Blind Sight: A Novel (10 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

B
ernadette caught a break: it stopped snowing.

She took Minnesota 200 to U.S. Highway 2 East. She gassed up after crossing the border into Wisconsin and got back on the highway. During the entire drive, she suppressed her worries about Garcia and thought about the northwestern Wisconsin murder. Radio stations along the way provided background music, mostly country-and-western dirges.

About the time Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl” made her consider slitting her wrists, she pulled into Brule. It had one motel, one restaurant, two gas stations, two bars, two churches, and a white clapboard town hall. Bernadette checked the dashboard clock. It was a quarter past ten. She’d made the drive in exactly three hours and twenty minutes.

She turned in to the parking lot of the Brown Trout Inn, a motel with a strip of rooms that faced the highway. The only other vehicle was a rusty Chevy sedan parked in front of the office. She pulled in next to the beater and hopped out.

The door to the office was open and the lights were on. Bernadette went inside. “Hello?” A door behind the counter was open to a front room. She heard machine-gun fire and the voice of Edward G. Robinson. An old gangster flick. She yelled louder. “Hello!”

A man wearing white chin stubble and black-framed eyeglasses shuffled out and leaned his arms on the counter. The night clerk was dressed in jeans and a thermal top, with the sleeves pushed up to his bony elbows. His wispy gray hair was matted on one side. He looked as if he’d been sleeping, and sounded like it, too. “What?” he croaked.

“A room.”

He hacked a couple of times and popped a cherry cough drop into his mouth. “You’ve got the place to yourself.”

“How about a room at the end?”

The clerk turned around and eyed the keys hanging on the wall behind him. “Which end?”

He reeked of menthol chest ointment, and her nose wrinkled. “Either.”

He plucked Room 8 off its hook and slapped it on the counter. “Twenty-nine a night plus tax.”

She picked up the key. “You need it now?”

Grinning, he revealed a gold top tooth. “Think I can trust you, little lady. Pay as you leave.” He slid a guest register across the counter and she signed it.

She parked the truck in front of her room and went inside. It smelled musky and salty, like the bedroom in Ed’s basement. The walls were aqua blue, and an acrylic-framed poster of a jumping trout hung above the headboard of each of the twin beds. Checking the bathroom, she was surprised to find the shower clean. So was the sink, and there was a night-light plugged into the outlet next to it.

She pulled down the pea-green spread of one of the beds; the sheets underneath looked and smelled questionable. Bernadette kicked off her boots but kept the rest of her clothes on. Her jacket and the rest of her gear went on the other bed.

Sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she picked up the television remote and pressed the power button. The set stayed dead, and she was too beat to walk across the room and turn it on manually. It had been thirty-six hours since Garcia called her at home about a dead girl and a missing fetus. Thirty-six hours since she’d slept.

Five minutes after she turned off the lights, she was asleep.

In the middle of the night, her eyes snapped open and she bolted upright in bed. Sitting motionless, she listened. Someone was jiggling the doorknob. Unless a motorist had pulled in even later than she, there were no other motel guests. The creepy clerk?

There was no peephole on the door, and the drapes of the windows on either side of the door were closed. She slid off the mattress, padded over to the other bed, and felt around until she found her Glock. Hunkering down low, Bernadette went over to the door and listened. The night-light provided just enough illumination. The knob moved again.

She’d put the security chain in place. Slowly, she raised her arm over her head, felt the chain, and gently slid it out of the slot. The instant she grabbed the knob, it stopped moving. The intruder had felt her hand on it. She stood up and threw the door open.

By the floodlights of a building across the street, she could see a figure running across the motel parking lot. She didn’t want to lose him. Dressed in only socks, jeans, and a sweater, she took off after him. “Stop! FBI! Stop now!”

As he ran across the road, he glanced at her over his shoulder. He had a ski mask pulled over his face. Given the distance and the darkness, she had a tough time judging his size, and had no clue whether he carried a weapon.

He darted behind a gas station that faced the highway.

“FBI!” she yelled. “Stop!”

