Haven (32 page)

“Nobody’s supposed to be searching this grid,” she said slowly. “Nobody but us.”

Navarro, eyeing the tire tracks the Jeep had clearly followed, said, “This road has been used, regularly. But it hasn’t been kept up to look that way. What’s at the end of it, Emma? We’re still a good hundred yards from the church.”

“
It’s…a cabin, I think. It’s on Victor’s land, but I think Dan leases it from him. Something like that. My and Jessie’s parcels are on this side of the creek.”

“Did she know that? I mean that she owned land up here?”

Emma nodded slowly. “I told her Victor wanted to buy it. She had a list from our lawyer, and was using it as an excuse to wander around town and out here. Said the gossips would believe she was sizing up her inheritance. Nathan…the Jeep. Is it him? All these years, and it was
him
?”

“Let’s go find out.” Navarro immediately moved forward, following the track toward the creek and moving fast but also as quietly as possible. “Stay behind me,” he breathed. “I think someone else is in that cabin with him.”

Realizing even as he had, as she’d heard the sounds of raised voices, Emma fell in behind him, keeping her own voice low when she said, “That’s Nellie’s voice. But how would she know?”

“If she has the right connections, she could get cell phone records. I saw three towers ringing this area on the map; I bet cell reception up here is remarkably good. If Maitland was on her suspect list, I’ll bet she wondered why he was spending so much time up here.”

Emma wondered where Nellie would have parked her car, but didn’t waste much time or energy thinking about it; Nellie knew this area as well as just about anyone.

They came within sight of the cabin, and Emma followed his lead when he left the road before they reached the shallow stream. They worked their way through the trees, then crossed the creek without even getting their feet wet, thanks to all the flat stones.

As they climbed the other bank and reached a surprisingly cultivated part of the land, Navarro glanced over his shoulder at her long enough to whisper, “Listen.”

Emma could hear it much better now, as they moved cautiously through what cover they could use as they approached the cabin that was nestled into a sizable clearing twenty or so yards ahead. Nellie half shouting something that sounded like, “Wait, wait! Just listen!”

And then the sound of a male voice rising and falling, using language so filthy and filled with hate that it almost sounded inhuman.

Evil.

She had known it, recognized it, fifteen years ago.

It had attempted to destroy her life, and it had destroyed her sister’s life. And all those other lives horribly taken, snuffed out…

By an evil straight out of hell.

If Emma hadn’t been with Navarro, she would have turned and run as fast and as far as she could to get away. Instead, she swallowed hard, reminded herself that she had to face her past as surely as Jessie had been forced to, and followed.

Navarro was moving faster as they approached the cabin, clearly believing that a preoccupation with his latest captive was blinding the killer to possible danger.

The cabin sat on a yard that sloped down to the creek in front of it, with a great deal of cultivated plantings all around it, and they had just reached the ring of trees when Emma saw three other people on the other side.

Two of the paranormal researchers and a cop. The cop looked dumbstruck, even horrified, but both the so-called researchers carried weapons they clearly knew how to use and wore grim determination on their faces.

The brunette woman spotted Navarro and took one hand off her gun to make a quick gesture.

He nodded, turning his head to whisper. “We’re going around back. For God’s sake, stay behind me.”

Emma didn’t feel the need to protest. She stuck close as they circled the cabin, hearing Nellie’s frightened voice.

“Dan, you know you don’t want to do this—”

“You had to stick your stupid goddamned nose into it, didn’t you? Had to be the one to figure it all out, the one to come looking for my flowers. And what did you do with my treasure box? Huh? I know you know where it is. Did she hide it? Or did you?”

“Dan, I swear to God, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Snooping. Trying to find my flowers. My roses. Just like the other stupid bitch came looking, her for a past she couldn’t even remember right, and you for a fucking story. Both of you thinking you’re smarter than me—”

“Dan, no!”

Emma saw Navarro move faster than she’d ever seen a man move, reaching the back porch of the cabin, then the door, and kicking it in even as she heard the crash of the front door also giving way beneath someone’s determined foot.

He disappeared through the doorway.

Gunshots, terrifyingly loud.

So many.

Emma didn’t realize she was holding her breath until, in the stark silence, she heard Nellie speak.

