In Shadows (9 page)

IRGIL WASN’T PARTICULARLY HAPPY
that Jake and Cramer had found evidence he had missed, or that they had been messing around a sealed crime scene. And since Jake had a familial connection to the case they all knew that anything he discovered could be construed as tainted by a good defense attorney, anyway.

“I didn’t have anything to go on until you found that print,” Virgil finally admitted, as the three of them sat in his cruiser. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you shouldn’t have crossed that tape, and both of you know that. I also got a report about
you
from Houston. You aren’t planning on dragging your problem with these Torrios here, are you?”

Jake frowned. “Cramer and I
can
help.”

Virgil eyed Jake as though weighing the idea again.

“No,” he said at last. “You made it pretty clear you didn’t want any part of local law enforcement a long time ago.”

Jake reddened. “So? What are you gonna do now?”

Virgil sighed, resting both hands on the steering wheel and staring out into the drizzle that had just started. “I have
no suspects other than the usual town reprobates. But they all have alibis, and even if they didn’t, Albert’s killing was out of their league. Hell, that kind of brutality should be out of anybody’s league. My boys have been to every house in the valley and along the highway. We had dogs all over Albert’s land. They didn’t find anything to track. How they missed that newspaper, I’ll never know. There were no fibers in the carpet or on any of the furniture, and all the blood in the house was Albert’s. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. The paper will go to the crime labs in Augusta. If they can’t find anything for us it will be sent to the FBI. Now, you stay out of it.”

“Good luck,” said Jake as he climbed out of the cruiser. “Nice seeing you again.”

Virgil shook his head.

Cramer nudged Jake as they walked back to their car. “He’s just mad because you’re back one day and you find evidence he couldn’t.”

Jake shook his head. “It’s a lot more than that.”

Cramer nodded. “Baggage,” he muttered.

They watched as Virgil’s cruiser disappeared down the drive, and for a while longer they sat there in silence, both lost in thought.

S
C
RAMER PULLED OUT OF
A
LBERT’S DRIVEWAY
a bright red sports car nearly took off their bumper. Jake caught a glimpse of a youthful face—barely high enough to see through the steering wheel—before the car banked away around the corner in a squeal of rubber and a roar of exhaust.

“At last,” said Cramer, gunning the car out onto the valley road. “Some excitement!”

“We’re not traffic cops,” said Jake, tightening his seat belt and pressing the soles of his feet down into the carpet as though
he
had the brakes.

“Yeehaa!” shouted Cramer as the Camry lifted up on two wheels in the turn.

“
I
rented this car,” Jake reminded him.

Cramer showed him a wicked, toothy grin before turning his eyes back to the winding road. “Sucks to be you,
mon ami.”

They almost caught the little guy when he slowed at the valley’s mouth to make the turn onto the highway. But then
the Mustang shifted gears, and it was all Cramer could to do keep it in sight. The driver of the car must have spotted the state trooper ahead even before Jake did, because he whipped off the highway and onto another farm road, and when Cramer and Jake made the turn Jake hung out the window, flagging his shield at the cop, who nodded and flipped on his lights.

“This is a bad road to speed on,” muttered Jake.

Cramer glanced at him, then back to the road. “Something I should know?”

“Something I hope
he
knows,” said Jake, nodding toward the disappearing car ahead. “There’s all kinds of drop-offs around here, and not many of them have guardrails.”

As Jake spoke Cramer burst over a low hill just in time to see the sports car fail to negotiate the next curve. That one
did
have a rail, but it didn’t slow the Mustang much, and Jake knew the road well enough to be certain the kid wasn’t going to survive the crash.

On the rim of the overlook Cramer ground the Camry to a halt, and Jake ran to the torn guardrail. He could hear the roar of raging water before he got there. Still shaken from the chase, he watched what was left of the car sink beneath the white water in the stream below. The boy’s body lay draped over a granite outcrop, forty feet down. Sirens heralded the approach of more than one police cruiser, and Jake noticed that the second car belonged to Virgil. Tires slashed gravel, car doors slammed, but they were faraway sounds that couldn’t touch Jake. When Cramer slapped him on the back he barely felt it.

“Nice vacation,” said Cramer, glancing up into the thin drizzle.

Jake waved toward the ravine. “A boy’s dead down there.”

“Car booster. I keep telling you, Caucasians are all criminals. You people just got no values.”

A deputy started looping a rope around the rail, preparing to rappel down over the lip of the road. Jake watched, feigning interest.

The deputy’s partner checked out both their IDs, nodding to Virgil as he approached the scene.

“Tourists?” the cop asked Jake.

“Family reunion,” said Cramer.

The cop stared at him and Jake glared. The black population in Maine was only slightly higher than the number of carrier pigeons.

