Wake to Darkness (16 page)

I shut off the machine and brushed the snow off my clothes. I swore I could still feel the motor’s vibration right to my bones.

The other sleds were already lined up in front of the shack. There was a big, fluffy, snowy wreath on the Shack’s red door that hadn’t been there before. It gave me a chill at first, making me think of the wreath that had magically appeared on our cabin door with that nastygram angel attached. But Mason knew the minute I went stiff, and apparently knew why. He put a hand on my shoulder and then pointed at the lodge a few yards away, where brightly gleaming outdoor lights cut through the snow to reveal that every door bore a matching wreath. It was fine.

I sent him a silent thanks with my eyes, and he nodded a you’re welcome.

We went inside.

Finnegan had arrived before us and was alone at his desk, looking worried. I didn’t see anyone else.

“Where’s the team?” Mason asked.

“I sent ’em to get some dinner. There’s no way they can get home in this, so they’re gonna have to bunk here tonight. We have a barracks for that, though.” He sighed in exhaustion. “I take it you didn’t find anything.”

“No.” Mason sighed, too, setting his walkie-talkie on the desk. I set mine next to it. “I think it’s time we call the police,” he said.

“I already have, my friend. Unfortunately, I waited a wee bit too long.” As Mason frowned, Finnegan nodded at the computer monitor on his desk.

We both moved around so we could see the weather site’s radar screen tracking the monster-sized storm. He poked a finger at its westernmost edge and said, “This is us. The wind changed, folks. There’s a major blizzard heading right for us. What we’ve had today was just the leading edge.”

“Holy shit,” I muttered.

“State police will be out first thing in the morning. They’re advising us to call off the search until then, for fear we’ll lose someone else. Not that we could do much in the dark anyway. We’re in for seventy-mile-an-hour gusts, starting within the next couple of hours. It’s gonna be a helluva night.”

I closed my eyes. “If he’s out there, he’ll be dead by morning.”

Mason looked at me, and I read his thoughts clearly.
If he’s the killer, then let him freeze. And if he’s not, then he’s probably already dead.

The Security Shack door opened and Cait walked in.

“You want to tell me why you shut down the lifts in the middle of the afternoon?”

“The storm—”

“Is bad. Terrible. Far worse than predicted. But it wasn’t when you made the call. We’ve left them open through far worse than what was happening at that point.”

Finn looked at Mason. So did Cait.

“Spit it out, then,” she said. “What’s going on with this missing guest? And why is there a detective involved?”

Finnegan gestured to Mason as if to give him the floor. Mason took a deep breath, looked at me. I nodded. It had to come out. It was serving nobody to keep this thing secret, not now.

So he told them a version of the truth, just the bare basics. That the man he’d been tracking was a killer. That he’d taken precautions not to tell anyone where he was going for his vacation, because that was his habit due to the nature of his job, and that now he was afraid the killer might have found out and followed him here. Nothing else. By the time he finished, Cait had sunk down into a chair as if her bones had melted.

“It seems odd to me,” Cait said, “that the killer might be chasing the cop instead of the other way around.” She shifted her intelligent green eyes from Mason to Finn and back again. “Are you sure there’s not more to this?”

“Nothing I’m at liberty to divulge. I’m sorry, Ms. Cole.”

She gave him a steely-eyed stare. “This lodge is my life, Detective Brown. If it wasn’t for the weather, I’d throw you out. ”

“I wouldn’t blame you,” I said. “I’d do the same.”

That seemed to take the edge off her fury just a bit. She said, “You’ll want to leave your Jeep in the parking lot for the night. You’ll never make it back to the cabin in this storm. Take a pair of snowmobiles back with you in case you need them.” Then she left the shack to tend to her guests, while I hoped like hell we didn’t end up ruining her business.

* * *

Finnegan fired up a large vehicle that ran on tracks like a tank, which he called the Abominable, to transport the rest of the family back to our cabin, and Mason and I took snowmobiles, as Cait had instructed. Rosie and Finn himself both rode along in the Abominable with Marie, Jeremy, Josh and Misty, to keep them safe.

