Strange Country (34 page)

Maker was beside her, barely visible, a dark shadow that moved as she did. She slipped slowly through the field to a spot near the ersatz weather machine, where she would have some cover but could watch the drive and the road, both.

Ten minutes later, in a vast emptiness so quiet, it might have felt like the world had ended if Hallie hadn’t grown up here, if she didn’t know what silence was, her phone rang.

“Boyd?”

“I can feel the magic. Which means I can feel you. I know you’re here.”

“Who is this? How did you get my number?”

“Is that really the important question?” Hallie was certain the voice was a woman’s, though it wasn’t a familiar one. It was scratchy, not smooth, as if the connection wasn’t particularly good. “The important thing is,” the voice continued, “I know where you are. I can see you.”

Hallie looked around as well as she could without rising from her crouch or moving. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“What I want is my life back. And I want that stone you’re carrying in your pocket. You have them all now, don’t you? They’re my stones, you know.”

Hallie gripped the phone so tightly, she was surprised it didn’t shoot out of her hand to be lost somewhere in the tramped-down grass. Why talk to her? Why not just shoot her? Where the hell was she?

“I can give you this stone,” Hallie said. “The one in my pocket. You can have it and then you can go. I won’t tell anyone it was you.” Which was a lie, and anyone who knew her would know it was a lie. She might give this person the stone, they might even get away, but she would find them.

“You won’t do it.”

“Yes,” Hallie said. “I will.”

“I was the most talented of all. Did you know that? Me. Laddie could talk to dead people. But what good is that? Dead people can’t give you anything. They can’t help you. They don’t even
want
to help you. They just talk.”

“I could leave it here,” Hallie said. “On the device.”

“Aren’t you listening?” The voice rose half an octave. “I want them all, not just the one you’re carrying. He’ll give them to me. For you. Because he cares about you. Right?”

Shit.

It was a trap. And maybe it was a trap of opportunity and not one she’d been set up for, or maybe the whole thing had been a setup from the start. Either way, it was a trap, and she was stuck in it. Maker had disappeared, for which she didn’t blame it, because what could it do except mark the time for her? She was alone, right here. And she needed to get out of this before this person, whoever she was, sucked in Boyd and Ole and anyone else who happened along.

Slowly, she started to put the shotgun down.

“Don’t move.” Whip-crack, a command.

Hallie didn’t.

Out here, no one would hear the shot, no one would know what happened, no one would ever see her again.

33

Boyd’s anger flickered all the way down in his bones. It was the kind of anger a person could use to climb mountains or ford rivers deep with spring runoff or even to send astronauts to the moon. The kind of anger that conquered the world. Today, right now, Boyd didn’t care about conquering the world, but he was going to find out who’d shot at him. And when he did, they’d better be wary. Because they were never going to know what hit them.

He wasn’t pacing, though even in his own mind, it felt like pacing, like there wasn’t enough space to contain him and his anger and whoever else happened to be in the room. But he wasn’t going to go off half-cocked, or chasing rainbows that would turn out to be puffs of cloud and smoke. He was going to solve this thing, get justice for Prue and Laddie. He was going to figure out what this person wanted, why they wanted it, and why they were willing to kill for it. Then he was going to stop them.

“What do we know?” Gerson’s voice made him turn away from the thoughts in his own head and back to the matter at hand.

“Not much,” he said. His voice was calm, not angry, all about the business at hand. He crossed the briefing room where they’d set up a makeshift incident room, pulled out a chair directly across from Gerson, and sat down. “I mean, we know that someone has shot and killed both Prue Stalking Horse and Laddie Kennedy with a high-powered rifle. Someone tried to kill Tel Sigurdson earlier today, and that same someone—theoretically—tried to shoot either you or me this afternoon. Theoretically, in the sense that we’re theorizing it’s the same person, not whether they meant to kill someone.”

“We also know or speculate,” Gerson added, “that this has something to do with either the stones located in the first victim’s house and the similar stone in the possession of the second victim. Or with something that happened twenty years ago.”

“Or both,” Boyd said.

“Or both,” Gerson agreed.

