The Ridge

THE RIDGE

MICHAEL KORYTA

For Tom Bernardo, whose generosity and friendship carried me

through this one, and in recognition of the incredible mission and

dedication of Joe Taft and the Exotic Feline Rescue Center of

Center Point, Indiana. Deepest thanks.

Spirits pay rent to the basements they haunt.

Joe Pug,

“Nation of Heat”

And I became a thin blue flame,

polished on a mountain range.

Josh Ritter,

“Thin Blue Flame”

1

KEVIN KIMBLE MADE THE drive to the prison before dawn, as he always did, the mountains falling away as dark silhouettes in the rearview mirror. In the summer the fields below had been rich with the smells of damp soil and green plants reaching to meet the oncoming sun, but now the air was cold and darkness lingered and the scents were of dead leaves and wood smoke.

It was an hour-long trip through winding country highways, traffic almost nonexistent this early, and he could feel the familiar weight of a sleepless night as he drove. He was never able to sleep the nights before the visits.

A steady rain was falling when he left Sawyer County, but down out of the mountains of eastern Kentucky and into the fields in the north-central portion of the state the rain tapered off into a thick fog, the world existing in gray tendrils. Foreboding, but peaceful and silent.

Shattered by a cell-phone ring.

He looked at the display, expecting to see his department’s dispatch number, but was instead faced with one he didn’t recognize. He considered letting the call go to voicemail, but it was 5:35 A.M. and even wrong numbers deserved to be answered at such a time, just in case.

“Chief Deputy Kimble,” he said, putting the phone to his ear.

“Good morning. I hope I didn’t wake you. I had a feeling I wouldn’t.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Wyatt French.”

Kimble shifted his hand to the top of the steering wheel and swung out into the next lane, away from a semi that was casting a thick spray back into his windshield as it chugged northbound, toward the Ohio River.

“How’d you get this number?” Kimble knew Wyatt French through one thing only—police work, and it was not as a colleague. He wasn’t in the habit of giving out his personal number to the people he arrested or interviewed, the two roles Wyatt French had occupied in the past. Kimble had done such a thing just once, in fact, and endured eight months of physical therapy after that decision.

“I have a question for you,” French said.

“I just asked you one of my own.”

“Mine’s a little more important.” The man’s voice sounded off, something coming up from beneath rocks or behind a sewer grate, someplace home to echoes and faint water sounds.

“You’ve been drinking, Mr. French.”

“So I have. It’s a legal enterprise, chief deputy.”

“Conditionally legal,” said Kimble, who had arrested Wyatt for public intoxication on three occasions and once for drunk driving. “Where are you?”

“I’m at home, where it’s absolutely legal.”

Home. Wyatt French’s home was a wooden lighthouse he’d built with his own hands. When he wasn’t causing trouble in the Whitman town streets, a bottle of cheap bourbon in hand or tucked into his mouth between a bristling gray mustache and an unkempt beard, the department still had to field complaints about the man. The strange, pulsing light that lit the woods in the rural stretch of abandoned mining country where he lived drew curiosity and ire.

“You’re on the road,” French said. “Aren’t you? Early for a drive.”

Kimble, who had things more personal weighing on his mind than this old drunk in the lighthouse, said, “Go to bed, man. Get some sleep. And however you got this number? Delete it. Don’t call my private number again.”

“I would like a question answered!”

Kimble moved his foot to the brake, tapped gently, dropping the speed down below the limit. French’s voice had gone dark and furious, and for the first time, Kimble had a sense of real concern over the man’s call.

“What’s your question?”

“You’re in charge of criminal investigations for your department,” French said. “For the whole county.”

“That’s right.”

“Which would you rather have: a homicide or a suicide?”

Kimble had a vision of Wyatt as he’d seen him last, weaving down the sidewalk outside a liquor store in the middle of the day. Kimble was on his way to buy a sandwich for lunch and Wyatt was on his way back from having attempted to buy a bottle of bourbon for the same. They bounced him out when he tried to pay with quarters, dimes, and nickels. That had been a few months ago. Since then, Kimble hadn’t seen the old degenerate around any of his usual haunts.

“Mr. French,” he said. “Wyatt? Don’t talk like that. Okay? Just put the bottle down and get into bed.”

“I’ll get more than enough rest once I’ve had an answer. It matters to me, Deputy Kimble. It matters a great deal.”

“Why?”

Silence, then, in a strained voice, “The question was simple. Would you rather have a—”

“Suicide,” Kimble interrupted. “There, you happy? I picked, and I was honest. But I don’t want either, Wyatt. I hate them both, and if there’s some reason for this call beyond alcohol, then—”

That provoked a long, unsettling laugh, the tone far too high and keening for Wyatt’s natural voice.

“There’s a reason beyond booze, yes, sir.”

“What is it?”

“You said you would prefer a suicide. I’m of a mind to agree, but I’d like to hear your reasoning. Why is a suicide better?”

Kimble was drifting along in the right lane, alone in the smoky fog and mist. He said, “Because I don’t have to worry about anyone else being hurt by that particular person. It’s always tragic, but at least I don’t have to worry about them pointing a gun at someone else and pulling the trigger.”

“Exactly. The very conclusion I reached myself.”

“If you have any thoughts of suicide, then I’ve got a number I want you to call. I’m serious about this. I want you—”

“Now what if,” Wyatt French said, “the suicide victim wasn’t entirely willing.”

Kimble felt an uneasy chill. “Then it’s not a suicide.”

“You say that confidently.”

“I am confident. If the death was not the subject’s goal, then it was not a suicide. By definition.”

“So even if a man killed himself, but there was evidence that he’d been compelled to in some way—”

“Wyatt, stop. Stop talking like this. Are you going to hurt yourself?”

Silence.

“Wyatt?”

“I wanted to know if there was any difference in the way you’d investigate,” the man said, his words clearer now, less of the bourbon speaking for him. “Do you pursue the root causes of a suicide in the same manner that you would a homicide?”

Kimble drove along in the hiss of tires on rain-soaked pavement for a time, then said, “I pursue the truth.”

“Always?”

“Always. Don’t give me anything to pursue today, Wyatt. I’m not joking. If someone has been hurt, you tell me that right now. Tell me that.”

“No one has been hurt yet.”

Yet. Kimble didn’t like that. “If you’re thinking about suicide, or anything else, then I want—”

“My thoughts aren’t your concern, deputy. You have many concerns around you in Sawyer County, some of them quite serious, but my thoughts aren’t the problem.”

“I’m going to give you a number,” Kimble said again, “and ask you to call it for me, please. You called me early, and on a private line, and I’ve given you my time and respect. I hope you’ll do the same for me.”

“Certainly, sir. If there are two things I’d hope you might continue to grant me in the future, it is your time and respect.”

French’s voice was absent of mockery or malice. Kimble gave him the number, a suicide assistance line, and he could hear scratching as Wyatt dutifully wrote it down.

“Take care of yourself,” Kimble told him. “Get dried out, get some rest. I’m worried about the way you’re talking.”

“What you should be worried about is that I’ll choose to live forever. Then you’d really have your work cut out.”

It was the first time any of Wyatt’s traditional humor had showed, and Kimble let out a long breath, feeling as if the worst of this strange call was past.

“I’ve dealt with you for this long,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right not to keep at it.”

“I appreciate the sentiment. And deputy? You be careful with her.”

Kimble was silent, lips parted but jaw slack, and didn’t realize he’d let his foot off the accelerator again until a minivan rose up into his mirror with an accompanying horn, then an extended middle finger from the driver who swerved around him. Kimble brought his speed back up and said, “Who do you mean, Wyatt?”

“The one you’re going to see,” Wyatt French told him. “Be very careful with her.”

His voice had the low gravity of someone speaking at a wake. When Kimble finally got around to responding, offering up an awkward attempt at denial, he realized that the line was dead.

There was no time to call back from the highway, because the exit for the women’s prison was just ahead, and Kimble had no desire to hear the old drunk’s strange voice again anyhow. Let him sip his whiskey inside his damned lighthouse in the woods. Let his disturbed mind not infect Kimble’s own.

He set the phone down and continued up to the prison gates.

2

A LONG, SINISTER BRICK STRUCTURE, the women’s prison had been built back in 1891, a hundred and twenty years before it would house an inmate of interest to Kimble. Approved adults could begin arriving at 6 A.M., but the parking spaces were empty when he pulled in. Kimble was always the first one in the door. He liked to be alone in the visiting area, and he liked making the drive in the dark.

They checked him in with familiarity and a quiet “Morning, deputy” and then escorted him into the visitation room. He was afforded privileges here that others were not, a level of privacy and trust that others were not, because he was police. And because they all knew the story.

She was alone in the room, waiting for him at the other end of a plastic table, and when he saw her his breath caught and his heartbeat stuttered and he felt a fierce, cold ache low in his back.

“Jacqueline,” he said.

She rose and offered her slim, elegant hand. Warm, gentle fingers in his cool, callused palm, and he found himself, as he always did when they touched, wetting his lips and looking to the side, as if something had moved in the shadows at the edge of the room.

“Hello, Kevin.” She took her seat again, and he pulled up a plastic chair that screeched coming across the floor and sat beside her. Not all the way at the opposite end of the table, but not too close, either. Purgatory distance.

“Are you well?” he said.

“Yes.”

Her voice took that distance between them and melted it like ice in a fist. It was so knowing, so intimate, she might as well have been sitting in his lap. The ache in his back pulsed.

“You look good. I mean… healthy.”

Looked healthy. Shit. If all she looked was healthy, then there were starlets all over Hollywood who looked sickly. She was the kind of beautiful that scorched. Tall and lean, with gentle but clear curves even in the loose orange inmate garb, cocoa-colored hair that somehow held an expensive salon’s sheen after five years of prison care, cheekbones and mouth sculpted with a master’s touch. Full lips that looked dark against her complexion, which had once been deeply tanned but was now so white he could see the fine veins in her slender neck. Blue eyes that he could not, even after several years, meet for more than a few seconds.

“They treating you okay?”

“Yes, Kevin. As well as a place like this ever can treat someone.”

Kevin. She said it in the sort of voice that should carry hot breath against your ear. Nobody called him Kevin. He was Kimble, had been since childhood, one of those boys who inexplicably becomes identified by his last name.

“Good,” he said. He was staring at the floor to avoid her eyes, but now he saw that she had hitched those loose prison pants up slightly, so that her ankles were exposed above the thin sandals. Her ankles and a trace of legs. Long, sleek legs. She leaned back in the chair now and crossed her feet, pushing them closer toward him, which made him flush and lift his head.

“How is your back?” she said.

He was silent for a moment. His jaw worked, but he didn’t speak, and this time he was able to meet her eyes.

“Fine,” he said.

“I’m glad.”

“Sure.”

She smiled at him, rich and genuine, a smile you were never supposed to see in a place where faces were so often dark and threatening or unbalanced and psychotic.

“I’m so glad. I always worry, you know. I worry that it pains you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

This was the game. This was the perfected exchange, performed each month as if they were rehearsing for some stage show and needed to keep sharp. Why did he drive up here? Why in the hell did he make these visits?

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” she said, and he wondered how many times he’d heard those five words now. First in a handwritten letter to him in the hospital, then in interview rooms, then at the trial and every visit that had been made since. She was always sorry that she didn’t remember.

“You’ve told me, Jacqueline,” he said, his voice stretched. “Let’s not worry about that.”

“You know how badly I wish I could, though. For you.”

“I know.”

She smiled again, this time uncertainly. “I appreciate you making the trip. I always do.”

“It’s nothing.”

“You’ve been so good to me. The one person above all others who shouldn’t be, and you’re the one person above all others who is.”

“You don’t belong in here,” he said.

She sat up straighter then, sat up with excitement, and said, “Didn’t they tell you I get to leave?”

He cocked his head and frowned. “Leave?”

“I thought for sure they’d tell you,” she said. “I mean, I’m always sure they talk to you about me. Don’t they?”

If there was one date Kimble knew absolutely, knew surer than Christmas or his own birthday, it was the scheduled parole hearing of Jacqueline Mathis. She was not leaving this prison. Not yet.

“Jacqueline, where are—”

“I’ve been approved for work release. It might not seem like much to you, but still… you can imagine how exciting it is for me. There’s not much change around here.”

“What? Where?” He was embarrassed by the evident concern—check that, evident fear—in his voice. He liked to know where she was. He needed to know.

“It’s a thrift shop,” she said. “Some little store just down the road. I don’t care where or what, though—it’s not in this place! I’ve made the petition three times. They finally approved it.”

“Why did they now?”

“Because I’m so charming,” she said, and laughed. He waited, and she said, “Oh, take off the cop eyes, Kevin.”

She sat up straight now, dropped her voice into a low, formal tone.

“They approved me, officer, because I’ve shown myself to be nonthreatening and of sound mind and character.”

He stared at her, rubbing one hand over his jaw. It wasn’t an abnormal decision, not at this stage of her incarceration. They’d be readying her for release, assuming she made parole. She would make parole—there had been no problems and many were sympathetic to her—but that was still a year away. He had thought he had another year to get used to the idea of her being free. Why hadn’t he thought of work release?

“So you’re happy,” he said finally, just to say something.

She laughed. “Of course I’m happy. You think I’d prefer to stay in here?”

“Probably not.”

“Probably not. Master of the understatement.” She shook her head, then said, “I’ll be working the mornings, though. That will change my visitation hours. I hope that wouldn’t stop you, if you had to visit later in the day? I’ve always wondered if you’re ashamed of me after the sun comes up.”

“No, Jacqueline. It’s just… well, you know, it’s a long drive. If I come early, I beat the traffic.”

“The Sawyer County traffic,” she said. “Yes, that area around the courthouse gets pretty gridlocked for about two minutes each morning. Particularly now, with the students home for the holidays? Why, you might have to sit through one entire red light.”

He didn’t answer.

“You don’t like the idea,” she said. “Do you? Me being out of here, even for a few hours.”

“That’s not true,” he said, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he liked the idea an awful lot.

“Well, I like it,” she said. “Out of these walls, out of these clothes. Do you know how long it’s been since I wore something other than this?”

She grasped her orange shirt between her thumb and index finger and tugged it away from her body. He got a glimpse of her collarbone and below it smooth, flawless skin.

“You could drop by there sometime,” she said. “You know—see me on the outside.” She shifted her tone to a theatrical whisper and capped it off with a wink. He could feel his dick begin to stiffen, performing against his will, his own body laughing at him. He got to his feet abruptly, making his arousal evident.

“Kevin?”

“I’ve got to get started back,” he said. “It’s a long drive. Too long.”

“Why are you leaving so early? Did I say something—”

“Be safe,” he said, the same thing he always said, and walked to the door, using his hand to adjust himself within his pants, not wanting the attendant CO to see that development.

“I thought you would be happy for me. I thought if there was one person in the world who’d be happy for me, it would be you.”

“I am happy for you, Jacqueline. Goodbye.”

By the time the guards opened the door, he had his police eyes back.

It had been a long drive for a short visit. That was how it went with her. He could never stay too long.

Be careful with her, Wyatt French had told him.

Yeah, buddy. Listen to the old drunk. Watch your ass, Kimble.

Be very careful with her.

3

THE SAWYER COUNTY SENTINEL WAS at 122 years and counting when they shut it down. Peak circulation, 33,589. On the last day, they printed 10,000 copies. That was a bump, too, operating with an expectation that the locals would want their piece of history, so the Sentinel printed extras to make certain they could shake an ash out of the urn for everybody who wanted one.

The staff—nineteen members strong at the end, down from forty-eight at the start of Roy Darmus’s career—blew the corks off a few bottles of champagne at five that afternoon and passed glasses around the newsroom and cried. Every last one of them. The editors, the reporters, the pressmen. Even J. D. Henry, the college intern, couldn’t help it. He’d been with them all of two months, but there he was leaning on a desk and sipping champagne he wasn’t old enough to drink legally and wiping tears from his eyes. Because they were a family, damn it, and it was a business that had spanned more than a century and told the stories of a community day by day and year by year longer than anyone alive could remember, and now it was gone. Who could be part of that and not cry?

When the champagne was gone, they’d all moved on to Roman’s Tavern, had burgers and onion rings and pitchers of beer and told stories that had been told a hundred times before, treating each one like new material.

Sometime around midnight, as awkward silences were becoming more common than bursts of laughter, J. D. Henry commented on how strange it had been to look around the place and see all those empty desks.

“Weren’t all empty,” Donita Hadley said. She’d been writing obits for thirty years, and if there was anyone who wouldn’t miss the details of a death, it was Donita. “Roy’s got his work cut out for him yet.”

How in the hell she’d known that, Roy couldn’t say. He’d taken everything off the cubicle walls and cleared the surface of his desk, but he hadn’t touched the drawers. Perhaps she’d opened them, snooping around. But somehow he knew that wasn’t the case. Donita, she just understood.

“Really?” J.D. asked, the kid showing innocent surprise as he stared at Roy, everyone else suddenly finding other places for their eyes. They knew what the intern didn’t; this was a loss for them all, but a touch more personal for Roy. He’d grown up at the paper. Literally. Had started drifting in as a kid, shoving stories onto the editor’s desk. After his parents were killed in a car accident and he’d gone to live with his grandmother, the staff essentially adopted him. His first paid job was culling the morgue files for a column called “Local Lore,” two-sentence recollections of the headline stories that had run twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five years earlier. He worked his way through college at the paper, took a full-time job immediately after graduating, and never left. There were those who’d been around longer, but nobody had spent a greater percentage of life inside the Sentinel’s newsroom than Roy Darmus.

“Why haven’t you cleared out yet?” J.D. asked.

“Lot of shit in those drawers,” Roy mumbled. “Been procrastinating. You know me, always past deadline.”

The truth was, he had to be alone for it. Not just alone—he had to be the last man standing. Captain of the sinking ship.

That seemed to satisfy everyone except Donita. Her eyes stayed on him for a long moment, and then Roy suggested they have another round, and the response was a collective hemming and hawing. The night had gone on too long for most now—they were an older crowd, J.D. excepted, and it had been a draining day. People began to reach for wallets, but Mike Webb, the editor, insisted he was putting it on the company tab, saying that if the owners didn’t like it, they could shut the place down.

That joke landed as smoothly as a buffalo coming off a balance beam, but hell, at least the drinks were free.

Everyone walked down the steps and out into the night. December, the town aglow with Christmas lights, air biting with cold wind driven out of the Appalachian foothills, the season, quite appropriately, of death. The course had been charted nine years earlier, when a newspaper that had been family-owned since its creation sold out to a national chain. The cuts began almost immediately—first pages, then staff. There had been talk of a Web-only product for a time, but this rural Kentucky community wasn’t viewed as a potential profit center, despite more than a century of profit, and eventually the terminal diagnosis was issued.

Outside of Roman’s, the last of the crew shared hugs and handshakes and went off to their cars and the rest of their lives, promising to keep in touch in the way kids did at graduations, firmly and incorrectly believing it would actually happen.

