Paranoid

by Lisa Jackson

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  She looked at the clock again, then dragged her cell phone from her pocket. “I want you to see something. I got this text message the other day, and right away I thought of Luke.”

  Her father’s eyebrows crashed together.

  “I know, crazy, right? But . . . well, it kinda freaked me out.”

  He frowned at her phone as she handed it to him and he read the message. “Did you call or text back?”

  “No response. And the police are looking into it, but Cade thinks it’s probably from some kind of burner phone. Untraceable.”

  “Could be a mistake?”

  “Don’t think so. Because of the time. The first one came in around midnight twenty years to the very date that Luke died. The night that Violet was murdered. I thought the text message might be a mistake, a weird coincidence, but then I got another one.” She scrolled to the second text. “Got it this morning, just hours after Annessa was murdered.”

  “Someone’s trying to get to you.”

  “He has,” she admitted and then told him the rest: sensing someone outside, the footprint, the scrawled message sprayed upon her door.

  He returned her phone to her. “You file a police report?”

  “Cade insisted on it.”

  “They find anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Jesus. I’d say it was just teenagers—y’know, bored and making trouble—but the murders put a darker spin on it.”

  “Yeah.” She told him about the precautions they were taking, then, seeing the time, got to her feet.

  “Anything you want me to do?” he asked as she set her half-full cup in the sink.

  “Nah. I just needed to talk it out, y’know.” She gave him a quick kiss on his beard-stubbled cheek. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Okay, but you be careful,” he warned, “and if you need anything . . .”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He walked with her to the back porch. “You do that. Keep me in the loop.”

  She sketched a wave and hurried down the two steps and shivered. It wasn’t cold outside, just gloomy. She had things to do.

  Such as what?

  Keep the kids safe?

  Get real.

  Patient, lying back in the recliner: “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  Therapist: “What do you mean?”

  Patient: “People are dying. People I know.”

  Therapist, calmly: “Death is a part of life.”

  Patient, a little more anxious: “But they’re being murdered! Killed.”

  Therapist: “And how does that make you feel?”

  Patient, whispering: “Responsible.”

  A beat.

  Therapist, concerned, leaning forward: “Why do you feel responsible?”

  Patient, fighting tears: “Because I think . . . I feel that if it weren’t for me, for my lies, they wouldn’t have died. It all started with Luke.” Tears begin to sprout. “I lied to him, oh, God. I lied to him and I shouldn’t have. I want to talk to him, but I can’t find him. I think . . . I think he’s hiding from me.”

  Therapist, eyeing the clock: “That’s long over.”

  Patient: “I don’t think so and it haunts me. He haunts me.”

  Therapist: “Luke haunts you?”

  Patient: “Because of my lies. You told me I could speak to him.”

  Therapist, pausing, then: “That might not be possible. You have to let him go.”

  Patient, swallowing: “I try, but it’s hard.”

  Therapist, relaxing a bit and inhaling the scent of lemongrass from the burning incense: “I know, but you can do it. Now, it’s time for you to surface.”

  Patient: “He would never forgive me.”

  Therapist: “You can’t bring him back. You can’t undo what’s done, but you can move forward. Look to the future.”

  Patient, confused: “What? How?”

  Therapist: “Just try. First, look back at the past. What do you see?”

  The patient is still uncertain.

  Therapist, encouraging: “Just look.”

  Patient, head turning to the left and frowning eyebrows knitting in concentration: “I see dark clouds. A storm over a mountain. Rain and thunder pouring over the valley.”

  Therapist, leaning in closer: “Good. Now, when you look to the future?”

  Patient, head slowly rotating to the right, the knitted brow relaxing, a smile toying on previously downturned lips: “It’s bright.” Relief is evident. “A warm glow over the mountain, sunshine beaming down on the valley where a river is flowing like liquid gold.”

  Therapist, pleased: “Then let go of the past. Of the storm. Accept the light. And now it’s time to return. Three: You’re beginning to surface.”

  Patient: “But the storm is following. People are dying.”

