Thief River Falls (13 page)

“What did you find out?”

“Well, I don’t know who told you about this manhunt, but nothing like that is happening up there.”

Lisa didn’t answer right away. She breathed the cold air in and out, and she felt the icy rain landing in wet drops on her face. She watched
Deputy Garrett and Deputy Stoll, whose faces were darkening with concern. She tried to hide her reaction, because she didn’t want to give them any hint that she’d found them out.

“Lisa?” Will went on when she was silent. “Are you there? Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m here. Are you absolutely sure? There’s no possibility of a mistake?”

“There’s no mistake,” he told her. “Whatever is going on in your area, it has nothing to do with human trafficking.”

14

Lisa had five seconds to decide what to do. She smiled at the two deputies. She shoved down her fear and summoned complete calm to her face. If she exposed the truth, Will would send help, but help was miles away. There was no FBI to rescue her in this place. Meanwhile, these two men would kill her and kill the boy. Life or death was going to happen in the next few moments, and a voice on the phone couldn’t save her. She had to act alone. She didn’t care about herself, but she wasn’t going to let them harm Purdue.

“Thank you for the information, Will,” she said in the calmest voice she could muster. “I really appreciate it.” Then she hung up the phone and said to the two men, “Sorry about that.”

“Is there a problem?” Deputy Garrett asked her.

“Oh, no, it was a work call. That was my agent in New York. We’ve been going back and forth on one of the clauses in my latest contract.”

“The boy, Ms. Power,” the deputy reminded her. “Please.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where is he?”

Lisa’s mind raced as she tried to decide what to do next. She was cornered, with nowhere to run and no way to grab Purdue and escape. They wouldn’t believe her if she lied and told them that he was somewhere else. They also outnumbered and outsized her, and they both had guns.

“Ms. Power?”

She gestured over his shoulder. “He’s in that little shed behind the garage.”

Deputy Garrett’s gaze flicked to the large aluminum shed and its latched door. He flagged the other deputy to accompany him, and then he stepped forward to Lisa and extended his hand to be shaken. She was nervous about taking it, but she let him crush her own hand with a fist that looked like a bear’s paw.

“I know this was hard for you, Ms. Power, but you’re doing the right thing. We’ll take good care of him.”

She forced a smile onto her face.
Liar.
“Remember your promise, Deputy. I’m coming with you. I don’t want the boy to be alone.”

“Yes, of course.”

Then she glanced down at Deputy Garrett’s hand, where something bright white drew her eyes. When she saw it, she struggled to hide her reaction. He had a tattoo emblazoned on the back of his hand, starting at the bumps of his knuckles and winding onto his wrist.

It was an alligator.

A snow-white, albino alligator, its mouth open, showing long teeth, its eyes black and beady, full of violence. When the deputy dropped Lisa’s hand and flexed his fingers, the jaws of the alligator snapped open and shut. As his wrist moved, the tail seemed to swish, as if it were pushing the reptile forward to its next helpless prey.

She heard Purdue’s voice.
The white alligator shot him in the head.

“Is everything okay?” Garrett asked, watching her face.

“Yes. Everything’s fine.”

“Deputy Stoll and I will go get the boy.”

“Of course. I’ll come with you.”

She tried to make her legs move to follow them, but her limbs felt like rubber. She had to act right now. She had to do something. If she and Purdue got in the SUV with the two men, their next stop would be a grave site. The remote lands offered plenty of places to hide bodies that would never be found. Evil men dug up the ground all the time in her books.

Deputy Garrett headed across the gravel toward the shed, with his partner following just behind him. With horror, Lisa realized that they were going to walk right by the driver’s door of her pickup, and she held her breath to see if they would glance inside and spot Purdue hiding below the passenger seat.

They didn’t.

They were focused on the aluminum shed.

Lisa rushed to catch up with them, but she let them walk ahead of her. Deputy Garrett got to the metal door and undid the latch, and as he pulled the door open, the hinges squealed. Even with the door open, the shed was dark and deep. There was no light. The rusty machines sat on the floor like dead animals, and the smell of dust and fertilizer seeped into the fresh air.

