Ice Cold (31 page)

Did they know that a time bomb lay buried in this soil, the soil they were digging into and churning up?

“A pesticide didn’t kill these people,” said Maura.

“But you said it matched the clinical picture.”

“So does VX nerve gas. It kills in
exactly
the same way that organophosphates do. VX disrupts the same enzymes, causes the same symptoms, but it’s far more potent. It’s a chemical weapon designed to be dispersed through the air. If you release it in a low-lying area …” Maura looked at Jane. “It would turn this valley into a killing zone.”

The growl of a truck engine made them both jump to their feet. Our car is parked out in the open, thought Maura. Whoever has just arrived already knows we’re here.

“Are you carrying?” Maura asked. “Please tell me you’re armed.”

“I left it locked in the trunk.”

“You have to get it.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“This
is what it’s all about!” Maura pointed to the half buried canister of VX gas. “Not pesticides. Not mass suicide. It was an
accident
. These are chemical weapons, Jane. They should have been destroyed decades ago. They’ve probably been buried here for years.”

“Then The Gathering—Jeremiah—”

“He had nothing to do with why these people died.”

Jane looked around the clearing with growing comprehension. “The Dahlia Group—the fake company that paid off Martineau—it has something to do with them, doesn’t it?”

They heard the snap of a breaking branch.

“Hide!”
whispered Maura.

They both ducked into the woods just as Montgomery Loftus stepped into the clearing. He was carrying a rifle, but it was pointed at the ground, and he moved with the casual pace of a hunter who has not yet spotted his quarry. Their footprints were all over that clearing, and he could not miss the evidence of their presence. All he had to do was follow their tracks to where they both crouched among the pines. Yet he ignored the obvious and calmly approached the hole that Maura had just dug. He looked down at the exposed cylinder. At the shovel that Maura had left lying there.

“If you bury anything for thirty years, it’ll eventually corrode,” he said. “Metal gets brittle. Accidentally run over it with a bulldozer or crush it against a rock, and it’ll fracture apart.” He raised his voice, as though the trees themselves were his audience. “What do you think would happen if I fired a bullet at this right now?”

Only then did Maura realize that his rifle was pointing toward the canister. She remained frozen, afraid to make a sound. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Jane slowly creep deeper into the woods, but Maura could not seem to move.

“VX gas doesn’t take long to kill you,” said Loftus. “That’s what the contractor told me thirty years ago, when they paid me to dump it. Might take a little longer to disperse on a cold day like this. But on a warm day, it spreads fast. Blows on the wind, seeps through open windows. Into houses.” He lifted his rifle and aimed at the canister.

Maura felt her heart lurch. One blast from that weapon would disperse a cloud of toxic gas that they could never hope to outrun. Just as the residents of Kingdom Come could not outrun it on that unseasonably warm November day, when they’d opened their windows and their lungs. Death had wafted in and swiftly claimed its victims: children at play, families gathered for meals. A woman on the stairs, whose dying tumble left her bleeding at the bottom.

“Don’t!” Maura said. “Please.” She stepped out from behind the tree. She could not see where Jane was; she knew only that Loftus was already aware of her presence, and she could not hope to outrun his bullet, either. But the rifle wasn’t aimed at her; it remained pointed at the canister. “This is suicide,” she said.

He gave her an ironic smile. “That is the general idea, ma’am. Since I can’t see any way this is going to turn out right for me. Not now. Better this than prison.” He looked off toward the destroyed village of Kingdom Come. “When they get back the final analysis on those bodies, they’ll know what killed them. They’ll be all over this valley, searching for what should’ve stayed buried. It won’t take them long to come knocking on my door.” He released a heavy sigh. “Thirty years ago, I never imagined …” The rifle drooped closer to the canister.

“You can make things right, Mr. Loftus,” Maura said, struggling to keep her voice calm. Reasonable. “You can tell the authorities the truth.”

“The truth?” He gave a grunt of self-disgust. “The truth is, I needed the goddamn money. The ranch needed it. And the contractor needed a cheap way to get rid of this.”

“By turning the valley into a toxic dump?”

“We’re the ones who paid to make these weapons. You and I and every other tax-paying American. But what do you do with chemical weapons when you can’t use them anymore?”

“They should have been incinerated.”

