her breasts. Part of the other. And most of her face.”
“Oh, my God.” Her once white-hot fear, which lately had been simmering, suddenly flashed bright. She remembered how Shacket had touched Woody’s face, how close his face—his mouth—had been to the boy. “We can’t stay here. We’re getting out tonight. Now.”
“I can assign you protection.”
She met his eyes once more. “You don’t have enough men. There aren’t enough police in the world to keep me here.”
“It would be helpful if you didn’t mention this to anyone. We don’t want to panic the public. We need to manage the release of the information, probably by noon tomorrow, maybe as late as early afternoon. We need time to craft answers to assure—”
A deputy, thundering up the front stairs, shouted, “Sheriff! You up there?”
As the man appeared at the head of the staircase, Eckman said, “What is it?”
“They got him. Johnson and Colt got the bastard. Colt’s hurt bad, ambulance on the way. Johnson’s all right, and the perp is under restraint.”
Eckman smiled broadly at Megan, as though the abominations so recently revealed were no longer of any consequence. “You’re safe, Ms. Bookman. Perfectly safe. My men have done their job. You can stay the night without concern. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”
His shoulders back and a bounce in his step, as though the terror visited on Pinehaven County was an opportunity seized, a political crisis become a career enhancement, he walked away.
To his back, she said quietly, “It’s Mrs. Bookman.”
68
The ambulance was capable of carrying two injured persons, but Walter Colt refused to be taken to the hospital in the same vehicle as Nathan Palmer, even though the EMTs intended to tranquilize the killer with chlorpromazine.
Freeman Johnson totally understood. He persuaded the first responders to put in a call for a second unit for Palmer, and Walter Colt was whisked away, the ambulance’s lightbar flashing and its siren wailing as if it were some woodland banshee chasing through the trees.
Backup had arrived before the ambulance, so that Freeman didn’t have to wait alone with the prisoner. He had his cattle prod ready, and Deputy Argento had one as well. Carrickton armed herself with a shotgun, and she looked as though she would enjoy using it.
Facedown on the ground, the perp struggled tirelessly to free himself from the zip ties that bound his wrists behind his back. He was so persistent that he had rubbed the skin away and was bleeding slightly. The pain seemed not to matter to him.
69
Hours past his usual bedtime, fueled by black coffee and two glazed doughnuts, beginning to consider using the next cup of brew to wash down a caffeine tablet, still at his computer in the morgue, Carson Conroy had gathered more information than he had hoped to acquire.
When he’d gone to the National Crime Information Center website to look for any warrant issued for Nathan Palmer, his screen had gone white except for a perfect silhouette of his shoulders, neck, and head. He knew this meant that some security agency—most likely the NSA—had an interest in who researched Palmer and had taken his photograph with the camera in his computer. He was not concerned, because this had happened twice before on other cases, without any subsequent consequences.
Although Nathan Palmer was wanted for larceny, arson, and murder, the specifics of these crimes, the what-when-where, were missing from the writ issued by the court in Salt Lake City. That data had been put under seal, which Carson found decidedly strange. Palmer’s photo, taken from a Montana driver’s license, showed a reasonably attractive man in his midthirties, clean-shaven with brown hair and brown eyes.
Something about the photo resonated with Carson. He had never met Nathan Palmer, yet the man looked familiar.
Lyle Sheldrake, the previous sheriff and the one who brought Carson to Pinehaven, had anticipated a moment when his successor, Hayden Eckman, would get himself into a situation where he would feel it necessary to set up a fall guy. Because Carson was not an Eckman loyalist, he would always be a prime candidate for the new sheriff’s scapegoat. Consequently, Sheldrake had created a secret back door into the department’s computer system and left instructions for its use only with Carson. Sheldrake had said, “Maybe Hayden’s not the snake he seems to be, but you best have some antivenin just in case.”
Now Carson Conroy swam secretly through the shallow lake of data maintained by the sheriff’s department and found his way into