Quinn brought the Taurus to a halt at a steep list toward the passenger side, its two right wheels off the road. He had to climb up out of the car. Pearl opened her door and simply tumbled out.
Around them were half a dozen parked state patrol cruisers with lights flashing. Moving figures crossed the blocked highway and ran into the woods.
Quinn hurried around the front of the Taurus and helped Pearl to her feet.
“Still got your piece?” he asked calmly.
Pearl held up the Glock and showed him.
“Ready?” Quinn asked.
But Pearl was already running with the others toward the woods. Jaws were clenched. Everyone was intent. There were sounds of heavy breathing, but no one spoke. If the state cops were giving orders, they were using hand signals.
Broken branches and crushed underbrush marked the SUV’s path, making it easy to find.
No one knew exactly what would happen when they found it.
* * *
Beth was aware that her left side hurt. Then she realized she was lying in an awkward position on top of Link.
Westerley’s SUV lay on its side. If Beth wanted to exit, she’d have to climb up to the broken-out window on the vehicle’s right side. If she could force the door open, maybe she wouldn’t have to climb through the window and risk being cut by remaining glass shards.
She remembered the SUV leaving the road, then rolling over and over. Link, belted in, was still in the driver’s seat, but he was flopping around, unconscious or dead. Beth had been bounced back and forth violently. She had no idea how seriously she was hurt.
She moved her body parts tentatively and tried to take inventory. No doubt she was badly bruised, and there was a painful bump above her right ear. It was the pain in her left side that was intense. Every move made her suck in her breath in agony. Maybe a broken rib. Maybe it had pierced her lung.
She managed to change position so she had one leg beneath her and could gain some leverage. She clutched the cushion of the bucket seat above her and tried to pull with her arms.
Something was in her way, blocking her left arm.
Link’s shotgun.
It posed no danger now. She gripped the barrel and shoved it away.
A little more room. She got her foot braced on the steering wheel, gripped the seat cushion, and started to raise herself so she could squeeze out through the window. She smelled smoke. She could hear fluid dripping and could also smell gasoline. Any second now, the SUV might catch fire. Burst into an orange fireball the way wrecked cars did in the movies and on television. She had to get out of here before that happened. She thought about Link. Maybe he was dead. Beth found that she didn’t care, not considering what she knew about him now. What he’d done. And he’d killed Wayne.
My God! He killed Wayne!
She drew a deep breath and found the strength to elevate herself. The pain in her side flared, but she made progress. She actually managed to close her hand around the door’s padded arm rest. Something to grip, to use to wriggle higher and see if the door handle worked.
Link’s hand closed like a trap on her ankle.
The overturned SUV hadn’t exploded. Not yet, anyway. But it was burning. Oil or gas in the engine compartment was sending out gray smoke that disappeared quickly among the canopy of leaves and the dark sky.
Quinn and Pearl stopped advancing with the contingent of state police, when Beth Evans staggered around from behind the big vehicle lying on its side. She dropped to her knees.
Quinn nudged Pearl and motioned with his head. They moved to the side as the state patrol advanced cautiously on Beth. It took only a moment to determine that the overturned SUV was unoccupied.
Pointing to a glimmer of blood on a dark leaf, Quinn struck out in a continuation of the way the vehicle must have been moving when it rolled onto its side.
“They always keep going the way they were moving,” he said.
“That Quinn’s law?” Pearl asked, keeping up with him.
“Link’s gotta be shaken up, not thinking straight. But one thing he knows, even if he hasn’t admitted it to himself, is that it’s over. His mind’ll clear and he’ll get tired enough or ache enough that he’ll stop running. It won’t be worth it to him to buy a few more minutes, or even hours. He’ll be played out.”
“Then what?” Pearl asked.
“He’ll stop. He’ll turn around. He’ll give himself up, or he won’t.”
Another siren yowled to silence nearby. Link had to know he was sewn up tight. There was no escape.
Quinn kept leading the way through the trees, his clunky black shoes crunching and snapping undergrowth as he cleared a path for Pearl. Mosquitoes started to bite. Branches started to scratch faces and bare hands and arms. Even though he was soaked with perspiration, Quinn found himself wishing he hadn’t left his suit coat in the car. A mosquito tried to fly into his ear. He slapped at it and it tried to fly up his nose.
A sound he recognized made him stop. He stood still, other than to slowly extend an arm to his side as a signal for Pearl to stop beside him.
“He’s got a pump shotgun,” Quinn whispered. “I heard him rack a shell into the breech.”
Pearl said nothing but stood stock still. She even ignored a mosquito drawing blood from her right arm.
They stood near the edge of a small clearing. Quinn figured Link Evans was concealed on the other side, and his running was over.
There was a lot of noise, and small branches snapped behind Quinn. The state police keeping up. One by one they appeared along the line of trees, on either side of Pearl and Quinn.
