It’s easy enough to sneak up on Brady. He hasn’t transformed into a master woodsman. The problem has always been simply getting close enough to find him in this endless wilderness. Once I am, I can hear him, stopped to catch his breath. Those gasps cover my approach. Then I grab his broken wrist, still bound by my handcuff tie. He lets out a shriek, half pain, half surprise.
When he sees me, he deflates.
“Oh, come on, Detective,” he says. “I’m starting to feel like that guy in Les Miz, chased by the cop who just won’t give up, even when he knows the poor guy is innocent.”
“Javert didn’t know anything of the sort,” I say. “And neither do I.”
“Seriously?” He slumps, shaking his head, like I’m a patrol officer who pulled him over for speeding. Just a pain-in-the-ass cop, wasting the taxpayer’s money trying to pin some silly little misdemeanor on him.
“I’m going to ask you again,” I say. “How far do you think you’ll get with your hands tied behind your back?”
“Does it matter?”
“Sure it does.” I walk in front of him, my gun lowered. “A few years ago, I went to a party where they played a game called Would You Rather. It’s supposed to be two equally shitty choices. Except the host didn’t quite get the point and kept giving choices where there really was no choice at all. Like ‘Would you rather take a bullet to the head or die of slow starvation in the forest?’ Whatever fate you’d suffer out here is much worse than what your stepfather would do to you.”
“Uh, did you miss the part where he’s a fucking psychopath? He didn’t shoot those people in the head. He tortured them.”
“Yes, I’m sure being tied up and beaten wasn’t—”
“Tied up and beaten? Is that your idea of torture? He cut them. He burned them. He pulled out their fingernails. Their teeth. He did the kind of things you see in movies, when they’re trying to get spies to talk. Only he didn’t want these people to talk. He wanted them to scream. To cry. To beg. To break.”
“You got a good look then, at that boy you caught him with.”
A heartbeat’s pause before he plows on with, “Yes, yes, I did, Detective.”
“And he molested you as a child.”
A glimmer of relief as I move on, and he nods, “Yes.”
“Tell me about that.”
“What the hell is this? A therapy couch?”
“No, it’s an interrogation room. You have accused your stepfather of molesting you. I’ve dealt with victims of that. I’ve had to interview them, lead them through it, and it was a horrible part of my job, but it was necessary to properly prosecute the offenders. So I know the stories. I know all the reactions a victim gives. Go on, Oliver. Convince me.”
He starts to rage that he won’t give me the satisfaction. That he won’t play this bullshit game. Rage. Deflect. Rant.
I’m lying, of course. I have dealt with those victims. I have interviewed them. But there is no way in hell that I can tell a real accusation from a false one just by speaking to the accuser. Every response is different. I just want Brady to believe I can do it. He does, and so he says not one word about the abuse. He just rages at me until he finishes with, “You want me to talk about that? Put me in front of a real professional.”
“With a lie detector?”
“Fuck you. My stepfather is a sadistic bastard, and whatever he did to me pales in comparison to what he did to his other victims.”
I ease back. “I don’t know. One could argue otherwise. I’m sure a defense attorney would. Gregory may not have molested you, but turning you into a killer? That’s some seriously bad parenting.”
“What? No. He’s the killer. He’s the one—”
“Yes, I suspect he is. You both are. Partners in crime, who turned on each other. How did it happen, Oliver? Not how he lured you into it. You’re right—that’s a story for a therapist, and I don’t really care. I’m curious about the schism. The break. How did it come to this? Former partners, each desperately trying to pin the crimes on the other.”
It takes three long seconds for him to say, “What the hell are you talking about?,” and with that I know I’ve hit on the truth. The reason I couldn’t pick a side. The solution that makes so much more sense than all the ones they’ve spouted.
Not a man trying to steal his stepson’s inheritance. Not one trying to shield his wife from her son’s horrible crimes. Not a young man who stumbled over his stepfather’s horrible crimes.
Shared crimes. Shared blame. Equally shared? I don’t give a damn.
“I’ve taken Wallace into custody,” I say. “I’m doing the same with you. Eric will fly you both back down south and tie you up in a hotel room and place an anonymous call to the police.”
“Sure, do that,” Brady says. “And we’ll tell them all about you and your town. Do you think you haven’t given us enough information to pass on to the authorities? I know your name, Detective Casey Butler. I know his, Sheriff Eric Dalton. I know the names of a half dozen people in your town. I know I’m in Alaska—I’ve been here before, and I recognize the terrain. They will track you down and . . .”
He trails off, and I smile.
“Can’t even finish that threat, can you?” I say. “They’ll do what? We’ve given them two serial killers. You tell them that you were turned in by some secret prison camp in Alaska? Why would they care? And why would you presume they don’t already know about us?”
He blinks at me.
“Turn around,” I say. “And start walking—”
“Not so fast, Casey,” a voice says behind me.
It’s a familiar voice, but on hearing it, my heart skips.
Not possible. That is not . . .
I turn, and I see Dalton. But it wasn’t his voice I heard. It was a woman’s. Then I see Dalton’s hands on his head, as he’s prodded down the path by a woman.
“Hello, Casey,” Val says. “You look surprised to see me.”
“I—I saw your . . .” I don’t finish. I will sound like a fool if I do, and I already feel the sting of my mistake.
But how was it a mistake?
I saw the bloat of her corpse. I know she was not alive.
Sharon, Dalton mouths, and with that, I understand.
Sharon. One of our winter dead. The woman who’d died of a heart attack last week. Whom we’d been burying when Brady arrived.
Sharon was not a perfect doppelg?nger for Val. She was older. With longer hair. Heavier. Shorter. But none of that mattered for a water-bloated corpse floating facedown in the water. Cut the gray-streaked hair to Val’s length. Dress her in Val’s clothing. Put her corpse in the water and send it downstream, and even if we had managed to pull it out, between the rot and the bloat, it would have been hard to say it wasn’t Val.
Peter Sanders had pulled that same trick with Nicole—found a dead hostile or settler and put her in Nicole’s clothing and damaged the body enough that Dalton naturally concluded he’d found Nicole. Val knew we didn’t have the equipment to test DNA, and that told her the trick might work again.
“Eric stopped to help me,” Val says. “He couldn’t resist, even when he considers me dead weight on your precious town. All I had to do was lie in his path, and he holstered his gun and raced over to help.”
“And that’s weakness to you, isn’t it?” I say. “That he came to your aid, no questions asked, despite all the shit you’ve put him through.”
“Put him through? I’m the one who’s gone through hell in that godforsaken town. Condemned to coexist with people who lack the IQ to carry on a proper conversation with me. Yet they all tried. Even you, Casey. Especially you. You had to try to help a poor fellow female, trapped in her home, cowering like a mouse. I wasn’t cowering, you idiot. I was waiting. You said once that the council constructed a prison for me—made me too afraid to leave my house. No. I constructed it. It was my refuge, and you couldn’t leave me well enough alone.”
“Yeah,” Dalton says. “We’re all assholes for giving a shit.”