That was supposed to be the last of it, the final rites administered, but Roy was back the next afternoon. He preferred to shut it down in private. It was home in a way your office never really should be, and that afternoon, when he went in alone, the building was so silent it made him feel unsteady. Newsrooms were never quiet, were always filled with a humming, delightful energy, sometimes chaotic, sometimes somber, but always present.

Today, it had all the energy of a crypt.

He had five drawers to empty—three in the desk, two in the file cabinet. It was very much like sorting through a loved one’s belongings after a funeral.

The first thing to go into the recycling bin was his tips folder. He flipped it open and saw notes jotted on scraps of paper and backs of menus and napkins: Brandon Tyler taught his blind brother to throw a tomahawk; astronomy club planning event for lunar eclipse; Evelyn Scott won national cookie recipe competition…

And so on. Stories of local people and local interest. He looked at them now, feeling sorrow because their forum was gone. Determined not to wallow in that sorrow, Roy went through the crank file next, knowing it would demand a smile. It was in the bottom right-hand desk drawer, a good five inches thick, jammed with letters. He opened it up and began to read through them, and, as he’d hoped, couldn’t help but smile. There was the savage critique of his story judgment from a woman who wanted to let the public know that she and her husband had caught the exact same smallmouth bass on the exact same day, and just what was the matter with him that he didn’t think people would be interested in that? There was the collection of letters from a group of neighbors who had recorded sightings of a sasquatch—well, it was probably a sasquatch but potentially a wolf capable of walking on its hind legs, which was twice as alarming, didn’t he think? There was a note from a woman who was certain her neighbor was breaking into her house to use her Jacuzzi and asserted that she had the pubic hair to prove it, and the allegation that the mayor had been sighted in Maloney Park in carnal embrace with a sheep.

He remembered them all, remembered sharing them with Donita or Laura or Stewart and sharing laughs. There would be no more crank letters here, there would be no more laughs. The smile gone from his face, he set the folder on top of his desk with a sigh and walked all the way into the break room in search of coffee, pulling up short when he saw the pot was gone. Right. He turned on his heel, and had just settled back down at his desk when the phone rang.

It was startlingly loud in the empty newsroom, which was going dark as the stormy day faded to night. Roy picked it up and said hello.

“Mr. Darmus. This is Wyatt French.”

“Oh. Hot-tip time?”

Old Wyatt was a well-known figure to those in the newsroom and those in the liquor business. He didn’t appear to intersect with much else, just booze and bizarre news. Roy had written about the old man’s lighthouse once, and apparently Wyatt had appreciated the tenor of the piece, because he’d taken to calling every so often with what he referred to as “hot tips.” They generally involved police misconduct or local bars that served watered-down bourbon. Lately the calls had been focused on the pending relocation of an exotic-cat rescue center to his isolated stretch of the woods. Wyatt did not approve of the facility, at least not across from his home. Today he’d either missed the fact that the newspaper was no longer in business or he was too drunk to remember.

“Mr. Darmus, I wanted to tell you… wanted to ask that you…”

“Buddy, we’re out of the tip business, I’m afraid,” Roy said, smiling, but then the smile faded when he heard French’s ragged breathing.

“It will be very important to keep the light on when I’m gone,” Wyatt French said. “Very important.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I’d like to say otherwise, Mr. Darmus. I would so dearly like to say otherwise.”

Roy frowned. “Wyatt, what’s wrong?”

“You were right about this place, you know. You just didn’t look far enough. Didn’t look hard enough. I don’t blame you. There’s more to it than I can explain, and more than a sane man would pause to hear. I’m not one who would be heard, anyhow. The mountain could tell it, if it could talk.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You haven’t got the faintest notion what I’m talking about. I did more than most, though. I fought it.”

“Let’s slow down,” Roy said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“If I felt I could make a soul believe me, I might stay around to try. The longer I stay, though, the greater the risk. I’m getting scared of the dark coming. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.”

The rant faded back to ragged inhalations. The breathing of a panicked man. Roy’s frown deepened.

“Wyatt, do you need help out there?”

“Oh, yes. Help is needed out here. For me? Sure. For you? Absolutely. I tried to provide it. I did what I could. You tell them that. You tell them that Wyatt French did what he could—for them. For everyone.”

“I’m not following, and you sound—”

“They should have listened to me about those damned cats. You know how many people will come out here now? Do you have any idea what that might mean?”

“No,” Roy said. “I do not. Explain it to me.”

“Take a closer look,” Wyatt said. “That’s all I ask. If you and Kimble both do that much, then maybe—”

“Kevin Kimble? With the sheriff’s department?”

“He’s gone to see her, you know.”

“Gone to see who?”

“Jacqueline Mathis. The woman who shot him, and he drives up there every month to pay a visit. He doesn’t ask the right questions.”

“What should he be asking?”

Wyatt went silent for a moment, and when he spoke again he’d gotten the harried pace under control.

“I want you to try to tell this story,” he said. “You’re the right one for it. You and Kimble. And somebody needs to tell it. I hope you will.”

“I would if I could, Wyatt. But they’ve closed the paper.”

“It’s not a newspaper story, Mr. Darmus. But so many of the ones that really need to be told aren’t, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I tried to tell the ones that mattered.”

“You really did, Mr. Darmus. You really did. And this one needs to be told, for you particularly. I think you need to know the character your parents showed.”

Roy felt his breathing slow. His parents had died in a car accident on Blade Ridge Road, very near Wyatt’s lighthouse.

“What do you know about my parents?”

“The decisions that they both made. Very brave. Very strong. And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult. You can be very proud of them.”

“Damn it, Wyatt, I don’t appreciate you talking about—”

“When you write the story,” Wyatt said, “please make something clear. I didn’t have to die. I could go on as long as I want.”

He hung up. Roy stared at the receiver in astonishment. Disconnected, then dialed the number that had appeared on the caller ID. It went right to voicemail. Roy hung up.

I didn’t have to die.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and then he took his car keys, left his boxes on the desk, and left the building.

4

BLADE RIDGE ROAD LAY in the western reaches of the county, a twenty-minute drive from Whitman, though Roy did it in fifteen as dusk fell over the wooded countryside. It wasn’t so much of a road—just a rutted gravel lane that broke away from County Road 200 in the foothills that had once been home to coal-mining country, making a straight line toward the Marshall River, which marked Sawyer County’s western border. County Road 200 bent sharply to the left at this point, but if you missed that curve and continued straight, you’d end up on Blade Ridge, which would deliver you to the realization that you’d made a mistake and then to a sudden wall of trees.

For some people—Roy’s parents among them—it was a very bad mistake. The narrow, twisting lane was treacherous, particularly in the winter, particularly in the dark. When Roy’s parents died, the county was inspired to replace the original dead-end sign with two larger ones and add a warning that traffic was for residents only. Not that there were many of them. Just a lighthouse, where once a trailer had stood. And, now, a cat zoo.

Thinking about his parents made him tighten his hands on the steering wheel. What had the old boozehound been trying to imply—that they’d driven off into the woods intentionally, a joint suicide?

And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult.

“Bullshit,” Roy said aloud, his voice hot with anger. His parents had been dead for forty-six years, but even that wasn’t enough time to provide a buffer against the emotions that swelled at the suggestion that they might have left him on purpose.

They were coming home from my basketball game in Jasper County, and they were looking for a shortcut and took the wrong turn. I’ve known that for decades, Wyatt, you prick. Don’t you dare poison my memories of them, don’t you dare.

Ahead of the spot where the gravel road reached its end, directly across from the fresh fencing and cages that had now been built into the woods to house a rescue center for tigers, cougars, lions, and leopards, there was a track that cut off to the right. This was the driveway to Wyatt French’s lighthouse. It came in from the north side at a harsh angle and began to climb immediately. Roy made the turn, loose gravel sliding under the tires, and heard the pitch of the Pilot’s engine turn harsh as it strained up the incline. It was like driving through a tunnel because the trees hung so dense and so close to the road. Then it broke to a crest and there were a few gaps that allowed you to see between the mountains and out to the Marshall River and an ancient railroad trestle.

A long fence protected the lighthouse property. The gate was padlocked; Wyatt French didn’t care for visitors. Built at the base of the lighthouse was a structure that looked no bigger than a shed. It was there that the old man lived.

“Crazy bastard,” Roy muttered, staring at the lighthouse as he parked the Honda in the weeds beside the fence. He hit the horn, three taps.

Nothing. He gave it a minute and laid on the horn again, longer this time, figuring the blaring noise would raise Wyatt’s ire and call him forth.

It didn’t, though. Roy shut the car off and climbed out into the rain. The fence was there, but fences could be climbed. Wyatt French hadn’t added razor wire and guard towers to the property, though they were probably on his list.

There was not a sound except for the rain, but the light was flashing steadily against the gathering dusk.

I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.

“Just go knock on the damn door,” he muttered to himself, and then he went forward. The fence was simple, six-foot chain link, and Roy was still in decent shape, cleared it easily. There was only one door. A piece of paper fluttered on it, secured with two large thumbtacks. Roy used the side of his hand to flatten the paper against the wind so he could read the message, hoping it was instructions for FedEx or a note for a neighbor.

It wasn’t.

For purposes of investigation, the handwritten note read, please contact Kevin W. Kimble of the Sawyer County Sheriff’s Department.

Roy took his hand away from the note, and the breeze slid under the paper again, rustling it against the wood. He was afraid now, plain and simple.

For purposes of investigation…

Kimble was the chief deputy, a man who’d taken a bullet in the back a few years ago and still returned to the job. He was, anyone in the county would probably agree, the man you’d want on a difficult case.

But what was Wyatt’s case?

Roy knocked. Nothing. He cupped his hands and shouted Wyatt’s name. The rain was streaming down his neck and under his shirt collar to his spine. He tried the knob, then swore when it turned.

Unlocked. Shit. Why couldn’t it have been locked? Why were the doors you knew you shouldn’t open always the ones that were unlocked?

He pushed the door open and peered into the darkness. The living quarters seemed larger than they should have, but they still weren’t much to speak of. There was a small bed in one corner, a desk beside it, some shelves, a kitchen table in the middle of the room. Refrigerator and range and sink. A bathroom blocked off by an old-fashioned accordion-style door.

“Wyatt? Mr. French? It’s Roy Darmus.”

By now he’d given up on getting an answer. He stepped into the room, and in the nickel-colored light of the rainy afternoon he could see that the walls were lined with maps. Topographic maps of Sawyer County. As he walked farther in, he saw that each map had a different year written on it in bold black marker: 1966, 1958, 1984…

Across the room was another door, also closed. This would lead to the lighthouse steps. Maybe this one would be locked. That would be nice.

It wasn’t. Opened outward and revealed the base of the spiral stairs that curled up and away. Roy began to climb, one hand on the railing.

“Wyatt?” he called.

There were more steps than he’d have thought. He climbed for a long time, into progressive darkness, and then finally the top showed itself in a gray glare of daylight.

By then Roy didn’t need to go any farther. The smell assured him of that—warm, fresh copper tinged the air.

He steadied himself and climbed on and at the top step his head finally broke the surface and he found himself staring at the light itself. There was one oversized bulb surrounded by a series of strange, mirror-like lenses, the light within flashing, and arranged beneath it were four odd fixtures with red lenses angled toward the cardinal directions. Roy could see no light coming from those, though.

Electrocuted himself, Roy thought. He was doing something to the light, trying to repair it or change it, and he electrocuted himself.

That thought lasted only until he pushed all the way up onto the lighthouse platform, turned to the right, and looked directly into Wyatt French’s dead face.

He’d shot himself in the mouth, and if Roy had made a full circle around the lighthouse he would have been able to see the blood and brain tissue that was still wet on the glass. There was a gaping, grotesque hole in the center of French’s face, and his long gray hair was clotted with blood. A handgun lay on his lap.

All of this Roy saw in a half-second flash, and then he turned away, turned too fast. His feet were still on the top step, and one of them slid off and his balance was gone. He fell sideways and put out a hand to steady himself, but he was dropping too fast, and knew before he hit it that he was going directly into the light. He heard a pop and felt immediate, scorching pain just before the blood began to flow. He’d landed with his palm out and his weight driving down and that was all it took for the glass lenses to shatter and bite.

“Son of a bitch,” he said, lifting his hand free, blood dripping onto the floor and splattering his jeans. He’d punctured not only the lenses but the bulb; the light had given a frightening spark at the moment of impact and then gone dark. Everything had; the lighthouse was soaked in shadow now.

He turned and stumbled down the stairs, grabbing at the railing with his good hand.

5

OF COURSE IT RAINED. Fate wouldn’t have it any other way. Audrey Clark was moving massive, uneasy cats and it poured rain. Absolutely ideal.

She’d had a vision of this day, and it wasn’t rain that spoiled that. No, rain would have been fine—she could picture David leaning down to kiss her, laughing, his wet blond hair plastered to his skull, water drops on his glasses, all of it still a pleasure to him, in charge of everything and enjoying every moment. They’d spent their first afternoon together in these Kentucky hills, when Audrey’s law firm was tasked with drawing up the endowment that would fund the cat rescue center and David had capitalized on her interest—ostensibly in the rescue center, but also in him—to show her exactly what he intended to build in Sawyer County. At the time it had been fascinating, admirable, and romantic.

At that time, there’d been no cat shit on the grounds.

Her vision of the day had died with her husband in the rocks along the Marshall River six months earlier. He’d fallen forty-six feet while scouting the new home for the rescue center one evening, and although the police told her that David had died instantly, Audrey was still falling.

They’d gotten started at daybreak, the third day of moving cats and, with any luck, the last. At her side were four volunteers and the rescue center’s only two paid staff members: Dustin Hall, a former student of David’s, and Wesley Harrington, the preserve’s manager and cat guru. She had just one transport vehicle, a large panel truck that could hold as many as eight cages at once. Getting those eight cages filled, though, took time and effort. Cats, large or small, are not fond of doing anything that hasn’t been granted their express written consent. Transportation in a cage generally does not qualify.

So it became a battle of wills, with one caveat: the humans could cheat.

They started with simple coaxing. True to the cliché, the cats were curious, if nothing else. Sometimes that curiosity would be enough to lead them to inspect the transport cage. The moment they entered, Wes or Audrey would drop the guillotine gate behind them. If curiosity and coaxing didn’t work, they’d stoop to the first of the cheating tactics: food baiting. Many of the reluctant animals could be lured into the cage when the right treat was offered—Small children work well, Wes had told her dryly—and then the gate would drop.

If the first two techniques didn’t work, then they’d stoop to the ultimate cheat and use tranquilizers. Wes was adamantly opposed to that. He’d been involved in cat recoveries all over the country, and on two occasions he’d seen animals lost because of mishandled drugging. His stance on sedation was that it had to be the last measure.

After five years of working with these cats, Audrey hadn’t thought they’d need to sedate any of them for the relocation, but as the day wore on she found herself in favor of the idea with Kino, one of the male tigers, and not just because Kino sprayed her three times in the morning alone.

The big tiger was full of bad attitude on a good day, and this was not a good day. Watching all the chaos, watching his peers being loaded into cages and driven away, Kino was quite pissed off. Audrey had always made fun of the way he stalked the fence, giant shoulders rolling, giant ass swaying, a surly stare on everyone.

We need to get you a leather jacket, she’d told him once. You can wear it with the collar up.

He’d sprayed her almost immediately after that bit of mockery, and the plans for the leather jacket had swiftly become a promise for a tiger-skin rug for her living room.

Today he was playing the role of an antagonist, roaring and banging against the fences and trying to get the other cats worked up.

“There is no way we get his angry ass into a truck without sedation,” she said.

“We’ll get him, and we’re not sedating him,” Wes answered firmly. He loved all of the cats, but Audrey knew well that Kino was his favorite, simply because Kino was the most challenging.

So they worked around Kino all morning and afternoon, and it was on the last load of the day that they finally got the big tiger into the transport cage. Drug-free, as Wes had promised. In the end it came down to Wes’s ingenious suggestion of totally ignoring the animal. He circled around Kino’s enclosure, talking to the other tigers, reaching out here and there to scratch along their jaws or in some cases allowing them to nuzzle his face and lick his cheek. By the time he made his third pass, Kino was bellowing for attention. Wes ignored him completely. Ten minutes later, the tiger marched sullenly into his transport cage. When they dropped the gate behind him, Wes knelt beside the cage and leaned close. Kino growled. Wes said, “Yeah, I know,” and held his ground, and a few seconds later the tiger’s sound shifted to the chuffing noise that signified pleasure and Wes was scratching behind one of his ears.

“I can’t believe you got him in that cage without tranquilizers,” Audrey said, and she meant it. She was better around these cats than most people, and David had been far better than she, but Wes was something else entirely. The cats accepted him in a way that they wouldn’t anyone else, and his innate understanding of them was extraordinary.

You’re always worried about whether you can trust them, he told her once. If you worry more about making it clear that they can trust you, you’ll be amazed at the difference.

Those lines or variations of them were constant from Wes, who spoke little except to explain things about the cats to Audrey, or, more aptly, to explain what she was failing to grasp about them. She rode an emotional pendulum between appreciation and irritation. At one moment there would be recognition that without him she could not run the preserve; in the next, deep frustration that without him she could not run the preserve.

“Kino, he’s all talk,” Wes said now, and then they used a forklift to put the cages onto the truck. Every time one was in the air, Audrey held her breath. She was envisioning disaster—a dropped cage, a broken door, a four-hundred-pound tiger on the loose—but Wes was calm and confident and that helped. The cages were loaded without incident, and then they were on the road, bound west across the county for Blade Ridge.

“Not many left,” she told Wes as they raced the rapidly fading daylight. “I hoped we would get them all, but that was pretty ambitious. Tomorrow will be easy, though. One load of lions, and then Ira.”

Ira was the preserve’s prize, a black cougar, the only such creature in captivity in the world, a cat so rare that many experts still refused to believe he wasn’t the product of crossbreeding.

“Hope you’re right,” Wes said, and she felt that she was. Despite the rain and the hard work and the weight of David’s absence, she felt good. She knew also that her husband would be pleased if he could watch the cats gathering at their new home. The land on Blade Ridge Road had been his dream option. Originally part of an enormous tract belonging to one of the town’s old mining families, it was so rugged that little had changed with the property in the past hundred years. It was far from any residential development and large enough for them to have plenty of room to grow, also isolated enough for the cats to have little in the way of human distraction.

Little, that was, except for the psychotic who lived across the road. Their only neighbor—the only resident on the entire stretch of gravel road, in fact—was a local drunk who had, long before David and Audrey acquired their property, made the decision to replace his trailer home with a lighthouse.

A real one. On a wooded hilltop, in the middle of nowhere.

She’d had a bad feeling the first time she saw it, only worsening when friends around town commented on their neighbor’s propensity for drink and odd behavior. There was something indescribably eerie about watching the light paint the treetops with its pulsing, relentless golden flashes. She urged David to make a formal complaint. He found it amusing; she found it alarming.

It will bother the cats, she’d said. Can you imagine how Jafar will react to that thing? It’s so damn bright.

