The Ridge

Wire services ran it all over the country. Made CNN and even the BBC.”

“Good as you are at this sort of game, Mr. Darmus,” Kimble said, “I’ve played a few of them myself, and I haven’t forgotten that I’m not here to give you information. It’s the other way around. Tell me—what did you find in that lighthouse?”

“Nothing but the names on the maps.”

“And you checked them out?”

Roy gave a hesitant nod. “In the newspaper’s morgue, yeah.”

“What did you find?”

“All accident victims. Is there some connection? Surely is. They all died close to Blade Ridge. But it’s too haphazard to make any sense. Fourteen people have died in the general area. Some on the road, some in the woods, some in the river. If that had happened last year, okay, it’s indicative of a problem. Or even in the last decade. But it ranges from David Clark’s fall off the trestle to people being killed by their horses in 1927. Fourteen deaths sounds like a lot until you spread it out over eighty or ninety years.”

“Why was he using maps? Any ideas?”

“I would have to see them again to be sure, but my suspicion is that he was charting the locations of the deaths.”

Kimble nodded. “You said you wanted to see the place in the dark. Why?”

“Everyone who died out there died in the dark.”

“At night?”

“That’s right.”

Kimble frowned. “It’s a spooky place at night, I’ll admit that. Shit, my best deputy is gun-shy about it. Now, maybe that’s the cougar, I don’t know.” Kimble took a drink of his beer, seeming not to enjoy the taste, and said, “What did Wyatt tell you about me and Jacqueline Mathis?”

Now came the real reason for this meeting. Kimble’s anger at the mention of her name in the lighthouse ran deep. Interesting.

“Not much,” Roy said, “and that’s the truth. He started out by raving about what the mountains could tell me if they could talk. Then he made the remark about my folks. Now, a lot of years have passed, but still…”

“It upset you.”

“Of course it did. When he started complimenting the bravery of their decision, and how hard it must have been, with the child at home, I was getting a little hot under the collar, yes. He hung up before I could really get going on that, though. Now as for you? All he said about you was that he hoped we’d work together on telling the story.”

“What story?”

“His, I suppose. The one the mountain could tell if it could talk? Hell, I don’t know. But he said he was counting on the two of us, and then he told me that you make drives up to see Jacqueline Mathis.”

Kimble tried to hide the bristle with another swallow of beer. It didn’t work; his eyes had gone cold and angry. Roy said, “Why did that matter to him? Any idea?”

“I don’t even understand how he knew about it,” Kimble said. “It’s nobody’s damn business. I go up there because… because there’s nobody else who will. She’s alone, Mr. Darmus. And yes, she shot me, but it was because of that bastard husband and a lot of confusion. If that prick hadn’t been beating her up, there would never have been a gun in her hands, and when I came in she was still in shock and he was still breathing and it was…”

“What?” Roy said.

“It was pitch black,” Kimble said thoughtfully. “There’d been a bad storm that night. Power was out all over the county. I remember that when I pulled into the driveway I could still hear thunder on the other side of the mountains.”

“Maybe that’s why Wyatt latched on to her story, then,” Roy said. “The man had one hell of an interest in darkness. Does it make sense? Of course not. Does a lighthouse in the woods make sense, though?”

Kimble gave a nod of acknowledgment, and then seemed to hesitate. He finally said, “Listen, Mr. Darmus —”

“Would you please call me Roy? Or better yet, just Darmus? I’ve worked around police for forty years, and when I start hearing politeness come out of their mouths, I know I’m getting old.”

Kimble smiled. “All right, Darmus. You muckraking son of a bitch.”

Roy laughed. “There you go, there you go.”

Kimble turned serious again and said, “I wanted to apologize for the way I ran you out of there yesterday. My temper got away from me.”

“Not a problem,” Roy said. “You know what’s funny, though? Both of our tempers got away from us that day. Why? Because Wyatt French knew just what buttons to push. Telling me that my parents made a brave decision on the day they died in an accident, that was a sharp call. Cruel, maybe, but sharp. It got a reaction. And then he poked you pretty good with Jacqueline Mathis.”

“He sure did. Wonder why?”

“Well, he seemed to want our attention. He got it, didn’t he? We’re sitting down together now, talking about him and the artifacts he left behind, instead of just moving on through the night minding our own affairs.”

After a long pause, Kimble picked up the folder he’d brought in with him and slid it over the table.

“Speaking of the artifacts he left behind—these are copies of the photographs he had on the walls.”

Roy opened the folder, saw the browning images, most featuring lanky men with harsh expressions and tools in their hands. With a few exceptions, they all seemed to be from the distant past, and from a specific group of men. Laborers on some unknown project.

“Why does he have so many labeled NO?” Roy asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Most of them are that way, but there are ten with names. I’ve made the list there.”

“I see it.” Roy was scanning the names.

“Any chance you could help me figure out who they were, exactly? I know what three of them did. I don’t need any more information on O’Patrick, Estes, or… Mathis.”

Roy looked up and met his eyes. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. What did you find on O’Patrick and Estes?”

“No connection to Blade Ridge.”

There was more there. Roy frowned and said, “Come on, Kimble.”

Kimble sighed. “They both killed people. In different ways, in different decades, in different places. I don’t know how in the hell Wyatt discovered them, or why he kept their pictures, but that’s the story.”

“And Jacqueline,” Roy said. “So of the ten here, you already know that three were murderers.”

“That’s right.”

“If these other seven prove to—”

“If they prove to be, I won’t be surprised. Murder seemed to fascinate Wyatt. I’m trying to understand why. You can help me by telling me about them.”

“Why do you care, Kimble? It was a suicide.”

Kimble drained the rest of his beer.

“Wasn’t it?” Roy said, the first time any other possibility had crossed through his mind. He’d seen the corpse, had seen the gun in the dead man’s lap. But guns could be placed in a way to suggest suicide. Kimble would be well aware of the forensic response to the scene by now, and maybe there was something in it that Roy hadn’t anticipated.

“He did a lot of talking about how I would investigate this,” Kimble said slowly. “When he called me that morning, he kept talking about the differences between suicide and homicide. Made the outright suggestion that someone could be compelled to kill himself by another, and then it shouldn’t be considered a suicide at all.”

Roy was astonished. He said, “You think somebody else is involved in this?”

“I have no idea. But it’s my job to find out. And listen—you had an inordinate amount of time alone at that scene before I reached you. Would have been shorter, but Shipley flipped his cruiser.”

Roy held up his hands, palms out. “I didn’t tamper.”

Kimble gave him a measured stare, then said, “You’d understand why I might be skeptical of that,