Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(33)

“Could be. People fake being crazy all the time.” He goes to say something else, rethinks it, gets to his feet instead. “I’ll put the body away.”

“How long have I been out?” Ida asks.

Harper smiles. “Seconds.”

Ida groans again, rising to a sitting position. “Oh.”

“What did you see?”

Ida tries to stand and almost doesn’t make it before Harper scoops her under the arm and helps her up. Stu gets to her other side just in time.

“You’re not going to be sick or anything, are you?” Stu asks her as they head for the door.

Ida shakes her head. “I just need air.”

They steer her past the desk. Barnie is just returning from his patrol. “Jesus, is she okay?”

Stu waves him off. “She gets a bit funny around the dead.”

Barnie rolls his eyes. “One of them, huh?”

Passing through the doors to the outside, they are hit by the cool night air. Ida inhales deeply, sucking it in, coming back to herself with each intake.

Harper and Stu let go of her arms and step back to give her space. Ida stands steady, but still looks diminished, as if she’s been drained of energy.

She looks like someone who’s just given birth, like everything’s been sucked out of her.

“Ah, that’s better. I feel like me now.”

Harper asks her again: “What did you see?”

“He gave her something to make her sleepy. She tried to fight him off, but couldn’t. She had dirt, in her hands. Squeezing it as he was . . . squeezing her. She could feel him doing his business, even as she was dying.”

“Anything more? Could you see his car? What he looked like?”

Ida shakes her head. “She was too panicked to notice the car. He wore a hood, a white hood with the eyes cut out. And a belt around his neck. I got the impression he put it on after he kidnapped her. It scared her.”

They walk to the car. Stu is the first to speak. “I have to look at the facts. That’s what I believe in, what can be proved. You could be makin’ this up.”

“Stu—” Harper starts.

Ida shakes her head. “No, he’s right. I don’t blame him for not believing me. But there’s one more thing. She gave me a name. Whether it’s hers or not, I can’t be sure. She said ‘Gertie.’”

“Gertie,” Stu repeats. “No second name?”

“No. That was it,” Ida tells him. “Now, if that girl turns out to be a Gertie, or related to someone called Gertie . . . will you believe?”

Stu swallows.

Harper opens the door for Ida. “Let’s get you back to your truck. You’ve still got a drive tonight. Or we can put you up in a motel if you don’t feel up to it.”

Stu looks at Harper. “Who’s paying for that?”

Ida shakes her head. “I’m feeling okay now. I’ll drive home. Never been much for motels. Dirty sheets and even dirtier bathtubs.”

She climbs in. Harper shuts the door behind her. Stu is still standing there. “You okay?”

“I’m on the fence here,” he says in a low voice.

“I figured as much. But she’s right, Stu. If that name has any bearing, you have to believe her.”

Stu looks down at the window, the outline of Ida’s face there in the dark. “Or put her as a suspect,” he says, walking around the front end to the passenger side. “Anyway, what does it matter what I believe? As long as the case gets solved, I don’t give a fuck if tea leaves and chicken bones point us in the right direction. I just wanna bag this prick.”

Harper watches him climb in, then gets in herself.



Ida gives them a wave from the cab of her truck and then heads out of the parking lot and onto the dark streets. She feels cold, as if she’s back in the morgue, surrounded by the sleeping dead again.

Ida flexes her hand—she can still feel the icy kiss of the young woman’s skin against hers, the charge of electrified particles that connected them both in those long, torturous moments. Ida runs the heater, turning the dial all the way to max. Soon warmth fills the truck, but she still feels the chill that inhabits her bones.

For a short while, we were connected. I felt the ice in her marrow. The awful agony of his hands around her throat, squeezing, squeezing, forcing her last breath away.

She turns on the radio, hoping that will take her mind off what she just experienced. Bobby Womack singing “Deep River” warbles through on the radio waves, semi-distorted as if it’s beamed in from Mars.

Ida sings along to it, just to drown the voice in her head, the whisper of a broken soul saying a name, repeating it over and over and over and over.

“Gertie.”





8


“You want a beer, Lester?”

He pulls up a chair at the kitchen table and sits down. “No, I got to drive.”

“Coffee then.”

“Okay,” he says.

Ceeli called him over to her place on the pretense of another auto repair, but he can’t find anything wrong with the vehicle. He knows the real reason she wanted him to come to her house.

“Mack not here today?” Lester asks her.

She rinses two cups. “Nope. He got work out of town. Won’t be back till tomorrow night.”