The ring of his new work cell phone startled Rath as he drove 114 West on his way to Johnson mulling what little he knew of Dana Clark and Jamie Drake. He looked at the phone on the seat beside him, a strange number on the screen.
He pulled over into the Lac Wallace fishing access and answered. “Hello?”
“Senior Detective Franklin Rath?” a voice said in an unmistakable Quebecois accent. It was not anyone who knew Rath: no one called him Franklin.
Rath confirmed that he was Senior Detective Frank Rath, though the title sounded as foreign as the name Franklin.
“This is Inspector Gerard Champine of the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu Police. I wonder can I speak to you, non?”
“Go ahead.”
“I prefer not.”
“I don’t—”
“In person. I prefer. I am in the Jay Peak Resort, for skiing with family, les petite enfants. Moi? I sit and read. But the fog. Rain. Aye. There is no skiing. I could drive to meet at a place you like as the kids enjoy the water park.”
“What is this?” Rath said, wondering if this man was even who he said he was.
“You have a murder, non?”
Rath nodded, though the inspector could not see the gesture. When the inspector said nothing, Rath realized his faux pas. Jamie Drake’s hanging had not been reported as murder. Not yet. “I can’t speak to any murder,” Rath said.
“I appreciate. Even still, you have a murder.”
“What is it I can help you with?” Rath said.
“Non, non. It is me who helps you. Or, as I prefer, we helps each other. I am ’omicide. I have dead girls. I am watching your local TV news just now. Your girl. In the woods. I am watching while les enfants swim. Your girl. She is hanged, non?”
How the hell did he know Jamie Drake was murdered, let alone hanged? Who was this “inspector.”
Rath looked out the Scout window toward Lac Wallace. But the lake was not out there. Only fog.
“My three girls are not solved,” the supposed inspector said.
Three girls? “Tell me more,” Rath said.
“I prefer not on phone, but I see on the news you have the girl in the woods. Hanged? Non?”
Had Test leaked information? “Is that what the news report said?” Rath said.
“It is what is not said.”
“Who the hell is this? Tell me about your girls, if you are who you say—”
“As I say. I prefer not on phone. We rendezvous? I can tell you my own cases. And what other links I think we share.”
“Tell me what you know, or I’m hanging up,” Rath said.
“I prefer not on phone.”
Prefer not. Who was this guy, Bartleby?
“How did you know I’m working this case? Or get my number?” Rath said. “I’ve barely started and—”
“I request from the woman who answers police’s line to please speak with the detective of the case. Will you rendezvous?”
“Give me a reason.”
“If your girl was hanged, we will meet. If not. We can say au revoir.”
Damn it, Rath thought. He could tell the inspector to meet him in Johnson, but if the inspector did indeed have three dead girls, hanged dead girls, Rath did not want to chance running into Rachel with him and having her ask questions. “There’s a roadside place in Starkville, about halfway between us. Called Borderland.”
“We meet in forty-five minutes then, non?”
“Twice that, with this fog.”
“Bon, detective.”
Rath ended the call.
Detective.
Rath had not been called detective in sixteen years.
He was not sure how he felt about it.
Desperate, he decided. Barrons had miscalculated. One factor that kept police officers from crossing lines was fear of ruining careers. Rath did not have a career to lose. Did not have to worry about scandal if he acted out of bounds. It wasn’t that he did not respect the profession. Or the law. He’d do whatever he needed to do within the bounds of the law. But life was about priorities. Preventing another girl from ending up dead in the woods, that was his priority.
When this was over, and Rachel safe, he would not look back. He would go deer hunting as deep into the woods as he could hike. Away from it all. He’d track and take a big buck, pack away venison to last until spring, and hole up in his home by a fire and read novels and carve decoys and grow a beastly beard. He’d hike up the remote trackless wilderness on the backside of Mount Monadnock and try to find an ancient geologic anomaly rumored to exist up there.
He stared out the windshield. At it. The window was painted white with fog, as if the fog were trying to block out the world in order to get Rath’s undivided attention, get him to focus, to tell him something.
Or warn him.