All she needed was the chance.
She looked back down at the phone’s display. They’d lost the signal, and Shannon Beckley’s camera was gone. No surprise, not in these hills. Dax wasn’t pushing the speed too much, and Abby expected that the women behind them wouldn’t be either. They were clones—one killer, one hostage, nobody looking to attract police attention. That would give Dax his five- or maybe ten-minute lead at Hammel. What would he do with it? Abby thought he would leave the car. He would expect the car to attract attention that a man on foot in the darkness would not.
If I get five minutes alone, I’ll get that headrest off. I know how it’s done now. Feet on the dash, back arched, start with the left side…
She just needed those minutes.
“Turn left here,” Abby said.
Dax seemed surprised by the instruction, but he slowed.
“The signs say the college is to the right.”
“We’ll save a few minutes this way. Minutes matter now, don’t they?”
Dax turned to her, looking even younger and less hostile without the hat. Just a boy out for a ride in a muscle car.
“Yes,” he said. “Minutes matter.”
He turned left.
They wound through a residential stretch with Abby calling out directions, and then they turned on Ames Road and started a steep descent. The darkness was lifting in that barely perceptible way of predawn, not so much a brightening as a fading of the blackness.
“The railroad bridge is at the bottom of the hill,” Abby said. “Parking is on the left. There won’t be any cars down there now, probably.”
She thought about saying more, adding something about how they’d stand out to Lisa Boone if they parked down there, but she caught herself. Let him reach that conclusion on his own. He’d be suspicious if Abby offered too much help.
The transmission downshifted on the steep grade, an automatic adjustment that took the driver out of the equation and that Abby had always hated but that Dax seemed to prefer. You could switch the Challenger to a bastardized version of a manual transmission, no clutch pedal but paddle shifters. He hadn’t done that once, though.
Scared of the power, Abby thought, and again the ludicrous confidence rose. I can beat him if he just gets out of the car.
The headlights pinned the railroad bridge below them, the angled steel beams throwing shadows onto the dark river. Abby looked at the place and tried to remember what it had felt like when she’d paced this pavement with a camera in hand and confusion rising. That’s all it had been then—confusion. Carlos Ramirez’s story, so clean and simple, wasn’t accurate. Carlos, the second person to die. Hank, who’d wanted nothing but easy money and a chance for Abby to face down her demons, was the third. Gerry, the man who’d died on his kitchen floor, the fourth.
Will I be the fifth? Shannon Beckley the sixth? How many more die before it’s done?
“Do you know what’s on Oltamu’s phone?” Abby asked.
Again, Dax seemed startled by the sound of her voice. He hesitated, then said, “I don’t. Should be interesting, don’t you think? A lot of people seem willing to go to extreme lengths just to have it in their hands.”
“What if it’s nothing?”
Dax laughed. “I hardly think that’s an option.”
“It may be. He could have wiped the data. You don’t know.”
“No. All those locks on an empty phone? There’s something there.”
“It will involve batteries,” Abby said. “And I think it might involve cars. He came from the Black Lake. He watched testing.”
Dax seemed more intrigued now, but he was also in the place where he had to set the trap, and he wasn’t going to divide his focus.
“When I find out,” he said, pulling into one of the angled spaces in the spot where Amandi Oltamu had died and Tara Beckley had nearly been erased from existence, “you’ll be the first to know. You’ve earned that much, Abby. I’ll tell you before I kill you. That’s a promise.”
He was surveying the area, taking rapid inventory, his mind no longer on Abby but on the possibilities waiting here in the darkness above the river. The possibilities, and the pitfalls.
“Did you see the dog when you were here?” he asked.
“I did not.”
“But our girl Tara believes he will appear. Hobo. There’s a lot riding on a stray dog named Hobo.” He went silent, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and staring into the dark woods where birches swayed and creaked.
“Boone needs the phone to be opened,” he said at length. “Interesting. Gerry’s German friend seemed to think it was worth trying to open it, but it wasn’t a priority. So our buyer wants to kill the phone, and hers wants to see it.”
He looked at Abby again. “You’re right—I’m awfully curious about what’s on it.”
He dropped his right hand onto the gearshift, put the car in reverse, backed out, whipped the car around, and drove up the hill again. Abby tried to stay expressionless, tried not to let her relief show.
Dax was going to park the Challenger where it wouldn’t stand out, and that meant he would need to leave the car. The options, then, were to keep Abby in the car or bring her along. The latter carried more risk.
There’s a third option. He kills you here. He doesn’t need you anymore.
At the crest of the hill on Ames Road, where more houses began to appear, Dax turned the car and parallel-parked in a spot between streetlights where the Challenger would be obscured by shadows. He cut the engine and the lights. Paused and assessed. Nodded, satisfied. He took the cell phone, its screen filled with the image of the weaving night road that Shannon Beckley was driving just behind them, and slipped it into his pocket.
“Now, Abby, I’m afraid we’re going to have to separate for a time. I’ll miss you, but it’s for the best. You’ll have nefarious ideas in my absence, I’m sure. Things you could do to hurt me and, in your noble if dim-witted mind, help Shannon.” He plucked the gun from inside the door panel, and for an instant Abby could see the barrel being shoved through the lips of the man named Gerry just before the kill shot was fired and thought the same was coming for her.
