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  The voice of the man who had said, “Evening, darlin’.”

  Now she figured that it was one of the Park County cops—probably the one called Hoppy—or somebody else who was up here that she didn’t even know about.

  The charcoal silhouette on the trail froze. From the silhouette came the plea, “Okay, okay. Don’t shoot.”

  Kelda knew it was Ira. And she knew from his voice that Ira was scared to death.

  On her hands and knees, she edged closer to him. She stopped abruptly as a second figure emerged at the very edge of the forest and said, “Don’t fucking move! Got it?”

  Kelda thought that was the “Evening, darlin’” cop.

  “Okay, okay. Don’t shoot.” Ira’s dread chilled her.

  “Who are you?”

  The cop was scared, too.

  Ira hesitated before he said, “Oliver Lee.”

  Kelda recognized the name—Oliver and Lee were Ira’s parakeets.

  “What the hell were you doing back there? With Clone and that fence? What was that?”

  “Just a prank. A thing. You know.”

  “Do I sound like I fucking know? What kind of prank thing?”

  “You know, we were . . . getting even.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me. Not we. Me.”

  “You said ‘we.’”

  “I meant me.”

  “Getting even for what?”

  “Something Clone did before he went to prison. An old . . . grudge. That kind of thing. Come on, let me go. Let me go. I won’t do it again. I got even. But now I’m all done. Let me go.”

  “Where’s my shotgun?”

  Ira said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have it?”

  “No.”

  “You lying?”

  “No.”

  Kelda could see enough of his silhouette to know that Ira was holding out his hands to show that he didn’t have the gun. She wondered how the cop had managed to lose both his shotgun and his backup gun in the same evening. She also wondered where the cop’s partner was.

  “Keep your hands out like that.”

  Kelda thought that the cop was trying to as if he was in control, but all he was succeeding in doing was showing how frightened he was.

  Ira kept his hands out.

  The cop asked, “What’d he do? Clone? What do you want revenge for?”

  “He killed a girl.”

  “Yeah, he was in prison for that. What’s your grudge? What are you getting even for?”

  Ira said, “He killed another girl. Someone . . . I knew.”

  Kelda worried how far Ira was willing to go with the story. The disclosures he’d made so far wouldn’t allow the cop to figure out who he really was. But if he offered much more . . . She mouthed, “Be careful, baby. Be careful.”

  She was, she guessed, twenty yards from Ira, twenty-five from the Park County cop. She considered moving closer but decided not to risk being discovered.

  “No shit? He killed another girl?” the cop asked.

  Kelda noted that the man’s tone had changed. Ira’s revelation about another murder interested him.

  “Yes, a few weeks after Ivy Campbell was murdered.”

  “What?” the cop asked. To Kelda’s ear, the question was a defiant “Are you crazy?” kind of “What?”

  Ira explained, “Clone was dating her, the other girl. She was living in Denver when she broke up with him. He threatened her, then he followed her to Hawaii, and . . . he killed her there.”

  The cop was silent for ten seconds. Finally, he said, “No, he didn’t. He didn’t go to Hawaii and kill any girl. You’re wrong, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “He did,” Ira said.

  Kelda thought she heard the slightest fissure emerge in Ira’s voice.

  “Then why haven’t I heard about this? Where’s your evidence? What do you have?” the cop asked.

  “Her journal. He was, like, stalking her. It says he was going to come to Hawaii to kill her. Then it says that she saw him there. And then . . . then she was dead.”

  “He cut her throat?”

  “No, no. He, he . . .”

  Kelda thought,Don’t Ira! Don’t!

  “He didn’t cut her throat.”

  The “Evening, darlin’” cop thought about something for almost half a minute before he said, “You’re saying he killed her in Hawaii?”

  Ira said, “Yes, yes.”

  The man grew silent again. When he broke his silence, his tone was even more skeptical than before. He asked, “And this was when?”

  “Just after Ivy Campbell was killed in Park County. Like I said, a few weeks. Nineteen days later to be precise. That’s all, just nineteen days.”