“I’ve talked to both the forensics team and the coroner,” she added. “Well, both coroners actually. Both victims were shot with the same type of bullet from the same rifle. Death for Ms. Stalking Horse was instantaneous. For Mr. Kennedy, death was attributed to blood loss and shock. The bullet nicked an artery and some of the bleeding was internal.”

“What about the bullet fired at Tel Sigurdson?” Boyd asked.

“They haven’t done the analysis yet, obviously,” Gerson said, “but I think we can expect it will also be the same rifle. As will the one fired at your SUV.”

Ole came into the room, carrying a thermos of coffee and a trio of coffee mugs, all gathered together by the handles. He set the thermos and the mugs on the table, poured himself a steaming cup, and sat in one of the two remaining chairs with a sigh that resembled the rumble of a distant train.

“I’ll tell you something,” he began without preamble. “This ain’t the kind of thing I like to see in my county. Which probably, you’re thinking, goes without saying, but the kinds of things that happen here, the kinds of things we’re on the lookout for in Taylor County are always—it’s always—people who know each other, spur of the moment mostly. Someone was drunk or hit someone too hard or just thought it made sense in that way things kind of maybe make sense and then don’t suddenly. Since I’ve been sheriff there have been—until this year—,” he added, “there’ve been six deaths by misadventure—hunting accidents and equipment mishaps mostly. Two abused spouses. Maybe—maybe—three brawls that killed one of the participants. And one, exactly one murder that someone planned out and executed.

“Well, two,” he corrected himself. “That Packer fella we found in Stalking Horse’s cellar. Could have been a accident, but I would say the evidence so far points in the direction of homicide.”

“Everyone we’ve looked at so far is either dead or has an alibi,” Gerson said after studying the coffee in her mug.

“That happens a lot around here,” Ole said.

“Two things,” Boyd said. “First, I found a fourth stone in an old foundation.”

“When the hell was this?”

“Yesterday afternoon,” Boyd said. “It’s been kind of busy since then.”

“I guess,” Ole said. “I assume that’s important.”

“I think so,” Boyd said. “I think Prue Stalking Horse buried it there not long after the tornado that flattened Jasper. It was in the old farmhouse foundation just to the west of town. You know the place.”

“Yeah,” Ole said. “Yeah, I do. That’s real interesting. What’s the second thing?”

“Where’s a copy of that photograph?” Boyd asked Gerson. She pulled the one they’d taken out to the Sigurdson ranch from her purse and laid it on the table. Boyd pointed to the second woman in the picture. “Tel Sigurdson says that Shannon Shortman always wore an electric blue scarf. He says she’s wearing it in this picture, though you can’t tell anymore. A couple of days after Prue was shot I met a woman outside her house wearing an electric blue scarf. She looked a lot like the woman in this picture.”

“Shannon Shortman. Jesus, hell of a name,” Ole said. “You think it was her?”

“I don’t see how it could have been,” Boyd said. “She didn’t look any older than me. Maybe younger. Did Shannon Shortman have a daughter?”

Ole said, “I asked Teedt to check Shortman out, back when all this started. Let me see what he’s got.” He heaved himself out of his chair and left the room.

Gerson’s cell phone rang and she left the room too. Boyd had tried to call Hallie as they were leaving the Sigurdson ranch, but she hadn’t answered. He wanted to know that she was safely back from the Badlands. He wanted to know that there were no more unmakers following her around, that she had taken suitable precautions—iron pokers and shotgun shells with iron in them. He wanted to know that she was okay. He reached for his phone to call her again, but Ole was already reentering the room. He carried a folder and a sheaf of paper that looked as if it had been torn from a steno pad. He slapped the papers down on the table, the sound sharp and brittle in the empty room. “Here we go,” he said.

Boyd looked through them quickly, passing them over to Gerson when she returned.

There wasn’t much. Shannon Shortman had had a driver’s license registered to an address in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She’d owned a modest town house that had been sold at auction five years after she disappeared. She’d had one bank account, had made thirty thousand dollars a year working at a bank where she’d been promoted three times. No mention of husbands or children.

“Who was Prue Stalking Horse’s lawyer?” Boyd asked. Maybe Prue had a daughter. One who looked uncannily like her sister.

“Henspaw,” Ole said. “He’s everybody’s lawyer.”

“Did she leave a will?”

