“They looked furtively at each other and made up the story that they will marry as soon as they bury me so their wives can keep up my shrine. That’s what they call this beautiful house—my shrine. This is work of art, I told them, not a ridiculous shrine, and they just looked at each other and shrugged. There is nothing to be done.”
Savich said, “Is that why you want your granddaughter to come live with you, Mrs. Backman? You want Autumn to grow up here and take over your place when you die? Keep up your beautiful gardens, buy more antiques?”
“That would be nice, if that is what she wished,” Mrs. Backman said comfortably, not at all surprised they knew about Autumn. “However, there is no need for more antiques. She is only a little girl, and she wasn’t here long enough for me to determine if she is worthy of such a gift. She carries half her mother’s common blood, after all.”
Whoa. Sherlock said, “Why do you believe your son’s wife is common, ma’am?”
“I had only to speak to her to know what she was.”
Savich said, “You must have been greatly saddened to hear of your youngest son’s death. A shock.”
Sherlock saw her fist tighten in the folds of her housedress. She shook her head as she said, “Poor Martin. He was confused, as are many young men. He would have come home, but that woman, she lured him away and convinced him to keep away from us. I didn’t even know where he lived until she called me, but by then it was too late. He was already dead. Do you know she didn’t preserve his body to be buried here beside his father?” Her voice was high now, and angry. “She had the gall to bring him home in a cheap urn. I wanted to see my boy, touch him one last time, but he was nothing but ashes.”
Sherlock said, “I understand his wife had to make an effort to notify you at all, Mrs. Backman. Actually, she didn’t even know you existed; she didn’t know anything about you. Her husband never spoke of you or his brothers, you see. He was the one who cut all ties to you, not his wife. I understand you called him the Lost One?”
“He was lost, but he would have come home to me. Now it doesn’t matter. His death was all her fault. She seduced my boy and kept him away from his family. She wouldn’t even tell me how or where he died. But how do you know about Martin? Has that woman been telling you tales?”
Savich said, “But your granddaughter, Mrs. Backman, you found Autumn to your liking?”
“I told you, that woman took her away too quickly for me to judge.”
“We know about Autumn’s gift, and you do too, don’t you, Mrs. Backman? Didn’t she tell you she spoke often to her father when they were apart? Isn’t that why you sent Blessed and Grace to Titusville, to fetch Autumn back to you?”
“That, young man, is quite absurd.”
Savich said, “Did you tell Blessed and Grace to murder Joanna while they were at it?”
Her eyes revealed arrogance nearly off the scale. The old woman believed herself invulnerable, believed no one could touch her. She was dangerous, Savich thought, despite her age, a woman who could kill without a moment’s hesitation and feel not a moment’s remorse. Like Blessed. What about Grace?
If Autumn was right about the bodies Mrs. Backman and her boys had buried, then this little old lady had already killed many times. He said again, “Did you tell Blessed to kill Joanna when he got ahold of Autumn?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Agent Savich. For you to accuse Blessed of all this, it only shows what a small, common mind you have. You will leave now. I have cooperated with you; I have told you Blessed and Grace aren’t here. I don’t know when they’ll be back.”
“Then let me tell you about Blessed,” Sherlock said, sitting forward on the settee a bit. “He is currently in a hospital, a blindfold over his eyes. His wrists are strapped to the bed railing so he can’t remove the blindfold and stymie anyone.”
She didn’t look at all surprised. “Why is my boy in the hospital?”
Savich said, “I shot him. He had surgery last night. But Grace called you, didn’t he? He told you how Blessed broke into Sheriff Merriweather’s house to kidnap Autumn. Maybe Grace is afraid of what you’ll do to him because Blessed was caught? Maybe Grace is afraid you’ll blame him? Did you give him further instructions, Mrs. Backman? Would you like to tell us what you told him to do?”
“You’re telling me you shot Blessed? You are despicable! You tried to kill my boy!” Her voice rose an octave, and rage pumped red into her parchment cheeks. Her eyes darkened to almost black.
“You will be punished for that,” she said. “I will see to it that you are punished.”