Mason and I rode on either side of the road, just like we had before, headlights on, searching through the falling snow for signs of Alan Douglas. But just like before, we didn’t find anything. Truthfully, in the full darkness and snowfall, I didn’t think we would have seen him unless we ran over him. Rosie said good-night at the front door, started to turn to go, then turned back again, pulling a familiar zipper bag from his coat pocket and handing it to Mason. “You may as well hold on to this, pal. FedEx never made it this morning, due to the storm.”

The eyeless angel, in her little white box, lay inside that bag. Just seeing it there gave me a chill.

Mason pocketed it with a worried look my way. Then Rosie got back aboard the Abominable and it started back to the lodge.

Sighing, I walked up the front steps to open the door, switched on the lights and was promptly bashed in the shins by the hard head of a little blind bulldog. I yelped. She backed up and hit me again.

“All right, all right. I know, you’ve been neglected all day. Let me get your leash—”

But there was no keeping her. She weaved and dodged and bounced between incoming feet and down the steps while I swore, yanked the leash from the hook on the wall and went charging back outside after her.

“Rachel!” Mason shouted.

“She’s gotta go bad to be this speedy in a strange place! I don’t have a choice here!” I slammed the door behind me.

“I know you must be about bursting, Myrt. But dammit, wait up!”

She was bounding around the cabin at a dead run, her short legs throwing snow behind her and her broad chest acting like a plow. You would have thought she could see where she was going, for God’s sake. I darted after her, leash in hand, wishing I had a flashlight. “I said I was sorry. It was an emergency.” I’d made it to the back of the house, but Myrt wasn’t there. Her trail led into the woods behind the cabin. The very
dark
woods behind the cabin.

I didn’t miss a beat going after her, even though my brain was finally blasting warnings into my ears.
It’s dark, you’re alone, there’s a killer on the loose who wants to gouge out your eyes and you’re a dumb shit if you take another step, Rachel de Luca.

I stopped walking for one brief second. Because there was less snow in the woods her trail was no longer obvious. It was also darker than a dungeon, and I could barely see my hand in front of my face.

And then my heart, normally the strong, silent type, urged me on.
She’s your dog, she trusts you implicitly and she’s fucking
blind,
you coldhearted bitch. Move your ass and find her before something awful happens. Besides, you have a gun stuffed in your coat pocket if you need it. And Mason will come chasing us down the minute he makes sure everyone in the house is safe and sound.

I started moving my ass, whisper-shouting, “Myrtle! Where the fuck are you, you little shithead?” I knew it was stupid, because if you’re going to whisper, it shouldn’t be at the loudest volume you can manage. I doubted any serial killer would have a lick of trouble hearing me in the deep, silent pines. “Myrtle!”

“Snarf!” said Myrtle.

She sounded far away, but the pines probably muffled sound, right? “Myrt!” I didn’t bother whispering this time. “Myrtle, come on, girl!” As I moved in the direction I thought her bark had come from, I had a brainstorm, yanked my cell phone from the depths of my pants pocket and opened the flashlight app, sighing in relief at the pathetic steam of light it emitted and aiming it ahead of me. It wasn’t the app’s fault it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot of good. It was made for finding your keys on the floor of your car, not maneuvering through a pine forest in a blizzard on the darkest night since the moment before the Big Bang.

“Myrtle?”

I heard a series of barks that were so deep and menacing that I thought she’d started up a range war with some other dog. But as I followed my cell phone beam closer, I knew that was her bark. I’d just never heard it that way before.

Something was wrong. I stuffed the leash into my pocket and pulled out the gun.

I heard Mason calling my name, and he sounded so far away that I got a cold chill up my spine. I couldn’t have walked that far. I told myself it was the snow and the pines making him sound so distant.

But then I pushed through some interlocking pine tree boughs and saw my dog crouched as low as she could crouch and barking up a storm at a lump in the snow.

“Oh, shit.”

I aimed the light at the lump that wasn’t a lump at all. It was a body. It was Alan Douglas’s body, lying beneath the sheltering arms of the pines. The snow around it was stained dark with his blood, and I knew without checking that it was probably missing a liver.

