Nowhere Safe

by Bush, Nancy

  “Yeah . . .” She darted him a quick look, then scurried from the room.

  So Claudia had planned for Molly not to be there. Of course. It made sense, but he was furious with her all the same. Sure, she was youthful looking and attractive enough—a helluva lot better than Daria the cow. But he’d pictured an intimate meal with the three of them and now that was not to be.

  He could kill her for that.

  It took serious effort on his part to drive home and get ready for the evening. He stepped under a cold shower to take some of the heat off his anger, then dressed in a pair of chinos and a white shirt topped by a tan pullover sweater. Dressy casual, Daria called it, but he hated her. HATED HER.

  He took HER car when he was ready to go, stopping by a store and buying a medium-priced bottle of wine with some of HER money. He imagined dropping the Maori figurine atop HER head and it brought on a massive boner.

  That was the first good thing that had happened all day, he determined. He would keep crushing Daria’s head in the forefront of his mind in case things got intimate between Claudia and him and he found she didn’t do it for him.

  She was waiting for him eagerly when he showed up promptly at six. When he presented the bottle of wine to her in both hands, like a practiced waiter, she giggled like a schoolgirl and said, “Ooh la la.”

  The sound was a turnoff in someone her age. And in her black sheath that showed off the bones at her throat there was something skinny and dried up and gristly about her. He could tell she worked out and was proud of her body, but there was the faintest hint of varicose veins running below the surface of her legs.

  She took his coat and hung it on a wooden hall tree that sat beside the glass and wrought iron console table in the entryway. Upon the table’s clear surface sat a heavy metal bowl that currently held the car keys to a Porsche.

  He was damn glad he’d driven the Lexus. Sure, she’d seen the wagon but he could fob it off as a work car.

  Grabbing his hand, she led him inside to a small living room with expensive furniture, then she guided him to the couch and the coffee table, which held a chased silver tray full of gourmet cheeses, sliced salami, and dried fruit. Soft, instrumental music played from speakers atop a bookcase that lined one wall. As he sat down he tried to dredge up the image of him slamming the figurine into Daria’s head. It worked some, but it was sort of fading in and out of his thoughts.

  She took the wine to the kitchen and opened the bottle there, talking so much in a loud voice that he didn’t have to utter a word, even when she returned with two healthy glasses of red wine. He’d known when he bought the bottle that he was going to have to pretend to drink the stuff, but he realized quickly that Claudia was going to swill her own glass down so fast that he wasn’t going to have to take more than a few swallows before she might not notice.

  Finally, she finished in the kitchen and sat down beside him on the couch, but she kept up the magpie chattering so much that his throat constricted and it felt like he was choking.

  “You wanted to talk about Molly,” he broke in to a particularly revolting discussion of her job as a geriatric nurse that reminded him of his father and the damned neighbors who wouldn’t leave him alone.

  “Oh, well, yes . . .” She smiled, her dark eyes—just like Molly’s—regarding him impishly. “That might’ve been just an excuse to talk to you,” she admitted, giggling again and rolling her eyes. “I’ve been working up to this”—she moved her index finger back and forth to include him and her—“since school started. Unless, of course, there’s something you want to say about Molly,” she added, growing more serious.

  His blood froze. “Like what?”

  “Like, is she having trouble in your class? She told me that you had to take her cell phone away yesterday. I say, go ahead. One of the best things we can teach our kids are boundaries.”

  Graham nodded and picked up a small piece of cheese. He had to look away from her or his distaste would show on his face. He’d so looked forward to tonight and then she’d sent Molly away. Bitch!

  His gaze fell on the bookshelf and the picture of Molly—with her head tilted and a sweet smile on her face—that was tucked into its corner. Abruptly he got up and walked toward it, pretending interest in the paperbacks jumbled beside it.

  “Let me put the finishing touches on dinner,” Claudia said, and he wanted to say, Don’t bother. He didn’t think he could work up an appetite.

