The Ridge

There was a murmur from the deputy. Audrey looked down again, then saw that his eyes were open and locked on hers.

“You okay?” she said. “You with us? You with us?”

Water dripped out of Wes’s short gray beard and off the brim of his baseball cap as he knelt over the wounded man. Beyond, in the preserve, no more than a hundred feet away, the cats had pressed close to the fences, intrigued. One of the lions gave a low roar, and that got the deputy’s attention. He swung his head up and around to face the cats, and Audrey winced when he moved his neck, sure that his spine had to be at risk. They’d been telling her to keep him still, that he would need a backboard.

“Please don’t move,” she said, and then, seeing how intently he was looking at her cats, she added, “They’re locked up. They won’t hurt you.”

She turned to Dustin. “Go try to calm them, please. The last thing we need is the cats going crazy right now.”

He went off to try to make peace with animals who were already restless from new surroundings and unnatural activity, and Audrey knelt beside Wes, watching the deputy.

“I hit him,” the deputy said.

“What?”

“Tried to miss, but he was right there, and I was going so fast… I tried to miss, I promise you that I did.”

“You didn’t hit anyone. Everyone is fine.”

That seemed distressing to him. He moved his head again, searching the dark woods, and this time his face split into an odd smile, blood on his teeth.

“He made it?”

“You didn’t hit anyone,” Audrey repeated, feeling ill at ease now. Maybe he hadn’t been so unscathed after all. A concussion was likely. Maybe something worse, bleeding on the brain, who knew?

“Light’s out,” the deputy said, staring over her shoulder. Audrey turned and looked up to the hilltop where the lighthouse stood against the weaving bare branches. It was dark, for the first time all day.

“We’ve got an ambulance on the way,” she said. “Just stay down. Please don’t move around. They’ll be here soon.”

“Where were you headed, bud?” Wes asked. “Is something wrong with the cats? Did you get a call about them?”

Blood was dribbling down the deputy’s chin as he shook his head.

“There’s a dead man in the lighthouse,” he said.

6

TEN MINUTES ON DUTY, running on frayed nerves and no sleep, and Kimble had a corpse call. He’d poured a cup of coffee but hadn’t taken a sip yet when he heard the news. Gunshot victim, they said.

“Active shooter?” he asked.

Probable suicide, he was told.

“We know the vic’s name?”

French, they said. Wyatt French. Maybe he remembered—

“Yes,” Kimble said. “I remember Wyatt French.”

He felt cold guilt in the pit of his stomach. All those questions, all that talk about suicide. Why hadn’t he sent someone to check? He’d hoped Wyatt was just drunk, the way he usually was. That last joke, too, the threat that he might just decide to live forever—it had suggested that he wasn’t in too dismal a state of mind. Hadn’t it?

Kimble swallowed some coffee for warmth, kept his face impassive, and, after a moment’s pause, asked that they send Nathan Shipley. He didn’t want to go out there himself, not after the morning call, and Shipley, though young, was one of Kimble’s favorite deputies, quiet and calm and tough. He’d seen worse than a suicide, and he’d be fine out there in charge of the scene.

They dispatched Shipley, only to come back for Kimble a moment later, just as he’d settled behind his desk.

It seemed Kimble’s presence had been requested at the scene.

“By Shipley?”

By the victim, he was told. There was a letter on the front door, asking that for purposes of investigation the case be handed to Kevin W. Kimble. Dispatch thought he’d like to know that.

First the predawn call to his private number, now a letter on the door? What did Wyatt French want from Kimble?

He pulled on a baseball cap and went back out into the rain, tired and confused and wondering what else he could have said, should have said.

What he should have done.

Roy stood outside the lighthouse as darkness gathered and the rain pounded down on him and blood dripped off his palm and into the grass. He felt a tingle in his elbow. That wasn’t good. He’d probably cut right through the nerves in his hand.

Explaining this to the police was going to be a treat. Tell them that a man was dead and Roy’s own blood just happened to be splattered all over the scene? Somehow he had a feeling that wouldn’t go over too smoothly.

Where in the hell were the cops, though? He’d heard a siren that sounded as if it were just below him, but then it had stopped.

The pain in his hand had ebbed away to a dull ache, but he was continuing to drip blood all over his pants. He considered taking off his shirt and wrapping it around the wound, but then he looked through the open door into Wyatt French’s strange living quarters and saw the dishtowels hanging from the stove. It wasn’t as if Wyatt would miss them.

He stepped back inside, feeling an uneasy sensation the moment he reentered, knowing damn well now what waited at the top of those steps. His first stop was the sink, where he ran warm water over his hand until the pain ratcheted up a few levels, and then he switched it to cold, hoping to numb things down. The water mixed with the blood and swirled down the sink. He felt lightheaded watching it, so he looked away and took one of the dishtowels from the stove, soaked it in cold water, and then wrapped it tightly around his palm.

The dizziness was still with him. He blinked and took a few deep breaths and stared around. When he’d first entered, his focus had been on finding Wyatt, but now he had a chance to register the room itself. Wyatt had never finished the walls—two-by-fours climbed like latticework, pink insulation showing between them, no drywall pinning them in. His focus, it seemed, had been on speed as he built. He wanted to get to the top and get that light going. The same one he’d asked Roy to keep on before he’d eaten his gun. The same one Roy had promptly shattered.

Like it matters, he told himself. Like the crazy thing really matters.

He stepped farther into the room, looking at the maps Wyatt had pinned to the exposed wall studs. There were a lot of them, names written across in red ink. Beside the maps, and all around the room, photographs were held in place with thumbtacks. Ancient pictures, sepia-tinted relics of another time, men with old-fashioned mustaches and women standing beside cars with wide running boards. Roy stepped closer, saw that each photograph was labeled. A few with names, but most—almost all of them, it seemed—with one scrawled word: NO.

It was eerie, standing here in the darkened room, a dead man upstairs and all of these faces from times gone by watching him. He shot a glance at the door, wondering again about the police.

One picture caught his eye—more recent, a color shot, and the woman in it was breathtaking. He crossed the room and stared into her crystal eyes and realized he was looking at the booking photograph of Jacqueline Mathis.

What in the hell went on in that man’s head? Roy thought. What was he looking for?