I tucked the cell phone back into my pocket, but kept the gun in one hand as I ran to Myrtle and wrapped both arms around her, picking her up as she wriggled and fought me. She was agitated. She couldn’t see, but she could smell. Death. Blood. Human liver. I’m sure she smelled every bit of it, and probably the stench of the killer, as well.

Is he still out here?

I backed away from the body and the blood, and, turning, started moving as fast as humanly possible back through the pines toward the cabin. I didn’t know how I would make use of the damn gun while carrying the dog. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure I was actually going toward the cabin.

“Rachel?”

“Mason! Out here! Hurry!” My breath was making steam clouds in front of my face, and I could only see them because they were a lighter shade than the darkness. Then I heard him, his footsteps strong and fast, his body brushing against the needled limbs, releasing their scent even more strongly. Finally I saw a light bobbing closer. “Over here,” I said.

And then he was right there.

“You okay? What happened? What were you thinking, coming out here alone?”

“Myrt ran off,” I said. “I followed her before I thought better of it. And then what was I gonna do, abandon her?”

He sighed, and rubbed the little dog’s face. “She okay?”

“She’s in much better shape than Marie’s new boyfriend is.”

He looked at me. His flashlight was pointed away, but it threw enough light that I could see his face, and the expression it wore was saying,
Don’t tell me what you’re about to tell me.

“You found him, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said. “Myrtle did.”

* * *

I remembered—somewhat belatedly, I know—that I had a leash in my coat pocket. So I put Myrtle down and snapped it on. Then she and I led Mason back to the spot where Myrt had found the body. I stood back while he went closer, flashlight in hand. I tried not to follow the beam of light as he aimed it at the dead man. But I followed it anyway. I saw the way the new snow had fallen over the pool of blood, so the deep black-cherry color glistened and sparkled. I saw the layer of snow coating the pale face and gaping mouth and wide-open eyes, sort of shrunken now. I saw that his clothes were mostly snow-covered, but where they weren’t, they were so bloody you couldn’t tell what color they were. They’d been cut open up the front, coat, shirt and all. There was a big dark gash under his rib cage, where his liver had probably been once. Other parts were spilling through the chasm someone had left in the poor man.

“He’s been here a while,” Mason said. “Probably killed last night. Lay here all day while we were out searching everywhere else.” He aimed the beam at the area around the body, making ever-widening sweeps. He found a glove a few feet away. And something else, something that caught the light and gleamed. It was partially covered in snow, but I thought it was a pocket knife. And near it, a syringe in the snow.

“Son of a bitch, he was alive, just like the others,” I said softly. “This sick bastard.”

Mason nodded, crouching near the syringe. “Why didn’t you have a vision this time?” he asked me.

“I’ve been wondering about that since he went missing. I think it’s because I didn’t sleep. This time I’m only getting them as dreams. And I never slept last night. You and I were... And then Marie came in and—”

He rose to his feet and came toward me, and I frowned, because the pocket knife that had been in the snow was no longer there.

“What are you doing, Mason?”

He got to where I was, took my arm and headed back the way we’d come, Myrt hustling along beside us, eager to be done with this disturbing walk. “Taking you back to the cabin. It’s not safe out here.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“No?” He kept walking.

“Mason.” I jerked free of his grip and planted my feet. “What did you just pick up out of the snow?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“The hell you don’t. I saw it. What is it, Mason?” I reached for his coat pocket, and he jerked away hard, then stood staring at me.

“You’re gonna
lie
to me now? You’re gonna start keeping secrets
now,
Mason? When it’s
my
fucking eyes he’s after? What do you have in your pocket? Tell me right now, or I swear to God I’m going back to that cabin, packing my shit and heading home, storm or no storm.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Okay. Okay.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a jackknife with a handle that was apparently made of real antler, what kind I couldn’t have said. There were initials engraved into the bone. I frowned, reached for my phone, and aimed the flashlight app at it. J.B.

J.B.

And then it hit me and my eyes must have gone as big as the humongous snowflakes falling between us.