Heaven's Fury

by Stephen Frey

  As I turn off the driveway and onto the path Bear bursts through the back porch door. “What happened?” he demands, hurrying down the cleared steps and grabbing the boy off my shoulder like he’s a twig. I’ve known Bear for many years, but every time I see him do something like that it’s still incredible.

  As Bear disappears inside I collapse on the steps, gasping for breath.

  He’s only gone for a few moments, then he’s back. “What happened?” he asks again, helping me up off the stairs and into the house. “Who’s that kid?”

  I stagger through the back porch into the kitchen and there’s Vivian. She’s standing by the stove and she’s got one of those guilty looks on her face that only I would recognize after having lived with her for so many years. Did she and Bear still find a few minutes to be together despite how long it must have taken to clear the driveway? Or did she recognize the boy? I just wish I’d had the strength to carry the little guy those last few paces so I could have seen her face when she first saw him. That would have told me what I needed to know.

  The paramedics get to our house in fifteen minutes, which is a miracle considering the fact that the roads are still so bad. They work on the kid feverishly in the living room for a little while, then they slide him into the ambulance and tear off for Superior Hospital, siren wailing. The boy didn’t regain consciousness while he was at the house and I could tell by the paramedics’ expressions that they were pretty pessimistic about his chances, despite their confident words. They told me I was a hero, and so did Bear a couple of times. But I won’t feel good about anything until the kid opens his eyes and the doctors say he’s going to be all right.

  Nobody recognized the boy, so I don’t think he’s from around here. I know he’s not from Dakota County and I’m pretty sure he’s not from Brower or Wabash, either. My guess is that the cult’s going to kidnap people from far away and do their dirty work away from the spotlight. I doubt there’ll be another incident like the one at the Prescott estate, but you never know, especially around here. Hell, at this point I can’t even be sure Cindy was murdered by the cult. Maybe somebody killed her and made it look like the cult’s work. And what’s the cult going to do if that’s the case? Come out and disclaim responsibility? I don’t think so.

  One thing I know for sure is that whoever built the cabin was going to do something awful to that little boy. I mean, they already had by leaving him out there tied up in the sack freezing to death. But I shudder to think what they would have ultimately done to him if the storm hadn’t gotten in the way. Bottom line: Somebody’s acquired a desire to see human blood run red and the killing isn’t going to stop until whoever’s doing the killing is caught.

  After the EMTs leave, I offer to give Bear a ride home and he takes me up on it immediately. Apparently he’s satisfied his exercise fix. He has no desire to ski home.

  “So what the hell happened out there?” he asks before we’re even out of the driveway. “What’s the deal?”

  He asked me that question several times at the house before the paramedics showed up, but I waved him off because I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Vivian. I saw her catch my subtle head shake to him, but she didn’t say anything about it before I left.

  “I ran into Sara out in the woods after I left you.”

  “Really? That’s weird.”

  I look over at him. “Why?”

  Bear shrugs. “I don’t know much about probabilities, Professor, I’ll admit. I never paid much attention in math class, but it seems like a long shot to run into somebody in a forest as big as the one we’ve got up here a few hours after a storm like the one we just had quits.” He chuckles. “Then again it’s Sara so maybe it’s not such a long shot after all. She’s out in the woods a lot, and they say that squaw can track a deer across bare rock, so it wasn’t going to be real tough for her to track you down in the snow. Yeah, that’s probably what happened,” he says, like he’s trying to convince himself. “She probably crossed over your footprints out there, then tracked you down.” He chuckles again, louder this time. “She’s got a thing for you. I don’t know whether it’s because she really likes you or because she really hates Vivian, but she’s got a thing for you. I hear even Ike admits it.”

  I don’t tell him how Sara’s prints were coming from the opposite side of the clearing where we ran into each other, and I have no intention of getting into a discussion about some “thing” Sara may or may not have for me. “Well, anyway, she said she wanted to show me something and it turned out it was this cabin east of here a few miles.”

