Roy frowned as he looked at the list. Estes. That name snagged on something in his brain, troubled him for no reason that he could articulate.
Adam Estes. Where had he just seen that? It was down here, in the morgue. He was sure of that. But the only reading he’d done here was confirming Wyatt’s list of accident victims.
“The drowned girl,” he said. That’s where he’d seen it. While reading about a red-ink name, Jenna Jerden. In 1975, Jerden had drowned in a canoeing accident in the Marshall River, trying to clear the swift eddies around the trestle in the dark. She hadn’t been alone. Her boyfriend had survived. Adam Estes.
He found the right volume, tracked down the story, and there it was. While Jerden had drowned among the rocks and dark water, her boyfriend had made it to shore, then gone for help. It was a long run to the nearest phone from Blade Ridge in 1975, though, and the help that finally came arrived far too late. The Sentinel commended the man on his futile efforts, while including a police quote that reprimanded the couple for attempting to canoe the unfamiliar and often dangerous river in the dark. The survivor was Adam Estes, thirty-three, of Whitman.
In 1975, Adam Estes had survived an accident at Blade Ridge that claimed another life.
In 1976, he’d killed a man.
“They can’t all be like that,” Roy said. There was no way.
It was noon by the time Kimble left the cat preserve. The scene had been processed, the body removed, the photographs taken. When he spoke to the coroner, the man said, “Damned unlucky spot these past few days, isn’t it?”
It sure was, Kimble agreed. It sure was.
He then said that in addition to the confirmed cause of death for Wesley Harrington, he would need an examination conducted on the tiger.
The coroner said “You want us to do what?”
Kimble explained it again, patiently. It didn’t appear that the bullet had come out of the cat. There was an entry wound but no exit wound, as if the shoulder bone had stopped it. He wanted the bullet.
Just due diligence, he said.
But he was thinking about more than due diligence. He was thinking about the size of the entry wound and about the range from which Wesley Harrington would have fired his high-caliber rifle. They did not match his expectation. Kimble found it patently obvious who had killed the man—the tiger. But he wasn’t so sure about who had killed the tiger.
He didn’t like the situation at the cat preserve at all, and when he left Shipley and Wolverton at the scene, he had private instructions for them that went beyond what he’d told Audrey Clark their purpose was, hunting for the missing cougar. While they were searching for signs of the cat, he also wanted them searching for signs of a human. Particularly, he said, shell casings.
“You think someone else shot that cat?” Shipley said. “The rifle was in that man’s hand. The brass was right there inside the gate.”
“I know it was. And when the coroner gives me the bullet and we find out that it came from his gun, we can close the case. Until we have that confirmation, though? It’s an active investigation, Shipley. Treat it like one.”
He left them then, resumed the drive he’d been trying to make seven hours earlier, and now there was even more on his mind than there had been then, and all of it was bad, and all of it went back to Blade Ridge.
It was the first time Kimble had ever visited her in the afternoon, but Jacqueline Mathis showed no trace of surprise.
“We’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this,” she said, smiling. The line seemed to hurt her, though, and he understood. It was what she’d said one Friday morning at the Bakehouse, when it had become far too clear that their accidental encounters were anything but accidental. What she’d said on a bright spring morning when she was a free woman, living in a beautiful old farmhouse with a view of the mountains, young and gorgeous and far from any idea of prison.
“I’m not visiting,” he said. “I’m working.”
“Working?”
“That’s right. I’ve got some questions. It worked out that I was coming by, otherwise I’d have just made a phone call, but I figured…”
He let the lies stop there. Kimble tried hard to be as honest as any man born to sin could be, but he’d told his share of lies, enough to know that they were pointless when neither you nor the recipient believed them.
“But I figured I’d rather talk in person,” he finished.
“I’m always glad to see you. And the way you left the other day… well, I felt bad about it. It was as if you didn’t like the idea that I’m going to get back out.”
I’m going to get back out. Yes, she was. He stared at her and felt an ache along his back, down near the scar.
“You said you had questions?” she prompted when the silence had gone on too long and sat too heavy in the room.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just a few. I doubt you’ll be able to help, but I had to try. I’m working a suicide, trying to find someone to come forward and deal with the dead man’s property, and I’m not finding anyone. Your name was written down in his things.”
“Who was it?”
“His name was Wyatt French.”
She gave it a few seconds. Shook her head.
“I don’t know anyone by that name.”
Kimble said, “I honestly don’t remember you lying to me before.”
She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. “You’re playing games with the truth yourself.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Really? You already know that he came to see me. You didn’t want to admit that, though, so you waited to see if I’d tell you. But I’m the only liar?”
He thought that over and nodded. “Fine. We’re both lying. We haven’t done that before, have we? Even in the worst of it, Jacqueline, have you ever lied to me?”
“No.”
