Slowly, excruciatingly, they moved down the stairs and began covering the short distance from porch to truck that seemed so very vast to Iris right now. In fact, all of her senses were distorted, not just her spatial perception – the light from her flash was vividly bright, the hushed crunch of icy snow beneath her boots was almost deafening, and the wool of her sweater felt like sandpaper against her skin.
They were close now, circling the vehicle, front to back, lights and guns raised as they swept the interior, and for the first time ever, Iris wondered what a bullet would feel like slamming into her chest at the speed of sound. Her light found the keys dangling from the ignition; otherwise the truck was empty.
‘He’s not in there,’ Iris said.
‘Never thought he would be.’
‘You might have told me that before I spent the last two minutes scared out of my mind.’
One his shoulders lifted slightly. ‘Figured you knew. If he had the keys and he had the vehicle, he would’ve been gone. Are you sure you didn’t leave the keys in the truck?’
‘Sampson.’ She jerked her light to the line of prints they’d avoided stepping in. ‘Those are not mine, and they’re not yours.’
‘Okay. Then why is the truck still here?’
Iris thought of her jumbled dreams, of imagining she was trying to start the SUV, grinding the battery down to its death. She opened the driver’s door and turned the key. Silence.
Sampson almost smiled. ‘Man, you gotta love that. Weinbeck breaks into your house, steals your keys, thinks he’s home free, and then the vehicle won’t start. Just beautiful.’ He swept his light around the truck, and found another set of prints heading away from the driver’s side. ‘Those tracks are going to fill in fast if this keeps up. We’ve got to move.’
It was the first time Iris noticed that the icy mix had changed over to full snow. Funny what your mind shut out when you were totally focused on a simple thing, like trying to stay alive.
They followed the prints down the drive, almost to the barn, and that’s where Sampson stopped. His light followed the trail up to the barn door, then he moved the flash up and down the enormous length of the building. ‘What’s in there?’
Iris knew exactly what he was asking. ‘A lot of empty space, and a lot of places to hide.’
Halfway through Sampson’s nod, the old barn made one of those old barn noises it was always making. He stiffened like a dog on point, then started making funny stabbing gestures all over the place. Iris had a momentary brain freeze. One hour in class, another studying the illustrations, and she’d had all the signals down, but they looked a lot different coming from a real cop instead of a cartoonish drawing in a textbook.
She was to go to the right around the building; he would go left. No noise.
Iris didn’t stop to think about it; she didn’t dare. She just started to move the way she’d been taught, and the second she took her first step through the knee-deep, ice-crusted snow that had drifted up against the building, her brain seemed to close the door on everything except the information her senses were feeding it. The animal-like focus lasted for two more steps, until she heard the sirens and saw the reflection of red and blue lights against the weathered siding as squads started to pull into the driveway.
‘Go!’ Sampson yelled at her, because the sirens had stolen the advantage of silence, and now they had to move faster.
By the time they met on the back side of the barn, there were five other officers slogging as fast as possible through the deep snow to join them.
Sampson and Iris both had their flashlights on a trail of bizarre-looking tracks that started at one of the barn’s back doors and headed straight across the snowy field into the night.
‘What the hell kind of tracks are those?’ someone asked.
‘Snowshoe,’ Iris said, remembering Mark’s notion to embrace winter sports once they had moved out to the country. He’d abandoned that idea after five minutes on the netted paddles last November, almost as fast as he’d abandoned his marriage. ‘My ex-husband had a pair hanging in the barn.’
Deputy Neville, the blue-eyed, baby-faced officer who’d stood near Steve Doyle’s body and wished her a pleasant good morning, moved next to Iris, playing his flashlight over the rolling field that grew corn in the summer and snow in the winter. ‘What’s on the other side of the field?’
‘Sarley Game Preserve,’ Iris said. ‘Five thousand acres of trees and swamps.’
Sampson stared hard at nothing, seeing the Dundas County plat map in his mind. ‘Damnit.
Lake Kittering backs up to the far side of that preserve. Courthouse on the east side of the lake, Bitterroot land on the west. He’s got a straight shot and big head start.’ He jerked his head toward Iris.
‘You have a sled?’
Iris shook her head.
‘Kendall, get on the horn, get the snowmobiles over here fast, as many as they’ve got, then all the rest of you head for Bitterroot, double up on the perimeter patrols. Neville, stick around, we’re going to have to take a look in that barn, just in case…’ He looked down at where Iris was digging under his jacket, around his belt line. He didn’t know what to make of that.
‘Cell phone!’ Iris said, and snatched it away the second he had it out of the holster. While Sampson continued to bark out orders, she called dispatch, pulled all the patrols in tight around Lake Kittering and the game preserve, and then called Maggie Holland at Bitterroot and got her out of bed. When she finished, Sampson took the phone and made one last call to Detective Magozzi’s cell.
Son of a bitch, it was cold, even with all the heavy winter gear he’d found in the basement. If it hadn’t been for that lucky little score, he’d probably be as dead as a doornail by now, laying out here in the field, turning into a snowman himself. Now, there would be some irony.
The snowshoes had been another stroke of luck. They sure as hell took some getting used to, and they were a pain in the ass, collecting snow and bogging him down every couple hundred yards, but he couldn’t have gotten this far, this fast, without them.
And come to think of it, that whole basement thing could have ended badly if the owner of the house had decided to come down to clean the litter box or throw in a load of dirty laundry while he was snoring away by the furnace. But it hadn’t gone down like that, and Kurt Weinbeck was starting to believe that his fortune was finally turning for the first time in his life. Things happened for a reason. Maybe this whole plan of his was destiny, and that fate or the gods or whoever was running the show was on his side, smiling down on him, making sure he had his chance to make things right.
The only problem was, he still wasn’t sure how he wanted his plan to end, or how to make things right. Part of him – the weak part of him – wanted to give Julie another chance, take her and the kid down to Mexico with him and start over, build a new life together. Maybe buy a little place by the beach, get a small trawler, and set up a fishing charter business or something. He wasn’t a wealthy man by any stretch, but he had done pretty well for himself selling insurance and bartending part-time… His thoughts ground to a halt.
Had done pretty well. Past tense. Had done pretty well for himself until that goddamned fucking bitch had sent him to prison. And he just wasn’t sure if he could live with her after that. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of torture she’d put him through; what it was like in hell day after day, month after month, year after year, and know you’d never be able to erase those memories, no matter how hard you tried. No way she’d ever felt that kind of pain.
He felt a white-hot rage building and boiling inside as he thought about the injustice of it all, and his anger, so pure and perfect, gave him the moment of clarity he’d been seeking, just like it always did. Suddenly, he knew exactly what to do. He needed to show her the pain, needed to make her understand what she’d done to him. That was the only way justice would be served. It was payback time.