Savaged

by Mia Sheridan

  He stood, heading to the front door and opening it. A blow of icy wind hit his face and he stepped back. “It’s an ice storm.” He’d known it as soon as he saw those fluffy flakes mixed with icy shine.

  Harper came up next to him, holding her arm against the whipping wind and closing the door. “God, that came up quickly. I should go before it gets really bad.”

  Jak turned to her. “It’s already really bad.”

  She met his eyes. “I lost track of time.” She looked toward the window, shaking her head, her expression nervous. She took her phone from her pocket, glancing at it. “No service here, but I’ve gotten service in this wilderness before. Sometimes it’s a matter of being in the right spot.”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about—he knew what a phone was, but not how one worked. The thing in her hand was a mystery to him, but he didn’t question it. The very last thing he wanted was for her to see him as a child.

  “I need to go out to my truck,” she said, grabbing her jacket.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll be right back.”

  “I’ll come with you,” he said again, not willing to let her walk out into the howling wind alone. He put on his coat and boots quickly and pulled the door open, squinting against the ice that burned his face. It was too easy to get lost in ice storms. One missed step or wrong turn, and suddenly you didn’t know where you were and could barely see a tree right in front of you before you walked into it. He used his body to shield her as they walked in the direction where her truck was parked, not able to see it until it was right in front of them.

  He’d been lost in an ice storm like this once. He’d hunkered down with Pup and barely— But he pushed his thoughts away. He didn’t want to think about that right now.

  Harper stepped around him, her head bent, the wind picking up in speed and sound, whipping her hood off her head, her hair going in every direction. She laughed, but it was high like a scared bird.

  She climbed into her truck and he went in after her, slamming the door and escaping from the wind. It pounded at the truck, sneaking between the cracks, trying its best to reach them. Their mixed breath came out in sharp pants. The sound of the wind got less, though the truck shook, the house invisible through the front glass.

  “Good lord,” she said, pushing her hair back, crystals of ice shining like jewels in the low light coming from the phone she’d brought from her pocket again.

  She made a sound of unhappiness and then held her phone up in the air, moving it from side to side. “There. Damn . . . ah. Crap.” She did that for another minute, finally dropping it to her lap. “It won’t hold a signal.” She turned to him. “I don’t think I should drive in this. I’d probably run into a tree trying to get to the road, and even if I didn’t, that road has a drop-off on both sides. I could, uh, just wait out here. I’m sure this will die down in a little bit.” She looked at him, her eyes wide as she waited for him to say . . . something.

  He frowned. Was she trying to get away from him? Did she want to sit in her cold truck instead of with him? “Why would you want to freeze out here, when you can be warm inside?”

  “I just hate to keep showing up and forcing you to spend time with me.”

  Forcing him? He was bigger than she was. Stronger. She couldn’t force him to do anything. He could crush her if he wanted to. He didn’t, but he could. His brow scrunched up. He didn’t understand when she said things that didn’t really say anything at all. He wasn’t sure what to say back. “If I wanted you to leave, I’d tell you to go.”

  She let out a breath that was taken by the sound of the wind outside. “I was trying to be polite.” She shook her head and made a helpless sound. “I guess that in itself is a whole language, isn’t it?” She took a breath. “A dumb one most of the time.”

  Jak thought about that. “So being polite is saying something you don’t mean so the other person has to say the thing you do mean.”

  She laughed, the soft one he liked. “Pretty much.” She turned toward him. “So, then. Jak, I’d like to come inside and get warm instead of sitting alone in my cold truck. Is that okay with you?”

  “I told you it was.”

  Harper laughed. “Right. You did. Thank you. Then let’s get back inside.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Mrs. Cranley?”

  “Yes. Who’s speaking?” The woman on the other end of the line had an unusually deep voice that rattled slightly. A smoker, Mark guessed.

  “Hi, ma’am. This is Agent Mark Gallagher. I’m with the Montana Department of Justice.”

  There was a brief pause and some rustling, and then Mrs. Cranley said, “What is this about?”

  “Ma’am, I’m very sorry to inform you that your brother was found deceased.”

  Another pause, longer this time. “Isaac?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did he leave something for me in his will?”

  Well, that was abrupt. Mark was taken off guard for a moment. “Actually, ma’am, it appears Isaac didn’t have a will. But you’re listed on several documents as his next of kin.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” Mark heard some more rustling and then Mrs. Cranley’s muffled voice yelling to someone in the background, “Lester, Isaac died and didn’t leave a will. I’m his next of kin.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to Isaac, Mrs. Cranley?”

  “You can call me Georgette. And, eh . . . maybe twelve years ago at our daddy’s funeral. Me and Isaac didn’t get on real well. Guess that doesn’t matter now. He was a creep, truth be told.”

  Mark cleared his throat. Apparently, this woman had no problem speaking ill of the dead. Made his job easier anyway. “How do you mean, ma’am? Georgette?”

  Mark heard a deep inhale as if the woman had just lit a cigarette. “He just was. He was always watching everyone with this weird look on his face. Gave me the chills, and he was my own brother. It got worse as he got older. I was happy when me and Lester moved to Portland, and I had no reason to see him anymore.”