“You think government contractors actually built the fancy incinerators they promised? It was cheaper to haul this away and bury it.” His gaze swept the clearing. “There was nothing here then, just an empty valley and a dirt road. I never thought there’d be families living here one day. They had no idea what was on their land. A single canister would’ve been enough to kill them all.” He looked down, once again, at the cylinder. “When I found them, all I could think of was how to make those bodies go away.”

“So you buried them.”

“Contractor sent their own men to do it. But the blizzard moved in.”

That’s when we showed up. The unlucky tourists who stumbled into a ghost town
. The same blinding snowstorm had stranded Maura and her party in Kingdom Come, where they saw too much, learned too much.
We would have revealed everything
.

Once again, Loftus lifted the rifle and aimed at the canister.

She took a panicked step toward him. “You could ask for immunity,” she said.

“There’s no immunity for killing innocent people.”

“If you testify against the contractor—”

“They’re the ones with the money. The lawyers.”

“You can name names.”

“I already have. There’s an envelope in my truck. It has numbers, dates, names. Every detail I can remember. I hope it’s enough to bring them down.” His hand tightened around the rifle stock, and Maura’s breath froze in her throat.
Where are you, Jane?

The rustle of branches alerted Maura.

Loftus heard it, too. In that instant, whatever uncertainty had plagued him suddenly vanished. He looked down at the canister.

“This doesn’t solve anything, Loftus,” said Maura.

“It solves everything,” he said.

Jane emerged from the woods, weapon clutched in both hands, barrel pointed at Loftus. “Drop the rifle,” she said.

He looked at her with an expression that was strangely impassive. The face of a man who’d given up caring what happened next. “It’s your move, Detective,” he said. “Be a hero.”

Jane took a step toward him, her weapon rock-steady. “It doesn’t have to end this way.”

“It’s only a bullet,” said Loftus. He turned toward the canister. Raised his rifle to fire.

The explosion sent a spray of blood across the white ground. For a second Loftus seemed to hang suspended, like a diver about to plunge into the ocean. The rifle dropped from his hand. Slowly, he collapsed forward, to sprawl facedown on the snow.

Jane lowered her weapon. “Jesus,” she murmured. “He forced my hand!”

Maura dropped down beside Loftus and rolled him onto his back. Awareness had not yet left his gaze, and he stared up at her, as though memorizing her face. It was the last image he saw as the light left his eyes.

“I didn’t have a choice,” said Jane.

“No. You didn’t. And he knew it.” Slowly Maura rose to her feet and turned toward the vanished settlement of Kingdom Come. And she thought: They didn’t have a choice, either, not those forty-one people who died here. Nor had Douglas and Grace, Elaine and Arlo. Most of us march through life never knowing how or when we’ll die.

But Montgomery Loftus had made his choice. He had chosen today, by a cop’s bullet, in this poisoned place.

Slowly she breathed out, and the white cloud from her breath curled into the twilight like one more untethered soul drifting into the valley of ghosts.

D
ANIEL WAS STANDING ON THE TARMAC, WAITING TO GREET THEM
when Sansone’s private jet taxied to the executive air terminal. The same high winds that had delayed their flight to Massachusetts were now lashing Daniel’s black coat and whipping his hair, yet he stoically endured the gale’s full force as the jet came to a stop and the stairway was lowered.

Maura was first off the plane.

She walked down the steps, straight into his waiting arms. Only weeks ago, they would have greeted each other with only a discreet peck on the cheek, a chaste hug. They would have waited until they were behind doors, the curtains drawn, before embracing. But today was her homecoming, her return from the dead, and he pulled her against him without hesitation.

Yet even as Daniel held her, joyfully murmuring her name, pressing kisses to her face, her hair, she was aware of her friends’ eyes watching them. Aware, too, of her own discomfort that what she had tried so long to conceal was now in the open.

It was not the biting wind, but her awareness of being watched that made her pull away from Daniel far too quickly. She glimpsed Sansone’s darkly unreadable face, and she saw Jane awkwardly turn to avoid meeting her gaze. I may be back from the dead, she thought, but has anything really changed? I am still the same woman, and Daniel is the same man.

He was the one who drove her home.

In the darkness of her bedroom, they undressed each other, as they had so many times before. He kissed her bruises, her healing scratches. Caressed all the hollows, all the places where her bones were now far too prominent. My poor darling, you’ve lost so much weight, he told her. How he’d missed her. Mourned her.

