Reapers (42 page)

"What happened?" Dee said.

"The Kono got wind of us. They took Hobson."

"Who told them? Kroger?"

"Or Nora."

"
Nora?
" Dee glanced east through the trees. "But she's supposed to be helping us."

"As far as we know, she's the only one who knows why we're really here." Ellie stood, but she couldn't make her feet move forward. "Or maybe I'm going crazy. We came here to find Quinn and now we've lost Hobson. If our cover's blown, we can't keep poking around the park. We're back to wandering the streets for the Clavans' van. Which probably returned to Albany two weeks ago."

The wind blew the snow across the mingled confusion of tracks. Clouds came and went from the face of the moon. Ahead, the path disappeared into the woods.

"If I told
you
all that," Dee said, "what would you do next?"

Ellie looked up. "Follow the trail that's still warm. Hobson. If it hits a wall, or wanders afield, return to the original objective."

"So where does Hobson's trail point us?"

"To push back on Nora." She turned and headed back the way they came in. "But first, we need sleep. We're already hours behind. A few more won't hurt us, but chasing after gangsters when we can't think straight is not a winning combination."

With a new course in place, she already felt better. They hiked back to the apartment, peeled off their socks, replaced them with dry ones. Her mind spun, but it was already so late she fell asleep within minutes. Anxiety woke her a half dozen times. Around dawn, she woke Dee. They shared the last of the meat pies and trekked back to Nora's boathouse. The sun was up, but it was hidden behind buildings and clouds, and the early light was foreign and gray.

Nora answered the door in a thick bathrobe. She saw it was Ellie and her lips pulled back from her teeth. "I told you not to come by during daylight."

"Did you tip us off to the Kono?"

"The Kono?" Nora's face bent with anger. "I've risked my family to help yours. If you ever accuse me of helping slavers again, they'll be the last words you speak to me."

"Someone found out who were are," Ellie said. "Last night, they took Sheriff Hobson."

"Get inside." The woman opened the door wide. When Ellie hesitated, Nora rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on. Why would I give up Hobson and not you?"

"I don't know." Ellie exhaled deeply and stepped inside. "Someone at the government has been after us from the moment we went to City Hall. Maybe they heard we came here. Found you. Made threats."

Nora had just closed the door and now looked regretful she'd let them in at all. "I'm sorry your friend's been taken, but I've done all I can. You can't blame me for not wanting to get in any deeper."

Dee snorted. "You're going to just let them get away with it?"

"Dee," Ellie said.

"Don't 'Dee' me. This is ridiculous. The only reason Quinn got taken is because no one in town had the balls to stand up to the men in the black fedoras." She turned on Nora. "You think you're keeping yourself safe by not lifting a finger against the Kono. But as long as they're here, you'll
never
be safe."

"And if I help you, you're going to scrub them from the city?" Nora said. "Or are you going to find your boyfriend, wave goodbye to New York, and run home to the mountains?"

Dee flushed. "If we show they're not invincible, maybe others will stand up, too."

Nora tightened the belt of her robe. "If they decide not to kill him, they'll probably sell him to one of the farmers."

"Then we're back to square one," Ellie said. "Except now the Kono are looking for
us
, too."

"I don't know how much I can do. But I'll keep my ears open."

Ellie laughed bitterly. "Or we could turn ourselves in. Who knows, the Kono might reunite us."

Dee frowned at the curtains across the bay windows of the converted dining room. "What if we did?"

"Can't. They might shoot us. Or split us up and sell us to three different people." She rubbed her hand down her face. "We'll keep going door to door. I don't know what else we can do."

She knew it was a deeply stupid idea—one that had already cost them Hobson—but there were only so many farms in the park. If they acted quick and got lucky, they might stumble onto Quinn before the Kono hunted them down.

But it was time to open a new avenue. As they knocked on cabins, asking careful questions of the guarded residents, Ellie inquired not only about whether they'd recently acquired new help, but where she might go to buy it for herself. Most mentioned Kroger. One man recommended checking in at the Kono bar, a place on Amsterdam and 90-something.

