08-A Thousand Bones, page 36
Joe grabbed his sleeve. “No.”
Mike pulled away. “I’m going. You get ready to take a shot at him when he sticks his head up from behind that rock. Make sure you hit him.”
She stared at him.
“That’s an order, Joe,” he said.
She nodded.
Mike gave her a moment to level the shotgun and set her feet, then he took off, zigzagging between the trees. She fought the urge to look at Holt, keeping her eyes trained down the long barrel and on the top of the rock. But there was no movement.
And Mike was drawing no fire. Finally, he stopped behind a tree about twenty feet away from her and they waited. Ten seconds. Then twenty.
She felt Rafsky’s labored breath behind her. But she kept her eyes on Mike. He was out in the open, walking toward Holt, gun held straight out in front of him.
What was he doing?
She tightened her grip on the shotgun, squinting at the rock, watching for the slightest movement. Then suddenly, there he was.
A blur of a green jacket. Wet, pale skin. Dark eyes.
She fired.
The buckshot shattered the top of the rock, sounding like cannon fire and sending a cloud of gray dust into the air.
A single shot rang back. From her .38.
She racked the shotgun, her eyes lasering to Mike. He was kneeling next to Holt, his gun pointed at the rock, his other hand pressed to Holt’s body. Holt’s arms were moving, grasping for Mike’s sleeve. She could hear Mike telling him to stay down.
Mike rose slowly, and she pulled her attention back to her sights, seeing Mike move into her view as he stepped into the stream.
He was too close to Roland now, too easy a target for even a wounded man to miss, and she knew if she let Roland get his last shot off with any accuracy at all, Mike was dead.
“I’m coming to get you, you son of a bitch!” Mike yelled.
Something moved in the corner of her eye. Not at the top of the rock but on the side—a tiny flash of a shadow that skipped across the shimmering white ground and disappeared. Roland had moved. He was going to take his shot from down low, near the bottom of the rock.
Or was he? Had she seen anything all? Or was it just the bowing of a branch? What if she was wrong?
Instinct. Trust your instincts.
“Rafsky,” she whispered, “watch the top. I’m sighting low.”
She centered her sights on the edge where the gray stone and blood-smeared snow merged. She drew in her breath and held it.
“You’re finished, you bastard!” Mike shouted.
From behind the edge of the rock, a glint of blue steel.
She fired, sending an explosion of rock, snow, and blood into the air. Somewhere in the concussion, she heard another gunshot, then a third, and suddenly a man was screaming. She looked first to Rafsky, then to Mike, before she realized that the screams were coming from behind the rock.
“That’s six. He’s empty,” Rafsky said.
Joe racked another shell and stepped out from behind the tree, keeping the shotgun level as she moved toward the stream. Mike was nearing the rock on the other side, gun pointed. She hurried after him, catching him at the top of the slope, pressed against the rock. He glanced at her.
“You go around the other side,” he whispered. “And watch for cross fire.”
She slipped around the rock, and when she was in place, she looked back at Mike.
“On three,” he said.
He counted down, and they spun around the rock in unison, guns drawn.
Roland was slumped on the ground between them. Thigh shredded, jacket soaked a dark red. Ragged flesh dripping from his buckshot-peppered cheek. Joe’s revolver lay at the tip of his bloody fingers.
Mike kicked the .38 away and dropped to his knees, grabbing a fistful of Roland’s collar. He slammed Roland’s head back against the rock, then shoved his gun into Roland’s mouth.
“You’re gone,” he hissed.
“No! No!” Roland screamed.
“Mike! Stop!” Joe said, pulling at Mike’s sleeve.
Mike shoved her off and Joe came back with the flat of her hand, pushing Mike so hard he tumbled back off his heels to the snow. His eyes swung up to her with angry questions.
“He’s mine,” Joe said, stepping closer and pointing the shotgun at his face.
