She pulled open the truck door. “Let’s go wake the senator and his wife.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
T
he Duntons were already wide awake.
“Ben had a wife! He had young children!” said Michelle Dunton, hugging a robe around her narrow shoulders. “Where is he?”
“That’s enough, Mickey,” said Mag Dunton, his eyes locked on the gun aimed at his chest. The senator, dressed in flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, was next to his wife on the trophy-room couch. This time they were sharing the same cushion, because the home invader had ordered them to sit close together.
The maid was long gone. The two drivers had already left for the Twin Cities in one of the cars. The chief of staff was going to drive the Duntons himself in the morning. It became clear to the Duntons, however, that Rathers wasn’t coming back.
“Where is he?” asked Michelle Dunton. “What did you do to him? Tell me what you did to him.”
“Didn’t do anything to him,” said the intruder, who was dressed in a parka. “Didn’t see him at all tonight.”
“We sent him to your place,” said Dunton.
“There’s open water,” the intruder said evenly. “He must have fallen in.”
“Liar.” She rocked slightly as she hugged herself. “You’re a liar. You killed him.”
“Quiet, Mickey,” said Dunton.
“Be a good wife.” The silver barrel moved so that it was pointing at the rocking woman. “Listen to your husband.”
Michelle Dunton fell back against the cushion and twined her arms even tighter around her body, as if she could stop a bullet that way.
The gun traveled back to the primary target. “Where’s the cash?”
“I already told you people, I can’t put my hands on that large a sum all at once. It’ll take time.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’re asking for a ridiculous amount,” said Dunton. “I don’t have it on hand.”
“Don’t give me that. You’ve got more money than God.”
“Why did you have to hurt her?” asked Dunton. “At least tell me that much. Why did you kill my little girl?”
“We didn’t,” said the intruder. “The witches—”
“Oh, please,” said Dunton. “I’m not a fool.”
“The hell you’re not,” snapped his wife. “You’ve been helping them. Telling them what you know about the FBI’s moves. Covering up for them.”
“I was protecting us,” Dunton said.
“Protecting your office,” continued his wife. “Be honest. For once in your life, be honest.”
Dunton returned his attention to the person with the gun. “Answer my question: why did you kill Lydia?”
A grim smile stretched across the invader’s face. “You want honesty? Let’s get it all out in the open.
She
came to
us.”
“You lured her somehow,” said Dunton. “You wanted to use her for leverage, for more money.”
“She found us. I have to give her credit. She figured that much out. Got that much right. We accommodated her. Gave her a place to stay. Food to eat.”
“Why did she go looking for you?” asked Dunton.
“Who cares?” asked Michelle Dunton. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me,” said her husband.
“She wanted to know more about her birth mother, and felt like she didn’t have anyone else to ask,” said the parka. “Pathetic, really. Thumbing rides all the way over to Brule because she thought we lived there. She read something about Brule in a letter.”
“How did she find you?”
“Lydia told us she called home while she was in Brule. Someone at home set her straight. Told her we lived in Walker.” The parka looked at Michelle Dunton. “Now who would have done that?”
Dunton shot his wife a look and continued asking questions. “Why did you kill her?”
“One night she overheard the two of us talking in the kitchen. She completely misunderstood what we were saying and—”
“What happened?” snapped Dunton.
“Little bitch threatened to go to the police.”
“So you killed her,” said Dunton, swallowing hard. “You killed my daughter and tossed her body in the woods for the animals to finish.”
“It wasn’t like that. She ran outside. Slipped and fell and hit her head. We had to take the baby or it would have died with her.”
“Sounds familiar,” Michelle Dunton said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked her husband.
“You think
I’m
a fool?” asked Michelle Dunton. “Lydia’s mother, that whore, didn’t die during childbirth.”
“Shut up about her,” said Dunton.
His wife’s eyes narrowed, and she sat forward on the couch so that she could turn in her seat and glare at him. “This is all because of you, you and your wandering cock!”
