Blood Runs Cold (27 page)

It was the worst possible thing to do to Salem Swade. But Malcolm Wardwell knew that. He made a haunted old vet stand with his back to the room while there was a gun somewhere behind him. Someone like Salem needed to face the room and face the door and feel safe. He started shouting; nonsense and swearing and orders and names and places and –

‘You – shut up, you crazy son-of-a-bitch, shut up!’ said Jason.

Salem stopped. But he was shaking violently, sweat soaking into the thin red fabric.

‘Let Salem go,’ said Ren. ‘Please.’

‘Let Ren go,’ said Salem.

Oh, God
. ‘Salem, I’m going to be OK. You don’t need to worry about me.’

‘Stop talking,’ said Malcolm. ‘Silence.’

Jason Wardwell was wired, his father eerily still.

‘You,’ he said, ‘can take care of this.’

Jason opened his mouth and closed it.

‘At least,’ said Ren, ‘let Salem stand in front of the mirror.’

‘Why would I do that?’ said Jason.

So he can see the whole room
. ‘What harm is it going to do?’ said Ren.

Salem started to move sideways toward it. Jason didn’t stop him.

‘Jason,’ said Malcolm, ‘put your gun to Salem’s temple and shoot him if Agent Bryce here doesn’t do what she’s told.’

Jason did as he asked.

‘Hold your arms up in the air,’ said Malcolm.

Ren held her arms up. He reached in and removed her gun from the holster under her arm, his hand brushing off her breast.

Her stomach turned. He bent down to her ankle holster. There was no gun there. He frisked her and found nothing else. He walked over to the battered old sofa and slumped down into it.

What is going on here?

Ren watched Salem. He had started shouting again. And sobbing. If Jason Wardwell, pumped-up and edgy, was going to do something, it would be directed at Salem first, it wouldn’t be directed at her. Because, no matter what, she was an agent and Jason Wardwell didn’t know yet if he was going to make it through this.

‘You need to shut the fuck up,’ said Jason to Salem.

‘He can’t,’ said Ren. ‘He’s afraid.’

‘He better get over it,’ said Jason. ‘Right now.’

Ren saw how Salem had realized he could see her face reflected in the mottled mirror in front of him. He fixed her with beautiful, terrified eyes.

Ren started humming, quietly – a John Prine song, top of the Most Played on Salem’s little iPod when she’d charged it. Everyone looked at her. Salem stilled. Ren hummed a little louder, holding him with her eyes.

Jason swung the gun her way, ‘
What
are you –’

Then there was no more shouting. Only the sound of Ren humming. The others turned to watch Salem, subdued. Jason turned the gun back to him. Ren could see Salem blinking rapidly, his chest heaving. Ren started to sing, ‘
We lost Davey in the Korean War and I still don’t
know what for, don’t matter any more
.’ Her voice
was shaking.

‘Shut up, you crazy bitch,’ said Jason. ‘What is wrong with you all?’

‘Salem, sweetheart,’ said Ren. ‘You’re going to be OK. Stick with me, OK?’

Tears poured down Salem’s face. He started to sob.

Ren kept singing, ‘
You know that old trees just
grow stronger. And old rivers grow wilder every day
.’

‘Stop,’ said Jason. ‘I mean it. Stop.’

Salem was rocking again, his sobs growing
louder and louder.

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ said Jason, raising the gun, lowering it, running the back of his hand across his forehead. ‘Shut up!’

‘No,’ said Ren. ‘No. Let him go, Jason. Let Salem leave. Let him get out.’

‘He’ll call the Sheriff –’

‘Think about it, Jason,’ said Ren calmly. ‘How can Salem do that? Salem has no way of doing that.’

‘She’s right,’ shouted Salem. ‘I don’t. I really don’t.’

‘Stop talking,’ said Jason, taking a step toward him.

Salem flinched, throwing his arms up, covering his head. ‘No,’ he said, over and over.

‘Stop,’ said Jason. ‘Stop.’

Ren started again, singing the rest of the song, her voice steady, but low: ‘…
people just grow
lonesome. Waiting for someone to say … hello in there
… hello
.’

Ren stopped as Jason raised the gun again toward Salem. Salem was swaying gently, his eyes closed, his hand across his stomach. Ren wanted to shout at Jason, to tell him Salem was quiet now, to tell him he wasn’t a threat, that she would be quiet too. But she knew she would startle Salem and she didn’t want him to have to open his eyes to this scene, unless she knew he was going to make it out alive. But in the new silence, Salem
opened his eyes and locked on to hers again. Ren smiled at him.

