Janet said nothing.
In the roar of the storm he thought the connection was gone. “Janet?”
“I’m here.”
“So what’s got your tongue.”
“I hesitate to say it, but there’s another possible scenario.”
A wave of static interrupted them. “Go on,” he said, when it cleared.
“Somebody could have tried to murder those patients by secretly injecting extra doses of the drug.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched.”
“But not impossible. It’s occurred in hospitals before.”
“But no one ever raised the possibility of foul play here. Certainly it was never mentioned in the charts.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen.”
He exhaled the way only a former smoker can – long, slow, and from the bottom of his lungs. “Being unable to talk with either of them means I may never know.”
“What about family?”
“I talked with the woman’s son this afternoon, but he never brought up anything of that sort. I can call him back and ask him outright if she ever mentioned having any enemies or suspicions of someone trying to harm her, but I think he would have mentioned it if she had. As for the man who died, he’d no next of kin, so there isn’t a hope of finding out more there.”
She fell silent again.
“It isn’t entirely a dead end,” he continued. “I’ve arranged to meet with the floor staff involved in her care. Maybe they can tell me if she ever mentioned anyone who might hurt her. And it turns out Melanie Collins continued to see the woman as a patient from time to time over the years, so maybe she’ll be able to fill me in on something I’m missing.” He’d already left several messages on her service, asking her to call, but she hadn’t gotten back to him yet.
This time Janet let out a sigh, minor-league compared to his own. “Good luck, love. Oh, by the way, I looked up divorce law on the Internet, and as far as I can see, she’d have gone offshore.”
Once Janet got an idea, she was relentless. “That may be, but the police found no record of any plane or boat tickets in her name.”
“That doesn’t mean she didn’t intend to go there. Maybe her killer stopped her before she could make the move. All I know is, find a woman’s divorce lawyer, and you find someone who knows a lot about the woman.”
Mark huddled in the bushes, trying to blend with the scrubby growth.
The man on the ridge looked up from his study of the ground and seemed to stare right at him. Then he looked in the other direction, and finally rose to his feet. If he’d seen Mark or the hunter below, he showed no sign, turning away and peering into the night.
The hunter must have been outside his line of sight, Mark thought. Otherwise, if they were together, why hadn’t he called to him? Even if they weren’t, he would still have reacted, possibly even mistaken him for Mark and taken a shot at him.
Instead the man walked off in the opposite direction, playing his light over the snow on either side of the spiny path.
Mark exhaled in momentary relief.
Looking down he saw that the hunter hadn’t budged, his dark form still visible, his breath coming out in well-spaced puffs. By counting the interval, Mark estimated that whoever he was, he’d controlled his respirations down to ten a minute, which took rock-solid nerve.
As Mark watched, the man slowly leveled the gun barrel as if he were about to shoot something farther down the slope. Again he seemed to be listening.
Mark heard nothing but the rush of the wind.
From within the darkness of the woods leapt a great amorphous shadow in what initially appeared to be a singular movement. Immediately it flew into pieces, the parts darting through the trees at the forest edge, each zigzagging around the trunks like formless gray spirits.
Three shots rang out, but, like smoke, the creatures had vanished.
Except for one.
Its antlered head twisted round, and it spiraled to its knees, staggered up on its legs, then pitched forward again. It writhed in the snow, kicking and thrashing its neck side to side as if to shake off what had felled it. Black stains pooled on the snow, and the writhing eventually slowed. It raised its head once more, as if straining to see the moon through the treetops, its mouth open and gasping. Then it collapsed, its mighty struggle giving over to lesser quiverings.
The hunter walked over and put a final bullet into the buck’s head.
Mark spun around in time to see the first man standing stock-still in the distance, staring toward the sound of the shot. He then scurried over the edge of the ridge and ran back down the way he’d come.
7:00 P.M.
Mark hated all-terrain vehicles. Gas-powered models were carbon-monoxide-spewing noise polluters. Battery-operated versions, though quieter, tipped, killed, and paralyzed just as many victims as their noisier cousins. But among hunters, especially the middle-of-the-night kind, they were the transportation of choice this time of year, before the snow got too deep.
Perched on the back of a red, four-wheel-drive minitractor, he said nothing of this to his grizzled driver as they bounced over the nonwooded sections of the valley. Rather he expressed profound gratitude for the ride home, especially given that the old guy had had to make a choice whether to haul Mark or the deer out first.
Mark had won, and got a shot of the man’s whiskey to boot.
He occasionally had to grab his host’s shoulders to keep from falling off. Under a blue-checked hunting jacket he felt muscles hard as tangled ropes despite a face etched with so many wrinkles they were like rings of a tree and gave an age near eighty. That made him from an era in which men took down deer to put food on the family table, not for sport.
When they pulled up to the back fence of Mark’s property, his driver didn’t give a name, and Mark didn’t ask. But the handshake between them felt firm, also from another time, when it would have been only natural for a man to help a stranger.
Mark watched him ride off to fetch his kill. The wind had chased away the storm, and the moon was at its zenith now, its light filling the countryside like clear blue water. Soon his rescuer was but a soundless dot churning a path back up the far slope.
Marked climbed the rickety log fence and headed over the field toward his house. The snow was barely six inches deep, and he had no trouble walking. All he could think off was a hot shower, clean clothes, and something to eat. Then he’d call Dan, and have him get his ass over to Chaz Braden’s place to ask some pointed questions-
His thoughts came to an abrupt halt.
The lights were on in his house.
And against the upstairs curtains he saw the shadow of someone walking about, moving from room to room.
Too incredulous to move, his brain clicked into action.
Braden!
That ambush and chase had been nothing more than a diversion, intended to keep him out of the way so the son of a bitch could search his house again.
“Well no goddamn way,” he muttered, sprinting for the back door.
He reached it in less than a minute, and, finding his key, let himself in as noiselessly as he could.
Sure enough, he could hear the floorboards above his head creaking as the intruder continued to walk back and forth.
He crept out of the kitchen, through the hallway to the stairs, pausing to pick up the baseball bat he’d put back in the front closet. He glanced outside, and to his amazement, saw a dark station wagon parked in his driveway. Bloody nerve, he thought, and, holding his weapon at the ready, crept up the steps.
The creaking seemed to be coming from behind the closed door to his guest bedroom.