“Any ideas?”
“I don’t think he has any other property or family. But I also didn’t think Baker was capable of murder, so what the hell do I know.” Park sounded a little disgusted with himself.
“Everyone’s capable of murder,” Cooper said, glancing over the shelves. Art books mostly; some more figurines with Baker’s signature “what the hell is it” style of metal shapes wrapped around that peculiar yellow quartz; a framed photograph of a laughing man and woman in baggy ’80s sweatshirts and stiff high-waisted jeans. Between them a towheaded boy of about twelve with huge ears hung from their arms and cheesed at the camera. Geoffrey Baker and his parents. Cooper tried to imagine this dopey-looking boy becoming the local Boo Radley, avoided and mocked by the locals and chasing bratty kids off his property, snarling. Kids who couldn’t have been more than a decade younger than him, really.
He tried to imagine this boy kidnapping and torturing young men before dumping their bodies in the woods.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Park said.
“What?” Cooper realized he’d picked the picture up and quickly replaced it on the shelf where it overlooked the room in a place of honor. Whatever had snapped in Baker, it wasn’t a lack of love for his family.
“Everyone’s capable of murder. You don’t believe that,” Park clarified.
“Yeah I do,” Cooper said, moving into the adjoining room, a small bedroom with a twin bed, a couple of posters on the wall. Rothko and Chagall prints. A book was open on the bedside table, The Creative Spirit. “Maybe not cold, calculated murder. But in the right situation anyone could become a killer.”
“Any wolf, you mean,” Park said. He’d followed Cooper into the bedroom and started looking through the closet and delicately sniffing the clothes.
“No, I said anyone. I meant anyone,” Cooper said a little tersely. First the comments about Whittaker and now this. He wasn’t used to people viewing him as a bigot. Or maybe he just hadn’t been forced to notice before. “It’s not like you’ve got the market cornered on rage. Though I do think wolves have a better chance of successfully killing someone. But that’s just logistics. Not morals or whatever it is you think I think about wolves.”
Park didn’t respond, so Cooper turned to check he was still there and not...holding Gould’s hidden head pulled out of a hatbox or something.
He wasn’t, thank god, but he had stopped sniffing the closet and was watching Cooper with a strange expression.
“What’s up?”
“I don’t get you, Dayton,” Park said. His voice was quiet, frustrated and something else Cooper couldn’t identify.
“What’s not to get? Unlike some people, I say what I’m thinking.” Too often, when I’m with you.
Park smiled and shook his head. “That must be why you don’t make any sense.”
Cooper flipped him off. “Got anything over there, Sniffy?”
“His scent is especially faded in here. I don’t think anyone’s slept in this bed for at least a week.”
“Definitely a secondary location then. An accomplice? Friend? Lover?”
“I don’t think so. He’s lonely.”
Cooper made a face. “Oh really. What does that smell like?”
“Smells like Baker and no one else ever touched these clothes. Ever.”
“Maybe he liked being alone. That doesn’t make him lonely,” Cooper said, feeling oddly defensive of a wolf he was pretty sure was in the middle of a killing rampage. But the memory of their argument last night had drifted awkwardly into the room. He wondered what Park would know from taking a whiff of his apartment. Not that Park was going to be in his apartment.
“Maybe,” Park said in a way that clearly meant he didn’t agree. “Anyway, none of it’s been worn in a week at least, either. If he is around he’s not wearing these clothes.”
They left the bedroom and quietly worked through the rest of the house.
Cooper wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He frowned at the multiple containers of takeout. He couldn’t get the delivery guy to walk up to his third-story apartment, but Baker was getting delivery up here to Deliverance? Maybe Baker went down to town more than they’d realized.
He sang softly to himself, “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand. Gonna get a big dish of—” Cooper opened a container with his pen “—pad thai.”
“Nope,” Park said from right next to his ear.
Cooper jumped. “Jesus! Make some noise every once in a while, why don’t you.”
“No nuts.”
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Park’s eyes narrowed in amusement but his face remained serious. He nodded at the fridge. “I don’t smell any nuts. Pad thai is cooked in peanut oil and served with nuts. Ipso facto, it’s not pad thai.”
Ipso facto? “Oh, well, case closed then.” Cooper slammed the fridge shut. “What are you, the Food Network’s next hit series, Chef Detective?”
“I like to experiment.” Park flashed a smile. “I want to show you something.” He led Cooper to the entryway by the front door and crouched. “What do you think about this?”
Cooper crouched beside him and their knees brushed. Park pointed at the doormat.
“What I am looking at?” Cooper said.
Park rubbed his hand across the bristle of the mat and dirt bounced up. No, not dirt. More of that crap that had been on the dead bear. He picked up a piece and squeezed it between his fingers. Again some distant childhood memory peeked through the haze, and this time Cooper let it. He thought of being ten and kneeling on the sidelines, relieved his mom was too sick to come to his soccer game that day and see him sit the whole thing out. And then feeling guilty for being relieved.