“Mickey, this isn’t helping,” he growled.
“You got that tramp pregnant and hired two backroom butchers to kill her during the delivery.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” said the invader. “That’s not what happened.”
“Then you bring her daughter into our house, a girl destined to take after her mother. Another little slut!” Michelle Dunton turned and pleaded to the person with the gun, “Let me go. Please.”
“Why should I?”
“Let me go and keep him. Make him pay you. He’s got it.”
The barrel was trained on the angry wife. “You’ve got it, too.”
“But this has nothing to do with me,” she said.
“It’s always been about you, Mickey,” said the senator. “If you hadn’t been so frigid, I never would have looked around for someone else.”
“I can’t believe you have the nerve to—”
“Save it for the marriage counselor!” The barrel went from one Dunton to the other. “All I give a shit about is the money! Where in the fuck is the cash?”
Magnus Dunton looked up at their captor. “I am not paying you or your partner another dime.”
“We’ll go to the cops. It’ll be the end of your career.”
“I’m going to them first,” he said.
The gun moved in closer to the senator’s sweating forehead. “You wouldn’t. You’d go to jail. We’d all go to jail.”
“I don’t care anymore,” said Dunton, his eyes moving from the gun to the angry face hovering over him. Back to the gun. “I’ve had enough of this crap. I can’t live like this, always afraid.”
“What about your granddaughter?” asked his captor. “Don’t you care about her?”
“Where is she?” asked Dunton. “I’ve never laid eyes on her. Show her to me. If she exists, let me see her.”
Bernadette sees the granddaughter while using her sight in the truck, on the fly. Someone dressed in pink is cradling the child. The killer is having trouble holding the baby while feeding her and keeps readjusting the bundle as she rests in the crook of the large left arm. The infant is fussing, throwing up its tiny fists.
Bernadette blinks and she’s in another place. The trophy room. There are two people seated on the couch in front of the second murderer, and Bernadette recognizes them by their hair. One has a short shock of auburn on his head and the other has a long ash-blond mane. Dunton and his wife. They’re sitting with their thighs touching. They didn’t suddenly become friendlier toward each other. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.
Back to the baby. The first killer is still struggling, trying to feed the infant. The nursemaid sets the bottle down on the kitchen table and stands up with the child. Readjusts the bundle. Why is this person so clumsy? It suddenly occurs to Bernadette.
The couple on the couch again. The senator rises from the couch. A glint of something silver comes into view. It is aimed directly at Magnus Dunton. Large hands extend the weapon. Bernadette thinks she recognizes something on the killer’s left wrist but can’t be completely sure. Dunton keeps coming. What is he doing? He reaches for the gun.
A bright light.
Bernadette gasped and opened her fist, dropping the knotted thread onto her lap. “Hurry!”
“What’s wrong?” asked Garcia. “What did you see?”
Bernadette blinked twice, but all she saw was blackness.
Not now!
she thought. She raised her hands to her eyes and rubbed hard. Closed her lids tight and opened them again slowly. Nothing. Still blind.
“Cat,” said Garcia. “Talk to me.”
Struggling to keep a calm voice, she told Garcia, “The Duntons are in trouble.”
“What’s going on?”
She closed her eyes and hoped. Prayed. Turned her head toward the passenger window and continued talking as if nothing was wrong. “The senator’s been shot.”
“You sure?”
“Someone is holding him and his wife at gunpoint. He went for the gun. I saw a flash.”
“Where?”
“His buddy’s place.”
“Call an ambulance. Tell the troops.”
She took her phone out of her pocket and opened it. Felt around for the right keys. Dropped the cell on the floor. “Fuck,” she breathed, and bent down. Fumbled around the floor.
“Christ!” said Garcia. “You’re blind again!”
She sat up straight and stifled a groan. Her head was throbbing. “You’d better call.”