It was not yet morning when she awakened. She sat in bed and watched him sleep as the night lifted outside the window, and she committed to memory his face, the sound of his breathing, the touch and the scent of him. Whenever he spent the night with her, dawn always brought sadness because it meant his leaving. On this morning, she felt it once again, and the association was so powerful that she wondered if she’d ever again be able to watch a sunrise without a stab of despair. You are both my love and my unhappiness, she thought. And I am yours.

She rose from bed, went into the kitchen, and made coffee. Stood at the window sipping it as daylight brightened, revealing a lawn laced with frost. She thought of those cold, silent mornings in Kingdom Come, where she had finally faced the truth about her own life.
I am trapped in my own snowbound valley. I am the only one who can rescue me
.

She finished her coffee and went back into her bedroom. Settling down beside Daniel, she watched him open his eyes and smile at her.

“I love you, Daniel,” she said. “I will always love you. But it’s time for us to say goodbye.”

FOUR MONTHS LATER

J
ULIAN
P
ERKINS CARRIED HIS LUNCH TRAY FROM THE HIGH SCHOOL
cafeteria line and scanned the room for an empty table, but they were all occupied. He saw other students glance at him, and noticed how quickly they turned away, afraid that he might misconstrue their looks as invitations. He understood the meaning of those stubbornly hunched shoulders. He wasn’t deaf to the snickers, the whispers.

God, he’s weird
.

The cult must’ve sucked out his brains
.

My mom says he should be in juvie hall
.

Julian finally spotted an available chair, and as he sat down, the other kids at the table quickly scooted away as though he were radioactive. Maybe he was. Maybe he emitted death rays that killed anyone he loved, anyone who loved
him
. He ate quickly, as he always did, like some feral animal afraid that his food would be snatched away, gulping down the turkey and rice in a few ravenous bites.

“Julian Perkins?” a teacher called out. “Is Julian Perkins in the cafeteria?”

The boy cringed as he felt everyone turn to look at him. He wanted to duck under the table where he could not be found. When a teacher yells your name in the cafeteria, it sure as hell isn’t a good thing. The other students were gleefully pointing at him, and already Mr. Hazeldean was coming toward him, wearing his usual bow tie and scowl.

“Perkins.”

Julian’s head drooped. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled.

“Principal wants you in his office.”

“What did I do?”

“You probably know the answer to that one.”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Then why don’t you go and find out?”

Regretfully abandoning his uneaten chocolate pudding, Julian carried the tray to the dirty dishes window and started up the hallway toward Principal Gorchinski’s office. Truly he did not know what he’d done wrong. All the other times, well, yeah. He should not have brought his hunting knife to school. He should not have borrowed Mrs. Pribble’s car without her permission. But this time, he couldn’t think of any infraction that would explain the summons.

When he reached Gorchinski’s office, he had his all-purpose apology ready.
I knew it was stupid, sir. I’ll never do it again, sir. Please don’t call the police again, sir
.

Principal G’s secretary barely looked up as he walked in. “You can go straight into his office, Julian,” she said. “They’re waiting for you.”

They
. Plural. This was sounding worse and worse. The poker-faced secretary, as usual, gave nothing away—just kept tapping at her keyboard. Pausing outside Gorchinski’s door, he prepared himself for whatever punishment was waiting. I probably deserve it, he thought, and stepped into the room.

“There you are, Julian. You have visitors,” said Gorchinski. Smiling. This was new and different.

The boy looked at the three people who were seated across from Gorchinski. He already knew Beverly Cupido, his new caseworker, and she, too, was smiling. What was with all the friendly faces today? It made him nervous, because he knew that the cruelest of blows too often came with a smile.

“Julian,” said Beverly, “I know it’s been really rough for you this year. Losing your mother and sister. All those questions about the deputy. And I know you were disappointed that Dr. Isles wasn’t approved as a foster parent.”

“She wanted to have me,” he said. “She said I could live with her in Boston.”

“That wasn’t an appropriate situation for you. For either one of you. We have to weigh the circumstances, and think about your welfare. Dr. Isles lives alone and she has a very demanding job, sometimes with night call. You’d be left alone far too much, without any supervision. It’s not the sort of arrangement that a boy like you needs.”

A boy who should be in juvie hall
was what she meant.

“That’s why these people have come to see you,” said Beverly, gesturing to the man and woman who had risen from their chairs to greet him. “To offer you an alternative. They represent the Evensong School in Maine. A very good school, I might add.”

