Humane Societies, unlike government-funded animal control services, are generally private, non-profit organizations that depend on donations and volunteers. They are not related to each other or the HSUS.
Denny’s Silverado sped down I-5 toward Longview. Since this wasn’t a Northwest Humane Society investigation, he couldn’t use the company vehicle, but the Chevy truck was just as versatile and probably smelled less like dog. I sat in the front seat and Halle and Connie Lee were in the back. Denny was driving.
Halle’s trip to the cop shop had been fruitful. She’d established that the location of the Sinclairii brothers shooting was indeed my mountain, and the time line, though indefinite, worked with the theory that it had happened soon after they had left me. I hadn’t heard the shots but that wasn’t surprising; the wind could have been blowing the wrong way or maybe I was in too much of a fog to notice.
Halle had also been successful at uncovering the police evidence that implicated me in the murders. Apparently they had found blood inside the car, and as their forensics experts nit-picked through the samples, they verified mine along with the brothers’. Well, not exactly along with the brothers—actually my specimen was on top of a great splotch of George’s blood.
From that, they extrapolated that I had been alive and bleeding after George was already injured—or dead.
There were some flaws to that assumption, including the fact that I hadn’t done it, but it left enough of a question to implicate me. I personally had no notion how it could have come about. I didn’t remember bleeding in the car. Though the brothers had handled me with a certain amount of unnecessary roughness, they had never cut me or caused any wounds that could account for blood.
The whole thing sounded pretty iffy, but because the police had no other suspects, I guess it made sense to follow the only lead available. Me.
The two had been shot with a nine-millimeter handgun. The gun had not been recovered, no shell casings retrieved, and ballistics had come up empty on a match. The fact that in my nearly six decades I’d never learned to fire a pistol seemed to be superfluous; after all, I could be lying. I might be Annie Oakley in disguise.
At first I hadn’t been too sure about the idea of visiting the scene of the crime or re-visiting the scene of my worst nightmare, but as I stared out at the tangle of trees that lined that section of the freeway, I began to appreciate the plan. It had been Denny’s decision to bring Special Agent Lee on board; at this point I figured we could use all the help we could get.
After the initial hi-how-are-you chatter, everyone had gotten really quiet. Denny was concentrating on passing everything in sight without going more than the acceptable five miles over the speed limit; Halle had her iPod—whether she was listening to Hip Hop, bagpipes, or Shakespeare, one could never tell; Connie Lee was reading something Wiccan on a Kindle. I found myself tossed back and forth between anger at the stupidity of my plight and delight that I would be picking up my new foster cat when I got back to town. The one made me furious, the other made me happy. Guess which I tried to center on? Guess how well that worked?
Denny pulled off the freeway at the Longview exit and headed for Highway Four which would take us down the Columbia and its various adjoining sloughs in search of the little dock where Larry and George had moored the boat. From there, I anticipated no problem in finding the logging road. I wondered if there would still be any sign of the crime scene, and if not, how we’d be able to tell where it was. From what Halle said, it sounded like the Badass boys had just paused somewhere along the way and got themselves shot. No scuffle, crash, or bleeding out on the dirt. The car would undoubtedly be gone. Unless the sheriff’s forensics investigations team had made a mess or the killer left a note saying X-marks-the-spot, the exact point of their demise might be hard to pinpoint.
Anyone could have shot them: a mugger or psycho or Deliverance-type hillbilly who hadn’t wanted trespassers on his land. Okay, now I was reaching, but I just didn’t see why they had to blame me. Oh, yeah. The blood. That awful blood for which I couldn’t begin to account.
Denny veered east onto the truck route that took us by the log yards, train yards, and industrial yards around the edge of town. We rolled past a green sign that read Longview Humane Society, and I wondered briefly what the LHS was like. Not as nice as FOF I figured, but then nothing was. Still you never knew. Some of the small country shelters were exceptional. Someday I’d have to check it out.
“Pit stop,” Denny said as he swerved into a Chevron station and glided to a halt by the mini-mart. “Anybody want anything?”
“I need to use the facilities,” Halle claimed.
“Might be a good idea. Last chance if you don’t want to make like the bears.”
“How about some food in case we get lost?” I joked.
“Okay,” Connie agreed. From her size, I could tell she liked her donuts, though most of her bulk was muscle.
Five minutes later we were back on the road, relieved, revived, and ready to roll. We had a shopping bag full of Cheetos, sodas, juice boxes, candy bars, apples and—surprise of surprises—donuts.
“We could hold out for days,” Halle remarked when she saw the haul.
I shuddered. The thought of being marooned up in that desolate forest again hit a little too close to home for me.
