Sadie was lost and he was going to go look for her, but he realized he didn’t even want to waste the extra ten minutes it would take him to detour to Matthew Browning.
In truth, Finn was wracked with guilt over his selfishness last night in leaving Sadie out in the yard to fend for herself against whatever had taken her away, just so he could get back to his horny dream about Morgan naked in the lake.
For a treacherous fraction of a second, he considered blaming Morgan for Sadie’s disappearance, then realized it was his dream, not hers. She’d had no part in it. If there was any blame for abandoning Sadie-and that was what he was now convinced he had done-the blame was Finn’s alone, and he hated himself for it.
Elliot heard the boy calling for his dog before he saw the flash of his red jacket moving through the yellow leaves.
He had spent the last hour scouring the ledge area where he thought he’d seen the crouching figure the previous day, but there was nothing at all-none of the usual indicators of passage: no cigarette butts, no obvious footprints, no noticeable disturbances of the foliage and undergrowth. He hadn’t really expected to find them, but he still hoped there would be something there he could tie to the Indian, even tangentially. Nothing would have pleased Elliot more than to nail that smug bastard in such a way that none of his fancy academic credentials and smooth talking would help him out.
Elliot wasn’t a stupid man, nor was he unaware of the fact that his feelings about Billy Lightning had as much to do with what he represented-like Jeremy, a threat to the established social order of the world with which he’d compacted-as they did with the Indian’s snooty way of talking to him, as though the fact that he was a university professor made him anything more than an Indian or, more to the point, anything more than Elliot himself. Still, even separating all of those variables from the mix, it still seemed a noteworthy coincidence that Billy Lightning should just show up in Parr’s Landing the day after what had happened in Gyles Point, and be talking about murders and crazy people (as it turned out, dead crazy people) and local legends.
And now, it appeared that what he’d seen had been a trick of the light, after all, or maybe a hiker. Or a kid, like this one who was calling
Elliot gauged that the kid was about 200 yards directly above him, close to the highest accessible point of the cliffs around the lake. It was a dangerous place for a kid to wander for any reason, and not just because of the ever-present danger of accidentally falling through some grown over mineshaft entrance, but because of the time of day-especially now, at this time of the year when the dusk came so much earlier.
Elliot turned towards the sound of the kid’s voice and walked towards it. He called out, “Hey, kid! Stay where you are-I’m coming for you. I’m a police officer. Don’t move. It’s dangerous up there. Let’s get you down.”
He still couldn’t see the kid, but he’d stopped calling for his dog. Elliot figured that he might have startled him, so he called out again, “It’s OK, kid. Just hold on. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Silence answered him. A sharp arrow of late-season Canada geese streaked southward across the sky. The light was burnishing as the late afternoon slouched towards evening. Elliot rounded a sharp turn on the hill and, with three wide steps, he reached the plateau. He vaguely recognized the kid standing there from one of his annual Elmer the Safety Elephant police visits to the primary school, but couldn’t think of his name-Frankie? Fenny? The kid’s face was pale and he’d obviously been crying. His red windbreaker was muddy and there were pine needles in his hair.
“Hey, kid, you all right?” Elliot said in his best Officer Friendly voice. “What are you doing up here all by yourself?”
But the kid wasn’t looking at Elliot. He was staring into the opening of a filthy hockey bag-a heavy one, too, judging by the way he was holding it. Even from six feet away, Elliot caught a whiff of something rotten coming from inside it. At the same moment, the kid seemed to smell it, too, and he dropped the bag. It landed on the ground, making a jangling metallic sound as it struck the earth.
The boy took two steps back, away from the bag. He pointed at it and said, “That’s not mine.” He wiped his hands frantically on the legs of his jeans as though he were trying to scrub them clean.
“Whose is it?” Elliot’s question was automatic, reflexive. When the kid didn’t answer, but instead kept wiping his hands, Elliot walked over to the bag, knelt down, and pulled open the flaps.
At first he didn’t know what he was looking at-metal, paper, grease. No, more than just metal. Knives, some hammers. The blades were stained, and there were streaks of red on the T-shirt inside. The stench was awful-old blood, obviously, and something like putrescent raw chicken skin, but also shit and sweat. He moved the bag away from his face and held his breath. When he was sure he wasn’t going to throw up, he took a deep breath of fresh air.
First and foremost in Elliot’s mind was that this was very likely connected to the murder in Gyles Point. He knelt down and pulled his hand up inside his sleeve, forming a cloth barrier against his hand. It wasn’t gloves, but it was better than touching the bloody knives and catching God-knew-what disease from the stinking T-shirt. He nudged aside the metal and saw that there was a bound typescript underneath. The title page was smeared with blood and dirt, but he was able to read part of it:
The rest of the text was unintelligible. The paper was warped from exposure to water, the ink smeared and bedaubed with rain and mud. It was a hefty manuscript. He judged there were at least 70 double-spaced typed pages in all. Awkwardly, he nudged the papers with his cloth-covered knuckles, but it was futile. To see more, he was going to have to turn the pages with his fingers, and he wasn’t going to do that without gloves. At the very least, Thomson would kill him for messing up evidence with his own fingerprints.
Turning his attention to the boy, he said, “What’s your name, kid?”
“Finn Miller,” the boy replied. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, you’re not in any trouble,” Elliot said in a reassuring voice. “What are you doing up here? Shouldn’t you still be in school?”
Finn’s eyes brimmed. “I was looking for my duh-duh-dog,” he said. His eyes spilled over. “My dog is lost. She’s been lost since last night.”
“Don’t cry, Finn,” Elliot said. “I’m sure your dog is all right. What’s her name?”
“Sadie,” he replied. Elliot saw that Finn was struggling to regain his composure. He admired the kid for that. “Her name is Sadie.”
“Is this where she usually likes to play?” he asked. He was consciously easing the conversation so he could ask about the bag without spooking the kid.
“We were up here a few days ago,” Finn said, glancing around. “Sadie was scared by something up here.”
“Scared? Scared by what?”
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “By something. She was really upset. I thought maybe she came back here to… I don’t know, to check it out or something.”
“Is this where you found the bag?” Elliot said calmly. “Right here? Or did you move it?”
Finn pointed to a clump of rocks and overgrowth a few feet away. “There,” he said. “I found it there.”
Elliot walked over to the spot and nudged aside some of the branches and broken tree limbs with the toe of his boot. It looked like a crack in the rocks, about four and a half feet long, maybe six inches across. It could be the opening to some sort of animal’s burrow, perhaps, or a snake hole. Nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not somewhere a man could hide. And yet, as he glanced around again, he knew that somewhere the owner of this bag was very likely hiding. For the first time in two days, he reached down to his holster and touched the gun, just to feel its reassuring solidity against his hip.
“Finn,” Elliot said. “I think you’d better come with me. We can stop off at your house and see your Mom and Dad, and they can come to the police station with us. Is that OK with you?”
“What’s in the bag? I saw knives and stuff. It sure stinks, too.”
“Yeah,” Elliot said casually. “Knives and stuff. Probably left behind by a hunter. But we have to make sure it’s all OK and that nobody got hurt up here. Gave you a scare, did it?” Elliot tried to chuckle, but he realized it sounded fake and this kid wasn’t stupid. Elliot knew he would see right through it.
“I’m not scared by a stupid hockey bag full of knives,” Finn said. “I’m scared about not knowing where my dog is.
“You said I wasn’t in trouble,” Finn continued. “Right? You
“Right,” Elliot said soothingly. “You’re not in trouble. It just looks like you might have found something
