The Deadlock Trilogy Box Set Page 4

  Will raised his beer, and the two bottles clinked together.

  “Welcome to Rook Mountain, Mr. Osmond, where we make our own fun. The great thing about this place is that nothing crazy ever happens.” He met Will’s eyes and that crooked smile reappeared. “The downside is that nothing crazy ever happens.”

  CHAPTER TWO: SAME OLD TOWN

  1.

  “If I had to guess the cause of death, I’d go with the two bullets,” Christine Osmond said.

  The deceased woman, positively identified as Jessie Cooper, lay on the medical examiner’s table. She was stuffed into a black body bag, unzipped at the top. Her head and torso poked out like a candy bar from a peeled-back wrapper.

  “Seriously, Doc?” the man in the police uniform asked. “That’s all you got?”

  Christine sighed. “Sullivan, she’s been unzipped for about thirty seconds. Come back in an hour and I might have something a little more in-depth.”

  Sullivan nodded. “I was hoping to get home tonight.”

  “Very subtle.” She looked up at him. “So you don’t have any concerns with me doing the medical examination?”

  Sullivan shrugged. “It’s not ideal. In the Before, we probably would have had to find someone else. But now… who else are we going to ask?”

  Christine nodded. She’d grown used to that refrain over the last eight years. She was one of only two medical doctors in Rook Mountain, and the other one had just celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday. In the Before, most people had gone to Elizabethton for their medical needs.

  In the old days, Christine had been a podiatrist. She had worked in a small but progressive hospital in Elizabethton, a tight-knit workplace high on results and comparatively low on drama. They were even starting to get some national recognition. A medical journal had written up their unique approach to cross-disciplinary teamwork. There had been talk of awards. Grant money.

  It had been a good life. Work hard all day and sometimes all night at a job she was passionate about. Sure, it was stressful, but it was a good stress, an invigorating stress. When work was done, she drove to her beautiful home in the mountains and her amazing family.

  Then the Bad Things had happened. The Unfeathered. Regulation Day. Jake’s disappearance. Now she might as well be one of two doctors alive.

  “Anyway,” Sullivan said, “I don’t guess you’ll find anything unexpected. This couldn’t be any more straightforward. Ms. Cooper here was a Regulation breaker. Will took care of her, protected the town, and taught all those boys a thing or two at the same time. You should be proud of your husband.”

  Christine smiled. “I am. Always.” Ever since she had married Will she’d never once been anything but proud of him. It was different than her marriage to Jake had been in many ways. She supposed no two marriages were exactly alike. She and Will had their ups and downs, but her trust in the man never wavered. The best part was that she knew he felt the same way about her.

  “Man alive, I wish Peyton had been in that group,” Sullivan said. “His Scout leader hasn’t even taught him to start a proper fire. And he’s fourteen in September.”

  Christine pulled on a pair of latex gloves. She reached up and hit 'record' on the video camera pointed at the table. Who the hell would ever watch this thing, she didn't know. But procedure was procedure. Christine made a point of following the rules. Trust was a must.

  “I’ll leave you to it then.” Sullivan turned and sauntered out of the room, letting the heavy metal door slam shut behind him.

  Christine dragged the zipper of the body bag down until the rest of the corpse was exposed. In spite of what she had told Sullivan, she didn’t want to be there all night, either. She wanted to get home to her family. She wanted to be with Will. And Trevor too. It wasn’t the first death that either of them had seen, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. But they both had to be going through some things.

  Christine sighed and took a deep breath. She couldn’t think about any of that now. There was a dead woman in front of her who deserved the courtesy of a thorough examination. Like Sullivan, Christine doubted there was anything to find, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t try.

  Christine pulled the body bag away from the woman’s arms and legs. Jessie Cooper was forty-two years old, or so her records said. It was a little hard to tell on visuals alone with the distracting hole in her forehead. It was clear from her clothing that she had been out in the wild for some time. The denim of her jeans was hard with dirt. Her hair was tangled and uneven. Christine tried to picture the way she might have looked before she went into the wild.

