Last Words

23

His belongings were in plastic evidence bags, but they had been released to Jeff, apparently without any objection from the police. Legally, no crime except trespassing had been committed. Mark had willingly driven to Trapdoor, parked, and walked down to the cave. This was exactly what he’d been asked to do — visit the cave, spend some time down there in the dark.

Do some thinking.

Jeff was gone when the nurse finally brought the bags into the room, all of the things that had been removed from his unlocked rental car after they’d hauled him out of the cave on a backboard and carried him to a waiting helicopter. His wallet was untouched, every card and every dollar still inside, and his laptop was still in his travel bag, along with the thick folder from Ridley Barnes. Everything seemed just as it should be, at least until he went through his pockets with a growing unease.

“There was something else in my pockets,” Mark said. “A diving permit.”

The nurse raised her eyebrows. “Diving permit?”

“It’s a little plastic disk. Like a poker chip almost.”

“I’m sorry, that’s all they gave us. I’m sure you can get your diving permit replaced,” she said without interest.

Mark thought of his first trip with Lauren, of the sunset over the Saba reefs, of how many times he had touched that old tag as a reassurance that he had been made whole once and could be again.

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get it all replaced.”

He lay alone in the hospital room, one light on and shadows heavy in the corners, and read Ridley’s case file for the first time.

The Diane Martin impersonator might have lied about what mattered most, but she’d been honest with regard to the way the case had developed. Evan had been the first suspect, his father also in the mix, before Ridley came to the surface with a body and a stream of bizarre statements that turned into silence and never changed. Evan’s story hadn’t changed either — he never backed off the claim that they’d heard noises and he thought someone had entered the cave with them so he’d told Sarah to hide while he checked it out, and she’d hidden a little too well.

Carson Borders had been a target of the investigation in the early days, and it was clear that the police had sweated Evan long and hard over the whereabouts of his father. He said he had no idea where his father had gone, and the police couldn’t turn him up either, but with good reason — Carson was dead by then. Five years earlier, he’d given information about a gun- and drug-runner from Detroit named Lamar Hunter in hopes of receiving an early release. He hadn’t been granted it, and Lamar hadn’t forgotten about him. Prison guards at Pendleton testified that those last five years behind bars had been plenty rough for Carson, but Hunter was too smart to kill him inside. He’d promised Carson that he’d never see his family again, and apparently Hunter had made good on that promise. Evan swore that he hadn’t seen his father after he was paroled, and while police had initially been suspicious of that, they couldn’t come up with any evidence that Carson had made it back to Garrison. He’d vanished almost instantly upon his release. Photos in the case file showed thirty-one teeth, nicked and scarred by pliers, in a simple plastic sandwich bag. The teeth, along with a candy cane, had been mailed from a Detroit postal code in a plain brown envelope that arrived at Carson’s son’s doorstep on Christmas Eve.

There were references to Diane Martin in the file, plenty of them, but no indication that she had died. At the time the case file was assembled, she’d been very much alive and a factor in the investigation. The world created by the case file included two highlight-reel moments:

The sheriff of Garrison County, the one Jeff had just identified as someone Mark was going to need to become awfully friendly with, had a personal attachment to the dead woman Mark had claimed to meet. It didn’t seem like a promising start for a friendship. Mark remembered Blankenship’s fists opening and closing, the way he’d said, I told you this thing could cause pain. Would cause pain.

They hadn’t been together when Sarah went missing. By then, Diane Martin was engaged to Pershing MacAlister.

A missing item from Sarah’s person, identified by both her mother and Evan Borders as something she was wearing the night she disappeared, was a sapphire necklace that was actually her mother’s and that had been given to Diane by Dan Blankenship. The sheriff’s voice had broken when he’d described Diane’s last moments, that trip to her daughter’s bedroom, the children’s Bible in her hand. Mark had thought it was just that the case had struck an emotional chord, but he’d been wrong.

Mark flipped through the case file until he came to a photograph of Ridley Barnes taken the day he’d appeared with the body. He was a decade younger but didn’t look much different. The wild hair was brown then, not gray, but not much else had changed. He was still whip-thin and fit, with hollow cheeks that seemed designed to draw attention to those oddly bright eyes. In the photograph he was dressed entirely in black but so covered in mud that the clothing looked like some sort of camouflage pattern. He was staring at the camera with distrust, like a primitive warrior who thought the device might steal his soul.

The final entry in the report was a supplemental written by the Indiana State Police summarizing the difficulties of getting the cave to reveal its secrets, a challenge exceeded only by the task of getting Ridley Barnes to reveal his.

“Good Lord,” Mark whispered. Blankenship had made the call. Blankenship had sent Ridley in, despite objections from the landowner. Mark doubted the sheriff had gone to sleep one night since without thinking of that decision.

Mark closed the file and dropped it back into the bag and turned off the bedside light, which did little to darken the hospital room, then closed his eyes and sought sleep. It was a fruitless search. He was exhausted physically, but mentally he was alert. Not just alert. Afraid. Mark was no stranger to horrors, but this one was unique. To say This is what happened and find neither trust nor support was a terrifying thing. How was it happening? Three men should be in prison for what they’d done to him, but the police weren’t even looking.

You’re going to need a witness, Jeff had said.

There had been three witnesses to his abduction. None of them were likely to corroborate Mark’s version of the events.

But who were they? Where had they come from?

He turned the light back on, found the phone, and called Jeff.

It was an hour before he got through to him, fresh off the plane in Texas.

“I want Ridley’s phone records,” Mark said. “Whoever came for me, they were sent by Ridley. There’s no other option. They came on fast too. He made a call, and there will be a record of it. The records can’t lie.”

The videotapes did, a voice in his head whispered. The voice had become familiar in the hours since Jeff had left, and its tone had shifted from warning to mocking. The people lie, and the videos lie, and you tell the truth, Mark? My, my. That’ll be a tough sell.

Almost on cue, Jeff said, “That’ll be a tough subpoena to get, considering there’s no legal case in progress and the only person who has grounds for charges here is Ridley, and against you.”

“I didn’t suggest a subpoena.”

Silence.

“Jeff, I’ve worked with you for years. I’m well aware of what can be gotten, and how. You can get them, and we both know it.”

“And we both know that it’s illegal.”

“We’re talking about saving my job here.”

“And risking mine.”

Mark lowered his voice. “This is all I have, Jeff. It’s not just a job, not just a paycheck. You know that.”

“That’s the same thing you told me the last time you jeopardized it. I listened then. I’m supposed to again?”

“Last time I made a mistake. This time I was forced into one. There isn’t a chance we’re going to take this case; it doesn’t even meet the rules of the damned bylaws, we couldn’t take it if we wanted to. Yet you sent me up here, and now everything I have left in my life is at risk, and you won’t run a fucking phone record for me?”

Jeff didn’t answer. Mark let the silence roll for a few seconds, and when he finally spoke, he had better control. “I know I’ve got no right to ask this of you. I know I keep pushing you for help, and your face told me what your words didn’t when you were up here — you’re starting to wonder about my story, aren’t you? To wonder about me. If I can be trusted.”

“I trust you,” Jeff said in the way a man might say I love you to his ex-wife on the day they signed the divorce papers.

“I need you to understand this from my point of view. After listening to you and hearing what work you’ve done to verify my story and what you’ve found, I’m beginning to have trouble trusting myself. Think about that for a minute.” Mark took a deep breath — which hurt; everything hurt, and he was still in bed — and said, “The only thing I can say is that Ridley is engineering all of this somehow. But he didn’t know I was headed to his house until I showed up. No one was following me. They came at me after I came at him. So if Ridley didn’t make any calls, Jeff? If his phone lines were silent between the time I left his house and the time I was stopped on the road? Then I need to go home. Without a job, because I won’t deserve one. I’ll deserve a room with padded walls.”

Still Jeff didn’t speak.

“You’re the one who told me I’m going to need to prove my story to keep my head above water,” Mark said. “It starts with those phone records. If you don’t want to do it yourself, I understand. Give me the right contact, and I’ll do it. You shouldn’t be involved anyhow.”

“Bullshit I shouldn’t. It’s my fault you’re up there. You shouldn’t have been there to begin with. You know that and you always did. I had an idea that it was what you needed. It was the wrong idea.”

“You wanted me up here because of the date,” Mark said. “You wanted to push my buttons, rattle me.”

“Yes. I thought — I hoped — that if you spent even a little time looking at an unsolved case that bore any similarity to Lauren’s, it might... give you a little perspective. Remind you that you’re not alone in the world. That others have suffered the same losses. It was a terrible idea.”

Two days ago, Mark had been enraged by the move. Now he couldn’t summon any emotion over it, let alone anger.

“If you feel any responsibility for this, then do this one thing,” he said. “Get those records. If Ridley didn’t make any calls, then it means...”

“I’ll do it,” Jeff said. “But Markus? You’re going to need to file this favor with all of the other things you can’t remember.”

“That’ll be easy enough.”

It took him less than an hour. Technology might have done a lot of good for the world, but it had done nothing good for personal privacy. If you floated around the investigative and intelligence professions for long enough, you began to understand just how laughable the illusion of privacy was; if a pro, or even a dedicated amateur, wanted someone’s information, he could find it, and fast.

Jeff’s phone-records contact was a retired FBI agent who’d specialized in computer intelligence and who now lived in Georgia and had an ax to grind with the government and a hard-core pill habit to support. His information came at a price, but it came fast, and it was reliable.

“Ridley was on the phone a total of four times to a total of three people in the two days you were in town,” Jeff said. “One was a dentist, one was a bakery, and two calls were with a guy named Evan Borders.”

“Evan Borders. Ridley called that guy?”

“You know the name?”

“He was the other suspect in Sarah Martin’s murder. He was her boyfriend, the one who took her into the cave.”

“Evan Borders called Ridley shortly before noon, at home,” Jeff said. “Ridley called him back shortly after one.”

Mark let out a breath that came more from his soul than his lungs. “That’s right after I left. They bookended me with phone calls, basically. Ridley picked up the phone just after I left.”

“Seems like a strange choice. Two lead suspects trading calls?”

“Sure does. But it’s real.” That word had taken on new meaning in the past day. “Ridley engineered all of this. He wanted me down in that cave. He asked me to go, and when I didn’t, he put me there. I don’t understand how he’s got the influence that he does, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll get him.”

“Step lightly with that boy.”

He asked Jeff for all the call times and numbers — Bishop was the dentist, and the bakery was Haringa’s — and he wrote them down, thanked Jeff, and then hung up. There was only one light on in the hospital room, and he lay there in the dimness and stared at those names.

Evan Borders. The kid who’d brought Sarah Martin down to Trapdoor was in communication with her suspected killer a decade later.

Evan was going to require a visit, Mark decided. No phone call there, no discussion with the sheriff beforehand. Mark wanted to see Evan’s face.

More important, he wanted to watch Evan see his face.

24

They released him the next day, after Dr. Desare had reviewed his test results and proclaimed him maybe not the luckiest son of a bitch in history, but on the short list.

“Go back home, and get some rest,” he’d instructed. “Your body took a beating. Don’t underestimate that. Some rest in the warm sun will be just right.”

It sounded just right, but it wasn’t an option. Mark had four days before his professional fate was decided for him, which meant three days to get some evidence for his side of the argument.

All of that evidence was in Garrison.

He arranged for a rental car to be dropped off at the hotel. This one was a Ford Edge. Charming names Ford was coming up with these days — Escape and Edge. They might be great marketing hooks, but Mark wouldn’t have minded seeing a Chevy at this point. He eased behind the wheel like an elderly man; each movement required planning and brought pain. He thought he’d known soreness before in life, but it had just been redefined. As he drove out of the parking lot, he felt alone in a way that surprised and chilled him. More alone than even the worst days after Lauren’s killing. Then, he’d had the support of those around him because they believed him. It had seemed a small thing then, to be believed.

Such a small thing.

You’re going to need a witness, Jeff, his closest friend, had said, unwilling to look him in the eye.

To fill the silence of the car on the highway, he streamed music through the car’s Bluetooth system. It was music he’d never allowed anyone except Lauren to hear him listening to. The songs had traveled with him from Montana, over time changing from one format to another and then another, the sound fuzzed with white noise by now. The original had been a cassette recorded by his mother at a powwow they’d attended one summer. It was drum and chant music, and the performances had been the one element of the weekend powerful enough to distract Mark from his shame even though his mother was recording it for use in her con. When Mark stole the tape, he’d been trying only to remove a bullet from her arsenal. He’d fallen in love with the sound, though. The power of the drums, the haunting cries in a tongue he could not understand but somehow felt he knew. The music was everything his mother was not: Authentic. And brave.

His uncle Ronny had caught him playing the tape once and viewed him grimly. Mark thought he might catch hell for stealing it, because his mother had searched frantically for weeks after discovering it was gone. Instead, Ronny had said only Don’t mess with that shit, Mark. You don’t know what it is.

Maybe he didn’t. He knew what he felt when he listened to it, though. Stilled and angry, calm and fearless, all at once. There was a hypnotic blend of fatalism and perseverance to the music, a sense of an understood mission.

He listened while he drove south, listened until the drums began to enter his blood like a pulse. By the time he reached Garrison, the pain and fatigue had retreated from the front of his mind, and his hands were steady on the wheel.

The downtown square snuck up on him in the way it can only in a small town — you ran right into the heart of the place without encountering any arteries along the way. The stretch of town that had been built up, where the hotels and chain restaurants were, was farther south, edging toward the interstate that was still miles away, trying to snuggle up as close as possible to something that connected the town to the rest of the world but not quite making it. Mark parked on the square, where he had his pick of empty spaces, their meters standing like hopeful ushers at a play that had overextended its run, the staff now outnumbering the audience. With piles of shoveled snow climbing the meter poles and not enough foot traffic on the sidewalk to even create slush, the only word for the town was forlorn.

