by Dete Meserve
“We should get you to a hospital,” I say, noticing the blood seeping through the new bandage I’d applied.
“So they can fix me up and then arrest me? We need proof that Shane framed me. We don’t have that.”
“Maybe there’s something more on the footage?”
As he sits back down beside me, I zip through more clips, starting with ones dated the night Ben was shot. Tuesday night. There’s so much footage to review that we start watching them at double speed, which is mind-numbing after a while. Long minutes later, I finally find a clip of Zack arriving home around nine thirty, just like he said he did. He unlocks the door, tilts his head to the side with a confused expression, and looks at the alarm box.
A chill races through me. I explain to Ben how Zack had set the alarm that night, but when he came home it was off. “That makes sense now. Shane had disarmed it using the security code you gave him. But when Zack came home, he was still in the house. That explains the footprints in the tub in the guest bathroom. Once Zack got home, leaving through the bathroom window was the only way Shane could get out undetected.”
I scan through several other clips from Tuesday night where nothing interesting is happening, until I finally find one that sends another cold blast up my spine.
In this thirty-second clip, Shane enters our bedroom, crosses the room, opens the door to Ben’s closet, then quickly places something in the pocket of one of Ben’s sport jackets. I rewind the action and but whatever he places in the pocket is small and it’s hard to tell what it is.
Ben leans forward and his eyes widen. “Are we seeing this right?”
“It could be the photo the FBI says was taken from Rebecca’s apartment. I mean, what else could it be?” I sit up straight. “There’s something not right about this. Shane knew we had a security-camera system. He knew the cameras were recording round-the-clock. Why would he walk around the house with the lights on and plant evidence? That seems like the stupidest thing he could do.”
I scan through the clips from that evening at double speed until I see Shane again. This time he’s walking through the doorway of my office and heading to my desk. The clip shuts off.
“Unless . . . ,” I say. “Unless he knew he was going to erase it all anyway. Remember when you and Zack erased the security system? Well, that internal delete function does a crappy job of deleting the data. But when I tried to recover it later, it was obvious that someone had run a more powerful scrub utility to wipe the drive clean. Maybe that’s what Shane is doing in my office.”
Ben rubs his face, his eyes heavy from the hurt and betrayal.
“When I told him I had recovered most of the data, he knew I’d find proof that he had planted the evidence. That’s why he lured me out of the house by pretending to be you with our secret code. He needed to make sure no one ever saw what was on this DVR.”
Ben is quiet for a long moment and when he speaks, his voice is strained. “Shane knew about our coded messages. Back in college, he was always teasing me about our secret code. Thought it was super geeky.”
“It is super geeky,” I say with pride. “But he didn’t know Klingon, because when I texted back in Klingon, he didn’t answer.”
He turns to face me, renewed energy in his eyes. “Besides us, how many people in the world do you think actually know how to read and write in Klingon?”
I smile. “We might be surprised. I’ll bet there are a lot of people like us.”
“Not like us,” he says softly. “No one is like us.”
Our eyes do a little dance, then he wraps me in his arms and kisses me gently like he’s discovering me for the first time. The second kiss is strong, as if he’s afraid I might be a dream. That I might slip away. I feel the coarse heat of his beard and grow dizzy, dissolving into his smell. Something in my heart unfurls then, and the kiss—he—becomes my whole universe.
My phone chirps and a text flashes across the screen. I ignore it, lost in our slow, almost wondrous kiss, the world around us fading into oblivion. Then another text insists.
It’s from Rachel, so I read it aloud: Are you okay?!?
Then another: All is good here. Zack and I are heading out Christmas shopping. And then maybe gorge on the cookies we made. When will you be back?!
Then another: Shane came by early this morning. After your last conversation with him, he’s really worried about you.
Then another text swoops across the screen: You are okay, right?! This one is followed by a string of heart emojis.
Then finally: I hope it’s okay that I told him where you are.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“If we’re right about Shane . . .” I hear the tremor in my voice and it scares me even more.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, finishing my sentence.
I grasp his hand, trying to hold on to the feeling, the intimacy, of the moment before. “You don’t think he’d—”
“Come here himself? No way. But did he send someone? Probably. That could be why you thought you saw someone in the bushes.”
“We should go.” I hear the panic in my voice.
I help him off the couch and he leans some of his weight on my shoulder.
“Do you think you can make it to the car? It’s down the road a bit.”
He draws a deep breath. “No, but I’m sure as hell going to do it anyway.”
I grab the gun and grip it tightly. Ben’s able to walk/hobble easier than I expect, but getting down the five wooden steps is particularly hard on him, and it takes us a half minute to navigate them. “I’m holding things up, aren’t I?”
“You’re fine. Everything’s fine.” If I keep saying that, maybe it’ll be true.
I place my hand on his back, and I’m aware of his body beneath my fingertips and the way his hand feels on my shoulder. It’s at least two hundred feet through dirt and leaves, and he makes me laugh when he compares his walking skills to an alien on Star Trek who had trouble on Earth because her planet had very low gravity. I’m sure he has no idea the effect he has on me, but even in the worst of situations, Ben has an uncanny ability to make me smile and is the only person on the planet who can make my entire body laugh.
