Mortal Fall (47 page)

“We could have arrested him for what he did to your brother if you’d gone to the police.”

“No, it was years ago.” I could see in the reflection that he was moving his head in small, frantic shakes. “Didn’t know about it until it was too late. Until after Bradley had killed himself. Now it’s too late for you. I didn’t want it to come to this, just like I didn’t want—” He stopped himself.

“Didn’t want what?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“For Wolfie to die?”

“You need to shut up now,” he said.

“If you kill me, you’ll go to jail.”

“Not if no one knows. Not if I take you to the woods, and they never find you.”

“People know I’m here—that I’ve come to see you.” I considered my options. I could elbow him, but the safety was off, and one quick move might make him fire. I could inform him that I was slowly going to turn toward him, so that he could see my face. It always made it harder to shoot when you looked into someone’s eyes, and he was obviously wanting to talk, needed to justify his actions. Facing him would give me more options.

“You’re lying. No one knows, and if they do, it’s a chance I’ll have to take.” Will’s hand was beginning to shake, but he kept the gun pointed right at my temple.

“I’m not lying. Look,” I said, my hands still up. “I’m just going to slowly turn toward—” and then I felt the hard steel of the gun come crashing down on my head, felt my legs go instantly numb and weak, and my body crumble as the colors before my eyes went from pinkish red and gray to black.

• • •

My limbs still felt numb. Everything seemed smeared together in my head, which seared with pain, but I tried to get control of my thoughts—tried to remember who I’d been talking to and why, and where I was, but all the answers seemed to be swirling outside my head, just out of reach. The vision in my right eye was fuzzy. I felt rough carpet underneath me, and heard the hum of a motor. I realized I was in a trunk, and the car was moving. I felt terror rise up in me, flood into my head, which already was hurting like hell.

I inhaled thick dust and felt the vibration and bounce of a rough road below me. We were on gravel. Maybe a logging road.

The bartender. Will had hit me, I remembered. Will had put me in a trunk, and now we were heading somewhere. I tried to think through the fog, but I had no idea because everything, including my panic, was swimming away as raw streaks wormed into my vision and made everything dissolve to black again.

47

I
WOKE UP, THIS
time clearer, and I was still cramped in the trunk. My trunk, I thought, because the shape, the carpet, and the sound of the motor all seemed familiar. Still driving, but now on smooth, paved road. The same paralyzing fear overtook me. We were heading somewhere where it was very dark. My knees were tight against my chin, and my wrists were bound before my stomach. I could feel them chafing and swelling against the tight ropes, but at least they weren’t behind my back. The muscles on my neck ached, my head was still throbbing as if it had been split down the center, and a pain pulsed down my curled spine.

I tried to piece the night back together again—Adam, Ken, the police station, Adam’s cabin, the bartender, the Snow Ghost. It was coming back. I had had a beer. I had noticed that Will’s father had a different name than DeMarcus. I had phoned Gretchen to ask about a Mr. Talbert.

Lying in the trunk while the car rolled along, one of the panels hot against my side, I remembered telling Will that I was going to slowly turn to face him, and that’s when it all had gone black. With my bound wrists and my elbows jammed into my stomach, I tried to wedge my arms to my side so my hands could pat my pocket. I couldn’t feel my cell phone. I knew he’d taken my gun as well because I couldn’t feel it against my waist. I ran through the time I had spent in the bar, going over what had made it obvious to Will that I was on to him—or at least suspicious, and wondered if it was when I followed his drunk father into the men’s room.

Whatever it was, this much I knew: Will had killed Mark Phillips because Will’s brother, Bradley, had been hurt by Phillips.
He raped my brother
rang in my ears. I knew this as well: Will planned to take me somewhere and dump me over a cliff, just as he had done with Phillips. Just as he might have done with Wolfie, and judging by the curve of the road and the feel of the pavement, it was going to be very close to the others, if not exactly the same—the Loop. I knew better than anybody how empty the Going-to-the-Sun Road was in the middle of the night. We had been on gravel earlier, so if I was correct that we were now on the Going-to-the-Sun highway, it meant we took the unpaved North Fork Road to the north entrance with no cameras.