Julian recognized the man as someone who had come to visit him while he was still in the hospital. That had been a confusing time, when he’d been foggy with pain meds, and there’d been detectives and nurses and social workers trooping through his hospital room. He didn’t remember the man’s name, but he definitely remembered those laser eyes, which were now fixed on him with such intensity that he felt all his secrets were suddenly laid bare. Discomfited by that gaze, Julian looked instead at the woman.

She was in her thirties, skinny, with shoulder-length brown hair. Although she was dressed conservatively in a gray skirt suit, there was no hiding the fact that she was pretty damn hot. The way she stood, one slim hip audaciously jutting out, head at a mischievous tilt, gave off a weird hint of street punk.

“Hello, Julian,” the woman said. Smiling, she held out her hand to shake his, as if she were meeting an equal. An adult. “My name is Lily Saul. I teach the classics.” She paused, noting his blank look. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. No.”

“It’s history. The history of ancient Greece and Rome. Very fascinating stuff.”

His head drooped. “I got a D in history.”

“Maybe I can change that. Have you ever ridden a chariot, Julian? Swung a Spanish sword, the sword of the Roman army?”

“You do that at your school?”

“All that and more.” She saw his chin suddenly tilt up in interest, and she laughed. “You see? History can be a lot more fun than you thought. Once you remember it’s about people, and not just about boring dates and treaties. We’re a very special school, in a very special setting. Lots of fields and woods, so you can even bring your dog if you’d like. I believe his name is Bear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We also have a library that any college would envy. And teachers who are among the best in their fields, from all around the world. It’s a school for students who have special talents.”

He didn’t know what to say. He looked at Gorchinski and Beverly. They were both nodding approvingly.

“Does Evensong sound like a school that might interest you?” said Lily. “A place you might want to attend?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Julian said. “Are you sure you’re talking to the right Perkins? There’s a Billy Perkins in this school.”

Amusement flickered in the woman’s eyes. “I’m absolutely certain I have the right Perkins boy. Why would you think you’re not the one we want?”

Julian sighed. “The truth is, my grades aren’t all that good.”

“I know. We’ve looked at your transcript.”

Again he glanced at Beverly, wondering what the trick was. Why such a privilege was being offered to him.

“It’s a great opportunity,” said his caseworker. “A year-round boarding school with top academic standards. A full scholarship. They have only fifty students, so you’d get plenty of attention.”

“Then why do they want
me?”

His plaintive question hung for a moment unanswered. It was the man who finally spoke.

“Do you remember me, Julian?” he said. “We’ve met.”

“Yes, sir.” The boy found himself shrinking under the man’s piercing gaze. “You came to see me at the hospital.”

“I’m on the board of trustees at Evensong. It’s a school I deeply believe in. A school for unique students. Young people who’ve proven themselves extraordinary in some way.”

“Me?” The boy laughed in disbelief. “I’m a thief. They told you that, didn’t they?”

“Yes, I know.”

“I broke into houses. I stole stuff.”

“I know.”

“I killed a deputy. I shot him.”

“To stay alive. It’s a talent, you know. Just knowing how to survive.”

Julian’s gaze drifted to the window. Below was the school courtyard, where cliques of students were huddled together in the cold, laughing and gossiping. I’ll never be part of their world, he thought. I’ll never be one of them. Is there anywhere in the world where I belong?

“Ninety-nine percent of kids wouldn’t have lived through what you did,” said the man. “Because of you, my friend Maura is alive.”

Julian looked at the man with sudden comprehension. “This is because of her, isn’t it? Maura asked you to take me.”

“Yes. But I’m also doing it for Evensong. Because I think you’ll be an asset to us. An asset to …” He stopped. It was in that silence where the real answer lay. An answer that the man chose at that moment not to reveal. Instead, he smiled. “I’m sorry. I never properly introduced myself, did I? My name is Anthony Sansone.” He extended his hand. “May we welcome you to Evensong, Julian?”

The boy stared at Sansone, trying to read his eyes. Trying to understand what was not being said. Principal Gorchinski and Beverly Cupido were both smiling cluelessly, oblivious to the strange current of tension in the room, a subaudible hum that told him there was more to the Evensong School than Lily Saul and Anthony Sansone were telling him. And that his life was about to change.

“Well, Julian?” said Sansone. His hand was still extended.

“My name is Rat,” the boy said. And he took the man’s hand.