I leaned close to him. It was Stork Neck. He’d been shot once through the chest and then fallen into the hedge. Had the sapphire dog gotten loose among the Fellows, turning them against one another? Or was something else going on?
I touched his hand. It was cold, but so was mine. I lifted the bottom of his ski jacket to feel his belly. It was still warm.
That was a bad sign. I glanced around quickly but didn’t see any other bodies. I had no idea how close the shooter was or whether he was coming back. I should probably have gotten out of there, but I didn’t. Instead, I got back into the car.
My headlights shone down the dirt path into the campground. Down the slope, I could see the tops of three motor homes, each with a dark SUV beside it. I’d found the Fellows’ camp.
“Stay low,” I said. Catherine ducked below the dash. I pulled all the way into the grounds, which seemed like a better option than parking on the shoulder of the road.
There was a second body beside the entrance to the nearest trailer. It was Fat Guy. He was sitting against the trailer wheel, his head slumped down over a bloody red hole in his breastbone. He didn’t look so dangerous anymore, but no one did once a bullet or two had run through him. There was a third body, one I didn’t recognize, beside the next trailer. Blood spatters from the exit wound had sprayed onto the white siding.
The shooter had fired from somewhere behind me, on the hill across the road. Someone was using a long gun and using it well.
I parked as far from the trailers as I could. Maybe the shooter, if he was still around, would assume I was alone in the car. Of course, the sniper had had plenty of time to take a shot while I’d stood over Stork Neck’s body. Maybe he wasn’t in position anymore. Maybe he was creeping closer in to inspect his handiwork.
“Stay as low as you can and keep out of sight. You’re safest if no one knows you’re here.”
Catherine nodded and I climbed from the car, walking quickly away from it. I took the ghost knife from my pocket.
The closest trailer was dark and all the curtains were drawn. I didn’t get any closer than ten yards as I trotted past. The second trailer was not lined up with the others—someone had hooked it up to a Yukon and tried to pull away. There was a bullet hole in the driver’s window and blood on the windshield, but I couldn’t see a body. I didn’t look for it, either.
I did see the red-and-white card on the dashboard. It was a parking permit for the campgrounds. Damn. I’d told Regina exactly where to find them.
The last of the trailers was parked beneath the trees. It was also dark, but the curtains were open. Everyone still alive must have fled. Then I heard a woman shout a warning, saw movement in a darkened window, and heard the shot.
Strangely, I felt something tear at the front of my shirt before I saw the window burst open. It took a moment to realize I’d been shot in the chest and should play dead. I toppled sideways, letting my right hand fall across my chest to hide the spot where the bullet hole should have been.
I tried to stay completely still, although my heart was racing—in fact, my heart was speeding up as I lay there. Some asshole had just taken a shot at me, and if he’d gone for my head, I’d be as dead as Stork Neck.
It scared me, and being scared pissed me off. The freezing mud soaking into my clothes pissed me off. Somebody was going to have something unpleasant happen because of this.
For now, though, I put that out of my mind. I heard a thin screen door smack shut and the squish of approaching footsteps. I held my breath and kept still. Through my half-closed eyes, I could see the trailer. A figure with a white ski mask and a white sleeve peeked around the front of the RV and aimed a rifle at me. My arm was curled and ready to throw the ghost knife, but the gunman was twenty-five or thirty yards away. By the time the spell reached him, he’d have put two or three bullets into my brain.
After a few seconds, the figure decided I was dead and aimed at the car. I hoped Catherine was still keeping low.
The sniper stepped out from behind the truck. Despite the ski mask, I recognized her. It was Ursula. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she held a gun on me in the guesthouse behind the Wilbur estate. I could even see the cuts the ghost knife had made in her white jacket.
I’d been thinking of the shooter as “he”; I should have learned better by now.
She walked directly toward the car, rifle to her shoulder like a soldier. She stepped around my feet and out of my line of sight. I counted four squishy, muddy steps after she’d passed, then a fifth and a sixth before I decided I was being a coward. I rolled over and threw the ghost knife.
She turned toward me, swinging the rifle around. The ghost knife cut through it, and the weapon came apart in her hands.
She gaped at the broken rifle for a few precious seconds while I rolled to my feet. Then she threw the halves aside and reached into her waistband.
There was no time to be gentle. I charged her and hit her once in the same spot I’d hit Esteban. She staggered but didn’t go down. I did it again.
