The Prophet (41 page)

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Chelsea, just call the police.”

She’d hung up.

He dropped the phone and pressed the accelerator to the floor and blew through a stop sign without a care, looking at the map on the navigation screen and knowing well that he would not make it in time. Whatever was happening, Kent would arrive too late, just as Adam had designed. He called his brother again while he sped along the rural roads. There was no answer.

He returned to the side door, where Grissom had exited the house back when Adam had no idea who he was, where Sipes had come down to meet Adam, shirtless and smiling, in the minutes before his execution. The empty aluminum frame of the storm door hadn’t been pulled all the way shut, and it shifted in the gusting wind, a soft, steady knock.

Whap, whap, whap.

Adam’s phone buzzed again as he approached the door, and this time he silenced it instantly, without bothering to check the display. He removed the Glock from its holster, studied the closed door, and wondered how to approach it. Sipes had opened it peacefully, had agreed to walk and to talk. There was no guarantee that Dan Grissom would do the same.

It seemed to Adam that the time for knocking on doors was past.

He drew his foot back and drove his right heel into the door just beside the knob. It was a perfect shot, fast and hard, and the frame splintered and tore and the door swung open, revealing the dimly lit linoleum stairs that led up from the driveway and
into the kitchen. As Adam shoved the remnants of the storm door out of his way and took the first of the steps, gun in hand, he heard someone rushing into motion inside, the sound to the left of the kitchen. He cleared the steps and spun to the left, in a shooter’s stance now, saw a blur of movement as Dan Grissom rushed out of the living room and down a hallway. Adam took one shot and only one; he knew even as he fired that he’d been a half-second too slow reaching the top of the stairs. The bullet caught air where Grissom had just been and then buried itself in the wall in a cloud of plaster dust.

It was just three strides from the top of the stairs to the threshold where the kitchen opened up into the living room, and Adam dropped to one knee as he reached it, then turned left again, saw that Grissom was at the end of the hall and, turning toward him, saw the shotgun in his hands and thought
I wish it was a different weapon
just before they both fired.

Adam’s nine-millimeter bullet hit Grissom in the right side of his jaw, drilled him against the wall, and then dropped him to the floor, blood and bone and flesh streaking the dusty yellow paint. It was a perfect head shot, clean and pure and deadly.

Grissom, both more panicked and less skilled, had not possessed similar aim.

The shotgun compensated for him, though, fired at fifteen feet, with a double-ought load. The thin layer of plaster between Adam and the muzzle did not impede the nine solid lead pellets that scattered from the shell. They tore through the wall and found his left side and opened it and spilled his blood. There was a reason why Adam had advocated for his brother to use the shot shells first if he needed them. They did not require precision.

He fell onto his right side but did not release the gun, keeping his eyes on Grissom, down at the end of the hall. Dead at the end of the hall.

Make sure,
Adam reminded himself, and then he took careful
aim, focusing through the pain that was catching him like a rising fog, and squeezed the trigger again. The Glock bucked once more in his hands, and another bullet found Dan Grissom, this one centered in the chest. The only reaction from the body came when the bullet passed through it. Dan Grissom was dead.

Got him, Kent,
he thought.
I got him for you.

Dizziness overwhelmed him then, and he put the Glock down and braced his right hand on the floor and sucked in a breath against the agony.

Be strong for just a while longer,
he told himself.
Call it up, Austin. Find it. Damn it, you’ve still got some in there, now call it up.

He gave a strangled cry as he pushed himself upright, got high enough so that his feet were under him and then he could use his right hand on the wall to steady himself. There was an instant when he thought he would faint, but he willed it down, and then he was moving back through the kitchen, taking care not to slip in his own blood.

He made it down the stairs and through the door and into the cold wind before he allowed himself to look at the wound.

All he could process was that he could see too much. Parts of him that should not be visible were, and the side of his jacket and his jeans were bright with blood. He used his right arm to pull the jacket tighter around him, and then, awkwardly, he zipped it up, as if that might help. He stood there for a moment, uncertain where to go. He would not make it far, but he did not want to stop here, either. He did not want to go down in this place, this evil house.

He spotted the brick smokestacks then, and he walked toward them, vaguely aware that they represented the place from which he had come, though he was no longer certain exactly how they did, or even where that place was. When he got to the sidewalk, he saw someone staring at him from the porch of a neighboring house. Words were shouted at him but they did not register. He
hesitated again, looking at the smokestacks and realizing that while it had once seemed a good idea to return to them, they were too far away. He’d never reach them now.

He turned left and began to weave down the sidewalk. Ahead he could see Lake Erie, could see the gulls, still circling, creatures of diligence, able not just to survive the chill winds but to benefit from them. He remembered the rocks and the waves and the shallow pools that formed there where cold waters were trapped behind stones and thought that was the right place, and close enough to be reachable.

It took him a while to make the first block. His feet were not obedient and balance alone was a struggle, let alone forward progress. There were still shouts behind him, but he had no interest in trying to decipher them until one of the shouts was his own name. He stopped then, looked back, and saw Chelsea.

She was out of her car and running toward him.

Of course,
he thought, hot pain easing toward warm relief,
of course.
She had come for him, and he should have known that she would, he should have remembered this, felt bad that he had not. He turned to meet her, but turning was a bad idea, it was too difficult a task for the uncooperative bastards that his always-strong legs had become, and they tangled and gave out beneath him and then he was down on the sidewalk.