Behind the station was a residential street lined with small houses. He ran alongside a rambler and she thought she saw him hook around to the home’s backyard. She followed, her gun in her hand. With each bounding step in the snow, her stocking feet stung.

Pitch-black behind the home. Neither it nor any of its neighbors had outside lights. Squinting in the darkness, she tried to look for a shape or movement against the white of the snow. Her lungs burned from the freezing air, and her feet and hands were growing numb.

“Fuck!” she said in a cloudy puff of air. She pointed her gun into the darkness. “FBI! Come out now, hands over your head!”

Nothing.

She yelled a less professional warning: “Don’t try anything, asshole! I’ve got a gun!”

The lights went on inside the rambler, and the back door opened. A rotund man with a jacket pulled over boxers and T-shirt came out on the back stoop, a shotgun in his meaty fists.

She lowered her Glock and raised her free hand. “FBI, sir.”

The first thing he noticed was her lack of outerwear. “Where in the hell’s your clothes?”

His question confused her. “What?”

“What’re you doing in my yard?”

“Chasing a suspect.”

“Bullshit!” He noticed the pistol in her hand and started raising the barrel.

“Don’t! I’m an FBI agent!”

“My ass!” He pointed the gun at her.

Bernadette dropped to the snow, and a shot rang out over her head.

“Jerry Dupray from the sheriff’s office!” Bernadette hollered from the ground. “I’m meeting him tomorrow!”

Another blast over her head. “Next one’s gonna be for real!”

A woman in a bathrobe and hair rollers stuck her head outside. “Boyd! Put it down! We know Jerry!”

He lowered the barrel. “She’s making it up!”

The woman yanked the gun out of his hands. “I’m sorry, miss. Kids broke in to the garage last fall.”

Bernadette got to her feet. “Call nine-one-one! Send them to the Brown Trout!”

Those instructions seemed to impress the man. “Crap.”

“Is Boyd in trouble?” asked the woman. “He really wouldn’t have shot nobody.”

Bernadette was freezing, and she wanted to return to her stuff. She’d left the door to her room wide open. “Call!” she yelled, and started running back to the motel.

As she dashed across the highway, she glanced over her shoulder. No one following her, neither an armed homeowner nor a guy in a ski mask.

When she got back to her room, she called the cops herself. Minutes later, a young male deputy came to her door and took notes while a female deputy roused the caretaker and questioned him. Patrol cars were out in the neighborhood, looking for the intruder. Deputies were also at the Zastrow residence.

“I don’t want him arrested,” said Bernadette.

“He shot at an FBI agent,” said the deputy.

Bernadette was angry about being forced to drop, but she’d been without a jacket or identification. It had to have looked suspicious. “Scare the crap out of him and let him off with a warning,” she suggested. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing her bare feet to get the sensation back.

“We’ll see what the bosses want to do.” The deputy clicked his pen. “You think someone came after you specifically? Who knew you were in town?”

“Jerry’s the only one,” she said. “Meeting with him on a case tomorrow.”

The deputy grinned. “Wasn’t Jerry messing with you. I know that.”

She grimaced as she asked, “Got a registered sex offender living around here?”

“Not for fifty miles.”

“Good,” she said.

“You think someone followed you here? Did you stop at a wayside rest and see some scumbag giving you the eye as you were leaving?” The deputy tipped his head toward the parking lot. “Maybe someone coming down the highway spotted the nice truck all by itself and, I don’t know …”

“I don’t know either,” she said tiredly“How about we leave a man outside your door tonight?”

“That’s not necessary,” she said, and got up to see him out. “Thanks, though.”

Bernadette contemplated getting a different hotel but figured at that hour she could have trouble finding something, and she was dead tired. She went to the office to have the clerk give her a different room. The guy still had the television blaring. “Anyone call for me tonight?” she asked.

“No calls,” he said groggily.

While he took down another room key, she eyed the guest register. It was sitting open on the counter. Anyone could have sneaked into the unlocked office and figured out that she was there. She chastised herself for signing her real name, but she never would have guessed that she needed to be so clandestine in this tiny town.

He handed her a key. “You okay?”

