“NO,” RATH SAID, as Barrons swiveled in his chair. “It’s not for me.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Barrons said, and laid his big mitt over his chest as if to prove it. It proved nothing.
“I’m not a cop,” Rath said.
“Bullshit.”
“I was a cop.”
“A good one.”
“A cop has to believe.”
“In what?”
“The law. The system. I don’t. I can’t. Not in a system that treats a sixteen-year-old girl as an adult. Or lets the Preachers of the world free to prey and victimize. Shit, even that crazy bat Malroy may have a shot at a cockamamie defense by perverting the system.”
“If—”
“No. There is no if. This is life. You can’t live life on ifs. Only is.”
“Listen to you, professor.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Well.” Barrons leaned back in his chair and spread his arms wide. Behind him, on the sill outside, the pigeon strutted back and forth.
“Grout’s not as green now,” Rath said.
“Grout took a leave of absence after he fucked things up with that old bag in Connecticut. She nearly died. I don’t think he’s coming back. I think he’s taking a security job. In New Hampshire.”
Rath nodded. Nothing surprised him.
“Sonja isn’t green anymore, either.”
“What can I say or do to convince you?” Barrons said.
“Nada. You can invite me down to the Bahamas. We can fish. You can show me how to fly fish.”
“You’re ready for that? It’s pretty refined?”
“I’m ready.” He was. He needed to get away to someplace he had never been before. Someplace hot and sunny and bright. A place to clear his mind and recalibrate. So when he returned he could focus afresh on what was most important. Ned Preacher.
“I thought you were seeing someone, had some lady on the line,” Barrons said.
“That. Yeah. That I’m really not ready for.”
“Have you told her that?”
“Not yet. She’s called.”
“You haven’t called back?”
“Not yet.”
“You should.”
“She’s seen the news. She must have an inkling that I’ve been a bit distracted.”
“Call her.”
“Right. OK. Can we plan this trip? I need it.”
“We’ll make a plan. Springtime is best for bones. March. Do you good to get out of here then. Does me good. Can you wait that long?”
“Sure, yeah,” Rath said. “I’m in. Were you able to get that address?”
Barrons grimaced. “I can, but I won’t. You need to stay clear of him.”
“I just want to make sure. Keep an eye on him.”
“You can’t keep an eye on him. Not forever.”
“All I need is an address.”
“Get it off the site,” Barrons said.
“All the Vermont site for registered sex offenders gives you is the name of the town. No address. That needs to change. People don’t need an approximation of where these cretins live. They need to know exactly where they live.”
“You’re a detective. You’ll figure it out. But I’m a friend. I’m not helping you go down that rabbit hole.”
Rath shrugged.
“March then?” he said.
“Plan on it.”
RATH WAS DRIVING home from the station feeling uplifted. The sky was blue, a fresh snow sparkling under the sun in the fields. It was, simply, a beautiful December day. His phone buzzed.
“Hello,” he said.
“How’s my girl,” a man on the other end said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘How’s my girl?’ ”
“Who is this?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me.”
Rath was about to hang up when he heard the laugh on the other end. Guttural and soulless. Rath’s blood drained out of him, and he knew if he looked down, he’d see a pool of it spreading out on the Scout’s floor.
The laugh came again.
Preacher.
Rath killed the call and stopped the Scout, staggered out into a field, tracking up the pure snow. He braced himself against a lone oak tree out in the middle of the cold field.
His phone rang again.
He let it go to voice mail.
It rang again.
He let it go.
He was not prepared for this. Of all the scenarios he had run through his head, none had involved Preacher contacting him. They had all involved Rath’s hunting Preacher, surprising him. Making his life hell. Now. This. Blindsided, he was not ready. He wanted it on his terms.
The phone rang. He turned it off and tromped back through the snow and got in the Scout and headed toward home.
At home, he plodded up the back stairs and set the phone on the kitchen table and sat with a bottle of scotch, poured a glass.
The landline phone rang on the kitchen wall.
Rath jumped in his chair and stared at the phone.
It rang and rang and rang. He’d discontinued the voice mail, so the phone would not stop ringing until the person on the other end hung up.
The phone rang and rang.
It couldn’t be him. The line was private. Unlisted. There was no way. How could he have his number?
The phone kept ringing.
Rath jumped up and grabbed it, and shouted, “Listen you piece of shit, I’ll find you, and—”
“Don’t ever hang up on me again,” the voice said, cold, reptilian.
“Who the fuck do you—”
“I asked you a question. ‘How’s my girl?’ ”
“When I find you—”
More laughter. “You? Find me? I’ve found you. Answer me. How. Is. My. Girl?”
“What girl?”
“My. Girl.”
“Who?”
“Rachel.”
Rath’s heart swelled in his chest, the blood trapped and pooling in it, the pressure terrific.
“Don’t you dare speak my daughter’s name.”
