by Saul Black
Different tracks. He’d switched cars. Get a dry cast. Time all the while hemorrhaging.
“Detective Hart?”
Valerie looked up. A short, compact Latina in Bureau fatigues and bulletproof vest approached her, hand extended. “Nina Moreno,” she said. “If anything happened here, we missed it. The building’s clean. There’s a local CSI team on its way.”
“I’m going to take a look.”
Moreno opened her mouth—then remembered who they were looking for. Adjusted her tone. “I’ve just taken the guys through there, Detective,” she said gently. “I promise you it’s empty.”
Valerie didn’t answer. Just headed toward the building. It wasn’t because she thought the team had missed anything. It was because she couldn’t stop herself. The demand for action was indiscriminate. Sheer irrational instinct told her that if Cassie had even been in the building, somehow she would know.
And if she died in there …
What? Her raw ghost in the ether? A palpable rent in the air where her beautiful life had been ripped from the world? Valerie was lightheaded, almost weightless. It was as if only fear were keeping her alive. Fear and desperation. Her imagination was running its own footage: the Mazda’s dropped seats and exposed trunk revealing Cassie’s body, limbs twisted, clothes torn, a puddle of blood long congealed, long cold. The moment of discovery insisted, as if it were a predetermined point in her future trying to force its way into the present. If she tried to think beyond it there was nothing. That moment, when she arrived at it, would be the end of her own life. She wouldn’t, she knew, have what it would take to move beyond it.
Something glinted in the flashlight’s beam. She hadn’t gone more than ten paces from the car. She could feel Moreno’s eyes on her back. She got down on her haunches and steadied the light.
“You got something?” Moreno said, coming up behind her.
“Yes,” Valerie said. “Get me some tweezers and a packet.”
“What is it?”
A rose-gold chain with green tourmaline stones set between the links. Broken.
“My sister’s bracelet,” Valerie said.
* * *
Moreno wrapped up a call on her cell. She looked guilty. “We’ve got to go,” she said. “You okay to hold the scene here? CSI should be here any minute.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Valerie said. She’d been through the substation. Moreno hadn’t lied: of course it was empty. Every detail of its emptiness testified. She’s not here. You’re too late. “We need a three-sixty search of the surrounding area,” Valerie said. “Starting here, starting now.” She took out her phone.
“You’ll get it,” Moreno said. “They’re pulling local blues and search specialists right now. Dog team, the whole nine yards. I don’t have a choice, Detective.”
Valerie had more footage running. Cassie struggling, his arms wrapped around her, the bracelet snapping and falling to the ground. You must have spent hours choosing it. Adrenaline pounded, as if it were a trapped prisoner in her body, desperate to escape. It seemed she must fracture, tear, break. He uses the knife on them while he fucks them. Her own words, her own thoughts. With Elizabeth and Raylene her analysis had been pure, cold cop. Now Cassie. Now her heart eclipsed everything else. Now there was only her heart.
“Who’s your superior?” Valerie said.
“Look, Detective, I know. But we’re five people. You need fifty. Hell, you need a hundred and fifty. The officers will stay and join the search team when it gets here. I promise you this is moving fast.”
Not fast enough. Never, by definition, fast enough. She had an image of the five FBI agents heading off each in a separate direction, with hundreds of square miles to cover. She knew it was ludicrous, but the knowledge made no difference.
She got on the phone with first Deerholt, then McLuhan, who was on his way. Same story. The search team was being assembled. Sit tight.