As soon as he stepped out of the car, the wind caught him, and while he’d shrugged it off on his first visit, he couldn’t afford to now, not in his present condition.

Coffee seemed like the best substitute for sleep, and there was an old-fashioned diner on the square with a few booths on one wall and a long lunch counter. When Mark pulled open the door, a bell jingled, and ten faces pivoted in unison to look at him. Seven customers — all older men — and three employees. Mark walked up to the counter and asked for the largest coffee to go that they had. The old men were watching him with undisguised interest the way you could only when you belonged and the object of your stare did not.

“Where’s the best place to pick up a warm jacket around here?” he asked the girl behind the counter.

“Easton’s Mercantile,” she said. “Three blocks south, can’t miss it. Big old stone building. Used to be the biggest store in town. Now they sell hunting gear and work boots, things like that. They’ll fix you up.”

One of the men, a guy with a gray goatee, slipped a five-dollar bill out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the counter.

“Take his coffee out of this, Donna.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Mark said.

“I’ll even buy you a cheeseburger,” the man answered, “if you don’t mind telling us why in the hell you felt the need to tell that tale about Diane Martin.”

The remark seemed to add silence to the diner, but the truth was nobody had been talking anyhow. They were all just watching Mark.

“My picture made the paper, I take it,” he said.

“Oh, sure did. Takes an unusual man to tell a story like that.”

“Wasn’t a story, old-timer. People in this town have lied to me and then about me. I’m back to set the record straight.”

Mark met all their eyes, moving through the diner one unfriendly face at a time. “You all seem like the types who do a solid job of spreading the word in this town. Why don’t you spread this one, far and wide: whoever put me in that cave made one hell of a mistake in letting me come back to the surface.”

Easton’s Mercantile — or Merchantile, according to the ancient spelling that was carved into the limestone building — had morphed into a work-wear and sporting-goods store, with racks of shotguns and shelves filled with shells. Mark’s eyes lingered on the oiled black-pump shotguns, remembering the three that had been leveled at him in the snow.

At the moment, Mark was wearing a pair of running shoes that he’d left in the hotel room before it all began, and he picked up a pair of waterproof steel-toe Wolverine boots to replace them. The weight of them felt good, and uncomfortably familiar. It had been many years since he’d worn real boots, but for many years before that, that had been all he’d worn. From the clearance clothing rack, he chose a pair of wool base layers and a couple of heavy canvas shirts. Then he moved to the jackets. The gray, hooded Carhartt was there, a twin of Ridley’s and a cousin of the one Mark’s mother had given him that Christmas. Rugged and durable, kiddo. Just like you. He grabbed it.

On his way to the cash register, he walked past a cubby filled with knit caps and ski masks. He pulled one of the masks out and looked at it, remembering the three of them advancing toward him through the snow. Then he added it to the pile.

Mark traded the running shoes for the boots before he even left the store, then slipped the jacket on and stepped outside, feeling warm for the first time in days and also feeling as if he blended in better, which wasn’t a positive, because he did not want to be a part of this place. No choice about that, though. Not until he had some answers. He glanced back into the window of Easton’s Mercantile and saw that rack of Mossberg pump guns, sleek and black and all too familiar.

No, he was not quite done in Garrison.

25

There’d been a poker game in a Montana town called Silver Gate on a blizzard-blasted week when Mark was fourteen. His uncles had brought him along with them to a bar and old boardinghouse called the Range Rider where they entertained the crowd by walking in their cowboy boots across the massive log beams that spanned the ceiling, usually for dollar bets, sometimes just for the hell of it. A slip from those timbers would have meant a broken back, but they’d never fallen.

The poker game that night was supposed to be good fun, but there was an out-of-towner and obvious cheat working the cards, a man who treated warnings with a wink. He’d given a false name, gotten up to go to the men’s room, and never returned, hustling out in the middle of the night on a snowmobile, which was a problem for him because there wasn’t far to go in Silver Gate on a night like that. “He got while the getting was not good,” Larry had said ruefully, and then he and Ronny had passed a bottle of bourbon back and forth in the silent mood that their nephew knew better than to test, and eventually Ronny had said, “So we don’t know who he is, but we know people who know him. He mentioned a name or two, if not his own.”

When Larry had nodded, it was almost with sadness. “They’ll bring him to the surface,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

It had been far from the only way. But it hadn’t been ineffective. They’d crossed paths with three men and broken nine fingers before they got the name they wanted. They’d gotten it, though.

“It’s a matter of physics,” Ronny said as they made their way to the stranger’s cabin, fourteen-year-old Mark at the wheel of the old Ford Sport Custom pickup, using the granny gear to claw through the snow while his uncles took turns on a flask. “You apply enough pressure, Mark, and eventually things start to leak. Ask any man who ever worked a pipeline. This world? It’s run by pressure.”

The pressure was on Mark now, and he had a limited window to adjust it. There was a proper way to work a case and there was a desperate way, and the former was no longer an option in Garrison. You fell back on more basic instincts when you had to, but Mark didn’t feel so bad about that. In their own ways, his uncles had been fine detectives. If you judged the results instead of the process, they’d been damn good.

The rental house that Evan Borders currently called home was probably close to a hundred years old, with a deteriorating stone foundation, vinyl siding that bubbled in most places and curled apart at the corners, and an aluminum porch roof that had pulled loose from one support and hung at a precarious angle, dumping melting snow onto the steps below. Three plastic bins lined the base of the porch, each one overflowing with Busch cans floating in the snowmelt. There was a vehicle parked in the weeds beside the house, an old Jeep with oversize tires and a roof rack of lights. A shame. Mark had been hoping for a white Silverado or a panel van.

Mark pulled his car in across the street and sat with the engine running, looking the place over and hearing echoes of the various warnings. Let’s get to it, Mark’s mind said, but his body didn’t agree. Mark didn’t often have a pronounced size advantage, but he generally had a strength advantage, and ever since he was a child, he’d had one of the greatest advantages you could carry into a fight: he didn’t mind getting hit. You learned a lot about fighting when you didn’t disappear after the first punch, and in the circle of towns that Mark had passed through, there’d been a lot of first punches. That came with the constant string of new neighborhoods, new schools, new shames.

All of these things were supposed to be gone from him, of course. They had been, for a while. A few good years. But now he sat outside of the house of a man who possibly had held a knife on him, and then a needle, and what he wanted wasn’t the sight of that man in handcuffs or a jail cell. What he wanted was blood. What he needed was the truth.

Whether Borders was the guilty man or not, there was a chance that Mark’s walking onto his front porch was going to start a war. And today, when Mark could exhaust himself just by walking up a flight of stairs, that would end badly for him.

Still, some part of him wanted it.

The frame of the storm door was bent, keeping it from closing, so he pulled that open, blocked it with his heel, and pounded hard on the main door. A police knock, the kind that suggested you had a short window of time to open it yourself or it would be opened for you. Evan Borders had probably heard that kind before.

The door opened fast, and Mark’s focus from the start was on the other man’s eyes, because he knew they would tell him more than anything. Mark wasn’t sure he’d be able to recognize anyone from that snowy road, not with the way they’d been dressed and had their faces covered, but he was damn sure anyone who had been there would recognize him.

Evan Borders took the detective work out of the equation fast. He said, “Hey, hey, the man himself. Novak, right?”

“I’m a familiar face to you?”

“Familiar face to anybody who reads the paper. You’re one famous fella around here.”

Mark looked into those eyes, trying to place them. Blue, and that seemed to fit, but he couldn’t be sure. His size eliminated him from two of the three possibilities — if he’d been there, he’d been the man who waited in the middle of the road, the one who hadn’t worn gloves. Mark looked at his hands, wondering if he’d have better luck recognizing something there. Again, it was impossible to tell. Evan was wearing an old T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, exposing tattoos on both biceps, a snake surrounded by flames on the right arm, a crucifix on the left. Perhaps that was an attempt at irony.

“Figured you’d drop by,” Borders said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you weren’t shy about throwing my fucking name around town, and even around the newspapers.” His eyes were flint. “But then, after somebody decided to chill you out, I wasn’t sure if you’d hit town again. After a thing like that, some men would head south.”

“I’m not one of those men.”

“Too tough, eh?”

“Or too stupid.”

Borders smiled a mean smile and said, “That one would get my vote.”

“I understand you and Ridley did some chatting the same day I took a beating.”

“No shit?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Yeah? So what of it, boy?”

Boy. It echoed in Mark’s mind, familiar for reasons unknown. A simple word, but still, something about it taunted.

“Well?” Evan said.

“Mind telling me why?” Mark said. “Man’s believed to have killed your girlfriend ten years ago, but you call him up at home same day I arrive asking questions? Seems odd.”

“Those feel like police questions. You ain’t police.”

“If you don’t answer me, the police’ll be asking the same questions eventually. I’ll see to it. You could save yourself the hassle.”

Evan Borders smiled. “Appreciate you thinking of me that way, though I understand that the police have questions for you. Me? I’ve got nothing to hide, and I’m telling no lies, not like you. So you ask me an honest question, you get an honest answer in response. I called Ridley Barnes to offer my services. You might recall that it was snowing that day? Maybe you don’t; you got an unusual memory, is what I hear.”

“I remember the snow.”

“Well, that’s progress. During the winters, I plow snow. I was plowing all day; you can ask my cousins and our clients if you don’t believe that. Plenty of witnesses on my side. Doesn’t sound like you’re too familiar with witnesses. I asked Ridley if he needed help ’cause I was out near his place, and turned out he didn’t. He called me back and told me that. Now, I’ll go ahead and answer your next question, which is whether I can prove this. Unlike you — notice how many differences there are between you and me and the stories we tell? — I sure can. I was working with two other people, and I got a client list a mile long that the police can check if they want to. You don’t get that list, because I’m already being more generous than I need to be. Point is? I know what I was doing that day. What you were doing crawling into that cave? Boy, I got no idea on that front. Nobody in town seems to.”

“Did you actually have feelings for Sarah?” Mark said.

Borders worked his tongue over his teeth like he was preparing for the taste of Mark’s blood.

“You don’t need to say her name. No more than you needed to say mine to that reporter. Saying too many names in this town will eventually get you in trouble.”

“I’m just trying to put myself in your shoes. If I had feelings for a girl who was killed, last person I’d offer to help — clearing snow, of course, there was nothing more to it — would be the man people blame for her murder. But that’s just me.”

Evan Borders reached in the pocket of his jeans, removed a plastic container of chewing tobacco, and methodically worked a dip onto his fingertips and tucked it between his lower lip and his gums. He sucked on it for a few seconds and spit into the snow, all the while looking patient and thoughtful.

“Listen,” he said, “I could invite you in out of the cold, but I’m not going to. Still, I’m a nice guy, right? Considerate. I’m aware that you’ve spent more time in the cold lately than you probably cared to. So I’ll hustle things along, let you go on back to your car and get warmed up again. Looks like you need it. Don’t mean to offend you, but you should be in bed, my man. Get you some chicken soup and some ginger ale, right? I don’t have any to offer or I would, of course.”

“Considerate,” Mark said.

“Exactly.” Borders leaned his lanky body against the door frame and crossed his arms over his chest. The muscles bunched against his skin. “And out of consideration, I’m going to save you time. I’m going to answer the rest of your questions with one word. That word is—”

“I don’t have any other questions.”

Borders raised his eyebrows. “No?”

“Was hoping you could do me a favor, though.”

“A favor, he says. No shit? You toss my name around, stirring up old shit that you don’t know a damn thing about, getting people to look sideways at me all over again, getting whispers started again, and then you come to me for a fucking favor? That’s bold, brother.”

“It would take only a few seconds of your time,” Mark said.

“Well, let’s hear it, my man. What favor can I do you?”

Mark reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out the black wool ski mask, and unfolded it methodically. He extended it to Evan Borders.

“Try this on, please. Just for a few seconds.”

Borders stayed where he was and though his expression didn’t change, one of the muscles in his arm trembled.

“Get the fuck off my porch,” he said, his voice low. It was a classic threatening line, the get-out-of-my-face type of thing that a million assholes who thought they were hard would utter in a million situations, but it felt different coming from him. It felt real.

“Won’t even try it on?” Mark said. “A considerate guy like you?”

Borders straightened, took the mask in his hands, and then, in a blink-fast flash, pulled it down over Mark’s head. He’d turned it around so the eye- and mouth holes were at the back, leaving Mark blind again, just like he had been with the hood over his head. He tensed his abdominals, expecting a punch, but none came. He reached up and grasped the mask but didn’t pull it off. Instead, he rotated it until it was in the proper place and he could see Evan Borders again.

“Feels good,” Mark said. “Nice and warm. The last time I asked you for one, you weren’t as generous.”

Evan Borders leaned close to him and said, “You walk your ass back to your car now. You get in it, and you leave. And the next time you feel my name on your lips? You keep them shut. Garrison hears enough lies from Ridley Barnes. Don’t need to add yours to the mix.”

“If he’s a liar, then why are you his cavalry when trouble comes?”

Evan Borders stepped back into his house and slammed the door.

Mark kept the mask on as he walked to his car.

This world? It’s run by pressure.

The dials were beginning to tighten down in Garrison, and Mark was going to keep tightening them. He’d see Ridley Barnes again, but there was no need to rush for him. When he did see him, he wanted Ridley to have had plenty of time to consider Mark’s presence back in town.

26

They made him wait an hour for the sheriff, at which point he began to whistle. Mark wasn’t much for whistling these days. Uncle Ronny had been great at it, could imitate a harmonica if he chose, but most of that had been lost on Mark. Still, he had volume, and although it took all of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the beginning of the marching song from The Bridge on the River Kwai, folks eventually decided the sheriff could see him after all.

Blankenship opened the door, gave Mark a sour look, and said, “I thought you were supposed to be back where the sun always shines, Novak.”

“‘Sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day,’” Mark said.

The sheriff blinked at him.

