State of Emergency

CHAPTER 10


Moscow, Idaho





Professor Matthew Pollard leaned against the lectern with both hands and tried to identify the new couple sitting at the back of the amphitheater classroom. At six-four he was too tall for the lectern, causing him to stoop.

Given his own way, he would have been wearing an unbleached hemp shirt and a pair of surf shorts, but his wife—not to mention the dean of the College of Philosophy—insisted he dress like a professor. Wavy black hair was pulled back in a short stub of a ponytail. His neatly trimmed beard would have made him look “bad” if not for his easy grin and the slightly too-large academic corduroy jacket complete with suede elbow patches.

He flipped through a notebook, pretending to look at it while he glanced up at the two strangers.

They weren’t his students. Pollard knew each of the fifty-three moldable freshman minds in his ethics class by face if not by name. The man was in his mid-twenties, blond and shaggy. He was likely a local, wearing blue jeans and a faded Carhartt denim jacket—typical dress for winter in northern Idaho. The woman wore tight jeans and a fashionable black turtleneck, leaning forward, plump and partridge-like, on the back row of the small auditorium. She held a green jacket across her lap and looked toward Pollard from beneath a set of heavy black bangs. Her head tilted as if she wanted to give the impression of paying attention, but the contours of her bronze face were slack with boredom. She reminded him of someone he’d known long ago, someone from a time that he did his best to forget.

This particular class—he called it Who Are the Monsters?—was known for its heated, gloves-off debate. But the strangers didn’t seem the least bit interested in the subject matter of his class. They appeared to be focused solely on him, studying him like an insect under a magnifying glass. He tried to calm his racing heart. He was an ethics teacher now, nothing more.

A restless buzz ran through the students and he pushed the thoughts away.

“. . . going to give us our final today, Professor Pollard?” A tall girl slouching on the front row of seats rescued him. Dressed in a black knee-length canvas jacket festooned with lengths of bicycle chain, she asked the question the rest of the class was dying to have answered.

Her name was Katherine, but she preferred the name Crash. Of the students who showed up regularly, only this one seemed to grasp even a tiny shred of his message. Three-inch platform boots with gaudy chrome buckles, and a mop of coal-colored bangs that gave her the appearance of a baby face Hitler, belied her true intelligence. Pollard thought she might be a pretty girl if not for the fact she was running from any and all aspects of life she thought could be considered normal. A pierced tongue and the tattoo of a fishhook at the corner of her heavily rouged lips told the world she flowed an entirely different direction than the mainstream.

“As a matter of fact I am.” Pollard nodded, trying not to focus on the strangers in the back. “Remember our very first assignment?”

“Sure.” Crash shrugged, but sat up straighter as she always did once they started a discussion. “You had us define evil.”

“Okay, then,” Pollard said, beginning to pace back and forth on the raised platform behind the lectern. “We’ve read, discussed, debated, written papers . . . and read some more. Some of you believe you can now define evil. So now, a semester later, let’s drill down.”

He looked directly at Crash’s eyes. Despite her counterculture costume, they sparkled with inquisitive brightness. “Is it ever right to do something evil in order to achieve an end state that is good?”

Crash rolled her big eyes and tossed her pen on the desk. “Governments use that excuse all the—”

“Save it.” Pollard raised an open palm to shush her. “That’s your final. Give me between fifteen hundred and two thousand words on whether or not evil actions can be used for good purpose. Quote three sources from your reading this semester.” He smiled. “Only one of them can be me and you may not use Chuck Norris as a source.”

A boy with a buzz cut leaning against the side wall raised his hand. “Professor, how many pages does it have to be?”

Pollard sighed. “Go for word count, Royce. If you give me something that’s twenty pages long and huge font, I’ll move you into my own personal ‘evil’ category. Same goes for you overachievers who use those tiny, unreadable fonts so you can cram more in to a few pages. That, my friends is the pure epitome of evil. E-mail your papers to me by next Wednesday.”

The woman in the back stood and motioned for the man in the Carhartt jacket to do the same. There was no doubt that it was she who was in charge. She flicked her bangs, and made momentary eye contact with Pollard, as if she wanted him to remember her, then walked out with her apparent lackey close on her heels.

“Okay.” Pollard rubbed his beard, trying to get the image of the dark woman out of his head. “I’m expecting great things here. . . .”

