“Angry, frustrated … that how you felt when you left?”
“Wouldn’t you be if it was your family, Inspector? I should have known better than to try to reason with a man like him. But no matter how I felt and still feel, I didn’t have anything to do with his disappearance.”
“See him again anytime since Thursday?”
“No.”
“Talk to him?”
“No.”
“Your daughter have any contact with him?”
“No. She was home with us all weekend.”
“She at home now?”
“Not since Monday morning,” Hollis said, and went on to explain about Angela’s decision to relocate, the arrangements she’d made. “I can’t tell you exactly where she is. My wife and I don’t know ourselves.”
“But you can get in touch with her.”
“Yes. She already knows that Rakubian is missing. What worries my wife and me is that he found out she was relocating and dropped out of sight to hunt for her.”
“How would he’ve found out?”
“I can’t answer that. I sure as hell didn’t say anything to tip him off. But he’s a shrewd bugger and he has plenty of contacts. For all we know he hired somebody to watch her. I doubt anyone could’ve followed her when she left on Monday, but how can we be absolutely sure?”
“I’ll want to talk to your daughter,” Macatee said. “Appreciate it if you’d get word to her, have her contact me as soon as possible.”
“You won’t try to force her to tell you her whereabouts? Or to come back here?”
“Not without good cause.”
“All right. I’ll e-mail your name and number to her.”
Macatee asked a few more questions, none of them, as far as Hollis could tell, motivated by anything other than routine. He said he and Angela would both be in touch and rang off.
End of round one. A draw, he thought—the best he could have hoped for.
Friday Afternoon
Stan Otaki called with the results of his PSA blood test. “The good news,” he said, “is that the cancer hasn’t spread outside your prostate.”
He clung to that for a few seconds. Then he asked, “What’s the bad news?”
“The growth rate is definitely accelerating. My advice, like it or not, is a ‘first cut’ to remove and test the lymph nodes surrounding the gland.”
“Surgery. I won’t do it, Stan.”
Otaki made a breathy, rumbling noise. “So be it. Then I suggest we begin radiation therapy right away.”
“No argument there.”
“I’ll make the arrangements.”
“And meanwhile,” Hollis said, “what should I do? Start putting my affairs in order, just in case?”
“Don’t make light of this, Jack.”
“I’m not. Just trying to keep a smiley face.”
“A positive attitude is important. We’ve discussed that.”
“I haven’t forgotten. My attitude’s positive,” he said, and he meant it. “I’m going to beat this thing, one way or another.”
“That’s the spirit.”
After all, he thought, this malignancy can’t be any worse than the one I buried on Saturday night.
Friday Evening
Cassie sat quiet when he finished telling her, no show of emotion of any kind. He thought her eyes were moist, but he couldn’t be sure in the lamplit living room.
After a time he said, “You knew, didn’t you.”
“That it’s been getting worse? Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You’ve had enough on your mind without me nagging you about the cancer. I knew you’d see Stan eventually—talk to me when you were ready. You’re stubborn and foolish sometimes, but you’ve always been a fighter. You’d never give in to a life-threatening disease.”
“No way.”
“So it’s radiation, then.”
He nodded. “You won’t try to talk me into having surgery?”
“Would it do any good?”
“You know how I feel. I couldn’t stand to go through an operation. I break out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.”
“Then I won’t say a word. But I want you to do one thing for me in return.”
“If I can.”
“Don’t lie to me anymore. Don’t evade the truth, or stretch it, or hide behind it. We’re a team, remember? Don’t fight me anymore.”
“I won’t,” he said. And he wouldn’t, where the cancer was concerned. Eric and Rakubian were another matter. Hiding that truth was a necessity—an act of mercy, an act of love.
Monday Afternoon
Napoleon Macatee drove up from the city to examine the evidence of Rakubian’s stalking. Hollis and Cassie met him at the house at two o’clock. He was a black man in his fifties, stocky and solid as a barrel, with eyes like brown wounds. Those eyes had seen a great deal and would never be surprised or shocked by anything again. At once the eyes of a cynic and a martyr.
He seemed forthcoming enough when Hollis asked if there were any new developments. The short answer, he said, was no. He’d spoken to Angela twice (as they had; she’d called after her first talk with Macatee, again a few days later). He’d spoken to Eric, a fact he mentioned briefly and without a hint of suspicion. He’d spoken to dozens of Rakubian’s neighbors, business associates, and individuals who might have cause to do him harm. No leads so far. Nothing to indicate accident, voluntary disappearance, or foul play.
Cassie said, “It doesn’t seem possible he could have vanished without any trace.”
“Happens more often than you might think,” Macatee said. “Fifty thousand disappearances in this country every year. Men, women, children. Across the board when it comes to social and financial status, race, religion, age. Known reasons, too. David Rakubian’s case isn’t so unusual.”
“How likely is it he’ll be found?”
“Depends. If it was voluntary and he covered his tracks well enough, odds are he’ll stay lost unless he decides to resurface on his own. If he was a victim of violence, evidence of it may turn up sooner or later. It’s not as easy to dispose of a dead body as people think.”
Not unless you’re very, very lucky.