“Well, it’s about goddamned time. That son of a bitch was planning to cut my throat and stuff me in his freezer!”

Emma hurried to the rear doorway of the cabin, seeing nothing at first except Navarro, standing just inside, his gun lowered.

Safe.

She took a deep breath, so utterly relieved that it told her everything she needed to know.

“You’re lucky we got here at all,” the brunette “researcher” told Nellie severely. “Next time tell somebody where you’ll be when you decide to go off and look for a killer.”

“Pot, meet kettle,” her partner murmured.

“I did
not
go off looking for that killer,” she said to him. “I just found him, is all.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nellie frowned at the enigmatic byplay. “I didn’t know he was a killer. Jesus. I just came up here because I was pretty sure it’s one of the last places Jessie was. She’d asked me at the festival if I’d ever been to Victor’s cabin, and I told her it was really Dan’s, something that seemed to shock her. So I came up here to look around. He came in not two minutes later and surprised the hell out of me.” She sat down suddenly on a rustic chair behind her.

She was very pale, Emma realized. Taking several more steps into the cabin, she felt her own face drain of color.

Dan Maitland, a knife in one lifeless hand and his service revolver lying not far from the other, lay only a few feet away from her. He had been shot at least three times in the chest.

The male “paranormal researcher” said to Navarro, “Did you have to kill him?”

“Yes,” Navarro said. “I did.”

The blond man studied Navarro for a moment, then nodded and said calmly, “Good enough for me.”

Officer Neal was also just inside the cabin’s front door, his gun drawn, face ashen. “I saw,” he said hoarsely. “I know…he would have killed Miss Holt. Or one of you. But…I don’t understand.”

“Yeah,” the blond man said, still calm, “the report’s gonna be a bitch. But everybody’ll know the truth in the end.”

Steadily, Nellie said, “Thank you—Hollis, isn’t it? And Reese?”

“Hollis Templeton. He’s Reese DeMarco.”

Navarro said, “And they’re FBI. Special Crimes Unit. Damned Bishop. I specifically
asked
him if he had agents here.”

“And I’m sure he neatly avoided the question,” Hollis said with sympathetic understanding. “He’s like that, you know. Even with us. Never shows anybody the cards up his sleeve.”

Emma was baffled by that, but all she could think to say was, “I didn’t think you guys had jurisdiction.”

“Hence the undercover jazz,” Hollis told her. “We’re here very, very unofficially. But our list of missing hikers covers people who came here across state lines, so assuming we find the bodies Chief Killer here must have buried somewhere about, I expect Bishop will fix things so it’s all nice and legal.”

“Bishop?” Emma finally thought to ask. Her mind seemed to be working very sluggishly.

“Their boss,” Navarro explained. “Remember, I told you about him. Special Crimes Unit chief. And a man who usually gets what he wants.”

“Oh.” Emma decided to let that sink in.

Nellie said, “Well, whoever you are, thank you.”

“
Thank Jessie,” Hollis said. “She led us here.”

Emma was more than a little startled. “You saw her? Is she here? Can you still see her?”

Hollis shook her head. “Afraid not.”

“Then where is—”

“Out here.” Navarro was standing on the small back porch, moving to make room for Emma as she joined him. “They’re all out here.”

She stood beside him for a moment, utterly motionless. And then her hand crept into his, and she leaned into him.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured. “Is every one—?”

“I think so. No…I’m sure. Every one.”

Stretching out before them, covering almost all the clearing between the cabin and the woods, was at least an acre filled with rosebushes of all colors, blooming gloriously.

“His flowers,” Navarro said. Every one a grave.

IT WAS NAVARRO
who found the box, searching the small cabin until he found the tiny lightning bolt scratched into the flagstone hearth. He immediately reached up into the chimney and brought out the box filled with trophies.

“What’s the lightning bolt mean?” Nellie asked, almost absently, as she looked at what the box contained.

“Haven,” Navarro said. “A sign we all use.”

“She must have slipped in here again and again to search,” Emma murmured, looking at the box that was filled with driver’s licenses and student ID cards, locks of hair and pieces of jewelry.

So many trophies. So many innocent victims.

