Valknut: The Binding (5 page)

He sat back, stunned. As he watched, the
blood seemed to evaporate and the hole slowly closed. Nothing
remained but a red splotch on her shirt and a small white dimple on
her side. He reached a hand toward it—a hand sticky with her
blood—but the dimple disappeared under his fingers. He couldn’t
bring himself to touch the smooth space where it had been.

He ran the flashlight along her body,
half-expecting her to sprout wings or disappear, but she just lay
there, snoring lightly. The scrapes and bruises on her arms and
face from boarding the train were gone as well. Blood stained the
edges of a tear in the knee of her jeans. That injury had been
particularly raw. He scooted closer and directed the light at
it.

Smooth, fair skin. Not even a scar.

That just wasn’t right. He had seen a lot of
strange things on the rails, but nothing came close to this. An
eerie, vulnerable feeling came over him, as if the shadows of the
nearly empty boxcar suddenly held an extra pair of eyes that
watched him when the flashlight pointed the other way. Fighting
panic, he swung the light around again, but there was nothing.

“Jeez,” he muttered. Next, he’d start
spinning in circles trying to shine the light everywhere at once.
He snorted at the thought.

Still, the blood on his hands had come from
somewhere.

He directed the light on Lennie again,
half-hoping, half-dreading it would wake her up. She stirred and
muttered something about a squirrel, but continued sleeping. He
examined her for some oddity, some hint to explain what had just
happened. There was something different about her. He had sensed it
from the moment she had boarded the train.

Slender, almost boyish, she wasn’t beautiful.
At least, not by the usual standards. Her features, half-hidden
under a tangle of gold-brown hair, were soft and rounded with a
sharp little chin. She looked much younger than he had first
guessed, but the two deep, vertical lines between her eyebrows made
her look angry, even in her sleep.

That was it, he realized. The difference. He
had never felt that kind of intensity from anyone before. Except
maybe from himself. He had felt it even before she had started
talking. That couldn’t explain why her wounds closed up as if they
had never happened, but the anger did give her another kind of
power. A pissed-off pit bull kind of power. Enough to get her into
trouble, but not enough to get her out of it again.

He understood that sort of power. It had
nearly gotten him killed, more than once. Somehow, he had to
convince her to go home and stay there before some gangbanger found
her. Or worse, the serial killer. But he knew she wouldn’t listen
to him any more than Austin had. He clicked off the flashlight and
left her blanketed in the dark, but he could still see her face,
fair skin damp from nightmares, her delicate, pink lips parted in
sleep.

If the serial killer took her, those lips
would be cut and crusted over with blood, her face forever twisted
by terror.

He could see it as clearly as if it had
already happen. That was how his brother’s face had looked, between
the zippered sides of a body bag. He shuddered at the memory. The
sight had nearly unhinged him for good. But then he had met
Detective Harcourt Briggeman and everything had changed.

He had still been in shock when a police
officer had taken him from the morgue to the police station. No one
had answered his questions beyond the obvious. They wouldn’t even
tell him if there was a suspect.

He was taken to a room containing a table and
two chairs. A box of tissues sat in the middle of the table, along
with a pitcher of water and some Styrofoam cups. The room was
otherwise devoid of furnishings or decoration.

A broad-shouldered man in his early thirties
sat in one of the chairs. His denim shirt was grease-stained and
coming untucked from his jeans. Mud flaked from scuffed work boots.
He slouched, elbows on the table, his head propped up in his hands,
one long leg stretching lazily to the side. He might have been
asleep but for the nervous jiggle in the other leg.

The officer escorting Doug strode into the
room, leaving Doug in the doorway. “Hey, Briggs.” He dropped a
folder on the table. “The report’s in there, along with duplicates
of the pictures, like you asked.”

Briggs opened one red-rimmed eye, then the
other, and dragged himself upright. “Thanks, Sam. I’ve been up all
night with this case. Again. What a goddamn mess, eh?” He rubbed
his face, making waves in the worry lines that creased his
forehead.

“Nasty business, and the hell of it is, it’ll
take a miracle to—”

Briggs spotted Doug in the doorway. “Captain
Harding! I didn’t see you there.” He shot Sam an annoyed glance and
stood up from the table. “You are Captain Harding, right?”

