* * *
Present—Friday
HERMAN HAS MADE me nervous enough that after I put Emily to bed, I go to my home office and get busy trying to catch up on the Smith case that I’ve neglected for the past two days since Reeve’s call. I pull out the folder he gave me earlier from my carrier bag and begin to go through the documents, chiding myself for taking this long to get to it.
Outside my office window, I can hear the wind coming in waves like rushing water. It rattles the branches of the maple tree in the backyard and gives me a chill even though I’m warm and safe inside. First I go through the recorded transcripts of one of our undercover guys who is posing as a gun salesman. He’s trying to lure Smith in, hinting that he has a “potent” firearm available for purchase—a Russian-made weapon with a magazine that can hold ten rounds of ammo. Attached to the transcript are a few other reports by the Bozeman office and a few local articles, including one about an NRA official who, according to evidence found by Bozeman agents, may been in contact with Smith.
I’m reading the exchange, but my mind keeps skipping to Reeve. I wonder whether I could have gotten Reeve wrong, missed some essential ingredient of his personality that would allow him to go off the rails, even for a moment, with a woman like Anne Marie Johnson. Sure, I know there’s his childhood trauma, things left unspoken, more guilt than any one person ought to carry, and leftover anger at his father—which is never great for anyone, but Reeve had been somewhat fortunate. He had had counseling—thank goodness for his mother—and he had self-control. He had picked himself up, moved to another state, and put himself through school. He adores Emily and of course McKay, and would never jeopardize his ability to be with them.
But could he have shot Anne Marie?
I’ve seen enough confessions where perpetrators have broken down, rubbed their eyes, and wept while the video camera rolled, saying that something just snapped, something changed. It wasn’t them actually doing it. They were simply in a nightmare; they didn’t mean to do it. It just happened in a single moment, and in the interrogation suite at the county, through their tears, they say regretfully that there’s no taking it back. And I’ve spoken to enough criminals to know that almost all violence boils down to a great ball of tension, stress, and anger that has been building and gathering through a long line of past unfortunate events, abuses, and wrongdoings—tension that coils tighter and tighter inside an individual, like a compressed spring, until one day it simply unloads.
But I have this one memory of Reeve that I’ll never forget. He and I are driving up the North Fork, his headlights showing the way on the dusty graveled road through tree-covered ridges. I’m exhausted from working a case involving a missing child and fall asleep while Reeve drives. I wake to find his truck parked, its engine purring idly, and see the car lights fanning out over the road. They illuminate Reeve cautiously going toward a doe huddled in the center. He stops a good ten feet from it, just close enough to get a look at it; then he walks a little from side to side, seeming unsure. Reeve holds his rifle—one I know he carries for circumstances exactly like this. Nature is not kind, and nature mixed with human contraptions, like vehicles, is even less kind. There’s tension in his face and his shoulders. And something else: fear. I can see the dread in his expression, even from the distance in the headlights. It reminds me vaguely of a scene from a Mafia movie in which the boss has asked one of the newbies to prove himself, to take out someone who hasn’t been loyal, and the novice is having a tough time acting on orders: pacing, sweating, and struggling with his conscience.
Reeve does a semicircle around the deer, giving it a wide berth. He looks at his rifle, but again, even from the vehicle, I can see the tremor in his hand, the entire weapon shaking. I can’t see his forehead, but I imagine it beading up with sweat.
Eventually he drops the rifle by his side and comes back, his boots scuffling on the gravel road, and hops in. He sighs when he sees me awake, looking at him. “I think it’s paralyzed,” he says. “Unable to move. It tried, but it can’t get up. It’s probably either been shot or hit by a car. It should be put out of its misery, but I . . .” He shakes his head. His face looks knotted with torment.
I understand what he can’t say: I couldn’t shoot it. At the time, I just thought it was special, that it was like that with us from the start—that we could finish each other’s statements for one another. Later, of course, I understood I was just deluding myself like all new couples in love who think that they are linked magically when it’s actually just common sense.
