We Can See You

by Simon Kernick

  She fought her way through the bushes, trying to remember where Maria had said the getaway car was parked. It had only been forty-five minutes since she’d given Brook that information, but now Maria was dead and the conversation seemed like something from another, more innocent life.

  Once again, Brook felt panic building as she stumbled aimlessly through the thick wall of undergrowth and trees, remembering all those TV shows in which a police helicopter arrives at the scene of a crime with heat-seeking equipment that can track fugitives, however well they’re hidden.

  She couldn’t let them get her. Not yet. Not before she’d found Paige.

  In the end she literally ran into the car, bouncing off its bodywork with a loud grunt before she realized what it was.

  It was small, khaki-coloured Rav4. The driver’s door was unlocked and she got in and quickly found the keys under the seat, as Maria had told her she would.

  The engine started first time. Brook didn’t switch on the lights, but she could see a rough trail cutting through the undergrowth and she threw the car into Drive and drove down it, weaving through the trees, suddenly feeling an incredible exhilaration. She’d faced death – been inches away from it – and survived. For a few moments she felt invincible, and when a fence appeared up ahead with a hole just about big enough to drive the car through, and what looked like a drop beyond, she kept going, clenching her teeth as she went through the hole and the car suddenly hurtled down a steep, near vertical incline, before levelling out with a bump that almost ripped off the hood.

  Brook was now on the track that she’d driven up earlier in the day. Still keeping the lights switched off, she drove as fast as she dared, braking suddenly as she came to the bends, before the track joined another and then suddenly there it was, up ahead: the highway.

  She looked in the mirror and felt the kind of relief that had been completely alien to her these past three days. No one seemed to be following her. With a sharp exhalation, she turned on the headlamps, slowed up for a car to come past and then turned back in the direction of Carmel, passing two patrol cars coming fast in the opposite direction, sirens blaring as they headed towards the Reyes house.

  Only then did the questions start to nag at Brook. If Tony Reyes had nothing to do with Logan’s murder and Paige’s kidnapping, then who on earth lay behind it? And was Reyes right? Was it her, and not Logan, who’d been the target?

  34

  When it happened, it happened fast.

  Giant had actually been standing at the locked front gates to the Reyes hacienda – an irritatingly tasteful-looking place up on the hill – about to ring the buzzer on the wall, since there was no one in the gatehouse, when he’d heard a single faint pop that could have been a gunshot, coming from inside. At the time he’d spotted Maria Reyes’s Porsche 911 parked at an odd angle in the courtyard a few yards away, facing the gates, and had still been trying to process what that meant when there was another pop, followed immediately by a burst of what was unmistakably automatic weapon fire.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jenna called out from the car as Giant sprinted back to it. ‘Did I just hear shots?’ She looked tense but, unlike Giant, she’d been in an active shooter situation before. Three years ago she’d become something of a legend in the police department when she’d shot dead two suspects during a bungled robbery, so she’d proved herself under pressure.

  ‘Yeah, you did,’ he said, jumping inside. ‘From at least three different weapons. One automatic. And Maria’s car’s here. Call for backup. We’re going in.’

  As Jenna pulled out her gun and reached for the radio, Giant drove straight at the front gates and, although they were pretty sturdy-looking, they burst open, immediately setting off an incredibly loud alarm that reverberated around the courtyard. Giant continued on, past Maria’s Porsche, keeping his head low in case anyone opened up from inside the house, and stopped a few yards away from the front door, throwing on the lights and the siren so that anyone inside would know who they were.

  In truth, he was terrified. His guts were churning and he prayed the shooting was over and that no one was going to want to continue the fight with them. But he also knew that he had to step up to the plate. The rules on active shooters had changed. No longer could law-enforcement officers wait for the arrival of a SWAT team. If they believed lives were in danger, it was their duty to confront the shooter.

