He wiped at his right eye with his thumb, and Mark looked at the floor out of respect. He kept his eyes down until Blankenship spoke again.
“Now I’m going to tell you one last thing you should know,” he said. “When Sarah went missing, at first all anyone understood was that she was lost.”
“Right.”
“Back then, I didn’t know that Ridley believed that a hole in the ground was a supernatural place. That he told Pershing the cave made him stronger with each trip. Gave him power with each trip. Didn’t know he’d said he had to work alone because the cave wouldn’t talk to anyone else.”
He pulled himself up to the desk and faced Mark again.
“Now you’ve heard what I have to say, and you’re smart enough to understand how we go from here. You might want to talk to somebody else. Otherwise, whatever you disclose here, you’re disclosing it to an officer who was removed from that investigation for due cause. You want somebody else, I can point you to the state police.”
“I think I’d rather talk to you, Sheriff,” Mark said.
“All right, then. Let’s hear it.”
Blankenship didn’t say a word until Mark was through. Then he said, “Ridley confessed. On video, he confessed.”
“Yes. But it wouldn’t be worth a damn to the prosecutor. It would be blown up for coercion or false memory even if Julianne was accepted by the court as an expert, and that’s discounting Ridley’s options entirely. He might sit down with you and laugh in your face and tell you that he was putting on a show for her the whole time, and who could prove him wrong?”
“Do you think he was?”
“Not after this morning, I don’t,” Mark said. “I think she got him to tell the truth.”
Blankenship rose and went to the window and looked out at his little town. Someone was shoveling snow off the sidewalk and the rhythmic scraping was the only sound for a few seconds. Then he said, “She really thinks that Ridley will show her something if he gets the chance to be alone in that cave with her.”
“That’s what I’m told. She’s willing to do it, and she’s willing to wear a wire or a camera. She says he won’t allow anyone else along. It would be a damn difficult surveillance.”
“It would be impossible. Ridley would smell anything out of place down there, and you need light to move an inch. Or at least most people do.”
“Could put recorders in the cave, but you’d need a lot of them, since we have no idea where he’d take her. Not practical. Any device has to be on her.”
“Anything went wrong down there, I’d lose my badge. Hell, even if it went right, I probably would.”
Blankenship’s voice suggested he wasn’t too concerned with that.
“It’s a tough spot for police,” Mark said. “She knows that. Ridley does too.”
“Damn that man,” Blankenship said suddenly, a near shout. “He killed her. He killed her but I can’t prove it, Novak. I have known this for ten years. I cannot prove it. I have no crime scene, I have no witnesses, and I have no forensics that he can’t explain away by claiming he found her body and dragged it through a cave. I have nothing.”
Mark had a flash memory of his last meeting with the lead investigator in Lauren’s case. I have nothing, Mr. Novak. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. We’ll get there, though. We’ll get there.
“I don’t want to go back in that cave,” Mark said. “I surely don’t want to go down there with Ridley Barnes.”
“Nobody’s asking you to. It’s a foolish idea, and nobody in his right mind would ask you to.”
“No, he wouldn’t. And let’s keep it that way. Because when I come back up from Trapdoor, Sheriff, we’ll both need you to have your legal distance preserved.”
“No. Absolutely not. I’ll handle Ridley.”
“All due respect,” Mark said, “but he’s not going to open the door to you, Sheriff. Not in any way that counts, at least. Don’t forget the essential difference in our approach here: You’ve been working on Ridley Barnes. As far as I’ve been concerned, Ridley Barnes has been working on me. Until today.”
“Until today. Now you care?”
Mark nodded. “I do. And you’re starting to trust me a little. The balance is shifting on Ridley. What scares me, though? What scares me is that he may already know that.”
Part Five
A Little Different
in the Light
50
It was time to see Ridley again face-to-face.
Mark had returned to Garrison determined not to make the same mistake he’d made on his first visit, when he’d had the blissful sense of going through the motions. He’d rushed into contact with Ridley then. He didn’t intend to repeat the mistake.
The time had come, though.
He was driving along the icy country roads when Jeff called.
“Please tell me you’re on a plane,” Jeff said without preamble.
“Not yet.”
“Mark…”
When Jeff London used the short version of Markus, it was the equivalent of anyone else using the full version and the middle name.
“I’ve got nothing for them yet,” Mark said. “But I will. You tell them that, and—”
“I can’t just tell them things! This is it. This is the end of the road. You’ve got to sit at the table this time. No pick-and-roll left to be run. You’ve got to understand that.”
“If I leave here, Ridley Barnes is not going to answer for anything, and—”
“Ridley Barnes is not your case!”
Mark turned onto the winding road to Ridley’s, grateful for the security of the all-wheel drive beneath him. “I was nearly one of his victims. If it’s not my case, whose is it?”
“That’s not the point, and you know it. There are victims and there are vigilantes. I thought we’d reached an understanding as to which side of that fence you were staying on.”
