The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (17 page)

At a spot behind a frosted holly bush opposite the van, cops still visible clustered in cover around it, we found the shooter's trail. Footprints, a rectangular patch of packed snow where Randy Faber — presumably — had laid down at the base of the holly to fire. Good position, plenty of cover. There were dimpled scuff marks off to the right that looked like fingertip scrapes.

“He’s gone. He picked up his brass before he left,” I said. “Smart guy.”

“Back the way he came,” she said, pointing at a line of footprints heading west through the woods. The trail was easy to follow even at a jog. About a quarter mile through the forest we hit a narrow gravel road running north-south along the line of the mountains. I thought I could still hear an engine fading into the distance. There were fresh tire marks in the snow, curving in to the shoulder where Faber had parked his car.

“We missed him,” Saric said, out of breath. “We goddamn missed him.”

Backup eventually arrived with an ambulance and a crime scene unit hot on its heels. The wounded cop was fine, sitting up and talking to the paramedics while they checked his injury. Then there were questions for me, and paperwork, and a great deal of waiting around in the cold before I was allowed to go. Flint wasn’t happy with his attempted bust turning into a shooting gallery, but I didn’t care. When I climbed into my car he handed me a photo, though.

“That's Randy Faber,” he said. “Remember what he looks like. If you see him at all, you call us straight away. Don't approach him, especially after today's events. You meet him, you're liable to end up having to defend yourself.”

I said, “Sure.” Wondered if he’d really just suggested he’d accept any claim of self-defense I made if I happened to shoot Faber, or if I was just reading too much into his words.

“We’ve stopped watching the old town, by the way,” he said before leaving. “Someone snuck in already and took the dope. I didn’t see a thing. Faber must know the area pretty well. Watch yourself.”

Then he was gone.

The guy in the five-year-old picture looked young. He would have been twenty-seven by now. Blonde hair, dark brown eyes. Lean and fit-looking without being heavily muscled. He didn’t look particularly intimidating, but maybe he didn’t need to be.

I knew Faber had been shadowing me. I also knew the voice on the recording of Gemma's death had an accent that wasn’t from the northeast, and he was from California, just like Jessie had said ‘Delaney’ was. Had he really killed Gemma and Adam Webb? If he had, Gemma’s murder hadn’t played out like Flint’s witness suggested; though I’d already seen that much at the scene. The car color matched, though. Faber could have arranged the farm meet to get a shot at me, but he might just as easily have been going there for his own reasons, only to find a bunch of cops waiting for him.

And then he’d tried to kill me anyway.

After the events at the farm, it wasn’t until the last twilight dwindled to black that I finally reached the site of Adam’s murder. Jessie's scrawled map was easy enough to follow even in the dark and I had little problem finding the same gravel parking lot she’d pulled into on the night he died. As I bumped through the entrance my headlight beams picked out the edge of a sizable copse of trees a little way up the slope. I parked and waited with the door ajar for a minute, getting used to the chill and the dark. The overcast night was starless, but the snow carpeting the slopes around Hazen’s Notch glimmered faintly.

“I could do this forever,” Gemma said softly, nestling tighter into the crook of my arm. Lying on the turf under a blanket, night air cooling, surrounded by the flickering of insects drawn out by the darkness. The rocks off to our left were dull gray gleams. We were looking up at the stars. God's great join-the-dots puzzle. It was the end of one of the last days of summer. On the cusp of fall, nights already lengthening, warmth heading south into distant memory. “I’m warm, I've got you, and all that above me.”

We’d spent the day picnicking on the slopes between the bulwark of Mount Mansfield and White Face Mountain in a little hollow out of the wind. I wasn’t sure where we were exactly and it didn't seem to matter. We’d made love like teenagers as the sun went down, the sky a brilliant purple-orange. Had hardly moved since. While Gemma talked, I wondered whether to suggest we get married. It wasn’t a simple matter, with our jobs and the distance between us, but it was the kind of thought that came easy at times like this. As if by sealing your relationship you’d also be able to seal and hold your feelings exactly as they were on that beautiful night in the middle of nowhere when nothing else mattered.

