Rise the Dark

14

Doug Oriel, known in Cassadaga as Myron Pate, had driven through the night and Janell slept as Florida fell behind them and they carved into the Georgia pinewoods. She had dreamed often and well in Cassadaga. Sometimes, they were memories of the Netherlands, her first days with Eli. Other times, visions of the dark world and the horrified faces of the foolish people who feared it. In the truck, though, she struggled to find deep enough sleep for dreams at all, and when they came, they were more like flashes of recent memory, Novak behind his circle of light, shining it into her eyes.

Their first stop was well north of Atlanta, an obscure spot on the map that would have been forgotten completely if not for the interstate that ran through it. Doug pulled into a gas station beside a pump, shut the engine off, and looked at her.

“It’s your role,” he said. “I can call him, but he will say that-”

“No. I’ll call. I’m senior.”

Usually this grated on him, but today he was relieved. This was the very reason he hadn’t been granted leadership. He was a weapon, nothing more. An operator. Without her guidance, useless.

“If he needs to hear from me, I’ll back up your story.”

“Just pump the gas,” she said, and got out of the truck.

In the backseat was a black bag designed to hold a laptop computer, innocuous-looking, invisible. She unzipped it and selected one of the forty cell phones inside, then powered it up for the first time. The gas was pumping, but she could see Doug watching her, and she walked away from the truck and into the shadows at the far end of the parking lot. Then she dialed the first of three carefully memorized numbers. Each one asked for a new number, rerouting her, rerouting her, and rerouting her again. Then, finally, a ring.

Her throat was tight and her skin prickled. When he spoke, she thought she would not be able to answer. It was that wonderful to hear his voice again. For months, their only communication had been short e-mail messages.

“It’s me,” she said. “We are in motion.”

“But Novak is alive?”

“I believe so.”

“You believe so?”

“It is my understanding he escaped the house unharmed.”

“Then this is not a question of belief. This is a fact.”

“Yes.” The fact that she had failed.

“What does he understand?”

“Nothing.”

“That seems impossible.”

“It’s true. His interest is only in Garland.”

“He can’t see beyond that?”

“His whole world exists in that ditch where his wife died. It is all that he sees. I spent extra time with him to assess this. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

“It’s important to know.” He sighed. “But Garland taunted him. If he can possibly track Garland here, we will have to deal with him.”

She was unaware of the taunt and wanted to know more about it, but he didn’t like questioning or prolonged phone calls, so she stayed silent. For a time, so was he. Thinking, no doubt, about her failure. She could picture Novak in the darkness, his hands in hers, and the memory made her wince. She’d been so close. A few seconds faster, that was all she’d needed to be. She hadn’t expected him to move so swiftly. Hadn’t expected him to move at all. He’d obliged her every request to that point, so there had been no sense of a rush.

“The house was clean?” he asked at last.

“Completely.”

Silence once more. She could hear wind from his side of the call and tried to picture his surroundings. She’d imagined them many times but never seen them. They’d been apart so long, Amsterdam seemed like another life.

“We will need to move faster,” he said. “That’s the only choice. I’ve already taken steps to expedite operations here. You will have to hurry to join us, and you must not be stopped.”

“We won’t be.”

“It will be different energy for you now. Not as strong as it was there. You’ll have to find it in yourself.”

“Not a problem,” she said, and truer words had never been spoken.

“So it begins,” he said, and she wasn’t fearful, but joyful.

It had been a long wait.

She powered the phone off, smashed it against the concrete wall until fragments of it scattered, and threw the remains into the trash. Doug was waiting nervously beside the truck, and she extended her hand for the keys.

“I’ll drive now,” she said. She couldn’t keep the smile off her face.

It was not the way things were supposed to have begun, but they were in motion now, and that was all that mattered.

15

The jail reminded Mark of many he’d known in his youth.

It was a rural jail, and the deputy who’d arrested him shared a last name with his booking officer, suggesting that good-ol’-boy policing flourished in Volusia County. At least here, though, the good ol’ boys were polite enough, if confused. In the jails of Montana and Wyoming, Mark had met plenty who weren’t so polite. In those days, the officers also hadn’t had cameras recording them, and they’d been drinking buddies with the prosecutors and the judges.

Tonight, the deputies didn’t know what in the hell to do with him, so they’d put him in the drunk tank. He’d gotten one phone call and had used it to reach Jeff London, offering no details beyond his location. Then they’d locked him up and gone off to consider the situation and determine whether he was a murderer or an arsonist or both.

Mark passed the time sitting on a bunk beside the stainless-steel sink and water fountain that were mounted on the back of the toilet, a one-piece unit. If you desired a drink of water, you’d better hope there wasn’t another drunk vomiting or shitting. Fortunately, Mark was alone and sober, and-all that really mattered, as he recalled the blond woman down on her knees before him in that dark room, her hands so close to the waiting knives-he was alive.

The police who eventually came for him weren’t local. It wasn’t the arresting deputy but a captain from DeLand, along with an agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They took his statement, recording all the while.

“He told you his name was Myron Pate, and she didn’t give you a name?”

“Correct. She pretended she was Dixie Witte, but she didn’t give a name. He said he was Myron Pate, but I think he lied.”

“We think so too.”

“Okay. Then I can’t help you. The only person who would know is Dixie Witte, and I never spoke to her. I assumed it was her body that I found in that basement.”

“You assumed right.”

“It’s a small town,” Mark said. “Someone has to know who they were.”

If the police had heard any names mentioned, they didn’t care to share them. They returned to asking questions, and Mark answered them. Most of them. The captain from DeLand was most interested in why he hadn’t fled the house when he’d had the chance.

“I was curious.”

“Not curious enough to call the police, even though you thought you might have just escaped a murder attempt?”

Mark shrugged.

“A woman was killed in that house, Mr. Novak. You don’t seem committed to helping us understand how that happened.”

“A woman was killed in Cassadaga more than two years ago,” Mark said. “It’s why I was there. You now know everything I know about the woman who was killed tonight. We can talk through it again, but you’ve already heard it.”

They wanted to talk through it again.

It was somewhere around four in the morning when Jeff London managed to rouse a judge from sleep and convince her that Mark’s questioning had reached excessive lengths if he wasn’t going to be booked.

Jeff met him outside the jail.

“Let’s talk in the car,” Mark said. “I’ve spent enough time here.”

Jeff drove, and they talked.

“Unless they were better at bluffing than I think,” Mark said, “the police don’t know any more about who was renting that house from Dixie Witte than I do. Am I wrong?”

“No. From what I’ve been told-and this comes from the prosecutor here, a guy I’ve known for years-all they’re sure of is that Dixie rented the place for cash, didn’t keep records, and was a big believer in respecting privacy. The neighbors all agree on this. Most of them didn’t like her tenants, and a couple of them saw the guy you know as Myron go into the house with the blond woman, both of them carrying gas cans, right before it went up. That’s good news for you.”

“Anyone mention a young boy? He was there.”

“A boy? Not that I’ve heard of.”

“He was the one who told me people in the house turned over often. And once you’re inside, it is pretty clear that the various tenants think it’s a special home,” Mark said, remembering the wild words scrawled in paint.

“Tell me what happened,” Jeff said, and Mark did. It was the same speech he’d given the police, with one addition.

“I have a license plate I need you to run. But first I need to find the kid who has my phone, assuming he kept it. I think he did, because he believes I’ve got the support of a dead man. It’s like being a made guy in the Mafia, apparently. In Cassadaga, a dead man named Walter vouched for me.”

Jeff stared at him. Mark shrugged. “It’s a different kind of place.”

“I’m familiar with that. What I want to know is why in the hell you chose not to give the evidence on your phone to the police.”

Mark didn’t speak. Jeff grimaced and said, “Don’t go down this road. Please, do not go down this road.”

“I need to find Garland Webb before the police do.”

“There are other victims now. Not just Lauren. And other suspects. It’s bigger than you, bigger than her.”

“They know where he is,” Mark said as if Jeff hadn’t spoken. “And the police have had their shots.”

“There’s no coming back from the choice you’re making.”

“Would you drive me to the town, at least? If I can find the kid and get my phone, I’ll figure out another way to get the license plate run. My PI license is still valid, even if I don’t work for you.”

Jeff’s voice was sad and distant. “We’ll get you the plate.”

Mark hadn’t expected him to agree to that. He said, “You’re losing your faith in the system a little bit yourself, aren’t you?”

“No, Markus. Not even a little bit.”

“Then why help me?”

A mile passed in silence before Jeff said, “Because she died on my watch. Working for my company, on my case. The things you feel? I don’t pretend to know them. It’s not the same. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel anything.”

“It wasn’t on your watch.”

“Like hell. I could have stopped her if I’d wanted to. She pushed it, but I could have said no.”

“She pushed it?”

Jeff nodded. He usually looked far younger than his years, but not now. “It was her idea. She didn’t just ask to go. She demanded, almost. She wanted to see the town, she said. It was odd, and I shouldn’t have allowed it. So, yeah, it was on my watch. Her interest in the town was strange, and I didn’t listen to my instincts. She never belonged there, and yet I facilitated it.”

“How she could put any kind of faith in the stuff they’re selling in that town, Jeff, it just kills me. Because it’s so obviously a con. And she was too smart to fall for a con. Too analytical, too by-the-book. She knew the psychic claims wouldn’t be worth a damn in court, and all she cared about was building courtroom product. I didn’t understand it the day she left, the last time we spoke, and I still don’t. She knew better.”

He heard the anger in his own voice. So absurd, but so hard to avoid. The grief never left, but the anger came and went, just like the boy had said of the people at that evil house in Cassadaga. It came and it went, an outlandish, self-righteous rage: How could you let yourself get killed, Lauren? Didn’t you understand how much I loved you, needed you, how absolutely lost I am now and always will be without you?

As if it had been selfish of her to die.

Jeff pinched his brow and held it for a few seconds. Then he said, “You’re a good detective, and a better man. You might actually find Webb first. And when you do, you’ll make the right choice. You don’t believe that anymore, but I still do.”

They didn’t speak for the remainder of the drive.

16

Sabrina was fed oatmeal again. The woman who’d smashed Sabrina’s nose with a flashlight only a few hours earlier now watched her eat with a smile.

“I need something to call you,” Sabrina said.

“No, you don’t.”

“That’s not true. You’ve already given me Eli’s name. I know Garland’s. And you told me that I need to learn to be happy here, and to listen. That’s hard to do if I’m scared of you, and everything is more terrifying if you’re all strangers. Don’t you understand that?”

The woman hesitated, then said, “Violet.”

“Violet. Any last name?”

“No, dear. Just Violet. Eli has a presentation for you. Are you able to go outside without the trouble we had last time?”

Sabrina’s face ached and she could breathe comfortably only through her mouth. She had no desire to repeat the last time.

At least not until she had a plan for the fence.

“I’ll be good,” she said. “I know the rules now.”

“I hope so.”

Violet uncuffed her and they went to the door. Both interior and exterior locks required keys. When they stepped out into daylight, Sabrina got her first sense of the scope of her surroundings.

They were on a high plateau rimmed by mountains, peaks looming in all directions. The slopes fell away from every side of the cabin, and fir trees screened it from view. Beneath the tree line was a ring of boulders; some of them seemed natural to the terrain, but others were too carefully aligned, as if they’d been excavated and moved into place to form a perimeter fence. Far below, down a steep slope of loose sandstone and scree, a stream cut through a valley basin. Where the stream fell out of sight, tumbling down to a lower elevation, another tree line blocked visibility. Traces of old snow lingered, but nothing fresh, and most of it had melted. They were somewhere well south of Red Lodge, and maybe east. There were no roads that she could see, no homes, no cars.

They were entirely alone.

“Good morning,” a voice from behind her said, and she turned to see the man named Eli, the first look she’d gotten at him in daylight. Average height, average build, with long hair tied back. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about him except for his eyes. They were inkwell dark, and forceful.

“Where is my husband?” Sabrina said.

He smiled. It was a smile that would have charmed anyone, she thought, or at least anyone he had not chained to a wall first.

“Your husband is fine and well. He’s doing important work. You should be very proud of him.”

A gust of wind rattled the fence. Eli faced it and breathed deeply, contented.

“Here’s something you should consider,” he said. “A quote that inspired me. Perhaps it will inspire you.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was deeper, with a powerful timbre. Violet nodded at the sound.

“‘For your people, the land was not alive,’” he said. “‘It was something that was like a stage, where you could build things and make things happen. You were supposed to make the land bear fruit. That is what your God told you…There were more of you, so your way won out. You took the land and you turned it into property. Now our mother is silent. But we still listen for her voice.

“‘And here is what I wonder: If she sent diseases and harsh winters when she was angry with us, and we were good to her, what will she send when she speaks back to you?

“‘You had better hope your God is right.’”

He stopped speaking and smiled.

“What do you think of that?”

“It’s a powerful question.”

“Isn’t it?”

“It also sounds like it belongs to the Indians. And that isn’t you.”

The smile widened. “Ah, Sabrina, but you’re wrong. We’re too far gone in this world to worry about heritage, about ethnicity. There are only two relevant parties now-people and power. Who has power, and who deserves it.”

“I guess you think that’s for you to determine.”

“Oh, I won’t determine a thing, Sabrina. Your nation is laced with the fuses of fear. All I’m going to do is provide the match. I’m fascinated to see how it turns out.” He looked out over the mountains again, took another deep breath, and whispered, “‘You had better hope your God is right.’”

When he finally turned back to her, the smile was gone.

“I understand that last night you made a mistake that led to two injuries.”

Sabrina waited.

“Are you familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla?” Eli Pate said.

The name was vaguely familiar. “Electrical genius,” she said, and he seemed pleased until she added, “like Edison.”

His eyes tightened immediately. “Tesla’s understanding was far ahead of Edison’s-ahead of the entirety of mankind-and it still took years for the money-obsessed pigs who ran the world to recognize it. And while the battle raged, Edison engaged in a campaign designed to destroy Tesla’s reputation, to obscure the truth with lies, to promote his own ideas even though he knew they were inferior, and to line his pockets rather than help the world. Highlights of this campaign included the slaughter of innocent animals that he claimed were dying by the droves due to Tesla’s alternating-current system. Our dear hero Thomas Alva Edison reached his zenith when he electrocuted an elephant in an attempt to discredit Tesla’s system. This is true.”

He glanced away then and Sabrina followed his eyes and saw, for the first time, a small cage near the fence. There were soft sounds coming from inside.

“Last night you were reckless, thankless, and dangerous. Two people were injured. I blame myself.”

He walked to the cage.

“This man who is celebrated in every schoolroom in the nation once electrocuted animals in the interest of his own commerce. We have neglected to teach the children that lesson. His team made movies of these atrocities, designed to prove one thing and one thing only: that his baby, direct current, was safer than the alternating current of Tesla. But guess what, Sabrina. It was not safer. It was not better. It was in all ways inferior, and Edison, if we are to believe anything of his genius, should have understood this. I suspect he did, down in his bones, where whatever remained of his engineering instincts hid, concealed by the instincts of the business tycoon. I suspect that he had slipped past the point of being concerned with what was right and wandered into the territory of what was righteous. It was all about fury then, about ego. Do you understand the difference in this?”

It was clear he wanted an answer, so she said, “Yes.”

He regarded her with disdain, shook his head, and then leaned down and fumbled with a latch on the cage. Three chickens emerged. A rooster and two hens, clucking and pecking; they approached Eli with immediate trust. He smiled at them and reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew some feed, which he shook out at his feet. The birds ate happily.

“Alternating current,” he said, “is indeed a dangerous thing.”

Sabrina said, “You don’t need to do this.”

“I’d hoped not. But you proved me wrong. I’m afraid you’ll have to watch the effects of your choices, Sabrina.”

He walked backward down the hill and toward the humming fence, spreading more feed. The birds scurried after him, using their wings for balance in their awkward runs. They swarmed over his boots and against his legs, and when he reached down and stroked one large hen, she showed no fear. Only trust. Sabrina tasted bile in the back of her throat and turned away.

“Sabrina? I’ll need your attention. If you turn away, I’ll have to find new methods of teaching. And I assure you that I will.”

Reluctantly, she looked back at him. Satisfied, he sidestepped and tossed a final handful of food at the base of the fence, near the lowest of the humming copper wires.

The first bird, a bantam rooster, made contact almost immediately, and there was a blink-fast bang and a small cloud of feathers blew into the air and the smell of charred flesh followed behind it. The rooster, blown five feet back, lay motionless and steaming.

The remaining hens, spooked by the bang, made frantic attempts to flee. Eli kicked the first one, catching her sideways and driving her into the fence, where a squawk of fear died abruptly in a shower of sparks. The final bird, the large hen who had let Eli stroke her just seconds earlier, was faster. She escaped the kick, ducking her tail as she scurried off, peeling her head back and uttering a high, warbling sound of terror. She sensed Eli’s pursuit and angled away with uncanny instincts and surprising speed, eluding him in a wobbling run up the hill and toward Sabrina. She was only a few feet from her when Pate finally caught her. He grabbed the hen by the neck and lifted it as she squawked and flapped, twisting in midair. One of her claws caught his forearm and opened a bright red gash, but he didn’t react, just marched down the hill, turned, and slung the hen at the fence. She had time to flap her wings twice in a desperate attempt to regain control before she made contact.

It wasn’t enough.

The once-fastest of the birds slid down the fence, sparking and smoking, to join her dead companions. He kicked the dead bird away from the fence, one blackened wing flapping against the white body, and then turned back.

“Violet, take Sabrina inside and secure her, please. Leave her enough mobility to pluck feathers, though. Sometimes sensory cues are necessary for a lesson to take hold.”

Violet hurried down to collect the birds. She shoved the fastest hen, the last one to die, into Sabrina’s hands. The body was still warm, and Sabrina could see that one eye had ruptured. Blood ran from the eye and over the beak. The smell of burned flesh and feathers was heavy.

Eli watched with a smile.

“Good news,” he said. “You’ll have a break from the oatmeal now.”

17

Jeff dropped Mark off at his car, which was still in the park, unbothered.

“You should be driving west with me,” Jeff said. “Go home, get some sleep, and we’ll talk through this.”

Mark nodded, but they both knew he had no intention of doing anything close to that. Jeff sighed and said, “You want help finding the kid?”

“No. I don’t want you any more involved than you already are. I’m sorry.”

“Just be careful. You’ll make the right decisions at the right times. I still believe that, like I said. But on your way there…watch your ass, Markus.”

“I will.”

Jeff drove away and then Mark was alone in the park. Everything about the place felt right except for the smell. The flower-and-orange-tinged air had an undertone of smoke this morning.

He didn’t know the boy’s name or where he lived. It was just past dawn and if he began knocking on doors he was sure to cause a stir and have his friends from the DeLand police called back out. It seemed like a problem, and yet somehow he wasn’t troubled by the task of finding the boy. He thought the boy would find him.

He was right.

It was no more than twenty minutes after Jeff left, and Mark had spent the time walking the streets of the camp, passing twice by the burned-out remains of 49B, glancing at it only briefly before moving on but feeling a bone-deep chill each time, remembering the blond woman’s smile and the glitter of the knives in the flashlight glow. He was on his third pass when a voice came from behind him.

“They put you in handcuffs. Why was that?”

When he turned, the boy was standing beside the hedge Mark had just passed, looking as if he’d been there all the while.

Mark said, “They were afraid I was one of the bad people. Then they figured out I wasn’t.”

The boy nodded.

“Did you sleep at all?” Mark said.

“No. I was waiting. Did you sleep?”

“No.” Mark looked from him to the houses nearby and said, “Son, who are your parents?”

The boy didn’t answer. Instead, he reached in his pocket and withdrew Mark’s cell phone. There was a bloodstain on the case.

“I kept it. Didn’t tell anybody either.”

“Thank you. That was brave, but it was the right thing.”

The boy regarded him with flat eyes. “You fit in here. Not in the house where you went last night, but here. In the camp.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

The boy looked disappointed in Mark. He handed the phone over, though, and then stepped back.

“You think I’ll see Dixie again?” he asked.

“No,” Mark said. “I’m very sorry. She was-”

“I know what happened. I watched them take her body away. But sometimes I see them again. Like with Walter. I wonder if she’ll be like that.”

“I hope not,” Mark said.

“Then you don’t understand what it’s like. That’s okay. Dixie always told me everyone had different learning speeds. You know what that means? We all figure it out, just at different times. I’m early, she said.”

Mark pocketed the cell phone and took a step back, as if the child posed a threat.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “All I can say is thank you. You helped me last night. Saved me.”

“Not yet. You might still die. Maybe soon.” He said it calmly and thoughtfully.

“I hope not.”

“Me too. But it will be close, I think. If you go to the mountains, it will be close.”

“Who said anything about mountains?” Mark asked. “Son, which one of them said anything about mountains?”

But the boy didn’t answer. He just lifted his hand in a wave and ducked back through the hedge in a soft rustle of leaves, and then Mark was alone again on the strange street with the smell of smoke in the air.

18

Mark used Jeff London’s username and password to run a reverse match of the license-plate number from the red truck with the registration through the BMV.

He knew by now that it wasn’t going to produce anyone named Myron Pate, but he was still expecting to find a male name. Instead, the BMV records returned a corporation: Wardenclyffe Ventures, LLC.

It was a smart choice. Registering the car under a corporation prevented the immediate attachment of a human, and unless pains had been taken to associate the license plate with an arrest warrant, it would keep any officer who ran the plate from seeing a driver’s record or conviction history. There was an address for the LLC, though, in Daytona, Florida, not far away, and every LLC needed a registered agent. The smoke screen was effective enough to deter cursory police attention but not much more. Mark went to the Florida secretary of state’s page and found the registered agent of Wardenclyffe Ventures: a Janell Cole.

Armed with this, he returned to the BMV and found her driver’s license. The image of her face was small on the phone’s screen, but Mark didn’t need a larger shot to recognize her: he’d seen her just hours before, smiling as she told him that his wife was inconsequential.

“Janell.” He said the name aloud, thinking that it didn’t match the person. He ran a few preliminary criminal-records searches but found nothing. Under the identity of Janell Cole, she was a model citizen. The only place he had to start was the address from the truck registration, and he didn’t think it would take long for the police to get there through their own means.

He drove fast on his way to Daytona Beach.

Janell Cole had lived above a garage in the sort of place people referred to as an in-law apartment. Between the garage and the main house was a courtyard with a bubbling fountain, a koi pond, and a brightly colored flower garden shaded by tall palms. The garage and apartment were painted in vivid colors and had flower planters under the windows, and the place didn’t fit with anything he understood about her. The polar opposite of the house in Cassadaga.

He climbed up the stairs and knocked. Nobody answered, but the blinds were angled to let some sunlight in. When he shaded his eyes and put his face to the glass, he could see that the place was empty, the carpets freshly cleaned and the walls gleaming with white paint, waiting on a new tenant.

“She moved.”

Mark stepped back from the window and looked down into the courtyard. A too-tan woman in shorts and a sports bra stood below him, dripping sweat and breathing hard, fresh off a run.

“Janell moved?” he asked, to test which name his girl had been using during her stay here.

“Yes. What kind of detective are you?”

Mark didn’t think he wore his profession like a fragrance, so either this woman belonged in Cassadaga herself, giving readings, or there had been other detectives looking for Janell Cole.

“The best kind,” he said, walking down the steps. She smiled at that, which was good, suggesting she wanted to cooperate rather than protect her former tenant. “You don’t seem surprised that a detective would be looking through the window of that apartment. Mind telling me why?”

