Last Words

1

January 24, 2014

It was snowing in Indiana.

Mark had boarded the plane in sunshine and seventy degrees, and two hours later it touched down in swirling winds that whipped snow around the tarmac. It was just beginning to accumulate, a dusting in the distant fields. The ground crew wore face masks and gloves. Passengers were pulling heavy jackets down from the overhead bins. When the flight attendant handed Mark his thin cashmere blazer, he realized that it might have been prudent to check the forecast. The truth was he didn’t even own anything like what the others were putting on. He hadn’t been north of Atlanta in five years now and hadn’t intended to be again. He’d seen enough blizzards in his youth. When he’d left Montana at seventeen, he’d hoped never to see snow again. Never to see a lot of things again.

The car waiting for him was a Ford Escape, and he was grateful to see it had all-wheel drive.

“How bad is it supposed to get?” he asked the rental attendant at the exit booth as he pulled out his driver’s license. The attendant was also wearing a wool mask and gloves. Everyone here was dressed like they were prepared to rob a bank.

“This? Just flurries, my man. Not bad at all. You’ll be fine.”

“All right.” Mark put up the window fast because the snow was landing on his lap and he was freezing already. Brought back memories: an April blizzard howling out of the mountains and across the plains, Mark searching for his mother in the snow, finding her half frozen and fully drunk. He’d left her three weeks later, taking only a backpack and a small wad of cash secured with a rubber band.

He pulled away from the airport and got on the highway, bound for Garrison, Indiana, on a fool’s errand while back in Florida, the board of directors for Innocence Incorporated gathered to discuss whether they had to terminate him or if a suspension and pay cut would suffice.

“Get the lay of the land and a sense of the players,” London had told him, shoving a small case file across the desk, “but mostly, just get the hell out of my sight. I’ll be in touch once the board has met.”

The truth of it was that his boss didn’t want to risk Mark’s speaking personally to the board. The questions they would ask — How can you reconcile your actions with the mission of this organization? — were not questions London could afford to have Mark answer.

Thus Indiana. You wanted to keep the live grenades out of the room when you could.

He had to leave the interstate almost immediately, and then it was onto state highways blasted by strong gusts of wind as he drove first across flat farm country and then into unbroken, old-growth forest, heading southeast. He was surprised by how wooded and steep southern Indiana was. The flat fields around Indianapolis had fit with his vision of the state, but these forested hills did not. He’d been on the road for two hours before he reached Garrison and rolled into the downtown square — which was literally a square, with a courthouse at the center and storefronts on the sides facing it, like a Hollywood set for a middle-American small town. Cue up the John Mellencamp. The square had buildings on only three sides, though. The fourth was an empty expanse, leaving the downtown feeling unfinished, as if somewhere along the line, the people who’d settled here had decided they’d made a mistake. Street signs promised him that the sheriff’s department was just a block beyond the courthouse. Step one. The case started wherever the file ended.

This was what he knew from the case abstract that Innocence Incorporated had provided: In September of 2004, a seventeen-year-old girl named Sarah Martin had entered a recently opened tourist cave called Trapdoor Caverns with her boyfriend with the intention of teenage romance. Noises spooked them, the boyfriend went to check things out, and the girl hid, but she did too good a job of it. When the boyfriend returned, she was missing, and he ran out of the cave and reported that she was lost. Security cameras validated his story and his timeline. There was no indication of criminal activity. Searchers had no luck finding her. Then a man named Ridley Barnes, whose reputation underground was without peer but whose reputation above the shoulders was not as impressive, pulled away from the search party. For days, he was considered as lost as Sarah. Then he returned, hypothermic and raving, carrying the girl in his arms. She was dead, handcuffed and beaten. Barnes initially claimed that he’d spoken with her, but when the coroner’s time-of-death assessment called that into question, he said that he must have been mistaken. When asked to take police to the place where he’d found her, he said he couldn’t remember where it was or even come close to locating it again. He then explained that he had no memory of finding the body. After that, he decided to stop talking to the police entirely. Ridley Barnes had not given an interview in the past decade.

This was what Mark knew of it. What he cared about it: nothing. There was no point in investing emotionally in this one because he’d be called off it within days. He knew it, and Jeff London knew it. Still, he had to go through the motions.

He hugged the blazer around himself and blew on his palms as he walked down the street to the sheriff’s office. It was adjacent to the Garrison County jail, which was the largest building in town. That suggested promising things about the community. Inside, three empty chairs stood beside a soda machine and a bulletin board filled with pictures of local people with active warrants. They were all white faces. Across from this was a pane of tinted bulletproof glass, and a uniformed woman stood behind it.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m hoping to speak to whoever handles your homicide cases.”

“You’re reporting a homicide?”

“No. I’m inquiring about one.”

“Which one?”

“Sarah Jean Martin. From 2004.”

Her face froze. When she spoke again, it seemed to take effort. “Is this a media inquiry?”

“No.” Mark took out his wallet, found a business card, and slid it to her through a slot in the glass along with his investigator’s license, which was still active, though in jeopardy. She studied both and said, “Florida, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Explains the coat,” she said, and then she hit a button and the door unlocked with an electronic buzz. Mark pulled the handle and stepped through and she met him on the other side. “Follow me. You can speak with the sheriff.”

“His name?”

“Dan Blankenship. Don’t know much about what you’re getting into here, do you?”

Her age and her lack of interest upon his arrival had suggested that she was waiting to get her pension and walk out the door, but now there was a little spark, and it had come from Sarah Martin’s name.

“I’m here to learn,” Mark said. When they reached the sheriff’s office, the door was open, and she entered without knocking, the way you did only after you’d worked with someone for a long time.

“Dan? This gentleman wants to talk with you. Markus Novak. He’s from Florida.”

“It explains my coat,” Mark offered, to save her the trouble.

The sheriff was a tall man of about sixty who looked like he should be advertising pickup trucks. His hand completely enveloped Mark’s when they shook. When they were alone, the sheriff sat down and leaned back in his chair as ice blew against the window behind him, a sound like tiny claws working to get through the glass.

“Florida. Bet you wish you’d picked another day to visit us, eh? Another month, even.”

“It’s a little brisk out there.”

The sheriff smiled. His eyes didn’t. Mark thought that he probably politicked just fine, as evidenced by his elected position, but probably was pretty good police too. He looked at Mark’s business card and said, “The death-row outfit. I’ve heard of you. Only case we’ve had in thirty years that landed anyone on death row has already ended in an execution. I’m afraid you’re a bit late.”

“Actually, our case doesn’t have a conviction yet, or even charges. The victim’s name was Sarah Jean Martin.”

Without even moving, the sheriff seemed to contract, as if something inside him had opened up and pulled in his exterior strength to fill the void.

“Sarah,” he said.

“Yes. She went missing in a cave ten years ago and it was assumed she’d gotten lost until a man named Ridley Barnes brought her to the surface in handcuffs, is my understanding.”

Blankenship blinked at him as if to refocus. He had the look of someone who was pretending to be interested in a conversation at a party while really eavesdropping on a discussion carrying on behind him.

“That’s your understanding,” he said.

“Is it incorrect?”

“Who brought you into this?”

“We received a proposal from Ridley Barnes. I’m just vetting it.”

Blankenship’s professional demeanor vanished and his eyes went from unsmiling to unfriendly.

“Ridley himself.” His voice was tight. “That makes sense. Been too long since people hurt over Sarah, at least visibly, at least so he could enjoy it.”

“You think he killed her.”

“He killed her, yes.”

Mark withdrew the original letter from his folder and passed it across the desk. “Tell me what you think of this.”

“I just did.” Blankenship made no move to take the letter.

“Read it,” Mark said. “Please.”

Blankenship accepted it with distaste and then began to read it aloud, in a voice filled with contempt.

The sheriff looked up. “Now, ain’t that touching? Ridley, he’s feeling all of our pain. Carrying it, apparently. This story come from his pen or from the Gospels themselves?”

Mark didn’t answer, and the sheriff cleared his throat theatrically and returned to reading.

Supercaves create innate dangers as well, warping the mind with claustrophobia, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, personality disorders. There is also a particularly insidious derangement unique to caves called The Rapture, which is like a panic attack on meth. It can strike anywhere in a cave, at any time, but usually assaults a caver deep underground.

And, of course, there is one more that, like getting lost, tends to be overlooked because it’s omnipresent: absolute, eternal darkness. Darkness so dark, without a single photon of light, that it is the luminal equivalent of absolute zero.

The sheriff said the name with a disgusted drawl, then spun the letter back across the desk to Mark the way you’d flick a greasy fast-food wrapper into a trash can.

“You guys must have more money than brains if that letter from that loon was enough to bring you up here.”

Mark couldn’t very well tell him that nobody would have considered sending someone up here if Jeff London hadn’t wanted to get Mark out of sight, so he just said, “Why so convinced that he killed her?”

Blankenship began to tick off the points on his fingers but never made it beyond the first one; as his anger grew, his counting stopped. “Because he’s the only one who knew that cave well enough to hide her in it. Then he decided to bring her back because it covered his ass. We had other experts searching in there, and they worked in a team. Ridley Barnes decided to go it alone and vanished in the cave. For a few days there, we figured he was as lost as she was. Then...” Blankenship’s jaw tightened. “Then he returned, with her body. She was wearing handcuffs and had been for a while.”

“Cause of death?”

“Hypothermia. Classified as a homicide investigation because Sarah died after being abducted. She didn’t die of the cold in that cave because she’d gotten lost. She had some help.”

“Had she been sexually assaulted?”

Blankenship swallowed and looked away. Mark thought the display of discomfort was odd in a man who’d spent a lifetime in policing.

“Not yet.”

“Yet?”

“My point is, somebody had kept her alive for a time. Maybe wanted to keep her alive much longer. You know the kind, like that guy in Cleveland, the one who had the girls in his basement for, what, ten years? Hell, maybe Ridley couldn’t get it up and took out his anger on her. That happens. Guys blame their own victims.”

“Why would he produce the body if he’d succeeded in hiding her so well?”

Blankenship looked down at his right hand as he curled it into a fist and then loosened it, as if it were a required exercise, some sort of stress release that allowed him to exhibit the demeanor he wanted instead of the one that threatened.

“Because Ridley’s a game player. Because he’s a sick son of a bitch who got a kick out of the idea that by rescuing his own victim, he’d give the prosecutor a hell of a hard time using the physical evidence against him. And that is precisely why we never got a conviction. Never even got it to court. The DNA results, her blood on him, all of that? Well, he did carry her body through a cave, didn’t he? Reasonable doubt.”

“It is reasonable,” Mark said. “But you don’t buy it.”

“No, I certainly don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because he claimed not to remember where he’d found her, or how. Because later he refused to speak to us. And because when he first emerged from the cave, he told us that he’d heard her voice and followed the sound to locate her.”

“Seems plausible.”

“It sure does. Right up until the coroner gave us a time of death that completely contradicted Ridley’s story. She would have been dead before he found her, but somehow he still heard her last words?”

Mark thought, Don’t embarrass me with this shit. He said, “What were the words? What did he hear her say?”

“‘Please, stop.’”

Mark was confused. “That’s what Barnes heard the victim say, or that’s what I should do?”

“Both,” Blankenship told him.

“Any motive?”

“He’s a deeply disturbed man. He’d told other people things about the cave that summer, including the following highlights: The cave had a soul; the cave did not like intruders; the cave required that anyone who entered it demonstrate respect. Unwelcome visitors, he said, would be treated harshly. Here’s another gem: If you spent enough time in the cave, if you listened to it carefully enough, you’d learn what it required of you. If you performed those tasks, you’d be granted powers that would travel with you back to the surface. You liking the way his mind works so far?”

“Not especially. But when I ask about motive, I mean a direct connection to the victim.”

“I’m well aware of what a motive is, Mr. Novak. Ridley had no direct connection to Sarah Martin beyond the fact that she worked at the cave as a tour guide all summer when he was working there exploring new tunnels and holes and pits. She was a beautiful young girl and he was a disturbed and lonely man.”

“So no motive.”

Blankenship looked at Mark as if he were wondering whether he could justify arresting him on charges of aggravated annoyance.

“I’ll tell you what you ought to do right now, Mr. Novak,” the sheriff said, getting out of his chair and unfolding to his full, impressive height. Mark was six foot, and Blankenship towered over him. “Don’t waste my time questioning me about motive before you’ve even met the man. Go visit Ridley Barnes. Talk to the wrongfully accused old boy in person. Then you give me a call. You tell me after meeting him if you really think this one is worth your time and dollars. You tell me what you think about motive.”

“Fair enough,” Mark said, knowing that Jeff London would be furious with him for letting the interview end so abruptly but not caring because Jeff didn’t want this one anyhow. As the sheriff had aptly observed, the case didn’t even meet the standards for Innocence Incorporated. Jeff had exiled Mark up here, and all Mark had to do was play out the string and wait to be summoned home.

“Let me show you out,” the sheriff said. They left the office and walked back down the hall and to the main door.

“Where are you staying?” the sheriff asked.

“Haven’t decided yet.”

“Really? All the way up from Florida without a hotel reservation?”

“Didn’t realize it was peak season in Garrison.”

The sheriff gave a wan smile as he opened the door. “I suspect you’ll find a room still available. And you let me know what you think of Ridley. Be mighty curious to see how he tugs on your heartstrings.”

“I’ll let you know. Say, whatever happened to the kid she went in there with? The boyfriend. He still around?”

That provoked a thoughtful nod. “Evan Borders. He’s a treat. There were plenty of police who had a hard-on for him ahead of Barnes in that case. Not because of the evidence. More because of the... character, I suppose you’d say.”

“He’s trouble.”

“His daddy was trouble, and Evan and the Leonards, his cousins, they carry on the legacy. The three of them run round here like a pack of feral dogs looking for things to snap at. But they pale in comparison with Ridley. He may be a true sociopath.”

“Right.”

Blankenship scrutinized Mark and said, “Mind if I ask you a question?”

“Feel free.”

“You’re in the pro bono investigation business, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“I would think a man finds himself in that line of work because he cares. No offense, Mr. Novak, but I don’t get the feeling that you give a damn about this.”

“Until I know whether we’re taking a case, I try to keep my emotional distance,” Mark said. “It’s tough to get invested in one when you might be pulled off it. Make sense?”

“I suppose,” the sheriff said, but he didn’t seem satisfied with the answer. “Something you need to consider, whether you want to preserve your, um, emotional distance or not: Sarah matters to people here. The people you’ll be talking to? They don’t have that distance, son.”

“I’ll keep that in mind when I see them,” Mark said.

“You be careful what doors you knock on around here, Novak.”

“That a threat?”

“Not in the least. You’re just... not acquainted with the place yet.”

“That doesn’t sound like a real warm endorsement of your hometown, Sheriff.”

Blankenship looked off to the darkening sky above the old limestone courthouse.

“Real storm’s coming tomorrow, you know. If you were to want to go back to the Sunshine State, tonight would be the time to fly out.”

“Going to get that bad, eh?”

“I don’t put much stock in forecasts, personally. There’s some calling for ten inches of snow here, others are saying it’ll be warm enough to keep it mostly rain. Like I said, I’ve learned not to trust them. Just to be ready. You learn the same in Florida, with the hurricanes and whatnot? Or do you trust the forecasts down there?”

“We still talking about the weather?”

The sheriff gave a humorless smile. “You’re a symbolic man, are you?”

“Actually, no.”

“Good, because I like straight talk. And I’ve given it. The weather is the weather. The warnings are the warnings. If I were you, I’d pay attention to both.”

2

He’d have to speak with Sarah Martin’s family at some point, and part of him wanted to have that done before he met with Ridley Barnes. It wasn’t a large enough part to win the day, though. He knew the family already in ways that they wouldn’t understand, and he wanted to protect them until the last possible moment.

Instead, he drove out of town, following the GPS directions to the address Ridley Barnes had provided. He called Jeff London while he drove and got his voice mail.

“Jeff, it’s Mark. Local law wasn’t real happy to see me, and they’re curious why in the hell we’re up here when nobody was charged, let alone convicted. I’ve got no answer for that. I don’t like being put in a position where I’ve got no answers. I know you’ll say I earned my ticket here, but these people don’t understand that, and it’s not fair to them. I don’t want to sit down with that girl’s family and lead them on. Consider that and give me a call, please.”

