Broken Angel (13 page)

TWENTY-SIX

C
aitlyn had been instructed to look for the third post on the downstream side of the railing. A small cross would be scratched into the paint at the base of the post.

She saw it there, even without her vidpod GPS confirming this was the location.

A pile of jagged, fist-sized stones also sat by the post. Nothing in her instructions had mentioned this, but to Caitlyn, as to anyone else in Appalachia, the stones were an ominous reminder of Bar Elohim’s power.

“Stop here.” Relieved as she’d been to see the small cross scratched at the base of the post, the jagged stones compressed her urgency.

Billy complied. Theo felt warm as he leaned back against her on the horse. He had spoken little since they’d resumed their ride down the road, with Billy still walking and holding the reins.

They stood by a bridge with white railings, some thirty feet over a small river lined with trees on both sides.

“It’s here,” Caitlyn said. The accuracy of the instructions she could obviously trust, but she’d spent the last few hours of silence wondering if she could still believe the same about her father. He had abandoned her. Yet she still agonized over wondering if he was still alive, and she could hardly deal with the guilt of surviving. And the guilt for doubting him. But the secrets he’d kept hidden haunted her. Why? What was ahead?

Billy, she noticed as she drowned in second thoughts, seemed unburdened by hardly a thought at all. He lifted the sleeping Theo down and set him at the side of the road. Caitlyn began to swing off the saddle, and Billy moved immediately beside the horse, holding up his arm for her to lean against. She made sure that her cloak was covering her arms and the hunch on her back before she accepted his help. Her ankle spasmed in pain, and she transferred most of her weight to the other leg. Yet another reminder that Papa had abandoned her.

“This is what we’ll do,” Caitlyn said, choosing action to hold the thoughts at bay. “We keep the saddle and send the horse down the road. The next town is over the hill. Someone will find the horse soon, and without the saddle, it’ll look like a runaway horse.”

Billy began to unbuckle the cinch of the saddle. They’d taken this horse from the bounty hunter. He couldn’t report it; they’d left him tied to a tree. “We go through the woods?”

“No,” Caitlyn said. “We’ll take the river.”

“How?” Theo’s voice was dull, barely audible.

“Canoe. It will be hidden in a bush below.” Caitlyn had instructions for where to find and eventually leave the canoe and look for a trail.

“Where to?” Theo asked.

“The Clan.” Just two words. But they felt so heavy.

“I don’t want to go,” Theo said.

“After everything else you’ve done to get here?” Caitlyn glanced over. Theo rolled to his side, tucking his hands as a pillow beneath his head.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go.” His words had begun to slur. “I just said I don’t want to. I’m afraid. But not afraid enough to keep me from trying to get Outside. I’d rather be barbecued than go back.”

Billy held the saddle under one arm. “Now?”

“Now,” Caitlyn answered. “Let’s hide the saddle under the bridge.”

With his free hand, Billy smacked the horse solidly on the hindquarters. It bolted forward, and at the other end of the bridge, it settled into a trot.

To Theo, she said, “Wake up. We’re ready.”

Theo opened his eyes. “Can you hear it? Drums. Coming down the road.”

Caitlyn couldn’t hear anything, but she had learned to trust Theo’s ears.

“We need to hurry. Into the trees.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
he brand on the horse’s flank confirmed it was from Mitch Evans’s livery. It stood in the shade of an oak, its reins tied in a knot around the branch.

The knot told Carney something. Someone familiar with horses would have made a loop, slid the ends beneath the loop, and pulled it tight. This one, on the other hand, was clumsy and overdone.

He climbed down from his own horse and walked closer.

Pierce, who had ridden in silence, began to dismount. But his lack of expertise with horses was obvious as he struggled out of the saddle, sliding in the stirrup and pulling on the mane. He gave the animal plenty of room as he walked away, as if expecting to be kicked, and Carney had a few seconds alone to study the scene before Pierce made it beside him.

“This explains how the bloodhounds didn’t pick up any scent beyond the livery,” Pierce said. “They rode it to here. But why park it here? They must have known we would locate it.”

Carney grunted. Wasn’t worth the effort to tell Pierce that horses weren’t parked. He focused on the livery horse’s saddle. It was askew—just slightly. As if something heavy had slid off of it.

