Ben Lyons collects himself. ‘I have to have a reason, Will. I have to be going someplace.’

  ‘Tell him it’s a death in the family. He’ll believe it. You sound terrible. Just don’t tell him who – or where you’re going. And don’t play with me, Ben. Not this time.’

  Ben’s look darkens. He hits the numbers. When Will takes the phone, he hears a woman answer. ‘Corrigans.’

  Will hands the phone back to Ben Lyons. He remains standing over Benny; it is all the threat he needs. Ben handles it perfectly. It’s quite sudden. No, nothing to be done. He’ll call next week. He hangs up before Tony Corrigan can ask anything more.

  ‘Principal at school,’ Will tells him. ‘Mr Ahrens, I believe his name is.’ Ben Lyons has to look the number up. When he finishes this call, Will asks, ‘Does Judy have a job?’

  Ben’s eyes flash, ‘Is Judy okay?’

  ‘Judy is upstairs, Ben. I won’t lie to you. She’s hurt…’

  ‘She’s alive?’

  ‘I’ll bring her down when she’s able to take the stairs on her own. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I want to see her!’

  Will smiles coolly. ‘Does she have a job, Ben?’

  Ben Lyons shakes his head, eyes wet. ‘She works at our two stores when we’re shorthanded…’

  ‘I’m going to need a day or so here,’ he tells them. ‘Through the weekend at the most.

  ‘Four days. After that, I’m taking off. Nobody needs to get hurt. Just stay in the room I’ve set up for you, and you have my word, you’ll all live through this.’

  ‘I want Judy with us,’ Ben tells him. ‘Let Penny and Tabit –’

  ‘As soon as she can walk on her own,’ Will answers.

  ‘Is she conscious, can she talk?’

  ‘She’s not conscious, Ben. It’s a head wound. I want to be honest with you. I don’t know if she’s going to make it.’

  ‘You bastard! We have to get her help!’

  ‘Don’t worry about Judy, Ben,’ Will answers gently. There is a bit of chiding in his tone.

  ‘Worry about getting everyone in this room through the next couple of days. That’s within your power. The rest, friend, is up to God and me.’

  ‘We need food.’ This from Boy. ‘You can’t lock us up without food and water!’

  ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll bring you some water.’

  ‘What about using the bathroom?’ Ben asks.

  <р> ‘I put a bucket in there already. That’s going to have to do.’

  WILL MOVES ON TO MORE important matters. First their clothing. They have to take it off.

  When it is stacked neatly in five little piles and they have only their underwear to cover their nakedness, Will sends Ben and Boy crawling back toward the room. The three girls walk behind them. At the door, Will holds Penny Lyons back. Penny’s eyes widen in surprise. Her lips fall open in confusion. From inside the darkness Ben Lyons roars in protest, but that is all. His eyes lock onto his little girl. Then the darkness swallows him.

  Will listens to Ben Lyons demanding that Penny come in with the rest of them. He is too loud. Will pulls his Bernardelli from his hip pocket and fires twice into the wall. Silence answers. He slips a towel across the bottom of the door, plunging them into perfect darkness, because that is the essence of infinity, as close as a kiss.

  Will takes Penny into her brother’s bedroom. Will has stripped it of its pornographic posters. He has made the bed with soldierly neatness. Penny comes without quarrelling; only a bit of shiver as he turns her so she will face him. He lets her sit primly on the bed, watching the terror forming in her eyes.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you, Penny,’ he tells her.

  ‘Please! I’ve never...’ Her voice is a whisper, a sigh. Her tears are fat drops that hang on the edge of her eyelids.

  ‘No!’ he answers. He puts his finger under her chin. ‘That’s not what I want. Now listen to me. Just listen…’

  Chapter 43

  Night.

  AFTER I LEFT THE MERRIWEATHER house I drove for a while. I stopped for gas at a highway service station. I got a can of Coke, a piece of pie in wax paper and then headed back into the countryside. It was an old habit I hadn’t tried on in years. The state trooper in me that hadn’t quite washed out when Sarah disappeared. Checking driveways, looking at cars, watching windows. I knew I was wasting my time and energy, but I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t sleep. I could only think of the last time Will Booker had struck. The way the community had been forced to watch the thing unfolding by horrible degrees. Like no crime in the history of Shiloh Springs. Two boys dead at the abduction site, then the days passing. First one girl, then the second turning up. Both buried in shallow graves. Then a long wait, two sisters imprisoned somewhere. No one finding a lead. The whole community holding its breath.

  Finally the word had come that one girl had survived, even as we learned her sister was gone, the body never found.

  In those days I had been running Century Secure, doing a lively business with various factories, stores and offices. I was blissfully unaware of personal tragedy that comes with a crime. Completely disconnected from criminal law enforcement. Unless I needed the cops to bust some folks for my clients I did not have any business with them.