  “And the kid was in the cabin,” Bear says, anticipating what I’m going to say.

  “Yeah. Sara said she found the place a few weeks ago when she was taking a walk.”

  Bear pushes out his lower lip. “Huh,” he says in a noncommittal way.

  I take a deep breath. I don’t know if I want to tell him the rest, but it’ll come out at some point and he’ll wonder why I held back on him and that’s something I can’t have. I need him to be as loyal to me as ever right now. But I’ve got to be careful. I hate to say it, but I can’t trust anyone a hundred percent right now. That’s how I feel, anyway, and it’s terrible to live like that. Even for a short time.

  “Was anyone around out there?”

  “No.” I hold back on what happened, about the shootout.

  “Was the place locked up?”

  “Yeah, tight.”

  “But you broke in and found the boy.”

  “Yes.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s got to be a hunting cabin somebody put up. Illegally, too, because I think that’s federal land back in there. And there aren’t any logging roads going through those woods that I know of. Not anymore.” He glances over at me. “So was that it? Was it a hunting cabin?”

  “That’s what I—”

  “But why’d Sara want to take you back there so bad?” Bear interrupts. “I don’t get it. People put up hunting cabins all the time around here on other people’s land.”

  I hesitate. “She saw burned bones in the yard, and some of them were chopped up.”

  His eyes flash to mine. “My God, were they—”

  “She said they were just animal bones.”

  “Oh.”

  “But it looked like a place the cult could be using.” I tell him what I saw inside the cabin’s main room and he slams the dashboard. “The kid was tied up in the back room,” I finish.

  “These people have lost it!” Bear shouts. “First Cindy, then that girl you saved from going off the cliff, now this kid. Christ!”

  “We’ve gotta keep this quiet, Billy.”

  Bear sneers. “Good luck. Davy called me this afternoon while you were gone and he told me that Mrs. Erickson found out about that girl in the Gorges. He says she’s already broadcasting it all over the place.

  It’s my turn to slam the dashboard. “How the hell did she find out about that?”

  “Nobody around here can keep their mouth shut about anything. You know that, Professor.”

  If Lew Prescott and Darrow Clements hear about the girl and about how she said she knew someone in the cult and what the cult was doing, I could have a disaster on my hands. Pretty soon they’re going to find out about the pentagram carved into Cindy’s forehead. Peter Schmidt, the head of the CSI team, told me he can’t hold on to Cindy’s body for long, not with Prescott banging on the morgue door. Then Prescott and Clements might put two and two together and start suspecting that there’s a cult up here after Clements does some digging. A little more digging and they’ll confirm the rumor and I probably won’t be in charge of the case after that. At the very least I’ll be shoved onto a siding, because then they’ll be able to get the state guys or the Feds to take it over on some kind of technicality.

  I’ve just got to keep Schmidt from telling Clements and Prescott the specific circumstances surrounding Cindy’s death for a little while longer. How she was nailed to the floor, how the candles were around
her body and that it seems obvious that there were at least a few people present at the murder. If I can keep that under wraps for a few more days, I just might have enough time to solve this thing before Prescott and Clements can take over.

  I curse out loud and shake my head. There’s just too much going on at this point.

  Bear pats my shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Professor. And you know I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks, Billy.” I take a deep breath. “I just feel so bad for that little kid.”

  “That’s why you’re a good sheriff. You do care, it isn’t just a job for you. These people around here are like your children, all of them. I just wish they understood that.” He gazes into the pitch dark out the passenger side of the truck. “I don’t think that kid you brought home today was from around here. I mean, I know he isn’t from Dakota County.”

  I know what Bear’s thinking. We’ve had this discussion many times. “I don’t think so, either.”

