Where Angels Rest (4 page)

Jesus Christ, he’d just hit a woman. The sound echoed in his ears—
dlmmp
—like when he’d run over a raccoon once, only the coon hadn’t bumped his truck nearly off the road. He wrenched the gear shift into
PARK
and threw open the truck door, grabbed a flashlight and ran back up the road, squinting through the dawn. Hoping, praying he was wrong.

He froze when he saw her.

Ah, God, it
was
a woman, and horror seized him by the throat. She lay partway across the gravel shoulder, twisted half onto her side, stretching up onto the pavement. She looked dead.

Nick tried to think past the terrible drumming in his chest, then said that to himself again:
She looked dead.
Not dead from having just been hit, but an old dead—the stiff, gray dead of having been dead a while. He squatted and touched her neck. She was cold and he nudged one of her fingers.
Rigor mortis
already coming on.

Okay. Dead, but not from him. His lungs started working again.

He scanned the road for any other traffic then aimed the flashlight on her body. Her front was coated with mud while her back and one side of her face appeared to have been drizzled on during the night and washed mostly clean. She was young, maybe even a teenager. Her lips had a bluish tint and her eyes, which were open, showed broken blood vessels.

Choked?

Nick’s head cleared a fraction and he dialed Dispatch. Asked for Anson Bell, the Carroll County sheriff. While he waited, he spotted the girl’s car and climbed down into the ditch to look at it. It was an older-model Camry, dark, with Cuyahoga plates, and the driver’s side door stood open. Nick peered inside. Her purse was open and her cell phone half out. There were no food wrappers or half-eaten snacks.

He circled the car. The front bumper barely kissed a tree and Nick’s hackles lifted: The slant of the embankment should have caused more impact than that. He looked up to where the girl lay, choked but with no food in sight, and a knot of dread tightened in his chest.

“Anson,” he said, when Bell came on the line. Let it go. This one wouldn’t belong to him. “This is Nick Mann. I just ran over a dead woman on 219.”

“What?”

“Her car’s in the ditch. I’m looking at the body.”

“What?”

“Eighteen, maybe twenty years old. Jesus, I thought I’d killed her, but she’s been dead a while. Probably been out here all night.”

“Aw, man.” Nick could picture him pushing away his
bacon and eggs, running a hand over his head and mentally forfeiting whatever weekend activities he’d had planned. “You got anyone coming?”

Nick could just make out the sign for the Carroll County line through the mist behind him. The knot of dread loosened just a touch. “Hell, no. This is
your
county.”

Bell and three deputies pulled up within minutes.

“I could’ve lived a long time without another one of these talks with parents,” Bell said. He’d been sheriff for thirty years. Had seen more than one young driver in a heap on the road.

Maybe never one that wasn’t an accident, though. Nick closed his eyes. Stop it. She’d probably gagged on a piece of chewing gum, pulled off the road, and clambered up the embankment in a panic. An autopsy would find a lump of hard candy or gum in her throat; a search of the car would find the wrapper. Case closed.

One of Bell’s deputies produced a driver’s license from the purse in the Camry. “Carrie Sitton,” he read, “born ten-twelve-ninety-three. From Cleveland.” He pushed a button on her cell phone and shook his head. “No calls last night.”

Bell walked to the front of the car and looked at the bumper just grazing the tree. His gaze followed a trodden path from there to where Carrie’s body now lay. “You hit her right there?” he asked Nick.

“She was out further in the road, facedown, I’d say, from the way the rain washed off the back of her clothes. My wheels must’ve bumped her over.”

“Looks like she dragged herself up here. But that car couldn’t’ve been going more than five or ten miles an hour when it hit the tree. Why didn’t she walk?” Bell stopped
at the body. He reached down and fingered her collar back from her throat. Nothing. He tugged a little further to expose the back of her neck.

Bruises.

Nick’s gut tightened. He cursed and walked away, putting space between himself and the dead girl. Not his problem. Nick didn’t chase murderers anymore; he chased possums.

Bell took a few more minutes with the scene then walked over to Nick. He took off his hat. “We don’t have murders in Carroll County.”

“We don’t have murders in Hopewell County, either,” Nick said. Time to go. Guns and tequila waiting.

“Whoa. All those years as a bigwig in L.A.,” Bell said. “You’ve worked more murder cases than anyone in this state.”

“Past tense. This one’s yours, Anson. Are you finished with me?”

