“All right, all right,” Bonaventure said, holding up a hand to tell him to relax. “Don’t have to get all righteous with me, Detective. I was just busting your balls. Tell you the truth, I think the chief’s expecting you anyway. Someone with Bascombe’s influence gets taken out like this, a lot of people are going to want to know how and why.”
They moved the cars to let him through and by the time he reached the house at the end of that long, snow-walled drive, Chief Peyton Bonaventure was waiting for him in front of the Bascombe house. Halliwell waved as he pulled up behind the last of the police cars lined up in front of the house. There was a black van from the medical examiner’s office and one other civilian vehicle, a sporty little Geo that he was damn sure didn’t belong to anyone with the last name of Bascombe.
As he climbed out of his car, Halliwell felt oddly claustrophobic. There was something wrong with that, feeling more cooped up once he’d gotten out of his stuffy car than when he’d been in it. He took a deep breath and tried to brush off that strange weight, the oppressiveness of the moment. It was cold, the wind bitter, but the sun shone and the sky was a clear, crisp winter blue. He should have felt relieved to stretch his legs, to breathe fresh air. But somehow he could not manage it.
“Jimmy radioed you I was coming up?” he asked the chief.
Peyton Bonaventure smiled humorlessly. “Yep. Nice that someone let me know you were coming.”
Halliwell took a deep breath and regarded the man evenly. “I had to play nice and diplomatic with Max Bascombe and his ‘people’ all day yesterday, Peyton. I’d like to think that you were above politics.”
“As opposed to Sheriff Norris,” the chief jabbed.
“Is that the way it’s going to be?” Halliwell asked, disappointed.
“Nope.” Peyton shrugged. “Just had to get that one in. You’re welcome to come in and have a look around, Ted. Though I don’t know what you’re going to find. The caretaker or whatever he is, Mr. Friedle, told me about the whole wedding fiasco yesterday, the son disappearing. Got to figure he came back, right? Maybe the sister helped him, or maybe he did her, too, and threw the body off the bluff.”
Halliwell nodded noncommittally. “Got to figure.”
But he wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of things that did not make sense to him and had not made any sense from the time he had arrived here on Rose Ridge Lane yesterday afternoon. Collette Bascombe had not been angry at her brother for leaving his bride at the altar, she had been afraid for him, and dead certain he would not have just taken off without at least explaining things to his fiancée. Then there was the business of Oliver Bascombe’s car. It had still been in the garage, and with the snow, there was no way that anyone had driven onto or off the property. So wherever Oliver had gone, he had been on foot. Unless someone had been waiting out on Rose Ridge Lane in the middle of a blizzard, with roads barely passable, to spirit him away. But Halliwell himself had followed up with the younger Bascombe’s friends and come up with nothing.
It was a puzzle.
And now it had several new and vicious pieces.
Chief Bonaventure walked him inside. A pair of Kitteridge detectives were still interviewing Friedle in the room off to the left, the same place Halliwell himself had met with Max Bascombe the day before. He gave them a nod of greeting but Friedle thought it was meant for him and shot back a hopeful look, as though he thought the sheriff’s detective might rescue him from the scrutiny of the local boys. That was not going to happen. As far as Halliwell was concerned, it was more than likely all three Bascombes were dead, and to his mind that would make Friedle a suspect, no matter what kind of alibi he might have.
Upstairs, they found Becca Green from the M.E.’s office still working on the victim’s bedroom. Halliwell was relieved to see both Becca and the covered body of the victim through the open door. This is where the investigation would really begin. If anyone would have learned anything significant, it would be Becca. The chief rapped on the door frame and she looked up from scraping a sample of something viscous from the floor.
“Well, well, the gang’s all here,” Becca said with a wan smile. She was a small woman, no more than five feet, with an olive complexion and thick black hair. Taken individually, none of her features would have been considered admirable, but there was certainly something attractive about the whole. Halliwell thought perhaps it was the intelligence that sparkled in her eyes, or the mischief in her lopsided smile. He had no interest in Becca Green romantically— he figured that part of him was dead, or at least retired— but he admired the hell out of her.
