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She felt like screaming. “What do you mean, he got sloppy?”
“Calm down. I’m not talking about a serial killer here. He had a temper, that’s all, and some girls made him mad. Helen . . . I couldn’t do anything about Helen, but no one had ever seen him with her, so it was easy to drop it.” He glanced at Fiona again. “But your sister—I knew from the minute they called me that Tim was done. Her father was a journalist, for God’s sake. Everyone had seen them fighting, had seen her get in his car. Tim called me and said she’d made him mad, it had gone too far, and I had to help him fix it. Someone would be looking for her soon. I had to think fast, and I didn’t have a lot of options. We had no chance to take her over the state line.”
Deb, Fiona thought. My God, Deb.
“The Christophers owned Idlewild then,” Garrett went on. “I thought we’d dump her there, quick, and I’d be able to go back later and do it proper without attracting any suspicion. It was the only thing I could think of to do. So we moved the body from Tim’s car to my cruiser, and while he dumped her, I distracted Lionel and the kids at the drive-in. I told Tim to hide her in the trees, but the idiot had to put her in the middle of the field like she was a goddamned display. A rush job—he just dropped her and ran, even after I told him not to. How stupid can you be?”
Deb, lying in that field, her shirt ripped open. Dropped like trash in the middle of the field, waiting to be seen. Mary Hand, Mary Hand, dead and buried under land . . . Fiona’s head hurt so much.
“It was a goddamned clusterfuck,” Garrett Creel went on. “She wouldn’t have been found so fast if she wasn’t in the field, and I would have had the chance to move her. But someone found her. I had to clean it all up—everything. I had to make sure his footprints were erased when we searched for evidence in the trees.”
“Richard Rush,” Fiona said, remembering the man who owned Pop’s Ice Cream. “He saw Tim at four o’clock in the afternoon. But you told him to say he saw Tim at nine.”
“Fuck him,” Garrett spit, angry now. “His shop was in debt, and I promised he’d be square if he did what I said. Instead, he bailed out on me when he realized he’d be called as a witness at trial. Said he wouldn’t commit perjury because of his kids. That was Tim’s best chance at reasonable doubt, flushed straight down the toilet.”
So many details. So many. Garrett had thought of them all. “The kids at the drive-in,” she said. “They saw you that night. You came and lectured them while Tim dumped the body.”
“That was easier. I tracked them down and told them that if they said anything about seeing me, I’d pin them on drug charges. Underage drinking. I wore my uniform when I sat them down, and I brought another cop with me. Intimidating as hell. Every one of them shit their pants and shut up. Lionel was tougher, but I just threatened to burn down his fucking business, because I knew he didn’t have a penny of insurance. And in the end, you know what? Tim went to jail anyway.” He glanced at her, his gaze furious, his face red. “People are so stupid, don’t you see? Maybe I sound crazy, but for thirty years it was just so goddamned easy. Nothing ever came back on me—not once. What is it with people? Why don’t they see?”
Fiona looked out the window. They weren’t driving back into town; they had turned onto another side road, past the south end of Idlewild.
“Even my own son,” Garrett said. His neck was flushed red where it emerged from his parka, and his hands were tight on the wheel. “I always wanted Jamie to be a cop, but he wasn’t on the force a year before I realized he wasn’t going to be like me. I did my best to raise him right, but he doesn’t have the instincts I do. He isn’t hard enough. He still thinks he can do right by everyone. Tim had brains and guts, at least until that last night. Until that night, I always thought Tim should have been my son instead of Jamie.”
Jamie knows about Helen, Fiona almost said, but she stopped herself. She didn’t think Garrett knew yet that Jamie had pulled the Helen Heyer file, that he’d seen a shoddy investigation under his father’s name. “Let me out of the car.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Garrett said. “You haven’t been listening. My son dating a journalist, Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter, Deb Sheridan’s sister—it isn’t going to happen. You’re too close. I thought you’d flake out and leave him, let him find a nice girl, but you didn’t take your chance. And now look what you’ve put your nose into, of all things. After twenty fucking years, you could ruin everything for me, for the whole force. For Barrons, because you just can’t quit. Jamie will never have the goddamned guts to get rid of you, but I do.”
Terror bloomed in Fiona’s agonized brain, yet above it she was strangely calm. He was going to kill her; he thought it was the only way to keep his secrets. He needed no other reason. Maybe he’d killed before; she didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He was going to kill her now. She could beg and plead and reason, but it wouldn’t work. He’d chosen a course, and he was going to follow it. That was reality, right now.
She unsnapped her seat belt, opened the car door, and jumped before she could form another thought.
The road was so rutted that the car wasn’t going very fast. She landed hard on her shoulder, the gravel ripping through her winter coat and the knee of her jeans. Her palms were scraped raw, and she rolled wildly into the ditch on the side of the road, thick with wet leaves and ice-crusted mud. She heard the car swerve to a stop, and she got up, climbed out of the ditch, and started to run.
The sky overhead was dark, looming gray, the trees stark black against it. She was on the edge of an open field, and even in the depths of her fever, fear, and pain, she knew instinctively that Idlewild was a mile in this direction and town was the other way. She took off across the field as fast as she could, her boots digging into the soft, half-frozen earth. She could try for the gas station at the top of the hill, but Idlewild was closer, and she remembered seeing workers there when she’d driven past it, machines moving.
He caught her quickly; he was bigger than she was, stronger, his legs longer. He drove her to the ground and jammed his knee into her stomach, his face looming over her. “I knew you would do this!” he shouted at her, his face red, his features distorted with rage. “I knew it!” He put his hands on her throat and squeezed.
Fiona bucked beneath him, trying to get away, but he was so much bigger, so much stronger. Spots bloomed behind her eyes. She beat at him with her fists and stared past his shoulder, where crows wheeled in a sky dark with falling snow, and thought, I’m not going to die like Deb. I’m not.
She twisted her hips beneath him and brought her knee up hard into his stomach. When he grunted and his grip on her neck slipped, she kicked him again. And again.
He reared back to hit her, and she smashed a hand into his face, scratching at his eyes. He cursed and his weight slipped, and she scrambled out from under him and ran.
It took him longer to get up—she didn’t look back to see why. Gasping for breath, her throat on fire, she sprinted as hard as she could in the direction of Idlewild, adrenaline giving her a burst of speed. The ground was hard and uneven, her boots kicking through tangles of dead weeds, but for once she didn’t put a step wrong. She just ran and ran.
By the time she got to the cover of the trees, her chest was on fire, her legs weak. She could hear him shouting behind her, his voice echoing off into the open sky, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then, with a chime of terror, she heard the car’s engine. He was going to cut her off when she got to Old Barrons Road, and he wouldn’t have to do it on foot.
Fiona called up the map in her head. She knew every part of this place, every foot of the terrain. She ran past the trees and down through a steep ditch, the bottom soaked with deep frozen mud, and scrambled up the other side, fighting her way through the undergrowth. Her hands were icy cold—she’d lost her gloves somewhere; she had no memory of it—and her throat burned, but ahead she saw the south end of the fence that bordered the Idlewild property, at the far end of the sports field. She climbed the fence, her numb fingers trying to slip on the chain links, and swung herself over.