"Maybe they haven't had time to sell Quinn yet," Dee said after they'd walked from the farmhouse to a snowed-in bike path along a pond that had partially iced over. "If the Kono are that powerful, I bet they make the Clavans sell exclusively to them."

Ellie nodded. "The Clavans could even be a franchise of the Kono. Or vice versa. Whatever this network is, it's spreading threads through the state like a cancer. When we get home, we'll have to make sure it can't take root in the lakes."

"As long as we're here, why don't we quit sniffing around the park and go straight to the Kono? If we pose as buyers, we could find Quinn
and
learn more about who they are."

"Won't work. Even if they don't have our exact description—and if the Talcotts gave them Hobson, I'm sure they gave up that, too—there can't be too many young women and their old mothers running around asking about slaves."

"You're not old," Dee said softly. "I think we should get off the road."

For a moment, Ellie thought that was some strange metaphor. Through the trees, she glimpsed four men walking down a path. They were a hundred yards away and following a curve in the trail that would spit them out in direct view of Ellie and Dee. Besides the leafless trees and a couple of scarred benches, there was no cover.

Ellie grabbed Dee's hand and pulled her to the banks of the pond. Reeds grew to unruly height in the riparian spaces. The water at the edges had frozen semi-opaque, layered with thin snow. Ellie led Dee onto the slick surface and crouched behind the thicket of brittle brown reeds. The ice creaked under the tread of her shoes.

Back at the trail, the men slogged through the snow, shoulders swaying. Each carried an assault rifle. They gazed into the trees and didn't speak. At the spot where Ellie and Dee had left the path, one man stopped and stared at the tracks in the snow. He reached into his pocket, removed the half-smoked stub of a cigarette, lit it, and exhaled voluminous smoke into the frigid air.

He jogged to catch up with the others. The men disappeared beyond a low hill. Ellie crawled on her hands and knees toward the bank. The ice popped. A crack traced itself across the surface, as if drawn by a ghost. She lowered herself and spread her limbs to distribute her weight. She was just a couple feet from shore, but the park's ponds were cut deep at the edges. And a brief plunge risked hypothermia.

"Go on," she said to Dee. "Slowly."

Dee's mouth was an O of stress. She army-crawled into the reeds, then rolled into the snow. Ellie followed. The ice creaked but held. On the bank, she stood hesitantly, wary for any sight of the men, then brushed off the snow and shivered.

"Were they looking for us?" Dee said.

"Don't know," Ellie said. "But it might behoove us to call it a day."

It was only another hour till dusk. She was cold and wet, and after hiding on the ice, her palms and knees had gone numb. She headed dead east out of the park and continued to Madison, putting some buildings between them and the Kono-roamed fields, then headed north toward their apartment.

Back "home," they stripped off their wet clothes. Ellie had walked a hole in one of her socks. She wadded it up and flung it in the bin they'd set up in the corner of the front room. She was down to just two decent pairs; the skin on her toes was soggy and white and one of her old blisters had sloughed off, showing tender pink skin. The apartment had socks, but they were white Hanes athletics, thin and flimsy. Should go search the other apartments. She knew that. But the energy wasn't there.

She wrenched apart a loaf of bread and handed half to Dee. They had no way to warm it and no butter. They sprinkled salt and poultry spices on it instead. It took a long time to chew; Ellie had to soften each bite with saliva before swallowing. After the sun went down, they moved to the back room, which was the only one without windows, and lit candles Ellie had taken from a Bed, Bath, & Beyond. They were peach-scented.

"I figure we've searched about half the park," Ellie said. "Could finish it in another couple days."

"If the Kono don't grab us first," Dee said.

"We could back off for now. Let things cool down, then pick up again after New Year's."

Dee's jaw was planted on her knees and when she spoke the rest of her head flapped strangely. "What if we just went home?"

"For the time being?" Ellie said. "Or..?"

"For the winter. If we come back after the snow melts, we can bring a wagon. All the food we need. No more stupid wet socks."

She gazed at the flickering pink-orange candle. "Do you want my opinion as your mother? Or as an investigator?"

"I don't think Quinn and the sheriff need a mother."

