Where Angels Rest (3 page)

“Inside? Inside, with her and the kids?”

“Just the kids. LeeAnn’s at work.”

“Ah, God.” The dregs of the nightmare vanished. “I’m on my way.”

Pine Lake Road ran due east and west across the south end of Hopewell County, a ten-minute ride outside of town. Nick did it in six, his mind revving as fast as the Tahoe’s engine. LeeAnn Davis was a single mom who rented an old farmhouse from a neighbor, Jerry Gaffe. Gaffe ran the rural equivalent of a slumlord’s dwellings, but LeeAnn, like his other tenants, couldn’t afford any better. A forty-something divorcée, she’d quit college to pay for her husband’s dental school, and just about the time the fourth kid was born, he found heaven in the arms of his hygienist. Now, LeeAnn worked days at the middle
school cafeteria and nights at the 7-Eleven on Gritt Road. Out of necessity, the kids were largely left to take care of themselves, but as far as Nick could tell, they were pretty good kids.

With an intruder in the house.

He batted back a thump of fear and dumped the SUV in LeeAnn’s driveway. Chris Jensen had beaten him there by one minute, his cruiser door hanging open and flashers off. He held a phone pressed to his ear.

“Dispatch put one of the kids through to me,” he said to Nick, his breath frosting the air. Another cruiser swerved into the driveway. The troops were rolling in. Two men climbed out and hurried into vests. “It’s Kayla,” Jensen continued. “She’s hiding in the bathtub with the youngest girl.”

Toddler hiding in a cardboard box. Mother in a dumpster, choking…

Focus. “Any reports of nearby robberies, escaped prisoners, like that?” Nick asked.

“No, sir. Quiet night, like usual.”

Nick took the phone. “Kayla, this is Sheriff Mann. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

“Someone’s h-here,” she whispered. “He was on the porch. He came
inside
.”

Nick pointed, wordlessly sending the new pair of deputies around to the back. “Was the front door locked?” he asked into the phone.

“I think…” Kayla said. “Unless Josh came in that way.”

“Are the others locked? Can we get in?”

“Y-yes. No. They’re locked. I heard the front door open. It squeaks.” The last was issued under her breath, her voice breaking. She was only thirteen years old. Terrified, losing it.

Two more deputies wheeled into the driveway. Bishop and Fruth.

“Kayla,” Nick said, “where are the other kids?”

“Lizzie’s with me. Josh and Kimmie are asleep, down the ha—Oh, God!” Her voice jumped a notch. “I hear something. H-he’s coming, he’s coming.”

“Hang on, sweetie.”

“What happened?” Bishop asked.

Nick traded him the phone for a vest and jammed his arms into it. He pulled out his gun. “Someone may have gone in the front, from the porch. The kids are all upstairs.”

“Surround the house?” Jensen asked.

Nick nodded and said, “The front’s probably open. Bishop, stay here. Keep Kayla on the phone and keep her where she is. You,” he said to Jensen and Fruth, “we’re going in.”

LeeAnn’s screen door lay on its side, propped against the porch rail. Nick flashed a light on it: cobwebs—down a while. But Kayla was right about the wood door. It was open a foot.

Jensen and Fruth flanked Nick and he pressed on the door with an outstretched hand. He stepped inside, leading with his 9mm and a flashlight, with Jensen coming in behind. The house smelled of firewood and musty curtains, and he blinked to let his eyes adjust. Listened.

Silence.

They stepped into the living room, the hairs on Nick’s forearms standing up. It had been a long time since he’d shot anybody—close to seven years. The memory wasn’t a bad one.

Nick tightened his fingers on the gun then caught a
sound from the stairwell. He spun on it, searching. Jensen did, too, but Fruth stayed with the living room, covering the doorways and clearing the other rooms as Nick and Jensen moved toward the place where the sound had been two seconds before. Silent now, but someone was there; Nick could feel it. He skimmed the stairwell with his gun hand, saw nothing in the narrow column of light. He jerked his head to the wall behind Jensen. A light switch right there.

Jensen flipped it but nothing happened. Bulb out. Nick took a step closer, swung the flashlight beam back and forth again, above the landing and lower, then finally low enough. He caught the culprit square in the eyes.

Well, shit.

T
HE INTRUDER DIDN’T MOVE.
For half a second, Nick wanted to fire a round just to release the tension in his body, then he cursed and loosened his fingers on the gun.