Then Dax switched the gun to his right hand and reached for the door handle with his left.
“Before you make any choices,” he said, “I want you to consider this—I’ve kept you alive, and Lisa Boone is unlikely to do the same. You want me dead, and that’s fine. If I’m dead, though? She’s the last one left. I’m not sure I’d choose that if I were you.”
With that, he opened the door and stepped out into the chill night. He’d disabled the interior lights, and when he closed the door, he did it softly. Then he started down the hill at a jog, moving swiftly and silently.
Abby watched until he vanished into the woods. Then she braced her feet on the dashboard, took a deep breath, and arched her aching back to extend the reach of her bound hands as far as possible. She found the headrest releases quicker this time, and she set to work.
59
Boone hadn’t been planning on a hostage, but that didn’t mean she was unprepared for one. She was always prepared for such a contingency.
She used plastic zip-tie cuffs on Shannon Beckley’s wrists and a single piece of duct tape over her mouth, things that could be removed quickly in the event of trouble, but she used real cuffs to bind Shannon’s left ankle to a bar beneath the passenger seat. There would be no runaways on Boone’s watch.
Satisfied, she drove away in the girl’s rented Jeep. In the backseat, Beckley seemed composed enough; she was avoiding hysteria, at least, which was a help. Boone would have no trouble silencing her if it came to that, but she also needed to keep her alive until all sequences of locks had been defeated. Tara Beckley had managed to claim an infuriating amount of control. For a quadriplegic who couldn’t speak, an astounding amount of control, actually. Even if they found the fucking dog and the lock actually opened, Boone would still have to make her way back to Tara once more and
deal with the challenges of the hospital without her helpful aide Dr. Pine. Shannon Beckley could be key to gaining access during the daylight hours, when the hospital was more active and the parents would be in the room, and Boone feared that the waking vegetable that was Tara Beckley could cause more trouble if she didn’t see proof of life of her sister. She could hold out. In fact, Boone suspected that she would, and she understood why—Tara didn’t have much left to lose.
Then again, there were the parents to consider.
Maybe Shannon wasn’t so vital after all.
All this would be decided after they left Hammel. For now the task was dictated by the image on the phone. Her current pursuit was ludicrous—this was a multimillion-dollar job in service of billions, and Boone was chasing a stray dog named Hobo. In her varied and diverse career, leaving corpses in more than a dozen countries, she’d never felt more absurd, and yet a part of her admired Oltamu. Somehow he’d felt the hellhounds closing in, and his response had been as resourceful as anyone’s could be in that moment. Nobody was going to get the intelligence he’d collected simply by picking up his phone. He’d played a risky game and lost it, but he’d made a fine effort all the way to the end.
Ask the girl, he’d instructed Boone, presumably having no idea just how difficult that would be. The doctor had come through, the girl had come through, and now the locks were turning, albeit slowly.
The drive ate away at hours Boone couldn’t afford to lose, and with the night edging toward dawn, she had to will herself to keep her speed down and use the time to consider what lay ahead. Pine was going to be a problem. People would find him soon enough, and while it would take a first-rate medical examiner to determine that he hadn’t died of natural causes, it would also inevitably cause chaos in the hospital. The place wouldn’t be nearly so quiet when Boone returned.
Chaos, though, could be used as a shield. It was all a matter of timing. The dog had to be dealt with, then Tara Beckley. Step by step. Unless, of course, Tara Beckley was lying, and there was no third lock. In that case, Boone could leave her sister’s body behind and be out of the country before Tara blinked her way through the alphabet board with any message that police might believe.
They reached the outskirts of Hammel, passed signs for the college, and then the winding New England road crested and dropped abruptly, a steep hill descending toward the river.
This was the place.
She slowed and checked the mirrors. No one had been behind them for long throughout the drive, and no one was now. To the right and to the left were peaceful houses with tree-lined lawns, windows dark, a porch light or outdoor floodlight on here and there. The streetlights were designed for form rather than function, and they cast only a dim glow over the sidewalks, where dead leaves swirled in the wind. Three cars on the curb to her right, one car and one truck to the left. None of them looked like police vehicles, but there was one that didn’t fit the neighborhood—a souped-up Challenger with a vented hood and wide racing tires. It was parked at the end of the street and in the shadows. Boone gave it a careful look as she passed, but the windows were deeply tinted and she couldn’t make out anything. Some professor’s midlife-crisis car, she decided, and drove on.
At the bottom of the hill, angled parking spaces lined the left-hand side, all of them empty, and then there was an ancient railroad bridge. Beneath it, the river was a dark ribbon, swollen from recent rains. The current would be strong. If Tara Beckley had gone in the water today, she likely wouldn’t have been rescued. That would have cost Boone some serious money. Tara’s miraculous recovery to waking-vegetable status had the potential to be very, very lucrative. Instant-retirement money, vanish-to-your-own-island money, though Boone had no intention of retiring. When you loved your work, why stop? And hers wasn’t a profession you left easily. Those who remained alert to every motion in the shadows stayed alive; those who didn’t died. There was no retreat. This was the journey of any apex predator.