Jafar, a leopard, was one of David and Audrey’s personal favorites, a sleek, beautiful animal with the personality of an affectionate if mischievous housecat, and in the end it had probably been Jafar’s desire, not Audrey’s, that tipped the scale. David called the sheriff and said the lighthouse was too bright. It turned out he wasn’t wrong—a permit was required for so bright a light. Wyatt French had responded formally at first, taking down his megawatt lamps and replacing them with something that—barely—satisfied the permit standards for light pollution or air traffic control or whoever made such decisions.

For a time it had looked as if he was just an eccentric, peaceful enough. Then came the county council meetings to discuss the rescue center’s relocation, and Wyatt French arrived intoxicated and angry and raving grim prophecies of doom. By the time the police finally escorted him from the room, then arrested him, Audrey was looking at David with I told you so eyes. They didn’t have an eccentric neighbor, they had an enemy.

And a cruel one, Audrey learned after David’s death. A card from Wyatt French had arrived amidst all the others, but his message was anything but heartwarming. He expressed his sorrow for her loss, yes, but then he added a few lines suggesting that David had done it to himself, and that if they had not forced him to tamper with the lighthouse, her husband would have been safe from harm.

Audrey had ripped the card into breath-mint-sized shreds, slowly and methodically, while her older sister watched in astonishment. That was the last contact she’d had with Wyatt French, who had yet to come down the hill and visit his new neighbors. He surely would soon enough, though, and that expectation just added to the strange light’s malevolence. It had been flashing today even after the sun rose, and continued; with each load of cats they brought, the storm-darkened skies glittered with flashes that found her eyes and crawled behind them and took hostile refuge in her mind, leaving her with an unfocused anger.

The anger was gone, though, and the frustration. The only negatives that would remain today were the muscle aches.

That was how she felt until the sirens and the flashing lights of a police car appeared behind them. Wes eased onto the shoulder, thinking they were being stopped, but the car hummed by without pause, a trail of mist from its tires hanging in the air like exhaust from a jet.

“He’s in a hurry,” she observed.

It was five minutes later when they turned onto the long gravel lane that led to their new home and saw a red light in the trees. As Wes drove on, Audrey stared at it, thinking that it might be from the lighthouse, thinking that the crazy neighbor was taking it up a notch, but then they rounded a bend and she could see the police car.

Or the remains of the police car.

The vehicle was upside down in the trees on the north side of the road, across from the preserve’s front gate. It looked as if it had been in the process of rolling a second time when the trees caught it, and now the car was propped at an awkward angle, the passenger side in the air and the driver’s side pressed against the ground. The roof was crushed down, fractured pieces of metal and fiberglass littered the gravel, and the headlights—both still on—were pointed crazily into the trees, one angled up, one angled down. The hood was torn and the engine showed like internal organs, things you knew you shouldn’t be able to see.

Audrey whispered, “He’s got to be dead.”

Wes didn’t argue. With the look of that car, there wasn’t much argument to be made.

“Call 911,” he said, and then a figure emerged from the trees just behind the car, stepping out of the shadows, and Audrey almost screamed before she realized that it was Dustin Hall, her own employee. He looked up at them, then back to the car, and shook his head.

Audrey knew what he meant. The driver was dead.

Wes popped open the door and stepped into the rain while Audrey took her phone out and dialed, gave their location, and explained the situation.

“It’s bad,” she said. “It’s really, really bad.”

“Is the driver breathing?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine… the car is just demolished.”

“Could you check? Can you get close enough to see if there’s any sign of motion? We have an ambulance en route, but I need to know what to tell them.”

Audrey got out of the truck. Wes had dropped to his knees by the shattered window, and now he removed his jacket, wrapped it around his fist, and began swinging at the car, trying to clear away the remaining glass from the passenger window.

“Is he alive?” Audrey asked.

“I don’t know.”

She walked closer, knelt in the wet gravel beside him, and peered inside the car. The roof had been crushed down to the headrest, both airbags had deployed, and the inside of the car was a cloudburst of broken plastic, glass, and fabric. The airbags had left a chalky dust in the air, the smell faintly like gunpowder. Pinned between the steering wheel and the remains of the passenger seat, which had been shoved toward him, was the deputy’s crumpled body. Audrey was just about to speak into the phone again, just about to say that the man looked to be dead, when he moved his head and focused his eyes on hers.

She almost screamed. It was stunning to see him move. She jerked upright and stumbled backward as the operator said, “Ma’am, what do you see?”

“He’s… um… he’s moving,” Audrey said, watching in astonishment as the deputy blinked, narrowed his eyes, and frowned at her and Wes as if he didn’t know what they were doing there and didn’t like seeing them. “He’s alive. I don’t know how, but he’s alive.”

The operator was busy telling her not to try to move him until the paramedics arrived when the deputy reached out of the broken window and placed one white palm on the gravel, dug his fingers in, and tried to pull himself clear.

“Tell him not to move,” Audrey said, but Wes was already leaning forward to help.

“Give a hand,” he shouted to Dustin, who had been one of David’s favorite students and was always capable around the preserve but now stood pale-faced and motionless. Dustin responded to the order, though, leaned down and helped support the deputy’s weight while Wes pulled a pocket knife free, opened the blade, and hacked through the seatbelt, whispering to the deputy to take it easy, not to rush. The whole time the guy was reaching from the wreckage with that one free arm, pulling at the mud and gravel, as if determined to claw out from within the car that should have been his coffin. Wes and Dustin caught him by the shoulders and lifted and then, somehow, he was out of the police car and on his back, breathing and alert.

Audrey hung up the phone. “What happened?” she asked Dustin.

“I think he missed the turn or something. All I know is one second I heard the siren and then the next he was in the trees.”

Dustin’s face looked bloodless, and he was weaving on his feet. She said, “Do you need to sit down?”

“Maybe, yeah.” He fell heavily on his ass in the road, pushing thick dark hair back from his forehead, his chest heaving. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“Help’s coming,” she said, patting Dustin’s shoulder. “And it looks as if he’s okay. I can’t believe he’s moving. How is he moving?”

There was blood on the deputy’s face, coming from his nose and his lips, and a crisscrossing of scratches over his forehead and left cheek, but those were the only evident injuries. He was a young, fit man, lean and long, with sandy hair and blue eyes. Being young and fit didn’t allow for escaping an accident like that unscathed, though. He was charmed by unnatural good luck, too, it seemed.

“Lucky,” Audrey said softly, thinking that her husband had died out here in a fall. One misplaced step, one slip, one life extinguished. This deputy had driven into the trees at top speed, demolished the car all around him, and survived.

Don’t think about it like that, she told herself. Stop that. Be grateful.

There was a murmur from the deputy. Audrey looked down again, then saw that his eyes were open and locked on hers.

“You okay?” she said. “You with us? You with us?”

Water dripped out of Wes’s short gray beard and off the brim of his baseball cap as he knelt over the wounded man. Beyond, in the preserve, no more than a hundred feet away, the cats had pressed close to the fences, intrigued. One of the lions gave a low roar, and that got the deputy’s attention. He swung his head up and around to face the cats, and Audrey winced when he moved his neck, sure that his spine had to be at risk. They’d been telling her to keep him still, that he would need a backboard.

“Please don’t move,” she said, and then, seeing how intently he was looking at her cats, she added, “They’re locked up. They won’t hurt you.”

She turned to Dustin. “Go try to calm them, please. The last thing we need is the cats going crazy right now.”

He went off to try to make peace with animals who were already restless from new surroundings and unnatural activity, and Audrey knelt beside Wes, watching the deputy.

“I hit him,” the deputy said.

“What?”

“Tried to miss, but he was right there, and I was going so fast… I tried to miss, I promise you that I did.”

“You didn’t hit anyone. Everyone is fine.”

That seemed distressing to him. He moved his head again, searching the dark woods, and this time his face split into an odd smile, blood on his teeth.

“He made it?”

“You didn’t hit anyone,” Audrey repeated, feeling ill at ease now. Maybe he hadn’t been so unscathed after all. A concussion was likely. Maybe something worse, bleeding on the brain, who knew?

“Light’s out,” the deputy said, staring over her shoulder. Audrey turned and looked up to the hilltop where the lighthouse stood against the weaving bare branches. It was dark, for the first time all day.

“We’ve got an ambulance on the way,” she said. “Just stay down. Please don’t move around. They’ll be here soon.”

“Where were you headed, bud?” Wes asked. “Is something wrong with the cats? Did you get a call about them?”

Blood was dribbling down the deputy’s chin as he shook his head.

“There’s a dead man in the lighthouse,” he said.

6

TEN MINUTES ON DUTY, running on frayed nerves and no sleep, and Kimble had a corpse call. He’d poured a cup of coffee but hadn’t taken a sip yet when he heard the news. Gunshot victim, they said.

“Active shooter?” he asked.

Probable suicide, he was told.

“We know the vic’s name?”

French, they said. Wyatt French. Maybe he remembered—

“Yes,” Kimble said. “I remember Wyatt French.”

He felt cold guilt in the pit of his stomach. All those questions, all that talk about suicide. Why hadn’t he sent someone to check? He’d hoped Wyatt was just drunk, the way he usually was. That last joke, too, the threat that he might just decide to live forever—it had suggested that he wasn’t in too dismal a state of mind. Hadn’t it?

Kimble swallowed some coffee for warmth, kept his face impassive, and, after a moment’s pause, asked that they send Nathan Shipley. He didn’t want to go out there himself, not after the morning call, and Shipley, though young, was one of Kimble’s favorite deputies, quiet and calm and tough. He’d seen worse than a suicide, and he’d be fine out there in charge of the scene.

They dispatched Shipley, only to come back for Kimble a moment later, just as he’d settled behind his desk.

It seemed Kimble’s presence had been requested at the scene.

“By Shipley?”

By the victim, he was told. There was a letter on the front door, asking that for purposes of investigation the case be handed to Kevin W. Kimble. Dispatch thought he’d like to know that.

First the predawn call to his private number, now a letter on the door? What did Wyatt French want from Kimble?

He pulled on a baseball cap and went back out into the rain, tired and confused and wondering what else he could have said, should have said.

What he should have done.

Roy stood outside the lighthouse as darkness gathered and the rain pounded down on him and blood dripped off his palm and into the grass. He felt a tingle in his elbow. That wasn’t good. He’d probably cut right through the nerves in his hand.

Explaining this to the police was going to be a treat. Tell them that a man was dead and Roy’s own blood just happened to be splattered all over the scene? Somehow he had a feeling that wouldn’t go over too smoothly.

Where in the hell were the cops, though? He’d heard a siren that sounded as if it were just below him, but then it had stopped.

The pain in his hand had ebbed away to a dull ache, but he was continuing to drip blood all over his pants. He considered taking off his shirt and wrapping it around the wound, but then he looked through the open door into Wyatt French’s strange living quarters and saw the dishtowels hanging from the stove. It wasn’t as if Wyatt would miss them.

He stepped back inside, feeling an uneasy sensation the moment he reentered, knowing damn well now what waited at the top of those steps. His first stop was the sink, where he ran warm water over his hand until the pain ratcheted up a few levels, and then he switched it to cold, hoping to numb things down. The water mixed with the blood and swirled down the sink. He felt lightheaded watching it, so he looked away and took one of the dishtowels from the stove, soaked it in cold water, and then wrapped it tightly around his palm.

The dizziness was still with him. He blinked and took a few deep breaths and stared around. When he’d first entered, his focus had been on finding Wyatt, but now he had a chance to register the room itself. Wyatt had never finished the walls—two-by-fours climbed like latticework, pink insulation showing between them, no drywall pinning them in. His focus, it seemed, had been on speed as he built. He wanted to get to the top and get that light going. The same one he’d asked Roy to keep on before he’d eaten his gun. The same one Roy had promptly shattered.

Like it matters, he told himself. Like the crazy thing really matters.

He stepped farther into the room, looking at the maps Wyatt had pinned to the exposed wall studs. There were a lot of them, names written across in red ink. Beside the maps, and all around the room, photographs were held in place with thumbtacks. Ancient pictures, sepia-tinted relics of another time, men with old-fashioned mustaches and women standing beside cars with wide running boards. Roy stepped closer, saw that each photograph was labeled. A few with names, but most—almost all of them, it seemed—with one scrawled word: NO.

It was eerie, standing here in the darkened room, a dead man upstairs and all of these faces from times gone by watching him. He shot a glance at the door, wondering again about the police.

One picture caught his eye—more recent, a color shot, and the woman in it was breathtaking. He crossed the room and stared into her crystal eyes and realized he was looking at the booking photograph of Jacqueline Mathis.

What in the hell went on in that man’s head? Roy thought. What was he looking for?

He wanted to see it all better now, but it was dark inside and the light switch by the door did no good. He thought of the popping sound he’d heard when he broke the bulb, that harsh snap. He’d taken the power out. Question was whether it was a blown fuse or a circuit breaker.

The positive side of Wyatt’s sparse home was that it was hard for anything to hide. Roy found the electrical panel easily enough—its metal door stood just over the head of the narrow cot Wyatt had used for a bed, almost as if he’d wanted it as close by as possible while he slept. Roy opened the door and saw that several of the breakers had snapped down. He reset them, and when he tried the light switch at the door again, it worked.

He wandered, studying the old photographs and the maps with the names in red ink, wondering what they meant, wondering what had happened to the police car down below and whether he should head out and take a look, wondering if he’d seriously damaged his hand, wondering why the dead man upstairs had pulled the trigger and why, above all else, he’d had to call Roy before he did it.

To keep the light on. And you broke it. Somewhere, his ghost is shaking his head at you now, Darmus.

His mind was like that, uneasy and adrift, until his eyes focused on a map tacked up just above the small kitchen table. The year was 1965, and there were two names written in red: Joseph Darmus; Lillian Darmus.

The blood seeping from his palm no longer felt warm as it met the damp towel.

It was then that Roy understood the significance of the names written in red ink.

Red was for the dead.

7

THERE WAS A TOUCH OF ICE in the rain by the time Kimble got to Blade Ridge, just enough to sting even as it soaked him. He was hardly the first responder: there was a volunteer fire unit and an ambulance already there, along with what remained of one of the department’s cars. It wasn’t much. Kimble, who’d heard the radio traffic as he neared the scene, knew that Shipley had wrecked but was awake and uninjured. He hadn’t been expecting so much damage.

He paused at the accident scene, watching as they strapped one of his best deputies into a backboard, then went over and put his hand in Shipley’s and squeezed it.

“You all right, brother? You coming back to fight another day with us?”

“Fine,” Shipley said. “Just fine.” But he was clearly shaken by the wreck, his typically cool blue eyes darting all around, taking in the cats on one side of the road and the lighthouse on the other. Bad wrecks were terrifying things, and one in a place like this? Had to be distressing, to say the least.

“Thought there was somebody here,” Shipley told him. “Right in the road. He didn’t move out of my way, so I swerved.”

One of the paramedics caught Kimble’s eye with a little hand motion, then shook his head. There’d been no one in the road. Kimble turned his attention back to Shipley, thinking that he didn’t like the look of the man’s face and eyes now, and when the paramedics told him they had to get on the road, he wasn’t disappointed. He wanted Shipley out of here.

“Make sure he gets a full round of concussion tests,” Kimble said. “He seems out of it.”

“We’ve got good doctors waiting.”

He nodded. “You take care, Nathan,” he called as they slid the deputy into the ambulance. “I’ll be in touch soon.”

Shipley didn’t respond before they swung the doors shut.

Kimble paused briefly at the wreck scene, where a tow truck was arriving, but he didn’t want to get caught in the mill of taking statements about the accident when his interest was in the lighthouse. Another car was responding to the wreck, and he’d let them deal with it. For now, he needed to focus on Wyatt French.

The entire drive out here the phone conversation had played on repeat in his mind, growing darker and more disturbing with each recalled word. He should have done more than just offer up the suicide toll-free line. If he’d done that much, then he’d clearly heard enough to be concerned, and he shouldn’t have settled for so little effort. But there’d been that odd remark about Jacqueline… the knowledge, first of all, that he’d been on his way to see her, and then the warning to be careful with her. After that, he hadn’t wanted to call anyone about Wyatt French. Hadn’t wanted to think about Wyatt French.

How did he know that? he thought as he drove up the steep, slippery drive. How did an unemployed alcoholic know that I was going to see Jacqueline?

He parked outside the fence, and when he got out of the cruiser he saw Roy Darmus, the newspaper reporter, standing in the yard on the other side of the fence. This was the true first responder, the man who’d found the body.

“Interesting that the gate is locked but you’re on the other side, Darmus.”

“I climbed over. Be glad I did, and not some kids. He’s a mess.”

“Yeah?” Kimble studied the padlock, then returned to the cruiser, rooted in the trunk, and came out with a pair of bolt cutters. The gate would need to be opened at some point, and Kimble’s back didn’t make climbing fences any easy task. He snipped through the chain that held the padlock, then swung open the gate.

Below them, the trees were lit with flashing lights from the accident. Darmus, a guy of middling size with salt-and-pepper hair and perpetually intense eyes, waved a hand in their direction.

“What happened down there? I was going to go check, but they’d told me to stay here until someone showed up. Took a while.”

“One of my deputies had a little trouble navigating the road. He’s all right. Now what exactly brought you out here, Darmus? And don’t tell me you’re working on a story. Aren’t any stories left.”

“There are always stories left. I just don’t have a place to tell them at the moment.”

“You think that qualifies as an answer?”

“I was closing up shop at the office today when I got a call from him,” Darmus said. “From Wyatt French. I’d written about the lighthouse when he first built it. I took it at face value, quoted him accurately, didn’t make a joke of it. He said he was building it because the place was dangerous, and I just put that in and let it sit there. I got a lot of eye rolls for that story, but I guess Wyatt appreciated the way I treated it. Him. He started calling me with tips, time to time. Once in a while there was actually some decent information. Most of the time there wasn’t. But today… today he was just frightening. Talking in riddles, breathing hard, saying that he was scared of himself, of what he could do. I wasn’t sure if he was suicidal or homicidal or just drunk. I drove out to see.”

“You wanted to see if he was homicidal?”

“I wanted to see if anyone needed to be worried about him. The answer, clearly, is no. Not anymore.”

“What time was this?”

“Maybe an hour ago.”

So Wyatt had still been alive, and working the phones, long after he’d called Kimble. He’d seen it through almost another day. Hadn’t been willing to let the sun go down, though, hadn’t seen it through another night.

“He talked about my parents,” Darmus said. “I didn’t exactly appreciate that. Then I walk in there and I see he’s got their names on a map. He’s got a lot of names on maps, a lot of old photographs.”

Kimble frowned. “Your parents?”

Darmus nodded, and the usually friendly eyes had a hard sheen to them now. “Yes. The old tosspot suggested that they killed themselves out here. Wanted me to know how brave they were, making a decision like that and leaving a child behind.”

“Out here?”