Mark watched the lonesome fields pass by and didn’t speak. They’d reached an understanding on this, yes. An understanding that was based on a lie: I will leave Lauren’s case to the authorities and I will not seek the death penalty.
It had been an easy lie to tell then, when it saved him the only thing he had left that he cared about—his job. Somewhere along the line, somewhere during his time in this backwater Indiana town, he’d begun to tire of the lie. No matter what it gained him. No matter what it cost.
“I think I’m drifting a little too Old Testament for our line of work,” Mark said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Eye for an eye.”
“Don’t start again, Markus. Damn it, do not start that again. Leave her case to the people who have the right distance.”
“We’ll talk about it. We’ll also talk about this case. We never would have taken it. Sarah Martin’s death wouldn’t have qualified, because there was no capital-punishment element. No conviction, even.”
“I’m well aware of that, and if you think you deserve yet another apology, then—”
“I don’t,” Mark said. “She does.”
“What?”
“What if Diane Martin had been alive, Jeff?”
“She isn’t.”
“She might have been. What if I’d walked into her town and sat across from her and promised her the answers she deserved would finally be given to her. And then I walked away.”
Jeff’s sigh had some horsepower behind it. “I’m going to say this once, and you need to listen to it and comprehend it: I’ve been busting my ass for weeks trying to convince the board that you are still a trustworthy employee, that when you are given direct instructions, you follow them. Your instructions here are simple: Come home. First flight you can get on. Or drive all night, I don’t care, but you better be back in town tomorrow. You’re going to have to talk with the board at this point. I can’t promise how that will go with you in the room, but I can promise how it will go if you’re not in the room—you’re done. And I won’t vote against it. If you can’t d
o something as simple as get on a plane when you’re told to, Markus?” There was a long pause, and when Jeff finally spoke again, his voice was sorrowful. “Then even I can’t trust you anymore.”
It was a statement that demanded a response, but Mark couldn’t even grant it his full attention. He was closing on Ridley’s house now, and two troubling things were already apparent: Ridley’s truck was gone, and his front door was standing open.
“Jeff,” he said. “I’ve got to go. I’m sorry. Really, I am. But I’ve got to go.”
He disconnected before he heard another word. He pulled into the driveway and parked in the place where Ridley’s truck belonged and stared at that open door. Maybe it didn’t mean a thing. The wind had been coming in gusts all day; it was certainly capable of pushing open a shut door, and maybe Ridley hadn’t locked it when he left.
Mark doubted that, though.
He got out of the car and called Ridley’s name but heard no answer. He wished he had a weapon.
He walked up the steps and called Ridley’s name again and received nothing but silence, and then he pushed the door wide open and looked inside at the shadowed room. Everything seemed in place, no trace of disturbance, but the shadows teased his mind and suggested possibilities. He found the light switch and flicked it on and breathed a little easier when the shadows vanished and tangible objects took their places.
“Ridley!” The name left his mouth with more aggression than he’d intended. For some reason, the empty place and open door had summoned adrenaline. You weren’t supposed to be scared of empty spaces. Ridley’s house had other ideas.
He walked to the stairs and stopped himself from calling Ridley’s name again. There would be no answer. He had proven that now. He found another light switch and illuminated the hall at the top of the stairs and then went on up. There was a single bathroom, clean and tidy but missing a mirror. The medicine-cabinet frame where it belonged was empty, the contents beyond the door exposed. Past the bathroom was a bedroom, and beyond that another room that was filled with bookshelves. There was a strange shadow to the left, something out of place. Mark hit more lights and saw that there was a false wall that had been turned into a door.
The chill he felt then was almost a prayer—Don’t let me find what I’m afraid of in there—as images of chains and shackles and bones flickered through his mind, all the things a psychotic might store away in secret places. Then he dropped to one knee, pushed the wall back, and saw what it hid: maps.
Nothing else. The wall was lined with maps. Not the sort that hung on the basement walls at Trapdoor, those hand-drawn illustrations of cave interiors. These were topographic land maps. Mark looked at them and thought of what he’d told Julianne Grossman during his trance: that he’d been looking at the wrong maps.
He pushed the wall back farther so he could see one of the topographic maps clearly. It was covered with notations and filled with pushpins.
Burial sites, he thought. My God. If every one of those pins represents a…
But they couldn’t. There hadn’t been that many missing people in Garrison County in the past hundred years, probably, and Ridley wasn’t known to range far from home. So what had he been locating?
Mark climbed farther behind the wall, studying the maps. None of them were of Trapdoor. None of them showed anything that made them worth hiding, as far as he could tell.
Wrong maps. You said you were looking at the wrong maps.
He’d looked at every map he knew existed, and now he was looking at others, but still he didn’t see where his mistake had been made, because he hadn’t known these existed before.
You told me your mother wouldn’t have made the same mistake.
But his mother wouldn’t have known about Ridley’s maps. Where was the joke there? Julianne said that he’d laughed before he said it. Hilarious stuff going on in his subconscious, apparently, but he couldn’t imagine what it had been.
