She opened her drawer and swept the journals and envelope into it, then switched off her light and unlocked her door. As she curled up on the little sofa against the wall, a knocking sounded on her door.
Caitlin didn’t move.
The FBI agent waited a few seconds, then turned the knob and leaned into the room. She could almost sense Kaiser’s eyes adjusting to the darkness.
“Caitlin?” he said softly.
She didn’t stir.
“Caitlin.”
She gave him nothing. Kaiser stood there in silence, making judgments she could only guess at. While she waited, the mind-boggling reality of what she’d arranged with Toby Rambin sent a chill up her spine. If she did everything right—and if Rambin turned out to know what he claimed he did—then by tomorrow at noon she might be cracking open the biggest story of her career. In a single day she could vindicate Henry Sexton, bring closure—and possibly justice—to the families of several civil rights martyrs, and rack up another Pulitzer Prize. You couldn’t do a better day’s work than that.
After some fraction of time she could not guess at, John Kaiser went out and pulled the door shut behind him. Caitlin remained on the sofa, breathing deeply, trying to slow her pounding heart. Now that she’d finally connected with the poacher, whatever had kept her going all these hours without sleep finally let go, and exhaustion washed over her. In the darkness of her mind, she saw the wild-eyed face of Elam Knox staring in fury from the black V in the trunk of the Bone Tree.
“I’m coming for you, you bastard,” she whispered fiercely. “And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it.”
CHAPTER 26
DREW’S LAKE HOUSE was locked when I arrived, so I opened it with the key he’d given me. Inside, I found nothing but evidence of a hasty departure. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and the chairs and sofa looked as though someone had gotten up and left the room only minutes ago. One bed had been slept in, and in the bathroom lay a pair of pants on the floor that matched my father’s size. Back in the den, I found something far more disturbing: a plastic bottle of nitroglycerine tablets. Dad usually keeps a couple of tablets in a pocket, but it was hard for me to imagine him voluntarily leaving that bottle behind. The only scenario that made sense—other than his being killed or kidnapped—was him running for his life, leaving so fast that he left critical medication behind.
After searching every room, I went out to the closed garage. Drew had told me I might find his old pickup truck there, but it was gone. Instead, I found Walt Garrity’s Roadtrek van. The sight of it stirred something in me. It was so easy to imagine Dad and Walt rolling down the highway, laughing and smiling. But necessity had separated them, and since the police had a description of the unique vehicle, they’d been forced to leave the Roadtrek behind.
Since I had no key to the big van, I picked up a brick in the corner of the garage and smashed the passenger window. My throat locked up when I opened the door, so afraid was I that I’d find my father’s body inside. But I found only clothes, a couple of cash cell phones, and quite a bit of high-tech gear that Walt must have brought from Texas. Nothing that would tell me where my father had gone.
I was walking down to Drew’s boathouse when I noticed some dark smudges on the dead grass to my left. Kneeling, I found that they were bloodstains, and the realization nauseated me. Did my father die here? I wondered. As best I could determine from the depressions in the soft ground, at least three men had faced one another at the edge of the lake. But exactly what had happened I had no way to tell.
Unable to find any other clues, I screwed up my courage and opened Drew’s boathouse, again expecting to find Dad inside. But again I found no sign of him. No less afraid, I walked the forty yards out to the end of Drew’s pier and gazed desolately over the lake.