overriding lesson was simply this: You could trust nature but not man. Jeremiah had forgotten that for a little while. Now he lived it.
Fearing they would search near his hometown, Jeremiah took to the woods in Pennsylvania. He hiked around for a while, changing camp every night or two, until he happened upon the relative comfort and security of Lake Charmaine. The lake had old camp bunks that could house a man when the outdoors got a little too nasty. Visitors rarely came to the lake - mostly in the summer, and even then, only on weekends. He could hunt deer here and eat the meat in relative peace. During the few times of the year when the lake was being used, he simply hid or took off for points farther west.
Or he watched.
To the children who used to come here, Jeremiah Renway had been the Boogeyman.
Jeremiah stayed still now and watched the officers move about in their dark windbreakers FBI windbreakers. The sight of those three letters in big yellow caps still punctured his heart like an icicle.
No one had bothered to yellow-tape the area, probably because it was so remote. Renway had not been surprised when they found the bodies. Yes, the two men had been buried good and deep, but Renway knew better than most that secrets don't like to stay underground. His former partner in crime, Evelyn Cosmeer, who'd transformed herself into the perfect Ohio suburban mom before her capture, knew that. The irony did not escape Jeremiah.
He stayed hidden in the bush. He knew a lot about camouflage. They would not see him.
He remembered the night eight years ago when the two men had died - the sudden gun blasts, the sounds of the shovels ripping into the earth, the grunts from the deep dig. He'd even debated telling the authorities what happened - all of it.
Anonymously, of course.
But in the end he couldn't risk it. No man, Jeremiah knew, was meant for a cage, though some could live through it. Jeremiah could not. He'd had a cousin named Perry who'd been serving eight years in a federal penitentiary. Perry was locked in a tiny cell for twenty-three hours a day. One morning, Perry tried to kill himself by running headfirst into the cement wall.
That would be Jeremiah.
So he kept his mouth shut and did nothing. For eight years anyway.
But he thought about that night a lot. He thought about the young woman in the nude. He thought about the men in wait. He thought about the scuffle near the car. He thought about the sickening, wet sound of wood against exposed flesh. He thought about the man left to die.
And he thought about the lies. The lies, most of all, haunted him.
Chapter 12
By the time I returned to the clinic, the waiting room was packed with the sniffing and impatient. A television replayed a video of The Little Mermaid, automatically rewinding at the end and starting over, the color frayed and faded from overuse. After my hours with the FBI, my mind sympathized with the tape. I kept rehashing Carlson's words - he was definitely the lead guy - trying to figure out what he was really after, but all that did was make the picture murkier and more surreal. It also gave me a whopping headache.
"Yo, Doc."
Tyrese Barton hopped up. He was wearing butt-plunge baggy pants and what looked like an oversized varsity jacket, all done by some designer I never heard of but soon would.
"Hi, Tyrese," I said.
Tyrese gave me a complicated handshake, which was a bit like a dance routine where he leads and I follow. He and Latisha had a six-year-old son they called TJ. TJ was a hemophiliac. He was also blind. I met him after he was rushed in as an infant and Tyrese was seconds away from being arrested. Tyrese claimed I saved his son's life on that day. That was hyperbole.
But maybe I did save Tyrese.
He thought that made us friends - like he was this lion and I was some mouse who pulled a thorn from his paw. He was wrong.
Tyrese and Latisha were never married, but he was one of the few fathers I saw in here. He finished shaking my hands and slipped me two Ben Franklins as though I were a maitre d' at Le Cirque.
He gave me the eye. "You take good care of my boy now."
"Right."
"You the best,