She fell into the mud, arms waving vaguely in the air, still trying to defend herself even though she was out. I pulled her handgun out of her belt and dropped it into my pocket.
She also had a knife, which I threw onto the top of the nearest trailer. Then I took her wallet and keys, just because she was annoying. In her inside jacket pocket, I found three pairs of handcuffs with keys.
I dragged her by the heel to the nearest trailer, wrapped her arms around a tire below the axle, and cuffed her.
I pressed my ear against the wet, freezing shell of the trailer. Someone had shouted a warning to me, and it sure hadn’t been Ursula. I didn’t hear anything, so I circled around to the door. One of the tires was flat. I knelt and saw a bullet hole in the rim. It was almost the same spot as the one on the tire of the overturned delivery truck on the estate. Ursula was quite a shot.
The trailer door was wide open. I reached in and felt for the light switch, flicked it on, and stepped back.
No gunshots zipped by me. I looked in, leaning farther into the doorway until I saw a woman’s fur-trimmed leather boot and the leg that went with it.
I went inside. The boot belonged to Professor Solorov; she was slumped against the wall in the little booth that served as a dining area. Her eyes were half closed and her mouth was hanging open. Blood had soaked through her blouse on the lower left side. She did not look like the same woman who had taken Kripke at gunpoint, or who had threatened to kill his whole family if he didn’t turn over his spell book.
The window above her had a bullet hole in it. I was standing where Ursula had stood when she shot at me. Solorov must have shouted the warning, although I doubted she knew who she was shouting at.
She looked at me, blinking sleepily as she tried to focus. “Did you kill her?”
“No. I’m going to call an ambulance, okay? Where’s the phone?”
“Right there.” She didn’t have the energy to point, but I did follow her gaze to the cell on the floor. It had been smashed.
“Hold on,” I said. I went outside and knelt beside the nearest corpse. It was Horace Alex; I took his cellphone again. The campground got one bar, but that was enough. I dialed 911. My headache flared and I said what I needed to say. I didn’t give my name, but I didn’t kid myself that it would be a secret for long. My headache faded as I went back inside. “Someone will be here soon.”
“Let me out,” a new voice said. “I don’t want to be found here.” It came from the back of the trailer. Through a tiny hallway I saw Stuart Kripke handcuffed to a narrow bed.
“Yes,” Solorov said. “Get out. Both of you get out.”
I went into the back. His cuffs matched the ones I’d taken off Ursula. I took the keys from my pocket and freed him. He rolled over onto his wide ass and sat rubbing his wrists. He looked me up and down. “You look like crap.”
Charming. I went back into the other room and leaned close to Solorov. She had ordered Biker killed and tried to do the same to me, but I still felt sorry for her. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Yes,” she answered weakly. “Go fuck yourself. I don’t need your pity. Wait! Wait.” She worked her carefully painted mouth, trying to call up enough spit to keep talking. “If you kill that Norwegian cow, I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”
“Why did she do all this?”
“Why do you think? That tattooed bastard told her we had the package. Of course it was a lie, but she didn’t want to hear it.” Solorov raised her other hand from beneath the table. Her fingers had been smashed crooked. “On second thought, don’t kill her. I want to do it myself.”
Kripke squeezed through the narrow hall. “I’ll pay you five hundred dollars if you can get me out of town before the police arrive.” His voice was too loud and too blunt. “Everyone else here is dead.”
I didn’t have time to deal with him. “Just a minute,” I said.
He leaned over Solorov and flipped open her sport jacket. The professor didn’t like that but couldn’t do anything about it. “You keep your hands off, you fat creep.”
“Hey!” His voice was bullish and thick. “You don’t get to tell me what to do! Not after all this. You’re lucky I don’t fuck you right here and now.”
I grabbed hold of his shirt. “That’s enough out of you! You keep running your mouth and I’m going to cuff you again.”
“And give up five hundred bucks?” he said, as if he was calling my bluff. There was something off about the guy, but I didn’t know what it was. He seemed like a brainy guy who wasn’t very smart. It wasn’t until he looked at my face that he backed down, muttering something about jocks.
I turned back to the professor. “Where can I find the tattooed man?”
“Forget him,” she answered. “He’s a big, bad grown-up and you’re just a little boy. And his boss is something else entirely.”
“Let me worry about that. Where can I find them?”
“Hah. What’s in it for me?”
“She can’t tell you,” Kripke interrupted. “She won’t ever admit that she doesn’t know something or that she’s in over her head. That’s how she ended up like this.”
