by Jeff Carson
Rachette turned to look at Wolf, but he was not where Rachette expected. He was zigzagging, running away as fast as he could.
But he’s going in the wrong direction.
And then Wolf was gone, twisting as he flew down and out of sight over the edge of the cliff.
The rope was fluttering limp, and then with the sound of a tightening guitar string it pulled laser-beam straight, one end scraping the top edge of the cliff, the other contracting around Hannah’s torso.
Hannah let out a panicked squeal as she was flung in a blur towards the cliff’s edge. Rolling in a thumping tornado of limbs, she barked like an animal as she smacked back-first against a tree. For an instant she was velcroed to the trunk of the pine, her body on the right side of the tree and the rope stretched around to the left. With a slack mouth, she stared vacantly at Rachette, blinked, and was then pulled over the edge and out of sight.
Chapter 64
As Wolf leaped head first off the cliff, as the wind rushed past his ears, as his stomach floated, and as death rushed up at him at 9.8 meters per second squared, he thought about a man named Claus Vaadner.
For the past six years, Claus had been a legend in Rocky Points. Because everyone in town knew the story of how, one day, Claus had cheated death with the aid of dumb luck, and a pallet of ceramic roof tiles.
Six summers ago, Claus had been installing Italian clay tiles twenty-five feet above the ground, working on the roof of a two-story luxury house in the hills to the west of Rocky Points, when he slipped and fell over the edge. Luckily for him, he was tied off, but unluckily for him, he had tied himself to the pallet, which was more than half empty and weighed less than he did.
With the aid of a few beers, fellow workers still told the tale of how Claus had dangled over the rocky ground, screaming frantically as the pallet had given way and slid toward the edge of the roof above.
Claus had been spared a horrific fall, however, because the resistance from the sliding pallet had effectively lowered him at a gentle rate, depositing him on the ground completely unharmed, as if he’d stepped off a three-foot step-stool and not just tumbled from a twenty-five-foot-high roof. Luckily for Claus, he’d watched as the pallet had flown off the edge, and he’d avoided the cataclysmic explosion of ceramic by diving out of the way.
With a wrench of his body, Wolf twisted one hundred and eighty degrees and pulled his legs to his chest, completing three quarters of a front-flip-half-twist, waiting for his pallet of tiles to slow his fall.
Now parallel to the ground and face down, he watched as the steep grade beneath him rushed up through his blurry vision. Just when he began to wonder whether his makeshift lasso had held, the slack in the rope pulled tight and his outward trajectory shifted downward.
He was halfway through the fall when the rope pulled again against the Grigri cam system, which was still locked on the rope and attached to his harness, changing his trajectory once more, this time sending him slamming chest first into the side of the cliff.
The collision was so fast and violent that he felt no pain, but he heard muffled crunches beneath his skin and felt the blows to his body as he tumbled down the rock face.
Disoriented, he sensed the ground nearing as his descent came to a complete stop.
The rope ripped at his harness, wrenching him around so that he faced the sky. He grunted as his body arched backwards and folded in half, and he felt his feet kick the back of his head. Then, an instant later, he was laid gently onto his back, on the cool, wet ground.
As the bright world tunneled in from the edge of his vision, he watched the rope drop in an angry coil next to him, and then he felt a rush of wind and a spray of warm blood as Hannah landed next to him.
Somehow amid the numbness, he found the muscle coordination to turn his head and look.
Hannah was next to him on her back, her neck twisted unnaturally, her face pointed toward his—eyes wide open but devoid of life. A web of blood trickled from her temple across her face.
Wolf’s lids fluttered, and then he closed his eyes and felt nothing.
Chapter 65
Patterson stared dumbstruck at the precipice. Wolf had been planning something, she could tell that, and part of her was wondering just what exactly he could do to right the situation, but never in a million years had she expected to witness what she’d just seen.
After snapping out of her initial shock, she realized there may have been method to Wolf’s suicidal move. By pulling Hannah over the edge, had he slowed his own momentum enough to survive the fall?