  Christine started with the hands. They were bound with rope but appeared uninjured. Her wrists showed no signs that she had struggled against the rope. Most likely it had been quick and her suffering had been minimal.

  Where to go next? She could start from the bottom and work her way up. The feet would be in terrible shape, Christine knew. It was difficult to take care of your feet when spending any significant time in the wilderness. Christine had seen it on countless hikers in the Before, men and women passing through Rook Mountain on the Appalachian Trail who had finally given in to their screaming feet and come in for a checkup. The feet were always the first sign of a life hard lived, long before the teeth or the hands.

  Not that the head was much prettier in this particular case.

  The shot, Christine had to admit, was impressive. Dead center of the forehead. From the way Sullivan had told it to her, the woman had been lying on the ground with Will standing above her. Shooting down was more difficult than it might seem. It wasn't the way a weapon was meant to be fired and not the way anyone practiced shooting. It would have been easy for Will to take off the top of her skull, but his shot had been true. Steady hand, that one.

  Not as steady as hers, of course, but she was a doctor.

  Christine could have stopped there. But she felt it was her responsibility to check for any other possible injuries prior to death. That was when she noticed the necklace.

  Jessie Cooper wasn’t wearing any rings, earrings, or bracelets, but she did have a thin gold chain around her neck. Christine slid a probing tool under the chain and lifted it, pulling it from underneath the woman’s shirt.

  On the end of the chain, there was a key.

  Christine took a sharp breath. It couldn’t be. Not on this random woman who had spent the last month hiding in the woods and planning her escape to Elizabethton. Christine unhooked the chain and held it up so the key dangled in front of her eyes.

  It was an old-fashioned key, a long cylinder with dramatic teeth jutting out at the end. There was a symbol on the head of the key, and that symbol was what held Christine’s attention. It showed the face of a clock with a jagged crack running down its center.

  Christine had seen the symbol before. She had spent much of the last eight years searching for something, anything, with the symbol. She’d searched until she had run out of places to look. No, that wasn’t accurate. There were still plenty of stones unturned in this little town. She had run out of something else. There was a word for it... Hope? Motivation? Some combination of those things.

  Christine peeled the latex glove off one hand and reached for the key. She closed her hand tight around it, feeling the coolness of the metal against her skin. Then she opened her hand and traced the symbol of the clock’s face with her thumb.

  It was real. She had found it.

  Christine took a deep breath and tried to clear her mind. Keeping this key—keeping anything with the broken clock symbol—was a violation of Regulation 2. The rule was clear—she was supposed to turn the object over to the police immediately. Breaking the Regulation didn’t bother her, she had broken this one before, but it did complicate things. It put her and her family in danger.

  She switched off the video camera. Then she took out the Mini-DV tape and put it in her pocket. Thank God for the old school video camera in the medical examiner’s room. She would burn the tape later. It wasn’t ideal,
she knew, especially since Sullivan had seen her turn the camera on. Couldn’t exactly say she had forgotten. And since the shooting involved her husband, it was plausible that someone might review the tape to make sure she wasn’t covering anything up. It wasn’t likely in Rook Mountain, but it was plausible.

  Christine, by her very nature, didn’t like dealing with this level of uncertainty.

  Still, there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t risk someone reviewing the tape and seeing the key. If the wrong people saw it, things could take a very bad turn.

  She would put another tape into the video camera, hit 'record,' and take the examination from the top. She would be thorough. Even though she desperately wanted to run home and show the key to Will, to celebrate the good news with him, she would force herself to complete the job. When Sullivan came back in forty-five minutes or so, she would tell him about the results of the examination. She would have an unhurried, casual conversation with him for as long as she could stomach. Only after all that would she go home. There was too much at stake for her to be anything but meticulous.