“You don’t know that line?” Mark said. “Son of a bitch, sheriff, that’s Catfish Hunter’s finest material, borrowed in the movie Hoosiers. I’d have expected more from you, being from Indiana.”

“Get in here,” Blankenship snapped, “so you can get the hell out faster.”

Mark followed him back to the same office where he’d started this thing. The last time, he’d cruised through the department without noticing it, but now, with his labored breathing and heavy stride, he had the chance to take a good look at the place and all of the hostile, watching eyes. It was like the diner only with everyone in uniform.

“Why are you back?” Blankenship said when they were in his office.

“Because a very serious crime occurred in your county. A felony. A handful of felonies, in fact. You don’t seem to be aware of it.”

“This would be the tale you told about how you ended up in the cave? I spoke with your boss. He gave me your, um, take on that.”

“You heard about a kidnapping and attempted murder in your county and didn’t so much as bother to check in with the victim?”

“I also heard from a member of your board of directors. A Greg Roche? Name familiar?”

Mark said, “I know Greg,” and hoped his face didn’t show more than that. Greg was the reason Innocence Incorporated existed. A well-known prosecutor who’d worked high-profile cases and was appointed U.S. district attorney for Florida, Greg Roche had had one of the more famous change-of-heart moments in American law after he’d been presented with evidence that one of the death-row cases he’d prosecuted had resulted in the execution of an innocent man. He’d formed Innocence Incorporated then, bringing Jeff London on as his first investigator. Greg had also been Lauren’s moral guide, a man she respected more than anyone else in the profession. The board of directors operated, theoretically, on majority rule, but Greg’s vote counted the most.

“He was very interested to know my take on you, what your conduct had been, how you were representing the organization.” Blankenship inserted a pause. “I got the impression that you’re in a little bit of trouble with your own team.”

“You got the right one. That’s exactly why I’m back. I can’t afford to leave here without the truth. I need your help proving it.”

Blankenship shook his head. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt with your story about Diane Martin. I’m not wasting time on you again unless you have some evidence.”

Mark nodded. “Understood. I don’t have the evidence yet. I intend to gather it.”

“Terrific. You step wrong here, and I mean at all, and I’ll arrest you. To tell the truth, if it had been anyone other than Ridley Barnes that you’d bloodied up, I already would have. Ridley, though? He deserved what you gave him.”

“Speaking of Ridley, I understand that he’s the one who found me in the cave.”

“He was the first one to you. The rescue team had located your general area, but Ridley was the one who determined how to actually reach you.”

“Because he knew where I was. Have you considered that?”

“I have.”

“And yet you show no interest in pursuing how I ended up in that cave. You tell me that I need evidence, but you don’t have evidence to prove me wrong. Don’t you want that?”

“After your opening act in town, no, I don’t. You told a savage and sick lie, Novak.”

“I would hope,” Mark said, “based on your personal relationship with Diane Martin, you would have some interest in finding out who’s pretending to be her.”

Blankenship moved his large, heavy-knuckled hands around his desk as if looking for something to fill them with before they found their real target: Mark’s throat.

“Let the dead have their peace,” he said softly. “What is wrong with you?”

“You and I might understand each other a little better if you looked into my background, Sheriff.”

“I’ve done so. I know what happened to your wife. I’m sorry. If that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back of your sanity, I am truly sorry. But the verdict is in: You lied. Why, I don’t know. But I do know that you lied. And as for the next story? The three men who you say came for you? Well, Ridley doesn’t have three friends in this world.”

“I had the same notion, and I was proven wrong. Painfully. So I’d be careful in underestimating the reach of Ridley Barnes. I’d also like to know whose call it was to bring him into the cave looking for me.”

“It was mine. He knows the place better than anyone alive. The only person who could solve my problem was him, whether I liked asking for his help or not.”

“He’s Captain Quint himself, eh?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Really? That might be the saddest thing I’ve heard yet. Hoosiers, sure, but you don’t even get the Jaws reference? My goodness, Sheriff. Disappointing. Mind if I ask you another question about Ridley’s, um, assistance in my situation?”

“Fire away.”

“You called for him when you wanted Sarah Martin found, and that didn’t go well. But when I went missing, you said again that you needed him, because he’s the best.”

Blankenship looked at him for a long time, the stare dim, as if he didn’t want to allow himself to see Mark in focus. Or maybe as if he were trying to see someone else.

“He knew the cave best,” he said finally, and his voice was hoarse. “Everyone said that, even Pershing admitted it; Pershing had hired him to explore the place! Pershing said he didn’t trust Ridley, that they’d had disputes over the cave, but I didn’t care about the cave, I cared about her.” He thumped a hand on the desk. “Every caver I talked to, and I didn’t give a damn what Pershing had to say, every expert I talked to told me that Ridley Barnes had to be involved because he was the only one who really knew the place, and I needed someone who could reach Sarah.”

He choked on the last words and took a moment to collect himself.

“So why did I let him go after you?” Blankenship said. “Honestly, I wanted to see him in there. I wanted to watch him, watch where he went. I wanted him to go to the right place.”

“You mean the place where she was found.”

“Yes. No such luck. But it saved your dumb ass, so you can thank me and then go on your way.”

Mark nodded. “Here’s what I’d do if I were you,” he said.

“This ought to be good.”

“You might want to nudge around my story about those three men with shotguns, Sheriff. If they came for me the way I said, then Ridley called them. And if I were you, sitting there with a cold case still waiting to be closed? Well, I’d want to at least have a look at who Ridley might have called. I think you might find that real interesting. I think you might want to have a different kind of talk with me then. More cooperative.”

“You talk like you already know what I’ll find.”

“Give it a look, Sheriff,” Mark said, getting to his feet and trying to hide the wince of pain that the motion caused. “Then give me a call. Maybe we’ll talk some more. Maybe you’ll give me a little more credibility than you think.”

“I don’t need to study your credibility. You made up a strange, sad little story, and two witnesses and a video disproved it. You’ve done absolutely nothing to help on the Sarah Martin case. From my perspective, you’re not much different than Ridley Barnes.”

“All due respect?” Mark said. “I need you to understand that I don’t care about Sarah Martin’s case, Sheriff. Never did and still don’t. I wanted to come and go and stay gone. Now all I want is to know who fucked with me and why. When I know that, I’m gone. But people aren’t helping me do that. You’ve got an aptly named little town, don’t you? Everyone closes ranks fast when a stranger arrives with questions. Then they put guards at the walls.”

“If you don’t want to be here, go on home.”

Mark ran a hand over his face, feeling the stubble from several days without shaving. He’d stayed clean-shaven in Florida, but not before that, when he was living in places where the cold could nip at your skin. His beard was growing in fast now.

“The hell of the thing, Sheriff? I just spent a lot of dollars on winter clothes. I’m in no rush.”

The courthouse had gone up in 1903 according to the plaque on the front door, and based on the smell of the interior, it had been cleaned maybe once since then. Every footstep echoed on the wide, scarred floorboards, which had a little give, as if the joists were considering calling it a day. The courtrooms were on the ground floor, and the second floor held the county offices, with old frosted-glass doors labeled in gilded trim Auditor, Clerk, Assessor. Mark went to the clerk’s office and asked to see the criminal records of Evan Borders and Jeremy Leonard.

“There’s another Leonard,” he said. “I think his name is—”

“Brett.” The gray-haired woman with bifocals who stood behind the counter said it without hesitation. “Sure. I hope you got some time on your hands, because there’s plenty of paperwork.”

Apparently Evan Borders and his snowplowing cousins were no strangers to the county court system. The gray-haired woman retrieved three stacks of folders, asked Mark to have a seat at a long wooden table beneath an arched window through which downtown Garrison looked almost charming instead of imposing, and told him to let her know if he had questions.

“They make for good reading, I’m sure,” she said, handing him the files.

It wasn’t quite as good reading as Mark had hoped. Evan’s first encounter with law enforcement — barring any juvenile issues, which wouldn’t be accessible in the public record — had come when he was twenty and arrested for marijuana possession and disorderly conduct. From then on, he’d visited more or less annually, but the charges never ranged into felony territory. He’d been arrested for assault once after a bar fight, but those charges had been dropped, and the other offenses were run-of-the-mill alcohol and disorderly conduct issues. Trafficking in stolen goods once, but that had also been dropped. He was like countless other small-town ne’er-do-wells, in and out of the local jail often but never staying long. If there was one thing that stood out, it wasn’t his penchant for fighting but the consistent refusal of his victims to press charges. It seemed that those who ran afoul of Evan’s temper were interested in seeking distance rather than justice.

Jeremy was thirty-two, the oldest of them, and Brett was twenty-seven, and the cousins were all cut from the same cloth, with one notable exception: Evan’s violence involved only men. In the probable-cause affidavits, there were no females mentioned, let alone victimized. The Leonard brothers couldn’t claim the same. Jeremy had been charged with statutory rape, which was pleaded down to a misdemeanor, but three years after that, he’d been charged with sexual assault after he’d bound a girlfriend’s hands with duct tape in a “game” and then slapped her around and locked her out of the house, naked and in the rain.

Mark read that affidavit and felt his throat tighten and his breathing slow. The Leonards were the right kind of boys, that was for sure. If they’d been in a bar in Florida, he would have locked eyes with them, and he’d have known. He had teeth scars on his knuckles from men just like them.

Jeremy had gotten two years in prison for that one and was back out in a year with good-time credits. He and his brother had run into trouble together after that, had been arrested for robbing a pawnshop, which had led to Evan’s charge of trafficking in stolen goods. Jeremy had gotten another six months; Brett got probation.

The most recent charge against either of the Leonards was an open case with a trial date set for April. Brett was out of jail after his father had posted a $10,000 surety bond in a date-rape case. An underage girl who’d been drinking at a bar called the Lowland Lounge had gone to the hospital the morning after a night of drinks and dancing with Brett Leonard. She’d woken in her own home, naked and sore, with vaginal bleeding and one black eye. She didn’t remember how it had happened, but unlike so many other girls who woke in the same circumstances, she didn’t let shame or fear keep her from going to the hospital. A blood test had shown the presence of a narcotic called ketamine.

The gray-haired clerk interrupted Mark, saying, “You need some help?”

Mark blinked back into the present and shook his head. “No, thank you. I think I’ve got the gist.”

She frowned. “The gist is, those boys are bad news.”

“Seems that way.” Mark lowered his head again and flipped through the most recent case file until he came to an address of record for Brett Leonard, on Tower Ridge Road. Jeremy’s was the same, albeit from a year earlier. It seemed they didn’t drift far from each other. He wrote the address down, then went back and studied their booking photos. Jeremy was a bigger kid, six two and two hundred and fifteen pounds. Brett, the ketamine artist, was five inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter.

Mark’s fingers drifted to the bruise on his forehead that the muzzle of a shotgun had left a few days earlier. A bigger, stronger man had slammed the muzzle into him, but he remembered being more concerned with the bantam-size man in the black mask, the one whose hands had seemed nervous near the trigger. He also thought of the witnesses he’d accused of lying, of his version of events that seemed so real but had no support.

Ketamine.

27

Rarely did the police arrive on your doorstep bearing good news, but Ridley found such good fortune when he answered a thundering knock. He was hoping for the visitor he didn’t dare expect — Mark Novak — but when he saw that it was the sheriff, he was far from disappointed. Next to Novak, Blankenship was the best option.

“Lose somebody in Trapdoor again?” Ridley said, opening the door.

“Who’d you call after Novak left your property?”

Ridley cocked his head as if the question presented a difficulty.

“Who did I call? My goodness, how in the world am I supposed to remember that? It’s been days, Sheriff.”

“It’s easy enough for me to learn,” Blankenship said. His long face was pale.

“Then why don’t you go learn it instead of asking me?”

“He came up here at your request,” Blankenship said, “but he’s back for some other reason. What went wrong, Ridley?”

Ridley’s already slow breathing nearly stopped. Novak was back? This was spectacular news. Ridley had been pleased with what he’d seen of the man, but the surface world exerted a unique set of pressures, and most people crumbled under them. The surface world should have sent Novak running from this place, not brought him back to it.

“I didn’t call Novak after he left,” Ridley said. “As I remember it, you came for me. Needing help.”

“Who did you call, Ridley?”

Ridley sighed. “I’d love to help you. I really would. Best as I can remember, I called my dentist, and I called the bakery to order a pie. Maybe that’s why I need the dentist, right? Have to cut out the sweets.”

The sheriff didn’t match Ridley’s smile. The sheriff rarely did. Ridley could remember the way Blankenship had looked as chief deputy, his shoulders not yet stooped, his hair not yet gray. His eyes not yet haunted. He remembered in particular the way he looked when Diane Martin passed by. Blankenship always stood straighter then, sucked in what little gut he had, pulled his shoulders back. He’d been a comical presence, large and awkward and obvious.

“I’m doing some research into your boy,” Blankenship said. “I can’t quite figure how you found him or what he wants with you, but I will. That letter was a mistake. I’m not sure that you wrote it, of course — he probably handled the words for you — but you wanted him to wave it under my nose. That was a mistake.”

“You ever read about the rapture before that note?” Ridley asked.

“I’ve read the Good Book plenty of times.”

“Wrong book,” Ridley said. “Wrong rapture. I’m talking about what happens to the mind when it’s left alone in the dark. I’m guessing you probably never considered that. Or tested it.”

“Did Novak enter that cave of his own free will, Ridley?”

“I can’t speak to the will of another man. I wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed to be able to either.”

“Who did you call, Ridley?”

“Why my phone activities are of interest to you, I have no idea. On that day, not only was I the victim of a crime, but I came to your aid. If not for me, Sheriff, you might have lost another one in Trapdoor. That would have hurt you, I think. Am I wrong?”

Blankenship was staring at the ropes in front of the dark and cold woodstove. He looked like he was about to say something, but Ridley beat him to the punch.

“Tell me,” he said, “did you ever discuss that situation with Pershing? I know there were some hostilities between you, or jealousies, however you prefer to phrase it, but I hope such petty things wouldn’t have kept you from an honest exchange.”

