A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(114)

She cackles. “Smart girl.” Another sizing-up look, this one a little kinder. “You’re probably not a whore. Hard to say, but you don’t seem the type. Now, what’d you come here to talk about?”

“I need to ask you a few questions about your son, Benjamin.”





SIXTY-THREE

On the way back, we run into our old nemesis—the shortening days of winter. We’ve barely reached the snowmobiles before the sun’s falling. We’re prepared with sleeping bags and emergency shelter materials in the saddlebags, but I’m really hoping we don’t need to use them. I have my answer, and every minute we delay is another minute we’ve left a killer in Rockton. And another minute Nicole is out there, trapped by the ever-increasing danger that this will all go to hell and we’ll never find her again.

The snowmobiles have lights, though, and that’s our saving grace. We take it slower on the way back, our headlights illuminating the trail we’d cut coming in. It’s not exactly a four-lane highway from Rockton to the First Settlement. There’s not even a direct path—we need to cross a kilometer-wide thickly wooded gap between trails, which was difficult in the daylight and is absolutely treacherous now. Dalton leads, with Jacob on the back, me following. My brightly colored scarf from Anders, flutters from around Jacob’s neck as a target to aid my headlight.

We drop Jacob off near his camp. He’s going to stay there, in case he has to positively ID a man he’s met before—a man he’ll never forget. But I don’t think we’ll need that. Jacob has provided a description that makes me sure we have that positive ID already.

It starts to snow again after that, but it’s not a storm, and we’re close enough that we don’t need to follow our own tracks. We’re just coming up to Rockton when Dalton hits the brakes, and I see Anders approaching along the dark path, two militia guys behind him.

“Nice scarf!” he shouts to Dalton as we kill the engines. “It matches your eyes.”

Dalton flashes him a gloved middle finger. Anders motions for us to get off and walk, and the militia will take the sleds. Once they’ve roared off, Dalton says, “Problems?”

“Yeah,” Anders says as we start walking. “We’ve got a situation.” He looks at me. “Did you get what you were looking for?”

“Shawn Sutherland is really Benjamin Sanders, a second-generation settler. That’s how Roger knew him. They hadn’t hung around together since they were kids—some falling out—but Roger recognized Benjamin as the man who attacked him.”

“He’s our killer,” Anders says.

“Seems that way.”

“Actually, that was a statement, not a question. It’s Shawn—Benjamin—whatever his name is. There’s no doubt of it because that’s our situation. Shawn figured out he’d been promoted from victim to prime suspect and that you two had gone digging into his past.”

“Shit,” I say and turn fast, looking out at the forest. “He bolted? Goddamn it. We need—”

“Really, Case? You think I’d be sauntering to town, filling you in, if Shawn was on the run?” He looks at Dalton. “At least my boss knows better.”

“Figure you’ve got it under control,” Dalton says. “He bolted. You caught him.”

“Mmm, not exactly. I’ve had my eye on him all day, like we discussed. He did try to sneak off, but I was close enough to call an alarm. Not close enough to actually grab him. He’s taken a page from his victim’s playbook and locked himself in the icehouse.”

“Fuck,” Dalton says.

“My sentiments exactly. We’re going to need to start padlocking that thing, because apparently people have figured out it’s the one place they can run that we can’t get to them without coming through the front door. Of course, that’s also the only way they can exit unless they manage to burrow through permafrost.”

“So he’s safely contained,” I say.

“Yep. He’s taking a second page from Nicki’s playbook. He’s threatening to kill himself if we don’t do what he wants, which in this case is to let him leave Rockton. He’s just waiting for you two, making sure his goose is cooked.”

“How’d he figure it out?” I ask.

“It wasn’t me.”

“I never said—”

“Hey, considering you thought I let him run while I sat on my thumbs…”

I bump his arm. “I apologize, okay? Momentary panic. I’ll buy you roses next time I’m in Dawson City.”

“Buy me a steak—a real steak—and we’re even. As for how Shawn found out…”

He trails off. We’ve just reached the edge of town. There’s a figure up ahead, seemingly just milling about.

“Hey, Jen!” Anders calls. “Casey’s wondering who tipped off Sutherland. You got any insight into that?”

She turns, and in the moonlight, I see her scowl. “You couldn’t even let them get into town before calling me out, could you?”

“Uh, no. We couldn’t even get into town without finding you skulking around the path, waiting to confess. You gonna do it? Or am I?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Guess I am,” Anders says. “She’s only waiting on her escort to the cell. Saves the bother of getting dragged out of bed for it. So, yesterday, Jen tells you that you’ve missed the obvious suspect. You told her the time line doesn’t work—which it didn’t. But if she believed that, she wouldn’t get the chance to tell the town how incompetent you are.”