Though she winced with every step, the pain was welcome. It meant the feeling in her lower leg had come back. Maybe the leg hadn’t been starved of blood long enough to suffer permanent damage. Maybe she wouldn’t have to wear a prosthetic below her left knee for the rest of her life.
Or maybe she was headed straight into a trap, and the rest of her life would prove too short to matter.
She and Ally had reached the decision together, with no discussion, only a meeting of eyes. Trish had seen the stark terror in the girl’s face, the awful fear for her parents, the desperate plea-and in her own mind she had heard the damnably persistent Mrs. Wilkes saying, No medals for quitters.
Trish meant to have a few words with that woman when this was all over.
Beside her, Ally moaned.
“You okay” Trish asked.
“Just thinking. I … did a stupid thing at this cocktail party … last Christmas.”
“And”
“Never told my mom and dad … I was sorry. That’s all.”
They went on, Ally staring blankly ahead, Trish thinking of Mr. Charles Kent.
His daughter wanted to apologize to him. The ugly irony of it was amusing somehow, or would have been if she could have obtained the appropriately distanced perspective.
Saving Charles hadn’t been a factor in Trish’s decision. She would risk nothing for that man.
But Barbara Kent and Philip and Judy Danforth … they were innocent. They were worth the risk.
Worth dying for She couldn’t say, almost didn’t care. Her own survival seemed somehow trivial, a mere luxury unworthy of serious consideration with so many other lives at stake.
She wondered if this was some sort of depersonalized reaction to shock or if it was what people called courage-or if there was any difference.
The soil grew spongier. Wet sand sucked at her shoes and Ally’s bare feet like a succession of hungry mouths. Rushes yielded to sedges, then to bristling ranks of cattails waist-deep in water.
The FireStar floated close to shore. In his haste the killer named Blair had simply abandoned the boat in a shallow cove, trusting to a semicircle of mossy boulders to prevent it from drifting far.
The port seat was still occupied by the slumped masculine figure Trish had seen earlier. His left arm trailed limply, and his chin rested on his chest.
Dead like his partner.
Probably.
But she wasn’t making any assumptions.
“Quiet now,” she whispered.
Screened from the boat by cattails, she and Ally waded in together, algae swirling around them in lacy ribbons of green.
Where the cattails thinned, Trish halted. “Okay. Let me go.”
Ally released her hold. Trish submerged up to her neck. A water bug as large as her thumb skittered away, its carapace shiny in the starlight.
Crammed under her belt was Blair’s Glock. She withdrew the gun and held it above the water as she slipped forward.
Waterlilies papered the shallows, prolific as weeds. She maneuvered among them, the agony in her leg partially relieved by the water’s soothing buoyancy.
She reached the FireStar’s stem. Hugging the hull, she circled around to starboard.
A breath of courage, and she grasped the gunwale with her left hand and hoisted herself up, aiming the Glock with her right.
“Freeze.”
Caution was unnecessary. She knew it as soon as she saw him at close range.
A bullet-one of her bullets-had opened his neck and the side of his face, exposing a red waste of bone. Blood soaked his jump suit and lacquered the molded seat.
Most of his face was intact. His mouth hung open. His eyes gazed unblinking at his lap.
At least he wasn’t looking at her. She didn’t think she could stand it if he’d been looking at her.
If anything, he was younger than his companion. Sixteen She had been a high school sophomore at sixteen. Staying out late on a Friday night had been the limit of her daring.
Finally she turned toward shore and found her voice. “It’s safe.”
Ally swam to the boat, climbed aboard, and helped Trish get settled on the bench seat at the rear of the cockpit.
“Try not to look at him,” Trish said.
Ally shrugged, nonchalant. “He doesn’t scare me. It’s the ones who are still alive that I’m worried about.”
Spoken like a battle-hardened warrior. Well, wasn’t she
Even so, Trish noticed that the girl did her best to avert her face as she slipped behind the wheel.
“Hey,” Ally said, “how do we start this thing”
“No key”
Ally shook her head. “He hotwired it, I guess.”
“Can you figure out what he did”
“You mean you don’t know I thought cops knew all this stuff.”
Not rookie cops, Trish thought. “Give me a few years.”
Ally hunched close to the control console. “There’s a knife on the floor. It looks like … oh, I get it.”
She inserted the blade in the switch, and the engine started.
“Just have to complete the circuit, see” Ally shrugged. “Easy.”
Trish shook her head. It was easy, absurdly easy. She could have done it herself, had she only known how. She need never have risked a return to the house.
“They should have taught you this stuff in cop school,” Ally said as she guided the boat out of the cove.
Trish felt her mouth slide into a weary smile. “I’m learning a lot of things they didn’t teach at school.”
62
“They’re leaving the island.” Lilith breathed the words above the drone of a distant motor.
Cain nodded slowly, tasting the woody sweetness of the night air. “Now let’s just hope they’re coming our way.”
He stood with Lilith at the trailhead adjacent to the parking lot, the best point from which to view the lake. His binoculars, trained on the dark hump of the island, caught a shimmer of movement near the eastern shore.
The boat. It flashed in a spill of starlight as the prow swung north-toward the picnic area.
“Our two Mouseketeers are taking the cheese,” he said with satisfaction, and Lilith shivered.
He tracked the boat until it vanished behind the treetops. Then he pocketed the binoculars.
“Move out.”
“Wait.” Lilith dialed the volume higher on the police radio.
The same throaty voice, the woman named Lou: “Eight-one, you still en route to that ten-thirty-three Eight- one Four-Adam-eight-one”
“It’s taken the unit too long to respond.” Cain frowned. “Dispatcher’s getting worried.”
“Should I answer”
He shook his head. “Even these local yokels may not fall for the same trick twice. And I don’t want them figuring out the last transmission was faked. We told them the car was on Hospers Road. That’s where we want them to be looking. Now let’s go.”
The dirt trail twisted down the hillside, past stands of black oak growing tall and thick-boled in the rich, dry soil.
Cain moved with unaccustomed lightness, his steps muffled though there was as yet no need for stealth. Lilith was a shadow at his side, supple and silent, the contours of her costume flowing like tendrils of ink.
Somewhere near the phones Tyler already was lying in wait. There was a good chance he would get Robinson.
