Dark Justice Page 5

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Ben stretched out on his cot. He knew he was making the right decision. He was almost proud of himself. For once he wasn’t running off on whatever half-baked quest fell into his lap.

  But he couldn’t quash the tiny voice in the pit of his brain that kept saying that maybe, just maybe, he was making a mistake. The tiny voice of doubt.

  And guilt.

  You have a unique opportunity here, Maureen had said. You could make all the difference.

  Ben rolled over, buried his face in the pillow, and closed his eyes. But he felt certain he wasn’t going to get any sleep.

  Chapter 5

  TESS O’CONNELL RUSHED BACK to her hotel room and slammed the door shut behind her. With lightning speed, she turned the deadbolt, slid in the chain lock, and pulled a dresser in front of the door.

  She wasn’t taking any chances.

  This was the first time she had ventured out of her hotel room since the night of the murder. When she looked back on it now, the whole episode seemed like one extended nightmare—far too chilling and extraordinary to be real.

  Except it was. She knew it was. Every time she closed her eyes, it came back to her, insistent and unbidden. Like a nightmare.

  She still wasn’t sure how she managed to elude that monster who had chased her away from the scene of the explosion. He had to have known the forest better than she did. All she did was run, not stopping, not checking directions, just running. Maybe he hurt himself, maybe he had to stop to do something. She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that somehow, against all odds, she had managed to give Sasquatch the slip.

  Whoever he was. Behind the mask.

  When she finally made it back to her hotel, she had locked the doors, crawled under the covers, and holed up for days. She hadn’t even let the maids in to clean. She made room service leave trays outside her door. She was that scared. She didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want anyone to come near her. Her boss at the Whisper kept phoning, leaving messages, but she didn’t return the calls.

  It was almost a week before she regained some semblance of the patented O’Connell chutzpah, before she felt she might be able to venture into the hallway without meeting Sasquatch at the first corner. Slowly, as the days passed, her terror began to fade, replaced by something altogether different.

  The scent of a story.

  For once in her life, Tess had the inside track on something big, maybe even bigger than anyone realized. She had seen what no one else had seen; she knew what no one else knew. What’s more, she had evidence.

  The videotape.

  Unfortunately, when she replayed the tape in the camera it was too dark to make out, and the rooms at the Magic Valley Holiday Inn did not come equipped with VCRs. The hotel management wasn’t able to provide her with one, either. Here she was, a reporter holding critical evidence in her hands—that she was unable to view. She realized that if she was going to see this, she was going to have to leave the room.

  It hadn’t been easy. But eventually, as the panic eased, she began to think about her station in life and what this tape could do to improve it. She had never meant to end up stuck at some low-rent tabloid. She had studied journalism at UCLA. She’d had ambitions, visions of Pulitzers. She wanted to be known as a serious investigative reporter. But at the time of her graduation, there had been a hiring freeze at all the newspapers. The industry was in a slump. It was beginning to look as if her only career opportunity would involve “hold the pickles, hold the lettuce.”

  Until she found the opening at the Whisper. And so she began her career of stalking celebrities and searching for the truth about crop circles and cow mutilations.

  And Sasquatch.

  She had seen the job as temporary, a stopping place until other prospects opened up. But when positions at the real papers did open up, she found herself tainted by her contact with the Whisper. “Oh, you’re that kind of reporter”—and the interview would come to a swift conclusion. After a while, she developed evasive responses, but to no avail. The journalistic community was small and close-knit. Secrets were hard to keep.

  And so her temporary stopover became an eight-year stint. With no end in sight. Eventually she had resigned herself to her fate.

  Until the tragic last night of Princess Diana. Tess wasn’t involved in that tragedy, thank God, but afterward the thought of having anything to do with this sort of journalism made her sick. Problem was, she still had to eat. And she couldn’t figure out a way to make a name for herself in legitimate journalism.

  Until now. If she could crack this murder, everything could change. This story had it all—murder, mayhem, sex appeal. This could be the lucky break that transformed her from Tabloid Mary to Diane Sawyer.

  And so she took the plunge, left the safety of the Holiday Inn, and sought out the nearest place she could rent a VCR. Hadn’t been hard, as it turned out. Even a one-horse town like Magic Valley had a video store on every block, and they all rented out VCRs. They even had a gizmo that converted the Video-8 tape from her recorder to a regular VHS tape.

  It had taken her ten minutes to install the damn thing, to disconnect the rip-off pay-per-view machine fused into the hotel TV and connect her VCR, but at last she had everything ready. She could feel her anxiousness; her mouth was dry and her hands were wet, both from anticipation of what might lie on that strip of magnetic tape.

  She pushed the Play button and the images flickered to life. The TV screen was bathed with vivid yellow and red. The tree cutter had already exploded; it was now just a raging mass of twisted, melting metal, fused together like the core of a nuclear furnace. The victim had already collapsed on the ground, all charred flesh and cinders.

  She watched for almost a minute as the camera panned and scanned the horizon, showing the devastation of the clear-cut forest, brought into sharp and haunting highlight by the raging inferno. Several times she thought she detected a trace of movement in the distance, but it was hard to be sure. Was there really someone there, or was it an illusion created by the flickering of the flames? It was impossible to be sure.

