I was surprised too, but delighted that Dana had opted to cover for us. She hadn’t needed to lie to the cops on our behalf, but it had been kind of her to do so. We’d been trespassing on federally protected land, and we’d gotten ourselves involved in a murder. I made a mental note to hunt her down and thank her later.
I nodded, half to myself and half to acknowledge I’d heard Nick. “You said she issued this from the hospital? Is she okay?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“No. She got into the ambulance when they took Tripp away, and we haven’t seen her since. I didn’t even know what hospital she was brought to.”
Nick’s eyebrow stayed aloft. “Not keeping the closest of tabs on her, are you?”
“We were volunteers, remember? It’s not like we’ve got to chase her down and make her pay us. Look, her husband had died and we didn’t know her terribly well. The cops told us to go home. We didn’t want to be in the way. There wasn’t anything we could do.”
Guilt rays emanated from Nick’s pointed eyebrow. At the time, going home had felt like the only reasonable thing to do. But now I wished I’d asked more questions, or made a phone call or two.
“Sure,” Nick said, jotting a note down in his palm-sized pad. “I understand. And she’ll be fine. Minor cuts and contusions, and all that jazz. She checked out of Erlanger this morning. I guess she went back to her hotel, or went home. You guys will probably have an easier time finding her than I would, right now. So anyway—things were pretty crazy. Let’s talk about those crazy things. It was late at night, the fog rolled in, and then what happened?”
“Then, we uh, we heard someone coming towards us. We couldn’t see him, but we could hear him. He opened fire on us and we put the lights out so he’d have a harder time hitting us, but by then it was too late for Tripp. Listen, man. We panicked and split up. Dana and I ran one way, my friends ran two other ways, and I don’t know what the hell happened to their camera guy. Eventually, me and Dana wound up back by the visitors’ center, and we threw the cannonball at the window to set off the alarm. That’s it. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. That’s all I can tell you, but it’s better than the nothing you’ve got so far, so I’m not going to apologize for it.”
“Yes ma’am, and I thank you for it.” Despite the tape recorder, Nick was scribbling notes again. “But let me ask, did you see the shooter at all? Were you able to give the police anything?”
I shook my head, and then rubbed at it with my fingertips. “No, I couldn’t. Nobody could. You know what the fog’s like out there.” I figured he probably did. Everyone does.
He bobbed his head, and I continued. “Like I said, we put out the lights. We were an easy target when they were on, so we shut them off. It was a blind run. Couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces.”
“You must be the luckiest bunch in the world.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it.” He sounded like a shrink. “Seriously—everyone got away with insignificant injuries—”
“Except for Tripp,” I scolded.
“Except for Tripp, yes—but the rest of you made it out without anything too serious. And you did it in the dark, in the fog, without lights. Do you know how far it is from Dyer’s field to the visitors’ center?”
“No, but—”
“It’s a couple of miles. You two made it nearly two miles under preposterously bad conditions. You look fine to me, though I hear you had a bad scratch; and Dana’s had stitches on her hands and elbows. I guess she fell or something. But still, really. The rest of you came out really well.”
Benny piped up from the kitchen, arguing around the corn chip he was chewing. “I hit my head.” He pointed at the bruise and the butterfly bandage.
“Okay, so that sets the tally at a set of stitches, a scratch, and a bump on the head. How did you do it?”
“I ran into a tree,” Benny answered, though Nick had been looking at me when he asked the question. “Headfirst. Broke my glasses. I passed out cold, and woke up with a cop’s flashlight in my face. Scared the crap out of me.”
We both stared at Benny for a beat; then Nick returned his attention to me. “Right. So now we know how he did it—how did you do it?”
He knew already; I could tell by the way he was asking. He wanted to hear me say it out loud, though; he was dying to hear me say it out loud. He was positively parched to hear it. I wondered if somewhere, sometime, he’d seen something himself…and no one had believed him.
Nick leaned forward, almost tapping the intangible edge of my personal space, but not quite. “Come on,” he begged. “We all know there’s weird shit going on out there. That’s what you people were doing on the battlefield in the first place, right? You were checking out the weird shit. Well, this is what I want to know: Did you see any weird shit?”
