“Boys,” she sniffs. “They all run off. Find some whore and leave. Boys and men alike. All the same.” She squints at me. “You’re a girl, though, aren’t you?”
I lower the hood I’d raised for the walk through the settlement. She eyes me and says. “You’re pretty. Boys prefer blondes, but blondes are whores. Course, having dark hair doesn’t mean you’re not a whore. Are you one?”
Poor Jacob is bug-eyed by this point. He keeps sneaking me looks, wondering why I’m not appalled, perhaps thinking he’s missed a few nuances of female greeting rituals. Dalton’s watching, too, but mostly to see if this woman’s particular brand of crazy is going to result in physical violence. Yes, we’re not dealing with a model of mental health, which is what I expect, if my suspicions are true.
I walk over to crouch beside the fire. “That depends on the definition of the person asking, doesn’t it? I don’t think I am. But everyone has their own way of identifying a whore. For some, it’s skin color. For others, hair. I’ve even met people who say they can tell a woman’s a whore if she has tattoos or piercings.”
“Nothing wrong with pierced ears,” Mary says. “Piercing in other places might be a problem, but I’d say it all depends on where. Tattoos, though? That’s a sign. You got any of those?”
“No, ma’am.”
“How about husbands? Leave one behind down south?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve never been married.”
“Ever steal one?”
“Steal another woman’s husband, you mean? No. What would I want with a guy who’d do something like that? It just means he’ll do the same to me someday.”
She cackles. “Smart girl.” Another sizing-up look, this one a little kinder. “You’re probably not a whore. Hard to say, but you don’t seem the type. Now, what’d you come here to talk about?”
“I need to ask you a few questions about your son, Benjamin.”
SIXTY-THREE
On the way back, we run into our old nemesis—the shortening days of winter. We’ve barely reached the snowmobiles before the sun’s falling. We’re prepared with sleeping bags and emergency shelter materials in the saddlebags, but I’m really hoping we don’t need to use them. I have my answer, and every minute we delay is another minute we’ve left a killer in Rockton. And another minute Nicole is out there, trapped by the ever-increasing danger that this will all go to hell and we’ll never find her again.
The snowmobiles have lights, though, and that’s our saving grace. We take it slower on the way back, our headlights illuminating the trail we’d cut coming in. It’s not exactly a four-lane highway from Rockton to the First Settlement. There’s not even a direct path—we need to cross a kilometer-wide thickly wooded gap between trails, which was difficult in the daylight and is absolutely treacherous now. Dalton leads, with Jacob on the back, me following. My brightly colored scarf from Anders, flutters from around Jacob’s neck as a target to aid my headlight.
We drop Jacob off near his camp. He’s going to stay there, in case he has to positively ID a man he’s met before—a man he’ll never forget. But I don’t think we’ll need that. Jacob has provided a description that makes me sure we have that positive ID already.
It starts to snow again after that, but it’s not a storm, and we’re close enough that we don’t need to follow our own tracks. We’re just coming up to Rockton when Dalton hits the brakes, and I see Anders approaching along the dark path, two militia guys behind him.
“Nice scarf!” he shouts to Dalton as we kill the engines. “It matches your eyes.”
Dalton flashes him a gloved middle finger. Anders motions for us to get off and walk, and the militia will take the sleds. Once they’ve roared off, Dalton says, “Problems?”
“Yeah,” Anders says as we start walking. “We’ve got a situation.” He looks at me. “Did you get what you were looking for?”
“Shawn Sutherland is really Benjamin Sanders, a second-generation settler. That’s how Roger knew him. They hadn’t hung around together since they were kids—some falling out—but Roger recognized Benjamin as the man who attacked him.”
“He’s our killer,” Anders says.
“Seems that way.”
“Actually, that was a statement, not a question. It’s Shawn—Benjamin—whatever his name is. There’s no doubt of it because that’s our situation. Shawn figured out he’d been promoted from victim to prime suspect and that you two had gone digging into his past.”
“Shit,” I say and turn fast, looking out at the forest. “He bolted? Goddamn it. We need—”
“Really, Case? You think I’d be sauntering to town, filling you in, if Shawn was on the run?” He looks at Dalton. “At least my boss knows better.”
“Figure you’ve got it under control,” Dalton says. “He bolted. You caught him.”
“Mmm, not exactly. I’ve had my eye on him all day, like we discussed. He did try to sneak off, but I was close enough to call an alarm. Not close enough to actually grab him. He’s taken a page from his victim’s playbook and locked himself in the icehouse.”