“I see you kept Mr. Bascombe around for company,” Halliwell said, gruff as ever. No matter how highly he regarded Becca Green, he had an image to maintain.
“He’s a fascinating conversationalist. Much like yourself.”
Chief Bonaventure sighed. “You two ought to take this show on the road.”
“With or without the corpse?” Becca asked. Then she shifted gears, turning all business. “You want the rundown?”
Halliwell nodded. “Please.”
Becca turned to survey the room. “I’ve got squat, actually. The chief will confirm no forced entry—”
Which means maybe the killer had a key, Halliwell thought.
“— and while there’s sign of a limited struggle, there are no signs of a fight. Whoever killed Mr. Bascombe overpowered him almost immediately and was strong enough to hold him off the ground, presumably with one hand—”
“Whoa! Hold on, there,” the chief said, actually holding up a hand to stall her report. “Where do you get that idea?”
But Halliwell was already looking at the floor and the rug. He saw the numbered markers that Becca had laid and was working it out in his own head.
“Marks on the rug from his feet. Blood spatter on rug and the wood as well,” he said. Becca nodded in confirmation. “That tells you where he was and that his feet weren’t on the carpet at the time of his death . . . but Becca, I’ve met Max Bascombe. This was a big man. I don’t think I could hold him up more than a few seconds with both hands, never mind just one.”
Which left out Collette as a suspect for certain, as well as Friedle, but not necessarily Oliver. Halliwell had never met Oliver Bascombe. He didn’t know how strong the younger lawyer was.
“And where do you get the one-hand bit? What makes you say that?”
Becca looked at him grimly and raised the small tube she had just capped, into which she had placed the sample she had taken from the floor. “This, if I’m not mistaken, is vitreous fluid. From the victim’s eyes. The perp was holding Bascombe off the floor when he ripped out his eyes.”
Halliwell felt his pulse throbbing in his ears. His mouth was open only slightly and he knew he was gaping like an idiot but could not help himself. He knitted his brows. Then he glanced past Becca to the thick shroud that covered the corpse, which was just waiting for the body bag that Becca would bring up from her van shortly. Ted walked over to Max Bascombe’s body, careful to step around the areas with evidence markers, and drew back the shroud that covered it.
The man’s eyes were gone, leaving only raw pits crusted with black-red blood.
“Cause of death is cardiac arrest. Trauma of the injuries gave him a heart attack.”
“And his eyes?”
“Not here,” Becca replied.
Halliwell let the sheet drop and took a deep breath. What the hell had he gotten himself into? His mind began to pursue every possible avenue. Last night he had begun to wonder if Oliver Bascombe had thrown himself off the bluff in the middle of the blizzard, or gotten drunk and walked off accidentally, snowblind. But now he was certain that was not the case. He wondered if, somehow, Oliver had never left at all, had hidden away waiting for the opportunity to do this. The pieces didn’t all fit in his head, but at least it was a shape that had a certain logic to it. A rationale. And any kind of rationality was helpful at the moment.
Then he remembered the look on Collette Bascombe’s face. Her sincerity and sureness.
“Tell me about the sister, Peyton,” he said. “Any sign of foul play there?”
“Nothing,” Chief Bonaventure replied. “She’s just gone.”
Like her brother. Halliwell felt something unpleasant niggling at the back of his brain.
“But her car is still in the garage, isn’t it?”
The chief frowned and nodded. “Yes. But we figured her for a victim, Ted. Nobody’s thinking the girl drove away from here.”
No, Halliwell thought. But her brother didn’t drive away, either.
“What about clothes? She take anything with her?”
“Far as we can tell, she was in her bathrobe.”
Halliwell stared at Max Bascombe’s corpse. The man had had wealth and power and kept himself remarkably, obsessively healthy. Halliwell had thought him a hard-ass son of a bitch, but nobody deserved to die like this.
“You’ve got A.P.B.s out on Oliver and Collette?” he asked.
“Statewide,” Chief Bonaventure replied.
