The woman was driving too fast, dangerously for the dark and the fog.
Rachel wondered if the woman were drunk.
She was acting like it. Or like she was on something. Erratic.
“Can you slow down?” Rachel said. “Please.”
The woman slowed the SUV down. “Sorry. Guys like that. They get me worked up.” She laughed.
Rachel took her phone out and texted Felix: Home in 5
Felix: cant wait 2 C U
Rachel: same
“Guys like what?” Rachel said.
“Who pretend.”
“How do you know he did all that? Do you know him?”
“Who you texting?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Ah. Got to check in?”
“Hardly.”
“Your generation, it’s so different from mine. Can’t ever be alone, out of contact. Check in constantly. No trust or independence. Texting replacing loyalty.”
Rachel did not understand what the woman was going on about, but her tremulous voice edged close to hysteria.
“I have loyalty,” the woman said. “I do what it takes to keep my man instead of betraying him, even if he is a betraying bastard himself.”
“You can let me out here,” Rachel said.
“Did he pull all that crap about kinks and taboos and how normal they are,” the woman said. She was angry now. Enraged. “Did he feed you the one about the rest of the world being so uptight, judgmental, hypocrites? Did he give you the bullshit but only after he manipulated you into asking about his ‘project,’ his fucking research. Is he still using that bait?”
The woman was scaring Rachel, even more than the man had scared her earlier.
“You can let me out here,” Rachel said.
Her heart pounding, she sent a text to her father and Felix: silver suv range rover? lexus? woman, 30s?
The text came back: Undeliverable.
“Please, stop,” Rachel said. “I’ll be all right to walk.”
“Stop here? Stop now? In the middle of the road in this storm, in the dark? You’re just full of smart choices, aren’t you? Like falling for his shit. That shit. A married man. Did you know that? Did you ever consider that? Did you bother to ask if he belonged to someone else? Did it ever enter your pea brain to ask what an older guy like that was up to? How he just showed up wherever you showed up? Or how he might be trying to trick you? Like he tricked me. Like he ruined me. At least I had a fucking excuse. At least I was a stupid fucking hick fourteen-year-old. You’re what, eighteen? In college. Your dad’s a cop.”
“How do you know—”
“And you have a boyfriend. And still you go to an inn on a weekday afternoon to fuck my—”
“What? I didn’t—”
“Don’t interrupt me,” the woman screeched, waving her hands wildly. The SUV swerved, teetered, crossing over the centerline around a curve. Headlights of an oncoming car raked through the windshield as the car blared its horn and the woman yanked the SUV back on her side of the road, just missing the other vehicle. “I’m talking here. I’m the one talking.”
80
Preacher’s house sat dark among the trees and fog as Test pulled the Explorer into the yard.
The Subaru was gone, but the old Ford pickup truck sat in the yard.
“No way to squirm out of this, not with him having that truck here,” Test said as she and Rath crossed the wet yard and took the steps to take Preacher into custody. Pieces of the broken porch still lay scattered in the muck, though the snow and ice had melted.
Test knocked on the door.
Rath sensed Preacher inside, lying in wait.
Test knocked again.
Rath stepped off the porch and knelt at a low basement window and cupped his hands to see inside.
It was too dark in the basement to see anything.
“We’re going in,” Test said.
Rath drew his sidearm as Test drew hers and took hold of the doorknob. The door was unlocked.
It opened with a creak.
Rath smelled the odor from out on the steps.
“What the hell?” he said as he and Test stepped inside, his handgun trained up the stairs, Test’s trained on the basement stairs.
The odor bloomed, potent.
The house stood silent.
The place was gloomy with shadows.
Rath hit the light switch beside him, and the chintzy fixture above him lit the stairway.
The top three stairs were darker than the rest. Nearly black.
Rath looked at Test and climbed a few steps.
Blood had spread over the lip of the stairs from the floor and run down the risers to pool on the top three treads.
Rath stepped over the blood-blackened stairs and followed the blood through the swinging doors of the kitchen, at the center of which Ned Preacher sat in a cheap folding chair, his body slumped forward onto the table.
The chair and table were caked with black blood, as were Preacher’s clothes and body. A lake of the blood had spread from beneath the chair to the stairs.
Test stepped up behind Rath.
“Let’s check that it’s clear,” she whispered.
She and Rath combed the residence, upstairs and down, finding no one.
Back upstairs, the two stepped carefully around the dried blood to stand in front of Preacher.
He’d been dead for some time.
His body had been slashed and torn and gored so many times there seemed to be no flesh untouched by the knife.
So much blood.
“I’ll radio the state police and ME,” Test said. She did not care if she were first on-site, first to investigate. She was tired of this shit.
Rath and Test backed out of the house, mindful of surfaces and the blood.
Outside, Rath watched Test walk to the Explorer. When she was out of sight behind the screen of hemlocks, Rath stepped off the porch to the trees.
The birdhouse was still there.
Rath put on a surgical, crime scene glove and lifted the birdhouse lid.
The trail camera sat inside.
