Hazel was the first one to the car. They’d seen the girl burst from the passenger side and she was still hobbling for the treeline as the two forces converged from the road. The Porsche was about two hundred metres in, sitting like a ticking bomb in a cloud of smoke and dust. “Get Travers out!” Hazel called to LeJeune. She was crossing the field toward the commander and her officers. “I’m going after the girl!”
As she ran, Hazel kept twitching her head over her shoulder and she watched the officers of the QBPS yanking at the handle behind which Lee Travers was sitting in a pool of his own gore. She saw his giant chest clearly, still moving up and down. The radios had come to life again. An ambulance was coming from Kehoe River, and a SOCO team was on its way to catalogue the mess in the house and in the field.
Larysa had reached the treeline and Hazel was going to have to follow her into the dark.
Bars of light from the edge of the woods lay across the uneven forest floor. They stretched out like pathways into the trees, where they joined other shadows and became a mass of variegated grey and black.
Hazel stood within the cover and listened. She had to shut out the sounds behind her now – voices calling to each other, and, in the distance, sirens. She closed it all off and focused her listening toward the dark. She expected to hear the sound of Kitty’s footfalls fading in the distance as she plunged forward. How injured was the girl? It would have taken a few moments for her eyes to adjust, as hers were doing now, and then she would have to pick her way through the fallen branches and the moss-covered boulders that hunched in the larger darkness.
“My name is Hazel Micallef,” she called out. “I’m a detective with the Ontario Police Services. I know what’s happened to you. I know what you had to do. I want to help you.” She listened for any sign, any movement. There was nothing. She moved deeper into the trees. There was no order here – it was old forest, an ancient forest that had forever lined the backside of the Gannon escarpment, a thick carpet of brown and green. The trees here had never been harvested or cleaned out, and eons of growth crunched and moaned underfoot. Deeper in, the trunks of the oaks and chestnuts thickened and crowded one another.
She was about a hundred metres further when she saw the glow of a grassy patch beyond the next line of trees, and she stepped onto the edge of it. The last of the light was filtering down and the clearing sat in a disk of metallic light. Ten metres away, on the other side, the girl who had been called Kitty was standing calmly in the half-light, a reedlike figure in a hoodie and sweatpants. Lit by the dusky sky, she looked phantasmal, like an image out of Grimm’s. A maleficent Goldilocks. She was holding what appeared to be a gun fashioned out of red metal. It was only when she realized it was covered in Travers’s blood, did Hazel begin to realize what this woman had accomplished, to be standing at liberty in these woods, alive, and only one more person standing between her and freedom.
Hazel took two steps into the dusk-tinged light and stood where the girl could clearly see her. Larysa was ceding the light to Hazel. Her face was not totally unlike the police sketch that had been made of her on the Wednesday night, but almost. It was a like a face remembered out of the distant past.
“Are you Kitty?”
“No,” the girl said. “I am Larysa. I have been rescued by Kitty.”
“I am not going to try to convince you that I can fix what has happened to you. But I know there were other girls. You can help the ones who have survived. You can tell us what you saw.”
“Cannot help. Cannot tell.” She was half-holding the gun on Hazel. Now she pulled her arm backwards and lobbed it toward her, and the gun described a gentle parabola and landed in the loam a metre from her feet. Hazel leaned down to pick the weapon up with her thumb and index finger. It was another Glock; Travers’s gun, cadged for him by Bellecourt. The girl was unarmed now, but she came toward Hazel, covering the distance between them quickly, and Hazel instinctively took a step backwards, raising Travers’s weapon in front of her. Larysa grabbed the barrel of the gun and drew herself into it, steadying it an inch from her eyes, eyes that were concentrating the last of the August light into two sharp beads. “Choose,” she said.
They stood together, connected by the gun. Larysa’s fingertip balanced the muzzle in front of her own face.
“Who is this girl?” Larysa said. “Whatever then, now she’s murderer. Why not she go to polis, for the polis to help her? No, she go and hunt. She can SAVE girls but does not! The dirty girls in the dirty hole, she leaves them. Takes her revenge!” She tugged the gun in toward her forehead, and Hazel felt it bump against the girl’s skull. “Choose.”
“There’s no choice,” said Hazel. She pulled the gun away from the girl’s forehead. There was a perfect red circle of Travers’s blood imprinted on Larysa’s forehead. “I have to take you in.”
“Shoot the gun,” Larysa said. She began to walk away.
Hazel was not going to shoot the gun. Her feet were rooted to the forest floor; she had become one of the old maples here, that had seen everything for a hundred years and been incapable of action. “Please stop,” she said.
Larysa stopped. She turned around again and faced Hazel. “Do you have child, Miss Polis?” she asked.
“You have to come with me.”
“You have daughter,” Larysa said plainly, stepping backwards, away from her. “Imagine, your daughter, this happens to her. Imagine.”
The fabric of the girl’s shirt was catching concentrated lashings of light as she slid away into the cover of the trees, and soon Hazel only heard her footfalls softening in the distance. The decision was too complex to make under these conditions. The girl was dangerous. The girl had suffered and done what anyone else in her position would have done. But Henry? Why had Henry known this girl? “Wait, wait a second. I want to ask you a question. Was Henry Wiest trying to help you?” She couldn’t hear the girl’s footsteps over her own voice. She called out, louder: “ Was he trying to help you?”
But she was gone. The girl had vanished into the forest.
When Hazel emerged from the woods, an ambulance was already in place on Highland Crescent and two men were marching a stretcher over the field. She walked up to it and she saw the extent of Travers’s injuries. She could tell that his survival would take a miracle. The paramedics carried him back across the field carefully.
She realized that her shoulders were up around her ears. So much of this case had been fugitive in nature that she had begun to mistrust her peripheral vision. She was expecting the ground to jump again, was braced for it. Even now, with the apparent kingpin dead or dying; his accomplices dead, gone, or perhaps even trapped underground; his victims silenced or missing, she still worried there was more to come.
When Travers was safely inside the ambulance, she looked for LeJeune. She found her standing with some of the men and women of the Ontario Police Service, Central Division. “Anything?” LeJeune asked.
“Nothing. She’s gone.”
“Where is my car?”
“Not now, Commander.” She stopped as she was passing LeJeune and turned to face her. “I’m sorry. This has been a very unpleasant case for me, as I imagine it must be for you too now. If I’d known more sooner …”
“There were unexpected complexities.”
“Yes. There were.” There was more to be said. But she couldn’t take her hand off her radio. “I need to talk to my people right now, Commander. Your car is smashed up on Sideroad 1, right near where all this stuff was going on.”
“This stuff with girls.”
“Yes. I’ll come see you tomorrow and explain it. As best I understand it.”
LeJeune let her go. The ambulance was pulling away from the curb, its siren silent, its beacons off. Travers was dead.
Hazel raised the radio to her mouth.