After several seconds, she heard him on his cell. She and Garcia would be the first to arrive at the cabin on Walker Bay—and she was blind. Useless.
She closed her eyes tight and dropped her face in her hand. Offered a silent prayer:
“Lord, help me see. Please.”
Then an angry addendum:
“What do you want from me?”
Bernadette lifted her face out of her hand and opened her eyes. She saw a wall of wrought-iron bars in front of her and hollered, “The gate!”
“Fuck it,” said Garcia, flooring it and smashing through the metal barrier. As the truck barreled through, he looked over at her with relief. “You can see now, I take it.”
“I can see.”
“Good,” he said shortly.
As they pulled up in front of the house, she glanced down at the knotted string in her lap, the object that had taken her to the two killers. As she dropped the yarn back into the plastic bag, she suddenly realized what purpose the bracelet could have served. Who would have worn it, and why. It was the equivalent of a string tied around a finger. A rubber band slipped over a wrist.
“Let me get you a catalog. Where did I put it? I can’t remember anything, I swear. I have the worst memory.”
Garcia popped open his door. “Are you okay?”
She opened the passenger door. “I’m good. Let’s do this.”
With guns and flashlights in hand, they went around to the back. The drapes on all the patio doors were closed, but they could see that one of the windows was lit. It was the trophy room.
“There,” she whispered, motioning with a tip of her head.
“I see,” he said.
They went under the deck. The basement door had been kicked in, but no alarm was sounding. The Duntons either didn’t know how to use the home’s security system or they hadn’t bothered to activate it.
The two agents went inside and shined their lights around. No one in the basement. They ran up the basement stairs. The main level was dark, except for a light shining down a hallway. The hallway that led to the trophy room.
That’s where they found the Duntons. His T-shirt more red than white, the senator had been hit square in the chest at close range. He was on the floor, crumpled at his wife’s bare feet. Michelle Dunton was sitting on the sofa, tipped to one side as if she’d fallen asleep while watching television. She’d taken a bullet to the gut.
Garcia put his fingers to her neck. “She’s alive.”
“Stay with her while I go through the rest of the house,” Bernadette said.
“Watch yourself,” he said after her.
Gun and flashlight still in hand, she went from room to room, checking out the main level and then the second floor. The rest of the place was dark and empty. By the time she got back to the main level, Wharten and Cahill were running up from the basement with guns drawn, a small army behind them. “The killer got away,” she told them as she holstered her gun.
“Who’re we looking for?” asked Wharten.
She spotted the medical crew bringing up the rear and pointed them to the room. “In there. Garcia’s with them.”
As he rushed past her in the hall, the lead ambulance guy asked, “What are we looking at?”
“They were shot,” Bernadette told him. “Dunton’s dead, but his wife is still breathing.”
“Who?” asked Cahill. “Who did it?”
Instead of answering B.K., Bernadette ran out the back and went down to the lake to check out a hunch.
Shining her light around, she spotted a set of fresh tracks.
A line of squads followed Bernadette and Garcia to a different house on Walker Bay. After finding snowmobile tracks behind the massive log home where the Duntons had been staying, Bernadette deduced that the shooter had gotten to the couple by avoiding the front gate and entering through the back. Wharten confirmed that one of her suspects lived on the bay.
“He said she inherited it from her grandparents. Went there summers. I’ll bet that’s how she met Dunton. I have no idea what she had on him, but it goes back to that body found in the woods in Brule.”
“And you think she’s the one you saw because of the way she held the baby?”
“Lydia must have told her boyfriend that she felt like
The Fugitive
, not
a
fugitive.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“The Fugitive
. That old show. He was always looking for the one-armed guy.”
“You said there were two of them.”
“I spotted a rubber band on the second killer’s wrist.” She pulled the packaged string out of her pocket and held it up. “This was the same thing. A reminder tool. Something tied around a wrist to remember something.”