Sherlock said pleasantly, “If that happens, I will kill you myself so you won’t know the pleasure of it. Now let’s get to it.” She pulled a warrant out of her jacket pocket. “This is a warrant, Mrs. Backman, to search your family cemetery for the bodies Autumn saw you and your sons burying.”
The old woman wanted to blight them, they saw it in her eyes, and they saw it in her white-knuckled fists. She said finally, “That is non-sense, and you know it. You actually believe a little girl’s nightmare because her mother wants you to? What, are you sleeping with her, Agent Savich?”
“Take the warrant, Mrs. Backman,” Savich said. Still, she didn’t reach for the warrant in Savich’s outstretched hand, merely looked at them both without emotion. “I will call Sheriff Cole if you do not leave immediately and take that ridiculous warrant with you.”
“But the sheriff already called you, didn’t he, ma’am? About fifteen minutes ago? Telling you we were looking for you?”
“I’m going to call Sheriff Cole,” she repeated. “He’ll deal with you two.”
Savich looked down at his watch, then up again when he heard a car outside.
“If that isn’t the sheriff, then it’s our forensic team here to go over your family cemetery.” He stood and put the warrant in her lap. “Feel free to read it. Feel free to call Sheriff Cole again, tell him he’s too slow.”
“I’m calling my lawyer too.”
“You might as well call Caldicot Whistler.”
It was a hit, they could see it. She sucked in a breath, but she held herself together and remained quiet.
Sherlock smiled at Mrs. Backman. “I believe it’s our forensic team.”
43
THE SEARCH WAS A BUST.
An hour later, forensic expert and team leader Dirk Platt walked to where Savich and Sherlock stood watching the operation at Martin Backman’s grave site. He was shaking his head even as he said, “Sorry, guys, but there are no bodies here.”
“She moved them,” Sherlock said. “Blessed notified her and she moved them. Or she suspected either Autumn or Joanna saw what they did and that’s why they ran.” Sherlock looked out over the cemetery. The forty graves positioned in odd triangles. The last graves were not two feet from a thick stand of oak trees that reached up the sides of the bowl to spear green and fat into the sky. The trees surrounding the cemetery laced their branches together, creating moving shadows in the breeze.
Dirk asked them, “Do you want us to dig up any of the other graves?”
“No,” Savich said. “Not yet.”
Dirk nodded and waved to the huge hole in the ground. “She moved something out of here. All we’ve got is a big hole recently filled in with dirt.”
“Any blood? Any clothes?”
“No, nothing, but don’t give up yet. If there were bodies thrown in that hole, we might still find something. Damnedest thing. To look around, this seems a peaceful-hidden-valley sort of place, an old-fashioned little American town where you expect to find some rustic charm, not missing bodies.
“Lori is taking soil samples, looking for traces of blood and human remains, which I don’t think she’ll find. She’ll also be checking to see if the soil comes from here or somewhere else. If the soil is clean, you can bet it was brought in.”
“When they moved the bodies,” Sherlock said, “I doubt they took them far. Who’d want to take the chance, too grea
t a risk of discovery. On the other hand, this valley is pretty large.”
“Not much risk if the grave robbers are the sheriff and his deputies,” Savich said. “They could have wrapped the bodies in a tarp and hauled them anywhere in the valley in the flat bed of the sheriff’s truck.”
“There’s no sign of any recent digging anywhere else in the cemetery, so we’re going to start checking the flower beds and anywhere else there’s disturbed ground with GPR, ground penetration radar. I’ve called for a couple of cadaver dogs to complement the GPR, but if we don’t find the bodies pretty close by, the cost builds up real last.”
Savich said, “I know. Do what you can, Dirk.” He turned to Sherlock. “Well, things don’t always go like you want them to.”
44
ROCKINGHAM COUNTY HOSPITAL
NEAR TITUSVILLE, VIRGINIA
Late Wednesday afternoon
The nurse, skinny as a windowpane, with salt-and-pepper hair and a no-nonsense stride, was pushing against Blessed’s hospital room door before Ox could roar to his feet and shout at her, “Hold on there I haven’t seen you before.” He grabbed her skinny arm. “Who are you? What do you want?”