She turned to Rachette with wide eyes.
“Go,” he said.
She sprinted to Rachel, handcuffed one of her wrists, pulled her semi-conscious form to the side of the house, clamped it on a water pipe, and ran to the top of the wooden stairway descending the cliff.
“All units move! Call Summit County and get a medevac helicopter up here now. Sheriff Wolf and Deputy Rachette are down and injured badly. Get the bus over here stat! I repeat, we need ambulances, and we need medevac!”
With thumping footfalls on the creaking wood, she ignored the eruption of voices on the radio, keeping her eye on Wolf’s unmoving form at the base of the cliff. She got to the bottom, jumped off the trail, and flailed across the steep incline.
Slipping onto her hip as she stepped on loose scree, and slamming her elbow on a rock in the process, she breathed through the pain with bared teeth, not slowing a second. When she reached Wolf, she pressed her fingers on his carotid, feeling the slick warmth of his blood on her fingers, and then the weak rhythm of his pulse.
“Medevac on route,” she heard the radio squawk.
A boat was roaring toward the dock beneath her, Wilson standing with fluttering hair above the windshield.
As she panted, she looked down at Hannah’s body. Her face was turned toward her and Wolf, but she was on her back and it looked like her neck had been twisted almost two hundred and seventy degrees. Her head rested in a growing pool of blood, and her face was completely red. She was as dead as it got.
Patterson thought about the concussion of air she’d felt against her face as Hannah’s bullet missed by inches; then she thought about Rachette’s pale face; then she looked back down at Wolf.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said with little conviction.
Chapter 66
5 Days Later …
Patterson squinted and gazed up at the sky, feeling the sun warm her face. The cotton-ball clouds above hung motionless, painting the water below with dark circles of shade, and the breeze brought the smell of freshwater and the whir of distant motorboats.
She popped her eyes open and sucked in a breath, remembering the zip of the bullet as it had passed inches from her face.
Perched atop the cliff below Hannah and Rachel’s house, Patterson was mere feet from where she’d dodged certain death almost a week ago. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that that night was over.
“That was depressing.”
Patterson turned around at the sound of Rachette’s voice. “You got that right. Jesus. What are you doing up here?”
Rachette stepped next to her, thumbing the sling on his right arm that hung over his formal khaki uniform top, which bulged at his right shoulder as if he’d stuffed a pillow underneath.
Patterson knew there was a mass of gauze hiding a line of staples covering internal scars from reconstructive surgery on his joint, a large divot in his clavicle bone, two shredded ligaments, and severe muscle trauma from the bullet that had hit him.
“Seriously. What are you doing here?”
Rachette tried to shrug, a move that made him bare his teeth in pain. “I got a ride up with Wilson after the funeral, since you ditched me.”
“I thought Wilson was taking you home. You should be in bed.”
Rachette ignored her and gazed into the distance. “Did you see Jack?”
“Yeah.”
It was an unnecessary question. Everyone had seen J
ack at his mother’s funeral earlier that morning. It had been the saddest thing she’d ever seen in her life.
Patterson had felt no sense of closure with the lowering of Sarah Muller into the ground, and she had not shed so many tears since her grandmother’s death six years previously. But with her grandmother’s funeral, she had at least felt resolution. Her family had been sad, but they had celebrated her life at the house later. Grandma lived a long, full life, and then she died.
The funeral earlier that morning had been the antithesis of her grandmother’s.
Wolf’s son Jack had stood next to Sarah’s parents, never once lifting his gaze from his mother’s coffin, a tear never once escaping his eyes—a sight that had blown Patterson’s heart into a thousand pieces.
Wolf’s absence had been the elephant at the funeral, but it had been impossible for him to attend, because he’d been in surgery at County Hospital, and when they were done with the third operation on his fractured hip, he remained unconscious, recovering from a ruptured spleen, three broken vertebrae, and an assortment of ten other shattered bones, ranging in severity from a cracked femur to a broken thumb. His absence had been necessary, but it made the whole thing that much more difficult.
