The Botanist

The Botanist

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright ©
2015 by L.K. Hill

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First Paperback Edition:
April 2015

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THIS TITLE IS ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hill, L. K.
 The Botanist : a novel / L. K. Hill. — First Paperback Edition.
      pages ; cm
 ISBN 978-1-63163-010-1 (paperback)
 I. Title.
 PS3608.I4346B68 2015
 813’.6—dc23

                                                           2014044353

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my big sister, Erica, who’s been my companion for most of our lives and made me love law enforcement and everything surrounding it. Love you, Sis!

The Botanist

L.K. Hill

Provo, Utah

Chapter 1

The flashing red and blue lights in Alex Thompson’s rear view mirror were not the first indication of trouble. She’d sensed something amiss before, as the sun disappeared and the blue of the sky siphoned away after it, but she was too caught up in her own crisis to pay attention. Where had he come from? He couldn’t have been following, or she’d have seen him sooner. She’d been alone for hours, isolated with her thoughts and the cool easterly wind on this potholed, prolapsed stretch of highway.

She glanced down and found exactly what she’d expected: she wasn’t speeding, unless the limit had changed and she hadn’t known it; it had been seventy-five for the past hundred miles. Turning on her signal, and wiping her tear-streaked face, she pulled to the right.

As she decelerated, she passed a dark mound, her headlights glaring briefly over the metal plaque on the front. One of those historical monuments, no doubt—the kind that were out in the middle of nowhere, where no one saw them or remembered what they stood for. It reminded Alex how far she was from civilization.

The road stretched out before her, a gray ribbon through the desert. As darkness edged in, the highway had grown darker, too—a black stripe on a blacker animal. It was eleven o’clock, and the light was long gone.

Only what could be seen in the field of her headlights was visible. If she gazed to the right or left, she could just make out the tips of the looming mountains in the distance, blocking out the stars, but beyond that it was just her and the squad car.

A soft alarm bell clanged inside her head. Her parents could probably guess where she’d gone, but she hadn’t actually told anyone. She’d just taken off.

As soon as the door of the squad car opened, something clenched down tight in Alex’s stomach, but she didn’t know why. Then he was standing next to the window. It was already down, and the cop stayed slightly behind her so she couldn’t look directly at him.

“License and registration.” His voice was a scratchy whisper. It sent chills down her spine. She wondered why she felt fear. It was just a cop.

Trying not to sniffle, Alex pulled her driver’s license and Conceal and Carry Weapons Permit from her wallet, and reached across the seat to get the registration from the glove compartment. She handed them to Officer Raspy with the CCWP on top, then craned her neck around, trying to get a better look at him.

He was tall—more than six feet, she was sure. He had a thick mustache with some kind of dark line under it, as though someone had drawn on his face with a ballpoint pen. The line stretched down over his lips and part of his chin. His hair was dark, but she couldn’t see much beyond that. The spotlight from his car made him look washed out, and his eyes were in shadow. His police uniform was filthy, and he looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks.

Welcome to Hickville,
she thought.

He looked at what she’d given him, and his eyebrows went down.

“What’s this?”

She didn’t answer. Once he read it, he’d know what it was. It was the reason it was legal for her dad to keep the loaded nine-mil under the seat. After a moment, he thrust the permit back at her.

“I don’t need that.”

A little confused, Alex took the permit back and tucked it into her purse.

“May I ask what the problem is, officer? I don’t think I was speeding.”

She felt his eyes on her, and the sense of danger intensified. It was a long time before he made any reply.

“Where’d you get that bracelet?”

She wished he would stop whispering. “What?”

Immediately there was a flashlight beam in her eyes.

“It’s sweet. Just wondered where ya got it.” His voice was almost serpentine.

Alex looked at the silver bracelet, covered with magnolia charms, on her left wrist. She hadn’t thought of the bracelet or its significance when she ran out of her parents’ home up north several hours earlier.

“M-my mother gave it to me.”

“Do you know where she got it?”

“No. It was a gift.”

A long pause followed, then his raspy whisper reached her ears. “Cordelia.”

“I’m sorry?”

