The answer came with another stunning blow to his face from the butt of her gun, leaving the inside of his lips torn and bloody and his mouth full of broken fragments of teeth.
“My name,” she said crisply, “is Captain Stacy Bowdree, USAF, and I am the very worst thing that’s happened to you in your entire shitty life.”
65
Corrie Swanson saw the tall, handsome figure of Stacy Bowdree emerge out of the swirling snow, leading a man with his hands tied together and his shaggy head bowed. She dimly wondered if it was all a dream. Of course it was a dream. Stacy would never be up here.
As Stacy stopped before her, Corrie managed to say, “Hello, dream.”
Stacy looked aghast. “My God. What happened to you?”
Corrie tried to think back on all that had happened, and couldn’t quite bring it into focus. The more she tried to remember, the stranger everything became. “Are you for real?”
“You’re damn right!” Stacy bent forward, examined Corrie closely, her blue eyes full of concern. “What are you doing with these handcuffs fastened to your wrist? And your hair is burned. Jesus, were you in that fire?”
Corrie tried to form the words. “A man…tried to kill me in the tunnels…but the rattlesnakes…”
“Yeah. This is him.” Stacy shoved the man facedown into the snow before Corrie and put her booted foot on his neck. Corrie noticed the .45 in Stacy’s hand. She tried to focus on the man lying on the ground but her eyes were swimming.
“This is the guy hired to kill you,” Stacy went on. “I caught him just as he was about to pull the trigger. He won’t tell me his name, so I’m calling him Dirtbag.”
“How? How…?” It all seemed so confusing.
“Listen. We’ve got to get you to a hospital and Dirtbag to the police chief. There’s a snowcat about half a mile away, near the burnt pump building.”
Pump building. “Burn…He tried to burn me alive.”
“Who? Dirtbag here?”
“No…Ted. I had my bump key…picked the cuffs…just in time…”
“You’re not making much sense,” Stacy said. “Let me help you up. Can you walk?”
“Ankle’s broken. Lost…a finger.”
“Shit. Let’s take a look at you.”
She could feel Stacy examining her, gently touching her ankle, asking questions and probing for injuries. She felt comforted. A few minutes later Stacy’s face came back in focus, close to her own. “Okay, you’ve got a few second-degree burns. And you’re right: your ankle’s broken and a little finger’s gone. That’s bad enough, but luckily it seems to be all. Thank God you were bundled up in winter clothes, otherwise you’d be a lot more burned than you are.”
Corrie nodded. She couldn’t quite understand what Stacy was saying. But was it really Stacy, and not some vision? “You disappeared…”
“Sorry about that. When I cooled off I realized those assholes had hired some thug to drive you out of town, and so I shadowed you for a while and pretty soon saw Dirtbag, here, skulking after you like a dog sniffing for shit. So I followed him. In the end, I stole a snowmobile back there in the equipment shed — just as the two of you did — followed your tracks up here just in time to see Dirtbag vanish into the mine entrance. I lost you in the mines but figured he had, as well, and I managed to backtrack in time.”
Corrie nodded. Nothing was making any sense to her. People had been trying to kill her — that much she knew. But Stacy had saved her. That’s all she needed to know. Her head was spinning and she couldn’t even seem to hold it up. Black clouds gathered in front of her eyes.
“Okay,” Stacy continued, “you stay here, I’ll take Dirtbag to the cat and then we’ll drive back to get you.” She felt Stacy’s hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “Hang in there just a minute more, girl. You’re dinged up, but you’re going to be okay. Trust me, I know. I’ve seen…” She paused. “Much worse.” She turned away.
“No.” Corrie sobbed, reaching out for Stacy. “Don’t go.”
“Have to.” She gently put Corrie’s hand to her side. “I can’t keep Dirtbag under control and help you, too. It’s better if you don’t walk. Give me ten minutes, tops.”
It seemed a lot shorter than ten minutes. Corrie heard the roar of a diesel, then saw a cluster of moving headlamps stabbing through the murk, approaching fast, pulling up to the mine entrance in a swirling cloud of snow. A strange, pale figure emerged — Pendergast? — and she felt herself suddenly in his arms, lifted bodily as if she were a child again, her head cradled against his chest. She felt his shoulders began to convulse, faintly, regularly, almost as if he was weeping. But that was, of course, impossible, as Pendergast would never cry.
Epilogue
The brilliant winter sun streamed in the window and lay in stripes across Corrie’s bed at the Roaring Fork Hospital. She had been given the best room in the hospital, a corner single on a high floor, the large window overlooking most of the town and the mountains beyond, everything wreathed in a magical blanket of white. This was the view Corrie had awoken to after the operation on her hand, and the sight had cheered her considerably. That was three days ago, and she was set to be discharged in two more. The break in her foot had not been serious, but she had lost her little finger. Some of the burns she’d suffered might scar, but only slightly, and only, they had told her, on her chin.
Pendergast sat in a chair on one side of the bed and Stacy sat in another. The foot of the bed was covered in presents. Chief Morris had been in to pay his respects — he’d been a regular visitor since her operation — and after inquiring about how Corrie was feeling and thanking Pendergast profusely for his help in the investigation, he’d added his own gift (a CD of John Denver’s greatest hits) to the pile.
“Well,” said Stacy, “are we going to open them, or what?”
“Corrie shall go first,” said Pendergast, handing her a slim envelope. “To mark the completion of her research.”
Corrie tore it open, puzzled. A computer printout emerged, covered with columns of crabbed figures, graphs, and tables. She unfolded it. It was a report from an FBI forensic lab in Quantico — an analysis of mercury contamination in twelve samples of human remains — the crazed miners she’d found in the tunnels.
“My God,” Corrie said. “The numbers are off the charts.”
“The final detail you require for your thesis. I have little doubt you will be the first junior in the history of John Jay to win the Rosewell Prize.”
“Thank you,” Corrie said, and then hesitated. “Um, I owe you an apology. Another apology. A really big one this time. I messed up, well and truly. You’ve helped me so much, and I just never really appreciated it the way I should have. I was an ungrateful—” she almost said a bad word but amended it on the fly— “girl. I should have listened to you and never gone up there alone. What a stupid thing to do.”
Pendergast inclined his head. “We can go into that some other time.”
Corrie turned to Stacy. “I owe a big apology to you, too. I’m really ashamed that I suspected you and Ted. You saved my life. I really don’t have the words to thank you…” She felt her throat close up with emotion.
Stacy smiled, squeezed her hand. “Don’t be hard on yourself, Corrie. You’re a true pal. And Ted…Jesus, I can hardly believe he was the arsonist. It gives me nightmares.”
“On one level,” Pendergast said, “Roman wasn’t responsible for what he did. It was the mercury in his brain, which had been poisoning his neurons since he was in his mother’s womb. He was no more a criminal than were those miners who went mad working in the smelter and ultimately became cannibals. They are all victims. The true criminals are certain others, a family whose malevolent deeds go back a century and a half. And now that the FBI is on it, that family will pay. Perhaps not as brutally as Mrs. Kermode did, but they will pay nonetheless.”