57
Natalie’s mind turned into a murmuring creek as she followed the DWW ranger across the beachfront, keeping a safe distance between them. She passed several emergency crew members on the scene, as well as a handful of reporters talking into their microphones. Stray voices threaded through the air: “A number of drownings have taken place at Devil’s Point over the years … could not be reached for comment … another unfortunate accident this year … the drowning victim was a local woman.”
Samuel paused at the snack bar, and then glanced over his shoulder at Natalie, his eyes resting briefly on her face. He nodded respectfully. After speaking to someone inside the command post, he continued on his way up the beachfront toward the parking lot. His wet brown hair was the color of baking chocolate. He had a cocky swagger.
A tear slid down Natalie’s expressionless face as she hurried past Luke.
“Natalie?” he said, stopping her. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” she lied.
“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” he suggested gently.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to go.” She strode past him up the beach, across the boardwalk, and toward the public parking lot.
Shock meant not enough oxygenated blood was circulating through the body. Symptoms included sweaty skin, a weak pulse, irregular breathing. Psychogenic shock was caused by emotional trauma, where the blood pooled away from the brain, causing dizziness and confusion. Natalie knew she was in psychogenic shock.
Fortunately, she’d parked her car in a poorly lit corner of the lot. She made sure Samuel didn’t see her as she unlocked the door and got inside. She sat for a minute, cradling her head. No tears. All thoughts gone. She was on autopilot. She inserted the key in the ignition and started the engine. She waited in a mental fog.
Samuel was loading his equipment into a weathered white pickup truck. He got in and started the engine. The mud-spattered pickup shuddered and died. “Damn. Come on.” He tried again.
Natalie could hear tinny voices coming from his sputtering radio.
He peeled away in a spurt of gravel.
She could feel her irregular pulse at the base of her throat as she stepped on the gas and cautiously followed. How you began a moving surveillance was crucial. You were supposed to keep a fair distance between yourself and the subject, but you couldn’t fall too far behind, or else you might lose him. Surveillance by automobile was tough in any city, but way out here in the boonies, only an idiot wouldn’t notice another car following them on such sparsely traveled country roads. Natalie would have to stay sharp. She’d have to keep several hundred yards between herself and the pickup at all times if she wanted to remain undetected.
The white pickup kept rolling through the stop signs. She tried to keep one or two vehicles between them whenever she could. The roads were familiar, but the woods always looked different at night. Dark clouds were beginning to congregate overhead, creating welts and bruises in the moonlit sky.
Now the ranger took a left. Natalie took a left.
He turned onto I-87. She turned onto I-87.
She’d taken this road out of town how many times? She shuddered. She understood what she was doing—pursuing a deeply disturbed individual while she was in shock. There was nothing chaining her to reality anymore. She had no center. Her father once told her, “That’s what being a detective is all about. You search for a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert. As the facts pile up, it’s only a matter of time before the case collapses inward and the truth is revealed.”
Natalie radioed Dispatch. “I need a license ID.”
“Okay, shoot.”
She rattled it off.
Five minutes later, the BLPD dispatcher came on and said, “Belongs to Samuel H. Winston, New York DWW Forest Ranger.” He gave her a home address.
“What’s the middle initial stand for?” she asked.
A short pause. “Hawke with an e.”
“Thanks.” She planted the mike.
Samuel Hawke Winston. What the hawk eats.
A strange feeling of disorientation and nausea came over her, fueled by sheer naked terror. She saw Grace’s unseeing eyes. She saw the boy crouched on the bank of the stream, poking the dead raccoon’s swollen belly, and the pus-filled intestines gushing out. She saw Daisy dead in a pool of blood. The smooth oblong bones of her sister’s legs, kicking as she swam in the high school pool. Grace drowning in a swirl of bubbles, unable to breathe. Natalie saw her entire life in a flash of stunning emotion, but then it faded just as quickly, an ember winking out.
The pickup’s taillights shimmered distantly in the smothering darkness as Samuel Hawke Winston turned north. The Adirondack Mountains were a protected area, consisting of six million acres, which included two thousand miles of hiking trails, three thousand lakes, and more than a thousand rivers. People got lost hiking in these mountains all the time. There were boating accidents in the rivers and lakes. The Adirondack Park, which was larger than Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon combined, was maintained by the New York State Department of Wetlands and Woodlands. The Division of Forest Protection had approximately 134 forest rangers, most patrolling in the Adirondacks and Catskills. They drilled for all types of missions. They responded to hundreds of missing-persons incidents in the parks and forests each year. On average, three hundred individuals were lost or injured on state lands and required an emergency response. The DWW utilized thermal-imaging equipment, search dogs, patrol vessels, all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, and a helicopter to augment their rescue efforts. Each ranger had a geographic territory he was responsible for.
Being a ranger was a 24-7, 365-days-a-year job. You were on-call for fires, missing persons, injured or trapped visitors, wounded animals, and any other emergency situation that fell within the park’s jurisdiction. Samuel was one of many brave men she’d known for years, exchanging platitudes in the most dire of circumstances. He would’ve had extensive training in wilderness first aid, law enforcement, emergency medicine, and other specialized fields. He was required to maintain his Emergency Medical Responders certification and participate in high-angle rescue, swift-water rescue, and dive rescues. Because of the frequency of campfires in the parklands, he was also trained in wildland firefighting, as well as structural firefighting. Rangers at the DWW were jacks-of-all-trades. She’d once considered joining their ranks herself.