“Because they’ve been here before.” She took a deep breath, her torso filling with air, then released it in a long, slow hiss like a leaking balloon, bent at the waist, and began to stretch her hamstrings.

“Which ones have you spoken with?” he said.

“The woman, mostly.” She straightened. “You don’t work with her?”

“No. But I’m sure as hell interested in talking to her. Do you know her name?”

“I don’t remember it, but I still have her card. Would you like that?”

He told her that he’d like that very much, then waited in the garden while the woman jogged around to the front of the main house and disappeared. When she returned she had a business card, and Mark took it and almost laughed.

“No shit,” he said. “The Pinkertons?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “You know them?”

“They never sleep.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” It was sad that she had no knowledge of the most famous private detective agency in history. Mark had grown up on stories of the Pinkertons. His uncle Ronny had traveled with a stack of paperback novels, romanticized old pulp stories, mostly Westerns by George Ranger Johnson but also many featuring the daring Pinkerton detectives. Mark had read them countless times, although as a PI, he’d never encountered anyone who actually worked with them. He knew that the company had been bought out long ago by a security conglomerate, but it still retained the brand and, according to the business card, that distinctive watching-eye logo. The investigator was named Lynn Deschaine, and she was based out of Boca Raton, just north of Miami. He snapped a photo of the card and handed it back to his new acquaintance, who was now standing in a midair stretch as if she were about to take flight. She accepted the card and tucked it in her sports bra, resumed her pose, and inhaled so deeply Mark thought she was going to uproot the palm tree. Then she closed her eyes.

“So,” he said, “what can you tell me about Janell?”

For a few seconds it seemed like she wasn’t going to respond, but finally, eyes still shut, she said, “I didn’t know her well. I will say I found her unusual. She didn’t like the sun. Her skin was so pale you could see the veins. That’s not healthy, you know.”

Her own skin was cured enough to be ready for belts and boots.

“You talk to her much?” Mark asked.

She shook her head without affecting her balance. “No. I really can’t say much else about her. Just like I told your partner. Or your predecessor. Whoever. She paid rent on time, she was quiet, and she left. When she left, she broke the lease, and I told her she couldn’t have the deposit back. She was fine with that. I had the impression that her new job was rather urgent.”

“What kind of job?”

“She’s an engineer.”

“An engineer?”

His shock was enough to finally disrupt her stretching routine. She blinked and looked at him. “Yes. That’s what she told me, at least. What do you think she is?”

A murderer, Mark thought, but he said, “That’s what I need to figure out.”

“Oh. Well, I can’t help beyond telling you that she paid rent in cash, which was her preference, not mine, that she paid promptly, and that she needed to spend some more time in the sun. That’s really all I know, Mr. Pinkerton.”

He liked that mistake so much he didn’t correct it.

Lynn Deschaine didn’t answer her office line, but he caught her on the cell. He identified himself as a fellow PI and told her he was working a case that had taken him to Daytona Beach and seemed to overlap with her work.

“Really sorry, Mr. Novak, but we don’t share information on our cases. It’s a confidential business. Good luck.”

“Hang on,” Mark said. “I’m not asking for you to fax over a dossier with Social Security numbers, Ms. Deschaine. If anything, I thought I could help you. I was told that you were-”

“I’m quite certain I don’t need outside assistance on my cases.”

These modern-day Pinkertons were real charmers.

“I’m sure you don’t,” Mark said. “So I won’t bother to tip you off about some problems with President Lincoln’s planned trip to the theater tonight.”

There was a slight pause, and then she said, “That’s both a silly remark and a historically inaccurate one. The Pinkertons were not providing security to President Lincoln on the night of his assassination.”

Her curt tone hadn’t changed, but Mark had the feeling that Lynn Deschaine, wherever she was, had smiled. He was almost certain.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you. Really just meant to offer some information in case you still had any interest in locating Janell Cole, but it sounds like you’ve got everything in hand, so I apologize for interrupting your day.”

He hung up on her. It wasn’t something he would have done in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, but Lynn Deschaine felt like number one hundred. If she was half the PI that her bravado suggested, she’d be too curious not to call back. If she was even a fraction as combative as she seemed, she’d be too pissed off not to.

The phone rang in about thirty seconds. He answered.

“Markus Novak. I never sleep.”

“Hilarious,” she said, but there was neither humor nor anger in her voice. Just interest. “Tell me about Janell Cole.”

“I thought you didn’t need the-”

“I know what I said and I apologize. What do you know about Janell Cole?”

“I know where she’s been staying for the past few months, I know some people she’s associated with, including a man who just walked out of prison, and I know that the police aren’t going to be far behind me, as she recently cut someone’s throat and set a house on fire. Is that enough to interest you?”

He listened to her breathing. It took several seconds before she spoke.

“Where did this happen? And who did she kill?”

“No, no,” Mark said. “It’s going to be an exchange of information, Ms. Deschaine. Not a gift.”

He expected her to balk. Instead, she said, “Are you in Daytona now?”

“Yes.”

“I can make it in four hours. Maybe less, depending on traffic.”

It was a long haul from Boca Raton to Daytona Beach, and her willingness to make the drive rather than continue to haggle with him on the phone told him just how intense her interest in Janell Cole was.

“I’ll be here,” Mark said. “But be prepared to trade intel, Ms. Deschaine. I’m not giving any away.”

19

Jay and Sabrina had talked about having a baby. In the months just before Tim’s death, they’d spoken of it often. Jay was perhaps more enthusiastic about the prospect than Sabrina had been. She saw the reality of it in a different way than he did. Time she needed to devote to her business would vanish with the ring of the phone and the report of an outage, Jay heading out the door and leaving her a single parent. Why rush into that? They had time. She’d said that over and over again, reminding him of their youth, of the expansive horizon ahead. Plenty of time.

That was before they went to the closed-casket funeral for her brother.

Time changed that day. Time changed in a hurry as she stood in the receiving line that was not so far removed from the receiving line of her wedding and accepted condolences instead of congratulations, a large photo of her grinning, adolescent-humored brother at her side. His remains just below.

She’d never seen the way he’d looked at the end. She’d asked, but Jay refused to speak of it. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing you pushed. Not with someone who did the same work, certainly. However he had looked-and it had to be terrible, she knew that-it would have been more than a horror for Jay. It would have been a possible future.

They had stopped speaking of the baby then. A topic once omnipresent in their lives gone in a flash, just like the uncle the child would never know. There was the unspoken but absolutely shared knowledge of how easily it could have been Jay, Sabrina left a young widow and, if they’d had a baby, a single mother.

She wondered, in private moments, if that was the reality she’d considered the whole time, if the funeral she hadn’t allowed herself to envision for fear of making it real was not her brother’s but her husband’s. And so her business and their youth became the most convenient reason, but not the real one. Single-parent nights were one thing, and she’d had no trouble voicing that concern. Single-parent life, though? To tell him of that would have been so much harder. You’ll make a mistake someday. Just like Tim. It will happen, and to pretend otherwise is selfish, Jay.

But he’d come down from the lines, had taken that foreman’s job in Red Lodge. Why hadn’t they spoken of the child again then?

Time again, that was why. The endless supply of time. They had time to get settled in Red Lodge, they had time to put distance between themselves and the tragedy, time for everything.

Then a man with a pistol entered their home.

Time changed again.

She wondered, if she ever saw Jay again, what would be said about bringing a child into this world. A world that had sent her brother to an early grave and brought Garland Webb into their new home.

You’re imagining he’s still alive. What if you’re all that’s left? What if this is the end?

Her brother had been unmarried and childless. Plenty of time for him too. He’d been dead for six months. If Sabrina never left here, that was the end of it. Their parents had been only children, and they’d been dead before they reached forty. Their son had already joined them. Their daughter sat in shackles in the mountains.

She pulled feathers from the dead chickens and piled them beside her, not looking at the birds as she worked. Her fingertips were sore and raw. She suspected Eli hoped for more disgust from her, hoped to find her cowering in revulsion, maybe even vomiting from the smell of the charred flesh, from the fading warmth of the bodies.

Should have picked a dog, asshole, she thought as she jerked another feather free. If you knew me even a little bit, you’d have done that to a dog. Then you might have gotten the reaction you wanted. But a chicken? Please.

Eli wouldn’t have a dog, though. Not up here where his particular brand of obedience was required. You had to earn obedience from a dog. From the chickens and Garland Webb and apparently from Violet, it came easier.

But there was more to Violet than he knew. Sabrina was sure of that. Violet’s obedience with him, which was more disgusting to Sabrina than anything else she’d seen in this place, also seemed questionable. Ironically, this revelation had come in the moment she hit Sabrina in the face with the flashlight. In that instant, she’d been nothing like the demurring follower she appeared to be in Eli’s presence, and she was not to be taken lightly. He took her lightly-dismissed her entirely, even-and Sabrina wondered about that. What was the great hold he had on her? How had it been achieved?

Violet was older than he was by a decade at least, maybe much more. She had a past without him, and Sabrina wondered what was in it. Who was in it. There were some things about the situation that made a perverse level of sense. Garland Webb and Eli, for example, were clearly predators, the type of people you knew were out there in the world but just never expected to cross paths with.

Violet was a different matter entirely.

There was a metallic clink as a key found the lock on the front door and then it opened and filled the room with daylight and Violet stood there with her strange smile, cheerful as a New England B and B hostess.

“I’ve got something to make you more comfortable,” she said.

It was a sleeping pad, a Therm-a-Rest like people took on backpacking trips. It was surprisingly comfortable, and Sabrina adjusted herself onto it without breaking her pace on plucking duty, watching Violet instead of the birds.

“Why don’t you see the truth of this?” Sabrina said.

The older woman blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“I’ve been kidnapped. I am chained to a wall. You know this is evil. I can tell that. I can tell it because you are not evil.”

“Please, dear. Just be patient. If you’ll just listen to Eli, you’ll learn that-”

“Eli is insane,” Sabrina said. “I already know it. Why don’t you?”

“Dear…” Violet sighed and shook her head in the manner of someone dealing with an impossible rube. “It’s so much larger than what you understand.”

“It’s evil,” Sabrina repeated. “And you’re not.”

Violet dismissed her with a wave of her hand and turned to go. Sabrina didn’t want that; she wanted to engage her, and so she asked a bizarre question, born of her own muddled thoughts.

“Do you have children?”

Violet stopped short. She didn’t turn. “Why do you ask that?”

“I don’t have any,” Sabrina said, plucking another feather. Her right index finger was bleeding now. “I was never sure I wanted any. Some days, yes. Others…my God, things can go badly for children in this world. I was an orphan. Did you know that?”

“I did not.” She still had not turned. But she hadn’t left either.

“Sure was. So I know exactly how bad it can go. But my husband and I talked about it. If things had gone differently, I might have had a baby by now. Would you still be so comfortable with all this if that were true? If you knew a child had been left behind? Is there a point where you’d look at this and admit that it was evil? What if the chicken had been a child, Violet? What if that had been a baby reaching for that fence? Would you still admire Eli?”

“It wasn’t a child.”

“If it had been?”

“It wouldn’t be. He’s not what you think, dear. He’s a pacifist to his core. We all are. No harm will come to you here unless you demand it.”

“And what good will come of this?”

“So much more than you know.” Violet turned, finally, and faced her. “The world will thank us when this is done. It’s an awakening. A desperately needed awakening.”

Sabrina stopped pulling feathers. She held one of the electrocuted birds in her hands and stared at the older woman and thought, This is the difference. This is what makes her special.

Violet believed. She and Eli said the same things, and in fact he said more of them, but Sabrina felt it was an act with him, a grandiose stage play. When Violet spoke, she believed, and the difference was palpable.

“What if he’s lying?” Sabrina said.

“He isn’t lying, dear. He isn’t even speaking. He just listens. The earth speaks, and he listens.”

“Indulge me,” Sabrina said. “Imagine, for one moment, that he is actually a brutal man. Nothing like the pacifist you believe in. What then?”

Violet left the cabin and closed the door behind her. Sabrina stared after her for a few seconds and then resumed plucking feathers. It occurred to her that Violet had never answered the question about children.

20

Jay’s goal for the day-the most immediate goal, at least-was simply to get through it without attracting attention or questions. He thought the truth was as visible on his face as a sunburn, but he survived the morning without drawing so much as a raised eyebrow.

Then came lunch.

They were running switchgear tests at a substation for one of the company’s electrical engineers, a good guy from Ohio who seemed to know the system better than most men knew their own families, and Jay had always liked him, or at least liked him as much as a lineman could like an engineer. That changed at the deli, when the engineer said, “Something wrong with your food, Jay?”

Everyone looked at him. They were all nearly done with their sandwiches, and Jay’s was untouched. He’d tried one of the potato chips and barely got it down. When their eyes went to him, all of them scrutinizing his face, he felt a flush of panic.

“You just gotta observe everything, don’t you, Pete?” he said. “I’ve had the shits, that’s all. I was hoping not to have to announce it, but I guess you’ve got to run diagnostics even during the lunch hour. Frigging engineers.”

That got a small laugh and they turned away again, probably more worried about whether he was contagious than whether he was hiding a secret, but still he felt like he’d made a fatal mistake.

He tried to follow the conversation, people arguing about football now, most of the group Broncos fans, Pete a Cleveland Browns fan, which required heckling, and Jay did his best to grin and chuckle in the appropriate places. His mind was far from the restaurant, though. It was back in Billings, in a darkened bedroom with Sabrina.

They’d been married three months when the power went out in their apartment, and he’d started for the phone automatically, intending to call the control center to see if he was needed. She’d pulled him back to bed, her lips against his ear as she reminded him that he was off that day, and someone else could fix this one.

They’d made love in the darkness with a warm summer breeze blowing through the cracked window, and afterward, spent and breathless, he’d been close to sleep when she spoke.

“So what happens to make it do that?”

“It seems like you understand exactly what happens to make it-”

She’d laughed and smacked his chest. “The outage, smart-ass. There’s no storm tonight. Why’d the lights go out?”

“Could be a lot of things.” He was groggy, drifting blissfully toward sleep, but she was awake and alert.

“Like what? The storms I get. Or equipment failure. But sometimes it’s neither. What triggers those?”

He’d propped himself up on one elbow and searched for her face in the black room.

“Squirrel suicide bombers.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I. Now, it may be a tree limb blowing into the lines, but limbs are easy to find. A dead squirrel is tougher. They’ll get down into the switchgear and chew.” He reached out and pinched the base of her throat lightly, tickled up her neck, giving a ridiculous impression of a rodent’s biting sound. Her skin was warm and damp with sweat.

“If that’s all it takes, I’m amazed the lights don’t go out daily. One squirrel in the wrong place can shut off the lights? One tree limb?”

“Well, it depends on the circumstances. The system tries to heal itself.” He put his index finger on her shoulder. “If your limb falls into the lines here, and it gets blown over to here…” He traced the finger to her other shoulder, beading her sweat on his fingertip. “Then the lights might take one hard blink. That’s a transient fault. Brief contact, brief disruption. The system senses that there’s voltage leaving the lines and going to ground somehow, and the system is scared of voltage going to ground. It has an automatic recloser that will test this, open that circuit up and see if there’s still a ground path for the voltage. If it’s a limb that fell and made brief contact, the ground path will be gone, and the lights will stay on. But…” He traced his finger back to her left shoulder. “Let’s say the limb stays tangled in the lines. Or the squirrel suicide bomber gets into some switchgear.” He tickled her left shoulder again, and she laughed. “Then the fault is still there, and the recloser will cycle just once more. You’ll get two hard blinks, and the next time it’s going dark for good. Three strikes and it’s out. Because by then, the system will have decided that the problem is dangerous. It kills the current to prevent larger problems. That’s when yours truly gets sent into the mix.”

“You really think it’s a squirrel that did this?”

He shrugged. “No idea. Clear day like this, equipment failure is possible. Suppose an insulator breaks and two lines touch. If two energized lines touch, say good night for a while. The system does not like that.”

He traced his finger lower, down her shoulder, between her breasts, down. He could barely make out her face in the dim room, but the outage had brought a special silence with it, like a snowfall, and their home felt safe and sacred.

“Not all bad,” he said. “People find ways to pass the time without electricity.”

“Sometimes,” she agreed, guiding his hand, “a little darkness is not a bad thing.”

“Jay? Jay?”

The voice shook him back into the present, and he looked up and saw that he was the focus of the table’s attention again. It wasn’t Pete calling to him now but Brett, one of his own crew, who was looking at him with concern.

“You okay, boss? You’re kind of pale.”

“Yeah,” Jay said, “I’m okay. Just…just fighting through this. I hope it’s not catching.”

He got unsteadily to his feet, picked up his untouched sandwich, crossed the room, and threw it into the trash.

21

Eli heard the growl of the ATV’s engine before it came into view, and he moved quickly to a high vantage point and turned his binoculars on the steep, rock-strewn, and forested slopes that led to the cabin. The path to the cabin was difficult to traverse, by design; only a skilled ATV rider would even attempt the final pitch. When he saw the driver of the Polaris begin to make the ascent without hesitation, he knew his visitor.

“Who is it?” Violet said nervously, extending a hand for the binoculars, but he stepped aside.

“I’ll deal with it. Stay here. Tend to our guests. No disturbances.”

“But who is-”

“Violet. Do you think I haven’t anticipated this? Do you think the spirits haven’t already informed me of this? Do you actually believe in your heart that the mountains have allowed me to be surprised by this?”

“Of course not,” she murmured.

“Then please do as I say.”

He left her and went out the door and down the exterior stairs, moving with long strides, knowing that he had to cover the ground to meet Shields before he became visible. As much control as Eli had over Violet, he knew that she still had a weakness for Scott Shields. Perhaps something more than a weakness.

He punched a code into the keypad that worked the electrified fence, shoved through the gate, and clamped it shut behind him. He was standing in the middle of the trail when Shields arrived, standing in such a position that Shields had to cut the wheel abruptly to avoid running Eli down. On the precarious slope it was a dangerous maneuver, and for a blissful moment Eli thought he might roll the thing down the mountain. Shields was too experienced, though, and he cut the wheels back and hit the throttle when most men would have let off it, allowing him to spin up and over one of the high boulders and find flat ground above.

“What in the hell are you doing!” he shouted as he cut the engine.

“You’re capable enough with the machine,” Eli said. “And I’m anxious to speak with you. There’s much to discuss.”

“I should damn well say there’s much to discuss,” Shields snapped. “I haven’t heard from you in weeks. I’d like to know what you’re accomplishing on my land.”

Eli nodded. “Let’s speak, but not here. I need to return to town anyhow. We’ll have a beer together, like the old days.”

Scott’s eyes had drifted from Eli up to the fence. From this angle, the tops of the utility poles were just visible.

“What in the hell are those?”

“They’ll provide backup power as needed.”

Scott gaped. “You’re using power lines to run generators into the lodge? That’s the craziest thing I’ve-”

Eli said, “I’m not flush for time. I’m headed to town, and you can accompany me or you can stay here.”

For a terrible moment, Eli thought he would demand to stay, and then things would become messy in a hurry. Instead, though, he jerked his head at his ATV and said, “Get on. I got plenty of questions. And when we come back, I want a look around this place.”

They bounced down the trail, the creek glittering beneath them and the Bighorn Mountains that abutted the property clear and beautiful in the morning sun. They rode on twelve hundred remote and rugged acres that were protected by miles of national forest; there was no access road, and the site was deeply concealed in the difficult terrain, as perfect a spot as Eli could possibly have hoped for but one that he would never have been able to afford. Enter Scott Shields. The land was his, purchased with settlement money from a lawsuit that had occurred three years earlier, when Shields had crashed a plane in the Alaska bush and his wife had been killed. Shields had sued the manufacturer, who had just “rehabilitated” the aircraft prior to the engine stall, and they settled for what was no doubt peanuts on the company’s books but a windfall in rural Wyoming. Shields had purchased a property described as a ranch in the listing, though the land was worthless for cattle-steep, wooded, and rugged. His vision, though, was a hunting lodge with private guiding. Elk were plentiful, some moose as well, and the stream was filled with trout. The challenge was in access, but Shields had visions of using that to his advantage by bringing his clients in on horseback, enhancing the wilderness experience. It was a ridiculous use of a spectacular property. For Eli, however, the site was ideal. And so Eli had begun to work with Shields, which required working through Violet, the only woman Shields trusted. He believed she could bring him messages from his dead wife. These were the things Eli had to indulge in order to fulfill his own mission.

Violet had provided unexpected gifts. While he personally regarded her as a foolish woman who would believe a lie with eagerness and regard the truth with sorrow if not outright denial, others found her an expert navigator of the human spirit. As such, she was an ideal recruiter for Eli. The things that mattered to her-connections between earth and people, bridges between cultures, experiences of psychic phenomena-were all perfect for the candidates Eli sought. In many instances, they trusted Violet before they trusted Eli.

Shields had left his truck, a white Silverado splashed with mud, parked on the forest road, but rather than hike the two miles up, he’d used the ATV. Eli climbed off and watched as Shields got a pair of folding ramps out of the bed and used them to drive the ATV up into the truck. Eli had to turn away so his contempt wasn’t evident. Here was a man so dependent on technology that he was literally driving one vehicle into another.

While Shields worked with his ramps, Eli squinted at the high slopes. Nothing of his camp was visible to the naked eye. The tops of the utility poles blended with the dead lodgepole pines. Without a helicopter, one was unlikely to stumble across the site.

“We’ll go to my place first,” Shields announced when he had the ATV secured. “I’m not interested in running you into town until I’ve gotten my answers, Eli. The work I hired you to do up there doesn’t seem to be getting done.”

Eli didn’t realize he was smiling until Scott Shields said, “Something funny about this to you?”

“No,” Eli said. “Not at all. I was just remembering something.”

He was remembering that Shields currently lived in a massive Winnebago and considering that the man had loaded one vehicle onto another to drive to another still. What was next for him? A tractor-trailer for the Winnebago? A ship for the tractor-trailer?

At what point will you have enough large machines to feel confident about the size of your pecker, Scotty?

They drove down the forest road to the paved county road and then went west toward Lovell and continued west, toward Byron. The drive was excruciating, pulling Eli farther and farther away from the work he could not afford to delay.

They headed into a blighted countryside along another forest road, this one leading to the Shoshone River, where Shields paid for the privilege of parking his motor home. He claimed it was for the fishing, but Eli knew it was because the location was remote but still easy enough for the bikers to reach. Shields had a drug habit that had started with painkillers after his plane crash and progressed from there, and he was on a regular route for the dealers that growled through northern Wyoming, working the oil fields.

As if finally comfortable now that they’d arrived, Shields began talking even before he opened the driver’s door.

“That property is a hunting camp. You said you’d get it powered for me cheap, using your windmills and whatever the hell, but we’ve missed every hunting season this year and now I’m not even hearing from you.”

Eli took a deep breath and turned away briefly, reminding himself of why this had to be tolerated, why the burden had to be borne. Then, just as Eli turned back to Scott Shields with a calm face and a ready explanation, he paused.

Things were different now. Markus Novak, down in Cassadaga like a thorn in a wolf’s paw, required acceleration. But…if the timetable was sped up, why did he need Scott?

Scott said, “I asked you a question, Pate. Give me an answer.”

Eli turned from him again and gazed down the lonely road to Byron. At some point, someone would come looking for Scott Shields. But how soon? Scott, paranoid sort that he was, did not maintain much contact with the outside world.

It will take some time. A few days, at least. What is the bigger problem for you, a walking and talking Scott Shields or a corpse?

