doing.
At sundown the sheriff’s deputies came by to tell Audrey they’d had no luck with the cougar hunt.
“He hasn’t touched the bait,” said the cold female officer named Diane, who seemed to hold Audrey personally responsible for her colleague’s death. She was the most intimidating of all of them, harsher even than the sheriff. Audrey couldn’t help but be impressed by her. She certainly had the look of a woman who did not take any shit from her male colleagues. Or, for that matter, from anyone.
“I didn’t think he would,” Audrey said. Technically, Ira should have been interested. He should be hungry by now, having grown accustomed to a steady diet that required no hunting, and the presence of massive pieces of bloody, butchered meat scattered along the river should have appealed to him. She just knew somehow that he would not fall for the trick.
He would be watching now, she was certain. Maybe from the rocks, maybe from the upper branches of a tree, maybe from some unremembered crevice of the old mines themselves, over on the other side of the river. Wherever he was, he would be watching, and he would not easily be fooled.
“I’m guessing the man with the dogs didn’t have any better luck,” she said.
“He hasn’t yet. The dogs can’t seem to pick up his scent.”
Again Audrey felt no surprise.
“You’ll try again tomorrow, I assume,” she said.
“Oh, yes. We’ll keep at it until we get him. Tomorrow the folks from the USDA will be down, too. They’re going to inspect—”
“They just did inspect. Right before we began to move. They said it was one of the highest-quality facilities in the country.”
“They want to inspect and see exactly how the cat escaped,” Diane Mooney said, as if Audrey hadn’t spoken. “So we will deal with all of that tomorrow. But I don’t want any of my people out here at night. Not after what’s been happening.” For the first time, the woman’s coldness seemed to abate, and she said, “I don’t think you should be here either.”
Audrey took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t particularly want to be, to tell you the truth. But I have to be. You see all of them?”
She waved her hand back at the cats.
“They can’t be left alone,” Diane Mooney said.
“No, they can’t. So Dustin and I, we’ll be here.”
“Call for help if you need it,” Diane said. “If you see him, or hear him, or just if anything seems wrong, call us, Mrs. Clark. Don’t try to handle things on your own. You got very lucky last night. I don’t want to see you press that again.”
Audrey nodded. “I don’t intend to.”
36
IT WAS NOT YET DARK when Kimble got stiffly out of his car—his back had been killing him all day—and walked into the prison with his order-on-jailer paperwork. They’d already gotten a call from the judge, so they were aware of the order and prepared to see him, but all the same he could feel the curiosity as he spoke with the supervising CO, a guy named John who’d seen Kimble come and go on many visits.
“There were supposed to be two of you. A female, correct?”
There were always supposed to be two, and you always tried to avoid pairing a female inmate alone with a single male officer. Kimble said, “We’re good,” meeting the man’s gaze with a flat stare and eventually receiving the shrug he knew he would receive. The procedural burden was on his department. If anything went wrong, Sawyer County would pay the price.
It took about ten minutes for them to bring her out, and she showed no trace of surprise. That was expected; she always gave off the air of having fully anticipated all developments. It had worked against her during the trial. One juror admitted that they had found her calm reactions to testimony disturbing.
The CO nodded at the handcuffs on Kimble’s belt.
“You want to use those?”
“She’s fine,” Kimble said.
The CO shrugged again. Jacqueline was a minimum-security inmate and Kimble was police. They expected he could handle her. He hoped they were right.
“Let’s go,” he told her, voice cool, indifferent. This was for the benefit of the CO. Let them see nothing but professionalism. Jacqueline Mathis stepped forward—physically free, technically still in custody. Kimble’s custody. As of this moment, she was his and his alone. He led the way to the door, held it open as Jacqueline stepped through. She walked at his side out to the car—he was in the cruiser now, this being official sheriff’s department business, though the sheriff knew nothing about it—and he felt an absurd desire to go around and open the passenger door for her, chivalrous, as if they were on a date. Instead, he opened the rear driver’s side door and she slid into the backseat, separated from him by a metal grate. Fences had held her from him for a while now.
She said, “We’re going to Blade Ridge, aren’t we?”
They were through the gates now and driving toward the highway. Kimble said, “They tell you that?” even though he knew they couldn’t have, because they didn’t know.
“I made a guess.” Her voice was so soft, so gentle. “It’s the right one, though, isn’t it?”
Kimble flicked his eyes at the mirror, then back to the road. “Yeah. A lot of people have died out there, Jacqueline. A whole hell of a lot. And the people who didn’t die…”
“What?”
“They’ve had problems,” he said.
He drove them up the ramp and onto the highway, pulling in behind a semi that was headed westbound.
“Problems like mine?”
“Problems like yours.”
“What are you hoping for from me, Kevin? What am I supposed to provide?”
“I want to know what you see,” he said.
“And you think I will see something? Still?”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s a folder back there. Pictures inside.”
She picked it up, opened it, began to sift through.
“Do you recognize any of them?”
“I’m supposed to recognize someone from photographs this old?”
“I thought you might.”
She looked up, and when he looked in the mirror he could see her eyes narrow.
“You think one of them is him,” she said.
“I don’t know. Wyatt French had the pictures. You were among them. So were the others like you. And then there are many that I don’t understand. I hoped you might.”
She fell silent for a time as she went through them one by one.
“No,” she said. “None of them are him.”
“You’d actually remember?”
“Kevin,” she said, “it’s not a face that you forget.”
“I think I know who he was,” Kimble said. “Who he claimed to be, at least, what he called himself. Silas Vesey. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No. How did you find the name?”
He told her about it as he drove, told her about all the work Roy Darmus had done, the story of the trestle and the fever and the man who’d wandered out of the hills with breath that smelled like cold ashes and said that he might be able to bind people to the bridge as Whitman had wanted, but that it would be far easier to do so with the sick and desperate men.
“Do you believe that story?” he asked her.
“It’s the truth,” she said simply. He looked at her in the mirror again, saw her sitting in the backseat staring