“Yeah, I'd like that,” I said. I didn't know whether I was replying to her or to my own thoughts.

I grabbed my flashlight and a folding tool that doubled as a snow scraper and a shovel from the trunk and checked that my gun was loaded. Felt a spike of adrenaline. The trees here were primarily evergreens. I guessed this was all plantation wood. On the edge of the copse the trees were still thick with needles but the interior was mostly bare brown trunks, and the only green parts visible were high up in the canopy. The plentiful outer cover meant I didn't have to go far inside to know I was near the site of Adam's murder as Jessie couldn't have seen what had happened otherwise.

Under the high, heavy sheet of needle-lined branches the snow was far thinner than the open ground beyond. I used the shovel to clear away the ice, started looking for traces of a dead man. For an hour the only sounds I heard were metal on snow and the white noise swish of the fir trees in the wind like a hundred vengeful spirits from some Japanese folk tale. Then finally I found two brass shell casings. 10mm caliber, centerfire pistol. The earth nearby was disturbed, rumpled and crushed by what looked like running feet, everything preserved by ground that had been wet enough to make clear impressions and cold enough to freeze soon after.

 
I followed three, maybe four, sets of footprints back to the spot where Webb had waited for Jessie that night. There I found a confused line where one set strode back and forth repeatedly. There were a good couple dozen cigarette butts dropped in its path. The others — definitely now two of them — converged on Adam’s from the direction of the other parking lot further up the track. By the time they reached the camp they’d spread ten yards apart, the hunters fanning out as they closed. Once Adam had ran they’d followed, trying to hem him in. There was no sign of other shell casings, so it looked as though they waited until they were certain of a killing shot before firing. They chased Adam to the point where I’d found the two cartridges, then, to judge from their stride lengths, they’d slowed to a walk. Both hunters' tracks converged on one spot at the end of Adam's trail. Here and there I saw signs of what was maybe a third set, coming from the same direction as me. The tracks were smaller, probably a woman’s: Jessie, finding the scene just like she said.

The mass of prints became confused at the killing site as the two pursuers had milled about. On the edge of this well-trodden patch, I found the beginnings of an area of broken earth with a couple of thin, mangled tree roots still clawing up from the frozen surface.
 

I cleared away more snow. The patch was six feet long, maybe just over. A couple of feet wide. All frozen soil that had been turned over and broken up not long before winter set in.

Here lay Adam Webb. I started digging.

The grave turned out to be fairly shallow. I was a little surprised the killers had chosen to bury him right here, but then they’d had no way of knowing anyone would look for him in this spot. A couple of feet down I uncovered the fingers of his right hand, blackened and distorted, but unmistakable as such even in the dark. Further down his arm, the remains of a wolf tattoo were still visible. There was no smell, not over the acrid scent of ice-hard earth.

I carefully scraped away the rest of the dirt packed around his corpse. He was still dressed in hiking gear and the winter had held back the decomposition process enough for me to instantly recognize the face as Adam's, even discolored and smeared with powdered mud. His eyes were open, but the orbs were cloudy and looked cracked where the fluid inside had frozen. There was a ragged, bullet wound at the base of his throat and another in the left-center of his rib cage.

The first wound was so similar to Gemma's that for a split second I couldn’t stop myself imagining what she must have looked like in her own grave near Bangor and I almost lost it.

Breathe out, focus.

I looked at the icy eyes of the corpse. I knew I should leave it alone for the forensic technicians, but I also wanted as much information as possible myself so I checked his pockets, clothes, and the ground underneath.

The pockets yielded a fair amount. Wallet, cards, driver’s license, other crap, all in the name of Adam Webb. Just over a hundred bucks in cash, a couple of business cards from the kind of small-time places he might once have applied for work, and a scrap of paper with a cell phone number on it. There was a decent map of the Green Mountains in his jacket, on both the US and Canadian sides of the border, as well as an unused guidebook entitled
101 Secluded Walks In Northern Vermont
. A pocketknife, some keys, and loose change completed the collection.