“Scott,” Eli said, “I’m on the brink of a crisis decision. Please understand that.”

“You’re on the brink? Son of a bitch, you’re bringing these packs of idiots onto my property without giving me so much as a word of notice? I don’t give a damn about your troubles, I’m concerned with preventing my own.”

“You don’t give a damn about my troubles. Is that so?”

“Better believe it. We had an arrangement.”

“I remember. One stipulation was privacy. Have you told anyone else where I am?”

“Of course not. I know you’re lying low.”

“I’m just curious what my exposure here is.”

Scott’s eyes widened. His big chest filled. “Curious about your exposure? It’s my property! I’ve got the risk!”

“And I intend to eliminate that for you.”

That mollified him just slightly. “How are you going to do that?”

“Before coming to see me, who did you speak to? Maybe have a beer with, do some bitching about the problems I’m creating for you up there, running behind schedule?”

“Not a soul. I came up to see you and find out what the hell was going on.”

“No other contact, then. You haven’t spoken to, say, Lawrence Novak?”

“Larry? Hell, no. I told you, he thinks I’m back in Alaska. What does he have to do with it?”

“Not a thing, evidently, which is excellent to hear. Now, Scott. About your risks…the way I understand it is that, so long as the property remains in your ownership, you’re worried about every activity that occurs there.”

“Damn right I am! You already knew this. That was the-”

“You don’t own the land,” Eli said. “You only rent it.”

Scott pulled back as if Eli had slapped him. “What kind of drugs are you on? I own that land. Go down to the damn courthouse and look at the deed.”

“The deed is not the point. We’re all renters here. Of earth, of our time. We don’t own either of those things. Understand?”

“You’re a lunatic. My only concern is-”

Eli lifted a soothing hand. “I can assure you-absolutely assure you-that all of your worldly concerns have reached their terminus.”

Scott Shields cocked his head and gave Eli a confused stare with the barest glimmer of suspicion. Then he spoke again and got as far as “You mind putting that in English, you crazy son of a-” before Eli drew a tiny.22-caliber Ruger from his jacket pocket and shot him directly in his right eye.

Scott reeled back; his feet tangled, and he fell. Eli closed on him without hesitation, a pouncing cat, pressed the pistol directly to Scott’s left eye, and fired again. The little gun barely kicked, but Scott’s face spit blood back at Eli. He wiped it away and remained there, kneeling over the man, until he was sure that he was dead.

“Well,” Eli said, “we approach warp speed, it seems.”

Passersby here would be rare, and the RV was unlikely to give them pause, but a body lying in front of it would. Eli fished through Scott’s pockets until he found his keys, and then he unlocked the oversize motor home and stepped inside. There was a back bedroom with closed window blinds and a door that screened the room from every other window. It would do. There were far better hiding places in any direction in this rugged land, but Eli was short on time, and Shields was a large man, certain to be difficult to maneuver.

He left the motor home, returned to Shields, and grasped the collar of the dead man’s jacket. He dragged Shields inside and all the way to the bedroom, and then he heaved him up onto the bed. Shields’s head flopped onto the pillow and his body fell naturally into a sleeping posture. The peacefulness of it bothered Eli. He took the gun out and fired two more bullets, one into each eye again. With the existing wounds, the small.22 shells worked like drill bits, boring cleaner tunnels.

Better. Those who found him should be able to grasp the problem that had led to Scott Shields shuffling off this mortal coil: his eyes were useless, for he had no capacity to understand what they offered him. By any definition that truly mattered, Scott had never been able to see things for what they were.

“Thanks for the land,” Eli told the corpse, and then he left the bedroom, checked himself in the bathroom mirror, washed the blood speckles off his skin and clothing, and returned to Scott’s truck. The pickup would be valuable; the ATV even more so. Eli hated the ghastly clatter of the vehicles and the smell of the exhaust, but sometimes, you had to make your deals with the devil.

22

Mark met Lynn Deschaine at a bar overlooking the Halifax River, a stretch of Intracoastal Waterway that was more like a lagoon than a river, separating the mainland from the barrier islands.

He sipped a beer, the cold bottle numbing the bandaged cut on his thumb, and watched a wood stork shift from one dock pylon to another, studying the water, and he waited on the Pinkerton to arrive. He thought of his uncle, wished he had a number for him, just so he could call and tell him that, because Larry would have loved it. Ronny would have loved it even more, but he’d been dead for years. Now it was just Larry, if he was even alive. That thought made him deeply sad. He’d walked away from his past for smart reasons, but he missed them all the same. His uncles, in particular, had been good men to him, if not to the rest of the world. And they’d cared for his mother.

Lynn Deschaine called from her cell phone while she stood in the shadowed interior of the bar, and Mark raised a hand to indicate where he was sitting. She was tall, only a few inches shorter than Mark, with hair so dark it shimmered in the light like oil. Her features betrayed some of the French look of her name, with high cheekbones, a delicate jaw, and eyes that seemed to be in on a joke that the rest of the world hadn’t gotten yet. They weren’t eyes that matched her phone style. Except for that one time he’d felt certain that she had smiled.

After she shook his hand, she said, “If you don’t mind my asking…what happened to you, Mr. Novak? You look a little worse for the wear.”

His face, neck, and arms were lined with scratches, and his hand was wrapped in gauze.

“Had a little trouble getting out of a house last night.”

“Why was that?”

“Your friend Janell had set it on fire.”

She stared at him.

Mark passed her a cocktail napkin that he’d been writing on while he waited.

“Refresh yourself,” he said.

She looked at the napkin and what he’d printed on it. Pinkerton Agency Code of Ethics, 1850

1. Accept no bribes

2. Never compromise with criminals

3. Partner with local law enforcement agencies

4. Refuse divorce cases or cases that initiate scandals

5. Turn down reward money

6. Never raise fees without the client’s pre-knowledge

7. Keep clients apprised on an ongoing basis

“That came from Allan himself,” Mark said. “The big boss.”

She lifted the napkin and held it up with two fingers of her left hand. He noted there was no wedding band. It had been a long time since Mark had noted that about anyone. He felt strangely ashamed by it.

“I truly don’t understand this,” Lynn said.

“Ethics?”

“No. Your amusement with my agency.”

Mark shrugged. “As a student of the profession, I feel like this is a really special opportunity for me.”

“I’m sure that it is.”

He leaned forward and took the napkin, set it down in front of her, and tapped it with his index finger. “These still hold true, right? The company never disavowed them?”

“Mr. Novak, if we could communicate like adults for just a minute here, I’d like to know what-”

“I think they’re still governing rules,” he continued. “In which case, I’m in luck. While I’m not local law enforcement exactly, I am working on a case with them. I can provide you with the name of a police officer in DeLand who will confirm that, but it will mean I’ll tell him about Janell before I tell you.”

“Let’s not rush,” she said.

Interesting.

They were silent for a moment, and then she broke it, saying, “You want an exchange of information. I can’t do that. Client confidentiality.”

“I don’t need to know who your client is. I just need to know who Janell is.”

She hesitated, trapping the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she took a deep breath. “A basic profile of what I know about her, that’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“And in exchange…”

“I’ll tell you where she has been staying for the past few months, what vehicle she’s traveling in, and the name of at least one associate. As for the house, well, as I said, it was burning the last time I saw it. And the owner was dead. I think your friend Janell cut her throat.”

“Let me call my client,” she said.

“That’s fine,” Mark said, though he was disappointed. You could only push so hard when you weren’t sure of your leverage. “I’ll go inside to the bar and leave you in private. You want a drink?”

“Vodka tonic,” she said, and she extended a credit card to him as she got her cell phone out. He waved it off but she reached out and caught his wrist.

“No, no. I’ll pay for my own drink, thank you. If I could refer you to rule number one, Mr. Novak?”

She had her index finger on the cocktail napkin: Accept no bribes.

That was the first time Lynn Deschaine smiled at Mark. First time she touched him too. Sometimes you don’t remember those things and later wish you did. Sometimes they stand out, almost as if you know from the start. Like someone whispers in your ear to take note. The last time Mark had experienced that feeling was on a dive boat on the Gulf of Mexico, and he’d been watching his future wife underwater, working her way slowly toward the surface.

Toward him.

Mark ordered another beer and Lynn’s vodka tonic and stood in the cool shadows of the bar and waited while she talked on her phone. It wasn’t a short conversation. He had time for another beer, and most of the ice had melted in her drink when she was finally done.

“Well?” he said, returning to the table and handing her the vodka tonic.

“I’m assuming you aren’t willing to lead off the conversation by telling me how you located Janell,” she said. “So you’ll want me to open the dialogue.”

“Correct. If I led, I’d have nothing left to bargain with. And you, Ms. Deschaine, strike me as a hard-bargain lady.”

“Your intuition exceeds your sense of humor. And please start calling me Lynn.”

“Lead the way then, Lynn.”

“Janell Cole is thirty-six years old, originally from Pennsylvania. She’s a graduate of Purdue University, where she earned a degree in electrical engineering.”

“She really is an engineer.”

“A very good one. She left her job fifteen months ago. She gave no indication as to why she was leaving.”

“Where did she work?”

“Atlanta.”

“I mean the company, not the location.”

She hesitated. It was brief, but it was there. Then she said, “I believe it was a utility company,” and took a long drink of her vodka.

Mark said, “That’s your client.”

She responded with total poise, unfazed. “I didn’t mean to imply that, sorry. But I also asked you to respect the confidentiality of-”

He held up a hand. “I don’t care about your client. But it might be easier on us both if you didn’t have to dance around it either. You’re too good not to know the name of her employer, Lynn. You won’t share it, though, and that means you’re trying to protect them, but I honestly don’t give a damn.”

She looked irritated, but he didn’t think it was with him. It was with herself for allowing him to make the determination so easily.

“Independent detective one, Pinkerton zero,” Mark said. “You hate that, don’t you?”

She didn’t bother to respond and chose to pick up where she’d left off. “After leaving her job, Janell moved from Atlanta to Daytona Beach. She had no known contacts or friends in the area. By the time I was asked to locate her, she’d left there too. I haven’t had any success finding her. As for the vehicle you mentioned, I’m assuming it’s a red Dodge truck? Purchased a year ago?”

“That’s the one.”

She nodded. “That’s how you got the Daytona address. BMV records.”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Do you know where she is now?”

Mark shook his head, and he could see the air go out of her.

“I know where she was last night. She just took off and left the house burning down behind her. That’s what led me to knock on her door out here.”

“So you’re looking for her? You’re not just interested in background. You’d also like to find her?”

“I’m doing more talking than you,” he said. “That wasn’t the deal. So tell me this: Do you know of any overlap between Janell and the criminal element? I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t have her pegged for an EE. I was going to guess any paperwork she’d left behind was in vice reports, not diplomas.”

“She has no criminal record. Not so much as a speeding ticket.”

“I asked about connections.”

She hesitated again. Mark sighed and set his beer down.

“Listen,” he said, “I get it-”

“My first responsibility is to-”

“Stop.” He leaned forward. “I’m going to go ahead and tell you what case I’m working. Why I want her. Then you can make a judgment call. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Here’s my case,” Mark said. “Lauren Novak. Homicide. Unsolved.”

She didn’t say anything. She’d gone very still.

He pushed back from the table. “Spend some time on your phone, Lynn. Do some searches for Lauren, and for me. Then call your client back. When you’ve decided what level of cooperation you’re willing to show, I’ll be ready.”

Mark left the deck and returned to the bar.

23

Lynn left Mark in the bar for maybe ten minutes, then she slipped in and took the stool beside him and said, “I’m sorry.”

He nodded.

“That’s an awful thing.”

He nodded again. What the hell did you say? Yes, they shot her in the head, it’s an awful thing.

“So your case is really-”

“Of personal interest,” he finished for her. “Yeah. I don’t have a client, Lynn. I’ve got nobody to protect. I just want to find the woman.”

“You think she had something to do with your wife’s murder.”

“I think she knows the man who killed her. His name is Garland Webb. He walked out of prison and vanished. No contact with the parole office. I’ve got a witness to the, um, events of last night who says that Janell and the man she was with are on their way to meet Garland Webb. ”

He didn’t mention that the witness was a child who also believed Mark was attended by the ghost of a murdered man named Walter.

“Where did the events of last night take place?”

“Cassadaga. The house is one weird place. Someone’s very fond of painting on the walls. Mostly vortex symbols, but some words. Rise the dark, the dark will rise, things like that.”

Even in the dim light of the bar, Mark could see color drain from her face.

“Rise the dark?”

“That mean something to you?”

“Maybe.”

“Bullshit, maybe. You just reacted more visibly to that phrase than you did to learning they’d killed somebody. Why?” He didn’t want to admit his own interest in the phrase, not yet. He had to hold some cards back.

“Was there any reference to a place called Wardenclyffe?” she asked.

“No, but I saw it was her company name, and the vehicle is registered to the company. What does it mean?”

“It was the site of Nikola Tesla’s financial ruin, a place out on Long Island that has been a popular home to conspiracy theories over the years. But the name means something else to these people. It’s a place, a movement, something. Do you know anything about the man she’s living with?”

“The only man I know is the one who helped her burn the house down. He is a big bastard with a short temper and, as of yesterday, a broken nose. That one is on me. Myron and I got off to a bad start.”

“Myron. Do you know his last name?”

“I know what he told me, but it’s a false name. He was going by Myron Pate.”

Again her face showed recognition. Mark watched and remembered what the boy had said and played one of the last cards he had left.

“They’re off to meet Garland and a man named Eli,” he said.

“Eli Pate.” She said it immediately, and he didn’t question it. He’d heard no last name for Eli, and he’d assumed Myron’s was an alias, but the way she connected the names suggested it wasn’t a shot in the dark.

“They’re going to see him? That’s what you were told?”

“That’s what I was told. Who is Eli Pate?”

She studied his face. “You really don’t know?”

“My only interest is Garland Webb. Who is Pate?”

She slid off the stool and stood up. “I’ve got some pictures to show you. You might not recognize anyone other than Janell, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”

She took an iPad out of her bag and opened a photo album that was labeled with only a case-file number, no names, and began a slide show. Some photographs were facial close-ups that had clearly been pulled from driver’s license photos, some were lifted from social media sites, but there were also others in which the subject had obviously been unaware of the camera. Surveillance shots.

The first five photographs were of the same woman, and Mark had no idea who she was. Janell Cole followed, looking nothing like the woman he’d last seen leering at him in the flashlight beam. Here, she was the picture of the perfect young professional. There was another unfamiliar man, and then the screen filled with a close-up image of Myron Pate’s face.

“Stop. That’s the guy she’s traveling with.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Who is he really?”

“His name is Doug Oriel.”

“If you tell me he’s another electrical engineer I’m really going to begin to lose respect for the profession.”

“Not an engineer.”

“Good.”

“He’s a demolitions specialist.”

Mark paused. “Ex-military?”

“No. His background is in construction. He recently attended a school near Cleveland where he obtained certifications in blasting concrete, underwater blasting, vibration and air-blast control, and delayed-timing methods.”

She rattled this list off like someone who’d prepped for a job-interview question. Myron, like Janell, had been on her mind a good deal.

“Did he work with your client company too?”

She shook her head. “We pulled surveillance photos that put them together. We aren’t sure how they met.”

She closed the cover on the tablet. For a while she watched the boat channel without seeming to see it and then she said, “How confident are you that they’re really going to Eli?”

“Very,” Mark said. It was true, though if he explained the boy to her she probably wouldn’t agree. “Do you know where he is?”

“Only a possible town. He maintains a post office box, and there’s been surveillance conducted there before, but without success. The box is still active, though. We’re told he sporadically appears to gather mail.”

“Who is he?”

She hesitated, and he said, “Lynn, come on. I just signed my soul over to you. I thought we were past this.”

She nodded, almost to herself. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you the gist.”

The gist took them about twenty minutes. The gist started with a power company in Georgia and ran to the FBI. The gist was the type of scare that some in the electrical industry and some in national security roles had been warning the nation of for decades.

The Pinkertons had been brought in by the Georgia power company after its prized young systems engineer Janell Cole quit her job and took some highly sensitive data with her. By the time the company realized it had been hacked, she’d left not just the building, but the city. Lynn had been tracking her ever since. “I’m in regular communication with Homeland Security and the FBI,” she said, “but I don’t think you need to be very astute to understand why the FBI is interested in a missing grid-systems engineer and a guy who specializes in industrial demolition.”

“No,” Mark said, “I don’t think there’s much of a reach there. But what’s their affiliation? Is there a shared group, some sort of right-wing fringe deal, religious fanatics, environmental nuts, or…”

She shook her head. “No affiliation is clear yet.”

“What’s Eli Pate’s role?”

“Online communication suggests he’s a recruiter. We wondered if Janell would head his way at some point, but she didn’t seem to be. Until now.”

“Where is his way?”

“The post office box is in Lovell, Wyoming.”

Mark set his beer down and stared at her. “Lovell?”

“You know the place? Did they talk about it?”

“They didn’t talk about it, but yeah, I know the place.” He felt queasy suddenly, the beer stirring in his stomach. Lovell, Wyoming, was not a coincidence kind of town. Anything was possible, he knew that, but it didn’t feel right.

It’s the Cassadaga effect. The freaks got in your head, and now you’re superstitious, jumping to silly conclusions, having silly fears.

“How do you know the place?” Lynn asked.

“I lived there when I was a kid, but I lived a lot of places when I was a kid. It’s not as odd as it seems, not when you’ve gone through as many small towns in your life as I have.” He was saying this more for himself than for her. “There’s nothing in Lovell to draw anyone, though, so what in the hell brought him there?”

“Probably the nothingness,” Lynn said. “But if they’re headed to him, that’s his last known address.”

Cassadaga had occupied pole position of the places Mark didn’t want to see for a long time. Wyoming, though, was one of the places he’d already promised himself he would never see again. But if Garland Webb had headed west, then Mark would too.

“I can go and tell you what I find,” he said.

“I don’t want to ask anyone else to do my work,” she said. “I’d like to go myself, if I can get the budget approved to fly into Wyoming.”

“Are we doing this together, then? It’s going to be odd if we’re working on top of each other, overlapping questions and suspects.”

“Working together is fine with me. It helps me. You’ve seen her recently, you’ve seen him, and you apparently know that part of the world.”

“Yes, I know that part of the world.” Mark’s voice was empty, the words clipped. “And you don’t get to Lovell by flying into Wyoming. You fly into Montana. Billings is the closest airport. Or you can start from Bozeman, but the drive to Lovell is longer.”

Such familiar names, familiar places. He could picture them all easily. He didn’t want to see them again.

He thought of the boy who’d told him that if he went to the mountains he might not survive. Only a few hours ago, there had been no mountains involved. Now here he was, discussing a return to them.

“If they’re driving,” he said, “we’ll beat them to Wyoming.”

“They’ll be driving. They pay cash and they drive. They stay away from airports. So, yes, we’ll be ahead of them.”

“I wonder where they are now,” Mark said, picturing the red truck headed northwest on the interstate, slicing through an oblivious nation, at least one murdered woman left in their wake already.

“I’ve been wondering that every day for months,” Lynn said. “This is the first time I might have an idea.”

24

On his way home, Jay passed a police car and had the overwhelming urge to pull a U-turn and chase after him, screaming for help.

But he couldn’t. He understood the way it had to work now; he understood the power dynamics, and it required patience.

At home, he paced the lower level of the house, the tracking chip clutched in his hand, and waited for the hours of the night that belonged to emergency workers and insomniacs. Occasionally he stopped and stretched out on the couch, setting alarms each time to prevent sleep, but sleep never came.

Mostly, he thought of the things he had never said to Sabrina.

Things like the truth about why they were here. Why he’d led them to Red Lodge, to this house from which she’d been taken. Now that he was alone in the dark, still-foreign house, the things he had told her appalled him. They’d all sounded good at the time, sure. The move would keep him on the ground. That part was always honest. What he’d allowed her to believe in the silence that followed it, though, was unforgivable. In the silence, he’d allowed her to believe that the decision was for her. Never had he confessed to freezing on a climb. Never had he described her brother’s face, the smoke that left his mouth like a final attempt at words, some last message that dissolved into the dark sky, unheard.

You’re next, the smoke seemed to promise Jay then.

But he hadn’t been next. Sabrina was next. And he’d led her here. Would Eli Pate have found him in Billings? Possibly. It didn’t feel that way, though. It felt like the result of Jay’s own deceit, his own secrets. He’d hidden the truth, had fled from the truth, and in so doing he’d guided them here.

What if you’d told her? Where would you go then? What if you’d just told the truth? Maybe you’d never have ended up in this place. You’d take another job. Work for her, work side by side with her, never let her out of your sight. All of this was possible if you’d just told the truth.

He rose and walked again. Paced in anguish. Every step recorded.

At four in the morning, with a few hours left before dawn and his movement patterns well established, he crawled on the floor, following the wall into the kitchen, then fumbled with the drawers until he found the duct tape. Then he crawled back through the dark living room to the entryway closet, where an all-time failure of a Christmas gift waited, a reason you had to stay away from late-night television advertising. The robotic vacuum cleaner, two feet in diameter and with the look of a large hockey puck, was useless when it came to cleaning floors, and Sabrina hated the sound of it as well as its inefficiency. Jay’s intrigue in the gadget had earned it a place in the closet instead of the garbage can, but he had to admit it wasn’t effective. All it did, Sabrina had pointed out, was circle the house in confused patterns, bouncing off the walls like a drunk man.

Or like an anxious man pacing away a sleepless night.

Jay taped the tracking chip to the top of the vacuum, turned it on, and released it. The device spun away. It bounced from wall to wall, and, just like Jay had, remained on the ground floor.

He had an hour, at least. He listened for a few minutes to make sure the device was running problem-free, and then he crawled to the front door and slipped out into the cold night.

25

Mark worked on Eli Pate late into the night, gathering intelligence on him before they flew out of Miami to try to find him. Lynn Deschaine already had plenty of knowledge about Pate, but that didn’t keep Mark from digging and, maybe, truth be told, digging a little competitively. She had resources that he didn’t, but he didn’t want to have to rely on those resources to do his job. There was another cloud on the horizon with Lynn, and that was the collision of goals. She thought that they were both looking for Janell Cole and company, and that much was accurate. What Mark intended to do once he found them-found Garland, at least-was another matter.

He suppressed that and focused on Eli Pate. When they arrived in Billings, Mark wanted to know everything about him that he could.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much out there-except for the surprising discovery that he seemed to be operating under his own name. What that suggested-the fact that he kept his own name, and people like Doug Oriel renamed themselves to match it-was both interesting and alarming.

Eli Pate was forty-one, his Social Security number had been issued in Kentucky, and his address history painted the portrait of a nomad, with short stints in seventeen states. There was no record of Eli having a phone in the past three years. He also had no active driver’s license. The last one Mark could find was more than a decade old, issued by the state of Idaho. In the photo, he looked whip-thin and mean, with brown hair that hung down around his shoulders and hostile eyes like flint chips. The last address on record in any of Mark’s databases was the same one that Lynn had, a PO box in Lovell.

He didn’t like seeing the name of the town. He knew it was the memories he connected to it that were to blame for that, but still, it troubled him. Lynn’s recognition of the phrase rise the dark troubled him too. When Ridley Barnes had vanished in Indiana, wading off into the unknown depths of an elaborate cave system, he’d left Mark with a strange set of promises. One of them had lingered in Mark’s mind ever since, Ridley’s last words: She doesn’t want you yet.

