Michael Prescott - Blind Pursuit

“You stayed with them.”

“For a few weeks. We moved from town to town, keeping close to the edge of the woods. Living off the land, they called it, though really we were scrounging through garbage.”

“Then your father came looking for you-”

“No. It didn’t happen like that. Not like that at all…”

His words trailed off, and his eyes lost focus. Ordinarily she was not averse to leaving a patient wrapped in thought, even for long minutes if necessary. But not now. If he became passive, disengaged, his internal controls would relax… and his impulses might take over.

From experience and study, she knew that epileptic episodes were most likely to occur in that half-aware state between wakefulness and sleep. As the mind wandered, the seizure threshold was lowered, sometimes to the danger point.

She had to keep him talking and alert, without getting him agitated. Emotional stress could trigger a seizure also.

A fine line to tread. A tightrope over a chasm.

“Tell me, Oliver,” she said softly. “Tell me how it did happen.”

“It was evening. A summer evening. Warm day, cooling as the sun hung lower.” His voice was remote and thoughtful, his words drifting up from a deep well of memory. “I went for a walk in the woods with another guy from the camp. Just the two of us. He wasn’t a friend, exactly, but he’d been pleasant to me. Funny to think he was just a kid. We both were. Just kids. Eighteen years old. Funny.

“We found a creek, ambled far enough along the bank to leave the camp sounds behind. In the quiet, we sat by the water, smoking. Peaceful there, with the current forking around the rocks, and the sun setting, and that sweet-smelling smoke.

“After a while it was dark, and we were both pretty high. Then… he got rough. You know what I mean.”

“He wanted to do what Lincoln had done.”

A shaky nod. “I told him no. He tried to force me. I remember him tugging at my jeans, me on my belly, struggling, and him hard against my rear, like Lincoln giving me some discipline, Lincoln making me bleed, and then he was Lincoln. Maybe it was the dope or… or some kind of long-buried revenge fantasy surfacing, I don’t know, but he was Lincoln, and I wasn’t going to take it from him anymore.

“Guess I went wild then. I don’t remember now. But I must have fought back, really fought, for the first time in my life.

“When I came back to myself, there was a rock in my hand. It was bleeding. At least it seemed to be. Blood from a stone, I remember thinking. I touched my face-wetness there, too. He’d broken this”-he fingered his pulped, shapeless nose-“and I hadn’t even noticed. Then I looked down, very slowly, and there he was, on the ground, with his pants around his knees and his dick hanging out and his skull open wide.”

“How did you…” Erin hesitated, choosing the right words. “How did that make you feel?”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

She believed him. The rare breakout of emotion must have consumed itself, leaving him empty and blank. He would have had no reaction to the body sprawled before him, the body of a boy of eighteen, killed in the woods.

Eighteen. Oliver’s age. Of course.

Erin shut her eyes, making the obvious connection. “This boy’s name-”

“Harold Gund.”

She nodded. “You took his identity. And erased your own.”

“I hadn’t planned on it. But as I sat there, watching the moon rise over the trees, I worked everything out. I saw a way to cover up the murder and take revenge on Lincoln. I felt strong enough then. I’d been liberated. I was… free.”

“How did you do it?”

“Gund was my height, my approximate build. I changed clothes with him, taking his wallet, leaving mine with the body. Used some of Gund’s money to hop a bus to Tucson the next morning, then rode a city bus from the terminal to the edge of town that afternoon. At night I walked to the ranch. This ranch.

“Easy enough to sneak onto the grounds; the gate wasn’t padlocked in those days. I eavesdropped through an open window while Lincoln talked on the phone. His end of the conversation made it clear he was alone; Lydia was in the hospital-nervous breakdown. Everyone assumed she was worried sick about me. Nobody guessed the truth.”

Erin did not ask what the truth was.

“Once the lights were out, I broke in through the back way. The lock never was any good, which is why I installed a padlock on that door once I bought the place.

“Lincoln was snoring in bed. I clubbed him unconscious with his own shotgun. Lugged him to the carport, dumped him in the trunk of his car. Drove north to Prescott Forest. Lincoln came to around three in the morning and started thumping on the lid.

“It was still dark when I pulled into the woods and popped the trunk. At first he was crazy with rage, till I let him see the gun-his own sawed-off Remington, steady in my hands. He turned conciliatory then. Tried to make nice. Hoped I didn’t hold it against him, what he’d done; it was just a father’s way of showing love; sure, that’s all he was, a loving father…

“I let him talk as I marched him to the creek in the predawn dark. After a while the words dried up, and he started to cry. Weeping like a woman, like the bullying coward he was. But I don’t think he believed I would do it, really do it, until he stumbled over the corpse at the water’s edge.

“Fear put some fight into him. He spun around, grabbed for the shotgun, and I gave him a taste of it, right in the face.”

Erin shuddered. He saw her reaction, and his eyes narrowed coolly.

“Don’t look so stricken, Doc. It’s not the worst way to die. He never even heard the blast.”

Just like I won’t hear it when you shoot me, she thought numbly.

“Before I left, I turned the gun on Harold. Put the muzzle in his mouth and blew his head off. Nobody was going to identify that corpse from dental records.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“I’d never been arrested; my prints weren’t on file. I don’t know if Gund had a rap sheet. But this was 1968, remember. No computerized fingerprint searches, no nationwide data bank. If Gund had been local, his prints could have been on file somewhere in Arizona. But he’d wandered in from Oregon only a couple weeks earlier.

“Low probability the authorities would bother with prints, anyway. The case was open-and-shut, a no-brainer. Lincoln had beaten me; folks back home knew that much. He’d made a lot of noise to the press about how angry he was at his disobedient son. And just a few days earlier I’d been seen by someone who knew the family; my father could have known where to find me. Besides, it was 1968, an angry year.

“When the police found Lincoln, he had the gun in his hand; I’d wedged it into his fingers with the muzzle under his chin, or where his chin used to be. Next to him, there was the body of a boy my age, wearing my clothes, with my wallet. His hair was brown, not blond like mine, but the shotgun blast had scattered most of it, and I’d gathered up the rest and fed it to the creek.

“Lydia’s hospitalization ensured that she was in no condition to view the body. The only people who looked at it were cops, coroners, and morticians, none of whom had known me.”

“So you got away with it.”

“Well, there was one thing that had me worried for a while. One of the papers reported that the police were trying to find a boy named Harold, last seen with me.”

“You must have anticipated that.”

“Not entirely. People entered and left the camp all the time. Nobody kept track of anyone. There was no organization, no one in charge. As it turned out, that’s what saved me. The kids interviewed by the police knew nothing about the missing boy except his first name. They couldn’t agree on his description, and they didn’t even know he was from Oregon; I was the only one he’d talked to at any length. The cops had nothing to go on; there were a million long-haired teenagers named Harold. I was safe.”