“Some date this turned out to be,” Pilate snorted.
Kate slapped the side of his head and led him to the guest bedroom.
When they arrived at the county hospital Saturday morning, Doc Hutton apologetically informed them that they had put Grif in a Diprivan-induced coma to give him a better chance to fight the swelling and damage he’d sustained in the beating.
“This is a good thing,” Hutton said. “It really can help the body concentrate on healing itself.”
“May I see him?” Kate asked.
Pilate sat with Kara in the waiting room, looking at old magazines while Kate visited Grif.
“Is Grandpa going to be okay?” Kara said, closing a dog- eared issue of Highlights.
“You bet,” Pilate said. “The doctors are gonna make him all better.”
“Good. He’s my only grandpa,” she said, resting her head on Pilate’s shoulder.
“I know, sweetheart.” He stroked her hair. “I know.”
Kate dropped Pilate off and headed home. She and Kara needed to sleep.
Lenny had moved on at daybreak. He would be back to watch the house at nightfall.
Pilate made himself a cup of coffee, dumped several heaping spoons of sugar in it, lit a cigarette, and sat on his living room floor. He shuffled through the stack of papers about the Bernard murders and reread several pages rapidly.
His eyes danced over dozens of lines on several pages until he found what he was looking for: the one fact about the Bernard murder that put it all together.
“That’s got to be it,” Pilate said to himself. “It’s fucking got to be.”
Pilate’s car was still in Jimmy’s garage, but he really wanted to have a look around the cornfield behind Grif’s place, and he didn’t need any companions. His gut told him Scovill was a trustworthy sort, but he also knew that Scovill’s father had played an important role in that situation all those years ago. That meant Scovill could be in on the whole thing, and if that was the case, Kate and Kara really were in danger. In an attempt to obey the better-to-be-safe- than-sorry rule, Pilate had to consider Morgan Scovill untrustworthy and keep an eye on him.
He slept fitfully, rising early Sunday morning to the sound of church bells. He contemplated trying to get Jimmy to release his car from the garage, but he knew that would be a fool’s errand on a Sunday. Krall had mentioned before that Jimmy considered Sundays holy in his own way: The mechanic celebrated the Sabbath by enjoying a case of beer in front of the tube.
So, Pilate made his regular Sunday call to his parents, careful not to worry them with anything beyond the events at work. His mother filled him in on family gossip and his father on the latest news of the long-storied plant closing.
Just before he said goodbye, his mother took the phone back from Pilate’s father. “Johnny,” she said, choosing the tone she always reserved for her most motherly moments. “What’s wrong?” “Nothing, Mom,” he lied, fighting the urge to spill his guts.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” she said. “Are you taking your vitamins?” her pet name for his antidepressants whenever she mentioned them in front of Pilate’s father, for talk of his son taking antidepressants always made John’s dad uncomfortable.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“Johnny, do you need to come home?”
“Yes,” he wanted to say. “I’m in over my head here. It’s like when I went away to camp when I was ten. I cried every day because I wanted to come home and read books and just be left alone, except here there are bad people doing bad things, Mommy, and it’s dangerous!“ Instead, he could only answer, “Mom, I’m fine—just the usual fitting in and new job issues, you know?”
His mother paused. “All right, Johnny, but if you decide you want to come home, we’re here for you.”
“I know, Mom. I know, and I appreciate it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By three o’clock, he’d checked the temperature on the old thermometer screwed into the wall outside. It was a partly sunny forty degrees, and he decided it would be okay to hike it.
Pilate rummaged through his kitchen junk drawer and found his Swiss Army knife, a small flashlight, and a glasscutter Samantha had once used to make stained glass Christmas ornaments. He dug in his closet until he found a mini survival kit in a plastic jug, something he’d gotten for Christmas the previous year. He grabbed a couple of granola bars and a half-liter of bottled water and shoved it all in his beat-up leather backpack.
