John Saul (33 page)

Moleno slowed his pace, moving carefully, until he was only a yard from the deep cut that sank into the cliff. Squatting down, he picked up a rock, then threw it into the opening, listening carefully for a reaction from the man he knew was hidden inside.

There was nothing.

At last Moleno edged closer, unconsciously held his breath, then sprang out to the center of the cleft, his gun braced in both hands, his finger ready to squeeze the trigger the moment he found a target.

Immediately, he saw something coming at him. Even before his eyes had truly focused on the object, he fired.

The wolf howled with pain as the lead slug ripped into her flank. Whimpering, the animal backed away.

Stunned by the unexpected attack of the wolf, Tony lost his concentration for a fraction of a second, but that fraction was still too long.

The mountain man dropped out of the narrow crevice he’d wedged himself into, sprang from the rock his legs had been braced against, and fell on Tony Moleno, the clawlike fingernails of his left hand sinking into the deputy’s eyes as his heavily muscled right forearm slid around Moleno’s neck. With a quick jerk, he snapped Moleno’s
neck, then picked up the twitching body and pitched it off the ledge. It glanced off the steep slope, flipped over in midair, then fell once more, skidding down the incline toward the edge of the rampart.

As he shot off the precipice, Tony Moleno’s arms and legs spread wide, giving his final fall to the rocks below the appearance of a dive.

A dive gone horribly wrong; a dive made in the silence of death.

“Rick? Rick, wake up!”

Gillie Martin jostled her husband’s shoulder, then shook him harder. He moaned, rolled over, then came slowly awake, blinking at his wife. “What the hell are you doing?” he groaned, still feeling the exhaustion of having been up all night, and certain that he’d only sprawled out on the bed a minute or two ago. “I barely got to sleep—”

“You’ve been out cold for three hours, and I’d have let you sleep, but we’ve got a problem,” Gillie said, the tone of her voice bringing him instantly wide-awake. “I was listening to the scanner, and I heard Tony Moleno calling down to the dispatcher in Challis.” She hesitated, then went on, knowing there was no way to break the news gently. “Frank Peters is dead, Rick. He lost his footing on the mountain, and Tony couldn’t get to him.”

Gillie’s words cleared the last of the fog from Rick’s mind. “Oh, Christ! Where’s Tony? Is he okay?”

“That’s the rest of the problem,” Gillie replied, her voice grim. “He thinks he’s got whoever lives in that cabin you found this morning trapped, and he’s going after him.”

“What?” Rick said, sitting up and swinging his legs off the bed. “By himself? That’s nuts!”

“He said he didn’t think he could get back down. There’s a storm coming in—”

But Rick wasn’t listening anymore. He’d snatched up the telephone, punching in the numbers for the dispatcher’s office. “Debbie? Rick Martin. Let me hear the recording of Tony’s last call.”

“I told him to come back down, Rick, but—”

“Just play it, Debbie,” Rick cut in. He listened intently to
Tony’s voice, barely audible over the storm and the static, as he’d reported to the dispatcher. At least, Rick thought, Tony had remembered to tell Debbie where he was. Though it might not mean much to the dispatcher at the other end of the county, Rick knew exactly the area Tony had described.

“I’m going up there,” he told Gillie, reaching for the jacket of his uniform. “I can get pretty close by going through Coyote Creek Campground and up the firebreak.”

“Are you insane?” Gillie demanded. “Rick, look outside! It’s freezing cold, and raining, and the radio says it’s going to start snowing in Stanley within the hour. Which means it will start snowing here, too, and it already is up in the mountains.”

“Then I’d better get going,” Rick said, brushing her words aside. He pulled on thick wool socks and a pair of boots in place of his usual shoes. “What time is it?”

“A little after one-thirty. You’ve only had a few hours of sleep—”

“I’m fine,” Rick cut in. “A hell of a lot finer than Frank Peters, and I’m damned if I’ll let Tony try to get off that mountain by himself.” He headed out into the garage, found a three-hundred-foot length of nylon rope, some pitons, and a grappling hook. Gillie followed him out to the car, still protesting as he tossed the mountaineering equipment into the backseat. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll be all right.”