He’d meant the cave. Everyone knew that in Ridley’s disturbed mind, the place had a personality, and Mark understood that. Still, he often found himself thinking about Lauren, some small, absurd part of him always wondering, What do you mean, she doesn’t want me yet, Ridley? What’s left for me to do?

That question had made sense, though. Mark was already focused on Lauren’s unfinished business-Garland Webb. It was natural that he’d bridge Ridley’s final, raving words to that mission. He could bridge anything to that mission. The other words had been easier to discard, because they’d had no such connection. In fact, Mark hadn’t thought of them much at all until today.

When things go dark, Ridley had told Mark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.

Madness, of course. Ridley had left his rational mind somewhere in that cave years earlier, and by the time he’d said that to Mark, he was also wounded and hypothermic. He’d had no idea what he was saying.

Still, his words rose in Mark’s mind tonight.

It was deep into the night, and the flight to Billings, with a layover in Minneapolis, left at seven in the morning, but still Mark kept searching. Even after he’d taken a second Ambien and knew that he didn’t have the focus for the work, he kept at it. At first he drifted into searches involving Eli’s name and terms related to electricity and energy. Nothing. Then he tried Janell Cole and Doug Oriel, and eventually, half asleep, without any real consideration, he ran a search for recent news using the words Wyoming and power grid.

Most of the first-page results were related to efforts to bring enough power to the oil fields to keep up with the drilling needs, but there was one floater from the Billings Gazette with a two-day-old date.

Outages in Wyoming and Montana Result of Vandalism

According to the article, communities including Red Lodge and Laurel, Montana, and Lovell and Powell, Wyoming, had lost power for most of a day after someone had felled trees on the high-voltage lines in rural locations.

Employees of the Beartooth Power Alliance who repaired the damage were left convinced that a crime had occurred.

“I’ve never seen anything so intentionally malicious,” lineman Jay Baldwin, 34, of Red Lodge said. “The location and manner in which those trees were brought down doesn’t really leave any question about an accident. Someone intended to knock some lights out, and they did.”

There was a picture of Baldwin accompanying the story; it showed a man standing beside a utility truck. He held a hard hat in one hand and a radio in the other and appeared weary but not worn-out. It was a compelling shot, really-he looked like the exact sort of man you wanted responding to emergencies.

Mark fixated on the picture, and when he blinked back to reality, he blamed the Ambien for the pointless level of scrutiny of a simple photograph. He closed the computer. It was time for bed-past time, in fact-and he’d be jet-lagged tomorrow after the flight to Montana.

The state’s name chased the photo of the lineman through Mark’s brain in a spiral of odd images as he drifted toward an unsettled sleep. That name had texture, somehow, rough and jagged and ready to wound: Montana. It got nothing but love from tourists, but tourists didn’t understand it. You had to see it through four full seasons to know a damn thing about Montana.

Mark had seen it through plenty more than that.

The dreams that came for him were varied and vivid. He dreamed first of Ridley Barnes, more memory than dream, Ridley in the endless dark of Trapdoor Caverns, warning Mark that great responsibility and great pressure awaited him on the surface. Then Ridley was gone, replaced by an unfamiliar man with no hands standing in a moonlit stairwell with odd symbols painted on the walls behind him.

She held all the beauty of the world, the man said. Her only mistake was her taste in men. The way she died wasn’t her fault, you know.

In the dream Mark said, I know, it was mine, because he thought the man was talking about Lauren. By the time he realized that the stranger wasn’t, it was too late, because a wave struck the house, a tremendous splash of gray-green salt water like a hurricane’s storm surge, and it swept up the stairs and drove the handless man away from Mark. They were in the water together and Mark thought that Lauren was too and maybe someone else, a woman he knew but couldn’t name, but as the waves rose and fell, they all drifted farther apart until Mark couldn’t see or hear the others anymore, and he was alone in an empty sea. The waves were towering and powerful but never drove Mark under. Instead he rode them through sleep and toward dawn, and though he’d lost track of the others in the water with him, he didn’t feel any panic, because he knew they were merely out of sight and earshot, not truly gone. The storm was raging, but they were all in it together.

The water faded then, receded in the abrupt fashion of dreams, and mountains replaced the waves. High, menacing peaks.

The mountains just sat there, lonely and wind-whipped, impenetrable and unyielding. All the same, Mark was grateful for the alarm that shook him from sleep and forced the image from his mind. The hurricane dream had somehow been more peaceful than the mountain image, despite all of the crashing waves and the loud power of the storm.

In that dream, he had not been alone.

26

The phone began to ring when Jay was three blocks from the police station. Unknown number. He stared at it without answering, let it go to voice mail, and continued walking. Almost immediately, the phone chimed with a different tone-not a voice mail, but a text message.

GO BACK HOME, JAY.

He stood dumbly on the sidewalk, looking from the phone’s screen to the empty streets around him. There was nobody in sight, no watchers. And yet…

The phone rang again. This time he answered.

“Jay, Jay, Jay.” Eli Pate sighed like a disappointed parent. “You’re not making wise choices. Certainly, you’re not thinking of Sabrina. What a risk you just took! Imagine what could happen to her. Imagine what you could have just provoked. Why, Jay, I might have been incited to do terrible, horrible things. Just think about it! Can you picture those things? My God, what you have invited into her life!”

Jay said, “Please, don’t.” His voice broke.

“Please? Well, okay, since you said please.” After a long pause, Pate spoke again, and the humor was gone from his voice. “Go home, Jay. I expected you to try once. I’d have been wrong about you if you hadn’t. But I’ll tell you this: I do not expect you to try again. Because now you know better. You’ll go home and think about the things that might have happened, and you’ll think about electricity in wires and wonder how on earth you could have made any decision other than to simply do as you’ve been asked. Go home. When you step inside, please wave to the camera.”

The camera. He had a camera. Where in the hell was the camera?

Eli Pate began to laugh. “Lord, you really believed that would work, didn’t you? A vacuum, Jay! That is brilliant.” His laugh, rich and carefree, boomed through the phone again. “Oh, that was beautiful. But I don’t have the time to waste letting you try again, I’m afraid. You’re going to need to understand that. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll believe you this time. But Jay? I can replace you. Can you replace her?”

The call disconnected.

Jay Baldwin lowered the phone, looked up the street toward the lights of the police station, and then turned and walked back to his dark house.

27

They were thirty thousand feet in the air somewhere over the Dakotas when Lynn Deschaine fell asleep with her head on Mark’s shoulder.

She’d been dozing on and off for a while, and so it was likely that she’d slipped down in her seat a bit and was unaware of the contact.

He was very aware of it, though. He was frozen by it. He could smell her hair and feel her warm, slow breaths on his neck, and he didn’t want to so much as blink for fear of waking her.

He also wanted to push her away.

As they flew through the cloud cover, Mark was both grateful for her presence at his side, the touch of her skin, and angry with himself for enjoying it. He realized there was no need for the latter-you can’t cheat on the dead.

Explain that one to your heart, though. Anyone who’d ever had to try, Mark thought, would understand.

When the flight attendant came down the aisle to see if anyone needed fresh drinks, Mark made the slightest motion possible, a tiny shake of the head that came more from the eyes: No, thanks, and please don’t disturb her. The attendant moved on in polite silence, and Lynn didn’t wake, and her breaths came steady and slow against Mark’s skin and his throat tightened and he closed his eyes and made himself think of his wife.

At some point, Lynn woke, realized her position, and moved away from Mark quickly. He felt her turn to him, no doubt prepared to apologize, but he kept his eyes closed so she’d think that he was asleep, and she didn’t say anything. He was glad of that. His neck cooled as the memory of her touch faded.

He didn’t open his eyes until they touched down, but he never slept.

There were only four gates at the Billings airport-A and B, 1 and 2. Mark was struck by how small it was and said so upon landing. Lynn looked at him with surprise.

“I thought you were from here? Sounded like quite the Montana expert.”

“I’ve never been in the airport. I could tell you what the bus stations are like.”

She tilted her head and studied him. “How exactly did you end up in Tampa?”

“It was a circuitous route,” he said. “That’s the best I can explain it. There was never a destination in mind.”

That was the truth. He’d had destinations he wanted to avoid, however, and they’d just arrived in one.

As they left the airport and crossed to the rental-car parking lot, Mark felt his breath catch a little. The Billings airport was built on a plateau above the city, and while the mountains were far off in the hazy distance, the big sky was right there on top of you. The Montana sky felt older than time and endless as space itself.

It was a humbling sky.

They took I-90 across the Yellowstone River and out of Billings, followed it to Hardin, and then angled south through the Crow Indian Reservation and toward Wyoming. He saw Lynn rubbing her face just above her eyes.

“Headache?”

“Yes. Strange.”

“Not really. Elevation change. You came from sea level, and we are going to hit ten thousand feet. Let’s stop for some aspirin.”

They stopped at a gas station in Crow Agency. Then they drove out of the town, and she was quiet as she watched it go by. He understood why. To drive through the places where the natives had been when the white settlers found them and then to drive through the places those settlers had left for those natives seemed to demand shame. Or should have.

“You should hear the music at a powwow,” Mark said, and she looked at him with confusion.

“The chants and drums. It’s powerful. Really powerful. I’ve never heard anything else like that, where the sound brings the past into the present. There’s a place called the Medicine Wheel that feels like that, though. Feels the way the music sounds.”

He was talking too fast and felt foolish for bringing it up. He wasn’t making any sense, and he was telling her things he’d never shared with anyone. It was all the fault of this place, the sensory memory of the return.

“Who introduced you to the music?” Lynn asked.

“My mother, I guess, but I’d hate to give her the credit.”

He hoped his tone indicated that the subject was done, and it seemed to, because Lynn didn’t press him.

They continued south into Wyoming, and in Ranchester they broke off the interstate and headed west, into the mountains. At least thirty minutes passed in silence and Mark was lost in thought when Lynn said, “What are you smiling about?”

He hadn’t realized that he was. “Lot of memories, that’s all.”

“Let a girl in on the fun.”

He glanced at her, saw that she was smiling, and went along with it, though he knew better.

“We drove a stolen car out of Sheridan on this highway once, me and my two uncles,” he said. “One of my uncles was convinced that it was a legitimate thing to do because the guy he’d boosted it from owed him more in poker debts than the car was worth. But what he didn’t know about the car was that the gas gauge was broken. This road gets up as high as ten thousand feet, basically two miles in the air, and we were right near the top when the car died. The argument my uncles had there on the side of the road was one for the ages. Then, once we got to walking, they turned philosophical and carried on for a few miles about how much easier things were in the days of the horse thieves, because at least you could tell what you were getting. It was harder stealing cars, because unless you were a damn mechanic, you might get screwed. I always liked that logic. Sucks to steal a car that’s a lemon, you know?”

When he looked back over at her, she had wide eyes, but there was no indictment to them. Just that faint amusement.

“A circuitous route to Tampa,” she said. “You weren’t kidding.”

He nodded and drove on as the rode wound in sharp switchbacks and climbed steadily-seven thousand feet, eight thousand, nine. The Bighorn Mountains closed around them, still snowcapped on the peaks, weeks from wildflower season. At Baldy Pass they crested ninety-five hundred feet, Mark’s ears popping as they drove just below the clouds, more like flying low than driving a car. Melted snow was all around them now, bleeding out in the sun in the places of trapped shadows where it had been able to survive so long. A voice inside Mark’s head that was not his own said, Welcome home, and it wasn’t kind. It was a mocking voice.

And a knowing one.

The post office box in Lovell was all they had for Eli Pate, but lounging around the post office waiting for him to show up was hardly the most effective way to go about finding him. Still, they started there, asking the girl behind the counter if she knew Pate. Mark thought he saw a ripple in her face, like the name had a sour taste.

“Well, sure. There are less than two hundred boxes in use here. I know everybody who uses them regular, but I’m not allowed to speak about it.” She was looking Lynn’s business card over. “What’s he done?”

“Nothing. We just need to talk to him.”

“Sure. But I’m just not, you know, allowed to tell you. It’s a federal crime. If I was to tell you that Mr. Pate comes in here once every two weeks, usually on Tuesday, and he didn’t come last week, that would be a federal crime.”

Lynn smiled at her. “Then we won’t ask you to do that.”

Today was Monday.

“Be careful with him,” the girl said, and Lynn’s smile faded.

“Pardon?”

The girl pocketed Lynn’s card and glanced out the window at the street. It was empty and they were alone. She seemed to take comfort in that.

“I would’ve remembered him even if he came in only the once,” she said. “He has these real intense eyes, real dark eyes, and they’re just, like, so…so focused. And I was running the paperwork for the box and all of a sudden he reached his hands out and I almost jumped, you know? But he didn’t actually touch me. He just kept them out, like this.”

She was holding both hands flat, palms toward her breasts, hovering about six inches away from her body.

“The way you’d put your hands out in front of a vent if you wanted to know whether the furnace was running,” she said. “Like he was testing me for heat. He did that, and he smiled, and he said, You’re very weak. And I don’t even remember what I said exactly, told him he’d have to stop being weird or that he had to leave or whatever, but before I got much out he put his hands back in his pockets and said that it was a good thing. Then he acted normal the rest of the time, just filled out his papers and thanked me and left and he’s never been anything but polite since then, but still…I remember it, you know? Fucking weirdo.” She had a distant expression when she added, “And I’m not weak.”

Mark was interested that what had lodged deepest in her mind seemed to be Eli Pate’s assessment of her, not his actions.

“You ever tell anybody about that, or ask about him or anything?” Lynn said.

“No. But like I said…be careful with him.”

They left the post office and walked back to the rented Tahoe.

“Your first claim in the West, and you’ve already hit gold,” Mark said. “If he shows up tomorrow, that’d be a gift.”

“It would be a lot of waiting if he doesn’t, though. Hopefully, we’ll find him first. Next date is with the sheriff.”

“Befriend the local law,” Mark said. “You’re really sticking to that 1850s approach.”

“Hardly. I think he runs with troubled people, and in a small town, the local law is indeed likely to know him.”

“If he’s been in trouble, he hasn’t served any time. Not under that name.”

“You’ve checked?”

“I checked on a lot of things.” He told her about his searches the previous night and concluded with the vandalism near Red Lodge and Laurel. “Probably unrelated, but from a timing standpoint, it bothered me.”

“Show me those places on this map.”

The map she had didn’t show any highways or roads. For a moment, Mark thought that the interconnecting lines across it were railroad routes, but then he realized it was a map of the national electric grid. It was too large in scale for him to locate such a small town easily, but there was one point that was close.

“That’s too far west,” he said. “But not by so many miles.”

“That’s the Chill River generation station,” she said. “I’d like to talk to their security people, see if they’ve had any issues, threats. Maybe show some photos.”

“What else do you know about this guy?” Mark said. “You’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with power stations, but you don’t know anything about Pate?”

“He’s just a name tied up with Janell Cole. He’s not my focus. She is.”

Mark said, “I wrote the high-voltage lineman’s name down and found an address in Red Lodge. The quote in the newspaper was short, but he was pretty emphatic that it was vandalism. We might want to check on him, see what he saw.”

A guarded silence, then, “Yes. We might. Sheriff’s office first, though.”

“You’re the boss. It’s not a bad place to start. They’ll know we’re in town fast enough, anyway, so we might as well lead the contact.”

Lynn looked down the street. “Where is the sheriff?”

“In Powell.”

“Another town?”

Mark nodded. “You’ve got to wait for the law around here, Lynn. The small towns, you’re kind of counted on to police yourselves, for better or worse.”

“There are a lot of empty miles out here,” she said. “Do you know how to get to the sheriff’s office or should I use the GPS?”

“I’m familiar with the route,” Mark said. Numerous family members had spent time there. Unless they’d moved the jail, Mark could get there without a map.

28

The sheriff’s deputy who spoke to them in Powell said he’d never heard of Eli Pate, Janell Cole, or Doug Oriel. Mark and Lynn showed him the photos and got slow shakes of the head.

“None of my local lovelies,” he said. He was a small man and his gun belt looked oversize on him, but he was gray-haired and weathered and had probably seen everything Powell had to offer several times over by now. “That doesn’t mean you won’t find him somewhere between here and Sheridan, of course.”

“He’s not in your frequent-flier program, though,” Mark said.

The deputy grinned. “Definitely not, and we got plenty in platinum class.”

“You heard anything about the vandalism of the electrical lines around here?” Mark asked. “Chain saws and trees, is my understanding.”

He nodded. “Mine too. But this department isn’t involved. Montana grabbed that one.” He pointed at the picture of Eli Pate. “He’s part of that mess?”

“Can’t say for sure,” Lynn answered, “but we’re curious, at least.”

As she was thanking him for his help and giving him a card, Mark looked at the booking counter, where a deputy was leaning back in a chair working through a can of Pringles and a bottle of Dr Pepper. Mark knew better than to ask, but damned if he could stop himself.

“You ever heard of anyone named Novak?” he asked the gray-haired deputy when Lynn was finished.

When he’d introduced himself earlier, he’d just said Markus, no last name, and let Lynn take the lead. Now the deputy studied him with fresh interest.

“Which one?”

Mark shrugged. “Any.”

“Haven’t seen them in a year, maybe two, but they’ll be around, and you’d be wise to start with the jails if you want to find them. Some of them are in our-what did you call it? Frequent-flier program. The ones who aren’t dead or disappeared, they’ll mooch a few meals off the county in due time, I’m sure.”

He’d said nothing wrong, nothing that Mark wouldn’t have said himself, and so he shouldn’t have felt his blood begin to boil and the skin around his eyes and mouth go tight.

“What do they have to do with it?” the deputy asked.

Mark shook his head. Lynn was watching closely.

“I knew a couple of them,” Mark said. “That’s all.”

“Sorry to hear it. Which ones?”

Mark felt like there was something ticking in his chest. He looked to the side of the old cop’s face when he said, “Larry, Ronny, and Violet, mostly.”

“Shit, you knew the brew crew!” The deputy was jovial and smiling. Mark’s body felt very still, and he could feel the ridges of his teeth on the sides of his tongue. The deputy kept going, oblivious. “There aren’t many jails around here those three didn’t drink themselves into. Last I knew of Larry, he was in trouble for running a hunting-guide service without an outfitter’s license.”

Mark nodded numbly. He was aware that he’d made a mistake in asking and now he just wanted out, but the deputy spoke again.

“You’re likely too young to remember Violet the way she used to be, but back in her day, we didn’t mind bringing her in at all,” he said, and he winked at Mark. Conspiratorial, man-to-man. “She had an ass like a…a…” He glanced at Lynn and stuttered to a stop. “Sorry. She was a bit of a looker, but what a train wreck of a human being.”

The ticking in Mark’s chest had moved into his brain and he knew from experience that it would not pause there long before it found his hands, and so he turned and walked away from them without a word. He passed through the doors and out onto the street, where a chill wind blew down out of the mountains. The sun was high and bright but with that wind blowing, it was hard to feel much warmth. It could stay that way right into the summer here. You could shiver your way through a sunburn in this country.

Mark felt a hand on his arm and looked back to see Lynn Deschaine staring at him with concern. “What was that about? Why were you asking about your family?”

“That was a mistake. I don’t know why I did it. Just curious, I guess. Time passes and you wonder if anybody remembers you. I guess they do.”

He walked back to the Tahoe with Lynn trailing behind, and he kept his hands in his pockets and the fingers of his right hand wrapped around the plastic disk from the Saba National Marine Park. He’d been there with Lauren on an endless blue sea where the sun shone warm on his skin. There was a wind over the Saba, too, but that wind didn’t chill the sun. He remembered that day regularly, called the visual up often. Sometimes it felt harder, though. Sometimes it felt very far away.

They drove northwest out of Powell and chased the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone out of Wyoming and into Montana. The water was running high and fast. Any place that had white water would be a screamer right now. It was too early in the season for the rafting guides to be out, but they would be soon enough.

Mark was driving in silence, feeling the fatigue from no sleep accumulating with the miles. Lynn must have been thinking the same thing, because she said, “I feel like we should have knocked on a lot more doors than this by now.”

“That’s the problem out here. You’ve got to commit to several hours on the road just to get from one door to the next.”

“You think the lineman is going to be able to tell us anything?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Your client will want to hear what he has to say, though.” Mark’s voice sounded curt, and he didn’t mean for it to. His mind was back on the deputy in Powell, the sly smile that had creased his good-ol’-boy face. Once upon a time, somebody would have knocked that smile into a bloody line. Once upon a time, that somebody might have been Mark.

No more, though. No more. Mark had killed that man in a place not far from here, up in the Beartooth Mountains, and later he’d buried him in a warm southern sea. That man was gone for good.

“Did you know Violet?” Lynn asked. Her voice was quiet. Gentle. She was looking at Mark, but he didn’t take his eyes off the road.

“She was my mother.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I got that response a lot growing up.”

“No, I mean I’m sorry that you had to listen to that guy-”

“He was fine,” Mark said. “He remembers things just right, I’m sure. A little different perspective from mine, but that doesn’t make him wrong. I shouldn’t have asked.” He paused and a few miles fell behind them in silence and then he said, “It’s just a bit of a brain-bender, being back here, you know? I still know all the roads, all the mountains, all the towns. It’s just as it should be. But I don’t want it to be. I want it to be so damned different that I don’t even have to think about the way it was.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

Mark nodded and drove on toward Red Lodge. Through one corner of the windshield, he saw the Beartooths taking shape, jagged granite towers that looked like they intended to take a bite out of the clouds. They were very much like the lonesome peaks he’d seen in his dreams.

29

They were out of the flatlands and into countryside that had begun to fill with rolling hills, the mountains still many hours ahead, when the police flashers went on behind the truck.

Janell had driven for most of the day, the cruise control locked exactly four miles per hour above the speed limit, fast enough to blend in but not fast enough to invite police attention so she would know immediately that any police interest concerned the identity of the truck, not its speed. They’d switched positions just an hour earlier, though, so she said, “How fast were you going?”

“Maybe ten over, max.”

Just enough to leave the situation in doubt. She watched the mirror and saw the driver’s door of the cruiser open and an officer get out. Older and overweight, with a mustache. He hadn’t spent any time on his radio or with his computer, and that was encouraging. He also kept his head down as he approached, and that was even better, because if he knew anything about the people inside this truck, he would have had his eyes up and his hand close to his gun.

“Speeding,” she said. “You idiot. You risked us for an extra five miles an hour.”

“I’ll talk him down.”

“You’re a probation violator. When he runs your license, he’ll see that.”

“He won’t run the license.”

“If he runs the plate we’re in trouble. And everybody runs the plate.”

They’d stolen a plate off a similar make and model truck in Georgia, but the VIN wouldn’t match if checked. The longer the stop went, the worse things would become. The cop was at the door, rapping on the window with his knuckles. Doug put the window down and said, “Taillights out again? They’ve been giving me hell.”

“There’s no trouble with your taillights, pal, and you know it. What’s with the fast-and-furious routine here? Speeding, driving all over the damn roadway.”

All over the roadway was a lie; Doug’s driving had been fine, just fast. But they were on a lonely stretch of highway in a shitkicker town in the middle of nowhere and they had a vehicle with a Florida license. They were good for a stop, and good for the county’s coffers.

“He’s only driving fast because I told him to,” she said.

The deputy lowered his head so he could see past Doug and over to the passenger seat.

“Why would you tell him to drive reckless, miss?”

“Because I’m about to be sick. I’ve been sick three times in the past eighty miles. Food poisoning.”