Darmus waved a hand down at the flashing lights in the trees below them. “Right about where your deputy wrecked, I’d assume. They missed the curve on the county road back in ’65, ended up on Blade Ridge, and ended up in the trees. I was fourteen years old.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago,” Darmus said, trying without success to be dismissive. Then he took a deep breath, nodded, and said, “Thanks, Kimble. I’m not going to let the guy get in my head. He was not a well man. And he’s in mighty worse shape now.”

Kimble said, “I’ll go have myself a look.”

“There’s blood up there,” Darmus said, “and it’s mine.” He held up his hand, which was wrapped in a towel but still showing blood.

“How’d that happen?”

“Wyatt doesn’t look good. Looks pretty ghastly, in fact. When I saw him, it scared me. I fell and put my hand through the bulb.”

“The wound serious?”

“Not too bad. But I’m glad that you ended up here, because—”

“Because you broke the law by trespassing and then proceeded to bleed all over the death scene?”

“The door was open.”

“And the gate?”

Darmus was silent. Kimble said, “All right, let me go on up and have a look. There’s an ambulance on the way. They can look at your hand. If he’s as you say, isn’t going to be much need to hurry him out of here, is there?”

“No,” Darmus said. “There surely isn’t. But you didn’t let me finish. I called for you because, well… Wyatt French did, too. There’s a note on the door.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Less than you, I expect,” Kimble said. “But he sent for you, too. Sent for both of us. And you know what that tells me?”

“What?”

“That even crazy men can read the papers.”

Kimble left Darmus standing in the rain and walked to the lighthouse. He stopped at the door and studied the note. A simple, oddly polite request to contact him for purposes of investigation. He read it, remembering the hiss of the tires on the pavement and the look of the fog in his headlights as he’d answered Wyatt’s questions that morning.

Do you pursue the root causes of a suicide in the same manner that you would a homicide?

Kimble had told him that he pursued the truth. Always.

Now, in the freezing rain outside the dead man’s door, Kimble turned back to Darmus.

“I suppose I should wait for someone else now,” he said. “I’m probably a suspect, what with my name stamped on the damn door. And he called me this morning, too. Probably said about the same things he did with you. Maybe he called half the town, I don’t know. But since my deputy just flipped a cruiser on his way here, and I’m the only officer on scene, I guess I’ll count on Wyatt having taken himself out of this life nice and simply and leaving me no trouble. Did he do that much for me?”

“He did it thoroughly,” Darmus said. “That much I can assure you.”

Kimble went in. The room was small but functional, with unfinished walls and bare-bones furnishings, the look and feel of a hunting cabin except that the walls were lined with maps and old photographs. He gave them a brief glance, then turned to his left and walked up the steps. He didn’t cover his mouth or nose, just climbed to the top, high enough to see all that he needed to see. Wyatt’s unkempt gray beard was matted with blood, and his eyes—he’d always had good-natured eyes, you could tell even when he was drunk and you were putting him in handcuffs that he wasn’t likely to take a poke at you—were locked in a death stare, facing east, away from the fog-shrouded river and toward the high peaks.

“I’m sorry,” Kimble told the corpse softly.

Now what if, Wyatt had said, the suicide victim wasn’t entirely willing.

What had been going on in this man’s life? So far as Kimble knew, his life was an empty one. There was never anyone who showed up to post his bond, never anyone who waited for him outside the jail when they kicked him loose on another public intox charge. He’d just been the sort who drifted along alone except for the booze, and you couldn’t help but feel sorry for such people, particularly when they weren’t hostile and when they didn’t stand to do much harm to anyone except themselves.

“Damn it,” Kimble said, and then he stepped away and went back down the stairs. He needed to get Darmus out of here, and the coroner on the way. It was time to begin processing the death scene, and he would, as he’d promised Wyatt, pursue the truth.

When he came back downstairs, he found that Darmus had stepped inside.

“Hit the road, Darmus. I’ll call you when I need to get an official statement. Go get that hand checked out, okay?”

“You see the other lamps he’s got in there?” Darmus said. “Those things pointed in every direction below the main light?”

“I did.”

“What in the hell are they?”

“Infrared illuminators. Security camera lights. But I’ve yet to see the cameras, so why he installed them, I have no damn idea.” Kimble looked at the steps and shook his head. “A lighthouse. Who builds something like that in the mountains? Though you can see the river from the top.”

“Right,” Darmus said. “I’m sure it has prevented dozens of shipwrecks down there. Why, I can’t recall the last time I had to report on a ship foundering at Blade Ridge. Any chance you can issue a posthumous medal of valor to him?”

The reporter was still plenty angry. His final exchange with Wyatt French had gotten under his skin, and that was understandable. It was a hell of a thing to hear suggested of your own parents.

Kimble moved around the room, looking at the old photographs and maps, but then he heard a scribbling sound behind him and turned to see that Darmus had a reporter’s pad out and a pencil in his hand.

“What are you doing? Don’t write any of that shit down. This isn’t a public scene. And there’s not even a newspaper anymore.”

“Did you look at these maps?” Darmus said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’s like he was charting accidents, but there’s no way there have been this many accidents out here.”

“Give me that,” Kimble said.

Darmus stopped scribbling and looked up.

“The list,” Kimble said. “You can’t walk out of here with it. This is an investigation, not a sporting event, Darmus. Give me whatever you’ve written.”

There was something deeply wrong with reporters. A corpse was sitting upstairs, and Darmus had willingly come back inside and was now taking notes?

“Come on,” Kimble said, and stretched out his hand. Darmus sighed, tore a handful of pages free, folded them, and passed them over.

“You see whose picture he has on the wall?” he said, tapping on one with his pen. “Maybe there is a reason he called both of us. My parents, and her.”

Her. Kimble followed the tip of Darmus’s pen and saw that it was pointing at a color photograph of Jacqueline Mathis. Her name was written beneath it.

For a moment Kimble just stared, but he saw Darmus watching him and was unsettled by it, felt as if he were suddenly exposed. “What did I just tell you? I’ve got a death scene to deal with. Get out of here.”

“Wyatt told me about you making those visits up to see her,” Darmus said.

“Why in the hell were you talking about that?” Kimble snapped.

“I don’t even know. He just told me that you went to see her every month. I was having trouble following the—”

“Well, it’s none of anybody’s damned business. I tell you, there’s some good things about that paper being shut down, too. Tough that you lost your job, but you know what? There are some things people do in private that should stay private. Now listen to what I told you and get the hell out of here.”

Darmus looked at him curiously, then nodded and turned and walked out into the dark and the blowing rain. Kimble watched until the car’s taillights had vanished down the hill, wishing he’d been alone up here, wishing he’d been the first to find the body. He looked down at the folded pages in his hand, torn from the reporter’s notebook, and unfolded them.

Blank. Every one.

“Son of a bitch, Darmus,” he said.

Good trick. A lot better than whatever Wyatt was playing on Kimble from beyond the grave.

He looked up again, at the maps and the photographs. All those old pictures, looking as if they’d been copied out of history books, and then Jacqueline, staring at him with those endless blue eyes.

Why did Wyatt have her picture up?

Kimble reached up, pulled the thumbtacks from the wood, removed Jacqueline’s picture, and put it in his pocket with the blank pages from Darmus.

8

IT TOOK A FEW HOURS for the medical folks to finish their work in the lighthouse. Kimble stood around in the rain and waited for them, spoke to the deputy coroner, and then watched as they finally removed the body, which wasn’t an easy or pleasant task, coming down those steep, narrow stairs.

Kimble had another deputy on scene now, Diane Mooney, and he discharged her, said he was shutting it down for the day. It wasn’t a bad move; every element pointed to a straightforward suicide.

Except for those maps. And that phone call. What if the victim wasn’t entirely willing…

As he’d waited for the coroner’s people to do their work, Kimble had perused the maps, reading the names. When he saw Joseph and Lillian Darmus, he felt a pang over the way he’d snapped at the old reporter for mentioning Jacqueline. It had surprised him, that was all. And he’d lashed out because… because it was his own damned business. Personal, private.

After Diane Mooney left, Kimble stepped back inside the lighthouse, armed with a Maglite now, and went to the electrical panel. He didn’t want to leave the busted light with live current going to it. Last thing he needed was a fire. He snapped the main breaker off, plunging the room into darkness.

He turned his flashlight on, checking for last precautions before locking this place up, and around him the old pictures picked up the glow, dozens of dead eyes watching him. He paced with the flashlight held at shoulder level, taking them all in. With only a few exceptions, they were turn-of-the-century photographs. A few, such as Jacqueline’s, had names, but most were tagged simply with the word NO. What did that mean?

Kimble slipped on a pair of plastic gloves, then moved around the room, carefully removing every photograph and every map.

It was a suicide, nothing else to it. No call for investigation. Still…

If there are two things I’d hope you might continue to grant me in the future, it is your time and respect.

“Why did you do it, Wyatt?” Kimble whispered. “And what is all this shit about?”

There was no suicide note, no explanation or farewell. Beyond the maps and photographs, there was nothing except a handwritten sheet of paper taped to the electrical panel above Wyatt’s bunk. Behind that panel existed everything that the man seemed to care about—the circuits that controlled his lights, the power that fed them—and Kimble leaned over the bed to read it more carefully. Lyrics to some poem or song titled “Lantern.”

It’s a hungry world out there

Even the wind will take a bite

I can feel the world circling

Sniffing round me in the night

And the lost sheep grow teeth

Forsake the lambs and lie with the lions

The story of the song, which seemed to be a defiance of human darkness, of an evil world, and the significance it might have had to Wyatt French, became vividly clear by the end:

So if you got a light, hold it high for me

I need it bad tonight, hold it high for me

’Cause I’m face-to-face, hold it high for me

In that lonesome place, hold it high for me

With all the hurt that I’ve done, hold it high for me

That can’t be undone, hold it high for me

Light and guide me through, hold it high for me

And I’ll do the same for you, hold it high for me

I’ll hold it high for you, ’cause I know you’ve got

I’ll hold it high for you, your own valley to walk

I’ll hold it high for you, though it’s dark as death…

Kimble stopped reading, saddened, and turned away. Wyatt had certainly held a light high, but for what? Kimble thought of him living up here in total isolation, listening to the wind work over the ridge and watching from behind the glass as his lighthouse illuminated the night woods. What had it meant to him? These words, that light? He felt the weight of sorrow on him as he always did soon enough with suicides, a hard tug of personal connection that he’d never dare put into words. I want out, too. A person was more than twice as likely to kill himself as to be killed by another, and yet people feared murderers far more than what lurked within themselves.

“Poor bastard,” Kimble said, and then he turned away. As some odd temple of loneliness the lighthouse made sense to Kimble, almost perfect sense—You’re right, Wyatt, it’s too dark too often here—but the maps seemed to suggest something more than that. He had been a lonely man, certainly, but there was more than loneliness here, and perhaps Kimble should be grateful that he’d not harmed anyone else. Another year or two of living in this place and brooding over whatever the hell he brooded over and he might have picked up the same gun and ventured out. It happened sometimes. Chief Deputy Kevin Kimble had been around long enough to know that terrible things happened sometimes, strange things, things that you couldn’t even say out loud…

With every passing minute the place felt smaller and colder, and Kimble found himself thinking of the infrared illuminators, that ring of lights below the main bulb. What in the hell was he using those for? He moved away, leaving Wyatt’s treasured song lyrics where they belonged, on the front of the electrical panel, and returned to the stack of photographs and maps he’d placed on the desk. After a moment’s pause, he reached into his pocket, withdrew the photograph of Jacqueline Mathis, unfolded it, and added it to the collection. For a long time he stood above the desk, staring down at her face.

One in the hole, he found himself thinking numbly. Rookie fucking mistake. Inexcusable error. It was your own fault.

He’d taken the gun from her without incident. Ejected the magazine, slipped it into his pocket, and then, as her husband wheezed on the floor, he’d set the gun on the coffee table and turned to the dying man. Never pulled the slide, never checked the chamber. It was his own fault.

She crossed the room for it, Kimble. That wasn’t your fault. She moved like a shadow, moved fast and silent, and she came ten feet across that room to grab the weapon and then she pointed at you and fired. That was your fault?

She’d been scared. She’d been terrified, and he had to remember that.

No. She was terrifying. There’s a difference.

He could still remember the way she’d moved, remembered it so damn vividly that it made his whole body tense. It had been a feeling more than anything else, an instinct—he didn’t remember hearing her or seeing her. There’d just been some flutter of recognition in his brain, some primal warning, and then he’d glanced back and seen her in the darkness with the gun in her hand and a smile on her face.

Well, no, she wasn’t smiling. That was just how he—

Yes she was! Yes she was, don’t lie to yourself, she was smiling.

Kimble remembered it, caught in his own trauma. Surely she hadn’t been smiling. She’d been frightened. Thought she was shooting at her husband again, thought she was protecting Kimble.

Yes, that was it. She’d wanted to help him. Not kill him.

He took the gun from her without incident initially. She didn’t fight, didn’t say a word, appeared to be in shock. They knew each other by then; he was surprised by her silence, but his oath to protect and serve covered the son of a bitch on the floor, too, and he had to attend to him. The house was in total darkness except for a patch of living-room floor illuminated by the flashing lights of Kimble’s cruiser. It had stopped raining, but there was still thunder on the other side of the mountains. She handed the gun, a Glock, over to Kimble calmly. Her eyes weren’t even on him, but rather on her husband, who lay on the floor in his own blood. He was still breathing, but there was an awful lot of blood. Later Kimble would find himself wishing that the man hadn’t been breathing. It was the breathing that rushed things along, the breathing that forced Kimble to handle the situation the way he did. The man was dying, and Kimble had to try to do something about that.

It was just him, though, no backup yet, no ambulance. Everyone was en route, but en route was awfully damn different from being there, and it was just him and the dark house and the silent woman with the gun. He took the Glock and asked her what had happened and she did not answer, but she did not need to; he could see the bruises even in the shadows. He’d been in this house before. He knew what happened here.

She was trembling, and she was glassy-eyed, and she was silent and passive, so passive. Even with the gun in her hand she hadn’t appeared threatening, and once it was out of her hand, what was there to fear? She’d called Kimble for help. The man on the floor was breathing, too, he was breathing and needed attention and Kimble had to move fast.

So he didn’t cuff her. He told her to sit and stay, as if she were a dog, and she had lowered herself onto the floor with her back against the wall. Kimble was standing there with two guns in his hands—her Glock and his own, which he’d drawn upon entering the home—and the man on the floor was bleeding and breathing and Kimble had to move fast. He’d holstered his own weapon and put hers down on the coffee table. Before he did it, though, he released the magazine and put that in his pocket. He was not wearing gloves and he was tainting all of the evidence, but such concerns did not seem important right then, alone in the dark house with the bleeding and breathing man on the floor.

He’d had just enough time to turn his head before she fired. Turned and saw her…

… smiling! Absolutely delighted, she was so happy to shoot you, she was so happy…

… with the gun and couldn’t even lift his own. The bullet caught him low in the back and drove him down into her husband’s blood. Jacqueline Mathis laid her Glock down, calmly, and walked toward him, knelt, and pulled his gun out of its holster. Then, while he tried to get his mouth to work, tried to tell her not to do it, she’d leveled the muzzle at his forehead.

He remembered wishing she’d just squeeze the trigger. Just finish it, not draw it out in such a way. But the smile turned to a frown and then she’d leaned toward him. Leaned toward him and down, her hair swinging from her face and close to his own, and it had been almost as if she were going to kiss him. The motion that gentle, that intimate.

Until the muzzle touched his skin.

She’d pressed the gun directly to his forehead, and her finger was tight on the trigger, and out in the driveway the lights on his cruiser flashed on the two of them there on the floor and in the blood, and she kept blinking against the glare. When the red caught her face the blink turned to a wince, and she took a sharp, harsh inhalation, as if struck by a sudden pain. Looked back at him, and the lights flashed again, and again, and she suddenly removed the gun and crawled backward, into the darkness. Then there was another car in the driveway and Kimble got the words out.

“Put it down.”

So she did. She laid his weapon on the floor and said, in a confused voice, as if she had just stepped into the room and interrupted his attempt at a quiet death, “I’m sorry. I just don’t know—” and right then the backup deputy turned the cruiser’s spotlight on, piercing the front window with an explosion of light. Jacqueline Mathis lifted her hands and covered her face, and Kimble realized he might live, and then he fainted.

Now he looked at her photograph and felt lightheaded again.

“What were you doing up here, Wyatt?” Kimble muttered, and around him the lighthouse creaked against the force of a strengthening winter wind.

9

THE CATS ALERTED WESLEY to the blue light that was not a light at all.

When they turned out in unified fury on the night after Wyatt French died at the top of his lighthouse, it was the first time Wesley had seen anything of the kind. And Wesley Harrington had spent forty-five of his fifty-seven years around cats. He’d been born in Wyoming in a place so far out in the mountains that there would be weeks at a time when he was unable to make it to school because the roads were impassable due to snow. His father had a sixth-grade education with books and a doctorate as a woodsman. He hunted, fished, and trapped, all for two things: food and money. There was only one exception to that approach: mountain lions.

Wesley went along on his first lion hunt when he was twelve. Some folks called them cougars, some mountain lions, others pumas, but in the Wyoming mountains there were just “lions.” There was, as Wesley’s father regularly explained to him by the fire that provided the sole heat source in their cabin, nothing finer than hunting lions. They were the only animal in America that could truly outthink a man. Oh, bears and deer and wolves had their instincts, but lions were crafty.

They were also, he often said, the only American animal that would stalk a man. He’d heard that polar bears would do such a thing, but there were no polar bears in the lower forty-eight. Lions would stalk, though. He’d seen it done, and heard tell of many other occasions. They were faster, more agile, more deadly, and far smarter than any other creature, and for those reasons a lion hunt had nothing to do with food or money and everything to do with the thrill of battle.

Those hunts outlasted almost all of Wesley’s childhood memories. The frigid air, the deep snow, the howling sounds the wind made as it worked through the mountains. An expanse of wilderness completely empty except for Wesley and his dad and the three Plott hounds. They’d find a track, measure it, estimate the size of the cat, and then they’d be off, off through some of the most unforgiving terrain in the area, because the cat’s first instinct when dogs were at its heels was not, contrary to popular belief, to tree. Cats were too smart for that. So first they’d run, and they would run toward territory that favored them. A mountain lion could cover twenty miles or more in a day.

Some of the locals had calling stands, and they’d sit up in the trees and call for the big cats, and sometimes it worked. Bill Harrington had no patience for such approaches. Lion hunts were supposed to be chases.

When Wesley was fifteen, he and his father had the greatest hunt of both their lives, scrambling through crusted snow and treacherous canyons, the hounds hoarse-voiced and with torn, bloody pads on their feet. They watched the lion—a massive cat, a true trophy—swim a frigid river to escape them and then, just as twilight was settling, they treed it on a rocky ledge. Bill Harrington gave his son a chance.

That was the first and last cat Wesley ever shot.

It was while they were preparing the body for transport back home that they found the cubs. The lion had led them on a merry chase away from the den at first—a wise instinct, carrying the threat away from those she loved—but in the end she’d decided to go back, maybe hoping to take refuge, maybe thinking she needed to stand and fight, but more likely confident that she’d lost the dogs in the river.

