Comes a Horseman (22 page)

“Let's roll,” he barked to his men. Pistols found their holsters, doors slammed.

When the first Jerusalem police car arrived, no evidence remained of anyone's particular interest in this traffic mishap. The only curiosity was the disappearance of the car's driver.

28

Cañon City, Colorado

O
ver the jump!” Trevor Wilson yelled to his buddy Josiah, pedaling behind him. Even ten feet ahead, Trevor could hear his friend huffing for breath. He didn't feel superior because he was fitter, and he didn't give Josiah a hard time for being fat. He only wished his friend could keep up better so he didn't have to wait for him when they were hiking the rough terrain out past the new construction. Worse was not going on certain adventures at all—like crossing Temple Canyon River into the BLM lands beyond—because Josiah would have died trying.

Where the curb yielded to a driveway, Trevor swerved off the street onto the sidewalk and aimed his bike at a plywood skateboard jump some teenagers had set up. He heard Josiah's bike rattle as it jolted onto the sidewalk behind him.
He's doing too good a job keeping up,
Trevor thought. If Trevor wiped out on the jump, Josiah would plow into him for sure. He pumped his legs harder, wanting to hit the ramp fast and as far ahead of Josiah as possible. Crashing would be bad enough—Mom had warned him about not ruining another Boy Scout uniform—but Josiah and his bike landing on top of him was a nightmare he didn't want to think about.

Ten feet to the ramp. Five. Trevor held his breath and pulled up on the handlebars just as the front tire made contact. A hollow rumble, then silence—he was flying. He looked straight down to see the concrete a good four feet below his sneakers. He hoped the older kids who'd built the ramp were watching from somewhere. Catching air like this might score him some points. Then he remembered his helmet and prayed the teens were nowhere near. Helmets were definitely uncool. Shifting his gaze to the point of impact, he braced himself and tried to keep the front wheel from wobbling. He hit and experienced a moment of panic as his bike wanted to bounce and tumble out from under him, but he held on and kept it under control. Immediately he veered into a yard and slid sideways to a stop.

He looked back in time to see Josiah take the ramp hard, not lifting on the handlebars to help the bike over. He was leaning forward instead of back as he took flight. And he should have been moving faster. The front wheel plummeted down against the sidewalk, suddenly becoming much slower than the rear of the bike, which careened upward, sending Josiah over the handlebars. The boy's death grip kept him from sailing ahead of his bicycle. Instead, for a few amazing seconds, fat Josiah Millard performed a handstand on the handlebars, as graceful and balanced as a circus bear. Then he came down—fortunately onto the seat and not in the other direction. But the acrobatics and the force of their conclusion proved too much for Josiah and his bike: the two shook violently and went their separate ways. Josiah landed on the sidewalk, skidded, rolled, tumbled, and came up standing, just to repeat the skid-roll-tumble once more before halting in a heap.

Trevor leaped from his bike.

“Dude! That was awesome!”

Josiah moaned.

“Are you all right?” Trevor leaned over, appraising his friend's face. His eyes were open; that was a good sign. A square of skin was scraped off one cheek. He was holding his elbow.

“Lemme see,” Trevor said.

Josiah's hand came away bloody. A gouged-out hole the size of a pebble oozed goopy crimson.

Trevor scrutinized the wound from several angles and declared, “You'll be fine.”

Josiah smiled faintly. Trevor knew his friend, like the kids at school, assumed the weeks he'd spent in the hospital after his accident had made him prematurely wise about medical matters. He did nothing to discourage that opinion. Why shouldn't something good come out of that awful time?

Of course, being in St. Thomas More ICU had not really boosted his medical IQ, except in the areas that had directly affected him. He now knew that in the United States an average of twelve people a day died of drowning. Of that number, ten were male. He knew that “cyanosis” was when skin turned blue from lack of oxygen in the blood supply, and that CPR, even when administered correctly, can cause broken ribs. He knew that broken ribs ached with every breath.

The hospital stay had also taught him that he wanted to do for others what his doctors had done for him. He didn't think it was a coincidence that he'd come out of the coma knowing he had to do something right with his life. He had to do
good
.

