Follow Me to the Edge Read online

  ALSO BY TARIQ ASHKANANI

  Welcome to Cooper

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Tariq Ashkanani

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542031325

  ISBN-10: 154203132X

  Cover design by Ghost Design

  For Sami

  CONTENTS

  May 1993

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Laura

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Laura

  Chapter Ten

  Laura

  Chapter Eleven

  Laura

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Laura

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Laura

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Laura

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Laura

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Laura

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Laura

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Laura

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Laura

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Laura

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  May 1993

  The blood wasn’t going to come off easily. It had long since dried.

  The water was cold, which didn’t help. Empty soap dispensers, too. It made Joe think of high-school bathrooms. Kids who used the mirrors to wipe their fingers dry; who wouldn’t bother washing their hands after a piss even if there was soap.

  That had been all Joe could think about on the ride over here. Getting clean. Sitting in the back of a cruiser, gliding along that straight, narrow highway in the dark. At some point it had started to rain. Heavy enough to dull the sounds of the road, to have the wipers on full. Joe had watched the droplets race along his window, his bloodied hands in his lap. They’d trembled all the way back to Cooper.

  The icy water came off his skin rust-tinged. Progress of a kind, he supposed. He scratched at his fingers, digging at the clumps that had collected between his knuckles. The blood had splashed across his chest and down his legs. It was in his shoes.

  The mirror in the bathroom was cracked. Shattered glass that sent a thousand of him back. Pale-faced, and with the right side of his blond hair matted with red. He must have run his hand through it. Afterward, maybe, while they’d waited by the side of the road. As the air cooled and the dusk settled. Together, the dead and the dying, and Joe, and the boy. And now his chest shook, and his hair was slick with another man’s blood.

  The detective at the door cleared his throat. Tossed him a towel. Joe took it, dried himself. When he was done the white material was red, and the detective pointed at the laundry hamper in the corner.

  The guy had been his shadow ever since they’d picked Joe up at the scene. Three hours in a little room with nothing but a plastic cup and a growing urge to piss. Said his name was Fields. Said it like him and Joe had never met before, only they had. A bunch of times. Detectives never did pay much attention to lowly patrol officers.

  Joe had told his story four times now, to four different people. People who nodded sympathetically and scribbled notes; people who got him coffees and offered him cigarettes. Offered him reassurances. That it had been a clean shooting, that Ballistics would back up his story. They’d taken his gun anyway.

  “One of our own,” they kept saying. They meant Frank. His partner. The guy who had just taken a faceful of buckshot during a routine traffic stop. Joe hadn’t even thought; he’d just pulled his Smith and Wesson and returned fire.

  “Come on,” Fields said, pushing open the restroom door. “Weather’s bad. I’ll give you a ride home.”

  But Joe didn’t want to go home. Didn’t want to try to sleep; he knew what he’d see when he closed his eyes. Hell, he could see it with them open: the red Buick, pulled over to the highway’s dusty shoulder ahead of them, its hazards flashing. The gleam of silver as Frank tossed the dime to decide who would approach. Frank’s laugh as it landed. Your lucky day—his last words.

  No, Joe wasn’t going home.

  He got a ride to the hospital instead.

  The waiting room was filled with the usual Friday-night clientele. Guys in football jerseys, chanting, leering at a woman passed out in the corner. Bar fights and drunken falls. Overdoses, people covered in vomit, holding their broken arms, holding each other. Joe pushed past a couple of hookers who catcalled him, calling him “baby” and “sugar.” They were flying, their faces busted. A drunk clutched a bloody towel in his hands and lay across three seats, crying quietly. Joe spotted a single nurse trying to keep order. She brandished a clipboard like it was a shield.

  Joe reached the edge of the throng and didn’t stop. Through double doors and into a long corridor. Someone called after him—that nurse, maybe—but he kept going. His shoes squeaked on the linoleum floor. He was jumpy, his heart staccato. Every cry from a patient’s bed was that kid howling from the back seat of the Buick. Every door slam was buckshot. Maybe he’d been wrong to come here.

  He knew where he was going. He barely glanced at the signs, the muscle memory still fresh. Half a childhood spent here with his brother, then five years as a Cooper cop to fill in any gaps. He’d gotten to know the hospital all too well.

  He dodged an orderly with a cart, barreled through another set of double doors and up two flights of stairs.

  Emergency surgery. Cathy was sat outside in the waiting room, this one smaller but no less crowded. She’d been crying, her eyes red and puffy. No makeup; dressed in the first things that had come to hand. When she saw him, her face crumpled. He let her sob into his shoulder.

