Tumbledown (18 page)

“Cake,” Alex said. “I think, given the circumstances, cake is acceptable as a meal.”

“Yeah.” Sarah smiled. “Should’ve baked a fucking file into it.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Emerson tap his watch. “I think I have to go,” she said. “My arraignment is at three thirty tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

Something in Alex’s voice destroyed Sarah’s ability to be brave. “I miss you,” she whispered.

“I miss you too.” Alex sounded as if she was walking the same tightrope Sarah had just lost her grip on.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Unable to bear a protracted good-bye, Sarah hung up the phone. She stared blankly at the receiver until Emerson came across to the desk. Then, without saying a word, she followed him back to her cell.

*

The guard on the night shift made it easy for Sarah to gauge the passing time. At what she guessed were hourly intervals, his boots would clomp across the tiled floor. Then he would open the observation hatch in the cell door, usually whistling or humming tunelessly as he did so. As soon as he was satisfied that she was behaving herself, he would slam the hatch so hard that the metal door shook, making the noise reverberate around the cell. He never opened the door, never stepped across the threshold, or threatened her with violence. He just left the light glaring overhead and ensured that once an hour she was startled from what little sleep she had managed to snatch.

As the metal rang for the seventh time, she pushed herself up to lean against the wall, in the hope that it might lessen his enthusiasm with the hatch. It didn’t, and she heard his cackle of laughter when he noted the success of his efforts. She drew her knees to her chest, pressed her eyes against her knees to try to block out the light, and started to count down the hour.

*

As the first hints of light began to creep between the shutters and the birds welcomed the dawn with enthusiasm, Alex gave up trying to sleep, abandoning the bed to Tilly and the cats. She had woken frequently in the night, only managing an hour here and there as nightmares tormented her and every little noise made her reach for the Glock on her bedside table. At two o’clock, Tilly had inched her way onto Sarah’s side of the bed, and Alex—hating the emptiness there—had let her stay. The cats, sensing an easy mark, had joined them shortly afterward.

Alex showered quickly and threw on the clothes closest to hand. She collected a flashlight and Sarah’s camera, clipped her Glock to her belt, and whistled for Tilly.

“Stay close, girl,” she said, and Tilly, somewhat less boisterous since Lyssa’s death, obediently walked to heel.

It was quiet and cool outside, but the cloudless, pale blue sky promised another day of unrelenting heat. Alex tried not to think about Sarah being held in a cellblock where fixing the air conditioning was always way down on the station priorities and fixing the drains didn’t even make the list.

She walked slowly, noting the tire impressions left on the driveway by the patrol units the previous day and snapping a photograph of a particularly clear example for potential use as a comparison. The more she thought about it, the less convincing she found her initial theory that Lyssa had been forced to stop by a vehicle blocking the path. Alex was pretty sure that she or Sarah had been the intended victims, not Lyssa, but Lyssa had at least been driving away from the house and might at a fleeting glimpse have been mistaken for one of them. If the murderer had jumped to the wrong conclusion and stopped her at gunpoint, he might have killed her in a panic when he realized she would be able to identify him. But what if the first person down the track had happened to be a deliveryman? The killer would have had to wait somewhere to watch him go by.

Alex kept walking, scouring the edges of the track for anything the fingertip searches might have missed and shining her flashlight into the denser patches of undergrowth. Tilly sidled closer to her as they neared the site of the murder. They were completely alone; there was no one guarding the area, and she wondered whether the search had finally been called off.

“S’okay, we’re okay,” she murmured, as much to reassure herself as Tilly.

All the CSI markers had been removed, furthering her suspicion that the police wouldn’t be returning, but still it was obvious where Lyssa’s body had lain. Four holes remained where a forensics tent had been staked, and the ground between them bore a deep black stain. Alex imagined Sarah kneeling in the blood, trying to help, knowing it was useless but refusing to let Lyssa go without doing everything possible to save her. The price Sarah was now paying for that made Alex want to punch her fist into the trunk of the nearest tree.