When Doug nodded, Briggs thrust out a hand
and said, “I’m Detective Briggeman with FRC Railroad.”

Briggs’s hand was as dirty as the rest of
him, with broken, black-rimmed nails. Doug accepted it, saying,
“This isn’t Fort Bragg. Just call me Doug.” The handshake was brief
but firm. “FRC Railroad—you’re the one who called my C.O. Can you
tell me what happened?”

Briggs pulled the other chair out from the
table and motioned Doug to sit down. “We’ll get to that. First, can
you tell me what Austin was doing on that train?”

Doug stared down at his hands and rubbed
absently at a dark smudge left by Briggs’s handshake. “I got
promoted. Just last week. There was a party Friday.” He rubbed
harder, but the stain only smeared. “Austin never misses a party.
He cut two days of classes to get there on time. Hopped trains and
hitchhiked all the way from Minneapolis to North Carolina in two
days. He tapped the first keg himself.

“I told him not to come, but he did anyway.
To surprise me, he said.” Doug smiled bitterly, remembering
Austin’s triumphant grin when Doug answered the door. Guests were
due to arrive any moment, and Austin was all greasy hair and diesel
fumes. Doug had made him take a shower.

“He left the next morning, maybe ten o’clock.
He was still drunk when he got on that train.” Austin never would
have forgotten his jean jacket, otherwise. The idiot was probably
half frozen by the time he...

“That stupid sonofabitch. I told him I’d buy
him a bus ticket, even a plane ticket, but he wouldn’t let me. He
said he hated that recycled air, that it contained more germs than
oxygen.” He remembered Austin laughing at his arguments, calling
him Dad. Doug’s voice broke. “Damn kid said he didn’t want to get
sick.”

He could still see the train pulling out of
the yard and Austin’s arm emerging from the grainer’s cubbyhole to
wave goodbye. “I should have dragged him onto that bus.”

Lost in those final moments, Doug hardly
noticed when Briggs pushed back from the table and walked Sam to
the door. Their voices murmured for a moment and the door closed.
Doug looked up and realized he and Briggs were alone in the
room.

“I sent Sam to check train schedules. It
should take him a few minutes,” Briggs said. “Before we continue,
you want some coffee?”

“No. Thanks. Look, let’s just get on with
this.” Restless, Doug was hardly able to stay in the chair. It was
time to do something.

Briggs sighed and returned to his seat. “So,
you’re stationed at Fort Bragg under Colonel Norton, right?”

“Can we just skip the formalities? I’ve been
getting the run around all morning and I’ve about had it. Now,
either you can start giving me some answers—or I’m gonna start
getting noisy.”

Briggs picked up the file folder and tapped
it on the table, straightening the pages within. He went on as if
Doug hadn’t said anything. “My father served with Colonel Norton
years ago. Norton is like an uncle to me. In fact, he just gave me
a call this morning.” He looked at Doug across the top of the
folder. “He spoke very highly of you and suggested you might be
able to help us. Unfortunately, we can’t tell you much without
risking compromising our investigation.”

A hollow ache filled Doug’s stomach. They
weren’t going to tell him a thing. “Come on, that’s a load of crap.
This is my brother we’re talking about. My only family. I was
supposed to take care of him. What a great job I did of that.” His
voice cracked and he swallowed hard before continuing. “And now his
killer is running around loose out there. You can’t expect me to
crawl back to Fort Bragg like a good boy and wait for answers.”

Briggs hesitated. He pursed his lips and
looked as if he wanted to tell Doug something. Then he sighed and
said, “I’m sorry. I wish I could give you the details. I could use
any help you might be able to give. But all I can tell you is that
a serial killer got him. He was tied up, knifed, and left to die
sometime before he got to Topeka.” He shook his head grimly.
“That’s a lot of territory to cover, even with the help of the
local P.D. and the FBI.”

“Dammit, you gotta give me more than that. I
got that much from the morning newspaper.”

Briggs gave Doug a speculative look and
seemed to come to a decision. He placed the folder at the center of
the table. “Are you certain you wouldn’t like that cup of
coffee?”