He'd started seeing people, especially children, as majestic beings cloaked in eggshell bodies. He'd wondered how many children had died throughout history who would have given the world something wonderful had they lived. He wanted to help them live to achieve their destinies.

Deep thoughts for the ten-year-old he was at the time of the accident. But Trevor had aged beyond the days he was comatose. Except for his brief babbling upon returning to consciousness, his family never addressed this change or the reason for it, sensing the pain, the fright that lay behind it. He wouldn't discuss it even with himself, pushing it away when it threatened to emerge from the recesses of his memory.

Trevor looked at Josiah again, and his eyes grew wide.

“What?” his friend said, scared again.

“Your helmet.” Trevor whispered the words. He unsnapped his friend's chin strap and gently pulled the helmet off his head. He half-expected brains and gore to spill out, but there was only messy hair and sweat. He turned it in his hands to show Josiah: a deep crack ran horizontally across the entire front. Broken Styrofoam showed through the cracked plastic.

“That could've been your head.”

Josiah rubbed his forehead. “I have a
little
headache, but . . .” He shook his head.

Trevor reached up to his own helmet. It had just become a lot more acceptable.

“Come on. Can you get up?”

Trevor reached out a hand to pull his friend up.

“Hey, look,” Josiah said when he was standing, leaning heavily on Trevor. He was squinting up at the rock cliffs that marked the end of their subdivision and the start of the vast Royal Gorge Park.

Trevor followed his gaze. Boulders and scraggly pines lined the top ridge, pale blue sky beyond.

“I don't—,” he started, but then he did; he saw the figure standing way up there, rock solid. Man or woman, he couldn't tell. They watched for a good thirty seconds, but the person didn't move. “Freaky,” Trevor said. “Let's get your bike.”

It lay in the street, front wheel mangled, spokes jutting out like spindly ribs. Josiah sat on the curb while Trevor tried to make the damaged bike rollable. First the spokes kept getting hung up on the fork. Then the tire peeled off and wrapped around the hub.

“Dude, I think you made out better than your bike,” Trevor said. He retrieved his own bike from the grass and told Josiah to walk it home. He lifted the other bike's front end and pulled it down the street on its back wheel.

Josiah was favoring his right leg, but not dramatically, and Trevor could tell he was relying on the bike to keep himself from falling. He came alongside.

“You need to get your mom to take you to a doctor,” he said.

Josiah's head swung back and forth. “I'm all right.”

They walked silently for a time. When Trevor let loose with a tight giggle, trying to restrain himself, Josiah turned.

“What?”

Trevor smiled. “Man, you should have seen yourself. You did a
handstand
on the handlebars!”

“I did?” Josiah grinned.

“Straight up.” Trevor laughed. “I mean, your body was straight up in the air, even your legs.”

“I thought you'd like that.”

“Oh, like it was on purpose!”

They both cracked up, and Josiah walked a little steadier. At Trevor's house, they wheeled the bikes up to the drive, and Trevor punched a code into a keypad that got the garage door rumbling up.

“He's still there,” Josiah said. The figure on the ridge.

Trevor went into the garage and came out with binoculars. After a moment of searching, then focusing, he saw the man—definitely a man, with wild hair and a long, bushy beard. He was looking back at Trevor with his own set of binoculars.

“He's got binoculars too,” he said. “I think he's looking right at us.”

“Probably a pervert,” Josiah said. He cupped his hands like a megaphone and yelled at the man, “This what you want, perv?” He turned around and shook his considerable backside.

Trevor backhanded him. “Knock it off!”

“Ow! Watch the elbow, dude!”

Trevor pressed his eyes against the rubber eyecups. “Hey,” he said, “there's a dog sitting next to him. Looks like a Husky.”

“Let me see!” Josiah pulled the binocs out of his hands.

“Probably just some construction worker.” Trevor sounded doubtful.

Josiah rotated the focusing knob. “Whoa,” he said. “Creepy.”

Trevor went into the garage. He didn't like creepy things. Not since the accident, he didn't.