Garrett filled the doorway with his bulky frame. “I don’t see him.”

“He must be hiding at the back.”

The deputy glanced over his shoulder at her with a vague suspicion, as if trying to gauge whether she was lying to him. He squeezed inside, and a few seconds later, she saw the bright glow of a flashlight he’d taken from his belt. It wouldn’t take him long to realize that Purdue wasn’t in the shed.

His partner, Deputy Stoll, hovered near the doorway. His back was to her, but he was still at least two steps outside the shed, and he showed no sign of following his partner inside. He was a big man. If she pushed him, even from behind and with the element of surprise, she didn’t know if she could jar him off his feet.

She was running out of time.

“Ms. Power,” Deputy Garrett called, and she could hear the change in the tone of his voice. It was low and angry now. “He’s not here.”

“Are you sure? Did you check everywhere?”

“He’s
not
here.”

“Well, maybe he sneaked off. He does that.”

“You’re playing games with us, Ms. Power. That’s really not a good idea. You have to tell us where you’re hiding the boy.”

Lisa watched Deputy Stoll begin to turn around to face her, and she could see the beam of Deputy Garrett’s flashlight as he retraced his steps toward the front of the shed. She realized she had no choice. There was nothing else to do. She took her right hand out of her pocket, with her fingers clutching the grip of the Ruger and her index finger hovering under the trigger guard.

“Stop!” Lisa barked at the second cop. “Stay where you are, and don’t move.”

Stoll froze and shouted to his partner. “Garrett,
she’s got a gun
.”

Lisa heard the clang of Deputy Garrett’s boots on the metal floor. His face appeared in the shadows of the shed behind his partner. “Ms. Power, what the hell are you doing? Put away that gun. Put it on the ground, and back away from it right now. Don’t make things worse for yourself.”

“Get in the shed!” Lisa shouted. “Both of you! Put your hands up!”

“Listen to me. We’re not going to hurt you.”

His voice was as smooth and sweet as honey. She didn’t believe him for a minute.

“No, you’re not. You’re not going to touch me, and you’re not going to touch the boy. Keep your hands in the air! Back up!”

The two deputies showed her their hands, and they took several steps back into the shadows of the shed. She was conscious of the guns on their belts. And their radios. She thought about having them strip off their gear and toss it out, but she didn’t want to give them any chance to trick her.

“All the way back,” she told them coldly. “Against the rear wall.”

“Ms. Power, don’t do this. There’s no way this ends well. Let’s talk, okay? All we want to do is talk. Put down the gun, and tell us where the boy is.”

“He’s safe. And he’s going to stay that way.”

She clutched the gun tightly in her right hand, and she grabbed the padlock off the nail where she always kept it. She felt clumsy and terrified, and she tried to keep her fingers from trembling. She thought
about how to do it all in one smooth motion. Keep the gun on them. Latch the door. Lock it. All before they could charge her, crash through the door, and topple her backward.

“I don’t know who the two of you are,” she said. She kept talking, because she wanted them listening to the sound of her voice. She didn’t want them thinking about their guns or about rushing the door.

“I don’t know if you’re dirty cops,” she went on, “or whether you’re even cops at all, but you’re not getting anywhere near that boy. I know what you did. You and your red-haired friend, Liam. I know about the bullet in the man’s head. The
fingers
. It’s all coming out. Whatever this is about, believe me, it’s all coming out.”

Neither of the men said a word. Their faces were dark in the shadows.

Lisa moved fast. The lock was ready in her left hand. She used her other hand, the hand that still held the gun, to grab the aluminum door. She fought the strong wind to close the door, but her hand struggled to do two things at once, and the gun slipped out of her grasp and fell to the gravel.

They saw it. They heard it. She heard them shout and heard the stomp of their boots as they ran toward her.

She slammed the door shut and closed the steel latch around the bar. She fumbled with the shackle as she threaded it through the hole in the latch, and at the very instant the lock snapped shut, the entire structure shuddered as the combined weight of the two men landed heavily against the door. Lisa screamed and jumped backward. The hinges groaned.

