The sheet came down. Loose at first, it soon pressed hard into her mouth and nose. She struggled for air. The sheet tightened, then twisted, and then he was bearing down on her face, snarling, sobbing, cursing Kaitlyn and himself. Meggie couldn’t breathe. Terror swept over her.
Why? How had she survived all this time only to die like this? Her horrific ordeal at the bottom of the cave, wedged in the rock. The fight for the surface, then Kaitlyn untying the rope so she’d fall. A high spine injury that left her locked away from the world. Years of silence and frustration. The long, agonizingly boring days. Waiting. Always waiting, and hoping against hope that someone would help her.
And now they would kill her. Nobody would even know how she’d died. They’d believe she died in her sleep. Nobody would ever find her killers, learn what had left Meggie paralyzed in the first place. It was too much injustice to stand. The universe shouldn’t be so cruel.
The sheet went slack on her face. Air came in. Not enough, not yet, but some. She sucked greedily to fill her lungs. The sounds of struggle.
He did it, she thought at first. He finally stood up to her.
But then another man was there, crying for help in Spanish. The sheet jerked off her face, and she caught people moving back and forth in her vision. A fist flew through the air. The newcomer cried out.
It was an aide, Meggie realized. Too early for rounds. How had he stumbled into here?
Two bodies slammed into the railing on her bed. They had him, whoever it was, both Kaitlyn and Benjamin pinning him down, while they punched at him, wrapped the sheet around his head.
Why wasn’t he shouting anymore? Why wasn’t he screaming for help? If only Meggie could turn her head, she could see what was going on. Something splattered on her face, warm and wet. It dripped from the tip of her nose onto her lips. A sharp, metallic taste hit her mouth.
Blood.
The man groaned in pain. They pushed him further over the railing. until his head was all the way down to Meggie’s chest. The sheet covered his head. Benjamin had his hands around the man’s throat, while hands flailed back, trying to get to eyes, mouth, anything.
Meanwhile, Kaitlyn was down low, grunting and thrusting. Each time she pushed forward, the man shuddered. His body convulsed on top of Meggie. Dear God, what was Kaitlyn doing to him?
At last he stopped fighting. He lay slumped across Meggie. A final twitch, then nothing. The other two pulled back. For a moment, all was silent except for the drumming rain.
Her heart pounding, Meggie tried to figure out what had happened.
Someone had burst in. While Benjamin was smothering her, one of the aides must have come walking down this way—why, she couldn’t say—and heard something. He came in, caught these two in the midst of murdering her, and tried to intervene. Then they’d killed him.
“Oh, my God.” Benjamin sounded sick. He staggered backward. “No, I don’t want it.”
“Hold the knife.”
“No!”
“Then give me the sheet. Quickly. He’s bleeding all over.”
They unraveled the sheet, spread it out on the floor, then finally jerked the dead man off Meggie’s chest. He slumped to the floor. She heard them wrapping the body.
Kaitlyn picked up something from the floor. A blue light flickered across the wall. She turned it off and pocketed it.
“Why did he have to come in here?” Benjamin asked. “I thought they didn’t do their rounds until later.”
“He wasn’t on his rounds, he was checking on Meggie. This is the guy I spotted talking to those people at the Devil’s Cauldron.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. He’s the one trying to get her out. Well, there’s one problem taken care of. Should buy us some time.” She sighed. “Too bad you took so blasted long with Meggie. Now we’ll have to do it again.”
“She’s a mess,” Benjamin said. “Blood on her face and chest. Someone will come in and see her.”
“No, they won’t.”
“How?” he demanded. “How the hell are they going to miss it?”
“Because she won’t be here when they come, got it?”
Benjamin fell silent.
“Now listen to me. The first thing is to get rid of this body. Then we’ll worry about cleaning the rest of this up. Including Meggie. It’s going to be tricky. Not like having her suffocate in her sleep. That would have been perfect. We’ll have to get rid of her body, too. Dammit.”
“I don’t understand. How are we going to move him out of here without being seen? They lock the door down to the ramp at night. We’ll have to haul him past the nurses station and through the front door. Meggie, too.”
“God, you are so stupid sometimes. You’re worse than that dumb kid I questioned at breakfast.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re not hauling them anywhere. They’re going over the railing.”
“Oh.”
“Starting with this one.”
Together, they dragged the body out the open doors onto the balcony. Some grunting and heaving as they lifted him up. Meggie waited in fear, sure that the first thing they would do when they got back was to finish her off, then do the same thing. But when they returned, she had one more reprieve.
Kaitlyn stripped out of her clothes and dropped them in a pile. She opened the wardrobe door and fished around inside until she found some of Meggie’s clothes. While she dressed, she gave Benjamin instructions.
“While I’m gone, smother her. No more fooling around.”
“With what? The sheet—”
“You’ll find something. Strangle her with your hands, if you have to.”
“My God.”
“I have to go out the front door and all the way around the building. Then I’ve got to find the body and drag it into the woods. That gives you plenty of time to grow a pair and get it done. By the time I get back from the woods, you’d better be done. Throw her down to me. Then toss the mattress.”
