Where Angels Rest (6 page)

She caught her breath and glanced at a clock over the mantle: seven-thirty. Nearly two days gone of Justin’s seven, but she was on her way. She’d identified Huggins and the police were here. Next would come the media and soon people would hear the truth and Justin would have another chance.
She
would have another chance. To do what she’d never been able to do before, even when they were children.

To protect him.

“I want to see Sheriff Nikolaus Mann,” she said, to a deputy who might have been twelve. He had red-blond hair that stuck up like an elf’s and had been reaching for his belt when she spoke. For handcuffs, Erin realized.

He seemed startled by her demand but relaxed his hand. “Uh… Okay. Come with me.”

Huggins intercepted them. “Deputy Jensen, this woman is trespassing, committing slander, and in violation of a restraining order.”

“I’ll take care of it, Jack,” Jensen said, and walked her out, seeming in a hurry to have it over. Erin held
Huggins’s gaze as they passed him, and his blue-green eyes bore into her like daggers.

She shook it off and they stepped into the cold night air. Erin noticed the two deputies’ cars, both with blue lights flashing. “Where can I find the sheriff?” she asked.

“He’ll be back Monday,” the young deputy said. His badge read C. J
ENSEN
. “Come on to headquarters and we’ll write up your complaint. Or, Jack’s complaint. Or…” He stopped. Confused.

Erin steeled her spine.

“This can’t wait until Monday. I need to see him now.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. He’s not here.” But he’d blinked. Weakening.

She stuck her hands on her hips. “And does he have a phone?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And do you know how to dial his number?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then do it.”

Somewhere in the distance, funky music played. Nick stirred, lying on the floor of the cabin. A tequila bottle lounged in his fingers, cigarette butts littered the hearth of the fireplace. His brain sloshed at the bottom of his skull.

A minute passed and the music stopped. He climbed to his feet and humped to a chair—a rickety wooden grab from a yard sale three years ago. There was a table, too, also with one leg shorter than the other. “A matched set,” the seller had said, right before Nick gave him ten dollars for all three pieces of junk. The third was an old mattress on the floor in front of the fireplace.

Otherwise, the cabin was empty. Nick had paid a guy to haul away the Italian leather sofa and chairs, the cherry
dining room set, the king-size bed in the master bedroom and the princess furniture in the adjoining room. A salvage guy had even pulled out the carpet and molding.

The music came again and Nick frowned. It seemed to be coming from his ass. He shifted and it got louder. It
was
coming from his ass.

He pulled the phone from his hip pocket, cursed at the number. Chris Jensen. He opened the phone and snarled into it. “What the hell are you doing, calling me?”

“Sheriff—”

“It’s not Monday yet. Leave me alone.”

“Sheriff, we have a situation.”

“Is Hannah okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My mom okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Has Hopewell been attacked by terrorists, burned down, or washed away in a flood?” That long of a speech actually left him dizzy.

“No, sir.”

Then Nick remembered, and an instant of sobriety threatened. “Did they find the son of a bitch who killed Carrie Sitton?”

“Uh, no. But there is one thing on that. Turns out she was a friend of Rebecca Engel’s.”

“Friend?”

“Carrie was on her way home from Rebecca’s house when she was murdered. Cleveland cops were down here interviewing Rebecca today.”

Aw, hell. Rebecca Engel lived in Hopewell. She was Nick’s. Too close, too close.

Jensen went on. “Rebecca didn’t know anything about Carrie’s plans after she left the house. They met doing
some barhopping up in Cleveland and had started hanging out a little. Sheriff Bell is putting two of his men with the Cleveland Robbery-Homicide team. They’ve got a pretty good group working it.”

Uneasiness roiled in Nick’s belly and that alone pissed him off. He shouldn’t be feeling it. At this advanced stage of this particular weekend, he shouldn’t be feeling anything. And yet, after two days of deliberate self-destruction, he’d identified the music in his ass as his phone, formulated coherent sentences, and felt something in his chest that bordered on true emotion.

Not acceptable. It was Saturday night. He still had thirty-six more hours before he was back on duty.

