Free High Crimes by Joseph Finder Page A

which she didn’t, she was driving along a stretch of the turnpike in the Berkshires near Lee, Massachusetts, where the road was lightly trafficked. She thought about Annie, asleep in bed, with Jackie downstairs, smoking.
    The road became hilly out here. It cut through ravines, then out into the open, up a steep grade to the top of a hill. She drove slowly, in the breakdown lane, hazard lights flashing. No one was following her, that she felt sure of. As she began her descent down the steep gradient, she noticed, in her rear-view mirror, a car pull out of a wooded turnoff, lights dark, and accelerate until it was just behind her. The car flashed its high-beams twice.
    She pulled off the road into the next turnoff, which was shrouded by a dense copse, and switched off her lights.
    Her heart hammered.
    She stared straight ahead, not daring to turn her head to look.
    The other car pulled up just behind her and coasted to a stop. She heard the car door open, heard footsteps on the pavement.
    Now she turned to look out of her rolled-up window and saw Tom, a few days’ growth of beard like charcoal smudge on his face, binoculars hanging from a strap around his neck, smiling down at her, and she smiled back.
    Tears flooded her eyes, and she threw her arms around him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

    She followed him in the Lexus along a meandering route, off the turnpike, onto local roads that became country roads, until she had no idea where they were. Tom was driving an old black Jeep Wrangler, though where he’d gotten it he hadn’t explained. They passed through a small town that seemed frozen in the 1950s. She glimpsed an old orange Rexall Drug sign, a Woolworth that had to be fifty years old, an antique round Gulf sign. The town was dark and shuttered. Along an unlit country road past a low modern brick elementary school, through a railroad crossing, and then nothing for a very long time. Then Tom signaled her to stop.
    She parked the Lexus and joined him in the Jeep.
    “Where are we going?” she asked.
    He nodded. “I’ll tell you everything. Soon.” He took an abrupt, unmarked turnoff into a dense forest, the road degenerating in abrupt phases from macadam to hard-packed gravel, on which the wheels crunched for a good five minutes, to rutted earth for even longer, until it dead-ended at a shelf of rock, jutting shale and schist and irregular boulders. He switched off the lights, then the engine, and let the Jeep coast to a stop. Then took a large black Maglite from the floor and motioned for her to get out with him.
    By the flashlight’s powerful concentrated beam they entered a cluster of large misshapen firs, starved of sunlight in the dense forestation that crowded the shore of a small lake. He navigated a jagged course along a path that was barely a path, a lightly trodden trace of dirt between the towering trees. Claire followed him, losing her footing several times. She was wearing her dress shoes: no traction. Outside the cone of light that shone from Tom’s flashlight, she could see nothing. All was blackness. There didn’t seem to be a moon in the sky.
    “Stay close,” Tom said. “Careful.”
    “Why?”
    “Stay close,” he repeated.
    Finally he stopped at a small, crude wooden house along the bank—a shack, really—with a steeply sloping, asphalt-shingled roof that here and there was missing its shingles. The shack was in rough shape. There was a small window, but a yellowed paper shade pulled all the way down hid the interior. The roof came down low enough that Claire could touch the eave. The shack appeared to have been painted white once, probably decades ago; now the remaining splinters of white paint looked like tiny snowdrifts on the weathered clapboard siding.
    “Welcome,” Tom said.
    “What is this?” But Claire knew her question was all but unanswerable: what is what, precisely? That it was an all-but-abandoned shack on the shore of a deserted lake in western Massachusetts was obvious. That it was a