The Zero Night

36

Chelsey Webster awoke in her own bed. She glanced at the clock on her nightstand and saw that it was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. She’d checked out of the hospital in the late morning, after the next battery of tests showed no further signs of physical trauma. Gavin had driven her home, and she’d been able to force down a little soup, but her stomach wasn’t up to much more. Then she’d felt a new wave of exhaustion and had gone to take a nap.

Now three more hours had passed.

Gavin sat on their bed, staring at her with his luminous eyes. While she’d been asleep, he’d showered, and he looked refreshed. His curly hair was damp. He wore a black sweater and tan slacks, but his feet were bare. Seeing that she was awake, he grabbed and hugged her, and she winced.

“Sorry,” he said, easing her back onto the pillow. “I forgot. You must be sore.”

Chelsey simply stared back at him. Her husband.

“I’m relieved that you’re safe,” he went on. “I’d nearly given up hope.”

“Here I am,” she replied.

“It must have been horrible.”

“Yes, it was.”

“But it’s over now. How do you feel?”

“How do you think I feel?” Chelsey replied, her voice like the edge of a knife.

Gavin blinked nervously. He reached out for her hand, but she yanked it away. “I know it will take time for you to get past this. That’s understandable. But you’ll get counseling. Everything will be fine.”

Chelsey kept staring at him. This fraud. This hypocrite. Did he really think she had any interest in his fake sincerity? His sugar-sweet lies?

“I did everything they asked,” Gavin continued, his eyes oddly desperate for her to believe him. “I got the cash. I gave it to them. I followed all of their instructions. The only thing I wanted was to get you back safely. They said they’d tell me where you were.”

“Instead, they left me to die,” Chelsey said.

“I know.”

“Gavin, who is Hink Miller?” she asked.

He hesitated. “You know about him?”

“The police told me.”

He shook his head bitterly. “Hink was a client. I represented him on an assault charge last year. That was all. I haven’t seen him since then.”

“They found part of the ransom money in his house.”

“I heard that, yes.”

“He was murdered. Someone shot him the day after you paid the ransom.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Chelsey threw back the blanket and got out of bed. She swayed a little as she stood, but then she steadied herself.

“Are you sure you should be getting up so soon?” Gavin asked.

“Don’t worry about me.”

She went to their walk-in closet and turned on the light. At the back wall, she reached to a shelf over the hangers and threw several sweaters to the floor. With both hands, she felt around the rear of the shelf. There was nothing there. She returned to the doorway and folded her arms across her chest.

“Where’s your gun?”

Gavin took a long time to answer. Finally, he said, “I don’t know. It’s missing.”

“Missing? It was there a couple of weeks ago. I saw it. The gun and a box of bullets.”

“I went to look for it on Thursday, and it was gone. The kidnapper must have taken it.”

“How would the kidnapper know where we keep the gun?”

His voice rose with a wave of outrage. “What, are you a prosecutor now? Is this some kind of cross-examination? I don’t know how he found it! The house was bugged. He was listening to us for days. One of us must have said something about it.”

“It wasn’t me,” she said.

“Well, maybe he searched the house.”

“He was there to abduct me, Gavin. Why would he take the time to steal a gun?”

“I have no idea!”

She came and sat next to him on the bed. “Was it you? Did you do this?”

“What?”

“Did you arrange for me to be kidnapped? Did you kill this man Hink? Did you ask him to kill me?”

“Did I—? Are you out of your mind? No!”

“The police seem to think you did.”

“The police are wrong. That’s what they do. They choose an easy suspect, and then they cherry-pick and misconstrue the evidence so that it looks the way they want it to look. I see that with my clients all the time. For God’s sake, Chelsey, I would never do this. You know me.”

“Do I?”

“Of course, you do.”

“The look in your eyes in the hospital,” Chelsey murmured, shaking her head. “You couldn’t believe I was alive. You were certain you would never see me again.”

Gavin banged his fists against his forehead. “You’d been gone for days! I told you, I was terrified! I thought you were dead!”

“Or did you assume Hink had killed me and buried my body? Like you’d paid him to do?”

Her husband shot off the bed. “This is nuts. I’m not going to listen to this.”

He crossed the bedroom, then stopped where he was and turned back to her, his face stricken. He approached the bed and slid to the floor in front of her and put his head in her lap. When he spoke, his voice was muffled.

“I know you’re upset. I don’t blame you. But you have to believe me, I didn’t do this.”

She listened to his labored breathing. After a while, she summoned a smile and reached down and cupped his cheeks with her hands. “All right, Gavin. If you say you’re innocent, then I have to accept that.”

“You believe me? Really?”

“We’ve had our differences over the years, but you’re still my husband.”

“That’s right.”

Chelsey stroked her fingers through his curly hair. She knew he liked it when she did that. “I’m not thinking straight. Plus, I’m starving. I think I’m finally ready to eat something.”

“What can I make for us?” Gavin asked.

“Actually, I’d love pizza. What about Thirsty Pagan?”

“Sure. We can drive over there.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not up for that. I’m not ready to leave the house. Would you go get one for us and bring it back?”

“Are you sure you’ll be okay alone?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“It won’t take long. An hour or so at most.”

“Good.”

He stood up, then bent down and pressed his lips against hers. They were dry and cracked. “We can start over, can’t we?”

“Whatever you say.”