Rath needed the SD card. Images of the killer had to be on the card. But there were images of him on it, too, pictures from fishing and hunting. He’d meant for whatever images the camera took here to be for his private use at the start. Now, he needed to erase the pics of himself. It could not be known that he’d put the camera up. It would complicate matters of evidence, even though he’d put the camera up as a citizen. He’d erase any images incriminating himself and send the SD card in the mail. Anonymously.
He was about to lift the camera out and snatch the SD card when the Explorer’s door slammed shut. He’d run out of time.
He closed the birdhouse lid and hurried to the porch without the SD card.
Test had a camera slung over her shoulder and held a box containing crime scene coveralls, hoods, booties, and rubber gloves. She looked at the gloves on Rath’s hands. “Raring to go, huh?”
They put on the garb and went inside.
Rath searched the kitchen as Test scoured the living room. There was no evidence of a struggle, nothing obviously out of place. Rath opened drawers, the refrigerator, cupboards, and a pantry, all of them nearly bare. He flipped through a pile of junk mail and bills on the table, checked the trash can under the sink and found nothing but a glop of pasta. Something nagged him. Something was missing; he could not think of what it was. The more he forced himself, the more it eluded him.
It would come; he needed to trust his subconscious.
He returned to the living room. Test looked up from where she was standing in the far corner of the spare room.
“Anything?” Rath said.
“How does someone stab Preacher in a chair without a struggle? It has to have been someone he knew. Trusted.”
“Clay Sheldon.”
“Sheldon visits, maybe under the pretense to share what he’s done with Dana Clark. Or maybe to do just this. Kill the one person wh
o knows what he’s done. After we visited him at the North Star, he knew we were circling and that Preacher was a loose thread.”
“Maybe.” Rath’s mind was working. “Who else could come to Preacher’s home and lull him?”
Rath stared at Preacher’s corpse. It strained against the ropes that bound it, as if Preacher were trying to get free. This was it then. The end of him.
“I need to call Rachel as soon as I’m back in cell service,” Rath said.
“About her,” Test said, her tone grave yet conciliatory. “She called me. The first night she stayed at your house. After Preacher was watching her. She wanted copies of the police report for her parents’ murders.”
“I hope the hell you didn’t provide them.”
“She has legal rights to the files.”
“You didn’t have to be the one to give them to her. You kept that from me? If you’d made her come in and make copies, she may have balked. Who knows what seeing all that shit might—”
“Trigger.” Test looked at Preacher’s body.
“I won’t honor that with a response,” Rath said, but he felt chilled, knowing what Rachel had read and seen about her parents. He knew the anger it spawned, the compulsion to do something.
He needed to get that SD card more than ever.
“We’ll see if forensics can find anything we can’t,” Test said.
“They usually do.”
81
Rachel tried to send the text again. It bounced back. As she checked the door handle to see if the door was locked, the woman snatched Rachel’s phone, smashed its screen on the steering wheel until it blinked out, then tossed the phone out her window and into the woods.
“Let me out!” Rachel shouted, her mind spastic. “Let me out of this fucking car!”
The SUV sped up, careened.
At the bottom of the hill, the woman drove through the red light and through town. The fog forced her to drive at twenty miles an hour. Rachel tried to open the door. It was locked. She tried to power down the window. Locked.
She watched, helpless as the vehicle drove past the Gihon River Inn where Felix sat waiting. Where her gun sat in her backpack.
Rachel yanked on the door handle.
It was no use.
She pounded on the window. She needed to break the window and scream out for help or climb out, fall out, if she had to, risk cutting herself on broken glass, risk breaking a leg or cracking her skull on the road.
Because if the woman got out of town and headed into the wilderness before Rachel could get out—.
Rachel pounded her fist on the widow.
“Stop it!” the woman screeched. “Stop it! Stop it stop it!” She grabbed at Rachel, but Rachel elbowed her and the car swerved.
Rachel considered attacking the woman or the steering wheel and making the vehicle crash. If it were just Rachel and the woman who might get hurt, she’d do it. But she had no idea who the SUV might crash into if she did.
She pounded her fist on the window. It splintered. She unlatched her seat belt and raised her fist to finish the job and felt something touch her hair, slide over her face and around her neck. A rope or a cord or—
It pulled tight as a noose around her throat.
She gasped. Her hands flew to her throat, clutched at the cord.
She couldn’t breathe. It felt as if she’d swallowed her tongue as a pressure swelled behind and in her eyes, as if her eyes might pop.
She clawed at the cord.
She tried to fight the woman, but the grip the cord had around her neck was too tight, seemed locked, and her hands instinctively would not leave her throat.
The vehicle drove out of town and jounced as it turned down a dirt side road into the woods.
Rachel tried to dig her fingers down between the cord and her throat but couldn’t.
She couldn’t breathe. She’d pass out soon. She’d die.
The vehicle rocked to a stop. The driver’s door opened as the cord tightened around Rachel’s throat and Rachel was hauled backward across the seats, out on her back onto the muddy ground, the rain falling in her face, running into her nose. She flailed, tried to turn over, tried to get to her knees. The woman stood over her, yanked on the cord as the rain cascaded in sheets. “Did you fuck him in that nasty hotel?”
