No Good Deed (37 page)

Chauncey was moving incredibly fast; either that or she was out of shape. She pulled her gun out of the back of her sweatpants, fired into the air. Yelled halt after she fired, glad no one was there to notice seriously out-of-sequence police action.

‘Stop! Don't make me shoot you.'

He knew where he was going. She reminded herself that he knew the area and she didn't. He disappeared around a rise in the land, and Sonora saw a chain-link fence and a down-at-heel car lot. The name of the lot was familiar, featuring regularly in reports from Vice.

She felt a catch in her side. My God, the man could move. There were children unaccounted for; she had to bring him back. Alive, if possible, which was not going to be easy. She was a terrible shot, she could easily kill him.

Sam's words of caution flicked through her mind as she felt the body-slam that sent her flying off her feet, gun spinning out of her hand. He had been waiting for her.

He could have run then, but he wasn't through with her. She squirmed and looked for the gun, saw him doing the same, spotted it eight feet to her left.

She never knew if he didn't see the gun or was in too much of a hurry. The first kick caught her square on the temple, bringing a rush of darkness and light speckles, and an ungodly ache. She was aware that he was kicking her again, and she tried to curl away from him, but could not seem to move. She did not see the kick that caught her in the left side, but she felt her ribs being crushed, felt the incredible jolt of disbelief and shock, and gasped, trying to fill her lungs.

She heard, rather than saw, his feet on the chain-link fence. Climbing in handcuffs. He was getting away.

She crawled toward her gun. Please God, just give her the breath and the aim to shoot him down dead.

A cacophony of noise brought her head up, and she opened her eyes, blood dripping down the side of her face. Heard him scream, heard the growl of dogs, Rottweilers, a pair, and the clang as Chauncey tried to scramble back up the fence.

The gun felt solid in her hands. Chauncey screamed, a noise she thought she would remember for the rest of her life, and then she heard shouts, and Sam's voice, and guns going off. Someone was shooting the dogs.

And then McCarty or Sam, she wasn't sure which, tried to pick her up, which brought a wave of agony, but she did not care, because she was safe, and Chauncey wasn't.

McCarty described it for her later, sitting beside her in the hospital, holding her hand.

It had been dark in the storage unit, much too quiet, the smell of exhaust thick in the air. The car's interior lights were on, the two little girls slumped in the back seat.

The car doors were locked and Sam had gone after them with the crowbar. Sonora had watched McCarty's face as he described it. Two little girls, so quiet and so still. Mary Claire still wearing her little round spectacles, John Lennon granny glasses, and Kippie slumped beside her, head in her sister's lap. Their lips were cherry red. They were clean, hair combed neatly, both wearing brand-new dresses, lacy socks and black patent-leather shoes. Placed, just like Joelle, by a loving father.

They had been surrounded by torn wrapping paper, ribbons. McCarty remembered each one. The death toys, he called them – a Tickle-Me Elmo, a Wedding Bells Barbie, a Slinky,
Rug Rats
coloring books, and a new box of crayons. Two juice boxes had fallen to the floor – apple juice, one hundred per cent fruit concentrate, from Motts.

Sam made it in first, handed Kippie, still warm, to McCarty, and Mary Claire to Gruber. The girls had not seemed to be breathing.

Crick had seen that help was on the way, and there were sirens, and a red fire department truck was at the top of the hill, coming down, and McCarty had heard gunfire, looked up, and seen that Sonora and Chauncey were gone.

Sonora stopped him then, mid-story, and thanked him for the back-up. He took her hand, and kissed her, and she always wondered what would have happened if Sam and Gillane had not rounded the corner bringing flowers and Twinkies.

Chapter Sixty-Three

Sonora walked up the hillside, turned her back on the drained, muddy pond at Halcyon Farm, stood about one hundred yards from where they had found Joelle Chauncey's body. It felt good to walk without having to stop and catch her breath every three steps.

It was ending as it had begun – a farm at dusk, horses in paddocks under a violet autumn sky.

She had come to bring the Kidgwicks a gold necklace Mickey had found when they drained the pond, a necklace that Sonora thought might have belonged to their daughter. No one was there. There was a ‘for sale' sign at the end of the road – the Kidgwicks were moving on.

Joelle's mother was going to be a trump on the witness stand. She'd taken her daughter's body home to Seattle, had faced Chauncey with a steely-eyed look that had Security searching the woman's purse with the utmost of care. Sonora had given her copies of the journals, the originals held in evidence.

Mary Claire had gone home to a mother so overwhelmed she could barely speak. They were still looking for Kippie's parents.

It was the apple juice that had saved Mary Claire and Kippie, apple juice laced with sleeping pills to make them drowsy, to smooth their way. The drugs had slowed their metabolism, reduced their intake of oxygen, kept them alive.

Chauncey had parked them in the garage, given them presents to open and play with while they waited for his supposed return, put a tape in the car,
Sleeping Beauty,
still in the slot when Mickey took the car apart.

Sonora had borne the brunt of a thousand and one dominatrix jokes, and now had a collection of dog-collars left anonymously on her desk.

Sundance had been returned to her grateful owners, and Hal had read them the Riot Act, till their gratitude was gone. Under his careful supervision, the mare had picked up weight by the time the truck arrived to ship her home to a farm in Nashville, Tennessee.

Their undercover investigation blown, TRC had decided to press charges against Donna Delaney and Vivian and Cliff Bisky. Sonora was not optimistic, but she wished them well.

She walked up the drive, moving slowly, her speed these days, looking out over the fields.

