Rath inched the Scout up Forgotten Gorge Road in LOW I 4WD. At this higher elevation the rain mixed with sleet and snow. The road was a treacherous track of frozen and thawing muck edging a ravine that fell steeply away to the gorge below, no guardrails to keep a vehicle from plummeting. With Preacher’s place a half mile ahead, Rath stopped the Scout, idling in the road. He was tempted to go to Preacher’s door and face him, warn him if he ever spoke to Rachel, or came near her again, Rath would see he was arrested, or worse. But he couldn’t do it. Preacher would bask in Rath’s anger, feed on it. Rath could not afford to bait him.
He turned the Scout onto a logging road and drove out of sight of Forgotten Gorge Road. At a clearing, he got out of the Scout and took a deep breath, letting the cold, clean air fill his lungs. He put on a knit cap and a camouflage waist pack, slung his climber tree stand over his camouflage jacket, and pulled a head net on over his face. The head net made him feel invisible, and he nearly was; it would be difficult for anyone to see him in the trees from even a few feet away, especially in the gathering fog.
A half hour later, winded and sweating, he descended the other side of the ridge until he came to a grove of ash trees where he foraged morel mushrooms in May. The tree trunks stood straight and true and branchless for many feet, ideal for his climbing stand, and just a couple hundred feet up the ridge from Preacher’s place, granting Rath an ideal, concealed vantage.
He strapped his tree stand to the base of a tree and cursed himself for forgetting his safety harness. With a rope from his pack he jury-rigged a harness around his torso and under his arms, and ratcheted the stand up into the tree, thirty feet, much higher than he would climb to bow hunt.
He removed his pack, worked his makeshift harness around the tree trunk, tied it off, minding his footing on the stand’s platform. One slip without a harness and he’d plunge three stories to the rocks below. He sat on the stand’s padded seat, his heart pounding. Now that he was seated he realized how bone-tired he was. The past two nights he’d slept all of a few fitful hours. If he closed his eyes, he’d be asleep in an instant.
The air stirred near his ear as a chickadee lighted on his shoulder, hopped onto his knee. The bird peered into his eyes with its own glassy black eyes, cocked its head, and flitted away on a breeze. Down the ridge two hundred feet, a 1970s duplex sat just visible amid dark hemlocks. Preacher’s lair. Dark vertical boards faced the bottom half of the place, the upper floor horizontal Masonite clapboard, both painted a deep forest green. If Preacher left the house, Rath would have to hike back to his Scout, giving Preacher a head start. But Rath would catch up. He knew the road well, far better than Preacher, and could drive it at a speed Preacher couldn’t.
Two vehicles sat parked on the plowed area of yard; a dented, gray Subaru Impreza and a late ’90s Ford Ranger pickup. Rath wondered which vehicle belonged to Preacher and which to the tenant in the adjacent unit. If he were still a cop, he’d have run the plates. Instead, he’d observe. Sooner or later, someone had to leave the premises.
He took his binoculars from his pack and focused them on Preacher’s entrance—number 1, on the left. He zoomed the binoculars to a meticulous clarity able to make out rust flakes on the nail on which Preacher’s mailbox hung by the door. The dark green was not paint. It was moss. The house was diseased with a dark, fungal moss.
Rain pattered the dead leaves. Rath yawned and stretched, his mind turgid with thoughts of Dana Clark, the CRVK, Preacher, and Rachel. The duplex sat quiet.
Snow melted, slipped free of the branches above, cascaded in clots to stamp protozoan imprints into the soggy snow below. Rath pulled his collar up against the strengthening rain. From his pack, he took out one of the cheddar cheese sandwiches he’d made, ate it in a few bites, washed it down with black coffee from his thermos. He’d spent many days bow hunting from a tree stand, from dark to dark, watching the woods and waiting for a good whitetail buck to appear, a creature far more cautious than any man could hope to be.
He pulled his coat collar tighter to his neck and hunched against the rain, fatigue settling deeper into his bones. The sandwich had done more to tire him than the coffee had to waken him. A door to the duplex opened. Not Preacher’s door. Rath trained his binoculars on the person on the porch. A woman, a dark ski cap pulled down so low it framed her face, her dark hair peeking out at the edges. Her black satin parka, the back emblazoned with a Harley Davidson logo, was unzipped and hung to her knees. She took a shovel from where it leaned against the duplex on the porch and scraped at the slush that had fallen from the branches of the overhanging trees.
Rath wondered if the woman knew that just one thin wall separated her from a man who had raped and murdered girls and women. She has a right to know. To be warned, Rath thought. The woman set the shovel back against the duplex and tromped across the slushy snow to get into the Subaru.
The Ford Ranger belonged to Preacher.
The faint sound of the Subaru engine turning over was followed by the loud thump of bass music playing inside the car as the car drove away.
The shovel slid and fell to the porch.
The house remained still as the dead.
Rath leaned back, worked his jaw and rubbed his face to ward off sleep, closed his eyes.