J. Black - The Shop

When Jolie got to Skeet’s office, he was standing by the window. “Look at that,” he said. “You’d think the president was just here.”

Jolie saw the two black SUVs follow Riley’s Boxster Spyder out of the parking lot.

“Is it true you’re related to those people?”

“Tangentially.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed at the solar system poster that took up one wall of his office. “Hope you’re not planning on getting a security detail for yourself,” he said. “We’d have to move Louis into the cleaning closet just to accommodate them.” He nodded to a chair. He had his copy of Chief Akers’s case file in front of him on the desk.

“You know we’ve been having budget cutbacks,” Skeet said. “We’re shorthanded. Everybody is, but with Louis out…Tim and I talked early this morning. We agreed that we just don’t have the manpower to keep up surveillance on Maddy Akers.”

In a way she’d been expecting it. Maddy had done nothing except go to places like the Piggly Wiggly and the car wash for three days. Jolie was disappointed, but it had not been out of the realm of possibility. Jolie wasn’t ready to bring Maddy in for questioning yet—she needed more evidence to make an interview worthwhile. She needed something that would rattle Maddy, trap her into giving something away. But now Skeet had taken away Jolie’s ace in the hole.

Skeet stood. “I hope this doesn’t put a crimp in your investigation.”

“Life goes on.”

Skeet nodded sagely. “Life does go on.”

Jolie thought of Chief Akers lying on the bed in a hotsheet motel, blood soaking into the mattress underneath his head. Life goes on, she thought.

Sometimes .

22

ASPEN, COLORADO

When Nick Holloway came back from laying in supplies, the first thing he did was turn on Fox News. He was unloading groceries into the refrigerator when he heard the words, “Brienne Cross.” He looked up in time to see two scruffy men shuffling into the Pitkin County Courthouse in manacles and leg chains. The Pitkin County Courthouse was one block away from where he was staying.

The Aspen killers had been caught.

Just like that, Nick’s fear that someone was out there lying in wait for him evaporated.

Their names were Donny Lee Odell and Ray Marquette, and they were about to be arraigned for the murders of Brienne Cross, Justin Balough, Tanya Williams, Brendan Shayles, Amber Redmond, and Connor Fallon.

No mention of Mars’s death, but that would probably be tacked on later.

Donny was the younger one. He had that country-peach face peculiar to Southern white boys and the wispy beginnings of a Fu Manchu. He had long, limp hair and spaced-out eyes. Two tats Nick could see—a teardrop tat in the corner of one eye, and barbed wire wrapped around one stringy bicep. The orange jumpsuit made him look jaundiced. Nick imagined Donny’s growing up years: a single-wide with plenty of siblings. He had no doubt they’d have the same blank look Donny had, as if life had whacked them hard in the face. He’d drive a seventies-era GMC truck with a Confederate flag in the back window and do the majority of his shopping at a convenience store—cigarettes, Slim Jims, and six-packs of beer that would cost twice as much as they would at a grocery store.

Ray was older and meaner. His eyes weren’t passive like Donny’s. In fact, he had the evil eye thing going on, thought he was Manson. His head was shaved, and a thatch of hair jutted out from his chin, somewhere between a soul patch and the beard on a Civil War general. No mustache. Scars on the face, as if he’d grown up in an era of smallpox outbreaks. Tats crawled across his shoulders and arms, and he had one hoop earring. He was bulky enough to overturn a car, and his jail-house muscles stretched his sleeveless orange jumpsuit to the breaking point. Nick pegged him as the instigator and Donny as the follower.

Now he could put faces to the killers who haunted his dreams. A couple of white supremacist types with obviously low IQs.

All his worries had been for nothing. Now he could move on.

He wondered if, down the road, he could interview Donny and Ray. Unlikely, but he’d discuss it with his agent.

But first, he walked down to the courthouse and became part of the crowd. Not much to see. Satellite news vans, reporters, cameras, even a staging area where the Pitkin County sheriff gave his press conference. The sheriff had a good time giving the press conference, too—his time in the sun. Nick liked being part of the crowd. Anonymous. He noticed a couple of celebrities behind dark glasses and under ball caps, and felt a kinship with them. No one knows who we really are .

On his way back from the courthouse, Nick picked up a sandwich for lunch, went home, and called his agent.

“Let me get this straight,” Roger said. “You want to expand the story to include this guy Mars?”

“Come on, Roger, he saved my life.”

“You think he saved your life. But is there any proof of that?”

Nick sighed. His agent never really trusted him, despite the fact that he’d delivered a bestseller that had surprised everyone. “I’ll find the link. All it will take is a little investigative reporting.”

“I don’t know,” Roger said. “Sounds like mission creep to me. The story about those kids in the house, as told by the sole survivor—I thought that was what this book was about.”

“But Mars is the reason I survived.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But I can find out, can’t I?”

“That’s what I mean. Mission creep. This thing is becoming amorphous. And that means it’s going to take longer to write. We talked about this. The sooner we can get this book out the better.”

“Don’t worry so much. I’ve written on deadline all my life.” He looked out the window at the beautiful day and felt energized. “I’m going out to the house later—I really want to see it again. Now that it’s empty, it might be a good way to start the book. But first, I’m going back to see if I can talk to someone in the sheriff’s office.”

Roger said, “Think about what I said, okay? Don’t lose focus.”

“Oh, I won’t, Roger. Don’t you worry about that.”

As Nick crossed the street to his car, he noticed a man on the sidewalk, his face tipped up to the sun in appreciation of the day. Nick shared his appreciation of the pure blue sky, benign sunshine, and cool shadows. It was as if his life had been handed back to him. He’d been in three narrow scrapes in his life, and he’d come out of them in one piece every single time. The child-killer who tried to get him in his car when he was nine. Nick got away, but another kid wasn’t so lucky—his body was found the following spring in a wilderness area. Then his near-miraculous survival of the Aspen massacre.

And now Donny Lee and Ray were safely locked up. They couldn’t come after him now.

The biggest dividend from the Aspen massacre had been completely unexpected: Nick was now magically free from fear. The idea that death was out there waiting for him, waiting for one slipup, one lapse in judgment or awareness—that was gone. Just like that.

The reaper had three cracks at him and couldn’t get it done. He was pretty sure there wouldn’t be another, not for a long time. The ultimate irony? If he died in his sleep at a hundred and three.

Nick got the runaround at the sheriff’s office. After an hour of waiting, he went back to the officer behind the Plexiglas window and told her he was the sole survivor of the Aspen massacre and needed to talk to Detective Sloan. But the woman must have been in the job for a long time, because she just blinked at him and looked bored. “You’ll have to wait your turn, sir. There’s a lot going on today and everyone is out.”