“He also called on us,” Kimble said, “and I don’t think he did that just for his legacy. The man had hope.”
“Again I’ll ask—what suggests that Jacqueline can understand them any better than Wyatt did?”
“Because,” Kimble said, “she’s already settled her debt. He hadn’t.”
Roy pushed back from the table and let out a deep breath.
“It’s one hell of a risk,” he said.
“I understand that. I also think the time has come to be willing to take one. Something needs to be done. We can’t allow it to continue. For more than a century now, good people have lost their lives to that place or because of it. That has to end. It has to.”
Roy said, “You must be capable of believing in great evil to push it this far, Kimble.”
“I suspect,” Kimble said, “I’ve already brushed closer to it than most.”
Roy took a sip of his coffee before remembering that it had already chilled, then pushed it aside.
“Tell me the part about Jacqueline, please. The part you don’t want to tell. I can ride with you either way. I already am. But I’d like to know. Not judge. Just know.”
“You already know all of that.”
“I don’t mean the details of what she did,” Roy said. “I mean the reason you can’t treat it like a cop.”
He’d expected an argument. Resistance, defensiveness, even outright anger like the man had shown before. The walls Kimble had built and guarded so carefully, though, seemed to have deteriorated rapidly in the past few days.
Kimble turned his eyes back to that empty patio, where the wind was swirling snow.
“I had feelings for her,” he said. “In a way I never had for a woman before, never will again. Used to daydream about the day she would leave that son of a bitch. A part of me was living for it. I didn’t count on the way she’d leave him, right? Didn’t count on that.”
“You were in love with her before she shot you?”
Kimble nodded.
“Was there… were you having an affair?”
“No. I was just waiting. I knew the day would come, had to come. Even that was bad enough, though. I was waiting out the end of an abusive marriage. When I think about it like that, I hate myself, Darmus. This morning I was thinking about Audrey Clark. You’ve seen her, right?”
“Yes.”
“She’s everything you could possibly desire in a woman,” Kimble said. “Bright, beautiful, and brave as hell. As strong as anyone I’ve ever seen. I think about her, and I ask myself, why can’t I be in love with her? Why can’t I sit in this coffee shop and hope that she walks in?”
He sighed, and his voice softened. “I just can’t. I think about a woman in a cell instead. I’d like to fix that about myself, but it is beyond me.”
“You really don’t think Jacqueline belongs in prison?” Roy asked.
“The night she shot me, she was not herself. Okay? That’s the clearest I can say it. You should have seen her that night. Because she was evil. Then the life went out of her husband, just as she put the gun to my forehead, and… and she was back. So now I’d say, you should have seen her that night. Because she was worthy of love, worthy of dying for, worthy of anything I could give.” He spread his hands. “They’re both true. Now you try living with that. Try treating that like you’re a cop.”
“You can’t decide which she is?”
“I couldn’t reconcile how she was both. I went to see the woman every month, and I always left thinking how damned egregious it is that she’s in that prison. But then I remembered the way she was that night, I remembered the fact that she smiled while she put a gun to my forehead, and I… I just didn’t know.”
Roy had covered the trial of Jacqueline Mathis. He had listened to Kimble’s testimony, he had read every document. There had never been a mention of a gun put to his forehead. Only a bullet in the back, supposedly fired in error, supposedly aimed at her abusive husband. He knew that Kimble had not made a mistake in what he’d just said, though. You didn’t forget something like that. So that meant he’d chosen to forget it on the witness stand.
“She wasn’t herself,” Kimble said. “When I say that, I don’t mean that her mood changed. I don’t mean that she was in shock. I mean that for a while there, the woman who is Jacqueline Mathis became something else. Then that woman came back. Put down the gun and apologized as I lay there on the floor in the blood—mine and her husband’s—and it was like watching a… a soul slip back where it belonged.”
He coughed, shook his head. “I know how that sounds. I know what you probably think of it.”