I must say the drive was more relaxing now that we were off the freeway. Denny didn’t seem to be in Maserati-mode anymore, and the anticipatory hush morphed into quiet banal conversation. I surveyed the scenery with appreciation. We passed a series of black lakes, thick with iris and water lilies and alive with ducks and birds. Soon the sheer face of wildflower-strewn basalt loomed on our right and the gray-blue expanse of the country’s fourth-largest river, the Columbia, spread out to the left. Boats sailed in holiday leisure; ships and barges chugged to or from the Port of Portland some forty miles upriver.
It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would to find the little dock. “That’s it!” I yelped as it zoomed up on the left.
Denny pulled into the gravel lot next to a Volkswagen and switched off the engine. I stared around the place, amazed at how fast my heart was racing. In the hot July sunshine, it looked nothing like the foggy nightmare of my memory. There were a few other cars besides the Volksie as well as several trucks with boat trailers. The little wooden dock was quaint and inviting; the river sparkled with gold coins of light. A family was having a picnic at a table by the water. Children’s laughter and the sounds of happy boaters didn’t jibe at all with my recollection of pain, dread, and uncertainty.
We piled out of the Silverado and began to explore. “What are we looking for?” I asked Denny.
“Not sure.” He kicked at a cigarette butt in the gravel.
“You think it’s a clue?” I asked.
“I think it’s litter and whoever dropped it should be cited.”
Denny pulled a Kleenex out of his utility vest, picked up the offending butt and tossed it in a green garbage can. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and sauntered down to the end of the dock. I rarely saw him in plain clothes and he looked younger, more vulnerable. Funny how the uniform creates a persona of its own. Connie Lee was the same—in uniform, her stocky build was intimidating, but here, wearing Levis and a layered tee, she was just one of the gang, a smiling friendly twenty-something kid you’d see at the grocery store buying melons or grapes—or donuts.
Denny was heading back toward me. “We done here?” he asked.
“It’s up to you—this is your show, Special Agent Paris,” I told him as we set out for the truck. “Did you find anything of interest?”
“Everything’s of interest, Lynley.”
“But I mean, interest to my case? What were you hoping for anyway?”
“Nothing really. Just trying to get a picture of the event. Visualization is an important part of detection.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what he meant but it sounded good.
Halle was already in the truck, checking a large Triple-A map.
“Can you see where we are?”
“Not exactly.” She poked at a twist in the blue line of river. “I’d guess about there.”
I studied the colorful intermix of lines and dots. “What’s that little town up ahead?”
She squinted at the tiny type. “Stella. Never heard of it, but then it looks like one of those places that’s easy to miss if you blink.”
We were all seated and belted except for Connie who was still lingering by the dock. I saw her lean over and pick something up, examine it and put it in her pocket. She jogged to the truck and hopped in with a smile on her face.
“Find something good?” I asked.
She fished in her pocket, retrieving a small shiny object. With a broad grin, she showed it to me. “Lucky penny.”
* * *
I had my doubts how lucky a lost penny was going to be to my case, but one thing I’d learned about Special Agent Lee was her penchant for the occult. What’s more, she made it work for her. Where Denny set out on an investigation armed with facts and information, she ran in head first with heart, soul, and spirit—or spirits. Now, Connie would probably appreciate my mum’s psychic friend.
The logging road wasn’t as steep and treacherous as I’d remembered it. The Silverado had all-wheel drive and good suspension, and we bounced along relatively painlessly. At each cut-back, I expected to see something familiar, something that would confirm it as the road I’d traveled on that fateful night, but each time I was disappointed. We could have been anywhere in the Pacific Northwest for the lack of identifiable landmarks if you didn’t count gnarled trees or bushes that looked like bunnies. A woodsman perhaps could read those things but not me. I wondered at times if I’d led us on a goose chase and we’d taken the wrong way, but there had been only one route leading up the hill from the dock and this was it.
Finally after what seemed like five miles but was probably more like one or less, we came to the fork where I had lost my way.
“Stop. Stop here!”
I jumped out as soon as the truck rolled to a standstill. “We must have passed it,” I said, gazing back the way we had come. “If they’d been any farther up, I would have walked right by them.”
Denny set the brake and turned off the engine. “Okay, we’ll take it by foot from here. Look for any signs that could tell us where the shootings actually took place. The car’s long gone but we should be able to find some sign of the police search. Watch for anything not native to the area.” He rummaged behind his car seat and pulled out some little pink flags set on sturdy wire. Handing them out, a few to each of us, he said, “When you find something, don’t move it or touch it—just stick one of these in the ground nearby. If we do find a pertinent item, we’ll have to get the locals up here to process it. Don’t drop anything, scuff foot or tire prints, or otherwise contaminate the scene. Connie and Halle, you go down the way we came; I’m going to head up for a little ways, just in case.” He turned to me. “Lynley, what do you want to do?”
