A second shot followed the first. Then a third.
Serena sprinted for the end of the hallway and slammed through the closed door into the gloom of a small child’s bedroom. The beam of her flashlight bounced crazily. All she caught were horrible, disconnected images of cartoon animals on the old wallpaper, colored butterflies hanging on ribbons from the ceiling, and an eight-foot by eight-foot padded cage taking up most of the bedroom floor. Lori Fulkerson fired her gun over and over into the soundproof foam, kicking up a cloud of synthetic white snow.
Serena jumped across the bedroom and hit her from behind, crushing the woman’s body against the metal bars of the cage. The gun fell. Serena knocked it away with her heel. Behind her, she was aware of Jonny scooping it up. She threw Lori bodily to the ground and landed on top of her with her knee in the small of her back, and as Lori struggled, Serena grabbed her handcuffs and pinned her wrist in the metal grips.
There were other noises in the house now. More shouts. The thunder of heavy footfalls.
She heard Jonny shouting. “All clear, all clear, all clear!”
“The key!” Serena screamed at Lori Fulkerson. She grabbed Lori’s shoulder and shoved her over onto her back and bellowed into her face. “Where’s the key?”
The pause was only a second, but it felt like forever. Then Lori murmured, as if in surrender, “My pocket.”
Serena squeezed her hand inside the right front pocket of Lori’s pants until her fingers closed around a tiny piece of metal. She pulled it out and crawled to the cage, where she fumbled in the darkness, trying to fit the key into the lock that held the door in place. She tried it again and again, dropped the key, and picked it up. She cursed loudly. Then Jonny was behind her with a firm hand on her shoulder, shining a flashlight onto the lock.
She picked up the key. She put it in the lock.
She opened the box.
The light inside showed Aimee Bowe on her back on the straw floor of the cage. Serena gasped in horror. Blood was everywhere. One of the bullets had hit her thigh. Another had gone through her shoulder. Another had hit her neck. Her breathing was ragged. Serena bent over her, and Aimee’s skin was bone white and frigid to the touch. Her eyes were closed.
She heard Jonny calling for an ambulance.
“Hang on, you’ll be fine,” Serena murmured. She took off her coat and draped it over Aimee’s body, trying to keep her warm. “Help’s on the way.”
Aimee’s eyes opened and tried to focus. The pain caught up with her and overwhelmed the numbness. Her lips murmured something, but Serena couldn’t hear it. She bent down near Aimee’s mouth and listened to what she was saying.
“I felt you coming,” Aimee said.
Serena smiled and held her hand. She stayed there, holding on, as Stride and Guppo applied pressure to Aimee’s wounds and tried to stop the bleeding. She felt too much time ticking away, too much blood pooling around them and soaking her clothes. The box was wet and cold and awful and evil.
And then, cutting through all of that, she heard a tiny flutter of wings and a greeting from the darkness of the cage.
Hey there.
Like a good angel, a chickadee landed on the bars next to Aimee’s face and began to sing.
48
“You don’t have to drive me all this way,” Cab said to Maggie. “I can afford a cab, you know. Catch-a-Cab Bolton, that’s me.”
Maggie shrugged behind the wheel of her Avalanche. It was late afternoon, and the sun already had set. They were on I-35 heading south out of Duluth toward the Minneapolis airport. Cab’s flight to Fort Myers was in four hours. She glanced in her rearview mirror at the highway behind her, which she shared with only one other vehicle. The storm had loosened its grip, but the roads were quiet.
“Admit it,” she said. “You’re afraid of my driving.”
“Terrified.”
“Well, buckle up, buttercup,” she replied with a grin.
Maggie passed the Grand Avenue exit. Not long afterward, she could see Mort Greeley’s house in the valley on the left side of the freeway. There were still police cars outside. She continued up the hill. Spirit Mountain loomed ahead of them; it was perfect skiing weather. Cab stared through the windows, and neither of them knew what to say. They had two hours alone in the car together, but she figured they would need all of it to figure out what came next between them. That was mostly because she was certain they would avoid the subject altogether until she was dropping him off at the curb at Terminal 1. Neither she nor Cab was an expert at emotions.
“So your mother released a statement?” Maggie asked.
“Yes, Tarla said she regretted not having come forward sooner to tell everyone about Dean Casperson. She wished she would have saved other women the trauma she’d gone through.”
“Except it wouldn’t have done that,” Maggie said. “Dean would have destroyed her career and gone on abusing other women just the way he did.”
“You’re right, but I was pleased to see Tarla say it.”
Maggie tried to keep the truck inside the lane, but the white line went in and out of view as she steered with one hand and snaked her other hand onto Cab’s knee. She glanced in the rearview mirror again.
“I really am sorry about Peach,” she told him.
“Thanks.”
“She didn’t suffer. That’s something.”
“I know.”
They’d found the scene of the crime in the daylight. Guppo had led the search behind the Hermantown apartments. They’d located a spruce tree thirty feet inside the dense woods that bore the red-black sheen of frozen blood. That was where John Doe had killed her.
“You’ll probably have to come back here for the trial,” Maggie said.
“Assuming there is one. I think Jack will make a deal.”
“Maybe so.”
That took them through another mile. They were nearly to the exit for the town of Proctor.
“Have you ever thought about moving?” Cab asked with a suddenness that shocked her. She hadn’t expected him to be so blunt.
“What do you mean?”
“To Florida. I need another investigator. Obviously, you’re very good at what you do, and it goes without saying that you and I have chemistry.”
“Leave Duluth? I’ve never even thought about it.”
“Maybe you should.”
Maggie did.
She thought about her life in Duluth, which had occupied all of her memories for twenty years. She thought about Stride, Guppo, and Serena. And about Stride again. She thought about the heat of Florida and the Gulf waters and being in bed with Cab. She thought about all of that in five seconds, and then she said, “No. Sorry.”
“I figured you’d say that,” Cab told her, “but it never hurts to ask.”
“Duluth is my home. Florida’s a nice place to visit, though. I like the amenities down there.”
“You should come back and see it sometime,” Cab said. “Maybe Troy and the girls would enjoy a vacation there. Magic Kingdom. Universal. Gatorland.”
Maggie shot him a sideways look. He was teasing her, but he was right. She had unfinished business with Troy. And she was smart enough to know that Cab had unfinished business of his own. What they’d shared was simply the right interlude at the right time for both of them.
“So do you have someone picking you up at the airport tonight?” she asked. “Since you don’t have your new Corvette yet.”
Cab waited a beat to reply. “Lala’s meeting me, actually.”
“Ah. Mosquito. She’s taking you home?”
“Yes. She wants an update on everything that happened here.”
“I bet she does,” Maggie said.
“It’s not romantic.”
“No, of course not.”
She winked at Cab because she didn’t believe him. Then she glanced in the rearview mirror again.
At first, she’d assumed she was mistaken, but she wasn’t. She made a snap decision. The exit for Highway 2 loomed in front of her, and she did a quick lane change to take the exit. Her eyes stayed on the mirror. Almost immediately, she turned left onto the frontage road. Then she made another right turn on a winding trail that took them up the hill.