Believe No One (35 page)

Fennimore kissed her neck, smoothing his hands over her shoulders, down into the curve of her back. As his fingers explored the waistband of her trousers, she caught his hand.

‘We're going to have to take this inside,' she said.

He looked around him. ‘Let me guess – Oklahoma law is
real
strict on making love
alfresco
?'

‘Worse,' she laughed. ‘There's fire ants on the property.'

The backwoods, Williams County, Oklahoma
Sunday night

The moon is full, and under clear skies Riley Patterson can see well enough without needing a flashlight – which is a good thing, 'cos he left that behind at the Tulk place. Though he lost an hour with his earlier foolishness, he made up time by not stopping to rest. He does not know where he's headed, except out of here. The fastest route is the highway, but he is too afraid of being seen to head down to it, so he stays on the slight rise, catching glimpses of the road through the trees, gleaming like weathered aluminium in the moonlight.

He has no food or water; just the clothes he's standing up in and his pocket radio, and he's going to need more than that if he wants to survive long enough to make it to … wherever he's going.
Just away,
he tells himself – 'cos the little boy in him says if
he
doesn't know where he's headed, how could anyone else?

He follows a deer trail for a bit, trying not to think about the hunger clawing at his belly. Up ahead, he hears a rustle in the underbrush. It comes again, and he stops, shouts, ‘Hey, bear!'

He listens a while, but it stays quiet, just the steady piping call of little peeper frogs and the chirp of the night bugs in the grass either side of the path. He turns a bend in the trail and freezes. Up ahead is a big grey coyote. It stands about twenty-five yards distant and watches him. He waits for it to move off, but it stays on the trail and lifts its snout, testing the air for his scent. The moonlight filtering through the trees looks like scattered silver pennies on its fur. If a coyote don't move, you're suppose to shout, he thinks, so he claps his hand over his head and yells, but the coyote just licks its lips and sits down, curling its tail around its paws.

Riley picks up a stick and waves it. ‘Go on, now. Git!'

The coyote lowers its muzzle and its ears flick back, flat to its head. It raises one paw and takes a step forward.

‘Get
a-way
from me,' Riley hollers.

It takes another step and shows its teeth, a snarl bubbling in its throat. It moves around to the side, and the boy knows it's trying to get behind him. He drops the stick and runs, the dog rushing after him. He dodges and weaves, hearing it getting closer; any minute he will feel the thud of its paws on his back, its teeth in his neck.

He takes one frightened look over his shoulder and trips. He rolls, feels air whoosh past his face, sees a rock sweep down on the coyote. A trap! He has run into one of the Tulk grows. The dog leaps sideways, but he hasn't bargained for the backswing and the rock catches his right hind leg. It's only a glancing blow and it yelps, but is able to swerve and come at Riley again. The boy is up and running, headed into the woods, because this is where the grow will be, and he knows there will be a fence. If he can get over that, he'll be safe.

Ten yards in, the twigs and leaf litter give way under him and he knows he's hit a pitfall trap. But he's small and light and he's running fast and, by the grace of God, it holds just long enough for him to reach the other side, while the dog, panting at his back, pitches in head first and falls with a dismayed howl into the pit.

Riley gives a fierce roar of triumph. ‘I hope you broke your damn neck!' he screams.

There is no sound from the pit, and he edges forward, curiosity getting the better of good sense: one step, another, one more, to peer into the hole.

It leaps at him, snarling and snapping, all white teeth and wild eyes and foaming at the mouth. Red falls on his ass and scrambles backward, kicking with his heels, waiting for its head to appear at the top of the pit.

But the hole is dug deep enough to hold a man, and the dog falls back down.

Riley raises his fist. ‘Ha! Get out of
that,
you bastard!' He wipes snot from his nose with the heel of his hand, and realizes he is crying. ‘Bastard,' he mutters again.

When his chest stops heaving, he starts off again, taking a wide detour to avoid going anywhere near the pit.

