A Shadow Fell Page 8

  “I look forward to meeting her.”

  “You’ll like her,” he said.

  * * *

  The next day I arrived at the hospital to find Callie in the middle of another therapy session. I watched from a distance so she wouldn’t know I was there. I wanted to see for myself just how well she was doing. It was amazing watching her fight to build strength in her withered legs. I couldn’t help but reflect on how much she had changed. She was much thinner now, more ethereal, gaunt in the face. She was still very beautiful, but her beauty now was of a different variety. Having been such a strong woman before, with a voluptuous figure, she had been transformed into a frail creature in need of protection.

  There were a number of small changes in Callie that had come to light as well. Nothing monumental, just curious. For one thing, her tastes in certain foods had undergone a transformation. I brought her in a pizza one day covered with green peppers, something she had always loved. She seemed to enjoy the pizza well enough but she systematically picked off and discarded every green pepper after tasting one. When I asked if she didn’t like them she scrunched up her face and made a sound something like ‘blaaaauuck.’ It brought quite a round of laughter from the nursing staff, all of whom adored her.

  27

  “So, did you get through to your wife yesterday?” I asked as we took up our customary seats on my verandah, beers in hand.

  “Yeah, I got through to her just as she was getting up. She should get here some time next week.” I had always liked Con’s easy ways and enjoyed his company but now that the black cloud about his past had been lifted I was unquestionably more at ease.

  “So you going to do a little house cleaning before she gets here?” I asked.

  He looked at me like the thought had not even remotely crossed his mind. “Might not be a bad idea I guess.”

  “Probably not.”

  “That’ll only take me a minute or two,” he said, vastly understating the project’s requirements. “We should use the time before Yolanda gets here to do some more scouting around up in Virginia.”

  “You sure you don’t want to put that on hold? With your wife coming back and all?”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “There ain’t nothing more important than getting that taken care of.”

  “Maybe there’s an easier way to do this,” I said. “I could rent a helicopter and do an aerial search.”

  Con shrugged unenthusiastically. “Nah, that ain’t gonna work. My guess is this guy is way too smart to be spotted from the air. I think you’d end up spending a ton a money and have nothing to show for it in the end.”

  “I suppose you’re right. You know Henderson has to leave a vehicle somewhere before making his trek up the mountain. Maybe if we concentrated more on finding that we’d have better luck.”

  “It’s a thought,” he said. “But there has to be thousands a places he could ditch a vehicle. He could be accessing the mountain from anywhere. And any vehicle he uses is obviously gonna be well concealed.”

  “So we hope that he’s been back to the cabin site and this time left us a trail we can track,” I said.

  “That’s the way I see it, yup.”

  28

  I didn’t’ want to leave for a week, or maybe more, without letting Callie know I wouldn’t be seeing her. I found her in the exercise room on a walking machine. She proudly showed me how well she was doing. She wasn’t a hundred percent recovered yet but she was getting close to it.

  I spent some time helping her with her exercises. When it was time for me to leave I walked her back to her room. “Callie, I have to go away tomorrow. So I won’t be able to see you for a little while.”

  She didn’t seem particularly upset by this news, more like mildly surprised. I had visited her every day since she’d come out of the coma and I was someone she had come to expect to see daily. “How come you’re going away?” she asked.

  “I have to see a friend who lives in another city. But I shouldn’t be gone for more than a week.”

  “A week,” she said, like she was computing what this meant in real terms.

  “Right.”

  “You will come back though, Jack. Won’t you?”

  “Of course I will, Callie. And I’ll miss you very much while I’m gone. Will you miss me a little?”

  She nodded shyly. She looked thoughtful. “When you get back will you tell me about our life? Where we live and stuff?”

  “Yes, honey. I’ll do that.”

  “And what happened to me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “None of the people here will tell me much. They just say it was an accident, what happened to me. Is that true?”

  I nodded my head. Lying to her was a distasteful thing for me even if it was for her own good. I took her hands and turned her to me. “I have to go now. Can I have a hug?”

  She put her arms loosely around me and tapped lightly on my shoulders. It was what I imagined being hugged by the Queen of England might be like. But for a very brief moment I was catapulted back in time: I was married to a beautiful, vital woman, we had a wonderful daughter, and nothing bad would ever happen to us.

  When Callie backed away it took every ounce of determination I could muster to keep smiling.

  I wanted to wrap her in my arms and never let go.

  29

  It was early August, just shy of six months since Reuben Henderson had escaped from prison; Con and I were again slogging our way through the Virginia wilds.

  At the end of our second day on the mountain we made camp by a stream, looking up at a particularly intimidating section of terrain with steep hillsides and a lot of loose rock that, if we kept to the same route as in the past, we had to face in the morning. I thought, not for the first time, how a fall from there could end badly.

  I was no longer a young man and, although I had always tried to maintain a reasonable level of fitness, with all that had happened in the last six months my regular exercise regimen had fallen by the wayside. If there was an easier way to reach our destination I was all for it. Maybe, I thought, by following the stream along its natural course as it meandered down the mountain, we could avoid this part of our hike. After all, Henderson was much older than I was and if he was making this trek there may, indeed, be a better way of doing it.

