Incarnate Read online

  But Zack came out of his daze as though a switch had been turned on. “Chief Plunkett took his own life,” he told the officer. “There were no other shooters. We need this whole area processed for evidence. Holt Plunkett should be treated as a suspect in the murders of Albert Sullivan, Isabel Wilcox, and George DeWitt. Probably more.”

  For a moment, Phil gaped at the scene—Holt lying unmoving, his blood seeping into the earth; Kim with her arms protectively encircling Scarlett; Zack standing ramrod straight and utterly alone.

  Paramedics came rushing into the clearing. Two of them dropped to the ground on either side of Holt’s lifeless body. As Scarlett sagged in Kim’s arms, the third paramedic caught her, and gently lowered her to the ground, talking to her in a soft, low voice.

  More officers arrived, and still the sirens sounded in the distance. There were gasps and shocked curses as each newcomer took in the scene.

  “Zack,” Kim whispered, and she lifted a hand to comfort him, to offer him some small measure of solace.

  But Zack didn’t appear to have heard her. He turned and walked into the woods, alone.

  * * *

  MANY HOURS LATER, LONG after the paramedics had taken Holt’s body and a colonel from the state troopers’ office had dealt with the swarm of media, Zack agreed to let Kim drive him home.

  The colonel took over the conference room and spent most of the evening on the phone with county law enforcement. The Ukiuk County chief would arrive in the morning; everyone agreed it would be best to wait and let him take statements from Zack, Kim, and Scarlett.

  Peter Hascall arrived looking white as a sheet, and it wasn’t until he’d swept Scarlett into his arms did he exhale the breath he appeared to have been holding since he got the call to come to the station. Scarlett burst into tears, but they were the kind of tears that Kim figured had a fair amount of healing in them. Kim promised to call the next day.

  The colonel offered to deliver the news of Holt’s death to Brielle, but Zack said he figured maybe he ought to do that himself. On the way to his house, his eyes fluttered closed and Kim wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  Then he spoke without opening his eyes.

  “Can you stay, just for a while?”

  That she could do.

  She stood off to the side while Zack, looking completely exhausted, gently broke the news to Brielle. He didn’t tell her everything. He probably needed to wait until the inquiry had made everything official.

  All he told Brielle was that Holt Plunkett, her surrogate father, had killed himself. Brielle dissolved into tears. Kim felt awkward, watching the two of them hug, until Zack looked up and held out his hand. She stepped forward and took it, and the siblings scooted over on the couch and made room for her, and then they all just held on to one another and didn’t speak.

  At some point, Kim woke up to find that Brielle had left and gone back to her own apartment, and Zack had gone to bed. Someone had draped a blanket over her and given the fire a final stir, so that the embers glowed a deep orange.

  Kim snuggled deeper under the blanket, closed her eyes, and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  THE NEXT TIME SHE woke up, it was because someone was holding a mug of steaming coffee under her nose.

  “Mmm,” Kim murmured, stretching and opening her eyes, only to remember where she was and why.

  She sat up in the tangle of blankets. Zack had changed into flannel sweats and a faded University of Portland T-shirt. He gave her a tired smile that didn’t match his eyes, and sat down next to her.

  For a while, they sipped their coffee in silence.

  “I keep going over it and over it—and trying to figure out a way that could have played out where he’d still be alive,” Zack finally said. “But Holt could never have lived with himself, once he realized that he’d violated his own code.”

  “I’m sorry. I know that what I said—it was . . .”

  “If you hadn’t led him to realize that, we’d all be dead right now. I’m so . . . so . . .”

  Kim put her hand on his. “He was a father to you,” Kim said gently. “What happened, it’s never going to feel . . . right. It’ll get easier, but that feeling will never go away completely.”

  Zack would have a great deal of grief to process—much of it complicated. At some point, Zack was going to have to reconcile his good memories with the dark side of the man who’d meant so much to him. Eventually, he might be able to cherish the part of Holt that had been idealistic and loving and brave.