When she reached him and took him in her arms, he saw that he was getting blood all over her, staining her with it, and he did not like that. There were tears on her face, and those were bad, too. She was telling him something about an ambulance, and he wanted to listen because it clearly mattered to her, but all that drew his attention were the tears and the blood. He wanted to clean them from her, but he was out of strength for that now, she’d have to do it on her own.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. He was sure the words made it to her, he was sure they were clear, but she did not respond to them, she
was still talking about the ambulance. He didn’t answer, couldn’t think of anything to say, but then she told him that she loved him and he knew what to say to that, that one was easy, because he loved her, too, always had. He was glad that she was there with him but wished it didn’t have to be like this, with the blood and the tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and this time she seemed to understand how hard the words came, how much they took. She laid her hand on the side of his face, her palm a soothing cool in a world that had grown far too hot.

“I know, baby,” she said. “I know. It’s all right. It’s okay.”

A
DAM WAS IN THE AMBULANCE
by the time Kent arrived, but the police did not delay him long. They took him to the hospital without much pause, and so it was there that he learned his brother was dead.

A surgeon told him. Dead on arrival, he said, one hand applying what was supposed to be a reassuring touch to Kent’s arm. Shotgun wound. He was very sorry. The police could explain more than he could. All he could say was that it was over.

Agent Dean was there by then, and Stan Salter. They did not ask questions yet, and for that Kent was grateful.

“He got Grissom,” Dean told him. “We don’t know much more yet. Grissom was dead inside the house, though. Your brother made it out, but did not make it far.”

Kent nodded and asked if he could have a moment before they spoke any further. Dean said of course, he could take whatever time he needed, and asked if he wanted them to call Beth or if Kent wanted to do that himself. Kent said he would do it himself, and then he walked down the long, brightly lit corridor, his
shoes slapping off shining disinfected tile, and out into the parking lot. His legs held up long enough to get him beyond the rows of cars and then he knew they would not last much longer, and he sought the closest place that looked dark and alone. There was a loading dock nearby, the doors down, no trucks in wait, and he made it that far, lowered himself onto the pavement, put his head between his knees, and wept for his brother.

He wasn’t sure how long he remained there. He was aware of Dean and Salter coming to the hospital doors, and though they saw him they did not approach. Eventually his eyes ran dry, because that was the way it went; they had no other choice. He looked at Robert Dean and thought of what he’d said just hours earlier, when he filled Kent in on the relationship between Grissom and Sipes, of his theory that one had murdered the other.

Two men walked out of a house with a secret, and one remains.

He stood up, brushed the dirt from his pants, and walked back to where the police waited, back to explain how it was that his brother had come to die.

Inside the house at 57 Erie Avenue police found items belonging to Rachel Bond, and identified the deceased Dan Grissom and Clayton Sipes as the primary suspects in her homicide. Privately, Dean told Kent that the story had produced three calls from current inmates and one from a former inmate wishing to discuss Grissom. He believed that these accounts and forensic evidence from the house would be enough to close the Bond case, certainly, and, he hoped, several others. Kent asked if they would have been able to convict Grissom had he lived. Dean said they’d have had a strong shot.

Penny Gootee, Rachel’s mother, told any news outlet that asked that she was pleased with the results and that Adam Austin had
promised her the very killings he had delivered. That story went national fast. International, even. Kent received calls from reporters in France and England. That Sunday he met with his coaching staff and told them he’d step back for the remainder of the season, because his team didn’t need that kind of media scrutiny, and he wanted to be with his family. He named Byers the acting head coach. He left them to the work that needed to be done then, closed the door of the conference room behind him, and left the locker room, pausing for one look at the picture of the 1989 championship team, the two Austin brothers standing together.

They buried his brother on Tuesday morning, just after dawn, in a private ceremony that was to be attended only by Kent’s family and Chelsea Salinas. Stan Salter asked Kent if he could be there as well. Kent agreed. It was a swift, simple ceremony. The goal was to avoid media attention, and they managed that. When they left, Kent sent Beth on with the kids and asked Chelsea if he could have a minute with her.

She was wearing an elegant black dress and heels, but when they reached her battered old Corvette, she slipped the shoes off and then slid herself onto the dirty hood of the car. Kent stood before her in his suit and asked her what it had been like for his brother at the end.

She told him all that she could. Her voice wavered sometimes but never broke. Adam had known he was dying, she said, but she thought that he was glad to see her. He did not seem afraid, he seemed sorry. She wanted to remove that from him, to give him some peace as he went, and she was not sure if she’d succeeded.

“I’m glad you made it to him,” Kent said, and he meant that. “But I wish I had, too.”

“He would not have wanted to see you,” she said, and on that point her voice was firm. “He did not want you to have to go near it.”

“It was mine to deal with.”

She pushed her hair back over her ears, stared at the cemetery grounds, and said, “He never could stop trying to make up for Marie. It’s sad as hell, but it’s also one of the reasons I loved him.”

“I could have helped,” Kent said, “and I did not. If I’d made some different decisions, or involved him more in those, then—”

“You know what he told me the other day, Kent? He told me that he wished he’d been able to coach with you. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the head coach. I believe he wanted the defense only. And you know what that tells me? He was proud of your decisions. Maybe not all of them, that’s impossible. But as a rule, he trusted them.”

Kent worked on an answer and couldn’t get to one.

“Should he have done what he did?” Chelsea said. “No. But he didn’t do it for himself.”

She looked away from the cemetery grounds and back to him and said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“The place he sent you. The address he gave you. Was it outside of town? Amherst Road?”

He nodded. “How did you know that? What’s the significance?”

For the first time, tears pooled in her eyes. She wiped them away and shook her head. “I just had a feeling,” she said, and though he wanted to know more, he sensed that he should not ask. This one stood between his brother and Chelsea, and should remain there.

“I’ve been told he has no will,” Kent said. “But I want you to be involved, because he would have wanted that.”

She shook her head. “Trust fund for his niece and his nephew.
All of it. That’s what he would have wanted. And a few other things. A few priorities. I can handle one. That’s clearing Rodney Bova. I’ll take care of that. The other one I think should come from you.”