I say softly to him, “I’ve got it.” I open the truck door and step out. I hear Reeve whisper my name, but nothing more. I walk over in the glare of the lights and slowly approach the doe. I decide to just use my service weapon because it will be cleaner than firing from a rifle, even though the Bureau suggests we report all shots fired unless it’s for practice.
He was right; she wasn’t going anywhere. Her neck muscles strain to get up, but she can’t get her front ones under her. She wiggles them for only a moment, her back ones unable to move at all. She quits straining when I come up next to her, almost as if she’s surrendering, and lies still. I put my Glock next to her head, her velvety, leaf-shaped ears silvery and twitching in the headlights, and fire the shot.
I stand staring at her limp body, at the small hole oozing a trickle of blood, when Reeve comes to my side. He grabs her thin legs and drags her to the ditch on the side of the road while I put my gun back in its holster. When we return to the car, I think I see a dampness under his eyes in the dome light of the car while the door is still ajar. It makes me think of a child—of a nine-year-old boy. Maybe because of the fear, it also makes me think of my sister in her adolescent years. Victims. That’s what it makes me think of—innocent victims—and it makes me want to reach out to him and run from him at the same time. He shuts the heavy door of the truck and the interior light goes off. We drive on, over the streak of blood smeared across the gravel, not saying anything else.
No, I think now in my office: Reeve wouldn’t shoot anyone or anything, really. He can’t even put an injured deer out of its misery. I force myself back to the file of transcripts. My desk lamp illuminates the papers in a yellow spray of light. I go through several more pages of details, when my breath catches. I pull my head away, rub my eyes, then look again. “No way,” I whisper out loud to the quiet room. In a section describing an interview with a witness, I read Anne Marie Johnson’s name.
“A witness,” I say to the quiet room, squinting at the report in disbelief. “Unbelievable. She’s listed as a witness.”
I read on, completely stunned at the coincidence of having her name in the Smith file right under our noses all this time. The report claims the FBI was initially looking at her as a suspect, as someone involved with Smith to help him purchase illegal firearms—machine guns and other unregistered firearms. But upon interviewing her, the agents quickly realized that she’s only poking around where she doesn’t belong—trying to get close to Smith to interview him for articles she’s been writing about an array of gun-related issues. Apparently she told the Bozeman FBI that she’d been doing some investigative reporting on a connection between Smith and the NRA. Farley, one of the agents, checked her out and said she was legit, but they warned her to stay away from Smith. She had agreed to do so.
I sit listening to the wash of the wind whisk around the north corner of my house where my office sits. I’m still a little in shock that in the folder Herman has given me, there is an actual tie to the victim. I have no idea if Brander or Reynolds know about this, or if even Herman realizes this, but I’m thinking he doesn’t or he would have said something to me. After all, he gave me the file. He knew I’d read it. It must have not clicked or he skimmed over the report.
I google all published articles by Anne Marie Johnson, and find only the ones I looked at earlier on the privatization of land and other wildlife studies. I make a note to talk to Ray in the morning again to see what else he’s found on her
computer regarding in-the-works articles on the NRA.
If she was trying to buddy up to Smith for information, then it would make sense that she hadn’t actually put anything out publicly for him or anyone else to look up until she was good and ready to break her story. I tap my pen on the desk and consider the situation. Anne Marie was playing a few dangerous games in her life beyond sleeping with married men. In the morning, I need to show the file to the county guys, and I plan to do so, but first I want to talk to Vivian again.
Reeve
* * *
Present—Saturday
I WAKE TO A skiff of snow. Like powdered sugar, it coats the brown fields, my ugly lawn, and the gray and white rocks scattered about. I check the forecast and am sure it will be gone by noon, since they’re predicting a high of forty-eight.