“Then let’s hold that pattern. Yes, I know that Wyatt visited you a couple of months ago. Now he’s dead. I’d like to know what you talked about.”
She said, “No, you would not.”
He frowned. “Jacqueline? What’s the story?”
She looked more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen her, more shaken.
“He’s dead?”
“That’s right. Shot himself in the mouth.”
She closed her eyes again.
Kimble leaned forward. “Please, Jacqueline. I want to know why he came to see you. Why he had your picture up in his damned lighthouse. Why he—”
“He had my picture up?” Now her eyes were open again.
“That’s right. Along with dozens of others. Many of whom… many of whom I didn’t recognize.”
A lie again. No, just a change of the truth he’d been about to tell. At the last instant he’d decided not to tell her that she’d shared wall space with photographs of other killers.
“He killed himself,” she said. The words came out slowly, as if she were carefully considering the idea.
“It appears that way, yes.”
She shook her head. “Sad.”
“Why did he come here, Jacqueline? How did you know him?”
She thought about it, frowning. While she thought, she wet her lips. He watched her tongue glide out, tracing the curve of her lips, and then, when she answered his question, he wanted to tell her not to be in such a hurry. Think more, he wanted to say, let me watch you just a little longer. Let me just sit here and be with you and not have to talk, not have to think, not have to remember how close you came to murdering me. I do not want to think about that. I want to remember you the way you were the first day, when you would never have shot me, and I would certainly have shot him for you.
But she didn’t need to think any longer; she had her answer.
“He wanted to apologize to me.”
“For what?”
“For the fact that his lighthouse was not functioning on a night in June of 2005.”
Kimble tilted his head back and raised his eyebrows. “You’re serious.”
/> “Absolutely.”
“Why did he think this mattered to you?”
Another long pause. She reached up and pushed her hair back over her ears, carefully, one elegant hand moving at a time, and then she fastened her blue-eyed gaze on his and said, “I tried to kill myself that night.”
Kimble didn’t have a response. Couldn’t begin to muster one. He sat and stared at her as she watched him with detached sadness.
“I’ve never told anyone that, Kevin. Not a soul.”
June 2005. It would have been around the same time the abuse began, around the time Kimble had first gone out to the house, first met her.
“What happened?” he said.
“There’d been a… debate at home,” she said. “You remember the kind. I left and went for a drive. There was no destination. It was just a drive, the kind you make when you need to be moving, Kevin, moving fast. Ever taken that kind of a drive?”
“Once or twice.”
“Then you understand. There’s a curve out there, on the county road. It seems like you shouldn’t take it, but you have to. Go straight and you’re off the pavement and on the dead end. There’s a sign, but it was late at night, and I missed it.”
“Okay.” She’d been on Blade Ridge then, sailing right past Wyatt’s lighthouse.
“The road ends in the trees.”
“I know the spot.”
“Well, I hit the dead end, and I stopped. It was sunset. Not quite dark yet. A very beautiful sunset, in fact. The eastern face of the rocks was all lit up red, and the water had this beautiful shimmer. I could see the lighthouse up there, and it was so surreal. Beautiful but misplaced, you know? I got out of the car to look at it. I was all alone, and the sun was going down, and the insects were coming to life. Cicadas humming all around. There’s a bridge out there, an old railroad bridge?”
“The trestle. Yes.”
“I could see it through the trees. And I decided to walk out on it. There’s a fence that is supposed to guard it, I guess, but that was pretty well torn down. You can slip through it easily enough. I could, at least.”
His mouth was very dry, and he wanted to touch her. Wanted to take her hand, pat her arm, something. Instead he folded his own hands together, squeezed them tight.
“I walked out onto the bridge as the sun dipped down and everything gave over to night. It was one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. The lighthouse was there against the trees and the rocks, but then it got dark, and I couldn’t see it anymore. Then it was just me on the bridge.”
She lifted one finger and slowly, carefully, wiped a tear away from her left eye. She didn’t comment on it, and neither did he.
“It had been a very bad night,” she said, and her voice was softer, huskier. “I sat out there and thought about what I had to go home to, and what could ever be done about it, and… and I just wanted to sit there and hold on to the night a little longer. That was all I wanted. To keep that June night going for as long as I could.”
She stopped talking. No more tears came, but her breaths were shallow and unsteady. He didn’t speak, didn’t move. Just gave her time.
“I don’t know how long I was there,” she said. “The moon came up and I watched its reflection in the water for a long time. And then there was another light there. The moon on the water, it went to blue. The strangest blue light I’d ever seen. Then the blue was moving, up onto the rocks, this flame that had just crawled right out of the water. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And I felt, I don’t know the word… beckoned by it. Called. I… I decided that I wanted to try it.”
She didn’t specify what the it was, and she didn’t need to. Now it was Kimble’s turn to close his eyes.
