Page 43 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

43.

Fiona Lavelle was wearing several layers. Smart. This space, an entrance to an old mine, had to be forty degrees. The stocking cap was probably a fashion statement.

She was definitely on the defensive. Her right hand continued to grip the rock, her left the light. He blinked once more and she backed away and aimed the beam elsewhere.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a professional tracker. I look for missing people. Your fiancé wanted me to find you. Though you’re not engaged, are you?”

“No. He just says that. So he’s here.” Her eyes closed briefly in dismay.

“About an hour ago. When you didn’t show up at the spa.”

A grimace. “Where he sent me to lose weight and get in better shape. He came looking for me when I didn’t pick up like I’m supposed to. He lets two calls go by unanswered and I’m in violation.”

And then what? Shaw wondered. He’d worked a number of jobs involving domestic abuse runaways. The abusers were infinitely clever in establishing rules.

And devising, and delivering, punishments.

Shaw told her, “And he’s here because he had an AirTag or tracker in the car.”

“That’s right. He hides them in very clever places. After I got stuck in the mud I went through the trunk and found it. I broke it but it was too late, I guess.”

“He called a gas station on Route Thirteen, south of Hinowah, on the way to Fort Pleasant. The manager looked over the security video and didn’t see your car. So he figured you must’ve had an accident here between the town and the crossroad.”

“Are you a private eye?”

“Sort of. I’m helping with the levee situation. When he was talking to the police, he heard what I did and offered to pay me to find you.”

She gave him a cynical glance. “How much?”

“Five thousand. Then he went up to seven five.”

She gave a laugh. “Didn’t even jump to ten. And he’s worth twenty-five million. At least.” Her eyes grew troubled. “But—”

“I didn’t tell him. Don’t worry. He believes the accident was real and that you survived and you’re lost in the woods somewhere, probably injured. His concern is real. But it’s like a bank robber’s concern is real—for his loot, if it goes missing.”

She gave a cold laugh. “Good way to put it. You didn’t say anything, so you must have suspected. Why?” She realized she was still holding the rock and dropped it.

“A few things. Why wouldn’t you pick up twenty calls? Excessive calling, even before he knew about the collapse. Typical domestic stalking behavior. And earlier, when I was asking him questions, to get a profile of you, he was patronizing.”

“Oh, one of his specialties.”

Shaw continued, “Then the skid marks on the asphalt just south of the levee? Where your Camaro ended up just after the collapse. There were both front- and rear-wheel skid marks. The front were brake marks. The rear were from acceleration. You made it off the levee and hit the brakes. Then I’m guessing you debated for a minute, made a decision, hit the gas and drove down that old trail to the base of Copper Peak.”

She lifted an eyebrow, clearly impressed with his deduction. “You’re like a detective.”

Sherlock Holmes, her non-fiancé had called him.

“I found your phone—where you meant it to be found. It looked like you were doing a YouTube or Instagram video. But the camera was pointed at the rear wheels. If it had been legitimate you would have included yourself in the driver’s seat, looking at the camera, narrating. But you couldn’t have any footage there—since you weren’t in the driver seat. You were standing outside the open window and using a stick to push the accelerator after you turned the wheel to the right. I saw those footprints.

“Another thing that made me suspicious? He had your passcode. Husband and wife, longtime married, maybe. But a younger couple, engaged or not. No. Passcodes would be secret. By the way, he leapt in after you.”

“ What? That river? Jesus. He can’t swim. Not very well. We go to the Caribbean and mostly he struts. He shows off in front of the women. I’m not allowed to talk to anyone, but he can flirt all he wants.”

“He’s obsessed with you.”

Lavelle scoffed. “A bank robber’s loot. You saved him?”

Shaw had to smile at the hint of regret in her voice.

“I can’t believe I’m baring my soul to you.” A shrug. “But there aren’t a lot of people I can talk to.”

Shaw heard this often. Successful tracking required good listening, and he was fortunate that doing so was a talent he came by naturally.

He looked at the cut on her arm. “Part of your act, the blood on your jacket?”

“Nail file. Stings like hell.”

“Let me see it.”

Superficial.

“Bandages?”

“Band-Aids. In there.” She nodded to her gym bag.

“Cover it. You’ll be fine.”

“My car…can it be fixed? I’m writing a fantasy novel.” She gestured to a notebook. “About a magic sleigh my hero was riding in. I have a subplot where it’s injured and she saves it. But what about my real car?”

“Probably. But you’ll have to leave it there for now. Keep up the fiction for the time being.”

“I figured.”

He nodded. “What exactly was your plan?”

