Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  From where he was parked, he had a clear view across the highway of the road climbing the mountainside. The silver convertible was already in the second switchback. She was driving fast, eager to get away, he thought, rushing toward her destiny. Behind her was a white van with black lettering on the panels. Some kind of service van that kept the appliances and televisions working at the secluded ranches of Denver’s oldest families. The van seemed to be crowding her, riding her rear bumper. Another confused witness, in shock and unsure of anything he saw.

  He had to smile at the sight of the vehicles coming down the mountainside, jostling for the road, intent on whatever occupied their thoughts, as if any of it mattered.

  12

  Catherine pressed down on the accelerator, driving as fast as she dared. In fifteen minutes, she had showered, thrown her things into the backpack, grabbed her laptop and bag. She’d picked up the envelope stuffed with ten thousand dollars, then let it drop. It had thudded against the counter, a thing of consequence. She picked it up again and put it into her bag. She’d set the bag on the front seat and thrown everything else into the trunk. And now the cans of dog food were banging together. Rex had settled into his favorite position in the backseat, resting his head next to her shoulder. She drove in and out of the sunshine and shadows that striped the road. So this was the way it felt to break out of prison, she thought. Every part of her consumed with the single goal of escaping.

  She steered the convertible through another switchback and glanced at the rearview mirror. A white van had appeared out of nowhere, coming up fast behind her. Sunshine Cable appeared backward in black letters across the top of the windshield. The dark head of the driver rose over the steering wheel. She banked into another tight curve. Outside her window, the mountainside—boulders, dusty brush, and pine trees— rushed toward her. On the other side, the mountain dropped off into space. Her stomach went into summersaults. The van was still in the rearview mirror as she came out of the curve.

  She gripped the steering wheel hard. She felt as if she were rappelling down a cliff. One mistake and she would fall into space. The driver could be him. A cable repairman with a white van, waiting for the convertible to pull out of the Stern Ranch. Waiting for her. So this was his new plan—nudge her back bumper and send her careening off the road, crashing down into nothingness. She pressed harder on the accelerator. She could feel the chassis bucking, the wheels skittering.

  A coldness gripped her, icy hands moving over her skin. She was aware of the sound of her own breathing, raspy and quick. She turned through a switchback, then another. Still the van in the rearview mirror, the driver—Erik—playing with her, waiting for the right moment. When would it come? The next turn? Her fingers locked around the steering wheel. The road was dropping fast. The faint roar of morning traffic rose from the highway below.

  And then the road began to level out across the meadow that divided the highway from the mountainside. She pulled to the right, hoping the van would pass, that it wasn’t Erik at the wheel. But the van stayed no more than a couple of feet behind.

  Then she understood: the way he tilted his head and stared through the windshield at something other than the road. He was talking on a cell phone attached to the dashboard. This wasn’t Erik. This was a cable repairman, checking in with the boss after finishing a job. She tried to relax, but her breath came in shuddering gasps, her fingers stiff around the wheel. A flash of anger moved through the fear. The bastard might have killed her up on the mountain—not paying attention to the road, driving like a fool, engrossed in some stupid conversation.

  But that explained only part of the anger, she knew. Would every incident in her life be colored by what had taken place at the town house? Every stranger a possible killer? Every gas station attendant or waiter, every customer or clerk in a grocery store? Every fool driving down the road? God, what was happening to her life?

  She’d been making such headway: building a new career, making new friends. She had gotten over Lawrence; she was going to be fine. Until the night before last, and in an instant—the pop of a gun—everything had changed. Her new life slipping away. Maury clinging to his life in the hospital. The town house and office off-limits. Then Lawrence had appeared again, and this was part of the anger, too. How could she have been so foolish? Falling into his arms, grateful for the smallest sense of the security and comfort she had felt when they were married. Trusting him again. What had she been thinking? That the last year hadn’t happened? That she was frozen in time: Mrs. Lawrence Stern III, spending a few days at the family ranch, protected and insulated from a world where someone wanted to kill her.