Ridley Barnes lived about nine winding miles outside Garrison in a single-story house with faded stone walls and a slouching roof. Undulating fields spread out in every direction, broken stalks of wheat protruding from the snow. Smoke rose from the chimney of the house and blended into the gray sky. By the time Mark was out of the car, the front door was open and a man in jeans and a hooded Carhartt work coat peered out at him.

“You lost?”

“You Ridley Barnes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m not lost.” Mark went up to the porch. Ridley Barnes watched him suspiciously. He had long, unkempt gray hair and a matching beard. His blue eyes seemed bright against it.

“You know my name, then I ought to hear yours.”

“Markus Novak.”

No reaction.

“I’m with Innocence Incorporated.”

The bright eyes widened and Barnes said, “No shit! Didn’t figure to hear from you, but I did figure I’d hear by phone, if anything, not have you just show up like this.”

“It’s not our standard procedure,” Mark acknowledged. He was looking at the heavy canvas jacket. You didn’t encounter them in Florida, but there had been other places in his life where they’d been common. His mother had given him one for Christmas, paid for with money she’d conned off tourists by telling them she was a Native American spirit guide even though she wasn’t even Native American, and told him, It’s rugged and durable, kiddo. Just like you. The first real fight he ever got into was with an older kid who’d tried to steal that coat. You weren’t supposed to win your first fight, but if you did, as Mark happened to, it was awfully easy to get a taste for it.

“I wasn’t even sure you’d talk to me,” Barnes said. “Seeing as how I’m not on death row.”

“The good news, Mr. Barnes, is that I am.” Ridley gave him a confused look, and Mark said, “I’m a little out of favor with my boss at the moment. I think he liked the idea of sending me into the snow. You know how it goes.”

“Sure, sure,” Barnes said, and he offered an uncertain smile. “Come in out of the cold.”

Mark followed him inside. A fire was going in an old cast-iron woodstove in one corner of the living room, and ropes were draped all around it. Ridley stepped through them nimbly without appearing to even watch his feet.

“Caught me tying,” Ridley said.

“Tying what?”

“I’m going vertical this weekend. Getting everything ready now. Shitty day, why not, right?” He lifted a neat loop of black rope off an old recliner and set it on the floor, then indicated that Mark should take the chair.

“Going vertical?”

“In a cave, man.”

“I don’t follow.”

“People who haven’t been underground, they always think a cave is like a bunch of tunnels. You just walk or crawl or whatever. But they develop in layers, right? Layers of time and stone. That means you’re not just moving horizontally, you’re moving vertically.”

“Got you.” Mark sat down and looked at all the rope and tried to estimate how many feet were laid out. At least two hundred. Maybe more. Ropes of different sizes, from thick static lines to paracord, hung nearby. Along the far wall was a row of shelves covered with what looked like more climbing gear: Harnesses and carabiners and bolts. Several battered helmets with lamps mounted on them. On a low shelf, there were also face masks and oxygen tanks.

“You’re a diver,” Mark said.

“Not a diver. Still a caver.”

“You use that gear inside of caves?”

“Sure. Water carves the caves. It’s still carving them. Got to be willing to go through the water to find out what’s there.”

“I suppose so,” Mark said. “But I’m not here to talk about caving. I’ve got to make a decision about this case. Whether it’s the right fit for us. To know if—”

“Novak!” Ridley barked the name the way a furious coach might call out a player who’d just screwed up. Mark raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

“You’re the one!” Ridley said. “I read about you. The investigator biographies, I read each of them, and you... with you, I knew. You had to be the one.”

“Why’s that?” Mark said. He’d gotten his first uneasy chill from Ridley, the first indication that this man’s cylinders didn’t fire in the standard patterns.

“You noticed the date, didn’t you?” Ridley’s eyes sparkled.

“What date?”

“I knew you would. Right there on your website it says that your work is dedicated to the memory of that girl, you know, and—”

“That girl,” Mark said, “was my wife.”

“Of course. But did you notice the dates? She was killed the same day that Sarah Martin went missing. Different years, of course, but the same day.”

Mark had not noticed the dates. He hadn’t had a chance to look at much more than Ridley’s letter, in fact, because he’d been shuffled out of town in such a hurry. Time had been short, and Mark’s information about Sarah Martin was so minimal, it would have been embarrassing if he’d actually cared about the case. He’d done no preliminary research, just proceeded with the one-page abstract and Ridley’s proposal letter. That why-bother approach was based on the knowledge that he was only marking time here until Jeff called him back, but now the lack of preparation was catching up with him.

“Is that so,” he said, his voice hollow.

“Absolutely. I noted it in my letter when I requested you, but maybe they didn’t show you that one?”

Frost spread through Mark’s veins. “You requested me?”

“Sure did. There were two letters. I guess they only showed you the one? But somebody must have agreed with me when I said that you were the right person for this.”

Mark felt an old tug, an instinct he’d thought was gone, one he’d tried so, so hard to put away: the urge to punch and keep on punching, swing until he could see the bones of his own hand through torn skin. He wasn’t thinking of punching Ridley Barnes, though; it was Jeff London’s face that he saw.

There are unsolved cases beyond Lauren’s, London had said. You’re going to need to prove you can continue to work them. Show me that you can still care about another case, Markus. If you can’t, then tell me.

Mark had insisted that he could and said that he understood Jeff’s point — Lauren’s case belonged to police investigators and not to him and if he didn’t accept that, he’d drown in it. All understood, check, check, check. But still Jeff sent him to Indiana to deal with this lunatic and, what, have some moment of clarity? It was a pathetic ploy, and an infuriating one.

“The date is irrelevant,” Mark said. “My only interest here is Sarah Martin. I’ve had a preliminary visit with the police, and that’s what I’m hoping to have with you. Explain what it is that I do, and what I don’t do, and—”

“Do you know what your name means?”

Mark tilted his head and stared at Ridley. “Excuse me?”

“The origin of your own name. Are you familiar with it?”

Mark took a deep breath and decided to indulge him. “My full first name is Markus. Markus means different things in different cultures. ‘Warring’ in one. ‘Hammer’ in another.”

“Mars was the god of war, you’re correct, but I mean your surname.”

“No idea. It’s Czech.”

“Excellent! Then you’re the new man, the stranger.” Ridley smiled. “Novak is the term for a newcomer in town. A stranger arriving.”

“Then it suits my family well,” Mark said. “But if we could get back to your story, I’d—”

“You want my notes? Hang on.” Barnes left the room, stepping through the ropes with an athlete’s grace that his weathered appearance didn’t hint at, disappeared down a short hallway, then returned with a stack of overflowing accordion folders. “Just take the files. I know it all inside out. Read it many, many times.” He pushed his shaggy hair back and said, “Trying to remember, you know. Trying to remember.”

“You do understand that if we undertake any investigation, the results could be damaging to you?”

“Obviously. But somebody needs to undertake it.” If Ridley Barnes was nervous about the idea, he didn’t show it. All that came off him was enthusiasm. There was something alarming about that.

“There’s a surveillance video in there,” Ridley said. “That one is a head-scratcher. Shows the cave entrance. Shows them go in and him come out. Shows the police going in and police coming out. And then... then me.” He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head violently. “Ah, damn.” A deep breath. “Someone needs to speak for her, you know. That’s why I went looking for people like you guys.”

“Yes,” Mark said. “Someone does need to speak for her.” He was looking at Barnes and wondering if this was a game to him, as Blankenship had suggested, if he’d killed the girl and gotten bored after the detectives went away and the years passed. If he wanted them back to play some more.

“Did you retain anyone to investigate on your behalf previously?”

“No.”

“Why now?”

Ridley shook his head, and he looked distressed, a patient who wanted a cure but didn’t want to have to describe his embarrassing symptoms.

“Ah, man, you know... patience was the thing. I’m struggling with that now. I’ll be honest with you. I’m struggling with it.”

“Clarify that.”

“Hard thing to clarify. What she wanted from me was patience. Maybe what she still wants from me. I have the promise, you know? She’ll tell me in time. I’ve tried to accept that, but, brother, it gets hard. The not-knowing? It gets hard.”

Mark had interviewed countless people with disturbed minds, including four in mental institutions, but he’d never felt as uncomfortable with any of them as he did with Ridley Barnes.

“By she, you mean Sarah Martin?”

“And Trapdoor. Either/or.”

“Either/or? One’s a dead child, Mr. Barnes. The other is a cave.”

Ridley frowned as if offended. “You’re going to need to start considering that from a different perspective if this is going to work.”

Mark held up a hand to silence him.

“I’m not going to get caught up in that before I understand the backstory. One question I have no answer to yet: Was there any reason police would have looked at you before you found her body? Did you have any prior knowledge of her?”

“Tangentially.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Tangentially?”

Barnes shrugged. “She worked at Trapdoor. I was mapping Trapdoor that same summer. So I’d encountered her a few times. I mean, you know, I’d watched her. Sure, I’d watched her.”

Mark felt a spike of distaste. “What do you mean by watched her, exactly?”

Another shrug. “I paid attention to everyone who was going to be around the cave. She was just a girl, you know, but she caught your eye. Good-looking girl, big smile, big laugh. Lot of joy. She caught your eye.”

One of the interviewing techniques that Mark brought naturally to the table and that impressed Jeff London was a comfort with silence. You developed that sort of comfort when you grew up listening to drunks and blowhards in places where the weather could lock you down for days at a time, nowhere to go even if you wanted to. It had taken him a while to realize just how effective a tactic silence was. Most people viewed an interviewer’s lack of response as judgment at best and a threat at worst, so when faced with calm silence, they tended to start talking again, to volunteer more than they’d intended. Ridley Barnes was not of that breed. When Mark went silent, Ridley matched it with equal stillness.

“Anything else you recall of Sarah?” Mark said at last. “Or her family?”

“Not a bit. And I don’t mean to tell you your business, you’re the expert, but I’d say you ought to talk to people who did know her. Get their viewpoints on it.”

For a moment it was silent again, and then Ridley smiled. “You’re wondering, aren’t you? Wondering if I’m bat-shit crazy.”

Mark nodded.

The smile vanished and those bright eyes darkened. “Me too. You know what you ought to do? You ought to get into the cave. Before you make a decision, you ought to spend some time down there. In the dark. Think about her, think about me.”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary.”

Ridley Barnes showed anger for the first time. He wore it well. Like a natural color.

“Oh, I think it is. I think that anybody who even considers that girl’s story should sit down there in the dark for a time.”

“Let’s agree to put a pin in that particular idea, how about that?”

“Are you familiar with the term false necessity, Mr. Novak?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised. You’re going to need to be. I had much higher hopes.”

“I’m often disappointing.”

Several seconds passed while the wind moaned around the old house, and then Ridley Barnes nodded as if Mark had said something that pleased him.

“Got yourself some spark, don’t you?”

“Pardon?” Mark said.

“More fuses than you’d like people to know you have. Oh, I understand. Don’t you worry, I’m not judging you. I understand it fine.”

“I’m not worried about you judging me,” Mark said. “But I’m not interested in wasting time either. If you insist on that, then—”

“Not insisting on anything. What would you like to discuss? I’m an open book. Just one with missing pages.”

His laugh was low and delighted. Mark felt a prickle ride along his spine.

“If you’re so curious about your possible involvement in the crime, then why not talk to the police? They say you shut down on interviews. Yet you’re talking to me.”

“The police don’t have distance, Mr. Novak. It’s too small of a town. They have pressure from all sides to get a conviction, sure. But not to get the truth. In your line of work, the difference between those things must be clear.”

“We pursue the truth, yes. But the truth could really hurt you, Ridley.”

He waved an uninterested hand. “So long as it’s told. Everything is connected. That’s why you’re here. The date does matter. It connects us, you see? You know that. This is what I mean when I say that everything is of consequence. The date connects you and me and Sarah and Lauren and—”

“Do not say her fucking name.” Mark was on his feet, and for the first time, Barnes looked nonplussed.

“You’re not understanding me,” he said. “What I mean is—”

“I don’t give a shit,” Mark said, stepping closer. “You were told, damn it, and you went back for it again, and I will not—”

He stopped talking when he saw Ridley move back. A subtle shift, but still visible. He was bracing, readying for a fight, or at least considering the possibility of a punch.

Now it was Mark’s turn to step back. He was holding tight to the file. Too tight. He looked down at it, at his knuckles pressed hard against his skin, and said, “I’ll review the file. I’ll review it and let you know what I think. Good-bye, Mr. Barnes.”

“Don’t go like that. You came all this way and you’re willing to go like that?”

“I’ll let you know what I think,” Mark repeated, and then he walked out of the house and back into the cold. It had started to snow again while he was inside, more of a sleet, really, and his windshield was already iced over. He cranked the heat up and turned on the defroster. While he waited for it to work, he opened the first of the folders.

Sarah Martin’s dead face looked up at him.

Morgue photos. About twenty of them. He went through them one at a time, handling them gingerly, as if he might disturb her. Lord, what someone had done to her. Dear Lord. Bruises showed around her eyes and throat, and scrapes and abrasions lined her entire body; it looked like someone had dragged her over concrete as if she were as inconsequential as a bag of garbage.

Good-looking girl, big smile, big laugh, Ridley had said. Lot of joy. She caught your eye.

Her eyes looked black in every picture. Dulled to something beyond death. Mark was holding his breath by the time he turned the last picture over, and then he found a sheet of yellow legal paper covered in scrawled notations with a heading: “Photographic Evidence — Ridley’s Notes.”

The first three notes, labeled with Roman numerals, were questions about the physical evidence, what had been considered and what might have been neglected. Other than some awkward grammar, they could have been an attorney’s notes, or a detective’s. Then the precision vanished, and the rest of the page was filled with scribbled questions.

The ink was darker with each new word, the scrawls becoming frantic by the end.

Mark looked up at the windshield. The ice had melted and was now dripping water down the glass, and beyond it, leaning on his porch railing, Ridley Barnes lifted one hand and waved at him.

3

Don’t scare him off. Ridley, do not scare the man off.

Those had been his only instructions, and now as Ridley stood alone on his porch, the Ford out of sight, exhaust steam all that remained in the air, he knew that he had failed. He went back inside, gathered the coil of rope, and put it back on the chair where Mark Novak had sat. Then he took the free end of the coil in one hand and began to tie hitches, never looking at the rope, trusting his fingers as they looped and twisted and tightened, looped and twisted and tightened. A man who had to look at his hands to tie a knot was a man who was likely to die in the dark.

“He’s here,” Ridley muttered. “He came.”

Somehow, he’d known all along that it would happen. He’d been expecting a call first, but this was better. So much better.

But now... now it needed to be handled gently, and Ridley hadn’t done that. He’d seen the spark that Novak had wanted to keep hidden, and he’d returned to it, and that was a mistake. At least for so early in the game.

“Have to keep you in town, Mark Novak,” Ridley whispered. “Can’t let you get back on a plane. Can’t have that.” His hands were moving faster and faster, and he closed his eyes. He could feel sweat on his forehead, dripping down his cheeks, but his breathing was steady. Ascender hitch, taut-line hitch, clove, Munter. A Prusik with two wraps, then one with three. He began to work backward now, the sweat flowing freely — too much wood in the woodstove; it had to be sixty-five degrees in the house, too warm, Ridley liked it cool, cooler, cold. His hands moved even faster, always you could be faster, reverse order on the hitches, three-wrap, two-wrap, done, on to the Munter, done, then the clove, the taut-line, the ascender, done!

His breathing hadn’t changed. His heart rate hadn’t changed. If the temperature had been right, he wouldn’t even be sweating. He’d worked fast and he’d worked hard but his hands were steady and smooth and his adrenaline had never spiked.

Control.

It was a good feeling. One that didn’t come easily. One that had to be earned; one that could be lost.

It wouldn’t be lost again. Never again.

You lost control.

No. No, he hadn’t, and he wouldn’t. Novak had lost control, and that was why he’d left the house. He wasn’t as strong as Ridley had hoped. Not as composed. But it was hard for Ridley to see those things, because Ridley couldn’t relate to fear; he was a man who toyed with panic, teased panic, tormented panic. He didn’t lose to it.

You did. You do.

Damn it, no. He opened his eyes, dropped the rope, and rushed back out onto the porch, welcoming the cold air. The wind pushed right into his face.

Don’t lose Novak.

He wouldn’t lose him. Novak was here because he’d already taken the bait. He wanted Ridley to believe that he was merely nibbling. Bullshit. You didn’t fly from Florida to Garrison for a nibble.

