“Mr. Bascombe. Good to see you again. Sorry it has to be under these circumstances.” Exactly what the sheriff would have wanted him to say. Halliwell was relieved and disgruntled simultaneously.
The older man knitted his brow almost imperceptibly. “Yes. Thank you.”
You don’t have the first clue that we’ve met before, Halliwell thought. Not that he was surprised. He hadn’t been running for office, after all. A sheriff’s detective was beneath notice for a guy like Bascombe. Why bother with the help when he could buy the boss?
Bascombe gestured to a chair. “Have a seat.”
It was more an instruction than an invitation. Halliwell did not take well to commands, but he was willing to cooperate if it meant getting back to his own life faster. He sunk into a high-backed burgundy chair. Bascombe came into the room but instead of sitting properly in a chair, he leaned on the arm of the sofa and looked at Ted as though the detective were a jury.
“What, precisely, did the sheriff tell you about the ‘circumstances’?”
Halliwell hated lawyers. “Your son was supposed to be married today. All I’ve been told is that no one has seen him since last night.”
Bascombe nodded and took a deep breath. For the first time, Halliwell thought he saw some humanity under the lawyerly veneer. Sadness, disappointment, perhaps even embarrassment. Reluctantly, he reassessed Max Bascombe. It was, he allowed, just possible that though the man wore his lawyerly face often enough that he had forgotten how to behave around ordinary people, Bascombe was not entirely without a soul.
“My daughter tells me that Oliver . . .” the man began, then trailed off, sighing with regret.
“Oliver’s your son?”
“My son. Yes.” Bascombe shook his head. “But he was always more his mother’s son than mine. Far more like her, God rest her. Sentimental. Lost in the clouds.” He frowned and glanced up as though annoyed to discover that he had spoken these personal thoughts aloud. “My daughter, Collette, tells me that Oliver was having second thoughts about the wedding. First I’d heard of it, of course. God forbid he should have spoken to his father if he was troubled.”
Halliwell waited for the rest, but the man seemed content to leave it at that. The detective leaned forward in his chair.
“Mr. Bascombe . . . I’m confused. Why, exactly, did you call the sheriff? Your son is an adult. It seems pretty clear what happened here. Awkward as it may be, he’s perfectly within his rights to—”
“The hell with his rights!” Bascombe snapped, eyes narrowing angrily. “I want him found. And today. The wedding mass is at three o’clock this afternoon and Oliver damn well better be at the church by then.”
Halliwell stared at him. “If there was any reason to think something had happened to him, I’m sure we could—”
Max Bascombe stopped him with a glare, and Ted Halliwell hated that he could be silenced that way. It churned in his gut. There was nothing he would have liked more than to give Bascombe a lesson in the realities of police business, but though he probably could have found employment in any town in Maine, he enjoyed working for the sheriff’s department. And Ted had no doubt that Bascombe could have him fired.
“I’m sorry,” the dapper man said, surprising the detective. He offered a wan smile that seemed genuine. “I know this isn’t what you signed up for. I’m sure it’s not what you wanted to spend your day doing. But I need your help, Detective. Yours and the sheriff’s. Oliver is going to regret this the instant he stops to think about what he’s done. Forget the expense and the— how did you put it? Awkwardness. He’s going to shatter this girl who loves him, and ruin his life. I just want to look him in the eye and make sure he understands this decision. As his father, I have to do that for him. I’m not asking you to cuff him and haul him back here. Just find him for me and I’ll go to him.”
Halliwell stared at Bascombe for a long moment. The man’s candor— his sudden, revelatory reasonableness— was a surprise. The detective knew he had a chip on his shoulder and was willing to consider that Bascombe might really want what was best for his son. Or, what he thought was best. Either way, he didn’t have much choice.
“I can’t make you any promises, Mr. Bascombe. I can get a list from you of your son’s friends and any places he likes to spend time. I’ll move as quickly as I can and I’ll be quiet about it. But we’re talking hours, and if he doesn’t want to be found—”
Bascombe halted him with an upraised hand. “Understood, Detective. You have no idea how much I appreciate your help.” He stood up and walked toward the bay windows at the front of the house, but paused before he got there and turned to regard Halliwell carefully. “Do you have any children?”