“All right. Let’s see what turns up,” Halliwell said, nodding slowly. “If he’s still alive, I would dearly love to have a conversation with Oliver Bascombe.”
He stared at the shrouded body on the floor, sure that even covered that way, even without eyes, the dead man was staring back.
* * *
Kitsune hardly left any tracks in the snow at all. Throughout the morning as they trekked northward through the forest in calf-deep snow, Oliver was drawn again and again to that observation. She seemed to walk on top of the snow, the only marks left by her passing a faint, indistinct impression and the occasional brush of her cloak on the new-fallen whiteness.
The memory of being carried away in the blizzard Frost had become still left him breathless. The winter man was intimidating under ordinary conditions, able to alter the shape of his body and to control the moisture in the air around him to a certain extent, but in wintry weather, his power was simply extraordinary. He was not invulnerable; the Falconer had proved that. But in the cold and the snow, Frost was more than formidable.
Not that such exertion was effortless. To create that blizzard and to rescue them had sapped much of his strength. Fortunately, the snowy weather and the cold were restoring him quickly.
They had been walking for hours in what Oliver presumed was a state forest, though which one he had no idea. The previous night he had been unable to determine the name of the town into which they had emerged. This morning he was not overly concerned with their location, only that they continued moving northward and that they remained within the boundaries of the state forest.
The lands on the other side of the Veil corresponded with public space on this side, old space, owned by no human and unused, unspoiled and free. Public parks and state forests, open wilderness and the ocean itself. Such free land was tied inextricably to the wildness of the magic that had not only created the Veil but infused all of the legendary beings who resided on the other side.
With the greedy sprawl of humanity, there was less and less of this land as time went by. Oliver wondered what this meant for the people of the Two Kingdoms, but that was one of a thousand questions he had for his companions and he supposed he would learn all he needed to know eventually. One question at a time.
They kept on through the forest, trudging in the snow. When they finally did cross back through the Veil, he wanted to be sure they had put some real distance between themselves and the Sandmen’s castle.
His muscles burned with the effort of slogging through the snow and his feet were wet and cold. The boots were waterproof, but that didn’t prevent snow from sliding down inside them and melting. What surprised him was how capable he was of accepting such discomfort. As children he and Collette had played in the snow for hours upon end and endured winds and temperatures that would have put them moments from serious frostbite, all without complaint. But as they had become adults, the resilience of childhood had left them. Or so Oliver had believed. Apparently, he was made of sterner stuff than he had come to imagine. It helped, of course, that the day was the warmest the region had seen in weeks— forty-five, at least— and the sun shone down amidst the bare winter branches and proud evergreens.
It was nothing short of a miracle to feel warm again. In the grip of the blizzard that the winter man had summoned to carry them away from the police, the cold had seemed all he would ever know. His mind had been muffled and numb, darkness closing in at the edges of his consciousness. Frost had swept Oliver and Kitsune away and into the woods, but even when they came to rest, it had taken long minutes for Oliver to shake off the chill that had dulled his thoughts and senses. He had his boots but no jacket— it had been left behind at the lake when he had first crossed the Veil— and his shirt was no protection from the elements.
Kitsune had been the one to find the cabin. Her senses were not at all human. They had struck out on a northerly course from the moment Oliver could manage to walk on his own, moving quietly through the woods until they were well outside the main area of town. Soon enough she was sniffing the air, and had located a small lake on the shore of which were spread half a dozen hunting cabins. Only one of them was occupied and enough distance separated them that it was half a mile from the most remote structure. That was the one they chose.
It had been all of the things he would have imagined of a real rustic cabin. There were two woodstoves but no other heat source, no electricity, and no running water. Instead of a stove, some enterprising and daring individual had rigged a barbecue grill with a propane tank just outside the rear door of the three-room cabin. It was crude as hell.
But there were beds and blankets and cans of deviled ham and SpaghettiOs in the cupboard. In a bureau, Oliver had found several sweaters and two old pairs of pants, and in the closet of the same room, a torn winter parka that must have been thirty years old. When he had slipped it on and found that it fit him, he laughed out loud with pleasure and relief.