Then there had been Sarah’s parents. They had been a sniveling mess, and every time Patterson had looked at them during the funeral she’d broken down into a sniveling mess herself. Sarah Muller lived a short, troubled life, and now she was dead.
“Hey.” Rachette nudged her with his good arm.
She looked up and wiped a fresh tear from her cheek.
“It’s gonna be all right.”
She nodded. “Yeah, right.”
They turned around at the sound of an approaching car. “Looks like the Idaho boys are here.”
A Caprice Classic with a Boise Sheriff’s Department paint job crunched on the gravel into a tight spot between a swarm of five SCSD vehicles. The vehicle rocked to a stop and both doors opened.
A younger man climbed out of the driver’s seat, dressed in a dark-brown uniform, and an older man dressed in civilian clothing pulled himself up with the passenger door.
Wilson was there to greet them and shook hands. They spoke for a few seconds and then he pointed toward Patterson and Rachette.
The younger, uniformed man raised a hand, and though it was far away, he looked like he beamed an attractive smile from under a black ball cap with a gold embroidered BSD on it.
Patterson raised a hand in greeting. For days, she’d been speaking to Deputy Michelson often while liaising with the BSD in order to close the file on the Kiplings. To her surprise, just like a pen pal from Japan she’d had in elementary school, she found she had connected on a deep level with the young deputy.
Now, as he followed the older man down the grass slope, she was seeing Michelson for the first time. He was dressed in a gray uniform, and she could tell he was young, probably no more than five years her senior—fit, medium height, brown hair—and moved with sure feet.
The older man next to him was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows; a trucker cap lay askew on his head. He waddled with a limp, and when Michelson offered a helping hand the man waved it away impatiently.
Michelson looked up at Patterson and smiled again, and it was enough to make her blush, which caused her stomach to twist with a pang of guilt thinking about Scott. What the hell was she feeling?
She turned to Rachette, determined to distract herself. “You hear anything about his surgery this morning?”
“Nope.” Rachette checked his wristwatch and began walking to meet their two guests. “He’s still in it right now. We should be there, damn it.”
Patterson nodded. “Don’t worry. We’ll go later today, all right? Maybe check you back in, for God’s sake. You need to sit.”
“Pssh.” Rachette took a breath through his nose. “I’m all right. Howdy,” he called out.
Deputy Michelson smiled with squinted blue eyes surrounded by a bloom of dark eyelashes.
Patterson returned the smile, feeling her face flush again. “Deputy Michelson.”
“Patterson, I take it?”
She nodded.
Michelson’s hand was callused and warm, and he gripped firmly with a quick shake.
“And you must be Rachette. We heard about your injury.” Michelson took Rachette’s left hand and shook his head with a sympathetic look.
“That’s a bitch, son.” The older man’s voice was gruff as he shook Rachette’s left hand and then took Patterson’s. His eyes were glimmering slits beneath leathery folds.
“Sheriff Dudley, nice to meet you,” Rachette said.
The man nodded and poked the underside of his trucker hat. “Used to be. Now you can call me Fred.”
Sheriff Dudley pointed past them. “Hell of a view up here.”
They twisted and looked at the lake, and Patterson exchanged a glance with Michelson.
“There’s quite a lot of activity up here.” Michelson turned around and motioned to the five SCSD vehicles parked in front of the house.
“We had a K-9 unit find Olin Heeter’s body yesterday,” Patterson said. “Buried in a fresh, shallow grave up the mountain. We have all available units checking the area now for more bodies.”
“You find anymore?” Sheriff Dudley asked.
Rachette shook his head. “Nope. But we’ve got some interesting stuff inside, that’s for sure. Or”—he pointed at his sling—“everyone else found a hell of a lot. I’ve been laid up in the hospital.”
