Sunday, December 17
“It’s just a day trip,” I told her for the tenth time at a quarter to one while I waited for Mason to pick me up. “I feel really bad for leaving you again so soon after the book blitz, but it’s just for the day, and I’ll bring you back something, okay?”
“Will you bring me back something, too?” Misty asked.
“Me, too. I want something,” Amy said.
I rose from the floor, where I’d been scratching Myrtle right in front of her ears, which was her bliss-spot. “Yeah, yeah, I owe you both my life. If for any reason I don’t make it back tonight—”
“I’ll stay over,” Amy said.
“Yeah, because being seventeen, I need a babysitter who’s twenty-five.”
“Twenty-four,” Amy corrected.
Misty rolled her eyes. “I could manage just fine on my own overnight.”
“I know you could.” With Aaron, Lloyd or whatever her current boyfriend’s name was. I just remembered the double letters at the beginning. I’d met the kid, hated him on sight. Cocky, arrogant little prick.
“I wish we were having more fun, Misty,” I said in all honesty. I did feel bad. She was missing the trip of a lifetime with her family, but it was obvious she didn’t mind that, and I had no doubt she’d been seeing plenty of the boyfriend while I was doing the talk show hop, with or without Amy’s knowledge.
Sandra thought it was fine when I talked to her about my suspicions, said she trusted Misty. If you asked me, “trust” and “seventeen” should never be uttered in the same sentence if there was a boyfriend involved. Teenage girls loved harder than any other species. Teenage love was apocalyptic. Wild horses couldn’t stop it.
“I’ll get back as fast as I can and we’ll do something fun. Really fun, I promise. Maybe we’ll go find a Christmas tree and decorate it.”
“I had a lot of fun at Mason’s yesterday,” Misty said. “Don’t feel guilty, Aunt Rache. You always say it’s a wasted emotion.”
Yeah, I did say that. In print and in front of live studio audiences. That didn’t make it true. Guilt was never wasted. It was going to net the kid a Swarovski crystal swan to add to her collection.
Mason pulled up in that big black boat he called a car. I closed my eyes, hitched my “just in case” bag over my shoulder, hugged Misty, then Amy, then Myrtle one last time. “Okay, I’m outta here. See you late tonight, and if there’s any change, I’ll call.”
They said so long and I was gone. I opened the driver’s door, and Mason looked up at me from behind the wheel.
“What, you want to drive?”
Damn, he’s good-looking. It’s like I forget just how good-looking when I’m away from him, and then I see him again and it knocks me on my ass.
“I know you love your boat and all, Mace, but—”
“It’s a seventy-four Monte Carlo, and it’s a classic.”
“It’s a rear-wheel-drive behemoth, and it’s an accident waiting to happen. We’re heading into the snow belt. What if we hit a blizzard? Why didn’t you bring the Jeep?”
He sighed. “It’s a clear day, maybe my last chance to drive my baby for the season.”
“Which part of the words snow belt did you not understand?”
“You want to take your Subaru, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. You have any objections?”
He lowered his head. “I have to tell you something I’ve never told you before, Rachel.”
Hell, this sounds serious. I frowned, watching his face. “Go ahead. What is it?”
“I hate your driving.” His head came up, and he was grinning, probably at the way my mouth was hanging open. I clamped it shut. “I don’t mean to insult you, but you scare the hell out of me when you drive.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re always looking at everything but the road.”
“I am not!”
“‘Oh, pretty mountain! Oooh, what kind of bird is that? Hey, look at that cloud.’”
I bit back my automatic defensive response and took a breath. “Try being blind for twenty years and see how much looking you do your first fall, first winter—”
He held up both hands to stop me, midrant. “I love the way you see everything like it’s the first time, Rachel. Makes me see things from a fresh perspective myself. It…enhances my every experience just being around you.”
Damn. That was almost poetic. My anger cooled a degree or two.
“I just don’t love being a passenger in a car while you’re doing it. That’s all. You gonna shoot me for that? You wanna use my gun? ’Cause it’s right here—”
“Shut the fuck up, Mason.” I dug my keys out of my pocket, hit the garage door opener button on the key ring, then dropped them into his lap. With his irritatingly perfect reflexes he caught them before they landed.
“You can drive, okay? But we’re taking my car.”
“That sounds fair.”
“You can put your boat in the garage if you want.”
“It’ll be fine outside.” He shut off the engine, dropped his own keys into the ashtray and got out. He had a dark green backpack on the backseat, and he grabbed that and was good to go.
So I let him drive. And yeah, I stayed mad at him for the first hour, until we drove past the wetlands preserve, partially frozen over, and I saw a red-tailed hawk dive-bomb not twenty feet from the highway, then soar up again with something furry in its talons.
“OhmyGod, did you see that? That hawk just nailed a freaking squirrel or something. Look, look at it go!” I was pointing and craning my neck. When I looked over at him, he managed to hold back for about three seconds and then he burst out laughing, and I did, too, in spite of myself.
