The Goodbye Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  “First Baptist.” Shaw said, “The wife and I’ve been going there for years.”

  He picked that denomination because even if Welles was inclined to check, there’d be thousands of them throughout the country.

  And all good churchgoing men need the wife.

  Welles nodded to Dodd, then lifted a hand when the deputy didn’t seem to understand. “Oh, right.” He dug into his pocket and handed Shaw a napkin. Inside was the bloody zip tie that had been cut off Adam’s wrists.

  Welles said, “Thought it might go better that wasn’t found. A zip-tied man could jump off a cliff but . . .” His sun-brown face creased more than it already was. “Just better not to raise any questions. The inquest’ll be handled here. Which is good. The coroner’s one of us. Poker buddy too. It’ll go good. Don’t you worry about nothing.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  Ironic that the sheriff’s and medical examiner’s “cover-up” report would present what actually happened.

  He jumped, did he . . . ?

  “Okay, we’ll get on finding that other boy. He’ll probably surrender. There are mighty bugs this time of year. And, course, snakes. Now, that is a most unpleasant way to go. Just ask J. P. Gibbons, my predecessor. Spent a bad last month. ’Cept, I guess you can’t ask him anything now.”

  “Was he a man of God?” Shaw asked.

  “Not enough, it seems. You take care now, Mr. Shaw.”

  10.

  Shaw watched the sheriff’s squad car amble down the road, rocking on the tortured asphalt.

  He walked to the edge of the cliff once more and looked down. The sight remained difficult; Adam’s body still lay, uncovered, where it had landed. The deputies lounged about, waiting for the coroner. Two played cards on the hood of a squad car.

  Shaw climbed the steep hill and returned to the Kia. He’d just arrived when he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle from the Highland Bypass—the road on which Adam seemed to have been expecting visitors. He’d forgotten about them.

  Armed neo-Nazis?

  He’d have to call Welles. However unpleasant the man and his crew might be, Shaw wasn’t going to let them be ambushed. From the shoulder here, gunmen would have a turkey shoot.

  He checked the Smith & Wesson. In the five-round cylinder were four spent shells. One live slug remained. He slipped the gun back into his pocket. In the Glock, there was one in the chamber and six in the single-stack magazine. Returning to the brush for cover, he pulled out his phone and prepared to call Welles.

  A black van pulled into view and braked to a stop on the shoulder, near where Adam and Erick had been sitting. On the side was the mathematical infinity symbol, a logo of some sort. The door opened and two men and two women got out.

  Not Nazis.

  More like . . . Amish.

  They were wearing identical uniforms—dark slacks or skirts and powder blue shirts and black slip-on shoes. Only one variation in costume: two of the men wore unmarked baseball caps, and one of this pair had orange sunglasses. Most of them seemed to wear necklaces. He expected crucifixes but, no, it was something else, which he couldn’t see from this distance. Shaw supposed they were from the retreat near Snoqualmie Gap, the one that Adam and Erick were apparently headed for.

  The driver stepped from the van too. He wasn’t tall but was quite broad and built like a wrestler—though not the lean, zero-body-fat athletes Shaw had competed against in college. He was clearly in charge and looked around impatiently, then barked orders. The others fanned out.

  A soft cry. One of the women was staring down the cliff. She’d seen Adam’s body on the road below. She was compactly built, a brunette with dark curly hair. Her hips were broad, though she was otherwise slim. An alluring face. Not a model’s; more like that of a thoughtful, art-house actress. Her eyes were light, though he couldn’t tell the exact shade. Her complexion ruddy.

  The driver, a man and the other woman joined her and gazed down at the corpse. Unlike the brunette, they glanced down without any reaction. Utterly nonchalant. The driver actually grimaced, irritated, as if the trip here had been a waste of time. He shooed the others back to the van. The brunette remained where she was, though, wiping tears. The driver strode up to her, taking her roughly by the arm. He was angry and he whispered something, his face dark. She bowed her head submissively, nodded. A reprimand. Why? For displaying emotion at the death of someone? Possibly a friend? She and Adam might have had a connection in the past.