He donned long underwear, jeans, hiking boots, and a sweatshirt. He put on his wool pea coat, threw the backpack over one shoulder, and walked out the door into the sunlight. The January sun reflected off partially melted patches of ice and snow. He slipped his sunglasses on and walked down the street toward the soy and cornfields that rimmed the edge of town on the way to Goss City.
He had to walk past a few houses on his way there; the carillon bells played show tunes. Within a few blocks he was warm under his coat and began to wish he had not worn the long johns.
After about fifteen minutes, he reached the main road leading out of Cross. Once he crossed over that and into the fields, he knew he would be hard to detect, unless someone was watching the fields.
As he reached the road, a familiar luxury SUV stopped beside him. The passenger window rolled down, revealing Jack Lindstrom, his catalog store driving gloves gripping the wheel. “Need a ride?” he said, his tone pleasant, though his eyes were as cold as ever.
“Oh, no, sir. Thanks,” Pilate said. “I’m just out taking a hike, trying to get some fresh air.”
Lindstrom eyed his backpack. “Hiking? In January? In this weather?”
“Not so bad,” Pilate said, cringing at his breath, which was visible in the cold as he spoke. He glanced in the back seat of Lindstrom’s SUV. Several rolls of what appeared to be architectural plans were strewn across it.
“Uh-huh,” Lindstrom said.
The SUV engine idled as the two men looked at each other’s faces.
“So, I hear you’ve been seeing Kate Nathaniel.” Lindstrom’s eyes narrowed.
Pilate just looked back at Lindstrom. “Well, anyway, enjoy your hike.”
“Will do,” Pilate said, taking a step back from the vehicle as the window went back up.
Then, suddenly, the window stopped in its tracks and rolled back down. “Oh…and Mr. Pilate…”
“Yes, Dr. Lindstrom?”
“Your contract is not going to be renewed,” he said, smiling. “We don’t need you. I just thought you’d like to know so you can plan your summer. Trevathan will give you the paperwork.”
Pilate didn’t bother saying another word to the man, as he had nothing else to say—at least nothing he could say.
Lindstrom’s power window rose, and the SUV slowly pulled away.
“And fuck you very much,” Pilate said.
He strode toward the field, his boots crunching the cold earth within a minute or two. As he walked, Pilate saw several small yellow surveyors’ flags placed a few yards apart here and there. “Shit,” he said. This was Bartley’s land—the land that was meant to be sold to the wilier of the town’s biggest bastards. All this for a land deal?
“Forget it, John. It’s Chinatown.” Simon’s voice echoed in his head.
Pilate soldiered on, crossing from a field into a small grove of trees in a small valley. A massive oak tree and several smaller maples constituted the grove, which hid a hunter’s deer stand about ten feet off the ground.
He climbed up into the stand and sat under the camouflage netting amidst several empty beer cans and beef jerky wrappers.
Pilate peered out the gun slits in the deer stand, viewing nothing but empty fields. A cloud front was coming in from the north, but it didn’t look too threatening to anything but the sunshine.
“Well, John, congratulations! You got your ass fired,” the singsong voice of Simon pierced the silence. “This has to be a new record for you.”
“Not now,” Pilate sa
id.
“And just what the hell are you doing out here? Trespassing, playing commando and Columbo all at the same time? Really, John. It’s kind of pathetic, don’t you think? Who do you think you are?”
Pilate suddenly felt a terrific pain behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples and lit a cigarette, then squeezed his eyes closed.
He sat for a peaceful moment, sensing nothing but the breeze in his ears and smoke in his lungs.
Simon cleared his throat, as if he was tired of being ignored. “Still here.”
Pilate opened his eyes and saw Simon’s shape under the netting in the opposite corner of the cramped deer stand.
“Why not end this? Permanently escape this vale of tears? Shuffle off this mortal coil? Take the dirt nap?” Simon said. “How long can you keep this up anyway?” the specter tempted. “Will Kate want anything to do with you when she finds out you got canned?”
“Fuck off.”