Dusk had slipped into full darkness now, but for the low moon’s creamy light. The land around the deserted substation was soft and empty. The first stars were out in a sky that had no memory of yesterday’s thunderstorms. Cassie was sensitive to gathering storms. Valerie thought of the arguments they’d had down the years, occasionally vicious, never fatal. As an adolescent, she’d been occasionally jealous of her sister’s two-year lead on her, watching Cassie edge into the female mysteries, breaking the new ground before her: cosmetics, confidences, parties, dating, sex. Cassie, as far as Valerie was concerned, was glamorous. She had a bigger public personality and a sharper tongue. Valerie sometimes watched her getting ready to go out and felt the agony of the age difference between them, as if, thanks to being older and prettier, Cassie was already grabbing all the treasure and excitement, so that there wouldn’t be any left for her by the time she was old enough to claim it. But for all that, they were close. They laughed at the same things in the same way (they were merciless, loving observers of their parents) with a shared delight in each other’s collusion. They were deeply and intuitively in cahoots. They had the rare gift, both of them, of knowing that they were loved. They had been loved and they had loved. But what did love do except raise the power of loss?
She took her phone out again, torn between knowing she should update Owen and knowing she shouldn’t. How could she possibly tell him this? What would it mean to him except that Cassie was already dead? And at the same time she knew that every second he was going through an agony just like her own, that he was standing with his phone in his hand, willing it to ring. She tried to imagine him beyond Cassie’s death, beyond the kind of death Cassie would experience. He would have to stay alive for the kids. He would have to, somehow, survive it. What would she say to him? A version of herself might have said: Owen, she’s gone. But I promise you I’m going to kill the man who did this. Wherever he goes, I’ll find him. I’ll find him and end him. A version of herself might have said that. But where was that version of herself? If Cassie died like this, she couldn’t imagine any versions of herself. She could see nothing but final blackness.
Her phone rang, startling her.
Arden calling.
“Go,” Valerie said.
“We have a location,” Arden said.
“I wanted to tell you myself!” Katherine’s voice called, cheerily, in the background.
“I’m e-mailing you the relevant map,” Arden said, “but you want to write this down just in case?”
Five seconds. Ten. Valerie heard her e-mail in-box ping.
“Buchanan Creek Woods,” Valerie said to Torval when she’d hung up. “It’s near here. Do you know it?”
The other two officers had come back to their squad car, nearby. Both of them were texting.
“Yeah, sure,” Torval said. “It’s just—”
“Here.” She held up her phone. “Look at this map. This X marks a set of latitude longitude coordinates to six decimal places. That’s an exact spot. Can you find it? Don’t waste time. Just look at the map.”
To his credit, Torval looked. “I don’t think there’s anything up there,” he said. “It’s just woods. That right there is Winnet Lane, and there’s a track runs off it up the hill after the creek. But I mean, it doesn’t go—”
“Okay,” Valerie said. “You’re coming with me. Let’s go. You guys”—to the two officers—“stay put.”
“What’re we—”
“Go ahead of me on the bike. Fast. No siren. Stop when we get to the creek. Don’t talk. Just do it.”
33
They stopped about fifty feet past the bridge at Buchanan Creek.
“Where are you going?” Torval said as Valerie took the bulletproof vest from the Taurus’s trunk and slipped a flashlight into her pocket.
“Where do you think?”
“I called for backup,” Torval said. “It’s ten minutes, tops.”
“My sister doesn’t have ten minutes. Stay here. Get back on the horn and tell them no sirens. They come on foot from here. You understand?”
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“Ma’am, you know the drill. We should—”
“Save it,” Valerie said. “This isn’t a discussion. Wait for them here and come ahead on foot. No flashlights. You got it?”
She checked her Glock. Full clip and two more in her purse, which she removed and stuffed into her vest pockets. “Here,” she said, handing the purse to Torval. “Hold on to it for me.”
Torval wasn’t happy, but he took the purse and put it into the bike’s left storage compartment. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No. You’re my guarantee the cavalry doesn’t fuck it up when they get here.”
“Wait,” he said when she turned to go. “Take this.” He pulled a headset from the storage compartment. “Talk to me, okay? Channel’s open. I’m on your side.”
Valerie put the headset around her neck.
“You’re not going to be able to see shit,” he said—but she was already moving away up the track.