A trooper named Gulliver, who seemed to be in charge, approached where Quinn and Pearl were standing in cover and concealment behind two trees grown close together. Gulliver was a spindly guy with a big Adam’s apple; he had long, skinny legs that accounted for most of his height.
“I think he’s straight ahead,” Quinn said softly, “and he’s got a shotgun.”
“We know about the shotgun,” Gulliver said. “It was missing from the SUV.”
“The wife gonna make it?”
“Yeah. Busted up some, but my guess is she’ll recover. She said Evans was holding her hostage, and they were getting ready to set out through the woods, when we arrived. She was talking to him, she said, trying to convince him to give himself up, and when she turned around he was gone. He deserted her.”
“She’s hurt and she’d slow him down,” Quinn said. “Leaving her alive and injured slowed you down.”
“Yeah. It sure wasn’t an attack of compassion.” Gulliver surveyed the clearing and surrounding trees, and the darkness beneath the trees.
“He’s run to ground,” Quinn said. “Had enough. I think if we talk to him right he’ll give—”
He stopped talking and stared in disbelief as Link Evans emerged from the trees on the other side of the clearing. His shotgun rested in the crook of his arm with the barrel pointed at the ground, as if he were starting out to hunt rabbits. He knew there was no hope and he was going to end it his way.
“He don’t look like he wants to be talked out of anything,” Gulliver said.
Quinn felt Pearl snatch at his arm as he moved into the faint moonlight and stepped out into the clearing.
Link Evans looked exhausted. His shirt was torn and hanging half off at the shoulder. His face was stained with sweat and dirt so that his eyes looked dark and hunted, the whites showing all the way around his pupils.
“You’re making the wrong move,” Quinn said.
Link shook his head. “It doesn’t matter when the game’s over.”
Quinn said, “Still and all …”
That was when Wayne Westerley stepped from the trees into the clearing. He was covered with blood and was no more than thirty feet from Link, and he held the twelve-gauge riot gun from his patrol car aimed at Link’s midsection. He was bloodstained and looked ready to collapse, but he held the shotgun steady.
Link managed a wide grin. “Sometimes prayers are answered.”
“Some folks pray and go to hell anyway,” Westerley said.
“You can’t pull that trigger,” Link said. “You’re too honorable a fool to kill the husband whose wife you stole. It’d be against your code. You know you did wrong once, and it’s not in you to do wrong again.”
Westerley said nothing from behind his mask of blood.
“I’m gonna shoot the shit outta you now, Sheriff Westerley, and fine and honorable man that you are, you’re not gonna do a thing about it. That’s ’cause you know you deserve it.”
Westerly’s shotgun roared through the night. He’d squeezed the trigger twice. From such close range Link caught most of the pellets in tight patterns. His body looked as if it might separate in half as he staggered back three wobbly steps and then folded up like a cloth puppet.
Westerley stood still and watched the circle of police slowly close in on what was left of Link Evans. Then, using the shotgun for support, he lowered himself so he was seated on the ground. He looked up as he saw Quinn and Pearl approach.
“I guess he had me wrong,” he said.
Quinn said, “He had you about right.”
In a pole tent the state police had set up as a temporary base of operations near Beth and Link’s house in Edmundsville, Quinn stood with a forensic expert named Wellington and examined the contents of Link Evans’s wallet. There were Visa and American Express cards, a Missouri driver’s license, three simple business cards with Evans’s name on them, an AAA card, medical insurance card, and eighty-six dollars, mostly in twenty-dollar bills.
In the single piece of luggage in the trunk of his car, a scuffed leather suitcase, they found his airline boarding pass and confirmation of his flight from Philadelphia to Kansas City.
It was the last flight he’d ever take.
Caught outside the structure of his planning and ritual, the Skinner had gone out in the inglorious blaze so many serial killers covertly sought. Their grand exit, and one last chance to outwit the hunters who were closing in on them.
Winning the game the hard way.
Beth awoke in a hospital bed in Jefferson City. Her ribs were wrapped, and her right knee was in a white plastic cast that made it impossible for her to straighten her leg beyond a thirty-degree angle. That was okay with her, because any effort to move the leg resulted in terrific pain.
She knew she must be under the influence of some kind of drug, because she couldn’t quite piece together the fragments of her thoughts. She remembered last night—if it had been last night. The fear and the horror of seeing Wayne shot. The ringing in her ears, and the smell of cordite. Then the jolting chase with Link in the SUV and the accident. After that it was blank. Here she was, staring up at an IV tube and clear plastic bottle, and with a spasm of pain every time she breathed.
A large man in a wrinkled gray suit came into the room. He had a bony, somehow handsome face with a crooked nose, and straight brown hair that needed a trim. His smile was surprisingly charming as he pulled up a chair so he could sit near the bed. His bulk, the scent of him, suddenly dominated the room. Beth closed her eyes, trying to fit him into the incomplete fragments of last night. He’d been there, at the house and at the scene of the accident. She was sure of that.
