Chapter 29
The paintings covered every wall. Landscapes mostly, what tourists bought and hung above their fireplaces.
Scattered between them were the other ones.
The ones that weren't for sale. Darker in tone, heavier in brushwork, images that felt less like representations of a place and more like memories of something that had happened there.
Callie stood in front of one, a night scene of a road through dense forest, the trees pressing in from both sides, and studied it, trying to decide if she liked it or if it unsettled her.
"You really think the DA will allow her as a witness?" Callie asked. "I mean, psychics aren't exactly considered the most reliable source of truth."
"I don't think she's psychic," Noah said.
He was sitting on a bench near the counter when a text from Kerri came in.
Ethan had gone out the night before and she couldn't stop him.
I'm not his mother, she'd written. Noah had checked that Ethan made it to school that morning. He had. He'd deal with it later.
"You think she had some Godly vision then?"
"No." Noah looked up from his phone and stood. "I think she has suppressed memories."
Callie turned from the painting. "You're telling me that those sketches," she said, motioning to the wall where the bog painting hung in its mismatched frame, "were her recalling seeing the bodies dumped there?"
"I didn't say she saw them. But I do think Bloomingdale Bog holds some meaning to her.
" He walked to the far end of the gallery and stood a few feet from the same image he'd seen through the window on the day before he found the bodies.
The bridge. The water. The landscape that had led him to six dead girls preserved in peat.
Standing this close, he could see the brushstrokes, the layering, the way the paint was thicker in the areas around the water as if Seraphine had gone over them again and again, unable to leave them alone.
His phone rang. He answered.
"Whereabouts? When?" He frowned. Callie watched him. "Okay. We'll check."
He hung up and pocketed the phone. "We've been keeping tabs on Tabitha Smith since she was released. She went last night to a place north of Jay and stayed overnight."
"You think it's Hollis?"
"She dates him."
"But would she be that reckless?"
"With all the attention Bridger's gotten, people are looking everywhere but at her. Eventually Hollis had to put his head up for air. Maybe she's supplying him with food." Noah was already moving toward the door. "Let's go."
"But what about Seraphine?"
“That will have to wait," Noah said, pushing through the door. The bell chimed behind them and the studio was empty again.
The property sat at the end of a dirt road north of Jay where the forest thickened and the houses thinned to nothing. A plainclothes officer was parked in an unmarked sedan at the junction where the dirt road met the county route, his window down, a coffee balanced on the dashboard.
Noah pulled alongside him. "What have we got?"
"Her vehicle's up there." The officer pointed along the dirt road. "Quarter mile in. She arrived around eleven last night and hasn't left. There's a structure up there, some kind of cabin and outbuilding."
"Anyone else?"
"I saw a second vehicle through the trees when I did a drive-by this morning. Couldn't make out the plate."
"All right," Noah said. "We'll take it from here."
They drove in slowly. The dirt road was rutted and narrow, branches scraping both sides of the Bronco.
The trees were dense enough that the afternoon light came through in fragments.
After two hundred yards the road opened into a clearing.
A cabin sat at the center, a single-story, log-sided, seasonal structure that hunting clubs built in the sixties, now settling into the ground.
Tabitha's car was parked to the left. A dark pickup sat beside it, mud on the wheel wells, a tarp thrown over the bed.
Noah killed the engine. They got out. The clearing was quiet except for birds and the distant sound of water moving somewhere through the trees. No movement from the cabin. Curtains were drawn across the two front windows. A thin line of smoke rose from a stovepipe at the rear.
Noah drew his weapon and approached the door. Callie moved to the right side, covering the corner. He knocked hard.
"Tabitha. State Police. Open up. We know you're here."
Silence. Then footsteps. The door opened and Tabitha stepped out onto the narrow porch, pulling the door closed behind her.
She wore jeans and a flannel shirt and her hair was down, the headscarf absent for the first time Noah had seen.
She folded her arms and looked at them with the same composed patience she'd carried through every encounter.
She had decided long ago that authority was something to be endured, not obeyed.
"Whose place is this?" Noah asked.
"It's one of our Three Pillar properties."
"You in the habit of coming here?"
"Often."
"See, that's odd. Because this is the first time you've been here since we started watching."
Something changed behind her eyes. A calculation. Noah saw it happen and then he heard it. From inside the cabin, a sound. Something dropped. A thud against the floor, followed by the scrape of furniture being moved.
Tabitha heard it too. She knew he heard it.
"Who's in there with you?"
"No one. I'm alone."
"Bullshit," Noah said, and shoved past her through the door.
The cabin was a single room. There was a woodstove, a cot against the far wall, a table with food on it, cans and bread and a water jug. The back window was open. The curtains blowing inward. And beyond it, a figure was running, moving fast, heading for the pickup.
"He's gone out the back!" Noah shouted. He climbed through the back window and hit the ground running.
Behind him he heard a scuffle on the porch and then footsteps coming fast around the side of the cabin.
Derek Hollis had fifty yards on him and was cutting left toward the pickup, which was parked at the far side of the cabin near the tree line.
Noah angled to cut him off but the ground was soft and uneven and his boot caught a root and he stumbled, losing three steps.
Callie came around the corner at a full sprint on a straight line to the truck.
She was closer. Derek reached the pickup first. He tore the door open and threw himself inside.
The engine turned over on the first try.
Callie reached the driver's side just as Hollis dropped it into reverse.
She grabbed the door handle. Locked. She smashed the window with the butt of her weapon, glass spraying across the cab, and reached in.
"Shut it off, Derek!"
He didn't. The pickup lurched backward, tires spinning in the dirt, throwing gravel and mud. Callie held on, her boots dragging, her arm through the broken window, fighting for the steering wheel or the keys or anything she could reach.
Noah jumped onto the hood, both hands flat on the metal, his weapon in his right fist. He slammed the butt of it against the windshield.
"Stop the vehicle! Now!"
Hollis kept going. The pickup swung in a wide arc, the rear end fishtailing through the clearing.
Callie lost her grip and fell, hitting the ground hard and rolling.
Noah slid across the hood as the vehicle swerved, his fingers clawing at the base of the windshield.
Hollis was still accelerating backward, wild-eyed through the glass, one hand on the wheel, the other swatting at the broken window where Callie had been.
Callie was on her feet. Blood on her forearms where the glass had caught her. A cut across her cheekbone.
Noah peeled off the hood as the pickup changed direction. Hollis jammed it into drive and the vehicle lurched forward. Noah rolled clear, came up on one knee, and raised his weapon. "Stop!"
The pickup accelerated toward the dirt road.
Noah fired. The first round punched through the tailgate.
The second hit metal somewhere under the bed.
The third caught the rear left tire. The rubber blew and the pickup yawed sideways, the rim biting into the dirt, and Hollis fought the wheel but the physics were already decided.
The truck slid broadside into a pine at the edge of the clearing with a sound that was part crunch and part snap, the tree shuddering from root to crown.
Hollis tumbled out of the driver's side door, staggering, and tried to run. Callie hit him from behind at full speed. They went down together in the dirt and pine needles, Callie on top, her knee in his back, her hands on his wrists.
"Stop resisting!"
He bucked once. She drove her knee harder.
Noah reached them and dropped beside her, pressing Hollis's face into the ground while Callie cuffed him.
Both of them were breathing hard. Callie's arms were slicked with blood from the glass cuts.
Noah had gravel embedded in his palms and a bruise forming across his ribs where the hood had caught him.
Hollis lay in the dirt with his cheek pressed against the pine needles and said nothing. His eyes were open and they were looking at the trees with a flat stare.