Things were in motion, and Ridley was in control. He let himself feel some satisfaction with that as he packed his bag. It was a small, battered backpack that contained carabiners, two helmets with headlamps, a flashlight, protein bars and almonds, a first-aid kit, and two Benchmade pocketknives. Assisted-opening, one-handed operation, the spring assist making it nearly a legal switchblade. Actually, switchblades were legal again in Indiana. The legislature had taken the time to consider that law and pass it. There was something about this that entertained Ridley to no end. Elected officials often did.

Mr. Barnes, something you need to understand — the people of this county have elected me to preserve law and order and punish all those who do not follow the law. I intend to do the job that I promised to.

Ridley’s smile was wider now, memories flooding back, and he knew that it was time to get underground, and fast. It was earlier than he’d intended to go, but Novak’s visit had him excited — not nervous, just enthused — and he wanted to be in motion, wanted to be alone in the cool dark where his mind could clear and his thoughts crystallize. There was much to think about, and Ridley always thought better when he was alone in the dark.

He changed out of his jeans and into heavy canvas pants, slipped knee pads on, then added a few loose layers of shirts and grabbed a backpack. When he left the house, he simply crossed the road on foot and started across the fields. There were three accessible caves within walking distance from his house, the reason he made his home there. Drive ten miles and there were five more. Burn the whole truck tank of petrol and he could reach fifty, maybe sixty. Hell, he had no true idea, didn’t keep count. Most cavers did, loved to talk about it, got a hard-on boasting about how many caves pocketed this part of the world, but they were missing the point.

There was only one.

Ridley had known that for years now. Most people counted entrances as separate caves because they reached walls and they said, Here’s the end of it. It was a poor understanding of both caves and walls. There were ways through walls, and once you were past them, were you really in a new place? No. You were in a different room of the same house.

The snow had stopped but the wind was still blowing as he walked across the field, his lug-soled boots crunching on frozen shafts of broken wheat. Ahead of him the land fell gently to the left and at the base was a small brook. Dry in the summer months, it was flowing now, or at least it was flowing just below the skim of ice. Along its banks, slabs of limestone showed, and then, just far enough away that all you could see of Ridley’s house was one edge of the roof, a small hole yawned in the rock. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would walk past it and dismiss it the way they would a storm drain. To them, it was just a place where the inconsequential was swept away from the world that mattered.

Oh, what sorry lives most people lived.

Ridley dropped to his knees and slipped off the backpack. He removed the helmet from it, this one outfitted with a new headlamp, slid the helmet on, and fastened the chinstrap. Then, without bothering to turn on the light, he put his head into the hole in the rocks. His shoulders stuck immediately. He made one quick squirm, a side-to-side shimmy, and then he was through. If he could clear his shoulders, he would always be fine in a passage, because Ridley took care to keep himself in shape. It occurred to him that Novak was built for caving, with a clear V taper to his torso that would allow his shoulders to tell the tale of the tunnels just as Ridley’s did. Very fit but not overly tall. Probably a shade over six feet, which was still a few inches taller than Ridley. The tall men Ridley had seen in caves tended to be uncomfortable men. Novak’s musculature was right, though, lean and ropy, his physical strength evident but not overdeveloped bulk. Too much bulk turned a belly crawl into a challenge. Yes, Novak would do just fine underground if he would only show the initiative to go there. Perhaps some encouragement was needed.

Although the entrance Ridley had taken looked tight from the surface, it opened up into a chamber the size of a bus, walled in by cool damp stone. Once he’d cleared his feet and was completely underground, he pivoted and reached back, grabbed his bag, and pulled it in with him. Then, for the first time, he turned on the light. The world was lit in all directions, and he frowned and clicked the lamp again, dimming it to a tolerable level. There was no sign that any creature had been here since his last visit. Once, he’d encountered a coyote who’d taken the place as a den. That had been an adventure, and one that ended badly for the coyote. Ridley’s hand drifted toward his knife as he remembered.

The large room faded to an angled shelf of rock about twenty feet from him, and below the shelf was a shadowed passage. He braced himself on his forearms, so the elbow and knee pads would take the brunt of the bruising, and crawled. Soon he had to drop all the way down to his belly and wriggle forward again. If he’d attempted to lift his head to see what was coming, he would have cracked it against the stone ceiling, and on either side of him, the walls were close enough to squeeze the shoulders. A classic panic passage for rookies, but a short test, thirty feet. The passage bent to the right and led down and then the cave opened again, this room larger than the last, stone formations showing, including a wall so pocked that it looked as if it had been riddled by cannon fire.

Though he’d hardly worked, he was surprised to feel a bead of sweat on his forehead. When he lifted his gloved hand to wipe it away, he froze.

His hand was shaking.

He looked at it with disgust, as if the appendage didn’t belong to him, then wiped the sweat away and laid his fingers against his throat. Even through the gloves he could feel that his pulse was too fast. This angered him. There was no excuse for these reactions. He should be in control. He always was.

Novak. He was the reason for the trouble, the reason Ridley didn’t have the control he should have. Ridley turned off the headlamp, plunging himself into a world of blackness, and waited for the silent dark to soothe him.

It always did.

4

There were four hotels in Garrison — two were locally owned, shotgun-style buildings with about a dozen units that looked like they were competing for the next remake of Psycho, and two were chain hotels on the outskirts of town where things had grown up a bit and turned into a sort of minor interstate exit. There were a few chain restaurants near the chain hotels, and a couple of gas stations. Mark chose the only hotel that didn’t have rooms opening directly to the outdoors. He’d never liked those. When you thought of crime scene tape over a hotel-room door, the image that sprang to mind was inevitably of a door that opened to the outside.

The clerk, a pretty brunette, smiled when Mark asked if there were rooms available.

“A few. How many nights?”

Mark hesitated. “One. I’ll just stay the night.”

Once inside the room, he cranked up the heat by ten degrees, dropped his suitcase, and set Ridley’s case file on the little desk by the window. He’d asked for a smoking room, and it stank like one. He always hated that. He’d never been able to get used to the smell. The taste he’d acquired with time. Some people lit candles for the dead, but that showed more than Mark liked to reveal. So he smoked Lauren’s cigarettes, filling his lungs daily with the thing he’d once feared would kill her.

He slid the ashtray over beside the case file, took out an American Spirit, and lit it. He smoked while he watched the wind push the snow around the pool cover, and when the cigarette was done and his mouth was full of the taste, he reached for the phone, ready to call Jeff and confront him. Jeff would have an answer, of course, a bit of sage wisdom, but Jeff should have realized that there were some buttons you didn’t push, no matter how good your intentions.

He had his cell phone in hand when the hotel-room phone rang, and for a moment he was confused and almost answered the cell. Then he picked up the room line, expecting the front-desk clerk because nobody else knew he was here, and a female voice said, “Who in the hell are you, and what do you want out of this?”

After a beat, he said: “My name is Markus Novak. Who in the hell are you?”

“What are you doing asking about my baby?”

The mother. Shit. Should have gone to her first, Mark thought. Not to the police, not to Ridley. Damn it, you knew better.

“I was going to call you, Mrs. Martin. You were next on my list. I was—”

“I was next on your list? You think that’s proper?”

My baby. Mark had a flash of memory: Lauren’s father down on his knees on the afternoon of the funeral, robbed of his ability even to stand.

Sarah Martin’s mother said, “What, you have no answer for that?”

Mark blinked, refocused. “I’d like to explain my role.”

“You don’t have a role. But I’d like to see you.”

“Tell me where to meet you, then. I can head out right—”

“I’m in the lobby of your hotel. And I won’t be leaving until I see you.”

“Be right down,” Mark said, but the line was dead.

She was supposed to look weary. Beaten. He’d met a lot of her kind over the years, enough that he’d begun to believe he could spot them in crowds. Grief took its toll, but grief without answers? That was acid. That ate you slowly but relentlessly.

Sarah Martin’s mother didn’t fit the profile, though. She was lithe and blond and, right now, equipped with a hunter’s stare. She radiated energy, the focus of a master at work on a task, and that was worse, because Mark was the task.

She had her hand extended as he crossed the lobby toward her, which seemed an odd formality, not in keeping with her anger on the phone, but when he reached out to shake it, her fingers moved quickly from his palm and gripped his wrist instead. He looked down, surprised by the strength of her grasp, and when she spoke, her words were hissed.

“Next on your list? You really said that to me? Come into this town asking around about Sarah, and I’m next on your list?”

“I gather the sheriff called you,” Mark said. She moved her fingers higher on his wrist, and his blood pulsed against them. He glanced down again, struggling for words. “I wish I’d been able to introduce myself first. That would have helped. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not a police officer, correct? So who are you? Who sent you here?”

She had the interest of the desk clerk now, and someone else poked a head out of an office. Sarah’s mother, still holding on to his wrist, her eyes scorching, said, “What, would you like to be somewhere else? Don’t want to be embarrassed here, with an audience? You’d rather sneak around the town?”

“Let’s walk and talk, Mrs. Martin. Please.”

“We can stay right here.”

“We can, but we won’t.” Mark went to the doors, and when they slid open, he looked back at her, waiting. He was struck by how unbothered she looked there in the middle of the lobby with everyone staring at her.

Used to that now, he realized. It’s been a long time, and in a town like this, so small? She knows her role now. She’s the dead girl’s mother. Stares don’t bother her. Not anymore. They’re just part of the landscape.

He turned from her and walked through the doors and knew without looking back that she would follow. She was, after all, there for him.

It was getting on toward dark and the wind was blowing harder, and in his hurry, Mark had left even the blazer upstairs. He’d have pneumonia by the time he boarded the plane for Florida. He didn’t know where he was going; he just wanted out of the hotel. There was a steak house across the parking lot, the only target in sight, so he angled toward it. It was some sort of Western-themed thing with wagon wheels on the sign, the type of place that disgusted people who were actually from the West because it reminded them of the moron tourists. Or the tourons, as Mark’s uncles had called them, usually when aggravated by the driving of some fucking flatlander who was uneasy on the mountain roads.

“Don’t you run away from me,” Sarah Martin’s mother called, hurrying in pursuit.

He turned back to her.

“I’m not running. I’d like to sit down and talk. I always intended to.”

“You always intended to. Well, that’s sweet of you to say.”

“I’m not going to cause you any trouble. I’m not going to be in this town for one damn minute longer than I can help it. I’m doing what I was told to by my boss, but the truth is, I’m biding my time up here because my boss is worried about me. You want to know why?”

“Not particularly.”

“Because he thinks I’m doing a poor job of coping with my wife’s unsolved murder.”

Several seconds of silence passed. The wind was howling in, and it was hard not to turn away from it, but Mark stayed in place, facing the wind and Mrs. Martin. Her hunter’s eyes had softened. Almost too much. They were harder to face now than the wind. He was so much better with anger than grief.

“Would you be willing to at least hear from Sarah Martin’s mother? While you’re busy talking to other people, perhaps you should pause to hear from Diane Martin. Are you willing to do that?”

“I never wanted to ignore—”

“It’s your choice. I just need to know if you are willing.”

Silence again. He tried to avoid her stare but couldn’t.

“Buy me a beer?” she said. It was a strange question, like she was asking for a date, but he nodded.

“Buy you plenty of them.”

They were nearly alone at the restaurant bar, drinking a local beer called Upland that was actually damn good, when Mark finished explaining Innocence Incorporated and why he’d come to Garrison. Diane Martin didn’t speak at all, just sipped her beer and watched him. He found himself avoiding her gaze, the reverse of his typical habit. He favored direct eye contact at all times because he’d learned that it often told you more about someone than words did, but her eyes unsettled him. She was so balanced, so composed, as if she understood him well from his one disclosure.

Maybe his biggest concern was that she did.

“I can’t tell you with certainty that we won’t take this case,” he said, “but I can tell you that it would be a first if we did. The whole point of the organization is death-row defense.”

“So why are you here? You said your boss—”

“I’m in exile,” Mark said, and gave a weary smile. “And maybe I’m fired. It hasn’t been decided yet. My boss wanted me out of the way of the board of directors. He’s fighting for me, and he shouldn’t be.”

“What’s your great transgression?”

He wasn’t going to tell her that. He hadn’t told anyone that, had admitted the truth to only London, who was now busy trying to convince everyone that it was a bullshit story concocted by a desperate inmate seeking attention.

“I can’t disclose that,” he said, but her damn eyes were fixed on his and he couldn’t look away from them. They were magnetic, but not in an attractive sense. Just a powerful one.

“Yes, you can. If you would like to tell me, you should tell me. Would you like to?”

Her voice was almost intimate. He tried to separate himself from her gaze by turning back to his beer, but she said it again: “Would you like to, Mark?”

She hadn’t used his first name before. He looked back up, back into that stare, and said, “I had a snitch in Coleman prison down in Florida. He told me that he’d heard a rumor that someone in there had killed Lauren. And so I offered him ten thousand dollars and free legal assistance for his appeal if he... if he confirmed the rumor.”

“And how was he going to do that?”

“By any means necessary,” Mark said, and his voice was steady. “And if it was confirmed, he had another hundred grand coming his way, though even he didn’t know that, because we didn’t get far enough along.”

“What was the other hundred grand for?”

“Killing him.” He had never told anyone this, not even Jeff. All that was understood of his negotiations in Coleman were that they’d been conducted in pursuit of information.

Diane Martin didn’t move or blink or even seem to breathe.

“You would have arranged a man’s murder?” she said at length. “You would have been comfortable with it?”

“If I could prove that he was the one who’d killed my wife? Absolutely. Without hesitation. My only regret would be that I couldn’t do it myself.”

“Are you at risk for criminal charges?” She held up a hand and said, “If you don’t want to talk about that, you don’t have to. Only tell me if you want to.”

“Nobody knows what I just told you. I don’t know why I chose to.” But he did. He’d told her because she was the only person he’d met who would understand. Not logically, not in the way a shrink or a counselor would claim to understand, but down in her bones, down in the place that had been hollowed out of her and could never be filled again. “Even with the other issues, though, things could have gone badly for me. My boss made sure that they didn’t. The snitch I talked to has a credibility problem. My boss built on that. He sent me up here so I wouldn’t have to answer questions myself. I think he knew that if I did, I’d tell the truth.”

It was an odd answer, and he wasn’t sure why he’d offered it. He was fine telling her that he’d plotted to kill a man, but he also wanted her to know that he hadn’t lied? Maybe it was because he thought she’d respect the former but not the latter.

“I would imagine it is also a problem for your boss because the approach does not fit well with an organization that abhors capital punishment.”

“No,” Mark said. “It does not. And that’s what brings me here, Mrs. Martin. I am just supposed to be out of the way, and I was happy to agree to it, because I need that job for reasons I can’t explain. It is all that I am now. I’m here so my boss can go about protecting me, and your daughter’s death, truth be told, is simply not a case we will take. I’m sorry for any trouble or grief it causes you.”

“What causes grief is Sarah’s absence, and the absence of any resolution.”

“I understand.”

“So perhaps you can convince your organization that this is worth their time.”

Mark frowned. “I thought you didn’t want me doing anything with it. I thought you wanted me gone.”

“Now I’m not so sure. I’m beginning to think you’re supposed to be here.”

He was supposed to be in Florida. He wanted to tell her that, but he couldn’t, not while he was looking into her eyes. So he glanced away again, a coward’s move but a necessary one, and he was ready to explain that this was not the right situation when she said, “What do you think Lauren would say? If she had the chance.”

His first instinct was anger. The question was unfair, and he didn’t like the sound of his wife’s name said in such a familiar fashion from a stranger. But when he turned back, Diane Martin’s eyes were gentle, that unique stare of hers, penetrating curiosity but soft-edged, and he found himself saying, “She’d be a poor judge.”

“Why?”

“Because she wanted to take them all,” he said. “Because she could not hear a story like yours and tell you no. Ever.”

“Can you?”

“Sure.”

“How about I tell you what I think,” she said. “How about I give you what you came for, and then... then you do what you want. But at least you’ll understand the full story. Or as much of it as I can tell.”

Mark took a breath, nodded, and then turned to the bartender and held up two fingers. “We’ll do another round,” he said. His fingers were trembling.

5

Two hours later, they were still talking.

“Do I think Ridley Barnes did it?” Diane said. “Probably. But I can’t say for sure. It’s that element that haunts me, haunts this town, haunts everyone. From friends to strangers, no one can look me in the eye when Sarah is mentioned because no one really knows. If the man who killed her is just walking around free, enjoying his days, and knowing all the while that he...” Her voice broke. It was a musical voice most of the time, one that didn’t betray her own pain so much as offer to take yours away. Mark wondered who or what had given her the deep wells of composure.