I feel like I’m on autopilot while I pack for the day. The incident last night left me with another restless night of sleep, and when I did fall briefly, I dreamed I was working. But instead of searching for wild animal scat, McKay was searching for my dad. Deep in my dream, in the way you have layers of knowledge going on simultaneously, I understood I had trained McKay with the scent from a utility jacket I still had of my father’s. The woods were dark and tangled—like a distorted setting out of The Lord of the Rings, and I sensed he was there, but not hiding from us, just there. McKay howled fiercely with the knowledge of his presence, even though that’s not the way McKay works, and I was oddly aware of that fact too. But then McKay quit. My father’s presence suddenly dissipated, and several layers even deeper, I somehow understood that his vanishing—my inability to find him—represents some void inside me.
The lingering emotions from this dream leave me unsettled. I feel like I should call my mom again so that this time, I can ask how my dad’s doing, but I don’t. Instead I feverishly get ready for a day of research, with McKay anxiously watching my every move. I fill my larger camping pack with extra food, clip my subzero sleeping bag and my two-man tent to my pack. I grab a flashlight, two lighters, extra polypropylene long underwear, rain gear, a down jacket, an extra fleece. I’ll miss Emily this weekend, but she’ll be with Ali.
Before long, my pack is loaded and heavy, and stored into the back seat of my truck. I lock my place up, turning the heat down, but not so low that the pipes will freeze if there’s an unexpected cold snap. The buzzing has moved to my ears, and my scalp tingles as if goose bumps are pricking every inch of it. I turn on a lamp—the one next to where Anne Marie had sat just three nights before—so that if I return when it’s dark out, there’ll be some light, or if I decide to stay a little longer in the woods, the lamp will make it look like someone is home.
I’m just about to lock the back door when Ali calls. I stand in my kitchen, my hip against the counter, and answer it. “Surprised you’re calling this early. Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” she says, and begins to tell me that I should make myself available, reiterating that I should get an attorney. I tell her I have to go and that she should give Emily a hug for me.
“Reeve,” Ali says before we hang up. “They’re getting your juvenile records unsealed. Just thought I’d give you a heads-up. You might need to talk about all of that with them. This is why I suggested an attorney.”
“You know as well as I do that an attorney will tell me to discuss absolutely nothing, regardless of guilt or innocence.”
The line is quiet, and I assume it’s because she can’t refute what I’ve just said. We say good-bye, and by the time I hop into the car, Ali’s voice seems like a blur, with only the bit about the juvenile records repeating in my head. McKay gives a squeaky yawn-whine combo that signals his excitement to go to work and pulls me back to the journey at hand. “On our way, buddy.” I rub his broad chest, throw the truck into reverse to turn it around, and head down my driveway.
Ali
* * *
Present—Saturday
ROSE CALLS ME first thing in the morning, thanks me for the soup, and says she’s feeling better—some twenty-four-hour thing that’s passed quickly. She claims she’s fine watching Emily if I need to work today. I want to talk to Vivian again, so I say that it would be great if she could come by just for a bit while I take care of a few things.
When she arrives, she looks a little wan, but otherwise fine, her blue eyes bright. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” I ask her.
“I feel fine. Really.” She unzips her coat, opens the foyer closet, and hangs it up. “If I relapse, I’ll call you. Where is the little terror?”
“Still sleeping, if you can believe it.”
“Maybe she has what I had yesterday.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so. It’s early yet.” I look at my watch. It’s only seven a.m., and even live-wire Emily will sleep until eight on weekends. I’ve spent a night tossing and turning, and was up by five thirty, angry and irritable. Damn Reeve—it’s become my mantra.
“Hope not, but it won’t last long either way. How’s Reeve?” Rose asks.
“Reeve?”
“Yeah, he was here the other night. Seemed like something was up.”