“Your daughter?” Preacher laughed. “You ever ask yourself why I came back, to your sister’s house?”
Rath wanted to hang up, but he heard a sound in the background that seemed vaguely familiar. If he kept Preacher on the line long enough, perhaps he’d be able to narrow down the type of place he was calling from if not an exact location.
“Well?” Preacher said.
“We know why you came back.” Rath took a drink. What was that sound in the background? Focus, he told himself. Focus and keep him on the line, ignore his games.
“No, that’s not why. That’s the what. What I came back to do; but why did I come back to do it? Hmmm. Why?”
“You’re evil.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Frank.”
Rath felt filthy hearing Preacher call him by name.
“You can do math, right, Frank? Simple math.”
Rath said nothing, listening. The noise in the background sounded like a . . . he could not quite place it.
“Here’s some simple math for you. How long was I gone from Vermont?”
The sound in the background where Preacher was became clearer as Preacher moved. A high scraping?
“OK. I’ll tell you. Sixteen months.”
Not quite a scraping, more like a—
“And,” Preacher said, “how old was Rachel?”
Rath snapped to attention, his spine going cold and as rigid as bar of iron.
An icy laugh came from Preacher. “And how long is the average human pregna—”
“You shut your mouth,” Rath roared. “You shut your fucking mouth.”
“I see I struck a nerve. Apparently, you can do math.”
“You lying fucking—”
“You weren’t the only whoremonger in your family, Frank. With women, of course, they don’t call them whoremongers. No. They call them whores. Funny. No matter how you turn it, the woman is the whore. Why do you suppose that is?”
Rath couldn’t breathe. The more he tried, the more he hyperventilated until he felt the bile burn his throat, and he spit it in the sink. What Preacher was saying was only to get a rise. Rath willed himself to ignore it. He had to get a grip, get leverage, the upper hand. This was not how it was supposed to go.
“Your silence is telling,” Preacher said. “You’re trying to tell yourself I’m lying, I’m fucking with you. But your body knows. It knows. Your sister lied to you. All those years. Your sister, the little angel. She didn’t put her cheap ways behind her when she met Daniel, she was just more . . . hmm . . . discreet—”
Rath could hear laughter on the line. His heart was thundering. “Listen, you soulless—”
But Preacher ignored him, his voice cutting straight through Rath: “She told me all about you: Her sad little brother nailing pussy to make himself feel like a man, like your old man. How you thought she was such a saint.” Preacher cackled. “But she. She couldn’t stay away from the bad boys any more than you could from the bad girls. Well, she picked the wrong bad boy in the end, wouldn’t you say? I came back through to give her some more of it. She turned me down. Gave me some holier-than-thou, prim-and-proper, Holly-fucking-Hobby bullshit. But I knew that was a mask. I fucking knew.”
Rath was shaking so hard, his legs would not hold him, and he had to sit down on the floor. He was soaked with sweat. He tried to block out Preacher’s voice and focus on the sound in the background. Focus focus focus. But he couldn’t.
“What I didn’t know,” Preacher said, sounding as if he were speaking with a clenched jaw, “was about the baby. Until later, when I read it in the papers. My girl. If Laura was such a good mother, she should have just let me take her one last time on my way through, stopped pretending she was some born-again saint. If she’d just given in to her nature, let me have her like the old days, when she wanted to slum it with the bad-boy handyman, I’d have gone off none the wiser. Instead, she had to resist. Play Good Girl. Cock tease. Force my hand. Agitate.” His voice was distorted. Demonic. “I can do math, Frank. Even if you can’t. I can do simple fucking math. Rachel’s mine. Ask yourself how the mess I made of Laura and her husband differed from my MO.”
Rath was gasping for breath. Every atom in him wanted to reject what Preacher said. But he couldn’t. How could Preacher know these things from anyone else but Laura? And what Preacher had said, about the MO. It differed drastically from the coldness of the rapes. And age of the victims. They’d missed it before because Preacher had been so easily caught, he’d left DNA everywhere. They’d missed it for what it was: a crime of passion. A sense of dread hardened in Rath. His worry over Rachel’s obsession with the twisted books and movies about sadists and depravity. He’d worried it had been because she’d heard about the murder of her parents. What if it was because she had Preacher’s blood running in her veins? Focus, his mind screamed. Focus focus. Focus!
That sound. He knew it. It was coming to him.
“You won’t tell me how My Girl is doing,” Preacher said. “OK. I’ll tell you. She seems fine. From what I see.”
“How’d you get this number?” Rath said.
Preacher snorted.
“How did you get my fucking home number?”
PRIVATE. That’s what the original call on Rath’s cell had shown. PRIVATE.
“Tell me! Goddamn you, tell me!”
More laughter came, ringing and echoing in Rath’s head.
When it died, Rath heard the sound again.
And suddenly, he knew what it was.
A bird. Birds. Two of them.
Canaries.