  The cop laughed. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You got the wrong guy. Clone didn’t do it. He didn’t kill any girl in Hawaii. Are you making all this up for me?”

  It was Ira’s turn to say, “What?” Kelda could tell that he was befuddled. It was easy for her to tell because she was, too.

  The cop said, “We were watching Clone the whole time after Ivy Campbell was killed in Park County. He was our prime guy from almost the beginning. He’d been dating her, he lied to us about being up there, his fingerprints were places they shouldn’t have been. From day two on, we were watching him. We might have lost him for a few hours here and there, or left him alone while he was at work, or asleep, but we never lost him long enough for him to get on a plane and fly to Hawaii and kill some girl. How long was he supposed to be there? In Hawaii.”

  “A few days, three or four. Less than a week.”

  “No way,” the cop said. He laughed some more. “You’ve been torturing the wrong asshole.”

  Kelda almost gasped for air. She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath.

  “No! He did it. He killed her,” Ira sputtered.

  The “Evening, darlin’” cop kept laughing.

  We’ve been torturing the wrong asshole?Kelda thought.Is that really possible? Ira?

  “Sorry,” the cop said. “You’re full of shit. You set all this up for the wrong guy. You’re as pitiful as he is.”

  Kelda wanted to yell, “No way, no . . . way!” Instead she struggled to still her heart as she listened to Ira’s reply.

  “No, it’s true. It is. I’ve seen the investigation from the Park County detectives. The file they put together. There’s nothing in there about anybody following Clone around during those first few weeks. He had time to go to Hawaii. He even had time off from work during the few days he was gone. I read the file. I read the whole . . . thing. I checked the timeline myself. He did it. He did.”

  Kelda thought,Oh shit. Careful, Ira, careful. Don’t fall into his trap. Don’t go there. Don’t reveal too much.

  She wished she knew where the second cop was. If she knew where the guy with the big arms was, it would really increase her options on how to intervene if Ira started revealing too much, which it appeared he was about to do.

  The cop asked, “How did you get a chance to read it? The murder book? How did you get ahold of it? That’s not public information. You can’t just walk in the door and get a copy of the murder book.”

  Ira’s breathing changed. He stammered, “Somebody showed it to me.”

  “Somebody?”

  “A friend from . . . there.”

  “Park County?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m from there. Park County. In fact, I’m the one who followed Clone about half the time between the murder and the day we arrested him. There wasn’t a twenty-four-hour period during the weeks before he was arrested that I didn’t lay my own eyes on Clone. He didn’t take any trips to any island paradise while I was watching him, I promise you that.”

  “You’re wrong. That’s not . . . It’s not in the . . . the . . . file. There’s nothing in the file about anybody following him. I read it. I checked all the dates. He had time off. He was
free.”

  “You’re right about one thing. There’s nothing in the file. Because maybe I didn’t put it in the file. Maybe I did it on my own because I wanted to catch the creep . . . that bad.”

  We’ve been torturing the wrong asshole?Kelda thought, once again.

  Ira tried to mount an offensive. He said, “Why are you here? Tonight? Why are you up here? What do you want with me?”

  “We’re not up here for you.”

  Kelda noted that he’d said “We.”

  Ira again. “Then what do you want with Clone?”

  Kelda thought,Good, Ira. Keep thinking. Keep thinking. Keep the pressure on him. Make him talk.

  “We’re cops. He’s a perp. Beyond that, you’ll never know the answer, asshole.”

  Ira said, “You’re wrong. You don’t know what Clone did. I know what he did.”

  The cop exploded in rage. “I’mwrong?I’m wrong? You little fuck, you don’t know who the hell you’re messing with. I’m going to make you so sorry—”

  Her vision had adjusted a little more to the darkness and, with the cop’s outburst, she registered a flurry of movement on the edge of the woods.

  Ira must have noticed the movement, too.