“Leaves her bank accounts and whatever’s in them, which isn’t much, to some organization called New Age Weathervane.”

“New Age Weathervane?” Gerson frowned. “I never heard of them.”

“Some place in Oregon,” Ole said. “Teedt’s checking it out.”

“Here’s the interesting thing, though,” Ole said. “Henspaw says Stalking Horse’s will leaves the house and all its contents to her sister.”

Boyd looked up from the written notes he’d been trying to decipher. “So, it’s an old will,” he said.

“I asked,” Ole acknowledged. “Teedt says that Henspaw drew it up for her ten years ago. Henspaw pointed out at the time, so he says, that Shannon Shortman had been legally declared dead three years earlier. Stalking Horse had him do it anyway.”

“That is interesting,” Gerson said. “But what? Do we think a dead woman killed Prue Stalking Horse and Laddie Kennedy?”

“Believe me,” Ole said heavily. “Stranger things have happened.”

“That license plate I asked you to check earlier,” Boyd said. “What did you find out?”

Ole shook his head. “It was returned to the airport five days ago. Rented to a Sam Smith.”

“Man or woman?”

“Woman, but the guy I talked to couldn’t describe her to save his life. I mean, Jesus, he didn’t even question the name. Sam Smith. Still, the initials match. Maybe it is a daughter.” He considered for a minute. “Once you’d seen her, maybe she decided to switch cars. Of course, that means we got no way to know what she’s driving now.”

“There’s something else,” Boyd said.

“Hit me,” Ole said, like he had no capacity for surprise anymore, but Boyd was welcome to try.

“That explosion at my house. That was because I put all four stones in my safe. It created some sort of critical mass. Blew the safe through a wall. Blew the stones through the side of my house.”

“Really,” Ole said. “That’s … I don’t even know what the hell that is.”

“Here’s what I think.” Now Boyd did pace. “I think the tornado that leveled Jasper twenty years ago was big magic, perversion magic. I think Prue Stalking Horse didn’t create that magic. I think that was Martin Weber’s grandmother. Prue was adamant, even back then, about not creating bad magic, though apparently she wasn’t above using it if someone else created it. I think she found a way to store that magic and she planned to use it for her own purposes. Laddie Kennedy said she wanted power. Tel Sigurdson says she wanted to use the magic to heal the sick, kill people, whatever she could use it for. I think she and Billie Packer and Shannon Shortman tried to use the stones and something went wrong. Packer was killed. Shortman disappeared—vaporized? I don’t know. Stalking Horse buried Packer. Buried the stones. And spent the rest of her life pretending that she didn’t mess with magic.”

There was silence when he finished. Ole said, “That’s a real interesting theory. And I’m sure it’s … more possible than I care to admit. But it still doesn’t tell us who’s been shooting people all over my county.”

Boyd looked at the photograph again. “Everyone in this picture is dead, except Tel Sigurdson. And he didn’t shoot at himself.”

“Everyone’s dead or
disappeared,
” Ole said. “If you’ll think back a few months, you’ll remember that disappeared is not the same as dead.”

Which was true, Boyd thought. But people disappeared from Taylor County five months ago because they’d fallen through into the under. Which happened because of the magic Martin Weber had done. Perversion magic.

Which, if his theory held, was the same kind of magic that had caused the tornado in Jasper.

Son of a bitch. The same kind of magic.

Boyd felt an ice-cold breeze on the back of his neck. He looked around, but didn’t see anything. He returned his gaze to the table in front of him; then out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door push open and swing closed. “Did you see that?” he asked the others. Gerson and Ole looked at him quizzically. “The door?”

Ole shook his head.

Something cold brushed against Boyd’s legs. He looked under the table. Nothing. Fatigue, he told himself. Too much happening and not enough time to process it. “We need to know more about Shannon Shortman,” he said. “Are there fingerprints on file? Can we circulate her picture? We need to know if she’s been hiding out somewhere for twenty years, if she’s actually dead, or I guess anything in between.”

“Which could be a hell of a lot of things, given the circumstances,” Ole said heavily.

“Then we’d better get started,” Boyd said. He headed toward the door. Something yanked on his sleeve and he stumbled sideways.

34

Ole looked up sharply. “Okay?” he said to Boyd.