Chapter Two

Erica Brink met me at the highway, where a dirt road led to the house they’d been renting for the last four months. She had a flashlight in her hand to signal me, because it was easy to miss the break in the trees on a snowy, pitch-black night. I pulled onto the shoulder, and Erica climbed into the passenger seat beside me.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said.

“Of course.”

I drove slowly toward the house. Erica and I didn’t speak, but I could feel tension radiating from her. Not that anyone could tell by how she looked. When I shot a quick glance across the seat, I saw that her wheat-field curls looked as fluffy as if she’d just come from the salon. She was nestled inside a fur coat that probably cost what I made in a month. We were the same age, twenty-six years old, but she made me feel much younger and out of her league. Her face had a perfect symmetry, and her cool-blue eyes didn’t hide the superiority she felt when she looked at someone like me. I was the girl at the Tanya Tucker concert, and Erica was Symphony Ball all the way.

But don’t mistake her for a squeaky-voiced blond toy. Erica was also savvy and tough, which you probably have to be to steal a corporate attorney away from his wife of fifteen years. It’s one thing to be the mistress. That’s easy work. But to get the ring? That takes a ruthless cunning you can’t help but respect.

I’d met Erica once before, a week earlier, when she was dripping with pig’s blood swiped from a local butcher. Somebody had jerry-rigged a bucket and rope over the front door and waited in the woods to douse whoever came outside. I assumed that Gordon had been the intended target, but Erica wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that she didn’t go to pieces told me a lot about her. I’d interviewed both of them together, and Erica didn’t freak out or shed a single tear. She sat on the front steps, covered in animal blood that had begun to freeze, and told me the story with a kind of frigid, furious calm.

Gordon was the one who looked ready to throw up the whole time I was there.

“Do you know who assaulted me?” Erica asked, as if she’d guessed that I was thinking about our previous encounter.

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

She turned her head, piercing me in the gloom of the car with her blue eyes. “Do you not know, or do you not care?”

“I do care, but the fact is, nobody’s talking.”

“We both know Sandra Thoreau was behind it,” Erica replied.

“Well, if she was, it’s not likely that I’ll ever be able to prove it. Plenty of people hate this lawsuit, but Sandra has people who are on her side, too. Even the ones who want to see her lose don’t want to see the mine win.”

Erica offered a thin smile. “Gordon said the same thing. He didn’t want to call the police after I was attacked. He said it would just make Sandra’s people feel like they’d won some sort of victory. They’ve been harassing us for months, you know. I was willing to let it slide for other things, but not this time. I called the sheriff myself to report it. No offense, but I wasn’t surprised when he sent a junior deputy. And a woman, too. Believe me, I got the message. I should just take a shower and shut up.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but in fact, the sheriff had used almost those exact words when he’d sent me out here.

We reached the end of the dirt road, where a large clearing had been carved out of the wilderness. The house that Gordon Brink was renting was four stories high, a log-and-flagstone home that looked like an old national park resort hotel. There were several outbuildings on the property, including a barn and machine shed, a hunting lodge in which to clean the guns and hang the dead animals, and a guest cottage that was larger than my own house. The property was a summer home for the retired president of the mine. While he wintered in Florida, Gordon had taken it over to get ready for the upcoming trial.

Erica and I got out of my cruiser. The door of the nearby garage was open, and I saw matching Mercedes sedans parked inside. His and hers. One was spotless, and the other was covered in snow and road spray.

“So tell me what’s going on,” I said.

Erica nodded at her car, which was the dirty one. “Like I told you on the phone, I got back here about two hours ago. I spent several days with my parents in Minnesota, but I drove all day to spend Christmas with Gordon and Jay. But Gordon’s not here. As you can see, his car is still in the garage, but I’ve searched the entire house, and I can’t find him anywhere.”

“It’s a little early to push the panic button,” I told her. “Isn’t it possible he spent Christmas Eve with one of the other lawyers?”

“You mean, is he shacking up with a woman on the team because I was away?” she asked in a chilly voice. “If that’s what you’re thinking, then no. Most of the other members of the legal team went home for Christmas. I called the ones who stayed in the area. He’s not with them. And he has no friends among the locals. Plus, Gordon knew I was coming back tonight. He said he would stay up and work until I got home.”

“When did you last talk to him?”

“Sunday afternoon. He didn’t have any plans to leave the house over the Christmas weekend. I tried calling again last night, but I didn’t reach him. Then I tried again before I left this morning and I stopped to call from the road, too. There was no answer. Trust me, Deputy, this is not like Gordon.”

“Did you talk to his son?” I asked.

“Of course. Jay hasn’t seen Gordon since breakfast on Sunday.”

“Did he say whether his father was home the whole time?”

“That’s what he told me. He never saw the car leave.”

“He and Gordon have been home together for two days, and Jay didn’t see him or talk to him?”

Erica rolled her eyes. “Their relationship is . . . difficult.”

“Did you search the entire house? It’s a big place.”