  “Oh, Joe,” she said. “They won’t tell me what’s going on with him.”

  And so they sat together in the corner of the room. Together, among the dead and the dying. Cathy slept on his shoulder and Joe slept too, and maybe he saw the red Buick and maybe he didn’t.

  They were woken by the doctor. An older man with white in his beard and tired eyes. Buckshot had caused Frank’s brai
n to swell. He was in a coma.

  They hoped it would only last until morning. But then morning came and Frank still slept. A day passed, and then another, and then a week went by and Frank went on sleeping. Cathy watched over him, every night by his bed. In a chair, her back breaking.

  She couldn’t sleep. Frank had stolen it from her.

  Around them, the town moved on. People went to work, they ate takeout food and watched shitty movies, they got drunk and argued and cried and fucked, and through it all, Frank slept. He slept through the rain, the worst rain Joe had ever seen. Across the Midwest it pushed rivers so far over their banks, the flooded fields resembled not just lakes but inland seas. Cathy said it was a sign, said it was her husband hanging on, fighting to stay with her. Joe smiled and kept his opinions to himself.

  Five months passed. Joe’s shooting was ruled justified. The sergeant who gave him his gun back told him to go speak to someone if he ever felt emotional. Said it with a laugh. Closest that prick had ever come to shooting someone was at the local arcade. Probably liked to twirl the plastic handgun around his finger after blowing some zombie’s head off.

  Maybe what had happened to Frank was a catalyst. Maybe Joe had just gotten tired of sitting in a prowl car ten hours of the day. He finished his exams and got his detective’s badge, and then on a warm day in October, when the rains finally stopped, three members of the Richardson family were bludgeoned to death in their beds. Three of them, and one just a baby.

  Chapter One

  The reservoir at the edge of Cowan’s land had always held special memories for Joe. A bored kid growing up in a town like Cooper, most of those memories were sexual—like skinny-dipping on his sixteenth birthday with Holly Williams from the grade above. He’d lost his virginity to her about a quarter mile into the nearby forest not too long after. For years it had been impossible not to think about her whenever he drove past.

  But now he was older. Now it was eight-fifteen in the morning and a man was dead on the banks of the reservoir. Now Joe knew that whenever he thought of this place, he would think of this.

  Course, right now, Joe was mainly thinking about the weather. About how it was still so damned hot, even though it was the end of October. All spring and into the summer—crazy, biblical-scale flooding. And now the switch had been flipped. If Joe had been a praying person, he’d have figured it was God, turning the oven on high and skipping town.

  The dirt slope down to the reservoir was baked, each step kicking up dust that settled on his newly polished black shoes. Already he could feel sweat breaking out on his forehead and under his arms. The sun had barely been up an hour; the air still hot from the day before.

  The man had died right at the water’s edge. Died sprawled on his back, his legs dangling in the lake. The water here was black, and it had traveled upward along his grey sweatpants in dark tendrils. Inky roots snaking up from the depths. Like a dead body wasn’t unnerving enough.

  Yellow tape was strung up around the scene. A young officer stood next to it, about as far away from the victim as he could get. Some folks just couldn’t handle death. Joe knew this, had seen it in other officers time and time again. In their expressions, in their reluctance to engage. He’d seen it in their sick days and their shift trades, and every time he did he wondered why they chose to work in a place like Cooper.

  A second man was crouched over the body. Rolled-up sleeves and purple gloves, a flash of light and a camera’s whine.

  “Morning, Bob,” Joe said.

  Bob swiveled round, his eyes crinkling against the sun. He smiled warmly and stood up. “Morning. Dispatch said Fields was on today.”

  “Fields went on a bit of a bender last night, asked me to trade shifts.”

  “Lucky Fields. Come to meet my new friend here?”

  “We’ve not been properly introduced.”

  “Ah, well, that’s because I don’t know his name yet.”

  Joe nodded, peering closer at the body. There was a thin trickle of blood, now dried, leading down the left side of the man’s chest from the edge of the knife protruding from it. A line of red running across his off-white T-shirt.

  “What can you tell me?” Joe asked.

  “Well, in my considered professional judgment, he died from a stab wound,” Bob said. Then added, “Look, I got here a whole ten minutes before you did.”

  “And in those ten minutes, did you happen to work out how long he’s been here for?”

  “Rigor is pretty well set in, so I’d say sometime in the last four hours, maybe eight. Difficult to tell in this heat, though. Speeds up the process.”

  “There isn’t much blood for a stab wound.”

  Bob shrugged, stretching a little, letting the camera swing on its strap around his neck. “Judging by the trauma site, I’d say he probably died from a pneumothorax. But I’ll need to get a proper look at him.”

