Cold Black Earth (31 page)

Rachel raised the gun and squeezed off three quick shots at where the flash had been, hoping this time to hit flesh.

In response she heard only the sound of the slide being racked again.

“Roger, can you walk?”

“Forget about me. Just go.”

“I’m not leaving you.” She could see him now, a dark huddled shape on the ground, twenty feet from the stream bank. “Hang on, Roger. Do you have your radio? Can you call for help?”

Roger made a sighing sound. “Lost it.”

“Well, somebody will hear the shots. I’m not leaving you.”

“He’ll kill us both.”

A sudden rush of steps sounded in the darkness, and Rachel raised the gun, peering into the black. A dark shape cut across her field of vision, toward the stream, and then she could see nothing but heard quite clearly the sound of somebody jumping down into the streambed.

She saw him as he crossed the stream a hundred feet from her and she fired twice more. You’re wasting bullets, she thought, watching him scramble up the far bank to disappear into the trees. She could see it all laid out before her, what was going to happen as he tried his own flanking maneuver, coming up through the trees on the other side of the stream.

He will expect me to pull back and protect Roger, she thought, and she was moving before thinking it through, crossing the stream herself to take cover under the opposite bank, nothing but an image driving her, the image of catching the man with the shotgun by surprise where he wouldn’t expect to find her.

How many times have I fired? She didn’t know; she didn’t know how many rounds Roger’s gun held. She knew only that it was time to start making the shots count. She could hear the man making his way slowly up the bank of the stream. Wait until you’re sure, she told herself. She held the gun two-handed as she’d seen it done, with no clear idea of technique, left hand wrapped around her right wrist, elbows resting on the ground, waiting for something to shoot at.

I am outgunned, she thought. I don’t know what I’m doing and he has a shotgun and Roger and I are both going to die. A great rage suffused her.

The dark figure came into view, stepping carefully through the trees. She could just make out the shotgun, barrel dipping slightly from the horizontal. Her grip tightened. Wait, she thought. Wait until you’re sure.

When she was sure, she fired, and the instant she did it she knew she had missed. The figure leaped sideways and blended with the silhouette of a tree trunk, and Rachel fired twice more in panic. She saw the shotgun rising.

There was a rush of feet in the darkness, from her right, impossibly. The figure jerked away from the tree, the barrel of the shotgun making a dull thwack against the trunk. Rachel fired again, but there were two figures now, one swooping out of the darkness with something raised above its head. There was a sickening crack. The barrel of the shotgun drooped, the first figure swayed and began to buckle, and then after a second blow it toppled backward and fell heavily into the creek bed, the shotgun sliding down the bank.

Above it, the second figure stood with legs apart, grasping a tree limb two-handed. “Aunt Rachel?” he panted. “You OK?”

“Oh, God, Billy.”

“Are you hurt?” Billy jumped down into the streambed.

Rachel could not find her voice. She held up a hand, the gun dangling in the other, and managed to say, “I’m OK. Roger’s hurt. He’s over there.”

Billy dropped the tree limb and picked up the shotgun. Holding it with one hand, he pulled something from his belt with the other. There was a click and a flashlight came on. “Watch this fucker,” he said. “If he moves, shoot him. You might want to shoot him anyway.”

“Who is it?” Rachel’s voice was full of dread.

The light played over the boots and denim-clad legs and the outflung arms, and Rachel knew before it reached the face framed in the hood of the sweatshirt.

“No,” she sobbed as Billy’s light fell on Dan Olson’s face.

31    

“We couldn’t save the arm,” said the trauma surgeon. “We were lucky to save him, all the blood he lost.” The surgeon was a gloomy-looking individual, perhaps because of all the ravaged flesh he had had to deal with. “I’m afraid his law enforcement career is over.”

“Well, we’ll fix him up with a nice pension,” said the Dearborn County sheriff, who had been sitting with Rachel in a quiet lounge in the intensive care ward of St. Mary’s Hospital in Warrensburg. “He’s earned it.” The sheriff was a tall, handsome man going nicely gray, and Rachel had taken a dislike to him because his every word was so obviously produced with an eye toward the public relations effect.

“When can I see him?” said Rachel.

“Try a couple of days from now,” said the surgeon, already turning away. “Right now he’s so far under he doesn’t even know he’s hurt yet.”

When the doctor had gone, the sheriff steered Rachel by the elbow toward the double doors at the end of the hall. “We’ll try to sneak you out a side door,” he said. “There’s a fair number of media people waiting downstairs.”

