LITMIR.BIZ

       FIVE

      Drew makes me wait until we have wrestled his four-wheeler out of the creek and stripped half the thing down before he’ll tell me anything about finding Kate. He’s one of those rare white-collar guys who actually knows how to fix things. He approaches machines with the same familiarity that he does the human body. Now he stands beside the steaming ATV, waiting for the air intake box to drain and the carburetor to dry. I’m sitting on a rotten log nearby, trying to catch my breath.

      “All right, start talking,” I snap.

      He walks away from me and stares up the hill that the motorcycle disappeared over. With his rifle slung over his shoulder, he looks like a marine standing guard in some lost jungle. My Springfield is gone; it must have fallen out of my pocket at some point during our charge through the woods. Drew has promised to find or replace it, but at this moment a lost pistol is not my highest priority. I want to know what he held back from me earlier tonight.

      “It was this afternoon,” he says, still looking off into the dark. “Whatever led to Kate’s death started this afternoon.”

      I remain silent, leaving him to fill the vacuum. I hope he doesn’t take long. It’s about fifty degrees, but with the wind hitting my wet clothes, it feels like deep winter.

      “Kate was late getting her period,” Drew says softly. “Only five days, but she was usually as regular as clockwork. She was worried.”

      So Drew has been sleeping with Kate for several months at least.

      “I told her to buy a home pregnancy test, but she didn’t want to. The truth is, I think she sort of hoped she was pregnant.”

      “Why?”

      He turns to me, but his expression is indistinct in the moonlight. “Because that would have forced everything to a head. If she was pregnant, all would have been decided. She wouldn’t have got an abortion. I would have asked Ellen for a divorce, and—”

      “Would Ellen have given you a divorce?”

      “I think so. It would have cost me dearly, but it would have been worth it.”

      “Go on.”

      “I was supposed to meet Kate tonight, after Ellen went to sleep. That’s usually when we’d meet, during the week. She’d slip across the creek and come over to my workshop.”

      “Jesus.”

      “It was pretty safe, actually. Ellen never goes out there. She just calls on the intercom. Anyway, for some reason Kate couldn’t wait until tonight.”

      “Maybe she took that pregnancy test after all.”

      He nods thoughtfully. “Maybe so.”

      “What did she do this afternoon?”

      “She sent me a text message on my cell phone. It said, ‘I really need to see you. The creek or the cemetery.’”

      “The cemetery?”

      “The city cemetery was our backup place. The creek meant St. Catherine’s Creek. We met there a lot in the beginning, at the bend between Sherwood Estates and Pinehaven.”

      “You used cell phones to communicate?”

      “Never directly. She sent me that message from a computer—probably one at St. Stephen’s. There was no traceable link to her cell phone.”

      Sherwood Estates and Pinehaven, the two most expensive subdivisions within the city limits. At the rear of each, wooded bluffs drop down to muddy, cane-covered flats that border the creek. During heavy rains, the creek rises several feet in hours and becomes a fifty-foot-wide torrent filled with logs and other debris.

      “Kate would take her dog down there like she was exercising him,” Drew says. “I’d just jog down there. If we needed to talk during the day, it was a good place.”

      “During the day? You’re nuts. Why not just get her a cell phone in your name, or something like that?”

      Drew shakes his head. “Too dangerous. In the past couple of months, I’ve had the feeling Ellen might be having me followed. It’s very easy to eavesdrop on cell phones, and you can monitor their GPS position simply by calling a company that specializes in that. No warrant required.”

      “Okay. Go on.”

      “I don’t know how long Kate was waiting at the creek. I got the text message at my office. It was time-stamped one fifty-four p.m. She was almost certainly at school then. She probably left the building at three. I left my office at three-thirty. It took me ten or twelve minutes to get down to the creek, I guess. I didn’t park at home, because I was impatient. I parked at the back of an empty lot in Pinehaven and came in from the south.”

      “Did anybody see you?”

      “I don’t think so.”

      “But they could have. The blackmailers, for example. They could have seen your car and followed you.”

      “Maybe. But I don’t think so. You can’t see the back of that lot from the street.”

      I motion for him to continue.

      Drew’s voice drops in volume, forcing me to strain to hear him. “I saw her from forty yards away. She was lying on the creek bank with her head trailing in an eddy of water. I told myself it couldn’t be her. My mind totally rejected the visual evidence. Cognitive dissonance, I think it’s called. But at some level I knew. I sprinted up to her and looked down, and I just … she’d been wearing her tennis outfit. Her Izod shirt and sports bra had been pushed up to her neck, but she was naked from the waist down. There was fresh blood on the side of her head … petechiae around her eyes. I cradled her head and—”

      Drew covers his mouth with one hand, unable to go on. A muffled sob comes from his throat. Then he speaks in a monotonic voice. “Her eyes were wide open, glassy, the pupils fixed and dilated. I was sure she was dead, but I tried to resuscitate her anyway. I gave her CPR for ten minutes, but I couldn’t get a heartbeat.”

      “You didn’t call 911?”

      “I’d left my cell phone in my car.”

      I wonder if this is true. “Would you have called for help if you’d had it?”

      “Hell, yes!”

      “Was she still warm?”

      Drew goes still. “Yes.”

      “Okay. So you knew she was dead. What happened then?”

      “I went insane. I literally came apart. Suddenly everything I’d been holding inside for months just burst out of me. I was crying, talking to myself, screaming at the sky like Captain Ahab.”

      “Is

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