The Call of the Mild

Chapter Thirty-Four

Somebody had been putting rocks in Gus’ backpack. Which was odd, because he’d spent most of the day’s hike at the end of the line of lawyers, and there was rarely anyone behind him to play that kind of trick. But the pack that had seemed so light and perfectly balanced only a few hours earlier now felt like the anvil Wile E. Coyote always ended up clutching as he plummeted off a cliff. Gus could feel it pulling him down, its straps abrading his shoulders through the lightweight T-shirt he was wearing.

Whoever had been loading Gus’ pack with rocks had apparently also been slipping nails into his shoes. They had seemed so comfortable the first few miles he’d walked in them, but now every step sent jagged bursts of pain through his feet.

Looking ahead at the lawyers spread out in front of him, Gus could see that most of them were suffering the same kinds of pain. Gwendolyn, who’d taken the lead right away, was still in front, but her long, confident stride had stiffened into an awkward, straight-legged march. Balowsky’s entire body seemed to convulse with every third step and when he turned around to make sure he wasn’t falling behind the rest of the pack, Gus could see him licking his lips compulsively, as if he might have stored a few drops of last night’s vodka there. Savage was dragging, too, which would have surprised Gus more if the lawyer hadn’t spent the first three hours of the hike zipping down the trail to see where they were going and then running back to report like a Labrador retriever off leash in the mountains for the first time. Jade looked like she had completely exhausted her store of pixie dust: She staggered forward as if the only thing keeping her going was the force of gravity.

And then there was Mathis. He was more of a surprise to Gus than Savage. Because Morton Mathis didn’t seem to be physically exhausted. Gus was becoming an expert on analyzing people’s walks from behind, and he could see the way Mathis’ feet pushed hard off the stony ground with every step.

That wasn’t what struck Gus as odd. Even though Mathis was a transplant from a large city, with no apparent wilderness experience, there was no reason to believe he didn’t spend huge amounts of time working out, despite a physical appearance that seemed to give the lie to that idea. But what did seem inexplicably strange was the way he was pretending to be as weary as the others. His shoulders slumped under his pack, his head hung down almost to his chest. He was in every way the picture of exhaustion. A picture contradicted by the reality of his legs.

Of course it was possible that Mathis was faking fatigue simply to get away from Shawn, who had spent the last few hours hiking alongside one lawyer after another, and who was now glued to Mathis’ side.

That had been the key to Shawn’s plan for the day. While Gus kept an eye on the entire pack from the end of the line, Shawn would use the time to get to know the lawyers better. Not that either of the detectives had any desire to forge the strong ties of friendship that Rushton had prescribed for the entire group. All Shawn and Gus really needed was a little confirmation of what they already knew: that Mathis was behind not only the murders of Ellen Svaco and mime Archie Kane, but also the espionage plot Archie had been trying to stop.

At the beginning of the hike, Gus had managed to tell Shawn everything he’d learned from the employee files, and Shawn agreed that this was all but proof that Mathis was their guy. By the time they reached their first night’s stopping point, they were certain that Shawn would have been able to get the last bits they’d need to put their murderer away for good.

But Mathis turned out to be a harder nut to crack than they’d expected. Shawn had tried to start a dozen conversations with the man, but they had never risen above the smallest of small talk, and each time, Shawn had had to move on to another lawyer without having learned anything.

Shawn slowed his pace enough to let Mathis move ahead, and then he stopped to let Gus catch up with him.

“Anything?” Gus said.

“He’s smart,” Shawn said. “He may be onto us.”

“What makes you say that?” Gus said, a feeling of dread managing to bubble up through the cracks in his exhaustion. He forced it back down quickly. He couldn’t afford to let fear get a foothold. There wouldn’t be a snack bar selling ice-cream sandwiches to bring him out of it here.

“I’ve tossed out enough bait to land a hundred sharks, but he hasn’t even nibbled,” Shawn said. “I’ve tried to engage him on the subject of Archie Kane, but all he says is that it’s a great loss to the firm and ‘to us all personally.’ I tried to get him to talk about the tech stuff he handles, but he insisted that so much of it was confidential that he makes a practice of never discussing any of it so as not to make a mistake. I even mentioned the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-which isn’t easy to casually drop into conversation. He acted like he’d never given the place a thought.”

A terrible idea hit Gus. Again, he fought to keep it from turning into panic. “What if he’s not the right guy?”

“We’ve decided he is,” Shawn said. “We put a lot of thought into that conclusion, and it seems premature to throw away all that work simply because we’re having a hard time making a brilliant career criminal expose himself on the course of a nature walk.”

“If by ‘a lot of thought’ you mean you made a snap decision based on a couple of physical and behavioral characteristics, it’s hard to argue,” Gus said.

“And you confirmed it through research.”

“I found information that reinforced my existing prejudice,” Gus said. “On its own, the fact that he specializes in technology doesn’t mean much of anything.”

They walked a few paces in silence as Shawn thought this over. “If you’re right,” he finally said, “we’ve picked the wrong suspect. And while we’ve been focused on Mathis, the real killer has been focused on us-and is planning to take us out.”

Gus felt a cold jolt of adrenaline surge through his system. At first he assumed it was from the awareness of the danger they were in. But then he realized his body was responding to a sound his conscious mind hadn’t noticed.

“What was that?” Shawn said as the sound came again.

It took Gus a second to recognize the noise that came drifting around the curve in the trail. At first he tried to figure out what kind of animal or bird made a sound like that.

Then it hit him. It wasn’t an animal. It was a woman.

And she was screaming.