Not a squirrel or a bird, Mackenzie thought, ducking behind an old sugar maple on the right side of the trail. “Come out, Jesse,” she said. “Put your hands in the air and show yourself.”
The man from last week—Jesse Lambert—jumped lightly from the cover of trees and brush, landing in the middle of the trail a few feet from her. He opened his hands for her. “See? Not armed.” He grinned, cocky, unconcerned. “I knew you’d come.”
Staying close to the tree, Mackenzie pointed her gun at him. “Get your hands up, Jesse. Now. Hands up!”
“Mackenzie, Mackenzie.” Still grinning, he kept his hands open and took a half step closer to her. “Here we are again after all these years. It’s fate, don’t you see?”
She ignored him. “I’m a federal agent, and I’m ordering you to get your hands up. Now!”
“You know who I am, don’t you, Deputy?” The soulless, colorless eyes gleamed, and he lowered his voice. “I’m the man in your little-girl nightmares.” He waved his fingers at her, as if to taunt her, tell her that, even without a gun in hand, he was in control. “If you shoot me, you won’t find Cal in time. He’ll die. You’re just a rookie agent, Mackenzie. You’re small. You’ve never shot anyone for real. You know you can’t handle me by yourself.”
“Last time, Jesse—”
“You’re just as helpless as you were at eleven, when your daddy was trying to protect you.”
She knew he was trying to get to her, but she wasn’t going to let him. “I’m not saying it again. Hands up.”
“You can’t shoot an unarmed man.”
“How do I know you’re unarmed? I wouldn’t know until I’ve cuffed you and searched you.” She could feel the weight of the gun, the pull of pain in her knife wound, but she kept her voice steady, her focus on him. “So, are you going to cooperate or not?”
“Mackenzie, you’re the reason your father kicked me out of here all those years ago. You know that now, don’t you? He didn’t trust me near you.”
Her father had always been a good judge of character, but Mackenzie refused to indulge Jesse by commenting. She’d practiced this scenario dozens of times—the uncooperative, unarmed suspect. The appropriate use of deadly force. With her injured side, she wasn’t in the best shape to tackle him.
“I wasn’t trying to kill your father. I just wanted him to suffer for not trusting me.”
She spotted Rook moving into position in the trees behind Jesse and decided to play him for more time. Push him. Let him make his move.
“Yeah, well, Jesse,” she said, “just give me an excuse to kill you, and I will. What about that poor woman you carved up last week in the mountains? That was to throw us off, wasn’t it? Make us think you were a deranged hiker picking his victims at random.”
He shrugged, obviously pleased with himself. “It worked.”
Bastard. “And Harris—you left him to rot like a dead rat in that rooming house.” Her arms were tired from holding up her Browning and keeping Jesse in her sight, but she didn’t waver. “Since you aren’t putting your hands up, as I’ve instructed you several times—”
“I want to go to Mexico and live out my life.” His voice took on a pleading note that she assumed was entirely phony, intended to manipulate her. “Why don’t you come with me? I have money, more than you’ll ever make as a marshal. I haven’t done anything someone similarly provoked wouldn’t have done. It was self-defense with Harris. Whatever happens to Cal is his own doing.”
“Shut up already. This conversation is over. I’ve had enough.”
That was her cue to Rook.
He leaped, tackling Jesse, both of them crashing to the ground. Mackenzie jumped forward, keeping her gun on Jesse.
A knife appeared in his hand. She reacted instantly, stepping on his wrist. He yelped in pain and released the knife. She quickly kicked it away from his reach and helped Rook cuff him and search him.
“Butcher,” she said, standing back from the man who’d maimed her father twenty years ago, who’d slashed her and another woman a week ago and had murdered Harris Mayer. “How many people have you carved up?”
Jesse leered at her. “More than you’ll ever know.”
Rook glanced at her. “Mac—you okay?”
She noticed the blood on her left side. “Just watching you two fight opened up my knife wound.” Actually, more likely jumping over the stream had, but she figured he knew that. “You were stealthy for a city guy, Rook. I’m impressed. I expected an elephant tramping through the woods.”
