The Black Silent

CHAPTER 26

H aley slipped inside the house, spooked out of her mind, sure that at any second the owner would materialize with a gun. Her body wanted to sweat despite the shivering cold of wet clothes and she caught herself breathing as if in a race.

"We haven't seen anybody," the lady of the house was saying to Frick's men.

The back door entered into a small vestibule, then into the kitchen. She could see through to the front door.

The man of the house stood with the woman.

"Is she dangerous?" he asked.

"She was with the guy who killed Crew Wentworth," said the officer. "She escaped with the killer. It would pay to be really careful."

"Should we evacuate the house?"

"I doubt that's necessary, ma'am. We'll be checking every inch around here. Keep your doors locked. Someone else thought they might have seen her just down the way, but she's probably not going to crash through a window. She's running."

Then Frick's men were asking about the neighborhood and who was away for the holidays and how they might get in the neighboring houses. Haley checked her watch and nearly choked. The goal was for her to pick Sam up in thirty minutes and she was stuck in a genteel country house. She resisted panic and the urge to run out the back. It would be suicide until Frick's men were finished with their search.

Quickly she glanced around and noticed two small wooden-slatted doors off the kitchen, probably a small pantry. There was another cubbyhole with a computer, where someone had been working. She had to move or be discovered. Haley proceeded from the vestibule into the kitchen. On the far side of a large counter was a spacious family room done in green leather and fabrics echoing forest themes. No place to hide there.

"Are the neighbors just through the trees there at home?" the officer asked the couple.

"No, they aren't," the husband said. "They went to the sunshine for the holidays."

"We need to get in."

"How about if we give you the key and you bring it back?" the wife offered.

Haley tried the small slatted doors.

Sure enough, it was a tiny pantry, just large enough to hold her and her bag of clothes.

The doors had an external latch, so she had to leave them slightly ajar.

The officers left, and Haley heard someone come back down the hall. She peeked to find the woman heading for the computer. Her heart sank. It seemed "Mr. and Mrs.

Gentleman Farmer" were going to hang around the kitchen.

"I'm tired," the man said. He was tall and slender, sandy-haired, square-jawed, and had a confident face.

Haley did a double take. The man had caught up with the woman before she reached the computer. Now it seemed as if he were rubbing her backside with his pelvis.

Haley watched, looking for any advantage or opportunity this bit of romance might offer. The woman, trim and blond, wore an elegant, pale green dress with a judicious application of makeup. Perhaps she'd had something in mind at the start of the evening.

"You're a voyeur, dear," she said.

"What do you mean?" He kept hugging her from behind.

"You were watching me in the shower."

Ugh. Haley wished they would take their growing passion to bed.

"I love you…" Then the man whispered something more.

Haley imagined it was dark and sexy. Then he began planting little kisses on her neck.

Maybe he did have some understanding of females. Then he started gently rubbing her shoulder. Prince Charming was obviously working hard at it.

Haley cursed her bad luck.

"Why can't you do this when you haven't been spying on me?" the woman asked, giggling as he kissed her ears.

"I was hardly spying." He tried a kiss on the lips.

Time was crawling. It occurred to Haley that she was carrying her dry clothes. It was risky to change now, but the clammy clothes were making her shiver. Carefully, Haley began undressing. It took less than two minutes, every second more nerve-racking than the last. As fast as she could, she pulled on the dry clothes. She was desperate to leave and get to Sam.

She heard faint rustling sounds.

"Maybe we should wait until bed," Mrs. Gentleman Farmer said. But the woman didn't really sound at all interested in waiting.

Haley glanced back through the crack, unable to deny herself the next installment.

"I guess not." The woman answered her own question.

Haley bit her lip to keep from laughing.

Now they were French-kissing and the man had his wife's dress unbuttoned. As the soft light played over their bodies, Haley felt the red moving up her neck. For just a second she watched them delving into tender intimacy. When she closed her eyes, images came back to her from thirteen years previous. She was nineteen. It was the Fourth of July. On each day of his three-day visit, she and Sam went to a dock off Brown Island, a friend's pier. They would lie in the sun and talk for hours, and watch the water-the sleek grace of the sailboats, the noisy grind of the powerboats. On the third and final day of his visit, Sam covered her back with suntan lotion. His light touch had given her pleasure. She hadn't known what to think or do, but he was reaching much more than her body.

From his fingers came a longing, almost more than she could bear. Haley recalled his whispers and his promise and the pain of it all. He said he would love her forever. Sam was not a man of idle words. Then came the days of waiting. She switched channels and was back in the closet.