Solorov sighed and closed her eyes. For a moment I thought she’d died, but when she spoke, her voice was whisper quiet. “Get out. Both of you. I don’t want you near me. Just go.”
I grabbed Kripke’s shirt and pulled him out of the trailer. He complained about the cold and the drizzle and the mud on his shoes. The sound of his voice put me on edge, but I didn’t tell him to shut up. I wanted him in a talking mood.
Ursula had come around and was working furiously at her cuffs, scraping them back and forth along the bottom of the axle. She was tenacious, if nothing else.
I put Kripke in the backseat of my Neon and climbed behind the wheel. My muddy clothes were cold against my skin. Catherine sat up and looked at me in silence.
“Before the cops get here,” Kripke said. “Five hundred bucks. I’m not kidding.”
I took Ursula’s handgun from my pocket and gave it to Catherine. “If he does anything stupid, shoot him.”
“Okay,” she answered.
He was silent as I pulled out of the campground. I didn’t hear sirens.
I glanced into the rearview mirror at Kripke. He was sulking. I’d interrupted my search for the pastor and the sapphire dog, and he was all I had to show for it. He’d better be worth it.
I drove by the school and beyond that the little houses and cross streets. I looked at Kripke in the mirror again. “Where have you been staying?”
He rolled his eyes. “Nowhere. I came to the auction. I was kidnapped. That’s where I’ve been staying, with my kidnappers.”
I wanted to question him, but where? Steve Cardinal might look for me at the Sunset. The Grable was a wreck. It was late enough that the bar would have closed. I wondered how Steve would react if I showed up at his house.
Kripke blew out a long, slow breath. “I shouldn’t have come anywhere near this place. I just want to go home and pretend none of this ever happened.”
“What about your buddy?”
“Who? Oh. Paulie. We weren’t close. Besides, he was supposed to be my bodyguard. It’s not my fault he blew it. Look, if you can get me out of town, I can get you two hundred dollars right away. That’s the ATM limit. I’ll send you a check for the rest.”
I parked in front of a narrow house with a lopsided porch. A six-foot-long baby Jesus had been mounted on the siding, and it watched us with big blue eyes. I turned off the engine, then turned around, took the gun from Catherine, and dropped it into my pocket. She went back to doing nothing. I wished I had the real Catherine here. This next part needed an investigator.
“I heard you talking to the professor outside the Wilbur house. Right before the floating storm was summoned. How much of that was true?”
He ran his fingers through the hair above his ears, fluffing the frizzy tangle. His motions were sharp and annoyed. “Oh, come on. Really? Are we going to do this here, on a public street? Are you going to threaten to shoot me in your own car? Please.”
“You don’t have to be impressed. Just answer my questions.”
“What if I don’t?”
“More people will die.”
He snorted. “Oh, noes! More people like the kidnappers who killed my bodyguard! Let’s do everything we can to prevent that!” His voice was raw with contempt.
I’d had more of him than I could stand. “I don’t think you understand the situation you’re in.”
“You don’t scare me any more than Paulie did,” he said. “You think this is still high school? You may have been King Dick among the jocks back then, but I have the money, the house, and the job. What do you have except a Walmart name tag?”
For a moment I just stared at him, astonished. If he’d given that little speech to Arne or one of my old crew, he would have gotten a beating so ferocious he would never stand up straight again. He’d lived all his life in the straight world. He had no idea how to behave in mine.
I took the pistol from my pocket and fired off a round. It passed through the back window about a foot from his head, but I’m sure it felt much closer.
Catherine shrieked. Kripke slapped his hand over his face as if he’d been shot. He rubbed at his cheek, then checked his palm for blood. A fleck of gunpowder must have landed on his skin, but he couldn’t tell the difference between a burning speck and an entrance wound.
“High school?” I said. “I didn’t go to fucking high school. While you were carrying your books in the halls and complaining about homework, I was on the street stealing cars and getting high. I was doing time in juvie for shooting my best friend. Don’t you brag to me about your money or your house, motherfucker. If I want anything you have, I take it. Understand?”
His eyes were wide and blank, but there seemed to be a little spark of understanding in there. “Everything I said to the professor was true, but there was some stuff I left out.”
“I’m waiting.”
“Okay, um. The guy who baited his way into our server and gave us all that information? He was logging on from somewhere in Bozeman, Montana. And he called himself TheLastKing.”
King? I knew someone named King. I hoped to God it wasn’t the same guy. “What was his real name?”