The flashlight was a risk. She’d have to switch it off when she got close, but without it she’d be moving at a crawl. Aside from the little ellipse of illumination at her feet, the darkness was dense. The trees embraced over her head. The moon wasn’t high enough yet to be any help. The wheel ruts in the track were overgrown, but discernible, and in any case, the two or three times she veered too far left or right, brambles scratched at her. She switched her phone to silent. Her body was sharp and present and fully in her control, despite the swarming adrenaline. Shreds of her professional self were, she knew, busy with the predictable fears and calculations, but it was peripheral, a necessary automation, negligible next to her personal self, which was wholly given over to willing Cassie to still be alive. Should she be willing that? Wouldn’t that depend on what Cassie had already suffered? Weren’t there things you’d rather not survive? Weren’t there things that someone could do to you that would leave you so changed, so unrecognizable, and so immune to love that you’d wish you hadn’t survived? Until now she’d asked herself only how Owen and the kids (and her mom, and herself) would be able to carry on if Cassie were killed. Now she asked what they would do if Cassie remained alive, broken and alien to all of them, transformed, beyond reach. You could have things done to you that forced you to become an entirely different person in order to carry on living. You could have things done to you that would make any continuation of who you used to be before they happened impossible. When torture victims spoke of their ordeals they left themselves out of it. They talked through the list of what was done to them, but not what it did to them. They talked about it as if it had happened to another person. Of course they did. It had. It was only by becoming another person that they could carry on. The person to whom such things were done had to die, otherwise the self’s grief was unbearable.
She quickened her pace. The vest was heavy. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn one. Her face and armpits were hot. How much farther? She was going fast, despite the darkness. There was no getting lost: the track didn’t fork and the woods on either side were unbroken.
She had just unholstered the Glock when Torval came through on the headset.
“You okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“ETA twelve minutes.”
What the fuck happened to ten minutes, tops?
“Roger that,” she whispered. “Stay off the air. I’ll shout if I need to.”
“Got it.”
Twenty more paces. A bat whirred past her head. The smell in the moist air was rich and old, wood and damp earth. It gave her a brief feeling of the planet’s age and grand indifference. Human lives came and went, tiny lights, winking for a split second in the void. Cassie had been through a phase of reading odd things when she was a teenager. One night, she had come into Valerie’s room and said: Imagine a dark winter landscape with a firelit feasting hall in the middle of it. Valerie, who had been half asleep, had said: Imagine being allowed to lie in your bed without someone coming in and bugging you. Cassie, in her calm, delighted way, had gone on: Inside this feasting hall, everything is happening. People are eating and drinking and singing and arguing and screwing and laughing and having conversations. There’s an open window at either end of the hall. (In spite of her superficial objection, Valerie had seen it quite clearly. Something like a scene from the days of knights and damsels.) A little bird, Cassie said, flying through the night, flies in one window, through the bright hall, and out the window at the other end. It takes no time at all, just a second. That’s your life. You’re the bird and the world is the feasting hall. You have to make sure you see everything. All of it, as much as you can. You’ve got a moment, that’s all. Valerie had lain on her bed thinking about it. Eventually she asked Cassie: Who said that? And Cassie had said: the Venerable Bede. He was a monk in England in the eighth century. Neither of them had forgotten it. “Bede” had become part of their private shorthand, as in: Why are you dating Justin Trask? He’s an asshole. Yeah, but, you know: Bede.
Valerie stopped. She’d heard something.
She held her breath.
Silence.
A twig snapped. Then silence again.
She killed the flashlight and switched the Glock’s safety off.
Still silence. Her eyes strained to adjust. Seconds. The moon had just begun to clear the tree line. It gave a very faint avenue of light between the embracing branches above her, but the darkness around her still swam. It was like looking up to the surface from deep underwater.
The soft swish of the undergrowth.
Someone was moving up ahead and to her right.
She didn’t have to go anywhere. He was coming toward her.
