Thief River Falls

13

Five miles passed in a haze before Lisa’s emotions got the better of her and she broke down. She felt utterly unprepared for what was happening to her, but she couldn’t allow herself to feel that way for long. She had to let it out and move on. She pulled off the dirt road, cupped both hands over her face, and sobbed. Her shoulders shook as fear and relief poured out of her. Her neck stung with pain, and when she looked down, she realized that the cut across her collarbone was still bleeding and had made a crimson stain as it soaked through her shirt and into her white vest. Seeing the blood brought a wave of nausea.

She felt like a different person. A changed person. Hiding in the elderberries, watching that man hunting for Purdue, she’d realized something frightening about herself. She was capable of violence. She was capable of killing, just like the people she wrote about in her books. If that man had come for the boy, she would have pulled the trigger. She was prepared to defend this child with her life if she had to. And she would take the life of anyone who got in her way.

“I’m sorry.”

Next to her, Purdue’s voice was full of misery.

Lisa wiped her face and tried to get hold of herself. She looked across the car and could hardly see Purdue through her tears. He was a boy made up of watercolors, the paint running in the rain. “You? You don’t have anything to feel sorry about.”

“This is all my fault.”

“No. Don’t say things like that. I don’t know whose fault it is, but it’s not yours.”

Her words didn’t seem to give him any comfort. She understood. The worst things in the world could happen to a child, and they would take it all on themselves. It didn’t matter where the evil came from. A bad man. A terrible accident. A cruel disease. A child could be on his deathbed and still apologize for the pain in someone else’s face. Don’t be sad...

“You need to send me away,” he told her. “I should go.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“All I’m doing is causing you trouble.”

Lisa cupped his chin with her hand and spoke slowly to try to get him to hear her. “That’s not true. I don’t want you feeling that way.”

He shook his head. “Why are you helping me?”

The thought sprang into her mind: Because I need to be saved every bit as much as you.

But she didn’t say that.

“Because you need help,” Lisa replied. “That’s what my mother taught me. If someone needs help, you drop everything, and you help them. Just like you hope they would do for you.”

“But what are we going to do?” the boy asked. “They’re trying to kill me. That means they’ll kill you, too. I don’t want that.”

Lisa stared through the sleet at the miles of empty fields. This remote region, so bitter and harsh, had always been home to her, but at this moment, it felt like foreign ground.

“We’re leaving,” she said.

“For where?”

“I’m not sure yet, but it’s not safe to stay here anymore. We need to get out of this place. I need a couple of minutes at home to get a bandage on my neck and change clothes, and then we’ll hit the road. How does that sound?”

A smile crept onto the boy’s face. “That sounds good.”

“Okay, then.”

Lisa checked her mirror, then steered from the shoulder onto the lonely dirt road. They didn’t have far to go. Two more miles led them back to the highway that went past her house. She turned into the teeth of the precipitation that streaked from the sky. It was getting colder, and the pavement already felt slippery under her tires. She drove south with the railroad tracks and the telephone poles keeping her company.

When she was a quarter mile from her house, she drifted to a stop in the middle of the highway lane. There was no traffic in either direction to be concerned about. She leaned forward, trying to see her house, wanting to make sure no one was waiting for them. If the police had come back, they’d already been there and left again. The land was empty. Her house looked sterile and abandoned.

“I think the coast is clear,” she told Purdue. “This won’t take me long.”

She turned into the driveway and drove until the truck was immediately outside her front porch. She turned off the engine. “Do you need to use the bathroom?” she asked the boy.

“No.”

“You’re sure?” she said with a smile.

Purdue nodded.

“Okay, well, we’ll need to stop for gas along the way. I’ll be right back.”

Lisa got out of the pickup. The sleet nipped at her face like a pack of mosquitoes. She climbed the porch steps, and then she removed her keys from her pocket as she walked to the front door. Before she could put the key in the lock, she noticed that the door wasn’t latched.

It was open an inch, rattling in the wind.

Had she left it that way? She didn’t always remember to lock her front door, but she was certain she had done so this time.