She hadn’t.

There were two cubs in the den, and Bill Harrington told Wesley that they would not survive on their own and should be put down fast and painlessly. Wesley, feeling tremendous shame, had refused, and Bill had relented. They took the cubs back down and called the state to come get them. That same night a screaming blizzard blew in, and it was four days before someone with the state arrived to inspect the cubs. By then one had died in Wesley’s arms; the other was alive. He’d bottle-fed it, slept with it, never left it. Those four days shaped a life.

He never hunted cats again. He tracked them, but with only a camera in his hands. After high school he worked with a group in California that studied the cougar populations. From that he met a woman who was headed to Africa to work with lions. He spent two years there. Then it was South America for jaguars, then back to the States to work for the USDA as an investigator on cases where tigers were being raised and slaughtered for their pelts, then on to one private preserve, then to another and another.

He’d spent far more time around cougars, lions, tigers, cheetahs, and ocelots than he had around people. The only people he knew well, in fact, were cat people. Big cats were his world, his life. He knew them well.

And he knew this: the cats at Audrey Clark’s rescue preserve did not like their new grounds.

Wesley lived at the preserve. He’d joined them years earlier, when David was getting it started, and he’d expected it would be a temporary gig. But they were wonderful people, the Clarks, and their mission—providing rescue, then homes and safety and pleasure, for abused exotic cats—was one he believed in deeply. So Wes had stayed, living on the grounds in a well-equipped trailer and surrounded by cats that he loved as family, happy both because he knew he was needed and because he liked the idea of the planned expansion at Blade Ridge.

Liked it until tonight, at least, when a cacophony of roars, hisses, and screams broke out just as he was about to get some sleep.

He’d never heard them all join in like this. Sometimes the tigers would excite the lions and most of those groups would get to roaring—a sound that seemed to make the very earth upon which you stood tremble—but as Wesley grabbed a flashlight and stepped out of the trailer, they were all going. He could even hear the low hisses from Tina, a serval, the smallest of African cats, whose cage was very close to the trailer door. He shone his light down at her and saw that she was standing with her back arched and tail stiff, staring away from him, out toward the road. Out toward the lighthouse. But it was dark and nobody had come down the road, so what in the hell…

He saw it then. A strange blue light was working its way around the face of the lighthouse. Every cat in the preserve was staring it down, and they usually didn’t give a damn about light.

“Hello?” Wesley shouted. He wasn’t a large man, but working with cats for years had taught him how to use a mighty large voice when he needed it. “Who’s there?”

No response came, and the light didn’t stop moving. It just bobbed around the outside of the lighthouse, and Wesley stared at it in fascination. The thing was no ordinary light, and that went beyond the blue color. It had the flickering, undulating motion of a flame. Yes, that’s exactly what it looked like—a blue torch.

It drifted around the hilltop and disappeared and for a moment Wes relaxed. Then he noticed that the cats had not. Every single animal was upright and pressed to the fence, watching and snarling. Wes stared at them, truly at a loss, and then looked back just in time to see the blue light reappear at the top of the lighthouse.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. Whoever was out there had gotten inside. But Wyatt French was dead, the police had told him that, and he knew for a fact that the last officer on the scene had left hours before.

The torch reflected off the glass and filled the lighthouse with an ethereal blue glow. Wesley suddenly felt both exposed and frightened, and he clicked his own flashlight off and stepped back into the shadows, close to Tina’s cage, the serval still making those low, warning hisses.

After a time the blue light vanished again, then appeared outside the lighthouse, and the cats went wild. The roar of a tiger could always make a newcomer tremble, but Wesley couldn’t remember the last time the sounds had made him uneasy. The cats were enraged, and it was at this blue light.

Do something, he told himself.

But what? Chase down the source? That didn’t seem like such a good idea. Because that light… there was something strange about it.

He was still standing there debating when the light vanished over the crest of the ridge, and the cats began to fall silent and settle back down. Some—Kino in particular—continued to pace and voice displeasure, but the unified response was done.

“What was that, Kino?” Wesley said, walking out into the preserve, where his favorite tiger was placed in a central location. “What was that, buddy?”

The tiger continued his restless patrolling. Wesley watched him, then looked back at Tina, the always-docile serval, who’d risen in such aggressiveness, and found himself recalling all of the legends that said cats could sense spirits.

And a man just died up there, he thought. The lighthouse keeper himself. Maybe he intends to remain on duty after all.

“Stop it,” he said, and while he directed the harsh command at Kino, it was intended for himself. He didn’t need to indulge such foolish thoughts. The cats, who had never united in aggression like this before, were simply responding to the new grounds, to unhappiness with the change, to…

“To that light,” he whispered.

And whoever carried it.

10

IT APPEARED THAT WYATT FRENCH had died intestate, no family or guardian in line to step up and handle the proceedings. That made it the county’s problem. If no will or heir was found, the dead man’s property would go up for auction. That one, Kimble wanted to see. Who in the hell would bid on a lighthouse in the woods?

In the course of working the phones that morning, he was beginning to develop a picture of Wyatt French. French had been an extraordinarily gifted carpenter, one of the finest in the area, and in his youth seemed destined for good things. When a big parcel of land at Blade Ridge—holdings of the Whitman Company for generations, back to the mining days—was released for sale, Wyatt mortgaged himself up to the ears to acquire it, intending, apparently, to develop it into a neighborhood of log homes that would embrace the region’s beauty.

Not a single log had ever been laid.

Times got tougher, Wyatt’s drinking habit worsened, and the grand plan faded from his conversation. Eventually he put a trailer on the choicest grounds of his property, telling friends—or, by that point, bartenders—that he’d soon replace it with the first of his custom log homes.

Instead he’d replaced it with a lighthouse.

By then his alcoholism was a crippling thing, and no contractor in the area would hire him, no matter his skills. Too much risk. He made a living through odd jobs and people with great patience—if you could wait for him long enough, he did fine work—and lived a solitary, bourbon-soaked existence out in his lighthouse. When the bank finally went after him, he’d lost the rest of his land and declared bankruptcy. All they let him keep was the ground on which he’d built his bizarre home. The rest sat untouched for a few years—it was so far from everything that no developer was interested—and then David and Audrey Clark came along and purchased it from the bank that had held it for so long.

Now they were moving in, and Wyatt was dead by his own hand.

Kimble had been working the phones for a full hour, trying to track down next of kin, when three plastic bags were delivered to him: the items that had been removed from Wyatt French’s pockets by the medical examiner.

There was a wallet, a cell phone, and a pocket knife. Kimble set the knife aside and started with the wallet. There wasn’t much to study: eleven dollars in cash, an ancient set of business cards that identified Wyatt as a “skilled tradesman,” and a driver’s license that had been revoked years earlier. When Wyatt came to town, he walked or hitchhiked. He did not come to town often.

Kimble put the wallet back in the plastic evidence bag, then turned his attention to the cell phone. It would be the only phone—no landline had ever been extended to Blade Ridge. Wyatt could have requested one when he moved out there, though it probably would have required a substantial payment, but he never did. The cell was a cheap thing, the sort you could pick up at a gas station or drugstore with cash and no contract. It held a log of calls, though. Kimble scrolled through, wincing a bit as he saw his own number, and then put the others into a computer search, looking for matches.

The most recent call was, of course, the last—the Sawyer County Sentinel, where he’d reached Roy Darmus. Before that, Wyatt had called Kimble. The previous eight calls had all gone to the same number, and when Kimble ran the reverse search, it returned to the office of a Dr. Kaleb Mitchell in Whitman.

Kimble frowned. That was a lot of calls. He picked up his own phone, dialed, and got the receptionist. After he identified himself and said that he was investigating a death, he had Dr. Mitchell on the line pretty quickly.

“Of course you’ll need a subpoena for medical records,” the doctor said before Kimble could even get warmed up.

“I’m well aware of that. But before you get too worried about protecting your patient’s rights, understand that your patient is dead. He committed suicide yesterday, Dr. Mitchell.”

“Oh, my.”

“Yes. I’m not interested in his medical records, I’m trying to investigate the circumstances of his death. There are some questions around it, and I’d appreciate your help.”

“Within proper limits, of course.”

“Do you know if there’s anyone I should contact on this matter? It doesn’t appear that he has any family. Are you aware of any?”

“There is no one,” Dr. Mitchell said with quick confidence. “I just had that discussion with him. He told me he was very much on his own.”

“You just had this discussion.”

“That’s right. You want to know if there was a medical reason that might have motivated him, don’t you?”

“I’m curious, yes.”

“Absolutely. In fact, I’m sorry to say that I’m not surprised to hear this news. Mr. French was dying, deputy. He had liver cancer.”

Kimble felt an odd sense of relief. It was a sad situation, certainly, but this brought a clarity that had not been there before.

“I see,” he said. “That’s very helpful. You’d informed him of this recently?”

“Last week. The prognosis was not good. Very grim. He did not seek regular medical treatment, and I believe he lived in a fashion that was quite abusive to the liver. Quite abusive.”

“You’re correct.”

“I was worried about him, frankly. Beyond the illness, I mean. I don’t mind telling you that I’m a little relieved to hear that the situation is what it is. I know that sounds terrible, but—”

“You were afraid he might be a threat to someone besides himself?”

The doctor hesitated. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve given a number of terminal diagnoses over the years, deputy. It’s always sad, and the reactions are always varied. Mr. French’s stands out, though. He asked the standard question—how much time. I told him specialists would be more certain, but it was likely that he was down to six months to a year. He responded by telling me that if he had only six months, then that meant someone else had less time. His words, I believe, were, ‘If my clock’s winding down, then somebody else’s is spinning faster. I can’t leave this world without settling that.’ I asked him what he meant by that, and he declined to elaborate. I don’t mind telling you that it was… somewhat chilling. I had the distinct impression that he meant it as a threat. Not to me. But to someone.”

The sense of understanding and relief that Kimble had just felt was fading. He said, “I appreciate your telling me that. It could be quite important, doctor. It could be more important than you know.”

The doctor’s voice changed, a note of alarm in it now. “I thought you said it was a suicide, and that was all.”

“I know it was a suicide,” Kimble said. “And I hope that was all.”

11

THE DOCTOR HAD PUT FIVE STITCHES in one incision on Roy’s palm and six in the other, given him some pain pills, and sent him on his way. When he woke the next morning his hand throbbed dully, and he washed another round of pain pills down with coffee and then stared out at the street, looking at his neighbors’ front porches and thinking that it was the first time in more than a century that they’d awakened on any day but Christmas and found no newspaper to greet them.

He did not know what he should be doing with his day. Everyone else at the paper had completed résumé and cover-letter tasks months ago, and most of them had jobs. That wasn’t an option for Roy. At sixty, he was hardly the commodity a newspaper wanted to add to the staff, but he didn’t want to leave his home anyhow. The newspaper buyout had been larger than most, though it was hardly something to shout about from the rooftops. If he lived with a miser’s eye, he’d be fine. But finances weren’t his concern. Identity was. For almost forty years he’d been Sawyer County’s storyteller. It was a role he cherished, and now it was gone. His own name felt hollow to him if not part of a byline.

He had one story left, though, one final assignment issued. Wyatt French had asked him to tell it, but Roy’s interest was not in Wyatt French. It was in his parents and all those names that had joined theirs on the maps in the lighthouse.

One more day at the paper. One more story to work on. He didn’t mind the sound of that at all. He drove to the office as he always had, cutting through the Whitman College campus, beautiful brick and limestone buildings that stretched out where once the mining company houses had been. Mines had built the town, back in the late 1800s. First it had been coal, and then timber, and then there wasn’t anything left to take and the town went back to sleep for a time. Roger Whitman, son of one of the early coal and timber barons, went the Carnegie route in his later years, dispensing his fortune to various philanthropic causes, and one of them—the college—had inadvertently saved the town. Whitman College had grown into a prestigious school, known for liberal arts and environmental sciences, for high academic standards and higher tuition rates. The environmental sciences bit was ironic to anyone who knew the local history. Nobody had pillaged the land with greater ferocity than the Whitman family.

Roy’s great-grandfather had worked for the timber companies, his grandfather had risen to a position as vice president of one of the town’s only banks, his father had gone to law school at Vanderbilt and spurned top-dollar offers to practice family law in his hometown. At fourteen, Roy had been certain he would be the first Darmus to leave the hills.

It was easy to be certain of things at fourteen.

His own house was two blocks past the courthouse and one block from the sheriff’s department, prime location for a reporter. Originally the newspaper offices had been downtown, too, but they’d moved in the 1970s for more space, a larger press, and more loading docks, unaware of the digital death headed their way.

His keycard was still active, and he went through the employee door and headed for the morgue with his list of names and dates from Wyatt French’s lighthouse. Most of the names went beyond the computer days and would require poring over the dusty bound volumes down in the newspaper’s morgue.

He wanted caffeine but the coffeepot upstairs was gone for good, so he walked through the pressroom, with its smells of metal and oil and newsprint, and to the break room, where for decades the pressmen had gathered in the wee hours of the morning. He fed a dollar into the vending machine and came away with a Diet Coke, then turned around and ran smack into Rex Schaub, the building’s maintenance supervisor. Rex gave him a cockeyed smile.

“What are you doing here?” His eyes dropped to Roy’s bandaged hand and he added, “And what the hell happened?”

“Cut myself on a lightbulb.”

“Damn. Hey, you know the difference between a lightbulb and a pregnant girlfriend?”

“What?”

“You can unscrew the lightbulb.”

Roy stared at him.

“Get it?” Rex said. “If you knock your girlfriend up, you can’t—”

“Brilliant,” Roy said. “Who said that, Ben Franklin? Or is that Twain?”

Rex grinned. “Look, what are you doing here? Building is closed.”

“Need to do a few archive searches.”

Rex’s smile was slipping away. “Roy… the building is closed. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, but nobody is supposed to be in here except the clean-out crew. I should have deactivated all the keycards by now, but I haven’t gotten around to it. The owners gave me real clear instructions, though, that nobody—”

“The owners can kiss my ass,” Roy snapped. “I’ve spent more than forty years in this building, making money for them. If I want another day in this place, I’m going to take it.”

Rex, who’d had a gig as a maintenance supervisor for an apartment complex in place within a week of the Sentinel’s closing announcement, dropped his gaze to the reel of cable in his hands.

“Okay, Roy,” he said. “I get you. Do what you need to do.”

“Thanks,” Roy said, and walked past him, bristling with anger that had less to do with Rex and more to do with the way they were dismantling the office. He’d known it was going to happen, of course, but seeing it, watching all the artifacts of the newspaper that had been his life scooped up and put into boxes, hit him harder than he’d imagined it would.

The owners said, the owners said… The owners could go straight to hell. It was more his paper than theirs. He’d spent more waking hours in this building than any other place on earth. Hell, maybe more hours period. He worked long and late and never minded because he loved telling the stories. And those stories, the ones that were developing across Sawyer County at this very moment? What would become of them? Why didn’t anyone think that loss mattered?

He opened the door to the morgue and slipped inside, back into that narrow room that smelled of dust and old paper. A hundred and twenty-four years of stories.

He was pretty sure some of them had mattered.

The morgue was where he’d gotten his professional start—an irony never lost on him—putting together that local-lore column. He’d kept it going over the years, which drove the editors nuts, because it seemed he always vanished into the archives at the exact moment they came looking for him with a shitty assignment. It got to the point where “If you’re looking for Darmus, he’s in the morgue” was a running joke.

There were microfilm readers, but Roy hated using those. You lost the tactile sense of history that the bound volumes exuded, wide, massive books that had to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. You could stand in the middle of the morgue and see the ebb and flow of the industry—the date ranges getting progressively smaller as the newspaper economy boomed and the Sentinel added pages and ad circulars, delivering a doorstopper each morning and double that on Sunday. Then the date ranges widened and the papers shrank in more recent years, as declining revenue triggered page cuts.

He had every name in red ink from Wyatt’s maps. The photographs he hadn’t managed to study before Kimble shut him down. Most of them hadn’t borne names, anyhow. He’d recognized one face—Jacqueline Mathis—and remembered another from her name—Becky Stapp—but it seemed as if ninety percent were anonymous faces from the past. That left him with the red-ink names, and after finding his parents among them, he was awfully curious about the others.

While his initial plan had been to work forward from the oldest date to the newest, he found himself going directly to the January–March 1965 volume. He’d seen the January 9, 1965, paper a thousand times, had stared at it for countless hours, but it had been several years since his last look. Too many years? You didn’t want to drown in grief, but you needed to remember the dead, too.

He dropped the bound volume onto the old, scarred desk—it had been the editor’s desk during World War II—opened it, and flipped through the pages until a familiar headline and photograph caught his eye. A single car smashed into the trees amidst a fine dusting of snow. They’d been predicting a big one, but it had never hit. Just a little freezing rain, an inch of powder, and two dead in a one-car accident. Minor storm. Minor.

Roy ran the back of his hand over his mouth, adjusted the light over the desk, and began to read.

Two people were killed Saturday night in a single-vehicle crash on Blade Ridge Road in the southwestern reaches of Sawyer County.

Joseph Darmus, 41, and his wife Lillian Darmus, 40, of Whitman, were killed when their 1957 Chevrolet sedan apparently skidded on black ice west of the junction of County Road 200 and Blade Ridge Road, sending the vehicle into a stand of walnut trees. The accident occurred at approximately 8:45

P.M

. There were no witnesses. Joseph Darmus was killed on impact, according to police, while Lillian was transported to Sawyer County Hospital and died of massive head trauma a short time later. The couple was driving home from a Whitman Junior High School basketball game in Chambers. Their son, 14-year-old Roy Darmus, was on the bus with his teammates when the accident occurred.

That was the end of the first article. Simple, straightforward reporting, written late in the night, pushing deadline. Roy flipped to the next day’s edition to read the follow-up piece, which had altered his life when it appeared, guiding him into this very building.

It led with a quote from Roy about his father: “He was a real good driver. He always said he was going to be the one to teach me how to drive in the snow, because it was dangerous and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.”

Even now, decades removed, Roy felt something thicken in his throat. He looked away from the article. He didn’t need to read it again. He could recite it if he wished.

Time to get back to the task, back to the story. He knew his parents had died on Blade Ridge Road, but what had sparked Wyatt’s interest in the others?

He returned to the morgue shelves to find out, began hauling down bound volume after bound volume, and after hours at it he had no more sense of the truth than when he’d begun.

There were connections between the names on Wyatt French’s maps—some of them, at least—but the parts simply did not fit together to make a whole. Roy had expected something more coherent, even from a mind as admittedly disconnected as Wyatt’s. All the time the old man had spent laboring over the odd list suggested at a linkage that did not appear—at least to Roy’s eyes—to exist.

At first he thought it was simple: they were victims of car accidents at Blade Ridge. Several others besides his parents qualified for that category.

That idea, though, vanished as soon as he tracked down one of the names, Sam Fielding, and discovered that he’d been a high-voltage repairman, electrocuted while attempting to repair downed lines in a summer storm.