More movements of a chair and the sound of the man's zipper. Heavy fabric hit the floor. His jeans.

"I love you," he whispered over and over.

"You are so good," she said. "So damn good."

It wasn't an original thought, but Haley could tell that Mrs. Gentleman Farmer meant every word. Through some slight miscalculation of her peripheral vision, Haley saw what was happening and made herself look away.

The last time Haley had spied on someone, she'd been watching Sam. They were adults then. It had happened nine months ago, not long after his return to San Juan Island to convalesce. Sam was on a weight bench, his enormous chest expanded, sweat covering his body, his breathing rough, like an old train.

Sam's face looked more intense than Haley had ever seen it. Here, apparently, he let the demon out of him, in the sweat and in the great blasts of air. Fighting the iron, he showed no good manners or signs of culture, he wore no disguise to keep the guttural aspects of the mind from rising to the countenance. At the weight bench Sam was something different.

Back in the closet Haley caught a glimpse of the woman's head flung back as she sat astride the man, her body and soul seemingly in perfect harmony with his. Haley put her fingers in her ears to stop the sounds of their lovemaking.

In her mind Sam's body gleamed, his long, flowing hair tousled. The sweat sheen traced the exquisite contours of muscle and sinew free of fat. He had the proportionality of a ripped gymnast. All her senses had been captive to the image of Sam: the steady rhythm of his breath, the deep groans near the finish, the quivering of muscle as he forced the weights, his arms like spring steel, his chest a beautiful smooth landscape of powerful curves, and the lower abdomen rippled like the rolling tan sands of the Sahara.

Haley removed her fingers from her ears for a moment. From the resonance in Mrs.

Gentleman Farmer's voice, she seemed to be in the homestretch. Their rhythm could be heard in the squeaks of the chair.

Sam was laboring under the weights. As she had watched him, something beyond the heat of the sexual wanting, mixed with nervous caution, had stirred inside Haley. It felt like some sort of spiritual event. Nothing massive, nothing like a rebirth or revelation, no burst of hope like spring flowers. It felt subtle and growing, a conviction, at one of the worst periods in her life, that things would start over for her.

The research-theft scandal had been in full bloom. Days before Haley had received a letter so terrible that it had sent her after Sam, desperate that he'd talk to her, reassure her. The letter had come from her dearest college friend and roommate, but it had a cold, distant tone and none of the warmth of their many months together. The worst part was the final line:

For whatever reason, you have chosen to betray a fellow scientist. You disdain academic pursuit. I'm afraid there is no place here for you at the present time. I don't know how, but there must be a way to redeem yourself. For the moment I cannot recommend you to the director.

Her "friend" had signed it, Trying to understand.

The letter had shaken her badly. Ben was in Seattle, with no way for her to contact him.

For a few moments she had been utterly despondent, but then, as was usually the case with Haley, her sorrow had turned to determination. It was the determination she'd learned as a child, to keep going, keep fighting the curse of her mother's heritage.

On this day she had been in such need of an ear to help keep her from a pit of depression that when she couldn't find Ben, she had gone to find Sam.

Haley had not been with a man in a year. Her mind still swirled with Sam on the weight bench. She opened her eyes and unplugged her ears and saw that her unwitting hosts were moving around. What if they came to the pantry? Now her heart thudded for a different reason. She opened her eyes as the woman stepped into her dress. Standing behind her, naked, her husband wrapped her in his arms as the dress remained draped around her waist. Her mostly nude body was enfolded in his, together a symphony of contours rolling the light.

Dear God, no. Why couldn't they be a typical, bored married couple? For a few moments Mr. Gentleman Farmer looked like he might be interested in a rematch.

"I've got to do the books, honey. Really. If you need more, it's in bed tonight," she said.

Thank God, Haley thought.

But hubby didn't give up, kissing her neck, running his hands over her bottom. Slowly she started to become pliable and the woman's resolve melted. The dress dropped to the floor.

Didn't they realize this was Friday Harbor? Not Paris. Not Hawaii.

Haley closed her eyes and returned to Sam. As she spied on him through the crack at the door hinges, she marveled at the expressions on his face. One of those expressions was most important. It was not the look as he lifted the weights- the look she found so sexy that it made her grind her legs together-she would never tell anyone that-it was the look of Sam at rest.

Sam had a spotter in the room-after all, the weights were on the order of three hundred pounds, and you didn't lift weights like that without a partner. It was amazing that a man with a bad back could bench-press that kind of weight. The spotter was Jeffrey, Haley's cousin, who worked at the small gym. When Sam rested, he would sit up on the bench and Jeffrey would sit beside him, unconsciously mimicking him.