  He waits a few moments before he starts up again. “They’re gonna start taking people from far away, so it’s harder for us to solve the case. You just got lucky stumbling onto that cabin with Crazy and finding the boy. Hell, that kid could be from Minnesota or Iowa for all we know, maybe even farther away than that. He’s probably from a poor family nobody gives a damn about, too. We might never find out who he is.”

  “I know,” I agree quietly.

  “I meant to tell you,” Bear speaks up when we’re almost to town, “Davy called to tell me that Route 7’s cleared east and west of town now. We’ll be able to get to everybody now.”

  “Good.”

  “And here’s another good thing,” Bear says enthusiastically. “The temperature’s supposed to get pretty warm over the next few days, up into the forties, I think.” He shoves me on the arm in a friendly way when I don’t say anything, like he used to do when we were teenagers. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks as the Bruner stoplight appears in the distance, when we’re just about out of the woods. “Come on, lighten up. Everything will be all right.”

  But I just keep gazing out the window into the darkness of the dense pine forest closing in on me on both sides, wondering if I’ve finally met that sinister element I always figured was waiting for me in there—or if this is just the beginning.

  When I come through the back porch door Vivian is standing by the stove with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello,” she answers coldly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What took you so long?” she demands.

  I shrug. “What are you talking about?”

  “You left two hours ago. It shouldn’t have taken more than thirty minutes to get Bear home.”

  “The roads are icy.”

  “Still.”

  I stare into her steely eyes. “Okay, I stopped by the precinct, then I went to the Saloon with Bear.” I was hoping we’d made some permanent progress over the last few days, despite what happened right before Bear started pounding on the back porch door, but apparently we hadn’t. “I was hungry and I got a bite to eat. That okay with you?”

  “Do you expect me to believe anything was open tonight?”

  “Call up there yourself.” I nod at the wall phone. “Ike’s probably still around. Ask him if I was in there. He’ll tell you.” Ike and Sara were both there, though I didn’t talk to her. She stood behind the counter and never took her eyes off me. It made me uneasy because Ike caught her staring at me a couple of times and I could tell that he was wondering what was going on. “I had chili.” I nod at the phone again. “Go on, call.”

  She takes two steps toward me, arms still crossed over her chest. “I don’t need to call. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Then what in the—”

  “Why are you taping me?”

  I swallow hard. The video camera I set up in the bedroom before I left this morning. She must have found it. “What, um, what do you—”

  “In our bedroom closet, no less.”

  Deny, deny, deny. That’s what my father always told me, even when you’ve been caught red-handed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her eyes narrow to slits. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she hisses, reaching for something on the counter beside her. “And what about this?” she demands, holding up the picture of Cindy I took from the mansion after she was murdered. “What was this doing in your truck under the driver’s seat?”

  The kitchen blurs before me. How can I possibly deny knowing what the picture was doing in my truck? I have to go on the offensive, I have no choice. “What were you doing going through my truck?” I yell. She must have gone through it while I was out in the woods. “You had no right to do that.”

  “I had every right!” she shouts back.

  She puts the picture down, then snatches a piece of paper and holds it out for me to see. “And I printed this off your computer, off your email.”

  I have a computer upstairs in the guest room, but she’s never asked to use it and she has no idea what my password is. At least, I didn’t think she did. “What’s that?”

  “Take a look. I think you’ll find it interesting. I know I did.”

  I grab the paper from her and my eyes open wide as I read. It’s an email from Cindy’s account that was sent some time after I left the Prescott estate that morning, after Jack showed up out of nowhere. In it she begs me not to do anything to Vivian, not to do away with her like Cindy says I promised I would. Which is ridiculous. I never said that. I was the one who couldn’t believe Cindy would even suggest something like that. But that’s going to be awfully hard to prove now.

  My eyes rise slowly to hers. “I don’t know what to—”

  “So, you two were going to kill me?”

