Mike’s chest was blowing up – he hadn’t run this hard in years. He scurried up the steep embankment to the residential street, grabbing handfuls of weeds and dirt and rocks, lost his footing, slid back, scrambled harder. He reached the street, clambered over a guardrail, and then kept going up, panting and coughing.
He saw him – Petrov was further up along the roadside. The residential street forked, and Petrov had taken the left side, still gaining elevation. God, why? Mike couldn’t take it anymore, going up and up like this. But he thought he was actually closing the distance.
Twenty-Five
Connor was working around Moody Pond not far from where Lennox lived, and so Bobbi circled the pond, looking for his truck.
She found it and waited.
She’d been texting Connor throughout the day, his responses curt, though he’d said he was sorry about Lennox, hoped he was found soon.
He emerged from the woods twenty minutes later with another surveyor, who climbed into the truck. Connor opened the door and stopped, spotted Bobbi. He said something to the other guy, shut the door, and headed over, his expression hopeful. “They find him?”
Bobbi got out of her car, shook her head.
He gazed at her a moment, then looked off into the trees. There was a smudge of dirt on his face, and he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with an orange, reflective safety vest and orange hard hat. “Pretty crazy,” he said. His eyes drifted back to her. “You okay?”
“I’m okay. How’s Joly?”
The mention of his son seemed to sting Connor a bit, but he recovered, said, “He’s good. With his cousins tonight, giving me a break.”
“Yeah? You going out?”
“Just a couple beers maybe. It’s Monday, so, open mike night at JJ’s.”
“Cool… My friend Rachel is a wreck. You know they released the name of the woman from Watertown? You were right.”
“Yeah. Saw it on the news. She was in a river?”
“In a pond near some nature preserve. I don’t think I’m going to stay out after dark tonight. I didn’t go to bed last night, I was awake until dawn, it was just so…” She trailed off, catching herself telling him her troubles like he was her boyfriend. She could see the same thought register in his face, and he cleared his throat, glanced at the truck, started to move away.
“Listen.” She caught his arm, quickly let go. “Let me, ah… Can we talk?”
His eyelids drooped and lips formed a tight line. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Let’s just talk…”
“Bobbi… I don’t want to play any games.”
“I know you don’t. I don’t either. I’m sorry.”
“I have a kid, you know? Yeah, I have a kid. But I’m his parent. That’s how it works. That’s why I don’t wear a T-shirt saying, you know, Single Dad Looking for New Baby Mama.”
He took his construction hat off, ran a hand through his mass of dark, sweaty hair, and his eyes acquired a sadness. “Okay. I gotta go take a shower. Like I said, we’re going to JJ’s, maybe to Trackside, have a few beers.”
Softly: “Who’s going with you?”
“Just me and a couple of the other guys.”
He meant surveyors on his crew, she assumed, and flicked a look at the guy in the truck, who was watching. She wanted more time with Connor, was afraid to let him walk away. “What’re you guys doing out here?”
“What’re we doing? We’re making precise measurements to determine property boundaries. We’re providing data relevant to the shape and contour of the Earth’s surface.”
She felt some relief at his dry humor. “It’s important work…”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks. Hey – look, I gotta go. Okay?”
He started to the truck, and she let him, just waited, feeling her heart beat against her ribs, a mix of emotions pin-wheeling her thoughts – she should be thinking about Lennox, thinking about Rachel, not watching Connor’s ass as he climbed up into his truck, not feeling like she’d screwed this up royally. That was selfish. Seemed like no matter what she did, the timing was bad lately.
Connor fired up the engine and did a three-point turn in the road. He drove back her direction, slowed, leaned out of his open window. “Your back tire is low,” he said.
“I’ll check into it.”
“Alright.” He gave her one last look, then drove away.
* * *
The son of a bitch was dug in like a tick.
For a little while, Mike had been chasing Petrov up the street – River Street. Like he was going to the pea-green house, and it was a cook-house, and that was the damn smell the real estate agent couldn’t get out.
The whole reason for talking to Petrov, Mike had thought, scrounging for breath as he ran, was because Petrov was tied in to Gavin Fuller and Steve Pritchard, and Harriet could be dead because of some big meth deal, maybe Lavoie, too. Chasing him down under the beating hot sun, headed up River Street, he’d wondered if Petrov could be the one who’d killed Harriet, hired by Pritchard. Maybe Petrov had been using the house to watch Harriet from there, waiting for her to be alone.
But then Petrov had changed course and moved deeper into the forest.
Mike tracked him to some long-abandoned place – just the crumbling foundation of a house left in the middle of the woods, with the rotted, rusted skeleton of an old T-model Ford sitting nearby. And then Petrov did something Mike never would have expected a real adult human to do – he climbed a fucking tree. And he wasn’t coming down.
Mike had his gun out, aimed up at Petrov, and was catching his breath, still marveling that this was actually even happening. He moved a little closer, only able to see pieces of Petrov up in the tree – just his leg and part of his arm. He’d found a nice maple, plenty of branches, and was at least thirty feet in the air, still climbing. Bits of tree came falling down, landed on Mike’s face.
How did an overweight, out-of-shape, middle-aged man like Petrov climb a tree like a child? Pure adrenaline; he was panicked.
“Dmitri! Come on, man…” Mike struggled for breath. He’d run for so long his clothes had dried. “What are you… doing? You’re gonna… How are you even…?”
He heard crashing footsteps, turned, and saw Farrington huffing and puffing, coming up to where the ground leveled off. Farrington looked around at everything, the old foundation with the metal bed frame still in it, piles of rock and brick, everything covered with lichen. “What the hell?” Then he followed Mike’s aim. “Jesus, he’s up there?”
“Dmitri! Come on down, man. You can’t stay up there. Let’s go.”
“I want lawyer!”
Mike sighed, wiped sweat and tree leaves out of his face, spit something to the side. “Who’s your lawyer? You got one? Pritchard’s got a lawyer; maybe you can use the same one.”
“I want lawyer or I jump!”
“Dmitri… we were just talking…”
Petrov tried to climb higher.
Farrington bent forward, hands on his knees, still getting his wind back. He looked up at Mike with a bemused expression and said, “Should we just read him his rights?”
“Why are you running, Dmitri? What did you and Pritchard have going? Talk to me, man. Maybe you’ve done nothing wrong and this is all a big misunderstanding, right?”
Petrov called, “Yes. Misunderstanding!”
It was hurting Mike’s neck to keep looking straight up like this. He lowered his chin to his chest, rolled his head around a few times, then tilted back again. “Dmitri, let’s go, bud. Did you hurt someone?”
“No! I hurt no one.”
“Then you got nothing to worry about from us.”
“You’re not who I worry about.”
More shit fell out of the tree; Mike felt something go in his eye. He was getting angry. “Then who are you worried about? Huh?”
“You’ll make me try tell you, then they will come. They will kill me.”
Mike said to Farrington, “He’s talking about Dodd Caruthers and Chapman. All of them.”
“Yeah,” Farrington agreed.
“You got all these bikers driving all over the state,” Mike said, “a ready-group of couriers. They go around gathering precursors – Red P., iodine, pseudoephedrine – bring them to Caruthers, and maybe Chapman runs the meth lab. Or Chapman’s just collecting everything, transporting it to the lab in his trucks.”