Winter at the Door (20 page)

Then he got it, his dark eyes narrowing. “So when we get there, the shooter’s waiting. Maybe he heard radio traffic and that’s how he knew when to expect us. We get close, he attacks us, then kills the new hunting client and Nussbaum, too—”

He stopped. “But why? He’s got to know shooting cops is a good way to bring the hammer down.”

“Yeah, maybe. But what if no one found out? Way out there in the woods … Dylan, if he’d gotten both of us, we might not have been found for a long time.”

In the city it would be nearly impossible. But here where the trees outnumbered people …

“He gets my keys, he weighs down our bodies in the lake, he puts the kayaks back where they were and hides my vehicle. Maybe the other bodies, too. Presto, we’ve vanished without a trace.”

And just like that, anyone who’d seen a child or heard the story of one would be …

“One problem,” Dylan objected. “The original hunter. The cops looking for us would track him down and—”

From Nussbaum’s records, he meant; surely he kept some. But: “So what? He can’t lead them back to where he was when he saw that camp or whatever it was. He was lost, remember?”

She shook her head decisively. “And he doesn’t know anything about us at all. Case,” she finished, “closed.”

Dylan looked thoughtful. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe.” He pulled his phone out and punched numbers into it.

“Toby?” he said. “Yeah, it’s Hudson. Listen, the hunter who was at Nussbaum’s before yesterday’s shooting? I need to talk to him. You got names and numbers from a … What did Nussbaum have, a guest book, maybe? Yeah? You got that handy?”

He waited, pulling out a pad and scribbling on it. “Newton. Andrew Newton … Yeah, thanks,” he said, then punched in another number and asked for Nussbaum’s previous hunting client.

The one who hadn’t been shot, who’d left before … But then a frown creased his forehead. “Really. I’m so sorry. It happened when? I see.”

He glanced up at Lizzie, shook his head minutely, scowled at the phone again. “I’m sorry to hear that. My sympathies. Sorry to trouble you.”

“What happened?” she demanded when he hung up.

He grimaced. “Well, our guy has apparently gone from being the luckiest hunter on the planet to the unluckiest.”

He tucked the phone away. “Seems he flew out of Bangor to Teterboro, took a cab home, and got hit by a car outside of his apartment late last night, in Manhattan. Hit-and-run. The cops are looking but there were no witnesses.”

She couldn’t speak. Finally: “So she’s out there. Nicki’s out there in the woods, Dylan, he saw her and …”

Searchers
, she thought.
The warden service can help. Dogs, Border Patrol officers. We’ll put posters up at the deer-tagging stations
—

And she’d go out there. Had to. “Get Chevrier on the phone, will you?” she snapped. “Tell him I’m closing up this office for a little while, I’ve got to—”

Nicki
. Her throat closed convulsively.
Honey, I’m coming, I’ll make it up to you, I swear I will
.

But Dylan didn’t obey, instead seizing her shoulders to gaze down into her face. “Lizzie, it’s not that easy.”

She shoved him away. “Easy? What do I care? You think it’s been easy for her, all these years in who knows what kind of a mess?”

She rummaged in her bag.
Weapon, ammunition, phone
. All fine, but not enough. Before she left, she’d have to find out what else a person needed for a long trip into the—

“Lizzie.”
Dylan grabbed her again, this time wrapping his arms tightly around her so she couldn’t free herself.

“Listen to me, dammit. You—we—can’t just go charging out there. We still don’t know where she is, or even if it’s her for certain. And we don’t know who has her.”

Imprisoned in his embrace, fists clenched against his chest, she gasped for breath, so full of emotion and urgency that there seemed no room for air. “Let … me … go. I’ve got to—”

“Yes. You do. But not like this. You could get her killed, Lizzie, don’t you see that? You saw Nussbaum and the guy with him, and now the other hunter’s dead, too, just like we’d be if that weapon he was using had any kind of accuracy at distance.”

He held her more tightly. “What do you think, that was just a convenient accident, that hit-and-run, some kind of coincidence?”

She stopped struggling. “No.”
Of course it wasn’t, that was why she had to …
“No, I—”

He relaxed his arms. But he kept them around her, and to step away from him now seemed … well, it was too much to ask of herself, that was all. Just too much.