Jesse spat into the grass. “Cal’s dead because of you.”
“If he dies,” Rook said, “it’ll be because of you.”
Mackenzie stared into Jesse’s eyes, remembering herself crouched in the woods and her father—so handsome, so strong—arguing with this intransigent, arrogant man. She’d sensed his violence. But she was only eleven, and if her father hadn’t known what Jesse would do, how could she?
She looked at Rook. “I know where Cal is.”
“The clearing?”
She nodded. “I’ll go. It’s just up the hill—”
“We’ll go together.” He grabbed Jesse by the shoulder. “On your feet, pal.”
Mackenzie scooped up Jesse’s knife and led the way to the clearing. It had been one of her favorite escapes when she’d first started wandering off on her own as a child, never imagining that anything out here could hurt her—or her family. Jesse had camped there, without permission, all those years ago. And her father had discovered him and worried that the young trespasser posed a danger to his daughter.
When they arrived at the clearing, no one was there. Sunlight shone on the field grass and ferns, and the shade shifted with the wind.
“You had your chance,” Jesse said. “You lose.”
Mackenzie didn’t even glance back at him. “You wouldn’t leave Cal out in the open,” she said, inspecting the trees along the edge of the clearing.
Behind her, Jesse kept talking. “The crooked bastard double-crossed me. Harris helped him.” Anger and entitlement crept into his voice. “I only want what’s mine.”
“There he is.”
Mackenzie crouched under the low, dead branches of a hemlock. Cal was shoved up against the trunk, bound and gagged and in clear physical distress. “Don’t try to move,” she said gently, strands of her hair catching in branches, the acidic smell of pitch and brown needles filling her nostrils. “Hang on, Cal, okay? Help is here.” His gag was yanked so tight, it cut into the sides of his mouth, and she had to use Jesse’s knife to cut it from him. Gingerly, she pulled the bandana from his mouth. “More help’s on the way. We’ll get you to a hospital.”
He blinked at her, tried to speak, then tried again. “Beanie?”
“She’s fine.” Mackenzie couldn’t remember him ever referring to the woman he’d married by her nickname. “Gus is with her.”
“Gus…those two…” Cal’s shoulders sagged, his head lolling to one side, but his eyes focused on Mackenzie. “Jesse—I wanted to get him out of my life. All our lives.”
“Save your strength, okay? We can talk later.”
She cut his hands free. He was dehydrated, his arms and face bruised and beaten. He licked his parched lips, his tongue swollen. “He killed Lynn. She wasn’t…I helped Jesse extort money from her boss. But Lynn and I…” He caught Mackenzie’s fingers in his. “I loved her.”
Mackenzie thought of the photograph in Bernadette’s bloody hand. Lynn must have been the name of the blond woman with Cal.
“Jesse was right about the shed,” Cal whispered.
“What about the shed?”
But he drifted into unconsciousness. She felt for a pulse, but it was thready. She broke off dried branches above them, trying to give him more room, more air, and get a better look at him.
And she saw the blood on his lower left side.
She and Rook had gotten to Cal in time to save him from dehydration, exposure and a beating, but not from a stab wound—not,
she realized now, from Jesse Lambert. Jesse had lied. There was no hope for Cal, no chance to save him regardless of what she or Bernadette or anyone did.
Cal was another of Jesse’s victims.
Thirty-Five
The loons circled in the water in front of the dock, closer to Bernadette’s house than usual, and Mackenzie wondered if they knew, on some instinctive level, that their presence was a comfort. As a child, she’d hide among the rocks and trees along the shore and watch them, always careful not to disturb them.
She stood on the threshold of the shed, smelling the lawn mower grease and the dust and the half-opened bag of composted cow manure. Bernadette was at the hospital, getting stitched up. Gus had accompanied her.
Cal had died before paramedics could get to him under the hemlock.
As she stepped into the shed, Mackenzie was aware of Rook behind her. “Before my father was hurt, it never occurred to me I could be in any danger out here at the lake. In town, maybe. But not here.”
