Forests of the Night (18 page)

“And if I'd had a real emergency and was counting on your help, I'd have been screwed, huh?”

“We knew where you were at all times.”

“Well, that's reassuring. You could've located my body. Great.”

She sidearmed the gadget at him, and it bounced off his chest.

Sheffield rubbed at the spot while some of his team fought off smiles.

“You were in with him?” Parker said. “You tricked me?”

“Sheffield tricked both of us. And for what?”

She looked around the empty cave. Nothing but bare rock and clay floor and the ooze of water down the broken face of one wall.

She glanced at Parker and saw that he'd shifted his gaze and was staring at the smooth wall behind her. She turned to look.

At eye level there was a primitive drawing in what looked like chalk: a tall, thin dog standing upright on its hind legs, looking perfectly at ease.

“What's that?” Roth said. “Some Indian thing?”

“Kids,” said Sheffield. “Rich summer camp kids.”

“Where's the naked girls then?” Roth said.

Sheffield went over and touched a finger to the edge of the drawing and tried to smear it. He looked at his finger, but nothing had come off the wall.

“Isn't chalk,” he said.

“No more touching,” said Roth. “We got a crime scene here.”

“What crime?” Charlotte said. “We're out for a hike and you guys come out of the trees to terrorize us. That the crime you mean? Police harassment?” Taking one of Parker's lines.

Frank shook his head and gave her a wincing grin. Nice try.

“Your daughter showed up,” Sheffield said. “Couple of hours ago.”

Charlotte swung around.

“Where is she?”

“We lost her.”

“What!”

“Pickup truck she was riding in turned off on a side road, disappeared.”

“You bastard. You had her in your sights but didn't stop her. Just the thing you promised you weren't going to do.”

“Hey, I'm sorry.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Look, Charlotte, your daughter's in the vicinity, that's the good news. We're homing in on her. Got our people interviewing some yokels who were standing around when she got off the bus. She looked okay to our guys. Looked healthy, maybe a little frazzled from the trip but healthy.”

“How would your guys know what healthy looks like?”

Charlotte pushed past Sheffield and stalked to the mouth of the cave.

“So how about it, Counselor?” Frank stepped over to Parker and brushed the crumbs of clay off the front of his shirt. “That drawing have any significance to you? Some scrawny dog standing on its hind legs?”

“None,” Parker said. “None whatsoever.”

 

He lay flat on his stomach and watched through the telescopic sight. The agents of the federal government were standing on the trail now, their harsh lights keeping them in bold relief. They were joking and talking loud. He passed his sight across the faces of four of the men. Square-jawed with tight military haircuts. He could probably nail three of them before they knew what was happening. With his flash hider and sound suppressor and his dark clothes, he could no doubt stay concealed through the whole tumult and, in the chaotic aftermath, sneak away down the hill.

It was tempting. If only to have something to show for the evening.

But he maintained discipline, waiting for the group to clear the mouth of the cave and head back down the trail. He waited an hour more, until the forest had begun to whir and rustle with the activities of nocturnal creatures, and the darkness once again reclaimed its rightful domain.

“Call off the dogs,” Charlotte said to Charlie Mears.

It was nine-thirty on Thursday morning. In her jeans and bra, she was perched on the edge of the rumpled bed, using the phone in their room at the Holiday Inn in the village of Cherokee. She'd been put on hold for ten minutes, then handed off to three other hard-ass secretaries before she worked her way to FBI Assistant Director Charles L. Mears.

“Which dogs?” Mears said.

Charlotte had slept fitfully. From the shadows under Parker's eyes, she knew he'd shared the mind-churning darkness with her.

Charlotte described Sheffield's raid the night before, the storm troopers. His use of Gracey as a decoy.

When she was finished, he was silent.

“You there?”

“Frank was acting on his own authority. I may have a slightly grander title than Special Agent in Charge Sheffield, but when it comes to fieldwork, I can't intervene in the investigative process. It's his show to run.”

“My daughter's a runaway. I'm doing what any reasonable parent would do, go out and try to find her. I don't give two shits about some fugitive you guys are after. If I happen to bump into Jacob Panther, I'll arrest the son of
a bitch because I'm a sworn officer of the law. But finding my daughter is number one. And there isn't any number two.”