  “Of course not. She was trying to get me in trouble with you by sending this. She was trying to frame me.” Another thought flashes through my mind. “Or someone else was.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe that, Paul?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Well, I forwarded that email to my own account for safekeeping.” She shakes her head and pushes her chin out. “And I forwarded the naked picture Cindy sent of herself along with the email.”

  “What? I swear I don’t know anything about a picture …”

  My voice trails off as Vivian turns and stalks out of the kitchen, leaving me to wonder how she could have gotten the password to my computer.

  17

  WHEN I COME upstairs an hour later, our bedroom door is locked. It’s easy to jimmy the thing open. I know from experience, but I don’t bother. I don’t even knock or call to Vivian, I just turn and head down the short hallway to the guest room where my shaving kit and a rumpled uniform are tossed on the bed. She hasn’t put my sleeping pills in the kit—probably on purpose because she knows how badly I need them—so I figure I’ll have trouble falling asleep, but I’m so tired I’m out almost as soon as my head hits the pillow. Before I know it the sun’s blazing through the guest room window because I forgot to pull the shade down. It’s a good thing I did or I might still be sleeping. I guess I was that worn out, physically and emotionally.

  I wake up at seven-thirty, an hour and a half late, but Vivian isn’t up yet. Our door is still shut when I come out of the guest room and I don’t bother trying to mend fences. Despite the long night’s sleep, I don’t have the strength to deal with her and I’m still shocked that she got my password and that Cindy—or whoever—sent that email to me. Before I crawled into bed last night, I checked my computer and, sure enough, the email from Cindy was there, sent about an hour after I left the estate that morning. There wasn’t a racy picture attached to it, and I’m sure that was just a lie intended to make the story seem even worse. But it’s not like it matters much, it’s not like that’s much of a relief. The incriminating piece is the insane email. I can’t believe Cindy sent that, or that Vivian went through my truck and found that pict
ure of her I took from the mansion.

  At least there’s one thing to cheer about as I head toward town. Bear was right about the temperature. When I pull into Bat McCleary’s Exxon station, it’s already well above freezing, according to the digital readout in the upper right-hand corner of the SUV’s rearview mirror. And, despite the fact that the strong rays from a clear blue sky are streaming down at a winter angle from the south, the thick white blanket of snow is beginning to turn to liquid. If the mercury continues to climb, the Boulder River’s going to become a raging torrent and bust its ice cover in the Gorges and the Meadows. That almost never happens in February.

  “Hi, Sheriff,” Bat calls from the other side of the pumps as I step out of the SUV. “Good morning.”

  He’s just finished topping off the tank of an old red Chevy pickup truck. It’s owned by an older couple who live out east on Route 7 past the lumberyard. I’m glad to see they’ve made it to town and I wave to them. I’ve gotta give the people in Madison credit. They came through for us this time with the plows.

  “Hi, Bat.”

  Bat’s a short, bowlegged guy with thick, black hair that sticks up at an angle over his big, pointy ears, making them seem even bigger and pointier. His hair’s forced up like that over his ears by a grimy Milwaukee Brewers hat he keeps pulled down over his scalp as tightly as he can. I’ve never seen him wear anything else on his head, even when the temperature drops into single digits. He’s almost always in a good mood and he’s always willing to help. Maybe it’s the hat.

  “Glad to see you’re open.”

  “Yeah, my sons and I were over here yesterday with shovels and the IH tractor first thing in the morning. It took us a while but we got things cleared out pretty good.” He gestures around the station proudly with one hand while he opens the gas tank flap on my truck with the other. Then he deftly unscrews the cap and shoves the nozzle in with a clatter. Like he’s done a million times before. It’s like he could do it in his sleep, you can tell. “These warm temps keep up and the snow’ll be gone in a few days. Three feet of snow gone that quick, now that would be incredible.” He chuckles. “Maybe all that whining those commie liberals do about global warming really has some teeth to it.” He shakes his head like he can’t believe he just said that. “Those idiots. It’s all just nature going through its cycles.”