“What happened?” asked Virgil, trotting up to them.

“The kid blasted by us on the valley road at about a hundred miles an hour,” said Jake. “We couldn’t catch him.”

The deputy glanced over his shoulder at the taut rope where the other cop had disappeared. Virgil nodded for him to go help, and he passed his clipboard to the sheriff.

“Anything else?” asked Virgil, turning back to Jake.

“Not much,” said Jake. “The boy was so small I couldn’t see the top of his head through the rear window.”

“Fill this out, then,” said Virgil, handing Jake the clipboard so he could write in his own statement. “Didn’t take long for you two to find more trouble.”

He shook his head as he walked away to join his deputies.

“You look tired,” said Cramer, giving Jake the once-over.

“I’m tired of people dying,” said Jake, shielding the clipboard under his arm.

“Neat vacation, huh?” said Cramer.

“Want to go back to Pam’s?”

“Nah. I’m going to rent another car, drive out to the coast, and kill myself.”

ANDI HAD REPAIRED THE BROKEN PANE by duct-taping cardboard where the glass had been. Pierce sat quietly beneath it, enjoying the smell of wet grass through the open window and the feel of misting rain on his hands.

But suddenly he experienced a sensation that didn’t seem to be coming from his nose or his tongue or his skin but actually entering his head somehow, like a vibration that wandered eerily up and down in pitch, somewhere inside his skull. He felt as though he were being sucked right out of his bedroom and blasted somewhere else. He could feel his feet still resting on the floor, but he could also feel the vibration of what he knew instantly was an automobile as it raced through the gears. And there was something else happening, as well. Strange explosions inside his skull like … shapes … only he sensed them as
patterns
rather than felt them. Weird, undulating, ever-changing … differences … variated
things
rather than the blank wall of darkness he was accustomed to. Then suddenly the vibration ceased and
instead he had an awful feeling of falling. But throughout the entire experience there was fear, as well. A weird and not quite definable terror that had nothing to do with the eeriness of the encounter or the imagined fall. And for the life of him he could not quite grasp whether it was
he
who was afraid or some other.

He gasped, clenching every muscle in his body, finally letting out a sigh that seemed to last forever, as though his life were slowly exhaling from between his lips.

With his arms still resting shakily on the windowsill, he closed his eyes and concentrated, trying desperately to hold onto the horrible sensation, to understand it. Closing his eyes had no physical effect on Pierce. It just always seemed to help him think.

He kicked off his shoes, and let his socked feet rest on the hardwood floor.

Nothing was moving in the house. His mom was at work, and he was alone.

He ran his wet fingers along his face, tracing the skin up his jawbone to his earlobe. The strange contact had appeared out of nowhere, and then just as abruptly it had been cut off, like flipping the switch on his mother’s electric razor.

Buzz.

No buzz.

But he did understand a
little
of what had happened, and the possibility filled him with both wonder and dread. His mother had explained the idea to him. Sound. For only a scalpel moment, for just that sharpest of times, Pierce knew that he had
heard.

And just maybe, oh, just maybe … he had
seen.

More than anything else in the world, Pierce had always wanted to see and hear. There was only one other wish he could imagine that he would have traded for either if God had suddenly chosen to come down and say
Pierce, you’ve
been a great kid. What would you like for me to do for you today?
But he had never thought that he was any more likely to gain his sight and hearing than he was a real father. Until this moment.

But
what
had he heard?
What
had he seen?

And what had
he felt
?

The terror had gripped him in monster talons, and he knew that it was a fear so deep-rooted it could only come from the knowledge that death was very, very near. And then it had all stopped just like the razor.

Someone was dead.

Wonder, awe, and fear bubbled up so fiercely in his chest he was convinced he could hear
them.
The last thing in the world he wanted to hear or see was people dying. If that was the only channel he was going to get, he thought he could live without it. Would God do something like that? Was it some kind of test, like he’d given to Job?

Pierce’s fingers slipped along the soaked windowsill, scratching at the flaking paint.

I don’t want to know that people are dying, Lord. Especially not if there’s nothing I can do about it. Please don’t ask me to know about that.

But in his heart he knew that something like that was happening to him, because he still sensed danger. Not immediate. Not a vibration in the house. No evil odor drifting through his bedroom. Something tantalizing but even more hateful and horrifying in its faint faraway feeling. The thing that had come to watch him was out there somewhere. On the move.

He leaned closer to the open window, and anyone who passed across the backyard would have been certain he was staring up at the mountains. His nostrils flared with each soft inhalation. The sense that something was broken in the valley came over him again, and he knew that whatever it was it
was getting worse. And even without eyes or ears, Pierce knew better than anyone that a real storm was blowing in high overhead.

But other than the constant dripping on his hands, the day below was still as death.