  “I see.”

  “’Course I figured it out when I went over to his place in Missoula, oh . . . I guess it’d have been going on eighteen or nineteen years now and there was an old lady neighbor at his place with her grandson I guess. Kid was just a toddler, so it’d have to be. Isaac kept staring at him with this look on his face.” She made a sound that gave Mark the idea she’d just done an exaggerated shiver. “Well, that’s when I said, ah, bingo. Isaac’s a pervert. It all made sense.”

  Mark felt suddenly sick. He cleared his throat. “But you never saw any evidence of him abusing children?”

  “Nah. Just that look. But women know things, ya know? Intuition.” He heard her suck in another inhale of her cigarette.

  “And this was in Missoula, you said?” Mark pulled Isaac Driscoll’s file closer and noted that his last known address had been in Missoula—probably an apartment building. He’d been in unit A.

  “Yup. I don’t have the address anymore, but that’s the last place I seen him.”

  “From what I understand, your brother did volunteer work for several social services agencies in the area.”

  “Well, there ya go. Gave him access.”

  Mark cleared his throat again. He’d spoken to several people at the volunteer agencies Driscoll had done work for, but no one had said anything disparaging about him. He made a note to widen the net of people to interview who might have known Driscoll in a volunteer capacity.

  “This woman at your brother’s house all those years ago, can you tell me anything about her?”

  “Yeah, she was real hard to understand. Had a thick accent. She left pretty quick with the kid but not soon enough for me to see how Isaac looked at him. I thought about going over to her apartment and warning her away from Isaac, but I figured people gotta learn their own lessons, ya know?”

  Again, Mark was taken off guard. Maybe the whole Driscoll family was just off. �
�Um, right. Well, I’m calling for another reason. Your brother owned quite an extensive acreage of land outside of Helena Springs. As his next of kin, the acreage will go to you, but Isaac was allowing a young man to stay in a cabin on the property.”

  She made a small huffing sound. “Yeah, I bet he was.”

  “There is no evidence of any sort of abuse. The man is in his early twenties. It appears Isaac let him stay there after his parents abandoned him, and the man grew up without any exposure to society.”

  Georgette laughed, a low sound filled with phlegm. “So Isaac was raising himself a mountain man? Weird.”

  “I can’t say Isaac did much of his raising. But like I said, he let him stay on the property. When the estate is released to you, would you allow him to remain in his cabin until he figures out what to do? His options are very limited.”

  Georgette sucked in another loud inhale and Mark grimaced on behalf of her lungs. “Nope, nope. I don’t want a thing to do with Isaac’s weirdness, not when he was living and especially now he’s dead. Nope, that mountain man’s gotta go. The sooner the better.”

  Mark sighed. “If you reconsider, ma’am—”

  “I won’t. He’ll need to vacate immediately. As far as I’m concerned, he’s poaching on my land.”

  **********

  The Internet was filled with information about the Spartans and for fifteen minutes or so, Mark got caught up in the research. He’d needed a palate cleanse after talking to Isaac Driscoll’s sister and her blackened lungs, and sad to say, stories of war and carnage were more appealing at the moment.

  Sparta, Greece, was a warrior society centered around military service. Apparently, it began in infancy when children were inspected for strength, and then, at age seven, soldiers came and took the child from the caretaker, whose gentle and affectionate influence was considered a negative, and housed them in a dormitory with other boy soldiers. The Spartan child then endured harsh physical discipline and deprivation to learn how to be strong, and rely on his wits. In his early twenties, he had to pass a rigorous test and only then, became a Spartan soldier.

  Sounds brutal. Mark could be grateful for one thing—he hadn’t grown up in ancient Greece.

  He looked up the Battle of Thermopylae, a military encounter with the Persians, who greatly outnumbered the Spartans. He studied the picture online, and just as it had the first time, it sent a strange shudder down his spine. It was definitely the presence of bows and arrows in the warriors’ hands—that obviously could not be ignored based on the weapon used in the two murders—but it was something else too. Something that skated just out of reach. Maybe not something in the painting so much as a puzzle piece that would link all of this together. Make sense of it.

  A mystery woman, murders, bows and arrows, an abandoned boy, a sister who thought her brother was a “pervert,” government-run social studies . . . Had Driscoll been attempting to raise . . . a modern-day Spartan? But why? Had he been plain batshit crazy? Or did he really believe he was helping Lucas?

  He rifled through the case files sitting on his desk in front of him. Crime scene photos, information obtained about the arrows used in the murders—a popular brand sold in hundreds of sporting goods stores, both locally and on the internet. All dead ends at the moment.

  The ding on his phone alerted him to an email, but since he was sitting in front of his computer, he opened it there. “Well, that’s interesting timing,” he murmured to himself when he saw it was from Dr. Swift. When he opened it, there was a very short note and attached, the final study that Isaac Driscoll had worked on at Rayform. Mark scrolled through it. It was a study on the incidence of incarceration in inmates raised by single mothers. There were lots of stats and graphs, none of which seemed to make a good case for single motherhood—though Mark knew that in any good psychological study, other variables needed to be accounted for, or at least mentioned as contributing factors. The study did that, naming low income, gun and gang violence in the area where the inmate grew up, and things of that nature. It painted a bleak picture, and Mark realized that it was mostly because the piece of work simply offered numbers and stats—not solutions. Which, of course, was what studies were meant to do. They weren’t designed to solve problems, simply identify them. He could see why Isaac Driscoll, or anyone working in that field for that matter, might become cynical about society after performing such studies year after year.