“I’d like to see my nephew if I could.” She was light-headed with lack of sleep and the aftereffects of stress and shock. She had bandages on her hands where the rocky streambed had lacerated them.

The sheriff frowned a little. “He’s at the county building, being debriefed. I think they’re still going at it.”

“I hope you’ll do a better job of keeping his name out of the papers than you did keeping his cover intact.”

The frown deepened. “We’re taking that extremely seriously. We’re looking into how that happened. There was a violation of procedures somewhere.”

Rachel let an icy silence be her only comment. When a deputy ushered her into an office in the county building twenty minutes later, Matt turned from a window with a cup of coffee in his hand. He looked haggard and worn down; Rachel would have sworn he had aged five years since she’d seen him last. He set the coffee down on a desk and they embraced. “How’s Roger?” he said.

“He’ll live. He lost the arm.”

“Jesus.”

“Billy saved his life by putting on a tourniquet. Billy saved my life, too. And he tied up . . . that asshole. Trussed him up with his shoelaces, neat as could be. Your son’s a hero.” Not least, Rachel thought, because he had refused to comply with Dan Olson’s tearful pleading to kill him, a request Rachel would have been all too happy to grant. She had finally stumbled a few yards away into the woods to retch herself empty before returning to wait for the police.

Matt shook his head. “I wish I’d known. I wish Roger’d told me.”

“I think the cops are usually pretty tight-lipped about informants. Except when they screw up and blow their cover.”

“I’m still not real clear on what happened. Nobody around here will tell me anything.”

“Because they’re busy covering their asses.” She reached for Matt’s coffee and took a sip. “All I know is what Billy told me last night. He’d agreed to be a confidential informant for the sheriff’s department, going after the meth networks in the county. He’d been doing it for weeks. Roger was one of the few who knew about it.

“Last night Billy got a text message from Kayla saying Stanfield was looking for him. Somebody’d blown Billy’s cover, probably someone in the sheriff’s department. When Billy got the message, he was at a house near Bremen with a couple of Stanfield’s pals, meth guys he was hoping to set up. He figured he didn’t have much time before they got whatever information Stanfield had, so he slipped out the back door and took off on foot.

“He didn’t know who he could trust, so he called me. He was a couple of miles from that old house across the creek from Dan’s place, so he made for there. He’d discovered the place when he worked for Dan that time, and as far as he knew, the meth guys didn’t know about it. He had no idea Dan was using it for . . . his purposes.

“When he got in there and saw Ryle, he freaked out and called Roger. Roger came and got him and parked in a field a couple of hundred yards away, then went back to investigate. Meanwhile I had showed up with Stanfield. I’m just lucky Billy disobeyed Roger’s orders to stay put at the car.”

Matt looked past Rachel with a thousand-yard stare. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t fucking believe it about Dan. I will never, ever understand it.”

“Believe it,” said Rachel, her voice tight with disgust. “I was there.”

“He’s in confession mode,” said the ISP detective, the older of the two who had sat at Matt’s kitchen table days before. “He’s spilling his guts. He breaks down a lot and cries, which slows things down. He’s way into remorse at this point.”

The detective sat across a desk from Rachel in an office at the Warrensburg Police Department, a gray-painted room with half a dozen desks, a couple of computers and a bulletin board with several layers of notices pinned to it.

“I’m sorry he feels bad,” said Rachel. “So do I.”

She felt as if she had been burned hollow and then filled with ice. She was beyond numb and into disembodied. She sensed she had perhaps two hours left before total collapse, and she was hoping to be at home in her bed before then.

The detective said, “Just in case it matters, he swears he had no intention of hurting you. It was Deputy Black he was after, because he knew he’d figured things out. He says he wouldn’t have hurt you.”

“That’s good to know,” said Rachel, coldly. She smoothed a stray flap of adhesive tape with a thumb. “How on earth did he run into Otis Ryle?”

“The company Olson works for has the pork contract for the prison. Olson delivers meat there every week. He just happened to be there on the day Ryle got hold of his bogus pass, and Ryle just happened to pick his truck to hide in. Ryle jumped him when Olson discovered him back there, and Olson won the fight. As in, he broke Ryle’s neck. He was all set to call the police, and then he found Ryle’s prisoner ID and realized who he had. He took him home and put him on ice in a big walk-in freezer he had and started to plan his campaign. It was damn quick thinking. He’s pretty smart, whatever else he is.”

