’t want an Amber Alert because you were afraid that the Gemerle connection might surface.”
Peg rubbed her eyes with balled fists; she could do that now because the contact lenses weren’t in. When she gazed imploringly at Lizzie, it was with eyes that were a deep, rich brown.
“What I still don’t understand,” Lizzie finished, “is why.”
In the past couple of hours Peg had cried too much, and drunk too much, to keep the lenses in. She’d taken them out in Area 51’s tiny restroom, Lizzie guessed, because they hurt and because she’d figured no one would see her anymore tonight.
But about that, as about so many things recently, Peg Wylie had been wrong. Another pang of anxiety for Tara stabbed Lizzie.
“No,” Peg protested again. “It was only that Tara’s run away before. And she’s always come home, so I just didn’t think—”
Lizzie shook her
head exasperatedly. “Yeah, right. Stick with that stupid story, Peg. Because, you know, it’s worked so well for you, so far.”
Ahead in the murk the skeleton of an old gas station hulked by the crumbling roadside, saplings thrusting up through what had been the service area. A maple tree grew in the mechanic’s bay and the antique gas pumps were all shotgunned to scrap.
Lizzie pulled onto the disintegrating tarmac. The gnawing urgency she felt, that Tara was still out there and in danger—but alive, she could still be alive—kept ratcheting upward.
But the mother of the year here, just went on lying about it. Lizzie turned in the driver’s seat.
“Give me a break, Peg, okay? She’s your child and his. And you wanted to make sure no one would suspect that.”
She forced down a surge of fury. “Because he threatened you, and Tara, too, and you’re still scared of him. But now what you feared is happening, because you gave a statement about him in New Haven.”
Peg shook her head in silence as Lizzie went on: “But what I don’t get is, why would you do that?”
More silence from Peg. “He’s dead, you know. Gemerle is. We found his body up in the fire zone. We think he was killed last night. From the condition of his body we think it was almost certainly his blood in the motel room, not Tara’s. We’ll know for sure when lab results come back.”
At the news Peg looked up wonderingly in relief, but not for long. “Then where is she?”
She was sobering up fast. “Why hasn’t she come home yet if he hasn’t…if he hasn’t hurt her?”
“I don’t know. But I think maybe he had her and now that he’s dead he can’t say where he put her.” Cruel, but Peg’s dawning look of simple fright in response gave Lizzie a way in at last.
“So you’ve got to tell me the whole thing, Peg. All of it, or we’ll have no chance of finding her.
“Everything you remember or that you even suspect,” she went on. “Then maybe we can still get Tara out of this.”
Peg finally spoke:
“No. She’s dead, isn’t she.” A flat, despairing statement, not a question. “He killed her, hid her body.”