Dudley squinted one eye and appraised Rachette, then nodded at Patterson. “Why don’t you two give us the tour?”
Patterson gestured and they followed her around to the back of the house. Memories of that evening clawed at her with each step, and she had to steel her thoughts as she rounded the corner and faced an open door at the rear of the house.
Deputy Yates stood sentinel, stifling a yawn. He raised his clipboard. “Go ahead inside.”
“Thanks, Yates.” Rachette stepped aside and gestured for Patterson to take the lead. Just like the two men from Idaho, she realized, Rachette had not yet seen inside the lower level of the house.
She walked through the door into a large rectangular room with a smooth concrete floor, which was lit brightly with an uncovered bulb hanging from the ceiling. She walked halfway across the space to the left toward a doorway on the far wall and stopped at a yellow plastic evidence tent.
“This spot is blood, and the rest underneath has been confirmed as the same,” she said, gesturing to the floor.
“My God,” Michelson said. “It’s huge.”
Fred Dudley pointed at the rust-colored smear on the floor. “This the most recent?”
Patterson nodded. “Our ME did a DNA analysis on it, and it matched William Van Wyke’s profile, which was in CODIS from his Idaho private investigator’s license registration.”
Dudley pointed at the brown spot beneath the smear. It was roughly circular in shape with a diameter of at least ten feet. “This is where she killed, I take it?”
“Looks that way. There’s a lot of old blood here, and check out that wall.” She pointed behind them and they all twisted.
There was an old workbench against a wall covered with pegboard, and hooks of various sizes hung from the holes.
“We’ve removed everything and put it into evidence, but when we came inside here, there was a razor-sharp machete, hunting knives, and a few filet knives. They all had traces of blood on them.”
Michelson shook his head. “And we heard that you’ve identified three of the other bodies you recovered.”
“Yep. All runaways, all reported missing from their hometowns. All three were boys in their late teens, with one or both of their parents deceased. People figured they’d run away. No evidence suggested foul play. The other four seem to fit the same mold, but we don’t have definitive IDs. I’m not sure if we ever will.”
“Hitchhikers,” Michelson said softly, his ey
es glued to the floor stain.
“That’s what we’re thinking,” Patterson said. “It makes sense. Highway 734 down the valley is a good place to find them. Even today, most people with their thumbs in the air will be late teens, early twenties, male, traveling solo.”
Dudley pointed at a closed door on the far wall. “And what’s in there?”
Patterson walked over and pushed it open. The bottom scraped along the top of high pile carpet, revealing a room with a couch, an old television, and a wood coffee table. Paintings of mountain scenery hung on the wood-paneled walls, and to the right was a stairway that led up to the second floor.
Dudley, Michelson, and Rachette craned their necks to see past her.
“Just a normal basement,” Michelson said.
“Minus the fact that it’s next to a killing room,” Sheriff Dudley said, turning around and walking back to the bloodstain. “William Van Wyke, eh?”
“Yeah.” Patterson stepped next to him and looked down. It thoroughly creeped her out every time she looked at this spot, and she was glad to be doing so with so much company this time. “A kill that definitely doesn’t fit the mold. You know him?”
Sheriff Dudley and Michelson exchanged a glance.
“Yeah,” Dudley said, “I do. Let’s get the hell out of here and we’ll talk about it.”
Chapter 67
Patterson led them out onto the back lawn and from the deep breaths it was clear that everyone was glad to be back outside.
Dudley stopped and put his hands on his hips. “Let’s see. Where do I begin?”
“Why don’t you start with the cat?” Michelson said.
“The cat?” Patterson asked.
The old man leaned his head back and closed his eyes against the sun. “Twenty-five years ago, I was a police officer in McCall, Idaho. McCall’s a resort town a couple of hours north of Boise. There’s Payette Lake right there, and McCall is a town on the south shore. Anyway, back then, during the summer, we got a call from a family. They’d found their pet cat in the woods. Decapitated, gutted from asshole to neck.”