Jason pulled the trigger.

Salem was blasted backward, shattering the mirror behind him, a huge hole blown into his sunken chest. Ren had closed her eyes only when she knew Salem could no longer see her. She looked down now on his small, broken frame, slumped against his rocking chair, a plaid blanket half-fallen across his body.

‘You fucking bastard,’ she roared at Jason. ‘You fucking bastard.’

She stepped sideways and took a step forward. She pointed a finger at him. ‘Do not say a fucking word, you fucking animal.’

‘Do not move,’ said Jason, pointing the gun at her.

‘I’m not coming near you, you son of a bitch.’ She walked with her hands in the air toward Salem, bent down and pulled the rest of the blanket over him. ‘I’m trying to give a man some dignity. So, you?
You
stay the fuck away from
me
.’

She had her back to Jason Wardwell as she covered Salem with his coat. With her right hand she reached around to the back of the cooler box, pulled off the gun she had taped there and slipped it into her ankle holster.

She stood back up and turned to face Malcolm Wardwell.

‘Jean Transom tracked you down, didn’t she? You would remember her as Jennifer Mayer. She came to confront the monster who abducted and abused her and her eleven-year-old friend, Ruth Sleight. She came up to the most remote place she knew she could find you. Somewhere she could talk to you in private. And if anything bad happened, you could be far away from town.’

Ren thought of the image that Ruth Sleight had drawn – the mosaic pattern from the floor of Wardwell’s store – the store he had the keys for, the one that had been vacant for years; down the stairs into the darkness, the windows boarded up. The beautiful patterned floor was the only thing Jennifer Mayer could see under the blindfold. And Ruth Sleight was able to back her up. And the smell that came through the vents was from the brewery next door. Jean Transom never drank beer. And never really knew why.

Malcolm’s face was gray.

There is something not right here
.

Ren thought about the store. She thought of the whole line of stores down Main Street. She thought
of the risk of discovery. The argument between Malcolm and Jason Wardwell about Mountain Sports, their bitter words flashing back:
spoilt,
ungrateful, terrible, terrible child; stay out of my business,
Dad; pact with the devil; sackcloth and ashes
. All because he was going to Mountain Sports. Ren remembered, standing on the balcony, looking out at the beautiful view over the Blue River. And closer still, the day-care center next door.

Oh my God
. ‘There she was,’ said Ren. ‘Poor Jean. So close, so close. And she picked the wrong guy.’

Malcolm Wardwell looked at Ren, confused. But he had years of practice in saying nothing. Salem’s voice rang in Ren’s ears.
You take the hits. You take
the hits
.

‘When the police came knocking at your door thirty years ago and raided your house,’ said Ren, ‘and you watched them take away those magazines and videos … you were more surprised than they were,’ said Ren.

Silence.

‘You took the hit, Malcolm, didn’t you? You took the hit for your son. In a split second, you made a call. You were forty years old. Jason was sixteen. And maybe … maybe Jason was just going through a phase, right? Maybe for him it wasn’t a teenage crush on a teacher like everyone else. Maybe if you caught it early enough, his “problem” could be treated and it would all go
away. I’m guessing he wasn’t on his last vacation before college that summer. My guess is you packed him off to a treatment facility … that clearly didn’t work.’

Malcolm bowed his head. But still didn’t speak.

‘And this is how it worked out for you,’ said Ren. ‘You end up on a freezing mountainside on a January night and you realized that your only son, who you’d laid down your life for, within eight months of him getting out of treatment had abducted two eleven-year-old girls, held them for three weeks in the building you had great plans for, abused them and impregnated one of them … And Jean Transom thought it was you. There she was – a strong, bright FBI agent who rarely put a foot wrong, but got tangled in a case so close to her broken heart that she thought it was you.’

‘Shut up, shut up.’ Jason squeezed his eyes shut briefly, then they were wild and traveling the room, searching for escape.

‘There
is
no exit for you,’ said Ren.

‘I didn’t …’ said Jason. ‘Those girls … they wanted a ride …’

Sweet Jesus
. ‘And you just gave them a ride.’ She nodded.

‘Exactly.’ Hope sparked in his eyes.

‘For three weeks, y’all just drove around in your car,’ said Ren, still nodding.