  For now, though, her profession offered no hard and fast rules. No right way or wrong way to help the adjustment. But she was determined to help him get through it.

  “I can recommend someone good,” she said gently. “If you need to talk.”

  His eyes dropped. “I like talking to you.”

  “And I, you. But you should have someone, more . . . neutral.”

  Slowly, Zack nodded. “Guess that’s probably a good idea. For me and Brielle both. I imagine I’ll be taking some time off. County chief won’t give me a choice, probably.”

  “Time off is a good idea.”

  “What about you?”

  Kim thought about it, letting the steam rising from her coffee warm her face. What about her? She was newly reemployed, and work would probably do her good. She ought to call her parents and let them know what happened before they saw it on the news.

  “Taking things slow might be a good idea for me, too,” she said.

  “I’ve got some juice in the fridge,” Zack said. “Brielle will probably be over here any minute wanting pancakes. You’re welcome to stay.”

  Kim was tempted. She loved this house, with its wood and cedar and wool and leather, its scents of woodsmoke and baking bread and Zack’s aftershave. She wanted to know every book on the bookshelves, every photo in the frames arranged on the sideboard.

  But Zack and Brielle needed to be with each other right now.

  “Thanks,” she said, untangling herself from the blanket and setting down her mug. “But I’d better get home.”

  Zack walked her to the front door, and to Kim’s surprise, drew her in for a hug as they said their good-byes. For a long moment, she let him hold her, feeling strangely safe despite all the horrible events of the past twenty-four hours.

  Then she slipped away, hoping that Zack had absorbed some of that safety, too. Hoping that he and his sister would find some peace.

  FORTY-ONE

  Zack stood in the front row of the mourners on a rainy Saturday morning, as Holt Plunkett was laid to rest in the plot next to the grave of his wife and unborn child. Next to him, Brielle shivered in her black dress and high heels. As the pastor led the mourners in prayer, Zack took off his suit jacket and slipped it over his sister’s shoulders.

  Holt had taught him to be a gentleman, among many other things.

  Last Thursday, it seemed like the entire town had turned out for Isabel Wilcox’s funeral. Dozens of her relatives, from as far away as Florida, had attended, and Zack could hear her mother sobbing all the way from where he stood up on a hill overlooking the service.

  Today, the crowd was much smaller. The shocking rumors about all the people Holt Plunkett had killed had started circulating immediately after Holt’s death, even though the department was trying to keep the investigation secure while it began opening old cases and procuring help from county and state agencies. It could easily turn into Alaska’s biggest serial murder case of the century.

  Zack knew that if he turned around, he would see friends, neighbors, his old teachers and coaches. He’d spotted more than one old girlfriend and his current barber in the parking lot, as well as members of Brielle’s book club and her entire recreational softball team. The town was there for them, even as they faced the reality that their chief of police was not who they’d believed him to be.

  Zack knew that the next day, and the day after that, and next month and next year, he would always have a home in Jarvis. Eventually, the wounds
that felt devastating now would begin to heal. He would be strong for Brielle, and he would do his best to serve Jarvis even as he was excused from working on its biggest case. There would still be crimes to investigate, citizens to serve, traffic stops and barroom fights and the insidious drug trade to stem. And he didn’t want to be anywhere else or do anything else for a living.

  The thing he couldn’t figure out, as the uniformed cemetery workers began slowly lowering the casket into the deep hole in the ground, was how was he supposed to get through the next moment, the next hour, the reception in the church basement where he’d once attended Cub Scout meetings?

  How was he supposed to get through tonight, knowing that the character of his adoptive father was being forged into the town’s memory as a villain, not the hero Zack had always believed Holt to be?

  Something brushed against his hand, and he looked down to see a slim, pale wrist in a gray silk cuff, familiar bitten fingernails. He took Kim’s hand gratefully, and as the pastor intoned the final prayer, he felt the smallest spark of warmth.