“What’s your hurry?”

“No hurry, just on my way to my cabin.”

Bell hiked his brows, then looked at Nick’s truck, where a deputy had been shooting pictures, checking the undercarriage. There was no reason to doubt Nick’s story, but there was no reason not to, either. Taking pictures was the right thing to do.

Bell said, “That cabin of yours borders Weaver’s Clay Mine to the north, right?”

“Right. On Lake Barrow, about an hour from here.”

“So if I were gonna try to reach you—”

“He’ll be hunting,” the deputy with the camera said, joining them. He shrugged at Nick. “I saw the guns in your truck.”

“Right. Hunting,” Nick said. “I’ll be back on Monday.
By then, you’ll either have this all wrapped up or you’ll have a helluva lot of questions for me.”

Erin woke in a bed, looked around. Her brain felt like damp wool. Everything hurt. She felt like she’d been hit by a—

The previous night rushed in. Justin—alive. The senator and his wife, Lauren’s family and friends all appalled by the Attorney General’s decision. A stray woman in the parking lot and a car bearing down. A last-second nose-dive toward the fence.

She closed her eyes, putting the pieces of the week back together. John Huggins was in Ohio: She’d raised enough questions about him that the Attorney General had ordered Ohio authorities to follow up. But there wasn’t much time.

She looked out the window. It was morning already—she’d been in and out of a daze all night. It was Friday now. The first of Justin’s seven days.

Dear God, she had to go.

She pulled the blanket down and sat up, wincing. Pain cut into her hip and she edged the hospital gown back to see. Her body told the tale. She’d landed on her side when she dove from the path of the car and there was an ugly bruise on her hip that felt bone-deep.

She got out of bed and looked in the mirror. Her cheek had an ugly scrape—road burn from playing dodge-car in the dark—but otherwise she seemed okay. She changed into her clothes and a nurse caught her, tried to convince her to stay and wait for a doctor to check her out.

She didn’t. She headed straight for the Starke County Sheriff’s Department.

“We don’t know who was in the car,” the investigator told her, around bites of a tuna fish sandwich. “Could’ve been anyone.”

“There had to be cameras,” Erin said. “Didn’t they catch it?”

“There are, and they did,” he said, “but the driver had parked out of camera range until the last minute. The cameras only picked up the car when it came into the frame taking the run at you.”

A chill ran down Erin’s spine. That didn’t sound like a disgruntled protester acting on impulse. It sounded like someone who’d been out there watching, waiting. And when the opportunity was right, he—or she, Erin acknowledged, with an eerie memory of the long-skirted shadow she’d seen—wheeled in, hit the lights, and gunned the gas.

“What was on the cameras?”

The deputy wiped mayonnaise from his chin. “Besides you leaping out of the way like a scalded cat?” He cracked a smile at her then tossed down his napkin. “It was a dark Hyundai. A rental.”

“Rental?”

He put up a hand. “The ID used at the rental agency was bogus. Fake driver’s license, fake credit card, fake insurance.”

The starch went out of Erin’s body. It
was
planned. And the investigation had already hit a dead end.

“We’ll keep on it,” the deputy said, though Erin doubted it. “We’re talking to everyone who attended the execution—er, the almost-execution—and everyone who’s been active in the senator’s campaign against your brother.”

“Even Mrs. McAllister?”

The man stared.

“There was a woman in the parking lot when I left. I could see the silhouette of a skirt, just below the knees, like the one the Senator’s wife was wearing.”

“Aw, God,” he said, wiping his face with a beefy palm. As if he could rub away what she had just said.

“Put it in your report,” Erin said.

He jotted down a note. The cynic in Erin made her wonder if it would go into the file or if he’d toss it into the trash the minute she walked out. When he looked back up, his gaze grazed the scrape down her cheek. “Look, miss, this isn’t going to go away. It’s already in this morning’s news and there’ll be a lot of hype for the next week, and now you’re asking me to look at a U.S. Senator’s wife.” He shook his head, reminding Erin of a badgered grandfather. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to disappear while the sheriff up in Ohio does his thing. Just get out of sight for a bit.”

Erin was a step ahead of him. She stood, remembering Sheriff Nikolaus Mann and his quaint little town. “Thanks,” she said, gathering her purse. “I think you’re right. It
is
a good idea to get away for a while.”

She knew exactly where she’d go.