I’m aware of the wild pounding of my heart and our loud, heavy breaths as we race to the car, stopping and starting like two people in one of those potato-sack races. And I’m aware of his fingers, entwined in mine, a feeling that is at once familiar but is suddenly kindled with possibility. The warm sensation is the same, yet somehow I am changed.
But our smiles disappear the moment we reach the car.
All of the tires have been slashed.
My first instinct is to call 911 and get police here. Fast. As Ben leans against the car, holding the gun, I dial. With scorching fear in my voice, I tell the dispatcher my name, that my husband’s been shot, and I’ve seen someone hiding in the bushes.
“What is their description?” she asks.
“I can’t see. Hurry, please.”
Giving her the location is pretty complicated. The cabins don’t have addresses, of course, and they’re only reachable by dirt roads that might have names or numbers, but I don’t know them. I open the Compass app on my phone, and with a wobble in my voice, I read off the coordinates on the bottom of the screen.
She dispatches a patrol car but can’t tell me exactly when they’ll get here because the roads are slow going and one lane in places. When I press her for a more definitive arrival time, she says firmly, “Ma’am, hang tight and get inside. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Let’s get back to the cabin,” Ben says. He’s been scanning the area, but the fact that he hasn’t seen anything seems to be making him even more nervous.
Then a shot ruptures the silence, and a bullet whizzes past his head, barely missing him. My heart rate spikes and we both drop to the ground, ducking behind the car. Terror shoots through me like a jolt of electricity. I want to scream, but my throat is completely closed.
As the sound of the bullet blast
echoes across the valley, Ben motions to a wide strip of land across the road near the indigo bushes. “Over there,” he whispers.
Seconds tick by and our ears become hypersensitive, listening for the slightest movement.
We hear something—a click, or is it a twig snapping?—and freeze, straining to hear. My breathing is shallow, even my own exhale seems like it’s too loud.
“Should we try to get away in the car?” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “Too many windows.”
I scan the area for a safer place to hide—a boulder, a large tree, anything. There is nowhere to go.
Ben grabs my hand and squeezes it. Fear surges in his eyes. Then he whispers something I don’t expect. “I got this.”
He takes the gun from me, presses a quick kiss to my lips, then crawls to the rear of the car and slides on his stomach, peering around the back wheel. Time slows as he waits there, eyes trained across the road, and hands rigidly gripping the gun, his finger a fraction above the trigger. Watching.
“I see someone,” he whispers.
A cold stone forms in my chest. It could be at least another thirty minutes before police arrive. With trembling hands, I dial 911 again and whisper into the receiver.
“This is Sarah Mayfield again. I called a few minutes ago.” I draw a deep breath and try to slow the trembling in my chest. “There’s now an active shooter here.”
She asks a series of questions, but they come at me like white noise. My heart is pounding so hard in my ears that, even though the dispatcher has a commanding voice, I can barely hear her.
As if I’m watching in slow motion, I see Ben pull the trigger. The shot shatters the silence and is quickly returned by whoever is across the road. But their shot is a little off target, a few feet from the car.
A line of sweat snakes down the side of Ben’s face. “Need to keep them where they are until police can get here,” he whispers.
How long can he keep this up?
There’s no way to know if there’s more than one gunman or how much ammunition they have. But the relative accuracy of their shots makes me think they have some serious skills that Ben, who’s never shot a gun, cannot match.
Then I hear the rumbling of a car engine and the crunch of tires on the dirt road. Is it too much to hope that police have arrived?
I crane my neck to see what’s coming up the road. This area is so remote that the last time we were here, we didn’t see a single vehicle for three entire days.
I squint into the bright light and see it’s a white van and there are no flashing lights. My stomach drops. Is it Shane?
Then the van comes into better view. It’s the Channel Eleven news van.
It heads up the road toward us, its cheery, multicolored Channel Eleven logo looking completely out of place, given the situation.
Kate Bradley is several hours early for my interview with her.
My hands fumble to find her number in my contacts and I press it. She answers on the first ring.
“I know I’m early but which cabin—”
“Stay back! There’s a shooter here,” I interrupt. “We’re behind the blue car on the road ahead of you.”
“Okay,” she says so calmly that I’m sure she hasn’t heard me. “Josh, call 911,” she says to someone in the van. “Sarah, we’re going to pull up behind you and you’re going to jump in the van.”
“It’s not safe. He’s already shot at us once.”
“Okay.” Her voice is steady, as though I’ve just told her where to park, not that she’s in the line of fire. “We’re coming anyway. Be ready.”
Ben turns his head to look at me, trying to understand who I’m talking to. “Channel Eleven,” I whisper. “They’re going to help.”
The news van pulls up and the side door opens.
“Let’s go,” I whisper, then scurry through the dry leaves and sand to the van door. Prickly heat races up my neck as I scramble inside, then turn to help Ben.
He’s not there.
I crane my neck out the door and see he’s still on his stomach, peering around the back wheel of our car, aiming the gun across the road. But more to the right than he was before.
“Ben,” I say, but the sound barely escapes my throat.