That she was the incidental cause of Dixon Chauncey's maiming would haunt her – not because she felt guilt, but because she did not. She knew in her heart that she could have brought the dogs down, or at least tried.

Chauncey would now show a face to the world that was a jigsaw of misplaced features and thick, ropy scar tissue, a face that brought a rush of revulsion and pity, his voice, hoarse and high-pitched, an obvious effort from vocal cords damaged beyond repair. He could now effect the instant sympathy that he had spent a lifetime trying to achieve.

The prosecutor's office was asking for the death penalty, a proceeding Sonora could have stopped with a word. She wondered if she owed him that, in exchange for the maiming. The prosecutor, eager to secure information from Chauncey about other children, unaccounted for, had been willing to make a deal with Chauncey's lawyer, until Crick, with Sonora's co-operation, assured him that they could get whatever information they needed from him without resorting to deals. The prosecutor, in the midst of a public thirst for blood, had agreed.

Sonora stopped to rest, thinking that her job had made her hard. She had a new and uneasy self-awareness when she was home, helping Heather with the impossible math, dealing curfews and making moment-to-moment decisions with Tim – do I punish, do I give this freedom, do I handle this latest transgression with a laugh in lieu of a frown? In some strange way, the awareness of her hard edges gave her a new perspective, an easier attitude, an inner knowledge that these were small matters, in the scheme of all things evil, and the cloud of anger over minor annoyances was refusing to rise these days.

Before, she might have sold that new horse of hers. Now she had no hesitation in keeping it.

She looked at the necklace in her hands. She wanted no reminders. She would have liked to have tossed it back into the pond but her side was dealing agony now, and she very much wanted to go home.

Sonora paused at the top of the road. The house with the back porch was empty, the porch swing gone. There was no one in sight, just cows, and horses on the horizon.

She looked over her shoulder, tossed the necklace behind her, looked away, and then back again.

She squinted, wondering if she saw what she thought she saw, there by the pond – a boy and a girl, slender and young. Likely it was nothing more than a trick of the dusky light, the distance, the sunset glare in her eyes, and wishful thinking.

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When it was all over, or as over as such a thing can be, Sonora could look back and pinpoint the precise moment when everything went wrong. There were times that she wanted to blame the case, times she thought that if she and Sam had not been on call that summer-soft night in March, things would be different, things would not have gotten so out of hand.

And other times she thought, no, she had handled other cases, some as bad, if not worse. The problem, maybe, was her. Maybe she was vulnerable then. Or maybe it wasn't her, who the hell knew, because life, when you come right down to it, life is a journey. You put one foot in front of the other and you choose a path, and stuff happens, good, bad, there aren't any guarantees. It's just a journey. A trip you've got to take.

Starting, as it often does in police work, with the ring of the phone.

She had dreamed the night before, a premonition, maybe, of something evil and old as original sin. But when the phone rang, Sonora, deep in a book, had forgotten the dream. She was tucked up on the couch reading
The Corinthian
by Georgette Heyer, the smell of pork roast baking in a mustard-barbecue sauce warming the kitchen. She had cooked. A miraculous event. Clampett, the three-legged dog, lay in front of the stove, guarding the roast, all one hundred and six blond pounds of him.

The roast was safe.

Heather, sixth grade, and Tim, newly seventeen, were watching television, reruns of
Home Improvement. The Simpsons
up next.

No doubt they had homework. Sonora had looked up from her book twenty minutes ago at Tim, propped on couch pillows that trailed clumps of foam like popcorn, and Heather, legs dangling over a beanbag chair they'd bought at a garage sale for her birthday, and had chosen peace and quiet over proper parenting.

It was a good decision. A moment that came and went like such moments do, you could no more keep it than you could hold water in your hand.

She put the book down, not wanting to let go of the story, thinking it was past time to put together a salad. She got up to turn the rice down and saw that Tim was handing her the portable.

“For you,” he said.

She was not sure who was more surprised. She leaned up against the countertop, nudged Clampett with a toe. He gave her a doggie smile. Drool had puddled on the floor. A tribute to her cooking.

“Blair,” she said.

“Sonora?”

“Sam. Darlin'. Haven't seen you for a whole two hours.”

“You want me to pick you up in the company car, or you going to meet me there?”

Something in his voice. “Where is there, Sam?”

“You'll never find it. Let me come get you.”

“What we got?”

His tone went flat. “Home invasion.”

Sonora put the phone down. Looked at the kids, who watched her. Seasoned cop kids. They knew something was up.

“Going to work?” Tim asked. She had only a sliver of his attention. Knew he would be on the phone the minute she walked out the door.

“Yeah,” she said. “Eat without me, and be sure to leave the kitchen clean. You hear me, Tim?”

He nodded.

“Can I paint my toenails?” Heather asked.

“In the bathroom, not in here.” Not that it mattered, except on principle. Sonora glanced at the couch. Dusty rose, cushions stained with ink, coated in dog hair.

She got her purse. Turned off the TV. The children gave her looks drenched with annoyance.

“Go ahead and have your supper. Make a little plate of roast for Clampett. Heather, you take care of that.” She knew Tim would forget. “And keep the doors locked. Did you hear me?”

Tim nodded. “Eat and lock up. You load your gun, Mom?”

“Sam's picking me up, I'll do it in the car.”

“Turn the TV back on,” he said.

“Turn it on yourself.”

She grabbed her all-purpose black blazer and the tie she had draped over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, retied her left Reebok, and she was out the door, standing in the twilight, waiting for Sam.