“All right,” I admitted, no longer angry. “I’ll have to try to stop doing that.”
“Don’t ever stop doing that. That was amazing, and I never would have even noticed it if you hadn’t been with me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Just…try not to do it when you’re driving.”
I rolled my eyes and returned to watching the passing scenery.
* * *
At Strong Memorial Hospital’s Financial Services Center, Mason made the impossible as easy as 1, 2, 3. He got in to see a patient accounts manager, claiming to be an insurance adjuster and saying he needed to verify some information about the patient who received the kidney on August 17 of this year. Then he shuffled papers looking for the patient’s name while the woman at the desk clicked her keys, bringing up the info. I waited in the hallway outside the office door, and when he sneezed, I walked up the hall a few steps, made sure no one was looking and, with a tissue covering my fingers, pulled the fire alarm.
People poured out of offices left and right, including Mason and the accounts person. I joined the throng moving forward, exclaimed, “My purse!” in case anyone was listening, and ducked into the same office he’d just left. I hurried around the desk, took a quick look at the computer and there it was. The patient’s name and address. Three patients had kidney transplants that day. But only one of them received a left kidney. I scribbled the info on a notepad, jammed it into my pocket, zipped out again with my heart in my throat and caught up with the throng heading for the stairwells. By then someone in charge was telling everyone to stay calm, it was probably a false alarm. Maybe even a prank.
“Fucking kids,” someone muttered.
I saw Mason talking to the woman whose office I’d just left and looking at his watch, making excuses to leave and follow up with her later. Then he entered the stairwell. I passed her in the hall as I went to join him, but there were lots of people heading down and I had to wait until we were outside. He was ahead of me, and he got into my car and started the engine. I hurried the last few steps and hopped in on the passen
ger side.
“You get it?” he asked.
“Henry C. Powell of Sodus Point, New York. You know where that is?”
“No, but your nav system does.” He poked buttons. “Street?”
“Twenty-five Lake Street.”
He punched a button, then another, and the nav system plotted a route and said it would take less than an hour to reach our destination. “We’re in business. You want to grab a bite first?” It was close to four-thirty, after the two-and-a-half-hour drive out here, and the time we’d spent executing our plan. Flawlessly, I might add. Neither of us had eaten lunch.
“Yeah, but only if it’s a drive-through. I’m kind of eager to check on Mr. Powell.”
“Me, too.”
So we grabbed some fast food and ate while he drove.
An hour later we were cruising slowly along the southern shore of Lake Ontario, which looked more like an ocean than a lake, since you couldn’t see to the other side. The water was dark and moody, deep blue-black, with whitecaps like sharp teeth in the mouth of a monster. The sky matched. Of course, it would be dark in another twenty minutes, so it was already dusky under heavy clouds.
We located number 25. I’d been searching for info on Henry Powell online, via my smartphone, for much of the drive. His Facebook page relationship status was “Single,” and he only had forty-seven friends, despite having posted daily up until about a week ago. He looked pale and pasty in his profile pic, and I imagined that was one of his better photos, because who uses their bad ones, right? Ruddy cheeks and pale blue eyes, blondish hair going gray, a long, horselike face.
“I don’t think he won too many beauty contests.”
“Does it say what he does for a living?” Mason asked.
“Retired. Doesn’t say from what.”
He pulled to a stop on the deserted road. I got a chill but told myself to buck up. We weren’t going to know anything until we got a look inside.
“You stay here, I’ll go check on things.”
“Uh-uh. I need to see the inside of the house, see if it’s the same as the dream.”
“You described it to me. I can tell if it’s—”
“I have to go with you,” I said. “I don’t know why. It’s…personal. Like we’re…related.”
“That’s a stretch, Rache.”
“Too fucking bad, that’s how it feels.” I got out and slammed the door, then started up the recently shoveled walk to the front door of the little lakefront cottage. There was a white door with three diamond-shaped windowpanes, and a big picture window just to the left of it. I hit the doorbell.
“He’s gonna answer the door,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “He’s fine. The whole thing was stress. My imagination could have spun a second murder out of the strands left over from dreaming the first one, right?”
“Right.”
No one answered. The bell was probably broken. I knocked this time. Mason moved away from the door and walked over to that big window that looked out on the lake. “Light’s on. Shit.”
“What?”
“That looks like the ceiling fan you saw in your dream. Palm leaves. Off-white. Window’s too high, though. I can’t see the floor.”
I closed my eyes, knocked harder. “Henry! Henry, are you in there?”
No answer, and I closed my gloved hand around the doorknob, twisted—and it turned.
“The door’s unlocked. I’m going in.”
Mason swore and headed for me, but I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Henry C. Powell was lying on the living room floor, facedown, head turned to one side, shirt torn up the back. There was a gaping hole where his left kidney should have been.
I turned to run outside, pushing past Mason. I was bent over, hands on my knees, gasping and gagging, when Mason came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t puke, okay? We don’t want anyone knowing we were here.”
I gulped air, swallowed. “Neighbors probably already saw the car.”