Roy said, “Don’t worry about how it sounds. I just needed to hear it.”
“I could never come to peace with that night, and she couldn’t help me. Claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. But now I hear the stories from O’Patrick, and I see all the work you’ve done, and I can believe her. For the first time, I can explain it. When I walked through that door, she was just… blackness. Evil. But her husband was still breathing at that time. And when he was gone? She came back. I can believe all these stories now, because I saw it.”
They sat together in silence, and eventually Roy nodded.
“Thank you,” he said. “I wanted to know. And hearing it helps me believe a little more, myself. I’d still say you’re taking one hell of a risk taking her out there by yourself.”
“I know it.” Kimble met Roy’s eyes and said, “Do you ever wonder why you’re along on this ride?”
“Because it’s a hard story to sell, and I was already involved.”
“Exactly. Wyatt called you out there, and you were willing to consider it longer than most, to follow it into stranger places and darker corners than most, and that’s because it’s personal to you. Well, it’s surely personal to me, too. He didn’t pick us by mistake.”
“No. I don’t think the man’s approach was anything close to haphazard.”
“All right. We’re agreed on that. You asked me to tell you the truth, and I’ve done it. I’ve told you what I intend to do, and what really happened with her that night. You’ve heard my soul emptied out, and you’ve got the chance to walk away. I won’t blame you.”
Roy waited. Kimble watched him for a while, then gave a short nod, satisfied.
“I’ve got something else to ask of you,” he said. “And please, Darmus, be careful. This one is riskier than reading old papers.”
“What is it?”
“I’m worried about Shipley.”
“I know that.”
“Well, I can’t very well put a surveillance detail on him. I start asking for that on one of my own deputies, say that he’s suspected in the murder of another, and I’m going to have to defend my reasoning in ways that I simply can’t right now. I can’t do it. But I also can’t have him showing up at the ridge when I’m there with Jacqueline. I want you to watch his house and call me if he leaves. That’s it. Don’t move, don’t engage him, don’t do a damn thing but call me. If he leaves his house tonight, I will need to know.”
“All right.”
“I don’t want to ask that of you,” Kimble said. “Bringing a civilian into a murder investigation… well, you can add that to the pile of reasons I might lose my badge. But there’s no one else I can ask.”
“I’ll do it, Kimble. Not a problem.”
“There’s an old gas station just up the road from his house. Empty for years, old Esso station. He’ll have to come by it to head into town, or toward the ridge. The only way he wouldn’t pass by is if he’s headed north, and I’m not worried about him heading north. If you see him pass by, he’ll be doing forty miles an hour, and he won’t notice you. If that happens, just pick up the phone and dial. Nothing else.”
“Okay. But Kimble? If you believe what you told me about Jacqueline and O’Patrick and all the others… he’s not going to kill again. If he did kill, he’s satisfied his debt. None of the others in the Blade Ridge history have killed again. Bound by bal
ance, that’s what you told me. Shipley is balanced now.”
“Right,” Kimble said. “The difference? If he did kill Pete, right now he’s getting away with it. The others were all arrested at the scene when they came back around from their trances. Shipley came back around alone in the dark woods. That means he might not understand why he killed, but he understands that he did.”
Kimble put his arms on the table and leaned close. “If all that is true, Darmus, then he might want to keep improving his chances of getting away with it. Why wouldn’t he? And the only evidence and witnesses are at Blade Ridge. Audrey Clark is at Blade Ridge. If Shipley did this, and he’s thinking about ways to clean it up… well, I just worry that he might head that way.”
“But you’re getting ready to drive in the opposite direction.”
“Yeah,” Kimble said. “Because I can’t see in the dark. But I think I know someone who can. At least out there.”
35
THE DAY WORE ON, snow fell in scattered flurries, and police came and went steadily.
No one found any trace of Ira.
At noon, while Audrey and Dustin took their first break of the day, with not even a third of the cats fed yet and many of them growing annoyed with the delay, a pickup truck rolled up with four dogs in cages.
