Luke stops typing, turns to face her. “What does that mean?”
“He says he wants to let me off the hook. For good.”
Luke spins in the desk chair. “He’s breaking up with you?”
“He’s not putting it like that. He says he doesn’t want me to suffer, too. His mom says he’s lost faith he’s going to recover and I should ignore him, but . . . I don’t want to talk about it. I need a distraction. Right now, it’s Lacey Shannon.”
The very thing Cole Graydon told me to let go. Awesome.
A few seconds later, he’s found the archived footage of the night in question on all three general cameras. He runs them simultaneously, but they’re slightly out of sync with each other, which makes him a little dizzy.
They’ve got Lacey’s sudden entrance, the alarmed looks it earned from just about everyone in the station.
They’ve got Luke and Henricks leading her to the short hallway that connects to the interview room.
He can’t fast-forward all three at once, so he picks the best angle on the hallway and advances to the moment when he came striding into the main room with Henricks nipping at his heels. Then he keeps fast-forwarding, watching as the clock at the bottom of the square advances past 9:40, 9:45, 9:50 . . .
When Henricks appears, alone, the two of them both sit back. Henricks turns down the hallway toward the interview room.
“Is that a hundred percent?” Luke asks.
“Pretty much. But I want to see her come out.”
“Not going to be easy to tell what expression’s on her face given how beat up it is.”
“True, but still.”
A few seconds later, head bowed, chewing on the thumbnail of her right hand, Lacey Shannon rounds the corner into the main room. She looks unsteady on her feet, and Luke wonders for a second if maybe she really was drunk. Her shoulder brushes the large potted plant next to her, then she looks toward the main room as if she’s embarrassed by her collision with the ficus and wants to make sure nobody noticed it.
Luke was right—her black eyes make it impossible to read her expression.
Henricks doesn’t appear behind her. But that makes sense. He knew about the cameras. No doubt he was holding back so he wouldn’t look like the one driving her away. There’s a restroom at the end of that hallway he could claim he was using. But he’d never be able to deny shutting the interview room camera off. Maybe that’s why he quit.
Then Luke sees something that makes him go rigid.
Mona doesn’t see it, however. She’s just shaking her head at the screen.
With a mouse click, he closes the video.
Shame will follow at some point, he realizes. But right now he feels nothing but adrenaline, and this rush empowers a slew of rationalizations for what he’s just done. He’s protecting Mona from something she doesn’t understand. He’s protecting the whole department, small and strapped as it is, from something that could overwhelm its resources in the blink of an eye.
“That’s all saved, right?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
But you’ve got no idea how to access the archive, and that’s a good thing, he thinks. Then he realizes the reason she can’t navigate the system is because she’s been so busy caring for her sick boyfriend, and his exhilaration turns to shame. Well, that was quick, he thinks.
“All right,” Mona finally says, “I’m gonna keep looking for Lacey. I’m gonna operate on the belief that Henricks freaked her into running and she’s out there somewhere.”
“If she is, what do you think she’s going to say?”
“I don’t need to get involved in her relationship issues. If Jordy shoved her into a ditch, and she’s running, good. But I need her to confirm Henricks is the reason she walked.”
“In case Henricks tries to bring a suit or something?”
“Yeah, or in case I need to see if I’ve got others like him inside my station.”
Luke just stares at her.
“Christ, I’m not talking about you, Luke.”
His stomach feels like it’s got a clenching fist in the middle of it. But he just nods.
“Thanks for coming in,” she says. “This cleared up a lot of . . .” Just then her cell phone rings, and he can tell who’s calling the minute he sees her expression as she looks at the screen.
“Need me to step out?” he says.
She nods, but it’s like her eyes have already joined the upsetting phone call she’s about to have with her incredibly sick, possibly soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend.
Luke subtly closes the screen on her laptop as if this is polite and necessary. Necessary for him, perhaps. But it’s far from polite.
When he steps out into the main room, drawing her office door shut behind him, he’s literally sweating under his collar for the first time he can remember. That giddy confidence that came over him a few minutes ago has turned into a blend of anxiety and dread. Before it can paralyze him, he starts toward the plant Lacey Shannon brushed up against. Slowly, he walks past it. On the surveillance cameras, it’ll look like he’s just peering down the short hallway to the interview room and bathrooms. If Mona somehow sees this footage later, she’ll just think he’s retracing Lacey’s steps. But as he pretends to look down the hallway, his eyes cut to the ficus.
That’s when he sees what Lacey dropped inside the ceramic pot.
Just to complete the lie, he walks down the rest of the hallway, even opens the door to the interview room, in case someone comes out of the bathroom and spots him.
Then he returns to the plant and pretends to study it. He bends forward slightly as he runs his fingers through the fake leaves. Once he’s confident he’s hidden his left hand from the security camera, he reaches into the pot and removes the flash drive he spotted there a few seconds before.
He stands, shaking the edge of the pot with his right hand, as if he only wants to know why it didn’t topple over when Lacey brushed against it. But he couldn’t care less. She was brushing against it to make sure it was fake. To be sure no one was going to douse the flash drive with water after she deliberately dropped it into the pot.