“I did. I checked in all the usual spaces where we spend time. I also called to him on the intercom, which is wired to every room. When he didn’t answer, I got worried, so I checked each room methodically. Every room, closet, bathroom. He’s not in the house.”

When Erica Brink said she’d done something methodically, I believed her.

“The most likely explanation is still that he’s with someone else in town,” I said. “If you haven’t heard from him by morning—”

She cut me off midsentence. “I am concerned, Deputy. I don’t want to wait until morning. Gordon is not with anyone. Last week, I was the target of a humiliating assault, and now I get back home to find my husband missing. He’s the lead defense attorney in a lawsuit that has generated countless threats from people in this area. I want to find him right now.”

I knew she wasn’t going to let me go.

I also knew that if I woke up my partner, Darrell, at three o’clock on Christmas morning, I’d better have more to show him than an angry trophy wife.

“Did you notice anything out of order in the house when you came home?” I asked. “Any sign of intruders or a break-in?”

“No.”

“Any footprints in the snow? Tire tracks?”

“No. Other than my own.”

“Did you check the outbuildings?”

“Yes, I walked around the entire property. I went inside all the other buildings except the guest cottage. Gordon uses that as his office.”

“Why didn’t you check the office? I thought you said he was going to work until you got back.”

“The office is where he keeps confidential legal files on the litigation. The door is always locked when he’s not there. No one else gets inside. I walked down there and checked. The lights were off.”

“Still, if that’s the one place you didn’t go inside, I think we should check it out, don’t you?”

Erica frowned with obvious reluctance. “Yes, all right.”

We hiked through the snow beside the trees and needed flashlights to guide us. Erica stayed close to me. I could tell that the wilderness made her nervous, but to me, the sounds in the darkness were like old friends. And of course, I did what I always did when I was near the woods. I listened for him. I’d been searching the forests of Black Wolf County for years to try to find the beast again. I knew he was out there somewhere, and I had the strange sense that he was looking for me, too.

The one-story A-frame cottage that Gordon had been using as his office was on the far side of a shallow hill. In the snow, I could make out Erica’s footprints where she’d come here earlier to look for her husband. The front door was locked, just as Erica had said. I knocked, but there was no answer. I circled the entire cottage and peered through each window, but the curtains were closed, and there were no lights on inside.

“I think we should go in,” I said.

“I don’t have a key.”

“I can break a window, but I need your permission to do that. The alternative is to wait until morning to see if Gordon comes back.”

Erica’s face tensed with indecision. I could see that the idea of breaching her husband’s private work space made her uncomfortable. That was probably one of the cardinal rules of their marriage.

Regardless, her worry won out. “Yes, okay, do it.”

I told her to move away, and then I took my baton from my belt and shattered one of the front windows with a quick tap. Punching out the remaining shards, I reached in, unlocked the window, and pushed it up. I squeezed through the frame into the cottage, which was cold and had the ashy smell of a log fire. My boots crunched on broken glass. There was no sound inside, and when I did a quick survey with my flashlight, I saw nothing amiss. I unlocked the front door, and then I turned on the overhead light.

Erica looked nervous about setting foot inside. “Gordon?” she called. “Are you here?”

Her husband didn’t answer.

The living space was filled with dark leather furniture and a massive fireplace that took up most of one wall. The kitchen was small, but I found half a pot of cold coffee on the counter. There were two doors on the back wall, one closed, one open. I checked the open door, with Erica following, and it led me into a sprawling room that served as Gordon Brink’s main office. File cabinets lined the rear wall, and curtains covered up a long spread of windows looking out on the forest. On the walnut desk, I found a half-smoked cigarette crushed in the ashtray and an open bottle of whiskey with an empty lowball glass beside it.

The floor was covered in a thick cream-colored carpet. Not far from the desk, I spotted reddish-brown drops dotting the shag. I bent down, rubbed one of the stains between my fingertips, and smelled a coppery odor. I looked up at Erica.

“I need to check the bedroom.”

The color had drained from her face. “Okay.”

“Maybe you should stay in the outer room.”

“No, I want to come with you.”

We returned to the living room, and I approached the closed door that led into the cottage’s master suite. Weirdly, I knocked, rather than just opening it. In the silence that followed, I pushed the door inward. Barely any light flowed from the other room, but the smell hanging in the cold air told the story.

“Erica,” I murmured, my own nerves raw. “Back up. Don’t look.”

“No, turn on the light.”

I did.

Next to me, Gordon Brink’s wife screamed. She stared at the abattoir inside and then covered her face to block it out.

I had to look. I had no choice.

Blood spattered every surface in the bedroom. The floors. The walls. The furniture. The curtains. The ceiling. In the middle of it all, tied to the king-size bed, was Gordon Brink, naked, dead, his eyes open in horror, his mouth gagged to keep him from crying out in agony. His entire body from skull to feet hung in ribbons, all his skin flayed with deep cuts made in crimson parallel lines.

Like the sweep of an animal’s claws.

Across the pale stretch of white paint above the bed, a message had been scrawled using Gordon’s blood.

Four words.

I am the Ursulina