I RAN DOWN THE MOUNTAIN. Night had fallen so rapidly that it seemed to have skipped dusk altogether. I had duct-taped my Maglite to my shoulder. The stark white blaze showed me an oval-shaped fraction of the world ten feet in front me. My steps were short and choppy, but in a steady rhythm that let me coast for long sections. When the lower half of my quads started quivering threateningly, I let myself walk for a quarter-mile before starting again.
I reached the gate at the edge of the Haymes property just before midnight. My truck was where I had left it, on the opposite side. My phone had one signal bar. I wiped trickles of icy sweat from my face while waiting for Willard to pick up.
“That was fast,” he said. “I’m not even to Portland yet.”
“Are you driving now?” I didn’t want him rolling his car in shock.
Willard must have caught something in my voice that was worth an instant of hesitation before he replied. “What is it? You found her?”
Sugarcoating the news wasn’t going to comfort anybody.
“I found Elana. She was at the cabin. She and Kend. They’re both dead, Willard.”
“What?” he said, as if the line had stuttered, and he’d misheard.
“Elana is dead.”
I heard him take a breath, almost a hum, low and under the digital static. “That—” he tried. “What. What happened?”
“I don’t know. She was shot. Willard.” It was my turn to take a breath. “There’s something else. Kend may have killed her.” When he didn’t reply I continued. “I’m about to call the cops.”
“Where are you?”
“Down the mountain from the cabin.”
It might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard tires screeching in the background. I could picture Willard pulling a U-turn right over the highway divider.
“I’ll be there in two hours,” he said. “Find out where they’re taking her. I’ll meet you.”
He was two hundred miles away. Set on covering the distance with the accelerator stomped to the floor.
“Willard, there’s no fixing this.”
He had hung up.
I DIDN’T SEE WILLARD in two hours. It was close to seven o’clock in the morning when a sheriff’s deputy named Banks and I were waiting at the emergency entrance to the main hospital in Port Angeles. Willard would be coming there to identify Elana’s body as soon as the sheriff was done talking to him.
I’d been interviewed three times. First by the deputies who’d responded to my 911 call. Then by the sheriff, before he and one of the deputies drove off in their green county SUV, headlights pointed up the mountain toward what awaited at the cabin. Then once again, in a conference room at the National Forest Service station in the nearby town of Quilcene, with a recorder running. They wanted to make very sure they had every detail.
Every cop I told, I could see the shock underneath their practiced poker faces. One of the deputies spoke to the other before he was completely out of earshot. Maurice Haymes’s kid, for God’s own sake.
What I told them was 98 percent facts, 2 percent omission. I left out only that Elana hadn’t shown up to work—the cops sure as hell didn’t need to know about Willard’s card game—and I claimed that the idea to go hiking had been mine. When Willard had said his niece was in the area, I’d decided to start my weekend in the woods by dropping by Kend’s cabin to say hello.
Just as the sun was starting to push its way into the sky, a black Escalade flew into the parking lot, barely slowing its speed from off the main street. It whipped to the right and stopped perfectly centered in a parking space.
Willard had arrived.
Banks stared as Willard got out of the SUV and managed to make it look smaller by comparison. Instead of one of his usual custom-made brown suits, he wore a red rain jacket over wool pants. His face, which always looked dour from his heavy brow and jaw, had sunk even lower, into mournful.
“Sheriff kept me all goddamn night,” Willard said to me in his ground-glass voice. “I want you along when I go to—to see her.” He glared at Deputy Banks. “Okay with you?”
It took Banks a second to find his words. “Sure thing.”
The morgue was on the basement level of the hospital. It was the only room on its hall without a sign. The attendant, a stoop-shouldered woman with braided gray hair, unlocked the swinging doors.
We walked into a frigid wind. Vents and fans worked noisily to keep the temperature somewhere under forty degrees. I smelled the sharp tang of antiseptic cleaning products, over the heavier scent of something like old leaves. Yellow tiles covered the floor. Most of the opposite wall was dominated by the faces of large stainless steel drawers, in two rows of four.
“Normally we could do this with a photograph,” the attendant said, “but I’m afraid in this case—” She tilted her head sympathetically and checked a whiteboard—KH 02/20 D4 was written in blue dry-erase marker just above the lowest line, uf 02/20 D6. Kendrick Haymes, and unidentified female.
The attendant led us around the flat metal examination tables to the wall of drawers, and then stopped and turned to Willard.
“Go ahead,” Willard said.
The attendant pulled hard on Drawer 6 and it opened slowly, releasing a thicker waft of cold air along with the rotting vegetation smell. A thick blue plastic sheet covered the body inside. The body’s weight made the long drawer sag a fraction of an inch, as if threatening to tip.
She pulled back the plastic sheet very carefully.