  The driver continued to whisper. More nodding. He glanced to the van and when he noted that the others weren’t looking his way, he moved his hand from her arm to her neck, the backs of his fingers. Then around to her throat, where, it seemed, he touched the chain or necklace. The hand then started down her chest. She turned abruptly and walked to the van. He frowned and called after her. Shaw caught the words “. . . or demerits.”

  She paused, looking crestfallen, then continued into the vehicle.

  Looking around once more the blunt man called out softly, so as not to draw the cops’ attention. Shaw caught what might have been two names: maybe “Jeremy.” Definitely “Frederick.”

  Not far away there came a rustle and a snap of footfalls, as the man in the orange sunglasses trooped down the hill. Apparently he’d stepped away to look for Adam and Erick before learning of Adam’s death. Had he seen Shaw? Maybe. At the van he stopped and looked back. Shaw crouched. The man climbed inside. The engine started and the driver made a careful three-point turn and the curious assembly vanished back the way they had come.

  Shaw climbed into the Kia and fired it up. He drove slowly back up Old Mill in the direction he’d come. He passed through Hope’s Corner and then five miles farther until he was out of Hammond County.

  There he pulled over onto the shoulder and climbed out. He walked to the rear of the car and used the remote to pop the trunk. He looked down at Erick Young, who was blinking against the bright blue sky.

  Shaw said, “Let’s get you out of there.”

  11.

  He was driving fast, though only a few miles over the limit. He didn’t need to be stopped by any associates of Sheriff Welles, even if he had the apparent blessing, one might say, of the man. He was glancing in the rearview mirror; nobody was pursuing so far.

  His mind returned to the brunette who, unlike her companions, had reacted with such shock and dismay to Adam’s death.

  Who was she and what about the group she was with? Was it the retreat he’d heard about?

  Hippies . . .

  Erick, in the passenger seat of the Kia, whispered, “Why would he kill himself?” The young man was staring out the window. His hands were now zip-tied behind him. Shaw was still armed and didn’t want to risk a wave of desperation within the boy driving him to lunge for the weapon. Or to leap from a car in motion.

  Saving Erick Young from the deputies had been a gamble, though he could hardly leave him to be found and arrested by Welles.

  “Come with me,” Shaw had called to Erick, after Adam had jumped. “Fast.” He’d helped the shocked young man up the hill to his car and opened the trunk. “Get in and stay quiet. You stay with me and I’ll get you back to Gig Harbor. Your parents. Find you a lawyer.”

  “Okay,” the young man had replied, his voice a whisper.

  With yet another county between them, Shaw began to relax. He checked the navigation system on the car. It would be an hour and a half back to Pierce County. Shaw had plenty of gas in the car and water for them, and they didn’t need food. As for a restroom, it would be brush by the roadside. There was no unsuspicious explanation to a gas station clerk as to why your traveling companion was zip-tied when you carried no badge.

  “They were going to hurt us, you said? The police?”

  “That’s right. They weren’t interested in just arresting you.”

  “Who are you?”

  S
haw reminded him about the reward offered by his family, and the one offered by the county.

  “Mom and Dad wanted you to catch me?”

  “They wanted you brought in safe. Running with an armed fugitive was a stupid idea.”

  “It’s just . . . I had to go with him.”

  “Why?”

  “I just did.” Looking at the pines zipping past. “He jumped,” Erick repeated. “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t take going to prison.”

  “But we didn’t do it.”

  The most popular defense in the world. Shaw asked, “Which part?”

  “All of it. I mean, yeah, Adam shot those guys. But it was self-defense.”

  This caught Shaw’s attention. “Tell me about it.”

  “Okay, there’s this cemetery where I go to. To visit . . . Well, my brother died last year.”

  “Mark. I heard. I’m sorry.”

  “I kind of go talk to him, you know.” The boy seemed embarrassed. “Sounds stupid but I do.”