None of your business, Ted thought. But he nodded. “A daughter.”
He expected Bascombe to make some kind of comment, either regarding the irresponsibility of sons or just in general about the trials and tribulations of fatherhood, but the man only seemed to contemplate the response for a moment before offering a small shrug and heading for the exit.
“For Oliver’s sake, I hope you find him quickly,” Bascombe said.
Halliwell recognized his cue to depart and got up to follow the man. “I’ll do my best.”
In the foyer, Bascombe turned to look at him. “It’s my understanding, Detective, that your best is pretty significant. The sheriff has a high opinion of you.”
Halliwell had no idea how to respond to that. The two men regarded each other awkwardly.
“All right,” Bascombe said. “Let me get Friedle in here, and Collette as well. Oliver’s sister. The two of them will have a far better idea where he might have gone than I would.”
As Max Bascombe strode away, Halliwell wondered if the man had any idea how very telling a statement he had just made. To look for Oliver Bascombe, he needed a list of the young man’s friends and his hangouts. And his father did not have the first clue what to put on that list.
Not that Halliwell was in any position to judge. There was a reason his own daughter only spoke to him every couple of months. Even back when Sara was in high school he wouldn’t have been able to answer those questions.
A minute or so passed before an attractive young woman appeared in Bascombe’s place. She was petite and finely boned, pale with a spray of light freckles across the bridge of her nose, and thick blonde hair that fell to her shoulders.
“My father said to tell you he had to take a phone call but he and Friedle would be along in a minute. I’m supposed to tell you where Oliver might be.”
“That would help,” Halliwell replied, studying her. The woman, late twenties or so, was deeply troubled, and not just because the wedding might not come off today. “You’re his sister?”
“Collette.”
“Ted Halliwell.”
She crossed her arms and hugged herself as though she was cold. “You’re a detective, right?”
“Yes.”
Her scrutiny in that moment made him uncomfortable. “I’ll give you the names and the places you want. But I know my brother. He might’ve gotten cold feet, and he was absolutely feeling some nervousness about going through with the marriage. But he loves Julianna. No way is Oliver going to just take off like this. He’s not the kind of man who could ever do something like that. If he decided he couldn’t go through with it, he would’ve gotten in his car and gone over to tell her.”
Halliwell knew it was possible for people to hide their true selves, even from the ones who loved them most, but the woman seemed very sure of herself, and of her relationship with her brother. He didn’t like the sound of it, either.
“What are you suggesting?”
She glanced back the way she’d come to see if anyone was within hearing distance. When she looked at Halliwell again, she seemed lost. “My father doesn’t want to hear it. This is the sort of thing he would expect of Oliver, but Dad doesn’t know him at all. Not really. So you’re going to have to take the list and look. But I’m afraid that . . .”
Collette brought one hand up to massage the bridge of her nose, then slid it down over her mouth as though subconsciously wishing she could silence herself.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Halliwell. Oliver wouldn’t do this. And before we all assume he would, that he’d just break Julianna’s heart like this, maybe we should be asking how he got out of here? He was gone before the plow came this morning, and his car is still in the garage anyway. So, what? Did my brother just walk out of here in the middle of the night, in a blizzard?”
Halliwell stared at her. The Kitteridge police should certainly have been called into this thing, but Bascombe wanted it kept quiet and wanted it handled quickly. The local cops wouldn’t start looking for Oliver Bascombe until Monday unless there was some sign of foul play. And even then it would be in every local newspaper.
But the sister was right to be concerned. Halliwell couldn’t imagine anyone— especially a young lawyer who stood to inherit his father’s wealth— going for a leisurely stroll in the storm they’d had last night. Unless he had someone on Rose Ridge Lane he could have stayed with, he wasn’t going to get very far.
He would have to do what Bascombe and the sheriff wanted, follow up on the leads, try to track down the guy that way. At least until the church bells rang and the wedding ceremony was supposed to get under way. If he hadn’t found Oliver Bascombe by then, Halliwell was going to take a very different approach to this case.