“Sounds like a normal kid to me.”
“I suppose.”
She glanced back at Rook, any effects of his encounter with Jesse Lambert impossible to detect. She and Rook had turned Jesse over to the state police. Jurisdictional issues would get sorted out. In the meantime, the locals had their slasher in custody.
“You FBI types won’t object if I take a look around in here, will you?” she asked.
Rook shrugged. “Would it matter?”
Mackenzie didn’t answer. She was focused on what Cal had told her before he’d died. She found a sawhorse on the back wall and dragged it to the middle of the floor, near her father’s old bloodstains. He hadn’t been distracted or careless that day—and his maiming wasn’t an accident. Jesse had sabotaged the saw, setting off a chain reaction her father had been helpless to stop.
It had been one of Jesse Lambert’s early acts of deliberate, malicious violence.
Mackenzie was convinced there had been others over the years. They hadn’t started up again just with the attacks on her and the hiker last week, on Harris—on Bernadette and Cal. They’d been ongoing.
Instead of telling authorities that Harris had sicced Jesse on him, Cal had joined forces with them and profited. When he realized he was in too deep and couldn’t get out, he hadn’t come to authorities and confessed, tried to work out a deal, but decided to pressure Harris to help him get Jesse out of their lives once and for all.
And if their plan backfired, he wanted to lead Bernadette to answers.
Mackenzie started to climb onto the sawhorse, but Rook touched her arm and shook his head. “No way, Mac.”
“Relax. I used to climb trees all the time as a kid.”
“Not with a knife wound in your side.”
“It’s healing—”
“You don’t want to end up with a fresh set of stitches. Besides, I’m taller. And,” he added with a smile, “I used to climb trees as a kid, too.”
He had a point. She stepped back out of the way. “Have at it.”
With an agility that surprised her but probably shouldn’t have, he climbed onto the sawhorse and reached up into the rafters. “What am I looking for?”
“Money? Anything that seems out of the ordinary for a lake house shed.”
He hooked one arm on an exposed beam and reached up higher. “Ah. What about an overstuffed dry pack tucked up in the rafters?” He glanced down at her. “I think this might be what Jesse was after, Mac.”
Rook lowered the dry pack down to her. She set it on the concrete floor and pulled open the drawstrings, peering inside. “It doesn’t look as if there are any kayak supplies in here, that’s for sure.”
She noticed a yellow-lined sheet of paper folded into thirds and clipped to some kind of folder on top of the rest of the contents. She lifted out the folder and removed the paper.
“Mac,” Rook said as he dropped lightly next to her.
“I know. I’m not wearing gloves. We can separate my prints out from any others, if prints are going to matter.” She unfolded the paper. “I’m guessing they won’t.” She recognized the handwriting, large letters in black marker. “It’s from Cal. ‘Dear Bernadette: If something happens to me, bring the contents of this bag to the FBI. I’m sorry. Cal.’”
Rook set another overstuffed dry pack onto the floor. “He made his deal with the devil, all right. He and Harris never should have gotten mixed up with blackmail.”
“When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Mackenzie opened up the file folder and flipped through the papers inside. “Spreadsheets. Addresses. A document map to the rest of the contents of the bag. Looks as if Cal turned the tables on Jesse and found out just about all there is to know about him. That should help prosecutors.” She shoved the folder and the note back where she’d found them. “What’s in this other bag?”
Rook opened it up and gave a low whistle when he peeked inside. “Cash,” he said. “A hell of a lot of cash.”
Mackenzie let out a breath. “If Cal had just taken this stuff to us—to Beanie—” She didn’t finish. “He always thought he knew better. Information and access were his strengths. Now, they’ll help us unravel what this Jesse Lambert has been up to. Other victims and associates. Who knows.” Her gaze landed on her father’s old bloodstains. “Want to bet there are more violent crimes in his past?”
“Cal and Harris might not have realized they were dealing with a violent man until it was too late.”
“Maybe so.”
