Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

A. Not with assault rifles, no, though we knew they were armed… The perpetrators had taken the cash and jewelry and were still inside the store. I ordered my men into the alley behind the store. It was my intention to enter through a side door and take them by surprise.

Corde listened to the snapping of some invisible animal making its way through the woods. He thought how odd it was that a creature was moving past him, probably no more than ten feet away, yet he sensed no danger. He felt if anything the indifference of the surroundings, as if he had been discounted by nature as something insignificant and not worth harming.

Q. Sergeant Corde, could you tell us then what happened?

A. Yes, sir. There were a number of exit doors leading from the stores into the alley. I had inadvertently told the men to enter through door 143.

Q. Inadvertently?

A. That was a mistake. The door that opened onto the jewelry store was number 134.1 -

Q. You mixed up the numbers?

A. Yes, sir. In speaking with the fire inspector, he had told me the correct number of the door. I had written it down. But when I radioed to the men which door to enter, I read it backwards.

Q. So the men entered the mall through the wrong door.

A. No, they tried to. But that door was locked. As they were trying to get it open, thinking it was the correct door, the perpetrators ran into the alley and fired on the policemen. Their backs -

Q. Whose backs?

A. The policemen's backs were to the perpetrators. Two police officers were killed and two were wounded.

Q. Have the perpetrators been apprehended?

A. To date, one has. The rest have not.

He'd been suspended with half pay for six months but he quit the force a week before reinstatement. He sat around in his suburban home, thinking about the men who'd died, thinking of the kind of jobs he ought to get, replaying the incident a hundred times then a thousand times. He stopped going to church and didn't even have the inclination to turn a bar or the bottle into his personal chapel. He spent his time with the TV, doing some security jobs, some construction work. Finally the mortgage payments on the trim suburban split-level outran their savings and with Sarah on the way they'd no choice but to come back to New Lebanon.

Feed and grain, planning and sawing, teaching… Long, long days. Then he's seen the ad in the paper for a deputy and he'd applied.

After Bill and Diane had moved back to New Lebanon he had five years with his father before the stroke. Five full years of opportunities to talk about what happened at the Fairway Mall. But what the two men spent those years on was pheasant loads and movies and carburetors and memories of their wife and mother.

One day, a month before the blood clot swapped a clear, complicated mind for one that was infinitely simple, Corde was crouched down, sharpening a mower blade in his father's garage. He heard the footsteps and he looked up to see the old man standing hunched and pale, licking the top of a Dannon yogurt container. His father said, "'bout time to deal with St Louis, wouldn't you say?" Corde stood, his knee popping and pushing him oh-so-slowly upward. He turned to face his father and cleared his throat. The elder Corde said solemnly, "Ten bucks says they'll cave to New York." Corde rolled grass flecks off his hands and dug into his pocket for a bill. "You're on," he said. His father wandered into the yard while Corde turned back to the iron blade in complete remorse.

Q. If someone else had read the number of the door to the policemen in the alley, the mishap might not have happened. Or if you had taken your time and read the number slowly?

A. (garbled)

Q. Could you repeat that please.

A. The mishap probably would not have happened, no.

He'd never told anyone in New Lebanon. The facts were there, somewhere in his file in St Louis. If Steve Ribbon or Hammerback Ellison or Jim Slocum or Addie Kraskow of the Register wanted to go to the trouble to look it up, they would find everything. But the New Lebanon Sheriffs Department simply glanced at his résumé and believed the truthful statement that the reason for termination from his last job was that he'd quit. They believed too his explanation that he had grown tired of fighting city riverfront crime and had wanted to move back to his peaceful home town. After all, he had a six-year-old son and a baby on the way.

Who'd think to look beyond that?

Another snap, nearby. Corde turned. The animal materialized. A buck. He saw two does not far off. He loved watching them. They were elegant in motion but when they stopped – always as if they were late for something vitally important and had time to give you just a brief look – they were completely regal. Corde wished he was a poet. He wanted badly to put into words what he felt at this moment: The knowledge in the deer's eyes.

The melting sun.

The unseen movement of the woods at dusk.

The total sorrow when you fall short of the mark that you know God's set for you.

With a single crack of wet wood, the deer were gone. Bill Corde scooted off the rock and slowly made his way to his twentieth-century home, with his pickup truck and television, and his family.

Special to the Register – Two days after the slaying of a second Auden University co-ed by the man known as the "Moon Killer", John Treadle, Harrison County Supervisor, ordered Sheriffs Department deputies to step up nighttime patrols around New Lebanon:

"But," he said, "I can't emphasize enough that girls shouldn't travel by themselves after dark until we catch this man."

The body of the student, Emily Rossiter, a resident of St Louis, was found floating in Blackfoot pond on the night of the full moon. She had been struck on the head and left to drown. The body was reportedly mutilated.

"We're devoting a hundred and ten percent of our time to solving these cult murders," Steven Ribbon, Sheriff of New Lebanon, said last night. He added that he had taken the unusual step of asking an outside consultant to assist in the investigation.

"This man has a number of years of homicide investigation experience with a big city police department and he's already provided some real helpful insights into the workings of this killer's mind."

Citing security, Sheriff Ribbon would give no details on this consultant's identity or exact role in the case.

The Chamber of Commerce estimates that the series of murders has cost the town one million dollars in lost revenues.

Her biggest fear is that somehow her father has scared off the Sunshine Man.

It is now a couple of days in a row that her daddy has gotten up late, had breakfast with them and then been home before supper. But worse than that he had gone for long walks in the woods behind the house, the woods where the Sunshine Man lived. Sarah considers herself an expert on wizards and she knows that they resent people who don't believe in them. Her father's certainly a person like that.

Although she's questioned Redford T. Redford at length about the wizard the bear has remained silent. She has left several presents and painstakingly written notes for the Sunshine Man in the magic circle. He has not picked them up or responded.

She has thought about running away again. But because her mother has agreed with Dr. Parker to keep her out of school for a while, Sarah is willing to postpone her escape plans. She listens to her books on tape, she looks at her picture books, she watches television, she plays with her stuffed animals.