“I understand the basics of the prosecutor’s decision not to pursue charges,” Mark said, “but what did they tell you? Anything different?”

She shook her head. “I can’t think of anything substantially different. It would have been what you heard — lack of usable physical evidence, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s my understanding.” She paused, swallowed, and said, “But then Ridley brought Sarah up and said he couldn’t remember where he’d found her. Then he stopped giving interviews to the police entirely. Offered no cooperation. The prosecutor was worried about getting the physical evidence into court, because Ridley had an explanation for it, since he’d carried her out. They also couldn’t ascribe a motive. Unless he’s just a sociopath, which is my vote.”

“When we talk about motive, we have to talk about your family,” Mark said. “I’m sure you understand that. Are there people you and your husband might have had problems with who—”

“No. No one who came to mind. And my husband died when Sarah was fourteen. I don’t think he left enemies behind. I think he just left a lot of emptiness and sorrow.”

“You said you think Ridley did it,” Mark said. “But who else do you wonder about? Who keeps you awake?”

Diane swirled her beer — it was still her first, the second one was warming beside it, untouched — and considered the question. “Who keeps me awake,” she said. “I like that. Yes. Excellent. That’s just the right question.”

Mark waited.

“Evan Borders,” Diane said. “He was the flavor of the week before Barnes.”

“What was your take on Borders? Obvious suspect, being the one who took her down to the cave, but is there more to it?”

“He was a troubled kid. Or at least from a troubled family. The family was just a wreck. Dad got arrested as often as most of us go to the movies. Mom went through jobs faster than that until she left, when Evan was maybe eight, nine years old. Then Dad, he’d take off, only he’d wander back, time to time. You ever read Huckleberry Finn?”

“Yes.”

“Picture that father, and you’ve got a sense of Carson Borders. Evan was pretty well on his own as a kid. Had an uncle who as good as raised him, a man named Lou Leonard. When Sarah started dating Evan, I thought that by showing him trust, I was helping him overcome that upbringing. But then... then it happened, and I wondered...”

“Right,” Mark said. There was no need to make her finish.

“It was probably for the best that Carson was out of Evan’s life, honestly,” Diane said. “Evan worked, he showed some initiative, and I think he carried a lot of shame, which I always felt bad about. It’s hard for a child to have to deal with that sort of family reputation, particularly in a small town.”

Mark nodded. It certainly was hard. He’d never known his own father, but he knew small towns and family reputations. He’d been raised by uncles who were on a first-name basis with every jailer in western Montana and northern Wyoming and a mother who changed her name almost annually to try to keep her scams from catching up with her. The worst part of the family burden was the lack of surprise people showed. The way they just nodded over the news, as if they’d been expecting it, and then they looked at Mark with eyes that said, Wonder when your time will come.

“Was Carson Borders ever considered a suspect himself?”

“Briefly.” Her eyes flickered away. “Then he was... cleared, I guess you’d say.”

“What cleared him?”

“His teeth.”

Mark cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. Diane Martin took a drink of her beer and said, “Someone mailed a bag to Evan with Carson’s teeth in it.”

“Good Lord.”

She nodded. “The package was sent from Detroit. Evidently Carson had tried to negotiate his way out of prison by giving up some information on cell mates from Detroit.”

“Evan must have understood something about them too. You get that package in the mail, you know why. It was a message to him.”

“If it was, he never explained it.”

“Which means the message was received.” Mark thought about that for a minute and then said, “Did Ridley have a similar reputation? Any history of violence, of crime?”

“He had a reputation, but not for being a criminal. He was viewed as an eccentric, that was all. But he was never right. He was always saying strange things, giving you strange looks. Ever met someone who doesn’t seem to fit into the world the rest of us share? People who seem to belong to another one, up in their own heads? He had that sort of reputation. He used to go caving with some of the groups around here, but he made them uncomfortable. He’d talk to the cave, he’d say odd things, and most people who went out with him once never went back to him again, even though he was apparently very skilled at what he did. He was as comfortable underground as any snake.”

You ought to spend some time down there. In the dark. Think about her, think about me.

“Anyone else?”

“Brett and Jeremy Leonard. They’re Evan’s cousins. Bad kids. He felt some loyalty to them, I think, but they were always trouble and he wasn’t, at least not back then. One of my rules for Sarah was that she was not to be around those two.”

“But you’d put money on Ridley?”

“Yes. If he had just stayed with the group and not broken off on his own, well, then his story would either hold up or it wouldn’t, right? Then we would know the truth. But instead, he went off alone and conveniently forgot the path he’d taken, so whatever happened down there became harder to prove.”

“He says he doesn’t remember anything. What do you think of that?”

She fixed that penetrating stare on him again but this time added are-you-kidding-me raised eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Mark said. “I know.”

“Total memory loss? Please. Something happened down there. He has to remember something.”

“I agree. Now, what happened once he was inside, we don’t know. But what about before he was called out?”

“He was already underground.”

Mark frowned. “He was inside the cave when this happened?”

“Another cave. Or so he says. The surveillance videos say he didn’t go into Trapdoor. But Ridley was the one person on earth who might have known another way in.”

“My understanding,” Mark said, “is that the police were never able to locate the spot where...where Sarah was found.” He was careful to say Sarah, not the body or the corpse or the remains.

“That’s right. And that’s another reason that Ridley Barnes becomes so hard to believe, because he’s an expert, right? He supposedly knows the place better than anyone alive, but he claims he can’t even begin to remember where he was when he found her?”

“Okay,” he said. “So it’s Ridley, Evan, and these cousins of his. Nobody else stands out to you?”

Diane went quiet. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.

“I lied to you,” she said.

“When?”

She turned to face him, and her eyes were bright with unspilled tears. “You asked who keeps me awake at night. I gave you three names. But I didn’t give you the one that matters most. I keep myself awake at night. I’m the one. Because isn’t it my job to see that someone finds out the truth, finds out who did it? Isn’t that my job?”

Mark shook his head and said, “No, it’s not yours,” but he’d never convinced himself to believe that either.

“Then whose is it?” Diane Martin asked.

“The police.”

“And when they can’t do anything? When they don’t do anything?”

“Then you need help,” Mark said. “Then you need...”

“Someone like you,” she said when he didn’t finish.

He drained his beer and put some cash on the bar. “I appreciate your time, Mrs. Martin. I truly do. You had every right to be angry with me, and yet you heard me out.”

“So you’ll help?”

“I’ll do what I promised. I’ll evaluate things, and the rest is up to my boss.”

“You should go there.”

“Pardon?”

Her face was intense; she was leaning close to him now, one hand on his arm. “To Trapdoor. To the place where she died. I think you should see it for yourself.”

“People keep telling me that,” he said, and he was afraid she’d ask who else had said it, but she didn’t.

“People are right. You should go down there and think about your wife, and then make up your mind.”

“My wife has absolutely nothing to do with this. That has to be understood.”

The silent smile she offered in response was impossibly kind.

6

He didn’t feel that he’d had that much to drink, but by the time they left the bar and walked into the wind-whipped cold, Mark had a shakiness and disorientation that suggested he’d had a few more than he remembered. Diane Martin was rock steady, though, walking briskly through the parking lot and toward the hotel. She stopped in front of a row of cars and turned back to him and offered her hand. The parking lot was poorly lit and he couldn’t make out her eyes in the shadows and was grateful for that.

“Consideration,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking for. If you believe you can help, and you wish to, then you should allow yourself to. It’s all up to you.”

Her hand lingered on his in a strange grasp, as if she was trying to communicate a sense of need that she wasn’t willing to voice.

“It’s not my call,” Mark said. “I’ve got bosses to answer to.”

“Consideration,” she repeated, and then she released his hand and said, “Get out of the cold, and get some sleep.”

He followed the instruction, because it was damn cold, and suddenly he felt damn tired. When the sliding doors parted, they revealed an empty and silent lobby, the hotel so quiet it felt like a funeral home. The girl at the front desk glanced up at him, and her eyes were hard, almost hostile.

Do I look drunk? he wondered. He hadn’t had that many. Two, right? Maybe three. No more than three. He’d paid the bill; why hadn’t he noticed how many beers were on it?

“Mr. Novak, I want to let you know that your room will be unavailable tomorrow.”

He’d been almost to the elevator when she spoke, and he turned back in confusion.

“I booked just the one night.”

“I know. I’m only informing you that if you decide to stay in this town any longer, it won’t be here.”

Mark stared at her. She was standing tall, shoulders back and arms folded over her chest, a just-try-and-argue-with-me look.

“There are maybe nine cars in your parking lot,” he said. “Not real crowded.”

“Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow you’re filled up? What battalion is coming to town?”

“We won’t have any rooms available for you,” she said. “That’s all.”

“For me? Or for anyone?”

“There are other hotels in town,” she said, and then she turned on her heel, walked into the office, and shut the door behind her, leaving him alone in the silent lobby.

There was a mirror a few steps away, and he moved to it and looked at himself. Clear-eyed, if a little tired. Well dressed, if not for this weather. There was nothing about his appearance that made him an undesirable in a hotel that was probably desperate for cash this time of year.

So it’s Ridley. She overheard that conversation with Diane, thinks that I’m working for Ridley, and now I’m an unwelcome guest.

He was tired and wanted to sleep and shouldn’t give a shit about a girl who was throwing him out of her hotel for whatever small-town reasons she had. All the same, it chafed. It had been a long time since he’d been told he wasn’t welcome somewhere, and those days were supposed to be behind him. No matter the reason, the eviction stirred unpleasant memories and dark urges. He looked at the closed office door and considered it for a moment and then shook his head.

“Get some sleep, Markus,” he said. “And then get the hell out of here.”

He heard the phones ring the next morning while he was in the shower — first his cell, then the room phone. When the room phone stopped and then started up again, he shut off the water, wrapped a towel around his waist, and hurried out of the bathroom. He was expecting it to be Jeff or possibly Diane Martin. But the caller introduced himself as Gary Clay, a reporter with a newspaper in Evansville, just an hour south of Garrison.

“I understand that you’re opening an investigation into the Sarah Martin case, and I was hoping to learn a little bit about that,” Clay said.

“I really can’t comment. I don’t know who told you about this, but it’s a nonstory.”

“All due respect, but I’ve got plenty of readers who would disagree. The Martin case still has a hold around here, as I’m sure you know.”

“If we move forward with it, I’ll talk with you at some point.”

“My editor isn’t going to let me make that bargain. I’ve been told to write something, and all I know right now is that you’ve been hired by the only suspect—”

“No, that is not correct. In no way, shape, or form is that correct. Who told you that?”

“I can’t reveal that.”

“Of course not. But I’m supposed to reveal things to you, right?”

“I called to make sure I had accurate information,” Clay said. “See, it’s already helping.”

“Whatever you write, you’d better make it damn clear that we are not working for Ridley Barnes. Not working for anyone. And if you’re going to refuse to hold this story until you learn whether it even is a story, you’d better get your facts straight.”

“My apologies. I just knew that he was the only person you’d spoken with, which led me to believe—”

“Then you don’t know anything,” Mark snapped. “If you write that I’m working for Barnes, you’re going to need to have an attorney onboard real fast. Because that’s a flagrant lie. As is the statement that he’s the only person I’ve spoken with. As is, for that matter, the statement that he’s the only suspect.”

“Who else is a suspect?”

“Go read your own damn archives,” Mark said. “You’ll find some names. Then go call all of them and let them speak for themselves. Barnes, Borders, whoever you’d like. But do not put words in my mouth.”

“Is it correct that you haven’t attempted to locate any surviving family members but have already spoken with Ridley Barnes?”

“No, that is not correct,” Mark said. “I’ve met with Diane Martin, and she’s aware of the possibility of the investigation and supportive of it if we choose to move forward, and right now that’s unlikely. So you don’t need to waste your ink on me.”

There was a pause, and when the reporter spoke again, his words were slow and careful. “You met with Diane Martin?”

“I certainly did. And she’s—” Mark caught himself, grimaced, and shook his head. Gary Clay was pretty good. He’d turned Mark’s refusal to speak into a back-and-forth session in a few smooth moves by making bold statements that were designed to provoke an emotional response and, thus, a quotable response. Mark should have been smarter.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got for you.”

“I understand that perspective,” Clay said, “but I actually think I might be able to help your reputation, not harm it. If you could—”

“I’m not going to let this go on any longer. If you write anything that says I’m working to clear Ridley Barnes, you’ll have some trouble over it. That’s not a threat. Just the truth of the matter.”

“In all honesty, I don’t think you can afford—”

“To continue this conversation,” Mark said. “You’re right. Good-bye.”

He hung up and closed his eyes for a minute. It would be better to fly back, sit before the board of directors, and tell them what had happened inside the prison than to linger here.

“Time to go,” he said aloud. “I’m sorry, Sarah. But this isn’t the right place for me.”

7

He’d meant it when he’d said it. He really had. He’d packed his bags and checked out of the hotel and was in the rental car headed out of town when he pulled over and used his phone to find the address of Trapdoor Caverns. The old web page was still active, boasting of boat and walking tours, of unmatched underground grandeur, fun for the whole family!

He thought then of the request, not Ridley’s but Diane Martin’s — You should go there. To Trapdoor. To the place where she died. I think you should see it for yourself — and he told himself that it was a bad idea and he needed to just keep driving. Then he thought, You’ve got the time, and if Diane Martin calls, you can tell her you did that much. You can tell her that you did what she asked. He turned off the highway and headed to Trapdoor Caverns.

Just for a look.

The place deserved a look, at least. It was the crime scene, after all, and even if he was just checking off boxes on his way to turning this one down, he needed to—

Sit down there in the dark

— visit the crime scene. That was obvious; it was fundamental.

There was a locked gate blocking the entrance to the property, and he left the rental car parked outside and walked around the gate and down the drive, his feet crunching on the snow. Not much of it covered the ground, only a couple of inches, and today the sun was brilliant and the snow crystals sparkled like white sand.

When he was about a tenth of a mile past the gate, two buildings came into view: a log home with wide windows and multiple decks and, about fifty yards from that, a large garage. Just below was a creek, the water iced over and shining. An ornate iron footbridge crossed the water, going from the house and the garage to a wall of stone that wouldn’t have drawn Mark’s eye if not for the part of it that didn’t belong — a set of iron bars like an ancient prison door. When he got closer, he saw that it actually was a door. Padlocked.

That would be the cave entrance.

He walked as far as the footbridge but didn’t cross it. Just stood there and looked at the cave waiting beyond it.

You should go down there and think about your wife, and then make up your mind.

As he looked at the creek he found himself wincing. The glare of the sun on the snow-covered ice was too bright. Across from it and beyond those iron bars, the darkness looked welcoming. Above, the stone faded into a steep slope lined with saplings, and up on top, the ground flattened out and ran off into open fields. He could see horses, their heads surrounded by fogs of warm breath that sat in the still air. One of them whinnied, a soft sound across the distance, but it still made Mark’s eyes close involuntarily.

He’d grown up around that sound. Different towns, different states, but always horses. Traveling with his uncles and his mother, staying in a place until one or the other of them got into enough trouble that they had to move on. There were always jobs to be found if you were good with horses, though, and his uncles had been good. There was a time, long ago, that he had been too.

People thought that his uncles were plagued by alcoholism and anger, but Mark believed they were really plagued by family. Their sister, his mother, in particular. They kept looking out for her when they shouldn’t have, refusing to give up on her. While his uncles had their faults, his mother was the only real con in the family. She had not a trace of Native American blood, but she’d tan her already dark complexion, dye her hair raven black, and braid it, weaving feathers into the braids. Then she’d announce herself as a great-great-granddaughter of either Looking Glass or White Bird, Nez Perce chiefs who had participated in the epic flight through the Rockies, struggling to reach Canada, only to be stopped, exhausted and starving, twenty miles from the border. She’d learned early on that Chief Joseph was a touch too famous, and there was the chance that a tourist might know more about him than she did, so she’d given up being his imaginary relation and chosen the lesser-known chiefs. Broadcasting her heritage as a spiritualist with great medicine powers, she would sell dream catchers and offer psychic readings and faith healings.

What money she made — and some summers she did quite well — went to bottles or, in the worst of times, needles. Mark and his uncles would have to track her down and bring her back to whatever was currently home. As Mark grew older, he began to dream of running away. Running south, to the land of palm trees and blue water.