“Or will it be when she finds out that you’re a tad mental and too stubborn or too stupid to take your medication?” Simon shifted under the net. “Then again, maybe she’ll just get killed because you and these hicks have no idea how to protect her, you worthless piece of—”
Pilate lunged at the shape under the net, a loud crack signifying the side of the deer stand giving way. He fell ten feet and landed hard on the frozen ground with his backpack under him. The plastic survival kit case made a cracking sound as the wind escaped Pilate’s lungs.
His eyes opened into cautious slits. The world was vertical, though his field of vision was horizontal. Pilate mentally inventoried his bones, testing his arms and legs for pain or fractures; nothing was broken, as far as he could discern.
Something moved past his field of vision a few yards away. An undernourished doe gingerly padded around, looking for food.
Pilate laughed, spooking the deer back into the recesses of the grove. “Run, Bambi, run,” he said weakly, sitting up.
He had been unconscious for only a minute or two, but it was long enough that the clouds now eclipsed the sun. He looked at his watch. Four thirty? Already? I have to get moving.
Pulling himself up on his haunches, he felt his back pop; it felt good. He checked the contents of his bag and found the survival kit case cracked in pieces, its contents spilled loosely all over the bottom of his bag: waterproof matches, a surprisingly unbroken mirror, compass, flint, needle, thread, and bandages.
He opened the water and gulped down half of it. Then, standing gingerly to his feet, he took a moment to get his bearings. Once he had regained his composure a bit, he headed again toward the highway and the back way into Nathaniel’s Mortuary.
An hour later, after a few wrong turns and ripping a two-inch hole in his pants on some barbed wire, Pilate spied the Nathaniel place from his terraced hilltop perch. There were no cars around and not much Sunday traffic passing on the state highway in front. It was never exactly a traffic jam anyway.
His watch read five fifteen, and the sunrays were making their last stand. It was colder, too, and the long johns seemed now a brilliant bit of planning. He crouched and headed down the terraced hill into a small line of trees that grew like a planned perimeter around the cornfield that guarded the back of the mortuary.
Pilate did his best seen-it-in-the-movies stealth routine as he navigated in the twilight through the cornfields. He felt scared, exhilarated, and more than a little idiotic.
An owl hooted just as he made it to the side door of the mortuary that he and Scovill had exited the day before. Pilate thought of his old college roommate, Brian, a U.S. Army paratrooper before college. When Pilate had asked Brian what it felt like to jump out of an airplane, Brian had said, “Oh it’s fine. A little squirt of piss runs down your leg, and then you’re okay.” The hoot of that owl had given Pilate his first squirt-of-piss experience, and to his surprise, just like Brian said, once that was over, he was, in fact, okay.
He put a gloved hand on the doorknob and turned, but it was locked, just as he expected. What he was counting on was getting in one of the three basement windows along the back of the building. He hoped he could manage to open one, and that it would be big enough for him to squeeze through.
Pilate knelt beside the one closest to the door, fishing around in his backpack for the flashlight. He shone it into his backpack until he found the glasscutter, quickly identified the location of the lock on the window, turned off the light, and applied the glasscutter to the pane. He tried to cut a half-moon shape large enough for his hand, but the old glass wouldn’t cut. In fact, the stupid glasscutter barely made a mark. Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief he was not. Pilate slipped the useless glasscutter in his coat pocket and punched the glass.
The entire window shattered. “Shit.”
Listening for signs of alarm and hearing nothing, Pilate punched out a few more shards of glass and dropped his bag inside. It made a loud thump on the floor below. He backed his legs inside the window. His hips went in without a hitch, but his bulky pea coat bunched up around the doorframe.
Crap.
He wriggled, gravity pulling him further until the coat was around his ears. He pushed against the ground and fell inside, landing badly on his feet, his right ankle popping—and not in the feel-good way like his back had after his plummet from the deer stand. “Ow!“ he said in spite of himself.
He tested his weight on the ankle. It was okay for the time being, but he figured it would be complaining in the morning. Pilate felt around on the floor for his backpack, then removed the flashlight. He clicked it on and waited for his eyes to adjust.