  The tires clattered over the metal overpass that spanned the highway, too narrow for the van to pass. The driver still seemed to be talking, nodding and tilting his head. Catherine could see the disgruntled look on his face; he was arguing with someone. The van wobbled behind her. She came off the overpass and turned left onto the entrance to the highway. Maybe he would pass her here. It was a long entrance that flowed gradually into the outside lane of the highway itself. Between the highway and the entrance was a wide patch of bare ground and—odd, this—a brown sedan parked there. No sign of any trouble. No flat tire. No emergency lights flashing. She was closing on the sedan. The head and shoulders of the driver rose over the front seat.

  The driver was waiting.

  Catherine pressed the gas pedal to the floor and jerked the steering wheel to the right as the van shot past. And in that instant she heard the sound of glass shattering, tires squealing. The convertible bumped downhill over rocks and brush, clouds of dust rising over the windows. The engine growled, the tires ground into hillocks of dirt. From the highway above came the noise of screeching cars and metal crashing against metal. The seatbelt dug into her chest. She was conscious of Rex on the floor of the front seat, but she had no idea of how he had gotten there.

  She managed to ease the convertible into a steady downhill drive, steering around the rocks that poked out of the ground, until she bounced onto the narrow dirt frontage road that ran below the highway. She was shaking. She tightened her hands on the steering wheel to keep them from shaking loose. She felt as if the air had hardened in her lungs; her mouth was like dust.

  It was then that she glimpsed the collisions on the highway above: four or five cars scattered over the lanes, spun in different directions, hoods and doors crumpled, windshields smashed. The white van sat sideways in the middle lane, the driver’s door hanging open, the driver slumped over the steering wheel. Other cars stopping, and people running toward the van. She had the picture then: The man in the brown sedan had been waiting for her to pull alongside him, but the van had shot ahead. The driver had taken the bullet meant for her, and the van had plunged into the highway traffic.

  There was no sign of the brown sedan.

  She drove fast along the frontage road. He would know that she had pulled off the entrance. He would know she was on the frontage road, and he would be following her. She spotted the turnoff ahead, and she stepped on the brake pedal and skidded onto the road. Rex had crawled onto the seat and set his muzzle in her lap. She patted his head. “It’s okay,” she said, but it wasn’t okay. She leaned onto the gas pedal and drove upward on a narrow two-track that parted the thick forest. She could feel the tires slipping. In the rearview mirror was nothing except the two-track disappearing past the trees and little clouds of brown dust rolling in the air.

  She kept going. The two-track didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. There were no signs of homes or ranches, no fences threading the trees. And yet the road had to lead somewhere. A timber camp, perhaps. Still the road could be one of hundreds of old wagon roads that combed the mountains, remnants of the gold rush days. The track was getting rougher, turning into a Jeep road, and she had to slow down to maneuver around the boulders that jutted out of the dirt and threatened the undercarriage of the convertible. She bent into a curve, slammed on the brake, and skidded to a stop. A massive boulder rose a
head, like a piece of cliff broken off in the middle of the track. Pine trees and other boulders crowded close. There was no room to pass.

  She started backing down. The road had dissolved in a fog of dust, and she had to twist around and look back to keep the convertible from crashing into a tree. The branch of a ponderosa scraped her arm, and she could feel the warm blood bubbling on her skin. She realized that she had passed a small clearing in the trees. She put the gear into forward, drove into the clearing, and stopped. She left the engine running, rummaged in her bag, and dragged out her cell. Then she went back to rummaging until her fingers found the small, stiff paper of Bustamante’s card. She punched in the number. Searching, the readout said. Searching. Searching. The sounds of sirens reverberated around the mountains. And something else: the faintest echo of an engine gearing down. She felt her stomach heave—a dry heave that left her feeling hot and clammy.

  Finally, the buzzing noise of a phone at police headquarters, then Bustamante’s voice: Detective Bustamante.

