Seven Days Dead Part 27

"Sure thing, emile. I don't mind driving this thing. Hang on. It'll be b.u.mpy."

"Try b.u.mpy," Sandra pipes up, "when you're tied up and gagged with a hood over your head. That's how I got here. Now that is b.u.mpy."

The others must walk. They do so knowing that the western sky is threatening, that they might only just make it, or get soaked, before leaving the ridge. One man, though, Aaron Roadcap, lags behind, as though he doesn't fear, and possibly might welcome, the storm. As if it means nothing to him to be out on a cliff in weather or to be struck by lightning.

His wife in his arms and on his lap, emile hangs on for the wild ride. He loves the intimacy of the moment, her cheek upon his shoulder, her mouth by his neck, the weight of her jostling on his thighs. Safe for now, they speed away, bouncing under the sun. He finds her soft, involuntary grunts when they hit the bigger b.u.mps hilarious. He'd love to kiss her and for their lips to linger awhile, except that the act would either be hilarious also or knock out their front teeth.

They might even swallow their tongues.

While Louwagie may have claimed the ability to drive the ATV, he's showing no particular expertise, and seems adept at finding every rock and hole embedded along the route. He slows down, in Cinq-Mars's opinion, when he should be gunning it, and speeds up when it's time to take care. The officer seems to know that he's flubbing this performance, but insecurity breeds self-consciousness, which breeds a whole new generation of tactical errors. Yet they survive, and make it off the ridge in one piece, though admittedly with loosened joints.

They pile into Louwagie's cruiser. emile and Sandra sit in the back together behind the protective mesh, not wanting to let go of the other's hand for an instant.

"Maddy Orrock's house," emile instructs the officer, only to have Sandra nix that idea immediately.

"I want out of these clothes. I'd burn this blouse if I didn't like it so much. I also want a shower, for obvious reasons." When her husband gives her a look, she tacks on, "emile, he put his hands inside my bra. That's all he did, but Jesus Me. Apparently, he had a job to do-he couldn't have restrained himself? I want this f.u.c.ker caught."

She so rarely swears.

"Get used to it," she says, and emile takes her meaning.

"All right," Cinq-Mars instructs the Mountie, "our cottage first. Let Sandra shower and change, then up to Maddy's." He'd rather get to work, but he isn't going to deny her anything for a while, and maybe not ever again.

After calling Maddy Orrock to update their arrival, he rings Sandra's mobile phone, not for the first time since her abduction. On the first occasion, her abductor answered and told him to find her on Seven Days Work. On the second attempt, the phone just rang. The phone was reported off-line on the third call, and he receives that notice again. "Sorry," he tells her now. "If your phone shows up again, it'll be because it landed in a lobster pot."

"You think they tossed it. If it's in the sea, I'm hoping it went down with a boat and those f.u.c.kers were on it."

Language, Cinq-Mars is thinking, but he has to let this phase play out.

Louwagie waits in the car as the couple enters the cottage, and emile stays downstairs while Sandra goes up. He's pretty sure that the spot of blood on the floor is hers, but he knows better than to tamper with evidence. A few minutes later, though, when he's stepping around the spot, he gets annoyed, and in a fit of pique, he finds a cloth and wipes it clean. n.o.body's bringing out a forensic team to test a blood spot that's probably from his wife's forehead anyway, so what difference does it make? He stands in the room then, listening to the shower upstairs and to an echo of the tumult that occurred here earlier, this violence against his wife that really was directed against him.

And gauges a violence of his own, latent in his bloodstream.

The terror she must have felt. He's suffering a kind of emotional whiplash, fiercely angry now, and all that tempers his rage is his own contrition for bringing it upon her. He knows he should keep her safer. Since his retirement, it seems that she's been exposed to more risk than ever.

Waiting, emile wanders out to the porch, where he finds notes on the table that Sandra inscribed in doing exercises in numerology. He's not terribly interested, but with his work in limbo for the moment he tries to figure out what she's been up to. Without having her references, her calculations resemble secret code, and he tries to break it without cheating, without checking her book. He idly pa.s.ses the time this way when suddenly, straightening at first, then bending his shoulders over the pages, his interest clearly piques. Sandra finds him in that posture, hunched and concentrating. She's dressed in a yellow print dress, looking pretty, still fluffing her hair with a towel.