They showed Macatee the evidence box, the dossier Hollis had brought home from the office. He sifted through the letters, cards, poems, time logs; listened to two tapes at random. Hollis watched him closely the entire time. Macatee’s expression remained neutral, but there seemed to be compassion in the brown-wound eyes when he looked at Cassie. He asked if he could take the dossier and several other items along with him, wrote out a receipt, thanked them for their cooperation, and left them alone. The interview had lasted little more than an hour.
Hollis was convinced that if Macatee had any suspicions, they were without any real basis. Fishing in the dark. Perhaps even doing no more than going through the motions. The dossier, the tapes and letters, confirmed what a sick bastard Rakubian had been. Could a cop who’d seen all sorts of human misery honestly care what happened to a wife abuser and stalker, as long as he stayed missing? Hollis didn’t see how. The inspector had struck him as a good man; if anything, he had to be on their side.
Monday Night
He had the dream for the first time that night. There had been others in the past nine days, disturbing but vague and jumbled, and he recalled little of them afterward. This one was vivid, murky in background but sharp in every detail, as if it were a terror-laced memory or precognition.
He was walking in a formless place of shapes and shadows. Wary but not frightened. Ahead he saw a wall, and as he neared it an opening appeared. He walked through the opening and found himself in a cave with wooden walls and a concrete floor. He stood looking down at the floor’s smooth black surface. And as he looked, cracks began to form there, to lengthen and widen, and the fear came in a rush as the concrete crumbled. A hand reached up through one of the cracks, fingers clawing toward him, then the entire arm, a shoulder, a h
ead—Rakubian’s shattered head, Rakubian’s face grinning in a savage rictus. Then, like a bloody monolith, dripping dirt and fragments of rotting skin, all of the dead man rose up out of the broken floor and started toward him, whispering his name. He tried to run, stood rooted, and the clawed fingers closed bonily around his throat—
He jerked awake damp and shaking, his breathing clogged. Only a dream, a nightmare, but it remained hot and clear in his mind. He could still see Rakubian’s face, the death’s-head grin, the bulging eyes; still feel the pressure of those skeletal fingers. His throat ached as if the strangulation had been real.
There was no sleep for him after that; he lay staring blindly into the darkness. And the feeling that crept over him was as strong and irrefutable as any he’d ever experienced. A product of the dream, of guilt filtered through his subconscious … but he could not make himself believe it. The feeling was too visceral, too intense to be easily dismissed.
He and Eric weren’t safe. None of them were.
Somehow, someway, Rakubian was still a threat to them all.
PART II
Early to Mid July: Phantom
13
Thursday
ANGELA and Kenny came home two days after the Fourth of July holiday.
They had exchanged daily e-mails with her, and as time passed she’d grown less afraid of Rakubian’s sudden reappearance and more willing to end her voluntary exile. Finally she’d agreed to set the Fourth as her own independence day. And stood by that decision when the time came, packing Kenny into her Geo early on the morning of the fifth. The little car rattled into their driveway just before dusk on the sixth.
The six long, difficult weeks of radiation therapy had made Hollis listless and depressed. Now that they’d ended, and he was no longer quite so fatigued or prone to sudden attacks of diarrhea, he had begun to regain both stamina and optimism; he’d gone back to work for the first time just before the holiday. Angela’s and Kenny’s safe return was just what he needed to boost his spirits, energize him.
She looked good. Smiling often again, the haggard look erased, the fear reduced to a shriveled presence deep in her eyes. Not her old self yet by any stretch; it would take time for a complete healing. But she was alive again, and seeing that made it a little easier to live with what he and Eric had done that Saturday in May.
Cassie had been right about his conscience: no matter how many rationalizations he used to erect a protective wall, his guilt and his knowledge of Eric’s continued to breach it. Doubts, nightmares, sleeplessness … they all plagued him. He was a changed man, forever changed. His sins, actual and intended, would torment him to one degree or another until the day he died.
That was the way it was for him, but evidently not for Eric. There had been no indication over the past several weeks that his conscience was tearing him up. On the phone today, bemoaning the fact that he couldn’t be there to welcome Angela and Kenny in person, he’d sounded happy and secure. The summer job he’d taken with a respected engineering firm in Santa Barbara was working out well; he bragged about an active love life, too. The seemingly too easy adjustment troubled Hollis. He wished they weren’t being kept apart by the summer work and his cancer treatments. If he could see his son in person he’d be better able to judge his mental state, and to broach the anger management subject.
He’d talked to Inspector Macatee four times since his May visit, playing the role of worried parent checking for any new information. There’d been none to be concerned about. Rakubian’s law offices had been closed at the end of June, the secretary gone two weeks before that, the paralegal hanging on until there was nothing left for her to do. Angela, in her divorce suit, had waived all rights to community property in perpetuity, so Rakubian’s house would remain closed up, his possessions untouched, until the bank that held the mortgage eventually foreclosed for nonpayment. Otherwise, the status was unchanged. Macatee had lost interest—it was in his quiet cop’s voice. He had other missing persons cases to deal with, dozens of them; Rakubian’s had been back-burnered, soon enough would be relegated to an inactive file and forgotten.
