She opened her mouth. Closed it. Shook her head as if to dislodge something from her ear. “For God’s sake, Randy, she already told Rachel. Any minute now she’ll be speaking with her doctor, and as soon as she points to you, he’ll have the cops on you. We’ve got maybe thirty minutes before Kevin comes back. If we’re lucky. And he won’t be smiling and all ‘Hey, Randy, how’s it going?’ this time.”
“I never meant to hurt her in the first place!” Randy looked as if he were going to cry.
“Baby, that’s not going to stop them from putting you in Clinton for the next ten years.”
“Look. There’s no evidence. It’ll be my word against hers if she tells the cops.”
“Oh, Randy.” She couldn’t help it. She wrapped her arms around him. “You spilled your guts to me in fifteen seconds. How much longer do you think you could hold out to the police?”
He buried his face in the crook of her neck. “What should I do?”
That was the question. She hadn’t had a chance to gather her thoughts since Rachel’s call. “Did you leave anything behind? Any evidence?”
She felt him shake his head. “I drove her car to the Reid-Gruyn plant.”
“The mill? Why on earth did you dump her car there?”
He leaned back so she could see him. “I was thinking, there should be another story, right? Another version of how it happened. So I parked it in Mr. Reid’s space. Then I left some of her personal stuff in the office.” He held his hands out. Don’t you get it? “Reid belongs to some of those environmental groups. And he likes young babes-look at who he dumped his first wife for. I figured, if worse came to worse, I could argue that they were getting it on, and he hurt her, and she didn’t want to turn him in.”
She squeezed him. “That was smart. But what about fingerprints and bloodstains and stuff like that?”
“I wore my gloves.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek, staring into the middle distance. He waited. Finally she said, “I think you need to disappear for a while.” He opened his mouth to protest, and she went on. “Just for a while. You made a good start, making it look like Mr. Reid was involved. If we have a little time, I can think of a way to back that up, so the cops will seriously look at him instead of you. If it comes down to a trial”-he made a whimpering sound, and she gripped his shoulders-“if it comes down to a trial, all we’ll have to do is cast a reasonable doubt that you did it.”
She wasn’t sure if he followed her reasoning, but he grasped the essential thing. “Where do I go? And how long do I have to stay away?”
“Go to one of your buddies’ hunting cabins. Or, here.” She broke away and hurried into the kitchen, where she kept cash payments in the cookie jar until she could deposit them. “Head up north and stay in one of those no-tell motels.” She handed him the cash. “Wherever you go, you need to stick to the back roads, because they’ll probably be looking for your truck.”
He had been thumbing through the bills, impressed, but mentioning the police tracking him brought his head up. “That’s right,” she confirmed. “Whatever you do, don’t let anybody see that license plate.” She turned him toward the stairs. “Grab one of the duffle bags and throw in enough clothes for a few days. I’ll pack you some food. It’d be better if you stayed out of stores. Especially convenience stores. Those places have security cameras every two feet.”
He stopped, his hand on the banister. “You really do think of everything.” His voice was threaded with awe.
“Go on, you don’t have much time.”
Lisa unhooked one of the plastic IGA shopping sacks from behind the pantry door and began emptying out the refrigerator. A loaf of bread, a jar of mayo, an unopened package of bologna. Hard cheese and applesauce in a jar and Randy’s favorite pickles. Stuff that could fill him up and last, if not in a fridge, then hanging outside a window in the cold November air. All the while, the back of her mind kept count of how many minutes it had been since Rachel called. She tossed in a bag of Chips Ahoy and a jar of instant coffee, on the chance that he’d have hot water. She threw in a couple of spoons and a knife sharp enough to slice the cheese and twisted the bag handles in her fist and lugged it to the foot of the stairs.
“Hurry!”
A moment later he appeared, a backpack slung over his shoulder and one of their sleeping bags beneath his arm.
“Good idea,” she said.
He stood before her, unsure, not Jesse James making a break for the border but a kid heading out to summer camp for the first time. She hooked him around the neck with her arm and pulled his face close to hers. “First thing,” she said quietly, “is that I love you. Second thing is, if you ever, ever lift your hand to me, I’ll cut off your balls and feed ’em to the fishes. And then I’ll move out west and you’ll never see me again. Got it?” She pulled him tighter into the crook of her arm.
“Yeah,” he breathed.
She released him. “When it’s safe, give me a call.” She handed him the bag of groceries.
At the door, he hesitated. “Maybe I-”
“Go on,” she said, cutting him off. He nodded. Stepped outside and closed the door behind him. She didn’t stand at the window to see him pulling out. Randy could talk of omens and foretelling, of bad luck and good luck. She knew it was thinking and planning that made the difference between success and failure. She flung herself onto the sofa and picked up the Aruba pillow. She had a lot of thinking to do if she was going to save them from disaster.
Kevin bounded up the granite steps to the Millers Kill Police Department. He knew Mark Durkee thought it was an old dump, the brick-and-stone exterior unchanged since it was built over a hundred years ago, but it still pumped Kevin up every time he passed beneath the carved sign. Knowing that he belonged here. He had wanted to be a cop since he was six years old, and how many other people could say they were living out their dreams?
He yanked his cap from his head and struggled out of his jacket as he headed up the hallway to the squad room.
“Hey! Kevin!” Harlene’s voice. He swerved into the dispatcher’s office, where she was enthroned on her swiveling, adjustable, ergonomically correct Aeron chair in front of a bank of phone lines. He had asked her once, on a dare, how she rated a seat that cost ten times more than any other piece of furniture in the station. She had looked up and up and up at him-like the chief, he was over a foot taller than she was-and said, “Because I’m worth ten times more than any runny-nosed police academy graduate.”
“Where’s the chief?” he asked, throwing himself into a chair. “Still up to Haudenosaunee?”
“The birthday boy just called in. He’s en route to the ME’s office. Don’t you get comfortable over there,” Harlene said. “Lyle’s been trying to get ahold of you. He interviewed the assault victim, and she’s ID’d her attacker. The deputy chief wants you to meet him and be in on the arrest.”
Kevin felt a warmth, like the sun rising in his chest. “Me?”
She looked over her half-glasses at him. “It’s Randy Schoof.”
The sun sank. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.” She swiveled away from him, needlessly snapping one of her monitors on. “The chief asked me to call Mark in early before we heard about this latest development. God only knows who’s going to tell him his brother-in-law’s put a girl into the hospital.”
Randy Schoof. He had stood on the man’s front steps and talked with him, smiled at him, taken his information. And all the time he had been eating a bunch of lies.
“Not that any of us will have time to sit and soothe him,” Harlene was saying. “Everybody’s coming in, off duty or not. Part-timers, too. Chief’s found something up at Haudenosaunee, mark my words.”
No. Not lies. He had been asking the wrong questions. And Schoof had taken advantage of his idiocy. Thank God Harlene had caught him before he entered his report. He would have never lived it down.