  An image of Shaw’s own brother, Russell, floated into his thoughts. “No, not stupid at all.”

  “I was standing by his grave and I was crying, I guess.” He glanced at Shaw and saw a sympathetic face. “Adam was there too. He walked over to me. He was . . . I knew he was kind of weird. But he seemed like he was worried about me. He asked if I was all right. I told him about Mark. And he didn’t say anything at first, then he pointed to a grave. It was his mother. He said when she died he got all fucked up.

  “He said there was this group. They had a place in the mountains. It had helped him a lot. He said maybe him and me, we could go there together. You spend, I don’t know, three weeks or a month or something. Like therapy, I guess.”

  Shaw remembered Adam Harper’s father telling about the young man’s improvement after spending some time away from Tacoma. This would have been what he was referring to.

  “I thought, can’t hurt to try. Nothing else was working. He said it was expensive but I said I could get some money. School was out and I could take time off work, so I said, ‘Sure.’ Then, all that shit went down at the church.” He was breathing hard. “Oh, man . . .”

  “Go on, Erick.”

  “We were walking back to our cars and talking about when we could leave and go to this place when we saw the fire. We went to see what it was.”

  “The cross in front of the church?”

  “Uh-huh. Like the KKK, you know? These two men came out and one of them—the janitor, William, I heard—he had a gun, and he starts shooting at us.”

  Shaw frowned. “He fired first?”

  “Yeah. I’m on the ground and Adam’s screaming, like, ‘Stop, we didn’t do it!’ But he just keeps at it. Adam pulls out his gun, the one you got, and he shoots back and we run. I saw the news later and it didn’t say anything about them shooting first.”

  If it had happened as Erick said, then the janitor had committed a felony; you can’t shoot a nonthreatening trespasser. If you weren’t preventing use of deadly force, it’s a crime to even display the gun, let alone pull the trigger. After the janitor was hit, he probably gave his gun to the lay preacher and told him to hide it. An unregistered weapon, Shaw supposed.

  Shaw asked, “What was this group he was talking about?”

  “It’s something Foundation. Up in the mountains somewhere, where we were headed. Some of them were coming to pick us up. I kind of lied when you asked. But Adam said there was nobody, so I didn’t know what to say.”

  “You were saying its like therapy?”

  “I guess. It’s expensive and you have to pay up front. That’s why we didn’t book outta town right away. I needed to get some cash together. At first I was thinking scam, you know. But Adam was all: no, it’ll really work. It helped him get over his mother’s death and there were some problems with his father too. Adam really wanted me to feel better. It was important to him.” His voice grew muffled. He was crying. Shaw pulled over, put his gun and holster in the lockbox in the trunk and helped Erick out. He rezipped his wrists in front of him and offered the boy a wad of napkins from the food he’d bought earlier.

  They resumed the drive.

  Miles rolled past before Erick said, “I don’t know whether it was crazy or not. I wanted to try it. I just miss him a lot, my brother. Every day. You ever feel that way, Mr. Shaw?”

  He didn’t answer. He slowed for a speed trap, easing through Evansville right on the nose at thirty miles per hour.

  Soon the Kia was back up to sixty-five.

  Picturing the brunette, her reaction. And the others’ glazed, sheeplike gazes as they looked at the corpse far below. Shaw asked, “The people Adam called to get you? Did he mention who they were?”

  “I don’t remember if he did. I didn’t pay much attention when he was on the phone.” Erick’s lips tightened. “I’m going to go to jail, aren’t I?” He wiped his eyes again.

  Colter Shaw had once thought of practicing law. When the family, for their own safety, abandoned the San Francisco Bay Area for eastern California, his father had carted along hundreds of books, many of them legal volumes. As a boy, Colter devoured them. He liked casebooks in particular, the compilations of trial decisions, many of which read like short stories.