  “He just tried to kill me.” Catherine blurted out the words. She could hear the hysteria in her voice.

  “Where are you, Catherine?”

  “Do you hear me? He tried to shoot me.”

  “I hear you. I need you to take a deep breath, try to calm yourself, and tell me where you are.”

  Catherine gulped at the air, but her lungs had gone hard and inert. She couldn’t catch her breath. Rex pushed a cold nose into the palm of her hand. She ran her fingers through his soft fur and managed to tell Bustamante that she was somewhere on a mountainside above Turkey Creek Canyon. She blurted out the rest of it: the brown Ford sedan waiting as she approached the highway, the way she had turned downhill and the white van behind her had shot ahead, the sound of a gunshot, the vehicles colliding on the highway.

  “Hold on a minute.” His voice was so calm that she wondered if he’d heard anything she’d said. Her chest still felt tight, and her breathing came in shallow, raspy gasps. The cell seemed lifeless in her hand. She was aware of the weight of the dog’s head against her thigh. Her heart was doing pirouettes in her chest.

  Then Bustamante’s voice again, igniting the cell back into life. “State Patrol report is just coming in of a multicar accident on Highway 285, east of Conifer. Looks like one fatality, possibly two. Several people injured. Emergency vehicles are responding now. What kind of car was he driving?”

  “I don’t know. Brown sedan. Ford, I think. It was nondescript. What difference does it make? He’s coming after me.”

  “Try to tell me exactly where you are.”

  “I’m at the dead end of a two-track road up the mountain from the frontage road. I don’t know where I am!”

  “I’ll notify the state patrol. They’ll send an officer.”

  “I’ll be dead by then. I have to get out of here now.” A barrage of ideas tumbled in her head. She could take off walking, she and Rex. They could walk east through the forest for a distance, then downhill to the frontage road. Someone would come by, give them a lift into Denver.

  The brown sedan could come by.

  “He’s looking for me,” she said. “He could be waiting somewhere on 285. He could be on the frontage road.” She was thinking that she had passed a road before she’d realized that she had to take the next one. Erik would assume she had taken the first road, which meant that he was searching on the mountain slope to the west.

  “Okay.” Bustamante’s voice again. “I’ve pulled up a map of the area. A few miles east of the collision, there’s a road that loops east and connects to Highway 470. You can get it from the frontage road.”

  “Are you listening to me? He could be waiting on the frontage road.”

  “I’m notifying the state patrol now to detain the driver of any brown Ford sedan on the frontage road or stopped along the highway. The road is not more than a few miles from you. You’ve got a chance. I’d advise you to take it.”

  God. When Erik didn’t find her on the first road up the mountain, he’d check the next one. She only had minutes before he drove up here, and she would be trapped.

  “I’m on my way to the scene now. I want to see you at police headquarters this afternoon. I’ll be waiting for you,” Bustamante was saying when she pressed the end key and tossed the cell onto the dashboard. She hunched forward and ran her hands along Rex’s flanks and legs. Nothing seemed to be broken. Then she buried her face in his soft fur, a jumble of sensations colliding around her: the weight of tears behind her eyes, the damp sheath of perspiration between her and the dog, the steady thump of his heartbeat.

  She pulled herself upright, mopped at the moisture on her cheeks, and backed out onto the road. Then she started downhill, gripping the steering wheel hard, half expecting the brown sedan to appear around the next curve. The rear end shimmied sideways, the tires skidded on the dirt. Through the trees, she could see the empty sections of the frontage road below. Another couple of curves and she was down the mountain. She tapped on the brake as she approached the turnout, scanning the road in both directions. There was no sign of the brown sedan.

  She turned onto the frontage road, pressed down on the gas pedal, and drove for the road that Bustamante had said was no more than a few miles ahead. She saw it then, the green sign with white letters that said: Highway 470 Next Right. She slowed into the turn and started winding down a mountain—wide, gentle turns that gave onto occasional views of Denver in the distance, hazy in the heat, and beyond, the sweep of the plains. Still she kept glancing in the rearview mirror. No cars behind her, no sign of the brown sedan. Bustamante was right; this was her chance.