“No, he’s not stupid. Why did he dump the deer behind our place?”

“He says he wasn’t trying to incriminate anybody. He was just looking for some place to dump it that wasn’t right by his place. He’d parked his truck in some trees and was scouting on foot for a way down to the creek when you saw him on the road. He did a lot of this on foot, he says. When he killed Holmes, he hiked across country to the bar on 150 and crawled into the backseat of his truck. He knew nobody locks their vehicles around here.”

“What happened the night he killed McDonald? He was with me that night. I don’t know when he had a chance to do it.” Rachel could still feel Dan on top of her in the creaking motel bed, grunting with pleasure.

“He’d actually killed him that afternoon. He’d arranged to talk to McDonald about a job with DAE, and McDonald came out to his house. He clobbered him on the head like he did the other two. They all three had skull fractures, by the way. None of them was conscious when the, uh, nasty stuff was done.”

“That was nice of him.”

The detective met her cold stare for a couple of seconds and then gave up and shrugged. “It’s something. Anyway, he hid McDonald and his car in a shed, and then after he spent the evening with you he went home, shoved McDonald into his car, drove him to the spot he’d picked, and set up the show. He’d had Thomas’s truck out the night before and parked it across the road at that spot, to leave the tracks. He wanted us to think McDonald had been stopped at random. But there was nothing random about it.”

Rachel sighed. “And all of this was about his aunt, was it?”

The detective nodded. “It was all about her land. The land had come to her from her father, Olson’s grandfather, that is. Her children had predeceased her, so when she married Holmes it meant the land would pass to him. And he had declared his intention to sell it off and go south somewhere. Olson said he had pleaded with his aunt to keep the land in the family, let him have a shot at farming it, but she just told him to talk to Holmes. She was sick by then and Holmes was calling all the shots. And Olson said he could see Holmes knew he had hit the jackpot and wasn’t going to budge. So he had to go. If he died before the aunt did, the land would pass to Olson. And that’s what would happen now if he wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Rachel sat tight-lipped, contending with warring emotions. “And the other two were just to cover up.”

“To sell the Otis Ryle scenario and to distract people from looking too closely at a motive for Carl Holmes. But he had reasons for picking both of them.”

“And what would those be?”

“Well, with Mark McDonald he said he considered it a public service. A whole lot of people had gotten hurt in the elevator scandal. He was playing avenging angel.”

“That would be a gratifying role,” Rachel said. “And Ed Thomas?”

The detective’s lips firmed, as if he were repressing a mild attack of gas. “It emerged that he and Mr. Thomas had . . . a history.”

“What do you mean?”

The detective frowned at a pen he was fiddling with and then his eyes flicked up to meet Rachel’s. “He said Ed Thomas molested him, repeatedly, when he was twelve years old and working for Thomas one summer.”

Rachel closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”

“Olson said he never told anyone about it. He was ashamed.”

“Oh, poor Danny.”

“Yes. I think that might account for the . . . savagery in the first killing.”

When Rachel opened her eyes and took her hands away from her face, the detective was staring at her, a pensive look on his face. “Olson told me Thomas did do one good thing for him.”

“What was that?”

“He said, ‘He made me a better football player. You need rage to play football, and he gave me that.
’
”

Rage would help, Rachel thought as she stood at the south window in the living room looking out across the fields. It would help to be able to feel something besides this bottomless horror at herself and the world. Rage would burn her clean. But all she could summon was loathing.

She pulled away from the window and wandered through the house where she had grown up. Everything was muted, colors and sounds; Rachel had been moving in a fog for days. She collapsed onto the couch, inert, staring out at the branches of the old oak.

Well, wasn’t that fun, she thought. You jumped in the sack with a guy you had always had the hots for, and damned if it wasn’t pretty good. And then he turned out to be a killer who hacked three men to death.

What do you do with
that
? That’s going to make intimacy problematic for a long, long time.

The pilot light of her optimism had gone out. Rachel had never given in to despair, but for the first time in her life she saw how a person could.

You wanted to be different, Rachel thought. You weren’t going to be like everybody else, marry a strapping boy just like your father and wind up another farm wife staring out the window while you did dishes, wondering what was out there beyond the fields. You wanted distinction and you spent your life chasing it, all the way to a bunker in Baghdad and a bitter good-bye in Beirut. And then you came home and found a way to really distinguish yourself. You fucked the Dearborn County Nightstalker, and they’ll be talking about you for fifty years.