Roland’s eyes drifted up to her, filmed with pink, as if he were bleeding everywhere on the inside. She shoved the barrel into his cheek, hard enough to pin his head against the rock. Behind her, she heard the shuffle of snowy footsteps. Rafsky and Holt.
“Frye,” Rafsky said calmly. “Back away.”
She shook her head, using the weight of her body to force the barrel deeper into Roland’s face, drawing the skin so tight it pulled back over his teeth.
His eyes were locked on hers. Then, to her amazement, he smiled.
“Do it,” he whispered.
“Shut up!” she said.
Roland lifted a limp hand to wipe his mouth, coughing on his blood. His eyes never left hers. “Do it,” he said. “Shoot me.”
“Shut up!” She slammed the barrel into his face, cracking bone.
“Shoot me!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Do it!” he screamed.
She pulled the trigger.
But she heard nothing but a hollow snap of the firing pin. The shotgun was empty.
She froze, her body stiff, still braced for the shot that didn’t come.
“Use mine,” Mike said.
She forced her head up. Mike was holding his revolver out to her.
“Use it.”
She blinked, and pulled in a deep, ragged breath. “No,” she said.
“Then what do you want to do with him?” Mike asked.
“We take him in,” Rafsky said.
“I’m not dragging his ass back a mile just so he can rot in some prison for the rest of his life,” Mike said. “I say we kill him now.”
“You’re cops,” Rafsky said. “You can’t commit murder.”
“Watch us,” Mike said, taking aim at Roland.
“Mike! Stop!” Joe said. “Just stop.”
For a moment, it was quiet. Just the hiss of the stream and their own labored breathing.
“Then what do you want to do, Joe?” Mike asked. “Your call.”
What did she want to do? She stared at Mike, seeing only shifting images of him. His hand smeared with Roland’s blood, pain and hatred carved deep in his face. Holt. The brown deputy’s jacket ripped with a bullet hole, face ashen and suddenly so much older. Rafsky. Overcoat soaked with Holt’s blood, his long body shivering and broken.
“We leave him,” she said.
“Frye, that’s the same as murder.”
Joe turned toward the soft sound of Rafsky’s voice. She looked back at Roland. He was conscious, his breathing watery and shallow. But he was watching her, his eyes filled with something she didn’t immediately understand. Then she knew what it was. Fear—fear of being left out here. That was why he wanted her to shoot him, so he could die his twisted mythical death by her hand.
She took a step back. “We leave him,” she said. “We leave him here for the animals and his fucking hunger moon.”
“No!” Roland cried. “No! Don’t leave me here! Shoot me!”
She took a slow look around her at the three men. “Are we in agreement?” she asked.
Mike holstered his revolver. “Yes.”
“Holt?” she asked.
Holt gave Roland a long look, then managed a weak nod.
Her eyes settled on Rafsky.
Disbelief shadowed his eyes as he looked to them one by one. When his gaze finally came back to her, she met it, sure and silent, giving him time to understand—hoping he could understand—that this was what needed to be done.
“You’ll be murderers,” he said softly. “All of you.”
No one said anything.
Rafsky set her .22 pistol on the rock, and without another word, he turned away, making his way down the slope and across the stream. Joe watched him until the dark overcoat disappeared into the trees.
“You can’t do this!” Roland rasped, trying to crawl to her. He fell forward, his cries smothered in the bloody snow.
Joe stared at him. He couldn’t move his arm, and blood was still dripping from the ragged wound in his thigh, melting the snow under him into a muddy, red mush.
“Tie him to a tree,” Joe said.
Mike handed her his revolver, and she held it on Roland as Mike dragged him to a tree. Mike tore a strip from Roland’s shredded jacket. Roland screamed as Mike tied his hands to the tree.
Mike turned to Joe. “We good?” he asked.
“We’re good.”
Mike walked to Holt, steadying him with an arm around the waist as he led him across the stream.
“Don’t leave me here!”
Joe picked up her .38 from the ground, brushing off the snow before she put it in her holster.