  He fumbled for his gun, almost dropping it in the process, and looked across at Jenna, hoping she hadn’t seen him do that. Her expression was tense, but in control. ‘Ready?’ he whispered.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They exited the car, using the doors as cover. It was hard to hear anything above the sound of the alarm, but Giant was pretty sure there was no further shooting from inside. They stayed where they were for a good thirty seconds, checking out the courtyard, which had now been illuminated by spotlights, in case someone was targeting them. But there was no movement, nor was there any sign of backup. They were close to fifteen miles from Monterey here, so it was going to be a while before anyone showed up. They were on their own.

  ‘You ready to approach?’ shouted Jenna above the noise of the alarm.

  Giant was never going to be ready, but he replied in the affirmative, pleased that his voice betrayed none of the fear he was experiencing. They moved to the front door and he tried the handle. Locked. ‘Police. Open up!’ he yelled, his voice drowned out by the noise of the alarm, before banging hard on the door and standing off to one side opposite Jenna.

  There was no reaction from inside.

  Giant wasn’t sure what to do. He could hardly kick the door in. And suddenly, in one of those nightmare moments straight out of childhood, his mind went completely blank.

  It was Jenna who saved him. ‘We need to find if there’s a way in around the back,’ she said.

  He nodded and they crept quickly around the side of the house, keeping low, with Giant in the lead, because he didn’t want Jenna thinking he was scared. Nor did he want her seeing that his gun hand was shaking.

  The side gate was open and led onto a vast back yard with a huge swimming pool shaped in a figure of eight, with a water slide at one end, beyond which a lawn ran down to a line of trees that were rustling in the cool night breeze at the foot of the mountain. A pair of French doors led out onto the pool, but a curtain was across them, preventing any view of inside, and they were both locked.

  And who said crime didn’t pay? thought Giant. It sickened him to think that a murderous thug like Tony Reyes was living in this kind of luxury, while an honest cop like him lived in a cramped apartment with a view of the block next door.

  Dogs were barking wildly from somewhere off to the left, but it was clear they were shut away in a kennel. Giant tried to ignore all the noise as they circumnavigated the house along a flagstone path lined with potted plants. Whenever they came to a window, he held up a hand and they’d both pause while he peered inside, knowing that every time he did so, he might find himself staring down a gun barrel. But every time the windows were either shuttered or the curtains were drawn, with no lights on inside.

  It was as he approached yet another window that he saw it – a beanie hat lying on the path directly beneath it. The window was open and the hat was black, the same colour as the one Brook Connor had been wearing in the restaurant camera footage. As he leaned down to pick it up, he saw a figure staggering towards them up another path that led to the back of the property.

  Giant moved away from the window, as Jenna joined him. They both held their guns in front of them and began moving towards the figure, who didn’t look as if he’d seen them.

  As they got closer, Giant could see that it was a man in a sports jacket. His face was bloodied and he was holding one side of it with his hand.

  He looked unarmed, but they weren’t taking any chances.

  ‘Police! Stay where you are, and put your hands up!’ shouted Giant, relieved that the man didn’t appear to be a threat.

&
nbsp; The man fell to his knees and raised his hands. That was when Giant recognized him in the moonlight, and he felt a warm glow inside as he realized the scale of the beating Tony Reyes had received. Even in the near-darkness Giant could see that his nose was twisted and broken, and one eye was badly swollen.

  ‘This is my house,’ Reyes called back.

  Giant felt an urge to shoot him, then and there, but he held back. ‘I know who you are,’ he said, not quite managing to keep the contempt out of his voice.

  ‘I want to report a homicide,’ Reyes continued. ‘That fugitive you’re after on the news, Brook Connor? She just murdered my wife.’

  35

  Brook staggered back inside the motel room, locking the door behind her.

  All the exhilaration and relief she’d felt earlier had long since disappeared. Now she felt exhausted, scared and, most of all, confused.