29

T
he boy disappeared into the garage. He was small for his age, and of course there had been no driver's license photo for Olaf to study, but he knew he had found Trevor Wilson. He fit the description: four and a half feet tall, ninety pounds, strawberry blond hair. And he had opened the garage door at the address listed.

The larger boy was still watching him through field glasses. Tomorrow, he'd tell police about the strange man on the cliff. They'd come up here and find where he'd stood, find some dog hairs. Nothing new. But if they snooped far enough, they'd find tire tracks. He'd have to do something about that. He didn't mind leaving fingerprints at the crime scenes, because he'd never been printed and he didn't plan on being caught. At least not alive. The tires were another matter. If the treads were unique enough, police could identify the van as a suspect vehicle while he was away from it, hunting or purchasing supplies, perhaps. They would then have the advantage of surprise, and that was something he wanted to keep for himself.

The big kid had lowered the glasses and was talking into the garage. The other boy, Trevor, leaned out, grabbed his friend by the arm, and pulled him inside, glancing quickly up at the ridge.
He didn't like being watched,
Olaf thought.
Smart kid.

He panned his binoculars to the back of the house. Then farther, to the greenbelt that conveniently ran like an alley behind the backyards the length of the block. Every yard was framed by a six-foot-high cedar fence, each with a gate opening onto the greenbelt.

His eyes followed the footpath across two streets to where the houses stopped and a small, sodded park filled the gap between the neighborhood and the cliffs upon which he stood. The park consisted of a wooden play set, a row of teeter-totters, and a smattering of trees. A gravel parking lot demarcated its southern border to Olaf 's right. A trail appeared to snake west, into the foothills. Most likely, it eventually passed near Olaf 's current position, though he hadn't crossed a trail on his way here.

He swung his vision back to the Trevor kid's house. The garage door was closed, the bikes gone.

A sour thought occurred to him: what if the big kid stayed the night? His own boys cherished overnights with friends. Olaf 's desire to kill the boy in his sleep meant using more stealth than he had before. That would make it difficult enough without the complication of another child in the room. He lowered the binoculars, taking in the grid of houses from his eagle's perch, and sighed. His mission was paramount. He'd get the job done—neatly or not.

He scanned his surroundings. He needed to be as sure as possible that he wouldn't encounter any surprises when he returned later that night. The trail that began at the park below was somewhere north of him. He turned and headed off in search of it, bounding over boulders and deadfalls far more nimbly than his bulk suggested he could. The dog hung at his side until it was sure of his direction. Then it leaped ahead, sniffing, watching. Together they moved silently and, once in the trees, invisibly.

30

C
rime scene photos covered every horizontal surface of Alicia's hotel room. Brady moved from one to the next with a magnifying glass and notepad. Alicia sat at the room's desk, watching her crime scene walk-throughs from Palmer Lake and Ft. Collins in slow motion on her PowerBook. Occasionally she'd freeze a frame and click a button to print out a high-resolution photograph. Whenever he heard the printer, Brady would drift over, take the printout, and drift back to wherever he'd been before the printer beckoned.

Once, he asked if Alicia had access to the Internet. She rolled her eyes, and he said he needed to surf for a bit. She strolled down to a soft-drink machine, and when she returned with a pop for each of them, he was back at the piles of photos. Twenty minutes later, he said, “Okay, ready?”

She watched another few frames of Daniel Fears's house click by before closing the laptop's screen. “Shoot,” she said.

He pointed to a pile of photos on the bed. “Vic number one. Joseph Johnson. Ogden, Utah. No images of hell, as far as I can see from the crime scene photos and reports. But check out these books:
Embraced by the Light
by Betty Eadie and Curtis Taylor,
Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life after Death
by Stephen E. Braude, and
Hell to Pay
by Duncan McAfee.”

“What are those?” Alicia asked.

“According to Amazon.com, they all have to do with near-death experiences—NDEs.”

“Okay,” she said, unsure.

“You know, someone's heart stops, they're clinically dead, and then they get resuscitated—CPR or whatever. While they were ‘dead,' their spirits . . . experienced things.”