Suddenly restless, Mackenzie pushed out into the air and down to the lake, splashing into the shallow water. The loons were gone. She stood on a rock, the wind gusting in her face.
Aware of Rook on the shore behind her, she said, “When Jesse attacked me last week, I remembered his eyes. They were like something I’d conjured up in a nightmare.”
“Repressed memory.”
“I’ve always known I was in the woods the day of my father’s accident, but I never could remember the details.” She glanced back at Rook, but he wasn’t a man who was easy to read. “I must have conflated what I did that day—the actual events—with my nightmares. After a while, I couldn’t distinguish one from the other.”
Making it look easy, Rook jumped to the exposed rock next to hers without getting his feet wet or losing his balance. “You were a little kid,” he said. “This bastard manipulated you. He becomes other people’s nightmare.” Rook was silent a moment. “That’s what Harris tried to tell me.”
“He should have been straight with you.”
She heard a car in the driveway. More cops, she thought. But when she looked back at Bernadette’s yard, she saw Carine wave and break into a run. “Mackenzie!”
Nate was behind his sister, his wife at his side. He wasn’t here as a senior federal agent, Mackenzie realized, but as a friend.
Rook winked at her. “You do the talking.”
“Scared of Nate, are you?”
He grinned. “Not even a little.”
Thirty-Six
After all the various investigators—local, state and federal—had left, T. J. Kowalski joined Rook and Mackenzie at the lake. “Quite a place,” he said, settling into one of the Adirondack chairs in front of the stone fireplace. “I’ve never seen a loon, you know.”
Mackenzie smiled. “You might hear one tonight.”
“If I can stand the bugs and the cold.”
Rook had built a fire and pulled his chair close to the flames. The night was chilly, but Bernadette had old wool blankets just for that purpose. Mackenzie had one opened up on her lap. But T.J. didn’t look that cold to her.
“Long day,” she said.
He shrugged. “Not for me. I took a nice plane ride north and talked to a few people. You and Rook are the ones who did the heavy lifting.” He didn’t smile, and in the light of the fire, his eyes were without humor. “Sorry I wasn’t here to back you two up.”
“If Jesse had managed to get away from here, you’d have kept his plane on the ground.”<
br />
“We had him,” T.J. acknowledged without pride. “Just not in time to save Harris Mayer or Cal Benton.”
Rook tossed another log on the fire. “They made their deal with the devil.”
T.J. nodded. “What about Judge Peacham?”
“Doctors are keeping her at the hospital overnight as a precaution,” Mackenzie said. “They’re watching for infection—the knife wound nicked muscle. She says we’re all welcome to stay here and toast marshmallows and listen to the loons.”
But another car arrived, Nate and Joe Delvecchio walking down to the fire.
T.J. gave a low whistle. “Guess the marshmallows and loons will have to wait.”
“Welcome to life as a federal agent, Mac,” Rook said with a hint of amusement.
She smiled at them both. “Fine with me.”
On Sunday, after she was released from the hospital, Bernadette insisted on sitting out on her screened porch. It was a warm afternoon, with almost no wind. Mackenzie joined her, trying not to hover because, even after two years of marriage, Bernadette Peacham was a woman accustomed to her own company.
“New Hampshire isn’t going to give up Jesse anytime soon,” she said, sounding more like a judge than an injured victim. “They’ll want to try him here—for Cal’s murder.” But the words seemed to hit her like a fresh wound, and she faltered, although only for a moment. “Chances are you’ll have to testify.”
“I don’t mind,” Mackenzie said.
“It won’t be easy to see him again, but at least you’ll know he can’t hurt anyone else.” Bernadette flopped back against her wicker chair, her face ashen just twenty-four hours after her encounter with Jesse—after learning that Cal was dead. “All these years, Mackenzie, and I had no idea that your father’s mishap wasn’t an accident. I feel like such a sap.”
“You and Dad tried to get rid of Jesse.”
“Your father tried to get rid of him. I can’t say I did much of anything.”
“But you never helped Jesse,” Mackenzie said. “Don’t beat yourself up, Beanie.”
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