  Tony Reyes was innocent. She knew that now. Which meant that someone else was behind Logan’s murder and Paige and Rosa’s disappearance – someone who’d put huge effort into planning the destruction of her family, while simultaneously setting her up for it. And it wasn’t about money. A quarter of a million dollars in cash was never going to be enough to justify all this. So who hated her that much?

  It was a hard question to have to ask herself. Brook wasn’t perfect, she knew that. She had faults, and plenty of them, but overall she considered herself a good person. Even her private clients, though occasionally they were not the most pleasant of people, were generally pretty harmless. One – a married guy in his fifties, high up in IT – had made a very clumsy and pretty aggressive pass at her once, as he was leaving her office a couple of years back, grabbing her in a bear hug and trying to plant a kiss on her lips. When she’d kneed him straight in the groin, causing him to collapse to his knees and throw up all over her carpet, he’d threatened to sue her for assault and – believe it or not – ‘testicular injury’. He’d even gone so far as to send her a lawyer’s letter and issue proceedings, although he had soon pulled back when Angie Southby had written back, informing him that the camera in Brook’s office had filmed everything. Brook hadn’t heard another word from him after that, but she’d read a few months ago that he’d been fired from the company he’d founded, after a string of sex allegations against him, a well-deserved victim of the ‘Me Too’ movement, so she figured he’d have far bigger fish to fry than coming after her after all this time.

  Brook poured herself a glass of water and lay on the bed, with the pistol that had saved her life beside her, along with the cellphone that the kidnappers had first contacted Logan on. She wasn’t sure what to do with the gun. She’d shot two men with it tonight, so in many ways it was just another thing to incriminate her with, but she was still loath to part company with it. Being armed somehow made her feel less vulnerable.

  She lay there for a long time, staring up at the ceiling, trying to work out who could possibly hate her this much. And who could have the sheer ruthlessness to kidnap a child. The thing was, Brook remained certain Paige wasn’t dead. It was the photo she’d been sent that convinced her. Paige was wearing clothes that had clearly been bought for her, and although she looked confused, there was no evidence that she’d been mistreated in any way. If the kidnappers had simply intended to kill her, they wouldn’t have bothered buying her new clothes. But if they intended to release her, surely she would have been freed by now. So who had her – and why?

  Paige’s maternal grandparents would have been the obvious suspects, except that the grandfather was dead, and the grandmother lived in Costa Rica and had made no move to keep in touch with her granddaughter. Logan’s parents weren’t much interested, either, and anyway they would never have killed their own son.

  Brook’s thoughts turned to her lawyer and friend, Angie Southby. Maria Reyes had given Brook a good reason why she’d been meeting Angie, and it seemed logical that Logan would have recommended her as a lawyer, since he’d known her for so long and knew how capable she was. But Brook didn’t like the fact that it was only Angie who knew that Logan’s body was in the trunk of the car in her garage. Angie wouldn’t have set the fire herself, but then she wouldn’t have needed to. She was a criminal lawyer. She had access to plenty of would-be accomplices. She also, it seemed, had known about the affair between Logan and Maria Reyes, and yet she hadn’t mentioned it when they’d talked two nights ago.

  There was something else, too. Brook remembered Angie telling her long ago in a rare, unguarded moment, after a couple of drinks, that she longed to have children, but had always put her career first and now realized she’d left it too late. What if she’d had an affair with Logan and had killed him out of revenge? What if she’d taken Paige as her own, now that she’d split up from Bruce and was alone? Angie lived in a big house. She could hire a Mexican nanny like Rosa, who didn’t ask too many questions, and live happily ever after.

  For a good few minutes Brook ran with this idea in her head. At one point she was even contemplating driving up to Angie’s house in Half Moon Bay to see if Paige was there. Then slowly it dawned on her what a ludicrous theory this was. If Angie really wanted a child that badly, she could simply have adopted one. It wouldn’t have been hard for a career woman like her to do, and was far, far easier than setting up a conspiracy to murder Logan, kidnap Paige and set Brook up for both crimes. And there was no way she’d have been able to hide Paige away with a nanny, while the news was constantly showing photos of her. It would have been way too risky.