  FORTY-TWO

  One month later

  “How’d you score this place all to yourself?” Scarlett asked, looking around Kim’s new office. The packing boxes full of her books, the overflowing trash can, the chair Kim had stolen in a midnight raid on Orthopedics—all of them were gone. In their place was a small but attractive bookshelf lined with framed photographs of family and friends, a beautiful ficus tree, and her diploma, which she’d finally hung.

  “Dr. Sing has a thing about our working conditions meeting ADA standards,” Kim said. The new department head, who had been hired after Kyle accepted a position in Iowa City, insisted Kim be upgraded from the supply closet, in which her former workplace had been housed, to a legitimate office. “So—how’ve you been?”

  This was their first official meeting since Dr. Graver finally gave Kim the thumbs-up to schedule a single follow-up session with Scarlett. After that, it was agreed that they would sever their doctor-patient relationship, and Scarlett would be referred to a psychiatrist who was not on the staff at Jarvis Regional. Even this compromise was highly unusual, but Graver had agreed to make a one-time exception to hospital policy in the interest of giving the patient some much-needed closure.

  Kim had broken with her own long-standing act-first-apologize-later approach by asking Dr. Graver for permission to keep in touch with Scarlett outside of treatment, and they had all agreed that contact initiated by Scarlett was permissible as long as Kim reported anything of clinical concern to Scarlett’s new psychotherapist. It was a little awkward, but Kim knew it was also the correct way to handle the situation. Besides, Scarlett had a supportive community to fall back on now.

  “Great!” Scarlett looked, for the first time since Kim had met her, like an ordinary teen. Peter Hascall had taken his daughters to Anchorage for a long weekend after the standoff with Holt. They’d gone to museums and shows and done some shopping, and Scarlett had gotten a haircut and highlights and a tiny tattoo of a willow ptarmigan—the Alaska state bird—on her shoulder. Today she was dressed in leggings and fashionable boots. Her eyes sparkled as she told Kim all about her plans to enroll at the community college in the fall, and possibly look into transferring to a four-year university the following year. “But I’ll be here for at least a year,” she added quickly. “So I can, you know, be there for Heather.”

  Kim was delighted to hear her enthusiasm for the future. Peter Hascall had called her to report that Scarlett was reconnecting with friends her own age, and there had been visits from a trio of girls who never stopped talking and ate everything in the fridge like a swarm of locusts, as well as a young man who’d been Scarlett’s lab partner during her junior year.

  “I guess I’m done testifying,” Scarlett said, turning serious. “Detective Skorczewski says I’m no longer a person of interest in anything.”

  Kim smiled. “That sounds like good news.”

  “Yeah, but know what’s even better? I haven’t had a blackout since that day. I ask Heather all the time. She says I’ve been totally normal.”

  Kim studied her carefully. “So you think the alters are gone?”

  “Not completely, no. I mean I can still feel some of them, deep inside me, but it’s like they’re asleep or something—you know what I mean?”

  Kim nodded, though she could never really understand how it must feel to be Scarlett, harboring the souls of the dead. She had been planning to ask Scarlett if she wanted to undergo hypnosis one final time, to do an inventory of any remaining alters and make sure that Isabel had moved on, now that justice was being done. After all, Julian, the most aggressive of her original alters, was presumably still in there—buried underneath the control that Scarlett had learned, true, but not gone.

  But Scarlett seemed so relieved and happy that Kim changed her mind. There was a lot to be said for serenity, and Kim didn’t want to do anything to ruin this new happiness. There was a part of Kim, though, that was starting to question her own past. For the first time ever, she had decided that she might undergo hypnosis—perhaps to unlock some of her own repressed memories—perhaps to learn more about Joselyn, and maybe even the identity of her birth parents’ killers.

  But that was for another day.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me about this guy who’s been hanging around your house.”

  * * *

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, KIM walked Scarlett to the elevator. As they waited for it to arrive, Scarlett gave Kim an impulsive hug. “Thanks,” she whispered. “For everything.”