“It’s Astroturf,” Cooper realized. “For sports fields, you know, with fake grass?” He was surprised it had taken him this long to recognize it. He’d had a particular loathing for it as a child. It was forever working its way inside his shoes and sticking to his socks and shorts where it would hide—even when he took his cleats off before going inside as he knew he was supposed to—until his father came home and demanded to know who had tracked dirt all through the house and made Mom upset.
Park was frowning. “I don’t think Baker’s the type to kick a ball around with some buddies.”
“On a hunch I’d say neither was that bear.”
“The field where they found Jenny this morning, that’s Astroturf.”
They both paused to think about that. “Is it the only one?” Cooper asked.
“I think so. Not a very modern town, Florence. But I’m not sure. Do you think Jenny’s abduction is connected to the killings after all?”
Cooper wasn’t ready to answer that. “Let’s check out those sheds.”
Christie and Harris were still clunking around the front yard, so Park took the containers in the side woods and Cooper headed to the back, where five more containers of varying sizes were perched in a loose circle like some weird, ritualistic Stonehenge. In between them perched more sculptures Cooper was beginning to recognize as figurative. Various animals and people with gleaming quartz eyes that seemed to watch him wherever he went. He shook off their gaze and started working through the containers.
Inside he found more metal and various rusted machines. A ton of camping and climbing gear. A lot of magazines. A cream-and-yellow-flowered couch wrapped in thick plastic and other dated furniture that had probably belonged to Baker’s parents. Sentimental? No wonder the house was so neat. Like an undercover hoarder, the guy had just boxed up everything out here. Despite the amount of stuff, nothing looked out of place or gave any clue of another property.
It was slow going, and by the end of it Cooper felt tired, dusty, sweaty and discouraged. He stepped out of the last shed and even the still summer air felt like a fan against his skin.
There was the Astroturf on the mat, and Astroturf had been found on the dead bear near Bornestein and Doe, and where Jenny Eagler had been found, and your leg bone’s connected to your hip bone and what the hell did any of this have to do with anything?
Cooper walked around the sheds where the tree coverage thickened and the difference between light and shadow grew more severe. His eyes were still adjusting as he walked, so it was lucky he noticed the deep crevice in the rock floor before stepping, or rather falling, into it. The crevice—or pit, or hole to hell—was deep. Deeper than he could see, and started at about four feet wide, narrowed quickly and then seemed to open up again. A large piece of metal fencing was propped up nearby along with a couple more poles. About four feet down in the crevice something smooth and inorganic caught the sunlight and stood out against the dirt and rock. Could be a stray bit of metal. Maybe part of the big piece of fencing against the tree.
But if they were counting Astroturf as clues now, he couldn’t assume anything was unimportant.
Cooper got onto his belly and peered into the crack. It was a flattened oval shape and now he saw a bit of chain attached to it, too. Something delicate and too bright. It caught the sun better than the other bits of metal lying around the yard. It shone like polished jewelry.
Cooper hadn’t seen any indication in the bedroom that Baker wore jewelry.
What about Jenny? The doctor had said she was held somewhere cold and wet. Would Baker have put her underground? Maybe even in this crevice? Cooper looked at the loose fencing again and an involuntary shudder rippled through him.
He scrambled to his feet and fetched a long piece of climbing rope and a carabiner out of one of the sheds. He knotted it carefully around a tree large enough to hold his weight and then some, carefully looped it through the carabiner and tied the other end around himself.
“Figure eight, follow the snake,” Cooper said, remembering the rhyme his dad had taught him as a kid, and finished up the knot. Doing all the proper ties was probably overkill for rappelling down the crevice the couple of feet he needed to reach the chain, but he’d done too much climbing with his dad and brother on their “be a man” trips to not respect the whole procedure. Plus, climbing had been one of the few activities he had always enjoyed. Being the wiry one in the family had been an advantage for once.
Of course, he’d always been climbing up and not down. Nice wide-open cliff faces with the sun on his back and a fresh breeze in his hair. Not narrow rat holes balanced between tons of earth and rock.
Cooper eyed the murky darkness of the crevice and the sweat on his neck suddenly felt cold. He hated being underground. Hated caves. Hated being in a small, enclosed space and breathing his own breath over and over. A tomb.
He didn’t need to be the one to climb down, of course. Christie would probably leap at the chance to use that gear he insisted on toting around. But Cooper didn’t want to alert the others yet. He didn’t even know if the...whatever it was was important. It could just be another scrap for Baker’s art. Though as far as Cooper could tell, rust and quartz, not shiny silver, was Baker’s medium of choice.
Wouldn’t they wonder why Cooper had not simply retrieved the metal himself? Why he needed help to rappel a few feet down into a crevice? Ridiculous. He was perfectly capable of doing this himself. He didn’t need anyone. This would be a good way to prove it. To prove himself. Not that he needed to prove himself to anyone in particular.