"Then here's the deal. If we leave, there's a good chance we'll never come back."

Chin planted on her knee, Dee rocked her head to the side. "Why wouldn't we?"

"Imagine us four months from now, when the weather's not so bad. We'll be three hundred miles away at the lake. Sowing the fields. Planning how we can afford a cow or a pair of goats. It won't be easy to interrupt that for another trip back here."

"I think I'll be more interested in getting my fiancé back than a new goat."

Ellie shrugged one shoulder. "The point is you'll be removed from him in time and space. Psychologically, too. We'll be mired in our regular routines. Pulling ourselves away from that will take motivation and effort."

"I'm not going to give up after four months! I've spent longer than that looking for my favorite pair of jeans."

"Then how long until you
do
give up?"

Dee's face scrunched in disgust. "Never."

"Really? Next winter, you'll be back down here? What about five years from now? When you turn thirty, and it's been more than ten years since the last time you saw Quinn, you're still going to be interrogating park-farmers who answer the door with a shotgun? You'll never look at another man again? That's how you want to spend your life?"

Dee blinked, knocking tears down her cheeks. "Why are you saying this?"

Ellie lowered her voice. "Because your life will move on. Sooner or later, once the guilt of the idea has faded, everyone stops searching. So when you talk about going home for now, I want you to be very, very clear about the decision you're making. Do you want to keep searching? Or do you want permission to stop?"

"I want to find him," Dee said. "But I don't want to lose anyone else."

"That's the other factor."

"Then it all comes down to the leads, doesn't it? So long as we have a good one, we keep looking. But if they dry up, staying here means risking ourselves with no plausible hope of success."

"That would be my decision-making process." Ellie aimed a small smile at the peach-scented candles. "But there are those who would consider me a cold hard bitch."

"It makes sense." Dee rocked forward and back, chin on her knee, gazing across the dim room. "But if we finish the park and still haven't found them, I'm not sure I'll be ready to leave."

"Not everything you do has to make sense. Just understand when you're not so you can snap back to reality if things get rough."

Dee didn't say more. Ellie went to the windows overlooking the park. She had tried to keep herself focused on the narrow edge of their search, on the actual locating of first Quinn and now the sheriff, but Dee had veered onto ground that had been neglected for too long. A search was only useful so long as it was moving forward. It was never easy to quantify these things, and a personal matter was leagues different than a professional one, but if she'd been handed this case to view through the prism of the DAA, she would be on the verge of calling it off.

She might give her agents the leash to continue a canvass of the park. But with the Kono on their heels, no hard proof the original subject was in the city, and the loss of an agent during the course of the investigation, the leash would end there. She would cut their losses, pull back, and engage more passive, low-risk methods. Hire a local such as Nora Ryan to keep an eye out for Quinn while she and Dee resumed their lives at Saranac Lake. Maybe pay another visit to Kroger and let him know they'd pay handsomely for a very specific ALP.

It was never easy to admit defeat. But Ellie didn't take such things personally. The world was too big and messy to control its every corner. In another day or two, when they wrapped up the park, she would propose they pull back. Dee's thinking was already halfway there. It wouldn't take much to prompt her to the right decision.

She slept through the night. They ate and dressed and hiked into the park. Dee was quiet. Ellie didn't push her. The day before, she'd focused the canvass around Turtle Pond, hoping that someone had witnessed the sheriff being marched away, but that had been a bust. Today, she took them northward, where winter wheat grew under softball backstops and the palatial Met rested on the eastern border.

She heard the first shots while she stood in the dirt in front of a cabin door. Nothing too alarming. They were at least a half mile south, and gunfire wasn't exactly a rarity on the island. She sighed inwardly and knocked again. Half the residents never answered, either because the homes were abandoned or they had no interest in whatever Ellie was peddling. She hadn't been keeping track of which homeowners had actually come to the door. It wasn't impossible that Quinn was being kept in one of the shacks they'd already visited.

After a third try, she walked across the converted softball field to the next cabin over. More shots erupted, still distant and southward. Ellie turned for a look. To the southwest, black smoke boiled from the trees. Six shots counted off one after another.