Carney looked at crushed grass and bent branches just past the horse, in the direction the saddle had shifted.

“Someone rolled off the horse,” he said. “Someone bigger than the boy or the girl. Kept rolling too.”

Carney pointed to the obvious trail. He followed but didn’t have to go far to find footprints at the base of a tree, toes outward. The prints were undefined, as if the feet had shifted back and forth.

He took out his vidpod and snapped some photos. Whoever it was had backed into the tree.

“Busted shoelace.” Pierce pointed at the ground. “Strip of cloth.”

Carney took another photo and used a twig to pick up the shoelace. He held it out for Pierce to inspect. It was a single piece of bootlace. The ends had been knotted together, and the knot was two-thirds down the length of lace.

Carney watched Pierce look closely at the tree. Waist high. “There,” Pierce said. “Like a knife tip had been jammed into the tree.”

Carney pretended to take a close look too. While he could see a shoelace clearly enough at arm’s length, he’d have to take Pierce’s word for the mark on the tree. Not the first time that Carney felt disgust about his failing eyes. “So?”

“You’re on a horse, and someone’s used that lace to tie your wrists together,” Pierce said. “Probably your ankles too, otherwise you would have walked to the tree, not rolled to hit it. Strip of cloth here means you’re gagged. They leave you on the horse. You roll off. You’ve got a knife in your front pocket, and when you get to a tree, you stand. Reach into your pocket for the knife, maybe your hands were tied in front of you, not back. Mistake easily made if whoever tied you hasn’t done it much. So you unfold your knife and jam it, blade first, into a tree. Now you have something to cut against. It’ll take a few seconds to snap through the lace, and you leave it there, knot in the middle. You ditch the gag and untie the lace around your ankles, but you keep that one, because later you can put it back in your boot. But you’re in a hurry now. Any second someone might show up and find the horse.”

Not bad, Carney thought.

“Was it your deputy? He big enough to make a hole like that through this brush?” Pierce answered his own question. “Nope. The girl and the boy aren’t big enough to lift him on a horse, let alone subdue and tie him. Chances are it was someone else and the deputy did all the hard work.”

Carney grunted again.

“Why go to all this work?” Pierce said. “There’s three of them. The girl. The factory boy. Your deputy. If this is a fourth person, why kidnap him, tie him up, and leave him with the horse from the livery?

“The one they tied up, whoever it was, and left behind, he must have had a horse when they found him. They took his horse and kept going. Back at your office, the guy is probably waiting to report all this. Once we start tracking his horse, we’ll find them.”

“Curfew.”

“Right.” Pierce made a clucking sound. “Anyone our three met last night was out after curfew. With the horse they took from him. No one will be in your office to incriminate himself.”

“Not yet.” Carney squinted at the screen of his vidpod and made a few adjustments. “Just logged in the coordinates of this location. We can do a reverse trace. Send in this location and approximate time, and we’ll get back a list of all the vidpods that went through this area overnight. That will lead us to the owner.”

“Unless the owner threw out his vidpod too.”

“Nobody moves anywhere without a vidpod. Penalties are too severe. Besides, people get lost in this territory. These parts are like an overgrown maze, and the vidpod has software to help him find his way around.”

“Unless your deputy stole it after dumping his.”

“Billy’s stupid, but not so stupid he’d ignore a knife while going through the guy’s pockets for a vidpod. And if he did steal the vidpod, when we track it, we’ll find Billy. He knows that, so he wouldn’t steal it. And…there’s something else,” Carney said. “If this played out as we suspect, how could this person have traveled after curfew on horseback without triggering any alarms?”

Pierce shook his head. “Explain.”

“Our satellite software is set up to alert the sheriff of the nearest town if any of the horse GPS chips are moving after curfew. So why didn’t I know about the other horse last night?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

J
ordan could not guess at how much time had passed. He’d slipped into and out of consciousness as if repeatedly dipping into a cool river.

He was still on the wagon; he could feel the motion. How long until the graveyard?

The light entering the coffin changed shades in an irregular pattern, and he guessed that the wagon drove down a lane arched with trees.

The wheels stopped creaking, but he was too exhausted to try to scream again.

There was a slapping sound. A scraping sound.

Then his coffin shifted. Again, two men were carrying him. He could tell by the rhythm. These men never spoke.

