Though he’d hardly worked, he was surprised to feel a bead of sweat on his forehead. When he lifted his gloved hand to wipe it away, he froze.
His hand was shaking.
He looked at it with disgust, as if the appendage didn’t belong to him, then wiped the sweat away and laid his fingers against his throat. Even through the gloves he could feel that his pulse was too fast. This angered him. There was no excuse for these reactions. He should be in control. He always was.
Novak. He was the reason for the trouble, the reason Ridley didn’t have the control he should have. Ridley turned off the headlamp, plunging himself into a world of blackness, and waited for the silent dark to soothe him.
It always did.
4
There were four hotels in Garrison — two were locally owned, shotgun-style buildings with about a dozen units that looked like they were competing for the next remake of Psycho, and two were chain hotels on the outskirts of town where things had grown up a bit and turned into a sort of minor interstate exit. There were a few chain restaurants near the chain hotels, and a couple of gas stations. Mark chose the only hotel that didn’t have rooms opening directly to the outdoors. He’d never liked those. When you thought of crime scene tape over a hotel-room door, the image that sprang to mind was inevitably of a door that opened to the outside.
The clerk, a pretty brunette, smiled when Mark asked if there were rooms available.
“A few. How many nights?”
Mark hesitated. “One. I’ll just stay the night.”
Once inside the room, he cranked up the heat by ten degrees, dropped his suitcase, and set Ridley’s case file on the little desk by the window. He’d asked for a smoking room, and it stank like one. He always hated that. He’d never been able to get used to the smell. The taste he’d acquired with time. Some people lit candles for the dead, but that showed more than Mark liked to reveal. So he smoked Lauren’s cigarettes, filling his lungs daily with the thing he’d once feared would kill her.
He slid the ashtray over beside the case file, took out an American Spirit, and lit it. He smoked while he watched the wind push the snow around the pool cover, and when the cigarette was done and his mouth was full of the taste, he reached for the phone, ready to call Jeff and confront him. Jeff would have an answer, of course, a bit of sage wisdom, but Jeff should have realized that there were some buttons you didn’t push, no matter how good your intentions.
He had his cell phone in hand when the hotel-room phone rang, and for a moment he was confused and almost answered the cell. Then he picked up the room line, expecting the front-desk clerk because nobody else knew he was here, and a female voice said, “Who in the hell are you, and what do you want out of this?”
After a beat, he said: “My name is Markus Novak. Who in the hell are you?”
“What are you doing asking about my baby?”
The mother. Shit. Should have gone to her first, Mark thought. Not to the police, not to Ridley. Damn it, you knew better.
“I was going to call you, Mrs. Martin. You were next on my list. I was—”
“I was next on your list? You think that’s proper?”
My baby. Mark had a flash of memory: Lauren’s father down on his knees on the afternoon of the funeral, robbed of his ability even to stand.
Sarah Martin’s mother said, “What, you have no answer for that?”
Mark blinked, refocused. “I’d like to explain my role.”
“You don’t have a role. But I’d like to see you.”
“Tell me where to meet you, then. I can head out right—”
“I’m in the lobby of your hotel. And I won’t be leaving until I see you.”
“Be right down,” Mark said, but the line was dead.
She was supposed to look weary. Beaten. He’d met a lot of her kind over the years, enough that he’d begun to believe he could spot them in crowds. Grief took its toll, but grief without answers? That was acid. That ate you slowly but relentlessly.
Sarah Martin’s mother didn’t fit the profile, though. She was lithe and blond and, right now, equipped with a hunter’s stare. She radiated energy, the focus of a master at work on a task, and that was worse, because Mark was the task.
She had her hand extended as he crossed the lobby toward her, which seemed an odd formality, not in keeping with her anger on the phone, but when he reached out to shake it, her fingers moved quickly from his palm and gripped his wrist instead. He looked down, surprised by the strength of her grasp, and when she spoke, her words were hissed.
“Next on your list? You really said that to me? Come into this town asking around about Sarah, and I’m next on your list?”
“I gather the sheriff called you,” Mark said. She moved her fingers higher on his wrist, and his blood pulsed against them. He glanced down again, struggling for words. “I wish I’d been able to introduce myself first. That would have helped. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not a police officer, correct? So who are you? Who sent you here?”
She had the interest of the desk clerk now, and someone else poked a head out of an office. Sarah’s mother, still holding on to his wrist, her eyes scorching, said, “What, would you like to be somewhere else? Don’t want to be embarrassed here, with an audience? You’d rather sneak around the town?”
“Let’s walk and talk, Mrs. Martin. Please.”
“We can stay right here.”
“We can, but we won’t.” Mark went to the doors, and when they slid open, he looked back at her, waiting. He was struck by how unbothered she looked there in the middle of the lobby with everyone staring at her.
Used to that now, he realized. It’s been a long time, and in a town like this, so small? She knows her role now. She’s the dead girl’s mother. Stares don’t bother her. Not anymore. They’re just part of the landscape.
He turned from her and walked through the doors and knew without looking back that she would follow. She was, after all, there for him.
It was getting on toward dark and the wind was blowing harder, and in his hurry, Mark had left even the blazer upstairs. He’d have pneumonia by the time he boarded the plane for Florida. He didn’t know where he was going; he just wanted out of the hotel. There was a steak house across the parking lot, the only target in sight, so he angled toward it. It was some sort of Western-themed thing with wagon wheels on the sign, the type of place that disgusted people who were actually from the West because it reminded them of the moron tourists. Or the tourons, as Mark’s uncles had called them, usually when aggravated by the driving of some fucking flatlander who was uneasy on the mountain roads.
“Don’t you run away from me,” Sarah Martin’s mother called, hurrying in pursuit.
He turned back to her.