She knelt to comfort Tilly, giving them both a minute to settle. The area of forest surrounding her was largely unfamiliar; she and Sarah usually walked or jogged toward the lake instead and only crossed this stretch by car. The track wasn’t easy for drivers to negotiate, forcing them to focus straight ahead, so when she set off again she started to pay attention to what lay on either side.

Ten minutes later, she reached the gate.

“Shit.”

She had been working on the assumption that Lyssa’s assailant had driven beyond the gate. She had no idea what his original plans had entailed—she was pointedly trying not to contemplate that—but he would surely have known that leaving in his own vehicle would be less dangerous than stealing one of theirs. They lived in a small town; the wrong face behind the wheel of a familiar car would have drawn attention. Now, having seen no place he could have concealed a vehicle, she wondered if he had risked parking on the public road and continuing on foot, perhaps planning to use one of their cars to return quickly to his.

It took her another fruitless hour to reach the access road. Shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun, she surveyed the deserted stretch of pothole-strewn asphalt and acknowledged the impossibility of the task she had set herself. The perpetrator could have approached from either direction and he could have parked anywhere. Completely disheartened, she turned around and began to retrace her steps.

Instead of unlocking the gate when she reached it, she chased Tilly through the trees until they were past the barrier and back onto the path. The quick burst of exercise brightened her spirits and she threw a stick for Tilly to fetch, wondering whether she would have time to drive out to Emerson’s apartment before Sarah’s arraignment. It was only as she stooped to wrestle the stick from Tilly’s mouth that she noticed the gap in the trees. Just large enough to drive through, the opening was well concealed by a line of saplings and half-grown spruce that rendered it undetectable from the direction of the house, but it was more apparent now that she was heading back. Anyone driving at low speed and keeping a lookout for just such a hiding place might have spotted it.

“Tilly, sit.” Alex didn’t want anything to disturb the area or distract her. She lowered her hand, adding emphasis to the command, and Tilly immediately obeyed. “Good girl, stay.”

Her pulse quickening, Alex walked off the track and down a slight incline, keeping to the margins to avoid trampling on any possible evidence. The early morning sunshine was barely penetrating the thick canopy overhead. She panned her flashlight across the ground, picking out nothing but leaf litter, pine needles, and fallen cones. Unwilling to admit defeat, she walked farther, and found a small clearing surrounded by trees sturdy enough to prevent any vehicle’s progress. She shone her light around the area. It was perfect: close enough to the track that the killer would hear anything approaching, but concealed enough to provide him with complete cover. She focused her flashlight downward, crouched low, and put her hand to the layer of debris covering the forest floor.

“What the hell?”

She pulled her hand back and looked around, staring first at the natural patterns where leaves had blown and drifted and then at the quite unnatural pattern she had just found. Someone had tried hard—too hard—to make the ground appear undisturbed. The area had a swept-over, churned look to it, old leaves commingling with new, and partly rotted cones lying above fresh ones. Angling her light, she took a series of photographs before carefully beginning to excavate the layer. It was deep; whoever had done this had taken their time. Sweat began to darken her tank top as she tried to fit that fact into a possible sequence of events. Her fingers touched a hard ridge and she started to dig more frantically, scrabbling and cursing at the muck that fell back into the hole. She knew it was the tread of a car tire even before it was fully exposed. Someone had kicked at it, obliterating large sections, but at some stage they must have realized that that wouldn’t be enough and covered it with debris instead.

Exertion and anger blurred Alex’s first attempt to photograph it. She forced herself to breathe slowly and take several more pictures. When she was satisfied, she stood back a little way and waited for the logical part of her brain to kick the emotional part into touch. Instinct and training told her that the killer probably hadn’t covered the treads immediately. No one involved in such a frenzy of violence was likely to be thinking rationally enough to stop and rake leaf mold over evidence, especially if he knew he had murdered the wrong person. He would flee and regroup, work out a strategy. Then—and this time Alex did slam her fist into a tree—he would return at the earliest opportunity to conceal the tracks.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