“This is no local yokel, Lizzie. Or if he is, he’s a yokel with some unusual connections. Now, it could’ve been a coincidence, the hit-and-run.”

“But you don’t think it was.”

He hesitated. Stranger things had happened and they both knew it. But then he shook his head.

“No. Or at any rate it’s not safe to assume that. Because it’s possible
that after the shooting, someone else got a look at that guest register of Nussbaum’s, too, and realized he’d made a mistake.”

And then made a phone call to New York, to someone who could correct it. Which of course implied knowing someone there who could and who would want to.

“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Dylan. “Because if we’re not wrong, we need a plan. We need to find out more, starting with exactly where this camp that the lost hunter saw is, how many people are there, how many weapons …”

She nodded again. He was right, of course. And she’d step away from him in a minute; she would. But for right now …

“I’ve always known I’d have to do this,” she whispered into his shoulder.

“Find her, no matter what. But I put it off, made excuses, I told myself she was probably dead,” she went on. “I told myself that and somehow the time went by until—”

Until I couldn’t stand it anymore
.

“I know. I knew back when we were together.” He moved her gently away from him, his hands on her shoulders. “You’re an open book to me, kiddo. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. And I’m on your side, whether you like it or not. Got it?”

She got it, and for a moment she was tempted yet again, remembering how it had been between them: everything she’d wanted and more.

Much more. “Oh,” she said, which was when Trey Washburn came through the door, head down, not seeing them until he was inside.

But then he did see, and he understood, too. “Sorry, I—”

Confusion and hurt clouded the big veterinarian’s gaze. “Lizzie, I just wanted to say I heard about the trouble at your place last night, wondered if there’s anything I can do to help.”

He glanced at Dylan, then at Lizzie again. “But I see you’ve got all the help you need,” he finished with a last, terribly communicative look at her.

Wordless. It didn’t need words, did it?

Way to go, Lizzie
, she thought.
Way to go
.

“So I guess I’ll be leaving now,” Washburn said evenly, and went out again, closing the door very firmly behind him.

Then Dylan spoke. “Lizzie? Look, Lizzie, I’m sorry if I—”

She whirled on him. “Shut up, Dylan, okay? That right there, what just happened? Him coming in? That was luck.”

Because Dylan was a heartbreaker; he’d done it before and if she let him, he’d … She stalked to her desk.

“Like a jumper getting yanked back off a ledge,” she went on cruelly, seeing him flinch.

“We might be working together—you’ve got connections I need so I don’t seem to have a lot of choice about that.”

Or about some other things, either
, her still fast-beating heart added wickedly.

She told it to shut the hell up, too. Just …“But don’t touch me anymore. And no more of your meaningful little looks. Stop—”

“Stop what?” he inquired innocently, and from the mischief in his grin she knew she might as well have been shouting into the wind. But at the moment, she wasn’t being carried away by it, anyway, and for that she felt almost grateful.

Almost. Meanwhile her search for Nicki had just taken a sharp turn, hadn’t it? A ninety-degree swerve into who-the-hell-knows-land.

“I’m calling the warden service,” she told Dylan. “Because you’re right, we need more info, and to get it, we need to find this guy and check out his whole setup. Weapons, personnel …”

“Might be hard to hold off the bod squad,” he warned, “if the wardens deliver a solid fix on their suspect.”

The homicide guys, he meant. They’d be hot to make their collar, grab up a shooter who’d already killed at least two and maybe more, and who’d attacked her and Dylan besides. And if there ended up being a little blond girl in the crossfire …

Well, if there
was
crossfire, they’d try to avoid her, of course. They’d try as hard as they could. But—

“That’s where you’ll come in,” she told Dylan. “You know them, you’re on the same team. So you’re going to exert what I’m sure is your considerable influence, when needed.”

For right now, though … She punched numbers into the phone.

“Hi, yeah, this is Lizzie Snow, deputy with the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department. I need to get a bulletin out to the deer-tagging stations. Is that possible?”

She waited while Dylan eyed her in surprise. Probably he’d thought it would take a while for her to be able to get things done. But when she hung up the phone, she’d extracted the promise that the tagging stations would post the flyer she’d be emailing, pronto; now all she had to do was assemble it.

