THAT NIGHT, RATH watched Barrons’s presser on WKDM, unsurprised by the reporters asking how the police could possibly have waited more than seventy-two hours to have made public a missing sixteen-year-old girl. Barrons had tried to impress upon them that it was a matter of the law. Miss Wilks had won her right to emancipation, adulthood. But since the logic of the law flew in the face of common sense, the reporters hammered away: “She’s sixteen.”
The deer carcass had frozen solid to the barn’s dirt floor, and Rath had called Grout to help with it. But Grout was too busy with running down files on old crimes involving Satanists and sadists and other assorted twisted fucks, and attending his son’s basketball game to be bothered with such a nuisance. Or so he’d said. Rath knew Grout had taken exception when Rath hadn’t backed him in front of Barrons. Grout probably wondered why Barrons had kept Rath back in his office, too. Rath wanted nothing to do with politics or a legitimate role in the force, especially now with Preacher having a chance to enter society a free man. If Preacher were released, Rath did not want to be bound by the law.
A raw northeast blow and sleet storm swept the last of autumn’s leaves from the trees and kept Rath inside with his Lagavulin and his case notes.
Halloween would soon be here. No trick-or-treaters came to his house — they never ventured down his dead-end road — but the thought of Halloween made him think of Rachel. He’d called her several times only to get her full-voice-mail message. He’d texted, to no avail. At least he had her text to refer to, and knew she was OK. He knew how it was: midterms, first year of college. His first semester, he’d had every intention of calling his mother; he had just never gotten around to it. It was part and parcel of college life.
So, he decided to surrender to his own new independence, relax into the silence of the house, and try to take a break from details of the case and from stewing about Preacher.
He spread out deer hunting gear in the living room to prepare for the upcoming rifle season. He hung his Johnson hunting jacket out on the back porch to air it out and get traces of human scent off of it. He broke out a box of grunt calls and compasses, sharpened his knife, and laid out his topo maps. He’d considered buying a GPS, a technology he’d sworn he’d never cave in to, and in the end hadn’t. If a man could not get by in the woods with a compass and topo map, what kind of outdoorsman was he?
The next day, he took a day trip across New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine Trading Post, where he bought a Zeiss scope that cost nearly a grand, without a hint of buyer’s remorse. Afterward, in Portsmouth, he indulged in fresh, deep-fried, whole-belly clams dipped in melted butter and washed them down with a couple Narragansett pints.
Back home, he broke out his old Lee reloader press and knocked out fifty rounds of hand-pressed superhot 190 grain, round-nose .30-06 rifle cartridges. He took his Springfield pump out back along Ice Pond and sighted in the Zeiss with his hand-loaded rounds, dialed the rifle in until it drove tacks at two hundred yards.
He plinked cans with the .22 revolver he kept in the Scout’s glove box.
Still. Thoughts of Preacher and the missing girls crawled into the back of his mind like a burglar slipping in through a cellar window. Snatches of each missing girl’s circumstances plagued him, and he returned to the files again and again. Much as he tried not too, he obsessed about Preacher’s parole hearing. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to go. During a late-afternoon nap, he dreamt of Laura at the bottom of the stairs, her face turned away in shame. And when he leaned at her side, he saw that her face was Rachel’s face. In his dream, Rath would jump back as the sound of Preacher’s cruel laughter broke around him. When he looked up the staircase, he’d see Preacher standing at the top, laughing, his lecherous eyes gleaming. In his arms, he held baby Rachel. What disturbed Rath most was that Rachel wasn’t squirming to escape Preacher’s grasp, but was calm and quiet; at peace in this monster’s arms. He awoke with a jolt to the sadistic laughter echoing in his head, icy sweat soaking him.
What good would it do for him to show at the hearing? To be subjected to a person with such a filthy soul and watch as that person was treated with respect and due process. What respect had he shown Laura and Daniel, or the young girls before them? But. If Rath didn’t go. What would his absence say? That he didn’t care? If he didn’t care, why should anyone else? He didn’t know what he could say that would convey his sense of loss. He worried his anger would get the best of him.
He was pondering what to do the next morning while out at the barn, standing over the dead deer with a Saws All to cut it up into chunks when his cell buzzed.
“Yeah,” he said, distracted.
“We found something. Lou did. The girl’s feet were bruised and cut.” It was Sonja.
“So our psycho’s a foot fetishist, too.”
“Cut up from running. Barefoot. She wasn’t dumped. She escaped. Her feet suffered so many cuts no one in their right mind could have kept running like she did. The St. J. force and staties have scoured the area. They found a cabin near where she was found. Nothing obvious that anyone was kept there. We’ll see. They figure she either came from there or escaped from a car on the road below. She died of exposure. She wasn’t murdered. Then, when the flood came—” She paused. “And—”
“And what?”
“She was pregnant.”
“How did Lou miss that in the initial?”
“The condition of the body, for one. And, there was no fetus.”
“What? How? Animals?” Rath felt ill.
“So to speak. Lou thinks someone took it.”
Took it. Rath swallowed hard. “How far along was she?”
“Impossible to say. No one close to her so far has claimed they knew about it. “
Rath slumped and sat, a hand resting on the frozen deer. Jesus, what was this?
“We need to meet. First chance. Grout’s got something, too.”