The urge to drive straight over to the station, slap the photographs in Quinn’s face, and demand he send CSI techs out to cast the treads was so potent that she had to dig her heels into the dirt to keep herself stationary. Quinn had been out here. Emerson had been out here. Half the fucking police force had been out here, not to mention a number of civilians. If it was someone on the force who had had the wherewithal to tamper with evidence and perhaps steer other search members from the area, whom could she trust with what she had just discovered? In a worst-case scenario, if Quinn were involved, it would be simple for him to spin everything around and insist that she had made the tracks herself. No one was with her to corroborate her find, and his good buddy Judge Buchanan certainly wouldn’t take much convincing of her complicity. She knew she hadn’t found enough to change anything.

She picked up her flashlight and walked back to where Tilly lay.

“Hey, Tilly-bud.”

She scratched behind Tilly’s ears and then signaled her to heel. Sarah’s arraignment wasn’t for another four hours, which would give Alex time to collect the pup tent from the shed and pitch it over the tracks to preserve them for as long as it took her to sort this mess out. She would also upload the photographs and send them to Castillo. In case something happened to her, she wanted someone external to the investigation to have copies. As far as she was concerned, the Avery PD was tainted. For now at least, she and Sarah were on their own.

Leah was already frying bacon in the skillet when Caleb walked into the kitchen. She poured him fresh coffee and set the mug by his place at the table. Scratching the back of his head absently, he sat and drank. His hair was still wet from the shower, he hadn’t bothered to fasten his shirt yet, and the White Pride tattoos covering his chest stood out starkly against his pale skin. Last night, she had run her hands across his torso, tracing the lines and symbols as he told her again what each stood for, as if she could ever forget. Afterward, he had slept soundly while she lay awake for hours, listening to the rasp of his breathing and planning what she would say to him in the morning. She thought she had it worked out now. Whether he would listen to her, though, was another matter entirely.

She piled bacon and pancakes onto his plate and sat across from him, sipping peppermint tea as he shoveled food into his mouth. He frowned at her as the smell of mint cut through the reek of grease, but he didn’t comment. She had already told him that too much caffeine was bad for the baby. She waited until he had finished half his plateful and then she pushed her cup to one side.

“Honey, I’ve been thinking,” she said, and watched the way his chewing slowed as he smirked.

“Have you now?” He swallowed and chased the food down with coffee. “About what?”

“Alex Pascal.” She shook her head, correcting herself quickly. “The cop.”

He never used their names; it was always “the cop,” “the bitch,” “those fucking dykes.” He didn’t dehumanize them to make it easier for him to hurt them; he did it because he didn’t consider them human in the first place.

“Yeah, so what about her?” He picked up a rasher of bacon and bit at the end. Just as Leah had hoped, his favorite breakfast and plentiful coffee had made him willing to humor her.

“If you go after her too soon, if you hurt her, the police will suspect that it wasn’t her girlfriend who killed that paramedic. They’ll start looking for someone else.” She took a shaky breath. “They’ll start looking for you.”

He scoffed but hesitated nonetheless, suggesting he might be giving her warning due consideration.

“Patience and perseverance, baby,” she said, reminding him of the mantra he had inherited from his father.

“Bitch has her bail decided this afternoon,” he said. “She’s not getting out, so I guess we’ll just wait and see where they send her.” Leah could feel the rough skin on his hands as he took hold of hers. “My guy says we can stay here as long as we like, so I’m not going to rush into anything.”

“That’s good,” she told him, hoping she had managed to buy Alex some time. Over his shoulder, she could see the river, a soothing endless flow of green water. She was still staring at it when she felt his hands begin to raise the hem of her dress.

*

Castillo had agreed with Alex: the tire tread evidence wouldn’t be compelling enough by itself, especially if Quinn was somehow involved in its concealment and could subsequently influence the judge.

“Do you think Quinn’s likely to be the culprit?” Castillo asked.

Alex thought of his single-minded pursuit of Sarah, the perp walk, his grandstanding for the cameras, his haste to secure an indictment, and the smoothed-over ground she had found that morning.