  She slipped the necklace into her pocket and went to find another tape for the video camera.

  2.

  Frank sat on a park bench in downtown Rook Mountain. He was eating a vanilla ice cream cone with sprinkles. It was the first time he’d tasted ice cream in over nine years. He was a free man.

  The release from prison had been a whirlwind. Usually, the hours leading up to a prisoner’s release were an exciting but stressful time. Often the prisoner was given little information on the exact time of their release. But the main reason for the tension was the fear that something would go wrong. Maybe there had been a paperwork snafu. Maybe someone in some government office somewhere would review your file and have a change of heart. It was unlikely to happen, but that didn’t stop the fears from coming in those final prison hours.

  Frank had been spared all of that.

  After the meeting with Ms. Raymond and the warden, Frank had been taken to another office area and asked to sign a few pieces of paper. Rodgers then led him to a large room where he was given a set of clothes he’d never seen before, an envelope of cash, and a hearty handshake. With that, Rodgers had called for a prison transport van and sent Frank on his way.

  Of course, Rodgers hadn’t been able to leave it at that. As Frank boarded the van, he heard Rodgers calling to him. “Maybe I’ll see you on the outside.”

  Frank had no idea if that was a threat or the guard’s awkward way of saying that he considered Frank a human being again. Frank didn’t much care. He turned and gave Rodgers a tooth-baring smile that probably could have been interpreted as menacing. “Yeah,” Frank said. “Maybe you will.”

  Frank asked the van driver to drop him off in downtown Rook Mountain. He wasn’t ready to head out to the cabin just yet. He wandered a few blocks, enjoying the freedom of not having his next move dictated to him. He didn’t have anywhere to be, and no one would yell at him if he wasn’t walking fast enough or on a straight enough line. He passed a few people on the street that he recognized. Some of them looked at his face for a little too long, as if trying to place him, but no one said anything. Thank God for that. He wasn’t ready for small talk. To say he was out of practice would have been a severe understatement. And he had no idea how he would explain his release from prison.

  He spotted Grumpy’s Creamery. It had been one of his favorite places when he was a kid. He’d spent many happy hours there back in the days before he knew anything bad could happen. Before he knew how dark life could get. Back when the future was something to look forward to rather than something to dread.

  So he took the envelope out of his pocket, peeled off a twenty, and walked inside.

  After he got the ice cream cone, he wandered for a few more blocks, licking at it when it started to drip. He sat down on a bench in front of a small playground. It was only after he sat that he realized where he was.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. It had to be his subconscious that had led him there. Perhaps it had been leading him there all along.

  Right there, right next to the swing set, was where he had killed Brett Miller almost ten years ago. It looked almost exactly the same as it had on that day. Frank could almost see Brett’s blood splattered across the ground and dripping from the park sign.

  He looked hard and didn’t try to force the remembered blood out of his mind. He’d had a lot of time to think about that night, and he didn’t run from it anymore. The thought of it still made the guilt bubble up inside him, overwhelming all his senses, but he didn’t try to push it down. He had done something terrible. As the prison counselors would say, it was an event that defined his past, but it did not have to define his future.

  So what did the future hold? Frank inspected his waffle cone, and then licked a drip running down the side. He bit into the cone, and it cracked with a sweet crunch. It tasted as good as he remembered.

  There wasn’t much in this world Frank was good at. He’d messed up his life about as bad as was possible. Even before he became a killer, he’d been fired from about every reputable employer in Rook Mountain. Frank had never known his father very well, and his mother had died still worried about how her younger son would turn out. But there were three things Frank knew. He knew locks, he knew the people of Rook Mountain, and he knew his brother Jake.

  The police had been searching for Jake for years, but that didn’t mean much to Frank. The cops never did really understand the Hinkle boys. Frank could do it. He could find his brother. And what would happen when he found him? Frank didn’t have it in him to turn in his own brother. But Jake needed him. And maybe he needed Jake.