I couldn’t make up my mind. Instinctively I suspected he was one more thwarted believer, but rationally I knew he was a television reporter with a ferocious desire to scare the hell out of everyone watching the five o’clock news.
The front door opened, startling us all. Nick drew back onto his own designated couch cushion, and Benny dropped the salsa. It broke on the kitchen tile with a crunching splat.“Dave.” I exhaled, happy and relieved to see him. His arrival gave me another moment to consider my response.
“Babe.” He nodded at me, and spied Benny’s backside in the kitchen—bending with a fistful of paper towels. “Ben?”
“Hello, Mr. Copeland,” he said, without standing up straight or turning around.
My uncle sized up the man sharing the couch with me, and tossed a quick, dismissive glance at the apathetic assistant with the camera. “Ah,” he said, and with his left hand he flicked an envelope towards me. “Don’t let me interrupt. But when you’re through, I’d like a word with you, please.”
He left us, ducking out into the garage. I measured his words and decided that I wasn’t nervous. I didn’t feel a sense of “You’re in trouble, young lady,” so much as I got the impression that he wanted to show me whatever was in the envelope.
“I’m sorry,” I prompted Nick. “You were saying?”
“Nice try. It was your turn to talk. What I want to know is, did you or did you not see anything unusual out there?”
He was a sharp little bastard; there was no missing that much. I leaned forward, meeting him halfway. Benny put his elbows on the counter and swung his head out into the dining room so he could hear my response better.
“It’s like this,” I began. “It was dark. Real dark. And there was more fog than I have ever personally encountered in my life. It doesn’t matter what I saw, or what I think I saw, or what any given one of us saw, Nick. No one would ever believe us, and there’s nothing you can say on the air or in print—there’s nothing you can scrawl down in that notebook—that anyone is ever going to take seriously.”
“But—”
“Nick, you seem like a cool guy, but there’s nothing I can do to help you. Go chase something you can prove, or something you can get on camera. A man is dead, and he was killed by another man—not by a ghost, and not by Old Green Eyes. There’s no story here except an ordinary murder.”
He snorted. “Ordinary? Are you serious?”
“Ordinary enough,” I insisted.
“You know, you keep referring to the killer as a ‘he.’ Are you sure you didn’t see anything that could be of use to the authorities?”
I hesitated, and gave him the benefit of a moment’s thought. “I think it was a man. I saw his shape through the fog. It was something about the way he moved, the way he carried himself. He moved like a man.”
“Mr. Reynolds didn’t say anything about that, though he said he thought he saw the shooter too.”
“Mr. Reynolds?”
Nick bobbed his head left to right, and gave me another flash of the eyebrow. “The A/V guy? From the Marshall crew? With which you were ‘volunteering’?”
I could hear the quotation marks around the word “volunteer.” It was easy to guess that we’d made up half our story, and I couldn’t tell whether or not he meant to imply a small spot of blackmail. I didn’t care. He’d already let it slide that Dana had our back, so he could hint around all he wanted. Or maybe I was only being paranoid and defensive. It was hard to judge.
“Oh, yeah. Him. We barely knew him—last night was our first night on the job.”
“Hell of a way to break into the biz, eh?”
“Tell me about it,” I said, catching a glance from Benny—who also sent me a quick ‘thumbs-up’ for the fib-on-the-fly. “So, is Charlie okay?”
“He’s fine. He made it out the back way, same as your other buddy, past the tower and into the subdivision.”
“And Dana?” I asked. “You said she checked out of Erlanger? Do you know where she went?”
Nick fluttered his notebook, flipping the pages closed with a whip of his wrist. “Back to her hotel? I told you, I don’t know. I couldn’t track her down. I thought you might know how to reach her, but I guess not. How did you ever meet the Marshalls, if you didn’t know where they were staying?”
“At the camera store,” Benny butted in with the truth, which was fine by me. “We ran into them while we were getting some film developed, and we started talking. They invited us out there. We met them there.”
While Nick was looking at Benny, I flashed my pal a thumbs-up in return.
“Anyway, it’s like I said—there’s nothing I can tell you that you’ll want to use. I’m sorry you’ve gone to so much trouble to find me up here, but I’ve said everything I’m going to.”