“Run away?” I chirped: half jest, half cry for help.
He waited patiently, now in total professional mode.
I straightened up my act. “I think I’ll check out the side road, the one I took by mistake when I came down the mountain. I can’t see how they could have gone that way in that big car but we might as well cover all bases.”
“Okay.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s meet back here in half an hour. “Don’t leave the road by yourself, any of you. Cell phones aren’t reliable out here and we don’t want this to turn into a search and rescue.”
Halle was changing from her lawyer pumps to a pair of white Reeboks that looked like they had just come out of the box. When she was finished, she took one side of the road and Connie took the other. Connie had her flags stuffed into the back pocket of her pants like a rooster tail that bobbed up and down as she moved along.
Denny looked at me. “You okay with this?”
“Sure,” I answered too quickly, then added, “I guess so.”
“Well, don’t feel pressured to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Just come back to the truck. I’ll leave it unlocked.”
“But this is all my fault,” I cried in a sudden fit of melancholy. “I’m the reason we’re here.”
“It’s not your fault. And nobody made us come, remember that.” He grabbed a handful of flags, gave a little wave, and began up the hill. He took the right-hand side, peering into the grass and brush, over to the forest, then back again in long, systematic sweeps.
I watched until he disappeared around a bend. Halle and Connie had moved out of sight as well though I could still hear them talking in the distance. Then that too was gone and I was alone in the silent wood.
* * *
Growing up in Oregon, I was never frightened by being out of doors. As a child—back in the dark ages—I spent summers at a rustic little cabin that boasted neither water nor heat nor indoor plumbing. Everything we had, we brought from town; if we ran out of something, we did without. At night, I slept soundly, the rush of the river as my lullaby; during the day, I had the run of the fields, forest, and mossy banks. I saw deer, raccoons, chipmunks, even the occasional beaver. I picked huckleberries and fiddleheads. Never once was I afraid of the wilderness.
And it wasn’t wilderness that I was afraid of now. But I was afraid. Fear welled up from deep inside me like a hairball. I was choking on it. I couldn’t breathe! I bent double, clutching my stomach. This was not good, not good at all.
Stoically I took myself in hand. I straightened, closed my eyes and recited every calming incantation I could think of. My chest eased and I managed a deep breath which made me feel a little better. I hadn’t even started my search; I couldn’t give up yet.
I opened my eyes and took in the leafy ambiance, tracing the patterns of the trees. I breathed the cool peat and honeysuckle scents; nothing scary here, nothing dangerous. The past was the past, and though being taken against my will had opened a doorway to hell that I doubted would ever completely close, I had to find a way to live with it.
Starting down the steep incline, careful not to skid on bits of gravel that had pried themselves loose from the narrow road bed, I began to hum to myself. It was a wordless nameless tune that just popped into my head, maybe a medley of Debussy and Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon. I glanced left and right, then decided to emulate Denny’s measured search, beginning on one side, planning to come back the other. That should cover all ground.
My hunt revealed daisies, bright hot perennial peas, cowbane, and lots of heady grasses, waving in the quiet breeze. I found an ancient non-biodegradable McDonald’s cup which, without intervention, would last longer than the earth itself. I put a pink flag beside it, planning to come back and collect it when I was done.
Though drier and dustier than it had been the month before, I remembered every inch of the terrain. It was as if the images had been branded into my brain: the big rock in the middle of the road that should have clued me in to the fact that the Ford had never driven up that way; the dry runoff gulch that wove from side to side; the break in the trees where there was a grassy micro-meadow. The grass had turned from green to gold since I’d seen it last, and the summer heat burned down upon it. I paused; the afternoon was waning and the sunlight blazed in my eyes. I squinted, wishing I’d worn a hat. It was very like that day...
For a moment, I was back there: broken leg, throbbing head, panic-stricken, lost and alone. The memory was so vivid, I swear I could feel the pain. Stumbling, I slipped and sat down hard on the clay.
“Dang,” I said out loud, looking around to make sure no one saw me fall on my ass. Oh, sweet vanity!
But someone had seen me, seen the whole embarrassing tumble. I could hear them in the bushes a little farther down the way. “Okay so I’m a klutz, I admit it,” I said as bravely as possible.
No answer.
“Hello?” I ventured. The rustle had ceased and suddenly I was unsure whether I’d heard it at all.