“Hello?” she called, slowly pushing the door inward. “Is anyone there?”

There was no point in being coy. If someone had broken in, they’d already seen her arrive. But no one answered. The house was cool and quiet, just the way she’d left it. Even so, there was a smell inside that wasn’t right. A hint of body odor. Someone had been there while she was gone. When she studied the hardwood floor, she could see that wetness had been tracked inside by someone’s shoes, and the puddles hadn’t had time to dry.

Lisa debated turning around and leaving immediately, but if her intruder had already come and gone, she decided she had time to deal with her wound. She ran upstairs to her bathroom and peeled off her vest and top. The blood from the cut on her neck had made a sticky mess from her collarbone all the way across her right breast, and she used a damp towel to clean herself. Quickly, she disinfected and dressed the cut itself. In her bedroom, she put on a new bra and a flannel shirt and deposited a few necessities from her dresser in a travel bag. The whole process took barely five minutes. She went to the kitchen, grabbed a box of power bars and some cheese sticks from the refrigerator, and then found a red leather jacket in her hall closet to replace the vest. She slipped her gun inside the pocket and went back outside. She made sure to lock the door behind her.

She hurried down the porch steps and across the gravel to the pickup, where she threw the bag behind her seat. Then she got in quickly and started the engine again. Her anxiety was on her face, and she knew Purdue could see it, but she didn’t say anything about what had happened. She put the truck in reverse and backed into a three-point turn, but as she did, she heard a low warning from the boy next to her.

“Lisa, look.”

She glanced out the driver’s window.

A police car was turning off the highway.

Her fear spiked as she recognized the vehicle. It was the same black SUV she’d seen overnight, from the Pennington County Sheriff’s Department. They were trapped, with no way to escape.

“Get down,” she instructed Purdue. “Don’t let them see you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, but I won’t let them hurt you. Now stay out of sight.”

Lisa got out of the truck before the police SUV got close to her. She walked toward the narrow ribbon of her driveway. She was conscious of the weight of the Ruger in her jacket, and when she shoved her hands in the pockets, she slipped her palm around the butt of the gun. The black SUV stopped in front of her, blocking the way. She could see the deputies through the windshield.

Two men got out. They wore chocolate-brown uniforms from the sheriff’s department and flat-brimmed hats. She hadn’t been able to make out the faces of the cops who’d visited her house overnight, but she was sure that these were the same men. They had the right look.

One of the cops approached her, and one stayed by the door of the SUV. They looked about the same age — midtwenties — but the driver, who was heading her way, was clearly the one in charge. He took off his hat; his big head was bald. He was bulky, with the thick-necked build of a wrestler. He was clean shaven, and he had jutting ears and narrow, squinting eyes. His mouth didn’t smile; instead, his lips pushed together into a thin line.

“Ms. Power?” the man said in a voice that had no inflection. “I’m Deputy Garrett. My partner over there is Deputy Stoll.”

His partner, standing next to the SUV, was shorter and doughier. He had curly brown hair and long sideburns. He was working hard to offer a friendly face, but the warmth looked false.

Lisa thought about Purdue’s story. Two of them were policemen.

She shivered. Cold rain dripped down her back.

“I don’t know who you are, Deputy Garrett,” she snapped. “I don’t know Deputy Stoll, either, which is odd, because I’m pretty familiar with all of the police officers in Pennington County.”

“Well, Deputy Stoll and I are both new, ma’am. Transfers from Warroad. We’ve only been on the job here in the county for the past couple of months.”

“I see. And did the two of you pay a visit to my house in the middle of the night?”

The deputy rubbed his chin with a thick fist. She’d surprised him by knowing that. “Yes, actually, we did. We didn’t think you were home. We knocked, but there was no answer.”

“You had your weapons out while you were on my property,” Lisa said. “Why is that?”

“No, ma’am. I assure you we didn’t.”

“I saw your guns very clearly in the moonlight, Deputy.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken.”

Lisa frowned. She didn’t think she’d made a mistake, but his certainty was making her doubt herself. “You also checked to see if my front door was locked. Am I mistaken about that, too?”