  Suddenly, the silhouette that was Ira disappeared in a blur.

  Across from where Ira had been, the muzzle blast of a handgun flared in the darkness on the forest edge. The sound of footsteps followed, sparking yet another fiery blast from the handgun.

  The footsteps stopped.

  Behind her, from the direction of Boca’s cabin, Kelda heard the rattling shrill of a whistle.

  Seconds later her cell phone chirped.

  Damn!

  She dove into the forest and tried to find the phone so she could quiet the thing. Another shot ripped through the darkness.

  This one was aimed at her.

  She hunched behind a tree and got the phone to her ear. “What?”

  Ira whispered, “I heard the phone ring. I know you’re here, babe. And I really, really need your help.”

  CHAPTER 57

  She took a deep breath and yelled, “I’m a special agent of the FBI! Everybody drop your weapons! Everybody!”

  The sharp crack of a semiautomatic weapon answered her command. At the same instant a slug buried itself in the soft soil a yard from her legs. She hunkered even closer to the tree.

  The Park County cop knew she was FBI. He was shooting at her anyway.

  Why?

  From somewhere in the woods, not close, not too far away, Tom Clone called, “Kelda?”

  Kelda heard Ira yell, “I’m really exposed out here,” an instant before another shot flared from the handgun.

  Ira’s words and the clap from the handgun were followed a second or two later by Tom Clone’s distinctive slur. “You’re the ’ear lessons guy! You’re the ’ear lessons guy!”

  That earned another shot from the handgun.

  The disproportionate roar of a shotgun blast swallowed the handgun’s echo.

  In the silence that followed, Kelda heard the characteristic hiss of a gasping exhale.

  Whose?

  She didn’t know.

  She felt almost paralyzed by fear.

  Who had guns? Who was shooting?

  Who were the good guys? Whom could she trust?

  The darkness had surrounded her and doubt was eating away at her soul. She turned her head toward the dirt road and thought,Is that Death Row?

  CHAPTER 58

  While I heard the shots from the handgun, I was crouching low, picking my footfalls carefully, trying to progress through the woods in the direction of Tom’s voice. Each time a gunshot sounded, I froze. But when the reverberations of the shotgun blast bounced off the mountainside, I fell hard to the earth, pushing my cheek into the soil. A mini-landslide of dirt slid inside my cast.

  In the silence that followed I could hear my own blood rushing in my ears, and the breeze sluicing through the pines, but nothing else.

  Tom’s last call before the boom of the shotgun had been, “You’re the ’ear lessons guy!”

  Fear lessons.

  What had Boca said? When the time comes for the fear lessons, I’ll know it?

  The time had come.

  When the series of gunshots sliced through the darkness the way a machete slices through flesh, I knew it.

  After an eternity, a voice said, “I’m standing up and going into the middle of this road here. Don’t shoot anymore. I’m dropping my weapon.”

  I couldn’t see him, had no way to know whether he was doing what he said he was doing. And I had no way to know who he was.

  After twenty more seconds, Kelda said, “Tom? Are you there?”

  In front of me, I guessed maybe twenty or thirty yards, Tom Clone, breathless, replied, “Yes.”

  Then she said, “Anybody else here?”

  No one else responded.

  Kelda said, “I’m a special agent of the FBI and I’m not dropping my weapon. I want everybody on that dirt road. You have ten seconds. You got it?”

  Tom said yes. The other male voice echoed the word.

  I could hear someone—Tom?—creeping into the woods. He was brushing branches and crushing twigs as he made his way to the road.

  Fingers closed over my ankle and someone cautioned, “Shhh. Not a sound.”

  My heart felt as though it instantly doubled in size.

  I snarled, “Damn you, Sam.”

  His lips so close to my ear that I could feel his breath, he said, “Sorry I’m late. Simon’s game went long. This thing here? This is the goofiest thing I’ve ever heard. How long you been here?”

  “Maybe ten minutes,” I whispered. “I think somebody was just shot.”