  But someone was holding Paige.

  For the first time in awhile Brook thought back to the deaths of her parents. She’d never believed her dad had killed her mom. He simply wasn’t that kind of man. Brook knew that a lot of people say that about their loved ones, because they don’t want to believe they’re capable of the horrific crimes they’re accused of, but where her dad was concerned, she was sure she was being objective.

  Brook had been to visit them three weeks before they died. It had been just after she’d discovered that the guy she’d been seeing for six months had been cheating on her with a woman at work, and she’d been feeling sorry for herself. She and her parents had gone for a long walk around the lake near their house; and afterwards Mom and Dad had comforted her – Dad by putting his arm around Brook’s shoulder, hugging her close, and saying that the guy didn’t deserve her; and Mom by cooking her favourite childhood meal of beef and bacon meatloaf with roast potatoes. They’d sat by the fire that night, not really saying too much, happy in each other’s company – a family once again. When Brook left the next day after lunch she’d been feeling a lot better, and she remembered promising to herself that she was going to visit them every month without fail from then on.

  It had been the last time she’d seen them, and she’d been dismayed when the police eventually concluded that it was a murder/suicide, and that no one else had been involved.

  Rather than cry tears of hopelessness, Brook had got on with her life and had used the money they’d left her to better herself. Whenever the subject of her parents came up in interviews, she always said she didn’t believe the official theory, but she hadn’t shown her grief on air. She didn’t break down; instead she talked about her mom and dad with genuine fondness, but kept her emotions from running too free, which, looking back, had probably been a mistake. Maybe she should have wept publically, but that wasn’t her. She was a private person. What she did do was get Angie to petition the Modesto police department to reopen the case two years ago, but they’d refused, on the basis that there was no new evidence contradicting their findings.

  And that was the thing. Brook had moved on. She didn’t blindly pursue her parents’ killer. In hindsight, maybe she should have hired a PI like Cervantes to look into the murders. But she hadn’t. And more and more, that was looking like a mistake, too, because her parents had been targeted for a reason, just like Brook herself had. And now, lying there on the bed in the shitty motel room, she couldn’t help thinking
that perhaps the same person had targeted them all. Seven years might have passed since her parents had died, but she now thought it was no coincidence. Find who had killed her parents and she might find who’d set her up.

  Exhausted she might have been, but Brook wasn’t ready to give up yet and, as she lay there thinking about her next move, she realized there was one person who might be able to help. She’d only seen him once since she was a child – and that had been at her parents’ joint funeral. She didn’t even know if he was still alive, and it was a long shot. Jesus, it was a long shot.

  But right then, he represented pretty much her last option.

  Part Four

  36

  This Morning

  12.30 a.m.

  For Tyrone Giant, one of the most frustrating things about police work was when you knew the person sitting opposite you was a crook of the lowest order, but the evidence to prove it remained as elusive as ever.

  Tony Reyes had become an obsession to Giant and now, for the first time in his career, he had the guy in front of him, alongside one of his hotshot lawyers. Giant had been questioning Reyes about exactly what had happened at his house that night. And it wasn’t exactly going according to plan.

  He leaned forward on the interview-room chair, conscious of it creaking. ‘Mr Reyes, you’re saying that Brook Connor turned up at your house tonight, accompanied by your wife, whom she’d kidnapped, and threatened you at gunpoint.’

  Reyes nodded, meeting Giant’s gaze. ‘That’s right.’ He might have had a badly bruised face, the beginnings of a black eye and a fat lip, but his manner was calm and authoritative.

  ‘Do you have any idea why Brook Connor would kidnap your wife?’ Giant asked him.

  ‘Ms Connor said that my wife Maria was having an affair with her husband, which was something I was unaware of.’