“What? Damn it, no. I don’t drink the
stuff.”

Briggs leaned closer, looking at him
intently. “Now would be a good time to start.”

He raised an eyebrow, waiting. Doug let his
gaze drop to the file folder between them. Coffee suddenly seemed
like a good idea. He drew a deep breath. “Uh, yes, thanks. Cream
and sugar, though.”

Briggs gave him a grim little smile. “I think
the crud in the pot is a bit old. I’ll brew some fresh. Be back in
say...fifteen minutes?”

As soon as the door closed, Doug reached for
the file folder.

Inside, a dozen photographs of the crime
scene told him a story that he could never have learned from a
visit to the morgue. Image after image fired into his brain. Austin
had been cocooned in white string. Yards of the stuff pinned his
arms and legs to his body in a fetal position. His eyes, frozen
wide with terror, stared from a mask of blood. Out of his gaping
mouth protruded the black handle of a knife.

His stomach churned. How could that be his
brother? He shoved the pictures away and launched to his feet,
knocking his chair over with a crash. He stared at the chair
wildly, wanting to pick it up and smash it against the wall, to
smash everything in sight. But one thought stopped him.

Someone had done this to Austin.

The idea hit him like ice water. His jumbled
up mind fixed on that one thought. Someone had done this to
Austin.

With deliberate care, he righted the chair,
sat down, and pulled the pictures close. One by one, he paged
through them again, slowly this time, memorizing every injury,
every clot of blood, every fear-twisted muscle locked in eternal
paralysis. When he was finished, he stacked the pictures with
precise, controlled movements. Then he began to read.

Ten minutes later, he shuffled the pages
neatly into place, closed the folder, and returned it to the center
of the table. There were no suspects. The police had found nothing
but a collection of useless facts and no leads. The only thing Doug
had learned with certainty was that, even with the help of every
police department in his territory, Briggs couldn’t track a killer
who could be hundreds of miles from a crime scene in a matter of
hours. By the time Briggs returned to the interview room, steaming
coffee in hand, Doug knew with cold certainty what he must do.

The next day, he hopped his first train. That
night was the first of many spent in a hobo jungle. His forty days
of leave flew by and he resigned his commission. His disguise
became a way of life as he joined the hobo community. And after
nearly a year, he was no closer to finding the killer.

Meanwhile, rumors of new murders reached him
through railroad gossip. And they seemed to be growing more
frequent.

He looked down at Lennie, now curled in sleep
and shivering against the night’s chill. Her naiveté was likely to
get her wrapped in a cocoon, a knife ventilating her palate. He
couldn’t let that happen. He took off his brother’s jacket and laid
it over her, then settled next to his pack for a long sleepless
night.

A moment later, a raven burst from a hidden
perch overhead and flew out the open door.

Chapter 3

September 1893

Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming

Walter “Red” Galloway poured a charge of mica
powder into a round hole in a granite boulder, lit the fuse, and
ran like hell for the shelter of a rock outcropping. He barely had
time to throw himself down next to his partner, Angus Cook, before
the charge blew. The blast shook the mountain. Fragments of granite
ricocheted like bullets off the surrounding rubble and trees.
Pebbles and sand showered down on the two men, and a rock the size
of a boot dropped between Angus’s feet. Angus jerked his legs back
and huddled tighter against the outcropping.

“Damn, Red,” he said, eyes popping. “Yer
makin’ them fuses shorter’n my mornin’ shit! One of these days
it’ll be yer head bouncin’ at my feet, and I’ll be scrapin’ the
rest of ya off a rock.”

Stuck laying track in the wilderness, with no
women and not enough whiskey, Red had been amusing himself by
cutting fuses shorter and shorter just for the fun of seeing that
look on Angus’s face. But that last one was a bit close even for
him. Not that he would admit it. He took off his hat and casually
shook the granite flakes from it. “And I s’pose you’d rather be
back in Homestead, rioting at the steel mill again and havin’ your
head broke open by the Pinkertons.”

Angus’s hairy, sunburned face knotted up in
chagrin. “You lousy piker! I hadn’t thought of those dirty finks in
months. If it weren’t fer them, I’d be workin’ reg’lar hours,
makin’ love to Maggie every night — “