Parker stood in the doorway with a bath towel wrapped around his waist. His cheeks foamed with shaving cream.

“My husband thinks we should call the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility and put a very large turd in Sheffield's file.”

“He was simply performing his duties. I doubt you'd make much headway with OPR.”

Charlotte said, “Well, then you should rethink how much you need my assistance in Fedderman's project.”

Charlotte listened to Mears silently consider the issue. She had no way to know the politics of the situation. But she understood from her years with Gables PD that people up the food chain could damn well interfere whenever and however they wanted.

Though she was playing the Fedderman card, it was hard for her to imagine that some simple intuitive quirk she possessed was worth enough for the feds to compromise their goddamn procedures, jeopardize a case on their Top Ten.

Thankfully, she was wrong.

Mears said, “The director very rarely takes the kind of personal interest in recruiting individuals that he has taken in you, Officer Monroe. He saw something remarkable in your test results, as we all did. So I suppose that qualifies you to have one wish granted.”

“Thanks.”

“I'll do what I can to see that Sheffield leaves you alone. No tails, no surveillance, you'll be out of his sights. You and your husband are private citizens with all the rights and privileges and responsibilities. You may do what you need to do within the bounds of the law to secure the return of your daughter, keeping in mind that you are a sworn police officer and you must not in any way knowingly interfere in the efforts and actions of federal agents.”

“Is that off a TelePrompTer?”

“My wife says that all the time. I have a robotic delivery. Talked that way as a kid. What can I say? I'll get Sheffield to back the hell off. You do what you have to.”

Charlotte thanked him again and hung up.

“Free at last,” she said to Parker.

He gave her a don't-be-so-sure smile and said, “Standingdog Matthews has been having a series of strokes. He's in a hospice run by the tribe. It's a few miles west of Cherokee.”

“How'd you find that out?”

He held up his cell phone.

“Reception sucks, all these mountains. Miriam ran down that stuff and a few things on Martin Tribue, the airport vic. He operated a construction company, Tribue Engineering. His father's the congressman, brother's the sheriff for the tribe. Named Farris.”

“They have this place sewed up.”

“Seems that way.”

“So I'm still on the payroll?”

“Probation.” He ran a finger through the foam on his cheek, sizing up his bristles. “You break my balls about being honest, not telling you about Lucy Panther, about Mother being part Cherokee, but meanwhile you're off consorting with the feds, making private deals.”

“Probation, huh?”

“End of the week you come up for review.”

“You sure about that cave drawing? It
could
be kids.”

“It could be, but it's not. That's a likeness of Standingdog. Jacob left it. He's guiding us.”

“I don't like games.”

“Well, he was right not to trust us. If he'd shown up last night, he'd be in jail right now, or dead.”

“What you mean is, Parker, he was right not to trust
me
.”

“You keep giving everything I say the worst possible twist.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah, I think you do. I think you're severely knotted up about all this shit, and I've become the fall guy.”

Then a phone was ringing. So muffled it might be in the next room.

“Yours,” Parker said, and pointed at her backpack on the nightstand.

She got it out, looked at the caller ID:
OUT OF AREA

When she answered there was static, then a disconnect.

“Nobody,” she said.

Parker swung back to the bathroom mirror and went to work with his razor. She looked at his back—the V still there, waist trim, shoulders wide. A body maintained on the Salvadore Park tennis courts three nights a week and weekends, when he wasn't at trial. The body still stirred her. It was his mind that was giving her trouble.

His goddamn persistent, all-embracing optimism and faith in the goodness of humanity despite all evidence to the contrary. His sneaky bargains with his mother, his hot and heavy teenage love affair. When she ticked off the list, ran it through her head, it seemed paltry. Certainly nothing worth shaking the foundations of their marriage. And maybe he was right about her giving everything he said the worst twist. Like the way she kept hearing him invoke the Qwik Mart holdup and her legal salvation. It might simply be her own guilty projection. An unwillingness to come to terms with the fact that she owed him her life, always would. She had to consider that. Bite on it a while, see if it was real.

