gave me no choice.'
Mark felt the breath leave his chest. He knew with a terrible clarity that there was really no hope now. No chance of this ending well, of him walking away alive and free. Reich was no immature kid like
Troy who was in over his head. When the sheriff ran out of bile, the gun in his hand would spit a bullet into Mark's heart.
'He was your best friend,' Mark said.
'That's right, I killed my best friend because of you.'
'Because of me?'
'Because you're a liar,' Reich told him. 'Because you had to hide behind a ghost in order to cover up your own crime. Pete was willing to give up everything to make sure you paid the price. I couldn't let him do that, but I'll make sure you pay. That's what Pete would want. That's why I can live with what I've done.'
Mark shook his head and slowly held up his hands. 'Sheriff, I swear I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'
'He's talking about Harris Bone,' Cab Bolton said.
Reich whipped his light toward the voice that rose from the cemetery graves, but he didn't take his eyes off Mark or lower the gun even an inch. In the beam, Mark saw Cab Bolton ten feet away, next to the gray tower of a bell-shaped tombstone. Tresa huddled next to him, her face red with anger and tears.
'Bolton,' Reich hissed.
'What now, Sheriff?' Cab demanded. 'Are you going to kill me, too? First Hoffman, then Bradley, then me?'
Reich's eyes darted furiously between Mark and Cab. He was a man looking for a way out and not finding one.
'The girl, too?' Cab went on. 'Could you shoot the girl? How many more people are you willing to kill to keep the secret?'
'Get the hell out of here,' Reich ordered him. 'Take Tresa with you. You have no idea what this is about.'
'Harris Bone,' Cab repeated. 'That's what this is about. Peter Hoffman couldn't handle the guilt anymore, could he? When he thought Bradley was hiding behind Harris to get away with murder; he decided to tell the truth. Hoffman wasn't about to let Delia Fischer get robbed of justice. He wasn't going to let some defense attorney use Harris to get an acquittal. He knew Glory didn't come face to face with Harris Bone in Florida. That was a lie. That's what he wanted to tell me.'
'Goddamn you, Bolton,' Reich said. 'You couldn't let it go, could you? What the hell did you do?'
'I found him, Sheriff,' Cab replied, i found him in that hole where the two of you left him to rot. Harris Bone never escaped. He never ran. You and Peter Hoffman killed him.'
In the miles since they left the county courthouse in Sturgeon Bay, Harris Bone hadn't said a word. He sat silently in the back of the squad car, his balding head hung forward, his hands and ankles cuffed. His jail clothes were baggy on his frame. Harris had never been a large man, but he'd shrunk inside his skin in the months since the fire, until he was almost a skeleton.
Reich watched his headlights tunneling through the night. He was south of Kewaunee in the midst of flat, dormant farmlands. It was January, during one of the frigid winter stretches, with temperatures falling into the teens below zero when the sun went down. The season had been mostly snowless, leaving the ground barren and hard, swept clean by the bitter wind.
He glanced in the mirror with hard eyes.
'You should look outside, Harris. You won't be seeing open country again for the rest of your life. Just eighty square feet of concrete for twenty-three hours a day.'
Harris didn't acknowledge him.
'I'd watch my back in there if I were you. Big-ass gang killers don't like a man who burns up his wife and family.'
Harris finally looked up with sunken eyes. 'Shut the hell up, Felix.'
'Oh, don't start mouthing off. That's a bad lesson. You shoot off your mouth in there, and bad things are likely to happen.'
'Thanks for the advice.'
Reich heard the sarcasm, and he didn't care. 'A lot of people think you're getting off easy, sitting on the taxpayer's dime for the next forty years. That doesn't feel like justice.'
'Is that right? What do you think, Felix?'
'If it were up to me, we'd gather volunteers and stone you.'
'Too bad it's not up to you.'
Reich nodded and studied the empty highway. 'Yeah. Too bad.'
Behind him, Harris closed his eyes, and his head fell back against the seat.
'I always felt sorry for you, Harris,' Reich called to him. 'Nettie was a bitch. Not that I'd ever say so to Pete. But there are some lines a man doesn't cross, no matter how much he hates his life. There are some things that when you do them, you stop being human.'
Harris leaned forward until his weary face was pressed against the steel mesh. 'What does that make you, Felix? How many babies did you kill during the war?'
Reich gripped the wheel fiercely. His lip curled into a snarl. 'Are you suggesting I'm the same as you? Is that really what you want to say to me?'
'I'm saying you can spare me the morality shit. I don't need it.'
Harris sank back and pretended to sleep. Reich studied the man's face and saw tears slipping down his cheeks. It didn't matter. He felt nothing for him. It was just as he'd said: there were lines a man doesn't cross. There were also things a man had to do when justice demanded it.
He was close to the rendezvous. Through the headlights, he spied the intersection at the county road, and he checked the odometer to count off one point seven miles. There was nothing but frozen land on either side of the vehicle. He and Pete had scouted the terrain weeks earlier as they made their plans.
Where to meet. Where to stage the escape.
Reich spotted the driveway leading to the farmhouse, miles from anything else around it. He slowed sharply and turned. In the back seat, Harris felt the change in direction and opened his eyes.
'What's going on?'
Reich said nothing. He drove into the rutted cornfield bordering the house and steered around the rear of the detached garage, where he parked the squad car with its right-hand door butted against the wall. From the highway, the car was invisible. It would be days before anyone found it.
'What the hell are you doing, Felix?'
Reich heard it in Harris's voice. The first tremors of fear. The first horrified realization of what was about to happen to him.
Justice.
Reich got out of the car. The wind was ferocious, and the cold bit through his coat like a maneater. He opened the rear door and dragged Harris Bone into the night by the cuff of his shirt. Harris, who wore nothing except his prison scrubs, howled as the frozen air knifed his skin. The bound man hunched his limbs together. Reich yanked a billy club from his belt and swung it across the man's skull. Harris collapsed to his knees. Reich laid a boot on the man's back and crushed him forward on to the rock-hard dirt, where he twitched from the pain and cold. Harris tried to crawl, but Reich held him down.
'Hello, Felix,' Peter Hoffman said. He was waiting for them beside the garage.
'No mercy tonight,' Reich replied.
'None.'
The house and land belonged to a retired couple who were away in the sunshine of Mesa and wouldn't be back in Wisconsin until after Easter. Reich had checked the house and garage three weeks earlier and