The rain drenched the woman’s hair. Her black eye makeup streamed down her cheeks. She looked wild, mad.
The cord released, just enough for Rachel to sip a breath, to gag and vomit.
“Did you?” the woman railed.
Rachel gagged. Shook her head no. Sobbed.
“Did you!” the woman shrieked.
The cord slackened.
“No!” Rachel blurted, gasping as the cord tightened again.
She kicked at the woman’s feet but the woman pulled on the cord and stepped around to stand by Rachel’s head, peering down at her, so she looked upside down from where Rachel lay on her back. She needed to tell the woman she’d left out the side door of the place. Had not stayed.
“Liar,” the woman said. “What’d he do to you? Did you like it? Like being choked? Like being abused?”
Rachel shook her head crying.
Her eyes felt so hot and strained and engorged it seemed she would start crying blood.
“You liked it, did you?” the woman screamed. The rain was nearly blinding Rachel, filling her nostrils. Her skull seemed to be cracking. “You loved it,” the woman railed. “Thought you could do more for him than me. His wife. The mother of his child. I’ll do anything for him.” She yanked on the cord, her eyes bulging as if she were the one being choked to death. “Any thing.”
She brought her face close to Rachel’s, her head cocking to the side as if she were a child merely observing, confused as this madwoman before her choked to death, unaware it was she who was tightening the cord. Her black eye makeup ran down her face and her soaked hair, straggly and wild, hung down in Rachel’s face.
The cord tightened.
82
Forensics found nothing of worth in Preacher’s place. Not at first blush. The state police forensics team lifted prints, but found no signs of struggle, no sign of forced entry, no stray hair that might belong to anyone but Preacher. Not a trace of a footprint in all that blood.
Rath was searching Preacher’s bedroom, looking through the clothes in the closet—six white button-up shirts, six pairs of black jeans, one black belt, two skinny black ties—when Test came to the doorway and said, “You need to see this.”
Rath followed her back to the living room where a forensics technician from the state police held a cell phone in his gloved hand. Test went to him and took the phone. “Look,” she said to Rath.
Rath stood near Test and looked at the phone’s screen display of typical icons.
“How’d you access it without a password?” he said.
“Didn’t have a password set up.”
“Where was it?”
“Between the couch cushions.”
“Is it his?” Rath said.
“You tell me.”
Test pointed at an app icon that looked like the face of an old radio.
“So?” Rath said.
Test tapped a gloved finger on the app.
As soon as the app opened, even before the audio started playing, Rath understood.
“Simple Wi-Fi app,” Test said.
“A scanner,” Rath said. “A fucking scanner?” His mind tripped. “He knew Jamie was hanged because he heard it on a fucking police scanner? He told me: ‘I hear things.’”
“That’s why he was so smug. While we were at his house with the warrant he was at the station, phone in his pocket. He—”
“What?” Rath said.
“He was reaching for his phone as I told him he had to come to the station. I told him to put it away. I think he was going to show me, then saw a chance to toy further with us. He was probably hoping we’d charge him, let us get as far along as he could stand before rubbing it in our
faces how he knew about her being hanged.”
“He was never involved,” Rath said.
“What?” Test said.
“Sheldon acted alone in killing Dana Clark.”
“Then who did this? Why does Preacher have Sheldon’s truck?” Test said.
Rath looked around at the nearly empty drawers and cupboards. The junk mail on the table.
The mail.
He looked through the stack of mail again.
“What is it?” Test said.
Rath checked the garbage can under the kitchen sink. Nothing.
“What is it?” Test said.
“Nothing,” Rath said.
But it wasn’t.
He walked out to the living room to find the state police detective. “You find a letter. On pink stationery?”
The detective called an underling over and asked the question of the woman. “No,” she said.
Rath peered out the window. Several scene workers were outside. There was no way to get to the camera. Where is that pink letter I saw you read that day I watched you get the mail on your porch? Rath thought. What was on it?
“The trash outside in the bin,” he said. “Has it been hauled for the week or—”
“Hauled yesterday.”
“What’s this about?” Test said.
“Nothing,” Rath said.
83
“You can’t have him!” the woman shrieked. “He’s mine. Despite what he is, what he does. He’s mine.”
She leaned her face in close to Rachel’s face, bared her teeth as if she’d bite Rachel’s face. Rachel reached up and grabbed the woman’s hair in both hands and yanked savagely. Kept yanking. The woman howled. Rachel tore at the cord. It loosened. Rachel heaved for a true breath, her throat raw and burning as she hauled on the woman’s hair, torqueing the woman’s head sideways, back and forth, back and forth until she rolled the woman over onto her back.
Rachel jumped up, coughing and wheezing, vomiting, and stomped her boot in the woman’s face. Stomped harder. Heard bone break. Stomped again. Kicked the woman in the side. Kicked her knees and ankles as hard as she could, as her father had once taught her, to hobble an attacker.
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