Blankenship’s pallor drained to match the old ashes in the stove. “You know why I’m still the sheriff?” he said.

“A poorly educated electorate, I’ve always assumed.”

“You,” Blankenship said. “You’re it, Ridley. You’ll step the wrong way someday, I believe in that because I believe in God, and when you do? I’ll be here.”

“Have a fine afternoon, Sheriff. Next time you need my help, and you always seem to, you’ll know where to find me.”

Ridley closed the door and stood on the other side of it, his palm pressed to the wood — his hand was trembling faintly, and he hated that — until Blankenship had returned to his car and driven away. When he was out of sight, Ridley went for his own keys and hurried to his truck. He wasn’t supposed to visit her unannounced, but he needed her now, and she understood emergencies.

Novak had returned, and Ridley needed to get his mind right before he saw him. He’d long ago given up the hope that he could achieve that alone, unguided in the dark.

28

Mark hesitated before deciding on the next person to call because all his hopes for a possible explanation of things rested on the conversation. Eventually he chose a medical examiner in Gainesville who had testified for Innocence Incorporated on a few cases, Arthur Stewart, and told him he had a simple question — he wanted to know about ketamine.

“Ever-evolving applications for the drug. Developed as a human anesthetic years ago,” Dr. Stewart said. “Then it became a popular animal tranquilizer. Now some psychiatrists are using it to treat depression. Real-world guys are using it for date rape.”

“Right. What are the effects?”

“There are plenty of them. Ketamine is a highly dissociative medication. Memory goes, and suggestibility of the victim is high, but physical performance isn’t compromised as dramatically as with other tranquilizers. There are reasons it’s a popular date-rape drug.”

Memory goes. Mark let out a long breath. He might have something more than a desperate plea for Jeff London.

“When you say suggestibility of the victim is high, do you mean that someone who has been given it could be convinced to believe a version of events that wasn’t true?”

“Possibly, although you’d have to see on a case-by-case basis; it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. The imagination runs wild too. Hallucinations are common, which makes victim accounts extremely unreliable and makes the investigator’s job harder.”

“Hallucinations,” Mark echoed, thinking of how clearly he’d seen Sarah Martin watching him from the rocks.

“Absolutely. It’s called conscious sedation. Even if you know what is happening, you’re unable to do anything about it. You’re along for the ride.”

“Suppose rape wasn’t the goal,” Mark said. “Suppose misinformation was the goal; would it be as effective?”

“I’m not sure that I follow. You mean, would it aid someone in lying to a victim?”

“Yes.”

“Absolutely.”

“And it’s a pill or a liquid?”

“Both. You can inject it or snort it or, as is most common for criminal use, add it to a drink.”

He spoke the words crisply but the images they conveyed were foggy and soft around the edges. Diane Martin’s face, open and honest and imploring even as she told lies. Her eyes, so compelling, so haunting. Mark had looked into her eyes and he had known her pain. The greater violation was that he had believed she’d also known his. He tried to recall whether he’d left the table at some point, gone to the restroom or taken a call, given her any opportunity to be alone with his drink. He didn’t think so. Then again, what he thought had happened no longer carried much weight. Memory and reality had taken different paths away from that meeting, and Mark had traveled along the wrong one.

“All right, Dr. Stewart,” he said. “Thanks for the help. One last question, though, and this is important: How long would traces linger? How quickly do you need to test for its presence?”

“It can linger for up to two weeks, depending on the dose, but I’d want the test done within a few days, if at all possible.”

Mark was four days removed from his meeting with Diane Martin now, and three days removed from the cave. He thanked Dr. Stewart again, hung up, and followed the GPS directions in search of Brett and Jeremy Leonard.

He’d been on the road for more than a mile before it felt familiar. He was in a tunnel of leafless trees, hemmed in, and up ahead, snow-covered fields stretched out, and a four-way stop loomed.

He pulled off the road and onto the shoulder and left the car running with the hazard lights flashing. Opened the door and stepped out into the snow and nodded when the wind rose to meet him. That was right. That was how it had been. No snow blowing in with it today, but the same arctic chill.

He walked down the middle of the road, looking at the pavement even though there would be nothing to see. The crime that had occurred here had been a clean one. No shots had been fired, no glass had broken, no evidence left behind to mark the road. He walked the pavement anyhow, just in case there was something. The intersection where the truck had turned sideways to block the road loomed ahead, and he thought then of an intersection in Cody, Wyoming, that he’d once thought of as the worst road in the world.

When Mark was thirteen, his uncles had retrieved a stray dog of indeterminate breed and presented it to him as a gift, against his mother’s wishes. His uncles had named the dog Amigo, for reasons that probably had more to do with tequila than logic. Amigo was a goof, but he had fine energy and was well muscled, and when he laid out to run, he was fast, a true burner, and thus a wandering boy’s best friend.

The only problem with Amigo — at least, the only one Mark saw — was that he pulled at his leash. The concept of being tethered was foreign to him, and what resulted was a war of wills.

It was on one of the more beautiful afternoons of spring that Amigo began to kick at the collar with his hind leg as they made the walk home. Mark responded by giving the leash a few gentle tugs, thinking that he needed to distract the dog from his itch, and then the third tug met no resistance and there was the tinkle of metal on asphalt. The collar had come free. For one long second, Amigo held his place, looking at Mark as if to see what the problem was. The choice Mark made then was the worst one possible: he lunged at the dog in the hope of recapturing him.

When Amigo hit full speed, he looked like a greyhound, his hind paws nearly catching his front as he exploded ahead. Mark compounded the mistake of the lunge by doing the only thing that he knew to do when a dog bolted — he ran after him. Amigo, absolutely delighted, raced ahead, the game of chase now fully approved.

There was a stop sign up ahead, and the road on the other side had a speed limit of thirty-five but nobody paid that number any mind and the average had to be fifty miles an hour. Mark ran after the dog as hard as he could, heart thundering and legs throbbing, but Amigo outpaced him effortlessly, gaining distance with each second and then pouring on speed as he approached the stop sign that meant absolutely nothing in his world. A Dodge pickup with oversize off-road tires and a lift kit roared downhill. Just before Amigo reached the intersection, he turned and looked at Mark with his tongue lolling and ears pinned back and an expression of utter, oblivious delight. Then he faced forward again, dipped lower, and ran on, through the stop sign and out in front of the truck.

Mark could see the rest as if it were written before him. The lift kit on the Dodge afforded extra height that exposed its undercarriage plain as day, including the axles that would corkscrew Amigo and thrash his body and throw it, mangled, out onto the other side.

Mark fell to his hands and knees and heard the horn blare and knew he owed it to his dog to watch — it seemed required — but he couldn’t. He dropped his head and looked at his bleeding hands on the gravel and although he’d promised himself when he turned twelve that he would never cry again, he sobbed into the dust of the road.

He was still crying when he felt the dog’s tongue. Amigo was lapping at his salty tears with the expression of delight still on his face, the game of chase everything he’d hoped for and more. Up ahead, the Dodge rested in a ditch just in front of the stop sign, trailed by black streaks of parched rubber, and a bearded man screamed obscenities at Mark from inside the cab.

Mark never walked Amigo on that route again. It was, as he told his mother and uncles — and, many times over, the dog — the worst road in the world.

He hadn’t heard of the road to Cassadaga in those days.

They’d been in Cooke City, Montana, when his mother was arrested, and the cop told them that they couldn’t take the dog. Mark, then fourteen, punched a grown man for the first time in his life that day. A police officer, no less. When his uncles heard the news and finally came to get Mark, they told him that Amigo was doing well, and the last time they’d seen the dog he’d been lounging in front of Miner’s Saloon. He’s the town dog now, Uncle Larry had said. It’s just as well. With your mother’s habits, well, that’s no way to raise a dog.

If he’d understood the irony of that statement, he hadn’t shown it.

For years, Mark dreamed of that hopeless run and the inevitable death that he was supposed to see, more a captured memory than a dream, always waking with a gasp when the dream dog’s tongue touched his tears.

He missed the days when that dream had qualified as a nightmare.

He reached the stop sign and turned and looked back to where his rental car sat with the blinkers on, and he remembered everything that had happened here but he could not prove it. It was bad, but there were worse things, and he was well aware of them. At least he knew what had happened on this road.

From his vantage point in the middle of the intersection, he could see a weathered sign that he’d missed on his first trip, when all of his attention had been on the truck in his mirror. If he’d looked to the right at the stop sign, he would have seen it — a billboard advertising the Amazing Trapdoor Caverns! only two miles away, on the left.

The Leonard brothers’ home was “three point two miles ahead, destination on left,” his GPS informed him.

Neighbors.

There were places where this wouldn’t matter. He’d lived in enough one-stoplight towns to know that. But Garrison had a little more size to it, and Trapdoor wasn’t on a major artery.

He walked back to the car and drove ahead slowly. The gated drive to Trapdoor appeared on his left and then fell behind in his mirror and the road curved sharply and then straightened out again and he saw that he was approaching the farm that could be seen from the banks of the creek near the cave, its rolling fields spread out over the bluffs.

Mark pulled into the gravel drive. The farmhouse was dark and the only vehicle in sight was a truck that looked as if it hadn’t been moved in days.

No one answered his knock at the door, but instead of returning to the car, he walked up the drive and toward the barns, searching for any sign of life. He went from one outbuilding to another, knocking on doors, opening them, calling out. The only answers were the echoes of his own weary voice. He was winded from the walk, and even the echoes knew it.

He reached the stable last. It was set farthest back from the road and was clearly the newest of the buildings, styled to look like a high-end Kentucky ranch, home to Thoroughbreds. From the moment he entered it, memories slapped at him like storm-tossed waves. Nothing drove memories through you faster or harder than the senses. He’d learned that in a crippling way after Lauren was killed. He could be doing fine, getting through a day with a feeling of emotional control, and then something as simple as the smell of the right soap or the distant sound of the right song threatened to bring him to his knees.

The stable was all of this, heightened. He’d worked in a dozen of them, all in the West, and when he’d arrived in Florida with no money and needing a job, he’d known damn well that he could find the best pay at a stable, but he had gone to gas stations instead. He didn’t want to remember the West. Not then, not now.

But here it was.

He put one hand on the steel rail of a stall gate and closed his eyes, drinking in the smell so pungent, it almost seemed to have a taste. The senses brought him another memory then, unbidden, as the thought of his family had been, relocating him in time and place once again. What he remembered was a smell that had been familiar but that he couldn’t identify: the scent of the hood they’d pulled over his head in the field, rough as burlap, stinking of something earthy.

It had smelled of horse feed.

He opened his eyes and looked around the stalls and now he was entirely in the present.

There are a million feed sacks around here, he told himself. It was farm country. It could have come from anywhere.

But the Leonards didn’t come from anywhere. They came from this place, and they ran with Evan Borders, and Evan Borders had once been a suspect in the murder of his teenage girlfriend Sarah Martin, and Evan Borders had exchanged calls with Ridley Barnes in the minutes preceding Mark’s abduction.

He heard the sound of an engine then and walked out of the stable in time to see a pickup truck rattling in. A white Silverado. Like feed sacks, there would be plenty of them around here.

He waited outside the barn as the truck was parked and the driver got out — a large, bald man with a gray beard.

“Can I help you?”

“I was looking for Brett and Jeremy Leonard,” Mark said, approaching the truck.

The man’s face went from cordial to wary. “Those are my boys. What do you need with them?”

This obviously wasn’t the first time someone had arrived in search of the Leonard boys.

“Wanted to ask them about clearing some snow,” Mark said. “I was told they do that?”

“Oh, sure.” The elder Leonard was relieved now. “I can just take your name and address, get you put on the list. ’Nother storm due this evening is what I’m hearing. Be good to get on the plow schedule. I’m Lou, by the way.”

Mark shook his hand but didn’t give his own name, just said, “Good to meet you, Lou,” and then he followed the older man inside the house. They walked into a kitchen that smelled of bacon, and Lou Leonard grabbed a notepad and a pen.

“It’s my plow truck, but I don’t get out there much anymore. That’s a young man’s game, you know? Takes a toll that you wouldn’t think, all that time behind the wheel. And, hell, my eyes aren’t what they used to be. When I was out in the last storm, I was struggling, to be honest. Was damn happy when the boys took over.”

“Your boys, they work with Evan Borders?”

“Time to time. Evan’s sketchy. Some days he’s on time, some days he don’t show up at all.”

“Why do you keep him on?”

Lou Leonard sighed. “Family ties. That’s my nephew. His mother left when he was a child, and I didn’t blame her, though I’m not proud to say it. She’d found the wrong man. Carson was in a bar when he wasn’t in a jail, and then he got sent up to Pendleton for a good stretch and Evan was in the wind, and I took him in so the state wouldn’t. He lived with me while his daddy was in prison. You try to look out for someone that doesn’t have anybody else. Some people call it foolish; I call it Christian.”

“You said you were out in the last storm?” Mark asked.

“For a bit. I’m only good for a couple hours anymore.”

Mark tried to keep his voice casual when he said, “What time was that?”

The old man gave him a curious look, and Mark said, “I was just thinking, it was blowing hard there for a while around noon. More than I could’ve handled.”

“It was blowing hard,” Lou agreed, and then he bent to his notepad again. “What was your name?”

“Mark Novak.”

No reaction. For once, someone in Garrison didn’t seem to be aware of who he was. He watched as his name was lettered in, and then Lou said, “Address?”

“I’m at Trapdoor Caverns right now.”

This caught his attention. He looked up with a frown. “Doesn’t Cecil clear the snow?”

“He’s having some issues with the plow. It’s a long driveway to work with just a snowblower.”

“It sure is.” But Lou was curious now, maybe suspicious.

“Your boys ever spend any time down in the cave when it was open?” Mark said. “I hear it was a popular place back in its day.”