Garcia shook his head. “I hope you’re right.”
“I am,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A
lerted by the roar of the snowmobiles as she hopped out of the truck, Bernadette started running down the hill toward the lake. The only illumination was coming from the snowmobiles’ headlights and the full moon overhead, but it was enough for Bernadette to identify the two accomplices. “FBI! Sonia Graham! Stop!”
Garcia followed, yelling the other woman’s name. “Rachel White! This is the FBI! Get off now!”
The midwife extracted something from her jacket.
“Gun!” Bernadette hollered, and she and Garcia fell on their bellies. Two shots rang out, slamming into the incline behind them. Both agents were dusted with the snow that scattered upon impact. Bernadette raised her head and saw White pull on her helmet and speed away. Graham’s sled had killed, and she remained behind.
Garcia crawled down the hill next to Bernadette and rasped, “Take cover.”
They scrambled to their feet and dove behind a pair of old evergreens, the lower quarter of the trunks bare of branches. She and Garcia were across from each other, hunkered about fifteen yards apart. Bernadette looked down toward the shoreline, but she couldn’t discern if Graham had the weapon in hand while she was fiddling with the snowmobile. The machine was sputtering and killing. The woman had probably flooded it. Bernadette and Garcia pulled out their Glocks and flashlights and trained both at the large figure.
Bernadette yelled, “Sonia Graham! Drop your gun and get off the sled! Now!”
A shot punched the ground between the pines, releasing another cloud of snow into the night air, and the agents ducked behind the trees.
Bernadette waited ten seconds and peeked out from around the trunk. Graham was again preoccupied with her sled. Bernadette looked at her boss and motioned with a tip of her head. Both moved forward, and closer to each other. The agents were behind pines planted less than five yards apart, and less than ten yards from the shoreline. They took aim at Graham with their guns and flashlights. “Sonia!” hollered Bernadette. “She ditched you! It’s not worth it! Drop it and get off! Hands up in the air!”
Graham turned, the big gun between both her hands. Two cracks sounded, and one of them found its mark. The midwife flew off the seat of the snowmobile.
Bernadette ran over to the sled.
“Shit,” muttered Garcia, holstering his gun.
Bernadette leaned over the sled and shined her flashlight on the body that had landed on the other side of the uncooperative machine. Graham was on her back, the revolver on the ground at her right and her helmet at her left. Her eyes were wide-open, and her hands were thrown up over her head in a kind of postmortem surrender. “Stupid,” Bernadette said, holstering her Glock.
“The others just pulled down the driveway,” said Garcia, coming up next to her while closing his cell. “I told them we’d go for the nurse while they look for the baby.”
“I hope the bitches didn’t kill her.”
Garcia trained his light over the entry wound, a wet hole in the middle of Graham’s parka. “Which one of us—”
“I don’t know or care,” said Bernadette.
Graham’s left foot was still propped against the side of the sled. Bernadette kicked the big foot off and hopped on the seat. She hadn’t ridden in a while, but she remembered the basics. Mounted on the right handlebar was the throttle, and all she had to do to put the sled in idle was take her thumb off the spring-loaded lever. The brakes were mounted on the left handlebar. She put her thumb over the throttle and slowly pressed down. As she pulled away from shore, she hardly noticed that Garcia had hopped on behind her. The big woman drove a big sled.
“White was headed north!” Bernadette yelled.
“Going for Leech!” Garcia hollered, referring to the massive main lake. “We’ll never catch her!”
The headlights of their snowmobile shined two hundred feet in front of the sled, allowing them to follow White’s tracks at night. Garcia was right. The nurse was heading for Leech. Bernadette wondered if White had an escape plan beyond fleeing across the lake. She suspected that the women had simply panicked after the shooting and decided to get the hell out of town in the quickest and stealthiest way possible.
