The Ridge

Strength, she told herself, you’ve got to show strength. Go out and find that damn cat, bring him back, and then you can grieve for Wes. Grieve for Kino. Grieve for David again, hell, grieve for yourself. You’re entitled to that. But first you have to find that cat.

“Mrs. Clark?” Kimble said. “Is there anyone who can help? Anyone who knows about these cats?”

She looked him straight in the eye. “That would be me.”

Kimble regarded her with no quality of judgment. “Can you find him?”

No, she thought. She was picturing the sleek black cat, so silent, so strange. No, they could not find Ira. That was even more implausible, somehow, than the idea that Wesley had been killed by Kino.

“We’ll have to,” she said.

19

ROY WAS LOST IN THOUGHT when he approached the employee entrance of the Sentinel that morning. A harsh electronic buzz finally shattered those distractions and brought him into the moment. He had just waved his keycard in front of the receiver. No green light, no soft chime of acceptance. Instead, the loud buzz and a flashing red light.

He passed the card over the receiver a second time, even though he knew.

Rex Schaub had deactivated his keycard. Shut him down. The Sentinel office doors would not open for him again.

He stepped back and stared up at the silent limestone building, his home for so many years, and then, as if he simply could not understand, he reached out and tried again, and again.

Red light.

Red light.

He could hear banging near the other side of the building, and after circling around, he saw that the loading dock doors were up. The crew was hauling out office furniture and piling it inside a pair of large panel vans that had been backed up to the docks. Rex Schaub was supervising, but Roy didn’t recognize anyone else. Those who were gutting his home were nameless, faceless sorts. Roy hated them on principle, but he appreciated this much: they’d left the loading dock open. He waited until they deposited a load in the truck and returned to the building, and then he followed, slipping into the pressroom, the massive machinery taking shape from shadows. He had no idea what a press like this was worth. It had been a big deal when they’d added it because the thing could print color pages on the inside, a first in the Sentinel’s history. Was there even a market for such equipment, or did it go to scrap now?

Your entire life, headed for scrap, Roy thought. Not even the dusty pages remain for you—you’ll never make it that far. The day of the dusty pages is done.

He stopped at the door to the morgue, realizing that this might be it for him. The last time in the building, the last perusal of all those pages of newsprint. Thanks to Kimble—and Wyatt—he had one last assignment, one last Sawyer County story to tell. But when he left the newspaper today… well, that might be it. The clean-out crew would work its way down to the morgue eventually. The building would soon enough be a hollowed-out corpse, and then the property would be sold, the structure torn down or converted into something else, and all that would remain of the Sawyer County Sentinel was the impact of the stories it had told.

He sat down with his notebook, where he’d written the names from Wyatt’s photographs in a column. He’d start with those, the known quantities being far easier to trace, and then deal with the mysterious old photographs, trying to put names where Wyatt had put only NO. That would not be an easy task.

Kimble had told him the names were likely to belong to murderers, which meant they were likely to be in the old index—murder in Sawyer County generally qualified as big news. Tracing some of the older cases back might be tricky, but the more recent ones should move quickly enough. He didn’t need to know any more about Jacqueline Mathis, and Kimble had already found out the significance of Ryan O’Patrick and Adam Estes.

Roy frowned as he looked at the list. Estes. That name snagged on something in his brain, troubled him for no reason that he could articulate.

Adam Estes. Where had he just seen that? It was down here, in the morgue. He was sure of that. But the only reading he’d done here was confirming Wyatt’s list of accident victims.

“The drowned girl,” he said. That’s where he’d seen it. While reading about a red-ink name, Jenna Jerden. In 1975, Jerden had drowned in a canoeing accident in the Marshall River, trying to clear the swift eddies around the trestle in the dark. She hadn’t been alone. Her boyfriend had survived. Adam Estes.

He found the right volume, tracked down the story, and there it was. While Jerden had drowned among the rocks and dark water, her boyfriend had made it to shore, then gone for help. It was a long run to the nearest phone from Blade Ridge in 1975, though, and the help that finally came arrived far too late. The Sentinel commended the man on his futile efforts, while including a police quote that reprimanded the couple for attempting to canoe the unfamiliar and often dangerous river in the dark. The survivor was Adam Estes, thirty-three, of Whitman.

In 1975, Adam Estes had survived an accident at Blade Ridge that claimed another life.

In 1976, he’d killed a man.

“They can’t all be like that,” Roy said. There was no way.

It was noon by the time Kimble left the cat preserve. The scene had been processed, the body removed, the photographs taken. When he spoke to the coroner, the man said, “Damned unlucky spot these past few days, isn’t it?”

It sure was, Kimble agreed. It sure was.

He then said that in addition to the confirmed cause of death for Wesley Harrington, he would need an examination conducted on the tiger.

The coroner said “You want us to do what?”

Kimble explained it again, patiently. It didn’t appear that the bullet had come out of the cat. There was an entry wound but no exit wound, as if the shoulder bone had stopped it. He wanted the bullet.

Just due diligence, he said.

But he was thinking about more than due diligence. He was thinking about the size of the entry wound and about the range from which Wesley Harrington would have fired his high-caliber rifle. They did not match his expectation. Kimble found it patently obvious who had killed the man—the tiger. But he wasn’t so sure about who had killed the tiger.

He didn’t like the situation at the cat preserve at all, and when he left Shipley and Wolverton at the scene, he had private instructions for them that went beyond what he’d told Audrey Clark their purpose was, hunting for the missing cougar. While they were searching for signs of the cat, he also wanted them searching for signs of a human. Particularly, he said, shell casings.

“You think someone else shot that cat?” Shipley said. “The rifle was in that man’s hand. The brass was right there inside the gate.”

“I know it was. And when the coroner gives me the bullet and we find out that it came from his gun, we can close the case. Until we have that confirmation, though? It’s an active investigation, Shipley. Treat it like one.”

He left them then, resumed the drive he’d been trying to make seven hours earlier, and now there was even more on his mind than there had been then, and all of it was bad, and all of it went back to Blade Ridge.

It was the first time Kimble had ever visited her in the afternoon, but Jacqueline Mathis showed no trace of surprise.

“We’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this,” she said, smiling. The line seemed to hurt her, though, and he understood. It was what she’d said one Friday morning at the Bakehouse, when it had become far too clear that their accidental encounters were anything but accidental. What she’d said on a bright spring morning when she was a free woman, living in a beautiful old farmhouse with a view of the mountains, young and gorgeous and far from any idea of prison.

“I’m not visiting,” he said. “I’m working.”