“He’s going to live. That bastard Kjel is bloody going to live. I swear he’s got nine lives, and he’s just getting started.”
She stared, confusion churning through her brain. “The arrow—it ... his neck. He wasn’t breathing. He—”
“He was breathing. If that arrow had hit him just a few millimeters farther left or to the right or gone in slightly higher or lower, or if the archer had used a more lethal arrowhead, like a broadhead tip, itwouldhave pierced a major artery. It would have damaged major working parts. But he was alive when they found him. They medevaced him out, flew him to Vancouver. After scanning him, making sure the arrow hadn’t hit any critical working pieces, the surgeons operated and successfully removed it.” He smiled, and Angie thought her heart would burst. “He’s stable. Recovering.” A laugh. “We’re not getting rid of that weirdo this quickly, and unfortunately, he will still be able to speak and chew that wretched green gum of his.”
“Oh God,” she whispered as it dawned on her. “He ... was alive when I left him. I just left him there. I ... the explosion. I saw his eyes staring up at the sky. He wasn’t moving. They were shooting at us, and the fire ... I saw a face in the container window—” Angie fell silent, struggling to pull it all back into her memory. “It was her,” she said. “It was Annelise Janssen being held captive, locked in that container, and it was catching on fire. Triage. The fire. I had to. I—I just left him.”
“Shh,” he said again, stroking her cheek. “Claire had called the RCMP in Port Ferris before you even arrived. She phoned the station as soon as she heard her father saying that he was going out to Axel Tollet’s place. She feared the worst, and she was right. Jacobi came right away, radioed for backup. They got a chopper into the air, dropped some guys in there. They managed to stabilize Holgersen. If you’d tried to move him, Angie, youwouldhave killed him. Some angel up there was looking after that guy. And after you.”
Tears ran copiously from her eyes now, and she did not try to hold them back. “Annelise?”
“Serious but stable. She was also airlifted out. They took her to Vic General. Her parents are with her now. Her whole extended family is with her. You saved her, Angie. After all these months, her mother and father had all but given up hope. The odds were stacked so high statistically against her being found alive at this point. A whole media phalanx is camped outside the hospital. Including international press.”
“Not me—Holgersen,hesaved her. He was on it before I even took him up there. He was onto the possibility of Axel, Sea-Tech Freight, putting two and two together that Axel might be the driver of the van that took her from that bus shelter.”
Maddocks seated himself beside her bed. Holding her hand, he said, “Yeah, as soon as our iMIT tech got his message this morning, she got hold of Sea-Tech admin and ran Axel Tollet’s routes and old delivery records against those cold missing persons cases Holgersen believed were linked. Tollet came up as a match—his delivery routes, the van, the logo, the dates, all of it.”
“A serial?”
Maddocks nodded. “I knew in my gut that Holgersen was going to be good on the cold case beat. I just knew he’d pull something out of those files. The mayor and police board are already patting themselves on the backs over the new funding and taking credit.”
“So, Jasmine Gulati—”
“Tollet’s first, it seems. So far, anyway. He apparently found her washed up downriver below the falls, all broken, and he ‘rescued’ her. Kept her locked up. No shoes so she couldn’t run away. He used her sexually, like a gift from his precious river. Then he found out she was pregnant. He built her that container house, covered it with dirt, and grew brambles over it in some sort of attempt to hide the place or to keep sound from getting out. We don’t know for sure yet. She gave birth in that container.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Some of it from Garrison Tollet. He came right out the gate talking and denying he hadanythingto do with either death. Not Porter Bates’s murder years ago. Nor Jasmine Gulati’s death.”
“Axel killed Jasmine?”