He should have known.

“Go on through the rest of the downstairs,” he said to Jensen, “but I think this is it.”

Nick pinned the intruder in place with the light beam, stepped around him, and climbed the rest of the stairs. He stalked through the upper level of the house, checking closets and under beds, behind the shower curtain in a second bathroom. Kim, about eleven, stirred when Nick swept through her room, then fell back out without really waking. Josh, the fifteen-year-old who lay sprawled across a high bed in the next room, never budged.

Nick called to Kayla as he entered the hall bathroom. “Kayla, it’s Sheriff Mann.” He tucked his gun away and crooked the shower curtain back with a finger. “You’re safe, honey. Come on out.”

He picked up the littlest girl and propped her on his hip, then offered a hand to Kayla. She was shaking.

“Did you find him? He’s gone?”

“We found him. He’s not gone yet; I thought you might wanna meet him.”

“What?”

Out in the hallway, Kim had rolled from bed, wearing a Snow White nightgown and rubbing her eyes. “What happened?” she asked, and fell in behind them.

They went to the top of the stairs. Jensen had finally found a working light switch.

“Your intruder,” Nick said, gesturing to the possum on the stairs. It hadn’t budged. He set down Lizzie and bent to his haunches. “You ever heard the expression ‘playing possum’? It’s that: frozen like a statue in order to fool someone. No, no,” he said, pulling the five-year-old back when she started toward the creature. “They can be nasty.” He turned to Kayla, who was finally breathing again. “Have you got a blanket I can use?”

Rodent removal took ten minutes. No, not rodent: marsupial, Nick remembered, as he carried the blanket out the front door. He went fifty yards to the side of the house and dropped the animal on the ground. It stood frozen a minute, then, getting comfortable with the darkness, waddled into the tall grass.

Nick walked back to the house with the empty blanket. Three more cars had arrived and he groaned. One belonged to LeeAnn, who hugged each of her three daughters hard. But the other two cars belonged to Leslie Roach and company. Roach was a reporter for the local newspaper, good enough to freelance for the bigger papers now and then, and ambitious enough to make a story out of anything. Nick thought her name must offend the insect world.

“Sheriff,” she said, coming at him with a digital recorder, trailed by a cameraman. “What happened?”

“It was nothing.” The irony of that statement sank under his skin like a bee sting. In LeeAnn’s front yard were seven vehicles, the county sheriff, five deputies, one reporter, and two photographers. Even as they spoke, Jerry Gaffe’s truck bumped into the drive.

Not nothing. Not for Hopewell, Ohio.

A muscle twitched in Nick’s cheek. Easy, man.
Someone
has to save the world from dumb, blind marsupials.

“Sheriff,” Leslie Roach said, “give me a statement.”

“Go away.”

“Damn it, Nick. What happened?”

“Nothing happened.” He picked up his pace but she jogged along beside him in her heels. Nick placed reporters in a stratum of society just below whale shit. The fact that he’d taken this one to bed before he’d learned she was a reporter had only affirmed his opinion.

“Did anyone get hurt?” she asked.

“Nothing happened.”

“The citizens of Hopewell deserve to know what their elected official is doing out here in a single woman’s home in the middle of the night.”

Nick turned on her, baring his teeth.

“Gotcha,” Leslie said, smiling. “Now, what happened?”

“Goddamn it. We got a report of an intruder. Turned out to be a fucking possum. Do you want me to spell that for you?”

“I know how to spell ‘possum’. Sometimes it starts with O.”

“I meant ‘fucking’. It’s an adjective.”

“Nick, Nick, Nick. Do the citizens of Hopewell have to worry about rabies, wild animals encroaching the city limits, anything like that?”

He might have chuckled if it weren’t so sad. “Sorry. No
public terror to sell the paper tomorrow. The only thing the citizens of Hopewell have to worry about is making sure their teenage boys shut the front door.”

Jerry Gaffe was out of his truck, surveying his property. “What happened?” he asked.

Nick spent the next ten minutes settling Gaffe down—nothing damaged, no one hurt, no lawsuits coming—while Leslie Roach crawled around the scene, interviewing anyone who would talk to her. Finally, it was over. The photography floodlights came down, the patrol cars eased back to the streets, and Roach’s entourage rolled out. Just as Nick said good-bye to LeeAnn, fifteen-year-old Josh appeared at the front door he’d left open. He wore polka dot boxers and an Adio t-shirt, and looked out over his front lawn while scratching a spot on his stomach.