“I don’t know, Kait.”
“You don’t know what?” Her voice was scalding.
“If I can do it. If I can kill her.”
“If you don’t, you’re on your own. I’ll walk right out the gates and get in the car.”
“You can’t do that. They’ll find me here. I’ve got blood on my shirt and hands.”
“Exactly.”
“What are we going to do, anyway? What if there are droplets of blood on the walls or the floor?”
“First the bodies, then we wake Usher.” She sounded frustrated. “He’s in this deep enough already. But we’ve got to take care of this before the night shift comes through to check on her. That gives us about thirty minutes, so get it done.”
She went outside again, maybe to throw her bloody clothes down with the body. When she returned, she seemed calmer.
“It was a screwup, no question. But if we keep our heads, we’ll be okay. Just do what I tell you. Take care of her and throw her over. Got it?”
He made a swallowing sound, and when he spoke, his voice was thin but determined. “Got it. You can count on me.”
“Good.”
She left. Meggie waited. This was it. Time to see if Benjamin could go through with it without Kaitlyn standing over his shoulder, goading him on.
Benjamin rummaged through Meggie’s drawers and wardrobe, cursing in a low voice. When he came back, there was nothing in his hands. He stood for a long time, motionless.
“That’s it, then,” he said in a flat, dead voice. “I’ll have to do it with my hands.”
He met her gaze. She blinked her eyes frantically. No reaction.
He pinched her nose shut with his left hand. He cupped his right hand and brought it toward her mouth. It hesitated above her lips, and a look of self-loathing swept over his face, like a final, horrified realization of what he was contemplating. Then he closed his eyes.
His palm pressed against her mouth and cut off her air.
Chapter Twenty
Hiring a lancha cost Wes 150,000 colones (about 300 bucks), plus another hundred in U.S. dollars. Basically, everything they had on them. He grumbled to Becca that they could have hired a taxi to take them to the coast, spent a day scuba diving, had a nice lobster dinner, then returned by bedtime in what it cost to retrieve his cell phone from the Devil’s Cauldron.
“And that’s assuming Diego comes through for us.”
“Your hypothetical taxi driver wouldn’t have to cross the lake in a downpour, then wait who knows how long on the other side.”
True, Wes thought as he squinted against the driving rain and through the faint light cast off the front of the bow. And the poor guy had just sat down to dinner when Wes came pounding on his door. He had looked sadly at his casado—a plate of rice and beans with chunks of chicken—and sighed deeply when Wes said they needed urgent passage across the lake.
“Sé que es una molestía . . . ” Wes added. I know it’s a hassle.
So how much? The man gave his price and Wes swallowed hard and negotiated down to what was essentially all the cash they had on hand. Uncle Davis was going to love this expense report. It would have been cheaper to stay at the luxury house on the other side of the lake.
Becca hunched inside her rain poncho, pinching it shut at the face to keep out the rain. Wes didn’t even have that; his poncho was a black garbage sack with holes for his head and arms. The boat owner looked miserable leaning over the wheel, drenched. But once he’d taken the money, he hadn’t breathed a word of complaint. And instead of sitting behind the windshield, he stood so he could better see the faint outline of the opposite shore and thus keep them moving at a good clip.
It took twenty-five minutes to cross the lake, or twice as long as the trip had taken by daylight. Fortunately, it wasn’t windy, and the surface remained relatively calm. Little hacking up and down through waves.
The motor cut to idle and the man asked Wes to reach beneath his seat for the flashlight and pass it up. The man shone it along the coast, took them in a little closer, then continued his search. The light stopped on the pilings of an old wooden dock, the platform of which had long since rotted or floated away. He then took them east along the shoreline, picking his way past rocks and partially-submerged tree stumps. At last, he expertly pulled up to shore. He jumped out onto a sandy beach.
“Señora,” he said, and held out his arms to help Becca down.
Wes was expected to hop down on his own power.
“Cuanto?” the man asked as he tied his boat to a tree trunk. How long?
“An hour, maybe,” Wes answered in Spanish. “Hour and a half, tops. We’ve got to hike up to the cauldron, grab something, and come back.”
“I don’t want to be here all night.”
“You said you’d wait.”
The man frowned, then gave a reluctant nod. “Está bien.”
“Look, if it turns out to be longer than two hours, I’ll pay you twenty bucks an hour. I won’t cheat you, I promise.”
This mollified the man. It would be a miserable night, sitting out here with his boat, hungry and tired when he should be home tucking into a hot plate of casado, but it was doubtful he had this kind of a paycheck waiting at the end of a typical day, either.
Wes and Becca grabbed their backpacks, checked to make sure the seals hadn’t popped loose on the bags holding their batteries or anything else they couldn’t afford to get wet, then fished out their flashlights and looked for the trailhead to the Devil’s Cauldron.
It took twenty minutes trudging through the downpour until they were up the flat, gravel trail and past the house where they’d been staying the previous week, when Uncle Davis had called them home. They’d been gone nearly a week already, but the house was dark and appeared to have remained unrented since their previous stay.
Becca shone her flashlight through the gates of the property. “A little luxury doesn’t seem so bad all of a sudden.”