She saw the little dream catcher earring and caught her breath, a sudden memory slamming into her. Jessie letting her borrow the earrings because they’d belonged to their mother, one of them torn from her earlobe in the attack and the other lost somewhere…

Low, Navarro asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She cleared her throat. “Just…remembering something. Tell you later.”

He nodded.

Still studying the trophies, Hollis mused, “I wonder if he caught her in here, or went after her somewhere else? This isn’t where he held them; that’s obvious. There has to be another place. But whichever it was, Jessie had time to hide the box. It must have driven him crazy to realize his trophies were missing. And I’ll bet it never occurred to him that she’d hidden them right here in his own cabin.”

Emma drew a breath. “I don’t want to know if he tried to make her tell him. Before he was done with her. Don’t anybody tell me that, okay?”

“No,” Navarro said, reaching for her hand. “Nobody will tell you that. Just remember that, in the end, Jessie stopped him. And she brought us here to find them. All of them.”

“
IT WAS A
favor,” Victor said, his face still gray with shock, and maybe something else. “Years ago, he asked me if he could put up a cabin out here, just for…fishing. A place he could get away from town, where he could be alone. He said—”

Guessing, Emma said, “He said you owed him. For keeping quiet about what you did to Jessie.”

Navarro looked at her, but kept his mouth shut. They were all three standing off to the side of the cabin, watching the swarm of state police crime scene people and FBI agents and God only knew who else.

Excavating Dan Maitland’s rose garden.

Victor half nodded, but said defensively, “All I did was keep filling her glass. It was wrong as hell, yeah, I admit that, and worse because I did it just for fun, because it amused me to watch her get so drunk she could hardly talk—but I didn’t know what they planned to do later. I never would have been a part of that.”

“But you were a part,” Navarro said. “She was barely seventeen and you got her drunk deliberately. Then you watched them take her upstairs.”

“To sleep it off, I thought. I swear. It wasn’t until a few years later when Peter got drunk one night and started rambling that I realized they had raped a girl upstairs. Him and Kenny and Dan. He kept saying Jessie would never forgive him for it. That you would never forgive him.”

Emma shook her head and spoke steadily. “Peter was one of Jessie’s friends. He never would have…done that on his own.”

“Like dogs in a pack,” Navarro said. “People do things in a group they’d never do alone.”

Emma wasn’t sure if she was strong enough to admit that it had been her who had been brutalized that night, so she kept up the fiction that it had been her sister, for now, at least. In a way, honoring the burden Jessie had carried for her.

“But you never checked on her that night. Never saw to it that she got home all right. Did you even think about her the rest of the
night, Victor, or did you go off with some other girl who was maybe a little bit older and a little less drunk and not your cousin?”

He let out a rough sigh, but didn’t look away from her accusing gaze. “All right, I was eight kinds of a bastard that night, and I should have been looking out for Jessie. And for you—though I at least made sure you weren’t drinking anything but soda. Then, later…I sort of lost track of you. I thought you’d gone home. I told Jessie that, and told her how sorry I was, when she finally confronted me about it.”

“At the festival,” Emma said.

Victor nodded. “I didn’t ask her forgiveness, but I did tell her I was sorry. I told her I believed, for what it was worth, that the men who had hurt her all those years ago had paid in their different ways, for what they’d done. Kenny killed himself just a couple of years afterward, and nobody will ever convince me that wasn’t why. Peter became an alcoholic, and his life pretty much went to shit; his liver’s shot now and it’s only a matter of time. Only Dan…”

“Only Dan Maitland seemed to have put it behind him,” Navarro said.

Victor frowned. “Yes. And no. He didn’t seem to think about it, to let it affect his life, yet there were times, like with the cabin, when he…used it. Not often, maybe half a dozen times in fifteen years. He didn’t say in so many words that I owed him, or that I was just as guilty as he was in what happened to Jessie. But he somehow made me remember, and feel guilty.

“This time, it was something that didn’t matter to me anyway. The land was good for nothing, really; I needed Emma and Jessie’s acreage to add to what I had to make a parcel large enough to maybe
appeal to developers. Emma was emphatic in saying no, and I had no reason to suspect, then, that Jessie would ever come back to Baron Hollow. So I told him he could put up a cabin if he wanted.”