He’d been seventeen when he finally left, even though one uncle was dead and one was in jail and there was nobody else to watch over Snow Creek Maiden, but it was a while before he made it to the palms and beaches of his dreams. For some years, he kicked around the West in the same tired circles he’d always known, taking jobs as a rafting guide, a stable hand, doing grunt labor for a hunting outfitter, tending bar for snowmobilers, whatever paid. Eventually he saved enough to head south with a small cushion. He’d been working night shifts at gas stations around Sarasota for a year before he got a job as a deckhand on a diving boat. He was fascinated by the idea of diving but couldn’t afford the lessons and was hesitant to ask his boss for a discounted rate. It was his boss’s daughter, Lauren, who offered him that first lesson. She had a small build and looked overmatched by the scuba gear but moved in the water as if she belonged to it. The first time he’d seen her, she’d been working her way up to the surface, graceful and gorgeous, her blond hair fanned out in the turquoise depths.

He put his hand in his pocket now and found the plastic disk that had been Lauren’s permit on that first trip together, the sentimental touch he’d never been able to show her on that deck on Siesta Key. There were moments when he could close his eyes and see the stern of the boat from Saba National Marine Park at sunset, the two of them sitting close but not quite touching, not yet. But soon. And by the end of that year, he’d gotten into what was then St. Petersburg Junior College, just a few hours away from where she was studying in Gainesville. Two years later he was in Gainesville too. Lauren had an internship with Jeff London. Mark had never heard anyone talk about his work with the passion Jeff demonstrated, and the idea of it, of cell doors opening for people who’d never belonged behind bars, was compelling. Truth be told, though, Mark hadn’t joined up because of Jeff’s passion. He’d joined because of Lauren’s. Because he wanted to catch some of the glow that radiated from her when she talked about Innocence Incorporated.

He was good at it too. Better than anyone had expected, certainly better than he’d expected. The investigative work came naturally. He could be both patient and instinctive, Jeff said, a magical blend. Mark didn’t know about that, but he knew he enjoyed the work. The idea that someone was waiting to die for the sins of another and that one piece of undiscovered evidence might free him was not a job you could tire of. It had seemed righteous to him. Back then.

The land of palm trees and blue water had treated him well indeed. It had been the paradise he’d known it would be, full of warm welcomes and soft edges, a place where cold pain and shame would never find him. He’d almost come to believe that before Lauren made the drive to Cassadaga.

“Hey! Closed property, pal! Can you not read the signs or do you just not give a shit what they say?”

The Florida memories were gone then and ice-covered Indiana was back and Mark turned and saw a tall black man in a knit hat and an untucked, half-buttoned shirt rushing toward him from the garage.

“Signs hang on that gate for a reason, you know. Hell, the gate is there for a reason! But you folks don’t care, the world’s your damned oyster, you just do as you please...”

He was walking nearly as fast as he was bitching, but it was a tight race. Mark waited until the man pulled up close and then he said, “I walked down for a look. I’m sorry.”

“That’s just the thing! That is just the thing that I mean. The signs and the gate are supposed to tell you that you can’t have a look! But people just do whatever the hell it is they please anymore. I don’t know when it became that way, I honest to God don’t. But there was a shift. There was a change.”

“Manners are lacking,” Mark said. “Common courtesy is a thing of the past.”

“You are f’ing-A right about that,” the man said. He seemed to be softening now that Mark had agreed with him that the world was in social decline, and he paused to finish buttoning his shirt. He was knotted with muscle and had thick wrists and a mechanic’s forearms. His face was hawkish and angular, like it had been built for cutting through the wind, and a perpetual squint added to the effect.

“F’ing A,” Mark echoed. “I apologize. I shouldn’t have trespassed. You the owner?”

“One worse or one better, depending on your perspective. I’m the caretaker. Cecil Buckner.”

“Were you around when the cave was in operation?”

“I’m the only caretaker she’s ever had. Was here then, and I’m here now.”

Mark nodded. “You’ve always lived in the castle.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. My name’s Mark Novak. I came up from Florida.”

He held his hand out and Buckner looked at it suspiciously and then chose to ignore it. “Came up for what?”

“To have a look around.”

“Well, that was ignorant. Cave’s closed.”

“How long?”

“Indefinitely. A damn shame, you ask me. If you aren’t going to use it, then why in the hell not sell it, right? I can tell you for a fact there was two million dollars on the table from the state for this place. Had eyes on turning it into a park. That’s from the government, mister, and you’d have to be a damn fool if you didn’t realize they don’t tend to pay top dollar. But instead, it sits empty, with those bars over the entrance and more locks than a prison ward. If you’re hoping to make an offer, good luck and good-bye. Because Pershing ain’t selling.”

“He has no plans for it at all?”

“If he does, he hasn’t shared them with me.” Cecil Buckner pointed at the big log home above the creek. “That house was built in 2002 as a summer home for Pershing when the cave was about to open for tours. You ought to see the place; it’s a gem. Now it just sits empty. Am I allowed to stay in it? Hell, no. I get the apartment above the garage. ’Course, I’m allowed to go in there and clean now and then. That’s it.” He shook his head. “Waste. All this place is now is a waste.”

Mark looked at the huge house that Cecil was allowed to enter only to clean or repair, and he felt a surge of distaste for the owners. Cecil’s was the first black face Mark had seen in town, and Cecil felt too much like a servant for comfort.

“How big is the cave?” Mark said, just to move the conversation away from Cecil’s living quarters.

“Ask Ridley Barnes.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s the only one who knows for sure. Most new caves, they have exploration teams. Trapdoor had Ridley Barnes.”

“Why just him?”

“Because Pershing MacAlister, bless his kindly soul for my employment, did not and does not understand caves. In his business world, the fewer partners you had, the better. So he said the hell with safety, the hell with experience, the hell with everyone, and he brought in Ridley to map what wasn’t obvious. That didn’t go so well. Cave was discovered in 2000, opened for tours in 2003, and closed for good by the end of 2004. Ridley Barnes was hired in the spring of 2004. No, that didn’t go so well at all.” Cecil’s face wrinkled with distaste. “What’s your interest in the cave anyhow?”

“I have no interest in the cave. I’m an investigator. Here for the Sarah Martin case.”

Buckner looked away from Mark and out over the fields as if in search of an oasis in a vast desert. “You have got to be shittin’ me.”

“Afraid not.”

Buckner shook his head, overcome by disgust. “Don’t go botherin’ folks with that. What’s the gain? If they could have convicted him back then, they would have.”

“There are some people who disagree.”

“Those people can go to hell. They have no stake in what happened here or what will happen here. They just like to gossip.”

“I’d argue that Sarah Martin’s mother does have some stake in what happened here. An emotional one but still worthy of respect.”

For the first time, Cecil Buckner seemed knocked off his stride. He blinked at Mark as if trying to clear clouded vision. “What?”

“Her mother thinks it’s worthwhile. Her mother is the one who told me to come down here and look around.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday.”

Buckner looked at him in disbelief.

“Does that surprise you for some reason?” Mark said. “You think she’d have lost interest in finding her daughter’s killer just because so much time has passed?”

“I thought she’d lost interest in most earthly pursuits.”

“What in the hell does that mean?”

“Let me be real clear here: You say you spoke to Diane yesterday?”

“Last night.”

“Then you’re a very special man.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I certainly do, and I’m not going to be alone in that assessment, trust me. Not if you believe that you coaxed any thoughts or feelings out of Diane Martin.”

“She’s usually that tight-lipped?”

“To most of us,” Cecil Buckner said, “the dead are mighty tight-lipped, yes.”

8

Mark stared at him, waiting on a punch line that he was sure would be delivered, just had to be. Cecil Buckner took a shuffling step back. You never wanted to be too close to a lunatic.

“You believe Diane Martin is dead?” Mark said.

“It ain’t a matter of opinion!”

Mark parted his lips but then closed them. His mind was swirling with images of the previous night: the woman’s relentless stare, the way she’d put her hand on his arm and told him that he needed to go to Trapdoor Caverns.

“Someone played quite a trick on you, brother,” Cecil said.

Quite a trick. Sure. It was one hell of a trick. Mark could see the intensity of those eyes, could hear her near-musical voice answering questions with such deep emotion.

“Sarah Martin’s mother is dead,” Mark repeated. His voice was numb. “The only mother she had? I mean, there were no stepparents, nobody who might have—”

“I’m quite sure of it. Can you hang tight for a minute? Ah, what the hell, follow me.”

Cecil Buckner led Mark back up the drive and to the garage. As soon as Cecil opened the door, smells of gasoline and diesel fuel and sawdust filled the air. They went up a narrow flight of unfinished wooden steps and entered a small apartment with a galley kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom. A gun cabinet was squeezed in a tight space between a television and the wall, two shotguns and a small-caliber rifle inside. There was soft blues music coming from the bedroom, something with mournful horns and subtle drums.

Cecil stepped away from him, said, “Hang on a minute,” and then walked down the hall. The music was silenced and replaced by the sound of drawers opening and closing. When Cecil returned, he held a folder that he was twisting in his hands as if he couldn’t decide what to do with it. “Would you like to make sure?”

“Make sure? Either she’s dead or she isn’t. You told me there’s no doubt.”

“Yes, but... well, I don’t know what you saw.”

“I don’t see things. I’m not having visions, all right? I’m not a crazy man with hallucinations. Someone impersonated her, and—”

Cecil opened the folder and shoved it at him and said, “Just tell me it didn’t look like her.”

Inside the folder was a copy of a newspaper story: “Diane Martin Dies with Questions About Her Daughter Still Unanswered.” Tucked below the headline was a picture of the woman. She was tall and broad-shouldered with brown hair and dark eyes. She was nothing like the woman who’d put her hand on Mark’s arm and told him that maybe this was the right case for him.

“Not her?” Cecil said.

“Of course not,” Mark said.

Cecil shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. There’s some folks see ghosts, some folks see—”

“Stop that bullshit. The woman was real, she was a fraud, and she set me up. I wish I’d taken her picture so I could ask you who she was.”

“Too bad,” Cecil said, but he didn’t sound particularly dismayed. “If Sarah’s daddy comes at you next, ignore that one too. He was killed in a car accident. So, how long were you in town before she appeared?”

“Arrived,” Mark snapped.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Mark didn’t like Cecil’s word choice. The woman didn’t appear, the way a ghost or a phantom might. She’d arrived at his hotel and called his room, the way a real person did. “It was maybe seven hours after I got here.”

“How many people in Garrison knew you were coming to town?”

“Zero,” he said, not liking it any more than Cecil did, the way this had been waiting on him like a snare.

“So someone at your hotel must have—”

“No.” Mark shook his head. It was the right idea, but the wrong sequence. Someone had sent her to him, yes, but not someone from the hotel. “How many places are there to stay in this town, do you think?”

“Maybe a half dozen.”

“Exactly. I wouldn’t have been hard to find. Not if you knew what I was driving.”

“Who knew that?”

“Ridley Barnes, Sheriff Blankenship, and that’s it. By the time she came to my hotel, it was just the two of them who knew I was here. I spoke to only three people yesterday. Barnes, the sheriff, and that woman. She came on fast, and she came on ready.”

That part bothered him the most. She’d been prepped. You didn’t just rush out of the house and pull off a pitch-perfect performance as a victim’s mother. Mark had met with too many of the real deal. He’d have spotted the falseness.

“Can’t believe I bought it,” he said. “I mean, damn, some detective, right?”

“She was that good?” Cecil seemed intrigued by the tale now, like he wanted to sit down and put up his feet and listen to it all. It was probably the best theater to arrive at his closed-for-business cave in a long time.

“She was that good.” Mark paused and then added, “And I let go of my own rule.”

“What’s that?”

“Question everything; trust nothing. I let it go, because she didn’t seem worth questioning, you know? She had to be who she said she was. But if I’d questioned it...” He gave a bitter smile. “There were some tells. Yes, there were. She was too composed. The act was good, and all of the words were right, but the eyes? Those didn’t fit. The way she looked when she told it... no, that didn’t fit. I kept thinking that her calm was impressive.”

He was cut off by the ring of his cell phone. Jeff London calling. Bringing him home, hopefully. That would be a gift. He couldn’t wait to get out of this town.

“Sorry, I’ve got to take this.” He answered the phone and said, “Hey, Jeff, I’m right in the middle of—”

“A disaster,” London said.

“What?”

“I just got a call from a newspaper reporter in Indiana.”

“Shit. Don’t talk to him. This thing is—”

“Oh, I’m going to have to talk to him, because his article is already up online. He won’t be the last reporter to call. It’s a hell of an interesting piece after all. Not every day that an investigator blows into town and claims to have interviewed a dead woman.”

“I’ll get him to kill it. I’ll get that pulled down.”

“Sure, Mark, you can stop the Internet. Before you do that, would you mind reversing the Earth’s orbit?”

“Jeff, you have to understand that—”

“I’m going to read this to you,” London said, talking right over him, his voice tight with anger. “I want you to hear what’s circulating about an organization that relies entirely on its reputation and credibility. ‘Mark Novak’s Florida-based Innocence Incorporated purports to have unique abilities on death-row defense cases. Based on his early work on the unsolved murder of Sarah Martin, the company’s abilities certainly are unique. This morning Novak claimed he opened his assessment of the case with an interview of Diane Martin, the victim’s mother. It’s an unsurprising place to start, but there’s one problem — Diane Martin died in 2008, after an apparent prescription-pill overdose. “I’ve met with Diane Martin, and she’s aware of the possibility of the investigation and supportive of it if we choose to move forward,” Novak said. “Right now that’s unlikely.” Unlikely seems to be the ideal word for all of Novak’s investigations in Garrison.’”

Mark had his eyes closed by the time Jeff finished.

“What happened?” Jeff said. “What in the hell happened?”

“Somebody set me up. It had to be Ridley Barnes. But this woman came to my hotel and told me she was the mother. I just found out the truth. I’ll call Clay and straighten him out.”

“Good luck with that. The Associated Press has already grabbed it. Every time I refresh the news page, I see more hits. I’ve got calls from numbers in five different states so far. I can’t wait to play all the messages. And I have to answer them, because I have to answer for your conduct.” His voice was bristling. “Yesterday I spent five hours convincing my board of directors that you didn’t deserve to be fired, that you had your head together. I used those words, Markus. I told them, ‘Oh, yes, he has his head together.’ Then I find out you’re talking to dead people? Boy, do I look like one fine judge of mental health!”

“I’m not talking to dead people, Jeff. I talked to a fraud. What she was after, I don’t know. But if you hadn’t sent me to this place to begin with to look at a case that we wouldn’t even consider taking, then—”

“No,” Jeff said. “Do not question that. Do not even mention it. I cleared you off the decks so I could protect you and make you think a little, maybe get some perspective back. Don’t you dare question that when I’m down here taking bullets for you. How in God’s name did a professional investigator, a detective with a license and training, not do enough research to learn that the girl’s mother was dead! It’s one Google search!”

“You know damn well why I didn’t do any research, Jeff. Because we weren’t going to take the case! You sent me up here with a one-page abstract and Ridley’s letter, that was it.”

“You want to debate the blame, knock yourself out, but now I’ve got to do damage control, round two,” Jeff said. “Because when the board sees this, I promise you, you’re done. Unless we can explain it. And we are going to need to explain it with something better than what I’ve heard so far.”

You’re done. Jeff might have thought he was talking about Mark’s job, but he was wrong. Without the job, Mark himself was done. The job was all that Mark had, all that got him through his days. But more important — most important, the only thing that mattered, now — the job gave him a way to complete the sole task that remained for him in this life. Lauren’s killer was still out there. Mark had leads that he’d gotten through his work, abuse of his position be damned, and he couldn’t afford to lose them this early. After he settled the score for Lauren, fine, let them take what they wanted, let them take everything, because everything wasn’t much anymore. But until then, the access Innocence Incorporated gave him was crucial. It had gotten him close already, and if he just weathered this storm, it would get him home. It had to.

“I’ll find this woman,” Mark said. “I’ll find her, and I’ll make her own up to this, and the board won’t have to decide anything because it will be obvious what happened up here.”

Jeff was silent.

“You got a better idea?” Mark said. “If so, I’ll take it. But I think we’re going to have to produce her.”

“All right, go ahead, but first make damn sure that you’re looped in with the local police. We need to have allies up there, not enemies.”

Mark had a feeling that Blankenship was not going to relish the role of ally, but he told Jeff that he’d do his best.