  All the same, William Booker had scared me the way only a nightmare can. He had been too close to ignore, proof no place was safe. Of course I hadn’t done anything about it. I had left it to Nat Hall and the state troopers and the city police and the FBI, in their advisory capacity. I remember ces Tthinking this is what happens all the time, somewhere, but not here. Not in Shiloh Springs. I remember pushing it all away until Will Booker had been caught, and then of course, like everyone, I wanted his blood. He had lost his rights as far as I was concerned. If I had known about the Russian roulette, I would have cheered old Nat Hall and voted for him no matter what office he was running for. Of course later, when my passions had cooled down, I was as shocked and outraged as every other hypocrite in town.

  I know I watched the fate of Will Booker as a perfect spectator. I know my heart was elsewhere. I was making money, securing the workplace for corporations. Living a decent life with my wife. Attending my daughter’s college graduation and coming up with a bit of extra cash to help her with law school. And going to the same school as little Patty Garrat! As good as a Garrat! ‘And when you see her in your classes,’ I told Sarah, ‘tell her you used to play together in the governor’s mansion!’

  Not bad times, only not enough of them. A short two years after Will Booker proved it could happen in Shiloh Springs, I got a call at work. My wife Nicole. The police in Attica had just phoned, she said. Sarah was missing. Missing? ‘ Took a walk at sunset and didn’t come back... ’

  There’s not much I don’t recall about what came next, starting with getting my revolver out for the first time in years and ending with it in my mouth on several dark nights a couple of years later. Always holding off the trigger because I hoped, before I died, I would kill the monster who hurt my Sarah. It was a hell of a reason to live, but the only one I had. Which says worlds about the marriage I had loved right up to the moment of that phone call.

  I don’t know how much I saw of the countryside the night the Merriweather girls vanished. I was adrift in other nights. I know my eyes scoured driveways, alleys, country roads, culverts, and dark lanes that led into lonely pastureland. But all the while my heart was seeking Sarah. It was not introspection. I was beyond introspection. I was in the night that does not finish. I was looking for ghosts. I was rescuing my own lost child. My Sarah. Losing my marriage again with the grim determination of a man who doesn’t deserve to be loved.

  WHEN I SAW ANOTHER GREY DAWN breaking out of the night sky I turned around and drove back to the city. The snow began shortly after that. It fell fast but without a wind, the flakes fat.

  By the time I ended up at my big broken down urban palace a thick blanket of snow had covered the street and topped the houses and cars. And still it came. I took a shower, then dressed about as well as I ever do, and headed over to the 24 hour joint where I ordered sausage and eggs and seven or eight cups of coffee. The snow was two feet deep when I came outside again, and it was still coming down. It was beautiful, the last hurrah of winter, and as I walked back to my house I saw the usual sights of winter. People were out getting their cars ready, stamping their feet, waving at neighbours, sometimes just smiling.

  I stopped at St. Jude’s on the way to the office, thinking to pray, but as I waited on my knees for something to say, I could only think about the beauty of a fresh, heavy snow and all the ugliness it hides.

  Chapter 44

  Thursday 5:30 a.m., March 25.

  CONNIE MERRIWEATHERt, d OPENED his eyes and blinked dully at the walls. He looked at his watch. It was 5:30. He was pretty sure he had slept most of an hour. He shifted about in the big chair, then stood and walked toward his office. Two federal agents were there, waiting.

  They were reading old Mission magazines. Through the window Connie could see the snow coming down, thick but not yet deep.

  ‘How long before they call – usually?’ Connie asked the one who looked up.

  The senior agent, a man close to Connie’s age, cleared his throat. ‘Sometimes it takes a few hours; sometimes it’s a few days.’

  ‘And we just wait?’

  For a moment, Connie was certain the agent wasn’t going to answer, but after a look that seemed to take Connie’s measure, he answered, ‘Yes, sir. At this point there is nothing to do but wait.’

  Wait and pray. Connie had spent the better part of a lifetime doing just that. Death watches, failing marriages, drug and alcohol addiction: it didn’t matter. In the end, you did what you could. Then you waited and you prayed. Sometimes the prayers were for God to move the world. Sometimes you prayed just to give you the courage to take what the devil dished out.

  Connie began to break apart from the inside at this thought, and before he lost control completely, he forced himself toward other matters. ‘You care for some coffee?’ He found himself looking at the gun one of the men had as he waited for the two men to respond. Its potential for violence gave him odd comfort.

  ‘Thanks, we’re okay. Your wife got us some.’

  Connie looked back in the direction of the kitchen. Rachel. When he had finally gotten home last night Rachel had thrown herself at him. Screaming, swinging her fists at him, her face knotted in fury, she had called him a damn fool. Then had come her coldness. His betrayal was too deep to forgive, and so she had no more words for him.

  Connie wandered back to the kitchen and found Rachel with four women and two men.

  They were all from the church; all but Louise Robbins had stayed with them through the night.

  Louise had come while he was asleep. Someone had left, but he couldn’t remember who.

  Through the kitchen window, Connie could see a deputy in his patrol car parked in front of Bryce Appleberry’s place, his car covered in snow. The angle of the houses gave the deputy a clear view to the Merriweathers’ back door. Connie tried to catch Rachel’s gaze, but she left the room. Well, he was a damn fool!