She could hear him breathing and knew he was watching her, trying to decide if she was awake and lucid enough to carry on a conversation.
“I’m Frank Quinn,” he said. “A detective from New York.”
“I’ve got painkillers in me,” she said, not opening her eyes.
“I know,” he said. “The nurse told me you were aware enough to hold a conversation, if you weren’t too tired.”
“Is Wayne…?”
At first Quinn didn’t understand who she meant. Then he did. “Sheriff Westerley? He’s badly hurt but alive. The doctors say he’s going to make it.”
“My husband tried to kill him,” she said. “Link. I really think Link was going to kill me, too.”
“Probably.”
She opened her eyes and stared into his. “Where is Link? I don’t remember anything after the accident. There’s a lot I need to know.”
Quinn moved automatically to pat the back of her hand but drew back when he saw the IV needle taped to it.
“I have a lot to tell you,” he said.
Westerley was released from the hospital first. The shotgun blast had sent pellets into his right chest and shoulder. Most of the damage was done to the shoulder and his right upper arm. A single pellet, diverted by bone, had barely missed his heart. Another had creased his skull above his right ear.
When he came to visit Beth in the rehabilitation center where the hospital had sent her, he was wearing a brown short-sleeved shirt and faded Levi’s. Brown moccasins that he could slip on and off easily. His right arm was in a sling. They’d talked on the phone, and she knew he might never regain full use of the arm.
Beth struggled up from the chair she was sitting in when Westerley arrived, and he held her in the crook of his good arm and kissed her. When she looked up at him she was crying.
“If only I suspected… about Link, I mean.”
“No way you could have,” Westerley said. He helped her sit back down in the chair and extend her injured leg. Then he dragged over a nearby chair so he could sit close to her.
“They tell me if I don’t respond to treatment here I might need an artificial knee,” she said.
“Your leg, my arm,” he said. “We can live with that.”
“I don’t like thinking about that night.”
“Then don’t.”
“Easier to say than do. Sometimes I think it was better when I couldn’t remember anything about it.”
“No,” Westerley said, touching her arm lightly with his left hand. “It’s better to face it and put it behind you. You did nothing wrong, have nothing to be ashamed of. What we both had was bad luck, but we lived through it and we’re together.”
“You’re right. We could be dead, like those women.”
“I don’t waste much time on what might’ve been,” Westerley said. “It’s time now to think about what’s gonna be.” He stood halfway up, so he could lean over and kiss her on the lips.
When he sat back down, he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a letter-sized white envelope that was folded in half. “Billy Noth gave me this, Beth. It came in yesterday’s mail. The DNA results from the samples we sent to the lab.” He gave her a look she couldn’t fathom. “You wanna see the results?”
“Do you know them?”
“Yeah. I talked to the lab on the phone.” He shifted his weight, wincing when he leaned on his injured arm. “Trust me, there’s no reason you need to know any of this now, Beth.”
She smiled. “Didn’t you just tell me it’s better to face the facts so we can put them behind us?”
He returned her smile and shook his head. “Seems I did say that. But I didn’t say always.” He reluctantly handed her the envelope.
She accepted it but didn’t open it. “Just tell me what it says, Wayne.”
“Salas’s DNA, Link’s, Eddie’s, and the DNA sample from the rape scene—none of them match except Eddie’s and the rape scene sample, Beth. There’s no way Link could have been Eddie’s biological father.”
“Or that Vincent Salas raped me.”
“But you already knew that, Beth.”
“I didn’t really in my heart. Not for sure. Not until now.”
Beth sat back, relieved. But now she was angry with herself. “All that mess and pain because of my imagination,” she said.
“Your imagination’s what got me looking into Link,” Westerley reminded her. “And it’s what brought us together.”
“It’s all so goddamned confusing,” Beth said.
Westerley shrugged. “It’s a mixed bag, Beth. Like most things in life.” He glanced down at the envelope in her hand. “You wanna keep that, in case of any future doubt?”
She crumpled the unopened envelope and squeezed it into a tight ball, which she handed back to Westerley.
It was about the past. She didn’t need it.
Westerley had been sure Beth would take his word rather than look into the envelope herself, and pretty sure she wouldn’t look in the envelope at all once he’d told her about its contents. The envelope had contained two folded blank questionnaires he’d picked up at the nurse’s station when no one was looking. The actual DNA report, the one that confirmed Link Evans was Beth’s rapist and the father of her child, was folded in quarters and tucked in a back pocket of Westerley’s Levi’s. Before leaving the rehab center, he’d duck into a restroom, tear the report into small pieces, and flush it down the toilet.
Beth didn’t need to know Evans was Eddie’s biological father.
And Eddie sure as hell didn’t need to know it.
The sad fact of the world, Westerley mused, was that sometimes the best way to deal with the truth was with a lie.