“I’ll get this cleaned up by tonight,” he said, and Cecil Buckner looked at Mark as if he’d just placed a high-dollar bet on a horse with three legs.

“You’d better,” Jeff said. “Or it’s back to the board I go, and the fresh questions aren’t going to be fun ones, for you or for me.”

He hung up then, and Mark pocketed the phone and looked at Cecil Buckner, who was watching with interest.

“That didn’t sound real positive, at least from this end of the call,” he said.

Mark ignored that and said, “Listen, I’m going to go talk to the police and get this shit handled. I may need to call you at some point.”

“Sure. And you do realize that I’m going to have to call the MacAlisters? Pershing, he’s in bad shape these days. Had himself a stroke on the golf course. Never been right since. But his daughter is looking after their affairs, and that’s kind of lucky, because she’s a lawyer.”

Lucky, indeed. The last thing Mark needed right now was a lawyer showing up.

“Can you give me a few hours before you make that call?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to do my job,” Cecil said. He didn’t look sorry at all.

9

Mark wasn’t surprised that Blankenship had been expecting to hear from him, but he was surprised at the man’s energy and anger. In their first meeting, the sheriff had been low-voiced and skeptical, more of a watcher than an aggressor. Today, that approach was gone.

“I’ve dealt with some stupid sons of bitches before, but you’re setting a new standard,” Blankenship said, boiling up to the front desk as soon as Mark’s presence was announced. “What in the hell about this entertains you, son? People hurt over this shit, you understand that? They hurt!”

He glanced at the listeners around him, straightened up to his full, impressive height, and said, “We’ll walk and talk. I don’t need you wasting anyone else’s time.”

He banged the door open and Mark followed him out onto the sidewalk. Blankenship’s large hands were clenching and unclenching as if he were willing down a desire to take a swing.

“I understand you don’t like it,” Mark said. “But can you pause to consider how I feel about being set up by some idiot like that?”

“I don’t give a damn how you feel. I told you this thing could cause pain. Would cause pain. You ignored me. But this? This with Diane? I’ve never heard anything like it. Never.”

Blankenship was walking toward the town square, his long legs moving so fast that Mark had to struggle to keep pace. Snowflakes were falling, and a plow went by and splashed slush onto Blankenship’s shoes and pants but he didn’t seem to notice.

“You know how that poor woman died?” Blankenship said. “She went into Sarah’s bedroom, lay down on the bed where her baby had slept, and read a children’s Bible she’d given Sarah when she was a little girl. While she read it, she took sleeping pills. One after another. Just trying to find some peace. People said suicide, but they were wrong. She was just looking for some rest. For just a few moments of peace.”

His voice broke on the last sentence. He cleared his throat and shook his head.

“Now you’ve even got that damned family coming back into town. Icing on the cake, right there. I never needed to see them again. Any of them.”

“Who in the hell are you talking about?”

“Got a call from Danielle MacAlister not ten minutes ago. I thought that whole clan was done with Garrison. But you pass through town and they decide it’s worth a return trip. Next they’ll probably decide it’s time to open the cave again. Of course, I’m the only man in Garrison who actually thinks that it shouldn’t be open — to everyone else, it’s lost money in a town that doesn’t have money to lose. Only thing Pershing and I ever agreed on was closing that cave. Him shutting that damned place down and then getting the hell out of this county, those were the only moves he ever made that had my blessing.” He shook his head, and by now his hands were no longer clenching and unclenching; they were held in tight fists. “I’ll see you charged for this, Novak.”

“You got nothing to charge me with, Blankenship. And I’d think you’d want to find out who set me up like that, and why. No interest?”

The sheriff studied him with disgust but didn’t say anything.

“The reporter alone is worth your time,” Mark said. “He wouldn’t tell me who called him with the tip. He might tell you.”

“Doesn’t need to. I know who tipped him.” Blankenship raised his hand. “And I’m not the least bit sorry about that either. I wanted to know what you’d say to the media that you wouldn’t say to me. You sure came through, didn’t you?”

“That’s a bullshit small-town move, Blankenship.”

Blankenship shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter,” Mark said. “I don’t need the damn reporter. I’ve got witnesses. In the hotel, and in the restaurant just across the parking lot. Hotels have security cameras. I suspect the restaurant does as well. We can get video of this woman. So before you start spouting off about charges again, why don’t you do a little police work? Give me fifteen minutes of police work.”

Blankenship didn’t like that, but he didn’t answer right away either. Mark said, “You want her worse than I do, Sheriff. Let’s go find her.”

Blankenship followed him to the hotel. Mark had expected they’d ride together, but the sheriff said, “I don’t want you in my damn car until I can put you in the backseat in handcuffs,” and he’d slammed the driver’s door, leaving Mark standing alone in the snow on the sidewalk, marveling at the amount of rage Blankenship showed. It wasn’t his reputation that had taken the hit; it was Mark’s.

When they entered the hotel, the same young brunette who had checked Mark in the previous day was working, a sight he took in with relief. She’d been all ears for the discussion, enjoying the theater playing out in her lobby. She would remember enough to help.

“I thought I told you that we were—” Then she caught a glimpse of Blankenship’s uniform and stiffened.

“Don’t worry,” Mark said. “I don’t intend to ask for another room. Just tell the sheriff here what happened in the lobby not long after I checked in.”

“When the woman came by to get you?”

“Exactly,” he said, feeling better already.

“You were here for this?” Blankenship asked.

She nodded. “Yes. He’d checked in, and then she came in and asked me to call his room. She did the talking, though. I just handed over the phone. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Blankenship assured her. “I just need to understand what was said.”

“Well, she didn’t say a lot to me. But, you know, I overheard enough to get the gist. I could hear only her. Whatever he said on the phone, that was too quiet. But she said that she was a friend of Ridley Barnes and—”

“Wait,” Mark said. “No, no, no. She might have mentioned his name, but she didn’t say she was a friend, she said—”

“Let her talk,” Blankenship said, his voice weighted with warning. Mark lifted his hands in frustration and nodded.

“So she said she was a friend of Ridley Barnes, and, well, that kind of stood out to me,” the clerk continued. Her name tag identified her only as Lily, no last name.

“Why?” Blankenship said.

“Um... you know how Ridley was... well, what people thought about him when Sarah Martin was killed.”

“Yes,” Blankenship said coolly. “I know what people thought.”

“Okay. So I knew Sarah. We went to school together. Ran track and cross-country together. We weren’t, like, super-close, but we were teammates, so I knew her, and I followed the story, everybody did.”

Mark was already concerned about his eyewitness. Not only had she misunderstood the context, but he was certain that Ridley hadn’t been mentioned at all on the phone.

“Tell him who the woman said she was when I got down here,” Mark said. “You were taking that whole conversation in and didn’t pretend not to be. Tell him what she said then.”

“The same thing.” Lily didn’t hesitate, didn’t so much as blink. “You came out of the elevator and she thanked you for making time for her—”

“Thanked me? What are you talking about? She was furious with me!”

“Novak, you say another word and I will put you in the back of my car,” Blankenship said. “Let her finish.”

The clerk was rattled now, looking at Mark uneasily, and he knew he needed to dial down the anger — witness accounts were always varied and rarely accurate, but she was so far off base that it was hard. Her hostility from the previous night had bled over into lies, plain and simple. He exhaled and stepped back, trying to cool off.

“What did you hear her say?” Blankenship asked her.

“She told him that she appreciated him making time for her, and then she said that it was important for him to hear a different perspective on Ridley Barnes from what everyone else around here would tell him. I remember that, because I thought, Well, she must be willing to say something nice about him. Nobody else does.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mark said. “If you didn’t actually hear what was said, then don’t make shit up! What she told me was—”

Blankenship put a hand on his arm, and the grip was not gentle. The sheriff’s eyes were locked on the clerk, and they were intense.

“Ignore him. Just talk to me. Did you happen to hear any reference to Diane?”

“Diane?”

“Sorry. To Sarah’s mother.”

“No.”

“You say you were teammates with Sarah in high school,” Blankenship said. “Did you know her mother?”

“Of course. Sarah’s mom was always around. Mrs. Martin drove our coach nuts because she loved to bake for us and he didn’t want us eating stuff like that.”

“So if this woman yesterday had identified herself at any point as Sarah’s mother, that would have stood out to you?”

“Are you kidding? Sarah’s mother is dead! Yes, that would have stood out to me.”

“She called Sarah her baby,” Mark said. “On the phone. She said, ‘What are you doing asking about my baby?’”

“I didn’t hear that.”

“Bullshit! You must have been standing right there! You handed her the phone! Why in the hell are you lying about this?”

“Novak—” Blankenship barked, but this time Mark cut him off.

“No, that deserves an answer! You tell me that Ridley is some sort of town pariah, but I’ve been here for twenty-four hours and it seems that plenty of people are willing to tell elaborate lies on his behalf. Aren’t you interested in why? Or do you already know?”

“Novak, get out. Now.” Blankenship’s grip tightened and he guided Mark to the front door and then pushed him through it, out into the blowing snow. “Wait here. If you so much as open this door, you’ll spend the night in jail.”

He went back inside and Mark stood in the parking lot and watched through the glass as the sheriff continued talking to the girl, who cast frequent, nervous glances at Mark. He stared at them, bristling with anger and fear and trying to fathom why she was lying. Had she been paid, threatened, what? Regardless, she’d been prepped. She had been as ready for this performance as the woman who’d impersonated Diane had been for hers. How in the hell had they put it together so fast? He’d chosen the hotel at random. Nobody had known where he was.

There were answers, but the sheriff wasn’t going to get them. Not from a girl who’d been either bribed or threatened. The answers would come from the people who’d started the game.

Mark left the hotel entrance and walked to his car. He was behind the wheel of the Ford and driving through the parking lot when the sheriff burst out of the hotel doors, shouting for him to stop. Mark ignored him and drove on, heading for Ridley Barnes and truth through any means necessary.

10

Ridley’s father had been a carpenter when he wasn’t being a drunk, and in those rare hours, he was both gifted and willing to teach. He had no interest in power tools; a true craftsman never used them and that, he claimed, was what separated a master from a journeyman when it came to woodworking. As far as Ridley and his mother and sister could tell, though, all it separated was men who didn’t have jobs from men who did.

But he’d been skilled, there was no denying that, and he’d enjoyed passing the lessons along. Between his first beer and his sixth, he was a marvelous teacher. When he edged toward the seventh, though, the steady hands vanished, and then the patience, and then the temper control. Some kids learned to count on their fingers; Ridley learned to count by his father’s empty beer bottles. Ten down, go underground, he’d rhymed to his sister, but he’d taken that mantra literally. There was an old strip pit on the family land in Stinesville — you couldn’t really call it a cave, because it went nowhere; it was just a hole in the ground, but it went deep and it went dark and it was tight. If you were committed, you could squirm far enough down that you’d never be found by a searching light or, worse, a reaching hand.

His father had been in a pine box for years — actually, there couldn’t be much of the box left by now — and what memories Ridley had of him were far from fond, with one exception: when he worked on wood with hand tools. They were the old tools, too, the ones Ridley had been taught with. And, more than occasionally, the ones he’d been hit with.

One thing his father could do better than any other carpenter Ridley ever saw was join boards so that they appeared to be one piece. He could work them in such a fashion that he seemed to convince the boards themselves that they belonged together. Even a trained eye had trouble finding the seams in Joel Barnes’s work.

But Ridley didn’t think his father had ever hidden a seam better than Ridley himself had with the knee wall in his attic. Under the dim light of the lone forty-watt bulb that lit the room, the wall looked flawless — one straight stretch, surely nothing but insulation and ductwork behind it. The old man would have been impressed. Between beers one and six, he might even have been proud.

As the morning wind rose to a steady moan, Ridley pressed on one corner of the attic knee wall and watched as it moved inward and another panel opened outward like a revolving door, all of it done without a sound. There wasn’t a screw or a nail in the whole thing. It was all built with wood, the door turning on a dowel. The area behind it wasn’t large — eight feet long by four feet deep and only four feet high. While that low ceiling would have driven many people mad, Ridley was used to tight spaces. Once he was inside and the wall was sealed behind him again, he had to use a headlamp or lantern.

There in the hidden room, surrounded by some items it was legal to have and others that would get him arrested, Ridley swung around so he was facing the wall that he’d sealed shut behind him. It was lined with maps — some topographic versions produced by the U.S. Geological Survey and others hand-drawn, produced by Ridley. The topos showed the surface world. Ridley’s showed what went on down below.

Today, he was interested in the topographic maps, all of which were covered with pushpins and notations in red, blue, or black ink. Each red circle had an X in the center, meaning Ridley had explored the cave, or potential cave, and found that it didn’t suit his memory or his needs. Each black circle had a check, which meant that he’d been in the cave and thought it held possibilities. Each blue circle had a question mark, meaning that he wasn’t certain there was a cave there but the topography suggested it was likely.

Southern Indiana was a karst landscape, which meant that part of the state existed above a world honeycombed with caves, caverns, and crevices. The land was home to springs where water bubbled up from below, sinkholes where the surface was pulled underground, a river that vanished for miles at a time — countless collisions between worlds above and worlds below.

Because of this, southern Indiana, like Kentucky, was heaven for cavers. Unless you were looking for one particular place in a cave and you weren’t certain that it even existed. Then it felt a lot less like heaven and a lot more like hell.

Trapdoor itself had been viewed as nothing but a sinkhole, a pocket of stone that caught excess runoff when Maiden Creek spilled its banks. Then came a week of relentless rain, and the ground opened up and revealed the entrance to an extensive cave system, but exploration efforts had stopped once the cave was closed, leaving Ridley to peck away from the outside and forcing him to remind himself, time and again, that the locked gate put in place by the MacAlister family concealed only an entrance, not the entrance.

There were others.

There had to be.

The issue was patience. That thing his father had never been able to hold, Ridley must keep firmly in hand. He put his finger on one of the maps and traced from one pushpin to the next, crossing over two blue circles with question marks. It was a swale maybe a quarter of a mile long, a small depression, and it seemed to offer little hope. But he’d searched so many better options for so long. He had to keep at it.

But not today. Today he would cut boards in his tiny sawmill operation, the only thing that still brought him any money. People had stopped hiring Ridley for carpentry ten years ago. There were rules in Garrison, and one of them was that you didn’t let Ridley Barnes in your house. Particularly if you had daughters.

Still, the men who were hired remembered the way that Ridley could work wood. Cabinets built by his hands were in plenty of homes around the area, though the owners didn’t know it. The contractors waited warily outside while he loaded their trucks, and they passed him cash quickly, and they left in a hurry.

Probably some of them had daughters.

Before he left the hidden room, he turned and took Sarah Martin’s necklace down from the peg on which it hung. A simple silver chain with a blue stone — it was a sapphire, her mother’s birthstone — in a setting rimmed with diamond chips. The clasp was still solid, but the chain was broken. It had been snapped, torn off her neck. The way things tore when reaching hands grabbed at them in tight, dark places. Trapped places.

He handled it delicately, running his thumb over the sapphire, remembering the time the police had come in with a list of things missing from Sarah’s body, things remembered by her mother and her friends and her boyfriend, and searched his house. Both her mother and Evan Borders recalled the necklace. Her mother said she never took it off and Evan confirmed she was wearing it the last time he’d seen her.

The police had been thorough with their search, but they didn’t quite understand Ridley. If they had, they would have looked at the place with different eyes. Maybe they would search again. Because they were coming back, make no mistake. Novak would see to that.

Everything old was about to be new again.

As if in confirmation, a knock thundered at his door. It wasn’t the knock of a casual visitor; it was a pounding of anger and authority. Ridley let out a breath of relief at the sound, understanding that things were, finally, back in motion.

11

Mark had given up knocking — either Ridley wasn’t home or he was pretending not to be — and was considering the pros and cons of kicking the door open when he finally heard footsteps inside.

“Now, Markus,” Mark whispered to himself, “you’ve got to think about that temper. Got to anticipate it.” He was speaking in an affected Southern drawl, handling each word as if he were testing the flavor. “A question of willpower, that’s what you’ve got to figure out. That’s what defines you, Markus. Willpower.”

Not bad at all. He could do a pretty decent impression of Jeff London when he wanted to.

“Greetings,” Ridley Barnes called as he opened the door, and Mark kept the London impression in his voice when he responded.

“How y’all doing, Mr. Barnes?”