Sitting there, they looked like two old friends-except that one of them had the mind of a ten-year-old. There was nothing about it that was extraordinary except the attention that Sam gave Jeffrey. To watch from afar, you'd think that everything Jeffrey said somehow fascinated Sam. Perhaps it was guile or perhaps in some strange way Sam was able to remain interested in mundane stories about the tourists, or in the latest tale about the barber's new chair.

Something about Sam's interest in Jeffrey turned Haley on even more than the sweat and muscle and the body.

Jeffrey did most of the talking. He wanted to know how to do certain things with the weights. Haley watched as Sam explained and invited Jeffrey to give it a try. She found it difficult to put what she witnessed into words. It wasn't enough to say that Sam was a nice guy or that he cared about other people. There was a sweetness to this mysterious, wounded man that caught hold of her, that seemed at odds with the great caution that she felt.

There came a moment that day where her shame at spying and her caution about Sam overcame her desire to talk and she quietly left with all her questions still inside her.

Safely inside the car, with the motor running, she thought she felt something in her besides her own anger at the Sanker injustice. It was dim, intermittent, and gasping to survive. It lived under the load of stark despair, but it seemed to her like a tiny ember in the dark of the night.

It was hope. At that moment back in February, and only for an instant, she had thought Sam might be worth another try. The thought left as quickly as it had come.

Haley glanced at her unwitting hosts again. She was running out of time. The police must have completed their search. It was now or never. Unbelievably, Mr. and Mrs.

Gentleman Farmer were in full swing, starting over. They were in a deep clench.

Apparently not everyone was bored with marriage.

Haley slipped out from the pantry as the woman commenced a deep kiss. Three steps and she was at the back door, slowly pulling it open. It creaked.

"Hey," the woman shouted. "Oh, my God," said the husband. Adrenaline shot through Haley. She stepped through the door and was out in the backyard, running with everything she had, watching desperately for the fence. Without thought she high jumped with her hand on a wooden post, the basic moves of her torso and legs left over from high-school track and field. Amazingly, she didn't rip her skin on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence. There was one cop car out on the road. Nobody behind her.

Fortunately, Frick's people had vanished. Unfortunately, they had probably moved toward the airport.

"How's the dog doing?" Frick asked the handler over the radio.

"He's running back and forth. I don't get it. In and out of a fire pit. Never seen anything like it. Darker than hell out here, except when the moon's out from behind a cloud."

"I hope it occurred to you that you're chasing a pro. He's making an ass of you and that dog. He's escaping."

"What should I do?"

"Don't try to follow a trail, just try to use the dog to intercept him along the beach and send cars along the roads in the nearby neighborhoods. Focus on intercepting him until you get a fresh scent."

"Roger that."

"The officers chasing after Haley Walther are calling," Delia announced.

Frick took the phone.

"Have you got her?" he asked.

"Not yet," his man answered.

"What's going on?"

"She was in a house. A couple was home. They didn't know she was there." He went on to explain.

"How long ago did she run?" Frick said.

"Five or ten minutes."

"Damn. She could go a long way," Frick said. "She's in decent shape. Figure a mile radius."

"Maybe the airport."

"Anderson's plane is down," Frick said. "Two men just checked it. Mechanic was there, but it's in pieces. Could be another plane, though, so scour the airport. We'll call in more men, cover the roads. There's a ton of houses in a two-mile circle."

"Roger. She can't have gone that far."

"Oh yeah? Just give her another ten minutes."

Frick knew that something needed to change.

He called McStott on the speaker phone.

"Anything new on your end?"

"Yeah, they found something of interest."

"Who they?" Frick said, annoyed at McStott's habit of starting in the middle of a thought.

"The men searching Lattimer Gibbons's house found some empty vials. The kind you would use for storing organ-ics in a freezer," McStott said. "It looked like stuff we found in Ben's lab. We think he packages whatever he's making with glycerol. That way he can keep it very cold without freezing and he can take out small portions at a time and he doesn't have a thawing problem."

"What's inside these new vials?" asked Frick.

"We're working on that. Probably organics. But frankly there is no way we'll find out quick from a tiny bit of residue. In fact, we need more than a tiny bit. Assuming there is residue."

"Well, if you've got it, can't you figure out what it is?"

"Not necessarily," said McStott.

"Call me when you have something." He hung up, disgusted, knowing that at any cost he had to find Ben, Haley, or Sarah.