The small light beam diffused at about three feet as he carefully crept toward the center of the room, glass from the shattered overhead lights crunching underfoot like rock candy. The small, blood- spattered desk came into view, and the bodies of Martin and Millie Nathaniel were lying sentinel just a few feet away.
The third table was bare; the body from the nursing home had been carted off to the funeral home in Vetsville, he supposed, unless it was in the freezer, and he wasn’t curious enough to look.
He felt like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, minus the seersucker suit and tennis shoes. His mother loved that show almost as much as she loved Columbo. Pilate wondered what she would think of what he was doing in that minute and if she’d think him anything like Peter Falk.
Acclimated to the layout of the room, Pilate pointed the light back to the desk. Behind it was the locked closet Scovill had left alone when they’d examined the crime scene the night before.
Pilate inched carefully across the room, careful not to disturb anything. He tried the door of the closet, but it was still locked. He retraced his steps back to the desk. He had to find something to force the lock.
He opened the center drawer of the desk, looking for a letter opener or screwdriver. He found one with a large, ornate Goss City Kiwanis logo on the end. He picked it up, revealing a brass key attached to a large paperclip. He quickly took the key, went over to the door, and slid it into the lock. He gave the knob a turn, and the door opened with a loud creak.
Pilate felt an emotion akin to winning a slot machine jackpot. He quickly entered the walk-in closet and closed the door. He banged his head on the single light bulb dangling in the center of the room. He pulled the chain on the light, and his pupils contracted painfully.
Once his eyes adjusted, he spied several wall-to-wall shelves, each full of cardboard boxes and bottles of chemicals. He removed a sheet from a stack of new white sheets and tucked it under the door to block any light that might escape the sixty-watt bulb swinging from the ceiling.
Pilate turned his attention to the shelving. Working left to right, he quickly read the labels on pedestrian boxes marked “Perfect Tone“ and “Eotone.” Then he moved past those to boxes of mortician’s wax and a box marked “Professional’s Choice Cosmetic Kit.”
Pilate examined older-looking boxes on the top shelf. Some were stuffed with paperwork. One contained Christmas decorations recently packed
away after the last holiday. Pilate started to replace the box when he noticed a cardboard cylinder unceremoniously shoved behind a couple of bottles of red liquid marked “B&G Lyf-Lyk Tints.” Standing on his tiptoes, Pilate reached for the cylinder. His fingertips grazed it, but it was too far back to grasp.
He looked around in the small closet and found a stepladder tucked between two of the shelves. He set it up and climbed to the third rung. Grunting, Pilate reached into the dark recesses of the shelf. An outraged spider crawled up his hand, and the teacher jerked his hand back, shaking the spider off. “That’s all I need. A black widow bite,” he said under his breath. He reached back in and grasped the cylinder with both hands, gently drawing it out.
In the light, a dark dust that was actually soot covered the heavy cardboard cylinder. He wiped away the soot that coated a desiccated label glued to the top and could finally read, “Brady Floyd Bernard, 1909-1963.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pilate sat on the step ladder, holding Brady Bernard in his hands. He turned the surprisingly heavy, soot-covered cylinder
over, the ashes rolling around inside like a tragic hourglass.
Ironically, the ashes had survived the fire a few years prior, and the tornado as well. He simply had to open the cylinder. It was his grail—holy or not—the reason he’d ventured there. For a moment, he considered that what he was doing was really no better than what those thugs had done to Martin and Millie’s crypt.
But I…I have to. For Kate and Kara. Perhaps for my own sanity.
I have to be right about something. I have to…to do what’s right.
He set the cylinder down, opened his Swiss Army knife, and carefully cut the heavy tape wound around the center of the cylinder; it cut away easily. He pulled the top off the cylinder with a whoosh, the sound like that of opening a poster mailing tube, and Bernard’s ashes rushed back into the world for the first time in more than forty years. Pilate turned his head and covered his mouth to avoid inhaling what was left of the man.
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