The cell number was the only thing which stood out. I didn’t recognize it, and I didn’t want to try calling it from my own. That meant waiting until I was off the mountain and could find a payphone. Then I had to decide what to do with Adam. Going to the cops would mean a bucket of trouble for disturbing the scene at the very least. In the end I figured I’d leave the shell casings on top of him, then call the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department anonymously. Not perfect, but it’d do, and at least then Mrs Webb would be able to bury her son.

In the nearest town I did just that from a phone at the intersection of two empty, icy streets. I gave the sheriff’s department decent directions, but said nothing about who I was or why I’d found him. Then I dialed the number Webb was carrying. Delaney’s, I assumed, the way Jessie had described the system. Ring three times then they’d hang up. I didn’t do that, though; I wanted to hear his voice.

One ring.

Two rings.

Three rings.

Four rings.

Five. “Hello? Who is this? What do you want? What the hell’s going on?”

It wasn’t Delaney — if Delaney was Randy Faber — but his boss, because the voice at the other end of the line was that of Detective Sergeant Karl Flint.

I waited until I was back at Gemma’s to call Rob. Before she passed the phone over, his wife Teresa asked me how I was coping and I said I was OK. The lie came easily. Once Rob was on the line, I told him where Webb was and what he’d been doing in Vermont, how come he’d ended up shot, and how I’d tipped off the cops.

“That was fast,” he said. “Less than a day. You do realize how we charge our clients, don’t you?”

“I think I told you once that either he’d show up quick or not at all. If his girlfriend hadn’t seen him killed, if she’d fled the state, I’d have got nothing. But she saw, and she hid out in a town where you can count the number of easy places to hide on your fingers, so I found her. Way it goes.”

“What about you? What are you going to do now?”

“I just need a couple more days. The operation Webb worked for is run, I think, by a bent cop, one of the detectives working Gemma’s murder, using an ex-mob guy from San Francisco as a go-between. I’m close to tying them all together: them, Gemma, Webb, the other people who’ve disappeared. Do that and I’m finished.”

Rob went silent for a moment. “A cop, huh? You'd better be sure before you try anything, Alex. It’s liable to blow up in your face if you’re not. OK. Take what time you need. And good work finding Webb.”

That was it then. I’d solved one disappearance, dug up a corpse, nearly had a hole blown in my head, and found out one of the cops investigating Gemma’s murder had probably had her killed in the first place. I was about ready to collapse. I lay on the couch in the silent dark, occasionally rolling from one side to another in a bid to get comfortable. It was cold, far colder than usual, but that didn’t stop me drifting for a couple of hours, more or less asleep. In my dreams I’d lost something, someone, and I was wandering through the woods trying to find it. I felt as though I was following a trail, an invisible set of tracks that I could sense even though I couldn’t see them. But it was confused and patchy, faded. Eventually I came to the edge of the twisted trees to see an expanse of calm water stretching out in front of me. I was able to walk across its flat, motionless surface, still searching. Flocks of small butterflies danced slowly here and there above it. I’d gone some way out when I began to realize that I was in the wrong place, that this lake was too small and the one I needed was larger and deeper. The one where I’d find what I was looking for. Cold seeped through my clothes, making it hard to hold on to unconsciousness. I tried to ignore it and keep searching, to stay inside my dream, but eventually it was too much and I snapped rudely awake.
 

There was no couch. No front room. No roof.

I was lying on a flat sheet of white beneath a dark sky. The edge was just visible as a line of shadows deeper than the night, surrounding me on all sides like the rim of a bowl. My head rested on my arm, which was wedged in a layer of snow over ice. My clothes were slowly becoming soaked with melt water from my failing body heat. Stray flakes fell from above. I stood, wide-eyed, and looked around. A line of scuffed footprints led towards me from the edge, beyond which some faint lights rose into the sky, studded against the black. I was in the middle of Silverdale Lake's frozen surface. The ice beneath me creaked and groaned as I moved and I wondered just how thick it was and how likely it was that I’d make it back.

My screwed-up sleep patterns needed sorting out, and soon. Weird dreams and falling out of bed were one thing; this was totally different. If I’d slept longer, I could have died from exposure. Tomorrow night, I promised myself I’d try my pills. The hell with this.