“I don’t know. He always logged in from a public wireless network. We could never find out who he was. We were going to ban him, but his first posts were full of great stuff, so we voted against it.”
“What did he teach you?”
“Well,” Kripke said, and swallowed. He lifted his hand close to his chest and pointed at my gun hand. “That’s the closed way on the back of your hand.”
I felt goose bumps run down my back. He knew more about the spells Annalise put on me than I did. I scowled to hide my excitement. “He taught you to recognize spells? What did he tell you about the closed way?”
“That it stops physical attacks the way a washed-out road blocks a traveler. That when a primary casts it, the marks are invisible and the skin can feel anything un-spelled skin can feel, but as you go down to secondary, tertiary, and so on, the spells become hard to hide and you lose sensation.”
I stared at him. Months ago, during our time in Hammer Bay, Annalise had used the word primary to refer to a very powerful sorcerer, but at the time I couldn’t press her for more information.
I couldn’t press Kripke, either. As soon as he realized I wasn’t testing him—that he had information I wanted—he’d want me to bargain for it.
“TheLastKing, huh? Did he give any idea who he might be or where he got the information?”
“Well, he had a spell book.” Kripke’s tone was almost disrespectful.
“Are you playing with me?”
“No,” he answered, almost swallowing the word. “He said he had a pair of spell books. He said he stole them, and that if we bought the sapphire dog for him, he’d share six of the spells with us. He didn’t say who he’d stolen them from.”
“I want to meet him.”
“I’ll bet, but I’m not going to be able to arrange that. The guys on the server already know I lost the auction. I texted them as soon as the price got out of reach.”
“All right,” I said. “Then let’s narrow it down by which spell books he has. Can you recognize any of these?” I set the gun on the seat and stripped off my jacket and my shirt. My bare skin prickled in the winter air, but I felt warmer with my wet clothes off. After glancing around to make sure there were no cars coming toward us, I turned on the dome light.
Kripke squinted at the spells on my chest. “Iron gate,” he said and pointed just below my right collarbone. “It protects against different kinds of mental attacks.”
“Is that it?”
He pointed low on my left side, just at the bottom edge of my ribs. “The twisted path. It’s a shape-shifting spell for primaries, but as you go down the … um … chain, it doesn’t do much more than alter your fingerprints and the way people remember you. And you can’t control it. Um, hey, can you control it?”
This guy was unbelievable. “Still want to know about magic? I guess you haven’t been kidnapped and shot at enough. There’s a lesson to be learned, if you have the brains for it.”
He didn’t seem to get my point. “You’re part of the society, aren’t you? You’re the reason TheLastKing couldn’t come, because he said you were looking for him. You know who he is, don’t you?”
“What about the rest?”
He glanced over my chest and stomach. “I recognize the closed way around the edges, but the other spells … he never went over those. Most of the spells he showed us were for summoning.”
“What?” If Kripke knew a summoning spell, I was going to drive him out of town and put a bullet in him immediately. There was no way I’d trust this idiot with that much power.
“Only the written part!” he said quickly. “Only the visible part. He only gave us enough to recognize one. He said that summoning spells don’t decay the way other kinds do, so we’d be seeing more of them.”
I believed him. He was too brain-damaged to lie this well. I picked up the gun. He winced but stayed silent.
I laid my thumb against the safety. Should I kill him? A single predator loose in the world could call more of its kind and feed on us until there was nothing left. People who summoned them, or just wanted one, were risking everyone on the planet.
And Kripke here had tried to buy a predator.
So. Bullet to the head, right?
He’d failed here in Washaway, but what if he hunted down a new spell, or bought one directly from his anonymous Internet buddy? Kripke was like a guy who’d tried to buy an A-bomb or a vial of anthrax. I couldn’t arrest him, but could I let him go?
Annalise had warned me about this. She’d told me that, because I was part of the society, it was my job to make corpses. And yeah, if I’d been ruthless with Ursula, no one would have known I was on the estate and the floating storm wouldn’t have been summoned to hunt me down. I didn’t like it, but being soft on these people had cost lives.
Kripke cleared his throat. “You’re trying to decide whether you should kill me, right? Because I tried to buy the sapphire dog.”
“Hell, yeah,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I can help you find TheLastKing. I can even connect you to the others in my group. Some of them claim to have a full spell or two.”
“You’re offering your friends to me to save your life?”
I expected him to make excuses, but all he said was: “Yes.” At least he was as blunt with himself as he was with others.