“Originally, I was just going to the spa to get away. He let me go because I told him I was going to work on my weight. He’s been after me for that.”

“He hinted as much when I interviewed him.”

Her jaw clenched in anger. Then she said, “What I was going to do was eat donuts and popcorn and write my book. Get away from him for four days.

“But then the more I drove, not answering the phone, not hearing his voice, I felt free. And then the dam collapsed. It was like a sign. And I thought: What an opportunity! I jumped at the chance. It would seem like I’d died in a natural disaster. One more victim of the flood. My body disappeared. The car found at the bottom of a river. It’d look real.

“I needed to find a place to be out of the storm…I couldn’t get a motel room. He’s on all the credit cards. I read about these old mines on the county’s website. This was one of them. Look, I know, Mr. Shaw—”

“Colter.”

“It all sounds so weird. But I was desperate to get out.” Her voice choked. Tears started to fall. “I was so goddamn stupid. Getting myself into this mess. At first, he was so kind, and interested in me and so romantic. Not much humor. That should’ve been a clue. He was too…”

She was thinking of the right word.

Shaw said, “He suffered from the disease of the literal.”

Lavelle laughed. “Ah, that’s good.” The smile faded. “Then little by little he worked his way in. He got me to quit my job. I was teaching. High school English. He kept asking me about the other faculty members. Questioning me about field trips, who came along with me. Did I really have to stay late? He’d show up at the school, surprising me. He kept saying I didn’t need to work. I could stay home, write my novels, we’d go to country clubs. Go to his firm’s events—he’s an investment advisor—meaning he coerces people into paying him to invest their money.” She sighed. “I could argue and fight…and win sometimes, but it was just exhausting. Easier to just surrender. I wanted to write anyway.” A nod toward her notebook.

“You’re not in grad school?”

“Ha, like he’d let me be around other men? He says that.” She wiped tears. “You know how terrible it is to be worshipped day and night?”

“Not a condition I’ve ever suffered from. Being worshipable.”

Another hollow laugh. “There. Funny! See. Humor. Ah, how I missed that.” She shook her head. “You know how bad it’s gotten? Last month we were having a nice dinner. John was behaving himself. No cross-examination about what I’d done all day. None of that. I thought maybe he’d changed. It was the old John. I thought maybe he was going to surprise me and tell me he was seeing a therapist.

“And you know what he does? Helps me clear the dishes and tells me to find a movie on Netflix and goes to the bathroom. I’m all hopeful…And when he comes out, his hands are bleeding! He cut his own palms with the steak knife I’d used at dinner—which he’d pocketed in a napkin when I wasn’t looking.”

“Defensive wounds.” Shaw understood.

“And just then the police show up. He’d called them from the bathroom, nine-one-one, and said I attacked him.” Lavelle shivered in rage. “He was all, ‘Oh, thank you for coming, Officers, but I’m all right. It’s okay now. She’s calmed down.’ He didn’t want to press charges. After they left he said now I was on record as being an abuser. And when he quote ‘punished’ me next time, he could always claim it was self-defense.”

“And he did?”

“Oh, yes. Every month or so. My sister-in-law sent flowers for my birthday. He was convinced it was some man who’d talked her into doing it for him. I got alcohol sprayed in my eyes for that. Sometimes it would be boiling water. A fall down the stairs…And every time I packed to leave, I’d find him on the phone with my mother or sister-in-law, saying he’d be in the neighborhood and wanted to stop by for a visit. And looking at me with this expression that said, ‘They’re next.’ How can one person be…the embodiment of evil, like that? Sounds like a terrible cliché, but it’s true.”

“A sociopath.”

“I saw an online therapist for a while—until he found out. That’s what she diagnosed. Sociopathic narcissist. I probably knew who he was sooner than I admitted to myself. But, the thing is, Colter, we want somebody in our lives so much. So desperately. And we open up the spiked gates and wave them cheerfully inside.”

One of the reasons his very career existed.

“So. Me. Dead to the world. People like him need somebody to possess. I thought he’d move on, find somebody else. Oh, I felt bad about that. But I needed to survive.” A cock of her head and a wistful smile. “It’s not going to work, though, is it?”

“A hundred years ago, maybe. But the world’s different now. Mobiles, facial recognition, social media, pictures and videos everywhere. And your video selfie of the car? There’s a sound-analysis program that can tell you hit the gas before you put the car in gear. And, there’d be a manhunt. And responders do not like wasting time on people who don’t need rescuing.”

“Unlike you…”

Shaw didn’t smile. He added, “And now, after trying to trick him? Nothing’s going to stop him from coming after you.”

