Snowblind (26 page)

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow she would go back to the only place she had ever really thought of as home.

Harley Talbot pulled his cruiser into Jake Schapiro’s driveway shortly after three
P.M.
on Monday. The shadows of the towering pines and old oak and birch trees on the property had already grown long. It had been a beautiful day, the ground covered with pure white snow and the sky blue and bright, but the winter days were always ephemeral. Harley had no quarrel with the night—he had gone through several nocturnal periods—but on those abbreviated winter afternoons when the color began to seep from the land so early, he always felt cheated.

Who are you kidding?
he thought as he put the cruiser in Park and killed the engine.
It’s not the shortness of the day getting under your skin.

Night falling meant the chief would halt the search for Zachary Stroud until morning—more than twelve hours, during which anything might happen to the boy, if he was still alive, out there somewhere. Harley had been with the search team all day, and now he had to pull a regular shift as well. Someone had to be out patrolling Coventry, especially at night.

As he climbed out of the car, relieved to be able to stretch his long legs, he glanced at the house and arched an eyebrow. In the fading light and the long shadows, Jake’s house looked abandoned. The shades had been drawn on every window.

“What the hell?” Harley muttered, dropping his hand to his sidearm and undoing the holster snap.

A quick survey of the property revealed nothing out of place. Jake’s car sat in the driveway, nose up close to the door of the garage, which was too cluttered to serves its intended purpose. There were no tire tracks in the snow that still framed the vehicle’s spot on the driveway—Jake hadn’t driven anywhere since the storm had ended. Harley glanced into the car and then went up the front walk. With the placement of the house and the trees, the walkway didn’t get much sun during the day and still bore a crust of ice that cracked underfoot.

Up close, Harley saw a ridge of light around the shades on the living room windows to his left. The sidelights around the front door had gauzy curtains over them but he tried to get a glimpse inside, to no avail.

He rang the doorbell, then rapped loudly on the door, the sound echoing off the snow and trees. Seconds ticked past. Normally he would have assumed that Jake had gone for a walk with his camera to take some pictures but the oddity of the drawn shades disturbed him, along with the fact that he had texted Jake half-a-dozen times today and left him two voice mails without getting any reply. He had dropped by to say hello, hoping to see if Jake was up for a late-night movie and Atomic Wings, a tiny worry in the back of his mind thanks to Jake’s radio silence.

Now his worry had grown.

“Jake!” he called, knocking harder. “You home? Open the door, man.”

You’re overreacting, Harley.

Maybe he was, but he had only seen all the shades drawn on a house like this once before—drawn all the way down, so that nobody could get a look inside—and that had been at the LaValle murder house. The previous summer, a twenty-year-old college kid named Martin LaValle had come home from a night of partying with friends, taken his father’s shotgun, and murdered his little sister in her bed. When his parents had come running, woken by the gunshot, he had blown them all over the faded floral wallpaper in the hall.

Harley didn’t like those drawn shades.

“Jake, answer the door, goddammit!” he snapped, slapping his palm against the wood, shaking the door in its frame.

Fuck it.

He tried the knob but found the door locked. After staring at it for a moment, as if his scrutiny alone might open it, he rang the bell one last time and then pressed his ear to the wood, listening to it echo inside and hoping to hear movement. It seemed to Harley that he did hear something, a kind of rustle or whisper.

He flinched away from the thunk of the dead bolt being drawn back.

“Jake?”

The door opened ten or twelve inches and Jake Schapiro’s face appeared in the gap, unshaven and smiling uneasily. He looked unkempt, hair mussed, wearing a T-shirt and old, baggy jeans. The way he stood reminded Harley of the times he’d come back to his dorm room in college only to have his roommate shoo him away because he had a girl in his bed.

“Hey,” Jake said. “Sorry I haven’t gotten back. I’m in the middle of a project. You know how I get.”

Harley stared at him. “What kind of project?”

“Finishing the back bedroom upstairs. Gonna make it a library, I think.”

“Cool,” Harley replied.

He tilted his head to get a look inside the house but Jake shifted his body and narrowed the gap a little and there could be no question that he did not want Harley to see within.

