The Guise of Another (28 page)

Max saw Desiree Rupert's Ford Explorer parked in the ditch where the dirt path to Torch Lake left the county highway. A shiver of foreboding passed through him, and he hurried to get to the cabin. Max had never driven his unmarked squad car to the lake, but when Niki told him about the ping in Hill City, he caught the first current north. Now his Charger scraped along the dirt trail as he headed back to the cabin.

The cabin glowed in the night, the incandescence casting a halo where the light reflected off of the pine trees. Max parked behind a black Cadillac. He paused to peer into the car and was about to open the door when a woman came running out of the cabin, her blond hair tussled, a jacket clutched tightly to her abdomen.

“Help!” she screamed. “He's been shot. Alexander's hurt.”

Max took a step toward the woman who fit the description of Ianna Markova given to him by Alexander.

“Are you Max? Are you his brother?”

“What happened?”

“He shot Alexander.” Ianna pointed to the cabin.

Max took off in a dead sprint but had only taken two steps when a voice in his head screamed for his attention. The voice had to break through the noise of Max's panic—the vision of Alexander lying wounded in the cabin. But by that second step, he heard it. Why was Ianna not running with him? She came out to get help, to get Max, but she stayed beside the car as he ran to help his brother. And something in her eyes wasn't right. She seemed properly distraught when she screamed for help, but as soon as Max committed to his run, he saw a change in her eyes—a split-second of calm.

By his second step, Max knew something was wrong. On his third step, he felt the bullet punch into his left shoulder blade, sending him tumbling to the ground. A second bullet slammed into the ground beside his head, splashing dirt into the air.

Max tucked and kicked, turning his fall into a roll. At the same time, he grabbed the grip of his 9 mm holstered on his right side. He pulled the gun as he landed hard on his back. He saw a flash of fire as Ianna shot a third bullet into the ground above Max's head. Max pulled the trigger twice. The first bullet missed the mark, but the second tore into Ianna's throat, opening a ragged hole in the back of her neck.

Ianna fell back, the gun bouncing out of her hand. She clutched at the blood spurting from her throat. Max stood and walked up to her, his gun still trained on her. She looked up at him with eyes wide with fear. She had to know she was dying. She tried to speak, but no words issued forth—her mouth simply opened and closed like a fish. She kicked at the ground with her heels, inching her body across the dead earth.

Max picked up the gun, its long barrel and silencer familiar from the shootout at the hotel. He ran to the cabin, holding his left arm tight against his body to ease the pain.

Alexander lay on his left side, his back against the refrigerator, his hands clutching his stomach. Max ran to his brother and lifted him off the floor enough to slide in beside him and hold him. Max pulled a cell phone from his pocket and dialed 911.

“Is Sheriff Voight on duty?” Max hurried the words even though he fought to remain calm.

“He's on call. What's your emergency?”

“I need an ambulance and squads at the Rupert cabin on Torch Lake. It's the dirt turnoff just past mile marker eight on County Road Twelve. Sheriff Voight knows where it is. I'm Detective Max Rupert of Minneapolis. I have an officer down and two civilians dead. Get the call out.” Max laid the phone down and propped his brother in his arms.

“I fucked up,” Alexander whispered. His words came with great effort and a deep wheezing.

“Hang on, Alexander. Help's on the way.” Max used his good arm to put pressure on the wound. Alexander's shirt was soaked with blood.

“She…shot me. She has…the flash…”

“She's dead,” Max said.

“Good.”

Max leaned his head back, a tear trickling from the corner of his eye and down his cheek. He looked at the face of Drago Basta lying dead at their feet. “You got Basta,” Max said. “They're going to throw you a fucking parade, Festus.”

“I'm sorry.”

Max held his brother and looked out into the darkness, hoping to see emergency lights coming down the trail. The trees swayed in the night air, the fur of their needles giving a hushed voice to the breeze. He felt Alexander grow heavy and limp. He shook Alexander—screamed his name—but Alexander was dead.

Max waited in the silence, knowing that the emergency vehicles would arrive too late. There would be no rescue. There was nothing they could do. Alexander was dead, and Ianna was…

Max told Alexander that Ianna was dead, but he didn't know that to be true. She had a life-ending hole in her neck, but she was still breathing when he left her. Max could hear the whistle of a squad car in the distance. If they arrived in time, they might save Ianna. She would be saved by Max's call for help, but Alexander would not.

Max gently laid his brother's body on the floor and walked out of the cabin to find Ianna Markova.

Ianna had moved about four feet from where she had fallen. She pushed against the earth with her heels, her body twisting in the pain. But she was still alive. Max could hear the sirens getting closer.

Ianna looked up at Max, but she couldn't speak. The blood drained from her neck in a ripple that kept time with her weakening heartbeat. She beckoned Max with pleading eyes. He shook his head “no,” and watched as the last trickle of her life drained away.