Her face resigned, she said, “Well, it was a good few hours I had, thinking maybe I’d made it to Fraeland.”

As she dabbed at her eyes, he was thinking of one reward job he’d had—in which a young woman had vanished and her parents offered him six figures to find their daughter.

He did.

But too late.

The abusive boyfriend she’d run away from had found her first.

Shaw would always remember the couple’s face as he broke the news.

Lavelle nodded around the cave. “You think I’m in danger here?”

“No. He’s the sort who can’t imagine someone would trash a fifty-thousand-dollar car and run off to a dank cave just to escape from him. He thinks you’re in the woods trying to find your way out. I have some things to take care of. Sit tight here for the night. You’ve got food and water and battery power. You have a phone?”

“A burner. He doesn’t know.”

“Take my number.” He recited it and she punched it into the mobile. “You’re up high enough so that if the levee does go, you won’t be flooded out. I’ll be back in the morning.”

He glanced at her notebooks.

“Work on your novel. I know a few writers. They’d give anything for a few days with no interruptions. Even in an abandoned mine shaft.”

—

Colter found Dorion and Tam Olsen in the command post. He parked and joined them.

“How is he?”

“He’ll live,” his sister told him. “Working again? They don’t know. The doctor said ‘most use’ of his leg. Ed liked to get out into the field. He was never good with desk work.”

Colter noted that Olsen’s face was particularly troubled. She was a soldier, yes, but army engineers were construction professionals for the most part; violence and gunplay rarely knocked.

“That’s where it happened?” Colter asked. He nodded to caverns on the hillside where the CP sat, about three hundred yards west.

“That’s right. He was getting those kids out of there.” Dorion, rarely bitter, muttered, “It was all a lark for them. And my friend took a bullet to save them from getting their asses drowned.”

Olsen asked, “He was only shot once?”

“That’s right.”

“I heard three. He missed twice, I guess.”

Dorion said, “No, there was just one. The others were echoes.”

“The valley, the hills,” Colter said. Then he did something they ought to have done an hour ago: he pulled the rope to release the flap of the tent. Protecting them from the sniper.

If he was shooting at one investigator, why not more?

His sister asked, “What’re we up against here? You don’t talk much about your jobs. You been involved in anything like this?”

He thought for a moment. “Ashton’s death. It was about a lot more than just that. But the truth stayed a complete mystery until a long time later. This reminds me of that. Not the facts, but the…” He sought for a word. “Tone.”

He then turned his attention from the levee and from Gutiérrez’s shooting. “We have another wrinkle. The woman whose fiancé drove here from Reno?”

“John Millwood?”

“It’s a domestic. He’s abusive and she engineered the whole thing to escape from him.”

He explained about Fiona Lavelle’s plan.

“Fake her own death?” Olsen said. “Sounds like the plot of a bad thriller flick.”

“Her idea was to buy some time. Probably hoped he’d move on from her.”

“He won’t,” Olsen said. “They never do.” Spoken from experience, darkly.

“She’s where?”

“Hiding out in an old silver mine.”

“He suspect anything?”

“No, he believes the accident was real and county deputies and I are looking for her. He’s in a motel in Fort Pleasant. I left her with chocolate, jerky and beer. And she’s writing the great American novel. Or the great something kind of novel. She’s got my number if there’s a problem.”

And there were plenty of dangerous-looking rocks at her disposal.

“We’ll deal with that situation later.”

Olsen asked, “Gutiérrez’s shooter, was it—?”

“Bear,” came a woman’s voice behind them.

Debi Starr walked into the tent.

The siblings and Olsen turned to her. “I found the shooter’s nest in the rocks on the south side of the valley.”

It was a huge area, he was thinking. How on earth had she found exactly where he’d shot from?

She explained. “I nailed the slug. Good news it went through soft tissue—both good for Ed and for the forensics—and ended up in the dirt. I stuck a straw in the bullet hole in the ground and sighted up it. Adjusting for elevation and a little wind, I found the nest pretty easy. If he had a rest for his rifle it was silicon and not a cloth sandbag. No fibers. And no brass. He’s a pro, no doubt about it now. Remember what I said about not having anything personal on him?

“He tried to walk away from the nest careful and was pretty good at it, but he planted a foot right in a bit of soft mud. Probably didn’t bother to clean it because he was in a hurry— and because he doesn’t think much of us poor small-town constables.

“But he’s in for a surprise. I drove out to the bridge where you got attacked this morning, Colter. Found matching boot prints. So Bear’s the sniper. I’ll write an application for a warrant and, you”—a nod toward Colter—“do an affidavit putting the shooter at the copper mine earlier today. And we pay Mr. Redding a visit.”