  Therapist: “Let them go.”

  Patient: “But Luke. You’re saying I have to forget him. I don’t know if I can. . . .”

  Therapist: “Two. You’re leaving them behind. You’re leaving the past behind. You’re leaving Luke behind.”

  Patient, nodding in the chair, hair rubbing against the leather, face more relaxed: “I will.”

  Therapist, relieved: “Good.” A pause. “One. And you’re back.”

  CHAPTER 28

  A redheaded twentysomething in blue scrubs with a name tag that read “Will Hart, Customer Service” was behind the counter at Ace Medical Supplies in Astoria. He had been stacking boxes on the back wall behind the register but had turned to face Cade and Voss when they’d entered the small storefront owned by Nate Moretti. The space inside was small, filled with freestanding shelves that displayed neat stacks of all kinds of medical equipment from bandages to blood pressure cuffs to latex gloves to diabetes monitors and more. Against one wall, a row of walkers stood at the ready, crutches stacked neatly behind, all gleaming beneath suspended fluorescent lights.

  “Can I help you?” Will Hart asked. A lanky kid, he had a pug nose sprinkled with freckles, dark eyes, and an eager-to-please expression.

  “Yeah. We’d like to speak with Nate Moretti,” Cade said. “We’re with the city police.” He showed his ID and badge, just as Voss retrieved hers and displayed it on the counter.

  “Oh. Wow.” Hart glanced at the badges and swallowed hard. “He. Um. Mr. Moretti’s not in right now.”

  “Do you know where he is?” Cade asked, shoving his wallet back into his pocket.

  “No. I mean . . . Oh, geez. Is he in trouble?” Will asked.

  “We just want to talk to him,” Cade said.

  Voss repeated the question: “Do you know where he is?”

  Will shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

  “But he called you?” she said.

  “Yeah.” He was nodding frantically, obviously unnerved at the presence of the police in the store. “But . . . it was kinda weird. First of all, he never misses a day of work. Never. And he left me the message at, let me see”—he fished a cell phone from his pocket and flipped through the screen—“three forty-seven in the morning. Like, who texts then?”

  “What did it say?”

  “Just that he wouldn’t be in today. That he was feeling sick.” With some trepidation, he handed the phone to Cade. The message was simple: I’ve been up all night. Stomach bug. Open up and Wendy will be in around noon.

  Sure enough the time was noted as 3:47 a.m.

  Hart’s response at 8:13 was: OK

  Ryder was tempted to scroll up, but didn’t. “Who’s Wendy?”

  Hart’s mouth pinched. “My coworker. She’d better show.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  He glanced over his shoulder as if he expected someone might be listening even though there was no one else in the store.

  “Because she’s a slacker, that’s why. Has she shown up? No. Has she answered any of my texts? No. Do I think she’s going to come in and relieve me? Take a guess.” He glanced at the clock, which read 12:2
8. “She’s already late. My guess: she’s not coming in.” His eager, wanting-to-please attitude was quickly disintegrating.

  “Well, if Nate calls in, let him know we’re looking for him,” Voss said and slid her card across the counter.

  “I will,” Hart said, dropping Voss’s card into the back slot of the register just as the front door opened and a white-haired man wrangling a woman in a wheelchair backed into the store.

  Cade held the door for him, and the man, in baseball cap and jeans with suspenders over a plaid shirt, spun the chair as he entered.

  “Thanks,” the woman said. She was in her late seventies, it seemed. With short, snow-white hair, she was wearing a housecoat and one leg was in a cast, propped on the footrest.

  “We’re looking for Nate,” the man said as he rolled his wife to the counter, where Hart waited.

  “Get in line,” Voss said under her breath as the door swung closed behind them. “Let’s go see if good old Nate is home in bed, nursing a bad tummy.” She threw a glance at Cade. “Who knows? Maybe he’s not alone.”