“What happened?” he asked.

Nick followed Jensen back to the office, filed the paperwork on LeeAnn’s intruder, then dialed the
Hopewell Daily Gazette
. Got Ralph Winston, the editorial supervisor in the mornings.

“It was nothing,” Nick said when Ralph came on the line. “Don’t let Roach turn it into a story.”

“It got four county cars and newspaper coverage in the middle of the night, cost the taxpayers a little chunk of change. Like it or not, Sheriff, that’s a story.”

“Damn it, Ralph.”

“Tell you what. I’ll have McCoy walk over there to get a statement from you, too.”

Nick looked at his watch. “Make it fast, I’m leaving town.”

“Oh, yeah, November ninth. I forgot.”

At the core, Ralph was a newspaper guy. He never
forgot
. “I’m going hunting up at the cabin for the weekend.”

“Right. You know, Mann, no one believes you go up there to hunt. Wanna know what I think?”

“No.”

“I think there’s a lover from your past life in the glamour world—Jennifer Lopez, maybe, or Angelina Jolie, or
both
—” he hesitated and Nick thought he heard a faint
Mmm
“—and they meet you there once a year for a weekend of hot, wild sex. Either that or you staff the place with a harem and every November ninth you live out my oldest fantasy.”

“Wow, Ralph. That’s exactly right.”

“Which one?”

“Take your pick. Journalist’s prerogative, right?”

“Low blow.”

“Keep the story down, Ralph. It was a fucking possum.”

“Can you spell that for me?”

And that was the start of his weekend. Nick drove home a little before seven in the morning, his temper illogically frayed, his headlights picking out tacky signs of the season. A pumpkin the size of a beach ball sat at the end of the Myers’s drive. Indian corn hung on every fifth or six mailbox, and at those homes lacking corn, a cardboard turkey or pilgrim adorned the front door. Mrs. Piltzecker, whom Nick had always thought was aesthetically challenged, had put a pair of plastic fawns in her dead garden every winter since Nick was old enough to remember. He and his brothers had gotten caught once trying to hoist them onto her roof on Christmas Eve.

He rolled past the timeworn deer and hooked into his
driveway, the thought passing that life here could be a Kodak commercial: festooned yards, affable neighbors, thriving businesses. Hopewell had a respected private college, an active community theater, an historic bed-and-breakfast, and even a sculptor who was a little bit famous. In Hopewell, youth groups caroled door-to-door at Christmas and kids set up lemonade stands for the Fourth of July. In Hopewell, the local rodent population—marsupial—posed the greatest challenge a sheriff would ever face.

Nick forced himself to stop grinding his jaw. This was what he’d wanted: no gangs, no drug warfare, no organized crime. None of the day-in, day-out crises of urban detective work, and except for the likes of Leslie Roach, no relentless buzz of media. All that had been a high for Nick when he was a young, hungry cop in L.A., but now what he wanted was peace and calm. A sanctuary where he could keep the people he cared about safe.

Like Hannah.

He got out of the Tahoe and popped open the back, the urge to get to the cabin gnawing at his bones. Frost hung in the air—not the picturesque kind that would shimmer in a winter calendar photo, but the wet kind that went up your nostrils and opened your sinuses, and clung to your skin like a cold rubber sheet. He zipped his bomber jacket and started loading the truck.

The long guns went in first: a 12-gauge shotgun and scoped Remington rifle. A pair of 45-caliber Hechler & Koch machine pistols followed, guns that made his county-issue 9mm Glock feel like a toy. Three bottles of tequila were next—the good kind from Mexico, illegal and complete with the worm. Then a Styrofoam cooler with beer and cold cuts. Ten boxes of ammunition.

Ready.

A sickly sun edged over the horizon as he drove out of town, the radio weatherman euphemistically pronouncing the morning “brisk” and promising a break in the sleet and rain. It would turn into a classic November weekend in the Midwest, the voice promised, perfect for playing tag football or raking leaves or roasting marshmallows at a bonfire.

Nick would spend it shooting demons.

He was thinking about that when he pushed the Tahoe to seventy-five, crossed the county line, and ran over a woman.

D
LMMP.

The Tahoe pitched, riding up on two left tires. It bounced to four wheels again and Nick stood on the brakes, fishtailed to a stop. His heart thrashed in his chest.