Joanna said, “Why did you leave, Ethan? It was really early when I heard you drive off.”
He looked at Autumn, shoved the horrific words back in his mouth and shrugged. “I had something pretty urgent to take care of.”
He saw her stiffen. She guessed, he thought, that Blessed had done something to get him away from the house, something awful. She swallowed. She didn’t want to know, at least not yet.
Thirty minutes later, Faydeen called to tell him they’d identified the victim. “His name is Harold Spalding, sixty-six, a retired bush pilot from Sitka, Alaska. A neighbor of his at the campsite said his daughter and her family were coming in today and they planned to spend a week exploring Titus Hitch. He was going to teach his grand-kids about survival skills in the wilderness.”
Only now he wouldn’t. Blessed had seen to that.
Ethan knew he’d have to meet with Harold Spalding’s daughter and family. He’d tell her that her father had been murdered, but no more. But what could he tell her about the motive? He felt battered and his rage at Blessed was beyond anything he’d ever known, through he’d been powerfully angry when he’d been at the DEA at what he’d seen the drug lords do. He walked back into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot Joanna had brewed. It was strong and rich. It cleared his head but didn’t lessen the anger in his gut.
31
Tuesday afternoon
A black FBI helicopter set down on the country road in front of Sheriff Ethan Merriweather’s house, whipping up the hot afternoon air and bringing everyone outside. Autumn yelled, “Oh, my. Look, Ethan, Mama, it’s the President! He just landed on the road!”
“Shows you how important we are,” Ethan said, and grinned. “I didn’t even have to call him. Service right to our front door.” He watched a big man wearing a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, black slacks, and boots climb down. He turned to help down a woman, tall and slender, dressed as he was, all the way to the black low-heeled boots. She had incredible hair, a beautiful red, vivid as an Irish sunset. The man waved to the helicopter pilot and the bird lifted off.
The two of them were carrying leather jackets over their arms, and the man held a black computer case.
So this was Dillon Savich. Ethan had forgotten how sharp a fed could look. He had dressed like that himself three years ago, before he’d realized they’d cast him in a role he didn’t want to play in the long run and had come back home to the mountains and to flannel shirts, boots, and jeans. He wondered if his deputies would have thought he’d looked as cool as these two back in the day. It seemed like a hundred years ago.
He felt Autumn’s small hand slip into his. He grinned down at her. “Sorry, babe, I don’t think it’s the President. But maybe it’s somebody you know.”
She became very still, shaded her eyes. She shouted, “Dillon!” and broke away from Ethan and her mother and dashed across the front yard, Big Louie barking at her heels, toward that fed who looked hard as nails, his black hair whipped up by the helicopter blades.
Savich recognized the little girl instantly and pulled up. “I believe it’s my midnight visitor,” he said to Sherlock, then caught the little girl when she opened her arms and leaped at him. “Hi, Autumn,” he said. He kissed her cheek and held her close, breathing in her kid smell, different from Sean, not better or sweeter, just different. A little-girl smell, he thought, and wouldn’t that be nice? “I like finally seeing you in the real world, in real time.”
“Real time,” she repeated. “I like that too.” She reared back in his arms and lightly touched her fingertips to his cheek. “You’re awful handsome, Dillon.”
“Well, my wife thinks so,” Savich said.
“You’re almost as handsome as Ethan.”
“Hmmm. Say hello to my wife Sherlock. Sherlock, this is Autumn who just kicked my ego in the chops.”
Sherlock lightly touched the little girl’s hand, smiled at her. “Do you know we have a little boy? His name is Sean.”
Autumn slowly shook her head. “Dillon didn’t tell me. Is he as big as me?”
“Not quite,” Sherlock said. “And he’s got a terrier named Astro. Astro’s all white, a live wire, and he fits right in Sean’s arms.”
Savich said, “Is that your mama standing over there, Autumn?”
The little girl nodded happily and called out, “Mama! This is Dillon. And Sherlock. They’ve got a little boy named Sean. And Astro. It sounds like Big Louie is lots more dog than Astro.”
“Nice job of ice-breaking,” Savich whispered to Sherlock. “Let’s meet everyone, Autumn. Would you introduce us?”
An hour later, Ethan was cooking ribs and chicken and vegetables and foil-wrapped potatoes on his backyard grill, his eyes searching the woods for any sign of movement, any sign of Blessed. Savich turned twelve pieces of corn on the cob on the grill with a long-handled fork, whistling, asking more questions as they occurred to him, getting a feel for the place, and this bizarre situation, and drinking the best iced tea he’d had in a very long time.
He said, “Did you tell Joanna any details about what happened to the hiker?”
“Not all of it. I couldn’t. She took it pretty hard.”
“This Bricker’s Bowl, where the Backmans live—since you know Blessed’s identity, did you call the local sheriff?”
Ethan turned a chicken breast, slathered on more barbecue sauce, he said, “Yeah, I called Sheriff Cole, for all the good it did me. He aked me straight off if I could identify Blessed Backman as the man responsible for all the trouble, and of course I couldn’t. I never saw him without his mask. I asked him to e-mail me a photo of Blessed and Cole said yeah, yeah, sure, he’d do that. When I told him about what Autumn saw, he sort of chuckled and said it was a private cemetery, no law against shuffling bodies around, now, was there? Of course, in this case, it sounded like the little girl dreamed it all. Sure, he’d go talk to Miz Shepherd, blah, blah. I wished I could have reached his throat through the phone.”
Savich said thoughtfully, “I’m thinking Sherlock and I should pay a visit to Bricker’s Bowl. I followed up on some Web research Sherlock told me about. I found a mention of what may be the Backmans in a blog by a group that calls themselves Children of Twilight. They traced the IP address of the server to northern Georgia, near Bricker’s Bowl. The blog claimed to be written by a Caldicot Whistler, who wrote with the snake-oil charm of a charismatic cult leader. It mentioned only their first names—Blessed, Grace, and Shepherd, as disciples who had developed the powers of mind under Whistler’s guidance. A cult requires money. I want to find out where the money’s coming from.”
Ethan knew where all the money came from, supposedly, but he simply couldn’t bring himself to tell Savich that Theodore Backman was a slot-machine whisperer.
Finally, Ethan couldn’t stand it. As he brushed barbecue sauce on the ribs and flipped the onions, he said, “Did Autumn really suddenly appear in your head one night and talk to you?”
Savich nodded as he carefully turned over the tinfoiled potatoes buried in the coals. He looked at Ethan. “It surprised me but good. At the time I was racing Lance in the Alps, both exciting and scary, since my bike was maybe three inches from a cliff, when there she was, right in front of me. I tell you, at first I thought I’d crashed my bike right over that cliff. I remember it was midnight on the dot.”
“She ... just appeared? Like that?” He snapped his fingers. “In your head?”