“For tourists maybe. I never cared for caves. Claustrophobic. Anyhow, we’ll get you on the list, and when it snows, Cecil won’t have to worry.”

“Appreciate that.” Mark turned to the window and waved a hand out at the fields. “Some beautiful horses there. You take care of them?”

“Yup. I never cared for horses much myself, but it’s part of the job.”

“What’s the job?”

“Just what it looks like — tending the farm. All leased land now. People who own them horses are from Indianapolis. Had an idea about turning this place into some sort of a riding camp, training kids, crap like that. Poured money into the barn, but I ain’t seen any dollars come back in from it yet. They don’t need any, though. Funny how that goes — the people who own the land don’t need the money from it; the people who live on it do. Ain’t that the way all around?”

“I couldn’t say. Your boys, do they tend to the horses as well?”

“Why in the hell are you so damn interested in my boys?”

“More interested in the horses, honestly. Look like nice animals. Well cared for.”

“I suppose.”

“Stable looks pretty well equipped too.”

Lou tilted his head, eyeing Mark uneasily, and said, “What’s it matter?”

“You ever hear of ketamine, Lou?”

“Nope.”

Mark nodded. “Maybe your boys have,” he said. “It’s a horse tranquilizer.”

Lou Leonard stared at Mark grimly. “What are you really after? What’re they into?”

“I’ll be real clear here,” Mark said. “Your boys are going to want to speak with me. You’re a smart guy, you get it. There are different roads I could take. The road they want to take? The road you want them to take? It starts with them coming to see me, Lou. Trust me on that.”

“I don’t know you. Sure as hell don’t trust you.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to gamble, Lou. I’ll let you think on it.” Mark gave him a little salute, turned, and left the house.

29

The black holes in Mark’s memory hadn’t swallowed his first visit to Trapdoor, and he noticed some changes there immediately: The gate at the top of the drive had been expanded with long strands of barbed wire, and the chains and locks were brand-new.

Mark pulled his rental car into the same place where they’d found the one that had been stolen, killed the engine, and sat in the silence for a few minutes, studying the property and trying to ignore the question dancing in his mind.

Is this the second time you’ve driven here or the third?

It was the second. He had to prove it, but he knew this.

Do you?

For the first time, he felt confident that he did. The ketamine explained what he could not. The proximity of the Leonards’ farm seemed to go a long way toward explaining the rest of it, but he wanted to see how one would get down the bluffs to the cave entrance and whether they’d left any trace. He opened the door and stepped out into the snow. The waterproof boots held up well, and the jacket kept the wind from cutting him. All the same, each step was agony. He’d done nothing but drive and walk today, but his body felt pushed to its limits, and the physical aches were beginning to move toward mental, leaving him feeling feverish and a little dizzy.

He didn’t make it nearly so far as he had on his first visit before he was interrupted.

“Unless you’ve got a badge, you better get the hell off this property or I’ll call someone who does have a badge,” Cecil Buckner began, boiling out of the garage as if he’d been lying in wait. He held a shotgun this time. Security at Trapdoor had been stepped up in the face of crisis, evidently. When he was close enough to see Mark’s face, he pulled up short and squinted. “You got to be shitting me. You’re back?”

“I’ve got some more questions,” Mark said. “They’re different this time around. I’d like to know how I got inside your cave.”

“You ain’t alone there, pal. I got my ass ripped good for it, like it was my fault.”

Cecil propped the barrel of the shotgun in the snow and leaned on it as if it were a cane. Maybe it wasn’t even loaded. Maybe he was just an idiot.

“I might know how to get us started answering them,” Mark said. “What do you know about the family who lives in the farm up there?”

“The Leonards? Trash and trouble. Old Lou, he’s not so bad, but those boys he raised are a different story.” Cecil pointed in the opposite direction of the bluffs, off to the southwest, where the fields ran up alongside the road and a dilapidated trailer was barely visible. “Lou’s sister lived right there, and she raised the only child in this county who could compete with his boys.”

“Evan?”

“You know all the names, don’t you? Yeah, that was his boyhood home. Nice place, ain’t it? Now, you tell me, why in the hell would anybody want to rent to a family like that? It doesn’t make sense. But Pershing—”

“Cecil?” A voice sharp as a gunshot snapped at them from the deck of the big house. “Who is it?”

Mark looked up and saw a woman framed in the doorway of the house. At the sight of her, Cecil went from cooperative gossip to guard dog in a flash, lifting the shotgun back into firing position and straightening up, like a sentry who’d been caught sleeping.

“It’s that asshole who broke into the cave! I was throwing him out. You want me to call the police?”

There was a pause as the woman considered this information. From a distance, Mark couldn’t tell much about her other than that she was young and slim and looked very cold on the deck. Outlined against the white landscape of the farm fields beyond, she also looked very alone.

“Bring him up,” she said.

Cecil looked at Mark with a touch of pity. “That’s Danielle MacAlister, Pershing’s daughter. You’re going to wish I’d just called the police.”

The woman met them at the front door. It hadn’t been a long walk, but Mark was winded by the time they arrived.

“Trespassing and breaking and entering could already be established, but now you’re back,” she said. “Perhaps stalking begins to apply.”

She was young, maybe not yet thirty, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up to expose thin forearms that were adorned with bracelets. An attractive woman, certainly, but if she had any charm to match her looks, it was well hidden. She had the bearing of someone used to being the boss but without the age that usually went with it.

“The breaking-and-entering charge might be useful,” Mark said, “but it won’t be levied against me. I was brought into the cave against my will. If you’re scrambling for legal grounds, you might want to spend a little time brushing up on your own liability. I nearly died in a cave that you own and claim is secure.”

“It’s been secure for ten years, and I hardly think I’m liable when someone pries bars apart so he can—”

“I’m not really interested in the charges,” Mark interrupted. “Go ahead and file them. I’ll deal with them as they come. That’s the least of my problems. I’m going to find the people who put me down there, and I’m going to find out why Ridley Barnes has such clout in a place where he’s supposedly loathed and what inspired him to try to hire detectives to put him in the electric chair.”

She’d wanted to continue the hostility, had been bracing for further argument, but something knocked her off stride.

“What do you mean, he tried to hire detectives to put him in the electric chair?”

“Ridley Barnes requested an investigation in Sarah Martin’s murder so that he might know whether or not he killed her. We’ve seen a lot of odd requests, but that was a first.”

Danielle MacAlister paused, then said, “Give us a few minutes, Cecil,” dismissing the caretaker without even glancing his way. He gave a sullen nod and shuffled off, casting one look back at Mark as if to say, I told you the police would be better. She told Mark to come inside, and only when the door was closed behind him did she speak again.

“Ridley Barnes wants the case reopened?”

“That’s right. I came up to discuss things. I knew nothing about what had happened here. It was preliminary talk, nothing more, at least until people began to involve me in elaborate lies and then tried to kill me. I owe your caretaker some gratitude, by the way. If he weren’t alert on the job, I would have frozen to death down there.”

She didn’t seem to register those words. “Ridley Barnes wants the case reopened,” she echoed, and then gave a bitter laugh. “That twisted bastard.”

“Tell me about him,” Mark said. “Please. Or put me in touch with your father so I can talk to him.”

“You won’t have any luck,” she said. “My father is not very lucid these days. He had a bad stroke two years ago and has been in assisted living ever since. He might tell you stories about Trapdoor, but they’re likely to be a product of his own imagination.”

“He won’t be alone in that regard.”

She considered him in silence for a few seconds and then said, “I shouldn’t be talking to you, but I’ll go this far, despite my better judgment. You tell me about Ridley, everything you know about him, and I’ll offer the same.”

“Fair enough,” Mark said, “but why so interested, Danielle?”

“My father was engaged to Diane Martin,” Danielle MacAlister said. “Sarah and I would have been stepsisters, Mr. Novak. Instead, by the next summer, Sarah was in a casket, and Diane had left my father. Meanwhile, Ridley Barnes is free and clear. Do you still have any questions as to why I’m so interested?”

“No,” Mark said. “No, I don’t think so. Let’s talk about Ridley.”

He told her. Everything that she asked and that he could answer, he told her.

“I’ve got to defend myself against the lies that have been told,” he concluded when she seemed to have run out of questions. “But more than that? There are people who should pay for what happened here, but I’m not one of them. I won’t play that role.”

She listened to that in silence.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s what I can give you. Every answer I have, you’ve heard. Your turn. Tell me about the Ridley Barnes you know.”

She hesitated, then turned from him. “Follow me. I can show you Ridley. I can show you where the whole ugly mess began.”

30

The basement was unfinished with walls of rough concrete block, cool and dimly lit. Metal stools without backs sat before an old workbench with a set of steel vises. An ancient La-Z-Boy recliner was in the corner of the room beside a minifridge from the same era, unplugged. Twin file cabinets stood against one wall beneath a bare lightbulb with a pull chain that produced dim light. The walls were lined with maps.

“The basement was my father’s sacred ground,” Danielle said. “Where all the grand plans were made. Where he looked at those maps and dreamed of success.”

“What was success, in his mind?”

“Something bigger,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Isn’t that always the way? The small want to be big, the big want to be monstrous, and the monstrous...” She ran out of orders of magnitude, leaving monstrous to be the end of the growth cycle.

Mark walked to the wall and studied the hand-drawn maps.

“Chronological order, from left to right,” Danielle MacAlister said. “The first ones were done by a group. You’ll see the names on there. Then you’ll see what it turned into.”

Mark moved from left to right, passing across the years of Trapdoor. Many of the maps — most, even — were redundant, the only difference being changes to dimensions of chambers or passages, with few new discoveries. Most of the discovering in the early days had been done by Pershing MacAlister, Tyler Spatta, Dave Everton, and Joseph Anderson. Their names were noted on all the maps, and each was signed by the party who’d created the physical drawing — MacAlister had less skill but paid more attention to detail; Anderson had crafted far better images, but MacAlister had gone back through and corrected his measurements. The artist and the engineer working in tandem.

“Who were these three?” Mark asked. “Beyond your father, who are these guys?”

“Local cavers. When the place was first discovered, he recruited a team to help him explore it. Then he came across Ridley Barnes, who was supposed to be the best caver in the area and the most experienced with exploration teams. The others were willing to work with him, but Ridley had his own set of rules. He wasn’t going to volunteer for the job, like everyone else had, and he was going to work alone. I don’t know how much you understand about caves?”

“Next to nothing.”

“Okay. Well, cave exploration, or digs, the trips to try and find new passages, they’re incredibly dangerous if not done properly. People always work in teams. For a man to insist on working alone is beyond foolish. But that was Ridley.”

“Why did your father agree to it, then?”

She sat on one of the stools in front of the workbench. “He got protective.”

“Of what?”

“The potential, I suppose. He had a theory that there was something truly massive waiting to be found in there. Something that would make the existing tour cave portion look like child’s play. Ridley promised him secrecy — I’ve reviewed the confidentiality agreements and contracts they signed — but in exchange, he was paid for his work, and he was allowed to do it alone. For nine months, Trapdoor was Ridley’s full-time job. He said it was the happiest he’d ever been in his life. That ended two weeks before Sarah was killed.”

The final sets of maps were signed by Ridley and drawn with remarkable skill and attention to detail and scale; here, engineer and artist were combined in one man. Here, also, the rate of discovery accelerated. The original chambers and passages remained, but every so often an entirely new section would appear. Seeing the cave grow on the maps this way was a bizarre, fascinating thing, like watching a chronological series of fetal ultrasounds, except that the cave had always been there and needed only to be discovered.

Some of the chambers had names — the Funnel Room, the Chapel Room — and others did not. The stream flowing through the middle was labeled Greenglass River. Danielle, following his index finger as he traced along, said, “Ridley came up with that name. Most of the names are my father’s ideas. The Chapel Room and Greenglass River belong to Ridley.”

Outside the mouth of the cave, Greenglass River changed to Maiden Creek.

“Maiden Creek? That’s really what it’s called?”

“Yes,” Danielle said. “Supposedly named after a beautiful young pioneer girl who drowned in it while running from the Indians.”

Mark felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. His face must have showed it, because Danielle said, “Why is that a problem for you?”

Because when my mother decided to be an Indian, she named herself Snow Creek Maiden, he thought, so if I’m standing beside Maiden Creek in the snow, maybe Ridley is right. When dangerous things stop feeling like coincidences, what’s the term for that?

But all he said was “That’s a sad story, if it’s true. Probably isn’t, though. Most of the legends aren’t. Here’s a novice question, but I don’t understand how it could take so long for these new portions to be found.”

“Then you don’t understand caves. My father didn’t either. Ridley Barnes did. It also wasn’t that long, really. My father bought the acreage for the timber rights but hadn’t cut a single tree before the cave opened up.”

“What do you mean, opened up? He had to go looking for it, right?”

She shook her head. “He bought the property in August and intended to begin timbering the following summer. That winter, it just sat. The next spring was a wet one, with high flood levels. The creek spilled over its banks and flooded a small pond that was on the other side. The level in the pond kept rising too. Then the pond vanished into the ground.”

“Completely?” He was trying to envision it, trying to imagine what it must have been like to walk out into daylight and see that while you’d slept, the earth had changed.

“Completely. Where it had been, there was nothing but a gaping sinkhole with a small gap in the stone at the base. The ground just opened up and swallowed the pond. Hence the name — it swung open just like a trapdoor. A couple of the locals grabbed flashlights and ropes and went in and eventually called my father. Back then, the entrance was so small you had to squeeze to get through it. When my father realized there was a large cave beyond, he blasted the stone out to get the entrance you see today, and it looks like it has always been there.”

Mark kept moving around the walls of maps as he listened, and as he studied the dimensions and details, he tried to find a room that approximated the one where’d he found himself. None of them did. There were some drops and cliffs, but nothing that looked as sheer as what he’d encountered. Maybe it wasn’t that deep at all. How do you know when you didn’t see it? You also heard snakes. Without a doubt. But those weren’t real. And what about Sarah Martin, sitting on that ledge with light emanating from her pores? Was that real?