“He’s good,” I say, thinking about my phone call with him, urging him to stick around. I know he won’t and is already out among the great, rugged wild. I want to roll my eyes, but Rose would have no clue why. I picture Reeve walking, soaking in the great sky, the ground, the mountains, and everything in between. I picture him marching straight ahead through overgrown trails and climbing over boulders, trying to jump past the vast empty holes in his life, but falling deeper into them with each stride.
Rose gives me a curious look, like she’s trying to figure me out. I want to say, Why are you looking at me that way? but I don’t because I don’t want the answer. She’s asked me in the past why Reeve and I don’t just get back together. She says it seems to her like neither one of us is completely over it. It’s in the way you look at each other, she says. I’ve told her it’s complicated, that she’s seeing it through her young, romantic eyes.
“Anyway, I gotta run, but I’m sure Emily’s fine.” I change the subject back to my daughter. I want to get going. “Call me though if you don’t think so.” I grab my bag, throw my coat on, and head to my car.
• • •
I was glad I called Vivian when I did, because she was planning to drive back to Seattle. She said she’d been hoping to get into her cabin to clean things up, but it was still off-limits, so she had decided to head home even though she didn’t have to work on Monday. She agreed to meet me on her way out of town at a coffee shop in Kalispell.
I find her sipping on an espresso and working on her laptop. She looks up and gives me a weak smile when I walk up to her small wooden table next to a redbrick wall. “I’m just going to get some coffee,” I say to her. “I’ll be right back.”
When I return with a cup, I sit across from her. She doesn’t look much different from when I saw her in her hotel room, other than a little less shocked, but she seems tired, with dark circles under her eyes that’s she covering with concealer. I can see it cracking in fine, delicate lines under her eyes, and again I think of Toni, who often wore too much makeup. I can hear my dad’s slurred voice telling her, You look like a whore with that shit on your face, and her lowering her head, embarrassed, and my losing my temper and yelling at him: Leave her alone, Dad. You think you know it all and you don’t.
“What can I help you with?” Vivian closes the lid on her laptop.
“I’m glad I caught you before you left. I just wanted to follow up on a few things.”
“I’ve told you and the other officers everything I possibly can.” She looks perplexed that there could possibly be more, her forehead pinched.
“I know, and we really appreciate your cooperation. You said on the phone that you don’t have to work Monday?” I had since checked my notes, which confirmed that last time I visited Vivian, she mentioned that she’d taken only Thursday and Friday off.
Vivian loo
ks slightly startled, her eyes widening for a brief moment, and I wonder what the look of surprise is about. She says, “Uh, yeah, well, I got another day off, you know, under the circumstances.”
I nod. “Since we last met, I had a chance to speak to a mutual friend of yours and Anne Marie’s—Rachel.”
“Sure, Rachel. I called her to let her know what happened. I didn’t want her to find out about it in the papers.”
“She mentioned that.”
“I didn’t visit her, though. She wanted to come see me, but I wasn’t up for it. You know, under the circumstances. I didn’t want to see anyone, really.”
“I understand. When we spoke last, you said that you had heard about the director of the University of Montana’s canine research program from Anne Marie.”
Vivian nods.
“And you recalled his name. Jeffrey O’Brien?”
“That’s right.”
“I need to ask—was Anne Marie involved with him romantically?”
Vivian blinks and looks down. I think I have my answer, but I want her to say it. She looks back up at me. “What makes you think that? He’s married. Why would she be involved with him?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
She sighs—a good sign. It means she’s surrendering to the idea that she’s going to talk. She takes a sip of her coffee, then sets the cup down, but keeps her slender fingers wrapped around it. She says, “I don’t know much. She met him at some fundraiser in Missoula.”
“How long ago?”
“Over a year ago, at least. I’m not sure exactly when. She didn’t tell me for a long time, and she made me swear not to tell anyone else when she did, not even Rachel.”
“Why did she tell you and not Rachel?”
“I guess we’ve always been closer. You know, we were roommates in college. I guess Anne Marie felt a little judged by Rachel.”
A Sharp Solitude_A Novel of Suspense Page 18