The roads were narrow and curving. Natalie drove along in silence, but there was a rush-roar sound in her ears. They were twisting through the foothills now, moonlight seeping through the heavy cloud cover. Up. Down. Gliding through the turns.
They passed the exit to Thaddeus Falls—Samuel’s hometown, according to the dispatcher. But he ignored the exit. When they passed the next exit, Natalie realized he wasn’t going home.
There were more lakes farther north. It was chillier up here. The farther north you went, the longer winter dragged on. Many of the rustic cottages were empty. There were lots of arts-and-crafts-style lodges and vacancy signs. After several more miles, the white pickup took a one-way street, and Natalie had to find a parallel road so Samuel wouldn’t suspect he was being followed.
After a few minutes she panicked, thinking she’d lost him. She drove around in circles before spotting the white pickup again at a gas station. Natalie kept on driving another fifty yards or so, then pulled over to the side of the road, where she picked up her phone and did an online search for the DWW website, but there was no employee information available. Next she found Samuel Winston’s Facebook page. He was certified in EMT, underwater recovery, high-angle rescue, and public-safety diving by Dive Rescue International. He’d been awarded for his rescue efforts, involving everything from boating accidents and plane crashes to accidental drownings. He was married with two children. The pictures of him posing with his lovely family were Instagramworthy.
Her heart fluttered as she made an illegal U-turn and doubled back. Her fury and outrage were stuck in her throat like a handful of sand. She di
dn’t want to lose him. As she approached the gas station, Samuel did her a favor by pulling out well in front of her and heading in the same direction she was going. She followed him for half a dozen blocks before he took a right onto Mountain Pass Avenue, the town’s main artery. She kept a good amount of space between them, while he continued his ascent through the foothills. When the white pickup truck turned north onto a little traveled road, she switched off her headlights and followed him for many more miles into the woods.
58
Drizzle. Gray country roads.
Houses. Kids’ tricycles.
Cornfields. Dilapidated silos. Rolling hills.
Rain scrabbling against her windshield. The storm had swooped in swiftly. Natalie turned her wipers on. There was static on the radio.
She listened to the rain pounding on the roof of the car. A hollow sound.
Too much rain. The rivers would flood. The lakes would rise.
Exhaustion had taken hold. She was lost. Buried alive under layers of grief—some old, some new. Now the white pickup turned down an unmarked road, and Natalie couldn’t spot any street signs. She didn’t know where they were. Her senses grew heightened. There was barely any traffic at this hour: 3:45 A.M.
The hardest part of any surveillance was remaining invisible. Natalie pulled over to the side of the road and parked. It was dark out, a good thing. The darker the better. She hunkered down and waited, until she was sure it was okay to proceed.
She sat trembling with inner tension, idling on the soft shoulder while she watched the truck heading down the two-lane road and turning left onto a driveway between two stone gateposts, KEEP OUT signs posted on either side of the entrance.
She let another minute or two pass before she drove toward the stone gateposts, lights off, and paused in front of the driveway. It went up a steep hill into pitch blackness. No house lights up there, with thick woods all around. She drove for twenty more yards before pulling over to the side of the road and parking. The car squeaked to a jerky stop.
She phoned Luke.
“Hello?” he answered groggily.
“Hey, it’s me.”
She could sense the tension in his voice. “Natalie, what’s up?”
“I found him.”
“What’s that?”
“I found the man with the birthmark on his arm. The butterfly.”
Long pause. She could hear him breathing into the receiver.
“Where are you?” Luke asked.
“Up north.”
“Where up north, Natalie?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I found him.”
“Turn around and come home, okay? We can follow up in the morning.”
“Luke?” she said. “I know I’m in shock. Emotional shock. I understand I may not be acting in my own best interests right now. That I’m all over the place. But I have to see what he’s up to. Because I know it’s him, beyond a shadow of a doubt. No one else has that birthmark. It’s Samuel Winston. His full name is Samuel Hawke Winston, as in ‘What the hawk eats.’ He has a wife and kids in Thaddeus Falls … but for some reason, he didn’t go home tonight. He drove farther north, and that’s where I am now.”
“Natalie…”
She hung up.
A few moments later, her phone buzzed. It was Luke again. She redirected the call to voice mail and sat in her car, trying to muster up the courage to act. She listened to the hum of the engine. The woods used to make her feel protected. But that was an illusion. Nobody was safe. Not really.
Natalie’s father used to say A secret is like a magic mirror, with endless layers of illusion. What you assume to be fact isn’t always real.
What was real? She didn’t have any answers. The world was a thousand shades of gray. She knew what she’d been trained to do. She’d been trained to set aside her emotions in the heat of the moment and follow procedure. But the heat of this moment was burning her insides.