Deputy Garrett grimaced as a wave of sleet slashed across his face. He looked uncomfortable now. “Ms. Power, if you would let me explain. You must know why we’re—”

Lisa interrupted him. “I got home a few minutes ago, and my front door was open, Deputy. I know I locked it before I left this morning. Did you break into my house? Do you have a warrant that would let you do that?”

“Ms. Power, please. I understand that you’re upset. We mean you no harm at all. Truly. Our only concern right now is the missing boy. We know he’s with you, and I’m sure that you feel protective of him, but it would be better for all of us if you let us take him with us.”

Lisa stiffened. He’d said it out loud. The boy.

He knew about the boy; he knew Purdue had come to her house. Then she realized: of course he knew. The word was all over town by now. They were looking for a boy, and she’d found a boy.

She tried to read the stolid faces of the police officers, but their expressions gave nothing away. She didn’t know what to believe anymore. If they were telling the truth, then the safest place for Purdue was to go with them. Maybe this whole nightmare was exactly what it looked like: a boy who’d escaped from a human trafficking ring; a ginger-haired killer who was trying to get him back; and the police officers hunting for both of them. These men, Deputy Garrett and Deputy Stoll, were the good guys.

But that wasn’t the story Purdue had told her. The boy had said that two of the killers he’d seen were cops. And yet he’d also admitted that it was night and he couldn’t see clearly. His emotions were running high. He’d witnessed a shocking crime. He’d been injured and his memory shattered into broken pieces. There was no way to know how his young brain had dealt with all that trauma.

What if he was wrong? In that case, the longer Purdue stayed with her, the more she was putting him at risk.

But what if he was right?

Then she would be delivering him into the hands of the people who wanted him dead.

She glanced at the windows of her pickup truck. The boy was hiding, just as she’d told him to do. She found herself frozen with indecision, like a high-wire artist in the wind, unable to go forward or backward. But standing still wasn’t an option, either.

“If I let you take him with you, I want to go, too,” Lisa said softly. “He trusts me. If you separate us, he’ll just run away again.”

Deputy Garrett exchanged a glance with his partner. Something odd flickered across his face that made Lisa uneasy with her decision. “Yes, of course,” he told her. “That’s not a problem. You can come with us.”

“Good.”

“You’re doing the right thing, Ms. Power.”

Lisa still felt anxious. “I hope so.”

“Where is he?” Garrett asked.

She hesitated before answering. She could picture Purdue’s face in her mind. That mop of blond hair; that smart, serious, quizzical expression as he analyzed everything. That fear and panic when she first saw him through her bedroom window. He was definitely running. Running from death. Running from murderers.

Running from the police.

Lisa thought, What if the boy is right?

“Ms. Power?” Deputy Garrett said again. “Please. Where is he?”

She opened her mouth to tell him. It was the only thing she could do. Then her phone started to ring in her pocket, making a loud, jarring noise in the still air. She took a step backward, away from the two deputies.

“I have to get this,” she said.

“Ms. Power, the boy.”

“It’ll just be a minute, I promise.”

She grabbed her phone and answered it. “Hello?”

“Lisa, it’s Will Woolwich with the FBI.”

“Oh, hi,” she said, not taking her eyes off the police officers in front of her. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“I wanted to let you know that I’ve investigated this story you told me about human trafficking. I talked to our field office in Grand Forks. Believe me — if something was going on, they’d be on top of this. This would be a major interdepartmental operation.”

“What did you find out?”

“Well, I don’t know who told you about this manhunt, but nothing like that is happening up there.”

Lisa didn’t answer right away. She breathed the cold air in and out, and she felt the icy rain landing in wet drops on her face. She watched Deputy Garrett and Deputy Stoll, whose faces were darkening with concern. She tried to hide her reaction, because she didn’t want to give them any hint that she’d found them out.

“Lisa?” Will went on when she was silent. “Are you there? Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m here. Are you absolutely sure? There’s no possibility of a mistake?”

“There’s no mistake,” he told her. “Whatever is going on in your area, it has nothing to do with human trafficking.”