“Is that so?” He studied her. His mustache was unevenly trimmed and his breathing was heavy, as if the walk from the car had winded him. Only one vehicle had passed since he’d turned the lights on. It was a lonely stretch of road.

“I’m about to be sick again,” she said.

“I’m sorry to hear it. But I’m still going to need the gentleman’s driver’s license and registration.”

“No warning?” Doug said. “It would sure be nice if we could-”

“License and registration,” the officer repeated firmly. His name tag glittered: M. Terrell.

“Just give it to him,” she said. “I’m going to throw up.”

When she opened the door, Terrell barked at her to stay in the vehicle, but she ignored him and lurched out of the seat and hurried several feet away, off the shoulder of the road and down the steep slope, and then she kept going, past the tree line, where she made a show of falling to her knees and retching. She could hear him instructing Doug to stay where he was, and then grass and leaves crunched beneath his boots as he made his way toward her. He wore heavy work boots, the kind her stepfather had worn. The first man she’d killed.

“Y’all been doing some drinking, maybe?”

She shook her head. She was on her hands and knees with a string of spit hanging from her mouth. She sucked air in noisy gasps, making sure her back rose and fell with the effort. He stopped just behind her, nothing visible of him but the work boots. She thought he probably liked the view just fine. She lowered her forehead to the ground, touched the cool earth with it, and closed her eyes.

“What’s your name, miss?”

She said, “Abenaki.” An old joke, one shared only with Eli, who was dealing with Violet, a woman who believed deeply in the spiritual power of American Indians. Eli would have laughed, hearing it under these circumstances. The deputy did not laugh.

“Ab-a-what?”

“Abenaki.”

“That’s some name.”

“It’s Indian.”

“You don’t look the part.”

“Who are you to say whether I look like my own name?”

“Fair enough. I’m going to need you to stand up and come back to the road. You have to puke, you can do it over by the side of the truck where I can see you. We’re not staying down here in the woods.”

She nodded absently, her head brushing the dirt, her hair falling around her face. She moved a hand to her belly and groaned.

“You sure y’all haven’t had a few too many?”

“None.”

“Okay. We’ll see about that. But let’s get over to the truck, like I asked. You can sit outside of it, but you’re going to sit where I can see you.”

She lifted her head, wobbled, and then fell again. “Can you help me up? Please?”

He hesitated, then stepped forward. “Let’s go.” He reached down and took her left arm, the one that wasn’t pressed to her stomach. She leaned her weight into him as he lifted so that he had to choose whether to use both hands or move back and let her fall. He chose to use both hands, one on her left arm and one around her waist. That was when she pivoted toward him, drew the knife from her belt, and opened his throat with a single, smooth slice.

His eyes went wide and he tried to step away from her, reach for his gun, and reach for his throat all at the same time. She held on to his right hand, held tight, feeling his pulse in his palm as he gave up on the gun and settled for reaching for his throat with his left hand, as if he could seal the wound with pressure, stem the inevitable tide. He fell over as blood seeped between his fingers and his mouth worked but no words came. She moved closer to his side, still clutching his hand, and watched. Life left his hand first, and then his eyes. The shortest of delays, but still there. Life seeped from the limbs first, and lingered longest in the eyes.

She knew this well.

She wanted to stay with him but there was no time. She released his hand and studied the front of her shirt, which was splattered with blood. Then she looked up the slope at his cruiser. It was a new-model Dodge, and it would have an in-dash video system that started recording as soon as he activated the emergency lights. That was why she’d come so far into the trees. She doubted the video would show what had happened, but it would show the truck.

She didn’t need long, though. She just needed to stay in motion. She got in the passenger seat and slammed the door, wiping the blade of the knife on her jeans.

“Drive.”

Doug stared at her, wide-eyed.

“What did you do! He wasn’t going to stop us, he was just going to give us a ticket, and now we’re-”

“In a hurry,” she said. “We were in a hurry before, and we are in a hurry now. Nothing has changed. It’s all about forward momentum. We just need to keep it going forward. Either start driving or get out of the seat so I can.”

He put the truck back in gear and then looked in the rearview mirror. It was still filled with the dancing colored lights of the police car.

“Forward momentum,” she said again, and he lowered his eyes and pressed on the accelerator and pulled them off the shoulder and back onto the road. Ahead, the mountains loomed in shadow.

“I’d change roads fast,” she said. “And I think we’re going to need a new truck.”

That was a shame, because she’d always loved the bloodred truck with the big tires and the throaty motor. All the same, it had to be done.

“Get off the highway. All of these hillbillies will have four-wheel drive. Look for a driveway that goes back into the trees. Someplace isolated.”

He didn’t answer. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The smell of blood was heavy in the cab of the truck, and if she concentrated, she could still feel the officer’s pulse against her thumb.

30

BMV records told them that Jay Baldwin lived on Twenty-Second Street West in Red Lodge, the last street off Highway 212 before it began to climb into the Beartooths. The home was a nice A-frame with a garage below the decks and wide banks of windows facing the mountains.

Mark parked on the curb, and they had just gotten out of the Tahoe when the garage door went up. A man’s boots and jeans became visible, and then the whole of him-Jay Baldwin, standing at the top of a short staircase, locking the interior door to the house. He had his back to them, and when he turned and saw them he jerked and moved a hand toward his heart like they’d given him a coronary.

“Mr. Baldwin?” Lynn said.

“Yes. What?” He hurried down the steps and out of the garage. “Who are you?”

“Private investigators,” Lynn said.

He stopped walking. Stopped breathing, it seemed. He looked like they’d fired off a flash grenade in his face.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Lynn said. “Nothing about you, I mean.” She offered him a card.

“Your name came up in an article about some vandalism on the high-voltage lines around here,” Mark said. “We were hoping you could tell us a little about that.”

“The lines?” He had frantic eyes. They bounced from Mark to Lynn and then out beyond, to the street. Most of the time, in fact, they were on the street.

“Yeah. In the paper, you were quoted as-”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. “Pardon? You don’t know anything about the words you provided to the newspaper?”

“I know what I said. I just mean…look, we’ve got public relations people for this. I can’t just…” He finally brought his eyes back to Mark. “Do you think you know who did it?”

“We might have some ideas. First, though, we need to know the situation. You said somebody had been cutting trees onto the lines. You called it, I believe, intentionally malicious.”

“Right. So who do you think it was? What’s his name?”

He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. A subtle movement, not as jittery as his eyes, but still restless. Something about him didn’t feel right, and Mark realized what it was: Jay Baldwin in person did not convey the same impression as Jay Baldwin in the photo, the man who looked a little worn but plenty steady. The guy you’d want responding to your emergencies.

“Everything okay, Mr. Baldwin?” Mark said.

“Fine, yeah, but I can’t deal with this. I just…it’s not for me.” Mark saw that he had something in his hand, something that for an instant looked like a twin of the dive permit Mark carried. A small plastic chip. He put it in his pocket before Mark could see it clearly. “Listen,” he said, “I’d really like to know the specifics of your case.”

“We can discuss all of that,” Lynn said. “You mind if we come in for a couple minutes? We can tell you-”

“No!” He barked it at her, and she tilted her head back, startled.

“Okay. We can stay out here. But-”

“No,” he repeated. “I’m not the guy who can discuss things like this. It’s, you know, it’s a, um…a policy. It’s a corporate policy. You’ll have to call the company.”

He backed away from them but kept his head up, his eyes darting. The street was empty but you’d have thought there was a pack of feral dogs out there. He reached his truck, tried to put his key in the door lock, fumbled, and dropped the keys. When he moved to recover them, the white chip fell free and hit the garage floor and he swore at himself in a harsh whisper. He went for the chip before the keys, picked it up from the floor and inspected it as if he’d dropped a Rolex facedown onto gravel. He put it back in his pocket, but it was a different pocket this time. His breast pocket. He had to unzip his jacket to secure it.

Mark walked back out to the street and joined Lynn in the Tahoe as Jay Baldwin backed out of his garage and lowered the door. He pulled away without looking at them, driving too fast for the street. On 212, he turned left and headed northeast.

“Waste of time,” Lynn said. “That guy isn’t much of a talker, is he? I’m amazed he gave a quote to the newspaper.”

“We scared him,” Mark said.

“He was a little leery of us. Didn’t even give me a chance to charm him.”

“No,” Mark said. “We scared him, Lynn. Really. He was afraid of us.”

She gave him an odd look. “What do you mean?”

“Did you see the way he tried to unlock his truck with his key?”

“He dropped the key. He was flustered.”

“When was the last time you saw someone unlock a modern vehicle by actually turning the key? That’s a new truck, it has keyless entry, they all do. And he didn’t need to do anything. The truck was unlocked. When he finally did get in, he just opened the door. He was just going through motions before, like he was stoned.”

“Maybe he was.”

Mark shook his head. “He thought we were coming for another reason.”

Lynn already had her phone in her hand. “Is there any place in this state with a good cell signal? I’ve got a dossier on Pate from the office, but I can’t download it. Can you find us someplace with Wi-Fi?”

“Sure.” Mark started the Tahoe, drove out to 212, and turned toward town. The main street looked just as he remembered it. The flickering neon sign of the Red Lodge Café was even still there. When they’d had the money, his family ate breakfasts there. It was also the last place Mark had stopped for coffee before he’d left the state of Montana entirely, heading south. At the stoplight by the gas station, Mark could see the taillights of Jay Baldwin’s pickup as he headed out of town. He felt like he was missing something, that Jay had shown Mark something he should have understood but had failed to pick up on. He wondered what the plastic chip was and why Jay handled it the way Mark handled Lauren’s old dive permit.

“He showed his hands,” Mark said.

“What?”

“He made a point of it. Like a guy might do if he’s hustling cards and he knows people are watching close. He made a point of showing his hands. Even when he didn’t need to, like the bit with the truck keys. That was about showing his hands.”

“Why would he think we cared?”

“Either somebody is watching our boy,” Mark said, “or he thinks somebody is.”

Jay’s truck had vanished down the highway, and the reddening pines stood silent as the sun fell behind the Beartooths.

31

They found a motel in Red Lodge called Benjamin Beartooth’s Last Chance Inn that promised Wi-Fi. The supposed last chance did not have anything to do with rooms, apparently-when they asked if there were two available, the clerk laughed and said they could have twenty if they wanted to pay for them. Mark’s mind was still on Jay Baldwin as they walked to Lynn’s room so she could set up her laptop and download the files her office had sent. She sat at the desk, clicking away, and he went to the window, looked out at the same street he’d traveled a hundred times in what now seemed like another lifetime, and wondered about the fear he’d seen in Baldwin. It was a particular kind of fear-fear of being caught.

But caught doing what?

Lynn said: “I thought you said Eli Pate had never done prison time.”

“Correct.”

“Incorrect.”

Mark turned from the window in surprise. “I ran his name last night.”

She had a small smile, one that was smug but not in an unattractive way. Pleased with herself, that was all. Still, he felt stupid, a step behind.

“What did I miss?”

“Amsterdam,” she said.

“What?”

“We have an office there.”

“Of course you do.”

The smile widened and filled her eyes. “Pinkerton Global,” she said. “Isn’t this what you were having so much fun with, giving me shit over my firm?”

“I gave you only respect. If anything, it was envy disguised as respect.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Just tell me what the hell I missed.”

She pushed back from the desk so Mark could come close enough to see the screen. He bent down and looked at the dossier her office had sent.

In 1998, a youthful Eli Pate had been arrested in Rotterdam on charges of conspiring against the state, which led to four years in prison in the Netherlands before his eventual extradition back to the United States. He’d been in the Netherlands on a student visa, studying petroleum engineering and history.

“What exactly does conspiring against the state mean?”

“Keep reading.”

There was a short abstract detailing the charges. According to the Dutch authorities, Eli Pate had been involved in a plan to blow up sixteen ships in the Waalhaven harbor of the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port. Although he was aligned with members of a self-described environmental watch group, all parties agreed that he was not himself a member. Rather, he’d attempted to recruit them to his cause. Affidavits claimed that Pate’s express goal was to “make a statement” about the shipping industry, which was responsible for more air pollutants than all the cars in the world, he explained. Due to the fact that nobody had made any real progress with the plan-news of it was leaked to Dutch intelligence agencies before Pate had secured any recruits, let alone explosives-the prosecution didn’t garner as much attention as it might have. Following his prison stay, he was sent back to America, leaving behind an unfinished degree and a two-hundred-page thesis on the energy theories of Nikola Tesla.

“I wonder what that thesis reads like,” Mark said.

“I can ask our Amsterdam office to put together a file.”

“You really like saying that, don’t you? Our Amsterdam office.”

She grinned at him. She had a hell of a smile. Mark hadn’t seen much of it because she was all business most of the time, and he felt the same-this wasn’t a pleasure trip. He felt the same, at least, until he saw that smile. When the smile reached her eyes and they took on that beautiful dark light, he wanted to forget why they were there. He wanted to forget about Eli Pate and Janell Cole and even Garland Webb.

He wanted to forget about his wife.

“What?” Lynn said. Her smile was gone and she looked concerned.

“Sorry. Mind wandering.”

“Low blood sugar.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“Well, it sure is for me. We haven’t eaten all day. You’re the local guide. Surely you can find a decent meal in this town for us?”

“There’s a Mexican-and-pizza restaurant called Bogart’s that isn’t bad.”

She raised an eyebrow. “A Mexican-and-pizza restaurant called Bogart’s?”

Mark shrugged. “It’s Montana. We don’t need to make sense to the tourists.”

We. He’d said it easily, no hesitation, as if he belonged to the place. You can’t go home again, or so the saying goes. Bullshit, Mark thought. You just take it with you.

They walked down the street to Bogart’s, a brick building with a sign featuring Bogie’s face, and Lynn said, “You weren’t kidding. It’s really about him. Why?”

“I honestly have no idea. But the food was good once. It maybe still is.”

They went in and sat at the bar and Mark looked at the beer taps and saw that they had Moose Drool. He ordered one.

“Moose Drool,” Lynn said. “You actually wish to consume this. You’re even willing to pay for it, I gather. Unless the bartering system is employed here? Do I need to find some pelts and beads?”

“It’s a damned good beer. Now, my uncles drank Rainier, mostly. They didn’t have much interest in craft beer. Rainier they called fuel. ‘Markus, run in the gas station and grab us a case of fuel for the road.’”

The Moose Drool tasted the way he’d remembered, a brown ale with a smooth finish. Lynn ordered the same, took a drink, and gave a small nod indicating that it was at least palatable.

“How’d you end up with the Pinkertons, anyhow?” Mark said.

“Swung and missed on the FBI. Came out of law school and wanted to get into the Bureau but they didn’t take me. I didn’t blame them, really, I was straight out of school and didn’t have any other experience. I thought I’d beef up the résumé with private-sector work. I ended up just liking the private-sector work.”

“You enjoy it?”

“I enjoy it. It’s hell on relationships, though. I travel a lot, and I can’t talk about why I’m traveling. All the things that men expect women to tolerate, they don’t do a very good job of tolerating themselves.” She held up a hand. “Sorry.”

“No need to be. It sounded like the truth.”

She nodded. “So I like the job. Enough that I didn’t try to get into the Bureau again. I’ve been treated well, I’ve been promoted fast, I’ve gotten good cases. I didn’t love the Boca Raton assignment, but it was a step forward. Just not my scene.”

“Where are you from?”

“New Hampshire, originally. My first assignment was in Cleveland. You’d think it’d be hard to miss Cleveland, but I do. I miss the seasons. Florida, it’s hot or less hot, you know? You don’t feel the turnover. Spring comes, and it’s nice, but…”

“You don’t feel like you’ve earned it.”

She smiled and pointed at him. “That is exactly the problem. If you don’t have to work to get through winter, what difference does spring make?”

They ate and drank and talked about the intel report on Pate. Drank more. As the beer went down Mark began to feel looser about the town, that cold dread of arriving here going a little warmer, and then he was telling Lynn stories about his uncles. The good stories, the ones that always got laughs. They got plenty from her. He loved hearing that laugh. He didn’t tell her any of the bad stories, or the sad ones. He didn’t tell her any about his mother. Lynn didn’t ask either. She’d heard all she needed to from the deputy in Powell, probably. Mark was grateful that she was content to leave it there. Lauren always had been too.

“You said Ronny is dead,” Lynn said after he’d told a particular classic about Larry getting arrested for public intox. Larry had been cuffed and was being guided to the patrol car by a cop when Ronny walked leisurely across the street wearing a ski mask and carrying a shotgun, which, as one might expect, got the attention of the cop. Both activities were perfectly legal in Montana; it was an open-carry state, and although wearing a ski mask in July when it was damn near ninety degrees outside was strange, there wasn’t anything criminal about it. While Ronny was explaining his fears of sunburn and skin cancer to the officer, Larry simply walked away from the patrol car, still wearing his handcuffs. Mark cut the chain later that night with a hacksaw, which made life easier for Larry but not exactly problem-free.

Eventually Mark’s mother showed up and picked the lock. She was a Houdini with locks.

He left that part of the story out.

“Ronny is dead, yes,” he said. “Cancer took him young.”

“And Larry?”

“You heard the deputy today. Sounds like he’s in Sheridan.”

“But you don’t speak to him? Or…”

Mark shook his head and ordered a fresh beer. Lynn watched in silence.

“I don’t have communication with any of them.” He took a drink. “The act got old, Lynn. It just got old.”

That was as much as he could tell her. He couldn’t tell her what he was already feeling, and fearing-that he was home. That without Lauren and without his job, Florida had become foreign to him. That the smell of snow in the air on a day filled with sun and dry winds felt natural and comfortable, and that Mark suspected he could come back to this place very easily, come back and stay, but that the man who stayed here wouldn’t be much like the man who’d lived in Florida.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I’ve wasted enough of our time on old bullshit stories. We’ve got work to do, and tomorrow we’ll need to be up early.”

He was in bed but not asleep when she knocked. He got up and pulled on his jeans and a shirt but left it unbuttoned as he opened the door. She was standing there holding a six-pack of Rainier in one hand. She was wearing just a white tank top over jeans and it was too cold for that and the goose bumps stood out on her tanned skin.

“I thought you might need some fuel,” she said. Her gaze was steady on his at first, but after a moment, she looked away. “Sometimes I make bad guesses. If this is one of them, I apologize.”

“You’re not wrong,” he said. His voice was hoarse. He pushed the door wide and she stepped inside and set the beer on the little table by the window and started to free two cans from the plastic rings. She was awkward with the cans, knocked one onto its side. When she opened them, she closed her eyes at the snap and sigh of the released pressure. Then she kept her eyes closed and shook her head.

“I should go back to my own room.”

Please, don’t do that, Mark thought, but he said, “Why?”

“Because this stopped feeling professional to me sometime tonight, and I do not like it when I stop feeling professional. Because I am here to do a job.”

“We both are.”

She nodded and opened her eyes, looked at him with a gaze that showed the first traces of vulnerability he’d seen in her.

“You’re not what I thought,” she said. “Who I thought.”

“What does that mean?”

Instead of answering, she said, “I’m not wrong, am I? Not that you’d tell me if I was. It’s up to me to decide whether to trust you.”

Mark said, “Lynn? I don’t know what you think of me. What you trust or don’t. I’ve not lied to you, and I won’t.”

Still she was silent.

“If you think you should go,” he said, “then you need to go.”

She took a deep breath. “No harm in having a beer.”

“What harm are you worried about?”

She ignored the question, reaching back down for the beers as he stepped toward her. When she turned to hand him one, he was standing close, and for just a moment she paused, just long enough for a heart to skip a beat, and then he took the beer cans out of her hands and set them back on the table. She reached up and looped her arms around his neck. Her expression was both earnest and wary.

“A mistake?” she said.

“I usually am.”

They stood like that for a second, and then Mark leaned down and kissed her. Her lips were warm and soft and tasted faintly of beer, but that was good, that was right, that was Montana again. Home. The girls Mark remembered from here were not Lauren, and that was good.

Lynn slipped her hands inside his unbuttoned shirt and ran her palms over his stomach and up to his chest and drove an electric thrill into him that left him short of breath. He broke the kiss as she pushed the shirt off his shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She kept running her hands over his torso, but she was studying it too.

“What happened to you? You’re all cut up.”

“I crawled through a broken window.”

Lynn touched a band of scar tissue that ran across his stomach and up toward his shoulder, thick as a snake.

“That one is not fresh.”

“No.”

“How’d you get that?”

“A rope.”

“A rope?”

“I was a rafting guide for a while. I went over once and got tangled up.”

“Ouch.” She lowered her face to the scar and kissed it, then traced its length with the tip of her tongue. Though the feeling was sensual and wonderful, Mark pulled her back up. She started to speak but he kissed her, hard, before she could. He didn’t want to hear any more questions, because he didn’t want to tell her how many times his wife had kissed that scar. The body remembers whether the mind wants to or not.

Right now, he didn’t want to remember anything.

They moved to the bed in an awkward walk, laughing as they bumped into it and fell onto the mattress. Mark slipped his hand under her shirt and felt that beautiful dip in the small of her back, something that is entirely the province of women and is unfailingly sexy. She sat up and pulled her shirt off and then pulled his head to her breasts as she worked the button on his jeans with her free hand. They shed the rest of their clothes gracelessly, and then she closed her hand around him and guided him into her. She leaned back and made a soft sound, and if Mark could have frozen time right there, it would have been all right.

When she began to move, though, that was all right too.

They finished in a breathless hurry that first time, but they hadn’t even spoken yet, were just lying side by side, breathing hard, when she felt him begin to stiffen against her thigh again and she gave a low laugh.

“Well, now,” she said. “Right back at it, I see.”

Right back at it. This time was slower, and longer, and better. When they finished, the sheets were damp with sweat and they were both out of breath and she lay on top of him with her head on his chest and one leg hooked around his, and he thought of the way she’d fallen asleep against him on the plane and how he’d wanted her never to wake up and shift away.

And then he thought of Lauren. Inevitably. He could picture her and smell her and taste her, Lauren, who’d been dead for nearly two years, and whatever had been warm within him went cold and small.

You couldn’t cheat on the dead. But, Lord, you could certainly feel like you had. The heart and the mind do not always align.

Mark lay there stroking Lynn’s hair and feeling like a first-rate heel, in violation of both the memory of his dead wife and Lynn, because she deserved better, she deserved Mark’s mind to be empty of all thoughts that weren’t about her.

Then, as her breathing went deep and slow and she edged toward sleep, he thought that was an ignorant notion. He didn’t know who else was in Lynn’s mind, but he knew that it would be foolish-and arrogant-to believe that it had been just him. Everyone carries the past with them. It shifts and re-forms and adds layers, but it never leaves.

But now she slept easily, adjusting so that her arm and one leg were wrapped around him and her head was nestled against his shoulder. Mark realized that his Ambien was out of reach, and he didn’t want to disturb her, though he knew he’d have to at some point if he wanted to sleep. He hadn’t slept without the pills in two years. Right then, though, he was comfortable. Right then, he was as comfortable as he’d been in a long time. He thought he’d give it a while, and so he listened to her breathing and found himself matching his own breaths to hers.

Stop that, damn it. Those are the wrong breaths from the wrong woman.

But the right woman didn’t breathe anymore.

Soon he was asleep.

32

They’d stuck to the back roads after Janell killed the deputy. Sirens became audible not long after they left, but those had screamed north on the highway while Doug drove west on a narrow, winding lane. She tried not to look at the clock. This was going to cost them precious hours, and she’d waited on the reunion with Eli for so long that she could hardly bear the delay, wanted to keep speeding toward him.