  Impossible—up to a point. Shortly thereafter, a large hairy figure began moving in a direct line toward the camera. It was tiny at first, barely discernible except as a point of movement. It came steadily closer until, even in the darkness, she could tell it was Sasquatch—or more correctly, someone dressed as Sasquatch. Sasquatch with his mask removed.

  She couldn’t make out the face yet, but he kept running closer, closer and closer, faster and faster. She could almost see it and then—

  And then the picture changed. The camera moved every which way at once, moved so quickly she could make out nothing. And then all she saw was the ground, moving fast.

  Tess knew what had happened. She had seen Sasquatch coming toward her and panicked. She had turned and fled for her life—just an instant before the monster’s face would have been visible on the tape.

  She punched the Stop button, cursing under her breath. And so, when all was said and done, she had nothing. Her big chance for success, her opportunity to bolt from the sleaze market, had dissipated.

  She felt a stinging in her eyes. It had been stupid to let herself fantasize. She should have known something would go wrong—didn’t something always go wrong? Face it—she was going to be spending the rest of her life with the ninety-five-year-old grandmother who gave birth to twins. There was no escape.

  She slapped herself hard on the side of the face. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, damn it, and think! Suddenly she realized she knew a hell of a lot more than anyone else did about this case. She was the only living eyewitness—not counting the killer. She was the only one who knew exactly how it had happened. And she was the only one who knew there had been a fight preceding the explosion.

  A fight. That was the key—it had to be. She had read in the paper that the victim was a logger, which made sense, since he knew how to start the tree cutter. If he was a logger, then wh
o would be fighting with him? Who would be having an argument in the dead of night, at the site of a massive clear-cut?

  Green Rage, that’s who.

  She knew that the police had arrested the leader of the group and charged him with the murder. But she didn’t believe he was guilty; he didn’t look anything like the person in the Sasquatch suit. The height and weight were all wrong. The police were just latching onto the obvious suspect, as they always did. They were assuming the bomb had been planted in advance, that it was part of a Green Rage terrorist strike, that the logger had just had the misfortune to be the person who turned the ignition that night.

  Tess knew better. She knew the killer had been there all along, including when the bomb was triggered. She knew the two men had fought. She didn’t know what they had fought about, but given the circumstances, it seemed more than reasonable to assume it had something to do with the destruction of the national forest.

  She pushed herself off the bed, grabbed her notebook, and started making plans.

  Somehow she would have to infiltrate Green Rage. The only way to learn what she wanted to know would be to gain their confidence, their trust. If she could get them talking, she might uncover the clues she needed.

  Of course she would, she told herself. She was a reporter, wasn’t she? A real reporter.

  But to do this, she would have to venture outside. And longer than it took to get to the video store, too.

  But what could happen to her? She had just been silly, hadn’t she? Paranoid? After all, she had nothing on the killer, whoever he was. He or she. There was no reason to go after her. Hell, the creep probably never even saw her face.

  Probably.

  She laughed, trying to convince herself. Probably didn’t have the slightest idea who she was.

  Probably.

  Enough. She was going to do this. No one and nothing was going to stop her. This might be the last chance she had to make the Pulitzer committee sit up and take notice. Or at least to get a job she didn’t have to lie about when she called her mother. She wasn’t going to let it pass her by.

  Her eye moved unbidden to the draped window. She wasn’t going to blow this opportunity, damn it. She wasn’t.

  No matter what the consequences.

  Sasquatch peered through his binoculars at the draped window of the Holiday Inn room. Of course, the Sasquatch getup was not being worn at the moment, but the brain behind the mask had begun to think in those terms. It seemed a good label. Or perhaps—The Artist Formerly Known as Sasquatch.

  After the night of the murder, after the woman escaped, Sasquatch had paced the streets of the city, but after several days without spotting her, he became convinced she must have fled town. What a relief it was, then, to see that familiar face strolling out of a video store this afternoon.

  And how grim to see her toting a VCR. Sasquatch didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what that was for. She had been carrying a video camera; it was the main reason Sasquatch had charged her. If anyone studied it closely—well, best not to even think about it.

  Sasquatch had to get that tape. And her, too.

  Sasquatch folded the binoculars and tucked them into a coat pocket. Best not to attract any attention. Best to keep a low profile. Best not to let anyone draw a connection between Sasquatch and that woman, whoever she was.

  Because there was a good chance Sasquatch was going to have to kill her.

  Chapter 6

  BEN WAS NOT HAVING a good night. He had always been a vivid dreamer, but tonight’s show was even more vivid than usual. Some of the dreams were standard-issue material: showing up in court in his underwear; being seduced by his childhood babysitter. But some of them were new: seeing his old Episcopal Sunday-school teacher shaking her head in disappointment; being tried in the Court of Celestial Appeals for murder—the murder of hundreds of thousands of old-growth trees. He even dreamed he’d been thrown into jail and was thrashing about on a rock-hard metal cot. Except—

  His eyes opened.

  Damn. That one was true, wasn’t it?

