The Broken Girls(89)
“It was a goddamned clusterfuck,” Garrett Creel went on. “She wouldn’t have been found so fast if she wasn’t in the field, and I would have had the chance to move her. But someone found her. I had to clean it all up—everything. I had to make sure his footprints were erased when we searched for evidence in the trees.”
“Richard Rush,” Fiona said, remembering the man who owned Pop’s Ice Cream. “He saw Tim at four o’clock in the afternoon. But you told him to say he saw Tim at nine.”
“Fuck him,” Garrett spit, angry now. “His shop was in debt, and I promised he’d be square if he did what I said. Instead, he bailed out on me when he realized he’d be called as a witness at trial. Said he wouldn’t commit perjury because of his kids. That was Tim’s best chance at reasonable doubt, flushed straight down the toilet.”
So many details. So many. Garrett had thought of them all. “The kids at the drive-in,” she said. “They saw you that night. You came and lectured them while Tim dumped the body.”
“That was easier. I tracked them down and told them that if they said anything about seeing me, I’d pin them on drug charges. Underage drinking. I wore my uniform when I sat them down, and I brought another cop with me. Intimidating as hell. Every one of them shit their pants and shut up. Lionel was tougher, but I just threatened to burn down his fucking business, because I knew he didn’t have a penny of insurance. And in the end, you know what? Tim went to jail anyway.” He glanced at her, his gaze furious, his face red. “People are so stupid, don’t you see? Maybe I sound crazy, but for thirty years it was just so goddamned easy. Nothing ever came back on me—not once. What is it with people? Why don’t they see?”
Fiona looked out the window. They weren’t driving back into town; they had turned onto another side road, past the south end of Idlewild.
“Even my own son,” Garrett said. His neck was flushed red where it emerged from his parka, and his hands were tight on the wheel. “I always wanted Jamie to be a cop, but he wasn’t on the force a year before I realized he wasn’t going to be like me. I did my best to raise him right, but he doesn’t have the instincts I do. He isn’t hard enough. He still thinks he can do right by everyone. Tim had brains and guts, at least until that last night. Until that night, I always thought Tim should have been my son instead of Jamie.”
Jamie knows about Helen, Fiona almost said, but she stopped herself. She didn’t think Garrett knew yet that Jamie had pulled the Helen Heyer file, that he’d seen a shoddy investigation under his father’s name. “Let me out of the car.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Garrett said. “You haven’t been listening. My son dating a journalist, Malcolm Sheridan’s daughter, Deb Sheridan’s sister—it isn’t going to happen. You’re too close. I thought you’d flake out and leave him, let him find a nice girl, but you didn’t take your chance. And now look what you’ve put your nose into, of all things. After twenty fucking years, you could ruin everything for me, for the whole force. For Barrons, because you just can’t quit. Jamie will never have the goddamned guts to get rid of you, but I do.”
Terror bloomed in Fiona’s agonized brain, yet above it she was strangely calm. He was going to kill her; he thought it was the only way to keep his secrets. He needed no other reason. Maybe he’d killed before; she didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. He was going to kill her now. She could beg and plead and reason, but it wouldn’t work. He’d chosen a course, and he was going to follow it. That was reality, right now.
She unsnapped her seat belt, opened the car door, and jumped before she could form another thought.
The road was so rutted that the car wasn’t going very fast. She landed hard on her shoulder, the gravel ripping through her winter coat and the knee of her jeans. Her palms were scraped raw, and she rolled wildly into the ditch on the side of the road, thick with wet leaves and ice-crusted mud. She heard the car swerve to a stop, and she got up, climbed out of the ditch, and started to run.
The sky overhead was dark, looming gray, the trees stark black against it. She was on the edge of an open field, and even in the depths of her fever, fear, and pain, she knew instinctively that Idlewild was a mile in this direction and town was the other way. She took off across the field as fast as she could, her boots digging into the soft, half-frozen earth. She could try for the gas station at the top of the hill, but Idlewild was closer, and she remembered seeing workers there when she’d driven past it, machines moving.
He caught her quickly; he was bigger than she was, stronger, his legs longer. He drove her to the ground and jammed his knee into her stomach, his face looming over her. “I knew you would do this!” he shouted at her, his face red, his features distorted with rage. “I knew it!” He put his hands on her throat and squeezed.
Fiona bucked beneath him, trying to get away, but he was so much bigger, so much stronger. Spots bloomed behind her eyes. She beat at him with her fists and stared past his shoulder, where crows wheeled in a sky dark with falling snow, and thought, I’m not going to die like Deb. I’m not.
She twisted her hips beneath him and brought her knee up hard into his stomach. When he grunted and his grip on her neck slipped, she kicked him again. And again.
He reared back to hit her, and she smashed a hand into his face, scratching at his eyes. He cursed and his weight slipped, and she scrambled out from under him and ran.