Sweet as syrup. Ridley cocked his head, aware that it was an act and not aware of the reason for it. On a porch chair beside the door was a coiled rope, dusted with frost; it looked like it had been left out to dry in the cold air and had frozen. Mark slipped it off the chair and ran it through his hands. Stiff, but not frozen. A fine rope, expensive. It was a static line, designed not to stretch. Ridley probably used it for rappelling. You wouldn’t want much stretch in a cave. Mark kept it in his hands as he walked away from the door and out into the yard. Ridley followed.

“What is this, seven-sixteenths?” Mark said.

“Good guess. You’ve done some climbing, I take it?”

“Not much. Spent some time with ropes, though. Trick stuff.” He slid the rope out of the coil with hands that were long out of practice but still far from forgetting, then looped and twisted a quick noose. “Poor man’s lariat,” he said. “With trick ropes, you use a metal piece called a honda. Brass, usually. But if all you have is the rope, you make do.”

Mark held the rope in his left hand, and with his right hand he flipped over the noose he’d created and gave it a clockwise spin, keeping it parallel to the ground. The rope wasn’t right for the task, and the absence of the honda was noticeable, but he could spin it well enough for the noose to stay open. He dropped his left hand from the rope and kept his right hand spinning it, mostly wrist action, almost like twirling a bicycle wheel. The noose spun in a circle about one foot above the ground. Mark walked with it, testing the feel.

“Impressive,” Ridley said.

“Not really. See that wobble? No good. It’s supposed to be flat.” Mark still hadn’t looked up at him. His eyes remained on the spinning rope.

“Not the sort of trick I’d expect a Florida boy to know,” Ridley said.

“Now, see, there’s your problem. You know that I came up from Florida, that I’ve got a suntan and don’t have a good winter coat, so you assume I’m a Florida boy. But that’s not the truth.”

“So where are you from?”

“Bozeman, Cooke City, Emigrant, Laurel, and Livingston, Montana. Cody, Casper, Bridger, and Sheridan, Wyoming. Ashton, Idaho.”

“Rodeo family or something?”

“Or something.” Mark lifted his gaze from the rope up to Ridley. “My uncle Larry, he was the trick-roper. Damn good at it. Let’s see if I still have any of his touch.”

He kept the rope spinning, the noose flatter now, but his eyes were on Ridley, assessing the distance. He twirled the rope in front of him, bringing it right to left across his body, and then brought it overhead, spinning it faster and a little wider.

Ridley smiled. “Nice. You look like a real cowboy. Question is, can you do that and ride a horse at the same time?”

“Oh, sure,” Mark said, and then he stepped straight toward Ridley and threw the rope, making sure to hold his follow-through, because it had been a long time since he’d done this. Ridley was only ten feet away, though, and he was standing still. Mark had been able to rope a post at that distance when he was eight years old. The toss wasn’t as pretty as it should have been, but it was effective — the noose settled over Ridley’s head and around his shoulders, and Mark gave a quick, snapping tug and cinched it. His timing was a touch off — he’d wanted to catch Ridley around the chest but got him at the waist instead — but it still served the purpose, binding Ridley’s arms against his body. Ridley stumbled forward, caught himself, and then gave another smile, this one less certain.

“Not bad at all. Uncle Larry would be proud.”

“Hell, no, he wouldn’t. He’d have spit tobacco juice at my feet, shaken his head, and told me to do it again. He was a stickler for form.” Mark was pulling the rope forward hand over hand, and Ridley walked toward him rather than resist it, still smiling. “Nobody tips a trick-roper if it doesn’t look good.” Mark stopped drawing the rope in when Ridley was two feet from him, studying the smaller man and his false smile.

“You’re not fond of being caught in a noose, are you?”

“I thought that was a universal trait.”

Mark nodded. “Well, good old Uncle Larry, he was a character, I’ll tell you. And my uncle Ronny? He had some tricks too.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. His were a little different, though. Let me show you one of Uncle Ronny’s tricks.”

Before Ridley could say a word, Mark jerked hard on the rope and brought him stumbling forward, then dipped down and snapped his forehead off the bridge of Ridley’s nose.

“Wh-what the fuck...” Ridley stammered, trying to reel away, the blood already spilling, but then he got caught in the rope and went down. Mark moved in above him, pulled up on the rope enough to get Ridley off the ground, then grabbed him by his belt, spun him, and drove him back until he slammed into the hood of the Ford. Ridley’s ribs connected with the metal, and his breath went out with a grunt. His hands were fumbling for something, had been the whole time, but Mark didn’t care much about his hands because his arms were pinned to his sides, useless. When he saw that Ridley had managed to get a knife out of his pocket and open the blade, he was almost impressed. Now that mistake with the rope, getting him at the waist instead of the torso, was actually working in Mark’s favor. Ridley couldn’t get the knife high enough to do anything with it from a distance, but if Mark hadn’t been paying attention, Ridley might have been able to stick him.

“Now, Ridley,” he said. “A knife at a rope fight? Do you think that is fair?” He shook his head like a displeased teacher and then banged Ridley’s wrist on the fender until the knife fell to the ground. Ridley stopped resisting and rested on the hood, gasping. The blood bubbled in his nose as he tried to get his breath back.

Mark leaned close.

“You understand that I’m going to require her name,” he said. “Not the one she gave me either, no more bullshit and lies. I’m going to need to find the real woman, Mr. Barnes. You understand that, don’t you?”

Ridley began with “I don’t know—” but whatever he was trying to say ended in a sharp gasp of pain as Mark hit him twice under the sternum with a flashing left hand.

“You can’t afford to go that way, Ridley. You really can’t.”

Ridley didn’t speak this time. Just leaned back on the car, submissive, breathing hard and bleeding hard. Mark gave him a minute. After those gut punches, it would take Ridley a while to get any words out. Mark loosened the noose and let the rope drop to Ridley’s feet, freeing him.

“How’d you get the hotel clerk to lie?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a hell of a good trick,” Mark said. “I’ll give you credit there. First the bit with the woman pretending to be Sarah’s mother? That was inspired, sure. But how you got the girl at the hotel in the mix, I don’t know.”

Ridley just stared at him. He had his sleeve pressed against his nose to soak up the blood. His gray hair fanned out in all directions. Mark cupped his hands and blew into them to warm them and said, “I’m going to need her name, Ridley.”

“I don’t kn—”

“Shut up. Do not speak to me unless you’re going to speak the truth. Understand?”

Ridley nodded, which shook some drops of blood loose.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” Mark said. “She had to come from you. Because here’s the scenario: I got into town, and I spoke to two people. You and the sheriff. That’s it. The sheriff wasn’t going to roll out somebody pretending to be the victim’s mother, I just don’t see that being an option. Sheriff also never saw my car yesterday. He didn’t know what I was driving, wouldn’t have been able to find me that fast even if he’d wanted to. Nobody knew I was coming to this town, Ridley. So she came from one of two sources, you or the sheriff, and I don’t think it was the sheriff. You going to try and convince me that it was?”

Ridley Barnes didn’t say a word, but he reached down to pick his knife up out of the snow. Mark let him do it, watching and feeling the old pulse, the sight of the knife exciting him rather than scaring him, a near-pleasant sensation of Oh, so that’s the way this is going to go.

Ridley snapped the blade shut and slipped the knife back into his pocket.

“It won’t be hard,” Mark said. “Finding her? It won’t be hard at all. Because she came from you, and my guess, Ridley, is that you don’t have too many friends.”

When Ridley took his sleeve away from his nose, his face was masked with blood. He spit into the snow, then touched his nose gingerly with two fingers of his left hand.

“What did you think of the file?” he said. The words were muffled and distorted by the blood leaking into his sinuses.

Mark stared at him. “You are truly insane.”

“That’s what you took from the file?”

“No. That’s what I take from you.”

Ridley breathed deep, blinked hard, and said, “I asked about the file.”

Mark thought about smashing his fist into that blood mask of a face, finding the nose again, adding pain to pain. He kept his hands flat at his sides with an effort and breathed, four-count in, four-count out.

“I don’t know the point of your game,” he said. “Maybe you got bored once the cops stopped coming by, I don’t know. I also don’t know how or why you selected me for your continued entertainment. But it was a mistake, Ridley. Sending that woman to me, asking her to impersonate the girl’s mother? In a lifetime of bad choices, that might have been your worst.”

Ridley stood and listened, blood working out of his nose and down his face.

“What I’d like to do,” Mark said, “is bounce you off that car a few more times, long enough for me to get tired of the effort, and then drop your ass on the ground and drive away and be done with it. I can’t do that, though, do you see? You took that option from me when you sent her. Now I’m going to find her and deal with her, and maybe you’ll be a part of that, maybe you won’t. I don’t give a shit. Not when it comes to you, Ridley. But tell her that I’m on my way.”

Ridley Barnes said, “What about Sarah Martin?”

Mark felt his hands curl into fists again and knew from experience that things wouldn’t go well from here if he stayed. He couldn’t afford to stay. Instead, he shook his head in disgust and got in the car. Ridley kept talking.

“You’re going to need to think about her at some point, Novak! You’re not going to be able to keep walking away from her. Too many people have for too many years!”

It was a relief to slam the door on the sound of that voice. Ridley was visible in the side-view mirror, standing there in the bloody snow, still babbling about Sarah Martin. Mark started the engine and pulled out of the yard.

He made it three miles before his hands started to tremble on the wheel. A mile beyond that and there was a shudder in his vision, and his head felt high and spacey. There was no shoulder to the road, just the fields, and he pulled off into one and put the car in park and got the door open and placed one hand on the snow-covered ground and gasped in air and waited for the rise of vomit in his throat.

It never came. The frigid air filled his lungs and cleared his head, and the feel of the earth brought the high dizziness swirling back down.

When it was done, he hung on the door frame and breathed in the cold air. There was blood on his shirtsleeve and the back of his hand. He wiped at his face, soaked in sweat despite the temperature, and then fell back into the seat, leaving the door open, and looked at himself in the mirror. His usually tan skin looked gray, waxen, the dark circles below his eyes standing out starkly.

Can’t have that, he thought, staring at his own face. Can’t go there again.

If Ridley wanted to make a call to the police right now, Mark would be in jail by the end of the night, and an already bad story would spiral into something far worse. He hadn’t wanted it to go that way. He’d wanted to confront him, yes, get something from him, and Ridley was the type who called for intimidation, but the rope had been enough, and things should have stopped there. It was that smile, the way Ridley Barnes had looked at him, like he was enjoying the game.

So much time had passed since he’d allowed a lapse like that. But then the old feeling had knocked, and he’d known what waited on the other side of the door and still he’d opened it and welcomed the familiar visitor in.

The first time he’d gone looking for blood — his own or someone else’s, it didn’t matter — was nine months after Lauren was killed, and Mark had just gotten off the phone with her father, just finished summarizing another week of no answers and no leads. He’d gone directly to the worst bar he could think of, the one where he could count on a chance. He hadn’t needed to wait long. All it took was the right kind of stare to the right kind of man, and things got started fast. The guy needed to be right, though; he couldn’t be just any guy. He had to look the part, had to come straight out of central casting.

He had to look like he might have killed a woman.

Jeff London had bailed Mark out of jail after talking with a prosecutor who’d said that he understood, who’d said that Mark was damn lucky the other guy had been a piece of shit with a bench warrant out for him or things would have gone different.

You’re shaming her, London had told Mark. His eyes held a sheen under the streetlights. Forget about yourself. Forget about me. You’re shaming her, Mark.

It was so close to those last words Mark had offered Lauren: Don’t embarrass me with this shit. Then came London: You’re shaming her, Mark.

People had their pride. Even the dead.

Or they should have it.

He used handfuls of snow to scrub the blood from his skin and shirt as best he could, and then, as the Midwestern wind picked up and whistled over the fields, he closed the door and got back on the road.

12

The snow had begun to fall again, fat, wet flakes, and Mark remembered the sheriff’s assertion that some forecasts were calling for as much as ten inches. He hadn’t seen a plow or a salt truck yet, but that wasn’t saying much, because he hadn’t seen any vehicle until a white Chevy Silverado rattled up behind him. The truck would have stood out even on an interstate, though — the muffler had been modified to enhance the growl of the engine. The driver was pushing it hard, rode right up on Mark’s ass, and Mark considered tapping the brakes to screw with him, but the last thing he needed right now was a fender bender that would roll out a deputy. He put the window down, letting snow blow into the car, and waved his hand, calling for the truck to pass him.

It didn’t pass. Just stayed planted. Mark could see that there was only one occupant and that he was wearing sunglasses, which was logical, of course, because the sky was the color of an old nickel.

They went another half a mile and the truck stayed on his ass, and Mark began to understand the situation. He’d been right in his assessment that Ridley wasn’t going to call the police to deal with Mark. That didn’t mean he hadn’t picked up the phone, though.

The snow was blowing harder, and the powder was coating the road quickly. Every now and then, a gust of wind strong enough to buffet the car came across the fields. Up ahead, where the fields ended, trees loomed, rows of tall hardwoods with bare canopies shifting in the wind.

A stop sign came up, surprising him, not just because he’d been distracted by the truck but because visibility was so poor. When he hit the brakes, the Ford fishtailed. The stop was a four-way intersection, but Mark saw no reason to divert from his plan to return to town, so he drove on. Within a few seconds, something felt wrong. There’d been a change in sound. The growl of the Silverado had faded. For an instant he thought perhaps he’d been mistaken, that maybe the truck’s driver had no interest in him at all and had turned in another direction. Then he looked in the mirror again and what he saw almost made him press the brake. The truck was in the middle of the intersection, the driver executing an awkward three-point turn.

Called off? Satisfied that I’m headed back to town?

The truck didn’t finish the turn, though. Once it was broadside in the middle of the road, blocking both lanes, motion stopped, the brake lights went off, and the hazard lights went on.

What in the hell was this about?

Mark kept driving, but the mirror had his attention. The truck remained in place, hazards blinking, as if there had been an accident that forced it to stop there in the road. There’d been nothing of the sort, though. The driver had come to a stop and then carefully turned the truck into that position, which achieved nothing except to...

Block the road.

You didn’t block the road behind someone because you wanted to see where he was going. You blocked the road behind him so somebody else ahead of him would have time with him.

Through the blowing snow, another vehicle appeared. This one was headed east, toward Mark, driving with the wind, seeming to be pushed by the snow. A white panel van. The van slowed and pulled sideways, cutting off the road in front of Mark in an identical fashion to the truck behind him, which was no longer visible in the mirror. The road was completely blocked now, eastbound and westbound, and Mark was alone in the middle.

Mark brought the Ford to a stop. The van doors opened on both sides and two men climbed out. Both wore jeans and hooded sweatshirts and black masks. Both carried shotguns. Behind Mark there was the sound of another door. The truck’s driver was out. He also wore a mask and carried a shotgun.

My guess is that you don’t have too many friends, Mark had told Ridley Barnes.

He had at least three.

The men walked toward Mark, shotguns pointed down, closing the gap fast. Then they fanned out, leaving the road so they were protected by the trees, their guns raised in shooter’s stances.

Mark had nothing approaching a weapon in the rental car. There was an empty Styrofoam cup that had once held coffee; a file folder of old case notes. He wasn’t going to take these three down with paper cuts. The only weapon was the car itself, and given the way they were flanking him, even the car wouldn’t be much use. He’d force them to open fire if he drove at them, and right now there remained at least a chance that they didn’t intend to shoot.

Lauren was found outside of her vehicle on a rural road, Mr. Novak. She’d been shot.

He wanted to reach into his pocket, wanted suddenly — desperately — to feel that worn diving-permit tag that had traveled all these years with him, but reaching for anything was potentially deadly. Instead, he put both hands on the wheel and waited. It wasn’t long — the men on the flanking sides closed quickly and simultaneously through the snow, like wolves. The one from the truck walked past them and then turned to face the car.

Nobody spoke. The guy on the passenger’s side was small, maybe five six, and he seemed to like holding the shotgun, had a more aggressive posture than the others. A bantam, a little guy eager for a fight. On the driver’s side was a bigger guy, over six feet, forced to stoop to have a clear visual on Mark. Wide through the shoulders, hands so big they curled around the stock of the shotgun as if it were a handgun grip. As long as he didn’t have to catch someone, the advantage would usually be his, and he didn’t have to catch Mark. Their gray sweatshirts were identical, no brand name apparent. Just generic hooded sweatshirts. Generic black knit masks. No telling features. The black pump shotguns were probably twelve-gauges, nothing fancy or expensive. Like the sweatshirts and the masks, the shotguns matched. Nobody was allowed to be an individual in this group, and that was troubling, because it was smart.