“Look, I—”

“I have some time tomorrow,” Harley interrupted. “I could give you a hand.”

“No, no, that’s okay. It’s been weighing on me, y’know? All the stuff I planned to do to fix the place up that I’ve just never gotten around to. I’m determined now, and I’d kind of like to accomplish that myself. No offense.”

Harley nodded, taking a step back. “None taken.”

As Jake’s friend, he wanted to force the issue, to give the door a shove. As a police officer, there were rules about entering a private residence uninvited and without a warrant.

Warrant? What are you thinking, that he’s got somebody tied up in there?

Harley exhaled, smiling at himself. Yes, Jake had gone all twitchy for some reason. Maybe he did have a girl inside and just wanted Harley to get the hell away from there so he could close the deal. Or maybe the story about the home improvements was the truth; Jake had an artist’s ability to immerse himself in something and forget that the rest of the world existed. Harley had seen that part of him before.

“Tell me the truth,” he said. “You got a girl in there?”

Jake rolled his eyes, his grin clearly forced. “I wish. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow, okay? We need a night out.”

“Atomic Wings,” Harley said.

Jake brightened. “Exactly!”

“Tomorrow, then.”

Harley began to turn to go. As he did, he saw Jake edge back from the door. In the moment before it closed, Harley spotted something in his right hand—a fan of what appeared to be playing cards, although the yellow edges of the cards niggled at his memory, as if he ought to have recognized the design. Had they had illustrations on them? Harley thought they had.

Whomever Jake had been playing cards with, he clearly didn’t want Harley to know about it.
Strip poker?
Always a possibility. Maybe the girl had been half naked already, sitting in the living room and waiting for him to depart. Harley figured it had to be someone he knew or Jake would’ve admitted he had someone inside.

You dog,
Harley thought, smiling as it all began to make sense to him.

He climbed into his cruiser and started it up, trying to figure out whom Jake might be hooking up with. Someone from the ME’s office, maybe, or a crime-scene tech. Though given the effort Jake had made to keep him out, Harley wondered if maybe it was actually one of the women on the Coventry PD. There were several Harley wouldn’t have minded seeing out of their uniforms.

Tomorrow he would pin Jake down.

Curiosity killing him, Harley backed out of the driveway and headed toward Carpenter Road, turning on his headlights as the twilight deepened around him.

FOURTEEN

The surface of Kenoza Lake had iced over by the turn of the year and wouldn’t melt for another month at least. The weekend’s snowstorm had left inches of fresh snow on top of the ice, and as the sun slid down behind the tops of the trees, the snowmobile tracks left behind that day looked like deep scars, carved in shadow.

“Where the hell are we going?” Baxter asked, glancing back at the small public lot in the lakeside park.

There were four cars there, one of them an old Chevy Monte Carlo that Doug had been restoring and one an Audi that he figured Franco had borrowed without permission from an unsuspecting customer at Harpwell’s Garage. Doug had arrived first and waited in his car, chewing gum to fight the urge to smoke—a habit he’d given up two years before. He had been early on purpose and instantly regretted it, but he sat and watched the sun drift lower in the sky, people returning to their cars, couples and dog owners who’d been walking in the woods around the lake.

Franco had shown up ten minutes late with Baxter in the passenger seat. But now they were all here, and it felt like the beginning of something. Doug could feel the tension in the air and wasn’t sure if it was the pressure pushing ahead of the huge storm on the way or just the animosity burning off Baxter.

Doug kept walking, leading the way along a path that vanished into the thick woods around the lake. When they plunged into the trees, the last of the daylight abandoned them, as if night had abruptly conquered the sun.

“I asked you where we’re going,” Baxter said, an edge of danger and just a trace of nerves in his voice.

“Take a breath, man,” Doug said. He pulled a flashlight from his coat and clicked it on, throwing a strong, bright splash of illumination onto the path ahead.

Franco gave Doug a hard shove and he stumbled a bit, caught his toe on a rock jutting from the path, and nearly fell. Doug spun around and shone the flashlight in Franco’s face, Baxter like an angry ghost hovering just outside their pool of light.