“I’m okay.”

“Good.” He turned around and went back to his program.

While pacing the new room, she called Garcia. Even though she’d wakened him in the middle of the night, he was paying complete attention. “Are you all right?” he asked.

In an attempt to lighten things, she laughed and said, “My feet feel like ice cubes.”

“I want that Zastrow character charged.”

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. Please, Tony. Promise.”

“Fine, fine.” Back to talking about the intruder: “Ski mask. Sounds like he had a plan.”

“Burglary plan? Robbery plan? Scare-the-agent plan?” She didn’t want to verbalize a possible rape plan.

“You’re obviously getting too close to something, and the killer figured eliminating the main agent in the case could slow us down.”

She didn’t like hearing that. “You think they would have gone all the way and killed me?”

“I do,” he said.

She wished he had sugarcoated it a little. “Why didn’t they go through with it?”

“I suppose the asshole thought he’d have an easy time busting into your room and taking you before you could put up a fight.”

“When he realized I was awake and ready for him, he panicked and ran,” she said.

“Think someone tailed you all the way from the cabin?”

“I would have noticed,” she said. At the same time, she wasn’t sure. Her head had been wrapped around the case. Didn’t help that the big truck would make such an easy tail; it was probably visible from Mars. “Besides you and Dupray, who knew I was going to Brule?”

“Haven’t mentioned Brule to anyone,” he said. “Haven’t mentioned Wisconsin to anyone.”

She stopped pacing and peeked outside from behind the drapes. “If I wasn’t followed and no one was told I was going to Brule, that means someone guessed I was coming here.”

“Why would they guess that?”

She resumed her pacing. “They know the two cases are connected. Knew it’d be just a matter of time before we drew a line from one to the other.”

“Why would they pick
tonight
to look for you in Brule? It’d have to be a lucky guess.”

She looked outside again. Again saw only the lights of the commercial building across the street. “What if the killer lives in Brule? He kills a woman here years ago. No one catches him. Time passes. He goes over to Minnesota. Slices up another pregnant woman on New Year’s Eve. Comes back home. Hopes no one figures it out. Then he hears we’re on the case. Getting too close. Waits and readies himself.”

“I don’t know, Cat. A little far-fetched. I’d have an easier time believing someone followed you, be it from Walker or from the gas station down the street from the motel.”

She sat down on the bed, mustard yellow instead of pea green. “You might be right.”

“You sound absolutely shot,” he said.

“So do you.”

“You should have taken the deputies up on their offer.”

“No one’s coming back tonight,” she said.

“Hey, about that fight we had earlier—”

“My fault, forget it,” she said.

“Get some sleep, and check in regularly tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t take any chances. Please.”

She had no intention of taking any chances. Bernadette slept with her gun by her side and a chair wedged under the doorknob. As wound up as she was, she managed to sleep deeply enough to dream.

This time she isn’t a participant in a dream; she’s a watcher
.

Bernadette was in a large, shadowy space, the only illumination coming from a massive stone fireplace. The oversized blaze lent a decidedly satanic quality to the pair occupying the room. Though the fire animated their faces with dancing light, Bernadette’s nightmare didn’t allow her to see their features. They could have been men or women or genderless demons
.

The hellish picture was thrown off-kilter by the Charlie Brown Christmas. The top of the mantel was crowded with winter-themed
Peanuts
figurines and music boxes. A balsam fir weighted down by more
Peanuts
characters—heavy on Snoopy and Woodstock—sat against the wall to the right of the hearth. From somewhere in this strange hell came the voice of Burl Ives singing “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”

One of the figures walked back and forth in front of the fireplace. The pacing had a practiced rhythm, like that of a zoo animal accustomed to getting exercise by going back and forth across the width of its cage. Again, Bernadette’s dream allowed no details. She couldn’t tell what the pacer was wearing. He or she was a dark blur. The moving figure was speaking, but Bernadette could make out only four words. They were repeated over and over with the rhythm of a drumbeat
.

“Should’ve killed the bitch … Should’ve killed the bitch … Should’ve killed the bitch.”