Burn(35)

“You know,” she said, “I’m beginning to wonder why I even got out of bed.”

Gareth Dewhurst watched his daughter stomp angrily away from the dragon.

He made his decision.





Ten


NELSON HAD SAID almost nothing for nearly four hours.

They were now in Montana. They had left the body of the Mountie where he died, in the red spray across the snow, then Malcolm had corralled Nelson into the passenger seat and had taken the wheel of the truck himself. They’d crossed the border, empty now that its single guard was gone, and driven into the mountains of the United States of America.

They were on a road that led to a town called Kalispell. Nelson had only pointed when Malcolm asked him directions. Every once in a while, Malcolm would catch Nelson looking at the blood that still stained Malcolm’s pant legs. Nelson would look away again hurriedly and refuse to answer any of Malcolm’s entreaties.

Malcolm felt an ache in himself, an ache that missed the closeness of Nelson, even though he was right there; the smell of him, the weight and warmth of his body and his hands. So near still, but across an impossible barrier now. He swallowed away a tightening in his throat as they drove through the increasing snow. If they could get to Kalispell, maybe he would have a chance to explain. Maybe he could share his mission with Nelson. Maybe he could— “I want you to get out,” Nelson said, so quietly Malcolm had to ask him to repeat it. “I want you,” he repeated, his voice rising, “to get the hell out of my truck!”

Malcolm didn’t stop driving. It would have been difficult anyway, a long, slow process of braking and waiting, so he just kept on, while Nelson began to weep.

“He would have killed us,” Malcolm said, quietly.

“You don’t know that,” Nelson said, his voice thick with tears.

“He would have killed me.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Malcolm didn’t say that the Mountie would have killed him because he would have fought until the Mountie was forced to. Perhaps this wasn’t the same thing.

But if he didn’t complete his mission, the Mountie and Nelson and everyone and everything they ever knew was dead anyway. The Mitera Thea couldn’t state that enough. The mission was the only way for there to be peace, she said, no matter what anyone else might tell him.

Perhaps that wouldn’t make any sense either.

“You heard what he said to us,” Malcolm said. “You heard his disgust.”

“It was only right,” Nelson said, his voice despairing.

Now Malcolm looked at him. “No. No, it wasn’t.”

“We’re fruits. We’re disgusting.”

“We are not disgusting.”

“How can you say that?”

“Believers have a much more relaxed view of human sexuality than almost everyone,” Agent Woolf said.

“I really don’t need to hear any more of that kind of talk—”

“It doesn’t matter what you want to hear, Agent Dernovich. If you close your mind to something that may bring this case to a conclusion, then you don’t deserve to be on it.”

Agent Dernovich gaped at her. Not just at her words—“sexuality” being the least of them—or her tone, which was calm but firm, but at the utter confidence with which she spoke them. She knew she was right, and she was never going to apologize to him for his own wrongness.

He tried to keep his voice under control. “We are standing at a murder scene, Agent Woolf. Of a fellow officer—”

“Yes, and the murderer is driving away, with another boy who could be his lover—”

“Or captive, Agent Woolf. Or accomplice.”

“He would never have an accomplice.”

“I don’t understand what possible point is made by bringing perversion into this—”

“Because if he has feelings for this other boy, it might give us a way to capture him.”

He wanted to strangle her. Not literally. Maybe literally. Her damnable calm, for one, in a snowstorm that still hadn’t managed to cover all the blood that had flowed out of Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman John C. Callahan, married father of four children. Then there was also her rightness. Again. Without force or aggression, she simply described the obvious next plan of action. He had no idea how she had made the leap to their boy being that way but . . .

If she was right.

They were surrounded by a horde of angry Mounties, understandably furious at the loss of their colleague. They wanted answers, specifically how the hell this had happened to an eighteen-year veteran at the hands of a teenager. So cleanly, so brutally efficient. But most especially, they wanted to know exactly to what degree these two Americans were responsible for it.

The RCMP Superintendent, who hadn’t even said hello when they arrived and who was demanding every five minutes to know what the U.S. was doing to find the murderer, approached them again. “We’ve got an ID on the license plate Sergeant Callahan radioed in,” he said, though he certainly didn’t make it sound like a prelude to good news, which it wasn’t, given that it was Sergeant Callahan’s last ever official act.

“What did you find?” Agent Dernovich asked him.

“And why would I keep you informed about a Canadian police matter when you don’t see fit to—?”