He finally reached the last one, an elaborate and painstaking sketch, dated May 2004.

“Ridley didn’t find anything new that summer?” Mark asked.

“Oh, he did. He claimed to have made extraordinary finds that summer. He was getting close, he kept telling my dad, he was always getting close. But he never turned over the maps.”

“According to the case reports, Blankenship was removed from the investigation because he had a relationship with Sarah’s mother. But she was engaged to your father.”

Danielle winced. “Both are true, ugly as that sounds. Sarah’s father was killed in a bad trucking accident when she was twelve. Blankenship was the deputy who’d informed the family. He stayed in touch with Diane throughout, and eventually, he fell in love with her. Fell hard, I believe. Sarah told me that. But then Sarah began to work out here. Diane had a terrible fear of cars after the accident. She wouldn’t let Sarah get a driver’s license, so she would drop her off and pick her up every day. It was humiliating to Sarah — you know, the worries of the sixteen-year-old — but it also meant Diane was around every day.” She sighed. “I’d love to tell you my father is this wonderful, noble man. I think he’s a good man, and I love him. But he has his weaknesses. Diane would have been his third wife, and I think there was another one who was almost in the mix. My mother was his second. My father liked to play the savior role. People accused those women of being gold diggers, but they were wrong. He liked to find women he could dazzle. Women he could introduce to a different type of world, a different lifestyle. Diane was one of those.”

“So Blankenship was the jilted one in all this?”

“He felt he was, at least. He was also the one who called for Ridley over my father’s objections. I don’t think he’s ever really recovered from that. How could someone?”

“Why did your father object?”

“Ridley was a disturbed man. We all knew that, because we’d been around him. Blankenship hadn’t. He just thought he was getting an expert. That much was true, but he hadn’t heard the way Ridley talked about the cave, talked about its power, talked about it like it was a person. And I think my father had an even darker concern that he didn’t give voice to.”

“What was that?”

“Ridley made some odd remarks about the girls who worked here. About me, and about Sarah. He said once that Sarah looked like his sister, but it was not a casual comment. It was creepy. It just felt off.”

Mark remembered the chill he’d felt when Ridley said that Sarah had caught his eye.

“I understand that Blankenship was told Ridley could move fast in the cave, but I’ve always wondered how much of that decision to overrule my father came from testosterone rather than logic.”

Probably a lot of it, Mark thought. Put a woman between two men, and anything that was even a cousin of logic would usually drown in the tidal waves of testosterone.

“At any rate, Blankenship was removed from the scene, and Ridley came. The rest... well, you know the rest.”

“I know the result. That’s all.”

“Then you know as much as everyone else. Nobody knows the rest except for Ridley Barnes.”

“What do you think he did?” he asked.

“I think he killed her. He was supposed to lead the team, not leave the team. And the way he talked about the cave as if it were alive? It always gave me chills. He referred to the cave as ‘her’ or ‘she’ all the time. ‘The old girl,’ that was one of his favorites. Then he began to talk about his discoveries of new passages as if the cave had guided him. ‘The old girl was whispering to me today, Danielle. She’s starting to tell me her secrets.’ I will never forget those words. So disturbing, particularly with the look in his eyes. This... hunger. He’d gotten possessive about access to the cave too, wanted limits on everyone. Ironic, because that’s just the way my father was. Trapdoor has that effect, I suppose. Another reason I’ll never open the door.” She looked at Mark with distaste. “Not that the locks stopped you.”

“I didn’t go in that cave of my own free will. And if you feel so passionately about Ridley’s history, then you really should believe me.”

“Maybe. If that were the only part of the story, I probably would, in fact. But that’s not the only part of the story, is it? You also claimed to have seen Diane. I can believe some things about Ridley Barnes, and most of them are uniquely evil, but I don’t believe he summoned poor old Diane Martin from the grave.”

“She wasn’t summoned from the grave. She was impersonated, and then people lied about it to make me look like a fool and keep the police from searching for the person who did it.”

“Why would they do that?”

“People lie for different reasons. For money, sometimes. For power.”

“Ridley is in no position to grant anyone money or power.”

“There are other reasons. Fear, for one. You don’t think Ridley can wield fear? Sounds like that’s what he’s good at.”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached out to one of the vises mounted on the workbench and ran a fingertip along the inside. It came back dry and clean, but she rubbed her fingers together and laughed.

“It still smells the same.”

“What’s that?”

“This room. Nobody has done any real work down here in years, but it still smells like sawdust, don’t you think?”

It did. There wasn’t a trace of sawdust in the room, but the smell was certainly there. She returned her focus to him. There was an intensity to it that, combined with her youth, made her painfully familiar. She looked like Lauren had when they were discussing a case for Innocence Incorporated. Danielle’s face was more angular, with higher cheekbones, and her hair was auburn instead of blond, but the body type was close, and the combination of intelligence and intensity was identical. She was an attorney too. A young attorney, full of confidence, ready to conquer.

He looked away from her and reached automatically into his pocket for the Saba dive permit, forgetting that it was no longer there. He removed his hand and gazed around the room at that mess of maps, slowly developing, like an old Polaroid, revealing more and more.

“Do these maps show where I was found?” he said.

“No. You were off the maps.”

“But not off Ridley’s.”

She shook her head. It was silent for a while, and then she broke the quiet by saying, “So people lie for different reasons. I’ll grant you that. But if this woman impersonated Diane Martin... that’s more than a lie. It would mean she’s a little more invested, don’t you think? It would mean that she has a stake in Ridley.”

“Agreed.”

“That’s why I have trouble believing you,” she said. “I can’t imagine who in the world would have a stake in Ridley Barnes.”

“Four people,” Mark said. “Three guys on the road, and then the woman who pretended to be Diane.”

Danielle frowned and shook her head. “Somehow the woman is harder for me to believe. The idea that he’d be able to recruit some locals with guns? I believe that. But a woman, any woman? Unless he paid her by the hour, I can’t see it.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve given you more than you deserve, Mr. Novak. More than I should have, probably. But I’ll admit that you’ve made me curious. If you have other questions, I’ll consider answering them. Emphasis on consider. Because until you find a way to explain that story about Diane Martin, or prove anything else that you say, you feel just a little too much like Ridley himself for comfort.”

31

She held a towel filled with ice against the side of his face and ran her fingertips lightly over the swollen skin. “Ridley,” she said, “it was a mistake. It was too much.”

He took a few breaths through his mouth — it was still painful to breathe through his nose, thanks to Novak — and said, “He’s still here, at least.”

“And how’s that going for you?”

“We knew he wouldn’t take it well. We always knew that.”

“There’s a difference.”

“Easy thing to say. But if you imagine how he felt...”

“Trust me, I did. Before I saw him, and after. And during. Especially during.”

“He was going to leave.”

“Maybe not.”

“He would have. I’m sure of it. And you know I can’t allow that. He’s too special.”

She moved the ice away. “A mistake,” she repeated.

“That’s what he called it too.”

“Unanimous, then.” She replaced the ice, a little lower now. He closed his eyes against it and spoke with them squeezed shut.

“Now the sheriff is back around. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I have trouble with him all the same. I have struggles.” He opened his eyes. “He asked questions about how Novak ended up in the cave, and I almost had to tell him.”

“What would you have told him?”

“The truth.”

“And what is the truth?”

“The cave sent forces to the surface for him. It was bound to happen. He’s special. The cave knows that. The cave wasn’t going to let him leave here without a visit.” Ridley shook his head with frustration and confessed the thing he did not want to tell her: “I drew a knife on Novak.”

The ice lowered again. Her eyes on him now were horrified. Julianne’s eyes usually held only sympathy or suggestion. This reaction to him was jarring.

“You did what?” she said.

“Nothing happened. But it just...” He struggled for words. Looking her in the eyes, he often did. “It just found its way there.”

“A knife just found its way into your hand?”

He fell silent, sucking air in through his mouth, and closed his eyes.

“Talk me down,” he said. “Please.”

“It won’t be easy right now. With the adrenaline? It won’t be easy.”

“I can focus,” Ridley said.

“Maybe we should stay up here for a while. Here on the surface of the mind.”

“I don’t need that.”

“Some people might disagree. Some people might hear the story you told, hear about the knife in your hand, and think that you cannot carry control back to the surface with you.”

“I have control!” The statement sounded ludicrous when shouted. He took a breath, steadied himself, and repeated it again, lower and softer. “I have control.”

“It’s about trust, Ridley. You’ve always understood this.”

“I trust you.”

“I’m not the concern. Mr. Novak is your concern, isn’t he? This will have been a waste unless you put real trust in him, Ridley. You’ll need to turn over more than a case file.”

After a short silence, the ice returned to his face. He tried to concentrate on only that sensation, tried not to think of the things that he wanted to think of, the things that could raise odd smiles at the wrong times. Knives and blood; shadows and screams. No, no. Don’t think those thoughts. Just the ice. Just concentrate on the ice.

Her voice floated toward him then, softer and lower.

“Tell me your awareness of this space. Tell me what you feel.”

“The ice. Only that.”

“The ice, yes. You feel it on your skin, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And below the skin, on your nerves. Do you feel the ice on your nerves?”

“Yes.”

“Follow the cold then. Down from the skin, down into the nerves. Let it go. Let it travel. Then travel with it, but only when you can see your path.”

Silence. He kept his eyes shut, trying to visualize it, seeing his nerve endings like sea grass, loose and shifting. Saw the ice spread through them, slide down, find tunnels, and seep into them.

Then her voice again. Softer. “Let’s imagine the way down. Do you mind if I touch you?”

“No.”

Her hand moved to his and turned it over, and she began to tap rapidly and rhythmically on the inside of his wrist. Then she moved to his face, her fingers avoiding the swollen areas Novak had left. The sensation, jarring at first, quickly became pleasant. So much tension — and things worse than tension — seemed to evaporate at the touch. It was like turning on windshield wipers, the way ahead suddenly clear again, the clouded vision gone.

“What do you see?” she asked as if she understood.

“Stone walls. Stone all around.”

“Yes. And what does it smell like?”

“Damp. Old water.”

“Yes. Tell me what you feel now that is different than before.” The tapping never disrupted her voice. They could move at distinctly separate rhythms but in perfect harmony.

“Cool.”

“Too cool? Cold?”

“No. Just right. Just right.”

“Yes, it is. Yes. Look farther now, out ahead. What does it look like ahead?”

“Darker.”

“Is the dark bad?”

“No. No, it’s good.”

“You’re right.” Her voice became softer still, fading, receding. “Now imagine a version of yourself that stands ahead, already there in the dark, already waiting. Perhaps he has always been here. Perhaps he watches over you from this spot. Go to that version of yourself now. Become that version of yourself. Now look back from that spot. What does that version of you see now, from this spot, that you did not see before?”

“That it’s dark behind me too. That I’ve always been in the dark.”

“What does that mean to you?”

“The darkness is within me. I don’t have to search for it.”

“Are you still moving?”

“I’m moving,” he said, and the ice was harder to concentrate on now, his own voice farther away too, remaining with hers, wherever hers was. “I’m going farther down the tunnel. Farther down...”

A glimmer then, a flash of steel and a spray of crimson mist, and Ridley winced against it, trying to close eyes that were already closed. He had to hold the right visual. The wrong ones were dangerous. Don’t take those tunnels. Find the right ones. He breathed deeply, slowly, and imagined himself returning to a chamber with many options. Imagined going down another passage now, one that led away from that glint of steel and blood. Here there was nothing but darkness and cool. Good. Follow it on, then. Go down, go deeper.

And keep going.

32

The exhaustion that had settled into Mark while he was with Danielle MacAlister peaked as he walked back to his car, every muscle ache amplified by the uphill walk through the snow. Cecil Buckner came out of his garage, where he had the bay doors open and appeared to be tinkering with a snowblower, and stood with his hands on his hips.

“Ain’t she a treat?” he called.

“She was more cooperative than most.”

Cecil shook his head. “Be careful with her, buddy.”

Mark stopped. “Why?”

Cecil turned to look at the big house. There was smoke rising from the chimney now. Danielle had started a fire. Snowflakes had just begun to fall, joining the thin trail of smoke. When Cecil spoke again, his usually booming voice was softer.

“Everybody’s got an agenda. Don’t you forget that.”

“What’s hers?”

Cecil wouldn’t take his eyes off the house, as if he was afraid someone would see them talking. “I couldn’t say. But she sure as hell hustled up here once you got inside the cave, didn’t she? First time I’ve seen her in almost three years too. I’ve asked her to come up and she says, ‘No, thanks, keep up the good work,’ click. But you got in and the police got called, and now she’s camped out at that house. Staying the week, she says. For what? I says. But she won’t answer that.”

“What’s her father like?”

“Aged and addled now. I haven’t seen Pershing in five years, at least. Back when he was around, when the cave was open, he was popular with some, I suppose. You want to know what Pershing was like, you just close your eyes and picture the nineteenth hole at a country club. Any country club. They’ve all got one like him. Old-timer camped out at the bar acting like he’s not an old-timer, telling bawdy jokes, silver hair that wouldn’t slip out of place in a cyclone, a big tipper when people are watching, ten percent when they aren’t. Tell me, buddy, ain’t you met a guy like that somewhere along the line?”

“A few.”

“Exactly. You got a sense of him, then. Some people take to that, others don’t. He rubbed some of the cavers the wrong way because of how he treated Trapdoor, like personal property.”

“Well, isn’t it?”

Cecil frowned. “Yes, except there’s a certain understanding with caves. A respect. It’s a small community of people who care about them, and Pershing didn’t get that. He just saw it as something like an oil well, a lucky piece of ground that was worth some dollars. Nobody else’s business.”

“Now he doesn’t care about the dollars?”