“Sheriff,” Jensen said, and a chair creaked in his ear. Nick recognized it as the one at the front desk at the station. “There’s a request here for you to check something for a case pending in Florida. It came in yesterday but you were gone already so Valeria left it on your desk. She was afraid to call you.”

“Smart woman.”

“And now there’s someone here insisting that you follow up on it. She says it’s urgent. It’s about Jack Calloway.”

A thread of interest threatened to unravel but Nick squelched it. There wasn’t one fucking thing that happened in Hopewell, Ohio that couldn’t wait.

“Will she still be there Monday?”

Jensen hesitated. “Uh, well, sir, I imagine so. She’s booked at the Red Roof Inn.”

“Well, good. That’s just when I’ll be home.”

“Monday?”
Erin bunched her fists on the desk, wincing at echoes of pain in her body. It was nine o’clock at night, and this cherub-faced deputy named Jensen had
spent the past two hours taking her through her story, writing down notes, and reading the online reports related to Justin. Finally, he’d deemed her situation significant enough to phone the almighty, not-to-be-disturbed sheriff.

For all the good it did
, she thought, looking around at the sheriff’s office. Not exactly a paragon of high-tech law enforcement: a lobby with a couple of large wooden desks and some file cabinets, a set of holding cells down one hallway, a handful of offices Erin couldn’t see, and a mysterious miasma of odors. A second deputy had gone searching for someone to open the courthouse across the street on a Saturday night, ostensibly to dig up details about the restraining order against her. Erin had been left to try to convince Deputy Jensen that Huggins should be behind bars and not her.

“Let me talk to him. Call him again,” she said.

“Look, Mis—” he caught himself, “Doctor. Technically, I could have you in lockup. Jack wants you charged with trespassing, at the least. I don’t think you want Sheriff Mann coming back here until the judge gets a chance to look at the restraining order.”

“The judge,” she snapped. “The one who’s deer hunting?”

“Judge Watkins always goes deer hunting the week after Oktoberfest ends, ever since I was a kid. He’ll be back M—”

“Monday,” she chorused. She’d heard it all already and dread clawed through her breast. In the hours left before then, how much could John Huggins do? Pack up and get away? If he vanished again, what would that mean for Justin?

Erin closed her eyes. She knew what it meant.

The printer against the wall started spitting out pages again and Jensen got up to collect them. “I’m doing what the sheriff would do, anyway—gathering the information on your brother’s case. By the time he gets back, I’ll have everything ready for him.”

She cursed and rubbed her face, winced. She’d forgotten the scrape. She scrubbed at it again, this time with a nail.

“Oh, damn it,” she said, looking at her finger. “I’m bleeding.”

Jensen was up in a heartbeat, looking at the side of her face. “Hold on,” he said, and started down the hall. Erin felt a pang of guilt. This was a kid, probably living out some childhood fantasy of becoming a deputy, and she was taking advantage of the fact that he was willing to get her a freaking Band-Aid.

Forget it. All’s fair in love and war. Her fight to save Justin was all-out war.

Erin gave him five seconds and began rooting through the desk. Address, address… Somewhere, there had to be some indication where the sheriff was. A cabin—that much Jensen had told her—and it couldn’t be far. Not when a man went there to hunt for just a weekend.

She pushed papers around, opened those drawers that weren’t locked and looked at the computer. No, she didn’t dare try getting into that. Keeping one eye on the front door and an ear peeled for Jensen’s footsteps behind her, she went to a smaller desk that sat near the door—that of a daytime receptionist, she supposed—and found a Rolodex. A good, old-fashioned Rolodex.

Her pulse skittered and she fingered through… Mann, Mann, Mann. And there it was:
Mann—cabin.

Erin snatched the card from its file and chanced a
glance down the hall, then pocketed the address just as Jensen came back.

“Here’s some antiseptic and—”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “You know, I think you were right in the first place. There’s nothing I can do right now without the sheriff and judge.”

His brows drew together a touch but he said, “Right. Go to your motel, so I’ll know where to find you. Get some sleep.” She turned to pick up her bag and he added, “And listen, you don’t have to worry about Sheriff Mann. He’ll take care of things.”

You’re damn right he will,
Erin thought, fingering the cabin address in her pocket.
Sooner than you think.