That fatality had occurred near Blade Ridge, in the woods west of County Road 200, which was close enough to count, but the nature of the death blew the car-wreck theory out of the water.

So then Roy shifted, thinking that the man had been looking for any deaths, period, in his strange little pocket of the mountains. Fielding’s case wasn’t unique. In several circumstances, Wyatt had noted deaths that had occurred near Blade Ridge Road. Emphasis on near. Because, as Roy discovered as he went deeper into the county’s history, pulling down volumes that billowed out dust when opened, the pages so stiff and yellowed that you had to turn them with infinite care or the paper would flake into pieces, the accidental deaths were certainly not limited to the road. In 1978, two boys died when they fell from the railroad trestle. In 1975, one woman drowned in a canoeing trip on the Marshall River with a friend. In 1958, a Marine who’d seen tours in Korea and the South Pacific shot himself in the head while deer hunting. That one could have been suicide—newspapers always had masked such stories in ambiguity—but Roy doubted it. In 1922, two men and a woman were trampled to death when a strange and violent panic took hold of their horses.

All of those names—they were the red-ink names—could be linked by two factors: death and proximity to Blade Ridge. The manner of death, though, those tales of trestle falls and stampeding horses and electrocutions, turned any legitimate concern about the road’s safety into a bizarre raving about… what? Some sort of cursed ground? A karmic disaster zone?

“What did they mean to you, Wyatt?” he mumbled, staring at the two lists, deciding that he’d wasted enough time on this endeavor. “Why did they matter?”

It would be impossible to say. And, Roy reminded himself, the old man had been losing his mind there toward the end. Yesterday’s ravings were a clear indication of that.

I’m getting scared of the dark. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.

Roy was halfway to the morgue door when that thought slipped into his mind, and when it did, he stopped walking and turned to look at the rows of old newspaper volumes as if they’d just told him something.

Hell, maybe they had.

He’d been looking for parallels, the same as Wyatt ostensibly had. For connective tissue between the names, and coming up empty.

Except for one thing. They’d all taken place at night. Without exception. Every fatality Wyatt had recorded from Blade Ridge’s lengthy history had occurred when it was…

“Dark,” Roy said aloud.

12

KIMBLE WANTED TO FOCUS ON Wyatt French, but the sheriff interrupted him in midmorning by entering with Nathan Shipley and saying they needed to have a talk about the accident.

Shipley’s cruiser was beyond any hope, so far gone that they just had it towed directly to the salvage yard where the sensitive equipment could be removed, not even bothering with a body shop. Shipley himself, however, had emerged from the terrible wreck with a few minor abrasions and bruises.

“Sore,” he told Kimble and the sheriff when he sat down. “I’m sore as hell, but considering… well, it really could have been bad.”

“I saw the car, son,” Sheriff Troy Black said. “Bad isn’t the word. Damn good thing I always see that this department has quality insurance.”

The implication being that they might operate without insurance if not for his savvy management. Kimble rolled his eyes, and Shipley saw it and cracked a small smile. The department was of a unanimous opinion on “Sheriff Troy,” as he insisted on being called. He excelled at politicking, handled the department’s public face well enough, but when it came to actual casework he’d gone past the point of being a broad-assed desk jockey and become an almost laughable figurehead. He insisted on wearing custom-made, chocolate-brown cowboy hats with his badge affixed to the crown, he was a partner in a horse farm that had yet to produce anything better than a dead-last finisher in a small-time race, he talked like he’d just fallen off a hay wagon, and everyone in the department knew damn well that when it came to investigative work, Kimble ran the show. That was fine by Kimble—he had autonomy within the department, and he also had Troy out there doing all the work that Kimble would never have been any good at. Kimble didn’t have to deal with the mayor’s office or the county council or campaigns or oversee the jail. The system in place in Sawyer County worked well; Troy glad-handed his way around town, keeping the public satisfied, and Kimble and his team got the policing done.

“Yes, son, it was a mighty bad wreck,” Troy continued. “That cruiser is totaled, you know. Less than a year old.”

“Like you said, it’s a good thing we have quality insurance,” Nathan agreed, and now it was Kimble’s turn to hide a grin.

“It surely is. My understanding is that you were well aware that the ten-zero was a probable suicide, that there was no shootin’ or stabbin’ in progress. My understanding is also that you were driving like Barney Oldfield when you flipped that car.”

Kimble had not the faintest idea who Barney Oldfield was, and it was clear that Shipley didn’t either, but they both kept quiet. Troy let his young deputy muse on things for a moment and then said, “Just need you to get the lead out of that foot, kid. But we also need to talk about your report.”

“My report.”

“That’s right. I just read through it. Seems to me we could have had one hell of a problem on our hands. You say you almost hit someone out there?”

Shipley’s face went uncertain. He parted his lips, closed them again, then tilted his head and said, “I thought there was someone in the road, sir. I was positive that there was a man in the road. I was running lights and siren and coming fast, as you said, maybe too fast, but I saw this guy in the rain and I swerved and…” He spread his hands. “That’s all. A mistake, I guess. Thought I saw something in the road. Tried to swerve to adjust.”

Troy looked puzzled. “So there wasn’t anyone? I was of the impression that you damn near killed a man.”

“So was I,” Shipley said. “But everyone else seems to disagree.”

Troy turned to Kimble. “You were out there.”

“Quite a bit later, but yes.”

“Is he right? Were the witnesses in agreement that he just plowed the car into the trees?”

“There was only one witness, a young guy who works out there. I think he heard more than he actually saw, though. It’s quite certain that Shipley didn’t hit anybody, and as for the circumstances of the wreck, there’s nobody to say what happened except him.”

“Well, that’s a load off. I looked at that report and was thinking lawsuit. You remember that college professor asshole who sued us two years ago?”

The college professor asshole had been T-boned by a deputy doing eighty miles per hour through a residential neighborhood in response to a possible burglary in progress that turned out to be a man trying to get into his own home after locking the keys inside. Kimble found it a fair enough complaint, but it would hardly do to share that sentiment with the sheriff. He just nodded.

“I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about.”

“That’s good to hear. Tell you what, Shipley. You take a day off, all right?”

“I’m good to work.”

“Not until tomorrow. Make sure there are no lingering effects. With the pictures I saw of that cruiser, there sure as hell might be.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry about the car.”

Troy nodded, then stood and looked at Kimble. “You got that suicide report wrapped yet?”

“Clearing up the details.”

“Good man. I’m not disappointed that we can shut that frigging lighthouse down for good. Had enough of a hassle over it when the cat people started to complain. Tell you what, crazy runs in the water out there. You got a lighthouse in the woods, and sixty damn lions right across the street? Would have been nice if they’d all crossed the river and ended up in Jasper County, you ask me.”

The sheriff left, and Shipley started to follow, but Kimble called him back.

“Hey—they check you out fully at the hospital?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Concussion tests?”

“Passed them, yes. Why do you ask?” Shipley had a way of discerning extra motivation, one of the things that made him good police. His understanding of the gap between what someone said and why they said it was well honed.

“The story you tell, it’s a strange one. Seems like the old brain stem might have gotten a pretty good whack.”

Shipley frowned.

“What?” Kimble said.

“I didn’t see a flash of something in the road,” Shipley said. “It wasn’t a deer, or a coyote. I saw a man. I locked up the brakes and swerved, and he ran the wrong way. Ran toward my swerve. Nothing I could do but hit him.”

Kimble said, as gently as possible, “Son, you didn’t hit anyone. Stop worrying about mistakes you didn’t make.”

“I saw it, though.”

“You remember seeing it. Big difference. Particularly after getting knocked around the way you did.”

“And when I came back around, when I could see again, there was a light,” Shipley continued, not content to dismiss his irrational memory.

“That lighthouse was right above,” Kimble said. “Would have been flashing like crazy.”

Except it wouldn’t have been, he realized. Because Shipley responded to the call from Darmus, and Darmus broke the light before he called. So it would have been darkness.

“Not the lighthouse,” Shipley said. “This was like a blue torch. That’s exactly what it was like.”

“A blue torch.” Kimble stared at him. “This is why I’m worried about concussions.”

Shipley forced a laugh.

“Guess I’ve got a creative imagination when I’m unconscious.”

“Be glad you imagined the worst and got the best.”

“Yes, sir.” Shipley pointed at the desk, where Kimble had spread out a full set of photocopies of the pictures and maps he’d pulled off the walls of Wyatt’s lighthouse. The originals were locked away. “What’s all that?”

“That,” Kimble said with a sigh, “is the disturbing collection left behind by your ten-zero.”

“The guy in the lighthouse?”

“Wyatt French, yes.”

Shipley picked up a few of the photographs, studied them. “Who are they?”

“I have no idea.”

“Strange hobby.”

“Strange man,” Kimble agreed. “You good, Shipley?”

“I’m fine.”

“All right. Go home and take some aspirin.”

“I was thinking I might run out to Blade Ridge first.”

“What?”

“I’d just… I’d like to look around.”

Kimble said, “You think it’ll help you clear your head, okay. But don’t get carried away worrying about it, Shipley. I don’t need a deputy who’s jittery behind the wheel, and the more you think about a disaster that didn’t even happen, the better the chance of nerves catching up with you.”

Shipley shook his head. “Of course not. I’m no superstitious sort, chief. You know that.”

Kimble did know that. If Shipley were a superstitious man, he probably wouldn’t have gone after this job. His father, Ed Shipley, a former Marine, had been in the department, too, had died in action in the summer of Kimble’s rookie year. Nathan Shipley had been twelve at the time.

Sixteen years ago, Kimble thought, watching Ed Shipley’s son walk out of the office. They pass by fast, no question about it.

Ed Shipley had beaten the fire department to the scene of a trailer fire because his car was a mile away when the call came. After he arrived, the hysterical family told him there was still someone inside. Marlon’s inside, Marlon’s inside, Marlon didn’t come out. Marlon turned out to be a cat. Ed Shipley, former U.S. Marine, hadn’t understood, and he went charging in after Marlon and never came back out. A day later the cat turned up at a neighbor’s house. Had probably been the first creature in the house to escape the inferno.

No, if Nathan Shipley had pursued this line of work, he wasn’t the sort who believed in jinxes. Wyatt French, on the other hand? He’d believed in something damn strange, and Kimble could not get a handle on it.

He flipped through the photo collection, all those ancient, sepia-tinted images of men with axes or picks or saws in hand. There were dozens of them, and across almost every one Wyatt had written the word NO in large bold print. Ten pictures had names, and computer searching had provided answers about just three of them.

In 1966, a Whitman restaurateur and local golf champion named Adam Estes had shot and killed his financial adviser. In 1979, an auto mechanic named Ryan O’Patrick had beaten his boss to death with a wrench. And in 2006… in 2006, Jacqueline Mathis had happened.

Wyatt kept photographs of all three in his home.

The seven other people who were named—Becky Stapp, Timothy Osgood, Ralph Hill, Henry Bates, Fred Mortimer, John Hamlin, and Bernard Snell—had left no mark on the department computer system or the Internet, but that wasn’t surprising. Their photographs were very old.

Kimble ran through them again, shaking his head, then locked them in his desk drawer and went down to the jail.

A three-story concrete structure built just behind the sheriff’s department, the Sawyer County Jail had been home to Wyatt French on several occasions, though never for more than a night. Kimble didn’t have any questions for the corrections team about Wyatt, though. He had questions about their lights.

Just inside the jail, past the booking area and behind darkly tinted glass, was the control center. Here the security of the facility was monitored around the clock, with banks of computers and television screens ringing the room. Tyler Abel, a longtime road deputy who’d eventually moved into a position as the jail commander and answered directly to Troy, was sitting in the control center today.

“What’s going on, Kimble?”

“Taking bets on the Wolverine. First race is only a few months away. Figured you’re in for, what, a hundred?”

The Wolverine was the department’s nickname for the sheriff’s current racehorse. Troy, whose ability to name a horse was only slightly more advanced than his ability to breed a winner, had named the animal Wolf and Steam for logic that only he could follow, and his deputies had quickly altered it.

Abel smiled. “Not a jockey alive who can handle the Wolverine. But assuming the sheriff finds such a wrangler, I’m in for a thousand, of course.”

“Noted.” Kimble waved a hand at the monitors that showed images from every security camera in the jail and said, “Got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“You use infrared illuminators for some of these, right?”

“In some cases, yeah.”

“What’s their purpose?”

“Lets us see in the dark,” Abel said, and smiled. “To keep a camera going, you’ve got to have light. The infrared illuminators provide it, but it’s invisible to the naked eye. So it’s not light that disturbs anyone. Perfect for security cameras, or military ops.”

“The ones I saw had these lenses that were, I don’t know, like… textured. Kind of speckled glass?”

“That’s an LED illuminator, probably. Some of them use halogen bulbs and filters, but the more expensive, better ones are LED. Light-emitting diode. Where’d you come across them?”

“You ever see that lighthouse out on Blade Ridge?”

“I have. The thing is… curious.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“But that’s not an infrared light, Kimble.”

“I know the main one isn’t. But here’s the deal: he had the main bulb, and then surrounding it this ring of infrared illuminators.”

“That is bizarre. And expensive.”

“Yeah?”

“If it’s an LED illuminator of the sort you were telling me about, I’d say each unit went close to a thousand bucks. Could be more. Lot of scratch for a man like Wyatt French to invest in lighting.”

Yes, it was. Wyatt French had tried to purchase his bourbon with scrounged change. It was one hell of a lot of money to invest in invisible lighting.

“What would those be accomplishing that the main bulb wouldn’t be?” Kimble said.

“Had to be using them with cameras,” Abel said confidently.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Security cameras are my business, Kimble. The only purpose for infrared illuminators is cameras or rifle scopes. I mean, what they would have been accomplishing was keeping the place lit, even if nobody could tell. The area within range of those illuminators would never be truly dark. It would be dark to the naked eye, but not technically dark. But there’s no gain to that unless you’ve got them paired with cameras, is there?”

“I’ll have to take a better look for cameras,” Kimble said, more to himself than Abel. He’d given the lighthouse a cursory search yesterday, but he could have missed a concealed camera easily enough. There had been the distraction of the corpse, after all.

“To see what, unchanging images of the woods at night?” Abel asked.

“The infrared lights were in the top of the lighthouse, and that’s where he shot himself. Maybe there’s video of it.”

“And you want to watch that little snuff film?”

Kimble looked at him, remembering Wyatt’s voice coming at him on the dark highway. If the victim were somehow compelled…

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I ought to.”

13

THE MOVE WAS GOING far more smoothly today. The rain had let up, the cats were agreeable, and Wes was his usual precise and competent self, although unusually quiet, often seeming lost in his own thoughts. Audrey watched the old preserve empty out, this place where she had met her husband, fallen in love, and spent such happy years. Everyone from friends and family to complete strangers had urged her not to allow herself to feel obligated to follow through with the relocation when David died. She understood their reasoning: it was his passion project, not hers. What they didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, was that the cats were all she had left of David. They had no children—that part of the five-year plan would never be completed—and now the remnants of her marriage were memories and sixty-seven exotic cats rescued from a variety of terrible circumstances. They were the legacy. And, oh, how he had loved them.

She’d had other options. One of David’s dear friends, a man named Joe Taft, ran a cat rescue center in Indiana. He’d been David’s mentor, and he’d offered to take the animals, all of them.

Audrey couldn’t agree to it. Canceling on the relocation would have been the ultimate failure to David, who’d been determined not to be chased away, although plenty of attempts had been made. There were multiple reasons for the move, but they all boiled down to one fundamental issue: proximity to people. Ironic, of course, because that problem was the reason all of these cats needed care to begin with. The age-old territory battle never stopped, and the cats would never win. When the preserve had first been built, the locals had regarded it with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, but there’d been hardly any objection. Over the following three years, though, development had overtaken the nearby fields. First came a seventy-home complex called Eden Estates, then talk of a golf course. The good people of Eden Estates moved into their homes, heard the occasional cougar scream or lion’s roar in the night, and began to fear for their children. Complaints began, alleging that the rescue preserve was too close to residential property and the cats presented a danger. True to form in the human-animal history, nobody seemed concerned with the idea that the cats had been there first.

Audrey’s legal background had a real use then, as she defended the preserve, pointing out that no cat had ever escaped from the property and no human had ever been bitten or clawed or hurt in any way, but even as she was making the arguments, David was eyeing new locations. He wanted space and he wanted distance from people. They found plenty of both at Blade Ridge.

Now all of his cats were there. Well, all except for Ira. He’d be moved alone.

There were dozens of cats on the preserve that nobody cared about, and then there was Ira, the subject of intense debate, his photographs and vital statistics being shipped back and forth from cat experts around the globe. The reason: he was living, breathing proof that the mountain lion of so many legends existed. While the term black panther was tossed about casually by the public, it was inaccurate. There were melanistic jaguars who exhibited a genetic quirk that turned their fur black—or, rather, black on black, since the cats were spotted—but no proof existed for a black North American cougar.

Until Ira.

And he’d come to the preserve of his own accord.

They’d been in operation for five weeks when he made his first appearance, and Wesley had been the only one to spot him. Even David had scoffed, sure that Wes was seeing things, but their manager was adamant: a cougar had come down out of the hills and surveyed the cages. A black cougar. The kind that didn’t exist.

For a time Audrey had believed Wes was enjoying a practical joke. But as the man spent more and more time in the woods around the preserve, leaving food bait behind and trying to rig a trap camera to obtain evidence of the creature, she realized he was serious, and she worried about what it meant. There was no such thing as what he’d claimed to have seen, and still he pursued it with absolute conviction. It was disturbing to watch.

And then, nine days after he’d first spotted the cat, Wesley wheeled it into the preserve in a transport cage. The cat had entered, he said, and then chosen to ignore the bait that was inside. The guillotine gate hadn’t been tripped by his entrance, though; he’d somehow gracefully avoided triggering it. Rather than retreat, he remained inside and watched Wesley as if daring him to come close enough to lower the gate himself.

“I had a moment of doubt,” Wes admitted.

He’d done it, though. Approached and lowered the gate, and for a moment the cat could have struck, but he did not. Then the gate was down and he was trapped and the Kentucky preserve had the only melanistic cougar in recorded captivity.

David considered that a stroke of luck unlike any other in his life—Thanks a lot, Audrey remembered telling him dryly when he’d informed her of that news. He believed the cougar had been drawn out of the deep woods by the presence of the other cats, by curiosity over his own kind. Wes never seemed convinced of that; cougars were not pack animals, they were isolated, territorial creatures. He would grant David the animal’s curiosity, but he didn’t believe the cat wanted anything to do with his peers, either—a belief that was rapidly borne out by Ira’s behavior. He was surprisingly docile around people, but he demanded solitary confinement. Many of the cats were happy to socialize with the others. Ira wanted his own space.