“I’d better see about this,” Audrey said.
The dogs belonged to a man named Dick Mitchell, a wiry old-timer with a Mark Twain mustache, a scoped rifle, and a large pistol on his belt.
“I’ve come to catch the cat,” he said. “I reckon you’re not too happy about it, but when the police call, I’ve found it wise to pick up the phone. Got me out of a speeding ticket or two along the way.”
She watched the dogs ranging about in the kennels, pressing their noses to the gates and staring out at her cats. Jafar emerged from his long, dark quarters, where he’d spent most of the day tucked back in the straw, bothered by the constant stream of traffic, and began to pace restlessly. Immediately one of the dogs let out a baying howl, and that triggered a response of roars.
“I thought the sheriff was trying traps,” Audrey said.
“He’s doing that, too. Somewhere along the way, he heard the best bet was Big Dick Mitchell. He heard right.”
Big Dick Mitchell hefted his rifle and took an experimental sighting, aiming it down the road. Audrey thought of Ira’s beautiful, sleek body, and somehow, even after the terror she’d felt only hours earlier, she was sad for him.
Just get the hell out of here, Ira, she thought. Hit those hills running and don’t stop. This isn’t the place for you. For anyone.
“Get your dogs out of sight of my cats quick,” she said. “I’ve got enough headaches today without this.”
“Plott hounds,” Dick Mitchell announced proudly, opening the first of the kennel doors. “They’ve yet to run a mountain lion, but they’ll catch on quick. They’ll catch on.”
“If you want to take them back home tonight,” Audrey said, “you’d better hope they don’t catch on.”
He gave her an odd look. “That nasty of a boy, is he?”
“He was fine until he came here,” she said, realizing that she sounded more like Wes with each passing day, and then she left and returned to her cats.
Kimble had once been a churchgoing man, and though he was no longer, he found himself in the parking lot of the one he’d once attended, detouring in there instead of heading for the highway and all that waited down the road. He sat alone in the parking lot with the engine running and thought about what Roy Darmus had said.
You must be able to believe in a great evil.
Yes, he was able to do that. He’d seen lesser evils—greed, anger, lust—too often and for too long not to believe there could be something beyond the crimes for which his department had specific names and charges. He was part of a justice system that was designed to quantify evil. There was something missing in that, to be sure.
He’d seen true evil in his time—mothers who killed their own babies, sons who killed their own mothers. The years in this job could erode your faith in good people just as the wind and water eroded the mountains. He fought it every day, but he wondered if there was a breaking point. How many child abuse cases could a man work, how many murders, how many rapes and assaults? How long could you go until you folded up under it? It was a question he thought most police considered on the bad nights. He remembered Diane Mooney asking it of him once, when they’d arrested a man who’d fractured his stepdaughter’s skull with a wine bottle because she was using up the minutes on his cell phone. Diane had asked him as they’d walked out of the jail and into a spring evening so beautiful it hurt, the air alive with fragrant blooms and driven by a gentle, kind breeze, and he remembered what he’d told her: You keep your head down, and you remember that people need you and that it’s a privilege to answer the call.
He thought he’d believed it back then. On that night? Yes, he’d believed it. That was a vivid memory. Such a beautiful night. He could still remember the smell of the flowers and the feel of the wind. He could still remember the way blood had filled that girl’s eye socket.
Kimble wasn’t certain what he thought of God. He knew that he should be certain—everyone of his years was supposed to have their beliefs in order by now. I’m a Baptist, I’m a Catholic, I’m an atheist, I’m an agnostic, I’m a believer in the Church of the Weeping Willow Tree, Fourth Circle, Second Cabinet. You were supposed to know where you lined up.
Kimble did not.
He knew this: there were times when he’d prayed to God and times when he’d cursed Him. On the latter occasions, he chastised whatever higher power there might be for having blind eyes and deaf ears.