Just over an hour later, her GPS announced the last turn to Sheriff Mann’s cabin, in the middle of nowhere. On her left, strange silhouettes rose in the darkness—mounds that looked like pyramids and huge buildings with security lights. Erin caught the reflection of standing water—ponds?—and just when she’d decided it must be a quarry of some sort, her headlights picked out a sign that said W
EAVER’S
C
LAY
M
INE
.

Maggie Huggins came to mind, evidently a well-known sculptor now. Like her husband, she seemed to have found her niche in life over the past few years. Justin hadn’t had the chance to find his.

“
You have arrived at your destination
,” said the mechanical female voice in the phone. Erin slowed, searching for whatever the GPS thought was there. Beyond the clay mine, there was nothing, but on her right, a gravel lane cut into the woods. She turned and followed it, the trees like skeletons with straggly remnants of white stuck to trunks here and there. A hundred childhood
fairytales rose to mind, all of them leading some poor, unsuspecting girl deep into a cold black forest toward certain doom…

“Stop it,” she said aloud, then saw the house. “My God.”

The word “cabin” was ill-chosen. The house was enormous, with a deep wraparound porch, French doors, and bay windows. The windows glowed with a faint, flickering light that qualified as downright eerie.

She pulled her Florida-weight jacket tight then walked up the porch steps by the glow of her headlights, which hadn’t turned off yet. At the top of the stairs sat a Styrofoam cooler with a roll of paper on top. A black marker lay on the porch railing. Erin started toward the door and the toe of her shoe kicked something. Small, dark objects were scattered on the floor like dead bugs. She bent to pick one up.

Shell casings.

She swallowed, wishing she could have brought her gun on the plane, then looked at the front door. It stood open an inch—like a dare—and she tamped back a pang of worry. Just do it.

She knocked. Nothing. She knocked again, harder, and the door glided open. She stepped inside.

“Sheriff Mann?” she called. “Sheriff, my name is Erin Sims. I need to talk to you.”

Nothing.

She glanced around. The light came from deeper in the house, sputtering as if from a candle or lantern, maybe a fireplace. There was no furniture, no curtains, no heat. No sign of life save for the flicker of light, the Styrofoam cooler outside on the porch, and the open door.

“Sheriff?” Her voice echoed and she realized the floors had been stripped. A row of bare carpet tacks poked up
across a threshold, like a strip of tire spikes. She stepped over it and followed the light through an archway down a wide hall, the scent of burning firewood luring her deeper into the house. “Sheriff?”

She rounded a corner and nearly jumped from her skin. A man sat in the center of an empty room—a large black silhouette in a wooden chair with his hands in his lap, the fire glowing behind him. The shape of a giant pistol showed in the dimness, idly pointed in her direction.

“Rumor has it you almost got shot once tonight,” he said. “You looking to try again?”

N
ICK HEARD THE
breath draft from her lungs and wished the light were better. He wanted to see what she looked like—this woman who would barge into Hilltop House with accusations on her lips, lie to a deputy, and steal away in the night to hunt down a sheriff. He wanted to demand that she take back the slander she’d already set rumbling through his town, then put her on a plane back to Miami.

Instead, he sucked on a cigarette until the embers flared red. Blew a stream of sweet nicotine into the air.

“I need to talk to you, Sheriff,” she demanded. “You have a man in your town I believe is a murderer. His name is—”

“Jack Calloway.”

She stopped, and Nick could almost hear the wheels turning in her mind. “Yes, that’s right.”

A vein throbbed in Nick’s temple. He had a day-and-a-half more numbness coming to him, but had quit drinking an hour ago, after Jensen called and reported that a Miami hurricane named Erin Sims was on her way. It hadn’t been enough time to become fully sober or get
caught up on what she was whining about. But it had been enough to feel one small section of his brain begin to function. And get good and pissed about it.

He stood, flicking his cigarette onto the stone hearth behind him, keeping his back to the light of the fireplace. He was six-three, broad-shouldered, wholly unkempt, and palming a large, Hechler & Koch machine pistol. It pleased him to think he made an imposing silhouette.

“Could you put down the gun?” she snapped. “You’re drunk.”

So much for imposing. “Not nearly enough, as far as I can tell.”