Twenty minutes later he passed through the deserted campground in which Glen Foster had died and started up the steep firebreak, shifting the Jeep into four-wheel drive and throwing the lever into the low range. The engine raced and the transmission whined, but the vehicle started up the rutted dirt track, rocks flying from under the tires, the car itself slipping and sliding over the rain-slicked mud.

After a mile he turned off onto an old logging road, now almost overgrown with brush, and dropped the transmission into the lowest gear, working the engine hard as he pushed his way through. When the road finally became impassable, blocked by a fallen tree, he pulled a plastic slicker on over his parka and scrambled out into the storm.

From what Tony had said, he was no more than a half mile from the spot where Frank Peters had fallen.

Shoving the pitons in the pockets of his raincoat, he slung the rope over his arm and picked up the grappling hook, then clambered over the fallen tree and began threading his way through the forest of seedling pines that had all but obliterated the unused road.

It was another quarter of an hour before he came to the base of the cliff from which Frank Peters had fallen. Ten minutes after that, he found Frank’s body.

Only a few yards from Frank Peters, he found Tony Moleno.

His partner was sprawled on his back, his head twisted grotesquely against his left shoulder.

As he stared at Tony’s face, the eyes no more than two bloody holes in his skull, nausea rose in Rick Martin’s stomach. He bent over as a great retching seized him.

As he threw up on the ground at the base of the cliff, then waited, still doubled over, for the nausea to pass, the mountain man slipped through the forest a thousand yards away.

Descending from his sanctuary on the sheer face of Sugarloaf Mountain, he was once more moving through the wilderness, the force of the storm only spurring him on as the feral instincts within him, fueled by the attack on Tony Moleno into a ferocious blood lust, surged to the surface.

MaryAnne Carpenter gazed around the storage attic under the house’s steeply sloped roof, searching for one more box—a trunk—anything she might not yet have looked through in her hunt for some reference to the man Audrey Wilkenson had been dating before she met Ted. But there was nothing. Every box and suitcase in the attic had already been opened, but there was no trace of what she was looking for.

Except a picture.

A single picture in the photo album downstairs, showing Audrey with a group of people MaryAnne hadn’t recognized.

The snapshot was blurry, but Audrey had been standing
next to a tall, broad-shouldered man with heavy features, whose arm was draped over her shoulders in a way that could have meant they were no more than casual friends, or could have signaled something else entirely.

So she had kept searching, hunting for a diary or a hidden packet of photographs Audrey might not have wanted Ted to see—anything that might have given her a clue to the identity of Joey’s real father. But there was nothing. Brushing her sleeve across her eyes in a futile effort to free herself of the dust that had been swirling around her for the last three hours, she finally abandoned the attic and went back down to the desk in the den. Knowing another search of its drawers would prove futile, she picked up the phone and dialed Olivia Sherbourne’s number one more time, once again getting only the veterinarian’s answering machine. “Call me as soon as you get this message,” she said, essentially repeating the same message she’d left twice already. “Olivia, I have a weird idea about who the man up in the mountains might be, but I can’t remember his name! If the man is who I think he is, he might have thought he had a reason to kill Ted, and maybe even Audrey, too! I know it sounds nuts, and I hope it is, but please call me as soon as you can!”

Hanging up the phone, she glanced at her watch. It was almost three, time for her to go pick up the kids at school. And she’d take Joey with her, since she’d already made up her mind not to leave him alone until she knew exactly who the man was the police were hunting for.

“Joey!” she called up the stairs. “It’s time to go get Logan and Alison!”

When she heard nothing but silence from the second floor, a terrible feeling of foreboding came over her. She rushed up the stairs, not even pausing to knock at his door before pushing it open.

The room was empty!

Instantly, her eyes went to the window. Closed. She felt, a strange sense of relief that at least if he’d gone out, he hadn’t slipped away through the window, dropping down off the roof of the porch.

But where was he?

She strode across to the window and looked out, only then realizing that it had begun to rain. It was coming down hard, and it looked as if there were snowflakes mixed in with the large drops.

Snow? But it was only the beginning of September. Then she remembered Bill Sikes’s words, uttered only a couple of days before.
Going to be an early winter … be surprised if we don’t get snow before the week’s out
.