Her phone peeped again and she picked it up, still looking at Parker's trim torso, the muscles working under the flesh as he reached out and wiped a path across the foggy mirror.

“Hi, Mom, it's Gracey. Your daughter.”

She froze. Barely recognized the voice. A prank?

“Gracey?”

Parker turned from the mirror.

“So I called Dad at work and he wasn't there, then I called home and Fredericka was there feeding the cats and she told me you'd gone on a trip. Lucy was after me to call you guys. Joan, too. Everybody said I should, that it was the right thing, so I did. You know, to check in. Make you feel better.”

Too bubbly and alert. Not the picture she'd built in her head, a kid on the run, unraveling.

“Where are you?”

Parker came over and sat beside her on the edge of the bed.

“Where are
you
, Mom?”

“We're in Cherokee, North Carolina. Where are you, Gracey?”

The reception faded, and Gracey's words turned to garble.

“Gracey?”

Her daughter was talking to someone else, and in the background a woman's voice answered her.

“Same place, Cherokee,” Gracey said. “That's pretty amazing, you tracked me down. I'm impressed, Mom.”

“Are you okay? Do you have your meds?”

Parker stuck his hand out for the phone.

“We have to keep moving, Mom. Lucy says to tell you to meet us this afternoon at five
P.M.
Jacob and Lucy have something they need to talk to you about. It's like really important. Life or death.”

Charlotte waved his hand away.

He lowered it and looked up at the ceiling. Patience, patience.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah, Lucy Panther.”

The breath lodged in Charlotte's throat.

“Butts on the Creek barbecue,” Gracey said. “Five o'clock. It's on the main drag in Maggie Valley, whatever that road is, where all the tourist shops are and everything, moccasins, tom-toms, all that crap.”

“Butts on the Creek barbecue?” Charlotte repeated for Parker.

He looked at her and nodded. Knew the place.

“We'll come now. We'll come wherever you are, right this minute.”

“Lucy and I have a few things to take care of first. Five o'clock.”

She drew a long breath.

“Let me speak to Lucy.”

She heard Gracey relay the request.

“She doesn't have anything to say. Just meet us at the barbecue place.”

“Your dad wants to talk to you.”

“We gotta go. Tell him I love him.”

Charlotte waited, listening to the silence.

“This is fun, isn't it?” Gracey said.

“This is not fun, Gracey.” But her words were spoken to an empty line.

“Fun?” Parker said.

“She's having fun. This is a game. Her and Lucy Panther.”

Charlotte repeated the little Gracey had said, and Parker flinched and turned away.

“So what do we do till five o'clock?” Parker said.

“We go see Standingdog. What we planned.”

“But that's irrelevant. We get Gracey back, to hell with the rest of it. We'll just go home and be a family and turn this over to the authorities.”

“Give up on your son?”

“This could be putting us in danger. And for what? We're just flailing.”

“In the first place, we don't have Gracey back yet.” She walked to the bathroom, picked up his razor, and beckoned for him. He came into the room, and Charlotte steadied his chin with one hand and began to rake the blade through the dying foam.

“And in the second place?”

In the mirror he held her eyes while she drew the blade across his cheeks in long, smooth strokes. Then tipped his head back and worked on his throat.

“In the second place, this son of yours appeared out of nowhere and warned us we're in danger and the next evening your mother was murdered. We can't slough that off, take our daughter home, pretend none of this happened. I don't like it a damn bit, but we have to resolve it, follow through. Would you ever feel safe again if we didn't?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You're right. I just lost my nerve for a second.”

Charlotte rinsed his razor, took the towel from the back of the door, and patted his face dry.

“By the way,” she said. “Gracey told me to tell you she loved you.”

“And you?”

“She was silent on that issue.”

She dabbed a fleck of foam away from his eye.

“She loves you, Charlotte, she does. I see it all the time.”

“In her way, sure. I suppose she does.”

He slid his arms beneath hers and drew her to him. She dropped the hand towel on the floor, and for a moment she thought his fingers were moving to unsnap her bra. Then she felt on her shoulder the warm flow of his tears and, against her chest, the long, unbroken shudder of his release.