Natalie could feel her fright at the base of her throat. Boom, boom, boom. “Reactance” was a psychological term used for children who did the opposite of whatever they were told. Psychiatrists would try to break a child’s reactance by using reverse psychology. Go ahead and do it. You have my permission.
Natalie told herself that. Go ahead and do it.
She hoped it would have the opposite effect.
But it didn’t.
She turned off her ticking engine, got out of the car, and looked at the sky. The rain was coming down in a steady downpour. The moon had vanished behind the roiling clouds. The higher you looked, the more frenetic the air became—a swirling, frenzied fury. She heard a few high-pitched cries—a squall of birds swooping underneath the storm clouds.
Thunder rumbled. She pulled up the hood of her jacket and shivered all over, eyes going wide in the dark. Fear flickering in her heart. She headed for the old stone gateposts, cracked and in disrepair. She stood at the entryway and gazed up the driveway into a charred nothingness. A wet wind blew through trees. The rusty old mailbox had a name on it—HAWKE. Listening to her own panicky breathing, she started up the driveway on foot, fright bubbling up her spine.
59
At the top of the hill was a ramshackle Victorian, eerie as a dream. Lots of gables and chimneys, with a whimsical roofline, like something out of a demented fairy tale. The porch light was on. There were shade trees on the front lawn, and the gutters were clogged with leaves. Half the shingles needed replacing. She noticed the dry rot above the window frames, where the paint was wrinkled and alligatored. A trickle of sweat zigzagged down her neck and between her breasts.
Inside the house, a woman screamed.
One piercing shriek.
It stopped abruptly, like a faucet shutting off. Natalie’s heart stopped with it.
She unstrapped her holster and drew her weapon. Wind chimes dangled on the front porch, creating a twinkly, carnival-like sound. The front yard was an obstacle course of Havahart traps. The night grew suffocatingly close. She glanced back down the driveway, where Samuel had parked his white pickup truck, leaving crisscrossing tracks in the dirt. Ferns grew deep on either side of the road, and all around the property were the towering, impenetrable woods.
All of a sudden, the woman screamed again. It was terrifying. A succession of tortured shrieks tunneled through Natalie, and she gripped her gun and approached the house.
Lightning flashed—so bright, it dazzled her eyes—and the clouds released a stinging rain. She took the walkway toward the porch, hurried up the steps, and tested the front door. Locked.
She followed the sagging wraparound porch around the side of the house and lingered in the shadows. The screaming stopped. The backyard was cluttered with junk—broken appliances and spring traps made of netting. Natalie had seen these traps before. They were meant for larger species of birds. What the hawk eats. Samuel Hawke. Serial killer.
She gripped her gun while beads of rain trickled into her eyes. Twenty yards or so away, in the backyard, was a small barn. The double doors were open. She could see a figure moving around inside, rummaging through an older-model truck, dinged and spattered with mud.
Natalie considered her options. The screen door at the back of the house stood open. Should she take a chance? She peered into the depths of the barn, where Samuel was poking around in the flatbed, hunting for something. He pushed a spine board aside and dug deeper into the flatbed. He picked up a cervical collar and tossed it aside.
She tried to gauge the distance between where she stood on the porch and the back door, primed to make a run for it, when all of a sudden, Samuel abandoned the search and, with a frustrated grunt, walked out of the barn. He unzipped his pants and peed in the weeds. Piss, shake, tuck, zip.
She ducked down behind the wooden railing while he tilted his face toward the sky and basked in a chill blast of downpour. He was dressed in jeans, white athletic shoes, and a blue vinyl windbreaker. His chest was bare. His ears were small and as curved as seashells.
Natalie fought off a burning sense of outrage as she withdrew into the shadows. Samuel turned and hurried up the back steps into the house, moving with energy and purpose. The screen door bumped shut behind him, but didn’t close completely. He’d left it unlocked. Maybe he was coming back soon?
She could smell the animal life in the folds and hollows. The dull green bayberry bushes rustled in the wind. Somewhere in all that lightning-dappled darkness, she could hear a woman whimpering and moaning.
Natalie took a chance and approached the back door. Another lightning strike outlined the bones of the house, good bones, fallen to ruin … and then came silence, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi … and kaboom. Another terrible clap of thunder. She looked up at the second story, and a light at the end of the hallway blinked on.
The rain sounds on the gabled roof were sublime—a sustained orchestral unraveling, accompanied by a flutelike rattling through the gutters, funnels of rainwater pouring through the spouts and soaking into the yard, eroding the soil and exposing the wet round rocks and wriggling earthworms. She hurried up the cracked walkway, slate slabs broken or missing. The splintery wooden steps sighed underneath her weight. She stood on the worn welcome mat and nudged the door open. She could smell the dry rot in the back hallway.
Natalie entered the kitchen, where the breakfast table was cluttered with dirty dishes and empty wine bottles. The room smelled of wet insulation and moldy leftovers. There were stacks of old photo albums, corroded kitchen appliances, eight-track tapes, and a pile of raw meat on a chipped white plate—tiny bloody hearts, livers, and intestines, a rodent’s or bird’s innards. She suppressed her gag reflex, steadied her gun, and moved on.
Trace of Evil Page 35