Incident Command Post, Westfield,
Williams County, Oklahoma
Monday morning

Detective Chief Inspector Kate Simms left the hotel at five thirty, as the first pale dawn light glimmered in the east. She discovered a path through a small copse behind the hotel and set off at a slow jog. She hadn't had the opportunity to stretch her legs since the Task Force relocated from St Louis. Running was her way to release tension, and since she'd Skyped her family at 1 a.m., she'd been wound like a spring. It was her husband's birthday, and she wanted to catch him before he left for work. It was 7 a.m. back home, and her mother carried Tim, her five-year-old, from his bed still in his Spiderman pyjamas. When she reached forward to touch the screen, he shied away, burying his face in his grandmother's shoulder. No effort of coaxing would persuade him to look at her again, and with a shrug that seemed laden with reproach, her mother whisked Tim off to breakfast. Becky said she was ‘too busy' preparing for school to come to the computer at all.

Kieran alone seemed in good spirits. ‘Don't worry about them,' he said, relaxed and smiling. ‘They're fine. We all are.' He was going out to celebrate his birthday with some work colleagues that night, he told her. Granny didn't mind watching the kids; in fact, she was taking good care of all of them. Simms had never seen him so content and she reflected, perhaps a little unkindly, that what Kieran had always wanted was a woman who would look after him.

The call left her feeling lonely, depressed and unable to sleep. Running cleared her mind, and the punishing heat left no space to rehash every word and gesture, as she had done in the hours of darkness.

The clump of trees was bounded by the hotel on one side and a gravel road on the other and, as she completed her second circuit, she heard a car approach along the road. She saw a glimpse of a red vehicle; it swept on, but stopped a hundred yards further down the road. She thought no more of it, until a couple of minutes later she saw Fennimore hurrying across the back lot of the hotel, and she remembered that Abigail Hicks drove a red SUV.

Fennimore, you old dog,
she thought. She finished her run, showered and changed and headed across the parking lot to the main block for breakfast. The air smelled of hot cedar and melting asphalt. Fennimore came out of his room and waved to her.

‘I was coming to find you,' he said.

‘I saw you earlier, heading back into the hotel,' she said.

‘I needed a walk,' he said.

‘Oh?' she said, allowing herself a flicker of a smile. ‘Wasn't that Deputy Hicks's car I saw, dropping you off?'

He gave her a blank look.

‘Come on, Nick, you don't need to be secretive with me.'

‘We all keep secrets, Kate,' he said coolly.

That stung. He meant Tim. She hadn't told Fennimore until recently about her son, born six months after he'd left. He'd never voiced that last forensic detail – even Nick Fennimore wasn't that unsubtle – but the question was there anyway, unspoken but heard.
All right,
she thought.
His relationship with Hicks is off-limits. Change the subject.

‘You said you were coming to find me.'

‘I've just had a call,' he said. ‘A thirty-two-year-old woman's been found in Scotland. Alemoor Loch in the Borders region. Her child is still missing – a girl aged ten.'

Simms took a breath. ‘When did they find her?'

‘Sunday.'

‘Who called you?' she asked. ‘Your FLO?' Fennimore had a police Family Liaison Officer assigned to him during the investigation into Rachel and Suzie's disappearance – standard UK police procedure. Even five years on, they would contact Fennimore if anything remotely like Rachel and Suzie came up, so he wouldn't have to read about it in the papers, or worse, hear it from some hack demanding a quote.

He shook his head. ‘Not my FLO – Josh.'

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Josh got the news to you
before
Family Liaison?'

‘Evidently,' he said, waspish. ‘Now, do you think you could climb down off your hobby horse and put in a call to Police Scotland, find out what the hell is going on?'

An hour later, Simms stood in front of the Task Force in the meeting room. Williams County Sheriff's Department were thin on the ground, Launer having recommenced the search of Lambert Woods at first light.

The Scottish victim, like theirs, was a single mother. She disappeared from home sometime during Friday evening or Saturday morning. Post-mortem results determined cause of death as traumatic asphyxia. Her body had been dumped in the loch inside cargo netting weighted with rocks. Backhand hitch knots secured the body inside the net.

