Captain finished a conversation with the head of the dive team and made his way toward Martin, his hands shoved in his pockets and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t be disappointed if they don’t find Michael,” Captain said.
Martin spun his phone in his hand. He knew he should be celebrating. Hazel and Ama would both spend tonight in their own beds. But he also doubted either one would sleep, that either one would feel completely free of Michael Walton until he was the one locked in a cage—or a coffin.
Martin’s phone buzzed with an incoming call, and Ama’s name flashed on the screen.
“Speak of the devil,” he muttered to himself. Captain raised an eyebrow.
“Hey,” Martin said into the phone.
“Have they found him yet?” she asked. Martin could practically feel her glaring.
“They just started,” he answered.
She was silent on the other end for two seconds. Three. “There’s a walking stick he carried. It has piano keys carved down the side.”
“I know the one. We found it. It’s bagged and tagged in evidence. GBI is taking over the case,” he added.
“Get it back,” she said.
“The case or the stick?” Martin asked, and pressed his fingers against his throbbing forehead.
“The stick.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Martin responded quietly.
“I need it, Martin,” she said, her voice breaking.
“You don’t want that in your house, Ama. God knows what he’s done with it.”
“If you don’t find him, that stick will be the best way to tell if he’s found me again,” she explained.
“How do you figure?”
“If he sneaks into my house or my office and the stick is there, he would have to take it, Martin. And if it’s gone, I’ll know he’s back.”
“Ama, we’ll find him,” Martin said.
“You don’t know Michael like I do,” Ama whispered, and hung up.
Martin stared at the ground, his hands squeezed into fists and planted on his sides. He needed to sleep for a week. He needed to drink or eat something besides coffee. He needed a damn body.
“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” Captain advised, regarding him from his peripheral vision. “I’m not saying Michael isn’t down there. With how many bone fragments we found in that bunker, I’d bet my fishing boat there’s at least one body in this river somewhere. Divers are just going to have a tough time finding it.”
Martin realized Captain was attempting to console him. “Why’s that?” he asked.
“The river is about thirty-five feet deep here, but the floor has a crevasse vein cut in it about four feet across at its widest points, and only the devil himself knows how deep that goes. They’ll do what they can, but it’s going to be slow going.” Captain dropped his cigarette to the damp earth and stomped it out with the toe of his shoe.
Martin leaned against a tree and watched for nearly an hour as divers surfaced, taking breaks or changing gear, and then sunk back down into the dark water. Each time they surfaced with no signal to the retrieval boat, the squeeze of pressure clenched harder. He tried to slow his mind, to calm his nerves, to silence the craving for a hit roaring in his blood. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed Stacy’s number. She picked up on the second ring.
“What’s wrong?” she asked upon answering.
Martin relayed the events of the past forty-eight hours and the revelation about Jonathon Walks and Michael Walton. “We had him cornered on a riverbank. We had him, and he jumped,” Martin explained, curtaining his mouth with his hand. “They’re searching the water now.”
“You found the girl. Isn’t that the most important part?”
“Ama found her,” Martin admitted, and in his mind, he made the commitment to bring her that damn stick no matter who he pissed off to do it.
“You know, Marty, I know this is a rough day, but you sound… you sound like yourself. I think the move has been good for you.”
“I wanted a fix,” he confessed.
“You called me instead,” she reasoned. “Call me back if you need to.”
“I will,” Martin answered. A faint smile crossed his face. “I love you,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“I know you do,” she answered quietly, and the line went dead.
Martin pocketed his phone and watched a diver’s bubbles rise, breaking the surface of the water. His craving was temporarily alleviated, but his heart was heavy as a stone. All he’d done in the last year was let people down: his ex and Toni, now Eddie, Hazel, and Ama. He needed to move his legs and clear his head, the pressure of this truth too thick to breathe through while standing still. Maybe he’d go buy a Sunday copy of the AJC and amuse himself with the fact that news of Ama’s kamikaze stunt had no doubt bumped Esther Kim’s article off the front page. He took one last glance at the water in spite of himself. The diver who’d just emerged pulled out his mouthpiece and waved.
“We got something!”
* * *
Martin stared down at the gray, lifeless faces of Michael and Janie Walton as a GBI forensic tech took photograph after photograph of their bodies. He zeroed in on Michael’s neck, where a silver cord looped in a snare around his throat, then ran straight for about a foot before coiling around Janie’s wrist, joining them together. Her fingers strangled the metal even in death. The coroner mentioned that it was too early to declare who had drowned who, but Martin recalled the stony resolve on Janie’s face during their drive to the factory, how she could smell the river, the way she had disappeared into the woods.
Michael’s shirt had a gaping hole, revealing a gunshot wound that exited to the left of his belly button, blood washed clean from the wound and the fabric from a night spent in frigid, moving water. When Martin saw Toni’s trademark garnet ring bagged in the evidence collected in the initial sweep of Michael’s underground bunker, he’d held it up to the sun, watched the light wink off the stone, wanting to believe Toni knew, wherever her soul was, that he’d never stopped looking, never stopped trying to find who killed her. He’d been unwittingly hunting this man for a year, and even when he knew his name, he never knew his face. He studied Michael now, wondering if there could’ve been any telltale sign Martin could’ve spotted had he crossed paths with him when Michael was alive.
“I didn’t see the male at first,” one of the divers said to Martin. “The female’s body had settled across the crevasse and was lodged half under a rock. His body had dropped inside the crack, but the wire kept him from sliding all the way down.”
“Stroke of luck,” Martin managed to say, leaning back against the lip of the boat as the tech motioned for the coroner to zip the body bags. He watched Michael’s profile vanish beneath the black canvas and nearly asked them to reopen it just so he could make sure Michael hadn’t disappeared.
They followed the coroner off the boat and to the access road, where the bodies were loaded into the back of a van. Two uniformed personnel slammed the doors shut, and Captain clamped a hand on Martin’s shoulder.