  “Yeah, the shotgun. I got that. You stay right here, understand? I’m feeling like my services are needed.”

  CHAPTER 59

  Sam called my name another ten minutes later.

  I’d been watching flashlight beams crisscrossing in the woods in the distance. I hiked toward them.

  I was almost close enough to Sam to begin to question him about what had happened when thethwap-thwap-thwap of an approaching helicopter drowned out every other sound that the night was manufacturing in the Indian Peaks.

  Sam waved me closer with one hand while with the other he painted light patterns in the sky with the flashlight. I thought that he was providing guidance to the helicopter pilot who was hovering above.

  Kelda stood in a caricature of catatonia on a narrow dirt lane about ten yards from Sam. She was holding a flashlight, too. The beam in her hand was locked in place at her feet, highlighting the torso of a man I didn’t recognize. Sprawled on his side, legs splayed, he too was still. Crimson shadows of blood darkened his neck and face.

  Kelda wasn’t tending to him.

  To me, that meant that he was dead.

  I wanted to ask someone who he was. How he had died. Who had killed him. And why. But the helicopter rotors insisted on my silence.

  I kept walking closer to Sam until I saw another man.

  He was sitting against the base of an aspen tree, his arms circled around the trunk behind him. Another step and I could see that his wrists were shackled with a plastic band. His head was bowed.

  Suddenly, a beam of light burst from the helicopter with an intensity that felt obscene, illuminating the tiny piece of the forest where I stood.

  That’s when I spotted Tom. Or someone who I guessed was Tom.

  He was curled in a ball on the forest floor about five feet away from Sam.

  He looked like a pile of rags that had been dumped in the woods.

  No, more accurately, he looked like a pile of rags that a passing motorist had used to cover, unsuccessfully, the carcass of some roadkill that had been dumped in the woods.

  I said, “Sam? Is Tom dead?”

  I stepped closer to them both.

  The helicopter rotors answered,“Thwap-thwap-thwap.”

  The obscene light slid away and the heli
copter disappeared over the ridge near Boca’s cabin.

  “Sam,” I repeated. “Is that Tom Clone? Is he okay?” I was ducking clumsily beneath the low branch of an aspen tree.

  “The Flight for Life chopper is for him. He’ll be okay, I think. Stop right there, Alan. I don’t want you any closer for now. Do you understand?”

  Sam’s voice told me he wasn’t kidding.

  I stopped, and then I took a step back for good measure. “Who’s the guy in the road?” I asked.

  “No ID on him. Best I can piece together so far, he’s the guy who was torturing Mr. Clone.”

  “And the guy cuffed to the tree? He shot the guy on the road?”

  “The guy cuffed to the tree says he’s a Park County sheriff’s deputy, if you can believe it.”

  “Why did he shoot the guy on the road?”

  “He didn’t. Clone shot him. Clone had the shotgun.”

  I glanced at Kelda. She still hadn’t moved. Not a muscle.

  I barely reacted to Sam’s recitation. Apparently, I was all out of adrenaline; I felt bone tired.

  I’d stepped into the darkness and found fear.

  Had I accomplished anything else?

  Boca had said that sometimes the step into the darkness leads nowhere.

  That, I decided, was the step I took. The one that led nowhere.

  PART FIVE

  Seeking Higher Ground

  CHAPTER 60

  The Boulder County Sheriff’s investigators completed the first round of questioning with Kelda and me at about the same time, about ten minutes before midnight.

  I could hear her a few steps behind me as I trudged back up the hill toward Boca’s cabin and my car.

  “Can we meet?” she asked slightly breathlessly. Her catatonia had disappeared along with the helicopter that had ferried Tom Clone down the Front Range to a hospital in Boulder.

  “Sure,” I said into the blackness. “Call my office tomorrow. We’ll work out a time.” My mind was elsewhere—the reverberation of the shotgun blast continued to echo and the darkness continued to shroud my vision—and I was tired. I told myself that I would have been more gracious to her if I weren’t so tired.