Gavin grabbed socks from his dresser and sat down on the bed to put them on. He slipped his feet into loafers, then disappeared down the hallway to the stairs that led to the lower level. She heard the outside door open and shut, and she went into the hallway and stood beside the front window. A few seconds later, she watched Gavin’s car drive away.

When he was gone, she hurried into his office. His MacBook was on the desk. She knew the password to access his files — she knew all his passwords; he reused the same one over and over with slight variations — and she accessed his desktop screen and loaded the internet browser. She went to Gmail and logged into the private account he kept for his geocaching activities.

There were no secrets between husband and wife.

She stared at the lineup of messages in his in-box. Her eyes flicked down the list of unread emails and stopped when she got to one that had been sent overnight, around two in the morning.

The sender’s email handle was Razrsharp. The subject of the message said:

Chelsey clicked on the message to open it. The email consisted of nothing but two rows of numbers:

GPS coordinates.

She copied the numbers and plugged them into a mapping utility, and the location came back on the west side of the city. When she checked the street view, she found herself staring at a remote section of Skyline Drive in the woods near Spirit Mountain.

Chelsey turned off the computer. She headed for her car.

Serena pulled onto the shoulder of Getchell Road, near a point where a small white cross was dug into the ground. She got out and walked into the weeds and squatted near the cross. There were rosary beads and dirty plastic flowers hanging over the post. A name had been painted on the cross in black, but two years had gone by, and the paint was fading. She could barely make it out.

Jonah Fallon.

It had happened right here. She stood up and looked in both directions down the lonely highway, seeing nothing but endless lines of trees. She’d been in this location once before, when she’d been helping Abel Teitscher scour the forest during the early part of the investigation.

Irony of ironies, she’d been called away from the case to deal with the suicide of Nikki Candis.

The road was arrow-straight. No curves at all. The accident had happened at ten thirty on a Saturday night. Fallon was a fitness geek, a man who ran every night, the same route on the same roads. He’d been wearing orange reflective tape on the back of his jacket and flashers on the heels of his running shoes. But the night would have been black as coal, and Nikki Candis would have been drunk to the point of unconsciousness, and Serena had no idea how fast the woman had been driving. Jonah Fallon didn’t stand a chance. The Highlander had taken him out at full speed and kept going. The coroner said he died instantly, his body broken.

Serena got back into her car. A mile north, she turned left on a road called Wildrose Trail. The forest had been chopped away here to make large, grassy lots for executive home sites. They were sprawling, expensive properties, some fetching close to a million dollars, which was still a lot of money in the Duluth market. She parked outside a house with multiple gables and a white-brick exterior. There was a neat garden in the front yard, and the lawn had been recently mowed. A car with Wisconsin plates was parked in the driveway.

She’d never met Susan Fallon. This was Abel’s case, and he’d been the one to deal with Jonah’s wife. There was no record in the file that Abel had contacted her in more than a year; he’d had nothing to report on the status of the cold case. Now Abel was retired in New Mexico, and it fell to Serena to tell this woman that they finally knew who had been behind the wheel when Jonah died.

It was much later in the day than she’d planned to be here. Most of the day had been taken up in finding a lawyer for Delaney and in taking her statement at police headquarters. They’d also discussed possible charges for Ben Larsen with the county attorney. Serena had finally been able to get away, but she deliberately hadn’t called Susan Fallon before showing up. After two years, this was the kind of news that she wanted to break in person.

At the door, Serena rang the bell and waited. It was a long time before she heard footsteps inside. She had no photograph of Jonah’s wife, so she didn’t know what to expect, but when the door opened, she saw two people standing on the threshold. One was a tall older man; the other was a short older woman. She knew them. They were familiar to her. She’d talked with them very recently, but she struggled to place them because she had no idea why she was seeing them here.

Something was wrong.

Something made no sense.

“Oh, Detective, hello,” the woman greeted her. She didn’t sound surprised at all to see Serena on the doorstep. “We heard about Chelsey. That’s such wonderful news.”

Serena blinked, forcing her mind to catch up to her eyes. She studied their faces again and glanced at the car in the driveway with Wisconsin plates.

Then, in a rush, she knew. She remembered.

Mary and Tim Webster.

Gavin Webster’s parents from Rice Lake.

“It’s very kind of you to come out here to tell us in person,” Mary Webster went on. “Of course, Gavin called us as soon as he got word. It sounds like Chelsey is healthy and fine. We’re so relieved.”

Serena tried to find the words to ask the questions that were in her head.

“What are the two of you doing here?” she asked.

“Well, we put it off as long as we could,” Mary replied. “Someone had to start cleaning out Susan’s house. Given everything, Gavin wasn’t going to be much help. He asked if we could take the lead, and we said we would. But I can’t tell you how painful it is. Her spirit is still here. This is where she died, you know. She didn’t want to pass away in a hospital.”

“Susan,” Serena murmured.

“That’s right.”

“Susan Fallon. Your daughter — Gavin’s sister — was Jonah Fallon’s wife.”

“Yes, as we told you, it’s just been tragedy upon tragedy for us. First Gavin lost everything, and then Susan received the cancer diagnosis so soon after getting married. And then for her to lose Jonah in that horrible, horrible accident. Well, God can be cruel sometimes. But at least He isn’t cruel today. Today Gavin got Chelsey back, so that’s something. It simply would have been too much for him to lose his sister and his wife in the same year.”