“Yes, so I assumed it was an emergency of some sort. Can’t even imagine what plumbers charge for weekend jobs these days.” Betty paused. “Something wrong, dear?”
“No,” Virginia said, her voice strained. “You’re right, the manager must have sent someone up to check out an emergency.”
“What did the plumber look like?” Cabot asked.
Betty made a dismissive motion with her hand. “Like a plumber. He was wearing a uniform. Had a toolbox.”
“What color was his hair?” Cabot asked.
“What?” Betty frowned. “I’m not sure. Dark, I think, but I can’t say for certain. He was wearing a cap so I didn’t get a good look at him. He was on the tall side.”
“Any idea of his age?” Cabot pressed. “Young? Old?”
“Well, he moved like a young man but I can’t be sure of his age. Say, do you think there was something off about him?”
Virginia pulled herself together with a visible effort. “Probably not. I’ll check to make sure nothing is missing and then I’ll call the manager’s office tomorrow and find out what’s going on.”
“Yes, you do that,” Betty said. “See you tomorrow, dear. Maybe both of you.”
She winked at Cabot and closed her door.
Virginia got her door open. Cabot saw lights blink on the control panel of an alarm system. Virginia quickly punched in some numbers.
“Ever given out your code?” he asked neutrally.
“No. Well, my grandmother has it, but she’s the only other person who does.”
“Except for the security firm that installed your system.”
He followed her into the small foyer, set the bag aside and closed the door.
Virginia turned on the lights. “Let me take a wild guess. You think this plumber development is not a good thing.”
“What I’m thinking is that you had better have a look around your condo. But I’ll go first.”
He did a quick sweep of the small two-bedroom, two-bath space, checked the tiny balcony and then nodded at Virginia. Without a word she walked through the condo, going room by room. Along the way she opened closets and drawers.
A short time later she came to a halt in the living room and looked at him.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything missing,” she said. “If he did go through my stuff, he was very neat about it. But the thought of a stranger in here, touching my things . . . It makes me feel a little ill.”
“After a burglary or a break-in people often say they feel violated,” Cabot said. “It’s a natural reaction.”
Virginia glanced back toward the foyer. “My alarm system . . .”
“Is just an off-the-shelf piece of junk. Wouldn’t take a genius to put it out of commission for a while.”
She winced. “I was told it was top-of-the-line.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “All right, let’s go with the worst-case scenario. Say someone dressed as a plumber did break in while I was out of town. What on earth could he have been looking for?”
“The break-in can’t be a coincidence. Whoever he is, he must be linked to Brewster’s death. We’d better assume he came here looking for something and that he has some reason to think you might have it.”
Virginia put up both hands, palms out. “Wait, hold on, you’re going way too fast here. I think it’s called leaping to conclusions.”
“We conspiracy theorists tend to do that.”
“Okay, you’ve made your point,” Virginia said. “What’s our next step? No point calling the police. Nothing is missing.”
“We need to take a look around your gallery.”
“At this hour? Why?”
“If I was looking for something and didn’t find it here, my next stop would be your place of business,” he said patiently.
“I’ve got an alarm system installed there. I haven’t been contacted by the security company or the police so . . .”
“Same brand as the system in here?”
She sighed. “I got a deal in exchange for adding the second system.”
CHAPTER 17
Traffic was light downtown. The result was that a short time later Virginia eased her car into an empty space at the curb near the front of the gallery.
She got out. So did Cabot. Neither of them spoke as they walked quickly to the front door. Virginia’s hands shook a little when she tried to insert the key into the lock. It’s the adrenaline, she told herself. Perfectly natural under the circumstances. You’re not having a panic attack. You’re just extremely tense. You’ve got a right.
She got the door open on the second—or maybe it was the third—attempt. Cabot had the good sense not to offer to take the key away from her and perform the simple task himself. That would have really pissed her off.
Once inside she hurried to the box on the wall and forced herself to concentrate long enough to punch in the code. Mercifully she got it right the first time. She flipped the wall switch. The overhead display lights came on. A quick look around reassured her.
“It doesn’t look like anything has been disturbed in here,” she said.
Cabot looked at the rear of the long gallery. “You said Brewster’s pictures are stored in a storage locker.”
“In the back. Right. I’ll show you.”
She went behind the elegant steel-and-glass sales counter and opened the door to the back room. A strange, disturbing sense of wrongness wafted out of the opening. It was followed by an odor that some primal part of her recognized. Instinctively she clasped a hand across her nose and mouth, took a step back and came up hard against Cabot’s immovable frame.
“What in the world?” she whispered.
“Stay here,” Cabot said.
He moved her aside and hit the switch on the wall. The overhead fixtures came on, illuminating the jumble of packing crates, draped canvases and art objects that littered the back room.