Luke turns in the direction of the camera, takes a deep breath intended to make him look both tired and frustrated. All of it a ruse to distract from the fact that he’s holding some sort of secret. Slowly, he walks through the station, nodding goodbye to others as he leaves, the flash drive burning a hole in his palm.
She wanted us to have this thing, he realizes. But she was afraid to hand it over until Jordy was in a cell. Whatever’s on it is proof Jordy’s not who everyone thinks he is. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to give it to Henricks after he threatened her. Instead, she got the hell out of there, but not before leaving it behind.
But if that’s true, it leaves one big, unanswered question.
Why hasn’t she called me to tell me where it is?
26
Charley’s amazed at how much they’ve managed to add to the Altamira Lodge in the month she’s been gone. It’s Sunday, so none of the crews are at work now, but the roof of the main building’s practically finished, and the frames of the adjacent cabins occupying the same promontory are also mostly complete.
Across the highway, they’ve started razing the newer-growth forest on the lower slopes of the mountain so they can lay the foundations for the additional rows of cabins. Just behind where she’s sitting now, the tunnel they’re about to build will one day open onto PCH.
If all goes according to the renderings, this entire rest area, with its bed of gravel and spread of tables and benches, is going to be cleared away, along with a chunk of the mountainside nearby.
This rest stop has always been Marty’s favorite spot. Years ago he carved Luanne’s name into the bench where they’re sitting now while enjoying Diet Cokes and greasy sandwiches from the Copper Pot. But if Marty’s upset this place will soon disappear, he hasn’t mentioned it. Right now they’re too busy discussing topics that would probably make the occasional passi
ng motorist’s head spin.
“When did they tell you?” Marty asks.
“After I woke up.”
“So you didn’t see it happen?”
“No.”
She figures Marty’s suppressing a dozen different questions he knows better than to ask.
“How did he tell you?” he asks. “Like it was your fault?”
“No. He had a very relaxed, professional attitude about the whole thing. He was . . . humble.”
“Cole Graydon. Humble. Imagine that.”
“He took this attitude that it was our first time going out in the field together, and nobody expected everything to go perfectly.”
“So he didn’t accuse you of killing the guy. He just told you the guy was dead.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Marty wipes mustard off his chin, chugs his Diet Coke like it’s the source of life.
“And you’re confident, based on what you saw, based on what he did to you, that this guy was the real deal?” he asks.
“A serial killer? Jesus. Yes.”
“All right, then. Bye, freak. Enjoy hell.”
She smiles, but the laughter she was expecting doesn’t come. Instead, the urge creates a tension in her chest that also gives her a headache.
“I hate that it has to be like this,” she says once the ache passes.
“Like what?”
“That I can’t tell you guys anything.”
“You can tell me anything you want.”
“I can’t, though. That’s not the agreement I made.”
“Charley, they set me up with a job I’m barely qualified for. I’m making more money than I ever thought possible. What I’m saying is they’ve bought my silence, and they know it. But they’ve only bought it when it comes to CNN and the National Enquirer. Not when it comes to you and your sanity.”
“I’m sane, I think. Do I seem sane?”
“All things considered, yes. But you’re still allowed to have feelings. You’d be insane if you didn’t.”
“I feel sad that the families will never know what happened to their daughters. That they’re going to spend their whole lives like my grandmother spent a big chunk of hers.”
“That makes sense.”
“But when it comes to him? I don’t feel a damn thing. But maybe that’s . . . I don’t know. Sometimes we think the absence of a feeling is a scab when really it’s an open wound.”
“That’s a good one. Where’d you hear that?”
“You. When I was seventeen. I rolled my eyes because I was a little tired of all the AA speak.”
“That’s not AA speak. That’s Marty speak.”
“How would you know? You don’t remember saying it.”
“Let’s not get bogged down in a lot of specifics.”
His smile seems genuine, and warm, but it fades quicker than his smiles usually do, and the unanswered question fills the air between them like a smoke cloud.
“Should I feel something, Marty?”
“You’re not a cop. You’re not a judge. And you’re not a lawyer.”
She didn’t expect this turn in the conversation and knows that if she speaks now, she won’t be able to keep the anger from her voice. “I see. So you think I’m playing judge, jury, and—”
“No, no, no,” he says quickly, hands out as if he’s afraid the bench between them is about to shoot up into the air. “I’m not saying that at all.”
“What, then?”
“Charley, you don’t experience these people at the level of a case file. You lost your mother to monsters like this guy. You lost your childhood to people like this guy. It’s like . . . When you talk to guys who’ve been in combat, they all tell you the same thing. They knew who the enemy was. The enemy was the one who would shoot them if they didn’t shoot first.
“That’s what you’ve been in for most of your life, Charley. A combat situation with sick fucks who abduct people off the street so they can use them as their twisted playthings. Everything your dad did to make money off you put you in their line of sight again and again. I mean, Jesus, who knows how many obsessed fans like Jason Briffel were out there waiting to strike?
