Part 11 (1/2)
”He'll call you back. He's real good about returning calls. He'd make a great agent. Bet it wouldn't take much to convince him, either. I think he's really got a thing for Anne Marie.”
”Has anyone notified the Fleming police?”
”I called them on my way here. G.o.d knows I had plenty of time. Honestly, could you have found a house farther out than this?”
”There was a time when you liked my little bungalow in the woods.” He turned his attention to pouring coffee into two mugs that had souvenir of nags head, n.c. in faded blue paint on the front and a pair of equally faded pelicans on the back.
”It has a lot of promise, I'll give you that. But I'll bet those narrow roads up the side of those hills are h.e.l.l in the winter.”
”Guess I'll find out over the next few months,” he said, handing her a mug.
”Guess you will.” She opened a cupboard and surveyed the contents. ”No artificial sweeteners?”
”Sorry. Only the real thing. Sugar's in the bowl on the counter.”
She opted for milk only, stirring it as she spoke. ”Anyway, Fleming sent a patrol car to the Lowell trailer. If he's there, we're going to have to consider the possibility that it wasn't him. I should be hearing from them soon.”
”It's not impossible to drive from Telford, Ohio, to Fleming, Pennsylvania, between midnight and eight or nine in the morning.” He dumped a teaspoon of sugar into his mug and stirred it thoughtfully. ”But would you really expect to find him there? You think he'd be dumb enough to go right back home?”
”Do I think he's dumb enough to shoot someone we expected him to shoot, and then go right back home where we can find him? Two words, Fletcher. Archer Lowell Archer Lowell.”
”So you think he's home.”
”It's a starting place. Where else would he go?”
”On to victim number two?” Will asked.
”I suppose that is a possibility,” she conceded. ”It would sure help if we knew who that was going to be.”
”It would help, too, to know how Archer's getting around. We know he doesn't have a car, he can't rent without a license, and I don't think he's smart enough to steal a car. So he's either gotten a friend to drive him-unlikely, that would require some explanation-or he took public transportation.” Will paused, mentally picking through the possibilities. ”My guess would be a bus. A train would be faster, but it's also more expensive, and as far as we know, Archer has no source of income.”
”You might be on to something.” She set her coffee down on the counter and rummaged in her bag for her phone. ”I'm going to call Veronica Carson back and ask her to check the nearest train and bus terminals in and around Fleming. But that's a little crazy, isn't it? I mean, isn't that like taking a bus to your prom?”
She punched in the numbers, and, while she waited, Will opened the back door and stepped outside onto the small porch he'd rebuilt over the summer. It had rained overnight, and the birdbath the previous owner had left in the yard overflowed water onto the slate patio, the construction of which had followed the porch. There were two chairs and a small table. The patio was too narrow to accommodate anything else.
The air was thick with autumn, the sky dark with leftover storm clouds. Crows screamed at one another in the trees at the back of Will's property. Will stood on the bottom step and felt a little like screaming himself.
Having Miranda in his house, sitting at the kitchen table in the morning once again, had unsettled him. He thought he'd done a d.a.m.n fine job of hiding it, but now, out of her presence, he was having a tough time holding the memories at bay. He'd meant it when he'd told her she was the total package. Her physical beauty was only part of it. When he was with her, it was easy to forget he'd ever been with another woman. And G.o.d knew it had been a while since he had. Miranda just had that effect on him. She'd taken his breath away the first time he'd seen her standing in the door of John Mancini's office on the day she'd reported for work. She still took his breath away. He thought he'd become accustomed to it-to that punch he felt in his gut when he looked at her, when he remembered their time together.
Apparently he was wrong.
The scent of wet earth took him back to a day almost two years ago, when they'd worked a case together in a small western Pennsylvania town where they'd gone to help track a serial killer who left his victims propped up against headstones in the local cemeteries. It had been the first time they'd worked together in months, the first time they'd seen each other in weeks, and Will recalled with total clarity the way he'd felt when he'd seen her get out of her car and walk among the graves that lay between the road and the place where he stood.
He hadn't been able to take his eyes off her. Her hair blew around her head in dark ribbons, and the wind plastered her jacket to her body. By then, he'd become intimately familiar with every curve and hollow, and that familiarity burned deep inside him as he watched her approach. She'd acknowledged him with a slight gesture, a small wave of the fingers of her right hand, and he'd had to force himself to concentrate on the business he'd been sent to do.
The first body they'd found that day had been left sitting against a headstone. The victim's hands had been folded demurely in her lap, and her chin rested on her chest. She'd been a pretty girl before she'd been s.n.a.t.c.hed from her pretty life and stabbed to death. They'd found three more bodies that day, and later, much later, when they returned to the motel where they'd been booked, he'd caught up with Miranda in the bar. They'd gone back to his room, and sought to forget the ugliness they'd seen that day by losing themselves in each other. Later, in the wee hours of the morning, Will had found Miranda out on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, staring up at the sky.
”When I was younger, my sister and I used to do rubbings in cemeteries,” she'd said without turning around. ”You know, wax rubbings of headstones. We used to look for old cemeteries, the ones with the really neat stones. Where people have been resting for years. For centuries, sometimes. Some of the stones were so pretty, some of the inscriptions so poignant. We'd walk along and read the names and the dates. We'd find graves of men who fought in the Civil War, and babies who'd only lived a day.”
”Like the cemetery we were in today,” Will had said, and she'd nodded.
”I don't think I'll ever be able to do that again. Not after seeing what he did to those women . . .”
He'd coaxed her back inside, and they'd made love until the sun came up. Later that day, he took her to another cemetery, this one outside of town, and they walked along the quiet graves, reading the inscriptions to each other. Two hours later, he was on his way to Maine, she to Phoenix. . . .
”Carson is sending someone to the bus terminal with Archer's mug shot, and they're also going to get in touch with his probation officer, see if we can get a warrant issued for Lowell,” Miranda announced from the doorway, oblivious to his disquiet. ”She's already had someone out to talk to Archer's mother. Mrs. Lowell said-surprise, surprise-she hasn't seen Archer since she left for work on Friday morning. He wasn't there when she got home yesterday, and he didn't come home last night. She's very worried about him.”
”I'd be worried, too, if he were my son. But I thought someone was supposed to be keeping an eye on him.”
”I think the Fleming police might have attended the same surveillance workshop as their brothers in Telford. In any event, the police are going down to the Well to talk to the bartender and some of Archer's drinking buddies, see if he mentioned to any one of them that he'd be leaving town.” She opened the screen door and stepped outside. ”You've done a lot of work on the house since the last time I was here. It's really nice, Will.”
”Thanks.”
She descended the steps and stepped onto the patio. ”This is really pretty. I bet it's nice to sit back here and drink your coffee in the morning, read the paper. Or have a drink at the end of the day.”
”It is. I'd invite you to have a seat, but as you can see, everything's wet from the rain.”
”Too bad. It's so cozy.” She looked around the yard. ”You put the fence in yourself?”
”Yes.”
”Planted all those trees?”
”Yes.”
”You do all that over the summer?”
”Yes.”
”You were busy.”
”I had some time on my hands.”
”You take any time off at all?”
”Only to dig another hole,” he told her.
”I noticed the inside of the house was all newly painted, too. And there's real furniture in the living room.”
”I did that back in June.”
”You fixing the house up to sell it?”
”No.” He shook his head. ”I like it here. I want to stay here.”
”It's a great house, Will. You've done wonders with it. Hard to believe it's that same ramshackle old heap of s.h.i.+ngles you bought back when.”
”Thanks.”