“You bitch!” Roland screamed. “Don’t you leave me! Don’t let me die this way! This is wrong! You know it’s wrong!”
She snapped her holster and picked up the .22 off the rock, slipping it into her pocket.
“Please…please…don’t leave me out here! Don’t leave me! You fucking bitch! You goddamn fucking bitch!”
Mike and Holt were waiting for her on the other side of the stream. When she reached them, Holt held out a hand, and she slipped her arm around him, just under Mike’s. They held on to each other all the way back.
53
In the first hours afterward, they didn’t talk about how to keep their secret. It wasn’t necessary.
Mike drove them to a two-story blue clapboard house on Trout River Road, about ten miles from the Collier cabin. A bearded man with wine-scented breath opened the door and, without a single question, showed Mike and Joe the way upstairs. They laid Holt down on a bed with a yellow chenille spread.
An hour later, Mike’s uncle Ernesto, a retired doctor from Detroit, had removed the bullet from Holt’s shoulder and told them Holt was resting comfortably. He said Holt could stay in the upstairs bedroom as long as they needed him to.
Around three a.m., Joe and Mike sat down at Augie’s radio console and copied the day’s activity log onto the next empty page in the book. Leaving out, of course, the line that showed the three of them in service at the Collier cabin.
Then they ripped out the original page, poured two glasses of brandy from Leach’s cabinet, and drank as they watched the paper burn in the station fireplace.
It was then that Mike remembered the audio tapes of the radio traffic. They burned only one, the four-hour period from two p.m. to six p.m. Afterward, they shared a second brandy while Mike filled out leave-of-absence paperwork for Holt, giving him permission to attend a funeral downstate for a relative who didn’t exist.
If Augie ever noticed the strange handwriting in his logbook or the missing reel of tape, or wondered about Holt’s absence, he never asked.
The next morning, Kellerman called to say they had a credible sighting of Roland over near Alpena on the Lake Huron shore. Mike offered the assistance of the Leelanau County sheriff’s office, but Kellerman turned him down.
Dorothy Newton called Joe that morning, too, asking if they had any news. Joe told her no, there was nothing new. No more bones had been found, but some carvings, suspected to be done by copycats, were still turning up all over the state. Dorothy told her she’d be at the Riverside if there was any news. Joe told her she knew the number.
Brad called her at around four. He said he wanted to know how she was doing. She told him she was fine and asked about his mother. He didn’t ask about hers, but he did tell her to call him if she ever wanted to talk. She told him she knew the number.
Rafsky did not call.
She had told him to take her cruiser from the Collier cabin, wanting to go with Mike and Holt to the uncle’s house. Rafsky had left the cruiser parked in front of the station, keys in the ignition. He had not left anything inside. And his was the one phone number she didn’t know. Nor could she call it, even if she did.
On the third day, they went back.
The three of them—Joe and Mike helping Holt along—made the same walk through the woods, guns resting in their holsters, their hearts thumping with the memory of three sudden shotgun blasts fired seven weeks ago in a place very much like where they were now. They trudged up the slope to the rock and looked down.
Part of him was still there.
His head was gone, chewed off at the neck. His insides had been eaten out, leaving only a partial rib cage and frosted tatters of red flesh hanging on the bones. Another piece of him lay nearby, but it no longer bore any resemblance to the human leg it was.
There was nothing else, except for animal tracks.
54
She stopped just inside the front door of the station, stomping the snow off her boots. Augie was standing at his radio console, taking down a silver banner that read HAPPY NEW YEAR 1976. The small Christmas tree that had spent most of December on the front counter was partially dismantled, ornaments lying on the console. Leach had purchased both items with his own money a few days before he died, and for weeks they had lain untouched on a shelf. Finally, Augie had put them up a few days before Christmas.