You have bound us, Kimble imagined saying, to an evil world. Where’s the love in that?
And in that scenario, God always answered, Temporarily bound you, yes. Now, during your time in that evil world, did you do anything to help?
For that, Kevin Kimble would have an answer, firm as steel: Yes.
It was the only thing he would ever be able to answer firmly about this world. He’d tried to help it. He had fought evil, and how many people could say that?
He thought now of Jacqueline Mathis, behind razor-wire fencing and concrete blocks and iron bars and countless locks. Did she belong there? Was she good, or was she evil?
Kimble touched his forehead with the back of his hand. Sweat. Thirty degrees outside, and he was sweating.
If you do this, he thought, it will be just the two of you in this car. You don’t have to put her in the back; she could sit right at your side, where you could reach out and touch her. Or she could reach out and touch you.
Why was he doing this? The answer lay both through the windshield ahead of him and in the mirror behind him. It was in the people who made up the place he called home. Whitman was a beautiful town, and, thanks to its distance from any interstate, a well-kept secret. Nestled among the Appalachian foothills and surrounded by deep forests and surging rivers, it drew people who wanted to get away. Kimble, born and raised here, often considered turning into one of those very people but heading in the opposite direction, packing his things and getting out.
But to where? And to what?
He’d never been an extrovert, but there was a time when he’d been at least somewhat social. That time had ended with the shooting. A version of Kevin Kimble had died with Jacqueline’s bullet. The one left behind valued privacy above all else. He’d spent his career walking into the dark shadows of private lives to help prevent harm, or to correct harm already done. Then suddenly people were walking into the dark shadows of his own life. There was the arrest, the trial, the sentencing. Kimble was a popular media target during that time—the committed cop who nearly died in the line of duty, then rose to defend the very woman who’d put the bullet in him. Lots of attention had come his way in those days.
He’d never stopped retreating from it.
He had attended this church until the shooting. His mother h
ad raised him there, and he kept going long after her death. Then came Jacqueline’s bullet, and the next time Kimble entered the building, they prayed for him during the service. Aloud and before the entire congregation, they prayed for him.
He never went back. Sometimes he ran into some people from church and felt a need to explain but couldn’t. Communication was a strength for him, until it came to communicating something about himself. Then he was utterly inept. He could not tell them how uneasy it had made him to be the personal target of pleas to God. He understood that it had been meant with the best intentions.
All the same, he’d never been back.
He hadn’t been much of anywhere in the past few years. Not in a way that mattered. He’d been the work, and the work had been him, and all the rest was detached and hidden and married to something he couldn’t explain and deeply feared. Something that, it seemed, began at Blade Ridge.
He was tired of letting it own him, and tired of letting it take its slow, steady blood toll from his town.
He would stand for it no longer.
He said a silent prayer then, first for himself and then, spontaneously, another one for his mother, many years departed. Then he started the car and drove off to get Jacqueline Mathis.
Roy had the address for Nathan Shipley’s house and clear instructions from Kimble: do not engage, do not so much as turn your headlights on if he passes. Just call.
He’d driven past the house, a sprawling but dilapidated place nestled in a high valley with a stunning view of the mountains beyond, and then he’d circled back and found the ancient gas station that Kimble had told him about.
Shipley’s truck was still in the driveway of his home, and there were lights on inside. So far he was following the chief deputy’s instructions and not wandering.
Roy settled into his car, looked at the fading sun, and hoped that Kimble knew what in the hell he was doing.
At sundown the sheriff’s deputies came by to tell Audrey they’d had no luck with the cougar hunt.
“He hasn’t touched the bait,” said the cold female officer named Diane, who seemed to hold Audrey personally responsible for her colleague’s death. She was the most intimidating of all of them, harsher even than the sheriff. Audrey couldn’t help but be impressed by her. She certainly had the look of a woman who did not take any shit from her male colleagues. Or, for that matter, from anyone.
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