Kripke had given me an excuse to spare him, and I grasped at it. If someone in the society wanted to kill him later, they could do it after they’d collected his buddies’ spell books.
“Give me your wallet.” He did. I took out his license and made a point of studying the address, then I tossed it back to him. “I’m not going to drive you out of town, and if you offer me money again, I’m going to punch you in the mouth, understand?”
“I do.”
After putting my shirt and jacket back on, I drove through the winding streets until I hit one I recognized. From there I made my way to the Sunset B and B. They had a VACANCY sign in the window. Yin might expect me to turn up here, but I doubted they’d be looking for Kripke.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“A place to hole up tonight. There’s probably a bus in the morning. Ride down to Sea-Tac and catch a flight home. Get a lawyer and tell the cops you came up here because you heard about the festival, but you got robbed. They’ll believe it. Just stick to your story.”
“On Christmas Eve? I’ll never catch a flight!”
“Then stay in Washaway. I don’t care. In the airport you’d have to eat overpriced food and wait around a really long time. I’m sure you’d rather be kidnapped again.”
“You’re right,” he said, and for the first time I heard a note of humility in his voice. “Of course you’re right. I … I just …”
“I don’t care,” I told him. “Get out.” He opened the door. “And Stuart? You’ll be hearing from me. Do I need to tell you not to mention our deal to anyone?”
“No, sir,” he said, which startled the hell out of me. He left the car and walked up the gravel path.
I did a quick U-turn and started back toward town. Did I have enough gas to keep driving around looking for Dolan?
A pickup started its engine and pulled up next to me. I was reaching for my ghost knife when I recognized the driver. It was Ford, Steve’s friend with the Wilford Brimley mustache who had gone to check on Little Mark’s head injury. “By God, it’s about time!” he said. His voice was deep and clear like a country-music singer’s.
“What’s going on?”
“Chief asked me to fetch you. He said there’s some dead Chinese millionaire fellas you need to identify. You want to follow me?”
That changed things. “Give me a minute.” I turned to Catherine. She was still staring at me with cow eyes. I couldn’t keep dragging her around with me. Ursula could have killed her, and Catherine would have sat there and let it happen. Not to mention what the sapphire dog would do to her.
But if Yin was dead, the Sunset would be safe for her again. “Go up to the room and get some sleep.” I gave her my key. I was going to say more, but she opened the door, shut it, and walked up the front path without asking for an explanation. She’d do whatever I asked without question. It was creepy.
Ford had his cellphone to his ear. He held up one fat finger without looking at me. Then he said, “Okay,” and switched it off. “Change of plans,” he said to me. “Follow behind.”
He backed up and did a three-point turn. I followed him around the block, past Hondo’s darkened garage to a street I hadn’t seen before. There was a shoe store, a gift shop, and what could only be the town hall Steve had mentioned. It was made of red brick, but the window ledges were marble, and at four stories, it towered over the other buildings on the block. Four round steps led up to a pair of unlikely stone columns and a single cramped door.
We parked in the adjoining lot. Ford waddled toward the back of the building and down concrete stairs to a basement door. We were going in the back entrance.
The room we entered had three more chairs and one more desk that it could comfortably hold. Papers were jumbled everywhere, and the corkboard on the wall was six deep with tattered flyers.
As Ford shut the door behind me, a heavy wooden door across the room opened. A black woman with Coke-bottle glasses came in. It was Sherisse again, who had gone with Ford to pick up Little Mark. She was younger than I’d first thought, and she trundled forward to give Ford a quick kiss on the lips. “Thank you for coming,” she said in a ragged, whispery voice.
“Of course, sugar kitten. What do you need?”
“I couldn’t get through to Steve,” she answered. “And I need him to know about this. Come on.” She looked at me. “You can come too, if you think you can be useful.”
She needed three steps to turn herself around, then she led us through the back door. The next room had a single desk and a huge boiler in the far corner. When Sherisse closed the door, I saw the jail cell.
It was only about seven feet by four feet. Inside was a bare wooden bench that someone had taken from a picnic table. Penny lay on the bench, her face slack. She was dead. One glance told me that.
Little Mark sat slumped in the corner. He was dead, too. Within the confined space of the cell, he was as far from his mother as he could be.
“My God,” Ford said. “What happened?”
“I thought they would want to be together, so when I brought Little Mark here, I put him with his mother. He didn’t seem to mind, but they didn’t even talk to each other. They wouldn’t even look at each other.”