It took him a while but he finally found the location of Trapdoor on the map. He traced the outline of Maiden Creek with his index finger and came up to the road and the place where the trailer stood and then he stopped and for a long moment he didn’t move or make a sound.
There had always been other maps, and they’d always been available to him. They were the ones that counted too. Everyone else cared about the ones Ridley had not shared, but those mattered only when they were paired with others: the ones of the surface, the ones that showed ownership.
He left Ridley’s hidden room and walked back down the stairs. In front of the cold stove where Ridley had once sat with bright eyes and told Mark that someone needed to speak for Sarah Martin, Mark sat and called Jeff London.
“Call back after a hang-up,” Jeff said. “Let me guess—you’re in trouble. What can I do for you?”
The bitterness in his voice was valid, but Mark couldn’t worry about it. Not now.
“You got a computer handy?” he said.
“Hell are you talking about?”
“I need to know whether Garrison County has a GIS database.”
GIS stood for geographic information system, computer-mapping technology that had its origins in nuclear-war fears during the 1960s but was now common for local property records.
Jeff was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, he sounded near desperate, a broken man asking a priest to explain to him once more why he should believe.
“What do you think this can accomplish?” he said.
“Ridley wants the cave,” Mark said. “I can’t explain how much it means to him. He believes it’s something more than a cave. But he’s no fool. He understands access. He understands that someone owns it. And that he isn’t that man.”
“Tell me why that matters.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Markus—”
“I’m almost there!”
This time the silence went on so long that Mark thought Jeff had hung up. He actually pulled the phone away and looked at the display, saw the ticking seconds. A countdown of trust. It had to blow at some point.
“They have a GIS database,” Jeff said. Speaking in measured tones now, clinically. Like Dr. Desare when he’d explained how Mark had been brought back from the dead. “Who do you want me to search for?”
“Ridley Barnes.”
Pause. “One property. Five acres, with a single residential structure valued at—”
“I’m standing in it now. I don’t need the specs. Try again. First name Pershing, last name MacAlister. M-A-C.”
Pause. “Nothing.”
“There has to be.”
“There isn’t.”
Mark rose from the chair but didn’t move away from it. “Put in the word Trapdoor. See if it hits.” Mark could see his reflection in the window. With the woodstove in the background, the image reminded him of different places, a different man. Howling blizzards and small towns. Broken fingers and pickup trucks crawling through the snow. Exposed lies. Blood and justification.
“Eleven properties,” Jeff said. “The name is Trapdoor Caverns Land Trust.”
“Eleven? Eleven unique properties. You’re sure? No duplicate records.”
“I’m looking at the parcel map, Markus. Eleven properties, roughly following the basin of something called Maiden Creek. Sound right?”
Too right. Mark wet his lips and said, “Can you see who owns the trust?”
“Nobody owns a trust.”
“What do you mean?”
“A land trust is its own entity. Like a corporation. It doesn’t have owners, it has beneficiaries. Those names aren’t public. Obviously, we can find them, but as far as the public record is concerned, Trapdoor Caverns is its own legal entity. Trapdoor can buy and sell land. So far, it has only bought.”
“How recently?”
“Let me see.” It was quiet for a few seconds while Jeff looked, and then he said, “Each parcel was transferred to the trust from Pershing MacAlister in October of 2004.”
“The month aft
er Sarah was killed.”
“That makes sense, though. They shut the place down after she was killed.”
“You said you could see a parcel map,” Mark said. “What does it look like?”
“Look like?”
“Yes. What does the shape of the Trapdoor land-trust property look like?”
“Like a snake. It follows the creek, then curls out and away. I don’t know what shape it has. It looks like a suburban subdivision, maybe. Winding roads and cul-de-sacs. What are you hoping to hear?”
“Exactly that.”
“Markus, what are you talking about?”
“Ridley mapped it from below,” Mark said. “But the cave’s not worth anything unless you own what’s above it. I’m sure of that, Jeff. I’m from oil country. Surface ownership extends to the core of the earth. Ridley was working from the bottom up.”
“Which matters how?”
“How fast can we get ahold of that trust document?”
“Not very. Private and sealed legal agreement. We’d need a subpoena.”
“There has to be a faster approach than that.”
“Sure. You can find one of the parties involved and ask if you can see a copy. Short of that cooperation, you’ll need a subpoena. But you still haven’t given me an answer. Why do you think this matters? What does it have to do with Sarah Martin?”
“I’m close,” Mark said, as if that answered the question. He was circling through the fog, waiting to land. Instruments were out, only instinct left. He was close. You either landed or crashed.
51
Ridley questioned Julianne Grossman’s authenticity on many things, but he couldn’t deny the power of her presence. Her energy was palpable in the truck, even though she couldn’t speak and chose not to move. She sat there in his jacket with the tape over her mouth and she stared straight ahead, and still he could feel her like a pulse. He was relieved that he had silenced her.
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