Until Dark - Mariah Stewart [118]
“What did you do to him?”
“You really want to know?” He smirked.
“The body they found in the cave . . . that’s Ian, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s Ian.”
“What happened?” she asked again. After all these years, Kendra needed to know. She would have begged him for the truth if she’d had to, but it seemed that Zach was now as eager to tell as she was to listen.
“Ian was so hot to trot to find this old Indian guy. He wanted that Cochise bow, let me tell you. He wanted it in a big way.”
“Was there really a bow?”
“What do you think?” He looked at her as if she had sported an extra head.
“Then why did you tell him?”
“Because I needed him to have money with him. And I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist something like that. It was the only way I was going to get out of there, don’t you see? I couldn’t stay there any longer. That TV program I told you about, I saw it the first night I was at your house that summer. All those kids, living together on the streets. It looked better to me than what I had. And I got the idea to go there. I figured I had nothing to lose. But I needed a little something to take with me.”
“So you got Ian to bring money out so you could kill him and steal it.”
“No, no, you gotta understand this. I never planned on killing him. I was just going to take his wallet, that’s all. I figured I could make him believe that he’d dropped it someplace on the trail, that it fell out of his backpack or something. The other stuff . . . it just sort of, you know, happened. I mean, like it was fate.”
“What exactly happened?”
“It was cold. I said I’d make a fire, but he didn’t want to sleep outside again. He went up the hill. I saw him going into the cave. For a minute, I almost called to him to not go in there.” Zach swallowed, remembering. “But as soon as he got past the mouth of the cave, he started to scream. Man, did he scream. I never heard anything like it.” A look of triumph crossed his face, as if he was reliving that moment, savoring Ian’s agony. “It seemed like he screamed forever. I thought he was never going to stop.”
“And you did nothing to help him?” A horrified Kendra shivered.
“Hey, what could I do?” Zach shrugged cavalierly. “The minute he went in there, he was as good as dead. If I went in, I’d have been stung to death, too. What good would that have done?”
“So you just stood there and listened to him scream.”
“Couldn’t avoid it, Kendra. He was loud.”
“And you left him to die.”
“Couldn’t avoid that either.”
“So that you could take his money.” Kendra swallowed hard.
“Yeah, well, his wallet was in his backpack there on the ground, so I figured, what the hell? I wasn’t looking that gift horse in the mouth. I took the backpack with his stuff in it, threw my old pack into the cave with him, and just walked away.”
“What about Christopher? Was he there?”
“Christopher? Oh, you mean the kid from the ranch? Yeah, he was there,” Zach said. “He followed us. We let him camp with us, but sometimes he had trouble keeping up. I told him to go back to the ranch, but he didn’t. He’d followed Ian up the hill, he was maybe twenty or thirty feet behind Ian when he went into the cave. He just stood there with his hands over his ears, whimpering and crying, all the time Ian was screaming. He was still crying the next morning.” He paused for a moment, reflected briefly, “I wonder if he ever stopped crying.”
“No,” Kendra said softly. “He never did.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw him when I was in Arizona recently.”
“You were in Arizona? Did you stop at the ranch?”
She nodded.
“See, that’s another thing. That ranch should have been mine, but she left it to her friends. I always knew she cared more for them than she did for me. She cared for everybody more than she cared for me. She was one damned poor excuse for a mother, Kendra. I deserved better. I deserved more.” His jaw settled