Max broke the seal on a bottle of scotch that had been collecting dust in his cupboard for the better part of a decade. Alexander had given him that bottle as a gift for making detective. It remained untouched, sitting in the back of a cupboard, because Max had never found the right occasion to break the seal. Now, he decided that the time had come. He took a sip, and it warmed the back of his tongue as it passed. His next drink was a large swallow that toasted his whole chest.

“That'll do just fine,” he said to himself.

He hadn't bothered to change out of his dress uniform and the shiny black shoes that he wore in the procession. His white gloves draped the brim of his service cap, which lay upside down on the couch beside him. Alexander's funeral had been the third he had attended in as many days.

First, he stood in the back of the church as they eulogized Desiree Rupert. They found her body after examining her car's GPS and searching the location that served as the starting point for the journey north. In the investigation that followed, Max learned about her affair with Martin Edwards. She and Edwards had been texting their desire to one another, and Desi hadn't been able to delete that evidence before she was kidnapped. That information remained in the hands of a few homicide detectives so that her family would never think the lesser of her.

After that, Max flew to New York and walked in a procession as they laid Detective Louise Rider to rest. The detectives and officers from the Tenth Precinct treated Max like a brother, inviting him to walk at the head of the procession. By the time they buried Billie, the story of the Putnam case and the arrest of Wayne Garland had been in the papers for two days. The
New York Times
had devoted most of its
front page to the Putnam, Pope, and Ashton stories, along with a big picture of Wayne Garland crying like a child and doing a perp walk out of the headquarters of Patrio International.

The third and last funeral was that of his brother, Alexander. Max began planning that funeral in those minutes that he stood over Ianna Markova and watched her die.

He rewrote the events in his head, creating a version where Drago Basta shot all three of them, killing Alexander and Ianna Markova, and wounding him. The bullet Max fired into Ianna's neck passed through her throat and would never be found, nor would the casing that Max slipped into his pocket. All of the remaining bullets came from Basta's gun. Max fired Basta's gun once before the sheriff arrived, the bullet sailing over the lake. He dropped the casing where Basta would have been standing when he shot Ianna Markova. No one would question Max's account.

Max's report detailed how Alexander's trip to the lake with Ianna came from a plan to get her to reveal the location of the flash drive—a plan that required Alexander to use his extensive undercover skills to convince Ianna Markova that they were running away together. It became necessary that he blow off the grand jury to give his story the needed credibility. And in the end, Max was able to produce the flash drive. What better proof could there be that Max was telling the truth? Their plan worked. The story fed to the press followed Max's script to the letter, and by the time they laid Alexander Rupert to rest, he had become a national hero.

Alexander's funeral was enormous, with law-enforcement agencies throughout the state sending representatives to walk in parade formation to the cemetery. The evening news estimated that the number of attendees exceeded three thousand. Max walked alone behind the hearse, followed by the mayor, a cadre of commanders and detectives, and then a sea of uniformed police officers, all coming to pay their respects to Detective Alexander Rupert.

Max now sat alone in the darkness of his living room and drank from a bottle of scotch that he never thought he would open. As the
warm glow of the alcohol began to take effect, he walked to his television and inserted a DVD into the player. On the couch again, he pressed the start button, and the TV came to life with a home video shot by his wife, Jenni, while they were on vacation in Aruba, the only vacation he and Jenni ever took with Alexander and Desi.

The scene jumped from their hotel room to the beach. He listened to the music in his wife's voice as she teased him and dared him to chase her into the ocean. Max could barely stand it as the voices and laughter of Alexander and Desi filled his dark house. He drank the scotch faster in the hopes that intoxication would overwhelm him and quiet the pain. He prayed that he might find enough relief from the memories to fall asleep—for the first time in three nights.

As the scotch numbed his senses, he felt the gentle touch of Jenni's fingertips against his temples, turning light circles on his skin. He could hear the sound of her voice coming from a place just beyond his reach, her words melting behind a veil of imperfect memory. She led him to a place where nothing existed outside of the sound of her voice and the touch of her fingertips. He followed her deeper into the darkness until he found the peace he needed to fall asleep.

I would like to thank the best literary agent in the business, Amy Cloughley of Kimberley Cameron and Associates.

I want to thank Dan Mayer, my editor at Seventh Street Books, for his steady guidance. I also want to thank the many people at Seventh Street Books and Penguin Random House for their faith and support. I know that my work is in the best of hands.

A special thank you goes out to my beta readers, Alison Krehbiel, Nancy Rosin, and Matt Grochow, as well as my fellow writers at Seventh Street Books, Robert Rotstein and Lynne Raimondo, who swapped chapters with me and gave me great advice.

Allen Eskens is the author of
The Life We Bury
, which won Left Coast Crime's Rosebud Award for Best Debut Mystery and was a finalist for both the Edgar® Award for Best First Novel and the Minnesota Book Award. A criminal defense attorney for twenty years, Eskens is a member of the Twin Cities Sisters in Crime.