“I field offers for this place on a regular basis. State officials, parks people, some private buyers. They come down here and talk to me, and I relay the messages. The answer is always a firm no. The MacAlisters don’t want to sell or open the cave. But if you’re not going to open the cave, why not unload it and make a couple million? I suppose he has the money not to care, but I don’t understand it, and it surely doesn’t sit well with people around here.”

“Why do they care so much?”

Cecil rubbed his thumb and index finger together in the universal gesture meaning ‘money.’ “When the ground opened up and the cave came into view, people thought it was manna from heaven. The town was going to become a tourist economy, don’t you know. Then that girl got killed, a sad deal to be sure, but no reason to shut the whole show down. But Pershing did shut it down, so there’s the sense that he didn’t ever give a damn about this place or the people in it. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong; all I know is that in the past ten years, I’m the only person in Garrison who’s been making a living off him.”

“How’d that come to pass?”

Cecil pointed at a massive tree beside them. “See that red oak?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I know. Trees. My family moved up here from Carolina in the early 1900s. Came for jobs at the resorts over by French Lick. But back in Carolina, they worked with timber. Until it was all cut. That’s the problem with the way they handled that job back then. Cut off the hand that fed them, eventually. Then you had to move on. My family moved here. The knowledge of these trees, hell, that goes back to men I’ve never even seen in pictures. My family loved trees. That might sound strange considering they’ve always cut them down, but it’s true. My father was in the timber business, and I came in behind him. Pershing was just a buyer. My job was to scout property for him. I chose this one for those trees. A lot of red oak, some walnut stands. Good hardwood. Turned out to be the most valuable find anyone ever made for him, but not because of the trees; they didn’t count in that equation. The cave was where the money waited. Still waits. Anyone who opened that cave now, if it’s everything Ridley Barnes claimed, would be a hero.”

“Have you dealt with Barnes much?”

Cecil pulled off his knit cap and ran a hand over his bald head, his mouth twisting as if he’d tasted something sour.

“Dealt with him? Shit. I s’pose you could say that I’ve dealt with him. Crazy bastard showed up a few times over the years, trying to get in. Caught him once when he was set to go to work on those doors with a damned arc torch. Last time I threw him out, he took to begging. Got down on his knees like he was about to blow me. The man is everything people say, and then some. But the dealings I had because of him, those were the real bullshit matters.”

“What do you mean?”

Cecil pulled the cap back on. His eyes had never left the house. “You heard what he had to say about his time in that cave before he found her?”

“I’ve read most of it, at least.”

“Then you heard about the dark man.”

“Yes.”

Cecil gave an unpleasant smile. “You haven’t been around town long, but let me ask you, how many black faces you seen?”

“Just you.”

“There you go. I’m not completely alone in Garrison, but closer to it than not. Tell you just how, um, politically correct our local police are. They heard the phrase dark man and brought me in for questioning. No bullshit, it was that fast. Dark man.” He shook his head, still in disbelief a decade after it had happened. “So I got grilled like a suspect while Ridley was being treated for hypothermia and, at that time, like a hero. For a few hours. Then they realized he was talking about some sort of damned ghost or phantom and thought the cave was a person and that the girl was alive but, no, maybe she was dead, she either said something or she didn’t, maybe it was the cave talking to him, and he didn’t remember her having handcuffs on, but maybe she did. Got to scrambling all over the place and then he just stopped talking, period. But not before he explained that the dark man lived in the cave and always had and couldn’t die. He was eternal, that’s my understanding. So me, this dark man, I got thanked for my time and sent on my way. But I haven’t forgotten that. Shit, would you?”

“No,” Mark said. “I wouldn’t.”

Cecil nodded and spit into the snow. “There ya go. As for Miss MacAlister up there? If I were you, I’d be careful with her, that’s all. With that family.”

“They seem to have been good enough to you.”

Cecil’s cockeyed grin held no humor. “Seem to, right? But that’s another question you might think on before you throw in with the MacAlister family, buddy. You might ask why in the hell it’s worth paying a caretaker to live down here if you have no intention of opening the cave or selling it. Why not seal the fucker down, pour some concrete in that entrance, and be done with it?”

“You’re the caretaker,” Mark said. “You tell me.”

Cecil shook his head. “I can’t, honestly. I keep expecting to get my walking papers. They never come. I stick on because, well, I like the place. I live for free, I hunt for free — there are fine deer in these woods, I take a buck every season — and what work there is ain’t so bad. Painting and roofing and general repairs. I like working with my hands, I like my solitude, I like this place. But I’m providing maintenance on a forgotten property and one without any future. There are times I wonder about that. But then?” He spit into the snow again. “Then I remind myself to be grateful for the job. It’s a paycheck, and it’s a fine place to live. Better than any I had before. Long as I can get away with it, I’ll stay here. But there are questions.” His eyes remained on the smoke wafting from the chimney and joining the leaden sky. “There are certainly questions.”

Mark was so tired when he reached the car that he wanted nothing more than to start the heater and sleep with his head on the steering wheel. Instead he drove through the blowing snow back to town, back to the same hotel where it had all begun.

The same clerk was on duty, the one who had looked the sheriff directly in the eyes and lied to him. When she saw Mark, she walked into an office and shut the door. A moment later, the door opened and a fat man with a receding hairline, pleated pants, and a stern expression appeared. Management.

“What do you need, sir?”

“A room, please.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. “The sign says vacancy.”

“It’s not an issue of space.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Let’s not play dumb, please. The last time you were here, you caused some problems. You frightened my staff. You’re not welcome back.”

Mark leaned on the counter, a move the man apparently took as a show of aggression, because he backed up fast.

“I didn’t cause any problems, and if your staff member was frightened, she was frightened by whoever convinced her to lie. Either way, I just want a shower and some sleep.”

“Please don’t make this difficult. I don’t want to call the police.”

“Call the police? I’m just asking for a damned room!”

“They have some across the street,” the fat man said, and then he, too, turned and walked into the office, leaving Mark alone in the lobby where once he’d believed he’d met Diane Martin. He stood there for a moment, then gave up and shouldered his bag. He walked back out into the cold and across the parking lot. The only other options were the kind of motels he hated, where the doors opened directly to the outside. The crime scene — tape doors. There was one across the street.

The clerk there was a bored-looking woman with dyed-blond hair and long, bright red acrylic nails. She didn’t seem happy that Mark had interrupted her television viewing with his arrival, but she rented him a room without question or curiosity.

According to the thermostat, the room was warm, but Mark’s body argued that. He cranked the heat up and fastened both the dead bolt and the flimsy chain and then sat on the bed, thinking of Danielle MacAlister and the information she’d provided and the questions he could have asked, should have, while she was talking. It had been a surprise that she was that willing to talk. From Jeff London to Sheriff Blankenship to Cecil Buckner, nobody had given him the idea that she’d be cooperative.

Why had she been, then? There was something wrong with that. He’d intrigued her with the information about Ridley, yes, but had he hooked her enough for an attorney, no matter how young or inexperienced, to begin to tell the family stories to a stranger, let alone a potentially problematic stranger? No. She should have been more guarded than that, and she’d intended to be when he walked into the house. Then she’d pulled a one-eighty during the conversation. Why?

He leaned back on the bed as warm air smelling of burned dust swept out of the small heating unit, then he closed his eyes and fell asleep on the grimy comforter before even removing his boots. When Jeff London called, he didn’t hear the phone ring.

His dreams were filled with maps. Obstinate, senseless maps. Frustrated in his attempts with them, he laid a compass down on the paper, trying to get his bearings. It was the compass his uncle had given him for his tenth birthday, a plastic device with a rotating bezel and a signal mirror to be used in case you needed rescue. To see the compass, you had to lift the top of the case, exposing the mirror. In the dream, when Mark set the compass on the map, the needle began to spin, true north impossible to find. Any true direction impossible to find. As the needle spun faster, the bezel began to move, too, going counterclockwise, so the magnetic needle and the guide were turning in opposite directions, spinning faster and faster. Something moved in the signal mirror then, and when Mark looked at it, he saw that the mirror was filled with Ridley Barnes’s face. As the spinning compass picked up even more speed, Ridley smiled.

33

The drive to Stinesville usually took more than an hour in good conditions, and it took Ridley two hours in the snow. The county roads hadn’t seen a plow yet, and though the accumulation was minimal, the changeover from rain to snow had allowed for a thin layer of ice. The rubber on the tires of his old truck was thinner still. He nursed the truck along, a tow chain jingling among the sandbags and cinder blocks that he’d tossed in the back to add weight over the rear axle.

The snow was blowing harder in Spencer, and the town streets were empty and unusually dark, none of the neon glowing at him from the gas stations along the highway. A power outage, evidently. He turned east and drove with the wind at his back, as if being offered up to the world by the storm itself.

The old family land was down a gravel road marked by sets of massive ruts left behind by an oversize four-wheel drive. Ridley decided he’d rather hike than shovel his tires out, and he left the truck on the side of the road, slipped his backpack over his shoulders, and stepped out into the wind. His breath was coming fast, fogging the air in quick puffs like antiaircraft fire. He didn’t like this place, never had, never would. It was where he’d buried the darkest parts of him. Or where he’d tried to.

He walked down the road, his boots occasionally catching gravel but more often just snow, and above him the naked branches of the ash and walnut trees weaved and creaked. Shadows flickered ahead, dancing from one side of the drive to the other, and once he was certain that he saw his father among them. He kept his head down after that. His mother was the only one who belonged here — they’d scattered her ashes on an autumnal wind beneath a sky so blue that it hurt to look at — but it seemed unlikely she’d make an appearance. She’d been a quiet presence in Ridley’s life and when his father was around, not much of a presence at all.

He wasn’t certain who lived in the old house now. It had changed hands a few times, he was aware of that. He didn’t care much. He’d sold the place as soon as it was his to sell, used the money to send his younger sister through two years of college. She lived in Rhode Island now, and he didn’t hear from her often. Christmas cards always came, but they bore no message beyond whatever the card company had thought to offer. Once they had spoken on the telephone with some consistency. That had ended about ten years ago. He hadn’t fought it. She had children who would ask questions about their uncle if they knew he was out there. You had to be understanding of something like that.

The house seemed to be occupied, with two vehicles parked outside, but the windows were dark, lights either lost to the power outage or turned off ahead of sleep. The outbuilding where his father had once taught him how to work wood with chisels and how to take a punch without tears had collapsed in on itself, the remains looking like something that had been subjected to a long, slow squeeze. A sapling was growing through a hole in the roof. Ridley skirted the building in a wide, looping arc, keeping his distance from whatever lingered there.

Fifty yards beyond the outbuilding, right where the field grass began to give itself over to brush at the edge of the tree line, the strip pit announced itself in a series of rock slabs burped up by the earth and then forgotten. The ash tree whose roots had once provided a chin-up bar — style exit had died and fallen on its side. Someone had taken the time to limb it with a chain saw but had left most of the massive trunk and root ball untouched. They loomed above the pit now like bulwarks hastily erected against an invading army.

You didn’t need a rope to descend into this pit, but Ridley wanted to work fast, and the ropes allowed for that. He freed them from his pack, scraped the snow clear beneath one of the uneven spots of the trunk, and then slid the rope around it and cinched it. A good anchor, and an easy one.

He was wearing a headlamp but hadn’t turned it on yet, performing all of the tasks so far with ease, because the night didn’t seem the least bit dark to him. Not aboveground, where the white snow held starlight and traces of a rarely seen moon. He glanced at the house, sure that he’d heard a whisper, but there was no sign of movement, and when he heard the whisper again, he knew that it was his own name, and he knew who was calling for him. He kept his eyes away from the remains of the woodshop, slipped into the strip pit, and began to rappel down into the darkness, closing his eyes against memories of outstretched hands scrambling to catch him before he could make it deep enough.

No hands chased him today. He went about ten feet down, until the neck of the pit narrowed, and then he clicked on the headlamp, keeping it to the dim red setting that was designed to protect night vision. He wasn’t worried about his night vision but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself if anyone in the house got up to take a piss. You could see the pit from the bathroom window. The bathroom window had been the place where Ridley usually reentered the house late at night. His sister, the one who now lived with her family in Rhode Island, had always unlocked it again after their father passed out. She’d been very young in those days, but still she had remembered Ridley, and stayed awake for him. The only one in the house who would.

He hated making this return, thought now that this had been a terrible idea. It had made some sort of karmic sense, leaving as much evil in this place as possible, but he should have known he would have to come back for one piece of it or another at some point. The world above didn’t just let you put things away and move on. It sent you back for them in time, or — far worse — brought them back up for you.

When the walls of the pit began to squeeze his thighs, he let the rope go slack. This was the place where his father had never been able to follow, not even with his most diligent efforts. He was a bigger man and he drank too much and exercised too little. Ridley remembered being on a date, back in the days when such things had been possible in his life, during which the woman noticed how little he ate and said, “What are you watching your figure for?” It had been a joke, and she’d laughed without knowing why when Ridley said, “Ease of escape.” That had not been a joke. They hadn’t had a second date.

He wriggled his legs down and through and now he was essentially sitting on the bottom of the pit, his legs stretched out but his face and torso pressing against stone. He paused to shed the bulkier outer layer he was wearing, balled it up, and pushed it into the rocks, and then he began to dig with his heels, slowly drawing his body down into the gap beneath the stone. By the time you were done with this maneuver, you were lying flat on your back, your face staring straight up to the top of the pit, your arms pinned against your sides, useless for protection. Ridley’s father used to throw rocks or, if they were available, beer bottles at him until he disappeared from sight. It had been a very good thing that the old man did most of his drinking from cans; the glass littered the rocks and laced your flesh with cuts when it was safe to emerge.

He’d experimented with a headfirst approach a few times, not wanting to have that experience of staring straight up into daylight and what waited there, but the feetfirst approach was faster, and when Ridley took to the pit, speed was usually of the essence.

He slid into position now and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the tight slide that waited. Above him, the snow whirled down through the blackness, and a few stars glittered. It was beautiful, and he wanted to lie there and drink it in. He lingered too long, though, and his father caught him, bounding up to the lip of the pit and leaning down, leering at him with a wolf’s smile.