She noticed something else new. The print of Mackinac Island that normally hung over the coffee station was gone. In its place were two new framed photographs of Clifford Leach and Julian Mack. Both bore plates that read, “Killed in the Line of Duty, November 1975.” They were the first memorial pictures ever to be put on the Leelanau sheriff department’s wall.
“Are they all right?” Augie asked.
“Yes,” she said.
He smiled sadly, and she knew he had chosen the pictures and had them enlarged and framed himself, with Theo’s help.
“Did you do anything special last night?” he asked.
“I was here until eleven,” she said. “Then I went home, my mother and I shared a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and I was asleep before the ball hit the bottom.”
Augie started to say something, but the phone rang, and he turned away. She heard the name of Mrs. Elsinore and smiled as she walked toward the back offices. She realized that the smile was possibly the first one she had allowed herself in more than two weeks. It felt good. It felt normal.
She paused at the conference room door.
The desk was stacked with files and envelopes. She knew what it was—all the reports, evidence, and photographs from Ken and Roland’s case. She gathered a breath as she moved to the desk. Paper-clipped to the top folder was a note.
Joe: Can you please do the evidence log, case summary, and prepare this file for permanent storage? Thanks—Mike.
She looked down at the folders. She hadn’t realized the case file had gotten this large. There had to be a thousand pages in almost twenty folders. And three or four fat envelopes of photographs.
She took off her jacket and sat down in the chair, picking up one of the envelopes. It held more than a dozen eight-by ten color photographs. Crime-scene photos of the woods where they had found Annabelle’s jawbone. The ground was leafy, the trees scarlet and orange with autumn. Suddenly, it seemed like a very long time ago.
She opened a second envelope, her stomach tightening when she saw the top picture. It was the Collier cabin murder scene. She put those away and picked up a third envelope that had writing on the outside: “Joette Frye/November 26, 1975/Body shots/Rape/Traverse City Hospital.”
She set it down and sat back in the chair. Once she filed all this away, the case would be officially over, at least for the Leelanau County sheriff’s office. Kellerman was still actively seeking Roland Trader, but the leads were growing cold, and his calls reporting in to Mike had tapered off. It was just as well.
She often thought about what would have happened if someone had found Roland Trader alive and they had been exposed for what they had done. But finally, in the quiet last days of the year, his face had begun to fade from her dreams. Instead, there seemed to be a slow settling of something else, a fragile kind of peace that she had welcomed.
She had no regrets. Except one.
She wished they had found more of the girls’ bones. Enough to give Dorothy Newton, Arthur Chapel, and the others something to take home and bury. It would have brought them comfort to be able to stand over a grave and speak to their daughters, in the way it brought her comfort to be able to stand over Leach’s grave and speak to him.
Grabbing an empty accordion folder, she started sorting the reports and statements, deliberately working fast so she needed only to scan the first few lines.
Then she moved on to the photographs, making sure each envelope was properly sealed, initialed, and labeled. She picked up the final envelope—this one from the Rexall in town. It was dated November 1964. She frowned, trying to figure out what they were. Finally, she dumped them onto the desk.
They were the photos the Leelanau sheriff’s department had taken eleven years ago, on the day Ken Snider, Sr., had been shot. They showed the backyard of the cabin as it had appeared when the Sniders—not the Colliers—owned it. Joe had first seen the photos the day Mike came to her cottage asking for her help with all the background on the brothers. Then, Joe had focused only on the photograph of the deer hoist in the tree.
She stared at the hoist photograph for a moment and then set it aside. She slowly sifted through the other photos, stopping at a wide-angle shot of the backyard. There was a corner of the shed in the picture—a drab gray before the Colliers had repainted it white. The picture also showed thicker trees before Don Collier had cut them down. And in the center of the photo was what looked to be an old wooden well.
She frowned. She couldn’t remember seeing a well on the Collier property in any of the times she was there.
So you changed the place a lot after you bought it, Mr. Collier?
Had to…no plumbing to speak of, just a well out back.
Joe pushed up from the chair and took the picture out into the main office.