I peered into the undergrowth, but with the sun in my face, I saw only deep black shadow. Maybe it was the cat, the one who had led me to her house, though it had sounded much larger. Or had it?
“Kitty? Kitty, kitty?” I racked my brain but couldn’t remember her name.
The rustling started up again, much closer this time. There was the snap of branches—big branches! This was no cat!
“Denny? Is that you?” My voice rasped into a whisper. Again no reply.
Instinct seized me. I vaulted to my feet and scuffled as fast as I could back toward the truck. It wasn’t far, only a few hundred feet or so, but that was the longest sixty-yard dash I could have ever imagined. Not daring to look behind me, I heaved myself into the cab. Hands trembling, I reached over to the driver’s door and punched the lock button.
From my glass and steel fortress, I stared around and around like an owl on hawk alert. Nothing moved. I cracked the window and listened but the only sounds were the sigh of the wind in the tops of the Doug firs and the faint drone of trucks on the highway far below.
Then I heard it. This time the noise was almost on top of me! In the grass, right next to the truck. I stared out, frozen with fear.
Relief replaced adrenaline when I saw the little cat. It had been her after all! I felt silly at my absurdly disproportionate reactions. I guess it would take some time—a lot of time—to put my mistrust of the universe behind me.
Tammy—the name came back in a flood of affection. Tammy, my little heroine. This forest was her back yard. I frowned, thinking about coyotes and other woodland dangers. Maybe I should speak to her people about keeping her in the house.
Still, risk aside, there was a bit of the feral in all cats, a symbiosis with nature where they can hunt and chase as their ancestors did for a thousand generations before them. The wiry tabby was beautiful as she stalked and pounced. She was definitely after something—a mouse? a grasshopper? a dryad?
There was a flash of light as a small, curved object sailed into the air and spun back down again. As much as I tried, I couldn’t make the shape and size into anything definable, and since crazy cat ladies fall heir to their idols’ curiosity, I was compelled to check it out.
Slowly I opened the cab door. I didn’t want to scare Tammy into running away, but I needn’t have worried; one glimpse of me and she came bouncing out of the grass and over to the truck. I stepped down to pet her and she nestled into my hand. For a moment, her green-gold eyes locked on mine, then she gave her little prmph and returned to her quarry.
“What have you got there?” I asked, moving closer. It took her a few seconds to relocate the object in the fringe of roadside brush. She sprung and launched it once more. When it landed, I stooped to have a look.
A roundish patch of shimmer nestled in the spiky shadows. I reached down and picked it up. It was firm to the touch, smooth and polished.
I swore and dropped it like a hot potato.
I had done the exact thing Denny had told us not to.
I had handled the evidence!
Because that’s what it was, I was certain of it. How else could you describe a loose glasses lens spattered with tiny brown splotches? This could be the thing we were looking for, and now I’d gone and contaminated it with my fingerprints—the very fingerprints I didn’t want showing up on anything having to do with the Sinclairii murders.
The gravel crunched behind me. I swung around to see Denny heading my way.
“What you got?” he called out.
I just stared guiltily. Tammy disappeared into the forest, on her way back home I hoped.
Denny came up beside me, his cat-green eyes following my gaze. “Wow! Great, Lynley! This could really be something.”
He pulled out a little camera and took a few close-ups. Producing a measuring tape from his vest, he peered around. When he saw what he wanted—a large rock embedded firmly in the dirt at the edge of the road—he took a measurement. He jotted the results in a small notebook, then looked again. This time it was a young hemlock tree opposite the rock. He repeated this activity once more, citing a fallen log a few feet back in the bush.
“Triangulation,” he explained, though I hadn’t asked. “You see, by logging the distance from three stationary objects to the object in question, I can get its exact position.” He made a few more notes, then flipped the notebook shut and put it away. “May not mean anything, but it’s always better to have more information than not enough.”
He stuck a pink flag beside the lens, thought for a moment and put down another. “We want to make sure no one touches this. Those red spots look like blood, though I suppose they could be mud. It’s a long shot, but if it pans out, it could put someone else at the scene, and lenses can be traced if they were prescribed by an optometrist. Then again, it might just be from a cheap drug store set, but I doubt it. I can see a bifocal line, and the cheap ones are usually set in permanent rims—the whole thing would come apart before the lenses themselves would fall out.”
I hadn’t moved throughout his commentary. He stared at me with sudden concern. “Lynley, what’s wrong? This could be the break we were looking for. Here’s a clue that definitely can’t be tracked back to you.”
He seemed so excited, so motivated. How was I supposed to tell him I’d ruined the only lead we had?