  A new realization started over her, like a slow fever. This wasn’t about any article she had written. Newcomb and the TV reporters had covered the same stories, but she was the only one targeted by a killer. That brought her back to the questions Bustamante had asked about her personal life. Lawrence? Lawrence had tried to help her; given her ten thousand dollars to help her hide from a killer. She tried to shake away the notion that he could be a killer himself; it made no sense. Still, he’d left the ranch ahead of her; he could have waited for her to come down the mountain, cross the overpass, and turn onto the highway entrance.

  The notion was crazy. It defied everything she believed true, contradicted her sense of reality. She forced her thoughts to loop back to her work. There was the Sand Creek story—two articles so far, a story told by the elders about a hundred-and-fifty-year-old massacre combined with history she’d culled out of library books that had been available for years.

  The casino was news. But she hadn’t yet written the story. She had missed the deadline for today’s Journal, and the story wouldn’t appear until tomorrow. In any case, the story was probably all over last night’s news, and Dennis Newcomb would have made certain it was on the front page of this morning’s Mirror. He would have covered everything: the rally on the plains, the speeches given by Whitehorse and Arcott, all the details about the proposed casino and hotel.

  But the other reporters wouldn’t have an interview with Peter Arcott. That would be her exclusive piece of the story, if Whitehorse had been straight with her. She shook her head and blinked into the sunshine. Think.

  Sand Creek was the story she was working on now. It was her story. Funny how she always knew that the story belonged to her, as if no other reporter could get it right. There had been other stories that had taken hold of her, demanded that she dig out the facts, refused to give her any peace of mind until she had written them. Stories that had shouted: Important. Sand Creek was that kind of story. It was still unfolding—the casino, the claim of genocide, and an old massacre that the Arapahos and Cheyennes had never forgotten.

  Someone didn’t want her to write the rest of the story.

  She wasn’t sure when the road had swung around the flank of the mountain, but she was taking gentle turns that swung out over the silvery highway below. Her thigh was numb from the weight of Rex’s head. She nudged him onto the passenger sea
t with one hand. He settled himself around the bulk of her bag and rested his head on the rim of the door, intent on the trees passing outside.

  She took the last curve, turned onto the highway, and drove toward the southern edge of Denver. Traffic was light, a broken string of cars and trucks shimmering in the sun. She felt a strange calmness settling over her, a gathering of forces, every part of her focused on what she had to do to stay alive. She reached for the cell on the dashboard and pressed a couple of keys. Three rings, and Marie’s voice floated out of nowhere: “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Catherine said.

  “Oh, darling. Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay. Listen, I need to see you right away.”

  “Of course. I’m right here.”

  “No. I can’t come to the house.” He knows everything about me. He will look for me at the house. “You know the restaurant on Osage where we used to go?” It had been there for more than one hundred years, the walls sagging with photos and mementos of Denver’s history. Her parents used to take her there when she was a little girl. It was like visiting a history museum that served delicious hamburgers.

  “My goodness. I haven’t been there in years.” And that was the point, Catherine was thinking. Erik would never look for her there. “You’re scaring me.”

  Catherine glanced at her watch: 11:14 a.m. “Meet me there in thirty minutes,” she said.

  13

  At nine o’clock that morning, Harry Colbert, administrative assistant to Senator George Russell, knocked on the door to the senator’s private office. Without waiting for a response, he stepped inside and stood still, arms at his sides. The brown envelope with the printed report brushed against the pant leg of his navy blue suit. The senator lay sprawled on one of the twin sofas arranged in an L-shape in the far corner. His mouth hung open, his snoring was jerky and erratic. A little line of saliva glistened at the corner of his chin. The comb-over of his dyed brown hair had slipped, revealing slices of pink scalp.