Ridley closed his eyes and used his heels to drag himself under the stone and out of sight.

That squeeze beneath the stone pulled you into a tomb of rock. If you were brave enough — or scared enough — you could keep pulling yourself forward with your heels, though, and eventually you’d come out into a small chamber. Ridley had a sense now of just how small it was, but in his boyhood, the place had seemed impossibly massive, big enough for treasure chests and pirate hideouts. High enough to allow you to sit upright if not quite stand, about eight feet in diameter, and, best of all, accessible only through an opening the size of a small oven door, easily sealed with a rock if you needed protection. He had spent more hours in that small chamber than he could count. He hauled himself toward it again, pausing once to lift his head and kiss the stone roof for luck, the way he always had. It felt like kissing an old tombstone, but the taste was damp and earthy and comforting.

Once inside the little chamber, he sat up and took a few deep breaths. This was the place where all bad things became good, where all negative energy became fuel. His sister had called it the Batcave, but she was wrong, it was more like Superman’s phone booth, a place where you transformed. There was an old metal ammunition box tucked in one corner, a relic from the Army Navy store in Bloomington, a gift from Ridley’s parents on some long-ago Christmas. It had held his sacred things when he was a child, and still did. He opened it, paused to examine a rusted Swiss Army knife and a few arrowheads and the dusty remains of a letter and a poem he’d written to a girl from school but never delivered to her locker. At the bottom of the box was the most recent addition, a DVD in a plastic case, labeled with a date written in black Sharpie: December 13, 2013.

Ridley extracted the DVD and slipped it into the cargo pocket of his pants then restored the other items to their proper places and closed the ammo box and put a flat rock over the top of it and leaned another against that. Of all the hiding places he had, this was the poorest construction, but he believed it also had the smallest risk of a human encounter. This was the place where he’d intended to leave as much evil as possible, here in the chamber room, where the evil might in time be transformed into something else, something good.

Foolish, childish notions.

The DVD rode along in his pocket as he slipped back out of the chamber, found his rope, and began to ascend. There was no sign of his father. He climbed on toward a howling wind and a sky that was just beginning to flush around the edges.

34

Mark slept for nearly twelve hours but woke feeling groggy instead of refreshed. And stiff. When he climbed out of the bed, every muscle seemed to protest the movement in rapid-fire shrieks, like a disorganized and off-key choir. He limped to the bathroom and ran the shower as hot as it would go, then stood beneath the water until it went cold, which didn’t take long. He toweled off and dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the day before and then stretched, or performed at least an approximation of stretching. It felt as if sleep had battered him rather than soothed him. He was cold but clammy with sweat too. Rest and warm sunshine, Dr. Desare had advised. Sure. When he pulled the curtains back, the landscape was covered with a fresh layer of snow, and the sky was an unbroken gray.

He was hungry, though, and when he considered it, he realized that he hadn’t eaten in nearly a day. Breakfast in the hospital, coffee in Garrison, that was it. The recipe for recovery. He grabbed his bag and put on his jacket and stepped out into the winter morning. This hotel wasn’t one that had a breakfast option, so he’d have to head into town. Or maybe he could walk across the street and see if they’d let him at least buy breakfast. Maybe if he sat there long enough, he’d have the chance to visit with Diane Martin again. Wouldn’t that be nice. He had questions for her again, but they were...

He stopped in his tracks halfway to his car. He was standing in the parking lot of the low-rent motel, facing the higher-rent one that had sent him away. They shared an access road, if not clientele. You drove in the same way from the highway, and the road dead-ended just beyond the hotels and the restaurants. If you were visiting one or the other, you had to come in the same way. The parking lots were divided by the access road.

He turned back and paced the exterior of the shotgun-style motel until he found what he’d expected — security cameras were mounted under the eaves on both entrance doors. He stood beneath them and squared himself with their angles. Both were positioned to show anyone entering the motel, but they might pick up the parking lot too. And if they did, they surely picked up the access road beyond. The entrances to the parking lot of the nicer hotel, the national chain that had refused him the room last night because they didn’t want more of his brand of trouble, were in plain view.

He left and got into his car and drove down the access road to the first gas station he found. Inside, he ran the Innocence Incorporated credit card on a cash advance. The machine limited him to four hundred dollars. He went to the next gas station and did the same thing. This time he got five hundred. In his own wallet, he’d had just over a hundred, bringing him to a grand, total. He could make another withdrawal somewhere else, but he was afraid of pushing it to the point that the fraud protection kicked in and killed his card. Besides, if it was the bored blonde again this morning, he thought that a grand might be enough.

She was in the office, and the television was still running. One of those shows where paternity tests were the bread and butter, everyone shouting at one another and the audience hooting at it all. Mark looked at her and considered whether or not to show his ID. Sometimes, the PI license helped. But in this town, his name was pretty familiar, and not in a helpful way. He’d lead with the cash.

“Your security cameras work?” he said.

She turned for the first time, regarded him with annoyance and contempt. “Yes. But there’s a sign in the parking lot for a reason. Anything happened to your car, it’s not our liability.”

It was a response that begged the question of just how often cars in this particular Four Seasons were vandalized, but that wasn’t Mark’s interest. It was, however, an entry point that he hadn’t considered, and one that he liked.

“Exactly. But you’ve got working cameras, to protect yourselves. Your buddies across the street? I stayed there last week, my car got busted into, and they said their cameras don’t show the parking lot. I think they’re lying about that.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. You know it’s one of those Pakistani chains. Or Indians, I don’t know. Saudis?” She shrugged. “They own ’em all, mostly. You wouldn’t believe how many hotels they own. Ain’t many locals like us left.”

Mark agreed that her establishment was one of a kind, then leaned on the counter and said conspiratorially, “I want to sue their asses. I don’t even need a copy of your security videos to do that, I just need a look.”

She frowned, torn. On the one hand, she clearly liked the notion of causing trouble for whatever Middle Eastern empire opposed her, but on the other, the task smelled like work. “I really shouldn’t do that for you. You know, the legalities and whatnot.”

“Sure.” Mark reached into his jacket pocket and removed the wad of cash, glad for the first time in history that ATMs didn’t dispense anything larger than a twenty, because it made the stack of bills look more substantial. “Or you could put this in your pocket, let me look at those videos, and I’ll get the hell out of here and you won’t see me again.” He nodded across the street. “But they will. And so will their attorneys.”

She looked out the front window. Other than her car and Mark’s, the motel’s parking lot was empty. She looked at the cash on the counter. There were at least fifty bills in the stack.

“It won’t take me long,” Mark said.

She used one of the laughably long acrylic nails to fan through the bills, then did the math — or gave up on doing it, one of the two — and said, “Come around the desk.”

The cameras were standard cheap technology, adequate for the motel’s liability insurance and little more. They fed back into a computer hard drive much like a television DVR, and a simple software program allowed you to enter the date and time of your choice. The blonde didn’t know how to operate it, but Mark figured out the intricacies in about two minutes. He’d seen plenty of similar systems before. She sat and watched with the bills clutched in her hand.

The cameras captured what he’d hoped for, and more — the view of the parking-lot entrances across the street was clear, and you could see the cars well. He had to scroll through only twenty minutes before he saw his own Ford Escape pull in, and he watched himself stride through the parking lot. The view gave him an unexpected chill. When he’d walked into that place only a few days ago, he was generally regarded as an honest man. By the time he’d checked out the next morning, he was about to hit the news as an unusually disturbing fraud.

He accidentally fast-forwarded right over Diane Martin’s arrival and had to go back to find her. When she appeared in the parking lot, his chill turned to rage. There she was, striding purposefully over the pavement on her way to destroy his career and threaten his life. Calm as could be.

He backed the video up farther and found the car she’d arrived in — an older Honda Civic, red — and discovered that she’d given him the most generous of gifts. She’d turned into the first entrance of the parking lot instead of the second. This meant that the back end of her car had faced the cheap motel squarely for a few precious seconds.

He zoomed in, his breath trapped in his chest. They weren’t high-end cameras, and you could save a lot of money on cameras if you didn’t care about the zoom. As he clicked, the image pixelated, but it held just clear enough. He could make out the license plate.

“Got a piece of paper?” he asked, and while the blonde was rummaging for a notepad and pen, he took his cell out of his pocket and snapped a few quick photos of the screen. When she gave him the notepad, he wrote the license plate down along with the arrival time of the vehicle and then tore the page free.

“That’ll do,” he said. “Thanks for the help.”

“Sure thing,” she said, and when he was back on the other side of the counter and had his hand on the door, she added, “Good luck chasing dead women.”

He turned and stared at her, and she gave him a wide smile. “I’m not quite the yokel you want me to be, mister. But I do appreciate the cash.”

Mark opened his mouth to speak, but she waved him off with those bright red nails. “Don’t you worry about me, honey. It’s an interesting little story, but I know how to run my business. Two things I’m real familiar with: cash and keeping my mouth shut. You go on your way now, and try to stay aboveground.”

35

Jeff had called three times the previous night, but Mark had slept through them all. When Mark called him back, Jeff was on his way into the courthouse in Austin, and the concern in his voice was evident.

“The last time you started missing calls, they had to chopper you to a hospital, Markus.”

“Sorry. I was asleep. Doctor’s orders.”

“Where are you?”

“Garrison.”

“Shit, you went without me?”

“You’re still in Texas. I can’t really afford to wait. You’re the one who made that clear. It became even more clear to me when I learned that Greg Roche is calling around. Not having someone do it for him — making calls himself.”

He could hear Jeff take a deep breath. “Greg’s concerned, yes.”

Mark closed his eyes. If Greg was concerned now, that meant Mark’s firing was imminent. But Greg couldn’t know what had really happened in Coleman, the full scope of Mark’s visits there and the offers he’d made, or Mark would already have been fired. Even Jeff didn’t know all of that. The organization was dedicated to the opposition of capital punishment, and if its executives ever learned that Mark had been trying to arrange a prison hit — even if the target was guilty of murder — he’d be fired, and he’d face charges. Greg would see to that; he’d have to. The integrity of his organization would require it, and neither Jeff London nor anyone else would be able to prevent that train from running Mark down. The only saving grace was that nobody on earth knew what he’d really been after in Coleman. He was counting on that to save his job at least long enough for him to make one more pass through the prison. The one that counted.

“Good news is, I’m making progress here.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Mark told him about the conversations with Evan Borders and Danielle MacAlister and then of the reference to ketamine in Brett Leonard’s recent charges.

“That could go a long way toward helping you,” Jeff said. “They take any blood when you were at the hospital?”

“They took plenty of it, but all they did was warm it up and give it back to me. There were no drug tests conducted as far as I know. I already talked to Arthur Stewart about it. There’s a chance something might show up at this point, but he thinks it’s slim. Right now, I’ve got another priority.” He told Jeff about the motel surveillance cameras and the license plate. “You get any questions about those cash withdrawals, come up with something good to cover me. Meanwhile, I need that plate run.”

“Read it to me and give me ten minutes.”

Mark gave him the number and hung up to let Jeff run it through DMV records. While he waited for the response, he drove to one of the gas stations he’d already visited, grabbed a handful of protein bars, a large black coffee, and a bottle of Advil. The aches and stiffness hadn’t loosened as the morning wore on, and that clammy sweat that signaled a fever had lingered.

“You strike out, bro?” The guy at the cash register had red eyes, an uneven beard, and blue-ink tattoos on his hands.

“What?”

The guy smirked. “You was in here, what, twenty minutes ago, loading up on cash, and now you’re loading up on caffeine and painkillers? You strike out or somebody sell you the wrong shit?”

“I’ll take a paper bag,” Mark said. “Leave you the plastic ones to put over your head.”

The kid laughed like that was a hell of a joke and shoved Mark’s protein bars and Advil back across the counter. He put them in his coat pockets and walked out, sipping the coffee and wondering if there was anyone in this town who wasn’t watching him. Back in the car, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror as he prepared to drop a few of the Advil and thought that the kid at the gas station hadn’t made a bad call. With his gray pallor, dark circles under his eyes, a four-day beard, and beads of sweat on his forehead despite the cold, Mark looked every bit the part of someone who would be hunting for a drug buy in the early-morning hours.

When Mark answered the phone, Jeff began without preamble.

“Owner is Julianne Grossman, white female, blond hair, age forty-four, of Garrison, Indiana. Previously of West Baden Springs and Evansville.”

“West Baden Springs. Why does that sound familiar?”

“Little town with a big hotel. Had a bunch of tornadoes blow through a few years ago. Made national news for, like, a minute. I ran her through a basic profile report once I had her name. No criminal records, nothing in PACER, but there was one interesting detail. Your girl used to have a professional license in Indiana. Doesn’t anymore. Her profession was once recognized and licensed by the state. Now it isn’t. You can just hang out your shingle, apparently.”

“What profession is that?”

“She’s a hypnotist,” Jeff said.

Mark had the coffee halfway to his lips. Now he set it in the cup holder. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I can look for more on her — all I did was a basic preliminary public records search — but that’s what turned up. You think she hypnotized you?”

“No,” Mark said. “Absolutely not, no chance.” He could see his mother’s face, one of the prettier images he had of it. She’d been leaning against the couch, sitting on the floor close to the fireplace with a blanket wrapped around her, on a night after another go-round with local police that had led to a rapid packing of the car. Her dark-colored contacts were out, so for once her blue eyes actually showed. She’d been staring into the fire with a deeply thoughtful expression when she said, Maybe spirit readings are out, Mark. Maybe I should try hypnotism. It does sound complicated, though.

“What’s her address?” Mark asked Jeff. He scratched it down on the back of one of the ATM receipts, thanked Jeff, and ended the call. For a moment, he sat there and watched the rain and considered Jeff’s advice about calling the sheriff. Then he entered Julianne Grossman’s address into his GPS and put the car in gear.