She pulled into one of the angled parking spaces on the river’s eastern shore, cut the engine, and said, “It’s going to be very unfortunate for your family if the dog isn’t here.”
The threat had nothing behind it, though. The dog was Boone’s problem and one that couldn’t readily be solved with or without the Beckleys. Either the girl was right or she was wrong. The dog would be here or he wouldn’t be.
“Sit tight, Shannon,” she said. She popped the door open and stepped out into the night.
For a few seconds, she just stood there, surveying the scene. The lonely lamps in the area, too dim, cast the only light on either side of the bridge. The next street lamp was all the way at the top of the hill, where the houses began. No one had built down here, probably due to flood risk. The river was high and felt close, the low whisper of moving water almost intimate in the darkness.
To her left, a jogging path curled into the trees, went up a small rise, and then vanished, probably running parallel to the river. To her right, the bridge loomed high and cold above the water, the old steel girders giving the wind something to whistle through. It was a long bridge, maybe two hundred feet, spanning a narrow river below. She saw now that there were actually two bridges—the old railroad bridge, set higher, the tracks running on banked gravel when they crossed the river, and slightly below it, a newer pedestrian bridge, connecting the jogging paths on eastern and western shores. On the other side of the river, ornate lamps threw muted light onto the path as it led through a thicket of pines and on toward the campus. She could see the brighter lights of the buildings beyond, maybe a quarter of a mile off.
It was a dark and quiet spot. It suited her.
Satisfied that she was alone, she moved away from the car. She had the knife in her left hand and the gun holstered behind her back. She left Oltamu’s phone in the car, unconcerned about that for now. Priority one was ensuring that she was alone and knew the terrain.
She walked toward the pedestrian bridge, thinking of how far a stray dog might have gone in all this time. He could be in a shelter or dead, hit by a car. What were the odds of finding him?
She went farther out onto the bridge, pivoted, and looked back down at the parking lot. Shannon Beckley’s rental Jeep was a dark silent shape in the place where her sister had once posed for Amandi Oltamu, clueless to all that was headed her way.
A dog, Boone thought with disgust. Amandi, you took it a step too far.
Somewhere to the west, behind the cold, freshening wind, a train horn sounded, soft and mournful, like something out of another time. Maybe the girl hadn’t lied. Maybe the dog would appear for the morning train as promised. Maybe—
“Hobo.”
The sound of the dog’s name came at her so softly that at first she didn’t believe it was real, as if the voice had come from within her own mind. Then it came again, clearer now.
“Hobo! Hey, buddy. C’mere. C’mon out.”
Someone at the other end of the bridge was calling to the dog. Boone stared in that direction, trying to make out a shape, but it was too far off. Branches cracked, and bushes shook, and somewhere on the western bank of the river, the voice said, “Good boy! Eat up, chief.”
A male voice, young and foolish. A Hammel student, probably. Another fan of a stray dog that the kids had adopted like a mascot.
Or a trap? Had Tara managed to communicate quicker than Boone had anticipated?
Boone considered this and dismissed it. If the girl had been able to summon police this quickly, they wouldn’t have been the kind of police who would set a trap. They’d have raced up with sirens blaring, county mounties with big guns and small brains, looking for a heroic moment.
“Good boy,” the voice said again, and again the bushes rustled, and this time Boone spotted the point of motion.
She drew her gun with her right hand and her knife with her left. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have considered this—you fired with two hands unless you had no choice. But she didn’t want to make any more noise than she had to, and then
there was the special consideration of the dog.
Oltamu’s phone was back in the Jeep. She considered returning for it but pressed ahead. She wanted to get a clearer view of what she was dealing with. She crossed the pedestrian bridge silently and swiftly, walking to the place where the bushes rustled. It was just below the pines, close to the water’s edge. As Boone neared the end of the bridge, the boy made one of those annoying clucking/cooing sounds that people used around animals and babies. It sounded as if he was trying to win the dog’s allegiance and hadn’t yet succeeded. This was a bad sign. If the animal was that skittish, Boone might have to risk a gunshot. But then, trying to get his eyes lined up for the camera presented its own challenges. How much fight would the dog have left, and how fast would Boone lose the opportunity to capture the life left in his eyes? Too many unknowns. Perhaps if she recruited the help of this kid who knew the dog, she could—
“Put the gun on the ground and then take two steps back, Boone.”
She knew better than to whirl at the sound. She was surprised by the voice, yes, but Boone had been surprised before, and she knew that you lived when you listened, stayed calm, and waited for the opportunity to correct your mistake. Clear head, fast hands. These were her gifts, and they weren’t gone yet.
“The gun,” he repeated.
Only the gun. This alone was a reassurance. If he hadn’t noticed the knife, then he was already on his way to death.
She knelt, taking care to let her left hand hang naturally, drawing no attention to the knife curled against her palm, and set the gun on the asphalt in front of her, then straightened and took two steps back as instructed. The voice had come from behind her and to the right. She looked that way, finally.
If She Wakes Page 32