The trail grew steeper above the house. Well-graded and adequate in normal weather for wheelchairs or bikes. But it was slick with rain, and flooded on the few stretches where the ground turned flat. They stumbled over branches, heavy with waterlogged moss, that had blown down across the trail.
But whenever Wes questioned whether they should have waited until daylight, he thought of Diego’s final message.
Get your brother out. He’s not safe here.
The sooner they recovered the cell phone, the sooner they had their proof, the sooner they could yank Eric and go home.
About halfway up, Becca called for a rest break beneath the outstretched branches of a tree. She uncapped her water bottle. “Any faster and I’m going to induce premature labor.”
“I wish I had an excuse.” He unslung his backpack and groped for fresh batteries. His flashlight was losing juice. “You’re running me into the ground. I can barely keep up.”
“You’re such a liar,” she said, good-naturedly. “I can tell when you’re coddling the pregnant lady.”
“If it’s coddling, then why does my heart feel like it’s going to launch itself from my chest?” He drained the offered water bottle. “Ready?”
As they set off again, Wes thought about Kaitlyn Potterman. Why was she tormenting Meggie? What crime was she hiding?
Sadly, it was common to find a locked-in patient only to face family opposition. Instead of being overjoyed to discover treatment for their paralyzed loved one, they fought to maintain the status quo. There were many reasons. One woman had caused the accident that crippled her husband while driving drunk. In order to battle the crushing guilt, she’d remade herself as a model wife, coddling him like he was a seventeenth century French king.
She worried that if they freed him from his prison, allowed him to communicate with the outside world, she would become unnecessary. Worse, she was terrified that the first thing he would say when given the chance to speak was, “I want a divorce.”
He hadn’t. He’d been grateful for her care and forgiving of her mistake.
In other cases, the family suffered quite a different blow. A son or parent had suffered a stroke and slipped into a coma. Brain dead, it was believed. And the family abandoned him. Left him to rot in a long-term care center, fed and bathed, turned and moved like a potted plant. To accept that all those years he had been fully alive inside, but left in crushing loneliness, with nothing to stimulate his mind, was more than some people could accept. And so they denied the medical facts. They refused to believe, even when presented with reams of data that proved full consciousness.
But this case was something different. It was more like the initial investigation into Uncle Davis’s paralysis, when Wes and Becca discovered that he’d been shot with a spear gun while diving on the Golfo Dulce, then been hidden away while Wes’s mother and her other brother fought it out for the company fortune.
And then there was Walter Fitzroy. Locked away in the former resort of Vanderzee in Upstate New York and tormented by a mentally ill woman who believed she was his girlfriend. It had taken trickery and personal risk on Becca’s part to free him for treatment.
The case of Meggie Kerr was reminiscent of those two investigations. Money, people willing to commit violence in order to cover their crimes. Exactly what the crimes were, Wes didn’t know. He was anxious to get Meggie out, use the miracle of modern technology to pry open her brain and excavate the dark pit of human motivation.
“Davis knows,” Becca said a few minutes later. “That’s what this is about. That’s why he told us to come back to Vermont.”
Wes was deep in his own thoughts. “Wait, what?”
“Think about it. We were on our call chatting about that kid in the Bronx. And gradually getting around to discussing Meggie. Then suddenly he orders us home.”
“I know. I was telling him we didn’t need an entire house. I didn’t know he was about to cancel it and change our tickets. I was thinking, ‘Where did that come from?’”
“Remember anything funny that happene
d right before he said that?” she asked.
“Um, he said that bit about ‘We find them, we rescue them.’ So it was bewildering that he gave up just when we were about to make a big score.”
“I mean what happened, not what he said. He went quiet all of a sudden. Didn’t say anything for about a minute.”
Wes frowned. “Yeah, I remember. I thought his computer had crashed.”
“He learned something. That’s why he went quiet.”
Things came together. “He was multitasking. Checking his email while talking to us. Someone must have sent him a threatening message. He ordered us home to protect us.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“You don’t think that’s a leap?”
“If it is, it’s not a very big one. Otherwise, why the about-face? There’s only one thing I can’t figure out. Why hasn’t he checked up on us since then? I’ve emailed him probably twenty times about other stuff. Not once has he asked me why I’m not in Vermont.”
“Wait a second.” Wes stopped and turned his light on Becca. He wiped the water from his face as his mind raced ahead. “I’ve got it.”
The rain had diminished to a drizzle and the frogs were bellowing, croaking, buzzing, and chirping in the trees that surrounded the trail. Somewhere in the distance, howler monkeys hooted.
“Think about Tropical Beans,” he said. “Think about what they do.”
“Um. . .they make coffee?”
“Not the whole company. Kaitlyn Potterman.”
“Computer stuff. What . . . ? Oh!”
“That’s right. Remember the lawsuit accusing her of putting keystroke software on a competitor’s computers? Uncle Davis must have read the file.”
“Then the email came, warning him off,” Becca said. “He’s a smart guy, and he figured it out right away.”
“Smarter than me, apparently. I didn’t think of it, not even after re-reading my notes about Kaitlyn.”
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