He doesn’t move. Why isn’t he getting into the van?
“Ben,” I try again.
Suddenly he pulls on the trigger, and another shot echoes across the desert floor. Then, using his elbows to propel him, he crawls army-style with surprising speed toward the door.
“Stay down,” he calls out to me.
Two more shots ring out, but I can’t tell where they’re coming from or where they’re headed.
When he reaches the van, I stretch out my arms to help him in, certain his injured leg will make the eighteen-inch climb near impossible. But in one swift move, Ben pushes up and lifts himself into the van.
As the driver slams the accelerator to the floor, I fling the door shut. We hear another gunshot blast behind us, but the van keeps gaining speed as we race down the road.
The buzzing panic makes it hard to concentrate. My hands are tingling and my fingers have gone numb with anxiety. I focus on taking two long, deep breaths.
The Channel Eleven driver, a twentysomething with curly blond hair, is talking quickly on the phone as he steers us around rocks and dips in the bumpy, winding road. I think he’s talking to 911 because he’s describing what just happened to us.
“Thank you,” I say to Kate.
But she’s not looking at me; she’s looking at Ben. Her voice is incredulous. “Ben . . . Mayfield?”
He nods and turns his head to look through the back window. “Are we being followed?”
“So far, no,” Kate says, checking her side view mirror. “The only car we saw on the way up here was about a half mile back. If that’s your gunman’s car, he’s got a long sprint ahead of him before he can follow us.”
Kate doesn’t take her eyes off of Ben. And the gun in his hand. “You both are going to explain what happened back there in a minute. But do you mind, um, unloading the gun?”
Though she sounds easygoing, I know this isn’t a casual request. The way she’s looking at him, it’s clear she doesn’t see Ben Mayfield, my husband, but instead the man who murdered Rebecca Stanton.
She holds out her hand.
Ben unloads the gun’s magazine and hands it to her.
Her eyes fall to Ben’s injured leg. “Looks like we should get you to a hospital. And get some help from the police.”
Ben shakes his head. “No hospital or police. All they’re going to see is that their prime suspect in Rebecca Stanton’s murder is alive.”
Kate frowns. “Actually, that’s what I see, too. I helped you out back there, but I want to be clear—we won’t be harboring a fugitive.”
At those words, the driver stops talking to the 911 operator and whips his head around to look at Ben.
Ben meets Kate’s gaze. “I didn’t do it.” There’s a quiet confidence in his words that rises above the rumble of the wheels on the dirt road. The words swirl around me, and even if I didn’t already have proof or evidence, I’d sense they were true.
Kate doesn’t hide her surprise. Or her skepticism. “The FBI has proof you did. Fingerprints. Eyewitness. Murder weapon found on your property.”
My voice is breathy, on edge. “We’ve got proof that the evidence was planted. And we know who did it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
FBI agents Elizabeth Elliott and Samuel Nelson look like they’re seeing a ghost. Whatever training they’ve been through to ensure they always appear unflappable and composed is failing them because their eyes widen and their mouths gape as if they can’t believe what they’re seeing.
Ben sits on the couch across from them in the living room, the lights from the Christmas tree playing across his face. He’s showered and even though it’s a chilly late afternoon, he’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt so that he can show them the places wh
ere the bullets grazed his arm and thigh.
Next to him is Zack, who hasn’t taken his eyes off Ben since he came into the room. It’s as if he thinks that if he blinks, Ben might somehow disappear again. He’s leaning his shoulder against Ben’s, the beginnings of a smile lighting up his face.
Ben speaks slowly, explaining everything he remembers from the night Rebecca was murdered. He tells them about discovering Shane’s watch in the apartment.
Elizabeth nods. She discloses to us that the watch was evidence the FBI found but never announced publicly. The fact that he knows about it is either going to incriminate him or help exonerate him.
I pull up a Facebook photo of Shane wearing that iconic watch. It doesn’t prove the watch in Rebecca’s apartment was Shane’s, but I can tell from their supportive nods that they see where this is heading.
Ben is calm when he describes how he confronted Shane about the watch and threatened to tell his wife about the ongoing affair. But his voice shakes when he reveals how Shane later arrived with a drink that he suspects was laced with belladonna.
Then his face turns white as parchment as he recalls the harrowing night he was shot and his decision to hide out. He details the moment he realized he’d made a big mistake and the fear that overwhelmed him when he realized he was alone in the desert, seriously injured, without a car or any way to get help.
All of that seems to have the effect of laying out a compelling story for the FBI agents, but I can see that they are dubious. All of us, even scientists, are skeptical when we’re confronted with a discovery that changes everything we thought we knew.
I bring out the clips from the DVR and explain how the drive had been erased but I’d used various utilities to recover the data. Then I show them what happened the night Ben went missing. The clip of the backyard security camera being blinded by bright light clearly intrigues them because they ask me to play it several times. But when Samuel sees Shane enter our bedroom and place something in Ben’s sport coat, even he can’t stop himself from saying what we’re all thinking.
“Incredible,” he whispers. “That’s exactly where we found Rebecca Stanton’s photo.”