"How did you find these birth dates?" he wants to know.

"The Reverend Unger. He's a doll. I mean that literally, by the way. I think he's a porcelain doll."

"Everybody's names. Middle names, too." He's impressed.

"You need the full name for numerology. The minister showed me how to check birth and town records for local people online. But Maddy already knew a lot of them, the names anyway, and she helped, too. Why?"

"It's curious."

"Why? Don't tell me you're interested in numerology. That, I won't believe."

"I believe in local knowledge. This is local knowledge."

"How so?"

Rather than answer, he smiles. "Let's get you up to Maddy's. I've got to track some people down."

She's willing to go right away, but first she has a question. "emile? When this started, remember? You said you knew who did it. Or thought you did. How's that panning out? Were you right back then? Or not?"

His reaction, and the scratch he gives his protuberant nose, strikes her as more humble than his usual investigative c.o.c.kiness. He's willing to take himself down a peg, although only a single peg. "I said then that local knowledge is key. It still is. As far as naming names goes, I have to keep an open mind. If I believe too much in my first instinct, I might miss something, or condemn the wrong person, or miss the best path. I might prove myself right, or trip up and be wrong, but as I said, I have to keep an open mind."

"Could be that our lives are at stake. Certainly our Jeep's life is. So get on it, boy. Stop all this p.u.s.s.yfooting around."

As if he's the one who just took time off for a shower and a change of clothes.

They wait at the roadside in Louwagie's cruiser while Sandra goes up the long walk, and only when Maddy answers and sends out a cheerful wave does emile give the nod to get moving.

Going down the eastern seaboard of the island to Woodwards Cove, he and Louwagie have no view of the western sky, the height of the island blocking it off. For all intents and purposes, this is a fine sunny day. They know better, and expect rain, but emile, in the shotgun seat, not having to drive, can appreciate the seascapes, the picturesque coves, and the rocky sh.o.r.e as they travel on. Then they're off the main highway and heading down a gravel road to Pete Briscoe's house.

He's home.

Warily, he greets them through the screen door.

"Can we come in, Pete?" Louwagie inquires.

"That's okay. The place is a mess. I'll come out."

He's putting on a shirt as he does so.

"What's going on?" Briscoe asks. The door clicks shut behind him.

"Just getting up?" Cinq-Mars probes.

"Changing my shirt. Hot day. I got sweaty is all. How're you guys doing?"

"Top-notch," Louwagie tells him. "You?"

"It's all good," Briscoe says. Once his b.u.t.tons are done, he tucks the hem into his jeans. "So what's going on?" he presses them again.

"If you don't mind, I want you to show me your dead dog's grave site," Cinq-Mars replies.

"I mind." Briscoe understands now that this is not a particularly friendly visit. "Why?" he asks.

"That's really not your concern, Pete," Louwagie informs him. "Detective Cinq-Mars has his reasons and that's all that's necessary here."

"That makes no sense to me," he argues. "You're supposed to be the law here, Wade. You're the Mountie. He's what? Retired? A mainlander."

"I'm also a mainlander, Pete. Mr. Cinq-Mars is helping me on the case," the Mountie explains, but Cinq-Mars is done with being delayed.

"Where's your dead dog buried?"

"What's it to you? Seriously, it's a private place. I'm not going to take you there. Maybe I can't even find it. In the woods. You know."

"I don't know," Cinq-Mars attests.

"You saw."

"I didn't see. I saw you. I didn't see your dog. What's her name again?"

"What do you care really? It's Gadget. What do you care?"

"We're the ones who get to ask the questions, Pete," Louwagie explains again.

Cinq-Mars supposes that Louwagie is being the caring and attentive cop, if not entirely the good cop. He can work with that.

"You get to answer," Cinq-Mars warns Briscoe. "If you don't, we drag you in and make you."

"Make me what?"

"Stop wasting my time. You're in deep enough without wasting my time. That only makes things worse. You haven't guessed that?"

"You come here, ask me where my dead dog's buried, and you're saying I'm wasting your time. You sure you got that straight?"