The rain was streaking against the glass, and heavy clouds had dimmed the daylight so that it almost looked like evening. As she raised the window to gain a clearer view of the yard and pasture, a gust of icy wind blasted in at her, and she quickly slammed the window shut again, then hurried downstairs. She was rushing through the kitchen on her way to the back door when she stopped abruptly. A note was propped against the salt shaker on the table. Frowning, she picked it up.

“I’m out in the barn,” she read in neatly blocked letters. “The horses need to be fed and the stalls have to be mucked out and I didn’t want to bother you.” It was signed “Joey,” and at the bottom he’d scribbled a P.S.: “Don’t worry—I’m okay!”

The fear that had gripped her when she’d realized Joey wasn’t in the house released its hold, and she dropped into one of the kitchen chairs, a brittle laugh rising in her throat as she realized how close to panic she’d been. As her nerves calmed, she went to the closet behind the stairs and pulled the heavy shearling jacket off its hook. Buttoning it all the way up, she fished a knitted cap off the shelf above the coats, donning the cap and turning up her collar as she went back through the kitchen. The back door threatened to blow out of her control as she opened it, but she managed to pull it closed, and started across the yard to the barn, leaning into the wind and holding up her arm against the rain. The barn door was propped open. She pulled it shut as, she went through, the wind slamming it behind her.

“Joey?” she called into the gloom. “Where are you?”

All she heard was the soft nickering of one of the horses, and she hurried across to the light switch, blinking in the
glare as the bright floodlights washed the darkness away. “Joey? Are you in here?”

Two of the horses were in their stalls, their heads hanging over the closed half doors, but the third stall—Sheika’s—was empty. Her pulse quickening, MaryAnne moved closer to the empty stall, peering inside.

Though the horse was gone, her feeding trough was full, and the floor of her stall was covered with fresh straw. But surely Joey wouldn’t have gone out riding in weather like this!

She moved to the tack room, scanning the equipment. All the saddles were in place.

Her concern deepening, she left the tack room and started back toward the barn door. When she was still ten feet away, she saw it begin to move, opening a crack, then slamming shut again as the wind caught it. Outside, she could barely hear Joey’s voice, shouting above the storm.

“Back up, Sheika! Come on! Back up! Thata girl. Good girl!”

The barn door opened again, but once more slammed shut, and MaryAnne ran forward. “Get her back!” she called, putting her weight against the big door and pushing it against the force of the wind. “I’ll push the door open!”

“Okay!” Joey called back.

She shoved again, bracing herself this time, and finally got the door open. As it swung wide, Joey, mounted bareback on the big mare, rode through the opening. Both the boy and the horse were soaking wet, but Joey was grinning broadly. “You should have seen Sheika!” he said. “She loved it!”

MaryAnne stared at the dripping boy. “Loved what? What were you doing? Where were you?”

“I took her out for a ride,” Joey said. “It was great—I’ve never ridden her bareback before.”

“In the rain?” MaryAnne asked. “Joey, it’s pouring out there!”

“It wasn’t when we started. It was just sort of drizzling. But you should have seen her! When it really started pouring, and the wind started coming down from the mountains, she really took off. You should have seen us coming across
the field just now! Her tail was up, and she was really prancing!” He patted the big horse on the neck, then lithely swung his leg over her neck and slid to the floor, already leading her toward the cross ties. “You liked that, didn’t you?” he asked as the horse nuzzled his neck. “Didn’t you like that?”

The horse whinnied, tossing her head and almost pulling the lead from Joey’s hand.

“Well, come into the house,” MaryAnne told him. “You have to get dried off and put on clean clothes, and then we have to go down to school to pick up Alison and Logan.”

“I can’t,” Joey replied, settling Sheika into the wash stall and snapping the leads to her bridle. “I’ve got to get her wiped down and blanketed, or she’ll catch cold.”

“And what about you?” MaryAnne replied. “Dr. Corcoran said you were already running a fever—”

“I’m fine,” Joey broke in. “As soon as I get Sheika back in her stall, I’ll go in and get changed.”

MaryAnne started to protest, then decided she had neither the time nor the inclination to argue with the boy. Besides, she wouldn’t be gone more than half an hour, and by now the police had probably either caught the mountain man or chased him out of the area. “Okay,” she sighed, “but promise me you’ll stay in the house and not go anywhere.”