Because he’d finished?
Finished.
With Cassie.
Valerie eased herself silently into the edge of the thorny darkness on her side of the track. He wouldn’t see her. He’d get level. She’d hit the flashlight and train the gun. Police. Don’t. Fucking. Move.
Five seconds. Ten.
He was moving erratically, stopping, coming on. Caution. Why? Had he heard her? Glimpsed the flashlight before she’d switched it off? Fuck. She should have found her way without it.
Tiny sounds now, across the track. As if he were tiptoeing. But he was almost level. The last steps had been less than ten feet away.
Valerie raised the flashlight and Glock. Made her arms stone.
When the sound came, it startled her.
A single wet exhalation. Like a horse snorting.
She steadied herself. Leveled the light and the gun again. Swallowed.
The undergrowth sighed, and a full-grown stag stepped daintily onto the track.
For a few moments it stood still, a solid mass of deeper darkness. It was aware of her. She didn’t move. In spite of everything, her urban self livened to it, the strangeness of a wild animal suddenly close. The antlers were like candelabra.
It bent its neck, briefly, sniffed, then stepped with the same delicate movement across the track and disappeared into the trees.
34
Valerie moved faster. The moon had cleared the trees now, and in its light the track was faintly discernible. Streaks of chalk showed through, an occasional white stone. She didn’t dare risk the flashlight. She stumbled, went down on one knee, got up again. Her lungs ached. Beneath the surging adrenaline her body was reporting that she hadn’t eaten or drunk for a long time. She ignored it, the threat of weakness when the finite supply of energy was burned through. She would have enough. She would make enough out of nothing.
The clearing surprised her.
The air thinned and the trees fanned out from her, suddenly, curving away left and right in twin crescents.
She didn’t see the cabin at first. The hill climbed in a wall of blackness—but the woods’ quiet sentience was focused here. The trees were like a circle of observers, bearing witness, holding their breath.
She crept left, skirting the edge of the open ground.
Five paces. Ten.
She smelled
the place—mold and weathered wood, something like kerosene—before her eyes picked it out, another fifteen paces ahead of her. Gradually the hard edge of its angled roof resolved itself in a thin line of reflected moonlight.
No lights, no sound. Two windows at the front. A short porch. One door, facing her, shut. He likes time, privacy, leisure.
Silence and speed. The terrible conflict between the need for both.
Keeping low, she ran to the door.
It was, naturally, locked.
The Machine insisted on the protocols: Circle. Check access points. Get the layout.
But if Cassie was hemorrhaging to death the extra seconds could cost her her life. No point not using the flashlight now. Valerie took it from her pocket, steadied it alongside the gun, aimed at the lock—and fired.
Fine. You know I’m here now, fucker.
She kicked the door in, Glock and light raised.
“Cassie?”
A muffled moan.
Valerie swung the light left.
The first things she saw were her sister’s bare feet, bound with duct tape. She flicked the light upward.
Cassie.
Squinting. Taped. Arms above her head, face wet with tears and dried blood, hair matted.
But alive.
Alive.
In spite of the danger (where was he?) there was room for the flood of relief, of joy. All their shared life was there between them, a miracle, a vivid, glorious bouquet—still here, still—darkened only for Valerie by the immediate question of what her sister had suffered, what had been done to her, what her survival would cost her. But postponement flung itself up. Alive, for now, was all that mattered. Valerie realized she was thanking not God but Death. Death had come close and whisked away. Nothing but a glimpse of its black rags, moving on, letting this one be. For now. Thank you. Thank you.
“What the fuck is going on?” Torval’s voice said in the earpiece.
“Quiet,” Valerie said.
Valerie raced the flashlight around the room. Just the one door, another room beyond it. She hugged the wall to the doorway. Her hands on the gun and flashlight were wet. She could hear Cassie breathing hard through her nose. Nothing else for it. She eased her head around the doorframe and shone the light.