  Bob Soloway asked Connie if he had been able to sleep. Connie poured a cup of coffee and answered that he slept maybe an hour. He stood for a moment looking at them. He thought about throwing his cup someplace. Bellowing his rage again. Instead, his eyes brimmed up suddenly, and his whole body began to shake. Louise Robbins came to him quickly, taking him in her arms. Her eyes were as wet as his, her voice tremulous. ‘Oh, Connie,’ she whispered,

  ‘it’s going to be...’ She stopped herself, gathering in all the strength she had, ‘...I just pray God protects them.’

  Connie felt something odd running across his hand. He looked dhou񀈹)own curiously to see scolding hot coffee splashing over his fist.

  Chapter 45

  Thursday 8:30 a.m., March 25.

  I FOUND GARRAT IN HER office when I got to work. She had everything from Max and probably three other sources, but she wanted me to go through what I had seen. I told her, then described what I had given Max in terms of advice. I finished my report with a review of the hard evidence we already had in hand. It was music to a prosecutor’s ears. She was paranoid, all the same.

  ‘Sounds like we have enough to convict – assuming we don’t lose the evidence. ’

  I gave her what she was waiting for. ‘I’ll oversee everything personally, Pat. Daily if necessary.’

  ‘Hourly, Rick. And statements,’ she said. ‘I want copies of those on my desk by lunch.

  If we don’t like what we see, you get out and do the follow-ups immediately. Date-stamp everything you do. I want this evidence so pure even a senile appellate judge can follow it. You hear me?’ She wasn’t mad at me or anyone else – with maybe the exception of William Booker, Judge Buford Lynch and that damn fool Connie Merriweather. She was just afraid that we would somehow lose our man again, assuming we ever caught him. Partly it was because the guy was slippery or at least lucky. Mostly it was because all her worldly ambitions hung on the successful prosecution of William Booker.

  ‘What about the murder charges?’ I asked her. ‘Too late?’

  Garrat’s eyes flashed hot. She had already filed with the court, she told me. ‘We lost him on the murders.’

  She said nothing more, and I thought about what must be going through her head. The kind of charges a good prosecutor could stack on Will Booker at this point, assuming we caught him before he killed anyone. It wasn’t pretty. Anything less than life in prison without possibility of parole and there would be talk that Pat Garrat was not equal to her reputation.

  ‘Maybe we ought to let the feds steal this from us,’ I offered gently. ‘Max could scream bloody murder – you know, take some of the heat off us.’

  Her eyes went cold, ‘When we catch this guy, Rick, I’ll build a cage for him! Don’t you worry about that!’

  ‘You care if I start digging around in the case, assuming I have some extra time?’

  Garrat looked surprised. ‘You want in on the hunt?’

  I had never admitted to Garrat how I had ruined myself because of my search for another madman, but she knew. Everyone who knew me knew. ‘No prayer is ever answered that isn’t first prayed,’ I said.

  ‘Look, I think I understand where you’re coming from – ’

  ‘I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I doubt it.’

  Garrat locked her gaze on me, then finally nodded in agreement. ‘It’s not in your job description, Rick. Finding those girls is police business. Prosecuting Mr Booker once he’s caught is our responsibility. Let’s not get confused about that.’ She saw my face screwing up with an answer, and cut me o="1񀈹) tff. ‘I can’t let you do it.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ I answered grimly.

  I was at the door when Garrat called my name. I looked back expectantly. ‘You really think you could find them?’

  ‘Rolly Tincher is running this case, Pat.’

  Garrat’s eyebrows lifted. She knew exactly what I was saying. Rolly Tincher had been trained by Nat Hall. It was the kind of police work that got results without much effort. She turned her chair so she was facing the window. She was thinking about my offer. How it would play in the media if she got me involved in the hunt for the girls. How Max would resent the interference. The political risks weighed heavily against the slim advantage of my experience as a human bloodhound. The chances of either girl surviving were negligible. Max Dunn’s fury was guaranteed. Finally, she shook her head.

  ‘I just can’t do it, Rick. It’s the sheriff’s business until he gives us the case. If we get in the middle of this thing before there’s an arrest, the press will make it look like we don’t have confidence in the sheriff’s office.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘Max has good people working for him.’

  ‘Rolly Tincher isn’t one of them.’

  ‘Max and Rolly go back a long way.’

  ‘That’s the problem. Rolly has his position because he knows too much.’

  ‘He’s not a bad cop, Rick.’

  ‘No, but he’s lazy.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t cross Max on this.’

  I knew what she was saying. She was in trouble for her decision not to prosecute, even though everyone had thought it was a great idea yesterday. The best way to handle things at this point was to hide behind procedures. Respect the bureaucratic boundaries. Let Max Dunn take centre stage and hope everyone forgot that she had reversed her position seemingly without cause a mere four hours before Will Booker finally tore the mask off. I had lost my idealism when this one’s daddy fell to an assassin’s bullet while I lay on the floor already hit. The Governor was taken down by a one-time political ally with a choleric temper. A scandal had left his career in ruins. What he did not understand was that Pat Garrat had protected him for as long as he could. When Garrat had finally walked away, the assassin felt betrayed. He took his revenge on the man he thought was responsible – the only man who had in fact defended him. I got hit throwing myself in front of the first two rounds.