Chapter 9
Wesley didn't stop to untie the knot. He hit the cable with the front bumper of the Impala; the wire gave with a shrieking, metallic twang, snapping the rusted padlock and whipping back into the wet elderberry bushes.
The lane wound through three-quarters of a mile of dripping hemlock and second-growth white pine, climbing toward a granite ridge that overlooked the muddy bend of the Black River.
The cabin sat in a clearing at the end of the spur: a squat, tongue-and-groove cedar structure with a green standing-seam metal roof and a stone chimney puffing a thin, fragrant plume of seasoned hickory smoke into the mist.
On the covered gravel apron beside the woodshed, the white Ford F-150 sat with its hood ticks cooling in the wet air.
Wesley killed the Impala’s engine. He didn't take his service weapon from its holster. He didn't call the dispatch desk in Columbus. There were no backup units within fifty miles that didn't have a cousin or an uncle who had carried a flashlight into the timber that night.
He took his briefcase, stepped out into the rain, and slammed the door.
His boots crunched heavily on the wet crushed river stone. He climbed the three cedar steps onto the front porch, where a split-oak rocker sat beside a stack of split ash logs.
The front door wasn't locked. In Black River, doors were only locked when outside investigators were in town.
Wesley pushed the heavy oak plank door open and stepped inside.
The cabin was warm, smelling of woodsmoke, gun oil, fried salt pork, and the faint, sweet plastic stench of medicinal oxygen. A cast-iron woodstove glowed cherry-red in the corner, radiating a dry, bone-deep heat that made Wesley’s damp wool coat begin to steam.
Calloway Miller sat behind a massive desk made from a split white-oak slab, illuminated by the green glass shade of an antique banker's lamp.
He wasn't wearing his khaki twill jacket now. He wore a faded red flannel shirt, unbuttoned at the throat to reveal a chest as sunken and pale as an old bread trough. An oxygen concentrator stood beside his chair, humming with the exact same mechanical rattle as the one in Hargrove’s room at the rest home. The clear plastic tubing looped around his ears and ran into his nostrils, his breathing deep, deliberate, and loud.
On the slab desk lay a clean field-stripping mat, a bottle of Hoppe’s No. 9 solvent, and a disassembled Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 caliber revolver—the standard-issue sidearm of the Black River County Sheriff’s Department from 1970 until the day Calloway retired.
Miller didn't reach for the cylinder. He didn't look startled.
He held a bronze cleaning brush in his liver-spotted right hand, slowly drawing the bristles through the blued cylinder chambers, one by one. *Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.*
"Wiped your feet on my cable, son," Miller said. His voice was deeper than Hargrove’s, a heavy, resonant baritone that had spent forty years giving orders from the front steps of the courthouse, now muffled by the plastic prongs in his nose.
"The gate was in my way, Sheriff," Wesley said.
"Most things are, to a young man from the capital." Miller set the bronze brush down on the green felt mat. He picked up an oily white cotton patch, folded it into a tight triangle, and began to wipe down the revolver's crane. "Hargrove talk to you?"
"He did."
"Raymond always was a weak vessel. Good hand with a scalpel, but he had no stomach for what comes after the sewing's done. Never could understand that sometimes the suture has to go through good skin to hold the rot in."
"Julian Vance wasn't rot, Calloway."
Wesley stepped up to the oak slab. He didn't sit down in the ladder-back chair across from the desk.
He unlatched his leather briefcase with two loud, violent snaps that cut through the hiss of the oxygen line. He reached inside, pulled out the surveyor’s field book, and threw it flat onto the wood, right between the cylinder and the bottle of gun solvent.
The yellow cover landed face-up, its corners frayed, the graphite measurements glistening under the green lamp light.
Miller looked down at the book. His gray eyes, framed by folds of weathered, sun-damaged skin, didn't widen. They simply grew heavier, older, sinking back into his skull like stones settling into river silt.
"You knew the whole time," Wesley said, his voice trembling with an anger that was cold, pristine, and razor-sharp. "You knew it wasn't a drifter. You knew it wasn't Wayne Thorne. You knew it wasn't a single lunatic running through the hemlocks with an armful of scrap iron."
Wesley leaned across the oak slab, planting both palms on the wood, his face twelve inches from the old sheriff's nose.
"Eleven different impacts," Wesley demanded, his voice hitting the cedar logs with the force of a hammer strike. "Eleven different angles. A skillet, a winch crank, a tractor pin, a peavey hook. All inside two minutes. Who was the untouchable bastard you destroyed your badge to protect, Miller? Which one of them was worth forty years of lies?"
Sheriff Miller didn't flinch.
He slowly set down the oily cotton rag. He reached up with both hands, slid the plastic oxygen tube out from his nostrils, and set it down on the field mat, where it hissed against the felt like a dying snake.
He looked up at Wesley with eyes that were utterly hollow, completely exhausted, and devoid of everything except a terrible, suffocating pity.
"You still think there was only one man swinging, son?" Miller whispered, his voice rattling in the dry heat of the cabin. "Turn the page and look at who owned the tools."