The cop stepped closer to her window and every fiber of her body screamed at her to get out of there, but what was she to do? Run from a cop? She’d never been in trouble with the law before. Deciding her nerves were due to what she’d learned this morning, she told herself to breathe and willed the cop to just give her the ticket and let her go.

He leaned his forearms on the window, his face close to her ear. His breath was acrid, and, even from the corner of her eye, she could tell his teeth were cornbread yellow.

“And where’s a pretty young girl like you headed this time of night?”

Something told her to lie. She glanced at the GPS. She’d turned off the audio, but kept the map up for reference. The next town she would drive through was seventy-five miles away; it was called Mt. Dessicate.

“Mt. Dessicate. I’m meeting my . . . someone there.”

She was going to say husband, but she choked on the lie. Did her license say she was single? In her fear, she couldn’t remember whether marital status was printed on driver’s licenses. She’d never been a good liar anyway. As though reading her thoughts, he chuckled softly—a hoarse, grating sound—before answering.

“You don’t look old enough to be married. Who ya meetin’?”

“M-my boyfriend. I’ve been driving a long time, and he’s meeting me there so we can drive the rest of the way together.”

The cop sighed, and then was silent for a long time.

Alex clutched the steering wheel with white knuckles to keep her hands from shaking. The minutes on the car’s digital clock changed twice before he moved.

He stepped backward—not toward his own car, but out from hers, backing up until he stood in the middle of the road. He looked in the direction she was headed, then back the way she had come, as though debating with himself about something.

When he stalked back toward her, hiking boots thudding on the ancient pavement, it took every ounce of self-control she had to not throw the car into drive and slam her foot down on the gas.

“You weren’t speeding,” he finally whispered. “I’m looking for two suspects who might be passing this way, and your car matches the description of theirs.”

Alex’s eyebrows jumped. “Really?”

“The outside does. The inner upholstery of theirs is red leather. He played the flashlight over her back seat. “And we’re looking for two men.
You
can go.”

He practically threw her license and registration papers back at her and, without another word, swaggered back to his cruiser.

Under the pretense of adjusting her mirror, Alex tried to get a better look at him. He was tall, husky, and walked with a slight gimp. When his silhouette was swallowed by the blinding spotlight, Alex adjusted her mirror for real and put on her left signal to pull out.

As distance opened up between herself and the squad car, she breathed easier. Maybe the situation hadn’t been odd at all; maybe it was just her nerves and the isolation of the open road.

The highway was relatively straight and flat in this part of the desert, so even after several miles, she still had a clear view of the cruiser’s bright—albeit smaller—headlights. Then, suddenly, they blinked out.

Another anomaly. Why would he turn off his lights? He hadn’t backed up or turned the car around. She would have been able to tell. He was still sitting where he’d parked behind her and had simply turned his lights off.

She supposed it made sense if he was waiting for two specific suspects to drive by—and perhaps that explained why she hadn’t seen him before he’d appeared behind her—but why hadn’t he repositioned his cruiser before turning off his lights? Was he just going to sit there, in that same position on the side of the road?

Alex shivered and hit her power lock, even though the doors hadn’t been unlocked since she left the house. As she drove on, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the cruiser was following, just far enough back to be cloaked by the darkness.

The sensation of being preyed upon perched in her chest. She eased her foot down on the accelerator until her speed gauge read well above eighty.

She didn’t care.

Miles
away, sitting high up in the mouth of a cave overlooking the desert, the Artist watched the civilian car be pulled over. He was too far away to tell the age of the driver or see if there were any passengers, but he didn’t need to. The details were irrelevant. It always ended the same way.

He sighed, running his hand through his thick hair. He was too young to have such a silver head, but this was exactly why he did.

For a while he tried closing his eyes, but it didn’t help. He could never escape the images. Eyes open or shut, asleep or awake, laughing or crying, he always saw them. There was nothing he could do, so he sat and watched and waited for the inevitable.

Then something happened that hadn’t happened in all the years he’d dwelt in this place. The civilian car pulled out onto the highway . . . and drove away.