He kept his hands on me as he looked up and down the narrow road. “Most of these places look empty. They’re seasonal. It’s winter.”
Nodding, I managed to straighten up. “We can’t just leave him there, though.”
“We won’t. We’ll make an anonymous call to the local cops from a rest stop. They’ll take care of him, notify his family. We can’t get you tangled up in this again, Rachel. Last time you were too close to being a suspect.”
“I know.”
“If that happens, we’ll be too busy trying to cover our own asses to keep on digging. And we have to keep on digging. No one else can do this.”
“No one else would believe this.”
He nodded.
“Mason, someone is harvesting your brother’s organs.”
“Maybe.”
“I have his eyes.”
“Yeah,” he said, staring right into them. And he couldn’t hide his fear.
I knew that fear. Felt it. Times ten. And I didn’t like it any better than he did. He was seeing it in his mind’s eye the same as I was. A horrible vision of him walking in and finding my body on a floor somewhere, with my eyes gouged out of my head.
Talk about a nightmare.
“We need to get you out of town, Rache. Somewhere safe.”
“I’m not even gonna argue,” I told him.
CHAPTER 5
Sunday, December 17
By the time we got back to my house it was almost midnight. Long drive, no snow, thank goodness. I missed my dog.
Mason got out and, instead of heading for his car, followed me to the front door. I turned around and tried for sarcasm to lighten the heavy mood that had settled over us on the long drive home. “What, you haven’t had enough of me for one day?”
He tried it right back. “Plenty, but I’m crashing on your couch all the same.”
It fell flat in both cases. For most of the ride we’d been more morosely silent than his brooding teenage nephew. My brain was wondering why the hell his damned brother refused to die, while his was probably piecing together clues and extrapolating them into some logical explanation for two murder victims who’d both had their organs harvested—his brother’s organs.
There was only one explanation in my mind. His tweaked-out sibling wanted his body parts back and had figured out a way to take them from beyond the grave. Period. And I was equally sure that meant my eyeballs were probably pretty high on his list. Mason was probably afraid that if he left me alone tonight, he would find me come sunup with two gaping holes in my head. And frankly, I was afraid of that, too.
“Earth to Rachel? Crashing on the sofa. I know I sounded all confident, but I’m still waiting for you to say that’s okay with you.”
“Fine, but unnecessary. I have plenty of bedrooms.”
“I know, but the couch puts me between you and outside.”
So would the left side of my bed.
“Suit yourself,” I said, and unlocked the door and went inside. The alarm panel beside the door started flashing red, warning me that it would start screaming bloody murder if I didn’t enter the code, and fast. I keyed it in while Mason looked over my shoulder. “Amy and Misty did what I told them for a change. Armed it.” I’d called home after our visit with the unfortunate Mr. Powell and instructed them to lock up tonight and set the system. I looked over my shoulder at Mason. He wasn’t smiling.
“Your birthday?” he asked with a nod at the keypad. “Are you shitting me?”
“How the hell do you know my birthday?”
“I think it was in one of your books. Or maybe it was in the background check I ran on you when you looked good for the Wraith killings. Or maybe I have an internet connection and a Google search bar like everybody else in the Wester
n hemisphere.”
He was worried about me. It was kind of sweet. Why did I still want to smack him?
“I wasn’t aware I was in any particular danger when I set the code.”
“You’re a minor celebrity. You’re always in danger.”
“What the fuck do you mean, minor?”
He softened up a little. I did, too. Then he opened the panel on the control box and hit a couple of buttons until the screen read “enter code.” The words flashed impatiently at me.
“I wouldn’t have known how to do that in a million years,” I told him.
“Pick a new code, Rache. No one’s birthday, not the last four digits of your phone number or your social, and not four sequential numbers. Make them random.”
“If they’re random, then how the hell am I going to remember them?”
“By repetition. Same way you memorize any other number.”
I scowled and entered the last four digits of my editor’s home phone number. He wouldn’t know that, right?
Right. As evidenced by his nod of approval. He hit another button or two and the thing read “code accepted.” Then the green light went on and the moon returned to its proper orbit around the earth.
“I’m beat,” I said, turning for the stairs, then stopping as my blood went cold. “I wonder why Myrt didn’t come down to greet us?”
He pulled his gun. I wanted to say, “Oh, quit being so melodramatic,” except I knew he wasn’t. After what we’d both seen today, he had good reason to be scared. The fucking organ snatcher would be coming for me, sooner or later, and my niece, best friend and bulldog had been home alone.
I was an idiot to have left them.
Don’t be stupid. I didn’t know… Not for sure, anyway.
I still don’t.
Yeah, I do.
He moved past me and went sneaking up the stairs like a TV cop, gun pointed up at the ceiling. I snagged my favorite baseball bat from the coat closet and hurried to catch up, walking on tiptoe with my heart in my throat, trying not to imagine my sister’s gorgeous daughter with her eyes gouged out of her head because the ghost-killer didn’t know the difference.
Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1 Page 41