Triangle

The short, snappy sound of the.22 filled the field.

Pete choked back a cry and looked around, nearly falling off the fence.

“Damn,” Doug muttered. He was aiming away from the fence, nodding toward a tree line. “Squirrel. Missed him by two inches.”

“Squirrel,” Pete repeated manically. “And you missed him.”

“Two goddamn inches.”

Hands shaking, Pete continued over the fence and climbed to the ground.

“You okay?” Doug asked. “You look a little funny.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

Fine, fine, fine…

Doug handed Pete the guns and started over the fence. Pete debated. Then he put his rifle on the ground and gripped Doug’s gun tight. He walked to the fence so that he was right below Doug.

“Look,” Doug said as he got to the top. He was straddling it, his right leg on one side of the fence, his left on the other. “Over there.” He pointed nearby.

There was a big gray lop-eared rabbit on its haunches only twenty feet away.

“There you go!” Doug whispered. “You’ve got a great shot.”

Pete shouldered the gun. It was pointing at the ground, halfway between the rabbit and Doug.

“Go ahead. What’re you waiting for?”

Roy was convicted of premeditated murder in the first degree and sentenced to life in prison. Yet he came very close to committing the perfect murder. If not for a simple twist of fate, he would have gotten away with it.

Pete looked at the rabbit, then looked at Doug.

“Aren’t you going to shoot?”

Uhm, okay, he thought.

Pete raised the gun and pulled the trigger once.

Doug gasped, pressed at the tiny bullet hole in his chest. “But. but. No!”

He fell backward off the fence and lay on a patch of dried mud, completely still. The rabbit bounded through the grass, panicked by the sound of the shot, and disappeared in a tangle of bushes that Pete recognized as blackberries. Mo had planted tons of them in their backyard.

The plane descended from cruising altitude and slowly floated toward the airport.

Pete watched the billowy clouds, tried to figure out what they looked like. He was bored. He didn’t have anything to read. Before he’d talked to the Maryland state troopers about Doug’s death, he’d thrown the true-crime book about the Triangle murder into a trash bin.

One of the reasons the jury convicted Roy was that, upon examining his house, the police found several books about the disposing of evidence. Roy had no satisfactory explanation for them.

The small plane glided out of the skies and landed at the White Plains airport. Pete pulled his knapsack out from underneath the seat in front of him and climbed out of the plane. He walked down the ramp beside the flight attendant, a tall black woman. They ’ d talked together for most of the flight.

Pete saw Mo at the gate. She looked numb. She wore sunglasses and Pete supposed she’d been crying. She was clutching a Kleenex in her fingers.

Her nails weren’t bright red anymore, he noticed.

They weren’t peach either.

They were just plain fingernail color.

The flight attendant went up to Mo. “You’re Mrs. Jill Anderson?”

Mo nodded.

The woman held up a sheet of paper. “Here. Could you sign this, please?”

Numbly Mo took the pen the woman offered and signed the paper.

It was an unaccompanied-minor form, which adults had to sign to allow their children to get on planes by themselves. The parent picking up the child also had to sign it. After his parents were divorced Pete flew back and forth between Wisconsin and White Plains so often he knew all about the airlines’ procedures for kids who flew alone.

“I have to say,” she said to Mo, smiling down at Pete, “he’s the best-behaved youngster I’ve ever had on one of my flights. How old are you, Pete?”

“I’m ten,” he answered. “But I’m going to be eleven next week.”

She squeezed his shoulder, then looked at Mo. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” she said in a soft voice. “The trooper who put Pete on the plane told me. Your boyfriend was killed in a hunting accident?”

“No,” Mo said, struggling to say the words, “he wasn’t my boyfriend.”

Though Pete was thinking: Of course he was your boyfriend. Except you didn’t want the court to find that out because then Dad wouldn’t have to pay you alimony anymore. Which is why she and Doug had been working so hard to convince Pete that Doug was “just a friend. ”

“Can't I have friends? Aren 't I allowed? ”

No, you’re not, Pete thought. You’re not going to get away with dumping me the way you dumped Dad.

“Can we go home, Mo?” he asked, looking as sad as he could. “I feel real funny about what happened.”

“Sure, honey.”

“Mo?” the flight attendant asked.

Mo, staring out the window, said, “When he was five Pete tried to write ‘Mother’ on my birthday card. He just wrote ‘M-O’ and didn’t know how to spell the rest. It became my nickname.”

“What a sweet story,” the woman said and looked like she was going to cry. “ Pete, you come back and fly with us real soon. ”

“Okay.”

“Hey, what’re you going to do for your birthday?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Then he looked up at his mother. “I was thinking about maybe going hiking. In Colorado. Just the two of us.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffery Deaver is the bestselling author of The Blue Nowhere, The Bone Collector, The Empty Chair, The Devil's Teardrop, and fourteen other suspense novels. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. He’s been nominated for four Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year. His book A Maiden 's Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was made into a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington. Deaver was born in Chicago, attended the University of Missouri, and received his law degree from Fordham University in New York. In 1990, he quit practicing law to write full-time. He lives in California and Virginia.

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