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An old pickup with a camper shell over the bed sat off the road on the access drive into a field down the road, partially obscured from view by another stand of small trees. Someone else who didn’t want to be seen from the building where Dahl held Carey.

“Can you see the plates?”

Tippen gave him a look. “Can you see the plates?”

“Christ, we’re old,” Kovac said. “Bring the shotgun. Let’s go.”

They got out of the cruiser, careful not to make noise doing it. Leaving the doors open, they made a dash for the truck.

“Is this what they use for an undercover car in the sheriff’s department?” Kovac said sarcastically when they stood at the nose of the pickup.

The truck had to be twenty years old. A Ford F-150. The once navy blue paint had faded over the years from sun and weather.

As Tippen called in the plate number on his cell phone, Kovac looked in the window of the cab. There was nothing in it. Not so much as a gum wrapper. He looked in through the windows of the camper shell. A couple of duffel bags, a small Igloo cooler.

He went around and opened the back to get a better look inside. One of the bags was long enough to hold a rifle. A luggage tag hung from one of the handles.

Kovac went cold as he read it.

“The truck belongs to a Walter Dempsey,” Tippen said. “Safe to assume he’s a relative of our man Stan.”

Kovac popped the latch on the tailgate and dropped it open. He reached for the nearest of the duffel bags. It was unzipped. Inside was an assortment of tools-handsaws, screwdrivers, pliers… and a wood-burning tool.

“Great,” Tippen said. “Double your maniacs, double your fun.”

Kovac jammed his hands at his waist and paced around in a little circle. They didn’t know jack shit about what might be going on in that building. There wasn’t time to do reconnaissance, regroup, form a strategy. Carey was in there with two men bent on no good.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

As he rounded the front end of the truck, he thought he heard voices in the distance. He walked faster. When he cleared the copse of trees, he broke into a run.

Someone was running toward the road.

A gunshot cracked the air.

The runner was Carey.

She tripped and fell hard.

She didn’t move.

Kovac’s mind was going wild. Had she been shot? Had she been dropped by Dempsey and a hunting rifle?

He didn’t look beyond her to see but barreled down what once had been a driveway. If the shooter had a scope, he was screwed, but he kept running.

“Carey!”

He dropped to his knees as he reached her.

“Carey!”

She lay facedown, crying weakly. Kovac put two fingers against her throat and found her pulse racing wildly.

He bent down close and brushed her hair back. “Carey, it’s me. It’s Sam. Can you hear me? Just lie still.”

Feeling his way gingerly down her back, he expected his hand to come away bloody from the gunshot that had dropped her. But he couldn’t find an entry wound.

Headlights washed over them. Tippen roared in with the squad car, skidding sideways to a stop between them and the building, giving them cover.

“Carey?” Kovac said. “Are you shot? Did he shoot you?”

All she could do was shake, and cry harder.

“I killed him!” she cried. “Oh, my God, I killed him!”

Kovac eased her over onto her side, brushed her hair back from her face. His hand was shaking like an old man’s.

“Shhh… It’s okay, you’re okay,” he said softly.

He pulled his suit coat off and covered her with it.

Where the hell was backup? Where the hell was the ambulance?

She pushed herself up with one arm and tried to wipe her face with a hand that was covered in blood.

“Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath. To Carey he said, “Lie down. Carey, lie down. Just lie down.”

She shook her head. “No. I want to go home.”

“Carey, lie down,” Kovac said more forcefully. “You’re bleeding.”

She looked at her hand, confused.

“It’s not mine,” she said, but she sounded disoriented, maybe delusional.

“Goddammit, Carey, lie down, or I’m putting a knee into your chest and holding you down!”

Still confused, she sank back down. Kovac grabbed the lower part of the man’s shirt she wore and tore it open. His hands came away bloody from the shirt, but he could find no wound on her belly.

“It’s not mine,” she said again, sitting up. “I killed him.”

Clutching Kovac’s arms, she fell against him, sobbing.

Kovac put his arms around her and held her tight while she cried, telling her again and again, “It’s all right. It’s over now. It’s over.”

He knew that that wasn’t true. It wasn’t over. Carey Moore couldn’t just go home and walk back into her life as if nothing had ever happened. She would have to be interviewed, would have to recount and relive what had happened to her here. She would have to be checked over by a doctor for injuries. If she had been sexually assaulted, she would have to endure the rape exam.

God, he hoped that that wasn’t the case. She’d had enough trauma without adding “rape survivor” to the list.

Tippen came around the back of the car. “Is she all right?”

Kovac didn’t know quite how to respond, so he didn’t. “What’s going on? Where’s Dahl? Where’s Dempsey?”

“Dead and dead. Dahl was shot in the face. Looks like Dempsey has a single stab wound.”

“I killed him,” Carey said, still crying against Kovac’s shoulder. “I killed him. I killed a man.”

Kovac stroked his hand over her wet hair. It had begun to rain in earnest. Thunder rumbled overhead. In the near distance he could hear the sirens approaching.

“Shhh… It’s over,” he said quietly. “It’s over. You’re safe now. That’s all that matters.”

64

THE CHAOS OF what had happened after Kovac had arrived at the scene was a jumbled blur of color and activity in Carey’s mind. She remembered the police and sheriff’s cars arriving. The noise of men arguing over jurisdiction. The carnival quality of the lights from the cars and the ambulance. A paramedic had given her something to calm her down. It made her feel numb. All things considered, that was a good thing.

Instead of letting all of it swirl around and around inside her head, she tried to focus on the sense of relief and of being safe as Sam Kovac had sat there in the pouring rain and held her. That was what she wanted now: to feel safe, to feel there was someone right there to hold her if she needed it.

But that feeling also brought sadness as she realized she hadn’t had that kind of support in a very long time. When her father had been healthy, he had been her Rock of Gibraltar. David had never quite filled that place. He had tried to in the first years of their marriage but had gradually stepped out of that role. And she had gradually stopped wanting him to try harder.

The red-haired nurse from Friday night bustled into the room to check her IV and make notes in a chart.

“You know,” she said, giving Carey a stern look completely betrayed by the kindness in her eyes,“we’re getting pretty sick and tired of seeing you around this place.”

“I promise this is my last time,” Carey said.

“How are you feeling?”

“Numb.”

“Good for you! Nothing like a little happy pill to take the edge off. I’m proposing the hospital put a gum ball machine in the nurses’ lounge and keep it filled with Valium. Everyone would be so much happier to do their jobs.”

Kovac peeked in the door.

“Is Casey giving you a hard time?” he asked, letting himself in.

The nurse gave him an innocent look. “Who, me?”

“The last time I was in her ER,” he said, coming to stand beside the nurse, “she stapled my forehead together with an actual staple gun.”