  As she pulled away, the doors of the elevator opened and Zack stepped out. “Just the two women I wanted to see,” he said. “Scarlett, if you can give me a few minutes, I need to get your signature on a few things. The new chief’s wrapping up his report and I said I’d stop by and take care of it.”

  His eyes met Kim’s, and she saw right through the ruse. He didn’t even try to hide it: he’d volunteered to take care of Scarlett’s signature on the report as an excuse to come see her.

  “Why don’t you two use my office,” she said.

  She hadn’t seen Zack since the funeral, unless seeing his face on the news and in the papers nearly every day counted; the media had kept up its frenzied interest in what they were calling Jarvis’s “decades-long murder spree.” But they’d spoken on the phone a few times. Things were hard, Zack had confessed. He wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. He’d lost more than just Holt—he’d lost his entire connection to his childhood, all the ideals that Holt had shaped with such care.

  “Thanks for listening, and for putting up with me,” he’d said during their most recent marathon phone conversation. “I know I’m not much fun right now. But . . . that headshrinker you sent me to says I’m processing everything all right, so. Uh, don’t give up on me.”

  “Never,” Kim had reassured him.

  While she couldn’t see Zack, she could feel him smiling on the other end of the line when he added, “I’m surprised you recommended such a cute therapist for me. Dr. Behrenfeld is really something.”

  “Um . . . Dr. Randy Behrenfeld is a man. So unless he’s helped you find some new hidden side of you, I’ll assume you’re just saying that to make me jealous. Unsuccessfully, I might add.”

  “Randy could be a woman’s name, too.”

  “Mmmm.” Kim didn’t mention that she had purposely given him the name of a seventy-four-year-old male psychiatrist.

  Now, she waited out in the hall while Zack got the requested signatures. When Scarlett came out, she practically bounded down the hall, on her way to meet her friends at the frozen yogurt shop.

  Zack followed a second later, the file tucked under his sleeve. “So . . . you’re doing well?” he asked formally.

  Kim grinned. “Better than ever, actually. I’ve kept a houseplant alive for almost a month, which is a record for me. They’ve got Cool Ranch Doritos in the vending machine now. And I beat my neighbor fair and square at gin rummy the other nigh
t. Of course, she fell asleep at the table during our game . . . twice.”

  “Nice,” Zack chuckled. Then he started to say something, and stopped himself.

  After an awkward pause, Kim spoke. “How about you? Everything good?”

  “Yeah. Really good. For the most part. Brielle seems to like Dr. Behrenfeld, too.”

  Kim nodded; Brielle had actually called to say the same thing the week before.

  “And, uh, the group I’ve been going to has been . . . good.”

  “I’m glad. Really.”

  Zack cleared his throat. “So listen, I was wondering . . . if you have time, maybe we could get together one of these days. For dinner or something.”

  Kim smiled at him. “I’d like that.”

  “Yeah?” He looked adorably uncertain for someone usually so confident.

  “Yes.”

  Zack gave her one of his megawatt grins. “Okay, then, I’ll call you,” he said, and turned to go. When he reached the elevator he turned back before he stepped through the open doors.

  Kim returned to her office with a smile on her face. Scarlett was doing well, and Zack had promised to call. The cafeteria was serving pasta alfredo for dinner, one of their least terrible offerings, and she had an interesting case to pursue, a woman who claimed to hear messages from the president whenever she brushed her teeth.

  For the first time in her life, Kim’s future felt wonderfully ordinary. Not in the way she might once have dreamed about long ago, but . . . perfect for her.

  Dr. Sing emerged from the secure doors at the end of the hall, consulting his watch. “Just about ready for group?” he asked. “Everyone’s on their way to the room.”

  For the next hour, Kim led a group doing trauma work, using mindfulness practices to refocus their experiences of their past triggers. Two women and one man in the group were under special observation for self-harm risk. All of them would see her privately as well, but there were often things that came out in a controlled group setting that proved beneficial.