It had to be three a.m. Even in the middle of tourist season in Glacier Park, it was highly unlikely anyone would be passing by. People needing to travel from east of the Divide to west of the Divide in the middle of the night were not tourists. They would be people trying to get somewhere and that meant taking Highway 2. During the day in the middle of summer, Going-to-the-Sun was no place for solitude, but in the middle of the night, it was a different story. Nobody was coming to help.

I heard no sound coming from the car besides the motor, no radio, no talking. It had to be only Will. No accomplice. I remembered thinking of Adam as I was walking to my car and felt sick to my stomach that I’d been obsessing about him. Had I not had such tunnel vision, maybe I would have taken Will more seriously, maybe I would have felt him behind me—a shift of air or a soft footstep, my flesh prickling with instinct and making me turn and pull my weapon.

I forced myself to stop it. Now was not the time for second-guessing. I took a shallow, shaky breath and played it out it my head. Will would open the trunk, force me to awkwardly climb out with my hands and feet bound, holding the gun to my head. He’d still be nervous, though. I could sense that he wasn’t a killer by nature. He was scared, didn’t know what else to do, like a man who accidentally killed his girlfriend in a fit of rage. Will was afraid of jail, and if I were to guess, Will
didn’t want to kill me. He just felt cornered and was afraid of getting caught. My only chance was to make the most of that fear.

Beneath me, the car slowed and took what felt like a 180-degree turn. I knew we had just rounded the hairpin curve of the Loop. Then we parked, and adrenaline shot through me. Suddenly, a flush of images reminded me why I wanted to stay alive: Lara, with her delicate fingers and large eyes, Gretchen, luminous and glowing, smiling; Adam, angry and sneering, perhaps human after all; my job in the Crown Jewel of the Continent. Maybe I didn’t have kids to fight for, or maybe I’d found some type of false sense of order in my tidiness and diligence, as Lara implied, but at least it kept me from drifting aimlessly. In Glacier, in my job, I belonged, and not as a dead corpse at the bottom of a ravine, but as an officer and a detective. I would fight for it.

I was in a full sweat when I heard the engine cut, the jangle of the keys, and the driver’s door click open. Will’s footsteps, crunching on the pavement, sounded like a hundred small shuffles. He was nervous, I thought, and wanted to get this over with.

The trunk suddenly popped open, and I could feel an instant cool mountain breeze wash over me. I’d have known the smell of Glacier Park anywhere—the resin of pine, the chilled sighs from the mountains, the sound of roaring water in the distance.

I saw a thick band of dark clouds from the earlier rain captured by the tall mountains and a partial moon straight above me shining a pale, very dim light on Will. I was right, his gun was pointing down at me. “Get out,” he said.

I tried to steady my shaking and did as he said—made my awkward climb out of the trunk, with my hands bound before me and my ankles tied. The car swayed when I sat up, and I saw it was my car, which made sense. It would be easier to throw me in my own trunk than drag me down the sidewalk to a different vehicle. I realized this as I accidentally knocked the crown of my head again on the inside of the hood. I reflexively tried to lift my hands, but couldn’t get them very high up with the ropes around my wrists. “Will, listen to me. I
wasn’t lying when I said someone knows I was onto you. Look at my cell phone. Check the log. I made some calls to find out why you and your brother’s names were different from your dad’s.”

“Don’t call him my dad. He’s not my dad. He’s just some drunk. Get out. Now.”

I swung my legs over the edge to the ground.

“Hurry.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Will, how many are you going to toss over the edge? You think this stops with killing a police officer? No. Then, it gets even crazier.”

“They won’t know you’ve been killed. Another accident.
If
they even find you, they’ll think you were up at the scene of the crime and while investigating, you fell. Just like the others.”

“No, no they won’t. Three bodies—one particular area? Radar goes way up.
Way
up. When it was just Wolfie, maybe, but after we found Phillips, full-blown investigation. With the guy doing the investigation added to that count, we’re talking special agents from the department.”