She couldn’t bring danger with her, though.

Several times Doug slowed and suggested cars to take. She dismissed each of them, but she saw what he was looking for-an empty car and a dark house. That was troubling. His resolve was weakening.

“You’re only picking out houses that are dark,” she said. “Tell me why.”

“It should be obvious.”

“Evidently not. Explain.”

“Speed!” he snapped. “Get a new car, one without all the police in five states looking for it, and get the fuck out of here.”

“Hmm.” She pursed her lips. “So you want to gain two things: time and distance.”

“No shit.”

“Can you find the flaw in your solution, or do I need to point it out?”

He didn’t answer. She nodded. “Time and distance are joined for us, obviously. The more time we gain, the more distance. Now, you’re attempting to gain time by rushing. It’s the exact philosophy that created the problem with the deputy back there.”

“You killed him. That created the problem!”

“No. You were speeding, in a foolish attempt to gain distance and time. This is the underlying problem. You’re bringing the same approach to the current situation. If we steal a car from someone who isn’t home, how much time did we buy?”

“More than we’ve got now.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Well, we wouldn’t know. Depends how long until they got home and called it in.”

“Exactly. So maybe we gained a day, maybe twenty minutes. The unknown isn’t desirable.” She’d lost the sensation of Deputy Terrell’s pulse under her thumb, but the odor of his blood lingered.

Doug started to speak, to object, but she cut him off.

“Slow down. I want to look at this one.”

There was a steep gravel driveway angling away to the right, climbing a wooded hill. Through the trees, the lights of a house gleamed. It was high on a forested ridge and would barely have been visible if not for those lights.

“Turn in here.”

“Somebody’s home.”

“I’m not disputing that. Just make the turn.”

He wasn’t happy about it, but he pulled into the drive and they crunched over the gravel. Halfway up, dogs began to bark and howl. Lots of dogs.

“Terrible choice,” he said. “Listen to all that.”

“Anyone who can hear them now has heard them before.”

A vehicle came into view, parked in front of a shed, a small house beyond, kennels just past that. A half a dozen dogs, floppy-eared hounds of some sort, stood with their paws on the fence, howling. The vehicle was a giant SUV, a Tahoe or a Yukon, covered with dust, the tailgate a hideous array of bumper stickers pledging allegiance to dogs, guns, and God.

“Promising,” she said.

“How in the hell you figure? That thing will be even easier to spot than this frigging truck.”

“This feels like the home of a lonely soul. All those dogs.”

Doug hadn’t even cut the engine before the front door of the house opened and a man in a flannel shirt appeared on the porch, peering out at them.

“Shit. See what we got now?”

“Exactly what we need,” she said, climbing out of the truck.

The man on the porch looked to be about sixty, tall but with stooped shoulders and thinning white hair.

“Can I help you?” he called.

“I hope so! We’ve lost our dog. I thought he might have headed toward the sound of your pack here.”

“What kind of dog?”

“Beagle. A fat, dumb old beagle.” She laughed when she said it, and the man on the porch laughed with her.

“He light out after a rabbit?”

“Most likely.” She was close to the porch steps now, walking quickly. “You haven’t seen him? He was running through the woods right there.”

She pointed to the west, and he turned to squint speculatively into the trees when she came up the porch steps and drew her knife. He kept studying the woods.

“Usually my own would take to barking if they heard another dog,” he said, “so I’d figure he must have headed in the other direction, or he might have crossed the road on you and doubled back. I’ll help you look if you give me a minute to-”

When he turned, he saw the blood on her shirt. He started to voice a question, but then he noticed the blade and stood with mouth agape, the question forgotten.

“Walk inside, please,” she said. Behind her, Doug finally got out of the truck. The man’s eyes went to him. He didn’t move toward the door.

She said, “The choices you make in the next few seconds are important. I’ll ask you again to walk inside the house.”

He went to it, with her just a step behind. Inside, the place lived up to the promise of its exterior. From the dirty dishes stacked in the sink to the jackets and boots in the corner and even to the smell, there was no indication that anyone lived here except for him and the dogs.

There was an Adirondack chair in front of a cold fireplace. “Sit there,” she said. Doug had appeared behind her, gun in hand, and he closed the door and set to work on the blinds. The white-haired man watched him with far more apprehension than he’d shown her, seeming to view Doug as the primary threat. The bull-moose approach of males, always deferring first to gender, then to size. Likewise, the gun scared him more than the knife when what mattered was not the weapon but the willingness to use it.

“Sit,” she repeated, and he finally followed her instruction, talking while he moved.

“Only cash I’ve got is in my wallet on the counter. Every gun is in the cabinet. It’s locked, but the key’s tucked on top. Take what you want.”

“We will,” she assured him. “But first we need to talk.”

The natural incline of the Adirondack chair forced him to lean back and look up at her, the height difference reversed, the power differential self-evident. She stepped forward, slipped her left foot through the gap between the arm of the chair and the seat, then her right, and settled onto his lap. He flinched and made a small whining sound, like a whipped dog. She smiled. Reached up with her left hand, which was still streaked with rust-colored dried blood, and stroked his cheek. His jaw trembled beneath her hand. She ran her fingers through his thin, wispy hair until she found enough for a solid handhold and tightened her fist. She pulled the hair at his scalp, forcing his head back. She kept her eyes on his while she brought the blade up to his throat and, with a precise hand, trimmed a few whiskers away from his Adam’s apple. He made the whining sound again and there was a sudden wet warmth beneath her thigh as his bladder released.

“I think you’re ready to be honest, aren’t you?” she said, releasing her tight hold on his hair and stroking his head, the blade still resting against his Adam’s apple.

He wanted to nod but the knife at his throat prevented that, so he had to speak. He gasped out the word “Yes” as tears formed in his eyes.

“What’s your name?”

“Gregory. Gregory Ardachu.”

“Okay, Greg. Does anyone else live with you? Or is it just you and the dogs?” Still stroking his head.

“Just me.”

“Good. You see, time is a concern to us. Replacing the unknown with a known. If we were to take your truck, for example, we would want to know how long we could drive it safely. Do you understand?”

Again he tried to nod, and this time he actually moved enough to press against the blade and open a thin red line on his own throat. He was that desperate to please. This was exactly what Eli understood so well-a man properly motivated by fear would do damn near anything, even if it amounted to a self-inflicted wound.

Doug was still and silent behind her. The white-haired man kept flicking glances in his direction. He was conditioned to fear a large man with a large gun, even while a small woman with a small knife was directly in front of him. Such was the way of his world. But that was a terrible mistake.

“The next question is critical,” Janell said. “Honesty will make all the difference.”

She paused, studying his face. He was breathing in quick little jerks that made his lips twitch. She could feel his racing pulse under her legs.

“If we were to tie you up and leave you here,” she said, “healthy and unharmed, how long would it be until you were found? You need to be very sure this answer is true.”

It took him a few seconds to steady himself enough to answer. “Two days,” he gasped. “In two days…friend coming for his dog. I’ve been…training the dog.”

“Two days! That’s wonderful. Did you hear that, Doug? Do you understand how much better this is, to replace the unknown with the known?”

“It’s great,” Doug said. His impatience-or was it fear?-was evident in his voice. “Get his keys and we’ll tie him up and we’ll go.”

“Does that sound good?” she asked the white-haired man. “We’ll borrow the truck, and you’ll wait here? It’s not ideal for you, but…” She shrugged. “Consider the alternatives.”

“Kitchen counter.” The words jerked out between his hitching breaths. “Keys on counter.”

Doug moved into the kitchen, and there was a metallic jingle. “Got ’em.”

Janell hadn’t looked away from those watery, terrified eyes.

“So all we have to do now is tie him.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a problem with that.”

“What?”

“I don’t have any rope,” she said, and then she drew the blade through his throat.

33

Mark registered the weight and warmth of Lynn’s body just before he woke, and for an instant he felt like he was surfacing from a long, terrible nightmare and that the woman pressed against him was his wife, the bad dream finally over.

Then he opened his eyes and saw the dimly lit motel room and reality returned just as he heard his wife say, Get out.

The words were crystal clear, the voice unmistakable, undeniable, as real as the motel room he was in, and he sat up with a jerk and looked around.

Empty, of course.

But still…

Get out.

It’s what she would have said, should have said. He was in bed with another woman. What in the hell else would Lauren have said to that? She’d have been more likely to shoot him than speak to him in that circumstance, but if she’d paused for any words…

Get out.

He had the fleeting thought that the imagined voice hadn’t been angry, just urgent. No rage, not even a reprimand, but a clear command.

The mind played cruel tricks.

Or maybe it was the heart.

He shifted away from Lynn, and she murmured what might have been an objection but then fell back asleep before giving full voice to it. If she’d spoken clearly and asked him to stay, he would have. But now he was awake and she was asleep and he felt like an intruder in the bed.

He slipped out from under the covers, dressed quietly, then walked to the table, took one of the warming Rainiers, and stepped outside. Without the sun there to even put up a fight, the frigid mountain air had won out, and he could see his breath. He sat on the sidewalk and drank the beer and told himself that he’d done nothing wrong.

He wondered how long it would be before he really felt that way.

With Lynn, maybe not so long. Maybe not so long as he’d believed.

He wasn’t sure whether to get back into bed with her or get in the car and drive away, put distance between them, remove possibility. It wasn’t the sort of thing someone should be torn over, but he was.

What do you really want, Markus? What are you hiding? Deep down in the darkest corner of the well, what do you want?

“Leave me alone,” he whispered, and he wasn’t talking to Lynn. He was talking to Lauren. If she couldn’t come back, why wouldn’t she just fucking leave? Didn’t she understand how damn cruel it was to stalk him like a shadow, invisible to the rest of the world but weighing on every choice he made?

Lord, if only you could cleanse your heart. Wouldn’t that be the way to live.

He got to his feet, stood in the cold wind and said, “I’m sorry,” and this time he wasn’t sure which one of them he was talking to. Both, maybe.

He looked at the closed door to the motel room, where Lynn lay waiting for him-or not; how was he to know whether she truly wanted him there?-and then he started to walk. There wasn’t any purpose to it, but the odd dream-waking sensation that Lauren was with him had been so disturbing that he needed to clear his head before he went back inside. He’d dreamed of her before, of course, but this time had been so different because there was no visual, just the voice, and he was sure he’d been fully awake when he heard it.

It reminded him of the caves again, and that was bad. On the list of memories Mark wanted to forget, his last exchange with his wife and his hypothermia-induced hallucinations in the cold caverns beneath Indiana’s frozen ground jockeyed for first place.

He put his hand in his pocket while he walked and found the dive permit that he always carried, the Lauren talisman, and he thought again of Jay Baldwin, of his bizarre behavior. Walking as he was, with no destination, Mark thought Jay’s house seemed as good a place to go as any.

It was only a few blocks away, and Mark had no trouble finding it because it was the only house in town with the lights on.

He checked his watch. Two in the morning. The expansive glass made Jay’s silhouette visible, and Mark could see him standing at the window, looking out at the dark mountains like a lonely sentry.

Leave the man alone, Markus, he thought, but still he walked on toward the house. Baldwin spotted him when he was coming up the drive; the reaction was evident, a stiffening followed by a rapid move away from the windows, and then the door was open and Jay’s voice called out, “Who’s there?”

“Another guy who can’t sleep,” Mark said. “Just like you, it seems.” He kept on walking, and Jay Baldwin turned and looked over his shoulder nervously, as if there was someone else in the house with him, and then he stepped out into the cold and pulled the door shut and hurried down the driveway.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Damn it, get away from here.”

Even as he spoke, he was looking over his shoulder, at the house, and he had his hand on Mark’s arm now, pushing him back. The resistance was strange-he wasn’t trying to force Mark straight down the driveway to the street, he was guiding him at an angle across the pavement and into the yard. The snow was slick underfoot, and Mark struggled to keep his balance. The whole while, Jay Baldwin had his eyes on the house, though. He stopped abruptly just outside the branches of a white-barked pine in the side yard, then pivoted to look at the road, into the darkness behind the tree, and back to the house. It was as if he was triangulating their position somehow, trying to locate a precise spot.

“What are you doing, coming here in the middle of the night?”

For the first time he looked at Mark, apparently content that whatever danger he’d perceived from the house was no longer a factor. Just over Mark’s head, a snow-laden branch waved in the breeze, the long needles making faint, cold contact with his scalp.

“I didn’t expect you’d be awake,” Mark said. “Let alone standing guard. What’s going on with you?”

“Get the hell out of here before I call the police.”

The pine needles swept back and forth over Mark’s scalp, spreading its chill to him, stray snowflakes falling on his neck.

“Call them.”

Jay Baldwin was silent.

Mark reached for his cell phone. “I’ll do it myself, then.”

Jay stepped forward and caught his arm. His grip was strong. With his face close to Mark’s, he said, “Don’t do that,” and his eyes were fierce.

“Okay. Let go of my arm, I’ll put the phone down, and we’ll talk.”

“We’re not going to talk.”

“Then I’m making the call.”

A tear leaked out of the corner of Jay Baldwin’s left eye. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. Please just go. Please.”

The wind picked up and the pine boughs struck Mark’s head harder, and he did the natural thing and tried to step sideways, clearing himself out from under. Jay grabbed his arm again, and this time his grip was painful.

“Don’t step over there.”

Mark looked at him and then back at the house. “Are there cameras on you?”

No answer.

“You had a little plastic chip in your hand earlier,” Mark said, and Jay released Mark’s arm and stepped back fast, as if the statement had burned him. He opened his mouth but he didn’t speak, and Mark felt strangely close to him right then. He put the cell phone back in his pocket and took out the old dive permit and held it up.

“This belonged to my wife. She was murdered. I don’t give a shit about your power lines, Jay. I’m looking for someone with information about my wife’s murder, and that person might intersect with your issues. That’s my interest. I’m shooting straight with you. Why don’t you try to do the same?”

Mark was wholly unprepared for Jay Baldwin’s response. He slid down onto the pavement like something melting, fell on his ass, and began to cry without making a sound. The tears dripped down his cheeks and he stared past Mark at the empty street and he said, “Please, God, please, don’t do this to me.”

“Mr. Baldwin…what’s going on? Tell me, and I can help.”

He shook his head. His eyes had no point of focus. Whatever he was seeing was out beyond the visible. He said, “What would you do to get your wife back?”

“Anything.”

Jay nodded and drew a breath that shook in his lungs like dust blown down a dry street. “And if you had the chance to go back and save her? If you could have made a deal to keep from losing her? What would you have been willing to do?”

“Same answer. Anything. Whatever was asked.”

Jay blinked the tears out of his eyes and focused on Mark’s face.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Then leave me alone. Because, brother? I’ve still got a chance. If you leave me alone, I’ve got a chance. But you’ve got to leave, and fast.”

Mark knew without question that if he pressed Jay right then, he’d break. But instead, he said, “You really believe this? That whatever you’ve got in front of you right now changes for the better if I walk away?”

Jay nodded.

Mark turned and walked back down the empty street.

34

He went back to the motel, shaken, ready to wake Lynn so he could tell her what had happened. Then he opened the motel door and stepped inside and saw that she was gone.

The sheets were thrown back on the bed, and the imprint of her body remained. He wondered if she’d been annoyed to wake and find that he’d left, if she’d taken that to mean something he hadn’t intended.

You see, Lynn, I heard my dead wife’s voice, and she didn’t love the look of the situation, so I decided to take a walk…

He left the room and went back outside. Her own room was next door, still dark, as if she’d just changed beds and gone back to sleep alone, a silent suggestion for him to do the same, and he felt guilty for leaving now, for being gone so long.

When he was close enough, he saw a faint blue light on in the room-a computer monitor. She was awake, and working. He knocked and waited.

When there was no answer, he knocked again, louder, and said, “Lynn?”

Still nothing. He sidestepped from the door to the window, shielded his eyes, and looked inside. She wasn’t in front of the computer, and the bed seemed undisturbed.

He stepped back and looked at his own room as if he might have missed her in there. The bathroom? No. The room had been empty. That one, and this one. And the Tahoe was still parked in front of his door.

“No,” he said aloud, his voice calm and reasonable. No, she couldn’t be missing. He’d just left her. The small town was silent and safe.

Like Cassadaga?

He tested the door handle. Locked. The motel wasn’t of the key-card-and-dead-bolt variety, though. It was old-school, thumb lock and chain. Mark’s mother could have gone through it in three seconds.

It took him about twenty. On the fourth try he shimmed the lock with a credit card and stepped into the room and saw that the laptop wasn’t all she’d left behind.

Her purse was on the table, her computer bag on the floor below. On the nightstand was the folder with the printouts of photos of Eli Pate and Janell Cole that she’d shown the deputy and the post office clerk.

She went looking for you. That has to be it. She saw you were gone and went looking for you.

That was hard to believe, though. Mark had just walked the length of the town’s main street. If she’d been looking for him, he was hard to miss. And why wouldn’t she have taken the car?

He went to the desk and looked at the open computer. The screen was still lit because the laptop was open and plugged in. As long as there was a constant power feed, the computer didn’t need to conserve battery. There was even music playing, though the headphones were plugged in and so the sound was soft. The music would have helped to keep the computer from entering sleep mode. Between the wall plug and the running application, the computer thought she was still there.

He walked around the desk so he could see the screen clearly, thinking it might tell him something, give some evidence of whether she’d returned here after leaving his room, and then he stopped moving and his breath caught.

There was a photograph on the monitor-she’d been churning through an album of surveillance photos, and while this was one he hadn’t seen, he knew it all the same.

He was looking at his mother’s face for the first time in nearly two decades.

35

She was only in her midfifties now, and she didn’t look even that old. She could have passed for his sister instead of his mother. In his mind, he’d advanced the image and turned her into an old woman. In reality, time had treated her well. She wore long sleeves, so you couldn’t even see the tracks on her arms.

Mark sat down and looked at the computer and shook his head. He wanted to say no, to deny the image’s very existence, as he had when he saw Dixie Witte’s body under those basement steps. His mother could not be involved with this. The family he had left behind all those years ago, they could not have anything to do with the death of his wife, a woman they’d never known, never seen.

There was no way.

But the photo, just like Dixie Witte’s unblinking eyes, stared him down.

After sitting in numb silence for several moments, he scrolled down. Below the photograph was a text summary from an unnamed investigator.

Real name is Violet Robin Novak, but currently uses only first, Violet, and provides no surname. Tells people that surnames have no purpose. It appears that she met Eli Pate in Cody, Wyoming. She does not own a home or vehicle and has no driver’s license. Her only known family in the area is a brother, Lawrence, and when she sees him she does so without Pate. Only other known family is a son, not local, and there does not seem to be contact between them: Markus R. Novak, of St. Petersburg, Florida, age thirty-three, father unknown. There is no indication that Markus Novak has been in Montana or Wyoming in the past decade.

Violet Novak was living in a motor home owned by Scott Shields, fifty-two, of Cody, Wyoming, when she met Eli Pate. Witnesses suggest that Violet Novak ended a romantic relationship with Shields after meeting Pate. What income she has is derived from providing what she calls “spiritual counseling” and giving palm readings. There are some in the area who are loyal customers, and they were distressed when she left Cody.

Friends paint a picture of Novak’s beliefs as being very ripe for Eli Pate’s exploitation. Although she is apparently of Germanic descent, she insists that she is of Nez Perce ancestry, though when pressed she will back down the claim to “spiritual ancestry.” She is an intense supporter of virtually any environmental cause, though she does not appear to put much effort into the study of these issues. A blanket supporter, easily swayed. Similarly, she is vocally opposed to many industrial efforts in the West but does not exhibit a great deal of understanding of the efforts she opposes. In these ways, she seems a perfect target for Pate, and with her existing beliefs and practices as well as her local contacts, she may be beneficial to his recruiting efforts. Her previous existence was already essentially “off the grid” through circumstance if not choice, so converting her on this front will not be difficult for him.

She was last sighted with Pate in Lovell, though their current location remains unknown. Her brother claimed no knowledge of Wardenclyffe and said he had not seen Violet in over a year, but she visited him just last week at his current residence (see supplemental), when the attached photographs were taken. She was alone for the visit, which lasted slightly over an hour, and drove there in a truck registered to Scott Shields. Visual contact with her was lost on Highway 301 near Belfry, when it appeared likely that she became aware of surveillance.

Both criminal records and acquaintance interviews suggest that while she has demonstrated little respect for the law or concern over legal consequences, she has always been a nonviolent offender and displays a general dislike of violence.

Further intelligence efforts on Markus Novak have shown no indication that he’s lying to you re contact with his mother. He’s a tough trace, very consistent in recent years but an absolute mess before that. In the past eight years he’s had two addresses; in the eight prior, he had twenty-three at a minimum. Most of those were in the West or Pacific Northwest. His criminal history is undistinguished, mostly misdemeanor charges stemming from fights or alcohol incidents. After he left the West, the only story of note, besides his wife’s murder, is his recent activity in Garrison, Indiana, with which you’re already acquainted. He appears to have reached a point of stability once in Florida, and there’s no evidence of efforts, successful or unsuccessful, to contact Violet. There is also no evidence of association or overlap with Pate, Cole, or Oriel until his arrival in Cassadaga. His ignorance of the phrase rise the dark appears genuine based on his interviews with police investigators in his wife’s homicide. With all that said, you should still consider him high risk.

He tried to open Lynn’s e-mail, but it was password-protected. He searched for other files, tried them, found the same problem. The only thing he could access was the file she’d left open before she came to see him. The last thing she’d read before she made a decision about him.

Consider him high risk.

He couldn’t locate the supplemental report referenced with the picture, but he didn’t need to. The surveillance photo was enough. It had been shot with a long-range lens, and his mother occupied most of the frame, either because the photographer had cared about nothing else or because he’d been trying to conceal her location, but if it was the latter, he would have needed a much tighter focus. When you were shooting pictures of a woman in a town with a population of fewer than two hundred, you had to be damn sure to hide all landmarks. In the picture, over her shoulder was a single sign that told Mark all he needed to know. It was a white square with the letters M and S painted on it, the S falling away from the M. There were no words, but he didn’t need them, not with that sign. It was Miner’s Saloon in Cooke City. Sixty miles away from where Mark sat, just over the Beartooths. Cooke City and Silver Gate had been frequent retreats for his family, both because his uncles loved the area and because the only police presence was second-day sheriff’s service from Gardiner. When things heated up, Mark’s family ended up in Cooke City more often than not.

He could not bring himself to believe that this was connected to anything. Not to Janell Cole, not to Garland Webb, not to Lauren. It couldn’t be.

Further intelligence efforts on Markus Novak have shown no indication that he’s lying to you re contact with his mother.

Mark drew a breath in through his teeth and looked at the window. The sidewalks were empty, the town dark and silent. Somewhere not far from this place, maybe just over the pass and in Cooke City, his mother waited. He’d kept his wife from any contact with her. Always.

This is a lie. All of it. Some sort of trick, Garland Webb’s work. Because the man in that report is not the man who lost his wife in Cassadaga. Not anymore.

Get out, his dead wife’s voice had whispered, and he had left, and now Lynn was gone and his mother remained.

His hand trembled a little as he withdrew his cell phone and called Jeff London.

Jeff’s groggy first words were “Please tell me you’re not in another jail.”

Not jail. Worse. Mark said, “Jeff, I need a big favor, and I need it fast.”

“That always seems to be the way.”

“I’m going to have to relay this information to Montana police in a hurry.”

Jeff’s tone changed instantly. “What happened?”