“What?” Franco demanded, grinning, eyes lit up with the violence that his kind of man always used to bludgeon the unknown.

Doug knew that his growing assertiveness was making Franco nervous and didn’t give a damn.

“You’ve got a decision to make,” Doug said, shining his light first on Franco and then on Baxter. “Are you going to shoot me? I’m not armed, boys. You want to put a bullet in me and leave me for the dogs back here, then do it.”

Franco looked like he might.

Doug glanced at Baxter, whose eyes were calmer. Baxter had his left hand stuffed in his jacket pocket but the right hand hung free, open but poised, ready to grab the gun that Doug had seen him jam into his rear waistband when he got out of the borrowed Audi back in the lot.

“Ease up, D,” Baxter said. He gave a little sniff of amusement as if to suggest he was above it all. “If you’re gonna be this wound up, man, there’s no point in doing this job. Being with you is gonna be like walking through a mine field. We’re gonna be trying not to get arrested; we can’t be worrying about whether or not we put a foot wrong and you go off.”

Doug nodded slowly, lowering the flashlight. All their faces were in shadow, now. The slivers of sky visible through the branches overhead had turned to indigo, except to the west, where striations of pink and orange were visible but fading fast.

“Understood. But I can’t be worried about you two, either,” he said, glancing pointedly at Franco. “This is huge for me. For all of us. Huge risks along with huge rewards if we don’t fuck it up. I have a plan. I’m going to explain that plan to you. If you’re with me—”

“With you?” Franco sneered.

Baxter shot him a hard look. “Shut it.”

“If you’re with me,” Doug went on, focusing on Baxter, who had been transformed by the deepening darkness into a creature of shadows, “then we do this thing together on Wednesday night. I’ve spent hours thinking about the angles of this thing, all the ways it could go wrong, and if we have the balls and a little luck, we’ll all be happy as pigs in shit come Thursday morning. On the other hand, if you don’t like my plan then you’re welcome to go your own way.”

Baxter stepped nearer to him, close enough that the glow from the flashlight, which Doug still held pointed at the ground, gave strange contours to his face.

“You’re saying we don’t like your plan then you’re out?”

“That’s the way it’s gotta be.”

“You think you know this shit better than me?” Baxter said, eyes narrowing. “You’re an amateur. You know how many houses I’ve robbed?”

Doug did not flinch. Instead, he thought of Cherie and of Angie, and of the new life he wanted for himself. The life he deserved.

“You know how many times I’ve been in prison?” he asked, chin high, close enough to smell the garlic on Baxter’s breath. “None.”

Franco snorted. “Motherfucker can’t be serious.”

Baxter tilted his head. Doug felt the violence radiating from him like body heat. The last color in the sky drained away as they stared at each other and now Franco might as well not have been there at all. In the reflected glow of the flashlight, it was just the two of them.

“I have a plan,” Doug repeated. “Do you want to hear it?”

Baxter gave a slow nod. “All right. Enlighten us.”

Doug turned away, shining the flashlight on the path ahead. “Follow me.”

He thought Franco might bitch a little more but it turned out that Baxter had the leash on his attack dog a little tighter than Doug had realized, because Franco didn’t say a word as Doug led them along the snowy path. The warmth of the day had softened the snow but as they trudged through deeper woods, following a path that branched off to the right—away from the lake—the icy crust crunched underfoot.

After a minute or two without a word among them, Doug used the flashlight to pick out an even narrower path, again on the right. They had to duck beneath some low branches to follow it.

“This better be good,” Franco said.

Doug kept walking. When the path began to lighten ahead he turned off the flashlight and a moment later they emerged from the woods at the bottom of a snowy hill. An old house sprawled above them, its roofline painted darker by the light of the early-evening moon. The house was dark except for a single, small window that might have been the kitchen.

He turned to face his companions. His fellow thieves.

“I don’t think you knew her, Bax, but back in high school there was this girl in my class named Tallie Hawes. Short for Natalie. Cute girl who never met a douche bag she didn’t like. Married Andy Porter, who I hated back then and who lived up to all of my expectations for him. Rich, arrogant, executive for some bank or finance company or whatever.”