Dismember

him in the gums, but he didn’t care.

His plan had not been perfect, especially the part involving Georgie’s mother, but now, listening, he thought maybe things hadn’t gone as badly as he’d first thought, that his scheme might still be falling into place in an unexpected but wonderful way.

The kid was giving directions, leading somebody here. Good directions, easily followed, though he seemed to babble like a brook. Hank would have been worried, would have thought maybe the kid was yakking to the cops, except for one word the boy had let slip, a word that was so gaspingly magnificent.

The word was Mommy.

THIRTY-FOUR

Libby wanted to rip the phone from Mike’s hand, talk to her son and make sure he was okay, but Mike seemed to be listening very intently, and she didn’t want to interrupt something important, something that might save her boy.

She stood at the end of the couch, shifting uncomfortably.

“—with a shotgun,” Mike said. “I remember.” He sat there and listened for a long time and then said, “Yeah.”

Libby moved closer, her ear pointed at the phone but still unable to hear more than the occasional word, things like road and tree and over, bits and pieces that were all but meaningless out of context.

“I know where that is,” Mike said and then listened again.

Libby watched, wouldn’t let herself blink. Trevor was alive. She wasn’t sure what was happening, how he’d gotten to a phone, but he was alive, and that was enough for now.

Escaped, she thought. Maybe Trevor had gotten free. She didn’t want to let herself believe that, didn’t want to get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help it. Escaped.

“Mommy’s here with me,” Mike said. He turned to face Libby, looked her in the eyes. He said, “Okay.”

Libby mouthed, what?

Mike ran a hand through his hair and turned away. “Just hold on, okay, bud. We both love you so…Trevor?” He turned the phone to look at it, then stuck it back against his ear. “Hello? Trev?”

Libby waited for what felt like a very long time before saying, “What is it? What happened?”

Mike looked at the phone’s indicator light, which was green. “I don’t…I guess his phone died.”

“What did he say? Where is he?”

Mike shut off the phone, tossed it onto the couch, and said, “He said he loves you. I’m supposed to tell you that.”

Libby didn’t move, didn’t speak. Tears she didn’t remember shedding flowed down her cheeks. Mike was pulling something off the table beside the couch, a small white rectangle, but Libby’s vision was too blurred to make any sense of it. Mike retrieved the phone and dialed a number, referring back to the blurry white thing after every two or three numbers. He crossed his free arm over his chest, squeezed it into his armpit, and paced. Libby wiped at her cheeks, rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, tried to say something and only sobbed.

“Hello,” Mike said, “Deputy Willis?”

Still crying, Libby moved to the couch and plopped down on the edge.

“I just got a call from my son,” Mike said, “gave me about the best directions you ever heard. I can lead you right to him.” He turned around, walked past Libby, and then turned again. “Do you have a pen?” Turn. Walk. Turn. Walk. “What do you mean?” He stopped pacing.

Libby watched him, the tears finished now, the front of her shirt damp but not soaked.

“Well, when will that be? My son needs help now.” Mike was getting red, the way he always did in those rare instances when his temper got the better of him. “That’s bullshit,” he said. He dropped onto the couch beside Libby, his leg not quite touching hers. Libby wondered why Mike hadn’t called 911 instead of the deputy and realized that wouldn’t have done any good. As small as the sheriff’s department up here probably was, Willis might have been the only deputy on duty anyway, and this way Mike hadn’t needed to re-explain the entire situation.

“No, I won’t calm down,” he said. “I’ve got a fucking map to the bad guy for you and you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do?”

He had gone beyond red. Libby heard his teeth grinding. Not knowing what was going on, she didn’t know whether to try to calm him down or join him in his fury.

She settled for waiting.

In the blood-spattered kitchen of one Ms. Harriet Anne Thompson, Deputy Sheriff Lester Willis listened to the cursing and the screaming without flinching. He’d heard worse.

“Listen,” he said during a break in Pullman’s tirade. “I can’t just leave a crime scene. I’ve got a dead body here and a partner already gone home for the night. Can you understand that?” He looked at the woman’s corpse again and shook his head. “But if you’ll give me those directions, I’ll get on the phone to the dispatcher and get every available deputy and emergency responder out to your boy as soon as possible.” He walked alongside the trail of maroon footprints, staying far enough away that he wouldn’t contaminate them. He pulled a pad of paper and a pen from his pocket and wrote, holding the cell phone to his ear with his shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said. “A left and then a right.” He knew the general area Pullman was describing and sketched a little map beneath the written directions. He said, “Okay, then what?”

Silence on the line.

“Mr. Pullman?”

Nothing.

He glanced at his phone. It had disconnected. He flipped through the notebook, found Pullman’s number, which Deputy Grey had dutifully written down, and dialed it. The phone rang. Ten times it rang. Twelve. He ended the call and sighed. He’d have to call into dispatch, get somebody up to Pullman’s place to see what was going on. They might have to pull a couple guys out of bed, but hell, if Willis couldn’t sleep, why should any of the rest of them?

He turned back to the body, to the puffy face and the throat slit so deep the head was almost completely disconnected from the body. The neighbor who’d called this in, a neighbor Willis would have to interview (and maybe interrogate) later, had said there was a boy, a son. Kid by the name of Zachary Thompson.

Willis wondered what the chances were that Zachary Thompson was the same kid Pullman’s abductor had been dragging along. Probably, he guessed, the chances were pretty damn good.

He would have to take some pictures, make a sketch of the scene. Eventually, they’d have a whole team up here, but he’d do what he could until they arrived. But first, he’d make the call into HQ. At least two kids were in some serious trouble, and now it looked like their kidnapper might be more of a murderer.

He only hoped someone would get to them in time.

Damn mountains. You might as well try to fight crime at the bottom of the sea.

Willis walked out of the kitchen to make his call, away from the stench of death, thinking about upset parents and a girl without the tip of her nose, thinking about little boys taken away from their families and trying hard not to think about their corpses.

Mike stared open mouthed at the phone. The indicator light was dark, dead. He said, “Oh my god.”

“What?” Libby stared at him.

Mike let out a single, short laugh. It was dry, more of a rasp really, the kind of sound Libby thought a movie mummy might make.

Mike said, “Now my phone’s dead.” He pressed the buttons on the handset but received no response. He might as well have held a brick.

“I thought you plugged it in.”

“I did.” He pushed the phone into the charging cradle. Nothing happened. He scooted the table away from the wall and she saw the plug on the floor beneath the outlet.