Friday, November 9

Lake Barrow, Ohio

6:00 p.m.

N
ICK STRAIGHTENED HIS GUN ARM
, homed in on the target, and fired. Staggered backward and almost fell. That’s what happened when you mixed alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. Mostly alcohol.

He lowered the Hechler & Koch, swayed, and peered into the woods at the target. Evening now, getting too dark for this shit. But he could still make out a few man-shaped pieces of paper hanging on trees, black circles closing around the centers. The closest one was Malcolm Hersher, stuck to a tree forty feet away.

Nick took another hit of tequila, aimed, and emptied the cartridge into the center of Hersher’s chest. Wobbled backward and wondered why he didn’t feel any better. Malcolm Hersher deserved every bullet. The retired math teacher behind the counter of an L.A. convenience store, dead from Hersher’s sawed-off shotgun, hadn’t.

He lit up a cigarette, shoved in a new cartridge, and carried his bottle and gun around the corner of the cabin’s deep porch. Took aim at another target hanging on another tree. Darren Hall. Hall was a gangbanger, had stabbed a guy in the name of “initiation” and raped a twenty-four-year-old mother in front of her son. When he was done, he pressed his thumbs into her hyoid bone until it gave, tossed her body into a dumpster, and left her three-year-old hiding in a cardboard box. Nick chased Hall for two weeks before he collared him on the rape, but a judge sprang him on the claim that the sex was consensual and someone else had killed her afterward. Before they could pull indictments for murder, Hall went underground.

He was one of the ones who got away.

Correction: He was one of the ones Nick had given up on. Moved to Ohio and took up possum patrol, instead.

Boom.
Nick nailed Hall in the shoulder. He cursed and squeezed off another shot, a better one, then proceeded around the perimeter of the house, taking out targets until only one remained. Nick glared at it. Bertrand Yost. It didn’t matter that Yost wasn’t on the streets anymore. It didn’t matter that Nick had hunted him down like a dog and fucked him up so bad he spent weeks in a hospital and months in rehab. It didn’t matter that Yost eventually wound up in court, and was found guilty.

What mattered was that a battalion of shrinks yanked a jury around until they bought diminished capacity. What mattered was that Bertrand Yost wound up in a cushy mental facility while Nick’s wife wound up in the morgue. Seven years ago, on November ninth.

Allison’s dead, Nick. Yost got her. And Hannah took a bullet…

He clenched his jaw and took aim but a breeze caught
the ghostlike page of Yost and lifted the edges. No good. Nick staggered out to the tree and jammed the tip of his pocketknife through the bottom, pinning it down.
Hold still, motherfucker. It’s our anniversary
.

He ambled back to the front porch of the cabin and traded the Magnum for a Remington 7mm. A thread of cognition in the back of his mind warned that a rifle at this range would turn the tree to rubble, but the tequila had him now, along with a rage so bitter he could taste it. He propped the barrel of the rifle on the porch rail, folded down to line up the shot and imagined every detail of Yost’s features—broad nose, steel-gray eyes, bushy brows.

Boom.
The first shot jolted Nick, ripped through Yost, and splintered the trunk of the tree. Nick maneuvered the bolt action of the rifle and pulled off another.
Boom.
Reloaded and kept at it until his ears rang and his shoulder ached, until Yost was confetti and the center of the tree was kindling.

He sank against the porch rail, tipping his face skyward. Sleet caught his cheeks like darts, in spite of the weatherman’s promise, and he propped the rifle on end under the eave and closed his eyes. Wondered how long Carrie Sitton had been alive on the road last night, feeling the sleet through the clay caked on her cheek.

Damn it, stop thinking about her; she wasn’t his. Nick had some 20,000 residents he’d sworn to protect, including 16,000 in Hopewell proper and another 4,000 who lived in the outer stretches of the county. Carrie Sitton wasn’t one of them. Her killer was out of his hands.

Just like Yost and all the others out there in the dark.

Nick unrolled another paper human and walked it out to a tree. He stuck in a tack and pulled a marker from his pocket, the same one with which he’d labeled the others H-A-L-L and H-E-R-S-H-E-R and Y-O-S-T. He stared at
the blank target for a long moment, trying to picture the son of a bitch who would leave an eighteen-year-old girl to claw her way to the shoulder of the road and die there in the cold. Finally, he drew a question mark on the target, strode back to the porch, and picked up his rifle.