The chaos built quickly. David’s fellow experts disagreed at first, claiming that Ira was the product of crossbreeding, but DNA tests supported Audrey’s husband: Ira was a North American puma, or cougar, or mountain lion. Wes had disregarded the controversy—Told you from the start he was a mountain lion, he’d said, and then gone on about his business. The cat, everyone except Wesley agreed, could certainly not have been wild. He was too good with people, too comfortable. Clearly he’d escaped from some private owner, and clearly that person had been involved in something illegal, or he would have reported him missing. Would have reported him, period.

Wes disagreed, but he didn’t like to be in the spotlight, and he refused to give any interviews when curious media folks came calling. David handled that. All Wes would say was, “The cat came out of the woods. Right now, that’s all you know. Don’t presume a damn thing when that’s all you know.”

It was, though, the most uncertain Audrey had ever seen him with a cat. Wes spent hours studying Ira, and she was convinced that he was wondering the same thing: where in the world had he come from? If he was wild, why didn’t he act like it? And if he was not, then how was he an unknown?

They researched for endless hours and came up with nothing but legends. According to Native American folklore, the black cat was a symbol of death. According to scientific history, the black cat didn’t exist. Put the two together and you generated a lot of excitement.

“He’s ready to go, you can tell,” Wes said when they arrived back at the now-empty preserve to collect the cougar. “We’ve moved everyone else, and it’s making him edgy, being the only cat left. He didn’t like watching the others go away. He’s ready to see where we’re taking them.”

Audrey hadn’t been able to perceive the slightest change in the cat’s countenance, but she knew better than to argue with Wes. If he suggested what a cat was feeling, he was probably right. He seemed to live inside their strange feline brains. It was, frankly, a source of irritation for her. In the months since David had died, she’d tried to think of the cats as her own, but at her core she knew that they did not trust her in the way they had trusted David, trusted Wes. Could she have even handled them without Wes, could she have kept the preserve going at all? It was a question she didn’t like to ponder, because she felt the answer was all too obvious.

She looked at him now and nodded, recalling again the intensity of David’s excitement upon finding Ira. He had knelt in front of the cage, staring in at the black cat with a wide smile, and said, “They’re real. Every wildlife biologist in the country would tell you that if they ever existed, they don’t anymore. But you’re looking at one. And you know what else? This cat’s roots don’t go back to Africa or the Amazon. They go back to these mountains. I can feel it, can’t you? Look at him: he belongs to this place.”

Now, months removed, Audrey watched the cat swish his long black tail and nodded. “Let’s get him out there.”

There were no problems. In fact, no sooner did they have the transport cage placed in front of the enclosure gate and opened than Ira unfolded to his full length and stalked over to it, eyes on Wes and not the cage. It was as if he knew exactly what was desired and saw no reason to fight it.

The drive, too, was problem-free, Wes going slow and sticking to the back roads. They’d just gotten onto the rutted gravel of Blade Ridge Road when they saw an unfamiliar truck parked ahead. A moment later, as they continued to approach, the door opened and a police officer stepped out.

“It’s him,” Audrey said. “The guy from the accident.”

Wes slowed at the gates, and Audrey put down her window. The deputy regarded them with a nod and a slight smile.

“Hi there.”

“Hi,” Audrey said. “How are you?”

“Just fine. Shouldn’t be, by the look of my wheels, but I’m fine.”

“You’re one lucky SOB, I’ll promise you that,” Wes said.

The deputy nodded, giving a cursory glance toward the dark lighthouse above, and then said, “Well, thanks for your help yesterday. And I’m glad I went into those trees and not into the fences. Could have let some tigers out.”

Audrey had never considered the possibility. If he’d exited the road left instead of right… She shook her head against the thought.

“All that matters is that you’re okay,” she said. “What brings you out?”

“Wanted to look around. Trying to get a handle on just how it happened. You’re certain that nobody from your staff was in the road?”

“Not a soul,” she said. “Dustin heard the sound of the wreck and came out. You were alone.”

“Is he here? I’d like to ask him about it.”

“He’s done for the day.”

The deputy nodded, but he seemed distressed. “All right.” He waved a hand at the preserve. “Those cats are pretty amazing. I’ve been watching them. Never seen anything like it, so many together.”

“You want a look around?”

“I’d love it.”

She got out of the truck and told Wes they would meet him at Ira’s new enclosure. Then, on foot, she began to lead the deputy around the preserve.

“You aren’t scared around them?” he said.

“Not a bit. Now, there are some who I wouldn’t want to be alone with in a cage, but that doesn’t mean they’re marauding threats. It just means they haven’t been socialized with humans as well as the others. They still can be sweet cats, and they still need a home, but you have to be a little more careful. Most of them, though? Sweet.”

She went over to the leopard cage and made a chirping noise with her tongue. Jafar, a huge spotted leopard, one of the most beautiful cats in the preserve, was in his cat house. Audrey had made the mistake of referring to it as a doghouse once—it seemed the universal name for such a structure—and David corrected her indignantly.

They’re cat houses, he’d said, and she’d remarked that it sounded like a whorehouse, and he’d laughed. There’d been a lot of laughs in those early days, as they acquired cats and built enclosures and dreams.

Jafar’s house was a long and low L-shaped structure, open at both ends, built out of plywood and filled with straw. He was one of the cats who could be distrustful of visitors, or annoyed by their presence, and so he spent a lot of time in the house, where he could retreat into the shadows and study the situation with golden eyes.

Now, when Audrey dropped to one knee and made the chirping sound, the leopard promptly left the house, trotted up to the fence, and leaned his big head against the chain link, pressing his fur against her face, cheek to cheek. She reached through and scratched his ears.

“This guy is my baby,” she said. Jafar was one of the few cats with whom she felt the same level of confidence that Wes demonstrated. “He was bought illegally by some guy in Ohio who kept him caged up in the back of a tattoo parlor. Then that guy was arrested for dealing meth—you would be amazed how many of our cats come from narcotics busts—and Jafar came here. He’s a little devious, likes to play tricks, but he’s a sweetheart.”

She stood and continued to walk, and Jafar gave an angry growl. The deputy, Shipley, turned uneasily to look back at him.

“He’s just upset because we’re moving on from him,” she said. “All he wants is attention.”

They made their way back toward Wes and the truck, stopping occasionally so Audrey could point out specific cats. She told him that the tigers tended to be far more playful than the lions, particularly in cold weather, and particularly in the snow. Nothing—nothing—pleased the tigers more than a snowstorm. During a good snowfall even the most lethargic of the tigers would turn playful, chasing the others and sliding through the snow. Kino would flip his water basin upside down, then climb on top and ride it like a sled, which made for the best video Audrey had ever captured at the preserve. She’d grown to pay religious attention to the snow forecasts in hopes of seeing the cats celebrate.

“Watch this,” she said, stopping by another cage. “Gabby! Hey, Gabrielle. Wake up.”

A tawny lioness rolled over, faced Audrey and the stranger, and yawned. Audrey whistled, said, “Gabby!” once more, and then clapped her hands three times.

Gabby rolled onto her back and clapped her own paws together, bringing a laugh from the deputy and coos of gratitude and adoration from Audrey.

“See? They’re peaceful,” she said.

“They weren’t last night,” Wes muttered, coming up to join them. Audrey frowned, wishing he wouldn’t say anything critical. “Last night they were anything but peaceful.”

At that point a tiger approached the cage, then swung his hindquarters around. Audrey grabbed the deputy’s arm and pulled him aside with her just as a stream of urine shot through the fence.

“Did he actually just try to piss on us?” the deputy said in amazement, checking his jacket.

“The bigger surprise is that he didn’t succeed,” Audrey said. “That’s Kino. He likes to mark me every time I pass by. He is, for some reason—or perhaps for that very reason—Wes’s favorite cat.”

Wes smiled and shrugged. Behind the fence, Kino had dropped onto his haunches and regarded them with a baleful stare, clearly disappointed with his marksmanship.

“Okay,” Audrey said, “let’s get Ira out of that truck. The man of mystery can check out his new digs.” She was feeling good, feeling energized despite the long days. They were almost done. Soon all of the cats would be here, and she could claim a long-fought victory.

They were now at the southwestern corner of the preserve. Through the trees, bare of leaves, the Marshall River showed, gray and swollen.

“You’re going to have a river view, Ira,” Audrey called to the cougar, standing beside the deputy at the gate to the enclosure as Wes backed up the truck.

“Hell of a place,” the deputy said to her as Wes stepped out and walked around to the rear of the truck. “Never seen anything like it.”

“There aren’t many things like it,” she said.

“Now this is the black cat?”

“Yes. The one Wes trapped. It was in the paper.”

He nodded. “I’ve heard about it. My grandmother used to tell stories about seeing a cat just like—”

He didn’t get to finish, because Wes lifted the transport cage’s gate and Ira came out in a blur of fury.

He streaked into the enclosure low to the ground and snarling, then spun back to face them, flattened his ears, and curled his lips back to show his teeth.

The deputy said, “Holy shit,” and took a step back.

“Ira,” Wes said. “Easy, buddy. Easy.”

He stepped toward the cougar, and Ira leaped. When he banged into the fencing, Audrey and the deputy shouted in unison. Audrey couldn’t help it; she’d watched cats twice this size show aggression before, but there was something different here, something frightening.

Even Wes seemed uncertain. He repeated his request for the cat to relax, and Ira responded by slinking toward the center of the cage and hissing. He locked his bright green eyes on the deputy and spread his jaws wide, showing every tooth in full glory, his front paws flexing.

“I know he’s behind a fence,” Shipley said, “but I’m still scared of that boy.”

“He’s the wild one,” Wes said softly. “Hasn’t been moved before. He’ll settle down.”

When Ira sprang onto the wooden platform, the deputy dropped his hand to his gun and Audrey joined him in taking yet another step back. Wes stayed where he was, and Ira ignored them completely, turned away to stare out west, toward the river. He gazed into the gray sky for a moment, then raised his head and screamed. There was no other word for it—cougars flat-out screamed, and Audrey had heard them before.

But she’d never heard anything like this.

“He’ll settle down,” Wes repeated.

“Sure,” Audrey said, her arms prickling, going to gooseflesh.

Behind them, the other cats had begun to stir.

Ira swung his head around, ears pinned back, and studied them. Then he jumped back down, and they all shifted when he landed, nobody—not even Wes—able to stay completely calm after that scream. The cat stalked toward them, sleek belly barely above the grass, tail swishing, each muscle loaded with coiled energy.

“Wes,” Audrey said, “maybe you should get the tranquilizer rifle.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“Wes, please.”

Wes looked from her to the cougar and then moved around the side of the truck. He opened the door and came back with the rifle, which fired sedation darts. Wes hated to use them, but right now Audrey thought they should have the option. She’d never seen any of the cats look this aggressive.

“I think we should just give him some space,” Wes said as he stepped back toward them. “Just give him—”

The cougar saw the rifle in his hand then, let out another chilling scream, and spun away from the fence. He darted to his left, then cut right, dodging between the platforms they’d built for him, almost as if he was seeking a screen against any attempt to shoot, and then, at the far end of the enclosure, he crouched and sprang.

And cleared the fence.

Shipley said, “Holy fuck,” and drew his gun. Wes pushed on his arm, preventing him from raising it and taking a shot, and Audrey just stared in astonishment as the cat vanished into the woods, running low and fast, a deadly shadow slipping back into the mountains from which it had come.

“It just jumped that fence,” Shipley said. His voice was trembling. “How tall is that fucking fence?”

“Fourteen feet,” Wes said. His voice was lower, but not all that steady either. “Fourteen feet, with a recurve at the top. It’s impossible for a cat to clear that thing. I built all of these enclosures myself. They can’t get out.”

He’d just watched it happen, but still he was insisting.

“What do we do?” Audrey said. She found it hard to speak. Her eyes were still on the place where the black cat had disappeared. Around them, the other cats were crowding to the edges of their enclosures, well aware that something was amiss. “How do we get him back?”

“I’ve got to call this in,” Shipley said in a stunned voice. “I’ve got to report this. That thing’s a mountain lion. We can’t just let it run around.”

“It was running around before,” Wes said, and he stepped away from them, went up to the fence, and ran one palm along the chain link, staring at it, this device that had betrayed him. He turned back to look at them, and his eyes were wide with wonder.

“I always told you he decided to join us,” he told Audrey. “I wasn’t wrong. He could have left whenever he wanted to, and he knew it.”

“Well, why did he pick today?” Audrey said, and as Shipley pulled out his radio and began to report the fact that they’d just lost a two-hundred-pound predator in the woods, Wes looked at her grimly.

“It’s this spot,” he said. “He didn’t like this spot. And you know what else? None of them do. Come sundown, you’ll see just what I mean.”

14

KIMBLE HAD ALREADY BEEN at Blade Ridge for two hours when he heard about the cat escape.

He’d gone there in search of the security cameras Wyatt had paired with infrared illuminators, only to confirm what he’d initially thought: there were no cameras.

Kimble scoured the grounds, the top of the lighthouse, the base. He checked the wiring leaving the circuit breaker, he tapped on the walls in search of hollow spots, he turned the desk inside out again.

There were no cameras.

Maybe they’d been part of the long-range plan; Wyatt had invested in the illuminators first, and never got around to the cameras.

But the longer Kimble searched, the more convinced he became that the infrared beams weren’t about capturing an image at all. They were simply about light.

They pointed in every direction, offering unseen illumination to the road and the woods, and Kimble remembered the initial fights about the light, the complaints that it was too bright, that it presented a danger. Wyatt had toned down the bulb, and apparently added invisible lighting. His idea of a compromise.

And the point?

Well, that was anyone’s guess. Kimble sure as shit didn’t have one.

The only find he made wasn’t a camera but another light. When he pulled Wyatt’s cot out from the wall, he found that the man had built a shelf beneath the bed, near where his hands would have rested while he slept. The contents: an empty holster that would have once held the Taurus .45 he’d used to kill himself, a hunting knife, a leather strop for sharpening it, and a spotlight.

The spotlight had a pistol grip and a trigger, and the lens was outfitted with a cherry-red filter. Two million candlepower rechargeable, a label on the handle boasted.

One hell of a bright light, Kimble thought, and then he squeezed the trigger and got nothing. He frowned, looked directly at the lens, and squeezed the trigger again. There was the faintest of crimson glows, as if the flashlight were draining away the dregs of its battery. When he touched the lens, though, he found it very hot. In fact, he could move his palm back from the light a good distance and still feel its warmth.

“An infrared flashlight,” he said aloud, turning the odd device over in his hands. Of course. If the power went out, you needed a flashlight handy. Particularly an invisible one.

He set the light back down, then inspected the knife and strop. It was a serious cutting instrument—six-inch stainless steel blade going down to a military-grip Teflon handle, and it was seriously sharp. The leather strop was worn from countless repetitions. Wyatt had spent a lot of time sharpening his knife. And, Kimble remembered from handling the suicide piece, oiling his gun. He’d wanted to be prepared, and was determined that the equipment would not let him down when the time came. This would be why a man slept each night with a gun, a knife, and a flashlight with a two-million-candlepower invisible beam within immediate reach. He wanted to be ready. The only question was, for what?

Kimble had promised him that he pursued the truth always, but maybe there was no truth to be found here, just madness. Maybe that was the truth when it came to Wyatt French.

He hit the spotlight trigger again, felt the warmth of the lens, and recalled Nathan Shipley’s statement about his wreck. He’d talked about seeing some strange light. Kimble looked down at the two-million-candlepower light in his hand and wondered about it. Was the thing truly invisible to the naked eye? What if it hit you just right, found just the proper angle? Those ridiculous laser pointers could do some damage to the eye, couldn’t they? Well, what about a two-million-candlepower infrared spotlight? It seemed plausible that if it were beamed just right, a flash of momentary blindness could ensue.

So what are you thinking, Kimble? That Wyatt was perched on a dead-end road, hoping for some poor lost soul to wander by so he could blind him with a flashlight? Come on.

He shoved the cot back into place, then sat on the dead man’s bed and wondered what Wyatt had known about Jacqueline that Kimble didn’t. Or what he’d known that Kimble did.

Had he known about the Bakehouse, for example?

Nobody should have. Nobody except Kimble and Jacqueline. And even between them, the coffee shop had never been remarked upon. Probably never would be.

He could remember her so well, the way she looked when she would step through the door with golden light behind her, putting a raven’s shine on her dark hair. Friday mornings. She never missed one. Once Kimble found out, neither did he.

Those encounters began after their first meeting, when Kimble was dispatched to the house after a neighbor called in a domestic dispute between Jacqueline and her husband. When Kimble got there, Brian Mathis came out to meet him, told him everything was fine. Kimble said he’d like to talk to the man’s wife. Mathis argued. Kimble was readying to explain that it was an argument he could make to a judge if he preferred when Jacqueline stepped out of the house. Kimble sent Brian Mathis back inside so he could talk to her alone, and he’d seen the dark look the man gave his wife as he passed. Kimble stood with her in the fading sun of a cold evening and watched the way she moved, so gingerly, one arm close to her ribs, and listened as she told him the neighbors must have been confused, there was no problem.

It wasn’t the first interview of that sort he’d conducted.

When he’d asked her if she was hurt, if her husband had struck her, she gave him a wan smile and said simply that there was no problem that required his assistance, though she appreciated the offer. He was explaining that she needed to be honest with him if there’d been any violence when she interrupted to tell him that she wasn’t the sort of woman he was expecting her to be, cowed and frightened and unwilling to report a husband who’d just post bond and come back home to finish the job.

“I appreciate what you’re telling me,” she said. “But I’m fully capable of handling this situation.”

The look in her eyes then, so firm, so strong, was different indeed from what he was used to in these situations. And it had worried him.

“There is nothing about you,” he’d told her, “that suggests you are anything but capable. But something else you are, when you go back in that house? You’re alone, Mrs. Mathis. You’re alone.”

She’d put her hand on his arm, held his eyes, and said, “I’m becoming more aware of that every day, deputy.”

Then she’d turned and walked inside. That was his first trip to the Mathis house.

Two weeks later he’d seen her at the Bakehouse, a café three blocks from the department. He liked to walk up there in the morning, clear his head, see the town. The coffee shop looked out on the courthouse where in the spring the lawn was lined with flowering trees, and sipping a coffee nice and slow at a sidewalk table could turn a potentially bad day into a good one, sometimes.

She was stepping in as he was stepping out on that particular Friday, and there had been an awkward moment of recognition. She smiled, said, “Hello, officer,” and he told her she didn’t have to call him that. She asked what she was supposed to call him then, and he said that his name was Kevin Kimble but most folks called him Kimble.

“I’ll call you Kevin, if you don’t mind,” she said.

He didn’t mind.

He sat at his table outside and she sat inside, and when she left she waved at him and softly said, “Thank you for your compassion, by the way. It helped.”

Routine took over, and he began his speech again, the one urging her to come down the street with him and make a formal complaint. She held up a hand to stop him and said, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

After a pause, he nodded and acknowledged that it was.

“Today I just want to enjoy that. Okay?”

He told her that it was okay. Told himself not to watch her walk down the street. He was full of useless advice that morning, it seemed.

