Once again nothing happened.
“Let’s go take a look,” he said loud enough for Anders to hear, nearly certain that wherever Logan was, he wasn’t inside the cabin. “You go around the back and I’ll go in the front. And for Christ’s sake, make sure you don’t shoot me, okay?”
Obviously disappointed that he wasn’t being allowed to open fire on the house, Anders reluctantly lowered his shotgun and disappeared around the far corner of the house as Ruston crossed the twigs and branches to the front door, which was neither latched nor even quite closed. Standing to one side, he used the butt of the gun to push the door wider.
When still nothing happened, he stepped in front of the door and pointed his shotgun at the dim interior.
A dog growled from the corner.
“Easy boy,” Ruston said, but the dog took a snarling step toward him.
“I’ll take care of the dog,” Anders said, coming through the back door at the opposite end of the cabin.
Ruston looked around. Clearly, Logan was not there. The shack was no larger than Ruston’s bedroom, and looked like it was mostly a storage place for whatever the hermit had scavenged over the years. The floor was littered with some kind of crumbs, and a crippled crow that was pecking at them only glared up at Ruston before going back to devouring the crumbs. A few ragged items of clothing hung on nails haphazardly hammered into the cabin’s rough walls.
Then the dog’s snarling grew louder, and Ruston turned to look just as it launched itself at Derek Anders, who reflexively pulled the trigger of his shotgun in response to the attack.
The blast almost knocked down the flimsy walls of the shack, and Ruston’s ears rang with the concussion.
The crow screamed, leaping into the air as its one good wing flapped wildly.
Ruston grabbed a filthy shirt from a hook, threw it over the crow, picked it up, and took it outside, where it immediately scuttled away into the brush at the edge of the small clearing.
Back inside the cabin, Ruston found Anders looking intently at something he was clutching in his right hand, the shotgun now slung over his shoulder. “Look at this,” the deputy said, and a moment later Ruston found himself gazing at a yellowed newspaper clipping. “It was nailed to the wall over there,” Anders went on, pointing at a nasty tangle of rags on a torn mattress that must have served as Logan’s bed. SUSPECT ARRESTED IN HARTWELL STRANGLING
MADISON — Riley Logan, a custodian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was arrested yesterday in connection with the strangling death of sophomore Melissa Hartwell. Hartwell’s body was found in the Administration Building’s custodial supplies closet last Thursday. Logan has been hospitalized several times in the recent past for psychiatric reasons. He is being held without bail.
Ruston’s blood chilled as he read the article.
“And take a look at this,” Derek Anders said. “It was on the same nail.”
KILLER REMANDED TO CENTRAL STATE HOSPITAL
MADISON — Riley Logan was found unfit to stand trial in the strangling murder of Melissa Hartwell, a UW sophomore. Judge Thomas P. Sewell, after reviewing testimony from three different doctors including Hector Darby, who was hired by the state for the purpose of evaluating Logan, has committed Logan to Central State Hospital, where he will be held indefi
The rest of the story had been torn away, leaving only a ragged edge at the bottom of the clipping. “Hector Darby,” Ruston breathed as his mind began to whirl with memories of the Hanover girl who had been murdered years ago, just before Darby’s disappearance. “What the hell is going on around here?” he said, more to himself than to Derek Anders. He scanned the shack again, the litter of boxes suddenly seeming a lot more foreboding than they had a few moments earlier. “I think maybe we better find out what’s in all these.”
Anders picked up one of the boxes and put it on the only table in the cabin. “Looks like medical files,” he said after pulling open its top and lifting out a yellowed folder.
“Medical files?” Ruston echoed. “Whose medical files? What are they doing here?”
Some of the boxes were so old they were mildewed and rotten, and even the best of them looked as though they could collapse at any moment.
“Oh, Jesus,” Anders breathed. “Take a look at this.”
Ruston joined him and peered at the folder the deputy had just opened. More newspaper clippings were on the top, all about the Hartwell girl. Under those was a fat file folder with the Central State Wisconsin Psychiatric Hospital seal on the front and RILEY LOGAN printed on the tab.
“It’s like he kept a scrapbook on what he’d done,” Ruston said. “And no one ever told us who he was — not even Darby.” He shook his head. “Let’s take that box with us and get out of here,” he went on.
Anders picked up the box, and a moment later Ruston followed him outside. He scanned the hillside, already calculating just how many square miles of wilderness Logan had disappeared into. And he hadn’t taken the dog with him, which could have meant one of two things — either he was coming back, or the dog would have slowed him down.
In all the years he’d watched Logan, Ruston had never before known him not to have the dog with him.
Which meant he wasn’t coming back.
“We’re not going to find him today,” he told Anders as they started back to their boat. “In fact, right now I’d bet we don’t find him at all.”
Anders’s brow furrowed. “Where’s he gonna go?”
“Anywhere,” Ruston replied. “But if he knew we were coming — which I’m damn sure he did — he’ll know better than to come back. And he knows the wilderness a lot better than anyone else, which means if he doesn’t want to be found, we won’t find him.”
“So what about tomorrow?” Anders asked, glancing worriedly back at the cabin, which was now all but invisible again. “It’s the Fourth of July picnic. What if he shows up?”
Ruston fell silent for a moment as he thought about his options, and decided he didn’t like any of them. If he started a manhunt now, he’d need an explanation, and any explanation he might come up with — and the rumors that would inevitably boil in the wake of that explanation — would put an instant end not only to the holiday tomorrow, but to the rest of the summer as well.
And his gut was telling him that no matter how many men he put on the search, Logan wasn’t going to be found.
“We’ll add some extra deputies for tomorrow, and tell them to keep a special lookout for Logan. I don’t think he’s going to show up, but if he does, we’ll deal with him.”
As they got back into the boat a few minutes later and started across the lake, Ruston silently prayed that his gut would be as reliable today as it had always been before.
Chapter 31
RUSTY RUSTON MOVED through the parade staging area in the Phantom Lake High School parking lot, keeping his eyes and ears open for anything that might be amiss.
An hour earlier he had deputized ten members of the volunteer fire department, briefed them not only on what had been found in Carol Langstrom’s shop yesterday, but on everything he knew about Riley Logan as well. “The main thing is to keep a low profile,” he’d told them as he handed each one a walkie-talkie. “The last thing we want is to panic anybody. So what I want you to do is stay alert and report anything you see that isn’t right. Anything.”
He’d placed Derek Anders at the parade destination, and assigned the rest to various points along the route. Once the parade was over, they’d move on to the park, where most of the town would gather for the rest of the day, staying right through until the fireworks went off an hour after sunset. The whole celebration needed to go off