  Except maybe for her daughter. But no, no . . . he knew better.... He’d be damned, if he were caught. He had to leave things be. Keep his thoughts hidden and not act on his desires.

  She’d made a chicken dish with herbs and more dried fruit over rice. He pretended to really enjoy it, and the constant gabbing, but it was damn near impossible. How come he hadn’t noticed her diarrhea mouth when she’d come to his room?

  Because she kept it from you. She didn’t want you to know. No wonder the husband left.

  After dinner, she refilled her glass—was that for the third time?—linked her arm through his and they strolled back to the couch. Graham had managed to pour out two-thirds of his drink when she’d taken a trip to the bathroom and now he held it in one hand, like her, as if he were relaxing and letting the night go where it would go.

  She was gazing at him with heavy-lidded eyes and he could practically smell her desire for sex. Well, he’d done this to himself, hadn’t he? Showing off yesterday. Getting her to look down at his dick.

  When she leaned closer to him, he had to fight the desire to push her away. He shut his eyes and gritted his teeth, and then he thought of Molly and as his arms tightened around Claudia and she leaned in for a kiss, his gaze flew to Molly’s picture and he thought of her instead.

  Suddenly he was clawing at Claudia’s dress and she was going with it, telling him to hurry, and giggling, and wriggling out of the dress and damn near jumping on his crotch, legs splayed, while he was still unbuckling his belt. For a moment, reality intruded, but he concentrated on Molly’s picture, then the thought of crushing Daria’s skull, then the remembrance of the soft crunch of Jilly’s as she tumbled to the entryway floor and he was suddenly driving into Claudia Livesay and she was gasping and hanging on for all she was worth.

  “Oh, baby. Oh, baby, come on,” she was shrieking.

  Graham, with his eyes on Molly’s picture, was miles away from the woman beneath him as he spilled into her with a deep groan.

  Suddenly she was squirming and swearing beneath him. “Good God. No condom? You’re crazy! I’m crazy. Oh, shit . . . oh, shit . . .” She was half laughing. “Oh, my God. I’ve never done anything like this. I can’t believe it! Oh, my God . . .”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off Molly’s picture. Claudia’s words buzzed like gnats around his head. He just wanted to swat them away.

  And then there was silence and it felt like a long time later before he finally tore his gaze away and looked down at her, seeing the deep lines etched between her brows. She was only half drunk, he realized, and her eyes were still on Molly’s picture where she’d obviously followed his line of sight.

  Now her eyes met his. “What the fuck were you looking at?” she breathed in shock. “Molly?”

  “What? No.”

  She tried to scramble out from under him. She tried to get away, and without thinking he immediately grabbed her hands, holding her down.

  “Let me up!” she cried, afraid.

  Graham came back to himself with an effort and released her, but she shot to her feet and ran for the bedroom, naked. Maybe he could have reasoned with her. Maybe. But all he could see was that she knew. She knew, and she would tell. Yanking up his pants, he went after her.

  There was no lock on the door but she was holding it closed and crying. He slammed into it, throwing her off her feet.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded, looking down at her as she huddled on the floor. “We have a good time and then you run away?”

  She blinked back tears. “I d
on’t know.... I . . . thought . . .”

  “What?” he demanded impatiently. She was really pissing him off and he was starting to worry that she was going to run down to the school and tell someone the first moment she could.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, cowed.

  Graham suddenly just wanted to escape. He stepped back into the living room, wondering what to do about her. She knew. She knew his thoughts. She’d seen him staring at Molly while he was having sex with her.

  And then suddenly she ran past him, toward the door, buck-ass naked. She was going to run outside and scream for help. He could feel it!

  With hardly a conscious thought he lunged forward, grabbed the metal bowl and swung it at her head as she scrabbled with the lock. Plunk. The sound of her skull cracking was music to his ears as she crumpled to the floor, just like Jilly had.

  He leaned over her. She was alive but her eyes were staring blankly and there was blood where the skin had broken, dampening her hair.

