She stared at him, hearing the words and processing them but unable to attach any real meaning. All she could think of was Wes, running barefoot into the night with a rifle and a pole syringe. What had gone wrong?
“When I say be ready,” Kimble continued, “I mean not just for the public reaction, but for a lot of tough questions. One of the toughest: will you be able to deal with the missing cougar?”
“That will be a tough question,” she agreed, her voice numb and distant. Kimble looked at her and shook his head, unhappy.
“Is there someone you can go to for help? Do you know anyone who specializes in this sort of animal?”
“Yes,” she said. “Wesley Harrington.”
Kimble didn’t say anything. She looked away from him and up at the mountains and felt her mouth go dry and chalky. She tried to remember the trick she’d devised for herself to get through the hardest days: imagining her emotions being carefully folded and placed into a tight box and tucked away in some never-opened closet, the way she’d handled all of David’s clothes after the funeral.
Strength, she told herself, you’ve got to show strength. Go out and find that damn cat, bring him back, and then you can grieve for Wes. Grieve for Kino. Grieve for David again, hell, grieve for yourself. You’re entitled to that. But first you have to find that cat.
“Mrs. Clark?” Kimble said. “Is there anyone who can help? Anyone who knows about these cats?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “That would be me.”
Kimble regarded her with no quality of judgment. “Can you find him?”
No, she thought. She was picturing the sleek black cat, so silent, so strange. No, they could not find Ira. That was even more implausible, somehow, than the idea that Wesley had been killed by Kino.
“We’ll have to,” she said.
19
ROY WAS LOST IN THOUGHT when he approached the employee entrance of the Sentinel that morning. A harsh electronic buzz finally shattered those distractions and brought him into the moment. He had just waved his keycard in front of the receiver. No green light, no soft chime of acceptance. Instead, the loud buzz and a flashing red light.
He passed the card over the receiver a second time, even though he knew.
Rex Schaub had deactivated his keycard. Shut him down. The Sentinel office doors would not open for him again.
He stepped back and stared up at the silent limestone building, his home for so many years, and then, as if he simply could not understand, he reached out and tried again, and again.
Red light.
Red light.
He could hear banging near the other side of the building, and after circling around, he saw that the loading dock doors were up. The crew was hauling out office furniture and piling it inside a pair of large panel vans that had been backed up to the docks. Rex Schaub was supervising, but Roy didn’t recognize anyone else. Those who were gutting his home were nameless, faceless sorts. Roy hated them on principle, but he appreciated this much: they’d left the loading dock open. He waited until they deposited a load in the truck and returned to the building, and then he followed, slipping into the pressroom, the massive machinery taking shape from shadows. He had no idea what a press like this was worth. It had been a big deal when they’d added it because the thing could print color pages on the inside, a first in the Sentinel’s history. Was there even a market for such equipment, or did it go to scrap now?
Your entire life, headed for scrap, Roy thought. Not even the dusty pages remain for you—you’ll never make it that far. The day of the dusty pages is done.
He stopped at the door to the morgue, realizing that this might be it for him. The last time in the building, the last perusal of all those pages of newsprint. Thanks to Kimble—and Wyatt—he had one last assignment, one last Sawyer County story to tell. But when he left the newspaper today… well, that might be it. The clean-out crew would work its way down to the morgue eventually. The building would soon enough be a hollowed-out corpse, and then the property would be sold, the structure torn down or converted into something else, and all that would remain of the Sawyer County Sentinel was the impact of the stories it had told.
He sat down with his notebook, where he’d written the names from Wyatt’s photographs in a column. He’d start with those, the known quantities being far easier to trace, and then deal with the mysterious old photographs, trying to put names where Wyatt had put only NO. That would not be an easy task.
Kimble had told him the names were likely to belong to murderers, which meant they were likely to be in the old index—murder in Sawyer County generally qualified as big news. Tracing some of the older cases back might be tricky, but the more recent ones should move quickly enough. He didn’t need to know any more about Jacqueline Mathis, and Kimble had already found out the significance of Ryan O’Patrick and Adam Estes.