Ford cleared his throat. “Honey song, how did they die?”
“Well, Penny started yelling at me, but it was all gibberish. Her left arm was hanging at her side like she couldn’t move it, her left eye was partly closed, and she started drooling. My Auntie Gertie had a stroke while she was teaching me to make piecrust, so I knew what was happening. I called 911 right away, but it was already too late. They were both … like this.”
“Strokes?” Ford said. “Well, Little Mark did bump his head.…”
“But both at the same time?” Sherisse said.
She was right. That wasn’t a coincidence. “Have they had any visitors?” I was suddenly sure that Pratt had killed them both with one of his sigils, just to be careful.
Sherisse seemed surprised by my question. She glanced behind her. There were two doors beside the cell: one had a sign that said RESTROOM hung on it, and the other was unmarked. She had glanced at the unmarked door. “No one that has anything to do with Penny or Little Mark.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Who?”
Ford cleared his throat. “If Sheri says—”
I lunged between them, stepped up onto the chair, and jumped the desk. Neither of them reacted quickly enough to stop me. I rushed to the unmarked door and yanked it open.
The next room was dark, lit only by the glow of a small television. Fantasia was playing, and three small children sat in front of it, legs crossed, faces pale and serious.
The sudden light from the opened door made them all turn toward me. “Momma?” the smallest one said, but when he saw it was me, he turned back to the show. The sound was very low, and I realized that there were six or seven more kids bundled up in blankets and sleeping bags on the couch and carpet.
The child who looked oldest said: “It’s you!” She jumped to her feet and came toward me. It was Shannon, the girl who had apologized for hiding from us. Staring up at me, her expression hidden in shadow, she grabbed hold of my wrist. “Did you kill it?” she asked. “Did you?”
“I’m sorry, but no. It got away from me. But I haven’t given up. I’ll keep after it.”
“Please,” she said. “Please kill it. I want my granma back. Please kill it.”
“That’s enough now,” Sherisse said, and pulled me out of the doorway. “Shannon, this is the last video, okay? I need you to be the big girl and get the rest of them to sleep a little. Okay? Will you do that for me?”
“Please,” Shannon said to me. “There’s no one else I can ask. No one is listening. Please.” She looked at Sherisse then, without saying anything else, and went back into the darkened room. Sherisse shut the door.
Ford’s phone rang. He answered it, moving away from us.
I lowered my voice so no one but Sherisse could hear. “How many kids are in there? Is Shannon the oldest?”
“She is. There are nine in there right now. Most of them, their parents just vanished. They don’t answer their cells, and no one knows where they are.”
I was about to tell her to prepare for more when Ford cut in. “All right,” he said in a sharper tone than I’d heard before. “That was Steve. You and I have to go right now.”
I shrugged and followed him out to the cars.
We drove back toward the fairgrounds yet again, but well before we got there, the pickup turned onto a feeder road. Fallen trees made it looked blocked and abandoned, but Ford led me around a sudden turn and I followed him uphill.
The pickup was big enough that I couldn’t see the road ahead, just a high back fender and cargo net. We turned sharply and drove up a switchback trail for another fifty yards or so before pulling into a small field. Steve’s Crown Vic was parked at the far end, and there were two burgundy BMWs and the Maybach beside him. Ford pulled in behind Steve, blocking him in, but there weren’t many other spaces left. I parked at the entrance, blocking everyone in.
The field wasn’t very large, but it was tremendously muddy, even by Washaway’s standards. To the left was a large log cabin with a shake roof. I’d have called it rustic if it hadn’t been painted fire-engine red. A few dozen yards behind the cabin the mountains rose straight up for several hundred feet.
The front door swung open and Steve strode out. He moved quickly, but he looked tired. I was already walking toward him when he waved me over. As I slipped between the BMWs, I glanced inside. They were empty.
Before he could say anything, I called: “I don’t know if they told you, but I found more dead bodies at the campground, and one woman who was near death. I haven’t heard an ambulance, so you might want to have it checked out. One of Regina Wilbur’s people, a woman named Ursula, shot up the place.”
“Thank you for telling me. After we finish here, I’ll head over there to look into the mess you … found.”
For a moment I thought he was going to say made. I kept my mouth shut and took a deep, calming breath. “What did you want me to see?”
“Before we get to that: Why were you in the campground?”
“I was looking for the pastor, obviously.”
“Who did you take away from the scene?”