“My point is, no one who knows everything about you, about this . . . situation, is going to expect you to slow down and humanize them for the greater good of I don’t know what. They’re monsters, Charley. Human fucking monsters. The Bannings. This guy, whoever he was. None of these people turned to crime because their circumstances were mean and they needed to put food on the table. And honestly, if you ask me, Dylan Cody’s not that far off. You ever heard that line about staring too deeply into the abyss?”
“We’re supposed to call him by his real name now,” Charley says. “Cole’s orders.”
“I’m happy to say I don’t remember what it is.”
She doesn’t tell him. She likes him not knowing.
And she’s not sure she agrees with Cole’s directive.
Calling Dylan by his birth name puts him in league with her; reminds her that his family was a victim of the Bannings, too.
“There’s another thing,” she says. She’s speaking before she’s collected her thoughts, which makes her nervous. She feels like that’s a luxury she lost months ago.
“Yeah?”
“Something about the way we were doing it this time made it easier.”
“Well, I bet it’s more efficient.”
“Totally. But that’s only part of it.”
“What’s the other part of it?”
“There was so much around me. So much support. Logistical support, I mean. It almost felt like I was just the scalpel in somebody’s hand, and the hand wasn’t mine. If it always feels like that, like I’ve got no responsibility for any of it, who knows what I might do?”
“Well, as long as you do it to one of those sick fucks, I can’t say I’m going to lose any sleep over it.”
Will I, though?
She can’t imagine this strange new life without Marty in it, and this makes her feel guilty all over again for how quickly she abandoned him after Luanne died.
Still, she sometimes worries Marty’s perpetual quest for moral clarity can result in oversimplifications. She remembers eating lunch at this same bench years ago, when she was a teenager, before they made an arduous hike to some old ruined limekilns buried in the redwoods near the top of the mountain. Upon their sweaty arrival, he lectured her for close to twenty minutes about how the limekilns used to work, and he did so with the same casual confidence he’s just used to put her mess of feelings into neat, labeled boxes. But sometimes matters of the head and matters of the heart are not as predictable and knowable as old machinery.
Does Marty know this?
Before she can answer the question, her cell phone buzzes. It’s a text from Luke.
Need you at home.
She texts back, Everything OK?
Not sure. Need your brain for something.
It’s not entirely frightening, but it’s not exactly reassuring, either. She writes back, Marty’s with me.
Good. I need him too.
27
Cole can’t stand the sight of Colorado from the air. It’s not the altitude that gets to him; it’s the state.
He’s never been a nervous flyer. One of his favorite pastimes is gazing out the window as he slices the clouds. But no matter how high up he is, Colorado’s mountainous folds always seem ready to swallow whatever plane he’s in, disappearing him forever. As the rented Gulfstream descends toward Eagle County Regional Airport, he feels like they’re about to land on a stormy sea of conifers and snow and he might need to reach for a life vest at any minute.
He doesn’t need a psychiatrist to interpret these feelings.
Colorado is where he suffered life-changing wounds; Colorado is where his father’s plan for healing those wounds only made them worse. Not just Colorado, but Stonecut Ridge, the ranch his father built to put him back together again.
It’s too far from
San Diego to get there by helicopter, so this two-and-a-half-hour flight has been the longest period of time Cole’s spent with his new security director since hiring the guy. They’ve only exchanged a few words. That’s a good thing.
Exchanging words with Scott Durham would require that Cole occasionally look at him, and right now Cole can’t stand to look at the guy because, despite Cole’s best efforts, Scott Durham is most definitely something to look at. And that’s annoying. He really did make every effort to pick Ed’s replacement based on qualifications alone, but of course, the most qualified candidate walked into his office looking like a fitness model.
But Durham’s most important selling point was the small string of letters in his personnel file that only Cole, and previously Ed, would have been able to interpret. EFLEVAL5, an abbreviation for Excellent Flight Evaluation Rating 5, code for some very important facts. Not only had Scott Durham done a fine job working security for Project Bluebird 1.0, escorting the test subjects to the island lab (and asking no questions when none were escorted back) and securing the facility itself. He’d also passed his postpsychiatric evaluations with flying colors. Cole couldn’t say that for all the men who worked security for Bluebird. One guy had been so disturbed by what became of the second test subject, they’d had to enter him into treatment and then gently retire him with a nice benefits package.
On paper, Scott Durham was the only man for the job.
“How many are coming to meet us?” Cole asks.
Scott lowers his tablet. For most of the flight, he’s been swiping through schematics of Stonecut Ridge and topographical maps of the surrounding landscape, occasionally watching live feeds from the microdrones that regularly sweep the property from several hundred feet up.
“Two SUVs. If I’m reading this right, that takes a third of the ranch’s security away from the ranch. For a little while, at least. Are you comfortable with that?”
“The security team probably looks light to you,” Cole explains, “because there’s something else in place that’s going to keep him from running. And it’s invisible.”
“His TruGlass?”
“No, that’s just for monitoring. He’s got blood trackers. They’re weaponized.”
Blood Echo Page 14