He tugged one last time on the rope to triple-check the knot and lowered himself down, feet braced against one side of the fissure. This was fine. Easy. He had to pause for a long couple of minutes and work on maneuvering his body around the jutting rock where the crevice narrowed temporarily, but worked it out eventually.
Once he got around the obstruction, the crevice widened again and he could unfurl enough to check his progress. Most of the sky was obscured by the rock he’d just worked around. He couldn’t see the land, just a gray streak of sky. Brighter than it had looked when he was up there breathing the nice wide-open air.
Cooper’s lungs began to tighten and he cleared his throat. It was wet down here. Wetter than he would have expected solid rock to be. The sort of dank, dark dampness unique to the bowels of the earth. Even the air tasted dirty. It made his skin feel thick and rubbery.
The bracelet—it was definitely a bracelet now that he was close—was a foot below him, caught on the other side of the crevice. He twisted in his rope harness and reached down to grab it. His fingers brushed at the thin chain, carefully avoiding the pendant in the middle. There was something engraved on the surface.
A sprinkling of dirt fell from the sky and got stuck on his damp skin.
“That’s odd,” Cooper said before his heart shot into his throat as he free-fell into the earth.
Chapter Nine
Cold, was Cooper’s first thought. Not falling anymore, was his second.
That’s your body’s priorities for you.
He was wedged between slabs of rock, in the dark. His left leg was bunched up against his chest, knee at his chin, ankle throbbing. His right leg hung loosely below him, still not touching solid bottom. The crevice may have narrowed enough to stop Cooper’s fall temporarily, but it definitely kept going.
A cold air tickling him from below indicated it kept going for a while. Cooper forced himself to inhale and then began breathing rapidly when his brain was reminded of what a tasty thing oxygen was and damn, why had he ever given it up? Once he’d sucked down a couple mouthfuls of the wet, heavy air, his body moved on to making new complaints.
His spine was crushed against the stone. His skin was stinging where his shirt had ridden up and his back scraped. His hands and feet were freezing numb from cramping as the blood fled his extremities like rats off a sinking ship. His right elbow ached like he may have cracked it. The good news was it wasn’t his head.
Cooper gently tested flexing his left leg, ignoring the twinge in his ankle, and started shimmying up the wall. He made it maybe three inches before his shoes, not meant for scrabbling up portals to hell, slipped on the wet rock and he jolted back down with a sharp exhale.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered. His heart, still recovering from his free fall, didn’t need much convincing to pick up the pace again.
His climbing rope hung uselessly from his waist. At least one end still seemed securely knotted and looped through the carabiner. He pulled the rope up, gathering it at his lap, and examined the end that had been attached to the tree. It wasn’t broken or frayed. Just...untied.
Cooper swallowed and looked up again. He couldn’t see the sky, only a direction where a faded gray light seemed to come from. He was breathing too heavily to hear anything so he put his own hand over his mouth and listened. Sound was weirdly distorted. The air pressed against his eardrums like he was underwater, not underground. He couldn’t hear anything from above, but the silence had a...watchful quality.
Was someone there, or was it his own tension affecting the air?
Someone definitely had been there. Cooper knew his knots had been good. Someone had untied his rope from the tree. Someone could still be up there now. Standing over the crevice. Watching and waiting to see if he had survived.
He closed his eyes, near useless in this dark anyway, and concentrated on slowing his brea
thing. If he called for help, would anyone hear him? If the person who had untied his rope was waiting up there, he or she certainly would. They might even finish the job.
If something, anything, came hurtling down the narrow space, Cooper would not be able to avoid it. He thought of all those rusty hunks of metal lying around the yard and felt nauseated. He fought the useless urge to cover his head with his hands.
Instead he waited, straining to hear anything up above. Still nothing. Should he wait here and hope the others found him? Did he continue trying to inch his way up? How long would his attacker wait up there? How long had it already been?
Cooper felt frozen with indecision. The wrong choice could kill him and there didn’t seem to be a right one. Not making a choice at all wasn’t looking so promising either.
His breathing was fast and shallow. It felt like he was only able to get air into the top of his lungs. He could feel his own pulse beating almost painfully hard in his throat. Now was not the time for this shit. He needed to calm down. Now.
Easier said than done.
He could not do this. He needed to do something.
His rising panic made a decision for him, and Cooper found himself trying to shimmy up the wall using his numb, fumbling fingers, grasping at mere suggestions of handholds. He didn’t get far. Without the space to pull his right leg up, he didn’t have the leverage to move very far at all. His left leg and back muscles were quivering now from staying tensed too long. But if he relaxed them, he was sure he would slip farther down. Maybe even to the bottom, if there was one, and then who would ever find him?
Park. If the guy could smell loneliness in a shirt collar, Cooper’s reeking desperation and fear should be a breeze. But would Park even be looking for him?
Cooper had made it pretty clear he wasn’t interested in hand-holding. If Park even noticed he was missing, would he assume Cooper had just taken off to pursue his own lead and intentionally cut him out? Again?
Shit.
The Wolf at the Door Page 17