  They knew his address and as Voss keyed it into her phone for a GPS readout, Cade slid behind the wheel of the Jeep, a department-issued Jeep that was short on comfort and big on technical equipment. Despite Voss’s preference for her phone, he punched the address into the GPS of the Jeep’s computer, then wheeled out of the lot of the strip mall.

  The fog had settled in rather than dissipating and Ryder, though he wanted to gun it, had to drive slower than usual, knowing though not seeing that he was paralleling the river and that somewhere out there in the mist the old cannery, now invisible to him, lay rotting. He told himself that he was reaching, trying to connect the death of Luke Hollander with the homicides that were happening now; but he couldn’t discount the fact that “KILLER” had been scrawled in paint across Rachel’s door or that the text she’d received suggested that it had come from someone close to Luke, if not from her stepbrother himself, who was long dead.

  Kayleigh was right—some sick prick was behind it, but why? Who would get his rocks off by terrorizing her?

  His hands gripped the wheel more tightly and from the corner of his eye he thought he spied the cannery, a behemoth of a building, holding its own secrets, but, of course, that was just his imagination. He couldn’t see fifty feet in front of the Jeep, much less across the acres that separated the cannery from the road.

  He saw the change in direction on the screen, just as Voss said, “Turn left up here . . . there.” She pointed at a crossroad and he waited, making certain no one was coming from the opposite direction.

  He headed upward through the hills on the county road, and the fog became less dense. Fir and spruce trees gave way in spots to fields that had been cleared, and fence posts stood like sentinels rising in the mist.

  “What d’ya bet he’s hiding out?” Voss said. “He knows we’re on to him. He’s got to know that we’d find her phone and start looking at him. God, can we get a little heat in here?” She fiddled with the control. “End of May and still colder than a well digger’s butt.”

  “You think Moretti’s the killer?”

  “Who else? If you ask me, they planned to meet at the school yard, things get a little rough, out of hand, and she ends up dead.” She nodded, as if agreeing with herself as she peered through the windshield. “Probably a sex game gone wrong.”

  “Then how does the murder tie to Violet Sperry?”

  “Not convinced the homicides are linked.”

  “Really? No murders in the area for years and now two, within a week, women who knew each other—”

  “Everyone knows everyone in this small town,” she cut in.

  “—both having blue painter’s tape slapped over their eyes.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She let out a sound of disgust. “Okay, I was just screwin’ with ya, playin’ devil’s advocate. But Moretti could be our doer; he knew Violet Sperry as well.”

  “Wasn’t very smart, though.”

  “When sex is involved, no one’s exactly an Einstein.” Scowling at the map on her phone, she said, “Maybe he was involved with both of them, you never know.”

  “No ‘sexting’ on Violet’s cell.”

  “Well, shoot. Maybe she was just more careful than the Cooper woman was. Maybe her husband kept an eye on her phone and computer. Maybe she was just smarter than Annessa Cooper.”

  “She still ended up dead.”

  “Yeah, I’ll give ya that. But that’s about all.”

  “The killer had to know we’d find him through the phone records. And he didn’t bother to take her phone. No, he wanted us to find her, to know who she was; it was like she was on display.”

  “In the church.”

  “In the bell tower,” he said, driving around a corner as the road flattened a little. “Her maiden name was Bell.”

  “Oh, geez, now you’re really reachin’.”

  “Am I?”

  Voss said, “Slow down, I think you’re about at the turn.”

  He squinted, searching for the lane in the soupy mix, then spied a mailbox. “Here we go.” He turned onto a gravel lane where two ruts wound into the fog, the space between the tire tracks filled with weeds and tufts of grass.

  “Let’s just hope he’s home.”

  * * *

  Rachel nosed her Explorer into the garage. After cutting the engine, while still behind the wheel, she decided to read through her recent texts. She’d skimmed them, saw that they hadn’t been from Cade or the kids, so she’d ignored the rapid-fire messages that she’d received in the past few hours. Now, more carefully she read each short text.

  The first was from Mercedes, of course: I heard about Annessa Bell and that Harper found the body. Call me.

  “Nope,” Rachel said aloud and deleted the text.