Damn. He knew more than he’d let on. Well, to hell with him. “No one. I did have Catherine with me, though. Why?”
Steve turned to Ford. “Did you see a third person in his car?”
Ford’s face flushed and he looked at the ground. “Um. I didn’t see everything.…”
Which meant he’d been waiting for me at the Sunset and had fallen asleep. I sympathized with him. Steve looked even more irritated than he had been. “Ursula said you took a man out of the trailer and drove off with him.”
“Maybe she thought Catherine was a dude. She never seemed all that sharp to me. Or maybe she’s lying. I did knock her down and cuff her, after all.”
He rubbed his chin. “She didn’t mind admitting to mass murder. I find it hard to believe she’d lie after being honest about that.”
I shrugged. “I did …” Hit her pretty hard, I was about to say. I felt dirty just thinking it.
“What about her gun?” He stared up at me squarely.
“Oh, you mean the handgun I took off her?” I laid my hand against my jacket pocket, then moved it away when I noticed Steve’s sudden tension. “Do you want it?”
He held out his hand. “Please.”
I had been aware this whole time that Ford was standing somewhere behind me and to the right, but I’d mostly ignored him. I felt his presence keenly as I took Ursula’s pistol from my pocket. I handed it over slowly.
Steve accepted it. “This weapon has been fired.”
I wouldn’t be able to hide the bullet hole in the back of the Neon. “Yeah. I thought the safety was on.” I shrugged again. “I’m not really a gun person.”
“What about Ursula’s rifle?”
I should have ditched it after I cut it apart. “What about it?”
“Ray, if I find you’ve been playing games with me—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I shouted, my voice echoing off the mountains around us. Steve flinched, but I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Games? You think I’m having fun here? You think I want to hang around some strange town, tripping over gut-shot people? Over corpses?”
And yet, this was what I wanted. This was my part in the society. I’d sought it out and now it made me sick.
“Chief,” I said, trying to give Steve a little respect because I wanted him on my side, “when all this happened to me that first time, it ruined my life. I can’t sleep right anymore, can’t focus at work, can’t … I sit in my room with a book in my hand and stare out the window for hours. I think about this stuff all the time. I’m constantly on the watch for it, in the faces of people on the street and in the newspaper and … and now here I am again. I found it here and I’m trying to stop it, because it absolutely has to be stopped.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Ray. But that doesn’t mean you’ve told me everything you know, does it?”
I saved you, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I hadn’t saved him to earn a marker I could call in. Still, it would have been nice to have a little more trust, even if he was right.
Steve sighed and turned away from me. “I believe you’re trying to do what’s best, son, but if you hold back on me, I’ll see you in jail, you hear?”
I nodded. I’d been in jail before and I’d expected to be back already. It wasn’t much of a threat.
Steve led me into the log cabin, and Ford followed. For a moment I thought they were flanking me, but they were too relaxed for that.
Inside was a store, with racks of skiing, climbing, and camping gear, along with flyers promoting climbing lessons and kiddie camps. Yin’s bodyguards lay around the room, handguns in their fists, their guts and brains all over the floor and walls. There’d been a gunfight. They’d lost.
Steve’s voice was shaky. “Ford found a .32 slug in the wall, but these fellows are all carrying .45-caliber weapons. They fired them, too. See the casings all over the floor? Doesn’t look like they hit what they were aiming at, does it?”
And I’d heard them, too, but I’d thought it was thunder. “What were they aiming at?” I asked, although I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Sorry. I can’t.”
“Then come look at this.” He led me behind the counter, through the back office, past a very interesting little goosenecked desk lamp and out onto a weather-beaten wooden deck. There were three more bodies out here. Two were burned and shriveled, lying on scorched sections of the deck. The third was Yin himself. His thick tongue stuck out of his mouth, and his face was purplish. He’d been strangled.
Lying on the deck beside him was his soul sword. It had been broken into three pieces.
The smell of blood and burned flesh became too much. I stepped off the deck and vomited into the bushes, making a mental note not to eat greasy grilled cheese when I was on society business.
When I turned back, Steve and Ford were giving each other a significant look. I wasn’t sure what it meant, and I didn’t care.
Steve cleared his throat. “Don’t feel bad, son. I did the same thing. Just I knew where the bathroom was.”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t feel bad at all. I’d feel bad when a building full of burned and head-shot corpses didn’t make me puke. I went back onto the deck.
“Do you know him?” Steve asked. It was a simple, dangerous question.
