Guilty as Sin (44 page)

He drove away from Lakeside, took a right on Oslo, and headed to Dinkytown, where the businesses looked abandoned, the buildings decayed. A night clerk stared out the window of a garishly lit convenience store, an oasis beckoning no one.

Lights still glowed in a few dorm windows on the Harris campus, but the class buildings stood dark. Even in the dead of night, Harris College gave the impression of tradition and money. The buildings were solid, substantial, erected in an era when collegei meant more than a means to higher earning. The grounds were parklike, studded with tall hardwood and pine trees.

Garrett Wright claimed he had been working here in Cray Hall the night Josh had been taken, as did Christopher Priest. If they were partners in this madness, then why would they not have given each other alibis? It could have been part of the game, Jay supposed. It could have been a small bit of truth to help Priest fool the polygraph.

Curiouser and curiouser, this case, he thought as he left the campus the back way, driving slowly south on Old Cedar Road. The secrets and sins that lay beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary lives had always fascinated him. The things no one suspected were going on behind facades of normalcy in picture-book settings like Deer Lake.

Jay let the Cherokee roll to a stop in the middle of the deserted road, lit his last cigarette, and sat staring out the passenger window. A chunk of moon glowed down on the winterscape, giving the snow a silver cast, turning the bare trees to silhouettes of black against a starry sky of midnight blue. The land that ran west of the college was farmland and woodland, rolling hills and fields where stubbled cornstalks poked up through occasional thin spots in the snow. A setting of apparent peace.

Running south, the road eventually skirted the eastern edge of Ryan's Bay, where Josh's jacket had been found nine days ago. According to Agent O'Malley's theory, this was where the game had been put in motion, along this strip of lonely county road. It was here that the car accident had taken place, the accident that had kept Hannah Garrison late at the hospital. Christopher Priest had sent a student on an errand. The student had taken the back way off campus, as students often did. His car had hit an unexpected—and, O'Malley speculated, a manufactured— patch of ice that sent him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The elderly female driver of the other car had been killed instantly; a passenger in her car had died of a heart attack upon arrival at Deer Lake Community Hospital. Two other passengers had been transported by helicopter to Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, where the student now lay in critical condition, having developed a bacterial infection that was threatening to take his life.

So many lives touched or taken by this game. And if O'Malley was right, it had started here, in this quiet, pretty spot on the far edge of town. Like a stone dropped into the lake, the effects had rippled outward in ever-widening circles.

Cause and effect. The chain reaction of events. He wondered how much the* master of this game had foreseen, how much he had known going in and how much had been twisted serendipity. He couldn't have known that Ellen North would get the case, or that the story would have been seized on by a writer fromEudora, Alabama, as an escape and an act of self-examination. Yet he had chosen an attorney who had ties, however oblique, to them both—Anthony Costello.

The sense of being watched by brilliant dark eyes from a darker dimension sent a current of uneasiness down his spine.

He was no longer an observer, but a player. Another one caught in the web of this crime.

"It's your job—going from one set of victims to another. Does it get to you, or are you immune?"

"Not immune; careful. I keep my distance. Don't let it get personal."

Liar.

A chill tightened his shoulders, and he reached to turn up the heater only to find it cranked to high already. Damn cold place. And here he sat like a damn fool in a truck in the middle of nowhere. He would sure as hell rather have been in bed . . . with Ellen, who thought he was not only involved in this case, but playing some sinister role. Ellen, who didn't trust or respect him. Who shouldered the weight of winning justice for a child, for a family, for a cop, for a town.

"You're just a regular damn prince, Brooks," he muttered.

He reached for another cigarette, finding the pack empty. Putting off the inevitable reality of a sleepless night and more introspection, he swung the Cherokee around and headed back through the Harris campus, taking the shortest route to the Tom Thumb. The clerk, a thick-bodied kid with volcanic patches of acne pebbling his red face, sold him a carton of Marlboros and made the usual tired, obligatory comment about the cold. Fresh out of small talk, Jay grunted an answer and pushed out the door.

A lone car rolling south held him up at the edge of the Tom Thumb lot. Directly across the street squatted the Pack Rat secondhand shop where Todd Childs worked part-time when he wasn't concocting alibis for his mentor. No one had seen him since before Ellen's car had been vandalized. Rumor had him stashed in a Twin Cities hotel courtesy of the Costello team, who had leaked the information about his pending testimony. But it seemed just as possible that Childs was tucked away in a farmhouse somewhere, guarding Dustin Holloman and carrying out the legwork or Wright's demented scheme while Wright himself sat at home playing innocent.

Jay eased the truck out into the street, angling across the northbound lane, something about the Pack Rat holding his attention. A reflection in the window. An odd glow coming from within. Light. A faint glow, like the beam of a flashlight.

Odd time of day to be browsing for bargains in a junk shop.

He turned the corner and doubled back down the alley, cutting the engine and the headlights on the truck as he rolled up behind the store. The security light was out, if there had ever been one, but enough illumination leached over the roof from the streetlight on the corner to set the scene. A set of crumbling concrete steps with a bent pipe railing led to the only back door. A Dumpster sat to one side of the steps. At the foot of the steps waited a dirty gray Crown Victoria from the late eighties. It sat, engine running, exhaust billowing from the tailpipe—ready for an escape that was now blocked by the Cherokee.

Who the hell robbed a secondhand shop? What was there to steal? There probably wasn't anything in the store worth more than ten bucks, and Jay couldn't imagine that there would be a lot of money in the till. Maybe the place had a safe. Employees would know. Like Todd Childs. Or maybe Childs had left something crucial in the building, something he couldn't risk coming back for in the light of day.