The Artist jumped to his feet, moving as close to the mouth of the cave as his shackles would allow him to go. He watched the car until he couldn’t see the taillights anymore. Then his eyes went to the cruiser. It sat there for a long time. Then the lights winked out, and he couldn’t make it out anymore. Mudface had let the civilian go! What happened? Knowing he had just witnessed something monumental, and probably useful, the Artist sat awake at the cave’s mouth for a long time, searching the night sky for answers.

An
hour later Alex drove into the unassuming little town of Mt. Dessicate. It seemed modern enough, but was very small. Main Street was synonymous with the highway, and from one end of town, she could see the other end, where it became desert and open road again. It looked like the man-made structures came and went in under a mile. A sleepy passenger could blink and miss the town all together.

Originally, Alex had planned to stop here for the night, find a motel or inn to catch a few hours’ sleep before going on. She was exhausted, and earlier she’d wanted nothing more.

After being pulled over, her outlook had changed. Her adrenaline was still pumping and she didn’t think she could deal with the solitary shadows of a hotel room. The next town was nearly eighty miles away, but she didn’t feel remotely tired, so she opted to drive straight through Mt. Dessicate and keep going, letting the lingering fear spur her on.

Despite only covering a short stretch of highway, the town sprawled right and left, tapering off into residential areas and probably outlying farms after that. Several blocks off the highway, a well-lit sign announced the grand opening of Mt. Dessicate’s Walmart.

So, perhaps this wasn’t a complete hickville after all.

On her left she passed the only building on Main Street that still had lights on. It was nearly midnight and sleepy little towns like this generally didn’t stay awake past supper time. As she passed the building, she read the brick sign in front: Mt. Dessicate Police Station.

Then Alex did something she’d never find the logic for in later years: she made a U-turn. She had to report what had happened to someone. She didn’t know who, or why, or what she expected anyone to do about it, but she had to tell
someone.
It was too unsettling to keep to herself.

Pulling into the six-car lot, where two spaces were already in use, she parked and got out. The second she put all her weight on her feet, she nearly fell over. She’d been driving non-stop for nearly five hours. There was a miniature cooler belted into the passenger seat with food, so she wouldn’t have to stop in every other city, but she’d been too upset to eat or drink anything, so she hadn’t had to stop for bathroom breaks either. Her legs didn’t want to work.

She staggered into the tiny gift box of a police station, and was greeted by a professional atmosphere and a round, homely woman behind the front desk. She didn’t look pleased to see Alex.

“Can I help you?” It wasn’t a happy question.

“Yes. Thank you. I have something I’d like to report. Is there someone I can talk to?”

The woman looked pointedly at her watch and then up at the large, flat clock ticking loudly on the wall.

“Honey, you know what time it is?”

“Yes, but—”

“Detectives won’t be here until morning.”

“Okay, but I’m just passing through.
I
won’t be here in the morning. Can’t someone take my statement now?”

The woman pressed her lips together and sighed loudly. She put her head back and opened her generous mouth. “Oliver!”

From the back corner of the room, a head popped up from behind a cubicle. The woman stabbed the air over her shoulder with her pen.

“Go see him. He’ll do your report.”

Alex hesitated a moment before walking around the desk. “Through here?”

The woman waved a hand in the general direction of the man in the corner, but didn’t bother to look up from her paperwork again. Alex wove her way around several desks before coming to stand in front of the man.

With sandy blond hair and a baby face, he looked like he could be younger than her twenty-one years, but she knew you had to be at least twenty-one to become a cop, so obviously he was older than that. He might have been handsome if his face wasn’t screwed up into a grimace.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“She said you’d take my statement?”

He looked over her shoulder and yelled toward the front of the room.

“Really, Rose? I have eight hours of paper work that I have to get done in five. Can’t you do this?”

Rose’s voice drifted to Alex’s ears, muffled but understandable.

“Sorry, kid. You’re the rookie, so you get the crappy shifts. I’m off in ten and I’m
not
staying late again, so you get to help the young lady file a report.”

The man, whose nameplate read Officer Cody Oliver, sighed loudly, just as Rose had, and then grudgingly motioned to a chair next to the desk he was working at.

“Have a seat.”

She did, feeling like a total intruder.