The Ridge (5 page)

The anger was gone, though, and the frustration. The only negatives that would remain today were the muscle aches.

That was how she felt until the sirens and the flashing lights of a police car appeared behind them. Wes eased onto the shoulder, thinking they were being stopped, but the car hummed by without pause, a trail of mist from its tires hanging in the air like exhaust from a jet.

“He’s in a hurry,” she observed.

It was five minutes later when they turned onto the long gravel lane that led to their new home and saw a red light in the trees. As Wes drove on, Audrey stared at it, thinking that it might be from the lighthouse, thinking that the crazy neighbor was taking it up a notch, but then they rounded a bend and she could see the police car.

Or the remains of the police car.

The vehicle was upside down in the trees on the north side of the road, across from the preserve’s front gate. It looked as if it had been in the process of rolling a second time when the trees caught it, and now the car was propped at an awkward angle, the passenger side in the air and the driver’s side pressed against the ground. The roof was crushed down, fractured pieces of metal and fiberglass littered the gravel, and the headlights—both still on—were pointed crazily into the trees, one angled up, one angled down. The hood was torn and the engine showed like internal organs, things you knew you shouldn’t be able to see.

Audrey whispered, “He’s got to be dead.”

Wes didn’t argue. With the look of that car, there wasn’t much argument to be made.

“Call 911,” he said, and then a figure emerged from the trees just behind the car, stepping out of the shadows, and Audrey almost screamed before she realized that it was Dustin Hall, her own employee. He looked up at them, then back to the car, and shook his head.

Audrey knew what he meant. The driver was dead.

Wes popped open the door and stepped into the rain while Audrey took her phone out and dialed, gave their location, and explained the situation.

“It’s bad,” she said. “It’s really, really bad.”

“Is the driver breathing?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine… the car is just demolished.”

“Could you check? Can you get close enough to see if there’s any sign of motion? We have an ambulance en route, but I need to know what to tell them.”

Audrey got out of the truck. Wes had dropped to his knees by the shattered window, and now he removed his jacket, wrapped it around his fist, and began swinging at the car, trying to clear away the remaining glass from the passenger window.

“Is he alive?” Audrey asked.

“I don’t know.”

She walked closer, knelt in the wet gravel beside him, and peered inside the car. The roof had been crushed down to the headrest, both airbags had deployed, and the inside of the car was a cloudburst of broken plastic, glass, and fabric. The airbags had left a chalky dust in the air, the smell faintly like gunpowder. Pinned between the steering wheel and the remains of the passenger seat, which had been shoved toward him, was the deputy’s crumpled body. Audrey was just about to speak into the phone again, just about to say that the man looked to be dead, when he moved his head and focused his eyes on hers.

She almost screamed. It was stunning to see him move. She jerked upright and stumbled backward as the operator said, “Ma’am, what do you see?”

“He’s… um… he’s moving,” Audrey said, watching in astonishment as the deputy blinked, narrowed his eyes, and frowned at her and Wes as if he didn’t know what they were doing there and didn’t like seeing them. “He’s alive. I don’t know how, but he’s alive.”

The operator was busy telling her not to try to move him until the paramedics arrived when the deputy reached out of the broken window and placed one white palm on the gravel, dug his fingers in, and tried to pull himself clear.

“Tell him not to move,” Audrey said, but Wes was already leaning forward to help.

“Give a hand,” he shouted to Dustin, who had been one of David’s favorite students and was always capable around the preserve but now stood pale-faced and motionless. Dustin responded to the order, though, leaned down and helped support the deputy’s weight while Wes pulled a pocket knife free, opened the blade, and hacked through the seatbelt, whispering to the deputy to take it easy, not to rush. The whole time the guy was reaching from the wreckage with that one free arm, pulling at the mud and gravel, as if determined to claw out from within the car that should have been his coffin. Wes and Dustin caught him by the shoulders and lifted and then, somehow, he was out of the police car and on his back, breathing and alert.

Audrey hung up the phone. “What happened?” she asked Dustin.

“I think he missed the turn or something. All I know is one second I heard the siren and then the next he was in the trees.”

Dustin’s face looked bloodless, and he was weaving on his feet. She said, “Do you need to sit down?”

“Maybe, yeah.” He fell heavily on his ass in the road, pushing thick dark hair back from his forehead, his chest heaving. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Help’s coming,” she said, patting Dustin’s shoulder. “And it looks as if he’s okay. I can’t believe he’s moving. How is he moving?”

There was blood on the deputy’s face, coming from his nose and his lips, and a crisscrossing of scratches over his forehead and left cheek, but those were the only evident injuries. He was a young, fit man, lean and long, with sandy hair and blue eyes. Being young and fit didn’t allow for escaping an accident like that unscathed, though. He was charmed by unnatural good luck, too, it seemed.

“Lucky,” Audrey said softly, thinking that her husband had died out here in a fall. One misplaced step, one slip, one life
extinguished. This deputy had driven into the trees at top speed, demolished the car all around him, and survived.

Don’t think about it like that,
she told herself.
Stop that. Be grateful.

There was a murmur from the deputy. Audrey looked down again, then saw that his eyes were open and locked on hers.

“You okay?” she said. “You with us? You with us?”

Water dripped out of Wes’s short gray beard and off the brim of his baseball cap as he knelt over the wounded man. Beyond, in the preserve, no more than a hundred feet away, the cats had pressed close to the fences, intrigued. One of the lions gave a low roar, and that got the deputy’s attention. He swung his head up and around to face the cats, and Audrey winced when he moved his neck, sure that his spine had to be at risk. They’d been telling her to keep him still, that he would need a backboard.

