“You think it’s any nutcase in particular?” Pescoli asked him as he stuffed the sword back in its box, closed the lid, and put it back on the shelf.
“She’s gotten threatening letters from a bunch of those jerk-wads and their families. One woman even came to Mom’s door once, called her a bitch and all sorts of names. Mom just had her arrested and got a restraining order against her.”
Pescoli asked, “Who was that?”
“Edie Gardener. She came over to Mom’s house around Halloween, I think, maybe just after. Went on a real tirade. Mom shut the door, called the police, and got a restraining order, but it kinda freaked me out when she told me about it.” He found a bare spot on a bench near the window, sat down, and clasped his hands between his knees. “This is just so . . . fucking unbelievable!”
“Win! Please. Language. We don’t talk that way. Now that we have Lily—”
“Mom is dead, Cee-Cee,” he snapped, his face suddenly flushing a deep, angry red, for the first time showing some of his mother’s fire. “Today, I think I can talk any fucking way I want.”
“But—” She was about to argue, then backed off, rubbing her protruding belly as she leaned back into her chair. “Fine, Winston. Fine.” Still slightly ruffled, with her daughter still calling to her from a bedroom down the hallway, she turned to the detectives. “It’s just such a stressful time for us right now.”
Pescoli understood. “We’ll try to make it as short and painless as possible. Anyone else beside Edie Gardener that you know threatened your mother?” she asked Winston.
Dan was the same.
Still in ICU.
Still in a coma.
Still under guard.
Still hooked up to machines, monitors, and tubes, his head bandaged.
Come on, brother, you can pull through this.
Cade stared down at the man he’d looked up to all of his life and willed him to get better.
He’d been here for nearly an hour, but if he’d hoped to see any small sign of improvement, he’d been disappointed. There was one more bed occupied now, a teenaged girl who, he’d heard, had been in a car accident that had taken the life of her boyfriend. She, too, was comatose, didn’t even know yet that he was dead.
The place was depressing and Cade was struggling to be patient. When he’d first asked, and then demanded, answers of the nursing staff and a doctor who the nurse had called in, he’d found out little more.
The platitudes hadn’t helped. No soft smiles or understanding looks could make him feel the slightest bit better.
He’d heard: “Your brother is doing as well as can be expected.” “He hasn’t been under care all that long.” “We’ll know more in the next few days.”
But no one had been able to give him the assurances he needed. At an intellectual level, he understood, but at a pure, raw, gut-emotional level, he was frustrated and scared as hell.
The truth of the matter seemed to be that there was no real prognosis, that every day Dan survived was a good sign, and that, for now, his condition was on a wait-and-see mode. No more surgery was scheduled and, Cade guessed, they were in for the long haul.
“I’ll see ya, Dan,” he said, and walked out of the big, sterile building where his brother clung to life.
He told himself to suck it up. Deal with the situation. He’d lived on a ranch most of his thirty-eight years. He knew about accidents and life and death. But he couldn’t convince himself to just let things take their course, that Dan was in the best medical facility in the area, that, by the hands of skilled surgeons and the grace of God, his brother would pull through.
Cade needed to do something, anything to help. As he drove away from Missoula, the lights of the town appearing in his rearview mirror, before the snow and distance extinguished them, he thought about all the times Dan had come to his rescue. From the time Dan had dived into the swift river to pull his nearly drowned brother Cade to safety when he’d been ten, to keeping his mouth shut when Cade had snuck out as a teenager, Dan had always been Cade’s savior. Hell, Dan had even taken the blame for a fender bender that would have canceled Cade’s insurance when he’d just started driving. Even as adults, Dan had tried to hold his younger brother’s rash, impulsive streak down. Hadn’t he counseled Cade against pursuing Hattie? Hadn’t Dan wrestled him down, put him in a choke hold, and told him that chasing Hattie while she was dating Bart was not only a fool’s mission, but a show of complete dishonor? Had it stopped him, no. Dan’s advice of “leave her alone” had gone unheeded. To this damned day, Cade hadn’t been able to control some of his most visceral and primal of urges—not when it came to Bart’s ex-wife. But Dan had tried to save Cade from himself.
Always.
Two years older, and light-years ahead of him in maturity, Dan had always been the rock of the family, the strong one, at least to Cade. Second-born, Dan had assumed the leader role in the family, a role Zed hadn’t been happy about relinquishing. While Zed seemed to have been born angry and his own trouble with the law had proved it, Dan had always been pleasant and even-keeled. Cade had earned his role of hellion with every scar on his body, and Bart, the youngest, was always a step behind the rest, never sure of himself.
Now, Bart was gone and Dan was barely alive.
Cade took a corner a little too quickly and his pickup slid a bit, but he held tight to the wheel, rode out the slide, and stared into the night. He met a few cars, the beams of their headlights diffused in the snow, but he drove by rote, the heater throwing off enough air to keep the windshield clear, the radio silent; only the sound of tires humming on the frozen pavement and the steady growl of the engine disturbed the night.
Once in Grizzly Falls he stopped at the Black Horse, a local watering hole where he downed a beer and ate a chili dog, then drove on to the sheriff’s office where he watched the press conference.
Darla Vale, the public information officer, stood at a makeshift podium under the cover of the overhang at the top of the few stairs leading into the building. To one side, still protected from the snow that continued to fall, the acting sheriff stood in full uniform, his face grave, his hands at his side. Next to Brewster were the two detectives working the case. Alvarez, looking as sharp as Brewster, though she was wearing street clothes, and Pescoli, taller, a little disheveled, but as serious as her partner.