  His door creaked open, and his wife peeked around it, her smile hesitant. He sat back in his chair, offering her one in return. “I made lunch if you’re hungry.”

  Mark ran a hand through his hair. “Thanks. I’m kind of involved in this though. Will you set some aside for me?”

  He didn’t miss the minute drop in her smile, but he also didn’t acknowledge it. The truth was, he’d gotten lost in his work, lost in the puzzle of the case in front of him, and he craved it. God, he craved it. An escape that wasn’t only for him, but for two dead people counting on him for answers. Is that how you’re justifying it, Gallagher? He heard his inner voice whisper the question but pushed it aside. Maybe it was a justification, but it was also true.

  “Need any help?” Her smile grew, but he could see the nervousness in her eyes. He knew her. He still did, he realized. Knew her expressions and her body language. What had changed was his desire to respond to what he knew she was asking for. Inclusion. But he had gone to her for the same thing, during moments when she had been the one unwilling to let him in. It felt like they just kept missing each other emotionally. He had to focus, though. In the past, she’d been his sounding board, the person he bounced ideas off if he was stuck, the person who’d helped him so many times when he couldn’t connect A to B. Now, having her around would distract rather than assist him.

  It will take time. He kept telling himself that and somehow it kept ringing hollow, but he didn’t know what else to hope for. “No, thanks. Not on this one. I’ll be out soon.”

  Her smile did slip then, but she nodded and turned, closing the door softly behind her. He released a breath, massaging his temples, trying to move his mind back to the case.

  But his focus was gone, at least for the moment. As he was closing the study Dr. Swift had sent him, he made note of not only Isaac Driscoll’s name, but his assistant who had worked on the study: Kyle Holbrook.

  He put in a call to Rayform and found that the man was still listed on the directory, but his voicemail picked up when Mark dialed it. He left a message and then tapped his pen on the desk, the smell of grilled cheese and tomato soup drifting under his door, as he sat staring at the wall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The snow sparkled under the silver-gray sky, fat flakes floating down and melting on Jak’s skin as he slid across the open field. The long flat shoes he’d put together, made it easier to walk over the ice-crusty ground without sinking into the soft fluffy snow beneath. He wished he’d thought of making something like these a long time ago. But, how could he? He learned the best he could as he went along, figuring new and better ways to survive. These shoes weren’t a . . . what was the word? He didn’t need to have them, but they were nice to have.

  His mind drifted, the words of the woman in the picture going around in his head. He talked to her sometimes, asked her questions, tried to guess what her answers would be.

  Sometimes, like today, when his mind wanted to drift from the cold of winter, he’d say the words that brought him peace. He’d say them over and over again until his heart settled, and he could find something good about the day. About life. About his presence in a world that only made sense in a physical way. To Jak, the writings of the woman were his friend, she was his priest from the story that he’d never actually read, and his teacher. He loved her, even though he’d never met her. He visited her sometimes too, in the bottom of that canyon. He sat outside the car where she’d died, said words to her and the man. He wondered if they’d died right away or if they’d suffered. He wondered where their child was—the girl. He felt so
much sadness. He wished he could have saved them. He wished they were alive and he could meet them. He would ask the woman all the questions in his mind and heart. She had so many more words than he knew.

  In his pretending, she answered. He closed his eyes and heard her speak, clearer now than the faded voice of his baka.

  It had been five winters since he’d found the car and the blue bag, and while he would never say his living was easy, the writings he’d found had made things . . . better. He wasn’t sure exactly why. He only knew that the writings had changed his mind about wanting to die. Had he really wanted to die though? No. He had wanted the pain to end, the loneliness. The writings had made him care about living.

  His muscled legs pushed one board forward, then the next, sliding across the snow, his breath puffing white in front of him for only a brief second before it was snatched up by the wind.

  Movement caught his eye and he slowed, his muscles tensing as he spotted a person far off to his right. Hide? Slink? No. He crouched low as he loaded an arrow into his bow, looking through the scope.

  It was . . . a woman?

  Jak lowered the bow and arrow, standing back up, his fast heartbeat slowing down, questions circling in his mind. Fear.

  The woman was fast-walking toward him, taking big steps in the snow, sinking down and then with a lot of trying, lifting her foot again and again. Jak was still with shock and confusion. As she got closer, Jak saw that she wasn’t wearing any winter clothes and much of her skin was showing. And she looked like she was crying, big chest-moving wails that came to where Jak was standing.

  Jak took two steps toward the woman at the same second that she spotted him. She stopped, and then moved toward him again, picking up her footsteps, tripping and getting back up. “Help!” she called. “Help!”

  Jak moved toward her quickly, and she tripped again, pulling herself up, her wails getting clearer the closer she got. “Please, please!” she cried. “I need help!”