  Joe wiped at his brow. “Get him back to the station as soon as you can,” he said. “Sun’s going to cook him.”

  “Lucky I skipped breakfast this morning.”

  “Whose vehicle is that?”

  Bob’s gaze followed where Joe was looking. A rusted, maroon SUV sat a little farther along the bank of the reservoir. Beyond it stood another officer. He was talking to a woman.

  “Vehicle belong to her, you think?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Know who she is?”

  “First witness on the scene. Out camping with her boyfriend, came across the body this morning. They had to drive a mile and a half into town to find a working payphone.”

  “Alright. Finish the victim. I’ll check in with you later.”

  Joe moved away toward the yellow tape and the nervous young officer. His uniform looked near-enough brand-new, his collar buttoned tight around his neck. His name badge read Gennero.

  “What can you tell me about that SUV?” Joe asked him.

  “It was here when we arrived, detective.”

  “You boys run the plate?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Uh-huh. Where’s your cruiser parked? Up the path there?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. I want you to run the plate back at the station, alright? Find me the owner.”

  “Oh, I can pull the owner’s name from my car.”

  “I know you can. But I don’t just want their name. I want their picture. Can’t do that in your car. Run the plate back at the station and see if it belongs to our John Doe here. If it’s a woman’s, find out if she’s married. Might be her husband, or her brother. Find me our victim’s name.”

  The officer nodded vigorously. Happy to help; happier still to get away from the reservoir.

  Joe turned and started walking back the way he’d come. Into the brush and up the slope toward his car. Already he was lost in the cool shade, climbing the dry verge back to the main road. Truth be told, he couldn’t blame Officer Gennero for being jumpy around this place. Joe’s memories of the lake were special, sure, but special didn’t always mean good. Didn’t always mean nice. He wasn’t exactly shocked to have found a dead man washed up on its shore.

  Something about this place had always given Joe the creeps. Since he was a kid, a nervousness rooted deep in the back of his mind. The way the morning light sank into the dark water, maybe. Like the lake was feeding off it, off everything around it.

  There were times he forgot all about his sixteenth birthday. Forgot about the way his hands had shaken as he undid his belt, his eyes glued to the image of Holly Williams shedding her clothes, casually, like it was no big thing. Her pale skin made paler by the moonlight as she sank slowly beneath the surface. There were times he forgot he’d ever swam in that lake, and there were times he wished he’d never emerged.

  Chapter Two

  Joe checked his watch as he pulled up outside the school. It was just before nine. He’d nearly missed it.

  Across the street, he watched as parents ran along the sidewalk and darted over the crosswalk
. Clutching their kids by the hands and arms. One of them carrying his little girl out in front of him like she was an offering, racing to get her through the gates before they closed.

  For a long moment Joe thought he had missed it. Not that it mattered much; today wasn’t his first morning here, and likely wouldn’t be his last, either.

  It wasn’t like he came every day—he wasn’t obsessive.

  He glanced down at the notebook lying on the passenger seat. Told himself he should’ve locked it away in the glove compartment. A man sitting outside a school with a notebook, watching the children arrive. He knew how it looked.

  The radio played the morning news. The ongoing fallout of the Mississippi bursting its banks, what they were now calling the “Great Flood.” A congressman shouting about Black Hawk Down, about American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Somalia. Repeated clips of President Clinton ordering a full withdrawal of American troops.

  Across the street, he spotted her. Sarah Miller. A tall woman with shoulder-length blonde hair. Today it was tied up in a bun; messy, like she’d been in a rush. She was doing that crouch-run that parents do when they’re trying to get their kid to hurry the fuck up. Behind her was a young boy in dark pants and a white shirt. His backpack was too big for him; his head was down as he walked. His name was Ethan.

  Joe leaned closer to the window and wiped at his forehead. The morning heat was ridiculous. His car was old, a black Pontiac that was starting to rust. The AC barely worked—and besides, he knew the clatter of his idling engine would draw attention. He cracked the window. Let the warm air and the excited shouts of the schoolyard roll over him.

  He watched as Sarah and Ethan skirted the gate and bounded up the steps toward the main door. An older, plumper lady was manning the entrance, and she gave them a smile and a shake of her head. Ruffled the boy’s hair as he went by. Joe felt himself shiver; he’d always hated people doing that to him.

  Afterward, Sarah slumped off, visibly relieved. Joe didn’t need to see what car she was headed to. A yellow Ford, license plate 2-D6875, with a dented front passenger door. She’d be heading to the grocery store, or the laundromat, or back home to her house next to the church. He watched her drive past him, his fingers toying with the key in the ignition.