They were carrying him to the gravesite. Jordan pictured it easily. The hole in the ground would be prepared already, then the coffin would be lowered. The first shovelfuls of dirt would thump against the top of the coffin. Too soon, the cracks of light would be filled.

Then there would only be embalming silence. If he were lucky, the dirt would be wet and the weight of it above the coffin would be tightly packed enough to seal him from air. He’d suffocate quickly. If not, it would take him days to die, helpless to move, his thirst amplified by the other agonies of his broken body.

Tears filled his eyes, because the dirt slamming his coffin lid would also be slamming any hope of seeing Caitlyn again. He continued the prayers that he used to fill his conscious moments, prayers that she would survive the journey to Outside, that he could believe in those he’d entrusted with her life.

The rhythm of steps stopped abruptly. The coffin was lowered and set gently down.

Would there be a preacher at the gravesite to say words over his burial? Or would he be buried as an unknown pauper?

He thought of the years that had brought him there since the fire in the lab. Would he have changed that one act all those years ago?

No, it had to be done.

He was about to close his eyes to pray again when bright light filled his world. He squinted and saw the outlines of two figures against the sky, leaning down, looking at him.

He tried to speak. But he was too exhausted, too stressed.

Jordan felt the black timeless void surrounding his consciousness, and he fell into it yet again.

In the tree, screened by brush, Caitlyn listened to the approaching drums. She wasn’t worried that they would be discovered. No one crossing the bridge to their side of the river would think about anything except for what would happen when the march of the procession ended and the drumbeats quickened until the herald’s public proclamation.

She was lost in these grim thoughts when Billy nudged her. He pointed at Theo, who sat with his knees drawn to his chin. His face was wet with tears as he stared at the river.

Caitlyn moved closer and sat beside him.

“Theo?”

The procession had reached the bridge.

Theo shook his head, refusing to look at her. “I can’t watch. I can’t watch. I can’t watch.”

“You don’t have to. We’re not part of the crowd.”

Theo pushed his head against her shoulder. He pressed his hands against his ears. His body shuddered.

Caitlyn turned her head back to the bridge.

She’d heard about these, recognized what the rock pile meant, but had never seen one.

Bruno was the name Mason had given the black bear. Not original, but Mason never claimed creativity as a talent outside of dealing with prey. The bear paced constantly in the cramped cage, hidden far into the foliage behind Mason’s private cabin. The place was in the hills, a quiet perk provided by Bar Elohim.

Mason approached the cage with a dart gun in one hand and a collar dangling from the fingers of his other hand. The air reeked with feces, as cleaning the cage was not high on his priorities. Nor was feeding the bear. He wanted the bear in a constant state of irritable hunger.

The bear stopped pacing and stared suspiciously at Mason, as if sensing this was not another visit to throw half-rotten meat in the cage.

Leaving the collar dangling in his fingers, Mason rested the barrel of the dart gun on a cage bar, resentful that his cast made it necessary to use the bar to steady the gun. Without ceremony, he aimed at the bear’s flank and pulled the trigger. With a puff of compressed air, the dart struck the bear solidly. The bear spun in tight circles, trying to identify the source of pain.

Mason leaned the dart gun against the cage and unbuckled the collar as he waited until he saw the first signs of the anesthetic taking effect. Then he opened the cage door, stood in the opening, and taunted the bear.

Groaning in rage and confusion, it staggered out of the enclosure. Once outside, it took a few feeble swipes at Mason before falling on its side. Mason had arranged the whole event with practicality in mind. If he didn’t release the bear before it collapsed, he’d be forced to walk into the cage, risk dirtying his polished boots by stepping in bear crap, and have to drag the stinking animal out.

Mason waited another minute, watching the bear’s ribs, until a slow rise and fall showed that it was completely unconscious. He knelt beside the bear and attached the collar.

The collar included a small weight to ensure the front remained lodged under the bear’s chin—the payload sat on the back of the collar, and Mason didn’t want the bear to be able to reach it.

He put the payload in place. Without looking back, Mason hurried into the cabin. When Bruno woke, he would wander the valley, hunting a meal, with Mason’s vidpod on his neck. Just in case someone was going to check on Mason’s location.

Which now gave Mason about as much freedom as a person could expect in Appalachia.