  Instantly he started to shake. Who knew that he was coming over here? Had she told anyone? Molly? Her ex-husband? Mrs. Pearce? God!

  Running to the hall, he threw open the door to what he suspected was the linen closet. His eyes fell on a thick comforter. Grabbing it up, he hurried back to Claudia. She was still staring but her breathing had slowed. With any luck at all she would die.

  He snapped his fingers in front of her face but she didn’t react. Nobody home.

  As quickly as he could he wrapped her in the blanket, covering her from head to toe. Cautiously, he opened the front door. There were other houses nearby but most of them had garages jutting out like pig snouts, blocking their windows from a view of Claudia’s house. Directly across the street was a park.

  If he was lucky, and careful, and smart, he could move her out the back door through Claudia’s garage and then around to the Lexus, which was parked right in front.

  What would he say if someone caught him?

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Pulling out his keys, he unlocked the Lexus with his remote from inside the house. Then, slinging the heavy bundle inside the blanket over his shoulder, his nerves jumping at the rasping gasp of her breaths, he hauled her into the garage, feeling his way through the dark. He carried her all the way across to the man-door on the side and stepped into a cold but dry night, hugging the side of the garage rather than risking opening the garage door with its big, wide maw.

  He grabbed the Lexus’s back door handle and wanted to scream when the overhead light burst on. Leaning in, he switched it off as soon as he’d laid her along the seat. Quickly, he shut the door and then relocked the car. Glancing around, he hurried back to the shadows, watching the neighborhood. He could hear rock music throbbing inside one house, but the windows that he could see were curtained. Vaguely, through the curtains of another house, he saw a television set’s flickering colors.

  He hurried back through the garage the way he’d come in, then grabbed up the tray of crackers and cheese and dumped it down the disposal. The dishes and wineglasses he hand washed and put back in the cupboards with shaking fingers. The flatware he stuck in the dishwasher. The pan with the chicken he decided to just take with him.

  The entryway tiles didn’t have much blood but he found the bleach and poured it on the tiles, recognizing dimly that this was becoming a habit with him. He’d set the metal bowl back on the console table and he realized with a start that there was a small circle of garnet-colored blood pooling beneath it. Grabbing up one of the dish towels hanging on a hook, he wiped that up, too, then threw the towel in the pan with the chicken.

  She’d made a salad, and he threw the remains of it down the sink and rinsed out the bowl and put it in the dishwasher.

  How long had it been since he put her in the car? The kitchen was clean. The entryway wiped up and spotless. The console table and bowl wiped down.

  Did he leave any fingerprints anywhere?

  The bedroom doorknob and panels.

  Quickly he grabbed another towel and wiped them off. His heart was pounding. He ran the towel over the knobs on the door to the garage, then, shouldering his way through, he cleaned the man doorknob as well, carrying the pan with the chicken in his other hand.

  At the car he put the pan in the front seat foot well, slid into the driver’s seat and inserted the key. Claudia’s breathing was ragged and deeper, like maybe it would stop altogether.

  Reversing onto the street, he put the car in drive, touched a toe to the accelerator and disappeared. He met no one en route as he drove carefully all the way back to Daria’s house.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  George called September’s cell as she and Wes were crossing the Marquam Bridge on their return from Tiny Tots Care. “We got a call from a Mr. Dorcas, who just happens to live right next to the Harmak house,” he told them. “Last Friday the Dorcas’s daughter, Diane, was out with her boyfriend, Keith Collier, and they had just come back and were saying good-bye to each other when this woman came barreling out from the backyard. Damn near ran into them. She was stuffing something in her pocket that they didn’t quite see. Coulda been a gun, but they didn’t think that at the time cuz they didn’t hear the shots. She just ran off.”

  “She ran out from Stefan’s neighbor’s backyard?” September questioned.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “The shooter?” she asked with repressed excitement.

