months, he had started to develop his own, alternative plan, but until then Shepherd had played his agreed-upon part over the years. He’d kept an eye out, studiously, even after the target moved to a different state. He’d been on hand, invisible in the background, making an adjustment here and there to the course of personal histories, simply by being close enough to deflect the fates. He had, ten days previously, issued a warning to a man that had resulted in the abrupt cessation of a friendship Alison O’Donnell had been enjoying for the past five months. This friendship had threatened to become a variable. Shepherd cleaved to constants, always: The family needed to remain stable. This cessation had caused, in large measure, Alison’s sudden decampment to Cannon Beach. Naturally, she had not told her husband what had been behind this new low in her intermittent depression, just as Mr. Golson had not revealed to her why he was no longer able to find time for coffee after work, that a man had sat down next to him in a Starbucks and quietly told him to drop it or face a very high personal cost.
It was likely that nothing would ever have happened between the girl’s mother and her friend, but that was not a risk Shepherd had been prepared to take. Taking risks was not what Shepherd did.
Except once, in that hotel bar.
It had seemed an acceptable risk at the time, a farsighted plan to better his own future. Recently his position had changed. And so, a long time ahead of schedule, he’d done what he’d done, and immediately it had started going wrong. He’d claimed his due. That part had worked just fine. But when he returned to implement the short and violent second half of his personalized version of the plan, the girl was gone.
The phone call came half an hour later. He ignored it initially—assuming that it was the woman who’d been on his case for weeks and with whom he didn’t feel like dealing right now—but grabbed the phone hurriedly when he realized it was not.
The call was short and came from a pay phone. He recognized the girl’s voice immediately and asked her precise questions. She sounded confused and frightened, and he got little but for two words—“Creek” and “Rest”— before the call cut off. A look at the map gave him a destination within credible range. It would have been a needle in a haystack had it not lain in the direction he’d suspected right from the very start.
Given the distance, it might become one again.
So he drove fast out of Portland and up past Kelso and Castle Rock, along miles of near-empty night highway lined on both sides with gray trees, a vacant landscape that wore civilization like a thin overcoat recently acquired. It started to rain, but Shepherd kept his speed constant through Chehalis, Centralia, past other dots along what was effectively a tunnel north to Seattle, up the west side of Washington State.
An hour and a half after leaving Portland, he saw the turn. He pulled off the highway and onto a curving exit ramp, turning off his headlamps. Rain was hammering down now, and between the squeaking slashes of the wiper blades he saw a low, flat building sparsely surrounded with trees, a large parking area behind. Dim light shone from two small windows in the building, making it look even more abandoned.
A sign on the side said SCATTER CREEK SAFETY REST AREA.
The lot was empty but for a single car. He swung his vehicle in an arc to come to rest twenty yards away and killed the engine. The other vehicle was a Ford Taurus of the type favored by rental companies. It was dark inside. He gave it two minutes and then got out into the rain.
He walked slowly, his gun held low down by his side. The car looked empty, but methodical meant making sure. He checked through the rear window and found the backseats vacant but for a jacket, then came carefully around the side and bent down to look. There was no one inside. He straightened, reached down to open the driver’s-side door. The interior of the car was cold. Either the driver hadn’t used the heater or it had been sitting here for some time. The keys were missing from the ignition.
Broken down, abandoned, the driver safely spirited away by roadside rescue? Possibly. But then it would have been locked, and it was likely that the jacket would be gone, too. Maps lay in the space between the seats, flimsy and thin, again characteristic of rental vehicles.
A half-empty pack of cigarettes was wedged in the door on the driver’s side, along with a disposable lighter. Lying on the floor in front of the passenger seat was a discarded Pop Rocks container, next to a wrapper for Chicken McNuggets.
Shepherd closed the door. He had never been a smoker, ironically, but he knew that people who need nicotine enough to ignore the DON’T FUCKING SMOKE signs in a rental car are not likely to leave the scene without their cancer sticks.
Somebody was here, somewhere.
He turned and walked toward the building. At the left end was a tiled privacy wall covering the entrance to the men’s restroom. A foot-square window provided one of the two points of sallow light. Stone pillars supported the rest of the structure, enclosing a covered space. Racks of leaflets on local attractions. A hatch from which complimentary coffee would be available during the day, now closed behind a metal shutter. A bank of three pay phones. A couple of battered drinking fountains. Everything dark, cold.
But when he looked closer, he saw that one of the phones was hanging down off its cord.
He walked back out and into the restroom. It was tiled in cream and tan. Two basins, two urinals, two stalls. Surprisingly clean. The walls to the latter stopped two feet from the floor. Nobody inside either. The sound of rain was heavy on the metal roof above.
He came back out and headed through the covered area to the women’s restroom. Three stalls, same deal. Except that a pipe was leaking, and the floor throughout was slick and wet. And except for the fact you could see feet at the bottom of the last stall.
Blue jeans, white sneakers. Wearer apparently in a kneeling position.
“Ma’am?”
Something else lay on the floor. Small, shiny plastic, purple.
He pushed the door open. A woman was curled into the corner of the stall. She could almost have looked like she was crouched, hiding in a game of hide-and-seek.
Shepherd bent down to pick the purple plastic off the floor. It was the battery compartment from a cell phone. He pulled on his gloves and took the woman’s shoulders carefully in his hands. Pulled the torso back. She had died from an oblique head trauma, most likely her head striking the toilet bowl. The remainder of the phone lay underneath this, the screen cracked. Shepherd let the body slump forward and picked up its right hand.
Faint yellow discoloration along the inside of the index finger.
Smoker.
Probable renter of car in parking lot.
Possible provider of a ride to a Pop Rocks/Chicken McNuggets consumer, who had caught her during an attempt to make a telephone call in the restroom, her passenger having said something just a little out of place while they were on the road, something that didn’t fit right.
Said passenger arrives at the stall door, woman is startled and slips on the wet floor, falls, is unlucky in the way some people are.
Probably.
Shepherd swore quietly and left the stall. As he walked quickly through the rain to the trunk of his car, he was already making lists in his head.
Dispose of phone fragments. Wipe stall for prints, ditto restroom floor and interior walls of restroom. Wipe all public-phone handsets, remove one she’s likely to have used. Search/wipe interior surfaces of victim’s car. Wipe area around exterior handle of door. Remove body from stall and stow in trunk of car. Relocate vehicle.
This was not good, Shepherd knew. As he unloaded cleaning materials from the back of the car, he calmly appraised just how bad it was. Assume victim didn’t get as far as a connection to the police, since the place isn’t crawling with cops. But someone, somewhere, might have seen the woman agree to give someone a ride. Seen them together at a gas station, the McDonald’s. Just enough to point the people looking for her in the right direction.
Shepherd pulled out an extra couple of tools and a folded bag made of thick gray plastic.
Messy work ahead.
Afterward he searched the perimeter of the parking area, in vain. Somehow the girl had found a way of leaving this place. It was hard to believe that some other traveler would have just taken her into his or her vehicle, been convinced of whatever explanation she might have concocted for her whereabouts. But Shepherd knew she could probably be convincing. Somehow she’d left here, just as somehow she’d gotten the dead woman to drive her this far, and she’d found a place or places to spend the day and the previous night, after somehow getting to