  Something that had always bothered me about this climb was how Henderson – particularly in his later years – had been able to get his victims up the mountain. How was he able to deal with a child who would have been fighting him all the way? And if, as the prosecutor during his trial had contended, he carried his victims up the mountain unconscious, how was he able to handle the extra weight this would entail? Even a young girl of ten is going to weigh eighty pounds or so. Add this to the camping gear and supplies he would need to carry and the situation seemed impossibly difficult to me.

  I told Con about my concerns and asked what he thought of my idea of scouting out an easier way to go.

  “Why don’t we take a little gander around the bend up there,” he said pointing. “See what things look like. I agree with you that making this trip with the added weight of a child would be pretty damn difficult. I ain’t sure I could even do it. I don’t see how Henderson would be able to manage it. At least not unless there’s a much easier way to get up there.”

  As we struck out, with Winston eagerly leading, the stream widened, large boulders rimming its banks, making headway both slow and difficult. Accessed from a different direction, however, there was at least a possibility that an easier ascension of the mountain was possible.

  We trudged on for about fifteen minutes before the trees thinned a bit and we had a decent view of what lay ahead. Sure enough it looked as though, if we continued to follow the creek a less hazardous alternative likely did exist. From where we stood it appeared that a long, gradual slope leading up the mountain from the west might well get us where we wanted to go.

  “It looks like we got lucky,” Con said. “But we better get
headed back. We’re starting to lose light.”

  I looked around for Winston. At first I didn’t see him but when I called out his name I saw his head pop up from between two boulders some distance ahead. He was a very well trained an obedient dog and seldom hesitated to respond immediately to the command to come. But obviously something had captured his attention and he was reluctant to leave it. When I called him again he stood his ground and barked at me. I knew from previous occasions that this was his signal he wanted me to help him capture some prize he had unearthed, and he could be stubborn about it. I decided the couple of minutes it would take to humor him was worth it.

  “Wait here, Con,” I said. “This won’t take long.”

  Winston was scratching at the patch of sandy ground where the boulders came together when I got to him. “What’s so interesting, fella?” I said. Then, bending down, I saw what was holding his attention. It looked like a piece of white cloth. Not something terribly unusual if we were somewhere people were likely to have spent time, but we were a long way from there.

  It was impossible to reach whatever it was from where Winston was trying to get it. I climbed up on one of the boulders and stretched out, dangling my arm down. It took some maneuvering but I was eventually able to get it between two fingers and lift it up. By now Con had decided to join us and when I lifted it free I tossed it to him while I climbed back down from the rock.

  “It’s a cap,” he said. “Says Maricopa County All Stars on it.”

  I took the cap from him and looked at the insignia myself. “Jesus,” I whispered.

  “What?” Con said. “Does it mean something to ya?”

  “Sun City, Arizona – my parents home – is in Maricopa County.”

  Con’s eyes went wide. “No shit,” he said.

  “The detective I spoke to at the Phoenix hospital told me the man who arrived at my parents home that day was wearing a white cap. It’s got to be him.”

  “Could be a coincidence,” Con pointed out.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Con took a moment to ponder in his usual style. “No, I guess not,” he finally said.

  “Me neither.”

  I looked up, imagining an access route to Henderson’s cabin location straight along our line of sight. It wasn’t hard at all to imagine a gust of wind blowing the cap off a climber up there.

  “I wonder if we’ve lucked out,” Con said, his eyes shining with a strange glint. “Maybe the bastard’s actually here.”

  I looked at the cap I was holding again. I was imagining what the outcome in Arizona would have been if my parents neighbor had not happened to notice the bogus delivery man walking up the walkway next door. I tried to keep the anxiety I was feeling out of my voice but it wasn’t easy. Suddenly the possibility of coming face to face with Henderson was real. “It’s only been two weeks since he was wearing this in Arizona,” I said quietly. “For it to be here now means there’s a decent chance he is too.”

  30

  When we resumed our climb the next morning it didn’t take long for us to see we had indeed found an easier route up the mountain. We were on a reasonably gentle slope – at least compared to what we had experienced before – and I was following a few yards behind Con when he came to a sudden stop. He knelt down and brushed aside some light debris, studying the soil.

  “What is it?” I said coming up beside him.

  “You told me yesterday you’ve always wondered how Henderson could have got his victims up the mountain with the added weight and all.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I think we may have just solved that little puzzle.”

  I looked at the area he was studying. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me and I said so.

  He looked at me and smiled. “These are skid marks. Judging by the pattern of the spray I’m thinking they were probably made by a small dirt bike.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I mumbled. We had never considered the possibility of motorized transport on the mountain because of the topography. And now it looked as though Henderson may well have been using a different route where the terrain wasn’t a problem.

  Reaching the cabin site took longer than we anticipated. The new route was less physically taxing but the distance covered was considerably greater.

