The Ridge by Michael Koryta Read Free Book Online Page B

in the rain and walked to the lighthouse. He stopped at the door and studied the note. A simple, oddly polite request to contact him
for purposes of investigation.
He read it, remembering the hiss of the tires on the pavement andthe look of the fog in his headlights as he’d answered Wyatt’s questions that morning.
    Do you pursue the root causes of a suicide in the same manner that you would a homicide?
    Kimble had told him that he pursued the truth. Always.
    Now, in the freezing rain outside the dead man’s door, Kimble turned back to Darmus.
    “I suppose I should wait for someone else now,” he said. “I’m probably a suspect, what with my name stamped on the damn door. And he called me this morning, too. Probably said about the same things he did with you. Maybe he called half the town, I don’t know. But since my deputy just flipped a cruiser on his way here, and I’m the only officer on scene, I guess I’ll count on Wyatt having taken himself out of this life nice and simply and leaving me no trouble. Did he do that much for me?”
    “He did it thoroughly,” Darmus said. “That much I can assure you.”
    Kimble went in. The room was small but functional, with unfinished walls and bare-bones furnishings, the look and feel of a hunting cabin except that the walls were lined with maps and old photographs. He gave them a brief glance, then turned to his left and walked up the steps. He didn’t cover his mouth or nose, just climbed to the top, high enough to see all that he needed to see. Wyatt’s unkempt gray beard was matted with blood, and his eyes—he’d always had good-natured eyes, you could tell even when he was drunk and you were putting him in handcuffs that he wasn’t likely to take a poke at you—were locked in a death stare, facing east, away from the fog-shrouded river and toward the high peaks.
    “I’m sorry,” Kimble told the corpse softly.
    Now what if,
Wyatt had said,
the suicide victim wasn’t entirely willing
.
    What had been going on in this man’s life? So far as Kimble knew, his life was an empty one. There was never anyone who showed up to post his bond, never anyone who waited for him outside the jail when they kicked him loose on another public intox charge. He’d just been the sort who drifted along alone except for the booze, and you couldn’t help but feel sorry for such people, particularly when they weren’t hostile and when they didn’t stand to do much harm to anyone except themselves.
    “Damn it,” Kimble said, and then he stepped away and went back down the stairs. He needed to get Darmus out of here, and the coroner on the way. It was time to begin processing the death scene, and he would, as he’d promised Wyatt, pursue the truth.
    When he came back downstairs, he found that Darmus had stepped inside.
    “Hit the road, Darmus. I’ll call you when I need to get an official statement. Go get that hand checked out, okay?”
    “You see the other lamps he’s got in there?” Darmus said. “Those things pointed in every direction below the main light?”
    “I did.”
    “What in the hell are they?”
    “Infrared illuminators. Security camera lights. But I’ve yet to see the cameras, so why he installed them, I have no damn idea.” Kimble looked at the steps and shook his head. “A
lighthouse
. Who builds something like that in the mountains? Though you can see the river from the top.”
    “Right,” Darmus said. “I’m sure it has prevented dozens of shipwrecks down there. Why, I can’t recall the last time I had to report on a ship foundering at Blade Ridge. Any chance you can issue a posthumous medal of valor to him?”
    The reporter was still plenty angry. His final exchange with Wyatt French had gotten under his skin, and that was understandable. It was a hell of a thing to hear suggested of your own parents.
    Kimble moved around the room, looking at the old photographs and maps, but then he heard a scribbling sound behind him and turned to see that