His eyes flashed with anger. ‘It’s not as if they were behaving like eleven-year-olds anyway …’

Ren guessed this was just the beginning of Jason Wardwell’s blame plan. DARVO – the sex offender’s instant response to accusation – Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

Ren fell silent. The stench of poor, dead Salem hung in the air with the smell of whatever food had turned black at the bottom of the hot pan. Jason Wardwell’s forehead was slick.

Paul Louderback, where are you?

‘I had no idea,’ said Malcolm, turning to Jason. ‘I watched those girls’ parents just like every other person in the country. And the screwed-up thing was, I thought I was like them. I thought about how I nearly lost you. I could understand their pain because I thought I nearly lost you. I hoped they were as lucky as I would be, that their little girls would get to come back, that they would get a second chance. I looked at
you
,’ he stabbed a finger at Jason, ‘and I thought it was all a success story.’ He shook his head. ‘And you were the one. You were responsible for this agony I was tuning into every day, hoping that, on one of those days, it would be gone, their daughters would be back. And then one day, they did. And we were all told that they were unharmed. And I cried and cried for them and for you, and I thought God is good, God has answered all our prayers.’

‘What a fool you were,’ said Jason, his tone a rotten collision of rejection and disgust.

‘You are a vile, thankless man,’ said Ren.

Jason Wardwell’s relationship with his father had stalled, aged sixteen, on the day his father made the decision to cover his son’s child porn habit. Jason Wardwell lived in a Peter Pan town where people got to play in the snow, say ‘dude’ and ‘super’ for as long as they wanted to, because it made them feel good and why shouldn’t they? But that didn’t cover Jason Wardwell. This paunchy, graying middle-aged man was trying to stay as close as he could to his target market.

‘This lady is right.’ Malcolm Wardwell was finally having his epiphany, a man too simple and hopeful to have ever pieced together the psychology of his son. ‘You are a nasty piece of shit!’ was the best he could do. He raised his hands. ‘And I love you.’

Broken-down emotions, the plain language of a small-town man who saw no nuances. He looked at ‘
Jason’s problem
’ and his thought process ran through truth/lie, reveal/hide, break/fix, sick/well. Malcolm Wardwell grew up in a time when parents warned their children in riddles: ‘Don’t cross the fields with whoever,’ ‘Don’t take a cookie from the man in the white house.’

Ren shook her head.
You poor, sad, old man
. Jason Wardwell’s face was almost unbearable to look at, yet drawing her like a magnet to understand what sickness lay behind it.

‘I thought you were better,’ said Malcolm. ‘Until you wanted that job right by the day-care center.’

Jason laughed. ‘You thought for twenty-six years I was dead from the waist down?’

You are a sick, sick man
.

‘What have you
done
?’ said Malcolm to his son.

‘What have
you
done?’ said Jason.

Ren still marveled at the shifting of blame; it was the man at a table on the street corner, playing the shell game, moving the cups to hide the quarter. The quarter will always be there … just under whichever cup suits him. And the audience never wins.

‘I … I didn’t do anything …’ said Malcolm, answering the pathetic question. He turned to Ren. ‘Is he right? Is it my fault he did these things?’

‘I don’t know where to start,’ said Ren. ‘But it won’t be here.’

Fear could come with hope. Fear could be resigned. And fear could be dead if there was no worse consequence to face. Pull back from the screen where all the action is held and it is surrounded by black. Jason Wardwell had reached the edge of the game. Nowhere to go. His eyes were bright with a hopeless fear – a glassy shine that said anything could happen.

Jason Wardwell wiped his hand across his brow. He blew sweat from his top lip. Ren’s face was burning, her eyes dry. She could hear Malcolm Wardwell struggle for breath.

‘At least turn off the stove,’ said Ren. ‘Please.’

Jason glanced over at it. He looked at his father. ‘Go ahead,’ said Malcolm.

Jason walked over to the stove, his eyes on Ren. As soon as he turned his body away from her a fraction, she dropped down and pulled the Glock 27 from her ankle holster and aimed it at Jason.

‘Drop your weapon,’ said Ren.

She watched his gaze flick back toward his father.

‘Put your fucking gun down,’ she said.

His eyes flicked again to his father, but he put his gun down.

‘Kick it over to me,’ said Ren.

He did. She bent down and took it. When she stood up, Malcolm Wardwell stood to her left with a gun pointed at her.

‘That is my gun,’ said Ren. ‘And I’m afraid I wasn’t kind enough to load it for you before I got here.’