  From his knowledge of criminal law, Shaw knew Erick was in trouble, certainly, even if his story was true. At a minimum: flight, obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting, but he’d have a good chance of acquittal or a suspended sentence. His prints would not be on the Smith & Wesson. The police might find the janitor’s gun and could locate the bullets in the ground near where Adam and Erick had been. Under interrogation, the janitor—if he lived—or the lay preacher might recant their account and tell the truth. There might be witnesses supporting Erick’s story.

  Shaw said, “You’ll have your day in court.”

  “Lawyers’re expensive, aren’t they?”

  “Good ones are.”

  This discouraged him. He asked, “How far to home?”

  “An hour, little under.”

  “I’m going to sleep, I think.”

  “Are the restraints too tight?”

  “No.”

  “I have to leave them on.”

  “Sure.” The young man closed his eyes.

  12.

  Shaw pulled his phone out of his pocket and, hesitating only a moment, placed a call.

  “Hello.”

  “Is this Stan Harper?”

  “Yeah. Help you?”

  “It’s Colter Shaw. I talked to you earlier about your son.”

  “I remember.”

  Shaw had had these conversations several times in his career. There was no way to buffer them. “Mr. Harper . . . I’m sorry to have to tell you that Adam died an hour ago.”

  No response.

  “He took his own life.”

  “What?” A gasp.

  “I was going to bring him and Erick in to surrender to the police.”

  “But you said . . .” The voice faded.

  “I know I did. I’m sorry.”

  I want to get Adam back safe . . .

  “Did he shoot himself?” Perhaps the thought of a son using his father’s own weapon to end his life was unbearable.

  “No, he jumped off a cliff.”

  “Jumped?” The voice said he didn’t understand.

  “The police will be in touch so you can make arrangements.” When the man said nothing more, Shaw continued, “Mr. Harper, I’ve been speaking to Erick Young. It’s possible they were both innocent.”

  “They didn’t burn the cross, didn’t shoot anybody?”

  “Adam fired, yes, but it might have been self-defense.”

  “So he would have gotten off?”

  “Seems likely, or been convicted on minor charges.”
>
  “Then why did my son kill himself?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.”

  Silence rolled up. Through the phone Shaw could hear a ship’s horn, the caw of an angry seagull.

  “Mr. Harper?”

  Five more seconds of silence, then the man disconnected.

  * * *

  —

  You ever feel that way, Mr. Shaw . . .

  As he drove, Shaw silently responded to Erick Young: More often than that, actually.

  Colter Shaw and Erick Young shared this in common: mourning for their brothers. Dead, in Erick’s case. As for Shaw’s, Russell was long gone, though dead or alive, Shaw had no clue.

  Ashton and Mary Dove’s three children assumed very different personalities. Their daughter, Dorion, the youngest, was the clever one. Colter was the restless one. Russell, the oldest, was the reclusive one.

  Ashton Shaw died years ago—ironically, just like Adam Harper, tumbling from a cliff in a foreboding place known as Echo Ridge. That death, however, had decidedly not been a suicide. Not long after their father’s funeral, Russell had disappeared. Colter Shaw made a living by finding people, and he was good at this profession. Yet Russell had managed to elude him since that day. Neither Mary Dove nor Dorion had had any contact with son or brother in all those years either.

  A father’s loss is tragic, especially under suspicious circumstances. At the end of his life, though, Ashton was growing increasingly demented and paranoid. Shaw—a teenager during those times—recalled moments when the man grew dark and dangerous. His death may have been premature but it seemed a natural conclusion to the complicated life he’d embraced in his later years.

  Russell’s disappearance had been much harder on Shaw. The absence was bad enough but aggravating that sorrow were certain questions. First, was he alive or dead? Mourning is a different process in each instance.

  And then there was the so-very-difficult question of what drove Russell away from the family.

  Shaw had resigned himself to the fact that his brother was gone forever and did what he could to cope with that pain. He’d noted how hopeful Erick had sounded when he talked about this group, the Foundation, and how their brand of therapy might dull the loss. Treatment like that, however, was not a remedy that had any appeal whatsoever to Colter Shaw.