Cabot moved slowly into the space. Ignoring his order, she followed him. He did not try to stop her. The door of the storage closet was open. The light was off inside. Virginia tried to connect the dots but her brain seemed to have gone numb.
“He was here,” she said. “He found Hannah’s paintings. But what is that smell?”
Cabot went around the end of a row of packing crates. He stopped and looked down.
“He was here but he wasn’t alone,” Cabot said.
The shivery feeling got more intense. She knew she did not want to see whatever it was that Cabot was looking at, but she forced herself to go around the crates and confront the truth.
For a heart-stopping moment she stared at the body lying in a pool of dried blood.
Cabot crouched beside the dead woman and reached out to check for a pulse. It was obvious he wasn’t going to find one. He looked up at Virginia.
“Recognize her?” he asked.
“No. I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
CHAPTER 18
“The cops have confirmed the ID of the victim,” Cabot said. He put his phone down on the dining counter that overlooked the kitchen. “Sandra Porter. She was a computer programmer who, up until a few days ago, worked in the IT department at a local company called Night Watch. Evidently, Porter recently left the company to pursue other opportunities.”
“That’s usually a euphemism for getting fired,” Virginia said.
They were eating a midnight dinner of pizza and red wine in her condo because by the time the police had cut them loose, neither of them had felt like trying to find a restaurant that was still open.
Just as well, Virginia thought. She was too wired to try to pass for normal in a public place. She wasn’t very hungry, either. After a couple of bites of pizza, she had decided to focus on the wine.
“It’s possible she really did quit,” Cabot said. “Good programmers often move around a lot simply because they
can. Their skills are in high demand.”
“Sandra Porter certainly didn’t show up in my back room because she wanted to apply for a job.”
“True. The question is, who else was in your back room?”
Virginia swallowed some more wine and slumped back in her chair. “Think it might have been the phony plumber who broke into my condo yesterday?”
Cabot picked up another slice of pizza. “I’d say that’s a definite maybe. Too early to tell. We don’t have enough information.”
“This thing is getting very complicated, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but we now have a couple more facts than we had earlier.”
“The name of the dead woman?”
“And her place of employment.”
“I suppose the police will chase down all the obvious leads and connections.”
“Sure.”
Virginia examined her almost-empty wineglass. “The cops are not going to buy into our conspiracy theory, are they? They’ll think we’re crazy if we try to convince them that a onetime cult leader has emerged from the past and, for reasons yet to be explained, started murdering people.”
“The police will spend their time investigating more plausible explanations. That’s their job. It’s up to you and me to try to find a connection to the past.”
“Think there’s a chance that Sandra Porter was in Zane’s compound with us?”
“No. According to her profile she was only twenty-four years old. That means she would have been two at the time we were all in the compound. I don’t remember any kids that young. Do you?”
“No.”
“You were one of the youngest on the list of cult members that my brothers and I have compiled. Zane didn’t want the problems that very young children or infants would have caused him. He wanted kids he could lock up at night.”
“We were hostages, weren’t we? We were insurance for our mothers’ obedience.”
“Yes.”
Virginia set the empty glass aside, sat forward and folded her arms on the table. “Okay, so Sandra Porter wasn’t at the compound. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have a connection to it. Maybe one of her relatives got sucked into the cult.”
“A possibility. But the real questions are, what was she doing at your gallery and why did someone kill her?”
“We need to find that fake plumber, don’t we?”
“That would be helpful,” Cabot said.
“So what’s our next step?”
“We start turning over rocks but we stay out of the way of the police. They will be extremely unhappy if they think we’re interfering in their investigation. And if they are unhappy, they won’t provide us with any insider information.”
“I understand. But where do we find the rocks to turn over?”
“Up until a few days ago Sandra Porter had a job,” Cabot said. “That means she had colleagues, people who knew her. She may have had a boyfriend.”
“She’ll have had neighbors and probably some relatives, too. Won’t the police be talking to all of them?”
“Sure,” Cabot said. “But they will be asking questions that are very different from the ones we’ll be asking. They’ll be looking for a relationship gone bad, a drug problem or maybe an indication of corporate espionage.”
“Got to admit, those sound like reasonable avenues of investigation—except none of them explain why Sandra Porter wound up dead in my back room.”
“It also doesn’t explain why Sandra Porter was killed in what television and the movies would have you believe is a classic hit-man style. Two shots, one to the chest to take the victim down, the second to the head to make sure of death.”
“Good grief. Do you think we’re talking about a professional hit man?”
“No, just someone who watches a lot of television. A real pro would have made the hit somewhere else and dumped the body into Lake Washington or Elliott Bay or driven it up into the mountains. There’s too much evidence associated with a body.”
Virginia exhaled slowly. “Good to know we’re not dealing with a hired killer.”
