Читать книгу The Goodbye Man - Jeffery Deaver, Jeffery Deaver - Страница 21

Shaw pulled his phone out of his pocket and, hesitating only a moment, placed a call.

“Hello.”

“Is this Stan Harper?”

“Yeah. Help you?”

“It’s Colter Shaw. I talked to you earlier about your son.”

“I remember.”

Shaw had had these conversations several times in his career. There was no way to buffer them. “Mr. Harper … I’m sorry to have to tell you that Adam died an hour ago.”

No response.

“He took his own life.”

“What?” A gasp.

“I was going to bring him and Erick in to surrender to the police.”

“But you said …” The voice faded.

“I know I did. I’m sorry.”

I want to get Adam back safe …

“Did he shoot himself?” Perhaps the thought of a son using his father’s own weapon to end his life was unbearable.

“No, he jumped off a cliff.”

“Jumped?” The voice said he didn’t understand.

“The police will be in touch so you can make arrangements.” When the man said nothing more, Shaw continued, “Mr. Harper, I’ve been speaking to Erick Young. It’s possible they were both innocent.”

“They didn’t burn the cross, didn’t shoot anybody?”

“Adam fired, yes, but it might have been self-defense.”

“So he would have gotten off?”

“Seems likely, or been convicted on minor charges.”

“Then why did my son kill himself?”

“I don’t know the answer to that.”

Silence rolled up. Through the phone Shaw could hear a ship’s horn, the caw of an angry seagull.

“Mr. Harper?”

Five more seconds of silence, then the man disconnected.

Y ou ever feel that way, Mr. Shaw …

As he drove, Shaw silently responded to Erick Young: More often than that, actually.

Colter Shaw and Erick Young shared this in common: mourning for their brothers. Dead, in Erick’s case. As for Shaw’s, Russell was long gone, though dead or alive, Shaw had no clue.

Ashton and Mary Dove’s three children assumed very different personalities. Their daughter, Dorion, the youngest, was the clever one. Colter was the restless one. Russell, the oldest, was the reclusive one.

Ashton Shaw died years ago—ironically, just like Adam Harper, tumbling from a cliff in a foreboding place known as Echo Ridge. That death, however, had decidedly not been a suicide. Not long after their father’s funeral, Russell had disappeared. Colter Shaw made a living by finding people, and he was good at this profession. Yet Russell had managed to elude him since that day. Neither Mary Dove nor Dorion had had any contact with son or brother in all those years either.

A father’s loss is tragic, especially under suspicious circumstances. At the end of his life, though, Ashton was growing increasingly demented and paranoid. Shaw—a teenager during those times—recalled moments when the man grew dark and dangerous. His death may have been premature but it seemed a natural conclusion to the complicated life he’d embraced in his later years.

Russell’s disappearance had been much harder on Shaw. The absence was bad enough but aggravating that sorrow were certain questions. First, was he alive or dead? Mourning is a different process in each instance.

And then there was the so-very-difficult question of what drove Russell away from the family.

Shaw had resigned himself to the fact that his brother was gone forever and did what he could to cope with that pain. He’d noted how hopeful Erick had sounded when he talked about this group, the Foundation, and how their brand of therapy might dull the loss. Treatment like that, however, was not a remedy that had any appeal whatsoever to Colter Shaw.

Odd how a rewards job in the wilderness of Washington State triggered memories and emotions with roots from a very different life, in a very different era.

Ah, Russell … Where are you? What are you doing at this moment?

If you’re doing anything at all.

Now, as Erick dozed beside him in the sedan, Shaw piloted the smooth-driving vehicle west.

Forty-five minutes to Tacoma.

His brother and father occupied his thoughts for a good portion of the drive.

Other images intruded occasionally. The group of curious men and women in their blue and black garb.

The brunette in particular, her run-in with the thickset bully.

And, of course, Adam Harper.

Whose death rested squarely at Colter Shaw’s feet.