So: scan in the Nicki photograph, specify the general area where she wanted the wardens to keep their eyes open, write up what she had of a campsite description …

She was pressing Send on the computer’s fax function when Cody Chevrier burst in, his face furious.

“Come with me,” he ordered her. “Now. You, too,” he added to Dylan, either forgetting or not caring—the latter, she saw from his expression—that Dylan Hudson wasn’t his subordinate.

Not until they were in his Blazer, speeding out of town with siren howling and roof lights blazing, did he explain. Even then it was in a voice so taut with anger he could barely speak.

“Another one,” he grated out through clenched teeth.

Trees and fence posts flashed by. Cars, too, Chevrier passing with ferocious abandon. Lizzie clutched her seatbelt and grabbed the handgrip over the passenger-side door, while in the back seat even Dylan held on, looking taken aback.

“Another
what
?” she demanded as they screamed around a slow-moving potato truck.

Chevrier hit the horn, swerving back into his own lane just in time to avoid an oncoming motorcycle. The look on the biker’s face was horrified, like he was witnessing his own death.

Which he nearly had been. But that wasn’t the death Sheriff Chevrier was so exercised about this morning.

“Another ex-cop,” he said, stomping the gas in response to a sign that read
SLOW
. The rural countryside flew by in a blur.

“Dead,” he said. “And this one—”

He yanked the wheel hard, avoiding a flock of ducks waddling across the road only by the length of a single feather.

“I don’t care what
anyone
says—”

In the side mirror, an aproned farm wife ran down the road behind them, shaking her fist.

“
This
one,” he snarled furiously, “was
definitely
murder.”

At the top of the driveway cut roughly through the leafless trees, the small, log-cabin-style house had a low-roofed porch running the full length of its front. A couple of wooden rockers flanked a bentwood table on the porch, next to a large gas grill, a metal shelf unit loaded with grilling equipment, and a picnic table spread with a red-checked cloth.

None of it had been touched in a while, the gas grill’s top littered with blown-in leaf bits and the tongs rust-edged. An electronic bug zapper hung from one of the porch posts, and on a wooden chair by the post, a woman sat stunned.

“Hi, Cody,” the woman said, looking up incuriously as they crossed the lawn. From the deadened expression on her slack face, it seemed that she might never be curious about anything ever again.

“I came to ask him if he wanted firewood from us this year.” Even her voice sounded distant. “I guess not, though.”

She smiled eerily. Her eyes did not participate. Lizzie was not even sure those eyes were focusing on anything, their pupils dark pinpoints and their gaze flitting this way and that.

“She’s in shock,” Dylan told Chevrier. He crouched by the woman in the chair, speaking to her gently.

Yeah, you’re good at that
, Lizzie couldn’t help thinking.

At making women, especially, think things are going to be okay when they’re absolutely not
.

But in this case, at least, the talent was useful; she put the thought away as Chevrier came back, his face tight with repressed emotion.

“Hudson, put her in my car. Give her some coffee out of my thermos. Go on, Hannah, go with him.”

Obediently the woman got up, looking as if she’d have jumped off a cliff if someone told her to. As if, after what she’d just seen, she really didn’t care what happened.

Then Chevrier brought Lizzie inside. “You need to see this. Because later they’re going to say that he did it. That he did it to himself. You need to know why they will.”

She followed him through neat, knotty-pine-paneled rooms filled with the same kind of oversized, plaid-upholstered furniture that was in her own rented house, ugly but comfortable.

Whoever lived here had health problems, she saw; by the recliner in the living room stood a small oxygen tank with tubing and a vaporizer of some kind connected to it.

The bedroom, small and plain, held the usual furnishings plus three more small tanks: two solid green ones like the one in the living room and one more, solid brown. In the kitchen, a large old-fashioned cookstove featured gas burners plus a wood-burning firebox to one side.

A percolator on the stove had boiled over sometime in the recent past, spilling coffee grounds into the burner. In the sink stood a rinsed plate and cup, two spoons, and a knife and fork.

“This way.” Chevrier jerked his head sideways. She could already see through the doorway from the kitchen into the small bathroom.