Serial

86

In a pole tent the state police had set up as a temporary base of operations near Beth and Link’s house in Edmundsville, Quinn stood with a forensic expert named Wellington and examined the contents of Link Evans’s wallet. There were Visa and American Express cards, a Missouri driver’s license, three simple business cards with Evans’s name on them, an AAA card, medical insurance card, and eighty-six dollars, mostly in twenty-dollar bills.

In the single piece of luggage in the trunk of his car, a scuffed leather suitcase, they found his airline boarding pass and confirmation of his flight from Philadelphia to Kansas City.

It was the last flight he’d ever take.

Caught outside the structure of his planning and ritual, the Skinner had gone out in the inglorious blaze so many serial killers covertly sought. Their grand exit, and one last chance to outwit the hunters who were closing in on them.

Winning the game the hard way.

Beth awoke in a hospital bed in Jefferson City. Her ribs were wrapped, and her right knee was in a white plastic cast that made it impossible for her to straighten her leg beyond a thirty-degree angle. That was okay with her, because any effort to move the leg resulted in terrific pain.

She knew she must be under the influence of some kind of drug, because she couldn’t quite piece together the fragments of her thoughts. She remembered last night-if it had been last night. The fear and the horror of seeing Wayne shot. The ringing in her ears, and the smell of cordite. Then the jolting chase with Link in the SUV and the accident. After that it was blank. Here she was, staring up at an IV tube and clear plastic bottle, and with a spasm of pain every time she breathed.

A large man in a wrinkled gray suit came into the room. He had a bony, somehow handsome face with a crooked nose, and straight brown hair that needed a trim. His smile was surprisingly charming as he pulled up a chair so he could sit near the bed. His bulk, the scent of him, suddenly dominated the room. Beth closed her eyes, trying to fit him into the incomplete fragments of last night. He’d been there, at the house and at the scene of the accident. She was sure of that.

She could hear him breathing and knew he was watching her, trying to decide if she was awake and lucid enough to carry on a conversation.

“I’m Frank Quinn,” he said. “A detective from New York.”

“I’ve got painkillers in me,” she said, not opening her eyes.

“I know,” he said. “The nurse told me you were aware enough to hold a conversation, if you weren’t too tired.”

“Is Wayne…?”

At first Quinn didn’t understand who she meant. Then he did. “Sheriff Westerley? He’s badly hurt but alive. The doctors say he’s going to make it.”

“My husband tried to kill him,” she said. “Link. I really think Link was going to kill me, too.”

“Probably.”

She opened her eyes and stared into his. “Where is Link? I don’t remember anything after the accident. There’s a lot I need to know.”

Quinn moved automatically to pat the back of her hand but drew back when he saw the IV needle taped to it.

“I have a lot to tell you,” he said.

Westerley was released from the hospital first. The shotgun blast had sent pellets into his right chest and shoulder. Most of the damage was done to the shoulder and his right upper arm. A single pellet, diverted by bone, had barely missed his heart. Another had creased his skull above his right ear.

When he came to visit Beth in the rehabilitation center where the hospital had sent her, he was wearing a brown short-sleeved shirt and faded Levi’s. Brown moccasins that he could slip on and off easily. His right arm was in a sling. They’d talked on the phone, and she knew he might never regain full use of the arm.

Beth struggled up from the chair she was sitting in when Westerley arrived, and he held her in the crook of his good arm and kissed her. When she looked up at him she was crying.

“If only I suspected… about Link, I mean.”

“No way you could have,” Westerley said. He helped her sit back down in the chair and extend her injured leg. Then he dragged over a nearby chair so he could sit close to her.

“They tell me if I don’t respond to treatment here I might need an artificial knee,” she said.

“Your leg, my arm,” he said. “We can live with that.”

“I don’t like thinking about that night.”

“Then don’t.”

“Easier to say than do. Sometimes I think it was better when I couldn’t remember anything about it.”

“No,” Westerley said, touching her arm lightly with his left hand. “It’s better to face it and put it behind you. You did nothing wrong, have nothing to be ashamed of. What we both had was bad luck, but we lived through it and we’re together.”

“You’re right. We could be dead, like those women.”

“I don’t waste much time on what might’ve been,” Westerley said. “It’s time now to think about what’s gonna be.” He stood halfway up, so he could lean over and kiss her on the lips.

When he sat back down, he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a letter-sized white envelope that was folded in half. “Billy Noth gave me this, Beth. It came in yesterday’s mail. The DNA results from the samples we sent to the lab.” He gave her a look she couldn’t fathom. “You wanna see the results?”

“Do you know them?”

“Yeah. I talked to the lab on the phone.” He shifted his weight, wincing when he leaned on his injured arm. “Trust me, there’s no reason you need to know any of this now, Beth.”

She smiled. “Didn’t you just tell me it’s better to face the facts so we can put them behind us?”

He returned her smile and shook his head. “Seems I did say that. But I didn’t say always.” He reluctantly handed her the envelope.

She accepted it but didn’t open it. “Just tell me what it says, Wayne.”

“Salas’s DNA, Link’s, Eddie’s, and the DNA sample from the rape scene-none of them match except Eddie’s and the rape scene sample, Beth. There’s no way Link could have been Eddie’s biological father.”

“Or that Vincent Salas raped me.”

“But you already knew that, Beth.”

“I didn’t really in my heart. Not for sure. Not until now.”

Beth sat back, relieved. But now she was angry with herself. “All that mess and pain because of my imagination,” she said.

“Your imagination’s what got me looking into Link,” Westerley reminded her. “And it’s what brought us together.”

“It’s all so goddamned confusing,” Beth said.

Westerley shrugged. “It’s a mixed bag, Beth. Like most things in life.” He glanced down at the envelope in her hand. “You wanna keep that, in case of any future doubt?”

She crumpled the unopened envelope and squeezed it into a tight ball, which she handed back to Westerley.

It was about the past. She didn’t need it.

Westerley had been sure Beth would take his word rather than look into the envelope herself, and pretty sure she wouldn’t look in the envelope at all once he’d told her about its contents. The envelope had contained two folded blank questionnaires he’d picked up at the nurse’s station when no one was looking. The actual DNA report, the one that confirmed Link Evans was Beth’s rapist and the father of her child, was folded in quarters and tucked in a back pocket of Westerley’s Levi’s. Before leaving the rehab center, he’d duck into a restroom, tear the report into small pieces, and flush it down the toilet.

Beth didn’t need to know Evans was Eddie’s biological father.

And Eddie sure as hell didn’t need to know it.

The sad fact of the world, Westerley mused, was that sometimes the best way to deal with the truth was with a lie.