“I came here with another investigator whose case involved people associated with Garland Webb. She’s gone. I think she was taken. I need to speak to somebody who knows what she was working on. I think she lied to me, or at least withheld details. She’s with the Pinkerton office in Boca Raton. You have a contact with them?”

“Yes. A guy named William Oliver. High on the food chain.”

“Get him for me. The higher up, the better. His investigator’s name is Lynn Deschaine. D-e-s-c-h-a-i-n-e. He needs to know she’s missing, and he needs to help me with the police.”

“I’ll call back in five minutes.”

It took him fifteen and they passed like an hour. Mark tried to determine how long he’d been out of sight of the motel. Thirty minutes? Forty-five? The walk to Jay’s, the conversation, then back. That was all.

In that time, she’d vanished.

The phone finally rang. “Will he help?” Mark asked without preamble.

“He can’t.”

“Bullshit, Jeff, this isn’t about confidential client information. I think his investigator has been kidnapped!”

“She’s not his investigator. Nobody by the name of Lynn Deschaine works for the agency or ever has,” Jeff said. “Nobody named Deschaine, period.”

Mark didn’t say anything. He sat there in front of Lynn’s computer with the phone to his ear and couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. She was a Pinkerton. He’d called her from the card, they’d joked about her agency, she’d gotten information from their Amsterdam office.

Jeff said, “Did you see an ID for her? Any proof of her name?”

“Just a business card,” Mark said, but then he shook his head. “No, wait. We boarded a plane together. I didn’t look at her ID, but I saw the boarding pass. That’s her name, Jeff. I know who she is.”

“Well, they don’t.”

Mark rose from the chair and picked up her purse. Jeff was speaking on the other end of the line, asking a question, but it didn’t register. Mark rifled through the bag, found the wallet, saw her driver’s license. Lynn Deschaine, of Florida.

“I’ve got the right person,” he began, but then he flipped past the license and fell silent.

There was another identification card in the mix, and it had been issued by the Department of Homeland Security.

36

They brought the new hostage in during the middle of the night. When the door opened, Sabrina awoke with a jerk and gasp. Then she heard rattling chains that were not her own. In the darkness the source wasn’t visible, just those rattling chains, like one of Charles Dickens’s ghosts.

A battery lantern clicked on and she saw them in the doorway: Eli Pate and Garland Webb and, between them, a handcuffed, dark-haired woman who looked like she was drunk, eyes open but unable to support herself.

Not drunk, though. Drugged. The woman was seeing exactly as much of the cabin as Sabrina had when they’d brought her in here-nothing.

Sabrina sat up on the air mattress and pulled herself back against the wall. Eli Pate set the lantern down by the door and it spread Garland Webb’s massive shadow against the wall, a towering shape. He held the woman with ease when Eli released her, supporting her entire body weight with one hand.

Eli said, “Sorry to disturb your rest, but we have unanticipated company!”

His genteel tone was as steady as ever but Sabrina had the sense that it was taking more effort than usual for him to achieve it, that his actual mood was many shades darker and that the new woman was a problem, not part of the plan.

Garland dropped the woman without interest, like a bag of garbage, and then he unfastened one of the handcuffs and clipped it to a free bolt in the wall and snapped it shut. The dark-haired woman followed the motion with her eyes, but too slowly. She was looking at the bolt in the wall several seconds after she’d been chained to it.

Eli knelt and put two fingers under Sabrina’s chin and turned her face to his.

“We’re in the midst of an acceleration. Unanticipated and undesired, but, as they say, man plans and God laughs. Do you believe that?”

It was clear that he wanted an answer, so she said, “Yes.”

“I do not. I believe all that man needs to do is listen. We’ve lost that ability. Most of us. Fortunately for you, Sabrina, you’re in one of the few places on the planet where there is a man who both listens and hears.” He paused. “It will move fast now, Sabrina. How reliable is your husband? How skilled?”

“What are you doing to Jay?”

“The only question that matters, Sabrina-how much does he love you?”

She didn’t answer. Eli looked into her face for a long time and then nodded.

“I hope you’ve pleased him, Sabrina. I hope you’ve been the wife of his dreams. He needs that inspiration now.”

The cabin door opened again. Violet, with a bottle of water in each hand. She looked questioningly at Eli and he nodded and stepped aside. Garland Webb had moved away, the obedient guard dog in the shadows, and Sabrina couldn’t bring herself to look in his direction.

Violet crossed the room in the slanted lantern light and set two water bottles on the floor, pushed one to Sabrina, kept the other in her right hand. She used her left to force the new woman’s head up. Violet tilted the bottle and splashed some water on her face, and the woman blinked and spluttered.

“Drink, dear. Drink.”

But she didn’t drink. Instead, she blinked, and recognition came into her eyes for the first time. Not just of the circumstances, but real recognition, and Sabrina, watching in astonishment, thought, She knows Violet.

Violet didn’t seem to know her, though. She exhorted the woman once more to drink and had the bottle pressed gently to her lips when the woman spoke.

“Your son lied.”

Violet lowered the water bottle, her face stone still and pale. “What did you say?”

“You talk to him,” the new woman slurred, her words thick. “You talk to him. And he lies. He left me for them. For you. He knew you were coming. And he left.”

“You’re mistaken,” Violet said. “I have no…”

Sabrina was waiting on her to say son or family, and she would have accepted either. To picture this woman as a mother was both difficult and disturbing. Violet fell silent, though, the sentence unfinished, and then the new woman spoke again.

“Markus.”

Violet dropped the water bottle.

Eli Pate had been standing near the door, watching, but suddenly he was on them again, kneeling just in front of Sabrina but with all his attention on the new woman.

“You were with him? With Markus?”

Violet said, “Don’t ask her that. She’s confused. She’s not-”

His stare silenced her. He turned from her back to the new woman and reached out and slapped her, a hard strike that triggered another blink and a refocusing of the eyes.

“You came here with Markus?”

“You know that,” she mumbled.

“That is a lie,” Violet said. Her usually distanced, daydreamer eyes were nightmare-focused now, staring down a monster.

Eli said, “Where is he?”

The new woman said, “With you.”

The impenetrable calm he usually wore was obliterated now, his frustration clear. He looked like he wanted to hit her again but didn’t. Instead, he turned to Violet.

“She believes it,” he said. “You can see that. She’s half out of her mind now, but she remembers him. Because he was the last one with her. We know she was not alone. Not during the day. It was him.”

Violet shook her head. “I haven’t spoken to him in years. You know that.”

“And yet he’s here,” Eli said.

“Then he came for him.” She pointed at Garland Webb.

For a long time, the cabin was silent as the three of them stood staring at one another in the dim light, completely ignoring the two women handcuffed to the wall beside them. When the silence was finally broken, it was by Eli.

“If he came for Garland,” he said, “then he shall have him.”

Violet said, “You promised me that no harm would come to him.”

“Does this look like a place of harm to you?”

Violet looked at the two women chained to the wall, one with fresh blood trickling down from a split lip, and said, “Of course not.”

37

Mark didn’t even try to go to Jay Baldwin’s door this time. He just returned to the same spot beside the white-barked pine, standing so close that the boughs touched his head, and waited. It took all of ten seconds for Jay to open the front door. When he reached Mark, he looked like he didn’t know whether to punch him or cry.

Mark didn’t give him a chance to do either. He just held up the photograph of Eli Pate.

“Is this the guy who has you so scared?”

He didn’t answer, but his face said more than words could have.

Mark said, “You asked me what I would do if I had another chance with my wife. I’m here to give you the same chance, but it’s going to have to be fast and you’ve got to talk to me. There are going to be a bunch of police in this town soon. I’m here to warn you of that and tell you that I haven’t mentioned your name. In exchange, I need to know what in the hell the deal is here. I can’t leave you alone. Not now. A woman is missing, and it’s because of this guy, and you know something about it.”

“You can’t tell the police about me. You can’t.”

“Then you’ve got to tell me why.”

Jay’s voice was softer when he said, “You were right. They’ve got cameras inside. I finally found where. Thanks for going back to this place and not the door.”

“Who is watching you?” Mark said. “Is it Pate or somebody else?”

Jay took out his cell phone and fumbled with it and for a moment Mark thought he was making a call. Then he shoved it toward Mark. On the screen was a photograph of a woman with a disoriented, foggy gaze. She wore a blue nightgown and her hair was disheveled and there was a handcuff on her right wrist.

“That’s my wife.”

It took Mark a moment to find his voice, and when he did, it was ragged. He said, “I’m not taking any of your options off the table. I promise you that.”

Jay Baldwin nodded without a word and put the phone back in his pocket.

“Let’s talk fast,” Jay said. “They’ll notice if I’m outside too long. Trust me.”

They stood in the cold dark while Jay Baldwin told Mark what he knew of Eli Pate, told the story of the night of the vandalism on the high-voltage lines and how he’d returned home to find Pate present and his wife missing. He told him of the ride to Chill River and the video of his wife in shackles. He wept while he told it.

“He sends pictures, and video clips. She’s alive; she doesn’t seem hurt. She’s still alive. That’s why I can’t…I just can’t risk doing anything. If you’d met him, if you’d seen that man’s eyes or heard him talk, you’d know. You’d know.”

Mark said, “The woman who was working with me is gone, Jay. We were together just a few hours ago, and then I left and came up here, and by the time I got back she was gone. She’s a federal agent, by the way. Not a private detective. I didn’t know that myself. But when I say there are going to be police all over this, we are talking big-league ball. You might have to cooperate. But right now I need to know how they knew we were in town. Did it come from you?”

He looked away, his cheeks wet with tears.

“Jay…I just need the answer.”

“Yes.” His voice was choked. “He calls, and he watches. He told me what would happen if I lied, and so I told him…I told him that you’d come by. I told him what you’d asked about. And what you were driving.”

What they were driving. That was all it would have taken. Red Lodge was a small town with only a few motels. They’d parked the Tahoe directly in front of their rooms.

“Lynn Deschaine didn’t disappear tonight without his help,” Mark said. “So he won’t be surprised when the police hit town, and he won’t be surprised if they find their way to you. I think he probably trusts you to say the right things.”

“You’re not going to tell them?” Jay’s face was so desperate it hurt to look at him.

“I’m not going to close any doors for you, Jay, but I don’t know that you’re making the right choice either.”

“It’s the best I have,” Jay whispered. “You think I haven’t thought about it? It’s all I think about, every minute, but the thing is…I believe him.” He was wearing just a T-shirt and the night was cold, but his shiver had nothing to do with the weather. “When he says that I have only one choice? I believe him. If you’d ever met him, you would too.”

“So you’re going to do it. You’re going to try to shut that place down.”

“As long as I know he has Sabrina, I am going to do what he asks.”

Mark did not condemn him for this. If someone had told Mark that he could have Lauren back if he blew up a power plant, his only response would have been Where’s the fuse? There was absolutely no way Mark could blame Jay for his decision, but he also didn’t think it would work. If Jay Baldwin was going to see his wife again, it wouldn’t be because he’d followed Eli Pate’s instructions. That wasn’t Mark’s call to make, though. He wasn’t going to take the choice away from Jay either. He couldn’t bear to.

“When are you supposed to do it?” he said.

“I don’t know. Soon. That’s all he told me.”

“Okay. So you’ve got no timeline, and until then he watches your movements with the GPS chip and cameras, and he calls you to check in.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea where he is?”

“I don’t even know who he is. I just came home one day and he was here. It was like being picked by the devil.” He’d taken to rubbing his hands together, the muscles in his forearms bunching. “Tell me something-do you think he’s alone?”

“No.”

That dismayed Jay. “You know anything about who’s with him?”

“The man who killed my wife.”

The wind gusted and tousled Jay’s hair and flapped his T-shirt around him and he looked into Mark’s eyes and then away, and for a moment Mark thought he was going to slide down to the pavement again as he had before. The more Jay had heard, the stronger he’d seemed-until Mark’s last disclosure.

Mark said, “I’m leaving you to your choice, Jay. I don’t know if the police will come for you or not. They know that the woman who was with me is missing, but I don’t know if they have any idea that we came here. You were my idea, not hers.”

“How did you know?”

“Because I’ve been you,” Mark said. “A version of you, at least. When do you think Pate will call next?”

“I’m not sure. But he will. Maybe an hour. Maybe two.”

“When he does, you tell him that I’ve gone to Lovell to find him. You don’t know my name, but you do know that I’m in Lovell looking for him. You’re going to tell that much of a lie for me. It’s not so much to ask, and it’ll help you. I think I’ve got a shot at him, Jay. A better one than most, probably.”

“Where are you really going?”

Mark shook his head. “I’m letting you keep your secrets, Jay, because I understand your reasons. You gotta let me keep mine.”

He left then and got into the Tahoe. Back in town, he could see the lights of a single police car. Jeff had made the call, at Mark’s request, and now the locals were doing their preliminary work. It wouldn’t be long until the Red Lodge police realized they were overmatched.

Lynn Deschaine, Special Agent, Department of Homeland Security.

No, it would not be long at all.

Mark pulled onto 212 and looked to the right, where the Beartooths loomed in the darkness. The quickest way to Cooke City was to follow 212 over the pass, but even though there wasn’t a trace of snow in Red Lodge and the temperature had been in the sixties during the day, he knew that there was no chance the pass was open. Where it crested at nearly eleven thousand feet, there would be snowpack as tall as three men. In a good year, they got it open by Memorial Day. Sometimes it was closer to July.

You could still get to Cooke City, though. The Chief Joseph highway was open. It took longer than 212, but you could get there.

Mark left Red Lodge and headed into the mountains in search of an uncle he hadn’t seen in more than fifteen years.

38

The white-haired man with the hounds in the kennel hadn’t even finished bleeding out before Doug began to fall apart. They were in the yard, and Janell was busy transferring their gear from the red truck to the GMC Yukon that reeked of wet dog fur. Working alone, because he was standing in the driveway, bitching.

“This was never part of it,” he said as she shoved past him with another bag. “What happened with the cop-okay, maybe you needed to do it, or felt like you needed to. But inside that house? That was fucking murder.”

“Guilty as charged.” She slammed the bag into the tailgate. She’d added all of the dead man’s weapons, which was not an insignificant arsenal. He had four shotguns, two rifles, three pistols, and plenty of ammunition for all of them. There’d been three hundred dollars in cash as well. Cash and guns were good-always useful, obviously, but she’d also thought they would appease Doug, the necessary spoils of the war he believed in.

It wasn’t working. He hadn’t even helped her search the house. He’d spent his time in the living room, standing in front of the corpse as if he didn’t understand what had happened.

“We could’ve tied him up, just as you said. It wouldn’t have changed anything. We’d still have had two days. The only difference now is you’ve made us a date with the electric chair. That’s all you did.”

She didn’t bother to tell him that after she’d killed the deputy, that date had already been arranged. Instead, she tossed another bag into the Yukon, turned to face him, and tried to find a last reserve of patience. It was like sifting through sand in search of water.

“We’ve been working toward this moment for nine months,” she said.

“Not this moment. This was never a moment I dreamed of!”

“Everyone else is in motion. Every…one…else. We’re already running behind. The world will change in the next twenty-four hours, and where do you want to be when it happens?”

He stood with his jaw slack, breathing through his mouth. A car passed on the road below the house, the headlights throwing fast shafts of light through the trees, and though it drove on without slowing, it was a reminder that police might be patrolling nearby. They were wasting time, and meanwhile another band of followers was gathering with Eli, where she belonged.

“I suppose we can wait here,” she said. “We can sit down and talk through all of this. Discuss what was planned and what was necessary. Argue the semantics of warfare. But I’d rather not be having a fucking philosophical debate when the police arrive.”

He shook his head. His hands opened and closed at his sides-tightening into fists, relaxing, tightening. The only way he could express himself, through his hands. She had warned Eli of this. Doug Oriel was a physical titan, and a mental child.

“It’s time to run,” she said. “I’m going, with or without you. You want to head south while I go north, take the red truck and give it your best shot. You’ll be in jail before noon, and I’ll be operating as planned.”

“Nothing is as planned.”

The dogs had stopped barking and howling and now paced their fence lines uneasily. She was sure they had smelled their owner’s death in the air and were curious about their own fates. How pathetic, that through smell alone they were farther along in understanding than Doug was.

She turned from him and jerked open the Yukon’s driver-side door. “Last chance for a ride.”

She had the engine running before he moved. Even then, he was hesitant-he looked all around him in a great, confused circle, as if searching for some other path, and finding none, he put his head down, walked to the Yukon, opened the passenger door, and climbed in beside her, his hands still clenching and unclenching. They were large hands, and she remembered the way the dead man who’d owned this car had looked at them and thought that it would be wise to watch them herself.

She backed out of the dead man’s driveway and turned onto the country road, heading north.

“We’ll get some distance between us and this place and then we’ll make contact with Eli,” she said.

Doug didn’t answer. One of his knuckles popped as he tightened his right fist.

Janell drove on.

39

The road to Cooke City was filled with ghosts.

Mark was used to traveling with them, had become accustomed to that since Lauren was killed, but there were more of them now. He was in the Sunlight Basin, carving through country he’d once known so well, and the faces of men and women who had probably been dead for years rose smiling in his mind. Also in the mix, all too often, was Lynn Deschaine, her face just above his own in the dark, her body pressed tight to him, her racing heart pounding against his chest.

The Chief Joseph Scenic Byway links Cody, Wyoming, with the northeast gate of Yellowstone, just a few miles from Cooke City, Montana. It crosses through the Shoshone National Forest and the Absaroka Mountains. The Beartooth range looms to the north and the Absaroka range falls behind to the south and the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone River winds along through the low country-if a vertical mile up can be considered low country-and then the road begins to climb again, and seeing it in the daylight, many people would consider it the most beautiful drive in the West, at least if they hadn’t driven the Beartooth Highway up and over the top.

Tonight, none of the grand country was visible beyond the reach of the headlights, and the road mocked Mark. He’d come here to settle the score for the family member who had been taken from him, but instead, he was driving the old roads in search of the family he’d left behind willingly, and he felt as if the mountains were laughing at him now. Even the route he had to take felt predestined, promised.

They never met, he thought. Never spoke. There cannot be overlap, not between my mother and Lauren, between this place and that one.

But already he knew the latter was false. Cassadaga, Florida, connected to Lovell, Wyoming. The place where Mark’s future had died was bridged to the past he’d left behind. And if that connection was possible, why not more?

She went to Cassadaga on a case. Went for Dixie Witte. That was all. It had nothing to do with my past.

Somewhere, a missing Homeland Security agent might have disagreed.

It was still dark when he arrived in Cooke City, and the temperature was at least fifteen degrees colder than it had been in Red Lodge. The traces of snow that were visible on the peaks down there lay in drifts on the ground up here. He drove slowly into town and Miner’s Saloon came into view, the sign that had been over his mother’s shoulder in the surveillance photos sent to Lynn Deschaine.

He parked in front of the saloon and cut the engine and the headlights. He turned on the cell phone just for the hell of it and saw the expected-no trace of a signal. Mark was, for the moment, at least, very securely off the grid.

He stepped out of the car and into the bracing cold and walked down the road to see what had changed in the town.

The answer: not much. There were a few new buildings, but for the most part, things were the same. They had a fire station now. That was impressive. Mark wondered if they had any firefighters. The summer before Lauren was killed, a forest fire had done some serious damage just beyond the town, ravaging the base of Mount Republic and chewing through the forest along Pilot Creek. Arson, apparently. People died. He’d read about it and looked at the photographs, and that was one of the few times he’d discussed the place with Lauren at any length.

At the end of the town the road curled away toward Silver Gate, just two miles farther on, but he knew that it would be as silent as Cooke City. It was the dead season, after the snowmobiling and before the Yellowstone summer tourists. Anyone who’d seen Mark’s uncle in the past few months was sound asleep, and the way to get cooperation wasn’t by banging on doors in the middle of the night.

He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance. Tonight it was worse. Mark didn’t feel just powerless; his entire understanding of the world had been ripped away from him.

His ignorance of the phrase rise the dark appears genuine based on his interviews with police investigators in his wife’s homicide.

He walked to the car with his breath fogging the air, the stars brilliant against the blackness, and then he fell back on family tradition on his first night in Cooke City: he slept in the car and waited for the saloon to open.

40

Eli took Garland Webb down the mountain beneath a blanket of spectacular stars, but his ability to find comfort in the spectral illumination was ruined by the clatter of the ATV engine and the harshness of the headlight.

And the news of Markus Novak’s presence in Montana.

At the base of the slope, where the stream cut through the valley and nothing could be seen of Wardenclyffe, he shut off the ghastly machine and stepped into the shallow remnants of the spring’s last snow.

“Everything is rushed now,” he said. “Because of you. You know she spoke the truth. She came here with Novak. Who knows how many will follow?”

Maintaining control and order of violent men was difficult, and Garland Webb was exhibit A-a critical player who had nearly been lost because he could not keep himself out of trouble. Garland was both a mechanical genius and a sexual predator. Eli needed the former, had no use for the latter. The problem was that you couldn’t separate the two.

“You taunted him,” Eli said. “That is why he came to Cassadaga, and from Cassadaga he got to Homeland Security somehow, and from there to here. Because of your taunt.”

“He tried to have me killed. You would have done nothing, said nothing?”

“Not until greater goals had been achieved. Absolutely not.”

Garland didn’t respond. The sound of the stream was all that could be heard. In the moonlight, it was a quicksilver ribbon.

“You passed the test in Coleman,” Eli said. “That was already done. You’d succeeded, but success was not enough for you.”

The test in Coleman had been vital indeed. Eli had instructed Garland to take full ownership of the murder of Lauren Novak, to claim it to his cell mate as an attempted sex crime, a random victim. Eli wanted to bring police attention to Garland and see if that would result in the utterance of Eli’s name, mention of Wardenclyffe, any of it. That much Garland understood. What he had not known was that Eli had another listener in the prison, and an execution planned if Garland didn’t follow through.

But Garland had obeyed. He’d confessed to the killing-a low-risk confession, cell-block boasting, immediately denied to police-and Eli watched from afar and waited to see if Garland would implicate him. He did not. Instead, he drew the focus of authorities, and also Markus Novak. Eli had been satisfied with this, and so he allowed Garland to live and came to realize that he was perhaps more useful in prison, where he couldn’t make any more mistakes, than on the outside.

Eli had not counted on his release.

“I followed your instruction,” Garland said. “Every bit of it. I could have let her leave town. She might never have returned.”

“With the questions she asked? She was going to return.”

Garland shrugged, uncaring. Eli knew that Garland felt little interest in the fate of Lauren Novak. He hadn’t when given the order, and he didn’t now.

“You’ll have to miss the council now,” Eli said. “The timeline has changed.”

Garland nodded.

“The traps are your responsibility,” Eli said. “Activate the ones already installed. We have no time for the others.”

He took out the keys to Scott Shields’s pickup truck, which was parked at the far end of the forest road.

“When they’re active, wait in the third warehouse until I’ve given you the word.”

“All right.”

“You might have visitors.”

Garland tilted his head. “Who?”

“Novak.”

“How will you arrange that?”

“There’s only one link between him and this place,” Eli said. “That’s his uncle. If he chooses to take that route, I know where it will lead him, and I’ll see that he is redirected. Right to you. You’ll need to be ready.”

Garland spun the keys on his massive index finger, a glittering whirl in the moonlight.

“I’ve been ready for Markus Novak for a long time,” he said.