“Not personally,” I said. “You know who he is, too.”
“Sure, but I want to hear what you have to say.”
“I already told you this. His name was Yin, and he was rich. He won the auction but let the sapphire dog get away. The people at the campground were some of the losers.”
Steve’s mouth was a thin, tense line. “Any other bidders I should know about?”
I sighed. If I really did want him on my side, I couldn’t exactly say no. “There was a fat guy from California and an old man from, I think, Germany. I don’t know whether they left town or are still here hunting for the sapphire dog.”
“Any reason you didn’t mention them before?” Steve’s voice was sharp.
“Because this is what they do to people who know too much about them. And how did you know about the campground? I doubt 911 dispatched you.”
“Justy found them. She talked to Ursula, then she called me and I called Bill and Sue direct. Then I called the staties. I gave up on the sheriff hours ago.”
I looked at my watch. Steve looked at his. How long until they arrived? He took out his cell. “Let me get an ETA for the state police.”
I felt a dull ache in the iron gate on my shoulder. It was a warning that someone was using a spell against me, but it didn’t seem important.
“Hi, Marlis,” Steve said into his phone. His voice suddenly sounded vague and dreamy. “Steve Cardinal over in Washaway. How’re the kids? That’s great news. I’m sorry you’ll be working through the festival. We’d have loved to have had you.” He paused a moment. I moved closer to listen. “Trouble? No,” Steve said, “we’re not having any trouble here. Just the usual Christmas spirit.”
The ache in my shoulder became very strong, and I closed my eyes against it. I heard a woman’s voice at the other end of the phone say: “Lots of you folks down in Washaway have been calling all day to wish me a happy Christmas. It’s … it’s …” She sounded a bit confused, as though she was trying to remember something important. “It’s very sweet,” she said at last.
Steve answered her in the only way that seemed logical to me: “Everything is just fine over here. You be sure to give a Christmas kiss to those kids of yours.”
He hung up the phone, and the pain in my shoulder eased. He’d said what he needed to say. He nodded to Ford. “That should get them out here right quick.”
I was glad Steve had made that call. I was glad the state cops knew about the trouble we were having.
I rubbed my face. “Where’s the woman?”
Steve looked startled by that. He turned to Ford, who didn’t have anything to add but a shrug. “Describe her.”
“Short black hair and dark skin. She looked like she was from Indonesia or something. She wore dark suits and had her hair up in a bun like a librarian. She was maybe my age, just a little under thirty. She was part of Yin’s entourage as some sort of researcher, I’d guess.”
“Does she have a name?”
His tone was getting annoying. “Yeah, but I don’t know it.”
“We searched the whole grounds and didn’t find any women. Could he have sent her home before all this?”
Steve was obviously a glass-half-full sort. “It’s more likely that she’s been reduced to a pile of greasy dust, or that she’s gone to work for the people who won the gunfight.”
Steve nodded. “There’s one more thing I want to show you.” He led me off the deck and across the muddy field. Ford was still trailing me. Now it did bother me to have him at my back.
I stopped, turned around, and said: “Hi. My name is Ray.”
He looked a little surprised, but not much. “I’m Ford.”
“Nice to meet you, Ford. This is ugly business, isn’t it?”
“That it is,” he said. He opened his jacket to show me his holstered gun. “Whoever’s responsible for all this shit is going to be shut down.” He gave me a hard stare as he said it, as though I was suspect number one and a wrong answer away from a beating.
“I agree completely,” I said. Then I turned to follow Steve.
We passed a swing set and an open sandbox. As we walked, Steve spoke to me over his shoulder. “When this Yin character rented the Johnson place over on Outpost Road, Pippa did a little checking. He’s so rich I can’t even imagine it. Who could have tempted this missing Indonesian woman away from him?”
I remembered the pirate’s expression on her face when she’d seen the tattoos on my hands. “Some things are more important than money.”
He grunted his agreement.
Steve led me down a trail, which ran alongside the cliff face. The night air was cold enough to sting. After about thirty yards, he stopped.
“Know this fella?”
We were well away from the cabin lights by now, and there were very few stars out. Steve flicked on a heavy flashlight and shone it into the bushes.
At first I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at—it looked like a jumble of brown clothes. Then Steve played the light across a face.
I recognized the hat and the tan coat. It was Pratt.
Oh, shit.
“Well?” Steve prompted. “Do you know him?”
“Remember when I told you help was coming? Here it is.”