Bernadette steered the sled north through the bay and hung a right onto the frozen narrows that led to the massive white expanse. At first, the tracks of the nurse’s sled indicated that White was hugging the south shore. Then the tracks went between two clusters of fish houses, one group close to shore and the other farther out in the lake. Suddenly the trail was lost in a tangle of crisscrossing lines.
“Shit!” Bernadette said, and stopped the snowmobile.
Each took out a flashlight and shined it around the snow-covered ice. Two sleds had exited the fish-house neighborhood recently. One hooked left, toward the middle of the lake, and the other hung a right, going up onshore between two rustic log cabins.
“I think she stayed on the lake,” Garcia said, training his beam over the tracks leading to the middle. “She’d get bogged down in the woods.”
“But she’d be too easy to pick off in the open,” said Bernadette.
“Your call.”
They pocketed their lights, and Bernadette steered the sled to the right. They bounced over a snowbank and onto shore, and cut between the cabins. Behind the log homes was a road and then a farmer’s field. Bernadette crossed the road and stopped short of entering the field.
“What’s wrong?” Garcia asked.
She took out her flashlight again and shined it around. “You don’t want to drive into that,” she said, her beam landing on a strand of barbed wire that was stretched in front of them.
Garcia took out his flashlight and shined it to their left, along the farmer’s fence line. “Did we lose her?”
Bernadette worked her light to their right and spotted a gap in the fence twenty yards down. A set of tracks went through and then stopped. There were footprints, and then the tracks continued. “Bike’s giving her trouble. I’ll bet she had to get off and pull-start it,” said Bernadette, referring to a cord that resembled that of a lawn mower.
She pocketed her light and steered the sled toward the right, taking the same path to enter the field. Bernadette was going more slowly. She knew that farmers’ fields could be filled with land mines: Pieces of machinery. Wads of barbed wire. Piles of boulders and tree limbs. Cow and horse carcasses. In the winter, they would look like harmless humps covered by snow.
Bernadette and Garcia went up over a rise, and when they peaked they saw the lights of a sled ahead of them. It wasn’t moving. It had to be White; no one else would be stalled in the middle of a farmer’s field in the middle of the night. Bernadette wondered why the woman hadn’t killed or smashed her lights to avoid being seen. Maybe she figured no one had followed her.
Bernadette gunned it, and the two agents went flying down the hill.
As they came up on White, she was just getting back on her sled. She looked over her shoulder at the agents and gave her snowmobile the gas. The sled jackrabbited forward, and the nurse shot up another rise. Bernadette and Garcia were close behind, the nurse’s sled trapped in the far edges of their snowmobile’s headlights.
White’s sled became airborne at the top of the hill and dropped down on the other side, disappearing from sight. Bernadette’s snowmobile got some air at the top, and both agents grunted upon landing but managed to stay on the sled.
As they hit a flat stretch of open field, White remained in their crosshairs, her snowmobile still caught in the headlights of their sled. Though one-handed, she was navigating the flying sled without a problem. Both machines were going better than sixty miles an hour, a dangerous speed at night. By the time they spotted an obstacle in the headlights, it would be too late to stop. Bernadette’s face was frozen and her gloved hands were growing numb. Though her body served as a windbreak for Garcia, she suspected that he was getting dangerously cold as well.
Bernadette saw a dark silhouette in the distance and recognized the shape. It was an old barn, leaning to one side. As the two speeding sleds neared the building, White opened her throttle further. Bernadette hung back. Where there was a decrepit barn, there was farm trash.
“What’s wrong?” Garcia hollered.
Both agents suddenly saw in White’s headlights what the nurse spotted too late: a stretch of old fencing poking up through the snow, at neck height.
Bernadette stopped her sled and screamed, more a reaction than a warning. It was far too late to warn.
Bernadette remembered reading somewhere that after a guillotine comes down the executed individual remains conscious for thirteen seconds, long enough to blink once for yes and twice for no. The agents didn’t make it to White’s head soon enough to ask it any questions.