Malcolm pulled the trigger anyway.

‘Clllllick,’ said Ren. She jerked her head at Jason. ‘Get over there with your father.’

Jason did as she said. ‘You’re not going to kill both of us,’ he said.

‘Probably not,’ said Ren. ‘But I could get you both in the balls.’

Malcolm Wardwell stood, defeated; tired and old and mistaken. He had spent his life covering for a son who he didn’t even realize had been showing up at parks and playgrounds and swimming pools, driving around to scout for girls to make his fantasies real.

Malcolm Wardwell had stood, confronted, on Quandary Peak – Jean Transom telling him the last thing he wanted to hear – that his devotion to his son had not mattered. That he had released a disturbed and violent child abuser into society, that from the age of seventeen, Jason Wardwell had been acting out what he had previously only ever seen in magazines and on video.

‘You hated that Jean Transom had been so damaged by your son,’ said Ren. ‘But you hated her more for thinking that it was you. And you
hated Jason for putting you in that position. And where was he that night? Where was the one person who could have bailed you out when you needed him?’

Malcolm muttered something.

‘What?’ said Ren.

‘He was there,’ said Malcolm. ‘Behind her. He just stood there, without saying a word. And she wouldn’t believe me. She wouldn’t believe it wasn’t me. He said nothing. He didn’t back me up.’

‘And there it was,’ said Ren. ‘You couldn’t take one more second of blame. You had lived to protect Jason. And he was happy to let you die to protect him. And it was just too much.’

‘It was,’ said Malcolm, his voice exhausted from years of lies. ‘It was. She wouldn’t listen when I told her. I was so terribly confused. On the darkest, coldest night of winter, when I had only gone up to help people: she was there. And I just wanted her to go away.’

The door to the cabin crashed open, shattering the timber frame. Paul Louderback had his gun drawn and moved in quickly opposite Ren. They formed a triangle with Jason Wardwell – both their guns trained on him.

‘Malcolm Wardwell killed Jean Transom,’ said Ren. ‘But it was Jason Wardwell who abducted the girls.’

Paul took two silent steps closer to Jason Wardwell, his face grim resolve.

Something is not right with Paul Louderback
.

‘So this man in front of me is the man who abducted and raped two eleven-year-old girls,’ said Paul.

‘One,’ said Jason.

‘Two,’ said Ren. ‘Are you out of your mind? Jennifer Mayer and Ruth Sleight. Two.’

‘I only wanted the little blonde,’ said Jason, as if he was talking about a trip to a nightclub. ‘I didn’t lay a finger on the other girl, the Ruth girl. I locked her in the fitting room. The only reason she was there was that I saw her with the blonde too late. So I had to take her too. She was an ugly, scrawny thing, covered in freckles, ready for braces – not my type.’

The room was in total silence at the casual defense in his delivery. Paul Louderback lunged for him. He slammed his fist into Jason’s face before he had even knocked him to the floor. He gripped him by his neck and used his free hand to quickly impact Jason’s eye socket, break his jaw, his nose, loosen his teeth, tear one of his earlobes free.

What the fuck are you doing, Paul?

‘You motherfucker,’ shouted Paul. He was repeating it over and over, lost in something more than Ren could understand as she watched this handsome man in his fine suit in a shitty cabin, releasing a rage she didn’t know he was capable of.

Ren watched, stunned, as Paul Louderback put
into practice everything he had taught her she would never need to do. He had been wrong before. And he was wrong now.

Paul fell on to his back, his breath heaving, his body drenched in sweat. He dragged himself on to his knees, pushing the muzzle of his gun up against Jason Wardwell’s temple. Ren knew Paul enough to feel his sense of failure and exposure. He couldn’t meet her eyes.

‘Nobody move,’ said Ren. ‘Nobody.’ She looked at Paul. ‘Give me your gun. Give it to me now.’

Paul reached for the cloth that hung from the back of a chair, wiped his face and threw it on top of Jason Wardwell, who lay curled on the floor, bleeding and moaning.

Ren lowered her voice. ‘Paul.’

He handed her the gun.

‘But I let them go,’ said Jason. ‘Those girls were free.’

Paul went rigid. He turned and jumped on Jason again, punching him until Jason blacked out, pounding him until Ren dragged him away.

Malcolm Wardwell stepped forward. ‘She told me that night … she gave birth to the child. She told me she had a child.’

‘She was lying,’ said Ren.