The man from the Silverado stood directly in front of the Ford, feet spread wide to give him a good base, his shotgun held at belt level, pointed at the windshield. His finger on the trigger. The wind raised the snow from the road and swirled it around him like a protective force.

It’s his show, Mark thought. Whatever happens from here, it’s his decision.

“Get him out.”

When the command came, the big man on the driver’s side cradled the shotgun against his shoulder and held it in one hand so he could free up the other to grab the door handle. That would have been Mark’s best chance, nine out of ten times — when the attacker had one hand off the gun and was opening a door toward himself. Mark could help the door along, kick it into his face and knock him off balance, or at least knock the gun out of his control long enough for Mark to get his hands on him, but this wasn’t nine out of ten times. This was the tenth, when you had shooters on every side.

The big one pulled the door open only to have the wind try to push it shut again. He wrestled it back and got one leg inside, trapping it open.

“Step out.” He had a voice that suited his frame. Loud and deep and commanding.

“I’m unarmed,” Mark said. “And you can see my hands on the wheel, can’t you?”

“Don’t care.”

“I’m just saying that if we’re talking, we can do that here.”

“We’re not talking.”

Mark nodded. “You mind if I turn the engine off? This is hell on my fuel economy.”

The big man shoved the shotgun muzzle into the car and smacked it against Mark’s forehead.

“You know what,” Mark said, “I think I’ll just get out and worry about the gas later.”

Mark released the seat belt and stepped out of the car and into the snow.

“Hands in air or hands on the back of my head?” Mark said. “What’s your preference?”

The big guy regarded Mark as if he distrusted the questions. “Back of the head. Then walk toward the van.”

Mark laced his fingers together behind his head. The gesture pulled his coat open, and the big guy took advantage of that to frisk him. The wind rose to a scream, and Mark shivered involuntarily.

“Cold,” he said. “Wouldn’t mind having one of those masks myself. Maybe you could take yours off and let me borrow it? Would be thoughtful, considering you’d still have your hood.”

A shotgun-muzzle jab to the forehead again. He heard his teeth click together as he fell back against the car, and he bit his tongue and tasted blood. He sucked the blood to the front of his mouth and then spit it into the snow. Looked like a small thing, but it wasn’t. That copper-flavored spit held his DNA signature, and there was a chance some detective might appreciate his leaving it behind. Dark thoughts, yes, but this was how it ended for some people. Places like this, moments like this. Men with guns on lonely roads. Sometimes this was exactly where it ended.

“Walk to the van.” That deep voice suggested there wasn’t going to be any further discussion. Mark walked away from his car and toward the van. The path took him directly into the wind, and the snow stung his eyes.

“We leaving my car behind?” he said. “Sitting there with the engine running? Seems like a good way to attract some attention. And you probably don’t want attention.”

He just wanted to talk, because talking gave him a chance to see reactions and learn more about these men behind the masks, and hopefully talking would also distract them from the way he kept spitting blood, trying to leave a trail of it as he walked. Leave a clue. Lord, what he would have given for a clue on another day and another road, one where windblown cypress leaves cast rippling shadows.

“Don’t worry about your car,” the big man said. He was walking with Mark; the bantam had stayed behind, and the headman was motionless, waiting.

“It’s just that, you know, I never spring for the full coverage,” Mark said. “Saves a few dollars, but it does make me worry.”

They reached the point man. He was about Mark’s size, maybe an inch taller, and thinner, but in a rangy way. The sweatshirt was too big for him, hanging loose.

“We could have this talk,” Mark said to him, “without me getting in the van.”

The other man didn’t respond. The bigger one jabbed Mark with the shotgun again, a hard shot to the kidney, and while it made him wince and stole his breath, he took a sad pride in the fact that he stayed upright and didn’t lower his hands.

A crunching sound came from behind them, and Mark turned to see that the third man, the smaller guy with the tense nerves, had climbed behind the wheel of the Ford.

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that,” Mark said. “It’s nothing personal. It’s not even my rule. The problem is with Hertz. They want you to identify everyone who is going to drive the car. So maybe if I could just get a real quick look at his driver’s license, that would be enough to—”

This time the blow knocked him down. Mark fell onto his knees in the road. He still had his hands clasped behind his head.

“There might be some confusion,” he said, “about what I’m doing in your town. I’m sure we can straighten it out. I don’t intend to stay here. I never did.”

When the thinner man without gloves nodded, the next blow came almost immediately, and the world wavered away. There was pain and there was darkness and there was cold, but not much else. Mark had a vague awareness of being lifted. They dragged him around the back of the van, and he thought, License plate, but his vision couldn’t anchor on anything, and then there were two metallic snaps and he thought, Kill shot coming.

No gunfire followed, though. He was lifted higher and then shoved into darkness and he realized the metallic noises had been the doors on the back of the van, and now he was inside of it. He tried to bite down on his tongue again and missed it somehow — how could you fail at an attempt to bite your own tongue? — but found his lip instead. He was satisfied with that, and he ground his teeth until he tasted blood again. That was the only thought he could hold in a mind that was swimming in and out of consciousness: he wanted to leave blood in their van. A strange hope, the polar opposite of what he should want to happen, yet he knew what it could mean to someone later. Without forensic evidence, good luck. Without forensic evidence, cases stayed open. Murderers stayed on the streets. Questions added layers of grief. He was determined that a lack of forensic evidence would not be a problem for anyone working his case.

So bleed, then, and keep bleeding. Leave a mark on this world.

13

The first thing he was aware of was pain in his shoulders. The headache came second, and then a sense of motion. Mark opened his eyes and saw corrugated metal covered with a thin layer of crimson-tinted water. Snowmelt and blood.

The motion was the van’s — he could feel it swaying as it took curves — and the source of the headache was obvious, but the shoulder pain seemed fixable, the product of awkward positioning. It was only when he tried to shift that position that he felt the rope binding his wrists.

Someone reached out, put a gloved hand against the back of his neck, and said, “Stay down.”

He didn’t need that advice; he wasn’t going anywhere. The van bumped over something, then slowed, and a voice said, “Hood,” and Mark was lifted and a bag was jerked over his head. The fabric was coarse. Something was looped around his throat and pulled tight enough to cinch the bag in place.

Returning the favor, he thought, remembering the look in Ridley’s eyes when Mark had dropped that noose over him.

The bag smelled of something vaguely familiar, but Mark couldn’t place it. An earthy, pungent smell. So familiar, and yet he couldn’t locate the source in a mind that was swimming with pain and disorientation.

The van came to a stop and he heard the back doors open, and a rush of frigid air hit him. He was grabbed by his feet and pulled and then hands caught him under his armpits and lifted him easily, as if he were a child. His feet landed on uneven ground and he slipped and would have fallen if the hands hadn’t kept him upright. Nobody said a word. The only sounds were men breathing and a keening wind. It was unbelievably cold.

“Move those feet, bud. We’re walking.”

He did as instructed, moving his feet, although they weren’t particularly cooperative. He was being held by the back now; someone had a fistful of his shirt. They were walking into the wind, and he began to shiver. He wasn’t sure how far they’d gone — it felt like a long walk but probably wasn’t — when the same voice that had ordered the hood spoke again.

“That’s good. You’re all done. I’ve got it.”

Mark’s shirt was released then, and he stood alone, shivering, hands bound and the bag — What was that damn smell? — over his head.

“Let’s get to it,” Mark said.

“You in a hurry?”

Mark tried to identify some distinct quality in the voice. There wasn’t much of one, though. A man’s voice, not particularly high or deep, with just a trace of the South to it. Not the real South, not a drawl like Jeff London’s, but a hint of hill country.

“I’m cold,” Mark said.

“Not dressed for the weather. Should be glad you have that hood on. Cuts the wind.”

“Let’s get to it,” Mark said again.

“You in a rush to die, boy?”

“That’s what’s going to happen?”

The answer didn’t come in words. Something cold and sharp touched the base of his neck, just below the hood. The point of a knife, applied with just enough pressure to break the skin. A trickle of blood began to work its way down Mark’s collarbone.

“Still in a hurry?”

Mark didn’t answer. The point of the knife moved from Mark’s collarbone and sliced down. He could hear his shirt ripping. With his shirt cut, the wind found bare flesh. The blood felt very warm.

He was pulled forward, and his feet struck something unexpected. The snow was still there but the surface beneath was no longer frozen earth. Whatever it was flexed and bowed as if it was not designed to hold human weight. He shuffled forward, trying not to lift his feet, overwhelmed by the odd sensation that he was walking up and into thin air and that ahead of him the surface would vanish and he would plummet down. Like walking a plank.

“Stop there.”

Mark was happy to listen to that, because whatever he was standing on seemed progressively weaker, each step producing more give. There were metallic sounds that he couldn’t identify and then the hand was back on him and the voice said, “Big step now.”

Mark tried to take a big step but his foot found nothing but air and he started to fall and the other man caught him and pulled him forward with an effort and Mark fell to his knees on a floor. Out of the snow now but still very cold.

“Who brought you here?” the voice said.

“I’m going to tell you the truth,” Mark said.

That provoked a low, dark laugh. “I think that’s the way for you to do it, yeah.”

“But you’re not going to like it much, I’ll tell you that now.”

“Why don’t you tell me who brought you to town instead?”

“The same son of a bitch who sent you after me. So let’s not waste our time pretending we’re confused about that. Ridley called me, and Ridley called you, but only one of us is actually working for him.”

“Thought you were here for Sarah Martin, not Ridley Barnes.”

“I don’t care about Sarah Martin.”

“That’s disappointing to hear from a detective. You’re supposed to care. You’re supposed to solve the thing. Think you’ll be able to do that?”

“It’s not going real well to this point.”

“Don’t care about Sarah, huh? Don’t like Ridley and don’t care about Sarah. What in the hell do you want in this town, then?”

“Not a damn thing. I just want to go home.”

“Little late for that.”

There was a pause, a rustling sound, and then another stab of the knife, this time high on his arm, in the flesh of his biceps. Wait. No, that wasn’t the knife. It was thinner and sharper and went too deep with too little pain.

Mark got it then, understood from touch what he could not see, and said, “What did you just put in me?”

There was no answer. The needle found him again, the other arm this time, and though he tried to twist away from it, he succeeded only in falling backward as an unknown chemical joined his bloodstream, slipping through his body and carrying a black fog with it.

14

The black fog never lifted, but it had shades. For a time Mark thought he was underwater, in the dim depths. He was certain he could see a familiar reef below, and he knew exactly where he was: Saba National Marine Park. Lauren had reached the reef first — she always did, she moved like an eel. She had beaten him there, and that meant she was just to his left. He turned to his left then, eager to see her, and the water rippled like a curtain, and her face was there but hard to see. There was snow in the water now, falling fast and hard between them. He’d never seen snow underwater before. It was beautiful. Lauren was smiling at it, reaching out to catch one of the flakes in her palm, and suddenly Mark felt panic rising, because Lauren didn’t know anything about snow, she’d always lived among palm trees and warm sunsets and blue waters and she was not prepared for the dangers that lurked in harsh winters. That was his fault. He had not done enough to prepare her for that because she was never supposed to see it.

Mark said, “Baby, be careful,” and then something slapped him in the face and knocked the next words aside. He’d meant to ask her a question, but he couldn’t recall it now, and the snow was falling faster and the curtain of water was rippling like laundry on the line, and Lauren faded out of sight behind it all. Mark blinked and squinted and tried to find her but the snow was gone and then the water went with it.

He’d come to the surface.

No, that wasn’t right. He’d never left the surface. His feet were on the ground and his ass was on a chair. These things were real, tangible. It was as dim here as it had been underwater. Some source of light was coming from behind him, painting shadows on a wall of boards in front of him. There was something wrong with the boards. The boards were melting. He tried hard to think of what that might mean, and then he thought Fire and fear overwhelmed him, because he knew that if there was a fire then he had to run, but he couldn’t even get out of that chair.

“Settle down, damn it,” someone said.

“The boards are melting,” Mark said. “Look at them. They’re melting!”

Another slap, and the fog that returned was gray, and Mark didn’t mind it so much because at least he didn’t have to see that wall melting in front of him anymore. His fear ebbed away and he became aware of a repeated question. Asked patiently but insistently.

“What did Ridley tell you?”

Ridley. That didn’t make any sense. Ridley hadn’t seen the reef. Nobody but Mark and Lauren had. The other divers were scared of going that far. Hell, Mark had been a little scared too. Lauren wasn’t, though. He could see her blond hair fanned out wide in the current, could see those sleek legs in a smooth churn that drove her down effortlessly, and he remembered that he’d been scared of her in that moment. Scared for her, yes, but scared of her too, because nobody can hurt you worse than someone you love. Lauren was reckless in the way that you could be only if you’d never had true cause for fear. Mark didn’t want her to be afraid, but maybe she needed to be. Fear protected you at times.

“She was just young,” he said.

“What?”

“Just too damn young. Came from a different place than me, and I thought that was good. I thought that was perfect. But some people don’t need to be older to understand what the world can do to you. She wasn’t one of those, though. She wasn’t.”

“Sarah? You’re talking about Sarah?”

The gray fog parted and Mark saw the melting boards again and felt panic again, but then the boards peeled away and there was nothing but water behind, shimmering curtains of water. Good. They weren’t going to burn after all. You couldn’t burn underwater, could you? Maybe in the right conditions you could. Things blew up underwater. Maybe in the right—

Another slap, then the voice, louder, and warm breath against Mark’s ear. “What... did... Ridley... tell you?”

Ridley hadn’t told Mark anything about Lauren. Why would he? He didn’t know her. Wait. Wait one minute. He had said something about her.

“Dates were the same,” Mark said.

“What dates?”

“When they died.”

Hands fell on his shoulders, their grasp rough, shaking him, and when the voice returned, it had added urgency. Mark couldn’t see anything but shadows now. One large shadow, looming above him. Too tall to be a man. Something bigger than a man, something worse.

“He knows they died on the same day? He’s sure?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he’s sure.” Mark didn’t understand the confusion about this. The dates were obvious; all Ridley had to do was read the newspaper. Maybe the shadow should learn to read. Mark started to laugh. The shadow didn’t like the laugh, and he slapped him again. That was getting old. Mark was tired of the slaps.

“What else? Think hard, now, tell me the truth. What else did Ridley have to say?”

Mark wanted to please the shadow, which seemed strange because the shadow kept slapping him, but there was something in its voice that was so urgent, nearly desperate, that Mark wanted to provide the right answers.

“He said...” What had he said? They’d talked, hadn’t they? Yes, they’d talked, and he’d said that the dates were the same, and that had bothered Mark. Mark got upset with Ridley then, he remembered that.

“He said what?”

“That I needed to go there.”

“Where?”

Good question. Where was there? For a moment he was convinced that the right answer was the reef, but the reef hadn’t involved Ridley, that had been just Mark and Lauren. Why did the reef keep coming to mind, then? Tanks. Tanks and rebreathers. Yes, he’d seen those with Ridley, that made sense. But Ridley didn’t dive, he...

“Wanted me to go to the cave,” Mark said.

“To Trapdoor?”

Mark nodded, happy to have been of help. “Yes, he knows about the cave. It is all about the cave with Ridley. Cave, cave, cave. That’s all he wants to talk about.” He started to laugh again. He got smacked again. He felt like crying. He felt like sleeping. Where was the water? Where was the reef? Where was his wife?

“Why did he want you in the cave?”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Mark said.

The shadow went silent. Mark saw the melting boards again so he closed his eyes and tried to find the water. There it was. Gentle currents pushing and pulling at him, and somewhere up ahead was Lauren. Glimpses of her hair. Here and gone, here and gone. Why wouldn’t she slow down and let him catch up? Going too fast was dangerous. It was reckless. It would get someone killed.

“Slow down,” he whispered. “Wait.”

“I’m thinking,” the shadow said from somewhere behind Mark. The shadow had misunderstood; Mark didn’t care if he slowed down. “I’m thinking that maybe Ridley was right. Maybe you need some time down there. It’ll stir things up, won’t it? Let’s stir things up.”

“Okay,” Mark said agreeably. “Let’s do.”

Something was pulled over his head then, and the melting boards vanished and so did the water behind them. He’d never make the reef now. Lauren was up there ahead, and she was all alone.