It wasn’t long before he determined that her trips to the Bakehouse were consistently Friday mornings. The encounters became weekly, and they lengthened, but not by much. Five minutes, ten, maybe fifteen. Small talk. Weather and town news, mostly. He didn’t ask after her home life. Then one Friday she wore a sleeveless dress, and he saw the bruise on her upper arm. The dress, he thought, worn when the mark could have been covered so easily by a sleeve, was defiance. Or a call for help. Or something torn between the two.

They spoke again, and he looked at the bruise pointedly, and then he asked her if she was all right. She sipped her coffee, steam rising across her face, and did not answer. That was when Kimble wrote his cell-phone number down and slid it across the table to her and said, like some foolish gunslinger in a black-and-white cowboy picture, “You need help handling anything, I’m one ring away.”

How ridiculous. How unprofessional.

How he hoped she would call.

And then one night she did.

Kimble was still sitting there on Wyatt French’s bed when his radio squawked, calling him out of the past and into the present with one of the stranger reports he’d heard in his time policing: a cougar was loose.

Shipley met him at the gates, and his face was pale.

“Son of a bitch jumped right out,” he said. “One try, right over the top. If I hadn’t been watching it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“All right,” Kimble said. “Put your damn gun away.”

Shipley looked at him, hesitated, and holstered his sidearm. He kept his palm on it, though.

“If you’d seen the way that thing could move,” he said, “you’d want yours out, too.”

Kimble moved away from him and over to Audrey Clark and a wiry, gray-haired man named Wesley Harrington, who held odd-looking weapons in each hand.

“What in the hell are those?”

“Air rifles. Shoot tranquilizer darts.”

“Can you hit him with it?”

“Sure,” Harrington said. “If he’s five feet away.”

Kimble looked at Audrey Clark and said, “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

Clark, who was tall and good-looking but too thin—she’d lost a lot of weight since her husband died, it seemed—said, “Not if it’s handled right.”

“And how would that be?”

“Quietly,” she said, and then, when he frowned, “I mean that honestly. That’s not concern for my reputation, that’s concern for getting him back. If you bring twenty people out here with guns and send them into the woods, we won’t have a chance.”

“Not the way he moves,” Shipley muttered. “Could bring a battalion out here, and they still wouldn’t get him.”

Kimble shot him a harsh look and then turned back to Audrey Clark.

“That’s a very dangerous animal,” he said. “We can’t just have it running around wild.”

“I could point out that he was running around wild to begin with,” she said, “but that’s a waste of time. I want him back, too. More than you do. But I’m telling you, the more people, and the more noise, the worse our chances. The commotion will scare him.”

“What are you suggesting, then?”

“I think he’ll come back when he’s hungry,” she said, and Kimble sighed at that, the notion of letting a two-hundred-pound cougar grow hungry not one that appealed to him as a solution. “We’re his home. He’ll come back.”

“Not here,” Harrington said, and they all looked at him in surprise. He gave an apologetic glance at Audrey Clark and then said, “It’s just… he had a pretty hostile reaction to this place. I don’t know that he’ll come back. In the old preserve, I might have agreed. But not here. Maybe he’s heading back to the old place.”

Audrey Clark looked as if she wanted to strangle him. Kimble said, “You’re proposing that we go after him, then?”

Harrington nodded. “Ought to try, at least. I doubt we’ll have much luck, but we ought to try.” He looked up at the gray sky. “And we’ve got a short window to do it. Once it gets full dark… that won’t be a good time to be in the woods with him.”

“Right,” Kimble said, thinking of a black cat moving in the darkness and suppressing a shiver. “We’ll want to hurry.”

“Make better time at it if we split up,” Harrington said. “Two by two. Work along the river, maybe, out in the open. See what we can see. I’ll take Audrey and—”

“Hang on there,” Kimble said, thinking that they had two police on hand and two civilians. “You and I will go down to the river together. Nathan, you hang fairly close, all right? You and Mrs. Clark can check the perimeter, but don’t get far.”

Having the damned cat out was bad enough; the last thing he needed was someone to be hurt by it. Harrington had the look of capability about him, and Audrey Clark appeared more shaken. He didn’t need her wandering off into the woods at dusk.

“Let’s go,” he told Harrington, and they set off down the road and for the river as the sun settled in the west, Kimble thinking that he was really beginning to hate this place.

15

AUDREY’S THOUGHTS WERE NOT even on Ira as she and Deputy Shipley walked out of the preserve and toward the abandoned, overgrown railroad tracks that formed its southern border. They were on Wes.

She couldn’t believe the way he was behaving, the things he was saying. The preserve had its share of opponents, people who didn’t understand the need and knew only fear of animals that would never harm them even if they had the chance to do so, and the county sheriff was among them. Now Wes was spouting off about the place as if it were dangerous, and to the sheriff’s deputies, no less.

“Hey,” Shipley said, bringing her out of her angry fog. “Why don’t we go right, not left?”

She’d instinctively started to follow the tracks to the left.

“More open view at the river,” he continued. “We’ll go have a look and then come on back. Like Kimble said, no need to get too far into these woods.”

“Fine.” She had a tranquilizer gun in her hands, and now she looked into the trees and refocused on Ira. Was he still out there? Had he hung close by, as she predicted, or had he simply fled? And which option was preferable?

They turned around and headed toward the river, stepping over jutting timbers and stretches of iron that had once brought trains to these hills in search of fortune. With fortune never found, all that remained were the scraps of what had been laid in its pursuit, covered now by dead grass and brush and, in some cases, even trees. The legacy of the Whitman Company’s efforts at Blade Ridge was becoming obscured by the very nature that it had tried to conquer. Audrey held the air rifle in her hands and swiveled her head left to right, left to right, but something deep within her whispered that it wasn’t worth the effort—Ira was gone, and would not return.

The deputy, Shipley, had gone on ahead of her, expanding his lead with long-legged strides. She saw that the young man was tapping his gun with his fingers. Every second step, there he went—tap, tap, tap. He seemed to be humming softly, too, the sound trapped in his throat. It was the sort of thing people did to convince themselves they weren’t scared when in fact they were terrified. After David’s death, Audrey had found herself doing the same sort of thing: I’m scared of what my future holds, alone in this house, so I’ll hum a song and that casualness will somehow prove my confidence.

Shipley was scared, she realized, and then, recalling the moment of Ira’s escape, she didn’t blame him, not one bit. Many visitors—most visitors, maybe—were scared of the cats at first, no matter how indifferent they tried to seem. The animals were incredible predators; there was no denying that. When people came out to see them for the first time, they were dazzled, impressed, and often afraid. Because no human stood a chance against those cats. Not without a gun in hand, at least.

Tap, tap, tap, went Shipley’s fingers against his weapon.

He had seen a cat in pure, wild aggression, too. In a way Audrey herself had never seen one before. The tigers had fights, the lions would roar with killer’s rage, but never in her time on the preserve had she seen anything like that. And the leap that he’d made… it was impossible to believe, even after watching it happen. He hadn’t laid his paws on the fence and scrambled to get over, he’d just cleared it with room to spare. Fourteen feet high, and he’d not even required a running start.

“He’s never been aggressive before,” she said. “What you saw back there… I don’t know how to explain it, but it was an anomaly.”

“I’m sure that it was,” Shipley said, and his voice was steady, but his head was shifting rapidly from side to side, tracking every shadow, his hand never drifting from his gun. She had the sudden, perverse urge to tell him that Ira could climb trees, could be poised on a branch right now, ready to spring down from above. She could tell him that the cat’s field of vision overlapped like a pair of binoculars, and that he could see six times better in the dark than a human could. David had named him well—Ira was Hebrew for watcher, and the black cat was the definitive watcher, the perfect predator. Fast and strong and blessed with extraordinary vision and sense of smell.

“This is what you do?” the deputy said.

She looked up. “Huh?”

“This is… your life. This is what you do.” He waved a hand back at the tall fences, from which the occasional roar echoed through the trees.

“That’s right.”

“Why?” he said, and he sounded genuinely curious. “Why those cats?”

“Because I love them,” she said, but she suspected she knew what he was thinking about—the way she’d reacted when Ira jumped versus the way Wes had reacted. Wes had been poised; Audrey had been terrified. So was she lying right now? She cared for the cats, certainly, believed in the importance of the rescue center’s mission, but did she love them? Could you possibly have love in a relationship before you had trust? She didn’t think so. Then different words—infatuation, obsession, enchantment—might apply, but without trust? No, love was a long step to take ahead of faith.

“They’re good with people,” she said hollowly. “Really.”

The deputy stopped walking, looked at her uneasily, ran a hand over his mouth, and then said, “Maybe we should go back now.”

“We just started—”

“Let’s go back while there’s still daylight,” he said, and then he turned and led the way again. This time, those long strides were even faster. Audrey stumbled along trying to keep up, thinking, First Wes, and now even the police? Am I the only one who’s not scared of the dark out here?

Blade Ridge Road died out in abrupt fashion, no circular dead end that would allow wayward drivers to turn around with ease, just a narrowing of the gravel track until it came right up to the line of shagbark hickories that ran along the top of the ridge. They were tall trees now, seeming to belong to the rest of the forest, but Wesley knew that they’d been cleared once. Probably there wasn’t a tree between this lane and the trestle that was more than eighty years old. That was a good age for most trees, but not out here in the forested hills of eastern Kentucky. With the exception of that small stretch that had been cleared to make way for mining operations that never produced a fruitful yield, the trees at Blade Ridge went back centuries. They’d provided shelter for many cougars in their time, and then white men with guns came along, and though the trees still stood, the cats did not.

Or so it had been thought. Then Ira arrived, slinking out of the hills with nothing attached to him but legends and myths, and now there was Ira back in the woods again, exiting the very way he’d come in, heavy with the feel of magic.

Wesley was trying to remember if he’d ever heard a story that even resembled the one which people would now be telling about his own cat. He gave up early, knowing that he wouldn’t find solace in shared sorrow. This escape was unique. What the cat did was almost preternatural. If Ira had somehow climbed the fence, Wesley would be stunned but able to fathom it. If Ira had somehow leaped from the top of the perch, Wesley might have been able to blame his angles, chastise himself for not creating a wider perimeter out from the top platform. Or if the son of a bitch had at least taken a running start…

But he hadn’t. No, he just leaped out, and Wesley knew in that moment that he could have done so at any time. He’d come to the preserve of his own accord, and now he’d left it. He was not likely to return.

Wesley and Kimble left the road and pushed through the hickories and walnut trees and began working their way down the slope to the water’s edge. There was a narrow trail of sorts here, and they made the walk in silence, stepping carefully, their footing often lost to shadow as the sun faded.

“You don’t think he’s coming back,” Kimble said finally. They had reached the riverbank and stood with guns in hand, looking into the darkening woods.

Wesley was silent.

“Tell me the truth,” Kimble said. “I’ve got to deal with this, and I want to do it right. For you guys, too. Not just to cover my own ass. I realize this might cause you problems, but I’ve got to deal with it right. Tell me what you think.”

Wesley looked at him, this tall, broad-shouldered cop who walked with bad posture, canting a little to the left at all times, as though something pained him, and said, “I don’t think he’s coming back, no. Not so long as we’re here.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t think he likes the place.”

“You’ll forgive me if I say that sounds a little wild.”

You want to hear something that sounds wild, Wesley thought. I could tell you about the ghost light that passed through here.

He just shrugged, though. Kimble sighed and rubbed his face with one large hand, then walked to the north, splashing in puddles as he tried to step from rock to rock.

Not so nimble, Kimble, Wesley thought, and he wanted to laugh, but had the sense that if he got going he might not stop. Darkness was coming, and Ira was out, and while he didn’t know what those things meant, he had an idea that it wasn’t good.

“I’ll give her the night,” Kimble said finally, stopping and turning back to him. “I can see some logic to what she’s saying, that the cat would come back only if he felt safe. Is someone going to be here all night?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Just you?”

“Just me,” Wesley said, and for the first time in his life that idea unsettled him. He tried to cover it by spitting into the river and scanning the low-hanging trees on the other side as if he were searching for the cat.

“Audrey doesn’t stay with them?”

“No. That’s a good thing, too. Audrey, she’s never quite developed the trust you need with the cats.”

“Seemed pretty comfortable to me.”

“More comfortable than most, of course. She’s great with them so long as there’s a fence between her and the cats. But she won’t go into the cages.”

“Doesn’t seem like a mistake to me.”

“If you run this place,” Wesley said, “there are times when you’re going to have to go into the cages. It happens.”

“You’re saying she can’t handle it without her husband?”

“She can handle it,” Wesley said. “She’s got me. If she didn’t? Well, then she’d either need to find some faith with the cats or… or find somebody else who does, I guess. But don’t worry about how she’ll hold up to this. Audrey, she’s got steel in her that you can’t see right off. She doesn’t even see it sometimes. But it’s there.”

“All right. Well, my understanding is that you trapped this cougar once. Can you get him again?”

Wes didn’t tell him that idea was false. Ira had chosen to join them. He had gone into the trap, yes, but he’d never engaged it. Just sat there and waited for Wesley to do it by hand, daring him, challenging his courage as if it were a test that must be passed before he’d allow himself to be confined.

Only you were never really confined, Ira, were you?

“I know what I don’t want,” Kimble continued, “and that’s a bunch of people out here in the dark with guns. My people, or, God forbid, civilians. The potential for a good result in that scenario isn’t high, and the potential for a bad one?”

Wesley nodded. The potential for disaster was high indeed if you put jumpy, armed men into these woods in the dark and told them to keep a sharp eye out for a black cat of astonishing speed.

“So I’ll give you the night to try to let him settle down and slip back in,” Kimble said. “See if you can bait him, see if you can trap him, or get him with that tranquilizer rifle. Whatever. But I’m only giving you until tomorrow. If he’s not back by morning, we’re going to have to bring other people out here. The state wildlife agency might be able to help.”

Sure, Wesley thought, that cat was out here for years and they just laughed at anyone who claimed to have seen him. I bet they’ll be a swell help.

They left the river as night fell and climbed back to the road and met Audrey and the other deputy, Shipley. Then Kimble explained his decision to them.

“One night, take your best approach, and see what happens,” he said. “I’ll come out here at eight tomorrow. If the cat is still missing, we’re going to have to make an announcement and bring some people in.”

“The more activity, the more—”

“He’s right, Audrey,” Wesley said, interrupting her and earning a scathing look. “You don’t want problems developing. We may need to get some help.”

Behind them, one of the tigers struck at the fencing, a metallic ripple pulsing out from the impact point, and they all turned and stared. It was Kino, and when he saw that he had their attention, he leaned his head back and roared, fierce and furious.

“This is what I’m worried about,” Audrey said. “If strangers are making them act like this, then—”

“It isn’t the strangers,” Wesley said. “You know that. You’ve seen them around people for years now.”

“What is it, then?” the young deputy said.

“They don’t like this spot at night,” he said. “And if you stick around long enough, you might see it get a whole lot worse.”

Audrey threw up her hands in disgust. “Stop,” she said.

“I’d like to hear what he thinks,” the young deputy began, and Audrey shook her head, and then they were all interrupted by a sudden glow of white light. All four of them looked upward instinctively, but Wyatt French’s lighthouse remained dark, and then there was the crunch of gravel and they realized a car was coming down the lane. They watched it approach, a Honda SUV, and when it got all the way up to them, the driver put down the window.

“Hi, Mrs. Clark. Hi, Kimble.” He was a lean older guy with short gray hair and sharp eyes, and though he was speaking to the people gathered by his car, he was watching the cats, who were making hostile circles around their enclosures, swinging their big heads from side to side. He looked familiar, but Wesley couldn’t place him.

“Why are you back, Darmus?” Kimble said, and then Wesley remembered. This was the reporter. He’d written about the preserve a few times—including the day Wesley got Ira.

Darmus said, “I just wanted to see the place in the dark.”

“You just wanted to see the place in the dark,” Kimble echoed.

“That’s right.”

“Well, hang on a minute, will you?”

He turned back to Audrey and Wesley and said, “One night. Figure out what you want to try to get him back, but you’ve only got one night to do it. Shipley, you willing to stay on and assist?”

The deputy’s brow knitted and his blue eyes drifted from Kimble and down to the road. “All due respect, sir, I’d like to head home.”

This seemed to stun Kimble. He said, “Shipley, I think they could use—”

“We’re fine,” Audrey said. “Between Wes and me, we’ll be fine.”

Kimble gave a slow nod, but Wesley could see he was disappointed in his deputy. “All right. Go on and get some rest, Shipley. I know it’s been a long day and you’re still recovering.”

Shipley, flushed with embarrassment, said, “I can come back out at sunup. See what we have.”

“Sure,” Kimble said, and turned back to the car. “Now, Darmus, I’m going to give you a choice, based on that stunt you pulled with the notebook yesterday. I can arrest you, or you can buy me a drink and we can talk. Right now, I could use a drink. Which will it be?”

“You know, I just noticed that I gave you the wrong pages,” the gray-haired reporter said, his face suddenly full of Tom Sawyer innocence. “Silly mistake. I’ll be happy to—”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Kimble said. “We’re going to talk. It can be an official talk pretty easily. I don’t think you want that option.”

Darmus grinned. “Kimble, you look parched. Could I interest you in a beverage?”

Kimble didn’t smile as he said, “Roman’s, twenty minutes.”

Darmus put his vehicle into reverse and began the awkward trick of turning around on the narrow road and Kimble returned his attention to Audrey and Wesley.

“You’re on your own, guys. Make something good happen. If you need help, call for it fast.” He looked at the cats beyond and said, “Good luck.”

Then they left, too, Kimble and Shipley, the latter driving away from the preserve as if he were fleeing, and it was just Audrey and Wesley in the dark.

They stood in silence until the cars were gone, and then Audrey turned to him and spread her hands.

“What is the matter with you? The sheriff already doesn’t like us, and you’re acting as if—”

“Audrey,” he said, “I’m not acting any way. I’m not pretending. You haven’t been out here at night before. Things got a little…”

“A little what?”

“Nothing,” he said, because he realized that if he told her the story, she’d want to be out here herself. She’d want to see it with her own eyes. That didn’t seem like a good idea. If that light—and the feline response to it—was going to continue, then Wes wanted some time to watch it and consider it, alone.

“It’s just a change for them,” Wes said. “They’re stressed. You’ve moved before, Audrey. Didn’t you feel any stress? Well, imagine being picked up and moved, no consultation, no understanding. How would you react?”

“They were fine until that damned cougar—”

“No, they weren’t,” he said.

“What?”

He sighed. “They get agitated at night. Sorry I bothered you by bringing it up in front of the police. But they were pretty wild last night.”

“They seemed fine this morning.”

“I’m sure they’re adjusting,” Wes said. He was thinking about the blue light and looking at Lily. Lily was a gorgeous white tiger. Lily was also blind. She’d been rescued from a traveling animal show where she’d been kept in a tiny cage and fed dog food. Now she was almost four hundred pounds of beauty, but the terrible care of her youth had left her blind. If the blue light came back in the night, Wes wanted to see if Lily reacted to it. If she did… if she did, it would tell him something. Not what he was hoping, but what he feared.