The face underneath was horrific. There was no other word for it. The bullets had gone through Elana’s nose and forehead and shattered every bit of bone and cartilage in their path, until the little nubs of metal and their shock waves had burst out of her skull altogether. Her splintered facial bones had collapsed inward. Even her hair was dull and grayish, as if trying to match her pallor. It was almost impossible to tell that she’d been young. Or even female.
Willard stared at her, suddenly red-faced and breathing through his mouth.
“There’s also this,” the attendant said, and drew back the lower corner of the sheet to reveal a tattoo in faded red and black on the body’s calf. Roses, in a loose bouquet, one tumbling out and down in a graceful curve.
I reacted an instant before the deputy did, both of us grabbing Willard as he slumped. Damn, he was heavy. We kept him roughly vertical as the attendant grabbed a chair and got it under him.
“Sir?” Deputy Banks said over and over.
“’M all right,” Willard said, even as he threatened to topple to the floor. The attendant rushed to cover Elana and close the drawer.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said.
“Mr. Willard, can you identify that woman as Elana Coll?” the deputy said.
“I can,” said Willard. He shuddered and put his face in his hands. The deputy looked embarrassed, and the attendant edged away.
“Give us a minute,” I said. The deputy nodded, not ungrateful, and they left the room.
I sat on one of the examination tables. Willard took a dozen deep breaths, each getting longer and a little less ragged. When he took his hands away, his eyes were bloodshot but mostly dry.
He fished out a pack of Camels and a lighter from his red raincoat. He offered me one and I waved it off, after an instant’s hesitation.
He lit one. The smoke didn’t smell good, but it was better than the other lingering odors in the room.
“Talk to me,” Willard said. I told him what I’d seen at the cabin. He listened. The busy fans caught the smoke as it trailed upward, yanked it from the air to vanish like a small, startled ghost.
“So maybe the little shit killed her,” Willard said when I’d finished.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I think the cops will start with the obvious and see if the evidence backs it up. Was Kend nuts? Did they fight a lot?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t share her love life with me, for Christ’s sake.”
“Would she have left him if he was getting rough?”
He glowered. “You knew her.”
The Elana I remembered wouldn’t have taken a guy who slapped her around. She’d have left, or stabbed him with a carving fork, or something. But I hadn’t seen her since we were teenagers.
Willard tapped his ash and watched it fall. “She was still the same girl.”
“Okay. So let’s say that violence was out of character for Kend. You said they went to the cabin at the last minute?”
“I said that was the feeling I got.”
“Kend had packed for a stay,” I said. “Elana hadn’t. She just brought her shoulder bag.”
“So what?”
“I don’t know. It just strikes me as weird, if they drove up together. Who doesn’t bring underwear and a toothbrush, at least? There were other tire tracks around the cabin. People had been there, and left. Maybe they saw something, or heard an argument.”
“You said the gate was locked. Weren’t they alone?” he said.
“Unless somebody decided to lock it behind them when they left. Maybe Kend asked them to.”
Willard rumbled. “Possible.”
“Call some of Elana’s people,” I said. “She must have shared secrets with somebody.”
“I didn’t know her friends. She liked running with Kend and his crowd. I guess she thought they were exotic. Or rich, anyway.”
“A new start? Was she running from something?”
“We didn’t talk. She took the job with me because she needed it. But”—he dropped the cigarette to crush it under his size eighteen wingtip—“she didn’t share much.”
That seemed to run in their family. “Maybe her parents know.”
“Her parents are in Australia, last I knew, or cared. I haven’t seen my sister and that fried egg she married in three years. I’m not sure Elana has, either.”
“But you and she don’t talk.”
“Van. Let it alone.”
I looked at him. “What’s going on, Willard?”
He shook his head. There was something missing, I realized. The threat of violence, which was almost always present with Willard, which had been boiling right at the rim when he’d walked into the hospital, was gone.
“Do you know something?” I said. “Did one of your scores lead to this?”
“I don’t know shit,” he said. He took a slow breath. “I’ll check. I’ll make sure it’s not on me. But I already know the answer. My life has been quiet and level for a long time. How I like it.”
“Okay,” I said. “There still might be a motive on Kend’s side.”
“You think that’ll explain anything?”
“How hard will the cops dig with the Haymes family?”
He shrugged. Not knowing. Or not caring. But my question was almost rhetorical. If rich kid Kendrick had killed his girlfriend and then himself, the Haymeses would bury this faster than all his daddy’s excavation machines could manage.
Willard looked at Drawer 6. “I’ve lost a lot of people, Van. You too, I suppose. Knowing why never gave me a damn scrap of comfort.”
The masking smell of smoke had been scrubbed completely from the air by the cold artificial breeze. We were back to the lower notes of decay.
“I’m sorry she’s dead,” I said.
Long after I thought he wouldn’t answer, Willard turned away from the drawer.
“You were right the first time,” he said. “There’s no fixing it.”