So why did Hollis keep having that dream about Rakubian heaving up through the concrete floor, coming after him with hooked fingers and revenge-hungry eyes?
Why was he still afraid?
Friday
Pierce showed up before they were finished with breakfast. He’d made a couple of tentative overtures to Hollis and Cassie while Angela was away, but for the most part he’d had the good sense to keep his distance. He was still living with his sister, but he’d taken part-time work on the Gugliotta cattle ranch in Chileno Valley—back in Los Alegres permanently, it seemed. Angela must have kept in touch with him by e-mail. The only way he could have known she was coming home was if she’d told him.
He hugged her and she let him get away with hanging on to her longer than was necessary, then kissing her. The look she gave him had heat and shine in it. Hollis stood from the table and went outside so he wouldn’t have to watch them. After a couple of minutes, Cassie came out to join him.
“Another pretty morning,” she said.
“It was.”
“Still cool, though. You should put on a sweater.”
“Don’t fuss over me.” Then, “You were right, Cass.”
“About what?”
“About Angela still being in love with him. Did you see the look on her face when he started pawing her?”
“I wouldn’t call it pawing.”
“As good as.”
“He cares about her. That’s obvious.”
“Does he? Maybe he just wants to sleep with her again.”
“I don’t think so. He’s trying, he really is.”
“Trying to what? Get her to marry him again … another damn Rakubian? Or just live with him this time?”
“Make up for his mistakes, be a father and a man. Give him a chance to prove himself. Everybody deserves a second chance.”
“If he really has changed. Maybe he’s just better at hiding what he’s been all along.”
“Don’t be a curmudgeon. She’s home, Kenny’s home, Rakubian’s gone God knows where, and you’re done with the radiation and making progress. That’s a lot to be thankful for.”
“I just don’t want her to make another mistake.”
“Neither do I. But if she does … well, it’s her business.”
He had a sudden flash of the wine cellar, Rakubian’s bagged corpse wedged into the shallow grave. “Until it becomes our business,” he said.
Late morning. Gabe Mannix arrived with a bouquet of welcome-home flowers for Angela, a video game for Kenny, and some designs he’d done for a new proposal request the firm had received. If they landed the job, it would be their biggest and most lucrative in years—a planned retirement community on the edge of the Dry Creek Valley, several hundred units on a thousand acres of prime real estate. The work perfectly suited their talents, Gabe’s because of its size and Hollis’s because the initial site survey indicated the need for harmonious blending into the rolling hillside tract. There would be strong competition, so their conceptual designs and the rest of their submission had to be just right.
Mannix was excited about the proposal; his preliminary designs showed more innovation than usual, more flair. Some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on Hollis. He spent two hours poring over the schematic site plan and fee schedule, adding his own vision to the designs. The work cheered him. And didn’t tire him much at all.
Monday
Angela drove to Santa Rosa to see Joyce Eilers, another of the women in the support group, and came home full of news. Joyce worked in the bookstore at Paloma State University, had arranged an interview for her for a job opening there. If she got it, she’d be able to start immediately on a part-time basis and to work full-time once the new school year began in the fall.
“It’s the best thing that could happen,” she said to Hollis. “I can rent a place of my own, and go back to school nights—work on
my teaching degree.”
“You mean move out right away? There’s no need for that. You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”
“I know, but I don’t feel right about it. You and Mom have done so much for us already.”
He waved that away. “Think of the money you can save. Apartments are expensive and you’d have to put Kenny in day care until he’s ready for school.…”
“I need to be on my own, Daddy. I need to start living like a normal person again. You understand, don’t you?”
He understood. And he offered no more argument, because he knew she was right.
Tuesday
Another session with Stan Otaki, to discuss his most recent blood test.
“So far so good,” Otaki said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet.”
What do you mean we, Kemosabe? “You just said so far so good. Arrested growth and no indication of spread outside the prostate.”
“It’s under control for now, but the cancer hasn’t gone into remission. It can still grow, still spread, at any time.”
“What, then? More radiation?”
“No. The body can stand only so much zapping.”
“We’re back to slice and dice, is that it?”
“Surgery is still my recommendation.”
“And my answer’s still no.”
“Then the next step is hormone therapy.”
Hormone therapy. Use of drugs such as LHRH-agonists to decrease the amount of testosterone in the body, or antiandrogens to block the activity of the testosterone. Upside: These drugs cause cancer cells to shrink. Downside: possible cardiovascular problems, hot flashes, impotence and loss of sexual desire.
“Any objections to that?” Otaki asked.
“No,” Hollis said bleakly, “no objections. When do we start?”
Wednesday
Angela landed the job in the Paloma State bookstore. She would begin work and Kenny would begin day care the first of next week.
Friday
Pierce took Angela out to dinner to celebrate her new job. Not Kenny, just her—him in a suit and tie and her all dressed up and glowing like a high-school girl on her first big date. They stayed out fairly late; Hollis and Cassie were still up when he brought her home. She didn’t have much to say to them before she went upstairs, wouldn’t quite meet their eyes. And the glow was more pronounced, almost a flush.
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