  “I knew you were looking for a new pied-à-terre, Ben, but I really think you should have consulted me before you made this selection.”

  The voice was very familiar. Even before he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, Ben knew who was standing on the other side of the metal bars.

  “Good morning, Christina. About time you showed up.”

  “Hey, I made the best time I could. I booked the first available flight tout de suite, after I played your rather desperate-sounding message on my machine.”

  “You’d be desperate, too, if you got only one phone call and you used it chatting with someone’s answering machine.” He peered blurry-eyed through the cell bars. She was wearing an all-combat ensemble—green fatigue pants with a flak jacket draped over a khaki shirt. Plus a kelly green hairband in her expansive red hair. “I thought you were trying to dress more conservatively. Now that you’re a serious law student.”

  She checked herself. “What’re you talking about? This is conservative. Besides, you’re the one who dragged me out to the great Northwest. Everyone dresses this way.”

  “Maybe in the Montana Militia, but not around here.” He forced himself to his feet. “Have you figured out a way to make my bail?”

  “I figured out it was impossible, even if we sold both our combined assets for twice their worth. So I tried something else.”

  “Which was?”

  “Getting the bookstore owner to drop the charges.”

  “Fat chance of that. He’s—”

  “—already agreed to do it.”

  Ben’s eyes widened. “He’s—”

  “—already agreed.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Would I lie?”

  “But—”

  “The only thing that man ever wanted was to get rid of the cat. Unfortunately, after you made such a cause célèbre of it, the vet canceled the appointment, and none of the other vets in the area would euthanize the cat either.”

  “Tough luck.”

  “So I told him I’d take care of it. If he dropped the charges. Which he did.”

  Ben was flabbergasted. “Christina, you’re a miracle worker. I’m eternally in your debt.”

  She smiled. “Truth is, he was beginning to feel guilty. He was glad to let someone else execute the cat for him.”

  Ben blanched. “Christina, you didn’t!”

  “No, of course I didn’t.”

  “Then what?”

  “I called an old friend of mine from TCC who knew a gal who had a sister whose husband was from Seattle. The husband in Seattle had a friend whose niece lives in a tiny burg not far from Magic Valley. The niece has a girlfriend who knows a girl from college who’s getting married. The girl who’s getting married is the youngest of seven daughters, and once she moves out, her mother’s going to be all alone in her house. The mother lives in Magic Valley. She agreed to take the cat.” She beamed. “Follow that?”

  “Not remotely, but please don’t repeat it. My head is already throbbing.” He took a step back. “And you did all that in a day?”

  “Well, I would’ve been faster, but the air phones on my flight didn’t work.”

  Ben grinned. No wonder he liked Christina so much. In the years they’d been working together, she’d proved invaluable. She was a brilliant legal assistant, and now that she was in law school, she could function equally well as an intern and legal researcher. Most important, he had learned to trust her instincts. She was keenly intuitive and had a better understanding of people than he ever would. And now, for the capstone of her career to date, she’d produced his get-out-of-jail-free card.

  “When can I leave?”

  Another voice harkened down the corridor. “Whenever you want, Mr. Kincaid.”

  Sheriff Allen was moving toward them.

  “In that case,” Ben said, “I’ll go now.”

  “Thought you might feel that way.” He pulled the jangling cell keys out of his pocket. “Th
is little lady’s got you all fixed up. Never seen anyone come to town and get things done the way she did. She’s got a lot of spunk.” He grinned. “I like that in a woman.”

  “Christina’s the best legal assistant I’ve ever had.”

  Allen tipped his hat. “That’s high praise, I expect.”

  “Not really,” Christina explained. “I’m the only legal assistant he’s ever had.”

  Allen began unlocking Ben’s cell.

  Ben heard stirrings from the cell to his left. Maureen was awake and on her feet. “Looks like you grabbed the brass ring, Kincaid.”

  “No need to display your penal envy,” Allen said as he slid Ben’s cell door open. “You’re getting out, too.”

  Rick pressed against the bars on Ben’s right. “We are?”

  “Yup. Judge says twenty-four hours is the most we can hold you for disturbing the peace. But let me tell you something. I got no feelings about your cause for or against. But if you and your people go on stirring up trouble around here, I will come down on you—hard.”

  Maureen nodded. “Thanks, Sheriff.”

  Allen unlocked Maureen’s and Rick’s cells. “ ’Fore you all go, I wonder if I might, um—” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “I wondered if I might have a word with Miss, uh, is it Christina?”

  Christina turned, surprised. “That’s my name.”

  “You think you’re going to be hanging around town for a spell?”

  “Well, I couldn’t get us a flight out of here until tomorrow.”

  “I just wondered if, you know, if you and this guy ain’t hitched or anything—”

  Christina’s eyes expanded.

  Allen cleared his throat. “I wondered if you wouldn’t mind having lunch with me.”

  Christina appeared momentarily perplexed. She glanced at Ben. “Is that a problem?”

  Ben shrugged. “Not with me.”

  “Then it’s a date.”

  A date! Ben thought. He just invited her to lunch, for Pete’s sake. Was that a date?