  The next was from Brit: OMG! Not Annessa too! I just can’t believe it. What the F is going on? Is Harper okay?

  Lila, of course, had texted several times. The first: I’m still reeling. Do you know anything? Chuck and Lucas and I are horrified! Horrified!!!! Call me!

  The second: Lucas wants to know if Harper’s okay. Have you seen Xander? He’s a mess!!! This is horrible. HORRIBLE!!!

  And a third: Call me, would you? We need to know that you’re all doing okay. I can’t believe this. Emergency reunion meeting! FRIDAY, MY HOUSE. 7:30!!!

  Really?

  Even Reva had weighed in: Just heard about Annessa. Hard to believe. My God, what’s happening and really, who’s next? This is bizarre and unsettling. I hope your daughter isn’t too traumatized. OMG—of course she is. Sorry. Can’t believe Lila thinks we need a reunion meeting. The woman is relentless. (Sigh.) Guess I’ll see you there.

  Deleting the remainder of the texts, Rachel felt a bit of satisfaction watching the stupid emojis disappear. Sometimes the too-cute graphics bothered her—well, make that all of the time. But now, in the wake of tragedy? They just seemed inane.

  She climbed out of the SUV and actually saw rays of sunshine piercing the fog. Maybe the weather would actually improve.

  Ever since leaving her father’s house, she’d been consumed in thought, turning the conversation with Ned over in her mind to the point that she’d nearly missed the turn to her own street.

  What had it been that bothered her about the conversation? Yeah, her father had been kind, even insightful, had told her to let things go, but there had been something beneath the tenor of the conversation, something hidden by words, a sense that there was more to it.

  Maybe it was because he’d asked about her mother. That was always a tense situation.

  “Oh, crap.” She’d promised to call.

  She found Melinda’s name on her contact list and hit the call button. Seconds later she was sent directly to her mother’s voice mail. “Hey, Mom,” she said as she opened the gate and let herself into the yard. “It’s me. Just checking in. Give a call back when you can.” She walked up the back steps, unlocked the house, and yelled, “I�
��m home!” into the hallway as Reno galloped up to greet her. She scratched her dog behind his head and yelled again, “I’m back!” into the house.

  Locking the door and rearming the alarm, she waited for a response.

  Nothing.

  “Harper! Dylan?”

  The house was still and she told herself not to worry. So what? They probably had earbuds in or were sleeping or caught up in some television show. With Reno beside her, she stepped down the hallway to Harper’s room and pushed open the door. Empty. A feeling of dread slithered through her and she told herself she was being silly. She opened Dylan’s door and he, too, was missing, an open bag of chips on his bed, the room the sty it always was. But empty. Silent. His game controller left on a pillow.

  This wasn’t good.

  “Kids?” she said, thinking they might be upstairs or down. But the house was too still, silent aside from the padding of Reno’s feet and the hum of the refrigerator. Don’t panic.

  They wouldn’t go anywhere.

  The house was locked, the alarm set....

  Then where the hell are they?

  * * *

  Nate Moretti’s house, an A-frame with an addition that extended to a double garage, was tucked into a copse of evergreens. The lane that had wound through a stand of fir and maple opened to a small clearing where the home had been built, probably somewhere in the early seventies.

  No light glowed in any of the windows, and in the mist-laden afternoon the house appeared deserted.

  Cade rapped on the front door and waited for the sound of footsteps or the woof of a dog, or even a cough.

  Nothing.

  He knocked again, louder this time.

  No one answered.

  “Well, damn it all.” Voss grabbed hold of the doorknob and gave it a twist, pushed hard, but the door didn’t budge. “Humph.”

  “Let’s check the back.”

  They did, peeking through windows as they followed a trail of concrete rounds to the back, where the grass was untended. The remains of what had been a chicken coop complete with wire fencing, partially rolled away from the path, stood fifteen feet from the back door, the sides rotting, weeds growing beneath the raised floor, discolored straw littering the area.

  “Looks like he could use a gardener,” Voss observed. “Or a wife.”