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Chapter Sixty-Four: The House on the Hill
"Chief, I'm requesting a reassignment."Caleb said it into the radio before he'd fully decided to, in the flat voice he used when his heart was doing something his mouth didn't want to confirm."Say again, Six?""Residence on Whitfield Hill. Two elderly occupants refusing evacuation. Embers on the roof. I can reach it in six minutes." He swallowed. "Highway Nine is stable. Truck Two can hold it."Static. The longest three seconds of his career."Reyes," Lowell said at last. "Is this personal?""Yes, sir.""Good. I'd rather have a man who cares." A pause. "Go. Take Six. Doyle stays on Nine. Don't make me regret it."Caleb had already pulled the rig onto the shoulder. Doyle looked at him from the passenger seat, soot streaked across his forehead."You heard the man," said the captain. "Let's go save a hawk."---The road up Whitfield Hill had become a tunnel of glowing smoke.The wind cam
Chapter Sixty-Three: Red Flag
The summer came in dry and stayed that way.By the middle of July, the grass on the hills had gone the color of old rope, the creek below Alder Street was a thread of cracked mud, and the weather service had begun saying the words *red flag warning* so often that the dispatchers at Station Six had started rolling their eyes at the radio."It's a ridge fire waiting for a match," Marcus Doyle said, pinning the county map to the briefing room wall. "Six weeks without rain. Humidity in the single digits. Wind from the northwest, gusting forty by Saturday.""Saturday's Harold's birthday," said Emmett Castillo."Then somebody's going to have to eat cake with a pager on their hip."Caleb, at the back of the room with a coffee, said nothing. He was looking at the map. A narrow strip of green marked Cedar Ridge, and at its southern edge, where the contour lines bunched tight, a small black square labeled *Whitfield Residence.*He had sp
Chapter Sixty-Two: Marlow Bridge
Marlow Bridge was an old steel truss span over a gorge, painted the green of tired copper, with a two-lane road that curved toward it through a stand of birches.The birches had lost their leaves. The sky above the gorge was white and low. A river ran far below, a thin, cold braid of silver at the bottom of the drop.Caleb stopped his truck at the near end at eleven fifty-one.The bridge was empty except for a long black car parked at the center, one door open, and two figures standing at the rail.Haskins stood with his back to the gorge. He wore the same charcoal overcoat, the silver hair stirring in the wind. Beside him, in a wheelchair she had been wheeled out of the hospital in, sat Margaret Whitfield. Her face was gray. Her cane lay across her lap. There was no rope on her wrists, no gag in her mouth. She did not need either. Haskins's hand rested on the back of the chair, and the chair rested a foot from the edge."You're
Chapter Sixty-One: Friday, Ten O'Clock
Nobody on the ninth floor of Ferris & Lowe slept that night.Priya made three copies of the tape in a borrowed office while the printer chewed through transcripts. Alvarez dispatched a team to St. Brigid's, where they found Margaret's bed empty, a nurse bound and gagged in a supply closet, and a wheelchair abandoned in the freight elevator. Caleb called Harold's room every half hour, and every half hour the night nurse said the same thing: still stable, still unconscious.At four a.m., Alvarez came and sat across from him in the dark."We can go to the bridge now," she said. "SWAT's mobilizing. Thirty officers.""And Margaret dies the moment he sees them." Caleb stared at the table. "He told me noon. He told me alone.""He's telling you that because he thinks you'll obey.""I will." He lifted his eyes. "But not at the point he expects."She frowned. He explained.---At ten o'clock sharp, the doors of t
Chapter Sixty: Granite Hollow
"Out the back," Alvarez said. "Now.""There is no back," Lonnie Dray said. "The back's the pit."She swore under her breath, drew her sidearm, and killed the lamp with the flat of her hand. The shed plunged into dark. The only light left was the glow of the woodstove and the three pairs of headlights spilling across the quarry floor like searchlights."Priya, under the cot. Caleb, with me."Priya dove for the floor with the recorder clutched to her chest. She had a laptop in her bag and the tape's only copy inside it, and Caleb watched her snap the cassette out of the machine and slip it into her bra with the grim efficiency of a woman who had read too many thrillers.Outside, a voice carried across the cold. Amiable. Almost bored."Detective Alvarez? Ansel Rourke. I'd hate for anyone to get hurt up here. If you'll come out and surrender the tape, you can drive home.""You're under arrest," Alvarez shouted through the wall. "Put your
Chapter Fifty-Nine: Lonnie Dray
Vanessa survived the night.The doctors at St. Brigid's said it twice, for emphasis, as though the news might not hold. A fractured collarbone, six cracked ribs, a concussion, forty-one stitches in her scalp. She would be sore for months. She would walk out of the hospital, they said, on her own two feet.Caleb stood at the foot of her bed at six in the morning with a paper cup of terrible coffee and watched her sleep. A bruise the color of a thundercloud covered half her face. For the first time in the years he had known her, there was no performance in it at all."She'll be out until noon," said Detective Alvarez from the doorway. "I wanted you to know the sedan's plate came back."Caleb turned. "To whom?""A holding company called Pennant Ridge Services. Nobody I'd heard of. Priya Shah found the registered agent in ten minutes." Alvarez folded her arms. "It's the same company that pays Gerald Haskins's driver. Ansel Rourke. Six-foot-three, fifty
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