It had suddenly become very messy. Collette Bascombe was afraid for her brother, and Ted Halliwell was worried that she might have reason to be.
His morning, which had started seriously shitty, had just gone abruptly downhill.
* * *
The massive granite doors at the entrance to the fortress of the Sandmen hung wide open. The approach across the dunes and up the hill toward the castle had been difficult. Oliver’s legs ached from the give of the sand beneath his feet, and the grit stung his eyes. The sun reflected off the dunes and raised the temperature twenty degrees over what it had been back on the road.
The night had been long and he was tired. It was catching up to him and he yawned in spite of the troubling sight of the stone gates hanging wide.
Just inside the fortress’s outer wall they found the second of the dead Sandmen. Bloody Caps, Frost had called them. Now the winter man paused in the courtyard between the fortress walls and the castle itself and, as Kitsune and Oliver watched, his fingers grew long and sharp as butcher knives.
“I need a weapon,” Oliver said, his voice a rasp.
Frost and Kitsune looked at him and then at each other. With her red-fur hood shading her face he could not see Kitsune’s expression well, but her jade eyes gleamed in that shadow as she studied him.
“Yes. That would be wise. We shall have to find you something. For now, though, you must do without, and rely upon us to protect you if we can.”
“That doesn’t inspire much confidence.”
Neither of the Borderkind bothered to reply. They started across the courtyard as though they wanted to be attacked. Oliver went more warily, glancing up at the castle and around at the interior walls of the fortress. It was all sand. All of it. Hard-packed so that it seemed almost like concrete, but he knew better. Sand blew across the courtyard and sifted against the walls, swirled up into dust devils, and showered down when the wind died. But there was nothing in sight that he might have used as a weapon. Not a piece of wood or a rock, and sure as hell not a box of hand grenades.
Oliver drew his fingers across his eyes, smearing grit and moisture, and picked up his pace. Ahead of him, Kitsune and Frost had stopped at the tall castle doors. Even as he approached, Oliver was beckoned forward by the winter man. He was more translucent than ever as he turned toward Oliver and raised a hand to urge Oliver on with those dagger fingers. His blue-white eyes gave off a mist of frosty condensation.
“Do not tarry, Oliver. Not with so much death here, and the whereabouts of its bringers uncertain.”
Kitsune had crouched in front of the partially open door. Her cloak rustled in the breeze, but not where it lay across her back or on her arms. There it simply rippled with the motion of her body, with the muscles underneath.
The castle doors were open only slightly, but in that gap was a third corpse, severed nearly in half.
When Frost pulled the doors open, dried skin and flesh stuck to the sides, and strings of it held on like spiderwebs, until at last the doors were wide enough that they snapped. It might have had sand instead of blood, but there were organs of some kind inside of it. Oliver averted his eyes. If he had looked at the remains for another moment he would have vomited.
He stepped over the dead creature so quickly that he nearly ran into Frost and Kitsune. He was so close to her that his face almost brushed the cloak, and he inhaled a powerful musk that rose off her. A sudden, stunning arousal raced through him and he took an involuntary step back, his heel landing atop the leg of the dead creature. Its skin burst like papier-mâché and it crumbled to dust. Or sand.
The winter man glanced back at him, danger in his eyes.
“You may want to find that weapon now, Oliver.”
Kitsune moved aside, glancing around for any sign of imminent threat, and Frost stepped slowly into the vast, cathedral-like chamber that was the main hall of the Sandmen’s castle. Oliver could only stare.
There were dozens of them. Perhaps hundreds. The Bloody Caps were all dead, strewn in bits and pieces around the floor of that massive cathedral and across the ornate staircases all around its circumference that led into other areas of the castle. Their clothes were shredded, skin and bones shattered and torn. Only their iron boots seemed intact. Untouched.
Kitsune moved in and out of the sunlight that streamed through the high windows, disappearing into shadows and then reappearing. The winter man’s body glinted with refracted light and he moved with strange, unhurried grace as he examined the scene. Oliver stepped carefully over the broken corpses of the hideous little things. Sleep bringers and dream makers, according to myth. They were horrible, but Oliver could not help pitying them.