  “Hello, Frank.”

  Frank whipped his head toward the figure on the bench next to him. Damn it, he had been doing it again. Drifting.

  The first thing he noticed about the man sitting next to him was the uniform. Then he saw the face. For a moment, Frank flashed back to the morning he killed Brett. He saw himself hitting Brett with the tire iron. He saw two police officers tackling him to the ground. Now, in the same spot ten years later, one of those officers was sitting next to him.

  “Hello, Sean.”

  Sean Lee was one year younger than Frank. In their elementary school days, Sean had often come over to the Hinkle’s house to play basketball in the driveway. The kid had shot the ball pretty well and hit the boards with enthusiasm on offense, but his defining basketball characteristic was his complete lack of interest in playing defense. He just stood around and waited for his team to take possession of the ball again.

  “You doing okay?” Sean asked.

  Frank wasn't sure how to answer that question. How was he doing? He was ecstatic. He was confused. He was angry. “It’s been an odd day.”

  Sean said, “You really put me through my paces in the last couple of hours. You know how many calls we’ve had to the station about you? Go ahead and guess.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Seven. We’ve had seven calls, and they were all pretty much the same. The murderer has broken out of jail. The Hinkle boy is out on the street. For some reason, even though they say your brother killed three people, you are the Hinkle everyone seems most afraid of.”

  Frank sighed. “I thought maybe no one recognized me.”

  Sean laughed. “You’re famous, buddy. Rook Mountain famous anyway. I called the prison and they confirmed that your release was legit. I told the next six people who called. It should be making its way around the gossip circuits. By midday tomorrow everyone will know. Then maybe people will start being a little friendlier. You got lucky today, though.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re lucky people called us about you. Things have changed in Rook Mountain since you went inside.”

  “So I keep hearing.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s true. When folks see someone doing something illegal, they don’t always tip off the law. A lot of times they decide to take care
of it themselves.”

  That didn’t sound all that new to Frank.

  “I’m not saying it’s going to happen,” continued Sean, “but if anybody starts harassing you, you come to me, understand? Or someone else in the department. Don’t try to resolve it yourself. Things can turn ugly fast that way.”

  Another image flashed into Frank’s mind: the tire iron slamming into Brett Miller’s head, the head bending and then caving in. And Frank pulling back the tire iron, slick with blood and coated with chunks of what had been Brett.

  “That I do know,” Frank said.

  Sean frowned. “Yeah, I guess you do. What I’m trying to say is...well, you remember that nickname Jake had for me?”

  Frank couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah. No D. Lee.”

  Sean’s ears turned a shade of pink. “That’s the one. I never agreed with it. I played some top notch defense in your driveway. Still do every Wednesday morning down at the Y.”

  “Sure. I remember your great defense. It involved a lot of standing behind your opponent and waiting for him to score, right?” It felt good to talk to an old friend, and it was surprising how quickly he fell back into the old pattern of giving Sean a hard time. It was like the last nine years had suddenly fallen away.

  “Now’s the time for you to play some serious defense. Don’t get in anyone’s face. Go with the flow. It will take you some time to get used to things, but you’ll get there. Did they tell you not to leave town?”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah, they made a big deal about that.”

  “That’s the most important thing. As long as you don’t leave town, and you don’t start any trouble, you’ll get along fine.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said. “Hey, can I ask you about something that’s been bugging me?”

  Sean looked away. “Frank, I’m sure you’ve got lots of questions. But I’m not really the guy to answer them.”

  “Just one. It’s about the cars.”

  Sean paused for a long moment, then nodded.

  “I bought a new Ford F-150 a couple months before the thing went down with Brett. I’d wanted one my whole life, and things were going well with the lock business, so I finally pulled the trigger. I thought about that truck a lot in prison. About how unfair it was that I’d finally gotten it and then had it taken away from me. Anyway, I can picture that truck almost perfectly in my mind.”