“You did good, Bobbi. You did real good. You’re good people, Bobbi… Hang in there, come on…”
He was still there when the first trooper pulled in, the ambulance a half a minute after. Trooper Farrington took out his firearm and cleared the house. He came back out as the EMTs went in, looked at Mike, who pointed toward the garden. Farrington slipped away into darkness.
More vehicles arrived, everything crunching in the gravel, tires and running feet. Two more EMTs dropped down beside Mike and Bobbi. They had to gently but forcibly pull him away. They went to work on her, put her on a stretcher; Mike watched them carry her off.
Farrington wandered back out of the gloom.
Mike waited.
“He’s gone,” Farrington said.
“Gone?”
“He’s dead, Mike.”
“We need to look around for anyone else. The woman – Richardson. Two kids. Hailey and Mason.”
Farrington nodded, joined up with two other troopers in the driveway, gave directions. They fanned out.
* * *
The EMTs brought Lennox Palmer out through the front door. He looked bad, but alive. They packed him in with Bobbi and closed the doors. Mike stood back as the ambulance surged out of the driveway, hit the road, and tore off toward Lake Haven, lights blaring and siren wailing.
“Somebody shut that music off!”
He walked to the house, went inside, and had a look at everything. Saw a clock radio smashed on the floor, found an iPhone plugged into the stereo and yanked it out. The music continued to play – he recognized The Doors – but small now, tinny, just coming from the phone.
He needed to get crime scene people here. The troopers were clomping around, looking for anyone else, trampling evidence. His phone was buzzing.
Lena.
“Mike? Are you… What happened? Mike?”
He sat down on the stairs going up to the next floor, ran a hand through his hair. Two troopers were talking in the kitchen. One yelled from upstairs, “Clear on the top floor!”
“Mike,” Lena said. “Talk to me. Is she… Was there anyone else there?”
“No. No one else here.”
“Okay, thank God. I’m going to try to locate them. Then I’m on my way.”
“It was bad, Lena.” He pulled his hand away, slightly shaking, covered in blood. “It was bad.”
A pause.
“Yeah, Mike. I know. But we got him. It’s gonna be alright.”
Twenty-Seven
MONDAY, one week later
A memorial service for Corina Lavoie, a funeral for Officer Cal Mullins. Bobbi had gone through it all, feeling sharper, more decisive than she’d ever felt in her life: She knew what she wanted. Her life was moving forward.
Trevor Garris. People said his name, but they stood close to a wall when they talked, their voices low. They closed doors to private offices and worked it all out. There was no trial, no one to prosecute. There was just a lot to discuss, plenty to process, victims and loved ones who needed to heal.
She packed up her office. No more working for Pierce County DSS. Rachel came in while she was sealing up boxes. Rachel wanted to see her stab wounds. Bobbi showed her, then they hugged, and Rachel saw her to her car, tears in her eyes, a crooked smile on her lips.
Lennox was still in the hospital. He’d been legitimately sick before Trevor Garris had beat him up and kidnapped him, brought him to Anita Richardson’s house. Spending the entire day there, subjected to further abuses, he’d gotten pneumonia. He was expected to make a full recovery, but it would take some time.
From his bed, he smiled at Bobbi. “How did Jessica take it?”
“I’m sure she’s happy to see me go,” Bobbi said.
“Nah.” He shook his head, coughed into a balled fist, then lay back again. “Nobody wants to see you go. What do you have planned?”
“I don’t know. Spend some time with Connor and Jolyon. Maybe go back to school. I like casework – it isn’t that.”
“I know,” Lennox said.
And she did like casework – it was gratifying to see how things had turned out with Carrie Lafler, for instance. Roy Richardson was now fully out of the picture, dealing with the fallout for helping Trevor Garris. He’d had no way of knowing, he claimed, who Garris really was, though he showed his own contempt for Child Protective Services. He’d taken money from Garris and then convinced Anita to take the kids to her sister’s for a few days, telling them that the house needed to be sprayed for termites. So he was looking at a little jail time.
There were no termites. Carrie Lafler had moved into the house with Anita, and the two of them were co-parenting the kids. Bobbi didn’t think it would last, but for now a new caseworker was seeing to it, and so far, so good. The kids seemed happy. They were safe.
She hugged Lennox and left the hospital, got into her car, loaded with the couple of boxes of her stuff from the office, and went to meet Mike Nelson at his house. She’d promised him.
He smiled when she came to the door. It was the first time she remembered seeing him since the morning they’d gotten egg sandwiches. She had no memory of him from that following night; nothing after images of Trevor Garris’s large shadow moving outside the children’s playhouse, the sensations of him grabbing her, cutting her – and then a gunshot in the night.
Mike was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt with the picture of someone named “Howlin’ Wolf” on it. He gave her a tour, showed her the garden, everything popping – tomatoes and snap peas and peppers.
“Kristen wishes she could’ve met you,” Mike said, poking a cherry tomato in his mouth. “She’s coming back though, in two weekends. She says she’s going to come up more.”
“She’s checking up on you,” Bobbi said.
He smiled. “That’s fine with me.”
It was hard to find the right words, but she settled on two: “Thank you.”
He let her out of the garden gate, closed the door, and paused, looking lost in thought. Then he focused on her and said, “Thank you.”
There was a bit of an awkward silence, and he walked her back into the house, told her he had a gift for her and handed her a homemade CD in a slim jewel case. On it was written, Bobbi.
“Don’t know if you’ll like any of this, but… you know. Hey, how’s your… You doing okay? Everything healing?”
Just the mention of it made her cold, but she knew Mike meant no harm; he was genuinely concerned. Every night since Trevor, she retraced her steps, thought of what she could have done differently, what she’d done wrong.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Nothing, you know… My insides are all intact.”
He just looked at her, he had those kind eyes, and he nodded. “Well, like I said, give it a listen. It’s old man music, I guess. But I feel like you’re… you’re like an old soul. Man, that’s corny, huh?”
It was corny, but she gave him a quick hug, thanked him again, and showed herself to the front door before he could say anything else.
Connor was waiting for her at his place. The three of them – she and Connor and Jolyon – were going to head out of town for a few days. They’d discussed camping, but she didn’t want to be in the woods. She wanted to be around people. So they were going to hit up The Great Escape in Lake George, let Joly go on the rides. Eat some cotton candy.
Screw it, she was young, she could handle it.
* * *
Mike watched her go, feeling awed. This five-foot-five woman, taking on a guy like Trevor Garris? He’d seen it when he’d come up on the place; she was over there on the hill, going up against this monster, just about kicking his ass. She’d lasted longer than pretty much anyone else would have, but she’d been bleeding, suffocating. Taking too many hits.
Mike had never shot anyone. Never killed anyone.