“Please don’t move,” she said, and then, seeing how intently he was looking at her cats, she added, “They’re locked up. They won’t hurt you.”

She turned to Dustin. “Go try to calm them, please. The last thing we need is the cats going crazy right now.”

He went off to try to make peace with animals who were already restless from new surroundings and unnatural activity, and Audrey knelt beside Wes, watching the deputy.

“I hit him,” the deputy said.

“What?”

“Tried to miss, but he was right there, and I was going so fast… I tried to miss, I promise you that I did.”

“You didn’t hit anyone. Everyone is fine.”

That seemed distressing to him. He moved his head again, searching the dark woods, and this time his face split into an odd smile, blood on his teeth.

“He made it?”

“You didn’t hit anyone,” Audrey repeated, feeling ill at ease
now. Maybe he hadn’t been so unscathed after all. A concussion was likely. Maybe something worse, bleeding on the brain, who knew?

“Light’s out,” the deputy said, staring over her shoulder. Audrey turned and looked up to the hilltop where the lighthouse stood against the weaving bare branches. It was dark, for the first time all day.

“We’ve got an ambulance on the way,” she said. “Just stay down. Please don’t move around. They’ll be here soon.”

“Where were you headed, bud?” Wes asked. “Is something wrong with the cats? Did you get a call about them?”

Blood was dribbling down the deputy’s chin as he shook his head.

“There’s a dead man in the lighthouse,” he said.

T
EN MINUTES ON DUTY
, running on frayed nerves and no sleep, and Kimble had a corpse call. He’d poured a cup of coffee but hadn’t taken a sip yet when he heard the news. Gunshot victim, they said.

“Active shooter?” he asked.

Probable suicide, he was told.

“We know the vic’s name?”

French, they said. Wyatt French. Maybe he remembered—

“Yes,” Kimble said. “I remember Wyatt French.”

He felt cold guilt in the pit of his stomach. All those questions, all that talk about suicide. Why hadn’t he sent someone to check? He’d hoped Wyatt was just drunk, the way he usually was. That last joke, too, the threat that he might just decide to live forever—it had suggested that he wasn’t in too dismal a state of mind. Hadn’t it?

Kimble swallowed some coffee for warmth, kept his face impassive, and, after a moment’s pause, asked that they send Nathan Shipley. He didn’t want to go out there himself, not after the morning call, and Shipley, though young, was one of Kimble’s
favorite deputies, quiet and calm and tough. He’d seen worse than a suicide, and he’d be fine out there in charge of the scene.

They dispatched Shipley, only to come back for Kimble a moment later, just as he’d settled behind his desk.

It seemed Kimble’s presence had been requested at the scene.

“By Shipley?”

By the victim, he was told. There was a letter on the front door, asking that for purposes of investigation the case be handed to Kevin W. Kimble. Dispatch thought he’d like to know that.

First the predawn call to his private number, now a letter on the door? What did Wyatt French want from Kimble?

He pulled on a baseball cap and went back out into the rain, tired and confused and wondering what else he could have said, should have said.

What he should have done.

Roy stood outside the lighthouse as darkness gathered and the rain pounded down on him and blood dripped off his palm and into the grass. He felt a tingle in his elbow. That wasn’t good. He’d probably cut right through the nerves in his hand.

Explaining this to the police was going to be a treat. Tell them that a man was dead and Roy’s own blood just happened to be splattered all over the scene? Somehow he had a feeling that wouldn’t go over too smoothly.

Where in the hell
were
the cops, though? He’d heard a siren that sounded as if it were just below him, but then it had stopped.

The pain in his hand had ebbed away to a dull ache, but he was continuing to drip blood all over his pants. He considered taking off his shirt and wrapping it around the wound, but then he looked through the open door into Wyatt French’s strange
living quarters and saw the dishtowels hanging from the stove. It wasn’t as if Wyatt would miss them.

He stepped back inside, feeling an uneasy sensation the moment he reentered, knowing damn well now what waited at the top of those steps. His first stop was the sink, where he ran warm water over his hand until the pain ratcheted up a few levels, and then he switched it to cold, hoping to numb things down. The water mixed with the blood and swirled down the sink. He felt lightheaded watching it, so he looked away and took one of the dishtowels from the stove, soaked it in cold water, and then wrapped it tightly around his palm.

The dizziness was still with him. He blinked and took a few deep breaths and stared around. When he’d first entered, his focus had been on finding Wyatt, but now he had a chance to register the room itself. Wyatt had never finished the walls—two-by-fours climbed like latticework, pink insulation showing between them, no drywall pinning them in. His focus, it seemed, had been on speed as he built. He wanted to get to the top and get that light going. The same one he’d asked Roy to keep on before he’d eaten his gun. The same one Roy had promptly shattered.

Like it matters,
he told himself.
Like the crazy thing really matters.

He stepped farther into the room, looking at the maps Wyatt had pinned to the exposed wall studs. There were a lot of them, names written across in red ink. Beside the maps, and all around the room, photographs were held in place with thumbtacks. Ancient pictures, sepia-tinted relics of another time, men with old-fashioned mustaches and women standing beside cars with wide running boards. Roy stepped closer, saw that each photograph was labeled. A few with names, but most—almost all of them, it seemed—with one scrawled word:
NO.

It was eerie, standing here in the darkened room, a dead man upstairs and all of these faces from times gone by watching him. He shot a glance at the door, wondering again about the police.

One picture caught his eye—more recent, a color shot, and the woman in it was breathtaking. He crossed the room and stared into her crystal eyes and realized he was looking at the booking photograph of Jacqueline Mathis.

What in the hell went on in that man’s head?
Roy thought.
What was he looking for?