Wilde laughed softly. “It’s like you, Luther, more seaworthy than it looks.”
“I don’t plan on going all the way downriver to the sea,” Luther said.
Wilde untied the boat and tossed the rope into the bow. Luther pushed while Tom Wilde pulled, and together they slid the boat along grass and mud and into the water. Standing knee deep, Wilde wrapped the bowline around a slimy branch that extended out low from the bank.
Luther and Wilde went back to where they’d left the fishing tackle and carried everything down and loaded it into the boat. Moonlight glanced dully off the water. They were in a small cove, and though a stretch of the black, tree-lined opposite bank was visible, Luther was sure no one was observing them. He slapped at a mosquito, this one trying to lance blood from the back of his wrist, and felt the insect mash beneath his hand.
“Once you get out on the river,” Wilde said, “they won’t be bothering you. They can’t abide the current.”
Both men were breathing hard from their efforts with the boat and heavy fishing tackle. They stood silently for a while, catching their breaths, trying to figure out how to say good-bye.
For the first time escape seemed not only possible to Luther, it seemed likely. He might actually take the boat downriver, sink it or dock it in some secluded spot, then make his way to safety and another chance, another life. He could be someone else entirely, the person I want to be, as Tom Wilde suggested.
Tom Wilde, who’d been like a father to him, but who was also the only one who could implicate him in the murder of Milford and Cara.
Luther, his head cleared by passing time, had been thinking about that. There was plenty to indicate he’d been in the house at the time of the killings, but if caught, he could always say he was also an intended victim of an intruder who’d murdered the Sands. He’d claim he defended himself with the kitchen knife, then dashed through the house and outside and escaped. He knew how it would look for him, so, of course, he ran away. In that situation anyone would have run.
His life on the streets had taught him the value of having a cover story in case he needed one.
But it was a cover story Tom Wilde could contradict, and would, if he was under oath in a court of law.
Luther looked at the heavy steel tackle box in the boat, and the thick bowline. He realized he was different now. Someone else. Someone harder. He’d gone through a door and now he was confronted by another. Whether to open it was his choice.
“I guess this is good-bye, then,” Wilde was saying.
Tom Wilde, who’d been kind to him and taught him a craft-an art. His mentor and only friend.
His greatest danger.
“I guess it has to be,” Luther said.
Neither Wilde nor Luther ever returned to Hiram. Milford Sand’s Ford Fairlane was found parked among some cottonwood trees off the highway outside of town. It was assumed Luther had murdered the Sands and made his getaway in the car. But without Luther, how the murders occurred was only speculation, and Luther was never seen again.
Tom Wilde’s old pickup truck was found parked next to the ruined A-frame near the riverbank. A week later his boat was discovered capsized in the weeds five miles downriver.
It was assumed he’d been fishing and perhaps struck his head while falling from the boat and drowned.
Every so often, the river claimed a life that way.
42
New York, 2004.
Finding out where he lived had been easy. He was in the phone book.
It was the first place Anna thought to look, but she’d been surprised to find Quinn’s name, address, and phone number. It was unsettling, how simple it had been. As if he might also be in the Yellow Pages under RAPISTS.
So here she was this morning, not at Juilliard with her viola, but across the street from Quinn’s apartment with her gun.
What’s a nice girl like you…?
She wasn’t sure herself.
Anna was running on pure emotion now and knew it. This wasn’t smart. In fact, this was totally dumb, what she was doing. But something in her was making her do it; to resist it would have been to escape something that had the most powerful hold on her she could imagine. That, too, was unsettling, that people could be made captive and controlled by something inside themselves. One of the reasons it was disturbing was that it explained in part why Quinn had raped her, almost provided him with an excuse.
There is no excuse for evil. It has to be-
There was Quinn, emerging from his apartment building! Quinn in the flesh!
Anna felt dizzy; for the first time in years, she laid eyes on the monster of her memory. He was big, but not as big as in her fearful thoughts and terrifying dreams. She knew larger, more ominous-looking men. Her friend Agatha’s father, and Professor Fishbien at Juilliard. But Quinn did look like what he was-a thug, a rapist, a liar. Not that he wasn’t dressed respectably enough, in brown slacks and a tan sport coat. He was even wearing a tie.
Sheep’s clothing…
As Quinn buttoned his jacket, Anna caught a glimpse of a leather strap and knew it was part of a shoulder holster.
I have a gun, too! I have a gun, you bastard!
Quinn glanced up at the sky as if checking for rain, then began walking. He had a lumbering yet athletic gait, relaxed but poised to move fast on short notice. He seemed amiable but at the same time dangerous, a man who would enjoy a cruel joke. Staying on the opposite side of the street and well back from him, Anna began to follow.
Quinn walked only a few blocks and entered a diner, where he no doubt would have breakfast.
Anna decided to wait for him.
She found a spot across the street and moved back into a shadowed stone angle at the base of an office building. Hardly anyone paid attention to her as they hurried past. If they did happen to glance at her, as far as they were concerned, she was just another young woman waiting for a friend or a lover, or she was building up nerve to go for a job interview. She was like thousands of others who were tending to business, professional or personal, in the city.
Still, Anna felt as if she were being stared at, maybe because of the gun in her purse. She pretended to be bored, and now and then, more for herself than for anyone who might be observing her, she glanced at her watch as if concerned with the time. Waiting for someone…that’s what I’m doing…
Anna watched people coming and going at the diner for almost an hour. Then Quinn emerged, with two people she’d seen go inside not long after she’d taken up position across the street. One was a balding, middle- aged man in a horribly wrinkled brown suit that emphasized his stomach paunch. The other was a short, dark- haired woman with vivid features, even from this distance, wearing a conservatively tailored gray skirt and dark blazer that didn’t disguise her curves.
They must be the other detectives Anna had read about in the papers. “Team Quinn.” The rapist’s friends and helpers.
Anna felt an overwhelming curiosity about Team Quinn. She wanted to know where they went on days off from work, what food they liked, which TV shows, what were their hobbies. How did they spend their free time, the time when she was trying to think about anything other than Quinn and what he had done to her? What did the other two think about Quinn’s second chance? Quinn, who had never seen the inside of a courtroom as a defendant, much less spend a day in confinement. They were supposed to be hunting a killer, and catching him would somehow-at least in the minds of some-rehabilitate Quinn.
A real rapist. Real detectives. How will they spend their workday?
The three detectives walked slowly and casually along the sidewalk, talking and gesticulating to each other. Then they stopped near a plain white car and chatted a few minutes more. Quinn stood with both hands in his pockets and seemed to be doing most of the talking now.