The door held, but it wouldn’t hold for long. It was an old shed, and the metal was rusted and weak. As she stood outside, she heard the two cops back up and charge the door again. Again the door refused to open, but she could hear the awful screech of metal tearing away from metal.

Soon they would be free. She needed to get away
now
.

Lisa scooped her gun from the ground and ran for the pickup truck. She ran for Purdue.

15

As Lisa drove, the rain finally took a break. So did the wind. The air grew still.

She didn’t know where to go, and she didn’t trust the main highway. People would be looking for her. So she took the back roads to Laurel March’s farm. Laurel and her husband, Curtis, owned a hobby farm on a large plot of land northeast of the town of Halma. Curtis grew soybeans, and Laurel ran her medical practice from a home office and made calls at clinics around the northern counties. They lived in a rambler that had belonged to his parents, and they grew their own vegetables and rode horses, and Curtis flew a little Cessna around the northland when he and his workers weren’t in the fields. Lisa had always thought of them as having the perfect life, but nothing was perfect. She knew that Laurel and Curtis had tried unsuccessfully for years to have a child of their own, and they still carried that disappointment with them.

She parked her pickup near the field where Laurel’s two horses, Ziggy and Carl, grazed in the green grass. The horses knew Lisa well. On summer Saturdays, she and Laurel had been known to ride for hours, almost to the Canadian border. If things had been different right now, she would have saddled up Ziggy and let Purdue ride behind her with his hands holding on to her waist, and they would have galloped across the meadow. That sounded like paradise. The cold air in her face
and her hair blowing crazily. The slap of the horse’s hooves in the mud and the snort of his breath. The boy’s skinny arms clinging to her hips.

“I like horses,” Purdue said, as if reading her mind.

“Me too.”

“I think my mom liked horses.”

Lisa glanced down at the boy. His serious face was even more serious than usual. “Your mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember her?”

“No, but I think she liked horses.”

Lisa said nothing. She felt a tightness in her throat, because Purdue was using the past tense about his mother without even realizing it. It was also the first time he’d talked about having a mother at all, the first time he’d opened that door for her a little bit. When he’d said he didn’t remember anything at all about his mother or his family, she hadn’t believed him, but she knew from her own experience that opening doors could be a scary thing.

She took Purdue by the hand and led him away toward Laurel’s house. In the garden outside, there was a gazebo that Curtis had built by hand, fully enclosed to keep out the summer bugs, with a conical roof and a fairy weathervane on top. Lisa knew that Laurel kept toys and games there for when children came to visit. She took Purdue to the gazebo, and inside they found a one thousand–piece jigsaw puzzle, barely started, with the pieces spread across an oak table. The picture on the puzzle box showed a collage of cats. Something about the unfinished puzzle made Lisa sad, as if she knew no one was ever going to put the pieces together.

“Do you want to work on the puzzle while I talk to Laurel?” Lisa asked.

“Okay.”

“Start with the corners.”

“I know.”

“Don’t go anywhere. If you see anyone or if anyone turns off the road, you come running inside and find me. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Lisa turned away, but Purdue called after her. “Hey, Lisa?”

“Yes?”

“I still don’t like her.”

“Laurel? You should give her another chance. She wants to help.”

The boy shrugged. “If you say so.”

Lisa left Purdue with the puzzle and headed for Laurel’s door. The house wasn’t large, and it was painted bright yellow, like a beam of sunshine. Laurel always wanted her house to be a buffer against the gray northern days. Beyond the house, she saw farm equipment sitting unused, because the ground was too wet to let Curtis and his men in the fields. On the border of the farmland was a narrow strip of grass that Curtis used as a runway, and his restored Cessna Skylark sat at the end, as if hungry for the sky. Laurel herself never went up in the plane with her husband. She hated flying. But Lisa had flown with Curtis many times. For her, the thrill was worth the fear.

She noticed that Laurel’s red Ford Bronco wasn’t parked near the house, and she wondered if her friend was out. When she knocked on the door, Curtis was the one who answered. He looked surprised to see her.

“Oh. Lisa.”

“Hi, Curtis. Is Laurel home?”

“No. She had an appointment, but I expect her back soon. Do you want to wait?”