She stared up at him with a face scrubbed clean of makeup. He swore for an instant that he saw a five-o’clock shadow on her jaw-no, couldn’t be. He shook his head as she said patiently, “I’m Nurse Eleanor Lapley. I work here. I just came on duty. Who are you?”
“I’m with the sheriff’s department, here to guard the maniac strapped down to the bed inside. Do you know about him?”
“Of course. First thing when I came in, they showed me that film about him. Kind of hard to believe. Seems to me it might have been faked, don’t you think?”
“Nothing was faked.”
“If not, then he’s quite something, isn’t he?” There was admiration in her deep voice. Not good.
Ox said, “I’ll go in with you. What do you need to do?”
“Check his vitals, see that he’s not in pain, the usual.”
Ox nodded and pushed the door open.
It was the last thing he remembered.
WHEN OX WOKE UP he was lying on his back, strapped down to Blessed Backman’s hospital bed, his eyes covered, his wrists strapped to the bed railings. He opened his mouth and yelled.
An orderly burst through the door, stood stock-still, and stared down at him.
“Whoever you are, get this blindfold off me and the straps.”
“I can’t, sir. I saw that film; I saw what you do to a person. I’m not even coming close.”
Ox managed to still his panic. He forced calm and reason into his voice. “Listen to me. Blessed Backman is in his mid-fifties, a skinny little guy. I’m not. Somehow he got me. That nurse—”
“What nurse?”
“Nurse Eleanor Lapley, she said her name was.”
“Okay, there isn’t a nurse Eleanor Lapley, not unless she started thirty minutes ago and nobody told me.”
“For God’s sake, look at me. Do I look like Blessed Backman?”
“Well, no, sir, but—”
“Get me loose, now! Blessed Backman’s escaped. We’ve got to get him back.”
“But—”
“You idiot! I’m thirty-three years old and I weigh two hundred pounds! Look at me!”
The orderly freed him.
Ox looked up at Savich’s video camera. Where was Dr. Hicks? He pushed past the orderly and looked into the next room. Dr. Hicks was unconscious but alive, the video equipment mangled.
He knew the only official security in the small hospital was at the front entrance, so he didn’t bother alerting hospital staff. He got hold of Ethan three seconds later.
“... This nurse, Ethan, I swear to you she had a five-o’clock shadow, I know Agent Savich told you Grace was probably here. I know it sounds weird, but do you think Nurse Lapley was somehow Grace?”
Ethan thought his brains were going to scramble. “I suppose it had to be Grace. He got in through hospital security disguised as a nurse only I guess he couldn’t quite make it realistic enough ... A bad disguise? I sure hope so, because if it wasn’t a disguise ... no I don’t want to think about that. Another couple of minutes and you would have suspected, but Grace was fast, got into the room and pulled off Blessed’s blindfold, and that’s why you don’t remember what hap-pened. . . . Get all our people out to my place. That’s where Joanna and Autumn are. He’ll head there, you know it. I’m on my way right now.” A moment later, Ethan was back on his cell phone, and Joanna’s phone was ringing.
“Hello?”
“Joanna, this is Ethan. Blessed’s escaped, with the help of his brother Grace. Get Autumn out of there right now. Drive back toward town. I’ll meet you halfway.”
She didn’t say a word, punched off.
Five minutes later when he saw her rental car barreling toward him he honked and pulled his Rubicon over on the shoulder.
Joanna’s first words were “I should have killed him. Dammit, I should have killed him.”
Autumn was white-faced and silent, plastered to her mother’s side. “Get in.” He threw the passenger door open and Joanna lifted Autunm inside, jumped in beside her. “I don’t have a gun. We just ran.”
“I do; don’t worry.” That was about the stupidest thing he’d ever said. “There’s a rifle in the box under the front seat. I’ll take that; you can have my Beretta.”
He patted Autumn’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right, kiddo.”
If Autumn didn’t believe him, he didn’t blame her. He pulled his Beretta off his waist clip, handed it butt-first to Joanna.
“Where are we going?”
