The Ridge(50)

Roy frowned as he looked at the list. Estes. That name snagged on something in his brain, troubled him for no reason that he could articulate.

Adam Estes. Where had he just seen that? It was down here, in the morgue. He was sure of that. But the only reading he’d done here was confirming Wyatt’s list of accident victims.

“The drowned girl,” he said. That’s where he’d seen it. While reading about a red-ink name, Jenna Jerden. In 1975, Jerden had drowned in a canoeing accident in the Marshall River, trying to clear the swift eddies around the trestle in the dark. She hadn’t been alone. Her boyfriend had survived. Adam Estes.

He found the right volume, tracked down the story, and there it was. While Jerden had drowned among the rocks and dark water, her boyfriend had made it to shore, then gone for help. It was a long run to the nearest phone from Blade Ridge in 1975, though, and the help that finally came arrived far too late. The Sentinel commended the man on his futile efforts, while including a police quote that reprimanded the couple for attempting to canoe the unfamiliar and often dangerous river in the dark. The survivor was Adam Estes, thirty-three, of Whitman.

In 1975, Adam Estes had survived an accident at Blade Ridge that claimed another life.

In 1976, he’d killed a man.

“They can’t all be like that,” Roy said. There was no way.


It was noon by the time Kimble left the cat preserve. The scene had been processed, the body removed, the photographs taken. When he spoke to the coroner, the man said, “Damned unlucky spot these past few days, isn’t it?”

It sure was, Kimble agreed. It sure was.

He then said that in addition to the confirmed cause of death for Wesley Harrington, he would need an examination conducted on the tiger.

The coroner said, “You want us to do what?”

Kimble explained it again, patiently. It didn’t appear that the bullet had come out of the cat. There was an entry wound but no exit wound, as if the shoulder bone had stopped it. He wanted the bullet.

Just due diligence, he said.

But he was thinking about more than due diligence. He was thinking about the size of the entry wound and about the range from which Wesley Harrington would have fired his high-caliber rifle. They did not match his expectation. Kimble found it patently obvious who had killed the man—the tiger. But he wasn’t so sure about who had killed the tiger.

He didn’t like the situation at the cat preserve at all, and when he left Shipley and Wolverton at the scene, he had private instructions for them that went beyond what he’d told Audrey Clark their purpose was, hunting for the missing cougar. While they were searching for signs of the cat, he also wanted them searching for signs of a human. Particularly, he said, shell casings.

“You think someone else shot that cat?” Shipley said. “The rifle was in that man’s hand. The brass was right there inside the gate.”

“I know it was. And when the coroner gives me the bullet and we find out that it came from his gun, we can close the case. Until we have that confirmation, though? It’s an active investigation, Shipley. Treat it like one.”

He left them then, resumed the drive he’d been trying to make seven hours earlier, and now there was even more on his mind than there had been then, and all of it was bad, and all of it went back to Blade Ridge.


It was the first time Kimble had ever visited her in the afternoon, but Jacqueline Mathis showed no trace of surprise.

“We’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this,” she said, smiling. The line seemed to hurt her, though, and he understood. It was what she’d said one Friday morning at the Bakehouse, when it had become far too clear that their accidental encounters were anything but accidental. What she’d said on a bright spring morning when she was a free woman, living in a beautiful old farmhouse with a view of the mountains, young and gorgeous and far from any idea of prison.

“I’m not visiting,” he said. “I’m working.”

“Working?”

“That’s right. I’ve got some questions. It worked out that I was coming by, otherwise I’d have just made a phone call, but I figured…”

He let the lies stop there. Kimble tried hard to be as honest as any man born to sin could be, but he’d told his share of lies, enough to know that they were pointless when neither you nor the recipient believed them.

“But I figured I’d rather talk in person,” he finished.

“I’m always glad to see you. And the way you left the other day… well, I felt bad about it. It was as if you didn’t like the idea that I’m going to get back out.”

I’m going to get back out. Yes, she was. He stared at her and felt an ache along his back, down near the scar.