  Upon our arrival Con did another circumnavigation of the area. He looked for new signs that a tent had been pitched and he scoured the cabin timbers looking for indications that there had been more campfires since our last visit. His initial search yielded no obvious signs of occupation beyond what we had noted before. He seemed disappointed in the extreme. As anxious as I was to find and deal with Henderson, he seemed even more so.

  “I’m gonna expand the search area tomorrow,” he said. He sounded a little strange and, uncharacteristically, looked nearly exhausted.

  “Okay, Con. I’ll make us some supper and we can turn in early.”

  He nodded and stretched out on the ground to relax. I set about heating a can of stew over our little cook stove.

  At one point I looked over at Con and an odd thing happened. He was staring at me. The only word I could think of to describe the look on his face at that moment was as one of malevolence. As quickly as our eyes met the look changed to a smile. But I had the distinct feeling I had caught him in an unguarded moment of pure hatred.

  A little chill ran through me.

  I told myself I was being ridiculous and tried to dismiss the sensation of unease that settled on me. But I wasn’t altogether successful.

  That night, as we bedded down in our tent, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with Con. As we lay in the dark I listened to his breathing. Usually he fell asleep well before me but not this time. I had the disturbing feeling that he was waiting me out. But to what purpose? Eventually I faked sleep by snoring lightly to see what might happen. After half an hour or so his breathing changed and it was obvious he had nodded off.

  After breakfast the next morning Con announced he would likely be gone for a few hours. He said he wanted to take his time doing a large sweep of the area to see if he could pick up any signs of occupation he may have missed during his earlier search. It was clear he wanted to be on his own and it left me with little to do in his absence. Consequently I used the time to try and analyze what had happened between us the previous evening. It had been strange to say the least. Was I making too big a deal out of what may have been nothing more than quiet contemplation on his part? I wanted to believe that was the case. But something – something I couldn’t define or conceptualize - kept niggling away at me.

  I began to think back through my association with Con to see if there were any other episodes of strange behavior on his part. I couldn’t really put my finger on anything specific although, truth be told, his conduct was frequently a little odd. I had come to accept his quirks over time and even, to some extent, appreciate them. Now I started to wonder if there might be more to it than a simple case of him marching to the beat of a slightly different drum.

  I couldn’t entirely discount what Tom Kilborn had told me about Con’s wife. After all, I had only Con’s word that he had received a letter from her. It was possible he had fabricated the whole story.

  It was my experience with liars that they usually gave themselves away through inclusion of unnecessary details. Often, when a person tells a lie, they will manufacture fine points around the story in an effort to add validity. It follows, of course, that these details are also lies and if you tell enough of them it’s easy to get tangled up in the web of deceit you’re constructing. It was in this vein that I tried to recall what Con had said about the call to his wife. Something about calling her at noon. And then getting through to her just as she was getting up.

  Almost at once something in my subconscious rang wrong. I did the math in my head. Unless I was mistaken there was a five hour time difference between Portugal and the east coast of the United States. Portugal, of course, being five hours ahead
.

  And there it was. If Portugal was five hours ahead of us, and Con called his wife at noon, that would make it dinner time there. She would be getting ready for supper, not just getting up.

  Con had figured the five hour time difference alright, but he had gone the wrong way.

  So, what did this tell me? Con was almost certainly lying about contacting his wife. And if he was lying about contacting her, that meant there was at least a reasonable chance that he may, indeed, have killed her.

  But if this was true, what was his motivation in lying to me about contacting her? The only thing that seemed to make any sense was that he wanted, for whatever reason, to gain my trust. He might well have surmised that my colleagues in the FBI had told me about the suspicions concerning his wife’s disappearance. That being the case he might also assume I would be reluctant to take him with me on my search for Henderson. But why would he have any desire to ease my mind if it was specifically in the hope that I would allow him to assist me in that connection?

  The whole thing seemed to make no sense to me.

  But I now had very good reason to believe that, to Con, it made a great deal of sense.

  Part 4

  The Betrayal

  31

  “I picked up signs of a trail,” Con said excitedly. “The bastard’s smart, but not smart enough.”

  He had arrived back at the camp after almost six hours away and wore a smug look on his face. As I studied him I could see that there was no doubt about it - his behavior had changed. He was less cool. More focused but in a fanatical way. I could see it in his eyes. And my experience with fanatics, much like that of liars, was without exception not good. Whether it was religion, politics, or something as benign as saving the whales, fanatics bothered me. I had once read something on the topic by someone I respected. I couldn’t remember the exact quote but it was something along the lines that ‘if you want to be taken seriously you need to abandon all or nothing fanaticism and embrace a balanced science-oriented view.’ When I come across someone who lacks this fundamental ability it raises all kinds of red flags in my mind. I supposed it was somewhat impractical of me to think this way. After all, I had taken on the role of an extremist myself. My single-minded determination to find Henderson and exact my own form of retribution had to be considered obsessive. But, given the circumstances, in my mind at least, it was justified obsession.