“According to my brother Jack, who studies this stuff, there aren’t a lot of actual professional hit men in the real world. The few that do exist tend to be affiliated with specific gangs or mobs. There are trained snipers, of course, but, by definition, they work from a distance.”
“I see.”
“That said, it doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people who think they’re smart enough to get away with murder.”
Virginia poured herself a little more wine, trying to suppress the wired sensation.
“What now?” she asked.
“Now I go downstairs and get my overnight bag out of the trunk of your car.”
She stilled. “You’re spending the night?”
“Do you want to stay here alone?”
She did not have to think very hard about that. “Under the circumstances, no.”
“Good choice,” Cabot said.
CHAPTER 19
The old nightmare struck out of the darkness.
The rear wall of the barn was on fire now, and there was no way out because Zane had locked the big front door for the night. The other children were screaming but she was too terrified to utter a sound. One of the older boys was ordering all of them to get down on the floor to avoid the smoke. She crouched, clutching her prized possession, the book her mother had given her a day earlier . . .
Virginia came awake on a full-blown panic attack. The crashing waves of anxiety were made even worse by the maddening knowledge that she could not control the terrible rush of energy. The experts said that, from a physiological point of view, it was as if her system was suddenly jolted into full fight-or-flight mode but with no obvious threat. The disconnect was unnerving. But as far as she was concerned, that explanation didn’t even begin to describe the infuriating sensation.
She was too far into the deep, dark waters of the anxiety attack to even attempt to stave it off with the self-defense routine. You’ve been here before. This isn’t your first rodeo. Do what you have to do.
She pushed the covers aside, made it to the bathroom, yanked open the cupboard and grabbed the bottle of meds. She got the lid off, shook out one pill and washed it down with a glass of water. Shivering, she gripped the edge of the sink and tried to breathe.
She hated having to resort to the meds. Doing so made her feel weak. But lately the panic attacks had been coming on more frequently, and there was no question that they were getting worse.
She went back into the bedroom, pulled on her robe and went out into the hall. In the weak glow of the night-light she could see that the door of Cabot’s room was closed.
Relieved, she hurried down the hall to the living room. But she came to an abrupt halt when she saw the otherworldly glow of a computer screen coming from the vicinity of the kitchen counter.
“How bad is this one on a scale of one to ten?” Cabot asked from the shadows.
And suddenly, the stone-cold normal way in which he was dealing with her weirdness had a calming effect.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Let’s just say I’ve been there.”
“Nine point nine,” she said, her voice very tight.
She was still jittery but she was regaining control.
“Did you take the meds?” Cabot asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Good. Do whatever you need to do until they kick in and then I’ve got a question for you.”
“Okay.”
She started pacing. Cabot went back to work. It was a relief not to have to explain everything to him, she thought. He knew better than to try to hold her or even touch her. He didn’t tell her to get a grip or attempt to soothe her with calming words. He just gave her the space she needed to deal with the attack.
To outsiders the scene probably would have appeared bizarre, she thought—one person having a serious anxiety attack while the other one acted as if such attacks were perfectly normal.
After a while she got her pulse and her breathing back under control. She drifted across the room and perched on one of the stools at the counter.
“I’m all right now,” she said. “What was the question?”
“I’ve been thinking about Zane’s first compound.”
“That ghastly old house outside Wallerton? What about it?”
“Early on when my brothers and I started looking for Zane, we checked out that first house. Like I told you, one of his followers handed it over to him. Zane sold it to raise cash to make the move to California.”
“So?”
“It was a dead end as far as leads go,” Cabot said. “But tonight when I got my one thirty a.m. wake-up call, I decided to review some of our old files on Zane. Out of curiosity I looked up the Wallerton house to see what had happened to it.”
“And?”
“It went through a number of hands but eventually wound up in foreclosure. The bank took possession. It stood empty for years but it suddenly sold—an all-cash deal—late last month.”
“Really? Who bought it?”
“That’s where things get interesting,” Cabot said. “I can’t ID the buyer.”
“What do you mean? That kind of information is public.”
“Not when the buyer purchases the property under the cover of a trust. It isn’t uncommon for wealthy people to buy real estate through a trust, but usually it’s possible to get some idea of the identity of the owners. Not in this case, however. Whoever constructed this trust wanted to be sure his identity remained hidden.”
Her anxiety was under control, but Virginia was aware of another kind of excitement sparking somewhere inside her.
“After years of rotting into the ground, the Wallerton house is suddenly sold to an unknown party,” she said. “What we’ve got here is another amazing coincidence.”
“It’s the kind of thing we conspiracy buffs take very seriously.” Cabot closed his laptop and looked at her. “Want to drive to Wallerton in the morning? Have a look around for old time’s sake?”
Promise Not to Tell Page 10