“It’s not as high as it looks,” she said. “I thought it would be high enough. It wasn’t. The fall was very fast, and I had imagined it would be peaceful, but it was too quick to be peaceful. I don’t remember fear. I just remember knowing that it was too fast, that I’d counted on more time and wasn’t going to get it.”
She took a long, deep breath, chest filling, her breasts swelling against the faded prison uniform, and said, “There are rocks under the water in that spot. Not too far below. I hit one of them.”
Kimble looked away. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stand to think of her like that, falling from that bridge into the dark and the rocks.
“It was Wyatt who found me,” she said. “Late in the night.”
“You didn’t go to the hospital,” Kimble said. “Or at least he didn’t call the police for you.”
If he had, there should have been a record. There was no record.
“No,” she said. “We didn’t call the police, and I didn’t go to the hospital. He brought me up, and I got into my car and drove home. He tried to stop me from that, but I didn’t listen. That was the last time I saw him until his visit five weeks ago.”
Kimble said, “Wait a second. You said you landed on a rock.”
“Yes.”
“How did you just drive home, then? Weren’t you hurt?”
She looked away from him. “I guess I was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Doesn’t feel like it now.” She waved her hand around the room. “Not after years in here. But I guess I was lucky.”
There was something in her eyes that he wasn’t familiar with, couldn’t read, and he waited for more, but no words came. She just watched him with a detachment he’d never seen from her before.
“Jacqueline? Is that all there is to the story?”
She held her silence for a long beat, then nodded. “Yes.”
He matched her nod, but it was difficult. Just as they’d discussed when he sat down, there had always been a relationship of trust, no matter how bizarre that seemed. In all these years, all these visits, in every encounter they’d ever had, even from before the trial, even when she was refusing to tell him a damn thing about her husband’s violence, she’d never lied to him. Until now. How could you feel so betrayed knowing that a woman who’d once shot you in the back had now lied to you? The logic didn’t track, but emotions often didn’t choose to follow logic. This lesson Jacqueline Mathis had ingrained deeply in Kimble.
“So when he came here,” Kimble said, “he came to apologize?”
“That’s right. The lighthouse had been off that night. It seems Wyatt had done some drinking the previous night. He was arrested. You can verify that easily enough. By the time he got out and made his way home, it was dark, but the light wasn’t on. He went up and got it going and then he saw me.”
“So he wanted to apologize that he didn’t have the light going?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess he thought it would have helped. He seems to understand the place very well. Much better than I do. He said if I spent time there, I’d understand it better myself.”
“Well, I’ve been out there. I don’t understand a damn thing.”
She said, “Take me there, then.”
“What?”
“That might help. If Wyatt was right, I’ll be able to understand what you can’t.”
“Jacqueline, I can’t take you anywhere. You’re in prison.”
“I’m aware of that. But you’re a police officer. You can get me out there.”
The thought of it was alluring and frightening. The two of them, outside these walls and alone together. No guards.
He said, “I don’t think that’s an option.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.
He leaned forward, braced his forearms on his knees, and looked her in the eyes. It was not an easy thing for him. Meeting her eyes had a way of tightening his lungs, a way of shrinking the walls around him, making doors seem impossibly far away.
“Please,” he said, “tell me what you’re holding back.”
“Kevin, I would like to make parole. Do you understand that?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know how much my chances will be hurt if
I begin telling stories that make me sound like a lunatic?”
“It’s you and me in this room. Not your parole board.”
“They’ll ask your opinion.”
“So did the prosecutor,” he said.
She knew well what that meant. She remembered the details he’d chosen to forget during her trial. Some of them, at least. Others—I’m sorry, I don’t remember—she either did not remember or had been lying about for year after year.
“I’ve earned this from you, damn it,” he said, thinking of the months of physical therapy, the nights of insomnia, the constant ache in his back that lived within him like a draft in an old house. “This much I have earned.”
She winced, then nodded. “Fine. That’s fair enough. You want to hear the story? Wonderful. It’s a ghost story.”
“A ghost story.”
“That’s right. Still want to hear it, or shall I save us both the embarrassment?”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “You asked me how I wasn’t hurt, landing on a rock like that. I was hurt badly. I was dying when he came for me.”
“Wyatt?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, Kevin. Not Wyatt. Not anyone you’re going to be able to find and interview. There will be no testimony from him, there will be no fingerprints. Still want me to go on?”
No, he thought, so vehemently that he almost spoke it aloud. He had the sense that if he let her go on like this, then it would all come crashing down, every hope that he’d held, that he’d somehow patched together through overstretched threads of logic and thick ropes of fantasy.
“Go on,” he said.
20
HE WAITED. She looked at him with an uncomfortable level of poignancy, as if she knew she might not see him again and wanted to preserve the moment, a woman watching her lover board a troopship and head off to war. Or ordering him aboard the ship. True to form with Jacqueline Mathis, he was never quite sure of her role.
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