Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

“You’re making me blush. Get outta here.”

Russ strode into the office. “Shaun!” Reid looked up quickly. “Thanks for all your help. Better hit the road. You and I are already going to be late to this thing.”

Shaun blinked. “I’m free to go?”

“Course you are.” Russ bared his teeth in a grin. “We can’t be disappointing the ladies, can we?”

Lisa Schoof drove slowly past the gates to the Reid-Gruyn mill for the third time since seven o’clock. When she had first approached the mill, she had been ready to drive through the entrance and on to the employee parking lot but had been frozen with terror at the sight of a cop car idling outside the offices. She had slammed on the brakes, coming to a dead stop in the middle of Route 57, expecting at that moment to see her husband escorted out of the building in cuffs. It was only the honk of a driver approaching from her rear that got her moving again. She took the first cross street she could and circled back toward the mill.

The second time she slid slowly, slowly past, a panel van had joined the squad car. She couldn’t make out the writing on its side, but the state seal and the lights on top made it clear it was another sort of police vehicle. Every light in the office appeared to be on, and she could make out a uniformed cop standing between the squad car and a small green car.

Now, on her third pass, the cop car, the van, and the lights were still there, but a pickup and a station wagon that had been parked next to the squad car had disappeared.

Could they have taken Randy away while she was driving in circles? Should she loop around a few more times in the hope they would all clear out? The dark pressed in all around her sister’s car. She wanted to hide in it, to scurry away from the mill office, lit up like the guard tower in a prison.

She clamped her hands around the steering wheel and turned through the gates. She wanted to think of herself as brave, but she admitted to herself it was hopelessness that propelled her across the parking lot, the knowledge that if her husband had been arrested, she couldn’t effect his release, and if he was still free, somewhere in the mill, she had to pass by the police. She had no choice. He was waiting for her.

She drove slowly, steadily, curving past the carnival of light that was the administration building, but not going so far out of her way that it would look suspicious. She had a cover story in her head: If she were stopped and questioned, she was delivering a meal to her husband, who worked on the floor. She knew that a lot of guys working second shift brought a big bag lunch to take the place of dinner with the family.

She was not stopped. No one emerged from the offices to wave or shout or blow a whistle. Instead, she slipped around the corner into the employee parking lot, a rectangle of asphalt running from the edge of the offices to the bank of the river. A dozen or more vehicles, almost all trucks and SUVs, clustered beneath a few fluorescent lights on aluminum poles. Three picnic tables sat near the featureless mill wall, scoured flat by cold and darkness. Cigarette butts littered the lot like spent casings.

Lisa got out of her sister’s station wagon. Randy had said he would meet her, but she didn’t know if he would recognize or trust the Durkees’ car. She walked toward the black and rushing river, passing one truck, then another. The third one was Randy’s.

“Babe?” she whispered. Nothing. She kicked the door gently. “Randy?”

His face appeared in the window. She almost screamed, clamping her hand over her mouth to still her surprise. He motioned for her to come around to the passenger side.

When she got into the cab he clutched at her, and she dug her hands into the back of his coat, and they held each other as if it had been four years instead of four hours. Lisa couldn’t stop patting him. “Are you okay?” she asked, over and over. “I was so scared when I saw the cops at the office.”

“I know. They were there when I tried to leave the mill. I nearly pissed my pants. I was going to go back to the old mill to wait for you, but I decided the truck was safer.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She sat back, separating them by a few inches. “Tell me what’s so important that we’re both here in the parking lot where we could be spotted any minute.”

Randy grinned. “I know who killed Eugene van der Hoeven.”

This was so far outside anything Lisa expected, she thought she must have misheard him. “Come again?”

“I know who killed Eugene van der Hoeven. It was Shaun Reid.”

“Mr. Reid? The guy who owns the mill?”

Randy nodded. She glanced out the windshield, wondering when the Candid Camera guy would show up and Randy would announce the whole day, everything, had been an elaborate gag. “Well,” she said.

He made an impatient noise. “You know the missing woman? Millie van der Hoeven? She’s in the old mill.” He pointed to where the building moldered, hidden behind the faceless brick wall of the new mill. “She witnessed the whole thing. Shaun Reid killed her brother, stuck her in the trunk of his car, and stashed her there to hide her.”

“You’re serious.”

“Of course I’m serious.”

She leaned forward and rested her head on his shoulder. “Okay. So how is this going to help you?”

“We tell Mr. Reid that we have her. If he confesses to beating up Becky Castle, we’ll keep her hidden away. If he doesn’t confess, we bring her out and he’s going down for murder.”

Lisa blinked at him.

“Don’t you see? He’d for sure rather be charged with assault than murder.”

It was such an ambitious and, in its own weird Randy way, brilliant idea that she almost hated to point out the flaw. “What about Millie van der Hoeven?”

“What about her?”

“What do we do with her during the months it takes for Mr. Reid to come to trial? Or is she volunteering to go into hiding to save you?”

He looked abashed. “That’s the fuzzy part of the plan.”

“Fuzzy? Babe, that’s a freaking jungle growing up around you. It’ll never work.”

“It could,” he insisted. “Think about it. Even if we didn’t make it stick, you know, with Mr. Reid, we could buy some time. We could take her home with us-”

“Take her home with us?” Lisa screeched.

“Long enough for it to set up in the cops’ minds that Mr. Reid did it. Then, even if we let her go and she narcs on Reid and he says he didn’t have nothing to do with Becky Castle, it’ll be his word against mine. Or who knows? Maybe we could convince her to say she saw him beat up Becky and kill her brother.”

“Like a buy-one-get-one-free.”

He didn’t hear the sarcasm in her voice.

“Yeah! There’s nothing says we have to, you know, treat her bad while we keep her. Maybe we can make her our friend.”

Lisa held up her hand for him to stop talking. There was something in what he just said-some kernel of an idea that might just possibly work. She closed her eyes so she could think better. Okay, what if Shaun Reid confessed? The cops would focus all their investigation on proving Shaun was the guy who beat up Becky Castle. Stuff that incriminated Randy would be pushed aside. Overlooked. Maybe, if they were lucky, forgotten. It wouldn’t be perfect, not with the victim herself yawping on about Randy, but it would be a big old help to that smart lawyer Rachel thought they should hire.

It would be terrible for Mr. Reid, of course. Maybe even-and here she shivered, from deep inside the core of her, because she hadn’t known that she was capable of thoughts like these-maybe he would even commit suicide.

Maybe it could just look like he had committed suicide.