  “Sounds like it’s the right timing. Guess it wasn’t till Sunday that the girl realized that her neighbor was dead. She overheard her parents talking about hearing something that night that they thought was a car backfiring. Then they saw the news and wondered if it was the shots from the Harmaks’ . The daughter was scared and called her boyfriend, but they didn’t come clean until today.”

  “She didn’t tell her parents?” September asked.

  “The kids were making out by the road when the woman appeared. The parents hate Collier. The daughter was supposed to be with her girlfriends that night, but snuck out and met him instead. She didn’t want to confess, so it got delayed. Typical stuff.”

  “How well did they see the woman?”

  “Close up. Security light came on and the place was lit up like day, apparently.”

  “Was she wearing jogging clothes and a baseball cap?”

  “Don’t know. The Dorcas family’s coming down to give us a description.”

  “Okay.”

  “What?” Wes asked, when September had clicked off.

  “We might have a description on our vigilante.”

  The Dorcases arrived at the station about an hour after Wes and September returned. They were utterly uncomfortable being at the police station and their daughter, Diane, felt the same. They did not invite the boyfriend along, so September put a call in to Keith Collier’s voice mail and asked him to get in contact with her.

  Diane’s description of the woman avenger was very generic but she said Keith could probably tell them more. From September’s point of view it was a win, whichever way you looked at it, because one of the first things out of Diane’s mouth was the fact that the perpetrator had indeed been wearing a baseball cap and jogging clothes. Bingo, September thought in jubilation. Things were turning around. The case was coming together and Jake was awake and going to be okay.

  She drove to the hospital to see him as soon as the Dorcases left. He was dozing most of the time while she was there, but held on to her hand again. Though she wasn’t certain he really heard her, she told him all about the investigations she was working on. In that regard, he was the best kind of listener. No interruptions, questions, or distractions. Finally, she ran out of things to say and with exhaustion creeping in, she took her leave. And this time when she snuggled into the bed they shared, she fell asleep cradling the pillow to her face, a smile flickering on her lips even in sleep.

  Wednesday morning September leaped out of bed and apart from a sharp twinge of protest from her neck wound, did a quick chec
k of her body and decided all systems were a go. Today was Jake’s surgery and Stefan’s memorial service. On the work front, she hoped Keith Collier had called back, and if he hadn’t she was going to hunt him down and get his input on the description of the woman who’d nearly run them over.

  She was at Bean There, Done That picking up an iced coffee—her summer drink and now her fall one, too—when her cell rang. Wes, she saw. “Good morning to you,” she said.

  “Cheery. Where are you?”

  “Getting coffee. D’Annibal told me to take some time off and I’m starting by showing up late today.”

  “We’re getting traction. You got a minute.”

  “Sure.”

  “Your stepbrother’s van,” he said. “It was wiped clean but there was a long hair, possibly female, found inside it. Not sure whether they can extract DNA yet, but it jibes with the woman vigilante theory. If we catch her, we might have something to put her in the van.”

  “When we catch her,” September corrected him.

  “Second, the Clatsop County Sheriff ’s Department caught up with Daniel Quade, per your brother’s intel from Bill Quade. He coughed up the name of one Hiram Champs, Mr. Blue to those who know him, as his skin is apparently blue.”

  “Just like Auggie said.”

  “Quade said he got the ketamine from Champs, so Clatsop County checked out his place. Anyway, they found nothing. It was almost like he was waiting for them. In fact he invited the deputies in for herbal tea.”

  “What do you make of that?” September asked, sipping her cold drink. She didn’t give a damn that the weather was dropping in temperature and there was talk of bitterly cold rain and hail for Halloween.

  “Quade’s getting the stuff wherever he can. Maybe he got it from him, maybe he didn’t. There’s a hot springs on Champs’s property that Quade and his new girlfriend like to use. Sounds like he and Champs had words about that, so maybe Quade’s getting payback. He spread the lie that he was moving to California, but he didn’t go that far.”