He saw an ancient Ford Escort in his rearview mirror, closing fast. He didn’t have to see for sure who was in the car. It was Blessed and Grace. Had to be.
“Hang on,” he said, and pressed down hard on the accelerator.
The Rubicon pulled away smoothly on the windy two-lane highway, and soon they were far enough ahead so Blessed couldn’t see them around the turns. Ethan pulled off fast onto a potholed fire road that led straight into Titus Hitch Wilderness, not the front entrance with the ranger kiosk but a narrow dirty path barely wide enough for the Rubicon. It came to an abrupt stop at the Sweet Onion River. If they were lucky, it would take Blessed and Grace a good long time to find out where they’d gone. But they would find them, Ethan knew it.
“Let’s go.”
Joanna said, “You know where we are; that’s good. Where to?”
“We’re going to head on foot into the Titus Hitch Wilderness. We can’t go back where we came from, and going forward is better than staying here. I know these woods well, know a good spot to stop.”
“Ethan, what are we going to do in the wilderness?” Autumn asked him.
He looked at the mother, then at the daughter, and said, “We’re going hiking.”
He pulled his bolt-action Remington 700 out of his gun box. It was a gift from his father when he was twelve years old—to make a hunter out of him, his father had said. Ethan had learned to shoot the bolt action, loved the rifle as a matter of fact, but he hadn’t stayed with hunting. He preferred to paint animals and take their picture rather than shoot them.
He grabbed two boxes of boattail bullets. He had only forty rounds. He had to be careful. He said, more to himself than to Joanna, “The clip is already loaded—ten rounds, so that gives us fifty rounds.” He looked up at her. “This baby is slow, but it’s really accurate at distance. Here’s two magazines, Joanna, fifteen rounds each, for the Beretta.”
He thought about setting up a blind, shooting Blessed from a good hundred yards away, far enough away to be safe. But what about Grace? Was he good at disguises, or was he something else entirely? Ethan was very afraid he knew the answer to that.
He walked to the back of his truck, opened a metal storage trunk, and hoisted on a heavy backpack. He passed a smaller one to Joanna, “Okay, guys, let’s get out of here.”
Ethan led them along the
edge of the Sweet Onion River, through lush water reeds, to a narrow slice of water only ten feet wide, with black stepping stones that he himself had laid fifteen years before, for a dry crossing. “Okay, Joanna, you go first, then Autumn. I’ll come across last.”
“Why don’t we pick up the black rocks so they won’t know where we’ve crossed?”
He said simply, “I want them to know.”
Joanna looked at his rifle, then back up at his face.
When they reached the other side of the river, Ethan pulled out his cell and dialed Savich. “We won’t have service for much longer.”
Two rings, then, “Savich.”
“Ethan here. Grace sprang Blessed. If you want the full story, call Ox. Joanna, Autumn, and I are heading into Titus Hitch Wilderness, a place I know better than you know Washington.”
“We just left the Backmans’ place. No bodies to be found, so they moved them. Do you want us back there?”
“You can’t get to us out here any more easily than they can,” Ethan said. “It has to end, Savich. I hope to end it here.”
“He can’t stymie me, Ethan.”
“There’s no time.”
“Can you get a distance shot?”
Ethan grinned into his cell. “Exactly what I’m hoping for. We’re going to keep moving and then camp for the night. If we don’t run across them, I’m planning to lead Joanna and Autumn out across the north boundary in the morning.”
“Have you called your deputies in after you?”
“No. I thought about that, but I want the only one trailing us to be Blessed. I don’t want to take the chance he’d stymie my deputies. Call Ox and let him know, will you? We’ve got to move.”
There was a pause, then, “Good luck, Ethan.”
Ethan pocketed his cell phone, then turned to Joanna and Autumn. “Either of you need to rest, you just holler, okay? We’re going to be going through some pretty rough terrain. I’m the only one without good footwear.” He kicked a stone with the toe of his low-heeled boots. “Your sneakers will be fine. Stay close. We’ve got a ways to go before we get to Locksley Manor.”
One of Joanna’s eyebrows went up. “Robin Hood’s house?”
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