He watched Crash as she gathered her books and shoved them in a backpack with a gaudy red anarchy symbol painted on the back. For all her posturing against “the man,” for all her outward trappings of rebellion, Pollard could see the goodness and intensity in her eyes. She’d grow out of her funk and become a doctor or a lawyer or some other high-powered professional. She was that smart and that good.

He, on the other hand, was an entirely different story. Oh, he might put on a good show, but no matter what sort of academic haircut and tweed jacket they stuffed him into, he would never be able to shake his past.

Matt Pollard knew all too well how to define evil. Something deep down in his gut told him the two visitors to his class had come to remind him of that fact.



By the time Pollard made it from his office to the parking lot, he’d managed to convince himself that the visitors were just curiosity-seeking locals. He’d grown to be an expert at rationalizing things away. He tossed his unbleached canvas book bag in the backseat of his silver-blue Prius and climbed in behind the wheel. He’d ditched the tweed for a fleece jacket made from recycled soda bottles and wore a Nepalese wool beanie against the overcast winter day. He was tall and fit, and apart from the rumpled clothing, he carried himself with a military bearing. He looked a decade younger than his thirty-seven years and could have passed for a student rather than a professor.

His cell phone rang before he made it out of the lot.

“Pick up,” Pollard said, activating the hands-free mike. He grinned when he heard Marie’s voice.

“How’s that sexy wife of mine?” Pollard pushed through a stale yellow traffic light and was surprised to see a white Ford Explorer shoot the red light behind him.

“I have Ellie lined up to babysit.” Marie’s honeyed voice purred from the dash speaker.

“That’s good. . . .” Pollard watched in the rearview mirror as the white Explorer fell into the flow of traffic two cars back. “Really good,” he mumbled.

“You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?”

Marie’s teasing yanked him pack to reality.

“Sorry, honey,” he confessed, an eye still watching the Explorer. “I really don’t.”

“Wow,” Marie laughed. She had to be used to him after thirteen years. “For a genius professor you’d forget your shoes if you didn’t stub your toes all the time.” Marie’s family sprang from Bremerton, Washington, and her easygoing Pacific Northwest demeanor came through even when she was miffed. “You know you have to guess now, right?”

Pollard tapped the wheel, thinking. The white SUV stayed glued to his bumper as he another corner.

“Listen,” he said, biting his bottom lip. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but someone might be following me.”

“Oh no, you don’t, Mr. Matthew,” his wife chided. “You’re not getting off that easy—”

“Seriously,” Pollard said, fighting to keep calm.

He took another right.

The Explorer followed.

“You’re a bona fide genius,” Marie said. “Lose them and get your butt home. Simon is getting on my last nerve and we have tickets—”

“I’m serious, sweetheart.” The white SUV maneuvered around the only remaining car on the road and moved up just inches behind the Prius.

“Maybe they just happen to be going the same direction.” Marie’s voice held a frightened edge.

“Maybe,” Pollard said, but his churning gut told him otherwise. His past was hunting him down. “I’m not far away, but I’ll make a block before I come home and see what happens. If I can’t lose them I’m going to call the police.”

Sweat beaded on his upper lip, hidden by his dark beard. He turned right again, a block before his street.

The SUV stayed on his tail, unwavering. He could make out the faces of the two earlier visitors to his classroom. The blond man wore a ball cap and sunglasses and leaned forward from the backseat. The woman sat in the passenger seat; her eyes still sneered with boredom. The driver was a smallish Hispanic man with a craggy face he’d never seen before.

Pollard swallowed hard. “Take Simon to the bedroom,” he said, feeling sick. “Lock the door and get my shotgun out of the closet—”

Nothing but dead air crackled over the speakers.

“Marie,” Pollard shouted at the silence. “Marie! Are you still—”

“Matthew? You sound absolutely flummoxed.” The voice was cold and soulless. “You have a beautiful wife, such an innocent child. Come home so you can formally introduce us.”

Pollard’s retched, his throat seared with acid dread.

He shoved the gas pedal to the floor and whipped the wheel sharply left, spinning the little Prius in the narrow residential street. Metal shrieked and groaned as the front fender careened off the tailgating SUV’s driver’s door, then slid down the side. He caught the glint of a cruel grin on the woman’s face as he sped past toward his wife and son.