41

It was just past dawn when a fist hammered on the window of the Tahoe and Mark jerked upright. A man in a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt was peering in at him. He had a mug of coffee in his hand, steam rising off it. There was a glaze of frost on the windshield and over the hood. Mark opened the door and climbed out stiffly. The man in the Hawaiian shirt sipped his coffee and regarded him without much interest.

“Well, that’s good, at least,” he said.

“Huh?” Mark tried to stretch his neck, without much success.

“You’re not dead. Sleeping drunks out front are the easy kind of trouble. Dead guys out front are a different thing. That would have been a ballbuster this early.”

“Sorry,” Mark said. “Came in late last night and didn’t have a place to stay.”

“I’d love to pretend that I give a shit, but I’m an honest man, so I can’t. You’re not going to be sleeping out front all day, okay? Bad for business. Now, if you were dead…that would have sold some drinks, actually. Huh. Maybe I miscalculated. Maybe it would have been better if you were dead.”

It was cold enough that Mark was shivering, and this man was wearing shorts and sandals to complement the Hawaiian shirt. Springtime in Cooke City.

“I’ll get out of your hair real fast if you can point me in the right direction,” Mark said.

The man in the Hawaiian shirt lifted his hand and pointed down 212 toward Silver Gate. “That way. The other way, the road is closed. Those are the only directions we’ve got. Pretty damn simple.”

He was headed for the door of the saloon when Mark said, “I’m looking for Larry Novak.”

The man turned back, looked the Tahoe over, and nodded as if something made sense to him that hadn’t before.

“Never heard of him.”

“I’m not serving any papers.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, I’ve never heard of him.”

“You own a place in this town that pours whiskey. You’ve heard of him.”

He drank his coffee and stared at Mark in silence.

“He’s family,” Mark said. “It’s a family issue, and it’s damn important.”

That was so interesting to the man that he almost raised an eyebrow. Almost.

“Listen,” Mark said, “I’m Larry Novak’s nephew. I came all the way up from Florida to find him. I know damn well he’s passed through here at some point in the past few months. If he’s gone now, you can save yourself some trouble and say so. If you want some dollars for your help, that’s fine. But I need to find-”

“I’m not taking any dollars to narc somebody out, bubba.”

“You aren’t narcing, you’re helping him.” Mark took out his wallet.

“I just said I’m not taking any money to-”

“I’m not giving you any.” He handed over his driver’s license. The man didn’t take it, but he read the name, and there was a little light in his eyes. He looked up over the steam from the coffee.

“Markus.”

“Yeah.”

He rubbed his jaw and didn’t say anything for a minute. He was staring up at Mount Republic when he said, “Tell me your dog’s name.”

“What?”

“You had a dog that got left here. Most people called him Town Dog. Larry didn’t. What would he have called him?”

“Amigo.” The dog had been Mark’s best friend for a short time. Then his mother got arrested and the dog was left behind in Cooke City. Mark swung at the cop that day, not because he was arresting his mother, but because he’d said that Child Protective Services wouldn’t let Mark bring Amigo with him. When Mark met with the social workers, his only questions were about the legal recourses available to get Amigo back.

The man was still regarding him in silence, so Mark added, “We also had a raccoon named Pandora for a while. My mother saved it from the side of the road, and it bit Larry twice. He did not have fond feelings for Pandora.”

The man in the Hawaiian shirt said, “Well, hell. I wouldn’t point anybody else toward him, but that old bastard has been sitting at my bar talking about you and wondering where you are for as long as I’ve been in this town, and that’s twelve years now. Unlike most people who ask after him, you he’ll actually want to see.”

“Where can I find him?”

“You know the Bannock Trail?”

Mark nodded. The Bannock Trail was a dirt-and-gravel road that ran parallel to 212 through Silver Gate, along the base of Mount Republic.

“He’s up there in a cabin with a green tarp over most of the roof.”

That sounded right.

42

In Silver Gate there was a wooden bridge that crossed over the Soda Butte Creek, a stream that fed the Lamar River a few miles farther down, inside Yellowstone. Mark had fished the Soda Butte with his uncle Ronny before a few state-run disasters with fish stocking, followed by fish killing, effectively ruined the stream. On the other side of the water, the pavement disappeared and the road went to packed dirt. This was the Bannock Trail. The modern highways through Yellowstone follow it pretty closely, but the Bannock was originally the path used by bison-hunting parties of the Nez Perce, Shoshone, Kalispel, and Flathead. He saw several cabins that were new to him, and some of them were pretty high-dollar.

The one with the green tarp over the roof was not one of those.

The cabin was set back far from the road, and he almost missed it because the tarp blended with the pines. That was why you went with green instead of blue-class.

He pulled in the drive and parked. The pines here were thick and the place was in the shadow of the mountains and so it was very dark. When a large part of the darkness moved beside him, Mark almost had a heart attack. He was fumbling for his gun when he realized what the massive shape was: a buffalo. A big bastard, too, taller than the Tahoe, with a matted hide that had bits of branches stuck to it. Only one of his massive eyes was visible, and it didn’t look friendly.

Larry was guarded by a Cyclops.

Mark opened the door and stepped out slowly. People who were not cautious around buffalo were people who didn’t know anything about buffalo. Every year a handful of tourists who expected the animals to be cute, harmless oafs were gored while trying to take photographs. Buffalo could be mean, and fast. This fellow didn’t look like one of the low-key breeds, and the fact that he was roaming solo, far from the herds in the park, wasn’t a good sign. Based on the baleful stare he was getting, Mark suspected this old boy had been ejected from the herd due to attitude issues.

Mark walked slowly toward the cabin and the buffalo watched as if he were considering chasing him, then he lowered his head and began to chew on one of the bushes. Apparently Mark wasn’t worth the effort.

Mark went up the steps to the front porch, which was surprisingly solid considering the condition of the roof. The cabin looked like it had been there a hundred years and probably wasn’t going to have much trouble lasting a hundred more. He knocked on the door and heard a slurred curse, then a rhetorical and profane question about the time. There were footsteps and the door opened and Mark’s uncle looked at him without recognition.

He’d aged in the ways Mark’s mother hadn’t. His hair was a thick shock of white and his face was leathered and there were gin roses on his cheeks. He wasn’t a tall man-a few inches shorter than Mark’s six feet-but Mark knew that you underestimated his strength at your own peril. He was built like a sapling. Some of the muscle Mark remembered was gone, but not all of it. He was wearing long johns and a sleeveless undershirt, standing barefoot on the wooden floor.

Mark said, “How are you doing, Uncle?”

Larry blinked and his misty blue eyes sharpened their focus and then he said, “Good Lord in heaven. Markus?”

Mark nodded, and Larry came out and hugged him. Hard and without any hesitation. It jarred Mark, and he was slow returning the embrace. Then Larry stepped back and looked Mark up and down, assessing him against his memory.

“You look good, son.”

“You too, Larry.”

“Shit.” He laughed and then said, “What in the hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for Mom.”

The smile went away. “Sure. Figured you would one of these days. It ain’t gonna be the reunion you want, though. Not if you got ideas of fixing things up.”

“That’s not my idea.”

Larry waited.

“A few things have happened in my life since the last time I saw you,” Mark said.

“I’d sure as hell hope so.”

“I got married.”

“That’s great.”

“My wife was murdered.”

Larry winced, shifted his weight, and was casting about for something to say when Mark spoke again.

“Even I have trouble believing what I’m going to tell you,” he said. He felt unsteady suddenly, wanted a chair. “So I don’t know why in the hell you’d believe it. But there are people…there are some law enforcement people who seem to think that you and Mom might know something about who killed my wife, and why.”

Larry’s eyebrows arched and he leaned forward with his head cocked, as if he hadn’t heard correctly. “That we might know something? Son, I didn’t know you were married. I didn’t know you were alive. When you left, that was that. And I didn’t blame you, but anybody who says otherwise…shit, all I’ve done is wonder about you. And hope for you.”

Mark nodded. “It happened in Florida, but it seems to be connected to a man up here. Somebody Mom knows.”

Larry looked away, a contemplative sideways glance at nothing that Mark remembered well. He had a habit of looking to the side like that just before the shit hit the fan, like he was considering advice from an invisible man in his corner. His invisible man usually gave piss-poor advice.

“Don’t say Pate.”

The confirmation was like another blow, part of the combination that had been building in intensity since Lynn Deschaine had first mentioned the town of Lovell. All roads leading back.

“He’s one of them,” Mark said, “but the one I want most is Garland Webb.”

“That one doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“He’ll be with Pate,” Mark said. “I’m almost sure of it. I came up here with another investigator who was looking for Pate, and-”

“What do you mean, another investigator? You’re police?” Larry said it as if Mark had announced that he made his living testing razor blades on the ears of live bunnies.

“Private detective. I was, at least. The woman who came up here with me is missing, I suspect at Eli Pate’s hand. I need to find him. Can you help?”

Larry worked his tongue under his lower lip. “You ever met a man and felt almost right away, down in your bones, like you’d be doing the world a favor if you popped him? That’s Eli Pate. That’s the boy you’re looking for. And he won’t be easy to find. He’s down in a hole somewhere.”

“What’s he hiding from?”

“Not hiding. Waiting.”

“On?”

“The end of the world.”

Mark gave a slow nod. “One of those. A prepper, that kind of thing?”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly. He’s his own breed. Get inside so I don’t have to stand here in the cold.” Larry stepped away and then added, sadly, “I wish it wasn’t this that brought you to my doorstep, son. I wish to hell it wasn’t this.”

“Me too, Uncle.”

43

Watching the new woman come slowly awake was a horrifying déjà vu; she mumbled to herself and tugged on the handcuff as if she didn’t understand it, then drifted back to sleep, indifferent, and Sabrina remembered what it had felt like, dealing with the match fires of awareness in the dark valley of drugged sleep.

Worse, she remembered what waited on the other side. How this woman would handle her reality-when she was able to comprehend it-would affect Sabrina’s own chances at survival.

She didn’t speak when the woman first began to show clear thinking because she could hear the voices upstairs and she didn’t want to draw the attention of whoever was up there. Each time the woman looked at her, Sabrina held one finger in front of her lips, urging silence. She didn’t want to risk speaking until she was sure she was talking to someone who was responsive.

When the woman said, “How long have I been here?” in a whisper, it was obvious that the moment had arrived.

“Maybe five or six hours,” Sabrina whispered back. “It’s hard to keep track of time. I’m not sure how long I’ve been here. A few days, at least.”

That news brought horror to the other woman’s face, but Sabrina didn’t say anything to soothe her. There was nothing to say. This was reality. She’d either accept it and fight alongside Sabrina or deny it and panic and risk them both.

She didn’t look like a panicker, though. When she’d finally been able to make sense of the handcuff and assess her situation, she’d taken stock of her surroundings and then asked that one question, trying to reason things out, not simply react.

“Who are you?” Sabrina asked.

“My name is Lynn Deschaine.”

“I’m Sabrina Baldwin.”

The woman cocked her head. “Baldwin.”

“You’ve heard my name before?”

“I met your husband. You’re the reason…you’re why he was so strange.”

She had met Jay? This seemed incomprehensible, like someone bringing a message from the dead.

“Where was he?” Sabrina said. “How is he? Do they have him here or…” She heard her voice rising, took a breath, then whispered. “Where do they have him?”

“Nowhere,” Lynn Deschaine said. Her dark hair had fallen over her face as she shifted, and she blew it away to clear her eyes. “He was at home. We interviewed him about the vandalism on the lines. Mark was right. Your husband was scared of us. Because of you. You were already gone, weren’t you?”

Sabrina was listening, but her brain had stuck on he was at home. That news gave birth to tangled emotions-relief that he was safe, but also astonishment at the idea of him just being at home talking to people about vandalized power lines when she was up here, chained to a cabin wall.

As if sensing this, Lynn Deschaine said, “I think he’s going through the motions to keep them happy and keep you safe.”

Sabrina nodded numbly. Sure, that was it, he just wanted to keep her safe. But still, she felt betrayed.

“Do you know more about them?” Sabrina said. “About why we’re here?”

Lynn seemed to choose her next words carefully.

“I don’t know why we are here, if you mean the specific location, but I understand why they have us. I know why they have me, at least. I’ve been investigating him for years.”

“Eli?”

“Yes.”

“Who is he?”

This time, Lynn didn’t hesitate. “If you gave Charles Manson the mind of Nikola Tesla,” she said, “you would find yourself with Eli Pate. Or so he thinks.”

Sabrina had a strange memory then. A clear recollection of the way the lights had blinked on the morning of her kidnapping, the outage that summoned Jay out of the house and into the storm. Just like a knock, she thought. Like there was evil at the door, announcing its presence. They’d blamed the storm then, but by midday she’d known it wasn’t really the storm. She just hadn’t known it was Eli Pate.

“How many do you think are up here?” Lynn asked.

“At least three. Maybe more. When they brought you in, you were talking about Violet’s son. They seemed concerned about him. Who is he?”

Even in the shadows, she saw something change in Lynn Deschaine’s face. “I don’t even know anymore,” she said. “I fell asleep feeling this horrible guilt because I hadn’t told him the truth. I thought I knew more than he did, and that wasn’t fair. But he knew more than I did. He knew exactly where I was headed.”

“They don’t seem to agree,” Sabrina said.

“What do you mean?”

“You were incoherent when they brought you in. But the idea that you were with him seemed to…shock them, really. They never lose their composure, but they came close when they heard that.”

For a time, there was silence. Then the quiet was shattered by the sounds of engines. Voices rose briefly, then faded away until the second engine started. Actually, the second and the third-two different pitches that merged into one sound.

“Not motorcycles,” Lynn said thoughtfully. “Maybe a four-wheeler?”

“Yes,” Sabrina said, and she was disappointed with herself for not recognizing the sounds first. “That’s exactly what it is.”

“And they’re only arriving. They’re not leaving.”

They looked at each other in silence as they contemplated what that meant.

Thirty minutes later, another engine. Five minutes after that, another still. Then two more.

Sabrina and Lynn had stopped looking at each other.

44

Mark’s uncles had spent some time on the rodeo circuit, though neither was much of a rider. Larry was a trick-rope artist, as good as any Mark ever saw, and he could shoot like he’d been born with a gun in his hand. All of the stunts in Westerns that people said couldn’t be done in real life, Larry did in real life. He’d toss a quarter in the air and draw a revolver and put a hole through the center, shooting accurately by fanning the hammer, and even though he wasn’t a lefty, he was better with his left hand than most marksmen were with their right. For a couple years he’d done sporadic stunt work for film and TV gigs. Then, as the popularity of the Western died and computer effects removed the need for any real human achievement, he was just an unemployed trick-shooter with a few stories about Hollywood starlets.

He drank on those stories for years, though. His brother began to call one of Larry’s actress conquests the Annuity because of how consistently the tale paid out for him. Chivalrous.

By now enough years had passed that Larry would have had to wait for people to Google the names of the starlets he’d bedded before he began the stories, and even then, nobody would have bought him a drink just to listen, but he was still shooting. Matter of fact, he was giving lessons, and that was how he’d met Eli Pate. It wasn’t trick stuff, and it wasn’t pistols.

“Your mother told me she knew a guy who wanted to learn how to shoot a sniper rifle,” he said as he and Mark sat in the small cabin and the early-morning light began to creep down from the peaks and fill the pines. Larry had started a fire in the ancient cast-iron woodstove and the small space quickly filled with heat.

“Now, usually when your mother says I met this guy, it’s trouble from the get-go,” he said, and then he caught himself and awkwardly added, “Sorry, Markus.”

“Come on, Uncle. It’s not like I don’t have a sense of the woman.”

Larry nodded ruefully and ran a hand over his unruly white hair as if to flatten it against his skull. He was sitting close to the stove, the fire poker still in one hand.

“So I never look forward to meeting the fellas, but, you know, I needed the money at that particular juncture. I’d hit a hard spell.”

Larry had spent his life hitting hard spells like a bug hits a windshield.

“At the time I was working for an outfitter in Wyoming named Scott Shields. He’d bought a ranch just outside of the Bighorns, had plans to put in a bunkhouse, get a good cook, set it up right, you know? He’d made his money up in Alaska, guiding for bear and moose out on the peninsula, but he was a Wyoming kid and wanted to come back. I met him through your mother. They had a good situation all the way around.”

“But it didn’t last,” Mark said.

Larry shook his head. “She was living with him down in Cody and I was working on this property, fixing up the cabins, and she brought Pate up, said he wanted shooting lessons. He had top-of-the-line equipment for a man who didn’t know how to use it. At least five thousand in the rifle and scope. He wasn’t much of a shot, but he asked all kinds of questions about range and impact. What he wanted to shoot at was metal.”

“What do you mean?”

“The questions he had were about different rounds and their damage at point of impact. He had these things he wanted to use as targets, like big ceramic canisters. Looked like electrical equipment, insulators maybe. He didn’t even want me to tell him how to shoot, he wanted me to do the shooting so he could see how these things blew up with different rounds at different distances. I said, ‘Okay, let’s set the bullshit aside, chief, and you tell me what you’re really after.’ And the weird bastard looks at me with this smile like a pedophile in an amusement park and says, ‘I intend to remind people about the true nature of power.’ That’s exactly what he said, word for word. I remember it because it was strange and the look on his face when he said it chilled me to the bone.”

Mark said, “He wants to shut the electrical grid down. I have no idea why.”

“Here’s the bullshit he’s slinging, and it’s bullshit your mother has bought: Spirits talk to him. Spirits of the mountains and of the old Indian chiefs. You know how much that pisses me off, listening to a white man claim that?”

“It’s smart,” Mark said. “It’s exactly what Mom would want to hear.”

“You got that right,” Larry admitted. “The last time I saw your mother, she told me about how he’d go up into these caves in the Pryor Mountains and wait for the spirit voices to tell him…Markus? What’s the matter?”

Mark hadn’t moved, but his face must have changed plenty. “Nothing’s the matter. I just had a bad experience with caves.”

An understatement. He could see Ridley Barnes standing in water a few hundred feet underground. Ridley, whose corpse had never been found, saying, She doesn’t want you yet. Saying, When things go dark, you’re the one who will have to bring the light back.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mark said.

“What doesn’t?”

“You say it like Mom’s buying the con. She’s usually selling it.”

“Give her points for both this time. She’s still peddling the stories, but they’re chapters in a bigger one now, and Pate writes that. She can draw in a different type for him. People who wouldn’t trust him, or at least not trust him easily…they believe in Violet. Always have. You know how she does that.”

“What’s she getting out of it?”

Larry looked away and made a drinking motion with his hand and then a plunging motion with his thumb, and Mark felt a sick, impotent rage as he remembered the syringes he’d taken from his mother and the bottle she’d had in her hand on one of the last days he’d ever seen her, the day he’d gone out into a howling snowstorm and found her passed out in a drift, near death, her flesh tinted the blue of a pale winter sky.

“Of course.”

“She got clean for a bit,” Larry said, somehow always able to rise to his sister’s defense. “She really did. After you left. That knocked her sideways, son. When you left, she got clean and dry and held on for a long time. But then…”

“Right,” Mark said. “But then.” He shook his head. “You mentioned the Pryor Mountains. You think Pate is up there?”

“No idea.”

“Well, I’m going to need some ideas. I’m not the only one looking for him either. The police are too by now. But I need to get there first.”

“Why?”

“Because I think the man who killed my wife is with him. She wrote three words in her notebook on the day she was killed that didn’t make sense to anyone I knew. It makes sense to everyone around Eli Pate, though. Rise the dark. I suppose it’s referring to the moment, this attack they’re planning. The man who told his cell mate he killed Lauren is supposed to be up here with Pate. I just need a shot at him, Uncle.”

Larry said, “You came up here to kill a man?” His voice steady. Unfazed.

“Yes.”

“Then you should know this: After my first go-round with Pate, I went looking for your mother to get her the hell away from him. Scott Shields had left by then, gone back to Alaska, and she and Pate were living in a campground. Couple bikers, guy with an RV, a few tents. You said something about preppers earlier? That’s what this group felt like, sure. And they protect him well.”

He got to his feet and pulled his undershirt off and Mark hissed in a breath and nearly turned away. Larry’s torso was wrapped with ribbons of scars, raised and red. Though the wounds had closed, the flesh would never look right again.

“That’s from a whip,” Larry said quietly. There was anger in his voice, but also shame. “They chained my hands to the tow hitch of an old Jeep and my feet to a cinder block and they whipped me like a dog. Why? Because they’d heard me telling your mother what I thought of Eli Pate. They told me that disrespect-that was the word they used, disrespect-wouldn’t be tolerated.”

Larry regarded his own wounds in silence for a few seconds, then said, “The most important lessons are the ones that leave scars, boy. That’s what your grandfather used to say, whether we’d gotten a lip split in a fight or been thrown by a horse or whatever. The most important lessons leave scars.”

He pulled his shirt back on.

“So that was the last time I saw Pate’s crew. Saw your mother once more. She came up here looking for me, wanted to apologize, she said, but it was more warning than apology. She knew what it would mean if I went back at them, and she knew I had the inclination to try.”

“Why?”

Larry looked at Mark as if he’d asked why he needed oxygen.

“They whipped me, Markus. Tied me down and whipped me. The hell do you mean, why?”

“Tell me where to find him,” Mark said.

“You don’t want to find him. It’s not worth it.”

“They shot my wife twice in the head and left her in a ditch,” Mark said. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”

“You go after Pate, the same thing might happen to you.”

“So be it. I’m not concerned about this being my last ride.”

“And I’m not supposed to be concerned about it being mine either?”

“Just tell me how to find him. I don’t need you to come along.”

“Oh yes, you do. Because he isn’t going to be easy to find, son! This boy is the type you need to flush out of the deep weeds.”

“Tell me where to start, then. Who to ask.”

“You’re not going to find Pate by asking, Markus. And you’re going to need me riding with you, or you’ll be dead before you get started.”

“Then ride with me. Please.”

Larry let out a long breath and opened the stove door and poked at the dying fire. When the flames were licking upward again, he closed the door, set the poker aside, sat down, and said, “I would’ve liked to know you got married. That would have been a nice thing to hear. Anything from you would have been nice to hear.”

“I’ll give you all the apologies you want, but right now isn’t the time.”

“The hell it isn’t! You just showed up at my door and asked for my help killing a man. Don’t tell me what you’ve got time for and what you don’t.”

Mark didn’t speak. Larry turned and looked out the window, up at the crown of Mount Republic, and made a soft sound with his tongue.

“And God made family,” he said. Then he got to his feet.

“Tell you something, Markus-older you get, the more you realize the only things in this world that can really cause you pain are the people you love. I always did love you, son, and it’s damn clear you loved your wife. No doubt about that. It would be easier on us both right now if we weren’t so afflicted, right?”

Mark stayed silent. Larry nodded as if the silence were a good enough answer, then said, “I s’pose it’s time for me to put my pants on, isn’t it? We’re burning daylight, and you’re running a race against the police. Won’t win that one sitting here by the fire, will we?”

“Thank you,” Mark said. His voice was rough. “And I’m sorry.”

His uncle stood looking out the grimy window at the mountain. “You know what I thought, the day those cocksuckers whipped me? I thought, Lord, if only my brother were still alive. Not that it would have put the numbers in my favor, but with Ronny, I didn’t mind being outnumbered. Ronny’s been in the ground a long time, though. I always miss him, but never more than I did that day. I needed a brother, and my brother was gone.” He turned back to Mark and gave a cold, humorless smile. “I got a nephew, though. How ’bout that. Now the question is, how much of Ronny is in you, boy?”