Jay called 911 on his cellular phone and reported a break-in in progress, then let himself out of the truck, pocketing the keys, careful not to let the door slam. Precious minutes would tick by before a patrol car could arrive. The perpetrator wouldn't escape by car, but if he could get out of the building, he could still run. If it was Childs, and if Childs was Wright's accomplice, this was the chance to nail him and possibly bring the case to a close.

And if you catch yourself a suspect, just think of the publicity angle, he thought sarcastically. That would be Ellen's first reaction—not that he had found some scrap of nobility within and helped them catch the bad guy, but that he wanted to help himself. Not that it should have mattered to him what she thought.

He made his way toward the building, the snow squeaking beneath his feet. He hoped that the rumble of the car's engine masked it, or that the midnight visitor was too intent on his task to hear. His lungs holding on to his breath, he eased up one step and then another.

The door burst open as Jay reached for it, hitting him hard, knocking him back and off balance. A black-clad figure followed, rushing him, swinging something short and black. It caught Jay on the side of the head and shorted out all thought. He felt himself falling backward, off the steps, arms flailing, colors bursting and swirling inside his head. He hit the rutted ice pack of the parking area hard.

He fought for orientation, struggled to discern up from down. A car door thumped shut and an engine roared. He managed to turn himself onto his hands and knees as the Crown Vic's headlights blazed on, blinding him. The car roared, tires whining on the ice as it rocketed backward. The sickening crunch of metal on metal told Jay the Cherokee wouldn't be spared any more than he had been. Then there was no time to think of anything as the car lurched forward, charging him.

He lunged sideways, his feet slipping out from under him, his left elbow cracking hard on the cement steps. He caught hold of the steel-pipe post that thrust up crookedly from the top step and heaved himself up. The bumper of the Crown Victoria followed just behind, the metal grating over the concrete of the second step.

Engine and tires screaming, the car rocked backward once again, once again smashing into the Cherokee, pushing its nose sideways and opening enough space in the alley for the car to turn north.

The son of a bitch was going to run. If the cops didn't show in the next ten seconds, he would be gone.

Rage pushed Jay off the steps. He staggered drunkenly toward the mangled Cherokee, trying to run and struggling to keep himself upright. The passenger door was jammed shut, punched in like a second-rate boxer's face. He lost seconds as he stumbled around to the driver's side. The Crown Vic inched forward, toward the street and freedom, its back end sliding sideways as the tires spun to gain purchase on the slick surface.

Spewing curses, Jay stabbed the key at the ignition again and again, his vision blurred and swirling, doubling, tripling. Hit the bull's-eye. Cranked it over. The engine roared to life, a belt inside it screaming like a banshee at the wounds that had been inflicted. He threw the transmission in gear and stepped on the gas. The four-wheel drive grabbed hold and the truck shot forward, rear-ending the car but at the same time giving it the push it needed to reach the plowed street.

The car lunged west down the residential side street. Jay turned the Cherokee out of the alley, the wheel seeming to spin too far, too easily. The truck rocked sideways, then straightened, and he stomped on the gas. The brake lights of the Crown Vic flashed two blocks down as it turned south. Taking the same turn, the Cherokee sideswiped a station wagon, careened across the street, and nicked the front end of a Honda, the sound of glass shattering a high-pitched accompaniment to the crash of steel.

They made a right onto Mill Road. Jay spun the Cherokee's wheel hard, swinging the nose of the truck around just as the front wheels jumped the curb. The truck plowed through the deep snow on the boulevard narrowly missed a tree, and bucked back down onto the road.

The paved road gave way to gravel. The streetlights ended, and the velvet-black of the country night enveloped them, only a wedge of moon and headlights brightening the dark. The road split between farm fields, rose and fell with the hills, then plunged down, curving into a valley dark with the winter skeletons of a thick hardwood forest.

With every turn the Cherokee's steering loosened more. With every curve and dip, Jay's battered brain swam wilder and wilder. Too fast, he thought. Out of control. The pop of gravel beneath the tires was like firecrackers snapping. The road was icy in patches, rutted and rough. He didn't know shit about driving in these conditions. The Crown Victoria was running away from him, putting more ground between them with every jog in the road.

It disappeared over a crest. Jay followed, foot too heavy on the gas. The Cherokee left the ground as the road dropped sharply down. There was no way to pull the truck down, to rein it in, to make the hard right-angle turn.

I'm fucked, he thought, gripping the steering wheel, bracing his body as best he could.

The truck plunged nose-first into a thicket, bounced up hard, throwing Jay around the cab like a rag doll. The headlights flashed at crazy angles as the Cherokee bucked and skidded down the slope, spraying up snow in blinding plumes, coming to a violent stop when it slammed sideways into a tree trunk.

Jay landed against the mangled passenger door, his head smacking hard against the cracked window. His mind drifted ever farther from his body, the connection between the two pulling as thin as hair. The truck's radiator hissed. The lights on the police scanner glowed red in the gloom of the cab. The radio crackled, picking up the transmission of the patrol car that had finally arrived on the scene at the Pack Rat.

The last conscious thought Jay had was You blew it, hotshot.

CHAPTER 24

"Tell me what you remember."

Jay closed his eyes and winced. Pain ran down his right side like a mallet playing xylophone on his ribs. Dr. Baskir, a small man with in enormous nose and a lilting Indian accent, had examined him thor-Dughly upon his delivery to the Deer Lake Community Hospital, addressing his various bruised and battered body parts as if each possessed self-awareness. He told the ribs they were not broken and tried to verbally placate his muscles, announcing to Jay in a whispered aside that they were ikely to be "angry" for days to come. He had deftly stitched two gashes in the side of Jay's head, picking broken glass out of his hair with tweezers and muttering to the hard plates of bone in his skull.