Maddocks snorted softly and moved a strand of hair off her face. “Yes. When she tried to escape. She had no shoes, but he’d gotten lax toward the end of her pregnancy. He’d apparently been taking her out of the container regularly to sit in the sunshine and to walk about in bare feet a bit. After she’d given birth, Jasmine became fiercely determined to get free. She’d seen the waders hanging in his shed, and she knew they were neoprene and would help keep her warm, even if they were slightly big. And they had boots attached. She made the break when her baby was two months old. Axel Tollet discovered them gone just minutes after Jasmine fled with her infant. He chased her down very quickly because she was having trouble outrunning him in those wading boots. He killed her mere minutes after she’d escaped.”
Angie closed her eyes again, trying to process it all. Her head was still thick. She moistened her lips. They were cracked and dry. Maddocks brought a glass of water to her mouth, helped her sip. She lay back on the pillow.
“Who killed Axel, then? Why? Who shot at me and Holgersen? Who set the place on fire?”
“Garrison Tollet claims Wallace Carmanagh killed Axel. He said it was Wallace Carmanagh who shot arrows at you in the moss grove, too.” He paused. “Wallace had the most to lose if you found out what happened with Porter Bates because according to Garrison, Wallace killed him, drowned him. In revenge for what Porter Bates did to Axel. The twins helped by carrying Porter Bates to the quarry and standing watch. It was Garrison, however, who lured Bates onto the secluded woodland trail where the others were waiting in ambush and jumped him. They beat him and trussed him up like a rodeo calf, hauled him off to the quarry, weighted him with concrete blocks, and sank him. But after you started poking around, they came to believe Axel would talk, and that would expose them for the Bates murder.”
“But the other missing women Holgersen linked to the Annelise Janssen case—what happened to them? How did that all play out? How—”
“The Tollet-Carmanagh gang didn’t have a clue there’d been others, Ange. They knew only about Jasmine. They thought Jasmine was a one-off weird sex thing for poor Axel, who’d never had an intimate female relationship in his life after being sodomized by Porter Bates and his boys. They were shocked to find Annelise being held captive in that container—they learned she was in there only when they arrived to eliminate Axel and burn his place down.”
“They had no idea at all?”
“Not according to what Garrison is saying. The gang had been going to attempt to make it all look like an accidental fire to hide the murder and to make sure they eliminated any old traces that might have been around from when he’d kept Jasmine. But then you and Holgersen arrived, and everything went sideways. From the detective I’ve spoken with, the RCMP figure Axel Tollet happened upon Jasmine just after she washed up. A crime of opportunity. But he learned from his experience with Jasmine that he liked female companionship, and he wanted more. He learned that capturing and keeping a woman for a period of time was a way to obtain sex.”
“What happened to his other victims? How many were there?”
“No one knows yet. Maybe we’ll never know. This investigation will take time. They’ve got a huge forensic ident crew starting to work on that homestead. Bottom line, the four men—Garrison, Joey, Beau, and Wallace—were all up at Axel’s place when you arrived. They’d come in two vehicles, but they all chased you in the one truck. Wallace has a dog, which they used to track you down before you and Annelise went into the river. But Darnell Jacobi and Claire Tollet were already on it from the other side.”
He gave her another sip of water and set the glass down again.
“Jacobi had called for reinforcements, which were already on their way. Jacobi and Claire Tollet were driving toward the boat put-out below the falls to go across in the jet craft—they had it on the trailer. They saw you from the road going into the water. Claire got that boat into the river pretty damn fast. Thanks to her SAR training, her swift-water skills, she and Jacobi hauled both you and Annelise out of that water in remarkable time. Jacobi radioed for medical assistance while they both worked to stabilize you guys.” He paused. “You owe Claire and Jacobi your lives. You’d have both gone over those falls like Jasmine did.”
Angie inhaled deeply. She hadn’t been sure where the young woman’s allegiances lay. But she’d read Claire correctly. She was an empathetic young woman with a solid conscience. She was just. But now Claire had to face the fact her father had done some very bad things. Poor woman. Poor Shelley. Life in that lodge as that family knew it was over.
He watched her intently as she digested it all.