“Quit talking and walk.” He shoved me toward the cliff near the road. “I’m not going to have you go down in the same spot anyway. This will be a different spot. Better. Can’t see down the ravine from the road or trail. No one’s going to find you.”

“But I’ll be missing and they’ll know you were the last person I was looking into.”

“Stop, just stop talking,” he yelled, his voice frantic. A bubble of hope rose in me that he would not be entirely in control. Then again, frantic people did frantic things. One quick shove and it could be over. An acidic taste formed at the back of my throat and for a moment—piggybacking on one of the crisp breezes brushing across the parking lot—I thought I smelled the scent of fear that I always linked to my mother.

Coyotes began to yip in the distance, and he pushed me again. I shimmied in very small steps toward the trail where he led me, the gun at my back. My boots scuffled on the lumpy trail while the
vocal call of the coyotes ripped through the canyon. Fear clogged and pounded into my chest. If I let him lead me to the edge and he pushed me over, I would die instantly, snapping against the rocks just as Phillips and Wolfie had—my broken, lifeless body relaxing into scree or maybe some stream, disintegrating into the earth while the world continued on. I’d seen it too many times already. I couldn’t let him get me to the edge, but I couldn’t try to juke or shove him with my body either. He was scared but still in control. One pull of the trigger and I was dead.

“Hurry,” he said again. I could hear, even feel, his heavy and fast breathing against the back of my neck.

“If you take the ropes off my ankles, I can walk normally.”

“Not going to happen. Keep going,” he said.

He was right. He was leading me to a different area, just off the Loop and far away from the wildlife camera, but around the bend so no one could see it from the road. “When I go missing,” I began again, “they’ll retrace my steps. They’ll go to the bar, they’ll ask Lindsay if I was in for a beer. She’ll tell them you left early and that I asked about that. What? You going to shove her off the cliff too? And my car. You just going to drive it back to Whitefish, for God’s sake?”

“I’ll deal with it.”

“But they’ve probably already got someone looking—”

“Stop,” he yelled at me again and pushed me off the trail toward an outcropping of rock.

I was getting to him. I forced myself to keep talking. “They’ll look through my files. They’ll see I was investigating Glacier Academy—they’ll see the names of all the boys I’d researched, including your brother.”

“Don’t talk about my brother anymore. Just keep moving,” he said, and shoved me in the back. I went flying forward, stumbling over an exposed root, my face smashing into prickly brush and sharp stones. I could feel a searing pain on my cheekbone and dirt smeared before one of my eyes. I gulped for air and turned and looked at him. My vision
had blurred on one side, but I could see he was cupping his head with his hands. “Just
stop
talking!”

I clumsily got back up on my feet into a crouch position. A wet trail of blood rolled down my cheek and I could taste the grit of dirt in my mouth.

Will continued to cup one hand over his left ear and pointed the gun at me with the other. His free hand started pulling at his wiry hair. “Just shut up, will you?”

I slowly stood up.

“I didn’t want this,” he yelled. “I didn’t
want
that biologist to die, but he had that damn film. He and that guy Ward, they came in for a beer and were talking about the wolverines, about the camera and how the one was going to go up and get it and the other was going to replace the cartridge for him over the weekend. I don’t believe in coincidences. They came to my bar to talk about that for a reason. The universe was protecting me, telling me I’d done the right thing with Phillips, and now I just needed to get the film. It took me hours to find it, but I finally did, and—” Will shook his head in quick, jerky movements. “He shouldn’t have fought me over it. He was stupid. He should have left me alone when he found me at the camera.”

“But it was his film. His camera. He needed it.”

“I didn’t
mean
for it to happen. It was unlucky, but that’s how it happened. I had no choice and then you came sniffing around.”

“I only wanted what’s right, Will. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” And when I said it, I knew it was true—could hear the sincerity in my own voice. It really is all I ever wanted—a sense of fairness, a sense of order.

“What’s right? As if that’s something people can just
have
! As if
what’s right
is a car or something you can own. If we could have rightness in this world, my brother would be alive today. People like Phillips wouldn’t be on this planet if we could have what’s fucking
right.
Bottom line is that sometimes to do what’s right, you have to do what’s wrong.”