‘The body was found at three-thirty p.m. GMT on Sunday; she'd been in the water for hours, rather than days,' Simms said. ‘No one messed with it at the scene – the divemaster was ex-Navy, knew exactly what to do. A police diving unit was there within the hour. They bagged her and got her to the Borders General Hospital two hours after that.'

‘Good possibilities for evidence,' Fennimore said. ‘The ropes could retain trapped paint flecks or dirt from his home or car.'

‘They're undergoing analysis as we speak,' she said.

‘And the daughter?' He avoided her eye.

‘Police diving teams have been searching the lake in shifts since the mother was found. There's a rocky overhang in the loch at about forty metres; the mother's body got swept under, and the netting snagged and held. Pure luck. But if the child's body was weighted in the same way, she might have sunk all the way down – and that's fifty-five metres.'

‘Which is beyond the permitted diving depths for British police divers,' Fennimore said. ‘Clever bastard.'

‘The School of Geosciences at Edinburgh University identified the rocks as grey andesitic. You find extensive deposits of it in the Cheviot Hills just north of the border between England and Scotland. The geologists said some of the stones were dressed – chiselled or hammered,' she added, seeing puzzled looks on some of the faces. ‘So they could have come from a building, or a wall.'

‘Could all these common factors be pure chance?' Dunlap said.

‘I could do the Bayesian analysis,' Fennimore said, ‘but top-of-the head assessment – bloody unlikely.'

‘So, now we got two killers,' Ellis said, ‘with a transatlantic connection?'

Detective Valance added, ‘And it looks like they took their victims at around the same time.'

‘On the bright side,' Fennimore said, ‘if these two do know each other, it just got a lot easier to track them down. We're either looking for an American immigrant in the Borders region, or a Scot in Oklahoma.'

Riley Patterson is hungry and thirsty, and lost. The land begins to slope downhill and the woods seem to be thinning out. Fearful of losing his cover, he climbs a tree to get his bearings and, seeing the road running north to south with nothing but grass on either side, at last he knows where he is. This is the place where the woods come to an arrowhead and just stop. Half a mile north they start again, blanketing Lambert Hill; he can just make out the curly tops of the trees draped over the hillside like the fur on a bison in summer moult.

He expected to be some way north of here, but the coyote chase must've got him turned around – he has covered just short of eight miles as the crow flies. He could push on, past Lambert Woods Park, another seven miles to Hays, where he might steal a ride; or he could stop and rest. He stares at the road, wanting to sit down and cry. But he has done crying, so he keeps looking, trying to make up his mind.

There's food and water at home, but going home might break the charm: if he knows where he's headed, others can surely guess. If Mrs Tulk told the police he was on the run, it will be on the news, and Lambert Woods will be the first place they'll look.

The news,
he thinks, and he feels in his jacket for the little Sony radio; his hand makes contact with nothing but pocket dust. Dismayed, he wiggles his fingers in deeper. It's not there.

He scrambles down the tree to the ground and searches for it, even walking back a short way to see if he dropped it on the last few yards of the hike. It's hopeless: his radio is gone.

In the fields below, the big bluestem grass seems to shimmer in the morning sun, and he yearns to steal down there and cut a handful with his pocket knife so he can suck the juice out of it. But he is afraid, after getting sick drinking the rainwater that leaked into Harlan's car. He needs familiarity – sounds and smells he knows and which make him feel safe; a few hours' sleep in his own bed.

Home, then.

Incident Command Post, Westfield,
Williams County, Oklahoma
Monday, late morning

Simms left it to Fennimore to call Josh and ask him to let their dialect specialist know about the possible Scottish connection. An hour later, the geographical linguist was on the line. Detectives Dunlap, Ellis and Valance, together with Simms, Fennimore and Dr Detmeyer gathered around a conference phone at the front of the Incident Room. Sheriff Launer was still searching the woods on Lambert Hill.

Dr Patrick Moran spoke with a Maine accent; he was an alumnus of Boston University, but gained his PhD from Clare College, Cambridge.