Logically speaking, he has a point. emile isn't going to concede anything today. "Where, Mr. Briscoe, do we find your dead dog? This is the last time I'm asking politely. Next time will be at the station where I speak to you privately."

Briscoe's defiant. "I can take you."

"Does that count for something? This isn't a wrestling match. You can dump that little fantasy in the trash for now. So, do we go down to the station?"

Louwagie helps out by extracting a pair of handcuffs from his belt. Briscoe can't believe this shift in his fortunes and fidgets on the porch.

"Okay. Look. It's nearby, all right? Between the house and the water. What's the big deal? It's above the tide line. It's legal that way. It's just not my property, see. That's why I'm reluctant to tell you. It's not my property."

Cinq-Mars looks over the lay of the land. He already has Briscoe dead to rights on several counts. "Then why," he asks him, "did you put Gadget on the front seat of your pickup? As if you were going to cart her some distance? You can't drive toward the water from here. Putting her in the truck didn't help you."

"I changed my mind is all. I planned to bury her someplace else."

"Why did you change your mind?"

"I just did," Briscoe maintains.

"Where's your shovel?" Cinq-Mars asks next. A new tack. Always keep the man you're interviewing off guard. Not only will he not know where you're coming from, he'll soon be disoriented and confused as to which questions are important and which are, in the vernacular of the sea, red herrings.

"What do you mean by that? What shovel?"

"Haul him down to the station," Cinq-Mars tells Louwagie. "Save us time and trouble."

"What do you mean?" Briscoe protests. "What shovel? I don't have a shovel."

"You buried your dog with your bare hands?"

"No, I-"

"What? I saw you up on Seven Days Work with a shovel!"

"I borrowed it. All right? I borrowed a spade, if that's what you mean. It wasn't my shovel."

"Who from?" Louwagie asks, exercising a patient voice as counterpoint to emile's aggression. "Where is it now?"

"What do you care? It's only a, you know, a spade, a shovel. I'm not being a hard-a.s.s, but seriously, what do you care?"

"Ask one more question," Cinq-Mars warns him, "one more, and we haul you in. You won't enjoy it. I will. You won't."

If Briscoe is a legitimate tough guy, his threat is meaningless, even laughable. The tough guy would already have won this contest of wills. Cinq-Mars doesn't believe that Briscoe is the tough guy he pretends to be, and he's sure the man has virtually no clue what he might be in for. Which gives him a huge advantage.

"Where's the spade you had up on Seven Days Work? Who'd you borrow it from? Where is it now? We want to know," Louwagie stipulates, less patiently now.

A long, low rumble is heard from beyond the nearest hills, and a darkening of the sky comes into view on this protected lowland.

Pete Briscoe's eyes skip back and forth between the two men, as though he's trying to choose his safer fight. "I returned it," he admits.

"To whom?" Louwagie presses him with mock sarcasm.

Briscoe hesitates.

"Pete," Cinq-Mars adds, "word to the wise. If you're arrested, I'll interrogate you night and day. My wife was abducted a few hours ago. She's safe now, thank G.o.d, but I'm after anyone and everyone who had anything to do with that. You want to exonerate yourself if you can. I'm p.i.s.sed now. You don't want to go toe-to-toe with me while you're handcuffed to a steel bed for hour after hour. Or do you? Do you?"

"I don't know anything about that! I had nothing to do with that! I don't know about your wife. I didn't do nothing!"

"Sure you did. You said so yourself. You borrowed a long-handled spade. I saw you digging with it."

"I'm allowed to borrow a spade. Holy mackerel! This guy makes no sense!"

"You know what?" Cinq-Mars asks. Then warns him again, "Don't answer with another question."

Briscoe doesn't know how to respond and so keeps mum.

"I know what you were digging up on Seven Days Work."

He sighs, as though this talk is torture. "Of course you know. I was trying to bury my dog."

"That's a lie and a half. That's a whopper. I'll remember it when we're together in our interrogation cell and you're strapped to the steel bed. I'll remember how you just lied to me for no good reason. I might go into that room with a hammer."

"Pete," Louwagie reminds him, "you just told us you buried Gadget nearby."

"Oh yeah," Briscoe says. "What was I doing, if you think you know?"